David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Chloroform in print.

Mark Twain called the Book of Mormon.

Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me.

Unquote, Gertrude Stein.

Oh, dear —

Reportedly having been David Garrick’s dying words.

Eddie Grant, the pre — World War I third baseman, who graduated from Harvard — and who insisted on shouting I have it instead of I got it when chasing a fly ball.

And who as an infantry captain would be killed by machine gun fire in the Argonne Forest.

Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become.

Said Mary McGrory.

Far too much music finishes far too long after the end.

Judged Stravinsky.

Still to be read in the blank spaces on some of Raphael’s preliminary sketches for his Vatican stanze frescoes — drafts of love poems to his latest mistress.

Will Durant’s amusingly unworldly conclusion that the Sappho in Raphael’s Parnassus is — quote — too beautiful to be a lesbian.

Hark, Hark, the Lark! and Who Is Sylvia?

Which Schubert set on the same single afternoon.

The word plagiarism — from the Latin for kidnapping.

To kidnap another writer’s brains, Martial had it.

Old Hoss. Old Pete. Old Reliable. Old Folks. Old Aches and Pains.

Novelist’s personal genre. In which part of the experiment is to continue keeping him offstage to the greatest extent possible — while compelling the attentive reader to perhaps catch his breath when things achieve an ending nonetheless.

Conclusions are the weak point of most authors.

George Eliot said.

If you know what you’re doing, you don’t get intercepted.

Said Johnny Unitas.

Eugene Sue, most of whose widely read novels dealt with the poor and downtrodden.

And thereby made him a millionaire, Kierkegaard noted.

Picasso, in Paris during the Nazi occupation and learning that someone had accused him of having Jewish blood:

I wish I had.

Drawing, for an artist:

A way of thinking, Valéry termed it.

February 23, 1931, Nellie Melba died on.

Let me alone. Good day.

Said Tom Paine — to the two clergymen who had contrived to make their way to his bedside when he lay dying.

How long the days for the wretched, how swift for the favored.

Said Publilius Syrus.

’Tis their will — that thy son from this crested wall of Troy be dashed to death.

The most tragic of the poets.

Aristotle called Euripides.

Proust’s excessively lavish over-tipping.

Gide’s reputation as a cheapskate.

Coryate, the English traveler, in Venice in 1611:

When I went to the theatre, I observed certain things I never saw before; for I saw women acte.

Reminding one that Ophelia, Juliet, Rosalind, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth — were all written to be portrayed by adolescent boys.

Until 1660, when one Margaret Hughes broke the English barrier as Desdemona.

Typhus, or his syphilis, caused Beethoven’s deafness — question mark.

A rejection of all that civilization has done.

Said the London Times of a first Post-Impressionist exhibition, in 1910 — which included Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, others.

Just an old queen, Auden spoke of himself as.

While also referring to Miss God.

One never steps twice into the same Auden.

Randall Jarrell said.

Seneca’s Thyestes, in which Thyestes unknowingly eats the flesh of his own children.

And is described as belching contentedly.

Twickenham, Alexander Pope was buried in.

Wondering how on earth one remembers — that when St. John of the Cross escaped after his near death by starvation in a Toledo prison, the first meal he was given, at a discalced Carmelite convent — was of pears simmered with cinnamon.

A good man — but he did not know how to paint.

Said El Greco of Michelangelo.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., at eighty-seven, seen turning to gaze after an attractive girl:

Oh, to be seventy again!

I must ever have some Dulcinea in my head — it harmonises the soul.

Said Laurence Sterne.

The pain of rereading Twelfth Night after far too many years and coming upon the end of the Clown’s song in II.iii —

Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Old age is not for sissies.

Said Bette Davis.

Tell me honestly, Cal. Am I as good a poet as Shelley?

Asked William Carlos Williams, not long before his death, of Robert Lowell.

Freud, born in 1856, being asked in 1936 how he felt:

How a man of eighty feels is not a topic for conversation.

Shaw, at ninety-four, being asked the same:

At my age, one is either well or dead.

Leukemia, Ernestine Schumann-Heink died of.

He was greater than we thought.

Said Degas at the funeral of Manet.

Apollinaire, who was severely wounded in World War I.

And then died of influenza two days before the Armistice.

December 8, 1918, Cpl. David Markson died on.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

Declares a line in Rasselas .

The Rokeby Venus . Which was purchased in Yorkshire in the early 1800s for five hundred pounds.

And sold to the National Gallery in 1906 for ninety times that amount.

Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson died in.

The Marquesas, Gauguin.

Tchaikovsky, Glinka, Borodin, Mussorgsky — all buried in the same St. Petersburg cemetery.

Diogenes, asking to be buried face downward —

Because the world will soon enough be turned upside down.

Every man is condemned to death — but with an indefinite reprieve.

Hugo said.

Those who know do not speak.

Those who speak do not know.

Forty-two, Kierkegaard died at.

There’s nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

Said Paul Celan.

It would have been our pleasure to be bombed.

Said a survivor of Auschwitz.

August 8, 1596, Hamnet Shakespeare died on.

July 11, 1649, Susanna Shakespeare Hall died on.

February 7, 1662, Judith Shakespeare Quinney died on.

Virgil’s ceaseless revisions of the Aeneid .

Writing only a few lines at a time and then licking them into shape as the she-bear does its cubs, Suetonius says he said.

One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

Said Benjamin Jowett.

To an astronomer, man is but an insignificant dot in an infinite universe — said whoever.

Though that insignificant dot is also the astronomer — said Einstein.

Please don’t get up, I’m only passing through.

No more firing was heard at Brussels — the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

What he had seen, was it a battle? And if so, was that battle Waterloo?

Thy labours shall outlive thee.

Wrote John Fletcher in lines dedicated to Ben Jonson.

Who spent his last years partially paralyzed and virtually alone — and in calamitous want.

Wondering when the last day may have passed — anywhere in the world — during which someone did not die in an act of religion-inspired terrorism.

Just glance around you: wars, catastrophes and disasters, hatreds and persecutions, death awaiting us at every side.

Commented Ionesco.

Acheron. Cocytus. Styx. Phlegethon. Pyriphlegethon. Lethe.

Late February or early March, 1945.

Anne Frank.

What see’st thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?