David Markson: This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Thomas Hardy wrote a carefully sanitized third-person biography of himself and left it behind for his widow to pretend she was the author of.

Not a soul to talk to about Bloom. Lent the chapter to one or two people but they know as much about it as the parliamentary side of my arse.

Wrote Joyce to Frank Budgen.

Sarah Bernhardt was known to sleep in an open coffin.

Pope offended so many people with the Dunciad that he subsequently never left home without pistols.

Or his Great Dane.

Philip Larkin died of cancer of the esophagus.

Only hours afterward, a twenty-five-volume diary that he had kept for almost fifty years was destroyed by one of his executors.

Less of a loss, Writer assumes, than the then-current last volume of Sylvia Plath’s that was destroyed by Ted Hughes.

Or the burning of Byron’s Memoirs.

Had journeyed long,

Singing a song,

In search of El Dorado.

This is even a mural of sorts, if Writer says so.

Marco Polo dictated the narrative of his travels to a fellow prisoner while in a jail in Genoa.

Jorge Luis Borges married a second wife at eighty-six.

John Dewey married a second wife at eighty-eight.

If it is just food you want, you will find that, she said in a voice calm, a little deep, quite cold.

Eugene O’Neill died of bronchial pneumonia in a Boston hotel room.

Albrecht Dürer died of malaria.

Sure I posed. I was hungry.

Caesar’s corpse lay at the Senate for some hours before slaves finally bore it away on a litter.

With one arm hanging down, Suetonius makes note of.

Enrico Caruso died of a minor pleural infection that became fatal only after an Italian physician evidently used an unsterilized instrument in examining him.

Xanadu. Kubla Khan. Writer’s tendency to misremember that they actually did exist.

Rustichello.

Opera bored me.

Said Helen Traubel.

Nobody knows the Traubel I’ve seen.

Said Rudolf Bing.

Jean Harlow died of cerebral edema brought on by uremic poisoning.

The friendship of Claude Monet and Georges Clemenceau.

Schubert could never afford a piano.

February 18, 1564. Michelangelo dies in Rome.

February 18, 1564. Galileo is born in Pisa.

Shakespeare is born that same year.

Isaac Newton is born the year Galileo dies.

The Amelia Curran portrait of Shelley, which has been Shelley since it was first reproduced via engraving in 1833.

But which was considered so unlifelike that Mary Shelley always intended to throw it out.

Galileo played the lute.

An Irish smut-dealer, Anthony Comstock called George Bernard Shaw.

This was Mr Bleaney’s room.

Einstein died of an abdominal aneurysm. Which one of his doctors said was the result of tertiary syphilis.

Caspar David Friedrich.

Diego Rivera very rarely bathed.

Said Lupe Marin, the second of his four wives.

Roger Bacon probably did not invent gunpowder.

Alexander the Great was once pontificating about art in Apelles’ studio. Apelles suggested that he change the subject — it being less than appropriate for the young apprentices to be tittering behind his back.

Ayot St. Lawrence.

The Delaware River, Einstein’s ashes were scattered in.

My son, think of the future! With genius, one may die. With money, one can eat.

Said Cézanne’s father.

No pasarán!

John Millington Synge died of lymph cancer.

Alexander also once commissioned Apelles to paint one of his mistresses, named Campaspe. Apelles fell in love with her. Alexander gave her to the artist.

Festina lente: Celerity should be contempered with cunctation.

Said Sir Thomas Browne.

Gustav Mahler’s father was a tavernkeeper.

Ivan Goncharov was essentially deranged in the last thirty years of his life.

And insisted that every word Turgenev published had been stolen from him.

Following the Restoration, Cromwell’s body was disinterred and hanged from a gibbet.

After his death in battle, Zwingli’s body was mutilated and burned on a heap of dung.

And the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.

Rossini said he wept, the first time he heard Paganini.

Josephus says that practically every subsequent ancient historian thought of Herodotus as a liar.

Geoffrey of Monmouth was called a shameless liar in his own lifetime.

Thomas Otway died destitute.

Dimitri Mitropoulos died of a heart attack while conducting at La Scala.

The death of Patroclus, Iliad XVI:

Even as he spoke, the shadow of death came over him. His soul fled from his limbs and went down to the house of Hades, bemoaning its fate, leaving manhood and youth.

The death of Hector, Iliad XXII:

Even as he spoke, the shadow of death came over him. His soul fled from his limbs and went down to the house of Hades, bemoaning its fate, leaving manhood and youth.

The word synagogue is actually Greek.

And originally meant a Christian assembly.

Minyan.

There was a large rock near. She hurled her head at the stone, so that she broke her skull and was dead.

Says the earliest version of Deirdre of the Sorrows.

John Lyly’s sonnet on Apelles and Campaspe.

The Tiepolo fresco showing Apelles painting her.

The semiliterary, semicolloquial, often tin-eared and generally annoying prose of H. L. Mencken.

Benjamin Britten died of a heart condition.

Aaron Copland died of respiratory failure brought on by pneumonia.

Virtually beyond Writer’s imagining:

The lost eighty or so plays, each, of Aeschylus and Euripides.

The lost one hundred and ten of Sophocles.

Tobias Smollett died of tuberculosis.

Botticelli seems to have signed only one painting in his life.

Simple Wordsworth and his childish verse, Byron called him and it.

Sartre’s father was a naval officer.

Lytton Strachey’s father was a general.

Flann O’Brien, on Brendan Behan:

A lout.

Congreve wrote The Way of the World at thirty. And lived twenty-nine more years without writing one further word for the stage.

Nikos Kazantzakis once spent two years as a contemplative on Mount Athos.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence.

Nietzsche, on George Sand:

A writing cow.

Thomas Hobbes was once Francis Bacon’s secretary.

Andrew Marvell was once John Milton’s.

In whatever version of the legend, Galahad is unvaryingly established as a direct descendant of Joseph of Arimathea.

Ergo as Jewish.

Perceval likewise.

Was Lorenzo Ghiberti the first artist of consequence to write an autobiography?

A friend, when Oliver Goldsmith briefly practiced medicine in London:

Kindly prescribe only for your enemies.

Louise Homer died of coronary thrombosis.

Matisse: In modern art, it is indubitably to Cézanne that I owe the most.

Picasso: He was my one and only master. Cézanne! It was the same with all of us — he was like our father.

Aeschylus never saw the Parthenon.

Zora Neale Hurston died in a welfare home.

And was buried in an unmarked grave.

André Malraux died from a blood clot on his lung.

On principle, Bertrand Russell gave away all of his considerable inherited wealth in his late twenties. And earned his own way thereafter.

Wagner was five months older than Verdi.

Wittgenstein was five months older Heidegger.

Elizabeth Barrett was six years older than Browning.

Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Enrique Grenados drowned while attempting to save his wife when their ship was torpedoed by a German submarine in the English Channel in World War I.