The Last Novel (3 page)

Wrote Leonardo two generations afterward.

George Moore once walked in on Swinburne, uninvited, to find him striding back and forth declaiming Aeschylus at the top of his voice — stark naked.

The first opera Toscanini ever saw, at the age of four, was
Un Ballo in Maschera.

The last opera Toscanini ever conducted, at the age of eighty-seven, was
Un Ballo in Maschera.

A sixth-century AD sporting event, as Novelist remembers it from
Beowulf:

Holding one’s opponent under water until he is drowned.

Fenimore Cooper used almost eleven hundred Shakespeare quotations as epigraphs and/or chapter headings in his thirty-plus novels.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Said Stravinsky.

The thought of Rembrandt’s bankruptcy, at fifty. Of his possessions — his
paintings
— being sold for whatever pittance they might bring. Of Rembrandt himself being evicted from his home.

Rembrandt.

Now Dawn arose from her couch beside the lordly Tithonos, to bear light to the immortals and to mortal men.

Says the opening of Book XI of the
Iliad.

Now Dawn arose from her couch beside the lordly Tithonos, to bear light to the immortals and to mortal men.

Says the opening of Book V of the
Odyssey.

He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest.

Said Auden of Tennyson.

Not conspicuously intelligent.

Auden added
re
Yeats.

Advice from Arthur Schnabel to the younger Vladimir Horowitz:

When a piece gets difficult, make faces.

The greatest love specialist in the world, Samuel Goldwyn called Freud.

While offering him $100,000 to supervise or even write a romantic story for Hollywood.

Freud at the time was asking fees of twenty dollars an hour. He dismissed Goldwyn with a one-sentence note.

Discovering that the Cynara to whom Ernest Dowson had been faithful in his fashion was in fact a London waitress.

Wagner has some fine moments. But some bad quarters of an hour.

Said Rossini.

The color of cognac.

Rodin described Suzanne Valadon’s hair as.

The imagination will not perform until it has been flooded by a vast torrent of reading.

Announced Petronius.

You have to read fifteen hundred books in order to write one.

Flaubert put it.

Fra Filippo Lippi was past fifty, and the chaplain of a convent, when he abducted the nun by whom he would have two children — one of the same being the Filippino who would follow him as an artist.

Albert Pinkham Ryder dressed so shabbily that now and again people attempted to hand him loose change as he walked the streets near Greenwich Village.

The artist must live to paint and not paint to live. He should not sacrifice his ideals to a landlord.

Ryder said.

Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.

Said Flannery O’Connor — apropos of being a Southern writer as a contemporary of Faulkner’s.

Among the many paintings in her Paris flat, Gertrude Stein had two exceptional Picassos.

If there were a fire, and I could save only one picture, it would be those two. Unquote.

August 15, 1967, René Magritte died on.

Victor Hugo constantly made notes about everything — and would turn aside in the middle of a conversation to scribble down something he himself had just said that he realized he might possibly later be able to use.

O Lord, who art hidden in the clouds and behind the cobbler’s house —

Commenced a prayer voiced by Marc Chagall as a boy in Vitebsk.

The nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

Said Louis Aragon.

Novelist’s isolation — ever increasing as the years pass also.

Days on which he is aware of speaking to no one at all, for example, except perhaps a checkout clerk, or his letter carrier, or some basically anonymous fellow tenant in the elevator.

Matt Arnold, he was commonly called.

Jack Galsworthy.

The grete poete of Ytaille.

Chaucer referred to Dante as — in the late fourteenth century.

Though there would be no English translation of the
Divine Comedy
until 1785.

Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.

Insisted Byron.

Was he Christian, Jewish, or atheist? Samuel Beckett was once asked in a Dublin courtroom. To which:

None of the three.

The extant application for a reader’s ticket at the British Museum signed by Arthur Rimbaud on March 25, 1873, attesting that he has read the regulations for the Reading Room and that he is not under twenty-one years of age — when in truth he was still only eighteen.

Catullus, informing friends that he is broke:

With nothing but cobwebs in my wallet.

The Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum.

An early French critic called Dostoievsky.

Foul. Like a rat, slithering along in hate. He is not nice.

Being D. H. Lawrence’s later view.

The concept of life after death should be empathically promulgated by the state, Plato said.

If only so that soldiers would be willing to die in battle.

George Washington left no children of his own.

A great-granddaughter of Martha’s, by way of her earlier marriage, married Robert E. Lee.

The most repulsive thing I ever saw or heard in my life.

Said Clara Schumann of
Tristan und Isolde.

Plutarch, who relinquished fame and power in Rome to live quietly and do his writing in Chaeronea, near Delphi.

A small town that would have been even smaller if I left.

Brave translunary things.

Michael Drayton saw in Marlowe.

Intemperate & of a cruel hart.

Thomas Kyd noted of him instead.

For half a dozen years, in his middle and late fifties, Oskar Kokoschka was forced to turn out little other than watercolors — because he generally could not spare the few dollars for oils and canvas.

Cry, art, cry, and loudly lament.

No one, any longer, desires you.

Woe is me.

— Lettered Lucas Moser, a minor German painter, onto an altarpiece in 1431.

Fortune favors the brave, says Virgil.

Presumably aware that Terence had said it earlier.

Brunelleschi once carved a wood crucifix by which Donatello was so impressed that he could only gape in astonishment — while also spilling the apron full of eggs he had been bringing to Brunelleschi’s studio for their lunch.

Tennyson was once so drunk at the end of a London dinner that he started to leave by way of the fireplace.

I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.

El Greco. Vermeer. Dieric Bouts. Frans Hals.

Each of whom was essentially forgotten for at least two centuries.

Or longer.

Bombastic nonsense. Concepts bordering on madness.

Humbug.

Schopenhauer found in Hegel.

The anecdote, passed on as genuine, about Beaumont and Fletcher once being angrily accused of high treason by strangers in a tavern who had become convinced they were plotting to kill the king — when in actuality they had been discussing the outline of a new play.

He had often regretted opening his mouth, said Simonides.

But he could not recall having ever caused any major catastrophe by keeping it shut.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

Said Cyril Connolly.

England expects that every man will do his duty.

Every
man,
on Nelson’s flagship the
Victory,
incidentally including boys of ten and twelve, some having been caught up by press gangs.

During most of his adult life, Joshua Reynolds made use of an ear trumpet.

And in his final years became almost totally blind.

Beethoven’s unkempt, laundry-strewn Vienna flat.

While beneath the piano, recollected at least one visitor, his chamber pot — unemptied.

John Locke died while sitting in a drawing room listening to someone read from the Psalms.

Novalis died while listening to a relative play the piano.

The wintry conscience of a generation.

V. S. Pritchett called George Orwell.

A poem by Theocritus written in Alexandria ca. 270 BC — Complaining that the streets were too crowded.

Antonin Artaud spent nine of his last eleven years in insane asylums.

For decades, next door to the building in The Hague that had housed Spinoza’s attic:

The Spinoza Saloon.

Man is the only animal that knows he must die.

Said Voltaire.

St.-John Perse. Who was translated into English by Eliot.

And into German by Rilke.

September 9, 1960, Jussi Bjoerling died on.

Looked into by church authorities at Arnstadt in 1706, where Bach at twenty was organist:

By what right he had recently caused the strange maiden to be invited into the organ loft?

One day I wrote her name upon the strand.

A Man of Genius whose heart is perverted.

Wordsworth called Byron.

The most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a great effect in literature.

George Eliot phrased it.

After devoting years to the score for
Pelléas et Méllisande,
Debussy played it through for Maurice Maeterlinck, on whose play it was based. Maeterlinck repeatedly dozed off in his chair.

Henry Moore was gassed in the trenches in World War I.

The
Bateau-Lavoir,
the legendary former Montmartre piano factory broken up into artists’ studios, where Picasso contrived any number of his early masterpieces — while living with no running water and only one communal toilet.

And which sixty years later was named a national historical monument — only to burn to the ground a few months afterward.

Continental degeneracy, Thomas Jefferson was several times condemned for.

Because of a chef who had been trained in Paris, Patrick Henry explained.

The bleak image Novelist is granted of himself as he asks a question of a local pharmacist — and becomes aware of the woman contemplating the conspicuously threadbare and even ragged ends of his coat sleeves.

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

Said Jules Renard.

Gilda, in
Rigoletto.
Whom Mattiwilda Dobbs sang as at the Metropolitan two years after Marian Anderson had done Ulrica in
Un Ballo in Maschera
— making her the first black soprano to perform there in a romantic role opposite a white tenor.

Jack Dempsey’s claim that he was partly Jewish.

Via a great-great-grandmother named Rachael Solomon.

Chaucer’s personal library. The guess being forty volumes, presumably most of them in Latin.

Leonardo’s. Known to have contained thirty-seven.

Joseph Conrad spoke English with such a thick, partially French accent that people often had extraordinary difficulty in understanding him.

Le Bateau ivre.

Margot Fonteyn, in an early discussion of women’s liberation:

Will it mean I have to lift Nureyev, instead of vice versa?

Xerxes: Go, and tell those madmen to deliver up their arms.

Leonidas: Go, and tell Xerxes to come and take them.

George Sand,
re
an 1873 literary evening:

Flaubert talks with animation and humor, but all to do with himself. Turgenev, who is much more interesting, can hardly get a word in.

Parodying without taste or skill. Very near the limits of coherence.

Said the
Times Literary Supplement
of
The Waste Land.

Unintelligible, the borrowings cheap and the notes useless.

Said the
New Statesman and Nation.

So much waste paper.

Summed up the
Manchester Guardian.

Kant’s irrationally compulsive 3:30 PM walk, which it is said he forswore only once in thirty years — on the day when the post brought him a first copy of Rousseau’s
Émile.

A German singer! I would as soon hear my horse neigh.

Said Frederick the Great, insisting upon Italian performers for opera in Berlin.

A. E. Housman. Who spent most of his adult life as a professor of Latin.

After originally failing his final exams at Oxford.

What, still alive at twenty-two,

A fine upstanding lad like you?

From the beginnings of the legend of Michelangelo’s sense of his own worth:

He treats the Pope as the King of France himself would not dare to treat him — unquote.

John Donne, near death, as recorded by Izaak Walton:

His sickness had left him but so much flesh as did only cover his bones.

Pausing to speculate about the plumbing of the era — and wondering how frequently Shakespeare might have bathed.

Or even two centuries later, Jane Austen.

Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski.

Rat-eyed, Virginia Woolf called Somerset Maugham.

An old parrot, Christopher Isherwood saw instead.

February 6, 1916, Rubén Darío died on.

Everyone honors the wise. The citizens of Mytilene honored Sappho even though she was a woman.

Said Aristotle.

He who has money is wise. And handsome. And can sing well also.

Says a Yiddish proverb.

Walt Whitman’s claim — never in any way verified — that he had fathered at least six illegitimate children.

The woman named Mercy Rogers, who in the early 1920s when the subject was relatively new, read practically every available book on psychoanalysis — and then put her head into the oven.