Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson Read online

  Simsy—

  A quick question, at your new address.118 Why, in your (very good) essay, do you say I called one book This Is Not a Novel because a reviewer did?119 Do I say that, in there? Did I, in casual conversation? I had René Magritte in mind—Ceci n’est pas un pipe—and then remembered Diderot—Not a Conte—and I’m sure (pretty sure) I named both of those in the text. But not what you say. Just curious, because it made me scowl both times I read it. (I did read it twice, honest.)

  Gimme a yell in an odd moment while settling in, eh? Otherwise you are contributing to my increasing senility.

  Love again—

  D.

  118 We’d arrived in Brooklyn.

  119 This was exactly the kind of response I’d been dreading. At the time, I was positive I had a solid source for that quote—that one reviewer had called Reader’s Block “not a novel,” so David had called his next one This Is Not a Novel as a kind of sarcastic response—but now I don’t recall what my source was, and I don’t remember how I resolved this with David, either.

  May 29 ‘09

  Simsy, love—

  Will you do me a small kindness, in a spare half-minute? I sent postals to half a dozen of the people who wrote in that notebook you passed around at the AWP panel120—most of whom I knew—but wanted to say six words to one other, who gave me only an e-mail address. And me sans computer, of course. Since she’ll recognize your name, could you send her 10 words telling her of my backwardness, but that I’ve wanted to say thanks for her kind note and only this tardily thought to ask you to do so.

  I do appreciate it. And now you learn—do Markson one kindness,* and you’re doomed to be pestered for others eternally!

  With school presumably over, I hope you’re writing up a storm. When was that next book due? You guys getting away somewhere, maybe?

  Me, I may very well be retired—ex-writer David. Gawd, just awful.

  Much love again—

  D.

  *Rather more than one!

  120 In February of 2009, I chaired a panel at the AWP conference, “In Celebration of David Markson,” with panelists Francoise Palleau-Papin, Martha Cooley, M.J. Fitzgerald, Joe Tabbi, and Brian Evenson. As part of the event, we passed a book of index cards around in which audience members could write messages to David. David had written some introductory remarks that were read aloud, too—page 143.

  Mar 7 ‘10

  Hey, Symsy—

  Why the hell did I put a “y” in there?121

  You OK? Seems like back around Christmas or so when I left you a hello on the machine—and no word since. You are, I hope, writing? And both well?

  Meantime nada here. Everything I can think of would be making me repeat myself—and I almost prefer the silence. (Actually, I hate it.)

  Hey, all love—

  David122

  121 I’d often wondered that myself!

  122 My last postcard from David. We talked after this, though, at least once before he died.

  David Markson and the Problem of the Novel123

  by Laura Sims

  In Markson’s Reader’s Block (Dalkey Archive, 1996), the narrator asks early on:

  What is a novel in any case? (RB, 13)

  To which he adds, musing on the work he anticipates writing, which bears a striking resemblance to Reader’s Block itself:

  Nonlinear? Discontinuous? Collage-like?

  An assemblage? (RB, 14)

  At the very end of Reader’s Block, and in the books that follow in this loosely defined tetralogy, including This Is Not a Novel (Counterpoint, 2001), Vanishing Point (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004), and The Last Novel (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007), this description reappears, albeit more emphatically; periods have replaced the question marks:

  Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. (RB, 193)

  Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. (TINN, 128)

  Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. (VP, 12)

  Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. (TINN, 8)

  And from his latest book, The Last Novel, after more than a decade of employing this particular form:

  Novelist’s personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless

  obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax. (TLN, 51)

  Vanishing Point begins with a quote from William de Kooning:

  Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it. Picasso did it with cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. (VP, 1)

  And from This Is Not a Novel:

  You can actually draw so beautifully. Why do you spend your time making all these queer things?

  Picasso: That’s why.

  …

  Writer has actually written some relatively traditional novels. Why is he spending his time doing this sort of thing?

  That’s why.

  (TINN, 156, 164)

  All of which would seem to confirm Markson’s reputation as a highly experimental, “difficult” postmodern writer “who write[s] writing” instead of stories, and who aims to rebuild the novel, in form and content, from scratch. (RB, 163)

  What complicates this picture, though, is Markson’s undeniable gift for “seducing the reader into turning pages,” a phrase we may associate more readily with paperback romances or mystery novels than with serious literature (TINN, 3). But Markson, while pushing the boundaries of the novel form, and of contemporary fiction in general, still manages to design characters, stories, and fictional worlds as rich and fully engrossing as those found in more traditional works, however fragmented and unfamiliar these components may appear at first glance. These refurbished versions of traditional elements collaborate with the more easily discernible experimental aspects of his novels to make his work a remarkable hybrid: fiction that is emotionally satisfying, intellectually rewarding, formally distinctive, and compulsively readable all at once.

  *

  In This Is Not a Novel, so named after a review dismissed his earlier book, Reader’s Block, as “not a novel,” Markson’s narrator contemplates how the protagonist, Writer, whose style seems to bear a close resemblance to Markson’s, aims to bust our idea of a novel all to hell:

  A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to contrive.

  And with no characters. None. (TINN, 2)

  Plotless. Characterless. (TINN, 3)

  Actionless, Writer wants it.

  Which is to say, with no sequence of events.

  Which is to say, with no indicated passage of time. (TINN, 4)

  A novel with no setting.

  With no so-called furniture.

  Ergo meaning finally without description. (TINN, 5)

  With no social themes, i.e., no picture of society.

  No depiction of contemporary manners and/or morals.

  Categorically, with no politics. (TINN, 7)

  A novel entirely without symbols. (TINN, 8)

  Ultimately, a work of art without even a subject, Writer wants. (TINN, 9)

  At which point a quote interjects to disagree:

  There is no work of art without a subject, said Ortega. (TINN, 10)

  Then another quote interjects to disagree with the previous:

  If you can do it, it ain’t bragging, said Dizzy Dean. (TINN, 10)

  Insinuating, perhaps, that Writer can “do it,” and by association, that Markson can “do it” as well, and therefore is entitled to brag. But we encounter an obstacle to this reading when Writer’s existence is called into question:

  Does Writer even exist?

  In a book without characters?

  …

  Obviously Writer exists.

  Not being a character but the author, here.

  Writer is writing, for heaven’s sake. (TINN, 13)

  Despite the assertion that he exists as an author, Writer remains confined to the page as a character who is thinking about writing a book, which
means that the book we’re reading is not, after all, a characterless novel, and does not, therefore, fulfill the standards Writer has set out for his own hypothetical novel. This is the first indication that, however closely it appears to mirror the book Writer hopes to write, one that would destroy all hallmarks of genre, This Is Not a Novel remains faithful to certain generic conventions, however unconventionally.

  Writer, for instance, is a highly unconventional character.

  Like Whitman, he “contain[s] multitudes.” Namely: Lorca, Dalí, Chagall, Capote, Sophocles, Kerouac, Corbière, Cato, Melville, Lardner, O’Keefe, and so on. In a feat of intertextual finesse, fragments by and quotes about artists, writers, musicians, fictional characters, and historical figures flit through his head (i.e. across the page), intermingling to tell us who Writer is, what he thinks, feels, and believes, and successfully taking the place of traditional character development. We know, for instance, that Writer is obsessed with death, due to the recurrence of quotes like these:

  Richard Burton died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Death-of-the-Month Club.

  Ensor died at eighty-nine.

  Having done every bit of his significant work before he was forty.

  Thomas Wolfe died of tuberculosis which had spread to the brain. (TINN, 137)

  In order to see Writer as a character, the reader must be willing to fill in the white space around the sparse lines, and find meaning in the juxtapositions, tracking them as they build throughout each book, or even from one book to the next. For instance, Writer’s moribund obsession may seem meaningless to the reader who expects a writer to hand him a character’s motivations on a platter. Markson expects attentive resourcefulness from his readers, and waits until page 190, the last page of the book, to drop this:

  Writer’s cancer.

  At this point, only the reader who has actively collaborated with the text will have formed enough of an emotional attachment to Writer to feel gratified, and deeply moved, by this admission and by the book’s last line:

  Farewell and be kind.

  *

  Although This Is Not a Novel does not satisfy Writer’s genre-busting dreams in terms of character, Markson seems, at first glance, to have successfully discarded plot. Writer’s circular thoughts, for instance, certainly do not yield a “sequence of events.” However, we find that plots do exist in Markson’s work:

  Pliny the Younger was a pupil of Quintilian’s.

  Years afterward, learning that Quintilian could not afford a proper dowry for his daughter, Pliny sent the money as a gift. (VP, 49)

  E. E. Cummings died after chopping firewood. (VP, 106)

  Voltaire’s corpse had to be secretly driven out of Paris—sitting upright in a carriage—to be given a Christian burial. (VP, 177)

  Things happen in these quotes; perhaps they happen in miniature, as separate, tiny plots or sequences of action, but these are plots nonetheless, such as: A.) Cummings went out to chop wood and B.) He died.

  In both their brevity and their self-contained completeness they are reminiscent of Félix Fénéon’s early 20th century Novels in Three Lines, each “novel” a tiny summary of a news story taken from the Paris daily newspaper, Le Matin, in 1906:

  Le Douz, a sailor, attempted to strangle Mme Favennec, 70, of Brest. When arrested he claimed to remember nothing.

  At Saint-Anne beach, in Finistere, two swimmers were drowning. Another swimmer went to help. Finally, M. Etienne had to rescue three people.

  Incurably ill, M. Charles Bulteaux opened the veins of his wrists in the woods of Clamart and then hanged himself from an ilex tree. (Fénéon, 49)

  Although Fénéon’s “novels” do not hang together in the complex, subtly interactive way Markson’s fragments do, Luc Sante, in the introduction to the new edition of Novels in Three Lines (New York Review of Books, 2007), sounds as though he could be talking about Markson when he describes Fénéon’s miniscule novels:

  They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage. His politics, his aesthetics, his curiosity and sympathy are all on view, albeit applied with tweezers and delineated with a single-hair brush. And they depict the France of 1906 in its full breadth, on a canvas of reduced scale but proportionate vastness. They might be considered Fénéon’s Human Comedy. (viii)

  Which leads us to consider Writer’s intention to write “a work of art without even a subject,” “with no politics,” and “no picture of society.” Do Markson’s books adhere to this guideline, at least?

  On the foul influence of religion on human nature:

  Burn down their synagogues. Banish them altogether.

  Pelt them with sow dung. I would rather be a pig than a Jewish Messiah.

  Amiably pronounced Luther.

  I told you not to go with drunken goy ever.

  Says the ghost of Leopold Bloom’s father. (TINN, 156)

  On poverty (as it strikes artists and writers most particularly) in The Last Novel:

  The big tragedy for the poet is poverty.

  Said Patrick Kavanagh.

  Try to get a living by the Truth—and go to the Soup Societies.

  Lamented Melville rather earlier. (TLN, 132-3)

  On the historical role of women in society, particularly in the world of letters (also from The Last Novel):

  The greatest achievement for a woman is to be as seldom possible spoken of, said Thucydides.

  Who mentions not one of them in his history.

  Johnson’s Lives of the Poets—which mentions none either. (TLN, 107)

  A work of art without a subject, indeed.

  On looking closer, then, Markson employs many familiar elements of the novel that Writer wants to eschew, but he employs them in radically altered form, which in turn changes the shape of the novel, making it almost unrecognizable to the uninitiated reader. Thus, he still manages to bust “our idea of a [novel] all to hell,” but he does so, wisely, without destroying the genre altogether.

  Significantly, Writer himself revises his convictions towards the end of the book, as if, in looking back on the previous pages, he recognizes that certain trademarks of fiction may, after all, be unavoidable:

  It is the business of the novelist to create characters. Said Alphonse Daudet.

  Action and plot may play a minor part in a modern novel, but they cannot be entirely dispensed with.

  Said Ortega.

  If you can do it, it ain’t bragging.

  Or was it possibly nothing more than a fundamentally recognizable genre all the while, no matter what Writer averred?

  Nothing more or less than a read?

  Simply an unconventional, generally melancholy though sometimes even playful now-ending read?

  About an old man’s preoccupations. (TINN, 189)

  The Dizzy Dean quote seems muted here, sandwiched in-between these ambivalent revisions. But if what we have witnessed is not, after all, an eradication of the novel form, it is at the very least a significant reinvention, and therefore gives Markson just cause to brag.

  *

  Form in Markson’s novels may be the most recognizably open and experimental element of all. Writer (of This Is Not a Novel) lists a set of interesting choices for naming this indeterminate form throughout that volume, albeit in sarcastic response to the reviewer who called Reader’s Block “not a novel”:

  An epic poem (TINN, 21)

  A set of cantos (TINN, 23)

  A mural (TINN, 36)

  An autobiography (TINN, 53)

  A continued heap of riddles (TINN, 70)

  A polyphonic opera (TINN, 73)

  A disquisition on the maladies of the life of art (TINN, 86)

  An ersatz prose alternative to The Waste Land (TINN, 101)

  A treatise on the nature of man (TINN, 111)

  A contemporary variant on the Egyptian Book of the Dead (TINN, 147
)

  A kind of verbal fugue (TINN, 170)

  A classic tragedy (TINN, 171)

  A volume entitled Writer’s Block (TINN, 173)

  A synthetic personal Finnegan’s Wake (TINN, 185)

  The most appealing and accurate of these may be: “a kind of verbal fugue,” and it is one with some history in literature, as Markson himself points out:

  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. (TINN, 41)

  Each volume of Markson’s tetralogy could be described as fugue-like in structure; actual lines, particular sentence structures, or sentences focused on the same subject matter repeat within each book, such as the following from Vanishing Point:

  Kuesnacht, near Zurich, Carl Jung died in. (VP, 40)

  Rome, Ingeborg Bachmann died in. (VP, 45)

  Phoenix, Arizona, Frank Lloyd Wright died in. (VP, 49)

  Herefordshire, Jenny Lind died in. (VP, 52)

  As evidenced by the above quotes, Markson often inverts the natural sentence structure, reversing the order of subject and predicate. In the following lines, in a slight twist on this sentence organization, the predicate comes first in its own fragment, and is followed by the subject in a separate fragment:

  Morningless sleep.

  Epicurus called death.

  …

  An unpurchasable mind.

  Shelley credited himself with. (TINN, 116)

  Latin, French, Italian, and Flemish.

  Rubens wrote letters in. (TINN, 117)

  Apart from helping to create the fugue-like echo, this reversal of traditional sentence structure acts as a tiny suspense-builder, leaving the famous subject’s name until the very last, so that our sense of wonder is preserved until the end of the sentence.

  The term “fugue” could also apply to the complex threading of lines that repeat exactly or echo one another through all four books, so that each book stands on its own but is clearly part of a larger whole. Because of this, the reader must remain attentive and active when reading the tetralogy, constantly connecting the lines/fragments/quotes not only with their immediate neighbors, but also with lines from previous books, including Markson’s earlier works.