The Last Novel (13 page)

A street in Nice is named after Marie Bashkirtseff.

Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.

Said Rebecca West.

He started off writing very well, then you can see his going mad with vanity. He ends up a lunatic.

Added Evelyn Waugh.

Very dirty and completely worthless.

Edith Sitwell called
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Wholly ignorant.

Waugh called Sitwell.

Wonderful, this death.

Allegedly said William Etty, as it occurred.

Oliver Goldsmith was the oldest member of his graduating class at Trinity College, Dublin.

And the lowest ranked.

Proust, in the equivalent of basic training during his one year of military service at eighteen, was ranked seventy-third in a platoon of seventy-four.

An incomparable painting by Apelles, which Augustus brought from Cos to Rome, where it was slightly damaged.

And where not one contemporary Roman artist had the confidence to attempt to restore it.

Auden’s notion that one could readily imagine a young Tolstoy or Stendhal or Dostoievsky in a bar fight.

But Henry James, never.

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.

Concluded Kelvin. In 1900.

I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid his company.

Quoth John Cheever —
re
John Updike.

Euripides’ father may have been a tavern-keeper.

Still curious all these years later as to why Faulkner would have given two of his major characters names then current in widely syndicated comic strips.

Though for that matter he gave three others the names of buildings on the University of Mississippi campus.

A passage in Montaigne where he speaks of himself as being well on the road to old age — having long since passed forty.

Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of forty-two.

Writes Daisy Ashford.

Anacreon, so highly acclaimed as a poet that the Athenians placed a statue of him on the Acropolis.

And so well known for other proclivities that Pausanias says the statue showed him drunk.

November 30, 1943, Etty Hillesum died on.

I become insane, with long intervals of horrible insanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drink, God only knows how often or how much.

Wrote Poe to a friend.

Reading a book in translation:

Like gazing at a Flemish tapestry with the wrong side turned out, said Cervantes.

Traduttore, traditore
— translator, traitor, the Italian has it.

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, his full name was.

Frank Raymond Leavis.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

A century before Alcoholics Anonymous, something called the Sons of Temperance, Poe did make a stab at. To no avail.

Inscribed on a painting by Jacob Jordaens:

Nihil similius insano quam ebrius
— Nothing is more similar to a lunatic than a drunkard.

According to Liszt, Chopin had blue eyes.

According to everyone else they were brown.

The man who eats in idleness what he has not earned is a thief.

Wrote Rousseau.

Catherine the Great died after having suffered a stroke and fallen from a commode in the royal water closet.

Eric Andrews here. Well, actually not here. But I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Please wait for the signal.

Giuseppe Ungaretti’s father was a construction worker on the Suez Canal.

The Homeric combat between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal at a 1977 cocktail party — In which Mailer threw a drink into Vidal’s face — and Vidal bit Mailer on the finger.

Chipping Sodbury General Hospital, near Bristol, J. K.

Rowling was born at.

Rilke’s over-sentimentalizing of the poor.

Did he ever once sit shivering in an attic? Kurt Tucholsky asked.

Why did Harper Lee never write another novel?

First, check the acoustics. Then make sure you know where the fire axe is.

Being Charles Mingus — offering advice
re
performing in unfamiliar basement jazz clubs.

Intellectual — hen-pecked you all.

Being Byron — reaching about as far as possible for a rhyme in
Don Juan.

So exhaustive was Raphael’s study of ancient sculpture in Rome that the city itself named him Keeper of Inscriptions and Remains.

Prokofiev was fifteen years older than Shostakovich.

The presumably apocryphal tale about a production of
Othello
by touring actors in the nineteenth-century American West — near the last lines of which a cowboy in the audience shot Iago dead on the spot.

Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, Warren Spahn died in.

Because of having lived openly with George Henry Lewes, who was married, George Eliot was denied burial in Westminster Abbey.

I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

The last time anyone mentioned James Jones.

March 22, 1417, Nicolas Flamel died on.

In 1760, one year after Handel’s death, a biography by a Reverend John Mainwaring.

Apparently the first ever written of a composer.

Like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

Says an Anthony Powell character about growing old.

Toscanini’s seven-year affair with Geraldine Farrar — which he ended only when Farrar finally insisted that he leave his wife.

Ernest Hemingway’s entire front-line service in Italy in World War I, before he was wounded by shell fragments, had added up to less than one week.

Handing out cigarettes and chocolate at a Red Cross canteen.

The greatest kindness we can show some of the authors of our youth is not to reread them.

Said François Mauriac.

Being reminded that Fermat was a magistrate — for whom mathematics was fundamentally a hobby.

I am half sick of shadows, said

The Lady of Shalott.

Tirra lirra, by the river

Sang Sir Lancelot.

Wondering if there is any viable way to convince critics never to use the word
tetralogy
without also adding that each volume can be readily read by itself?

Alessandro Manzoni spent five years on the first two drafts of
I Promessi Sposi
— and twelve more on the final version.

Lulu slept naked because she liked to feel the sheets caressing her body and also because laundry was expensive.

Readily read?

A drawing by Rubens, in Rotterdam, of Achilles driving his spear into Hector’s throat — with his left hand.

When Homer specifically describes him as using his right.

The Trojan War will not take place, Cassandra!

I will make you a bet on that, Andromache.

— Reads an exchange in
Tiger at the Gates.

I just pretend.

Explained Laurence Olivier.

A pale, gentle, frightened little man.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife described a not yet middle-aged Thomas Hardy as.

Berlioz read every Fenimore Cooper novel as quickly as it appeared.

And admitted that fully four hours after he finished
The Prairie
he was still weeping over the death of Natty Bumppo.

The classic orator Hyperides, who divided his time between homes in Athens, Piraeus, and Eleusis.

Depending upon which of his mistresses he felt like visiting.

Georges Simenon’s affair with Josephine Baker.

Chardin died at eighty — without ever once in his life having ventured farther away from Paris than the forty miles to Fontainebleau.

Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault.

Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.

Johnson told Boswell.

Chingachgook —

Pronounced Chicago, I think, said Mark Twain.

Altogether impoverished in his early years in Paris, for a time Juan Gris did not even possess a bed — and slept on newspapers.

Kees van Dongen’s admission that there were occasions during his own early Montmartre years when he was forced to filch milk and/or bread from neighborhood doorsteps — with an accomplice named Picasso.

Let there be Maecenases and there will be no lack of Virgils.

Said Martial.

Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it — that’s all right.

Says a last unfinished letter of van Gogh’s found after his death.

The poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of inspired madness.

Said Socrates.

Gris was dead at forty. Of uremia.

August 28, 1947, Manolete died on.

Recalled from Eastern European ghettos, virtually until the very last residents were evacuated to Nazi death camps — schoolchildren reading Yiddish editions of
The Prince and the Pauper
and
Around the World in Eighty Days.

God of forgiveness, do not forgive those murderers of Jewish children here.

Said Elie Wiesel, visiting at Auschwitz a half-century later.

Wait. Don’t carry away that arm till I’ve taken off my ring.

Said Raglan during surgery after Waterloo.

Learning that there actually was an apple tree outside Newton’s window at his mother’s home.

Indeed an entire apple orchard.

Not a composer. A kleptomaniac.

Stravinsky called Benjamin Britten.

The appointment of a woman to public office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.

Determined Jefferson.

As many as five little-documented years passed between Shakespeare’s departure from the Globe, at forty-seven or forty-eight, and his death in Stratford.

After thirty-seven plays, and probably parts of others, plus the poems — did he have no inclination to write
anything
in those last years?

Or does there appear a possibility that he sometimes collaborated with others and/or doctored their work anonymously?

Poetry makes nothing happen.

Auden said.

I will not go down to posterity speaking bad grammar.

Said Disraeli, correcting one of his final speeches.

Whether posterity will give us a thought I don’t know. But we surely deserve one.

Wrote Pliny the Younger to Tacitus — in the early second century AD.

I’m a poet, I’m life. You’re an editor, you’re death.

Proclaimed Gregory Corso to someone in the White Horse Tavern — who shortly commenced punching him through the door and across the sidewalk.

Taking no more account of the wind that comes out of their mouths than that which they expel from their lower parts.

Leonardo described his response to critics as.

Ancora imparo,
said Michelangelo at eighty-seven.

Still, I’m learning.

More true poetical genius as a painter than possessed by perhaps any other.

Joshua Reynolds saw in Julio Romano.

Me retracto de todo lo dicho,
I take back everything I told you.

Announced Nicanor Parra at the end of each of his poetry readings.

Everything useful is ugly.

Said Gautier.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life.

Said Constable.

The rumor that Gainsborough deliberately painted his
Blue Boy
to mock Reynolds’ academic insistence that blue was a color for use in backgrounds only.

Nicanor Parra’s day job —

Professor of theoretical physics at the University of Chile.

Miroslav Holub’s —

Chief research immunologist at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Franz Kafka, the gravestone names him.

Apropos of his Doctor of Laws degree.

Superimposed metastatic disease would be difficult to exclude in this region.

Reads a gladsome evaluation in the analysis of Novelist’s most recent bone scan.

So debilitatingly paranoid was Kurt Gödel in his later years, over imagined plots to poison him, that he essentially refused to eat.

And died weighing no more than sixty-five pounds.

Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.

Says the narrator of a Gilbert Sorrentino story.

The world has no pity on a man who can’t do or produce something it thinks worth money.

Says Gissing in
New Grub Street
.

And to this day is every scholar poor:

Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor.

Says Marlowe, in
Hero and Leander.

October 8, 1963, Remedios Varo died on.

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant.

Pointed out the disaffected Muslim Wafa Sultan in 2006.

As Dickensian as anything Dickens ever wrote.

Graham Greene labeled W. C. Fields.

Maidservant gallantries, Constanza accused Mozart of.

Flaubert soils the brook in which he washes.

Said the critic Saint-Victor of
L’Éducation sentimentale.

M. Flaubert n’est pas un écrivain.

Said
Le Figaro
of
Madame Bovary.

Why, this is very midsummer madness.

We live not as we will — but as we can.

Said Menander.

Cocteau, meeting Diaghilev for the first time, and asking what he might do to involve himself in ballet —

Astonish me, Diaghilev tells him.

Demodocus, the blind bard whose songs of the fall of Troy evoke tears in
Odyssey
VIII.

Could he have perhaps been the source of the legend that Homer himself was blind?

Languidezza per il caldo
— Languidly, because of the heat.

Suggests Vivaldi’s notation over the
Summer
segment of
The Four Seasons.

For several hundred years, more than half a millennium after her death, coins bearing Sappho’s likeness were minted on Lesbos.

In all the centuries since history began, we know of no woman who can truly be said to rival her as a poet.

Said Strabo, equally as long after her era.