Reader's Block (2 page)

Nor is the fence mesh at that, rather it is a more traditional cemetery construction of tall iron spikes. The gate at the entrance is partly unhinged and askew.

The paths inside are of gravel, or were, long since thinned and scattered.

Is there a need to explain the house’s availability?

Obviously a former gatekeeper’s or superintendent’s.

William Butler Yeats was an anti-Semite.

A neighbor once came upon William Blake and his wife Catherine reading
Paradise Lost
aloud in their garden. Sitting naked.

Robert Moses Grove.

Manet was so vituperatively condemned by critics that for a time he was too embarrassed to ask anyone to pose for him.

Before Cezanne had gained any recognition he once burst into tears when someone sincerely admired his work.

Nothing now, but my books.

Haller’s books? Selkirk’s?

The Persians deployed so many bowmen at Thermopylae that it was said their arrows would blot out the sun.

To which a Spartan commander: All the better, then we will be fighting in the shade.

In his mid-thirties, T. S. Eliot was known to wear pale green face powder. One of the Sitwells said it was to make him look as if he were suffering.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was an American prisoner of war in Italy at the end of World War II.

Should Protagonist possibly have written books of his own once? Unnamed and undescribed, mentioned almost incidentally?

Once, he wrote a few books. That was long ago.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

Rossini wore a wig. In chilly weather he sometimes wore two.

In fact only two Spartans survived Thermopylae. One was killed in battle elsewhere. The other hanged himself in disgrace.

Cervantes was a tax collector during the outfitting of the Armada.

And was imprisoned when his accounts did not balance.

Je crois entendre encore.

Early on, Protagonist will naturally become familiar with most of the gravestones.

Both of Paul Celan’s parents went to their deaths in German concentration camps.

Rudyard Kipling once lived in Vermont.

After Cesare Pavese committed suicide, several young women none of his friends had ever seen before appeared at his funeral weeping, in the hope of being taken for former mistresses.

They make a desert and they call it peace.

The Knight of Pentacles, Reversed: A brave Man, but out of Employment, Idle, Negligent.

Boris Pasternak so admired Rilke that he carried two letters from him in his wallet for decades.

Nothing now, but Protagonist’s books.

Those, and the graves of strangers.

Working as a publisher’s reader, George Meredith rejected
The Way of All Flesh.

Working as a publisher’s reader, Andre Gide rejected
Swann’s Way.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen.

Or would Reader rather see Protagonist live somewhere else entirely?

An isolated house at a beach, for instance?

Although perhaps without the even more absolute solitude that might establish?

At least with others on a floor above? A woman? Women?

Tomorrow it will rain in Bouville.

Preferably separate entrances. The house on a dune, possibly, with Protagonist and the others coming and going along opposite sides of the slope.

And with Protagonist’s entrance in the rear, a sort of basement? Possibly what had once been an indoor garage?

Ergo almost never seeing these women, merely being aware of their proximity. Or hearing them, on occasion.

Raskolnikov. Bloom. Mr. Kurtz.

Rochester died in 1680. A full collection of his verse was not published until 1926.

And even then was not allowed into the United States.

Flaubert’s lamp burned with such regularity late at night in his workroom at Croisset that pilots on the Seine were able to take their bearings from it.

Or would Raskolnikov surely at least sometimes see them from other vantage points?

In this house the same initial impermanence, the same cartons.

At twenty, Bach made a pilgrimage of more than two hundred miles, on foot, to hear Buxtehude play the organ.

Ship me somewheres east of Suez.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the
Ode on a Grecian Urn
is worth any number of little old ladies.

A person on business from Porlock.

Aldonza Lorenzo.

Raskolnikov wrote some books once.

Very little happened in connection with any of them. In any event that was long ago.

Jack London committed suicide.

Bruno Schulz was carrying home a loaf of bread when he was shot down in the street by the Gestapo.

Protagonist reading. Hearing them, up above.

Mussorgsky died raving mad from drink.

A listing still exists of the winning runners in the Olympic Games from 776 B.C. through the next 993 years. Events in Greek history were dated by the Olympiad in which they occurred.

Kant was an anti-Semite.

That garage area, at the rear, looks out onto little more than scrub and brush. There is a path Raskolnikov/Bloom follows through the dunes, but heading away diagonally, so that he has almost no view of the upper story then either.

Anaximander was sixty-four years old in the second year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad.

Being how Diogenes Laertius once situates him.

Would some sort of deck on the upper story face the ocean? How distantly perceived from the beach when Protagonist strolls there?

Only a lunatic would dance when sober, said Cicero.

Behold, I have heard that there is corn in Egypt.

How many years have passed since the last burial in the cemetery? Do mourners still appear?

Heraclitus did not say that one cannot step into the same river twice. One of his followers did.

Heraclitus did say that praying to statues of the gods was like talking to a house instead of to its owner, however.

And that souls smell in Hades.

A. E. Housman never in his life lived in Shropshire.

Ralph Roister-Doister.

It took eight years to sell the first printing of six hundred copies of
The Interpretation of Dreams.

Our sister, death.

Perhaps one solitary mourner appearing, regularly, at one grave. Here again, a woman. Young. In fact too young to have a connection with anyone buried here that Protagonist can fathom.

Or are some few of the graves more recent?

Roland Barthes died after being hit by a laundry truck.

When Ovid was banished from Rome, it was to Tomi, on the Black Sea.

Would Reader have otherwise ever heard of a city in Romania now called Constanta?

Anne Bradstreet’s first home in Massachusetts, a decade after the
Mayflower,
was at what later would become Harvard Square.

Aesop was a slave. Terence was a slave. Epictetus was a slave.

Protagonist watching the woman who appears?

After a time, finding himself waiting for her almost unwittingly?

Helen Frankenthaler Motherwell, her name legally once was.

Frederic Chopin was an anti-Semite.

Madame,

If I interpret your letter right, you are ignominiously married; if it is yet undone, let us once talk together.

Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an insane asylum.

Someone will call. Surely someone will call.

Aristotle’s may have been the first purely private library.

At forty-six, after an illness, Goya suddenly turned stone deaf.

How long can Reader deal with Protagonist’s isolation without explaining his background?

How conceivable is it for the emptiness to simply
exist?

L’Être et le Néant.

Blaise Cendrars lost an arm in World War I. As did one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brothers, a concert pianist.

Lice in the locks of literature, Tennyson called critics.

Or will the question persist? Why does Protagonist have no life?

Having written books of his own, would he have known other writers?

Does he not, now?

After Anne Sexton turned on her car’s engine in a closed garage to commit suicide, she sat drinking vodka while waiting.

Erinna of Telos, who died at nineteen.

Twenty-three hundred years ago.

Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.

The woman at the grave.

Brunelleschi was the first Renaissance artist about whom a full-length biography was written.

I am weary, Ananda, and wish to lie down.

June 22, 1633:

With sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and abhor the aforesaid errors and heresies contrary to the Holy Church, and I swear that henceforward I will never again say or declare, verbally or in writing, anything that might bring about a similar suspicion toward me.

Goethe did not go to bed with a woman until he was forty.

Where would Protagonist’s son and/or daughter be? How often would he see, hear from them?

Will he?

Samuel Beckett was once forced to hide for ten days under a false floor in Nathalie Sarraute’s Paris attic while working for the Resistance in World War II.

Eppur si muove.

Armande Bejart.

Tolstoy’s wife copied out the entire manuscript of
War and Peace
in longhand seven times.

An illiterate, underbred book.

Said Virginia Woolf of
Ulysses.

I can’t even pronounce the filthy thing.

Said Wallace Stevens of the word
womb
in a poem.

All legends to the contrary, Empedocles did not leap into Mount Etna. Or even die in Sicily.

Byron was nine when he was introduced to sex by his nurse, one May Gray.

How well insulated would the ceiling of a former garage be? Would Ishmael/Meursault/Kurtz be aware of virtually every movement on the floor above?

Tony Trollope, he was naturally called.

Madeleine Grey. The
Chants d’Auvergne.

Why is it never part of Reader’s active memory that Helen of Troy was the daughter of a god and was hatched from an egg?

Though Homer insists she was mortal.

Aquinas knew almost nothing about history.

Maigret.

Does it go without saying that this upstairs presence would accentuate Protagonist’s sense of his aloneness?

Does it go without saying that he deplores being alone?

Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself in the head. He may have been playing Russian roulette rather than definitely intending suicide.

But in either event had put on a clean shirt first.

Menin aei’de, tbea.

George Gissing’s first wife became a prostitute. His second wife went mad.

No one nodding to him on the street in passing after all? Something more categorical?

I am completely alone here now?

Helen was not the first petticoat that caused a war.

Says Burton in the
Anatomy.

Impoverished and freezing, Gerard de Nerval hanged himself near a cheap Paris doss-house after no one responded to his late-night knock.

Alexander Pushkin was an anti-Semite.

The Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.

Hegel had an illegitimate son. At his wedding, the boy’s mother showed up with a letter promising matrimony. And had to be bought off on the spot.

Protagonist is completely alone here now.

Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

102 Boulevard Haussman.

Even on the coolest evenings, when she kneels at the grave, the woman is bareheaded.

Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors. He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he wrote Cicero the news.

Ananda. Having been Buddha’s cousin, as well as his favorite pupil.

The Gulf of Spezia.