This is Not a Novel (13 page)

Runnymede.

Rydal Mount.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze died impoverished and forgotten.

Dawn Powell was buried in a potter’s field.

Writer had but a glimpse of Faulkner. As it happens, of Hemingway
tambien.

I see no point in reading, said Louis XIV.

Pliny the Younger having been a nephew, not a son.

Ty Cobb died of prostate cancer.

Faulkner, at a funeral. Small and beady-eyed. Hemingway at ringside.

Was Shane his first name or his last?

Faulkner in fact looking like a Eula Varner in-law.

Sit not down on the bushel.

You are leaving the American Sector.

Miguel de Unamuno died of a stroke.

Glenn Gould died of a stroke.

When and where did the last person die who still believed in the existence of Zeus?

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a cantaloupe.

Green-wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, Lola Montez is buried in.

Bronislaw Malinowski died of a heart attack.

Vittorio Gassman died of a heart attack.

Lincoln never saw Europe.

The one person in the world he would have liked to meet, Lenin said, was Charlie Chaplin.

The one person in the world he would have liked to meet, Eliot said, was Joe Louis.

Camille Pissarro died of blood poisoning.

Le Douanier
died of blood poisoning after neglecting a cut.

Is there a single Jane Austen volume that manages not to bring up the subject of money before the end of page one?

The Odessa steps.

Isak Dinesen died of what was recorded as emaciation.

W. S. Gilbert died while trying to rescue someone from drowning.

How old was the Virgin Mary?

Rogier van der Weyden’s panel of St. Luke sketching her portrait.

Clay Allison died of a broken neck.

Was Glenn Gould someone else who talked to himself, or would he have only been singing along?

Kenneth Rexroth’s incomparably godawful verses on the premise that people who shopped at Brooks Brothers caused the death of Dylan Thomas.

Malcolm Lowry, on the same death:

We drank his health, poured a libation of gin to his memory, and for some reason cut down a tree, likewise dead, and an old friend.

Died on Saturday, Buried on Sunday.

Rexroth died of a heart attack.

Jean Cocteau died of a heart attack.

The Brahms
German Requiem:
Listening to it is a sacrifice that should be asked of a man only once in his life, Shaw said.

Overheard, frequently, by Xenophanes: How old were you when the Persians came?

Writer has actually written some relatively traditional novels. Why is he spending his time doing this sort of thing?

That’s why.

But where is your friend, Daddy?

Melville’s lifetime earnings from his fiction—from more than forty-five years—would appear to barely exceed ten thousand dollars.

Minnie Hauk died blind. And living on charity.

Lenin died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Juvenal’s poetry is not mentioned anywhere, by anyone, during his lifetime or until almost two hundred years after his death.

By the era of Petrarch and Boccaccio and Chaucer, he has become O Master Juvenal.

Words, words, words.

Vous sortez du Secteur Americain.

Does Lunita Laredo desert Major Brian Tweedy, or does she die young?

What time was it forty-five minutes before the beginning of time?

Wanamaker’s department store, in Manhattan, Richard Strauss once conducted concerts in.

At Actium, what with the torching of a number of his ships, many of Antony’s troops were roasted alive in their own red-hot armor, says Dio Cassius.

What a coarse, immoral, mean, and senseless work
Hamlet
is, Tolstoy said.

By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot boys are laid
…

Is
Clarissa
still the longest single novel in the language?

I must dye one day, and as good this day as another. Says a suicide in Rowley.

Trade is wholly inconsistent with a gentleman’s calling. Said John Locke.

Salamis, Solon’s ashes were scattered at.

Kipling died of a hemorrhage from duodenal ulcers.

Alfred de Musset died of heart failure.

Lope de Vega wrote what may have been as many as fifteen hundred plays. Of which almost a third survive.

Thomas Eakins made Walt Whitman’s death mask.

Camerado
is in no one’s dictionary.

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping In fields where roses fade.

Edmund Wilson died of a coronary occlusion.

Sir Thomas Beecham died of a stroke.

Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.

Being a fictitious name once used by Coleridge in the dragoons.

Kilgore Rosewater.

Being one used by Kurt Vonnegut in a hospital.

Bix Beiderbecke died of pneumonia while also confronting delirium tremens.

Fichte died of an unspecified fever.

The friendship of Rene Char and Martin Heidegger.

Charlemagne could read but could not write.

Joan of Arc could do neither.

How old were you, what were you doing, when you heard Lord Byron was dead?

Genevieve de Galard-Terraube.

Oliver Goldsmith played the flute.

Hopp, hopp! Hopp, hopp! Hopp, hopp!

The
Pervigilium Veneris.

Gertrude Stein, to Jacques Lipchitz:

Besides Shakespeare and me, who do you think there is?

Luis Bunuel died of cancer of the bile duct and the liver.

Tennyson, at fifteen, etched it with a sharp stone into the face of a boulder in the woods:
Byron is dead.

Samuel Pepys once smacked his wife in the eye. In point of fact, on December 19,1664.

And so to bed.

Salvatore Quasimodo died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

I shall look as if I were dead, and that will not be true.

Zara Dolukhanova. Irina Arkhipova.

Tchitchikov.

Stein died of cancer of the uterus.

Berthe Morisot was a great-granddaughter of Fragonard. And married Manet’s younger brother.

Judah Halevi was trampled to death by an Arab horseman at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Or died in ways unknown at Damascus.

St. Lawrence was broiled on a gridiron in Rome. Or was beheaded.

William Ernest Henley died of tuberculosis.

At fifty-nine, George Eliot married a man twenty-one years younger than she.

Who on their Venice honeymoon jumped from a hotel-room balcony into the Grand Canal.

Did Professor Bloom take any books with him, do you know?

Someone said he had a twenty-six-volume complete Joseph Conrad. It’s only a weekend cruise.

Conway, New Hampshire, E. E. Cummings died in.

Conway, Massachusetts, Jack Chesbro died in.

Eliot died within months of her wedding, after catching a cold at a concert.

The kingdom of heaven, as described to Rilke by Marina Tsvetayeva after a lifetime of deprivation: Never again to sweep floors.

Pascal died of abdominal convulsions.

Valery died of throat cancer.

La Guerre de Troie riaura pas lieu.

But I always think as we tumble into bed Of little Willy Wee who is dead, dead, dead.

De Quincey was less than five feet tall. Hogarth was less than five feet tall. James Stephens was less than five feet tall.

This is also a kind of verbal fugue, if Writer says so. If still perhaps less than self-evident to the less than attentive.

B-flat Major, Op. 133.

The realization that Joan was not canonized until two decades into the twentieth century. Or Thomas More until 1935.

Jesus did not urinate or move his bowels, said Valentinus.

Erasmus died of dysentery.

Luther died of apoplexy.

Mordecai Anielewicz. April 19,1943-Nine rifles. Fifty-nine pistols.

These cool blond people make me feel uneasy, said Einstein. In 1914.

Does Dante want the reader to suspect that Ugolino ate his sons, or not?

I am getting on with my job, said Bernadette of Lourdes. What is that? Being ill.

Francois Boucher died at his easel at sixty-seven. Painting a backside of Venus.

You can never do too much drawing, Tintoretto said.

In a dramatic, not a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and terror.

Nonetheless this is also in many ways even a classic tragedy, if Writer says so.

He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone.

Don’t cheer, boys. The poor devils are dying.

As great an artist as ever lived, Mendelssohn called Jenny Lind.

The greatest singer of us all, Callas called Rosa Ponselle.

William Carlos Williams died after a series of strokes.

John Cheever died of cancer that spread from the kidney to the bone.

Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, Melville is buried in.

Woodlawn Cemetery, in Toledo, Ohio, Addie Joss is buried in.

Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!

Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

Disraeli was thoroughly convinced that Mozart was a Jew.

Cagliostro died in a dungeon of the Inquisition.

German beer music, Nietzsche called
Die Meister-singer.

Sde Boker.

A. E. Housman died of a heart condition.

Shostakovich died of a heart condition.

Cafe Guerbois. The Bateau-Lavoir.

News that stays news, Pound identified literature as.

Hectic red.

Henry Adams died of a stroke.

Addison died of dropsy.

In search of Eldorado.

And of Ophir. Which, still, no one has ever discovered the location of.

Horace’s father was a manumitted slave. Chekhov’s grandfather was a serf.

Ivory. Apes. Precious jewels. Peacocks. Sandalwood.

Bangkok, Thomas Merton died in. After stumbling into an electric fan while wet from a shower.

Or on the other end of the scale even a volume entitled
Writer’s Block—
which Writer is willing to wager some petulant soul will have it.

Depraved May.

Zeno was a pupil of Parmenides. Who was a pupil of Xenophanes. Who was a pupil of Anaximander. Says Diogenes Laertius.

Kalidasa was the adopted son of an oxcart driver.

Yossele Rosenblatt. Jack Dempsey died of a heart attack. Nelson Algren died of a heart attack. Congreve died after a coach accident.

Why should we honor those that die upon the field of battle, a man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

Said Yeats.

February 23, 1821. July 8, 1822. April 19, 1824.

The calamitous last years of Swift: Labyrinthine vertigo, deafness, paralysis, aphasia, insanity.

Of Carson McCullers:

Stroke, paralysis, heart attack, breast cancer, brain hemorrhage.

Bertrand Russell, at seventy-six, survived an ocean plane crash in which a number of other passengers were killed.

I know death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits. —Says Webster.

James Clarence Mangan. Who died of alcohol or opium or poverty or neglect.

And is alluded to a dozen times in
Ulysses.

Giulio Romano.

Who is mentioned in
The Winter’s Tale.

Bizet died of heart disease.

Hobbes died of palsy. At ninety-one.

Russell died at ninety-eight, of bronchial pneumonia.

Janacek died of bronchial pneumonia.

Scott died of the effects of a stroke.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide. Said Cesare Pavese.

The chimney smokes and I leave the room. Why do you think it a great matter? Asked Marcus Aurelius.