The Last Novel (4 page)

Certain men have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously, at their pleasure, so as to produce the effect of singing.

Insisted Saint Augustine.

Englishwomen have big feet.

Nietzsche determined.

Man: But a little soul bearing about a corpse.

Marcus Aurelius says Epictetus said.

Richie Wagner, Charles Ives amused himself by calling him.

Truman Streckfus Persons, Truman Capote’s birth-certificate name was.

He wore a grey suit, black shoes, white shirt, tie and vest. His appearance never changed. He came down in the morning in this suit, and he would still be wearing it the last thing at night.

Said John Huston,
re
Sartre.

Einstein often went without socks.

The final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.

Clifton Fadiman said of
Absalom, Absalom!

Curiously dull, furiously commonplace, and often meaningless.

Alfred Kazin said of Faulkner in general.

Me, tell you? I don’t know anything about it. I laid down face up and began to sing. Children came like water.

British troops reached Belsen, the first Nazi concentration camp to be reported on, in April of 1945. Forty thousand starving and/or dying prisoners. Ten thousand unburied corpses, corded like wood.

It is my duty to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind, began the dispatch to the
London Times.

I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald.

Pleaded Edward R. Murrow, on trans-Atlantic radio, after reporting much the same soon thereafter.

Our worst century so far.

Elizabeth Bishop called that one.

Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

Says a line in
Slaughterhouse-Five.

Huckleberry Finn
was once banned from the children’s room of the Brooklyn Public Library because — Novelist is quoting here — Huck said sweat when he should have said perspiration.

Wondering if the myth of Dedalus and Icarus has ever been thought of as the first science fiction story?

The only thing that could sound worse in an orchestra than a flute — would be two flutes.

Said Cherubini.

Jean Genet was arrested for the first time — for theft — at the age of ten.

David Garrick’s explanation for the excessive number of bawdy plays on the late eighteenth-century English stage:

Because the first great ruling passion of actors is to eat.

E. M. Forster’s astonishment at learning that telephone wires were not hollow.

Old enough to remember when any number of people seemed to believe something similar — or at the least felt it necessary to shout, when confronted with long distance.

Five or six lunatics, the contributors to the first Impressionist exhibition were called by
Le Figaro.

Heine read Plutarch’s
Lives
for the first time when quite young.

And said it made him wish to leap onto a stallion and ride off to conquer France.

William Blake’s emphatically avowed lack of interest in sex.

The Red and the Black,
John F. Kennedy’s favorite novel was.

According to Vasari, Leonardo devoted four full years to painting the
Mona Lisa.

The
Mona Lisa
covers a slight fraction more than five and one-half square feet of surface.

Sarah Bernhardt lost a leg at seventy-one.

And one year later was performing for French troops at the front in World War I.

On a wall in Freud’s waiting room in Vienna:

Bernhardt’s photo.

A man either utterly devoid of sense or one who takes his listeners for fools.

An early critic called Schoenberg.

A debris of sour jokes, stage anger, dirty words, synthetic loneliness, and the sort of antic behavior children fall into when they know they are losing our attention.

The
New Yorker
called
Catch-22.

Lo, there is just appeared a truly classic work.

Wrote Horace Walpole — within one day of the publication of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall.

Rhoda Broughton’s
Dear Faustina,
from 1897. Is it the first lesbian novel in English?

Jean Cocteau’s addiction to opium.

Francis Thompson’s.

Modigliani’s. To opium, hashish, and drink.

People who more immediately think of Meursault as a character in Camus rather than as a dry white Burgundy.

Czar Alexis, father of Peter the Great, who in the mid– seventeenth century ordered the destruction of all musical instruments in Russia.

Pope Leo XII. Who in the 1820s issued an edict forbidding the waltz in Rome.

Magnificently, awe-inspiringly ugly.

Henry James called George Eliot.

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-etre hier, je ne sais pas.

Not until a year after his burial at Sag Harbor did someone notice that the title of
The Recognitions
was misspelled on the back of William Gaddis’s headstone.

The true/untrue/pleasant-in-either-case tale that Salvador Dalí had been noticed gazing in almost hypnotic fascination at a melting wedge of Camembert on a dinner table not long before painting the limp watches in
The Persistence of Memory
.

I am extremely happy — until further notice.

Says a letter of Berlioz about his romance with Harriet Smithson.

An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks almost as much as you do.

Said Dylan Thomas.

But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

Suggested J. C. Squire.

The seeming likelihood that Pythagoras is implying that the world is round — in the mid–sixth century BC.

He had not escaped the common penalties of transgressing the laws of strict purity, wrote Alexander Thayer
re
Beethoven.

Which is to say — he had syphilis.

Guillaume Apollinaire authored a considerable amount of art criticism, particularly as an early champion of Cubism.

While at the same time being incapable of distinguishing a Rubens from a Rembrandt, Braque commented.

Thales of Miletus, when his mother begged him to marry: It is too soon.

After she permitted him some delay: It is too late.

Once, watching a ceremonial procession near the Vatican, Samuel Morse failed to remove his hat — and had it roughly knocked off by a papal guard.

And became vociferously anti-Catholic thereafter.

June 7, 1843, Friedrich Hölderlin died on.

Be informed, Christian, that after the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous, more violent, than the Jew.

Pronounced Luther.

World War II — started by sixty kikes.

Pronounced Ezra Pound.

Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God.

Pronounced the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem — well before a State of Israel existed.

While also citing Adolf Eichmann as both gallant and noble.

To sit for John Singer Sargent, Yeats appeared in a velvet coat and a billowing bow tie — and then carefully arranged a lock of hair to fall across his forehead.

All this to remind himself of his importance as an artist, Sargent said he said.

The last time anyone mentioned William Saroyan.

Eleusis, Aeschylus was born in.

Colonus, Sophocles.

Salamis, Euripides.

T. S. Eliot missed military service in World War I because of a hernia.

Pound had astigmatism.

Andrea del Castagno’s masterwork, a last supper, was painted at the Convent of Sant’Apollonia in Florence in 1447.

And was not seen by other artists for four hundred years — because of the convent being closed to laypersons.

The state should keep me, Schubert once suggested. I have come into the world for no purpose but to compose.

Now that a certain portion of mankind does not believe at all in the existence of the gods, a rational legislation ought to do away with the oaths.

Wrote Plato — 2,310 years before an act of the United States Congress added the phrase
under God
to the Pledge of Allegiance.

Suddenly taking a moment to wonder — does anyone any longer make use of Morse code?

I pay well. But the wenches are all whores and pigs.

Says a Michelangelo letter about a servant problem.

André Malraux had reached Spain within two days of the start of the Civil War in 1936.

Living the classic impoverished artist’s life while a student in Milan, Giacomo Puccini was once forced to pawn his overcoat — as he allows one of his characters to do in
La Bohème
.

In
El Diario de Madrid,
February 1799, a first advertisement for prints of Goya’s
Caprichos:

On sale at No. 1 Calle del Desengaño, the perfume and liquor store.

Beatrix Potter had to pay to publish
The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

I am hungry. I am cold. When I grow up I want to be a German, and then I shall no longer be hungry and cold.

Wrote a Jewish youngster in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Not long before his death, Toulouse-Lautrec spent several months in a mental institution, being released only in care of a guardian whose portrait he then painted.

My keeper when I was mad, he inscribed it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s shockingly limited aesthetic sensibilities in every area except music. His virtual
consecration
of third-rate American pulp fiction detective stories, for instance.

Or his unashamed admission that Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton ranked as his two favorite film actresses.

The earliest known reference to London by name, dated as long ago as 61 AD — in Tacitus.

Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams was born in.

In an Episcopal rectory.

Moments in which Novelist does something like leaving his desk to retrieve a book from across the room — and finding himself staring vacantly into the refrigerator.

Or tossing his keys into a drawer — without having opened the drawer.

In Meleager’s first-century BC anthology of Greek verse, an epigram in honor of an extraordinary woman —

The one who slept with only one man in her life.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, on realizing that he feels a certain kinship with Whitman:

As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a very pleasant confession.

Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: your father had an accident there.

John von Neumann was twenty-nine when he was appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton — for life.

André Gide had a sexless marriage with a first cousin.

In spite of his admitted homosexuality, he also had an illegitimate child by another woman.

In Vermeer’s paintings, repeatedly, letters being read or written.

In the real world — not one known word of any sort in Vermeer’s own hand.

Manet’s earliest major canvas,
The Absinthe Drinker.

The only absinthe drinker here is the painter who perpetrated this madness, said Couture.

I’d rather not sing than sing quiet.

Janis Joplin said.

The Hiroshima survivor who remembered rushing into the street amid the chaos and tripping over someone’s severed head.

And hysterically calling out Excuse me.

A stark naked man standing in the rain with his eyeball in his hand.

Another survivor recalled.

The ashes of Shelley’s heart. Which Trelawney had scooped from the flames when the corpse was burned on the beach at Viareggio in 1822, and which were passed on to Mary — and were found in her copy of
Adonais
after her death in 1851.

Any
asino
can conduct. But to make music, eh? Is
difficile!

Said Toscanini.

Rubens, in his early sixties — with arthritis so severe that both hands were paralyzed.

Rubens.

I’ve never read Shakespeare because the print’s too small.

Says someone in Odets.

Wondering how things worked at the Institute for Advanced Study. Come noon, might von Neumann casually poke his head into Einstein’s office and ask if he felt like lunch?

J. D. Salinger was awarded five battle stars as a staff sergeant in the European Theater in World War II.

Evelyn Waugh saw combat as a major with British commando units in North Africa, Crete, and Yugoslavia.

The Medieval poet Probus, whom Walafrid Strabo deemed superior to Virgil or Horace or Ovid — and whom no one any longer knows anything whatsoever about.

Paganini’s legendary showmanship. Which included sometimes deliberately breaking a string midway through a performance — and going on with only the remaining three.

Wallpaper, George Steiner dismissed much of Jackson Pollock as.

Extremely expensive wallpaper, Kenneth Rexroth made it.

Someone once asked Caruso if he considered himself the world’s greatest tenor.

Not unless John McCormack has suddenly become a baritone, Caruso said.

Why Diogenes had been noticed begging alms from a statue, a citizen wished to know.

To get into practice at being ignored, Diogenes explained.

The so-called Wicked Bible. Dated London 1632.

In which the word
not
was omitted in the seventh commandment.

Samuel Johnson’s compulsive inability to stroll past a picket fence without superstitiously touching each separate picket as he went.

Remembering that in the
Odyssey
Odysseus himself is not first seen until Book V.

And then is seen weeping.

Rudolph Valentino was dead at thirty-one.

Mithridates, he died old.

If you think you understand it, that only shows you don’t know the first thing about it.