And told Arnold Zweig that it almost made him angry that Zweig believed otherwise.
The Athenian general Phocion, who was interrupted by extraordinary cheering during a speech:
Have I inadvertently said something stupid?
Huckleberry Finn is thirteen.
Raskolnikov is twenty-three.
Winslow Homer was an artist-correspondent at the front during the Civil War.
Schopenhauer was someone else who talked to himself—loudly, on public thoroughfares.
In Wordsworth’s instance the talk meant that he was composing verses—which he completed in his head before putting them down on paper.
Entirely fourth-rate—Tchaikovsky re Handel.
Pushkin’s tentative English—much of it learned by struggling through Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
Molly Bloom is thirty-three.
Have the people who conclude that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the Earl of Oxford ever read the poetry Oxford actually did write?
The twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet. Ergo, the twenty-four books of the Iliad and of the Odyssey.
Arranged by editors at Alexandria centuries after the fact.
When you are going to bed on a sleeper car, put your wallet in a sock under your pillow. That way, in the morning you’ll never forget your wallet, because you’ll be looking for your sock.
Said Ping Bodie.
Eliot was not a very experienced writer, he didn’t write very much, he didn’t write very much poetry.
Said Allen Ginsberg.
Every poet is a fool. Which is not to say that every fool is a poet.
Said Coleridge.
Teresa Stratas, who in midcareer took time to work in Mother Teresa’s hospice in Calcutta.
And later in orphanages in Romania.
Was Stalin’s right arm withered, or was it his left?
Jerusalem, Martin Buber died in.
As did Else Lasker-Schiller.
And S. Y. Agnon.
And Yehuda Amichai.
Paradise Lost sold fewer than three hundred copies a year in its first ten years in print.
The Courtship of Miles Standish sold fifteen thousand copies on its first day.
Giacomo Puccini’s fanatic addiction to duck hunting.
There is no peace to be found except in the woods.
Said Michelangelo.
Herodotus claimed that Nebuchadnezzar’s walls at Babylon were thick enough so that two four-horse chariots could traverse them side by side. No one believed him for twenty-four hundred years—until excavation showed them thicker than that.
Swinburne suffered epileptic seizures. Once in the British Museum.
The United States Constitution was formally declared to be in effect in March of 1789. At a celebration in Philadelphia, provision was made for tables serving kosher food.
Van Dyck was known to do many of his portraits in no longer than an hour.
It is wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log hut on the frontier.
Said Emerson.
There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.
Said Tocqueville.
Is Suetonius the first writer ever known to make a reference to Christianity?
Revolting immorality.
Said an earliest Italian response to Rigoletto.
Like mending a sewer and setting it to music.
Said a New York newspaper of the Anvil Chorus in a first American review of Il Trovatore.
Are there still cedars in Lebanon?
Dionysius Exiguus, a monk in sixth-century Rome who calculated the birth of Christ as having occurred 531 years earlier—and for the first time designated the years since as anni Domini nostri.
Is this the little woman who made this great war?
Said Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe.
To celebrate my fiftieth birthday, Hemingway told Charles Scribner, I fucked three times, shot ten straight pigeons (very fast ones) at the club, drank with friends a case of Piper Heidsieck brut and looked the ocean for big fish all afternoon.
Why has Author always been suspicious that that parenthesis may be inadvertently modifying the wrong activity?
And looked the ocean?
For years, Stanley Spencer regularly put on his clothes over his pajamas.
And came and went that way no matter how formal the occasion.
Meleager, who compiled one of the earliest anthologies, indicating how many of Sappho’s verses he had included:
Few. But roses.
I shall never see Atthis again, and indeed, I really long to be dead.
The first painting Gauguin ever sold was to Degas.
Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!
Says Estragon.
Every man is as God made him, and often a good deal worse.
Says Sancho Panza.
William Carlos Williams died at seventy-nine—having lived virtually all of his life within a ten-minute walk of where he was born.
North’s translation of Plutarch, which Shakespeare so heavily depended upon.
And which was actually translated from the French version of Amyot.
Hermann Hesse was at one time a patient of Jung’s.
9 Ridge Road.
Rutherford, New Jersey.
The two hundred extant First Folios.
The forty-six Gutenberg Bibles.
Beethoven. Schubert. Liszt.
All pupils of Salieri.
Antigonus II, who drunkenly told Zeno the Stoic to make any request whatsoever and as king he would fulfill it.
At which Zeno requested that he step outside and vomit.
Baltimore, Edgar Allan Poe died in.
As Heraclitus saw it, Homer should have been driven from the lists and beaten with rods, for all the deceitful and adulterous acts he showed the gods involved in.
A mere trifle consoles us, a mere trifle distresses us.
Said Pascal.
Names are known to this day of artists who painted scenery for Aeschylus and Sophocles.
The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Lübeck in 1601 and 1603.
And in Paris in 1604.
If the sun were to go out, how long would we continue to see the sun?
Why has Author composed that line as a question when he would have known how to calculate the answer by the age of twelve or thirteen?
Eastward Ho! On which Jonson, Chapman, and John Marston collaborated.
And which for years the Oxford Companion to English Literature listed as Eastward Hoe.
Frederica von Stade’s father was killed in World War II. No more than weeks before her birth.
Sunt lacrimae rerum.
A hunchbacked toad.
The playwright-critic John Dennis called Pope.
Sickly, D. H. Lawrence called Yeats.
Mayakovsky angrily condemned the suicide of Sergei Essenin, in print, as an act of cowardice—
Five years before killing himself.
Agatha Christie has been translated into more languages than any other English author except Shakespeare.
Eight minutes, twenty seconds. Give or take.
Boccaccio offered a series of public lectures on the Divine Comedy in Florence as early as in 1373.
Electra, in blue jeans.
Which is not from a Yannis Ritsos poem.
Wordsworth’s illegitimate daughter.
Byron’s.
Shelley’s.
Schopenhauer’s.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Being maried to an author is a very hard life.
Said Nora Joyce.
Saint Teresa’s corpse was twice stolen before it was at last returned to Ávila for burial.
Pindar was buried in Thebes.
According to Pausanias, at a racetrack.
Macaulay insisted he knew every word of Paradise Lost and of The Pilgrim’s Progress by heart.
&nbs
p; Benjamin Britten was a conscientious objector in World War II.
Giambattista Vico’s mother was illiterate.
As was his wife.
Diana of the Crossways.
Defoe was nearing sixty when he published his first novel.
Hardy was nearing sixty when he published his first volume of poems.
Benjamin Franklin was still making marriage proposals to younger women in his mid-seventies.
Why should not old men be mad?
Darer, Holbein, and Quentin Massys all did portraits of Erasmus.
Diego Rivera’s 1932 mural in Rockefeller Center. With its portrait of Lenin that he refused to remove.
Whereupon the Rockefellers effaced the entire wall.
The Mexico City Rivera mural that included the phrase Dios no existe.
Which in that case he finally agreed to alter.
Marlowe was two months older than Shakespeare.
As recently as in the year 2000:
A small Cimabue panel of a Madonna and Child discovered under the stairs in a country manor in Suffolk.
Karl Marx reread the Oresteia once every year.
Soutine’s famous Carcass of Beef, which he painted from an actual eviscerated steer in his Paris studio.
And which decomposed to such a degree that neighbors finally brought the police.
Good Lord, how you have to mess about in life!
Said van Gogh.
I paint what I think, said Rivera.
Paganini, who owned a Stradivarius viola, commissioned Harold in Italy because he knew Berlioz needed the money.
And then never performed it because it wasn’t challenging enough.
Toronto, Glenn Gould died in.
Caravaggio’s father was a stonemason.
That lump, Ezra Pound called Robert Lowell.
Oscar Wilde died in 1900.
Bosie Douglas in 1945.
There are 16,696 lines in the Iliad.
I must die; must I then die complaining?
Asked Epictetus.
If your Hercules had his hair cropped, he would not show skull enough to hold his brains.
Said Cellini of a sculpture of Baccio Bandinelli’s.
Two of the thugs hired to castrate Abélard were themselves caught and mutilated. And also blinded.
Stravinsky, born near St. Petersburg, became a French citizen in 1934.
And an American in 1945.
In his manic, suicidal last year, Randall Jarrell was once called upon to introduce Hannah Arendt to a college gathering—and talked for twenty minutes about Johnny Unitas.
Without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew, said Byron after Shelley’s death.
Presumably not remembering that Shelley had deserted Harriet, nineteen and four months pregnant, to run off with Mary, also pregnant—and leaving Harriet to drown herself less than two years later.
Enrico Fermi’s wife was a Jew. When the family left an increasingly anti-Semitic Italy to accept his Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1938, instead of returning they sailed directly to New York—having made plans with virtually no word to anyone beforehand.
Edmund Spenser died in poverty.
But was buried in Westminster Abbey very near Chaucer.
Tom Paine died in poverty.
Five people attended his funeral.
For years, following Pearl Harbor, the Metropolitan Opera left Madame Butterfly off its schedule.
Why did Saint Paul not date any of his letters?
Heinrich Böll was wounded three times as a conscripted German infantryman in World War II.
Debussy, on the personality of Proust:
A bit of the concierge.
Louis Norman Newsom.
A past which was never a present, the historian Grote called the romanticized era of the Trojan War.
Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, and Muriel Rukeyser were at Vassar together.
Being annoyed at Aristotle for mentioning that someone once accused Euripides of having bad breath.
Or does Author more likely mean being amused at being annoyed?
Yet in either instance, why, still, is Author so lacking in energy?
In fact why has Author now and again even caught himself taking a nap, which he cannot recall having ever done before in his entire adult life?
Like his younger grandchildren, for heaven’s sake.
Yeats once proposed marriage to Maud Gonne and was turned down.
And in no time thereafter proposed to her daughter.
Whistler did not get married until he was fifty-four.
Edmund Wilson managed to go through life without reading Don Quixote.
And through a full ten-year period without paying his income tax.
Henriette Sontag, the soprano at the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth—who turned Beethoven to face the audience so that he might see the applause.
A fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
Bertrand Russell called Christianity.
Emile Zola’s first English publisher spent three months in jail for obscenity.
Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata was once banned from the mails by the United States Postal Service.
Puppies and first operas should be drowned.
Said Carl Maria von Weber.
No painting by Rogier van der Weyden is signed.
No painting by Hugo van der Goes is signed.
William Faulkner once allowed himself to be interviewed on radio during a University of Virginia football game.
And was introduced as a winner of the Mobil Prize.
Gerard de Nerval spent much of the last decade and a half of his life in and out of mental institutions.
Antwerp, Rubens died in.
Tacitus, when young, defending other young writers against the eternal Old Guard:
What is different is not necessarily worse.
Julia Ward Howe was paid five dollars by the Atlantic Monthly for The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Eliot used custom-made umbrellas with deliberately outsize handles.
So that no one would take one from a cloakroom by mistake, he told Herbert Read.
Julian Schnabel’s claim to The New York Times that his peers among painters were Duccio, Giotto, and van Gogh.
Gabriele Fallopio.
Bartolommeo Eustachio.
Pomes, Bronson Alcott said Whitman pronounced it.
Why is it said of a batter in baseball that he flied out rather than that he flew out?
Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not until they examined the rings that they recognized who it was.
Tolstoy. Tchaikovsky. Lenin. Gorky. Rilke. Einstein.
Each of whom posed for a portrait by Leonid Pasternak.
Plutarch’s report of an epidemic of women’s suicides in Miletus.
And of a law enacted that all suicides must thenceforth be carried naked through the city before burial.
At which the suicides cease.
Theo van Gogh once asked Camille Pissarro to take in Vincent as a boarder.
Pissarro’s wife declined to have such an unbalanced individual at loose among her young children.
Amelia Earhart flied the Atlantic?
Wondering if youngsters still read The Count of Monte Cristo.
Practically all those interviewed in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster agreed that they had never confronted anything more horrendous.
Author’s curiosity as to whether anyone thought to inquire of the writer of Slaughterhouse-Five.
One should always read with a pen in one’s hand. Says Delacroix in the Journals.
Dickens’ best friend when, at twelve, he worked in the blacking factory:
A boy named Bob Fagin.
Verdi wrote Il Trovatore and La Traviata in less than a month each.
As to boundaries, the Great Spirit knows no boun
daries, nor will his red children acknowledge them.
Said Tecumseh.
Several of Montaigne’s ancestors—Jews, on his mother’s side—had been burned at the stake in the Spanish Inquisition.
It is setting a high value on our opinions to roast people alive on account of them.
Said Montaigne himself not unreasonably.
Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Which Byron, Scott, Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, Thackeray, Rossetti, Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson all admired.
Picasso. Joan Mini. Philip Guston. Willem de Kooning.
Who were all devoted to Krazy Kat.
Pomes Penyeach.
Sophocles, in old age, on finally being free from sexual urgings:
Like escaping from bondage to a raving maniac.
Pope Leo X, to Sebastiano del Piombo, as to why he was holding off on commissions for Michelangelo:
There is absolutely no getting on with the man.
Pope Clement VII, a decade later:
When Buonarroti comes to see me, I always take a seat and bid him be seated himself at once—feeling positive that he will do so without leave or license otherwise.
On one of his visits to the wreck of his ship early in the novel, Robinson Crusoe finds gold—but quickly realizes it is of no value to him at all.
However, upon second thoughts, I took it away.
A fraud and a fake, Nabokov called Eliot.