This is Not a Novel (7 page)

Badges? I don’t have to show you no stinkin’ badges.

One of St. Jerome’s letters to St. Augustine took nine years to be delivered.

Capitoline. Palatine. Aventine. Caelian. Esquiline. Viminal. Quirinal.

What existed before the Big Bang?

Where?

Exclude God from your response.

Camille Pissarro was poverty-stricken for much of his working career.

Alfred Sisley was perhaps worse off, and for longer.

William Goyen died of leukemia.

Fragonard’s
The Swing.

Which William Carlos Williams had the impression was Watteau’s.

Plato talked too much, Diogenes said.

While dismissing Socrates as a lunatic altogether.

Erasmus was indisputably the most famous author of his day. Thomas More even admitted to being thrilled that the very fact of their friendship would help keep his own name alive with posterity.

A piece of
dreck,
Luther on the other hand called him.

I, O Plato, see a table and a cup. But I see no tableness or cupness.

Dickens’ astonishing manic walks. Of as many as twenty-five miles—and at a headlong pace.

Oedipus Rex
did not win first prize in the dramatic competition in the year when it was first presented.

Any contemporary philosopher who ventured to compare himself with Leibniz could at best wind up wishing he had a quiet corner to go die in, said Diderot.

William Wycherley married a second wife, far younger than he, at seventy-five. And died eleven days later.

George Herbert died of consumption.

The most odious of small creeping things, Landor called critics.

A
walk
²
.
What on earth
for
²
.

Asked Auden at someone’s country home.

Dizzy Dean had less than a fourth-grade education. But a post-doctoral sense of the joys of that game, said Marianne Moore.

Hemingway, on Ezra Pound’s indictment for treason: If Ezra has any sense he should shoot himself. Personally I think he should have shot himself somewhere along after the twelfth canto although maybe earlier.

Disraeli said he had read
Pride and Prejudice
at least sixteen times.

The straight line predominates in nature. Ingres once said.

Only curved lines are to be found in nature. Ingres once said.

Maud Gonne was six feet tall. Akhmatova was five feet eleven.

Jessica Mitford died of brain cancer.

Ellen Glasgow was buried in the same coffin as the exhumed remains of her two favorite dogs.

Venus Pudica. Venus Anadyomene.

Absolute reason expired at eleven o’clock last night.

Think how many royal bones Sleep within this heap of stones.

—Wrote Beaumont
re
Westminster Abbey.

Roger Martin du Gard died of a heart condition.

Arthur Honegger died of a heart condition.

Henry James ill-advisedly took an author’s curtain call on the opening night of his play
Guy Domville.
And was hissed.

The Hebrew in Exodus 34:29-30 translates literally to say that after Moses came down from Sinai for the second time, the skin on his face sent forth beams, meaning it shone.

A mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate said he was horned.

Ergo Michelangelo. And cetera.

Rameau died of typhoid fever.

Lovis Corinth.

Rilke wrote standing up. Lewis Carroll wrote standing up. Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up.

Robert Lowell and Truman Capote wrote lying down.

Writer sits.

Jens Peter Jacobsen died of tuberculosis.

Balzac often worked for sixteen or eighteen hours consecutively, generally beginning at midnight. Awash in coffee.

Gibbon died of infectious complications from hydrocele.

Contemporary architecture is basically a bore.

Writer sometimes also talks to himself.

As did Yeats.

As did Yeats even walking the streets of Dublin.

Mad as the mist and snow.

Writer sitting and/or talking to himself being no more than renewed verification that he exists.

In a book without characters.

As noted, not being a character but the author, here.

We are and we are not. Said Heraclitus.

Even with innumerable obvious likes and/or dislikes and certain self-evident preoccupations.

How frequently was
Anon,
a woman?

Marcel Duchamp died of prostate cancer.

Already condemned by lung cancer, Duke Ellington died of pneumonia.

The word
ghetto
originally meant f oundry. Until the Jews of Venice were forced to live on an island that had previously been the site of one.

Knowledge is not intelligence. Heraclitus additionally said.

Thales, solving the height of the pyramids: Simply by measuring their shadows precisely when his own shadow matched his height.

The legend that as a young man Leonardo was so strong he could straighten a horseshoe with his bare hands.

Robert Capa was killed by a land mine in Vietnam.

Fray Luis de Leon, returning to his Salamanca classroom after five years of imprisonment by the Inquisition: As I was saying…

Hey, Dad, hot this for me, please?

A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity, Johnson said.

Disgusting eating habits, there or elsewhere, Boswell says Johnson had.

Roald Dahl died of leukemia.

There can be no doubt that there is something peculiar in the condition of the English retina.

Said Taine, viewing a first exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art.

I hear a white horse on the way.

G. K. Chesterton died of heart failure.

Hilaire Belloc died, senile, at eighty-three, when he set his clothing on fire by spilling coal from a grate.

Hardy’s father was a stonemason.

Turner’s mother died mad.

Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

On radio, the opening lines of Verlaine’s
Chanson d’automne:

Being the signal to the European underground that the D-Day invasion was underway.

Jane! Jane! Jane!

Filippo Lippi died of quinsy.

Account for Joan of Arc.

According to Vasari, ordinary citizens in Florence were so impressed by a Madonna of Cimabue’s that it was actually carried in a procession from his workshop to Santa Trinita.

Heralded by trumpets.

It is an aspect of probability that many improbable things will happen.

Aristotle says Agathon said.

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

Aristotle himself added,
re
tragedy.

Wittgenstein had nephews fighting on both sides in World Warn.

Meyerhold was executed by the Soviets.

He dug a grave of the same length as Pakhom’s form from head to heels—three Russian ells—and buried him.

Ruben Dario died of cirrhosis of the liver.

Diderot died of coronary thrombosis while sitting at dinner.

I used to say to them, Go boldly in among the English, and then I used to go boldly in myself. Said Joan.

He could not get rid of the idea that he was damned, and he would have drowned himself if he had not been prevented by force.

Says a chronicle from the monastery where Hugo van der Goes was a lay brother.

He was known to drink, which made things worse. Says the same.

This is even a disquisition on the maladies of the life of art, if Writer says so.

Wanhope.

John Reed died of typhus.

Louise Bryant died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Not even to a philosopher could old age be easy in the depths of poverty, Cicero said.

Nor could a fool find it anything but burdensome even amid ample wealth.

Maria Jeritza was the first Tosca to sing
Vissi d’arte
while lying on the floor.

Only because she had been elbowed off a couch by accident.

It was from God, Puccini decided.

Though with Jeritza also flaunting far too much obvious posterior, put in Geraldine Farrar.

Venus Callipyge.

Louise O’Murphy.

Tiepolo and Francesco Guardi were brothers-in-law.

Richard Wright died of a heart attack.

The question of Mikhail Sholokhov’s authorship of
The Quiet Don.

The question of Dmitri Shostakovich’s authorship of his
Memoirs.

St. Teresa of Lisieux knew
The Imitation of Christ
by heart.

John Masefield died of gangrene at eighty-eight when he refused to have an injured leg amputated.

Schopenhauer played the flute.

He has no insight into character. And no dramatic talent. His dialogue hardens to wood and stone.

Said Emerson about its author after reading
Oliver Twist.

Camille Saint-Saens talked with a lisp.

Mahler, discovering that Alma was having an affair with Walter Gropius.

And spending an entire day discussing it with Freud.

Is Macbeth impotent?

Hans Memling. That very model of a major minor master, as Erwin Panofsky had it.

The legend that as an impoverished, wounded soldier, Memling had begun to paint in gratitude to monks who sheltered him.

Edward Arlington Robinson died of pancreatic cancer.

Warren’s Blacking. 30, Strand.

Carl Maria von Weber died of tuberculosis.

Ambrose Bierce fought at Shiloh, Stones River, and Chickamauga. And was wounded at Kenesaw Mountain.

The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters.

Leonidas and the Three Hundred, who would perish at Thermopylae.

Only men who had already fathered sons to leave behind had been permitted to join the command.

Said of George Washington, at the height of the war with the British:

He sometimes throws and catches a ball for whole hours with his aides-de-camp.

Nabokov appears to have died of an infection caught in a hospital where he was being treated for the flu.

Paul Bowles died of a heart attack.

Jane Bowles died after a stroke.

Friday is on their island with Robinson Crusoe for thirteen out of Crusoe’s twenty-eight years.

Why does Defoe not let him ever learn to speak more than pidgin English?

Why does Stephen Crane never actually state that the battle in
The Red Badge of Courage
is Chancellorsville?

La Scala was severely bombed in World War II.
The Vienna Staatsoper was severely bombed in World War II.

There are so few people who know how to make art. —Julian Schnabel.

One less than he thinks. —Robert Hughes.

In
Coriolanus,
Shakespeare allows someone to mention Cato.

Three centuries ahead of time.

And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

Pericles died of plague.

Stefan Lochner purchased a house in Cologne in 1442. Konrad Witz purchased a house in Basel in 1443. Martin Schongauer purchased a house in Colmar in 1477.

Hans Baldung Grien purchased a house in Strasbourg in 1527.

Paganini died of what was evidently cancer of the larynx.

Walter Pater died of gout.

It is written in a careless and humble style, in the vulgar tongue, which even housewives speak. Said Dante of the
Comedy.

William Etty.

The Axion Esti.

All through the night Rome went burning. Put that in the noontide and it loses some of its age-old significance, does it not?

Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Gilgamesh.