The Last Novel (9 page)

The one truly great political figure of our age.

Einstein called Gandhi.

Dostoievsky’s graduation from an engineering institute.

Achieved only after having first failed elementary algebra.

A cobbler makes a greater contribution to society than does a Homer or a Plato.

Asserted Proudhon.

Katherine Mansfield was dead at thirty-five.

March 7, 1944, Emmanuel Ringelbaum died on.

Ballplayers on the road live together. It won’t work.

Said Rogers Hornsby
re
the signing of Jackie Robinson.

I only wished to tell people honestly: Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live!

Said Chekhov, late along.

Tirso de Molina, who wrote the first dramatic version of the Don Juan legend — in which he allows someone to ask the stone Commendatore if there are taverns in the underworld.

And can poets down there still win prizes?

John Ruskin’s insistence that he could never live in America — a country so miserable as to possess no castles, as he put it.

Freud’s addiction to cocaine.

Sherlock Holmes’.

Contemporary college students — college students — who when asked to identify Joan of Arc have supposed her to be a character in the Biblical story of Noah and the flood.

Or indeed Noah’s wife.

The first hospital in Europe was opened in Paris in the seventh century AD.

At least four hundred years after such things existed in Hindu India.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

America is now given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.

Determined Hawthorne, in 1855.

The greatest achievement for a woman is to be as seldom as possible spoken of, said Thucydides.

Who mentions not one of them in his history.

Johnson’s
Lives of the Poets
— which mentions none either.

Yasser Arafat was reported not to have read one book in the last forty years of his life.

But to have spent innumerable hours enrapt by Tom and Jerry cartoons.

The man who has seen a truly beautiful woman has seen God.

Said Rumi.

a pretty girl who naked is is

worth a million statues

Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, John Cowper Powys died in.

By her own count, Vigée-Lebrun produced six hundred and sixty-two portraits.

Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.

Wrote Dickens.

Butterfly, my child.

Puccini spoke of her as.

William Faulkner. Seated on a park bench near City Hall in today’s Oxford, Mississippi — in bronze.

Thomas Eakins was once accused of incest with a sister.

And a niece.

Henry Roth
acknowledged
the same with a sister — and for over a period of years.

Contemplating several of Turner’s early watercolors, a prospective buyer implies that he has recently seen better.

Which has to mean you’ve been looking at Tom Girtin, Turner tells him.

Wondering if there can be any other ranking twentieth-century American poet whose body of work contains even half the percentage of pure
drivel
as Wallace Stevens’.

Novelist’s calendar, which he leafs through idly to verify something he already suspected — that he has been out to dinner a grand total of three times in the entire past year, and then only when taken by some book person with an expense account.

The unceasing preoccupation with marriageableness and/or the economics of same in Jane Austen.

Suicide is more respectable, Emerson said.

Rarely remembering that the first translation from ancient Greek any of us learn to quote is of Pythagoras.

Kierkegaard’s mother had originally been the family maid, whom his father married after the death of an earlier wife. There is not one word about her in anything Kierkegaard ever wrote, his journals included.

Henry Fielding’s wife’s maid — whom he likewise married after the wife’s death.

Rembrandt’s — who became his mistress.

Handel spent almost fifty years in London — and to the end spoke only broken English.

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the et cetera.

Hideous, Hume condemned much of Spinoza as.

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

Said Voltaire — describing opera.

Unlike most Italians, Joe DiMaggio never reeks of garlic.

Life
magazine matter-of-factly took note of in 1939.

Not to add that he keeps his hair slick with water instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease — unquote, additionally.

And so to Mrs. Martin and there did what
je voudrais avec
her, both
devante
and backward.

Reads an entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary for early June, 1666.

An earlier tenant in the same London building where Sylvia Plath would commit suicide — had been Yeats.

Pelion and Ossa. In
Odyssey
XI. In
Georgics
I. In Horace’s
Odes
III.

With small Latin and less Greek, Shakespeare found them for
Hamlet
where?

The thirteen extant letters of Plato.

Did Plato write any of the thirteen?

Gertrude Stein once delighted Picasso by reporting that a collector had been dumbfounded, years afterward, to hear that Picasso had given her her portrait as a gift, rather than asking payment.

Not understanding that that early in Picasso’s career, the difference had been next to negligible.

I don’t think anybody should write his autobiography until after he’s dead.

Said Samuel Goldwyn.

One author pilfers the best of another.

And calls it tradition.

Says a fragment of Bacchylides, ca. 450 BC.

Brooklyn, Leonard Bernstein is buried in.

February 22, 1913, Saussure died on.

Too lazy to copy down passages he thought he might later wish to quote, De Quincey often simply ripped them out of the book at hand.

Even when the book was someone else’s.

A photo of Lillie Langtry, as Rosalind in
As You Like It,
taken in 1882.

How can Novelist have fallen in love with someone dead since 1929?

Henry James, addressing Joseph Conrad:
Mon cher confrère.

Conrad, addressing James:
Mon cher maître.

Both,
repeatedly,
when in conversation, said Ford Madox Ford.

More than fifty relatives of Bach, whose names remain on record, were musicians.

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

Guy Davenport’s account of a lunch with Thomas Merton — at which Merton devoured six martinis.

Spinach, fruit, water.

Having been Mahler’s unvarying diet.

Ethiopians have black sperm, believed Herodotus.

A sort of gutless Kipling.

Orwell called Auden.

Ernest Poole. Margaret Wilson. Julia M. Peterkin. Margaret Ayer Barnes. T. S. Stribling.

Being five of the first fifteen winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Caroline Miller. Josephine W. Johnson. Harold L. Davis.

Being the next three.

Ted Hughes’s father was one of only seventeen survivors from an entire
regiment
annihilated at Gallipoli.

No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more.

Said Seamus Heaney at the 1998 funeral of Hughes himself.

I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion, I loathe the country.

Says someone in Congreve’s
The Way of the World.

I’m going. I find the company very uncongenital.

Says someone in a Gypsy Rose Lee mystery.

He had abroun hayre. His complexion exceeding faire — he was so faire they called him
the Lady of Christ’s College.

Being Milton, as reported by John Aubrey.

Paavo Nurmi died partially paralyzed.

Paavo Nurmi.

The French government provides the Paris Opera a subsidy of roughly $135,000,000 each year.

The United States gives the Metropolitan Opera less than $1,000,000.

At eighteen, John Stuart Mill spent several nights in jail for having distributed birth control pamphlets in a London slum.

Delmore Schwartz, in his disturbed final years, hearing voices — and insisting that they were directed at him from the spire of the Empire State Building.

The Book of Margery Kempe
, evidently the first autobiography in English by a woman.

Surely the first to have been dictated — by an illiterate author.

Martin Heidegger’s affair with Hannah Arendt — conducted in the main at a squalid hotel next to the Marburg railroad station.

Sainte-Beuve’s affair with Victor Hugo’s wife.

Teilhard de Chardin was forbidden by the Jesuits to publish any of his philosophical writings while he lived.

November 30, 1935, Fernando Pessoa died on.

Leuprolide acetate. Metoprolol. Hydrochlorothiazide. Atorva-statin. Aspirin. Salmeterol xinafoate. Flunisolide. Omeprazole.

Loperamide hydrochloride. Simethicone. Calcium carbonate.

Or is Novelist forgetting one or two.

It is really most unfortunate that she rules out copulation.

Said Lytton Strachey of Virginia Woolf ’s major novels.

Jeanne Eagels. As the original Sadie Thompson.

Irene Papas, as Antigone.

Irene Papas, as Helen.

Stainless maiden amid the stain of blood.

Lucretius calls Iphigenia.

You never hear of a novel-wright or a picture-wright or a poem-wright — why a playwright?

Asked W. S. Gilbert.

When the stove is clean enough I shall turn on the gas.

Wrote Anna Wickham — twelve years before she hanged herself instead.

Where the synecdoche of
tessera
made a totality, however illusive, the metonymy of
kenosis
breaks this up into discontinuous fragments.

Somewhere declareth Harold Bloom.

It may be essential to Harold Bloom that his audience not know quite what he is talking about.

Commenteth Alfred Kazin — pointing out other immortal phrasings altogether.

How many of you are there in the quartet?

The affecting ancient legend that when Pindar was a youngster, bees once coated his lips with honey while he slept.

Alprazolam.

Robert Pershing Doerr.

Pausing to remember that no fewer than eight characters in
Hamlet
— eight — die violently.

The Theatre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris.

Whose name the Nazis changed during the occupation because of her having been a Jew.

174517 —

Which Primo Levi could read tattooed on his left forearm from Auschwitz onward.

Light from the lighthouse at Alexandria, one of antiquity’s Seven Wonders, was visible from as far as twenty miles at sea.

Helmut Newton died in a car crash. At eighty-three.

Trying to conceive of having attended Georgia State College for Women in the mid-1940s.

And wondering who in heaven’s name there was for Flannery O’Connor to have a conversation with.

Paul Valéry’s wife was a niece of Berthe Morisot — and had in fact posed for Morisot any number of times.

Alexander Blok’s wife was the daughter of the chemist Mendeleyev.

Morningless sleep.

Epicurus called death.

Leonardo. Michelangelo. Botticelli. Raphael. Watteau. Claude. Van Dyck. Guido Reni. Pontormo. Poussin. Donatello. Reynolds.

Being but a handful among artists who never married.

An unpurchasable mind.

Shelley credited himself with.

Baudelaire, twice — in print — called upon Poe as a kind of patron saint to intercede for him during a prayer.

Malcolm Lowry, seemingly serious himself, told a friend he had once prayed to Kafka:

And he answered my prayer.

In addition to French, Delacroix read fluently in Greek, Latin, Italian, English, and evidently German.

Latin, French, Italian, and Flemish.

Rubens wrote letters in.

Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben.

Pigalle’s sculpture of a naked eighty-plus-year-old Voltaire — for which the body was posed for by a different elderly man altogether.

Saul Kripke had mastered advanced calculus before finishing grammar school.

In Omaha.

She Who Was Once the Helmet-Maker’s Beautiful Wife.

Readers who assume that the title
Samson Agonistes
means something about Samson in pain.

After the breakthrough by Marian Anderson and Mattiwilda Dobbs, the next two dominant black singers at the Metropolitan were Leontyne Price and Martina Arroyo. Arroyo was frequently mistaken for Price. I’m the other one, love, she told the Met doorkeeper who got it wrong one morning.

Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.

Fanny Burney’s account of her surgery for breast cancer at fifty-nine, in 1811.

Before anesthesia.

Dwight Eisenhower was once asked by an assistant if he would like to meet Robert Frost, who happened to be visiting someone else at the White House.

Eisenhower could not think of a reason why he should bother.

A hetaera named Cyrene, remembered for 2,400 years — because Aristophanes indicates that she could perform in a dozen different positions.

Theoris and Archippe, two others remembered for slightly longer.

Because Sophocles had affairs with each.