At seventy-seven, Georges Rouault burned no less than 315 canvases that he felt were not as good as they might be—and that he would never find time to do more work on.
Johann Theophilus Goldberg.
The cloudy perception that labels Hardy a better poet than novelist.
Lessing wrote Laocoön without ever having seen the sculpture.
Hegel and Fichte are buried next to each other in Berlin.
Edmund Wilson once proposed marriage to Edna St. Vincent Millay—
And only afterward became aware that she was sleeping with at least four other men at the same time that she was seeing him.
Eugene O’Neill, who died rich, left not one cent in his will to any of his three children.
Einstein. Churchill. Shaw.
All of whom went out of their way to meet Charlie Chaplin.
Never seeming to remember that Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes is based on a poem by George Crabbe.
Francois Villon’s heatless garret near the Sorbonne—where his inkwell froze solid.
Saint Anthony lived 105 years.
Without ever learning to read or write.
Perfection in life is to carry out in maturity the dreams of one’s youth.
Said Alfred de Vigny.
When Chagall paints you do not know if he is asleep or awake. Somewhere or other inside his head there must be an angel.
Said Picasso.
Let us indulge our own lunacy.
Said Chagall.
Guido of Arezzo. Who gave the names to the first six notes of the scale.
Ca. 1040 AD.
Willem de Kooning did not have his first one-man show until he was forty-three.
From Seneca, writing to a friend about suicide:
But I am running on too long. How can a man end his life if he cannot end a letter?
Edith Stein.
Endlösung.
Gauguin fathered at least four illegitimate children in Tahiti.
In addition to the legitimate clan he had deserted at home.
Zeuxis, who ultimately began to give away his paintings—because they had simply become beyond price.
Though Aristotle would call Polygnotus the greater artist.
Bordeaux, Goya died in.
Truman Capote’s mother was a suicide. His adoptive father, whose name he had taken, went to prison for grand larceny.
Vaness, sí. Battle, no.
Schumann’s ever-increasing intermittent madness.
Once being visited by the spirits of Schubert and Mendelssohn—and making note of a theme he insisted they had given him.
Demons and hyenas at the worst of it, he also saw.
Always acknowledge the gift of a book before there has been time to read it, said Eliot.
If you wait you will have to commit yourself to an opinion.
There are many Nobel Prize winners I wouldn’t want as friends.
Said a member of the Swedish Academy after the award to V. S. Naipaul.
Karl Marx learned Russian mainly to read Pushkin. Joyce learned Norwegian to read Ibsen.
At the age of three, Jeremy Bentham read a then-current eight-volume history of England.
Joseph Brodsky had no schooling after the age of fifteen.
Lawrence Sterne’s love letters to his mistress:
Which he sometimes copied word for word from letters he had earlier written to his wife.
According to Castiglione, two self-important Vatican cardinals once informed Raphael that the faces of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in one of his paintings were too red.
And were informed by Raphael in turn that he had given the matter much thought—and was convinced the saints would be blushing in heaven to see their church governed by men such as themselves.
Shakespeare’s equal, Voltaire called Lope de Vega.
Six in the fifth place means:
Repeatedly ill, nonetheless does not die.
Ernest, don’t you think that Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?
Ernest insisted Zelda Fitzgerald said.
Évariste Galois.
Kalamazoo, Michigan, Richard Tucker died in.
The mackerel-crowded seas.
Maynard Keynes was born in the year Marx died.
Paparazzo, which in the plural becomes paparazzi—but which was originally the name of a character in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.
And which Fellini himself took from the name of an actual person in a travel book of Gissing’s.
Leonhard Euler.
Anton Bruckner was so completely the socially inept rustic that he once handed a tip to a conductor who had rehearsed one of his compositions.
We talk about our assholes, and we talk about our cocks, and we talk about who we fucked last night, or who we’re gonna fuck tomorrow, or when we got drunk, or when we stuck a broom in our ass in the Hotel Ambassador in Prague—anybody tells one’s friends about that.
Said Allen Ginsberg in an anthologized interview.
Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
Said Dorothy Parker, about something else altogether.
When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.
I have now done nothing for fifty years but earn and spend money, and it has become clear to me that spending money gives more pleasure than earning it.
Said Lorenzo de’ Medici.
Titian. Tintoretto. Veronese. Bellini. Giorgione. Canaletto. Piazzetta. Guardi. Longhi. Verrocchio. Antonello da Massina.
All deaths in Venice.
Beethoven. Brahms. Gluck. Haydn. Mahler. Mozart. Schubert. Strauss. Vivaldi. Wolf. Bruckner. Berg.
All in Vienna.
That malignant deity criticism, Swift named it.
Florence Foster Jenkins was seven when she made the recording.
Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, from the William Carlos Williams poem.
Which Williams wrote at the corner of West Fifteenth Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan.
The used dressing gown of Flaubert’s that Sacha Guitry bought at auction in 1930.
A tacky raincoat of Jack Kerouac’s, did Author read something similar about?
Take care, you who call yourself my judge. Take care what you do. For the truth is that I have my mission from God, and you put yourself in great danger.
Said Joan of Arc to her chief Inquisitor.
Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.
Said Giordano Bruno to the several of his.
No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied.
Says a peasant woman in Synge, after a last son has been drowned.
A critic once told Whistler that one of his paintings wasn’t good. Whistler told the critic he shouldn’t say it wasn’t good, only that he didn’t like it:
And then, you know, you are perfectly safe.
It has also been adopted by the Freudians as the supreme glory of their dirty and degraded cult—
Noted an early London article re Ulysses.
Now Barabbas was a book reviewer.
Rarely did any friend or other person eat at his table. Says Vasari of Michelangelo.
Spinoza’s queer insistence that he found it almost impossible to believe he had ever been a child.
An obnoxious squeak, Charles Lamb heard in Shelley.
A latrine, Baudelaire called George Sand.
Frederick Delius for a time taught music in Jacksonville, Florida.
Cicero’s ironic view of philosophers who preach that men should repudiate ambition—but who sign their books.
Roger Clemens was discarding that splintered bat.
William Wycherley’s seven years in debtors’ prison.
A great mind unequaled anywhere, Goethe said of Scott.
While of Byron:
Only Shakespeare and the Ancients his superior.
The realization that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all wrote between forty and seventy years after the events in question.
Cavaf
y worked for the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria for thirty years.
Anthony Trollope worked for the British Post Office for thirty-three.
Jeanne la Pucelle.
Dickens, in America, met Kate Douglas Wiggin, then twelve.
The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.
Crucifixion, for example.
Woodland Hills, California, Buster Keaton died in.
Emily Sarah Sellwood.
Cyril Connolly once snuffed out a cigar in his chocolate mousse at the New York apartment of Diana and Lionel Trilling. Diana Trilling took it as a deliberate affront.
What high rooftop could who have shouted this from, that Author knows it all these years later?
The friendship of Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin.
Puella.
Thomas Nashe, informing Gabriel Harvey of Robert Greene’s drinking habits:
In one yeare he pist as much against the walls, as thou and thy two brothers in three.
Theo van Gogh died within six months of Vincent.
August 6th, 1916, Officer previously reported died of wounds now reported wounded, Graves, Capt. R., Royal Welsh Fus.
The greatest artist who has ever written, George Eliot called Jane Austen.
A prose Shakespeare, agreed Macaulay.
Without poetry—Charlotte Brontë’s dissent.
How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?
Asked Johnson of the American Revolution.
The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Munich in 1721.
The extent to which Aristophanes quotes or parodies Euripides—so that he appears to know much of the work by heart.
The extraordinary implication that the audience is thus assumed to know it too.
Lenin saw Sarah Bernhardt in La Dame aux Camélias—and admitted that he wept.
Stephen Crane, on horseback. Happiest there, said Conrad.
The legend that Bucephalus whinnied at sight of himself in a painting by Apelles that Alexander did not like.
Your Majesty’s horse knows more about art than you do, the artist is said to have said.
Attila could not read or write.
A madman, a charlatan, and a miserable fool. Being Rousseau, via Voltaire.
Seventy-two virgins.
Brahms was twice offered an honorary degree by Cambridge and twice declined.
For fear of crossing the Channel, friends suspected.
From Nightwood:
Pray to the good God; she will keep you.
From The Recognitions:
Just ask God, baby, She’ll protect you.
Chet Baker died on a sidewalk in Amsterdam. Almost surely from drugs.
Poetry must be as well written as prose.
Said Pound.
Seventy-two white raisins?
Modernsky, Schoenberg mocked Stravinsky as.
The infantrymen who during combat took time to set up a marker where Ernie Pyle was killed in the Pacific in 1945.
Wondering idly how many people who live in Rochester—have read Rochester.
One hundred and fifty carriages followed Washington Irving’s funeral procession in New York in 1859.
Apelles’ explanation for his mastery:
Knowing when to take his hand from the picture.
To know when to stop is of the same importance as to know when to begin.
Said Paul Klee, twenty-two hundred years later.
Missa Papae Marcelli.
The computer analysis that says readings in modern high school senior honors classes are less difficult than those used by people Author’s age when they were in the eighth grade.
Alleged of Einstein, when he was given the news of Hiroshima:
Oy, vey.
Salzburg, Paracelsus died in.
There lived a singer in France of old,
By the tideless, dolorous midland sea.
Eliot, John Reed, Alan Seeger, and Walter Lippmann were in the same class at Harvard.
112 Mercer Street.
Princeton, New Jersey.
Rudyard Kipling was so repeatedly abused when farmed out to relatives as a child that when his mother finally reappeared and entered his bedroom for the first time to kiss him good night, he flung up his hands—to protect himself from the anticipated blow.
How often, if ever, pausing to remember?—
Museum, i.e., place of the muses.
An honest man but no poet.
Ben Jonson called Samuel Daniel.
A good rhymester but no poet.
Milton called Dryden.
No trace of Apelles’ work has come down from Greek antiquity—though it remained enormously valued in the Rome of the Caesars and beyond.
Elmhurst, New York, Albert Pinkham Ryder died in.
Proust’s deathbed photo. By Man Ray.
Joyce, asked to compare D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley:
Huxley at least dresses decently.
Eileen Farrell’s husband was a New York City policeman.
The redheaded maniac, van Gogh was called by the youngsters at Arles.
Il prete rosso—having been Vivaldi.
3.14159.
Clara Schumann’s letters to Brahms:
More interesting than Brahms’ to her.
Hey, Dads, will you take us to that new movie, what’s it called—Apoplexy Now?
I can control the flow of paint. There is no accident.
Said Jackson Pollock.
Hemingway made a display of announcing to friends how frequently he bedded his wives. Someone asked Mary Hemingway about this later on.
If only, Mary Hemingway said.
Dost thou call me fool, boy?
All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.
Untalented and entirely lacking in ear.
Said a Baltimore music school, expelling Larry Adler.
Crapulous, John Adams called Paine’s Common Sense.
Neil Shicoff’s two-word telegram to a New York Times music reviewer who had disapproved of one of his performances.
Archimedes was able to calculate pi to one decimal place. Roughly four hundred years later, Ptolemy managed three.
The fact that Socrates wrote nothing.
The fact that Jesus wrote nothing.
The fact that Buddha wrote nothing.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s fluency in as many as eight languages, including Hebrew.
Including Portuguese.
The friendship of Freud and Wittgenstein’s sister Margarete.
Sir Edward Elgar flew kites.
Cuidado con el Ganado.
Hart Crane’s At Melville’s Tomb.
Is there evidence that Crane ever actually made the pilgrimage—to the northern reaches of the Bronx?
Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel—
Rarely remembering that the film is based on a novel by Heinrich Mann.
Munich, Oswald Spengler died in.
John Masefield, off a ship at eighteen, worked for a time in a Greenwich Village saloon.
Henry Fuseli taught drawing at the Royal Academy. Among others, to Blake.
The fifteen young Muslim girls who were left to burn to death in a school fire in Mecca when vice police drove off those coming to their aid—lest they be seen by men while not wearing their head scarves.
In 2002.
The woman in Pakistan who was raped—and under Muslim law was convicted of adultery and sentenced to be stoned to death.
In 2002.
There was no word for war in Yiddish.
Oscar Wilde, reading Marie Corelli while in Reading Gaol:
The way she writes, she ought to be in here.
It was James Laughlin who was called upon to make an official identification at the morgue after the death of Dylan Thomas.
To write only according to the rules laid down by previous classics signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.
/> Said Prokofiev.
Caruso was the eighteenth of twenty children. The two following him were the only others to live past infancy.
A man can be a grandfather in thirty years.
Pointed out Heraclitus.
Shakespeare became one at forty-three.
Doña Jeronima de las Cuevas, El Greco’s mistress—whose face he used for most of his Virgins.
Bulwer Lytton once threatened his wife with a carving knife.
Because she didn’t answer when he spoke to her, she claimed.
You better be careful what you are saying, if it is a white man you are talking about, the marshal says. I don’t care if he is a murderer or not.
At sixty-eight, Hans Sachs married a second wife. Of twenty-seven.
Vaughan Williams married a second wife at eighty.
Max Beerbohm married a second wife at eighty-four.
And died a month later.
Strangling is a very quiet death.
Says Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi.
Willem de Kooning’s Light in August. Oil and enamel on paper, 42 by 55 inches, ca. 1946.
Indianapolis, Indiana, Frances Farmer died in.
Carl Maria von Weber once unwittingly swallowed nitric acid—and for the rest of his life could speak only with difficulty.
Decades before it became commonplace, Joyce was generally most comfortable in tennis shoes.