This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

  Being reminded that Garrick would also later be buried adjacent to the Shakespeare monument in Westminster Abbey.

  Max Beerbohm lived in Italy for most of forty-six years.

  And never learned to speak Italian.

  A Vatican cardinal, visiting Nicolas Poussin’s modest house in Rome: How distressing that you have no servant.

  Poussin: How distressing that you have so many.

  Tolstoy had an illegitimate son he never acknowledged.

  Karl Marx had an illegitimate son he never acknowledged.

  Henrik Ibsen had an illegitimate son he never acknowledged.

  Teaching mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, Isaac Newton lectured so abstractly that often no students appeared at his classes at all.

  That utterly dreary German scoundrel Wagner.

  Dostoievsky called him.

  Whose tale, locked for some decades, now, in Author’s memory?—

  Of someone visiting at an old people’s home and noticing a woman beyond an unclosed bathroom door—scrubbing her face in a toilet bowl.

  And why peculiarly indelible?

  James Baldwin borrowed money from Marlon Brando with which to finish his first novel.

  Phoenix, Arizona, Frank Lloyd Wright died in.

  Learning from the Divine Comedy that one-way traffic had been established in thirteenth-century Rome.

  Within weeks of John Berryman’s father’s suicide, when Berryman was twelve, his mother remarried. To their landlord.

  Books agreeing with Copernicus or Kepler or Galileo—i.e., acknowledging that the earth moved around the sun—remained on the Catholic Index until as late as 1835.

  One’s delayed awareness that in Hamlet, Claudius prays. Or attempts to.

  And that Hamlet never does.

  Are you actually the Arnold Schoenberg.

  Somebody had to be.

  Pliny the Younger was a pupil of Quintilian’s.

  Years afterward, learning that Quintilian could not afford a proper dowry for his daughter, Pliny sent the money as a gift.

  Dryden was England’s first official Poet Laureate.

  One hundred and seventy-five years earlier, both Oxford and Cambridge had awarded the title to John Skelton.

  Fifteen thousand children were among the prisoners who passed through Theresienstadt.

  Ninety-some survived.

  The probability that James Joyce and Lenin exchanged pleasantries.

  In a Café Odéon in Zurich, in 1915, which both spent much time in.

  Pascal could see no worth whatsoever in poetry.

  The original of Lady Macbeth. Whose name was Gruoch.

  Yeats, in the mid-1930s, noting that he had met Gerard Manley Hopkins several times more than fifty years earlier, but remembered almost nothing:

  A boy of seventeen, Walt Whitman in his pocket, had little interest in a querulous, sensitive scholar.

  At thirty-three, with a number of what would become his most famous poems already written, Edwin Arlington Robinson’s total lifetime earnings as an author came to seven dollars.

  The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in the year 2000, on the Holocaust:

  A fairy tale.

  Handel wrote Messiah in twenty-two days.

  I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it.

  Said Gertrude Stein.

  Vasari’s painful single-sentence description of an aging Piero di Cosimo, struggling to continue painting while suffering from palsy—and enraged when the maulstick and even his brushes would fall from his hand.

  Renoir’s arthritis.

  27, rue de Fleurus.

  Benvenuto Cellini had at least six illegitimate children.

  The proposal that Dylan Thomas would sleep on a couch in Stravinsky’s Los Angeles living room while they collaborated on an opera.

  Precluded by Thomas’s death.

  The King Lear that Verdi always hoped to write but didn’t.

  Remembering that the Chinese invented moveable type well before Gutenberg.

  As did the Koreans.

  Poaching venison and rabbits from Sir Thomas Lucy.

  Too raw for the majority of women.

  Said Sainte-Beuve of Madame Bovary.

  Writing in bed, Mark Twain preferred.

  Fretful, timorous, and a tell-tale—Coleridge’s own description of his childhood self.

  The schoolboys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me, and hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly.

  Schrödinger’s equation.

  Pausing to recall that before watches became commonplace, one told time by heeding church bells. Or when possible by sundial.

  As in the London of John Donne or of Samuel Pepys, for example.

  Copies of all of the now long lost plays of Sophocles and Euripides still existed at Constantinople until 1203.

  When the city’s churches and libraries were indiscriminately ravaged and torched by the abortive Fourth Crusade.

  According to Suetonius, Virgil first wrote the entire Aeneid in prose—and only then recast it into verse.

  From an earliest major review of Jane Eyre:

  Sheer rudeness and vulgarity. An anti-Christian composition.

  Of Wuthering Heights:

  Repulsive vulgarity. Odiously and abominably pagan.

  Herefordshire, Jenny Lind died in.

  Poor Tom’s a-cold.

  At Lamb House, in Rye, Henry James had no fewer than eight writing desks.

  And most often paced back and forth dictating.

  Johnson. Boswell. Gibbon. Walpole. Goldsmith. Sterne. Garrick. Edmund Burke. Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Sarah Siddons.

  All of whom sat for Joshua Reynolds.

  Napoleon. Louis XVI. Catherine the Great. Rousseau. Voltaire. Washington. Jefferson. Franklin. John Paul Jones. Diderot. Lafayette.

  All of whom sat for Jean-Antoine Houdon.

  By order of the Council of Avignon, 1209, forbidden to handle bread or fruit set out for sale:

  Harlots and Jews.

  There were 945 booksellers in Paris in 1845.

  Tolstoy carried on a vast correspondence. In 1908, Thomas Edison sent him an early dictaphone. Tolstoy learned to make great use of it, in the two years until his death.

  Goethe’s English spelling:

  I am luky.

  The best dramatic writer since the days of Shakespeare and Massinger, Walter Scott called Joanna Baillie.

  Who was forgotten before her death.

  Fragonard was so little known at his death that there would appear to have been no obituary anywhere.

  How many miles to Babylon?

  Threescore miles and ten.

  Beaumarchais, who wrote The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville—and who surreptitiously arranged for the sale of muskets and cannon and gunpowder to the Americans during the Revolution.

  And was never paid until an Act of Congress compensated his heirs sixty years later.

  Donne would not last, Drummond of Hawthornden says Ben Jonson said.

  For not being understood.

  An uninteresting, and one may almost say, a justly exterminated race.

  The New York Times called the American Indian, in an 1855 review of Hiawatha.

  An amiable barbarian. Voltaire called Shakespeare.

  For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

  The reading or non-reading of a book—will never keep down a single petticoat.

  Said Byron.

  Stevie Smith’s cheerfully gruesome voice, Robert Lowell called it.

  There are no English critics of weight or judgment who consider Mr. Joyce an author of any importance.

  Said Edmund Gosse, two years after the publication of Ulysses.

  Who can plow through such stuff?

  Added George Moore.

  The best thing that could happen to English literature is that a large number of o
ur critics should be taken to a remote place in the country and locked up alone for six months with a volume of Wordsworth.

  Concluded Alfred Noyes in the same regard.

  Can I get there by candle-light?

  Yes, and back again.

  As his deafness progressively increased, Beethoven banged harder and harder on pianos. And made a total ruin of several.

  Strabo’s Geography, dated 7 BC. Which states that the world is round and that one could reach India by sailing westward from Spain.

  Plutarch read ceaselessly. Whether eating, having his haircut, being shaved, or even riding horseback, he says.

  Shelley’s habit of reading everything aloud, whatever the circumstances so that his friend Hogg finally once yanked a book from his hands and flung it out a window.

  For the first several centuries, the Mass in the Roman church was conducted in Greek, not Latin.

  Rather than in shorthand, Henry James’s dictation at Lamb House was taken by his secretary on a Remington typewriter.

  The universe was created on October 26, 4004 BC. At 9:00 AM.

  Announced Archbishop Ussher, in 1645.

  The death of Hector occurred on August 28, 1185 BC. Declared an equally perspicacious scholar.

  Abu Said, a Sufi poet and saint.

  Who sat in a recess in a chapel and said Allah! continually for seven years.

  Beverly Hills, California, Sergei Rachmaninoff died in.

  As did Bruno Walter.

  Saint John of the Cross was exceptionally short and slight.

  Half a friar, Saint Teresa of Avila playfully spoke of him as.

  A half-bottle, Toulouse-Lautrec called himself because of his own stunted growth.

  Washington had Tom Paine’s The Crisis—These are the times that try men’s souls—read to his troops.

  Lafayette was nineteen when Washington made him a major general.

  The value of a classical education, according to a mid-nineteenth-century dean of Christ Church, Oxford, one Thomas Gaisford:

  That it enables us to look down with contempt on those who have not shared its advantages.

  Oh, isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?

  Says Polly Garter.

  We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.

  Said Isaac Bashevis Singer.

  Fetch up Nell Gwyn, he says. They fetch her up. Next morning, Chop off her head! And they chop it off.

  Outside of the family and attendants, Victor Hugo was the last person to see Balzac on the evening of his death:

  The nurse and the servant stood in a kind of horrified silence as they listened to his dying rattle. An overpowering, sickening odor was wafted from the bed. Unquote.

  Martha Washington could barely read or write.

  Theodora Bosanquet.

  The best work of the best poet.

  Dryden called the Georgics.

  The apocryphal notion that after four years on the Sistine ceiling scaffolding, Michelangelo could read only by holding pages above his head.

  Kierkegaard’s father was fifty-seven when Kierkegaard was born.

  Who could be more oppressive than the landlords?

  Asked Saint John Chrysostom.

  Ca. 400 AD.

  These new composers seem to be satisfied only if they can produce the greatest possible tonal disturbance.

  Said a critic of Claudio Monteverdi.

  In 1603.

  Dead! Dead! And never called me mother.

  Evidently several life preservers were flung overboard only moments after Hart Crane’s suicide leap into the Gulf Stream. A boat was lowered and circled for an hour or more, before the freighter sailed on.

  Adriaen Brouwer. Who was found dead outside a tavern at thirty-two.

  But by whom Rembrandt had bought eight paintings. And Rubens as many as seventeen.

  Lermontov. Whose first fame accrued to a poem condemning Pushkin’s death in a duel.

  And who four years later was killed in a duel himself.

  Where did Author learn that Boris Pasternak borrowed the name Zhivago from the manufacturer’s identification on a Moscow manhole cover?

  Aware that the myth begins with the infant Oedipus being abandoned on a mountainside.

  Not always remembering that in archaic Greece exposing unwanted children was common practice.

  An honorary degree of Thomas Mann’s from the University of Bonn was formally rescinded when he condemned the Nazi regime and went into exile.

  I find it impossible to take him seriously as a major writer and have never ceased to be amazed at the number of people who can.

  Said Edmund Wilson of Kafka.

  J. Edgar Hoover lived with his mother until her death when he was forty-three.

  Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown.

  Stephen Crane’s judgment that War and Peace should have been one third its length:

  It goes on and on like Texas.

  William Byrd. John Dowland. Thomas Campion.

  The suggestion that most editors are failed writers.

  To which Eliot: So are most writers.

  Odious vermin, Henry Fielding called critics.

  The first time Osip Mandelstam was arrested by Soviet authorities, Stalin himself phoned Pasternak to indicate that Mandelstam would be released. Pasternak then asked if he and Stalin might meet for a chat. A chat about what? Why, about life, about love, about death—

  Stalin had already hung up.

  There are more than 530 miles of bookshelves in the Library of Congress.

  Most of Homer is trash, determined Walter Savage Landor.

  Who felt the same way about Dante.

  Two thousand years before Shakespeare, Aeschylus apparently acted in his own plays also.

  And may have directed them as well.

  No man has a right to set himself up as a lecturer at $50 per night who cannot for one minute take his eyes from his manuscript.

  Said a Rockford, Illinois, newspaper about Melville.

  Was Apollinaire the first to call it cubism in print?

  Oh I have been to Ludlow fair

  And left my necktie God knows where.

  Oskar Kokoschka’s life-size effigy of Alma Mahler.

  Which he sometimes slept with.

  A cursed, conceited, wily heathen.

  Being Aristotle as viewed by Luther.

  Pontormo, who studied under Leonardo, Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea del Sarto.

  Vasari, who studied under Andrea and Michelangelo.

  Pierre Corneille died in poverty.

  Buddha warned his disciples to avoid the company of women.

  Asked his favorite pupil: What if one of them should speak to us?

  Keep wide awake, Ananda.

  Horace Walpole’s cautious suggestion to Gibbon that certain lesser technical portions of the Decline and Fall might be boring.

  After which Gibbon never spoke to him again.

  Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe all once worked together in the same German architectural studio.

  For approximately a century and a half, Vivaldi was as little known and little rated among composers as was Vermeer for even longer among painters.

  Vermeer having evidently been mentioned in print only three times in his life, and all three inconsequentially.

  The friendship of Parson Malthus and David Ricardo.

  Under the Caesars, a virgin could not be executed.

  Thus any so sentenced were matter-of-factly deflowered beforehand.

  At a doctor’s suggestion, Mozart went horseback riding every morning for four years.

  Ceasing a month or two before his death when he was forced to sell his mount—for need of the few ducats.

  Louvain, Dirck Bouts died in.

  John Ruskin, educated at home, had no friends among boys of his own age.

  John Stuart Mill, the same.

  Much too early I came to many places, or too late: the beer was not yet ready, or was already drunk.

/>   Says Odin, in the Elder Edda.

  The era when postage was still paid for by the person who received the delivery.

  And Scott said that his fan mail was driving him toward the poorhouse.

  Byron, briefly, on Southey: Twaddle.

  On Wordsworth: Drivel.

  On Keats: Flay him alive.

  At certain moments in his madness, John Clare was heard to hold conversations with Shakespeare.

  When Hölderlin talked to himself it was often as if in a dialogue between two extraordinarily different personalities.

  Thomas Love Peacock read voraciously in Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and of course English.

  Having left school at thirteen.

  There’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said before.

  Says Terence in the Eunuch.

  We can say nothing but what has been said; the composition and method is ours only.

  Says Burton in the Anatomy.

  Jonson’s To Celia—Drink to me only with thine eyes.

  Which he contrived by juggling fragments from the Greek of Philostratus.

  James Ensor’s portrait of himself as a beetle.

  Drawn twenty-four years before The Metamorphosis.

  Sakyamuni.

  Mendelssohn, on Liszt:

  Few brains.

  On Berlioz:

  One ought to wash one’s hands after handling one of his scores.

  Paul Robeson’s father was a former slave.

  Sigmund Freud was one of those who categorically refused to allow that the William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could have been the author of the plays.