This is Not a Novel Read online

  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 Aiden.

  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 Ttahison des oleics.

  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.

  Said Constanze.

  Far too many notes, my dear Mozart.

  Quentin de La Tour died mad.

  Charlie Parker died of pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, though with unquestioned contributions from alcohol and drugs.

  Quinquiieme of Nineveh from distant Ophir.

  Boccaccio’s tale of Giotto, on horseback, caught in an August rainstorm.

  Hunchback’d Papist, Pope was called in print.

  Maeterlinck died of a heart condition.

  Beethoven, preoccupied. Crossing to his washstand to pour water over his head oblivious of the fact that he is fully dresssed.

  And even in the ages to come, men will make of us a song for telling.

  Says Helen to Hector of their destiny.

  Theodore Dreiser once tried to bribe H. L. Mencken to start a campaign promoting him for the Nobel Prize.

  After the burning, Joan of Arc’s remains were dumped into the Seine.

  After the burning, Savonarola’s remains were dumped into the Arno.

  James Clerk Maxwell died of abdominal cancer.

  During the thirty days’ grace between his conviction and the hemlock, Socrates memorized a long poem by Stesichorus.

  I wish to die knowing one thing more.

  You have only to walk about until your legs are heavy, and then to lie down, and the poison will act. Explains the jailer in Phaedo.

  What Pieter Bruegel knew about summer.

  Kipling, in Sussex, may have been the first author to actually dispense with horses, owning a motorcar as early as in 1902.

  Henry Adams owned a Mercedes in France in 1904.

  John Fletcher died of plague. Beaumont’s death was apparently registered with no cause listed.

  Trifles, Catullus waved away his verses as. Two full thousand years ago.

  The height of absurdity in serving up pure nonsense, or in stringing together senseless and extravagant masses of words, previously seen only in madhouses, was reached in Hegel.

  Said Schopenhauer.

  In or about December 1910 human character changed.

  Yes, Virginia.

  Ben Shahn was once an assistant to Diego Rivera. Jackson Pollock was once an assistant to David Alfaro Siqueiros.

  Richard Feynman’s roommate, when they were both working at Los Alamos, was Klaus Fuchs.

  Raymond Carver died of lung cancer.

  Last Week I saw a Woman flay’d, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her Person for the worse.

  Why does there appear not to have been one word written about Jesus until he is mentioned by Josephus more than fifty years after his death?

  Rembrandt’s father was a corn miller.

  Corot more than once added a few brushstrokes and then signed his own name to the work of other painters— who would otherwise not have been able to sell.

  The St. Vincent de Paul of painting, he came to be called.

  Ned Ludd was feeble-minded.

  By far, the two greatest stylists who ever wrote in German were Heine and Nietzsche. Said Nietzsche.

  I painted this from myself I was six-and-twenty years old. Albrecht Diirer. 1498.

  Nancy Barron, a madwoman at the poorhouse farm in Concord.

  Immortalized because Emerson could hear her endless screaming from his study.

  Racine died of an abscess of the liver.

  A bigot and a sot, Thomas Babington Macaulay called James Boswell.

  Simone de Beauvoir died of pneumonia.

  Giambattista Vico died of what sounds to have been Alzheimer’s disease.

  No great talent has ever existed without a tinge of madness, Seneca says Aristotle said.

  All poets are mad, Robert Burton corroborated.

  A fine madness, being how Michael Drayton read it in the case of Marlowe.

  Gainsborough played the bass viol.

  Laird of Auchinleck.

  Written with the imagination of a drunken savage. Said Voltaire of Hamlet.

  There is no foulness conceivable to the mind of man that has not been poured forth into its imbecile pages. Said Alfred Noyes of Ulysses.

  Tom Macaulay, he was commonly called.

  Jacques Offenbach died of a heart condition.

  Jussi Bjoerling died of a heart condition.

  Donatello kept extraordinary amounts of cash in a basket hung from the ceiling in his studio. Quite literally for his workmen or friends to take as they saw fit.

  Seneca was a usurer.

  Ammannato, Ammannato, che bel marmo hai rovinato!

  What beautiful marble you have ruined. Said contemporary Florentines of his Neptune Fountain in the Piazza della Signoria.

  Nothing but a continued Heap of Riddles, Theobald found in Donne.

  And death i think is no parenthesis.

  At least two people were drowned in the Seine because of the crush along the route of Victor Hugo’s funeral.

  Antonello da Messina died of pleurisy.

  The maniac who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta in 1972.

  His counterpart who spray-painted Kill Lies All on the Guernica in 1974-

  The second of whom actually later owned an art gallery in S0H0.

  Knut Hamsun, at twenty-five, was told he had three months to live because of rampant tuberculosis. And died at ninety-three.

  Oscar Wilde wrote Salome in French.

  En attendant Godot.

  Lawrence Tibbett died after an automobile crash.

  If it is art it is not for all, and if it is for all it is not art. Said Schoenberg.

  Three or four years after the Civil War, Thomas Carlyle told the American Charles Eliot Norton that slavery should be reinstituted.

  Or that blacks should be eliminated altogether.

  Starvation and/or massacre being obligingly suggested. Durendal. Olifant.

  A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up and be shot at.

  Said Hardy when he ceased writing novels after the exorbitant

  denunciations of Jude the Obscure.

  Andrea del Sarto’s wife, Lucrezia. Could she have conceivably for all the years been misabused?

  Elizabeth Bishop died of a cerebral aneurysm.

  Elizabeth Bishop’s mother died mad.

  Lessing died of a stroke, though already wasted by severe asthma and damaged lungs.

  Plotinus died of what was probably throat cancer.

  Rafael Sabatini’s father was John McCormack’s singing t
eacher.

  An unforgotten lifetime debt of Writer’s, since adolescence:

  To Constance Garnett.

  Half-cracked. Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s earliest evaluation of Emily Dickinson.

  Cyrano de Bergerac died in an accident involving a falling beam.

  Mitsubishi manufactured the torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor.

  Porsche manufactured tanks.

  O the Chimneys.

  Robert Browning died of a heart attack.

  This is also a continued heap of riddles, if Writer says so.

  Simplify, simplify.

  For a time, Rossetti, Swinburne, and George Meredith shared a house in Chelsea.

  For a time, Domenichino, Guido Reni, and Francesco Albani roomed together in Rome.

  The latter three later despising each other.

  Whenever possible, Erasmus sought out Jewish physicians.

  Whenever possible, Montaigne sought out Jewish physicians.

  Rubens died of arteriosclerosis.

  Orwell died of tuberculosis.

  Kathleen Mavourneen.

  Artemisia Gentileschi. Agostino Tassi.

  Sir Thomas Wyatt died of an undiagnosed fever.

  Heine died of the spinal paralysis, presumably syphilitic, that had confined him to what he referred to as his mattress-tomb for his last eight years.

  Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Theseus.

  Didier. Ferol. Langlois.

  The next shot went into a brain which was already dead.

  Vicente Huidobro died of a stroke.

  Did Ben Jonson have any notion that Drummond of Hawthornden was writing all that down?

  Darling, you’ll never guess what happened in the men’s room at the New School for Social Research tonight!

  Oh, dear. Not all the way down the inside of your pants leg again?

  It is not necessary to have dandruff to be a genius, Puccini said.

  J started walking home across the bridge.

  Beethoven, Gluck, Schubert, and Brahms are buried in the same Vienna cemetery.

  Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau are buried in the same one in Concord.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer’s father was a rabbi.

  Marc Chagall was the grandson of a shohet.

  Braque, an image of Picasso at the moment of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon:

  Drinking turpentine and spitting fire.

  Writer reminding himself that the Avignon here was a brothel in Barcelona, not the city.

  What artists do cannot be called work.

  Says Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.

  La Grosse Margot.

  The precious, pinchbeck, ultimately often flat prose of Vladimir Nabokov.

  The fundamentally uninteresting sum total of his work.

  Some dozen years after Berlin Alexanderplatz, living on handouts as a wartime refugee in California, Alfred Doeblin applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. With a recommendation from Thomas Mann.

  Guess.

  The friendship of Lorca and Salvador Dali.

  It may be for years, and it may be forever.

  Or even a polyphonic opera of a kind, if Writer says that too.

  Andre Chenier had published only two poems when he was guillotined.

  Skeptic: And can you possibly have read all these walls of books?

  Anatole France: Not one tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?

  Gabriele Miinter.

  Lise Meitner.

  Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin.

  Aldous Huxley died on the same day as John F. Kennedy.

  Nathanael West died one day after F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Hemingway died one day after Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

  West and Fitzgerald had had dinner together one week earlier.

  Machado de Assis was an epileptic.

  Twice as many baseball batters are hit by a pitch on days when the temperature is in the nineties as when it is in the seventies.

  Rousseau was categorically convinced of the existence of vampires.

  Gammer Guiton’s Needle.

  Goldengrove unleaving.

  It took Eliot forty years to allow that the word Jew in Gerontion might be capitalized.

  Then Abraham fell upon his face and laughed.

  June 16, 1904.

  Stephen Dedalus has not had a bath since October 1903.

  Transnistria.

  Edward Teller lost a foot in a streetcar accident.

  Par Lagerkvist died of a stroke.

  Howells and Mark Twain once canceled a dinner they had planned for Maxim Gorky—after discovering that the woman he had sailed from Russia with was not his wife.

  Fra Angelico was said not to be able to paint a Christ without weeping.

  For the World, I count it not an Inne, but an Hospitall; and a place not to live, but to Dye in. Says Browne in the Religio Medici.

  Cola di Rienzi’s father was a saloonkeeper.

  Django Reinhardt spent his childhood in a Gypsy caravan.

  And was considerably less than literate.

  Cesar Vallejo died of an intestinal infection.

  I’ve been reading Cousin Bette. I’ve been reading it all summer. I may never finish.

  William Kapell died in a plane crash.

  Dinu Lipatti died of lymphogranulomatosis.

  Archytas, who invented the baby’s rattle. Which Aristotle actually takes note of. In Politics VIE 6, 1340b 25-28.

  Chekhov died of consumption.

  Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf at least once played the violin in a string quartet in which two of the other performers were Mozart and Haydn.

  Beaumarchais died of a stroke.

  Alain-Fournier was killed in action in France less than two months into World War I.

  Protesilaus, in Iliad II. The first Greek to leap from the ships onto Trojan soil. And the first slain.

  Pylaemenes. Who is fatally speared at the collarbone by Menelaus in Iliad V.

  And is inadvertently shown alive again in Iliad XIII.

  He fell, immortal in a bulletin.

  East Tenth Street in Manhattan, Adelina Patti grew up on.

  There is no hippopotamus in this lecture room at the present moment.

  Lamarck died blind.

  And was buried in a pauper’s grave.

  Gehenna.

  Isaac Newton died of complications from a kidney stone.

  Ramanujan died of tuberculosis.

  Badges? I don’t have to show you no stinkin’ badges.

  One of St. Jerome’s letters to St. Augustine took nine years to be delivered.

  Capitoline. Palatine. Aventine. Caelian. Esquiline. Viminal. Quirinal.

  What existed before the Big Bang?

  Where?

  Exclude God from your response.

  Camille Pissarro was poverty-stricken for much of his working career.

  Alfred Sisley was perhaps worse off, and for longer.

  William Goyen died of leukemia.

  Fragonard’s The Swing.

  Which William Carlos Williams had the impression was Watteau’s.

  Plato talked too much, Diogenes said.

  While dismissing Socrates as a lunatic altogether.

  Erasmus was indisputably the most famous author of his day. Thomas More even admitted to being thrilled that the very fact of their friendship would help keep his own name alive with posterity.

  A piece of dreck, Luther on the other hand called him.

  I, O Plato, see a table and a cup. But I see no tableness or cupness.

  Dickens’ astonishing manic walks. Of as many as twenty-five miles—and at a headlong pace.

  Oedipus Rex did not win first prize in the dramatic competition in the year when it was first presented.

  Any contemporary philosopher who ventured to compare himself with Leibniz could at best wind up wishing he had a quiet corner to go die in, said Diderot.

  William Wycherley married a second wife, far you
nger than he, at seventy-five. And died eleven days later.

  George Herbert died of consumption.

  The most odious of small creeping things, Landor called critics.

  A walk2. What on earth for2.

  Asked Auden at someone’s country home.

  Dizzy Dean had less than a fourth-grade education. But a post-doctoral sense of the joys of that game, said Marianne Moore.

  Hemingway, on Ezra Pound’s indictment for treason: If Ezra has any sense he should shoot himself. Personally I think he should have shot himself somewhere along after the twelfth canto although maybe earlier.

  Disraeli said he had read Pride and Prejudice at least sixteen times.

  The straight line predominates in nature. Ingres once said.

  Only curved lines are to be found in nature. Ingres once said.

  Maud Gonne was six feet tall. Akhmatova was five feet eleven.

  Jessica Mitford died of brain cancer.

  Ellen Glasgow was buried in the same coffin as the exhumed remains of her two favorite dogs.

  Venus Pudica. Venus Anadyomene.

  Absolute reason expired at eleven o’clock last night.

  Think how many royal bones Sleep within this heap of stones.

  —Wrote Beaumont re Westminster Abbey.

  Roger Martin du Gard died of a heart condition.

  Arthur Honegger died of a heart condition.

  Henry James ill-advisedly took an author’s curtain call on the opening night of his play Guy Domville.

  And was hissed.

  The Hebrew in Exodus 34:29-30 translates literally to say that after Moses came down from Sinai for the second time, the skin on his face sent forth beams, meaning it shone.

  A mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate said he was horned.

  Ergo Michelangelo. And cetera.

  Rameau died of typhoid fever.

  Lovis Corinth.

  Rilke wrote standing up. Lewis Carroll wrote standing up. Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up.

  Robert Lowell and Truman Capote wrote lying down.

  Writer sits.

  Jens Peter Jacobsen died of tuberculosis.

  Balzac often worked for sixteen or eighteen hours consecutively, generally beginning at midnight. Awash in coffee.

  Gibbon died of infectious complications from hydrocele.

  Contemporary architecture is basically a bore.

  Writer sometimes also talks to himself.

  As did Yeats.

  As did Yeats even walking the streets of Dublin.

  Mad as the mist and snow.

  Writer sitting and/or talking to himself being no more than renewed verification that he exists.