This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Wittgenstein almost never wore a necktie.

  Seventy thousand people died in London in the Great Plague of 1665.

  Seventy thousand.

  Two hundred thousand lost their homes in the Great Fire of one year later.

  Gluck at one time gave singing lessons to an eight-year-old Marie Antoinette.

  The brownstone in Brooklyn Heights where Auden, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Carson McCullers, Paul and Jane Bowles, and Gypsy Rose Lee all once shared boarding-house style meals—with Auden performing as housemother.

  Ford Madox Ford was a nephew of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

  Jacques-Louis David was a great-nephew of François Boucher.

  If Anne Brontë had not been Anne Brontë, would she still be Anne Brontë?

  Such hard work it is to die? Such hard work?

  Exceptionally shy, Virgil was known to be. In part because of a stutter.

  Toulouse-Lautrec’s first teacher was the portrait painter Bonnat.

  Who called his efforts abominable.

  An explosion in a cesspool, Paul Elmer More called Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer.

  The G-String Murders.

  Why does Author not know if what used to be named Arbor Day is still celebrated?

  Until he was almost fifty, Rousseau was forced to earn a living as a music copyist.

  At least four popes have been assassinated.

  Historical details regarding the Amazons were left by both the Greeks and the Persians but ceased with the Romans—as if they had abruptly disappeared.

  Has it ever been verified that they existed?

  Simone de Beauvoir was one inch taller that Sartre.

  Luca Signorelli, at the sudden death of a young son—having the corpse stripped and making a full-length drawing of the boy for remembrance.

  And with extraordinary fortitude, shedding not a tear, Vasari says.

  Haarlem, Frans Hals died in.

  This book on which I have grown thin through all these years, Dante speaks of.

  A strict accounting of even the most trivial household expense, Hegel was said to keep.

  To the last pfennig.

  Cleopatra, in a burka.

  Joan, in a burka.

  Marilyn.

  Albert Camus was having lunch in a Paris restaurant when he was informed he had won the Nobel Prize. By his waiter.

  The pretense in speaking of second-rate 1940s Hollywood melodramas as film noir classics.

  Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle.

  Oscar Williams’ long-popular Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, dated 1946.

  Containing five poems by Wallace Stevens, four by Ezra Pound, four by Marianne Moore, two by William Carlos Williams—and nine by Oscar Williams.

  But I kissed her little sister,

  And forgot my Clementine.

  Gus Broberg. Bob Davies. Arnold Ferrin.

  He who follows another will never overtake him.

  Said Michelangelo.

  If you are alone, you are wholly your own.

  Said Leonardo.

  Swinburne’s pronouncement that he was a better poetic dramatist than Euripides.

  Scott, proposed as Poet Laureate—but calling the entire concept ridiculous.

  Byron, mocking Southey for accepting the position.

  Browning condemning Wordsworth for the same.

  Saussure’s doctoral dissertation: On the use of the genitive case in Sanskrit.

  Madame Tussaud began a death mask of Robespierre only instants after his severed head was handed down from the guillotine.

  The era when books were still chained to desks or lecterns in certain libraries.

  Hashshasheen. Assassin.

  Diogenes, explaining why people give to beggars, but not to philosophers:

  Because they think it possible that they themselves might become lame or blind, but they do not expect to turn out philosophers.

  New Haven, Connecticut, Hermann Broch died in.

  A thoroughly superficial book with all the profundity of Rebecca.

  Scott Fitzgerald called For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer’s father was a rabbi.

  The insistence of both Plutarch and Arrian that the Persians under Darius III at Issus lost 120,000 men—to Alexander’s 450.

  The feminist character in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm whose name Cicily Isabel Fairfield borrowed as a pseudonym—to become Rebecca West.

  Philomela.

  To spend too much time in Studies is Sloth; To use them too much for Ornament is Affectation.

  Said Bacon.

  Janet Baker. Marilyn Horne. Grace Bumbry.

  All of whom attended master classes with Lotte Lehmann.

  Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston went to high school together.

  I certify that this vehicle has been inspected and that there are no children left on board.

  Auden’s first volume of poems—and Stephen Spender’s—were both published by Spender himself on a small hand-operated press.

  Charon. Who charged an obolus for the ferry ride across the Styx.

  Christina Rossetti’s pet wombat.

  Disappointment to this day that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau never sang at the Metropolitan.

  Genghis Khan had five hundred wives and/or concubines.

  Moe Berg and Allen Ginsberg were distant cousins.

  Toby Greene. Who jumped ship with Melville in the South Pacific and later reappeared—as a housepainter in Buffalo—to verify events in Typee.

  These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big black bucks.

  Being Dwight D. Eisenhower—edifying someone re Southerners opposed to desegregation.

  William Faulkner voted for Adlai Stevenson.

  An obolus. Six of same having equaled one ancient drachma.

  Ivan the Terrible died while playing chess with Boris Godunov.

  Dante tires one quickly; it is like looking at the sun.

  Said Joyce.

  Lavinia.

  One of Melville’s grandfathers took part in the Boston Tea Party.

  As did one of Edith Wharton’s great-grandfathers.

  An uncle of Kafka’s was the director general of the Spanish railway system.

  Henry, why are you here?

  Waldo, why are you not here?

  A pack of lies, Carlyle dismissed poetry as.

  Stone dolls, Isaac Newton called sculpture.

  You cannot trust the ones who are too careful. As writers or drinkers. Old Goethe cannot have been so good a man as Keats or Chatterton or Rimbaud. The ones that burn.

  Said Lowry.

  Mark Twain’s was the first house in Hartford with a telephone.

  Norway’s king attended Kirsten Flagstad’s funeral.

  Do certain people actually remember learning to read?

  Monte Carlo, Lillie Langtry died in.

  Louis MacNeice died of pneumonia after descending into a mine to check on sound effects while producing a program for the BBC.

  Glee-wood, the harp was called in Anglo-Saxon.

  Harry Haller, in Steppenwolf—in a setting based on Zurich, ca. 1920—speaks of three mail deliveries each day.

  Leopold Bloom, in the Ulysses set a decade and a half earlier, notes the nine o’clock evening postman meaning the last delivery of what in Dublin at that time would have been five.

  Haller even then complains of junk mail.

  Kurt Weill’s father was a cantor.

  James Levine’s grandfather was one.

  They said I was mad, and I said they were mad, and, damn them, they outvoted me.

  Said Dryden’s sometime collaborator Nathaniel Lee, upon being confined to Bedlam.

  Titian might have become an even greater painter if he had ever really learned elementary draftsmanship i.e., if he had ever really learned to draw.

  Michelangelo evidently suggested.

  Ellen Terry once refused the lead in a p
lay Henry James had written particularly with her in mind.

  James called her a hag.

  Pliny the Younger’s detail-by-detail letter of 79 AD to Tacitus about the death of his uncle in the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii.

  The claim that Vicente Huidobro’s mother could trace her ancestry back to El Cid.

  I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.

  Begins Malone Dies.

  Two of Jane Austen’s brothers became admirals in the Royal Navy.

  Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.

  The Persistence of Memory.

  Itzhak Perlman. Nigel Kennedy. Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. Midori. Shlomo Mintz.

  Who all studied under Dorothy DeLay.

  An appointment with E. M. Forster that Tennessee Williams once canceled.

  Because he could not abide old men with urine stains on their trousers, Gore Vidal said Williams said.

  Nabokov once dismissed Don Quixote as overrated during a lecture at Harvard.

  Harvard thinks otherwise, he was complacently informed by Harry Levin.

  Michael Praetorius.

  Simone Signoret.

  They are hardly more obscure than Hegel or Swedenborg. Said Nerval, refusing to explain the meaning of some sonnets.

  The possibility that Phidias died in jail.

  Now, listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face.

  Nazim Hikmet was buried in Moscow. Thirty-eight years later a tree from Turkey was transplanted beside his grave.

  Not long after Byron’s death, Teresa Guiccioli had an affair with Lamartine.

  Was E. T. A. Hoffmann the first writer to use the word Philistine in its modern cultural sense?

  What might Johannes Kepler have been allergic to, that his nose ran eternally?

  Remembering that Bedlam is a contraction of Bethlehem, from London’s Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, since approximately 1400 an asylum.

  Where in the eighteenth century tours were conducted—to view the chained inmates.

  Only three former baseball players appeared at Ty Cobb’s funeral.

  Litheck, Dietrich Buxtehude died in.

  Josephine Baker’s mother was an East St. Louis washerwoman.

  Omar Khayyám. Which translates as Omar the Tentmaker.

  Though in fact he was a mathematician and astronomer.

  Saint-Rémy.

  Perhaps the greatest woman poet since Sappho, Harriet Monroe called Edna Millay.

  I think she is every bit as good as Elizabeth Browning, acknowledged Hart Crane.

  I can only say I do not greatly care for Madame Browning.

  Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlstein were once apartment mates.

  Rubáiyát. Which itself means nothing more exotic than quatrains.

  Jascha Heifetz once composed a piece of popular music under the pseudonym Jim Hoyle—and was called Jim by his friends from then on.

  Fritz, Nietzsche was known as among intimates.

  Point Barrow, Alaska. August 15, 1935.

  Once more before he dies Author will reread Huckleberry Finn.

  Alprazolam.

  Demosthenes, to conquer his speech impediment:

  Shouting orations into the surf with a mouth full of pebbles—or declaiming while running up and down hills.

  Does anyone in Shakespeare have more lines than Hamlet?

  Lily Tomlin’s program note that the understudy for her one-woman show was Zinka Milanov.

  Who sued for two million dollars.

  More than 60 percent of the people in the United States have not read a book from beginning to end since adolescence.

  If then.

  I sometimes think that never blows so red

  The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled.

  Mickey Cochrane. Ray Schalk. Nap Rucker.

  Peggy Mitchell, the author of Gone with the Wind was commonly called.

  Nate West, the author of Miss Lonelyhearts.

  I have not for these things fished in other men’s waters; my Bible and my Concordance are my only library in my writing.

  Said John Bunyan.

  Isocrates, who starved himself to death. At ninety-eight.

  Johnson wrote Rasselas in one week of evenings to pay for his mother’s funeral.

  John Cleland wrote Fanny Hill to keep himself out of debtors’ prison.

  Arcetri, near Florence, Galileo died in.

  You can’t see out of the back of your head. I do not think there is any record of a man being able to criticize the people that came after him.

  Said Pound.

  Impecunitis.

  What a joy—that syntax is no longer subversive in the White House.

  Said John Steinbeck after the election of John F. Kennedy.

  Yeats had his tonsils removed at fifty-five—by Dr. Oliver St. John Gogarty.

  Tom Eliot. Wally Stevens.

  At twenty-nine, Toscanini conducted the world premiere of La Bohème.

  And conducted it again on its fiftieth anniversary.

  The first occasion on which the word shit appeared in the New Yorker:

  Quoting Richard M. Nixon.

  Forgetting by now that Frieda Lawrence’s brother was Baron Manfred von Richthofen.

  What Palestrina would have made of a Stockhausen score.

  What Giotto would make of a Gerhard Richter canvas.

  When you have a tan, she said, what have you got?

  Dottie Parker.

  Schopenhauer on critics:

  Mistaking their own toy trumpets for the trombones of fame.

  During the night after Modigliani’s death, and before her suicide from a fifth-floor window, Jeanne Hébuterne repeatedly sketched self-portraits that showed her stabbing herself with a knife.

  Samuel Pepys owned 2,474 books.

  De Quincey owned five thousand.

  Wordsworth fewer than three hundred.

  Jim Farrell.

  Jim Agee.

  Naomi Ginsberg’s lobotomy.

  Rosemary Kennedy’s.

  The wagon train moved slowly westward.

  William Empson: You could do that with any poetry, couldn’t you?

  I. A. Richards: You’d better go off and do it, hadn’t you?

  The reaction when sudden sunshine on a late winter afternoon brings with it a first unanticipated hint of spring. At Dachau.

  Al Naharot Bavel.

  I see only a heap of white clothes, like a snowdrift. O God, she moves her arm!

  Tertullian’s father was a Roman centurion.

  Silver Spring, Maryland, Rachel Carson died in.

  Garden Spring Valley, Maryland, Rosa Ponselle.

  We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above others.

  Concluded Machiavelli.

  I was once in Italie myself, but I thanke God my abode there was but IX days. And yet I saw in that litle tyme, in one Citie, more libertie to sinne, than I ever hard tell of in our noble Citie of London in IX years.

  Added Roger Ascham, in 1563.

  A country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels.

  Being Horatio Nelson’s subsequent two cents’ worth.

  Ted Hughes writes the kind of stuff I throw away.

  Said James Dickey.

  I did greatly enjoy the first few years of Act I.

  Said Alexander Woollcott of an operetta by Rudolf Friml.

  The title for Vanity Fair came to Thackeray when he was almost asleep. And sent him literally bounding around his bedroom in delight.

  The Republicans are as wicked as they are stupid, which is saying a great deal.

  Said Bertrand Russell after a visit.

  What Balzac would make of a novel of Author’s.

  Bill de Kooning.

  On Lucas Cranach’s tombstone: Pictor Celerrimus, the fastest painter.

  Camilo José Cela fought on the side of the fascists during the Spanish Civil War.
r />   Who is it that can tell me who I am?

  Macedonian barber: How would you like your hair cut?

  King Archelaus: In silence.

  Ariosto spent twenty-six years writing and revising Orlando Furioso.

  Frank, the Francis Beaumont of Beaumont and Fletcher was known as.

  Charley Dickens, to Wilkie Collins and others.

  Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem about having seen an older man in the Copenhagen airport who was the very image of Hemingway.

  And only later learning that it was.

  Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo made their Metropolitan Opera debuts within eight weeks of each other.

  Acute lymphocytic leukemia, José Carreras recovered from.

  Hadrian, at fifty, climbed Etna to watch the sunrise. Goethe climbed Vesuvius twice.

  Wondering if youngsters still read Beau Geste.

  Actually, more than his persistent tiredness, what has started to distress Author lately is the way he has found himself scuffing his feet when he walks.

  But also the singular small missteps he sometimes unexpectedly takes. As if his Adidas have whims of their own.

  Literature is what gets taught, Roland Barthes said.

  Ridgfield, Connecticut, Geraldine Farrar died in.

  Jimmy Whistler.

  Opera is opera, symphony is symphony—