The Last Novel Page 3

  Albert Pinkham Ryder dressed so shabbily that now and again people attempted to hand him loose change as he walked the streets near Greenwich Village.

  The artist must live to paint and not paint to live. He should not sacrifice his ideals to a landlord.

  Ryder said.

  Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.

  Said Flannery O’Connor — apropos of being a Southern writer as a contemporary of Faulkner’s.

  Among the many paintings in her Paris flat, Gertrude Stein had two exceptional Picassos.

  If there were a fire, and I could save only one picture, it would be those two. Unquote.

  August 15, 1967, René Magritte died on.

  Victor Hugo constantly made notes about everything — and would turn aside in the middle of a conversation to scribble down something he himself had just said that he realized he might possibly later be able to use.

  O Lord, who art hidden in the clouds and behind the cobbler’s house —

  Commenced a prayer voiced by Marc Chagall as a boy in Vitebsk.

  The nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

  Said Louis Aragon.

  Novelist’s isolation — ever increasing as the years pass also.

  Days on which he is aware of speaking to no one at all, for example, except perhaps a checkout clerk, or his letter carrier, or some basically anonymous fellow tenant in the elevator.

  Matt Arnold, he was commonly called.

  Jack Galsworthy.

  The grete poete of Ytaille.

  Chaucer referred to Dante as — in the late fourteenth century.

  Though there would be no English translation of the Divine Comedy until 1785.

  Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.

  Insisted Byron.

  Was he Christian, Jewish, or atheist? Samuel Beckett was once asked in a Dublin courtroom. To which:

  None of the three.

  The extant application for a reader’s ticket at the British Museum signed by Arthur Rimbaud on March 25, 1873, attesting that he has read the regulations for the Reading Room and that he is not under twenty-one years of age — when in truth he was still only eighteen.

  Catullus, informing friends that he is broke:

  With nothing but cobwebs in my wallet.

  The Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum.

  An early French critic called Dostoievsky.

  Foul. Like a rat, slithering along in hate. He is not nice.

  Being D. H. Lawrence’s later view.

  The concept of life after death should be empathically promulgated by the state, Plato said.

  If only so that soldiers would be willing to die in battle.

  George Washington left no children of his own.

  A great-granddaughter of Martha’s, by way of her earlier marriage, married Robert E. Lee.

  The most repulsive thing I ever saw or heard in my life.

  Said Clara Schumann of Tristan und Isolde.

  Plutarch, who relinquished fame and power in Rome to live quietly and do his writing in Chaeronea, near Delphi.

  A small town that would have been even smaller if I left.

  Brave translunary things.

  Michael Drayton saw in Marlowe.

  Intemperate & of a cruel hart.

  Thomas Kyd noted of him instead.

  For half a dozen years, in his middle and late fifties, Oskar Kokoschka was forced to turn out little other than watercolors — because he generally could not spare the few dollars for oils and canvas.

  Cry, art, cry, and loudly lament.

  No one, any longer, desires you.

  Woe is me.

  — Lettered Lucas Moser, a minor German painter, onto an altarpiece in 1431.

  Fortune favors the brave, says Virgil.

  Presumably aware that Terence had said it earlier.

  Brunelleschi once carved a wood crucifix by which Donatello was so impressed that he could only gape in astonishment — while also spilling the apron full of eggs he had been bringing to Brunelleschi’s studio for their lunch.

  Tennyson was once so drunk at the end of a London dinner that he started to leave by way of the fireplace.

  I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.

  El Greco. Vermeer. Dieric Bouts. Frans Hals.

  Each of whom was essentially forgotten for at least two centuries.

  Or longer.

  Bombastic nonsense. Concepts bordering on madness.

  Humbug.

  Schopenhauer found in Hegel.

  The anecdote, passed on as genuine, about Beaumont and Fletcher once being angrily accused of high treason by strangers in a tavern who had become convinced they were plotting to kill the king — when in actuality they had been discussing the outline of a new play.

  He had often regretted opening his mouth, said Simonides.

  But he could not recall having ever caused any major catastrophe by keeping it shut.

  Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

  Said Cyril Connolly.

  England expects that every man will do his duty.

  Every man, on Nelson’s flagship the Victory, incidentally including boys of ten and twelve, some having been caught up by press gangs.

  During most of his adult life, Joshua Reynolds made use of an ear trumpet.

  And in his final years became almost totally blind.

  Beethoven’s unkempt, laundry-strewn Vienna flat.

  While beneath the piano, recollected at least one visitor, his chamber pot — unemptied.

  John Locke died while sitting in a drawing room listening to someone read from the Psalms.

  Novalis died while listening to a relative play the piano.

  The wintry conscience of a generation.

  V. S. Pritchett called George Orwell.

  A poem by Theocritus written in Alexandria ca. 270 BC — Complaining that the streets were too crowded.

  Antonin Artaud spent nine of his last eleven years in insane asylums.

  For decades, next door to the building in The Hague that had housed Spinoza’s attic:

  The Spinoza Saloon.

  Man is the only animal that knows he must die.

  Said Voltaire.

  St.-John Perse. Who was translated into English by Eliot.

  And into German by Rilke.

  September 9, 1960, Jussi Bjoerling died on.

  Looked into by church authorities at Arnstadt in 1706, where Bach at twenty was organist:

  By what right he had recently caused the strange maiden to be invited into the organ loft?

  One day I wrote her name upon the strand.

  A Man of Genius whose heart is perverted.

  Wordsworth called Byron.

  The most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a great effect in literature.

  George Eliot phrased it.

  After devoting years to the score for Pelléas et Méllisande, Debussy played it through for Maurice Maeterlinck, on whose play it was based. Maeterlinck repeatedly dozed off in his chair.

  Henry Moore was gassed in the trenches in World War I.

  The Bateau-Lavoir, the legendary former Montmartre piano factory broken up into artists’ studios, where Picasso contrived any number of his early masterpieces — while living with no running water and only one communal toilet.

  And which sixty years later was named a national historical monument — only to burn to the ground a few months afterward.

  Continental degeneracy, Thomas Jefferson was several times condemned for.

  Because of a chef who had been trained in Paris, Patrick Henry explained.

  The bleak image Novelist is granted of himself as he asks a question of a local pharmacist — and becomes aware of the woman contemplating the conspicuously threadbare and even ragged ends of his coat sleeves.

  Writing is the only profe
ssion where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

  Said Jules Renard.

  Gilda, in Rigoletto. Whom Mattiwilda Dobbs sang as at the Metropolitan two years after Marian Anderson had done Ulrica in Un Ballo in Maschera — making her the first black soprano to perform there in a romantic role opposite a white tenor.

  Jack Dempsey’s claim that he was partly Jewish.

  Via a great-great-grandmother named Rachael Solomon.

  Chaucer’s personal library. The guess being forty volumes, presumably most of them in Latin.

  Leonardo’s. Known to have contained thirty-seven.

  Joseph Conrad spoke English with such a thick, partially French accent that people often had extraordinary difficulty in understanding him.

  Le Bateau ivre.

  Margot Fonteyn, in an early discussion of women’s liberation:

  Will it mean I have to lift Nureyev, instead of vice versa?

  Xerxes: Go, and tell those madmen to deliver up their arms.

  Leonidas: Go, and tell Xerxes to come and take them.

  George Sand, re an 1873 literary evening:

  Flaubert talks with animation and humor, but all to do with himself. Turgenev, who is much more interesting, can hardly get a word in.

  Parodying without taste or skill. Very near the limits of coherence.

  Said the Times Literary Supplement of The Waste Land.

  Unintelligible, the borrowings cheap and the notes useless.

  Said the New Statesman and Nation.

  So much waste paper.

  Summed up the Manchester Guardian.

  Kant’s irrationally compulsive 3:30 PM walk, which it is said he forswore only once in thirty years — on the day when the post brought him a first copy of Rousseau’s Émile.

  A German singer! I would as soon hear my horse neigh.

  Said Frederick the Great, insisting upon Italian performers for opera in Berlin.

  A. E. Housman. Who spent most of his adult life as a professor of Latin.

  After originally failing his final exams at Oxford.

  What, still alive at twenty-two,

  A fine upstanding lad like you?

  From the beginnings of the legend of Michelangelo’s sense of his own worth:

  He treats the Pope as the King of France himself would not dare to treat him — unquote.

  John Donne, near death, as recorded by Izaak Walton:

  His sickness had left him but so much flesh as did only cover his bones.

  Pausing to speculate about the plumbing of the era — and wondering how frequently Shakespeare might have bathed.

  Or even two centuries later, Jane Austen.

  Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski.

  Rat-eyed, Virginia Woolf called Somerset Maugham.

  An old parrot, Christopher Isherwood saw instead.

  February 6, 1916, Rubén Darío died on.

  Everyone honors the wise. The citizens of Mytilene honored Sappho even though she was a woman.

  Said Aristotle.

  He who has money is wise. And handsome. And can sing well also.

  Says a Yiddish proverb.

  Walt Whitman’s claim — never in any way verified — that he had fathered at least six illegitimate children.

  The woman named Mercy Rogers, who in the early 1920s when the subject was relatively new, read practically every available book on psychoanalysis — and then put her head into the oven.

  Certain men have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously, at their pleasure, so as to produce the effect of singing.

  Insisted Saint Augustine.

  Englishwomen have big feet.

  Nietzsche determined.

  Man: But a little soul bearing about a corpse.

  Marcus Aurelius says Epictetus said.

  Richie Wagner, Charles Ives amused himself by calling him.

  Truman Streckfus Persons, Truman Capote’s birth-certificate name was.

  He wore a grey suit, black shoes, white shirt, tie and vest. His appearance never changed. He came down in the morning in this suit, and he would still be wearing it the last thing at night.

  Said John Huston, re Sartre.

  Einstein often went without socks.

  The final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.

  Clifton Fadiman said of Absalom, Absalom!

  Curiously dull, furiously commonplace, and often meaningless.

  Alfred Kazin said of Faulkner in general.

  Me, tell you? I don’t know anything about it. I laid down face up and began to sing. Children came like water.

  British troops reached Belsen, the first Nazi concentration camp to be reported on, in April of 1945. Forty thousand starving and/or dying prisoners. Ten thousand unburied corpses, corded like wood.

  It is my duty to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind, began the dispatch to the London Times.

  I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald.

  Pleaded Edward R. Murrow, on trans-Atlantic radio, after reporting much the same soon thereafter.

  Our worst century so far.

  Elizabeth Bishop called that one.

  Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

  Says a line in Slaughterhouse-Five.

  Huckleberry Finn was once banned from the children’s room of the Brooklyn Public Library because — Novelist is quoting here — Huck said sweat when he should have said perspiration.

  Wondering if the myth of Dedalus and Icarus has ever been thought of as the first science fiction story?

  The only thing that could sound worse in an orchestra than a flute — would be two flutes.

  Said Cherubini.

  Jean Genet was arrested for the first time — for theft — at the age of ten.

  David Garrick’s explanation for the excessive number of bawdy plays on the late eighteenth-century English stage:

  Because the first great ruling passion of actors is to eat.

  E. M. Forster’s astonishment at learning that telephone wires were not hollow.

  Old enough to remember when any number of people seemed to believe something similar — or at the least felt it necessary to shout, when confronted with long distance.

  Five or six lunatics, the contributors to the first Impressionist exhibition were called by Le Figaro.

  Heine read Plutarch’s Lives for the first time when quite young.

  And said it made him wish to leap onto a stallion and ride off to conquer France.

  William Blake’s emphatically avowed lack of interest in sex.

  The Red and the Black, John F. Kennedy’s favorite novel was.

  According to Vasari, Leonardo devoted four full years to painting the Mona Lisa.

  The Mona Lisa covers a slight fraction more than five and one-half square feet of surface.

  Sarah Bernhardt lost a leg at seventy-one.

  And one year later was performing for French troops at the front in World War I.

  On a wall in Freud’s waiting room in Vienna:

  Bernhardt’s photo.

  A man either utterly devoid of sense or one who takes his listeners for fools.

  An early critic called Schoenberg.

  A debris of sour jokes, stage anger, dirty words, synthetic loneliness, and the sort of antic behavior children fall into when they know they are losing our attention.

  The New Yorker called Catch-22.

  Lo, there is just appeared a truly classic work.

  Wrote Horace Walpole — within one day of the publication of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

  Rhoda Broughton’s Dear Faustina, from 1897. Is it the first lesbian novel in English?

  Jean Cocteau’s addiction to opium.

  Francis Thompson’s.

  Modigliani’s. To opium, hashish, and drink.

  People who more immediately think of Meursault as a character in Camus rather than as a dry white Burgundy.<
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  Czar Alexis, father of Peter the Great, who in the mid– seventeenth century ordered the destruction of all musical instruments in Russia.

  Pope Leo XII. Who in the 1820s issued an edict forbidding the waltz in Rome.

  Magnificently, awe-inspiringly ugly.

  Henry James called George Eliot.

  Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-etre hier, je ne sais pas.

  Not until a year after his burial at Sag Harbor did someone notice that the title of The Recognitions was misspelled on the back of William Gaddis’s headstone.

  The true/untrue/pleasant-in-either-case tale that Salvador Dalí had been noticed gazing in almost hypnotic fascination at a melting wedge of Camembert on a dinner table not long before painting the limp watches in The Persistence of Memory.

  I am extremely happy — until further notice.

  Says a letter of Berlioz about his romance with Harriet Smithson.

  An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks almost as much as you do.

  Said Dylan Thomas.

  But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

  Suggested J. C. Squire.

  The seeming likelihood that Pythagoras is implying that the world is round — in the mid–sixth century BC.

  He had not escaped the common penalties of transgressing the laws of strict purity, wrote Alexander Thayer re Beethoven.

  Which is to say — he had syphilis.

  Guillaume Apollinaire authored a considerable amount of art criticism, particularly as an early champion of Cubism.

  While at the same time being incapable of distinguishing a Rubens from a Rembrandt, Braque commented.

  Thales of Miletus, when his mother begged him to marry: It is too soon.

  After she permitted him some delay: It is too late.

  Once, watching a ceremonial procession near the Vatican, Samuel Morse failed to remove his hat — and had it roughly knocked off by a papal guard.

  And became vociferously anti-Catholic thereafter.

  June 7, 1843, Friedrich Hölderlin died on.

  Be informed, Christian, that after the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous, more violent, than the Jew.

  Pronounced Luther.

  World War II — started by sixty kikes.

  Pronounced Ezra Pound.

  Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God.