This is Not a Novel (6 page)

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 teacher.

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.