This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

  Attempting to detour the young Thomas Aquinas from a career in the church, his family once arranged for a seductive woman to be sent to his rooms.

  Whom he chased off with a flaming brand from his hearth.

  Maid of Athens, ere we part,

  Give, oh give me back my heart!

  For a time, Rilke and Cocteau had apartments in the same Paris building — evidently without ever becoming acquainted.

  Every passenger in the non-smoking section of a plane that crashed off Norway in 1948 was killed.

  Bertrand Russell had been smoking — and was one of those able to swim to safety.

  Ravel once composed music for Diaghilev that Diaghilev never used.

  And which almost led to a duel between them.

  April 23, 1554, Gaspara Stampa died on.

  I don’t very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them.

  Said Georgia O’Keeffe.

  Harvard was founded in 1636.

  The University of Mexico — in 1553.

  One of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published.

  Edmund Wilson called This Side of Paradise.

  Not a lovable man.

  John O’Hara said of Scott Fitzgerald himself.

  Occasions on which one has seen it transliterated as Theodor Dostoievsky.

  A tea-time bore.

  Dylan Thomas called Wordsworth.

  A son of Einstein’s died in a mental institution at fifty-five —having been confined there for a third of a century.

  The relatively recent revelation that Einstein had also had an illegitimate daughter.

  Unhesitatingly specifying Pound’s anti-Semitism as the reason, Yevgeny Yevtushenko once refused to appear on the same podium with him at a literary event.

  Teddy Dostoievsky?

  The Duccio Madonna and Child purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in 2004 for more than $45,000,000.

  Which is eight inches wide and eleven inches high.

  Jan Peerce. Leonard Warren. Richard Tucker. Robert Merrill.

  The Lower East Side. The Bronx. Williamsburg. Williamsburg.

  Jacques Derrida failed his entrance exams to the École Normal Supérieure. Twice.

  People are exasperated by poetry which they do not understand, and contemptuous of poetry which they understand without effort.

  Said Eliot.

  We cease to wonder at what we understand.

  Said Johnson.

  Sir Thomas Beecham once told an orchestra that a certain passage in Mozart should sound innocent — quote — like a breath of spring. It should float on the air like a voice from another world.

  When the musicians stared emptily:

  Oh, well, anyway, play it legato.

  A real good guy.

  William Carlos Williams called Emily Dickinson.

  A bitchy little spinster.

  Denise Levertov saw her as instead.

  Géricault’s intensity when at work on The Raft of the Medusa:

  The mere sound of a smile could prevent him from painting, someone said.

  Ingres’ judgment that the finished version ought to have been removed from the Louvre or even hidden away altogether:

  Is it in such horrors that we should find pleasure? Art should teach us nothing but the Beautiful!

  If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.

  Said a 1920s Texas governor opposed to the teaching of foreign languages.

  Persia, as it was still then called, Doris Lessing was born in.

  Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

  Because bookshops are among the very few places where one can spend time without spending any money, George Orwell noted, any number of practically certifiable lunatics are guaranteed to be regularly found in most of them.

  I’ve finished that chapel I was painting. The Pope is quite satisfied.

  Wrote Michelangelo to his father, after four years’ effort — and with no further need to let fall brooms or lumber.

  So impoverished was Linnaeus as a university student that the closest he could come to repairing worn-out shoes was to stuff the holes with paper.

  The general acceptance that it was Antonello da Messina who taught Venice the Flemish method of painting with oils rather than with tempera.

  Venice — and thus Italy.

  More floggings than meals.

  Haydn remembered from his childhood.

  Trying to imagine E. M. Forster, who found Ulysses indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruce — to which in fact he was once taken.

  Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorne — who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked at the profusion of naked statues.

  January 22, 1945, Else Lasker-Schüler died on.

  Raskolnikov. Minus the last two letters, the word translates as dissenter.

  While the pseudonym Gorky means the bitter.

  Fifty years after combat in World War I, David Jones could still be momentarily panicked by an unexpected explosive sound like that of a backfiring truck.

  And now we three in Euston waiting-room.

  Latin, Greek, Italian, and German, George Eliot read.

  Latin, Greek, Italian, and French — Mary Shelley.

  Hindi, not English, Rudyard Kipling’s first language was.

  People who pronounce the word ask as if it were spelled with an x.

  As for that matter it was, until the late sixteenth century.

  If God had not created breasts, I would not have become a painter.

  Renoir once unseriously announced.

  A woman’s breast or a commonplace milk bottle — my feelings remained the same when painting either.

  Corot soberly insisted.

  Nobody comes. Nobody calls —

  Which Novelist after a moment realizes may sound like a line of Beckett’s, but is actually something he himself has said in an earlier book.

  The name Copperfield came from a sign Dickens had noticed on a shop in a London slum.

  Chuzzlewit likewise.

  Nothing but obscenities and filth.

  Being all Conrad could find in D. H. Lawrence.

  Disgust and horror, recorded Abigail Adams after a blackface performance of Othello:

  My whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona.

  The revolver with which van Gogh shot himself had been borrowed. Van Gogh having claimed he wished to fire at crows that were annoying him as he painted.

  The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

  Said Arthur Honegger.

  Remembering that before writing Ben Hur, Lew Wallace had been a Union general during the Civil War.

  Remembering that Abner Doubleday had been the same.

  The endless commentary, and analysis, and even retelling, in Clarissa. Anyone reading it just for the story would hang himself, Johnson said.

  Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?

  James Thurber said Harold Ross had to ask.

  Roughly two-thirds of the paintings described in the corrected second edition of Vasari’s Lives — finished in 1567 — would appear to no longer exist.

  Hamlet. A boring play full of quotations.

  Swinburne’s delirium-tremendous imagination, Hopkins called it.

  Grant Wood’s sister, Nan, and a dentist named McKeeby. Who posed for American Gothic.

  In Cedar Rapids.

  July 4, 1934, Hayyim Bialik died on.

  The letter announcing the first acceptance of a poem by Francis Thompson never reached him.

  Thompson being so indigent at the time that he literally had no address.

  Poe, in his late thirties a half-century earlier —

  Unable even to afford postage to put his manuscripts in the mail.

  For poor people, sick or lame, or travelers.

  Advertised the Savoy, a charitable residence in sixteenth-century London — which also saw fit to take in s
truggling authors.

  Thinking of them for so long as essentially literary characters that one has to force oneself to recall that Dante actually knew the Paolo of Paolo and Francesca.

  Goya died at eighty-three.

  Having had to read lips for the last thirty-six years of his life.

  Borges at eighty-six.

  Having had to be read aloud to for almost as long.

  Ovid’s poem about his sweetheart Corinna’s near-fatal abortion — dated ca. 23 BC.

  The child was mine — or so I at least

  do think.

  Baudelaire’s addiction to laudanum.

  Coleridge’s. De Quincey’s.

  Poe’s.

  The Nike of Samothrace, in the Louvre, which was excavated in 1863 — in more than one hundred fragments.

  Newspapers expressed such indignation over the ostensible immorality in Richard Strauss’s Salome at its 1907 American premiere that the opera was withdrawn after a single performance and not produced again at the Metropolitan until 1934.

  Diseased and polluted. Indescribably, yes, inconceivably, gross and abominable. Unspeakable.

  Read a small portion of what the New York Times had to contribute.

  Aristide Maillol’s practice of repeatedly urinating on his bronze sculptures.

  To add patina.

  If you value my work, please, do not knock.

  Requested a notice on Hermann Hesse’s door in Ticino.

  Gérard de Nerval, in some of the milder moments of his madness — known to toss such money as he possessed into the air for anyone’s taking in restaurants and coffeehouses.

  Anne Sexton’s periods in mental institutions.

  Only native-born citizens in ancient Athens were allowed to own property.

  Meaning that no less a personage than Aristotle, from Stagira, could not.

  The nunnery on Montmartre, mentioned a few years earlier by François Villon, where in 1503 it was discovered that the abbess and several nuns had borne children — and still others were pregnant.

  A fiend of a book. The action is laid in Hell — only it seems places and people have English names there.

  Said Dante Gabriel Rossetti of Wuthering Heights.

  Olive Fremstad. Mary Garden. Ljuba Welitsch. Karita Matilla.

  Wagner played the piano badly.

  Berlioz not at all.

  For safety’s sake during the bombings of World War II, the Elgin Marbles were removed from the British Museum and stored deep in the London subway system.

  While the French Resistance during those same years was using the Lascaux cave as a place in which to cache weapons.

  Tchaikovsky was found weeping after he had written the death of Lisa in The Queen of Spades.

  Georges Bernanos was married to a direct descendant of a brother of Joan of Arc.

  A simple creature unlettyrde.

  Julian of Norwich called herself.

  The most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.

  Echoed Jane Austen — four hundred years afterward.

  Pastor Martin Niemöller — who spent seven years at Sachsenhausen and Dachau.

  After having been a German U-boat commander in World War I.

  April 13, 1945, Ernst Cassirer died on.

  Ivan Goncharov worked in the Russian Civil Service for his entire adult life.

  Mussorgsky, the same.

  Then again, quoting himself or not, Novelist naturally does receive some few phone calls after all.

  All too often in these years with news of someone’s death, however.

  Leonardo’s peculiar habit of surreptitiously following interesting-looking strangers on the street.

  To be able to sketch them from memory later, the contemporary assumption was.

  Christianity must be divine, since it has lasted seventeen hundred years despite the fact of being so full of villainy and absurdity.

  Voltaire said.

  The first priest was the first rogue who crossed paths with the first fool.

  Voltaire also said.

  Slop, Pound was calling Yeats’s recent verse in the mid-1930s— after having been best man at Yeats’s wedding two decades earlier.

  The influence of Donne upon the literature of England was singularly wide and deep — although almost wholly malign.

  Said Edmund Gosse.

  There is no indication whatsoever of anything even remotely resembling a State of Israel on the maps in most contemporary Arab schoolbooks.

  Sixty-seven, Cézanne died at.

  Some few days after having been caught for hours in a sudden downpour where he had been at work on a landscape.

  A sort of God of painting.

  Matisse was to call him.

  One can now hear famous pieces of music as easily as one can buy a glass of beer.

  Proclaimed Debussy in delight at the advent of the phonograph.

  They who drink beer will think beer.

  Said Washington Irving.

  Cracked, Edith Sitwell called Blake.

  Flaubert’s outrage at the notion of an illustrated edition of Bovary.

  Jane, Jane,

  Tall as a crane,

  The morning light creaks down again.

  Still the most avant-garde book ever written.

  Anthony Burgess said of Tristram Shandy.

  A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

  Johnson said.

  Mahler died in 1911. Alma not until 1964.

  Beckett, on the posthumous publication of letters or other papers that their authors might not have approved of:

  When a writer dies his widow should be burned on his funeral pyre.

  To publish one line of an author which he himself did not intend for publication — especially letters — is a despicable act.

  Had said Heine earlier.

  What the dickens, lower case — which has nothing to do with the author of Great Expectations.

  I cannot tell what the dickens his name is, says someone in The Merry Wives of Windsor, on stage by 1601.

  It is never difficult to paint, said Dalí.

  It is either easy or impossible.

  Willie Yeats, he was frequently called.

  William Cuthbert Faulkner, his full name was.

  Christopher Marlowe evidently wrote Tamburlaine while still a student at Cambridge.

  Learn or leave. A third alternative is to be flogged.

  Declared a Latin inscription at the entrance to a church-sponsored Medieval English elementary school.

  Rousseau’s father was a watchmaker.

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu died of breast cancer.

  Too much interest in music could turn one effeminate.

  Kant said.

  Tolstoy’s certainty that Darwin was already beginning to be forgotten.

  As early as in 1903.

  Hugh Kenner’s sense of the same re Freud.

  Whom he called already nearly as dated as Trilby — in 1958.

  Goyisher kopf.

  Byron, with amiable confidence, to friends whose silence suggested that they did not particularly admire Don Juan:

  I wish you all better taste.

  The ugliness of some of his music is really masterly.

  Stated a London journal after an early Delius concert.

  Andromache. Alcestis. Helen. Medea. The Bacchae.

  Each of which Euripides ends with his chorus speaking an identical verse — to the effect that the ways of the gods are unpredictable.

  Helen, the most famous woman in Greek mythology — whose name is not a Greek name.

  The curiosity that we possess copies of ten evidently authentic letters of Dante’s — and not one of Shakespeare’s.

  August 11, 1494, Hans Memling died on.

  Dylan Thomas’s eighteenth birthday, Sylvia Plath was born on.

  I hate that dreadful hollow behind the little wood.

  Strolling on Park
Avenue in New York, John Gielgud unexpectedly runs into Greta Garbo —

  Looking like a displaced charwoman, he later reports.

  Edgell Rickword lost an eye as an officer in France in World War I.

  Siegfried Sassoon was wounded twice.

  Thinking with someone else’s brain.

  Schopenhauer called reading.

  In the late spring of 1944, at the height of their efficiency, the forty-six ovens in the crematoriums at Auschwitz were incinerating as many as twelve thousand corpses per day.

  The word genocide had not existed until being coined by a Polish scholar in that same year.

  Italo Svevo had to pay to publish Confessions of Zeno.

  Stratford-on-Avon, Marie Corelli died in.

  I say that if you can tell a story in a picture and if a reasonable number of people like your work, it is art.

  Said Norman Rockwell.

  If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting it should be burned.

  Said Shaw.

  Ronald Reagan was a clandestine informer for the FBI when it was investigating so-called left-wing influences in Hollywood in the 1940s.

  Confucius was illegitimate.

  Michelangelo’s passing comment to Raphael, at the Vatican, that there was a young painter in Florence who would bring sweat to his brow — unquote — if he ever fulfilled himself.

  Meaning Andrea del Sarto.

  Michelangelo, who was incidentally eight years older than Raphael — and would outlive him by forty-four.