The Last Novel Read online

  There are four chances in 2,598,960 of being dealt a royal flush in a hand of poker.

  How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?

  Asked Satchel Paige.

  Baudelaire wrote a poem about Watteau.

  Verlaine wrote a poem about Watteau.

  Proust wrote a poem about Watteau.

  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, long since categorically exposed as a fraud.

  Nonetheless incessantly reprinted throughout the Muslim world — not to add dramatized on television.

  Kant’s father was a saddle maker.

  If you are going to make a book end badly, Robert Louis Stevenson once pointed out, it must end badly from the beginning — Such as by mentioning an eighth-story roof in its very first paragraphs.

  And which should presumably call to mind Chekhov’s admonition that if a pistol is displayed in a first act, it had damned well better be fired by the last.

  Raphael died on his thirty-seventh birthday.

  Always young in men’s memories, someone thought to say.

  Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.

  Only days before Edna St. Vincent Millay’s birth, her mother’s brother’s life was saved in a New York hospital. Millay’s middle name, those few days later, was taken from the name of the hospital.

  Florence Nightingale.

  Simply because she was born there.

  Canon in D Major for Strings and Continuo.

  By Johann Pachelbel.

  Does having been six feet eight inches tall make Charles Olson the tallest known poet?

  How tall was William Langland, who because of his height was called Long Will?

  One half of the children born die before their eighth year. This is nature’s law; why try to contradict it?

  Inquired Rousseau.

  John Jay Chapman’s conclusion that a visiting Martian would come away with a more critical lesson about life on earth from attending an Italian opera than from reading Emerson.

  The lesson that there are two sexes.

  September 13, 1506, Andrea Mantegna died on.

  Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

  Lente currite noctis equi.

  Says Ovid in the Amores.

  O lente lente currite noctis equi.

  Says Marlowe, at the end of Faustus.

  Of no significance whatsoever. But the hospital where Dylan Thomas would die, sixty-one years after the fact, was the one after which Edna Millay had been named.

  O run slowly, slowly, horses of the night.

  Pandora’s box. Which in the first written version of the tale, in Hesiod, is in fact a jar.

  A reference to the good old hearty female stench, unquote.

  Which Pound excised from Eliot’s manuscript of The Waste Land.

  Sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.

  Said Luther, dismissing this fool, Copernicus.

  Flat, clumsy, labored, and embarrassingly crude, Isaac Deutscher called Doctor Zhivago.

  Which Akhmatova found so intermittently inept that she refused to believe Pasternak had written it all.

  Like Benedetto Croce earlier, Ignazio Silone lost both of his parents in an earthquake.

  Paul Robeson’s Othello.

  With José Ferrer as Iago.

  Renée Fleming’s Metropolitan opening-night Desdemona — sung only three weeks after having given birth to a second child.

  Because of a promise to his mother, Jorge Luis Borges recited the Lord’s Prayer every night of his life:

  Even though I don’t know whether there’s anybody at the other end of the line.

  God seems to have left the receiver off the hook.

  Once suggested Arthur Koestler — in more general political terms.

  And prayers have no power the Plague to stay.

  Wrote Long Will.

  Montaigne was taught to read and speak Latin before he knew French.

  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was reading Plato and Aristophanes, in Latin translations, at the age of eight.

  Anton Bruckner, in old age, tells Gustav Mahler that he can readily foresee his coming interrogation by his Maker — Why else have I given you talent, you son of a bitch, than that you should sing My praise and glory? But you have accomplished much too little.

  Cosima Wagner’s Jewish great-grandmother.

  Egon Schiele was once briefly jailed — but then not prosecuted — on allegations of abducting and molesting a girl of thirteen.

  Q. Who is the Buddha?

  A. Three pounds of flax.

  After a performance, Queen Victoria once ventured to inform Paderewski that he was a genius.

  To which: Perhaps, Your Majesty. But before that I was a drudge.

  The word nihilism.

  Coined by Turgenev, for use in Fathers and Sons.

  The next night he did not know where he was, did not feel the cold. The wind blew dust along the ground and into his mouth as he sang.

  Nelson, at Trafalgar. Who had a horseshoe nailed to the mainmast of the Victory before the battle.

  Niels Bohr — who kept one above a door in his vacation home.

  Niels Bohr.

  I would rather have a drop of luck than a barrel of brains.

  Allegedly said Diogenes.

  Franco Zeffirelli’s Taming of the Shrew. In which Zeffirelli’s name in the credits was larger than Shakespeare’s.

  Please return this book. I find that though many of my friends are poor mathematicians, they are nearly all good bookkeepers.

  Read Walter Scott’s bookplate.

  January 14, 2005, Victoria de los Angeles died on.

  Ivor Gurney, who was both wounded and gassed at Passchendaele, spent the last fifteen of his remaining twenty years in a mental institution — convinced that the war was still going on.

  Italo Calvino died after a cerebral hemorrhage suffered while sitting in a garden.

  A portable fatherland, Heine called the Torah.

  From a letter of Petrarch’s, ca. 1352, in which he mentions having been reminded of some task or other by the town clock:

  By this recent invention we now measure time in almost all of the cities of northern Italy.

  Eliot’s second marriage, in 1957, took place in the same Kensington church where Jules Laforgue had been married seventy-one years earlier — which Eliot claimed not to have known beforehand.

  How can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?

  Asked the principal headline in the London Daily Mirror after the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004.

  G. E. Moore was known to appear at his Cambridge classroom in bedroom slippers.

  Father, dear father, come home with me now!

  The clock in the steeple strikes one.

  I don’t go upstairs two nights out of seven without taking Washington Irving under my arm.

  Said Dickens.

  Actually, the door to Novelist’s roof is connected to an alarm. Workmen unable to locate the building superintendent now and again trip it. No one pays any attention, however.

  Jean Giraudoux spent two very brief periods, when young, as an instructor at Harvard.

  And for years thereafter kept a Harvard pennant above the bed in his Paris apartment.

  The writer Bret Easton Ellis, who imparted to a New York Times reporter that he had been reading the Bible — but then seemed uncertain as to whether in the Old Testament or the New.

  Were the stories about Moses or Jesus?

  Jesus. I think.

  The frequent blind beggars in Euripides, particularly in plays now lost.

  The crutch and cripple playwright, Aristophanes called him.

  August Strindberg’s mother had been a barmaid.

  The marriage of Roberta Peters and Robert Merrill — which lasted three months.

  The Greatest Novel Reader in the World.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning suggested her own epitaph could well be.

  Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin over
dose. At twenty-seven.

  Sir Thomas Bodley, who organized the Oxford library subsequently named the Bodleian, permitted the inclusion of no such idle bookes and riffe raffes — unquote — as writings for the current theater.

  Including of course those of his almost exact contemporary Shakespeare.

  Allen Ginsberg’s insistence that he was once accosted by the apparitional voice of William Blake — immediately after masturbating.

  How now! Whose mare’s dead?

  The extraordinary fame of Menander in antiquity — to the point where he is even quoted by Saint Paul.

  Robert Graves’ claim that as an infant at Wimbledon he had been occasionally patted on the head by Swinburne — he himself being wheeled by his nurse, Swinburne en route to his pub.

  Theodore Watts-Dunton’s wife’s claim that when the monumentally alcoholic Swinburne was finally weaned away from brandy, he initially drank port because Tennyson did, then burgundy because of the Musketeers in Dumas, and at last ale — because of Shakespeare.

  What a pleasant party, Plutarch records someone commenting to Timon of Athens.

  It would be, if you were gone, Timon responds.

  If there is anyone here I have forgotten to insult, I apologize.

  Announced Brahms, exiting somewhere — 2,300 years later.

  Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad.

  No battleship has yet been sunk by bombs.

  Said the caption on a photograph of the USS Arizona in the program for the 1941 Army-Navy football game — eight days before Pearl Harbor.

  Ovid’s banishment from Rome by Augustus — which meant that his books were automatically removed from the city’s libraries as well.

  The similar banning of Virgil’s and Livy’s three decades later — by Caligula, who simply did not like them.

  May the devil bung a cesspool with his skull.

  Requested John Millington Synge, re a dim-witted reviewer.

  One of us was once in love for eight days with a woman of fairly easy virtue, and the other for three days with a ten-franc whore. Altogether, eleven days of love between the two of us.

  Being Edmond and Jules Goncourt, elucidating their relationships with the opposite sex.

  Longfellow published his first poem at thirteen.

  Bryant wrote Thanatopsis at seventeen — and after publication several years later was to hear it called a hoax.

  No one, on this side of the Atlantic, is capable of writing such verses, insisted Richard Henry Dana.

  Never having realized that there originally once was an actual troublemaking Irish family named Hooligan.

  Or a military officer named Shrapnel.

  The John Cage composition entitled 4'33"

  .

  In which the performer sits at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds — and plays nothing.

  Cervantes was fifty-eight when Part I of Don Quixote was published.

  And sixty-eight at Part II.

  Finding the earliest hints of a theory of evolution in Anaximander.

  In the sixth century BC.

  I never knew a writer’s wife who wasn’t beautiful.

  Said Kurt Vonnegut.

  Has Novelist ever known many who could not contrive some way to keep the pot boiling during fallow stretches?

  General Mikhail T. Kalashnikov.

  Joseph Ignace Guillotin.

  Sir Rudolf Bing was once robbed of a cheap watch he wore only for sentimental reasons. Zinka Milanov was infuriated:

  The General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera does not display a twenty-dollar wristwatch!

  The mugging in which Giuseppe di Stefano, at eighty-three, was quite badly injured — while being stripped of a gold chain he had been given by Maria Callas.

  It was Beckett’s wife who took the call informing them that Beckett had won the Nobel Prize. Her first reaction, even as she turned to tell him:

  Quelle catastrophe!

  Toledo, Judah Halevi was born in.

  Córdoba, Maimonides.

  Saint Benedict, essentially the founder of moderate monastic rule.

  Whose earliest regulations as an abbot were so harsh that the monks tried to poison his wine.

  In the dense mist

  What is being shouted

  Between hill and boat?

  Beethoven’s brief period as a pupil of Hadyn’s:

  I never learned anything from the man.

  There is no such thing as abstract art, said Picasso.

  You always have to start somewhere or other.

  Inconceivable nonsense.

  Tchaikovsky called Das Rheingold.

  Machiavelli’s interminable visits to prostitutes — described in unexpurgated detail in his correspondence.

  Graham Greene’s — so compulsive that a biographer was able to reproduce a cryptic list, in Greene’s handwriting, of a favorite forty-seven.

  Georges Simenon’s — whose autobiography speaks of as many as a thousand.

  That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

  Says a Flaubert letter.

  Yeats evidently knew no music.

  The word serendipity.

  Coined by Horace Walpole, in a 1754 fairy story.

  August 22, 1904, Kate Chopin died on.

  August 17, 1935, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

  George Eliot’s instantaneous anger over any sort of anti-Semitic reference or joke.

  Molière was on stage, performing in the role of the hypochondriac in his own last play Le Malade imaginaire, when he was stricken by the bursting blood vessel that caused his death a day later.

  I hope I never get so old I get religious.

  Quoth Ingmar Bergman.

  Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over.

  Like their grandly perspicacious uncles — who groused that Monet had done those damnable water lilies nine dozen times already also.

  When a head and a book collide, and one sounds hollow — is it always the book?

  Asked Lichtenberg.

  Owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.

  Milton labeled critics.

  Ménière’s disease, Swift suffered from.

  Erysipelas, Herman Melville.

  Chopin’s phthisis — which left him weighing less than one hundred pounds.

  They told me I was everything; ’tis a lie — I am not ague-proof.

  Realizes Lear.

  The central railway-station platform of destinies.

  Blaise Cendrars called early twentieth-century Bohemian Paris.

  Virginia Woolf ’s suicide, for which she filled her pockets with stones before walking into the Ouse.

  Wondering if anyone has ever noted how many stones — and what they might possibly have weighed?

  Sleet falling;

  Fathomless, infinite

  Loneliness.

  Verlaine was at most eight or nine feet away when he famously fired three shots at Rimbaud with a revolver — fortunately no more than wounding him in the wrist with the first and missing completely with the next two.

  The painter of painters.

  Manet called Velazquez.

  A German equivalent of Tubby, Schubert’s nickname was, among his friends.

  Not to be born is far best.

  Wrote Sophocles.

  Not to be born at all would be the best thing.

  Wrote Theognis, at least a half-century earlier.

  Richard Feynman’s conviction that as the perspective grows more and more distant, James Clerk Maxwell will loom ever larger as the single towering eminence of the nineteenth century.

  The one truly great political figure of our age.

  Einstein called Gandhi.

  Dostoievsky’s graduation from an engineering institute.

  Achieved only after having first failed elementary algebra.

  A cobbl
er makes a greater contribution to society than does a Homer or a Plato.

  Asserted Proudhon.

  Katherine Mansfield was dead at thirty-five.

  March 7, 1944, Emmanuel Ringelbaum died on.

  Ballplayers on the road live together. It won’t work.

  Said Rogers Hornsby re the signing of Jackie Robinson.

  I only wished to tell people honestly: Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live!

  Said Chekhov, late along.

  Tirso de Molina, who wrote the first dramatic version of the Don Juan legend — in which he allows someone to ask the stone Commendatore if there are taverns in the underworld.

  And can poets down there still win prizes?

  John Ruskin’s insistence that he could never live in America — a country so miserable as to possess no castles, as he put it.

  Freud’s addiction to cocaine.

  Sherlock Holmes’.

  Contemporary college students — college students — who when asked to identify Joan of Arc have supposed her to be a character in the Biblical story of Noah and the flood.

  Or indeed Noah’s wife.

  The first hospital in Europe was opened in Paris in the seventh century AD.

  At least four hundred years after such things existed in Hindu India.

  Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

  America is now given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.

  Determined Hawthorne, in 1855.

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

  Who mentions not one of them in his history.

  Johnson’s Lives of the Poets — which mentions none either.

  Yasser Arafat was reported not to have read one book in the last forty years of his life.

  But to have spent innumerable hours enrapt by Tom and Jerry cartoons.

  The man who has seen a truly beautiful woman has seen God.

  Said Rumi.

  a pretty girl who naked is is

  worth a million statues

  Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, John Cowper Powys died in.

  By her own count, Vigée-Lebrun produced six hundred and sixty-two portraits.

  Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.

  Wrote Dickens.

  Butterfly, my child.

  Puccini spoke of her as.