Authors: David Markson
The Last Novel (15 page)
What he had seen, was it a battle? And if so, was that battle Waterloo?
Thy labours shall outlive thee.
Wrote John Fletcher in lines dedicated to Ben Jonson.
Who spent his last years partially paralyzed and virtually alone — and in calamitous want.
Wondering when the last day may have passed—anywhere in the world — during which someone did not die in an act of religion-inspired terrorism.
Just glance around you: wars, catastrophes and disasters, hatreds and persecutions, death awaiting us at every side.
Commented Ionesco.
Acheron. Cocytus. Styx. Phlegethon. Pyriphlegethon. Lethe.
Late February or early March, 1945.
Anne Frank.
What see’st thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?
His powers of mind have almost entirely left him; his late paintings are miserable; it is really a lamentable thing that a man should outlive his faculties.
Said Samuel Morse after a visit with an elderly John Singleton Copley.
You don’t always
make
an out. Sometimes the pitcher
gets
you out.
Said Carl Yastrzemski.
In the long run we are all dead.
Noted Keynes.
When I went to America, my very first inquiry was concerning Melville. There was some slight evidence that he was alive, and I heard from Mr. E. C. Stedman, who seemed much astonished at my interest in the subject, that Melville was dwelling somewhere in New York.
Charidas, what is it like down there?
All darkness.
And resurrection?
All a lie.
— Quoth Callimachus.
Minor authors — who lived, men knew not how, and died obscure, men marked not when.
Roger Ascham takes notice of.
Those rare intellects who, not only without reward, but in miserable poverty, brought forth their works.
Vasari likewise commemorates.
One must go on working. And one must have patience.
Rodin told Rilke.
My time will come.
Said Gregor Mendel, ignored throughout his life.
On van Gogh’s bier at Auvers-sur-Oise — clusters of golden sunflowers.
Brought by Dr. Gachet.
The report that Osip Mandelstam spent the last hours before his death in Siberia reading Petrarch — by firelight.
O lente lente currite noctis equi.
Verdi’s funeral — which according to his own wishes was conducted without music.
Verdi’s.
Though in fact he had asked that the score of his
Te Deum,
one of the
Four Sacred Pieces,
be placed in his coffin.
Regensburg, Johannes Kepler was buried in.
Where there, long unknown.
My old paintings no longer interest me. I’m much more curious about those I haven’t done yet.
Said Picasso, at seventy-nine.
Kynge Arthur is nat dede but shall come agayne.
I’m cold, Snowden said. I’m cold.
For sundry doctrinal reasons, the Archbishop of Paris refused to sanction a Catholic burial for Colette.
Conversely, France itself granted her a state funeral — making her the first woman ever so honored.
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.
I have often thought of death, but now it is never out of mind.
Said Swift, in his late sixties — a decade before it actually occurred.
You can tell from my handwriting that I am in the twenty-fourth hour. Not a single thought is born in me that does not have death graven within.
Wrote Michelangelo at eighty-one — himself with eight years remaining.
The long littleness of life.
Frances Cornford speaks of.
As he reclined at table, there arose a question what sort of death was best. At which he immediately, before anyone could speak, said, A sudden one.
Says Dryden’s Plutarch,
re
Caesar.
Philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.
Wittgenstein once suggested.
Merde pour la poésie.
Decided Rimbaud.
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Being William Dunbar — The fear of death distresses me.
And which Novelist is quite certain he has quoted before in his life.
Memento mori.
Any man if he is all alone becomes more aware of being lonely as he ages.
Said Eliot.
Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death; yet there is no man, says Tully, who does not believe that he may yet live another year.
Johnson is somewhere reminded.
The last act is tragic, however happy all the rest of the play.
Perceives Pascal.
Lorenzo da Ponte’s memoirs — in which Mozart is practically never mentioned.
I’ve no more sight, no hand, nor pen, nor inkwell. I lack everything. All I still possess is will.
Said Goya — nearing eighty.
With an ink too thick, with foul pens, with bad sight, in gloomy weather, under a dim lamp, I have composed these pages. Do not scold me for it!
Appended Telemann to the score of some light soprano airs — written at eighty-one.
Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on.
What happens in the end?
Oh, in the end she dies.
Twenty-five years after his death, Poe’s remains were disinterred from what had been little better than a pauper’s grave and reburied more formally.
Walt Whitman, who made the journey from Camden to Baltimore in spite of being disabled from a recent stroke, was the only literary figure to appear at the ceremonies.
O that it were possible
We might but hold some two days’ conference
With the dead.
— Laments Webster’s Duchess.
Celan’s recollection that his mother had never had white hair.
Because of having been murdered in a concentration camp while still too young.
Cézanne, who lived in greater and greater isolation, late in life.
Degas, who lived in greater and greater isolation, late in life.
A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles, and is there one who understands me?
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith
In addition to his name and date on the frame of a portrait by Jan van Eyck:
Als ick kan
— The best I can do.
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.
Saint Gildas the Wise, of Wales, who asked that at his death he be placed in a small boat and set adrift at sea.
Sophocles,
re
a tremor in his hand, as recorded by Aristotle:
He said he could not help it; he would happily rather not be ninety years old.
It is later than you know.
Printed Baudelaire onto the face of his clock — after having broken off its hands.
There is always more time than you anticipate.
Said Malcolm Lowry. For whom there wasn’t.
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
— Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.
I too have written some good books.
Said Nietzsche, overhearing someone’s reference to literature in a fleeting moment’s lucidity during his final madness.
Having died they are not dead.
Wrote Simonides of the Spartans slain at Plataea.
Keats, in a last letter some weeks before the end, telling a friend it is difficult to say goodbye:
I always made an awkward bow.
Tiny drops of water will hollow out a rock.
Lucretius wrote.
Als ick kan.
Which Novelist finds himself several times repeating, even while not even sure in what language — is it six-hundred-year-old Flemish? And uncertain as to why he is caught up by van Eyck’s use of it.
That’s it, I can do no more? All I have left? I can go no further?
Als ick kan?
Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.
Said H. G. Wells.
The world began without man, and it will end without him.
Said Lévi-Strauss.
Swiftly the years, beyond recall.
Solemn the stillness of this spring morning.
—
Reads the Arthur Waley translation of a Chinese fragment.
One man is born; another dies.
Being Euripides.
After death, nothing is.
Being Seneca.
The old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Said Santayana.
When Grandpa dies and his ashes are dropped into the ocean, may I have just a little bit of them? To put into something nice, so I can keep Grandpa with me for all time?
Pulvis et umbra sumus.
Quoth Horace. We are but dust and a shadow.
Dispraised, infirm, unfriended age.
Sophocles calls it.
Unregarded age in corners thrown.
Shakespeare echoes.
The worn copy of Donne’s verses, inked throughout with notes in Coleridge’s handwriting. And at the rear:
I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb, and then you will not be sorry that I bescribbled your book.
I am weary, Ananda, and wish to lie down.
Bhartrihari, fully fourteen hundred years ago, bemoaning the poverty of poets — in Sanskrit.
Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
Be patient now, my soul, thou hast endured worse than this.
Odysseus once says.
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
Is it true then, what they say — that we become stars in the sky when we die?
Asks someone in Aristophanes.
Access to Roof for Emergency Only.
Alarm Will Sound if Door Opened.
Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.
The old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Als ick kan.