This is Not a Novel Read online

  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 Ari-mathea. 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 Cezanne that I owe the most.

  Picasso: He was my one and only master. Cezanne! 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.

  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 lachmosa

  Vivaldi’s. Haydn’s. Rossini’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.
r />   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 Bronte 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 bejel a ferly, of 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 Man-tegna.

  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.

  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 ofer 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.

  Chateau-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 Jons, 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 Warn.

  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 sentto 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 Valery 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 HI, 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 Gaudi 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.