Reader's Block (18 page)

I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent, Scott Fitzgerald said.

Capt. Wilfred Owen was an acting company commander, attempting to cross an enemy-held canal, when he was machine-gunned.

Wilhelm Furtwangler. Herbert von Karajan. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Alfred Cortot. Kirsten Flagstad. Walter Gieseking. Inextricably bedfellowed with the Nazis.

As was Gigli with the Italian fascists.

That nearby, Protagonist awakening mornings to the wash of the surf?

Mitigating, will it, the morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before?

Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come?

Thesmophoriazusae.

Anne Sexton sometimes allowed a recording of the
Bachianas Brasileiras
to replay itself endlessly when she was writing.

But now they that are younger than I have me

in derision,

Whose fathers I disdained to set with the dogs

of my flock.

The Virgin for those who have nobody them with.

André Malraux flew sixty-five missions as the commander of the Loyalist air force. And in World War II was captured twice by the Germans while a leader of the Resistance, and twice escaped.

Was Moses murdered in the wilderness?

Was willst du
_y
fremder Mensch?

Bidú Sayão.

Freud and Frazer were immediate contemporaries. Freud read a good deal of Frazer. Frazer did not read one word of Freud.

Kurt Tucholsky committed suicide.

Henry Miller was an anti-Semite.

Les Nuits d’Été.
The poems Gautier’s.

Whittier threw
Leaves of Grass
into a fire.

Suffering Alzheimer’s disease, de Kooning once had to be prevented from eating a cigarette.

With kings and counsellors, murmured I.

Xanthus.

Why does it sadden Reader to realize he will almost certainly never know what book will turn out to be the last he ever read?

What piece of music, the last he ever heard?

Matthew 27:3-5 says that Judas hanged himself.

I am old, and can no longer work, and am without means of livelihood, and my wife is ill.

Said Paolo Uccello on a tax declaration in Florence in 1469.

Un grand peut-être.

Sacajawea.

Fanny Imlay committed suicide with laudanum.

Rubens was fifty-three when he married his second wife Hélène. Who was sixteen.

No more behind

But such a day tomorrow as today

And to be boy eternal.

The second Brandenburg concerto, on an indestructible phonograph disc, is drifting eternally in space affixed to
Voyager II

Anna Comnena.

Alfonsina Storni drowned herself in the Mar del Plata. Having mailed off her final manuscript that morning.

Ninety feet between bases is the greatest invention of Western man.

Jean Giraudoux was an anti-Semite.

Cavafy, acknowledged as the great Greek poet of his time. Who lived his entire writing life in Egypt.

The names of the dead.

Stanley Badner.

Carlo Crivelli was once imprisoned in Venice for kidnapping and rape.

And later knighted in Naples for creating altarpieces like the
Madonna della Rondine.

Bruno Bettelheim committed suicide.

The shaving lotion that Malcolm Lowry drank in Manhattan in 1954 was Mennen Skin Bracer.

Protagonist will still have the same brand on a shelf at the cemetery.

O
che dolce cosa è questa prospettiva!

1 couldn’t do that to him.

Said Nora, at the suggestion that Joyce be given a Catholic funeral.

The several ancient oaks. Reader’s nighttime image of only the faintest glow from a single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window.

And?

Saint Jude?

Gertrud Kolmar died at Auschwitz.

Etty Hillesum died at Auschwitz.

Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress.

And curst be he that moves my bones.

Remedios Varo was rumored to have committed suicide.

The ghost in the machine.

Alexander died in bed. Legend says that near the end he tried to drown himself in the Euphrates, hoping his body would be lost and his legions would believe he had been carried off as a god.

Roxane found him and shooed him back.

How does Protagonist spend a day like Thanksgiving?

Or any holiday?

How does Protagonist spend a simple Sunday?

Juvenal was an anti-Semite.

And can you not understand that having told you all this, I shall forever despise you for having heard it?

Someone wished Protagonist a merry Christmas in passing on the street yesterday?

Potestas Clavium.

Botticelli’s father was a tanner.

Maria Callas was rumored to have committed suicide.

Nelly Sachs was gotten out of Nazi Germany at the last possible moment. On a flight to Stockholm arranged by Selma Lagerlof.

With Reader well aware that he has still not satisfactorily thought Protagonist through.

Once, indisputably, more of an existence than his cartons and the recusant weeds amid the headstones of strangers.

How has Protagonist managed to so calamitously fuck up his life?

More than fifty thousand people followed Sartre’s cortege to Montparnasse Cemetery.

Where someone in the crowd fell into the grave on top of his coffin.

Truman Capote was an anti-Semite.

Or is he in some peculiar way perhaps thinking of an autobiography?

Did Jesus ever laugh?

Thirty-six publishers rejected
The Ginger Man.

Houses. Automobiles. Summer homes.

Indulgences.

Jules Pascin committed suicide by slashing his wrists. And wrote, Lucy, forgiveness, to his mistress in blood on a wall.

Flaubert and Baudelaire were prosecuted for immorality in the same year.

Y la vida no es noble, ni buena, ni sagrada.

The skull, lower left foreground, a redundant nearer
memento mori.

He was a moment in the conscience of mankind.

A one-legged woman in a conspicuously short skirt.

Kant’s habits were so precise that shopkeepers in Konigsberg adjusted their clocks by his daily three-thirty walk.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes committed suicide.

A Christ of our neighborhood, Ortega called Don Quixote.

Can Reader force any of it all?

Or will memory still persist in sidetracking imagination?

A Wehrmacht officer in Picasso’s studio during the occupation of Paris,
re
a photograph of
Guernica:
Did you do this?

To which Picasso: No, you did.

I grow older ever learning many things.

Said Solon.

Abraham Cowley died after sleeping off a drunk in a damp pasture.

As above, so below.

Remembering a Fern, lovely though fragile, who tolerated baseball games.

Remembering a Kate, strikingly handsome, who plucked a knotted root from a river in Spain.

Renoir was an anti-Semite.

Michelangelo died in Rome. And had to be smuggled out, quite literally wrapped like merchandise, to be buried at Florence rather than in St. Peter’s.

Vasari’s reportage in this instance authoritative.

Oh my God I am heartily sorry for having offended thee and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell.

Ross Lockridge committed suicide by running a hose from his exhaust pipe into his car.

Books are a load of crap, a Larkin line says.

Ernest Dowson was dead, penniless, at thirty-two. Of absinthe and influenza.

Nero kicked Poppaea in the stomach when she was pregnant. And killed her. The Monteverdi Poppaea opera concluding rather earlier in her biography than this.

Remembering a lithe, dark-eyed girl named Christine, who danced.

Remembering a Josie. And a Liz. And a Susan.

Marina Tsvetayeva hanged herself. And was buried no one knows where.

C. S. Lewis, on overly romanticizing the distant past: Think of a world without anesthetics.

A miniature American flag, fixed beside one of the graves.

Will Protagonist have ever found flowers?

The woman, bearing any?

Four of Freud’s five sisters were incinerated by the Germans in 1944.

Four.

Aeschylus was a foot soldier at Marathon. And wanted that, rather than his plays, noted in his epitaph.

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

And only the day before yesterday, once having seemed.

Remembering a Rachel and an Anne and a Lisa.

Remembering Piero di Cosimo’s Simonetta Vespucci.

By the rivers of Babylon,

There we sat down, yea, we wept.

Was Peter Warlock the only serious composer who ever committed suicide?

Tchaikovsky and Schumann and Hugo Wolf having tried, but unsuccessfully.

Berlioz also, though being histrionic only.

Who
is
the woman at the grave?

Erinna ofTelos.

Chaucer was the first poet buried in Westminster Abbey. Simply having lived in Westminster.

I have come to this place because.

Are Saint Francis of Assisi’s stigmata the earliest ever recorded?

Shakespeare’s mother and father were illiterate. And only one of his two daughters, Susanna, could sign her name. The other, Judith, made a mark.

Shakespeare’s daughters. His one son, Hamnet, Judith’s twin, died at eleven.

Before certain dawns at the gatehouse, like a windborne echo out of Protagonist’s own childhood, the wailing of a far-off train?

Mitigating, will it, the morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before?

Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come?

Remembering yet others?

Some undeniably casual, some fugitive.

Some even now dead?

Nonetheless.

Did it ever, once, enter even Protagonist’s bleakest conjecturings that he would finish out his life alone?

Katherine Hamlet.

Of making many books there is no end.

I have not read a novel in any language in very many years, Joyce once mentioned.

Van Gogh shot himself in the chest.

And then walked home and took two days to die.

No survivor could recall having ever seen a single bird flying near any of the Nazi death camps.

Arbeit macht frei.

Mozart, the
Ave, verum corpus.

A street in Paris, the late 1890s:

Madame Melba, you don’t know who I am? I’m Oscar Wilde, and I’m going to do a terrible thing. I’m going to ask you for money.

Dostoievsky was an anti-Semite.

Who does walk the winter beach at water’s edge in the distance far ahead of Protagonist?

Emma Bovary.

Anna Karenina.

Othello.

Jocasta.

Brünnhilde.

Hedda Gabler.

Romeo and Juliet.

Werther.

Dido.

Cio-Cio-San.

Antigone and Haemon.

Miss Julie.

Axel Heyst.

Quentin Compson.

Aïda.

Inspector Javert.

Mynheer Peeperkorn. Leo Naphta.

Smerdyakov.

Rudolf Virag.

Edna Pontellier.

Hero.

Manrico’s Leonora.

Cheri.

Goneril.

Richard Cory.

McWatt.