This is Not a Novel and Other Novels
Says someone in Dorian Gray.
The legend that Rilke died after being pricked by the thorn of a rose.
Actually, from leukemia.
Valmont, near Glion, Switzerland. 3:30 A.M. December 29, 1926.
Where are those who were in this world before us? Go to the cemetery and look at them.
Said Anon. in the twelfth century.
The ways we miss our lives are life.
Methinks I have the keys of my prison in my own hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword.
Said Donne, in Biathanatos.
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story
Said Isak Dinesen.
On the tomb of Esteban Murillo in Seville: Vive moriturus. Live as though about to die.
No one truly believes in his own death.
Said Freud.
A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own. Says someone in The Magic Mountain.
As many as thirty thousand people may have attended Beethoven’s funeral.
Brancusi. Soutine. Léger. Vlaminck. André Derain. Jacques Lipchitz. Suzanne Valadon. Kees van Dongen. Picasso.
All of whom attended Modigliani’s—after his death in a paupers’ ward.
I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanatoriums.
Said Scott.
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Says William Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers: The fear of death distresses me.
Which Author suspects he has quoted before in his life.
As late as in the mid-nineteenth century, shepherds in the neighborhood of Marathon insisted that the clash of swords and the cries of horses could still be heard after the fall of darkness on the plain.
Mougins, near Cannes. Late morning. April 8, 1973.
Oxford, Mississippi. 2:30 A.M. July 6, 1962.
Ketchum, Idaho. Soon after dawn. July 2, 1961.
St. Vincent’s Hospital, Greenwich Village. Ca. 1 P.M. November 9, 1953.
Schwesterhaus vom Roten Kreuz, Zurich. 2:15 A.M. January 13, 1941.
Hollywood, California. 5:15 P.M. December 21, 1940.
Kierling, near Vienna. Noon. June 3, 1924.
Railroad station, Astapovo. 5:45 A.M. November 7, 1910.
East Twenty-sixth Street, Manhattan. 12:30 A.M. September 28, 1891.
Auvers-sur-Oise. 1:30 A.M. July 29, 1890.
Gad’s Hill, Kent. 6:10 P.M. June 9, 1870.
Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire. Ca. 2 A.M. March 31, 1855.
Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire. 2 P.M. December 19, 1848.
Vienna. Amid lightning, late afternoon. March 26, 1827.
Missolonghi. 6 P.M. April 19, 1824.
Bay of Spezia. Hour unknown. July 8, 1822.
Piazza di Spagna, Rome. II P.M. February 23, 1821.
Stratford-upon-Avon. Hour unrecorded. April 23, 1616.
Madrid. Hour unrecorded. Identical with the foregoing.
Eleanor Bull’s tavern, Deptford. Perhaps 7 P.M. May 30, 1593.
Castle of Cloux, near Amboise. Hour unrecorded. May 2, 1519.
Age. Age.
Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself about.
Said Marcus Aurelius.
Sophocles dressed the chorus of his next play in mourning, after the death of Euripides.
Or are all these nuisance disabilities somehow more serious than Author acknowledges?
So persistently worn out. And that peculiar lightheadedness still, his sense almost of something beckoning from just beyond the edges of vision.
Threescore miles and ten.
Edgar Allan Poe’s wife Virginia, dying of tuberculosis in their Fordham cottage—and having to be swaddled in his old army greatcoat because Poe could not afford firewood.
The same coat Poe then wore to the funeral.
My memory and intellect have gone to wait for me elsewhere.
Wrote Michelangelo to Vasari at eighty-three.
I know the color of that blood. It is arterial blood—I cannot be deceived in that color. That drop of blood is my death warrant.
And a sensation even of gaps in his consciousness? As if moments have sometimes bolted past that Author has somehow managed not to be aware of until they are gone? Recently, did one?
Thunder occurs when clouds collide.
Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye.
Which Chaucer says in Troilus and Criseyde.
Having appropriated it from Ovid’s Tristia.
And with brightness involved? A flooding of stunning light?
Velazquez was in the employ of Philip IV for almost forty years.
I am utterly crushed, wrote the king in the margin of a document dealing with his death.
Light. Terrifically, it seems.
But why in heaven’s name is Author convinced that he only hours ago abruptly stopped working and went in to lie down? In the middle of the day? Another nap? Could Author have taken a nap almost without realizing that he did?
The legend that Ibsen, dying, lay near a window and confused the people passing on the street with characters from his plays.
The legend that Mozart, dying, asked that a canary be removed from his room—unable to abide its song.
And Author’s shoulder smacking against the corridor wall again?
A passage he has normally navigated ten thousand times without a second thought?
You and I must always remain young, and you shall always be beautiful to me. We must keep no count of the years.
Wrote Ausonius to his wife.
Wrote Ausonius—whom Gibbon disparaged as a second-rate poet.
As if Author’s Adidas have whims of their own.
Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.
I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it.
His secretary’s recollection that in his last moments Henry James asked to hear the sounds of her Remington—typing one of his manuscripts.
And after the corridor? This even newer image of Author’s bed having gotten to be such a vast distance across the room?
Why can’t Author tell whether he is imagining that or remembering it?
Among the wreaths and bouquets at the funeral of Verlaine—one nodding bunch of violets.
Brought by Mallarmé.
Plus the sense that Author could also not seem quite able to make his way across?
Hovering there, did he almost seem to be?
O God! O God! That it were possible
To undo things done; to call back yesterday
Says someone in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness.
Your Majesty’s horse knows more about art than you do.
But the brightness, was that when the brightness occurred?
Going in to take a nap he is now not sure he is really remembering having gone in to take at all?
That terrificness, that extraordinary flooding.
I have wasted my hours.
Said Leonardo at the end of his life.
Leonardo.
When, dammit, that terrificness?
Does anyone know any longer where Spinoza is buried?
Where Rembrandt?
Where Marlowe?
Did anyone essentially ever know, with Mozart?
Light? Brightness?
“Dad? Dad? Say something.”
Rosie, You Are My Posy.
A sentence consists of a noun and a verb. If you want to use an adjective, come and ask me first.
Orchestra play like pig.
“Dad? Please? You can’t just sit there and stare. Talk to us. Answer us, Dad. We love you, you know?”
I do at least three paintings a day in my head. What s the use of spoiling canvas when nobody will buy anything?
A symphony is no joke.
You know I can’t stand Shakespeare’s plays, but yours are worse.
“Dad? We truly want to bring the children. But they won’t understand at all, if you just sit a
nd don’t say anything. They’ll be frightened. Dad?”
Couldn’t that lady cut herself, standing on that seashell?
Go, litel bok.
“Oh, Dad. Oh, Dad.”
Selah.
THE LAST NOVEL
Again—
For Sydney, for Duncan, for Toby
And for Trish Hoard
Painting is not done to decorate apartments.
—Picasso
If there wasn’t death, I think you couldn’t go on.
—Stevie Smith
There are six floors in Novelist’s apartment building. Then again, the paved inner airshaft courtyard is at basement level, making seven.
And then the roof.
From high up on the Sistine ceiling scaffolding, Michelangelo was known to now and then drop things — brooms, even fairly long boards.
Most frequently, it appeared, when the pope happened to be lurking below for a glimpse at his latest efforts.
When I die, I open a bordello. You know what is a bordello, no? But against every one of you — all — I lock shut the door.
Said Arturo Toscanini, to a recalcitrant orchestra.
As a talisman for the future while still young and penniless, Balzac once sketched a large blank representation of a picture frame on one of his garret walls — and designated it Painting by Raphael.
Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.
A Frenchman in Delft in 1663, looking to purchase inexpensive art, was shown a Vermeer — on display in a pastry shop.
Almost certainly being held there as security for a debt of Vermeer’s to the baker.
Keats stayed up all night on the occasion when he actually did first look into Chapman’s Homer — and then composed his sonnet so swiftly that he was able to messenger it to a friend to read before breakfast.
Van Gogh, in a letter from Arles, some few weeks after having presented a piece of his ear to a woman in a brothel:
I went yesterday to see the girl I had gone to when I went astray in my wits. They told me that in this country things like that are not out of the ordinary.
Shelley, in a letter from Venice, on Byron’s local innamorati:
The most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted; countesses smell so strongly of garlic, that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, L.B. is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets.
The unimaginably cramped cell in which St. John of the Cross was once imprisoned for months, beaten repeatedly and virtually starved, but where he nonetheless managed to compose some of his finest verses.
In a building that no longer exists — but can still be seen in El Greco’s View of Toledo.
At least once, Flaubert informs readers that Emma Bovary’s eyes are brown.
And several other times that they are black.
Sigmund Freud ran his household in such a rigidly patriarchal manner that his wife was literally expected to have spread the toothpaste on his brush each morning.
Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.
All of which obviously means that this is the last book Novelist is going to write.
Anton Chekhov died in Germany. His coffin arrived in Moscow in a freight car — distinctly labeled Oysters.
During their first four years in the East Hampton farmhouse where they would live until Pollock’s death eleven years later, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner could not afford to install plumbing for heat and hot water.
Clarence Darrow went out of his way to inform A. E. Housman that he had recited two pieces of Housman’s verse in avoiding the death penalty for Leopold and Loeb, even presenting Housman with a copy of the courtroom summation — which showed he had misquoted both.
Claude Monet’s admission, after standing beside the deathbed of someone he had loved — that in spite of his grief he had spent much of the time analyzing which pigments comprised the color of her eyelids.
That day being come, Caesar going into the Senate house and speaking merrily unto the soothsayer, told him, The Ides of March be come. So be they, softly answered the soothsayer, but they are not yet past.
Says North’s Plutarch.
A woman’s body is not a mass of flesh in a state of decomposition, on which the green and purplish spots denote a complete state of cadaveric putrefaction.
An early critic presumed to inform Renoir.
The devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac’d loon;
Where gott’st thou that goose look?
— Wrote Shakespeare in Macbeth.
Now friend, what means thy change of countenance?
— Substituted William Davenant, in a rewritten version that was played for almost a century.
His last book. All of which also then gives Novelist carte blanche to do anything here he damned well pleases.
Which is to say, writing in his own personal genre, as it were.
The first one-man artist’s exhibition on record — put together by Gustave Courbet in Paris in 1855.
In a tent just outside the official group show that had rejected him.
Preoccupied with a poem-in-progress, Paul Valéry once paused to glance at a proof sheet in the window of a printing shop, and then without quite realizing it began to mentally revise the lines.
Until it embarrassingly dawned on him that he was rewriting Racine and not himself.
Vermeer died in 1675. At which time one of his largest debts was, in fact, to a Delft baker.
For bread to feed a family of thirteen.
In November 1919, after a solar eclipse had irrefutably verified Einstein’s concept of relativity, British physicists convened a major press gathering to announce it. The New York Times assigned the story to a man named Henry Crouch — a golf reporter.
An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar. Oblivion lurks in the immediate neighborhood.
Said Thomas Bailey Aldrich of Emily Dickinson.
The William Sakspere of Gloucestershire — who was hanged as a thief in 1248.
Along with a letter of homage, Berlioz sent copies of the score of The Damnation of Faust to Goethe.
Who never responded.
Venomously malignant. Noxious. Blasphemous. Grotesque. Disgusting. Repulsive. Entirely bestial. Indecent.
Being among the critical greetings for Leaves of Grass.
Not to omit ithyphallic audacity.
Plus garbage.
Profound stupidity. Maniacal raving. Pure nonsense.
Among some for the best of Shelley.
Which was also called abominable.
Infantile. Absurd. Driveling. Nauseating.
Reserved for Wordsworth.
For the rain it raineth every day.
Actually, Goethe had been gratified by Berlioz’ letter. But then showed the Faust score to a now long-forgotten minor German composer — who informed him it was valueless.
After the 1953 Laurence Olivier film of The Beggar’s Opera, Britain’s Inland Revenue Service repeatedly sent inquiries regarding an address for John Gay — from whom they had not received income tax returns.
1732, Gay was buried at Westminster Abbey in.
I like Mr. Dickens’ books much better than yours, Papa.
Said one of Thackeray’s daughters.
At the height of his career, Richard Brinsley Sheridan had become the owner of the Drury Lane Theater. And subsequently astonished everyone concerned by calmly drinking in a nearby coffeehouse when it went up in flames:
Surely a man may be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside?
What would you think this artist puts on canvas? Whatever fills his mind. And what can be in the mind of a man who spends his life in the company of prostitutes of the lowest order?
Inquired a review of François Boucher by Denis Diderot in 1765 — when libel was evidently an absent concept.
An unmanly sort of man whose love
life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing house.
Auden called Poe.
After having been driven to distraction by an organ grinder across the street from his Rome apartment, Pietro Mascagni finally politely demonstrated to the man how to operate the instrument less loudly.
Later to find him wearing a sign while performing: Pupil of Mascagni.
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Said Gertrude Stein.
It is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for one’s mind.
Said T. S. Eliot — re Stein’s prose.
Whistler, intending to show someone a new painting in his studio — who would always step in first and turn every other canvas to the wall.
Jackie Robinson had already played major league baseball for eight years before the Metropolitan Opera saw fit to ask Marian Anderson, then fifty-seven, to become its first black performer.
A full half-century after Marie Curie died from exposure to radiation, the very cookbooks she had once used were found to remain contaminated.
The courtesan Laïs, who once asserted that she knew nothing at all about the alleged wisdom of poets and philosophers — except that they knocked at her door as frequently as anyone else.
No philosopher has ever influenced the attitudes of even the street he lived on.