This is Not a Novel Read online

  You ever read that, that Cousin Bettel Should I go on with it?

  Virtually every inadequacy in recent French literature is due to absinthe, Daudet said in the late 1800s.

  Annals 165. Where Tacitus actually does, does, call a spade an implement for digging earth and cutting turf.

  Paul Klee died of cardiac arrest after years of enduring scleroderma.

  Sarah Orne Jewett died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Thomas of Celano.

  I have wasted all my youth chained to this tomb. Michelangelo protested to Julius n.

  Uhomme est ne libre, et partout il est dans les fers.

  Why hasn’t Writer ever known? What is the black liquid that spills out of the dead Emma Bovary’s mouth?

  O death, where is thy sting at?

  Les Rougon-Macquart.

  Montesquieu died of pneumonia.

  Eliot pursued graduate studies in the philosophy of E H. Bradley, in part at Merton College, Oxford, where Bradley was still a lifetime fellow.

  Presumably ignoring the rumor that Bradley went about at night shooting people’s cats.

  Wallace Stegner died after an automobile crash.

  Bradley died of blood poisoning.

  Liam O’Flaherty was shell-shocked on the Western Front in World War I.

  Roger Bacon probably did not invent eyeglasses.

  Forgetting, when starting to reread The Hamlet, that her name before the end will become Eula Varner Snopes. And that in a later Snopes novel she will shoot herself.

  Richard Bentley died of pleurisy.

  The maniac who went at Rembrandt’s Night Watch with a bread knife in the Rijksmuseum in 1975.

  His counterpart who slashed a Barnett Newman in a different Amsterdam museum in 1986—and another Newman in the same museum a decade later.

  No one ever put up a statue of a critic. Said Sibelius.

  Elderly, shabby, obscure, disreputable, pursued by debts, with only a noisy tenement room to work in.

  Being a description by Gerald Brenan of the man who was writing Don Quixote.

  The apparent evidence that two of Cervantes’ sisters, and a niece, and his illegitimate daughter, became prostitutes—and in the very period of the book’s first success.

  Frida Kahlo’s affair with Leon Trotsky.

  The best French novelist of their era, Gide called Simenon.

  Leaving moot the question of which of the man’s more than five hundred novels he had in mind.

  Stop pawing me, she said. You old headless horseman Ichabod Crane.

  Rilke was devoted to polishing furniture. Jackson Pollock baked pies.

  Origen castrated himself.

  No artist tolerates reality, Camus said.

  Virgil spent seven years writing the Georgics. Meaning an average of one line per day.

  Pablo Neruda died of leukemia.

  Nazim Hikmet died of a heart attack.

  How beautiful yellow is! Says a van Gogh letter.

  Sortes Virgilianae.

  Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

  Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight.

  Dorothy L. Sayers died of a stroke.

  If we regard the Fish as a Divine Life symbol of immemorial antiquity, we shall not go very far astray.

  Jack Johnson died in an automobile crash.

  Nikos Kazantzakis died of the flu.

  Jessie Laidlay Weston.

  Laurence Sterne’s realization roughly a third of the way through Tristram Shandy that the book lacks a preface. Whereupon he inserts one right where he is.

  Jack Donne’s transparently excessive eulogy for his patron’s young daughter—whom he had never met or even seen.

  If it had been written of ye Virgin Marie it had been something, Jonson told him.

  William Saroyan died of prostate cancer.

  Somerset Maugham once had four plays running simultaneously in London.

  How much greater than it already is would the Odyssey seem if there had never happened to be an Iliad for it to be compared with?

  St. John of the Cross was the son of a weaver.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer died of throat cancer.

  Maugham died of a stroke.

  At last she grew common and infamous and gott the Pox, of which she died.

  Says Aubrey’s Brief Lives of one Elizabeth Broughton.

  Paper will put up with anything that’s written on it. Said Stalin.

  The best geometer in the world, Hobbes claimed Descartes could have become.

  But that he had no head for philosophy.

  Kurt Weill died of a heart attack.

  Turner was considerably less than fastidious about cleanliness.

  The Reader.

  Being Aristotle’s nickname at Plato’s Academy.

  A colt that kicks its mother.

  Being what Plato personally called him after an early disagreement.

  Samuel ha-Nagid.

  Say it out for God’s sake and have done with it. Said William James to Henry.

  Molokai. June 1885. We lepers.

  Anagnostes.

  No Man is my name, and No Man they call me.

  A Walk in the Sun.

  A decade after Nelson’s death at Trafalgar, Emma Hamilton died in poverty.

  Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Susan Sontag.

  St. Catherine of Siena was illiterate.

  Kafka was a vegetarian.

  The English think soap is civilization. Treitschke said.

  Theodore Roethke died of a coronary occlusion.

  At least one Boston newspaper suggested in all seriousness that Whitman should be horsewhipped for Leaves of Grass.

  Charlotte Salomon died in Auschwitz at twenty-six.

  Pavel Friedman died in Auschwitz at nineteen. Or younger.

  Would Moe Berg really have shot Heisenberg?

  Gongora died of apoplexy.

  Balzac wrote more than two thousand characters into his Comedie humaine.

  There are 260,430 words in Ulysses.

  Calvin died of hemorrhages of the lungs.

  Oswiecim.

  Exeunt.

  Moliere was never elected to the French Academy. Balzac was never elected to the French Academy.

  Was it John Searle who called Jacques Derrida the sort of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name?

  I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

  Josquin des Prez.

  It took ten years after her suicide for Jeanne Hebuterne’s family to allow her remains to be reburied beside Modigliani’s in the Jewish section of Père Lachaise.

  Adelaide Procter. Mrs. Henry Wood.

  Gericault died after a fall from a horse.

  Hindemith died of a stroke.

  Nebuchadnezzar. Who razed Jerusalem. And went mad. And ate grass.

  Cardinal Spellman of New York once sent Pope Pius XII a Cadillac automobile with solid gold door handles.

  Wyatt Earp died of chronic cystitis.

  Because night is here and the barbarians have not appeared.

  Charles Lamb’s insuperable proclivity to gin, Carlyle termed it.

  Frobisher. Hawkins. Drake.

  Hitler typed with two fingers. Mencken typed with two fingers.

  Beethoven washed excessively.

  Penthesilea.

  The speculation that Dante spent time in Paris. Or even at Oxford.

  The possibility that on a political mission that took him to Florence, Chaucer met Boccaccio.

  Charlotte Corday was a great-grandniece of Corneille. And devoted the morning to reading Plutarch at his bloodiest before stabbing Marat.

  Or a treatise on the nature of man, if Writer so labels it.

  He had catched a great cold, had he no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed. Said Thomas Fuller.

  Potatoes were not known in ancient Rome. Tomatoes were not known in ancient Rome. Oranges were not known in ancient Rome.

  Hume died of what was probably colon cancer.

>   Edgar Degas never learned which side won World War I. Piet Mondrian never learned which side won World Warn.

  Flicka von Stade.

  Manet died of tertiary syphilis.

  Truman Capote died of heart disease complicated by drug abuse.

  Marianne Moore taught stenography at the Carlisle Indian School, in Pennsylvania, when Jim Thorpe was a student.

  And fifty years later would remember that he held a door for her.

  Debussy’s first wife shot herself. As had a mistress, earlier.

  Caedmon was illiterate.

  The rue Descartes, Paul Verlaine died in.

  Avenue Emile Zola, Paul Celan’s last Paris address was on.

  A calle in Madrid was renamed in honor of Vicente Aleixandre while he was still living there.

  Herman Melville Boulevard is where, in Manhattan? Twelve blocks north from the wishful-thinking intersection of Mark Rothko Road and Hart Crane Place.

  The poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age, Gibbon said.

  But specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she that was very ambitious, burning in unquenchable desire to bear the name of a Queen.

  —Adding up to the sum total of what Shakespeare found in Holinshed from which he created Lady Macbeth.

  The friendship of Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff.

  Claudia Muzio was illegitimate. Jenny Lind was illegitimate.

  Voltaire’s second wife was his own sister’s daughter.

  A passing thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s, re Princess Diana:

  Do we know if she ever read a book?

  Title of an unfinished composition by Charles Ives: Giants vs. Cubs, August 1907, Polo Grounds.

  Ives died of heart disease compounded by diabetes.

  Well, Bourrienne, you too will be immortal.

  Why, General Bonaparte?

  Are you not my secretary?

  Tell me the name of Alexander’s.

  Hm, that is not bad, Bourrienne.

  Haydn’s father was a wheelwright.

  The legend that Donatello almost supernaturally refused to die until his commonplace crucifix could be replaced by one carved by Brunelleschi.

  But go, and if you listen she will call.

  Eight people appeared at Robert Musil’s funeral.

  E Scott Fitzgerald died of a sequence of heart attacks.

  His most recent royalty statement showed seven copies of The Great Gatsby sold during the preceding six months.

  The claim that John Wesley preached more than forty thousand sermons.

  Marc Blitzstein. Elliott Carter. Aaron Copland. David Diamond. Roy Harris. Walter Piston. Roger Sessions. Virgil Thomson.

  All studied with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau.

  Dave Brubeck studied with Arnold Schoenberg and with Darius Milhaud.

  Corbiere died of tuberculosis at thirty.

  Novalis died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight.

  Laforgue was twenty-seven.

  Basically every justification for persecution on the part of the Inquisition was at hand in St. Augustine.

  As anyone’s justification for censorship is ready in Plato.

  J. R. R. Tolkien died of a chest infection while hospitalized for something else.

  Ausonius once composed a poem to his writing paper.

  The literary fame of The Bonfire of the Vanities condemns the taste of its age.

  Mary Mapes Dodge.

  Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

  Don’t come to us with your troubles. If you can’t make enough money to live on, you can jump out the window or drown yourself.

  Which Maria Callas vehemently denied having said to her mother.

  The vasty hall of death.

  Emile Verhaeren died in a fall under a train.

  Arcangelo Corelli owned paintings by Bruegel and Poussin.

  Adrienne Lecouvreur died of what was apparently rectal cancer.

  Though in the Cilea opera is poisoned, which had been a rumor.

  But in either event was buried by torchlight in a field beside the Seine—as an actress, forbidden sanctified ground.

  Maria Caniglia. Magda Olivero. Renata Tebaldi.

  One of St. Teresa of Avila’s grandfathers was Jewish.

  Jongkind died mad.

  Hugo Wolf died mad.

  Blake, at their only meeting, re Constable’s pencil sketches: Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration. I always meant it for drawing, Constable said.

  The peculiar immortality of Sulpicia. Six love poems, totaling only forty lines, and customarily tacked onto the collected work of Tibullus. For two full thousand years.

  Callas died in Paris, of a heart attack. And was buried from a Greek Orthodox church on the rue Georges Bizet.

  Tatiana Troyanos died of cervical cancer.

  Writer’s pleasure in realizing that the translation of Rabelais he most recently read was done by the father of Tanaquil LeClercq.

  The Hay Wain.

  Billie Holiday died of a kidney infection after years of heroin abuse.

  Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.

  Who but my darling Greensleeves!

  And Arthur was so bloody, that by his shield there might no man know him, for all was blood and brains on his sword.

  Sir Thomas Urquhart. Peter Motteux.

  Did Miss Linda Stillwagon ever see the poem?

  John Singer Sargent died reading Voltaire.

  Please, sir, I want some more.

  Does Temple Drake ever go back and graduate from the University of Mississippi?

  Merle Hapes. Junie Hovious.

  Is it in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Greensleeves is mentioned? Even twice?

  Gluck died after a series of strokes.

  Worms feed on Hector brave.

  Siegfried Sassoon threw his Military Cross into the Mersey in disgust with the waste of war.

  Mina Loy, already suffering advanced spinal osteoarthritis, died of pneumonia.

  In one of his less balanced periods, Robert Lowell penciled in some revisions in Milton’s Lycidas.

  And insisted he was the author of the entire poem.

  An anthology of extraordinary suicide notes. Or of any suicide notes. Is there such?

  Dorothy Parker died of a heart attack.

  Kenneth Tynan died of emphysema.

  He doesn’t want me to have a life of my own. Says Sonia Tolstoy’s Diary.

  Machiavelli died of unidentified stomach spasms.

  Addie Joss died of tubercular meningitis.

  Are we ever told what Addie Bundren dies of?

  Lawrence Durrell was found dead in a bathroom.

  Paulette Goddard died of heart failure.

  Why does Writer sometimes seem to admire the Iliad even more when he is thinking about it than when he is actually reading it?

  Augustus Montague Toplady.

  Ignorant asses, John Webster repudiated the Elizabethan theater audience as.

  Get thee to a brewery.

  Sailing the circumference of Lake Geneva, Byron and Shelley took time to pay homage at the house in Lausanne where Gibbon had written a great deal of The Decline and Fall

  Hey, Dad, sharp this for me, please?

  Theodore Watts-Dunton was said to sometimes hide Swinburne’s shoes—as a way of keeping him from drinking.

  From the King James Ecclesiastes:

  One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

  From the Revised Standard Version:

  A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.

  From the King James Song of Solomon: Our vines have tender grapes. From the Revised Standard: Our vineyards are in blossom.

  James Baldwin died of cancer of the esophagus.

  Michael Harrington died of cancer of the esophagus.

  S. S. Orizaba.

  You never have music here, do you. It ma
kes me nervous.

  Mozart was addicted to billiards.

  Frances Farmer died of throat cancer.

  Martha Argerich.

  Andre Breton died of heart failure precipitated by massive asthma attacks.

  Eddie Poe, Edgar Allan was commonly called.

  Leslie Howard died in a plane shot down by the Germans in World War II.

  William Gaddis died of prostate cancer.

  Velazquez was unconditionally dismissive of Raphael as a painter.

  George Meredith died of what was called a chill.

  Arrigo Boito died after catching the same in church.

  John Gay died of what was called colic but was most probably stomach cancer.

  Wallace Stevens once worked briefly as a newspaper reporter.

  And was assigned to cover Stephen Crane’s funeral.

  Zane Grey was a dentist.

  This skull is Helen.

  Divinites du Styx.

  Art which is not propaganda is not art, said Diego Rivera.

  Writer’s arse.

  Edgaiipo.

  For a time as young men Delacroix and Bonington shared a studio.

  Tony Lazzeri died in a fall down a flight of stairs during an epileptic seizure.

  Early in the morning I go to the rear blackboard and draw a small dollar sign. No one notices. The janitor who washes the blackboards every night must surely guess why it’s there.

  Rachel Carson died of breast cancer.

  St. Perpetua. Requesting a pin to fasten her hair—before guiding the gladiator’s sword to her throat in the arena at Carthage.

  Thomas More. Jesting on the scaffold and lifting aside his beard—before being beheaded.

  Was Bede the first historian to date events B.C. and A.D.?

  Lotte Lenya died of abdominal cancer. Teresa Stratas had essentially camped out at her bedside for weeks, so that she would not die alone.

  I shall not cease to fear Carthage until I know it is utterly destroyed, Cato said.

  A son of Ring Lardner’s died fighting with the Lincoln Brigade in Spain in 1938.

  A son of Ring Lardner’s died as a correspondent when his jeep hit a mine in World War II.

  Sibelius died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Pauline Viardot. Who sang the first performance of Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody.

  And may have had an illegitimate child by Turgenev.

  Johann Uhr, the Royal Armorer.

  Ford Madox Ford died of heart failure.

  The Cartesian Soul of Frank Sinatra. Having been the subtitle of an actual academic paper delivered at Hofstra University in 1998.

  Dear God! the very houses seemed asleep.