This is Not a Novel Read online

Stockholm, Greta Garbo’s ashes were buried near.

  They’re going to cut a street through. They would, Bill said.

  Plutarch says that to force himself to study oratory, Demosthenes once shaved half his head—so that he would be too embarrassed to leave his house.

  Though with Writer also now recalling the refrain from Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers, about the deaths of such as Chaucer and Lydgate and Henryson and Gower:

  Timor mortis conturbat me. The fear of death distresses me.

  And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?

  There is no such thing as a great movie. A Rembrandt is great. Mozart chamber music. Said Marlon Brando.

  Eliot died of emphysema in conjunction with a damaged heart.

  Pound died of a blocked intestine.

  Being less than surprised that Rouault began his career working at stained-glass windows.

  She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

  Otello. Verdi was seventy-four. Falstaff. Verdi was eighty.

  Office of the Dead.

  The friendship of John Donne and Isaak Walton.

  Rudolph Valentino died of a perforated ulcer.

  Trollope, as remembered by a schoolmate at Harrow: Without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met.

  Ben Shahn died of a heart attack after surgery.

  Andy Warhol died after gallbladder surgery.

  East Coker, for Eliot’s ashes.

  Roman Jakobson, in opposition to a novelist, namely Nabokov, teaching literature at Harvard: Should an elephant teach zoology?

  Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were tennis partners.

  John Donne. Anne Donne. Undone.

  Camoens died unknown and penniless in a plague.

  A lieutenant of Alexander’s, before the Battle of Arbela: Don’t think we fear their vast numbers, Sire. They’ll not stand the stink of goat that clings to us.

  For centuries, in England:

  The burial of a suicide under a high road, ideally at a crossroads.

  And with a wooden stake driven into his/her heart.

  Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem about one of the Dempsey-Tunney fights.

  Xanthippe was a shrew.

  Living with her teaches me to get along with the rest of the world, Socrates said.

  Gershwin died of a brain tumor.

  Edward MacDowell died mad, probably from syphilis.

  Manolete. Islero. Linares.

  The wife of Johann Strauss, Jr., once asked Brahms for an autograph. Brahms sketched out the opening notations for the Blue Danube.

  And signed them Alas, not by Johannes Brahms.

  Ronsard me celebrait du temps que j’etais belle.

  Wolfgang Pauli: You probably think these ideas are crazy.

  Niels Bohr: Unfortunately they are not crazy enough.

  Katyn.

  Nanking.

  Kyd’s scene in The Spanish Tragedy where Hieronimo finds the corpse of his son hanged from a tree in his garden.

  Luciano Pavarotti’s inability to read music.

  Ronsard died of gout.

  Conan Doyle died of a heart condition.

  Fichte once badly needed to borrow money from Kant. Kant said no.

  Frederick Exley died of a stroke.

  Joanna Baillie.

  Auden was known to show up at the opera in a stained tuxedo and bedroom slippers.

  Samuel Johnson died of dropsy.

  Gregor Mendel died of dropsy.

  Albert Pinkham Ryder lived in such filth, with even his bed spilling over with rubbish, that he generally slept on a patch of rug on the floor.

  Willie Maugham, he was commonly called. Archie MacLeish.

  Joe DiMaggio died on Al Gionfriddo’s birthday.

  Scriabin died of a blood infection.

  W. N. P. Barbellion.

  Daydreaming of a MacArthur Foundation award.

  Writer talking to himself yet another time.

  As did Gogol, in addition to Yeats and Holderlin and Hesiod.

  Talkative, outgoing, inquisitive, formidably erudite, and sharp.

  Stamford, Connecticut, Ezio Pinza died in.

  Lakeville, Connecticut, Wanda Landowska died in.

  That blockhead John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche anointed him.

  Passage to India. 1871. A Passage to India. 1924.

  Then again Kant did help Fichte find a teaching post.

  Jonas Salk died of heart failure.

  O tu, Palermo.

  George Gissing’s father was a druggist.

  I am a lost man! I whispered to myself. Ladies and gentlemen, I am a lost man! And I repeated that over and over as I went on jumping on my hat.

  Augusta Leigh died in poverty.

  Ouida died in poverty.

  Mary Webb died in poverty.

  Jane Avril died in poverty.

  Monk Lewis died of yellow fever on board a ship in the Atlantic.

  Two of the Le Nains died within two days of each other. The third would continue painting for twenty-nine more years.

  Mill died of what was termed a local fever.

  Hubert van Eyck died in 1426. If there was a Hubert van Eyck.

  Thorstein Veblen was once fired by the University of Chicago for—quote—womanizing.

  Anaxagoras, in exile, when told that the Athenians had condemned him to death for impiety:

  Nature long ago condemned them and me both.

  Dashiell Hammett died of lung cancer.

  Raymond Chandler died of pneumonia, hardly warded off by uncompromising alcoholism.

  The Loss of the Eurydice.

  Where Hopkins rhymes portholes and mortals.

  Beckett died of complications from emphysema.

  Einstein once gave private lectures to small groups in Prague.

  Some of which included Kafka.

  Montaigne could not swim. Unfortunately neither could Shelley.

  Dish-washings, Carlyle called Jane Austen’s novels. Swill, Steve Crane called Tennyson.

  Antoine. Louis. Mathieu.

  Orfamay Quest.

  Sir Thomas Malory may have died in prison.

  Vincenzo Bellini died of tuberculosis. Or of an intestinal inflammation.

  Handel owned a number of Rembrandts.

  Schoenberg taught at the University of California at Los Angeles for eight years after leaving Nazi Germany.

  And then was made to retire on a pension of $38 per month.

  Rome has spoken. The debate is concluded.

  How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?

  The suspicion that Ambrose Bierce was a suicide. And perhaps did not even go to Mexico.

  Teresa Guiccioli had hemorrhoids.

  Edith Wharton and her husband used separate bedrooms.

  Jones Very spent time in the same Boston insane asylum where Robert Lowell would be a patient a century later.

  Doak Walker died after being paralyzed in a skiing accident.

  Abba Kovner.

  Rimsky-Korsakov died of a heart attack.

  Leonard Bernstein died of a heart attack though already doomed by lung cancer.

  A kind of shopgirl’s philosophy, Levi-Strauss dismissed much of Sartre as.

  An ecstatic schoolgirl anti-style, Leslie Fiedler accused Kerouac of.

  Wharton died of a series of strokes.

  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 go with drunken goy ever. Says the ghost of Leopold Bloom’s father.

  What the world would know of the Holocaust if the Germans had won.

  Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. 1495-1498.

  The fellow that was pilloried, I have forgot his name.

  You can actually draw so beautifully. Why do you spend your time making all these queer things? Picasso: That’s why.

  Giv
e me a laundry list and I will set it to music. Said Rossini.

  The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.

  The friendship of Menander and Epicurus.

  St. Anthony was illiterate. And did not bathe. Ever.

  The exact route by which Hannibal crossed the Alps. Which to this day historians have not determined.

  Voltaire said he would believe in doctors when he met one who was a centenarian.

  Dying himself at eighty-four, of uremia.

  A hundred devils trample me down if old drunkards do not outnumber old doctors, Rabelais said.

  Is Frans Hals the most documented drinker among earlier artists?

  Is Addison close to it among writers?

  Walker Percy died of prostate cancer.

  Lillian Nordica. The first American to sing at Bayreuth. George London. The first American to sing Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi.

  Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis.

  Rube Waddell died of tuberculosis.

  July 14, 1789. There were seven prisoners, total, in the fortress.

  A man can die but once; we owe God a death.

  The Colossus of Rhodes crashed down in an earthquake in 224 B.C. Fully three centuries later Pliny the Elder would comment on the monstrous bronze fragments that still lay about the harbor.

  George Herbert played the lute.

  Nordica died of pneumonia after a shipwreck in the Malay Archipelago.

  London died after years of paralysis from a stroke.

  An intriguing speculation of La Fontaine’s: Was St. Augustine as wise as Rabelais?

  Then Werther blew his silly brains out—unquote— while Charlotte went on cutting bread and butter.

  Chares of Lindus.

  Ann Rutledge died of typhoid fever. At nineteen.

  Auden died of a heart attack in a hotel room.

  Richard Tucker died of a heart attack in a hotel room.

  Dirty, dull, and false. Said R. L. S. of Tom Jones.

  Yeats and Pound married cousins. Coleridge and Southey married sisters.

  Domenico Scarlatti died penniless. Farinelli saw to it that his family was cared for.

  Our American Cousin.

  Stevie Smith died of a brain tumor.

  Ava Gardner died of pneumonia.

  1893. Sixty feet six inches.

  Lillian Russell went out of her way to arrange to meet Amos Rusie.

  The anti-Semitic clause in the Magna Carta.

  And mighty poets in their misery dead.

  Dreiser died of a heart attack.

  Mencken died of a heart attack.

  Barbaric degrees of drinking, Arrian says Alexander took to by the end.

  Edward Hopper Highway. Susanne Langer Mews.

  Even Homer sometimes nods, Horace said. Wordsworth sometimes wakes, Byron allowed.

  Wordsworth on Byron in turn: Perverted.

  E. M. Forster died of a massive stroke.

  Solomon Grundy.

  I suppose my main source of annoyance with him was his affectation of not being a writer, but a farmer,- this would have been pretentious even had he been a farmer.

  Said Allen Tate, re Faulkner.

  Correggio died either of heat prostration or from drinking foul water to relieve it.

  Correggiosity.

  The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction. Said Orwell.

  So certain was Pliny the Younger that the histories of Tacitus would last through the centuries that he pleaded with Tacitus to be mentioned in them.

  The centuries presently numbering nineteen.

  Runnymede.

  Rydal Mount.

  Jean-Baptiste Greuze died impoverished and forgotten.

  Dawn Powell was buried in a potter’s field.

  Writer had but a glimpse of Faulkner. As it happens, of Hemingway tambien.

  I see no point in reading, said Louis XIV.

  Pliny the Younger having been a nephew, not a son.

  Ty Cobb died of prostate cancer.

  Faulkner, at a funeral. Small and beady-eyed. Hemingway at ringside.

  Was Shane his first name or his last?

  Faulkner in fact looking like a Eula Varner in-law.

  Sit not down on the bushel.

  You are leaving the American Sector.

  Miguel de Unamuno died of a stroke.

  Glenn Gould died of a stroke.

  When and where did the last person die who still believed in the existence of Zeus?

  Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a cantaloupe.

  Green-wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, Lola Montez is buried in.

  Bronislaw Malinowski died of a heart attack.

  Vittorio Gassman died of a heart attack.

  Lincoln never saw Europe.

  The one person in the world he would have liked to meet, Lenin said, was Charlie Chaplin.

  The one person in the world he would have liked to meet, Eliot said, was Joe Louis.

  Camille Pissarro died of blood poisoning.

  Le Douanier died of blood poisoning after neglecting a cut.

  Is there a single Jane Austen volume that manages not to bring up the subject of money before the end of page one?

  The Odessa steps.

  Isak Dinesen died of what was recorded as emaciation.

  W. S. Gilbert died while trying to rescue someone from drowning.

  How old was the Virgin Mary?

  Rogier van der Weyden’s panel of St. Luke sketching her portrait.

  Clay Allison died of a broken neck.

  Was Glenn Gould someone else who talked to himself, or would he have only been singing along?

  Kenneth Rexroth’s incomparably godawful verses on the premise that people who shopped at Brooks Brothers caused the death of Dylan Thomas.

  Malcolm Lowry, on the same death:

  We drank his health, poured a libation of gin to his memory, and for some reason cut down a tree, likewise dead, and an old friend.

  Died on Saturday, Buried on Sunday.

  Rexroth died of a heart attack.

  Jean Cocteau died of a heart attack.

  The Brahms German Requiem: Listening to it is a sacrifice that should be asked of a man only once in his life, Shaw said.

  Overheard, frequently, by Xenophanes: How old were you when the Persians came?

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

  That’s why.

  But where is your friend, Daddy?

  Melville’s lifetime earnings from his fiction—from more than forty-five years—would appear to barely exceed ten thousand dollars.

  Minnie Hauk died blind. And living on charity.

  Lenin died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Juvenal’s poetry is not mentioned anywhere, by anyone, during his lifetime or until almost two hundred years after his death.

  By the era of Petrarch and Boccaccio and Chaucer, he has become O Master Juvenal.

  Words, words, words.

  Vous sortez du Secteur Americain.

  Does Lunita Laredo desert Major Brian Tweedy, or does she die young?

  What time was it forty-five minutes before the beginning of time?

  Wanamaker’s department store, in Manhattan, Richard Strauss once conducted concerts in.

  At Actium, what with the torching of a number of his ships, many of Antony’s troops were roasted alive in their own red-hot armor, says Dio Cassius.

  What a coarse, immoral, mean, and senseless work Hamlet is, Tolstoy said.

  By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot boys are laid…

  Is Clarissa still the longest single novel in the language?

  I must dye one day, and as good this day as another. Says a suicide in Rowley.

  Trade is wholly inconsistent with a gentleman’s calling. Said John Locke.

  Salamis, Solon’s ashes were scattered at.

  Kipling died of a hemorrhage from duode
nal ulcers.

  Alfred de Musset died of heart failure.

  Lope de Vega wrote what may have been as many as fifteen hundred plays. Of which almost a third survive.

  Thomas Eakins made Walt Whitman’s death mask.

  Camerado is in no one’s dictionary.

  The rose-lipt girls are sleeping In fields where roses fade.

  Edmund Wilson died of a coronary occlusion.

  Sir Thomas Beecham died of a stroke.

  Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.

  Being a fictitious name once used by Coleridge in the dragoons.

  Kilgore Rosewater.

  Being one used by Kurt Vonnegut in a hospital.

  Bix Beiderbecke died of pneumonia while also confronting delirium tremens.

  Fichte died of an unspecified fever.

  The friendship of Rene Char and Martin Heidegger.

  Charlemagne could read but could not write.

  Joan of Arc could do neither.

  How old were you, what were you doing, when you heard Lord Byron was dead?

  Genevieve de Galard-Terraube.

  Oliver Goldsmith played the flute.

  Hopp, hopp! Hopp, hopp! Hopp, hopp!

  The Pervigilium Veneris.

  Gertrude Stein, to Jacques Lipchitz:

  Besides Shakespeare and me, who do you think there is?

  Luis Bunuel died of cancer of the bile duct and the liver.

  Tennyson, at fifteen, etched it with a sharp stone into the face of a boulder in the woods: Byron is dead.

  Samuel Pepys once smacked his wife in the eye. In point of fact, on December 19,1664.

  And so to bed.

  Salvatore Quasimodo died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  I shall look as if I were dead, and that will not be true.

  Zara Dolukhanova. Irina Arkhipova.

  Tchitchikov.

  Stein died of cancer of the uterus.

  Berthe Morisot was a great-granddaughter of Fragonard. And married Manet’s younger brother.

  Judah Halevi was trampled to death by an Arab horseman at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Or died in ways unknown at Damascus.

  St. Lawrence was broiled on a gridiron in Rome. Or was beheaded.

  William Ernest Henley died of tuberculosis.

  At fifty-nine, George Eliot married a man twenty-one years younger than she.

  Who on their Venice honeymoon jumped from a hotel-room balcony into the Grand Canal.

  Did Professor Bloom take any books with him, do you know?

  Someone said he had a twenty-six-volume complete Joseph Conrad. It’s only a weekend cruise.

  Conway, New Hampshire, E. E. Cummings died in.

  Conway, Massachusetts, Jack Chesbro died in.