David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Come away; poverty’s catching. Wrote Aphra Behn.

Anni 68 Cenzza Ochiali, Canaletto signed a drawing in 1766.

At age sixty-eight, without spectacles.

Handel died blind.

Gaddo. Taddeo. Agnolo.

Lodovico. Agostino. Annibale.

Liszt sat down and played at sight what the rest of us toil over and in the end still get nowhere with, Clara Schumann said.

Or John Bellini, as Ruskin insisted on calling him.

Maria Malibran died at twenty-eight after being thrown from a horse.

Has time pardoned Paul Claudel?

Ruskin died of influenza.

Anton Webern was shot and killed by an American soldier in Austria at the end of World War II. Wholly by error.

There should be nothing in a novel that the author would not say out loud in the presence of a young girl, said William Dean Howells.

Kate Chopin died of what was apparently a brain hemorrhage.

Remind me to get some money from this bugger.

Piero della Francesca’s father was a shoemaker.

Joseph Cornell lived with his mother all his life.

Admire the martyrs of Bloody Mary’s reign.

D. H. Lawrence died of tuberculosis.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

In his mid-twenties, Joseph Brodsky was sentenced to five years shoveling manure at the White Sea for what the Soviet Union saw as social parasitism.

Petrarch — and the St. Augustine eternally in his pocket.

Reading the Confessions at the peak of Mont Ventoux.

Romney painted Emma Hamilton nearly fifty times.

Clit lit.

Appointed maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s in 1613, Monteverdi was robbed by highwaymen while moving there from Cremona.

Terence would appear to have died in a shipwreck.

The room was full of Sitwells. And Sacheverell others.

Jeanne Eagels died of an overdose of heroin.

Plutarch says Xerxes watched the debacle at Salamis from a golden throne on a hilltop above the strait — surrounded by scribes meant to record the trappings of a victory.

A king sate on the rocky brow

Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis.

Did Kierkegaard’s father have venereal disease?

A good-natured man of principle.

Pablo Neruda called Stalin.

A saint and a martyr.

Ezra Pound called Hitler.

Mark Twain died of a heart condition.

Rupert Brooke’s only brother died in World War I no more than weeks after Brooke himself.

Château-Thierry, La Fontaine was born in.

Realizing idly that every artist in history — until Writer’s own century — rode horseback.

For instance Keats doing so beside the Tiber each morning until not long before his death.

George Sand, disdaining sidesaddle on a favorite mare she by chance called Colette.

Or twenty-three centuries earlier Pindar even reassuring readers that there would be horses in heaven.

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three.

A monk asked Ts’ui-wei: For what purpose did the First Patriarch come from the West?

Ts’ui-wei answered: Pass me that chin rest.

As soon as the monk passed it, Ts’ui-wei thwacked him with it.

Any and all public gatherings were prohibited in Venice during a plague in 1576.

An edict that was unhesitatingly ignored at the death of Titian — so deserving was he felt to be of a state funeral.

To Helen. Poe was sixteen.

Le Bateau ivre. Rimbaud was sixteen.

Thanatopsis. Bryant was sixteen or seventeen.

Thomas Gray died of gout.

Jean Genet was a paid informer for the Nazis in World War II.

Colette the novelist died of cardiac arrest.

Salacious, bad-smelling, sick.

Said Van Wyck Brooks of Joyce.

While deriding Rimbaud as a neurasthenic little wretch.

Berlioz, on critics:

Where do they come from? At what age are they sent to the slaughterhouse?

Adam Mickiewicz died of cholera.

William Collins died mad.

Writer’s equally idle realization that all of those same equestrian artificers likewise went through life without flush toilets.

What type of outhouse had Peter Paul Rubens, for example?

What bedroom slop bucket disguised as a clothes chest had Jane Austen?

Chaim Soutine died of stomach ulcers.

John Steinbeck died of a heart condition, little tempered by acute emphysema.

Kandinsky once invited Arnold Schoenberg to join the faculty at the Bauhaus.

Indicating magnanimously that while Jews were normally not welcome, an exception would here be made.

Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!

This is the lamentable condition of our times, that men of art must seek alms of cormorants, and those that deserve best, be kept under by dunces.

Said Thomas Nashe in 1592.

For two decades, starting at twenty-five, Paul Valéry did not publish a line.

Wagner died in 1883.

Cosima not until 1930.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti died of Bright’s disease.

Tennessee Williams choked to death on the plastic cap of a nasal spray.

Let’s choose executors, and talk of wills.

He is either mad, or he is reading Don Quixote.

Said Philip III, at the sight of a student banging himself on the head and doubling over in hysterics over a book.

Perugino probably died of plague.

There is no one so foolish as to praise Don Quixote.

Said Lope de Vega.

The Metropolitan Museum’s only Caravaggio, the early Allegory of Music, was not known of for more than three centuries.

And was walked off with for less than one hundred pounds when come upon in an English antique shop.

This can only be the devil or Bach himself!

No date will ever be available for Marian Anderson in Constitution Hall.

Said Constitution Hall.

Camus went through most of his adult life with recurrent tuberculosis.

Michael Tippett spent three months in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector in World War II.

The tail gunner on the Enola Gay wore a Brooklyn Dodgers cap.

Antonio Gaudí died after being hit by a streetcar in Barcelona.

Blaise Cendrars died after a series of strokes.

The worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918–1919 killed forty million people.

Including Apollinaire. And Egon Schiele.

And both of Mary McCarthy’s parents.

Descartes and Pascal met twice.

Neither being impressed.

David Hume was grossly fat, reported even to crack chairs.

Edward Gibbon became equally so.

Amy Lowell as well.

What sort of chamber pot had Bishop Berkeley?

Enoch Arden.

The kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled, George Orwell described Auden as.

Orwell on Sean O’Casey:

Very stupid.

On Steinbeck:

Spurious.

La Trahison des clercs.

Until he was forty, Hermann Broch was the manager of his family’s textile firm.

Grazia Deledda died of breast cancer.

Dost thou think Alexander look’t o’ this fashion i’ th’ earth? And smelt so? Pah!

Not even worth the trouble of condemning, said Gautier of Manet’s Olympia.

As late as in 1874, Jacob Burckhardt felt licensed to dismiss Jan Vermeer as inconsequential:

Women reading and writing letters and such things.

Archilochos is said to have died in battle.

The most acute thinker ever born, Kant called Kepler.

The first English translation of Madame Bovary was done by a daughter of Karl Marx.

Who would later take her own life much the way Emma does.

An extant letter of Michelangelo’s complains about money that Luca Signorelli borrowed and never repaid.

He was always strumming upon something — his hat, his watch fob, the table, the chair, as if they were the keyboard.