David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Pyrrhus died after being struck by a tile flung from a roof.

Hit Sign Win Suit.

Whitman said he had read The Heart of Midlothian a dozen or more times.

Among Wittgenstein’s spellings, when using English:

Anoied. Realy. Excelentely. Expences. Affraid. Cann’t.

Plotinus did not begin to write until he was fifty.

Goethe was seventy-eight before he started Part II of Faust.

Two millennia before Princess Diana, Virgil, visiting Rome, would be forced to flee even into the private homes of strangers because of admirers crowding after him on the streets.

And this when he had written only the Eclogues and the Georgics, the Aeneid to be posthumous.

I had but a glimpse of Virgil, Ovid himself, younger, had to say.

Fulke Greville was murdered by a disaffected servant.

Asculum.

Fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos.

Account for Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia.

Walter Johnson died of a brain tumor.

For we must consider that we shall be as a city on a hill.

Lice, Dickens labeled critics.

Swine, D. H. Lawrence preferred.

Samuel Barber was Louise Homer’s nephew.

Southwell was hanged and then drawn and quartered at Tyburn.

Palestrina’s Stabat Mater.

Pergolesi’s.

Without fail, given pause at recalling that Captain Ahab is a Quaker.

As similarly always needing a moment for the precise meaning of drawn and quartered to register.

Paracelsus may have died after a brawl in a tavern.

And his sandal shoon.

Gerhart Hauptmann was a supporter of the Nazis.

Igor Stravinsky admired Mussolini.

Stabat Mater dolorosa

Iuxta crucem lacrimosa

Vivaldi’s. Haydn’s. Rossini’s. Schubert’s.

Poulenc’s.

The legend that Gregory the Great had to be dragged to St. Peter’s by main force, when he was elected Pope.

No man will ever write a better tragedy than Lear, Shaw said.

The Burning Babe.

Orson Welles died of a heart attack.

Stephen Foster never learned which side won the Civil War.

Michelangelo. Piero di Cosimo. Guido Reni. Pontormo. Tintoretto.

All of whom wanted no one anywhere near them when working.

Piero and Pontormo becoming pathological about it.

Jacopone da Todi.

Anna Pavlova died of pneumonia.

Ronald Firbank died of pneumonia.

The little Marcel, Proust was called. All his life.

A. E. Housman, on the surest source of poetic inspiration:

A pint, at luncheon.

Kirsten Flagstad, on the most critical aspect of singing Wagner:

Comfortable shoes.

Les Saltimbanques, which inspired the fifth of the Duino Elegies:

Rilke in fact having been a guest in a home in Munich where the canvas hung above his desk for months.

Anthony Trollope wrote seven pages a day, seven days a week.

And would actually begin a new book if he came to the end of one before his day’s quota had been met.

Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint stool.

Eliot’s first wife, Vivien, insisted upon washing her own bedsheets.

Even when staying at a hotel.

My breviary, Montaigne referred to Plutarch as.

While frequently quoting him with no acknowledgment whatsoever.

Which Seneca had also long since made a practice of.

Sinclair Lewis died of a heart attack.

Thomas Eakins was once fired for removing a loincloth from a male model in a women’s life-drawing class in Philadelphia.

Defoe’s father was a butcher.

Sadi. Rumi. Hafiz.

Saul of Tarsus very likely participated in the stoning of St. Stephen.

Was he also an epileptic?

Was John the Baptist an Essene?

I was, with God’s help, born poor.

Ralph Ellison died of pancreatic cancer.

Tarsus. Being also where Cleopatra arrives, on her barge, to meet Mark Antony.

On the river Cydnus.

In Turkey.

Tommaso Campanella spent twenty-seven years in a papal dungeon for heresy.

An information bureau of the human condition, Theodor Adorno called Kafka.

Shelley, at nineteen, was sent down from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet on atheism.

Landor, at the same age, was expelled for shooting a fellow student in a political argument.

Two hundred and forty-three people die in the Iliad who are named by name.

One hundred and forty-seven separate wounds are mentioned.

The Graham Sutherland portrait of Winston Churchill.

Which Clementine Churchill cut into pieces and then burned.

Exsultate, Jubilate. K 165.

Maria Stader.

Writer’s tendency to forget that there were two other Brontë sisters, scarcely older, who died when Charlotte and Emily and Anne were eight and six and four.

Consumptive, the brood.

Boris Pasternak evidently died of lung cancer that had spread to the area of his heart.

Peredelkino.

I have never heard of any old man forgetting where he had hidden his money, Cicero said.

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror:

1524, Parmigianino’s version dating from.

Philip of Macedon: If I reach Lacedaemon, not one stone will I leave upon another.

The Spartans: If.

Enrico Fermi died of stomach cancer.

John von Neumann died of cancer of the brain.

Haworth Parsonage.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets / Never Before Imprinted. A small quarto, 1609:

Sixpence.

But on a May morwening upon Malverne hilles

Me befel a ferly, a fairye me thoughte.

Jenny Lind died in the Malvern Hills.

My work is not a prize composition done to be heard for the moment, but was designed to last forever.

Said Thucydides.

Pierre Bonnard and Wassily Kandinsky were nearsighted.

As were Samuel Johnson and Tennyson.

And Nietzsche.

And Maria Callas.

Marshall McLuhan died of a stroke.

Robert Lowell once punched Jean Stafford in the face and broke her nose.

Which he had broken two years earlier by drunkenly smashing a car into a stone wall.

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

Bach and Handel, born twenty-six days apart.

And never once meeting.

Beethoven was left-handed.

Rembrandt worked so slowly, especially in his later years, that it became ever more difficult for him to find sitters.

In good part explaining the hundred-odd self-portraits.

Luisa Tetrazzini died penniless.

Tolstoy, asked if he had read a recent play by Maurice Maeterlinck:

Why should I? Have I committed a crime?

They who write ill, and they who ne’er durst wrote,

Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

— Said Dryden.

Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss.

— Added Pope.

He was being called Papa Haydn well before he was thirty.

Jacopo. Gentile. Giovanni.

Not to add sister Nicolosia, who married Andrea Mantegna.

Was Liszt the greatest pianist who ever lived?

Planning his Balzac, Rodin went so far as to search out a tailor the novelist had used forty years before — and had a suit made to the dead measurements.

Birgit Nilsson’s debut at the Metropolitan Opera, as Isolde, was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times.

I am not overly fond of poetry and I do not read it willingly. In my reading, poems take up a very small space.

Said Ingeborg Bachmann.

Rodin died of pulmonary congestion.

Anabasis.

Your last novel was a flop. You’ve got two wonderful children depending on you. Don’t you think it’s time to consider doing something more financially responsible in your life?

This is also even an autobiography, if Writer says so.