Reader's Block (7 page)

Bach and Handel were born in the same year.

Wagner and Verdi were born in the same year.

François Villon was born in the year Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.

On mourra seul.

Could a woman with one leg, on crutches, navigate in the sand of a beach?

The word
philosopher
translates from the Greek as lover of wisdom. Pythagoras is credited with having originated its usage.

Auden married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika, whom he had never until then met, so that she could evade the Nazis through British citizenship.

Djuna Barnes had no formal education whatsoever.

Will Protagonist have spent time in Spain also?

Dostoievsky’s father was the resident physician at a hospital for the poor. But treated his own serfs so abusively that a group of them ultimately murdered him.

I would prefer not to.

Roncesvalles. The story perhaps not being entirely mythical. An actual nephew of Charlemagne’s named Roland in fact probably having existed.

To reproduce the exterminating gesture.

When Poe, at twenty-seven, married his cousin Virginia Clemm, she was thirteen. And consumptive.

In Germany not much earlier Novalis had been engaged to a girl of twelve. Who died, however.

David Gascoyne spent two decades in mental hospitals.

We have too many things and not enough forms, Flaubert said.

H. G. Wells was an anti-Semite.

Manitas de Plata.

Dante situates Mohammed in the ninth chasm of the
Malebolge
for having sown division in the Church. He is seen slashed open from his chin to his anus and with his innards spilling out.

In retaliation, Muslim fundamentalists in the early 1990s threatened to blow up Dante’s tomb in Ravenna.

Seven hundred years after the fact.

Rosso Fiorentino committed suicide.

Benedetto Croce’s parents were killed in an earthquake.

Will Reader make anything out of that notion of Protagonist having seen the woman from the grave on the street?

Contrive something with more immediacy than that?

Bertrand Russell and Basil Bunting were conscientious objectors in World War I.

Robert Lowell and Kenneth Rexroth were conscientious objectors in World War II.

Here. This isn’t a musical peepshow. And don’t you smash that piano. Who’s paying here?

The first books printed in England, roughly four decades after Gutenberg, were a history of the Trojan War and a volume on chess. Both set by Caxton.

Raoul le Fevre. Guido della Colonne. Benoit de Sainte-Maure.

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.

The
Mona Lisa
has no eyebrows.

If Protagonist has in fact taught, it will have been only briefly. And/or part-time. Possibly in writing programs.

That and his few other past employments leaving him with no kind of retirement benefits.

And no more than minimal Social Security.

Caxton me fieri fecit.

The primary aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at Aricia.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul

When hot for certainties in this our life!

Not one of the violent moments in Greek tragedy occurs on stage. Medea murdering her sons, for instance. Or Orestes bloodying Clytemnestra.

Does Reader yet know how long Protagonist has now been alone?

Who, when, the last woman in his life will have been?

Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.

Pio Baroja was an anti-Semite.

Magdalena Abakanowicz.

Melville. A little heterodox in the matter of clean linen.

Said Hawthorne.

Coleridge. Considerably more so.

Said several.

Sara Teasdale committed suicide with sleeping pills.

Could the woman who appears at the grave be the woman with one leg?

What belated queer obsession of Reader’s is this?

Jacqueline du Pre’s cello was a Stradivarius.

And was later Yo-Yo Ma’s.

Balzac called Ann Radcliffe a better novelist than Stendhal.

God is dead, everything is permitted.

Preoccupied, Beethoven was known to lather his face and then forget to shave.

He also possessed an unstrung piano, adequate in his deafness.

Ernst Toller hanged himself.

Mr. Earbrass.

Jim Thorpe is buried in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania.

Isaac Newton’s father was illiterate.

Curiously, there is no refrigeration in that part of Kingston as Reader sees it, instead there are old-fashioned iceboxes. Meaning deliveries by truck of blocks of ice.

Does Reader now have some notion of setting his novel back practically a lifetime ago?

Or is memory merely getting in the way of imagination for a minute?

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

Said Faulkner.

Probably it will not be Kingston in any case.

Frank Plumpton Ramsey was dead at twenty-six.

Robert Frost had exactly five poems accepted in the first seventeen years in which he was submitting.

Heinrich Schliemann. Sir Arthur Evans. Carl Blegen.

Saint Augustine was an anti-Semite.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

From Rabelais’s will:

I have nothing. I owe much. The rest I leave to the poor.

Shelley once insisted he had seen the devil leaning against a tree on his lawn.

And eyes staring at him from Mary’s breasts.

Hippo is now a town in Algeria called Bone.

Willard Hershberger slashed his throat with a straight razor in a Boston hotel room.

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

Which would have been virtually the day before yesterday, in the period Reader is thinking of.

Thales of Miletus was believed to have predicted an eclipse of the sun for May 28, 585 B.C.

Evident as it is, why is Reader surprised to so rarely make the connection between aphrodisiac and Aphrodite?

Mathilde Wesendonck.

Nadezhda von Meek.

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

A completely unabridged performance of
Les Troy ens
was not given until 1969, exactly one hundred years after Berlioz died.

It had taken almost that long for Bach’s Mass in B Minor to be done completely also.

For Protagonist’s past. The girl named Fern Winters, lovely though fragile, who tolerated baseball games? Was she twenty-two when Reader last saw her?

Also Kate Winter then, strikingly handsome. And some few years more than twice Fern’s age, meaning a good deal nearer to Protagonist’s present.

Plus fictionalized names for each, if only provisionally?

Sonia Marmeladov. Catherine Earnshaw.

Matisse called
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
a hoax.

Thales might have been a Hebrew, Herodotus thought.

I do not believe in God, though I believe in Picasso, said Diego Rivera.

Gerard Manley Hopkins died of typhoid fever in 1889. One of his brothers would live into the 1950s.

A verray, parfit gentil knyght.

And as for Protagonist’s former wife?

Reader has decided to let her look like Simonetta Vespucci.

Who may have been painted by Botticelli as well as by Piero di Cosimo.

Christina Rossetti almost certainly died a virgin.

The undeniable sexual attraction that Dorothy Wordsworth felt for William.

What is all this about Irish wit and humor? Have we any book in the house with any of it in? I’d like to read a page or two.

Are any of the books Protagonist is packing inscribed by their authors?

Or are those the ones he is more likely selling, for their added value?

Sapere aude.

Nerval once tried to lead a lobster by a ribbon through a public garden in Paris.

Tristan Corbiere did the same with a pig in Rome. In evening clothes.

Thy necessity is greater than mine.

Said Philip Sidney, in passing a drink to a dying soldier while dying himself.

Gottlob Frege.

The saloon that Protagonist now and again stops in at is an Edward Hopper.

Its name in semicircular lettering on the windows, Reader sees, viewed backwards from at the bar against wintry late afternoon sunlight.

Hilaire Belloc was an anti-Semite.

John Clare spent his last twenty-three years in an asylum. Not recognizing his own wife. At times claiming to be Byron. Or Nelson at Trafalgar.

No needle marks on your Annunciation’s arm, now.

We do not come to thoughts. They come to us.

Thought Heidegger.

The first translation of major length for purely literary purposes was a Latin
Iliad,
ca. 250 B.C., by Livius Andronicus.

Sheri Martinelli.

Diane Arbus committed suicide by opening her wrists in a bathtub.

Clare’s parents had been illiterate. He himself never revised a line.

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?

My friends forsake me like a memory lost.

I am the self-consumer of my woes.

In Joseph Conrad’s view there is not a single sincere line, unquote, in
Moby Dick.

Boris Christoff and Tito Gobbi were brothers-in-law.

Richard Tucker and Jan Peerce were also.

When Sophocles was nearing ninety, his sons tried to have him declared incompetent. Sophocles won easy dismissal by reading to the jury from
Oedipus at Colonus.

Which he was only then finishing.

Schleiermacher.

Then again, Reader may let Protagonist’s ex-wife look like Isabella d’Este.

Who was painted by both Leonardo and Titian.

The termites has got me, Mr. Mack.

Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie was the model for the face on the United States dime and half-dollar.

Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie and Wallace Stevens had separate bedrooms.

Hopkins to Robert Bridges: I am a eunuch, but it is for the Kingdom of God’s sake.

Baudelaire spent two hours a day getting dressed.

Irgun.

Honor, power, wealth, fame, love of women.

Algernon Swinburne’s father was an admiral.

When I could have used a wife, I could not support one; when I could support one, I no longer needed any.

Said Kant.

Why has Reader always automatically assumed that the skull beside his desk is a man’s?

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Ernestine Schumann-Heink. Elisabeth Schumann. Eleanor Steber. Elisabeth Soderstrom. Ebe Stignani. Elena Suliotis. Erna Sack.

Being a successful reader of poetry on stage, said Akhmatova, is not necessarily the same as being a writer of successful poetry.

Snorri Sturluson was assassinated.

Twenty American publishers rejected Elie WiesePs
Night.

Browning’s
Sordello
contains 5983 lines. Tennyson said he understood two of them.

Holbein died of plague.

Percy Bridgman committed suicide.

Photographs of anyone other than his children, has Protagonist kept?

Of himself with?

T. E. Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash.

Thomas Campion’s songs were essentially forgotten for well over two centuries.

But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house.

Igor Stravinsky was an anti-Semite.

Being sent to a dictionary at fifteen for
eleemosynary
on the first page of
Tom Jones.
Has Reader come upon the word twice since?

Give him a jugful and he will write one hundred poems. Said Tu Fu of Li Po.

He dozes in a wine shop

On a city street in Chang-an.

Saint Luke was hanged from an olive tree.