This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

  Sophomoric and obvious, said Ned Rorem.

  Bob Dylan, as composer:

  Banal and unmemorable, Rorem aussi.

  April 21, 1924, Eleonora Duse died on.

  For no reason whatsoever, Novelist has just flung his cat out one of his four-flights-up front windows.

  Saint-Exupéry wrote Le Petit Prince while living on Long Island.

  Well past fifty, Tolstoy began an intensive study of Hebrew with a Moscow rabbi — not very many years after having devoted similar concentration to mastering Greek.

  The awareness of not having accomplished anything, and not expecting to accomplish anything in the future, is not so terrible because Tolstoy makes up for all of us.

  Concluded Chekhov.

  When will you pay me?

  Say the bells of Old Bailey.

  You go wherever you like. I’m not about to get myself killed for that wife Helen of yours.

  Says Agamemnon to Menelaus — essentially about commencing the Trojan War — in the little that remains of a lost play by Euripides.

  Act. Then call upon the gods.

  Says another Euripides fragment.

  That tampon painter.

  Joan Mitchel called Helen Frankenthaler.

  The friendship of Zola and Cézanne.

  Tracing back to when they were boys of twelve and thirteen.

  The big tragedy for the poet is poverty.

  Said Patrick Kavanagh.

  Try to get a living by the Truth — and go to the Soup Societies.

  Lamented Melville rather earlier.

  Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.

  Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.

  For a time, at the Tuileries, Napoleon kept the Mona Lisa in his bedroom.

  Only this tardily realizing — that if he had not made use of his middle name, among the better-known twentieth-century American poets would be a William Williams.

  One of the two listed witnesses at the wedding of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, was the church janitor.

  Turgenev was sentenced to a month in jail, and subsequent banishment from St. Petersburg, for the simple act of having written an obituary of Gogol, whose work was considered subversive by czarist authorities.

  I absolutely cannot do without it.

  Says Tchaikovsky’s diary, about alcohol.

  Veronese’s Finding of Moses, at the Prado.

  In which Pharaoh’s daughter and her handmaidens are shown in clothing not worn until the Renaissance.

  The last time anyone mentioned Erskine Caldwell.

  Lorca was thirty-eight when he was murdered.

  Everywhere Lorca went he found a piano.

  Rafael Alberti remembered of him.

  Met him pike hoses.

  Had Sir Thomas Beecham ever conducted any Stockhausen?

  No. But he believed he had trodden in some.

  Before the Euro, the portrait of Yeats on Ireland’s twenty-pound note.

  America’s Whitman twenty-dollar bill, when?

  The Melville ten?

  One of the rare pieces of expository writing by a woman in antiquity — a list of rules for behavior when visiting an exclusive house of prostitution.

  Left by one Gnathaena, in third-century Athens, and actually catalogued in the great library of Alexandria until its destruction.

  No more than ten or twelve weeks after an actress he had been living with took her own life, Gottfried Benn was engaged to another woman.

  1427–1429. Being the closest one can evidently come to a date for the death of Masaccio.

  The Threepenny Opera. For which Brecht stole much of the language from someone else’s German translation of the original John Gay version — and for which he was ultimately forced to surrender part of his royalties.

  Truth lies at the bottom of a well.

  Cicero says Democritus said.

  Truth lies at the bottom of a well.

  Rabelais says Heraclitus said.

  I’ve had it with those cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

  Growled Kenneth Rexroth.

  Novelist does not own a cat, and thus most certainly could not have thrown one out a window.

  Nonetheless he would lay odds that more than one hopscotching reviewer will be reading carelessly enough here to never notice these two sentences and announce that he did so.

  God help us, did I not tell your Grace that those were nothing but windmills?

  All cats are grey in the dark.

  What would non-creative writing be?

  George Steiner once casually wondered.

  Musicke, the Elizabethan spelling was.

  Hydeous. Swolne. Perswasion. Sinne. Subtill.

  Brightnesse falls from the ayre.

  He would not blow his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry.

  Said Cyril Connolly of Orwell.

  Billy Graham’s anti-Semitic exchange with Richard Nixon, as preserved on White House tapes.

  E. M. Forster lived with his mother until her death when he was sixty-six.

  Children of Palestrina, Verdi referred to Italian composers as.

  Bastien-Lepage was dead at thirty-six.

  Aubrey Beardsley was dead at twenty-five.

  The somewhat notorious soprano Susanna Cibber. Who sang so movingly in an early performance of Handel’s Messiah that a Dublin bishop informed her afterward that any and all of her earthly sins were therewith irrevocably forgiven.

  Charlotte Brontë died in March of 1855.

  The Reverend Arthur Nicholls, whom she had married nine months before, would live until 1906.

  A daughter of Dickens lived until 1929.

  After Jean Stafford, vacationing, had explained to a weathered Wyoming ranch hand how she made her living:

  That’s real nice work. I reckon you can even always arrange to do it in the shade.

  Wondering why it always seems somehow not quite accurate — that Mozart was born only fourteen years before Beethoven.

  Now I’ll have eine kleine pause.

  Said Kathleen Ferrier — dying.

  British cavalry in the Crimean War were so scandalously ill-supplied and neglected that many starved to death — as did the very horses that had survived the Charge of the Light Brigade.

  February 2, 1940, Meyerhold was executed on.

  Picasso, avec laughter, after being asked if he had used models for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon:

  Where would I have found them?

  A dreadful old fraud.

  Edmund Wilson called Robert Frost.

  A sententious, holding-forth old bore who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal little twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word.

  James Dickey would elaborate subsequently.

  Edith Piaf was four feet eight inches tall.

  George Lyman Kittredge, who taught Shakespeare at Harvard for forty-eight years — and demanded that all of his students memorize at least six hundred lines per semester.

  Six hundred lines. The student reciting the entire To be or not to be soliloquy has mastered all of thirty-five.

  Alexander the Great once watched in puzzlement as Diogenes sifted through a heap of human bones.

  How strange, Diogenes finally decided — that I cannot make a distinction between those of your father and those of his slaves.

  Ephesus, Mary Magdalen died in.

  Ephesus, the Virgin Mary may have died in.

  José Clemente Orozco lost his left hand in a college chemistry explosion.

  Mr. McChoakumchild, Dickens names the demanding schoolmaster in Hard Times.

  Almost an insult to the serious reader, Shaw said.

  An abridged, accelerated, night-school course.

  Eugenio Montale saw in Pound’s version of culture in the Cantos.

  Oh, Aaron Burr, what hast thou done?

  Thou hast shooted dead that great Hamilt
on.

  For a millennium, or longer, Greek and then Roman seamen along the coast of the Troad repeatedly insisted they had seen the ghosts of Achilles and/or Hector in full armor at the shore.

  After Vicente Aleixandre’s Nobel Prize, Madrid renamed the street on which he lived in his honor.

  Which was to say that one could then write to Sr. Vicente Aleixandre — on Calle Vicente Aleixandre.

  There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet.

  Suspected Elizabeth Bishop.

  A remedy once suggested by Camille Pissarro for the betterment of French art:

  Burn down the Louvre.

  What I have always liked about this place are the windows.

  Determined Bonnard, strolling through the same museum.

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

  A quirky new impulse of Novelist’s, at news of several recent deaths —

  Dialing the deceased, in the likelihood that no one would have yet disconnected their answering machines — and contemplating their voices one eerie final time.

  A trampish sort of appearance.

  Iris Murdoch recalled re Wittgenstein.

  Joyce himself is an insignificant man, wearing very thick eyeglasses, dull, self-centered.

  Says Virginia Woolf’s diary.

  Reality is under no obligation to be interesting.

  Said Borges.

  December 31, 1936, Unamuno died on.

  October 18, 1955, Ortega.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt, well into his political career, at least once wrote a book review.

  Bach was fifteen when he began his professional music career.

  As a boy soprano.

  A quart or more of alcohol per day, uncounted amphetamines, uncounted aspirin, uncounted barbiturates — and at a minimum two packs of cigarettes.

  Being Sartre in his most productive years.

  The novels of Paul de Kock, which are admired by Molly Bloom.

  As they were in fact by Karl Marx.

  Dear President George W. Bush:

  Herewith please find uncorrected proofs for the newly discovered rewritten version of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Kindly limit your review to twelve thousand words. Thank you.

  John Kenneth Galbraith was made to repeat his senior year in high school.

  Scarcely intelligible, Dryden labeled Shakespeare’s language.

  Quote: His whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is coarse.

  A jockey can earn more in one race than a schoolteacher is paid in an entire year.

  Objected Juvenal — close to nineteen hundred years ago.

  He who today writes artistically dies without recognition or reward.

  Complained Lope de Vega — in 1609.

  Landlords in lower Manhattan who were shrewd enough, over the years, to accept recent work by moneyless young artists instead of rent.

  One of those, in the late 1940s, who wasn’t — and rather than two paintings by Robert Rauschenberg insisted upon the month’s $15.

  Jaroslav Seifert, like Dostoievsky earlier, who once eluded execution only moments before the shots were to be fired.

  Yet afterward insisted he was no more traumatized by the recollection than a youngster remembering last year’s measles.

  The nephew of Aeschylus named Philocles, also a playwright, all of whose plays are lost.

  But who was talented enough to gain the prize for tragedy in the year when Sophocles presented Oedipus Rex.

  A cask of brandy, Nelson’s corpse was brought back to London in, after Trafalgar.

  To slow decomposition.

  Agonies of galloping speechlessness.

  Beckett once talked of a writer’s block as.

  When you can see the bandwagon, it’s already gone.

  Said de Kooning.

  Late-life Nietzsche postcards — that he signed Kaiser Nietzsche.

  Freakish, Voltaire called the Divine Comedy.

  Extravagant, absurd, disgusting.

  Horace Walpole made it.

  According to Ford Madox Ford, Flaubert once opened his front door to Henry James and Ivan Turgenev in his dressing gown — and thus offended James’s sensibilities virtually beyond redemption.

  The nicest old lady I ever met.

  Faulkner decided to christen James.

  Multiple surgical chain staples are evident in the right lung, consistent with prior resections.

  Reads a recurrent notation in reports on Novelist’s chest x-rays.

  A post-Mao version of the Long March — which implies that forcibly conscripted porters carried him on a litter for much of the 5,000 miles.

  All the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution.

  Said William Jennings Bryan — in 1924.

  Abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians — all in good part responsible for 9/11, said Jerry Falwell.

  I totally concur. Said Pat Robertson.

  David Gascoyne’s addiction to Benzedrene. And lighter-fluid fumes.

  Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars.

  Remembering that Charles Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey.

  Fundamentalismbecility.

  Django Reinhardt died of a cerebral hemorrhage — while fishing in the Seine.

  People who actually believe that Damien Hirst’s fourteen-foot shark in a tank of formaldehyde has something even remotely to do with art.

  Our father who art in heaven

  Stay there.

  Requested Jacques Prévert.

  Tamara Geva. Vera Zorina. Maria Tallchief. Tanaquil Le Clercq.

  All of whom married George Balanchine.

  Offensive, ill-written, mechanical. All in all, detestable.

  Sainte-Beuve called the novels of Stendhal.

  I count only on being reprinted in 1900.

  Said Stendhal himself, who died in 1842.

  I shall hear in heaven.

  Which Beethoven did or did not say, nearing death.

  Do Not Leave Car Unattendant.

  Jean Giono was twice imprisoned for collaboration with the Nazis in World War II.

  Englishing Pindar is so exacting, concluded Abraham Cowley, that if one were to attempt it literally it would sound as if one certifiable lunatic had translated another.

  Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov were for a time roommates.

  The first use of the word classic in its long since traditional sense — by the Latin critic Aulus Gellius, ca. 180 AD.

  I am no Einstein.

  Once said Einstein.

  Pope Eliot.

  Dylan Thomas called him.

  Michelangelo’s David stood on the open porch of the Palazzo Vecchio, where Michelangelo had asked that it be placed, from 1504 until 1873 — when Florence moved it into the Academy and out of the weather.

  And to where some cretin a hundred and twenty years later would take a hammer to its left foot.

  Only a single, incomplete manuscript of the Annals of Tacitus remained extant after the Dark Ages.

  August 21, 2005, Dahlia Ravikovitch died on.

  Pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world —

  Reads an Isak Dinesen description of a herd of elephants.

  The ménage à trois involving Paul and Gala Eluard and Max Ernst —

  After which Gala became Gala Dalí.

  Simone de Beauvoir’s affair with Nelson Algren.

  Which she later infuriated him by writing about.

  A leper and a sodomite.

  Emerson called Swinburne.

  Like a vile scum on a pond.

  Pound viewed G. K. Chesterton.

  Landskip, painters long spoke of it as.

  Dreiser, years in advance, telling H. L. Mencken that he has already prepared his dying words:

  Shakespeare, I come.

  Alan Turing was dead at forty-one.

  Yo
u don’t have a computer? So how do you write your books? You don’t still use a typing machine?

  Wondering if anyone, ever, has listened to Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march without repeated irrepressible grins of delight?

  I fear that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.

  Said Sarah Bernhardt of Nijinsky.

  He eats with his knife and accompanies every gesture, every movement of his hand, with that implement, which he grasps firmly when he commences his meal and never puts down until he leaves the table.

  Said Mary Cassatt re Cézanne — and what she also described as his total disregard for the dictionary of manners, unquote.

  The likelihood that Lenin died of syphilis.

  Raymond Chandler did not publish his first novel until he was fifty.

  Dashiell Hammett published his fifth novel at thirty-nine — and not one thing else in the remaining twenty-seven years of his life.

  Great Empedocles, that ardent soul,

  Leapt into Etna, and was roasted whole.

  Oh, that flagon, that wicked flagon! thought Rip — what excuse shall I make to Dame Van Winkle?

  Chekhov’s grandfather had been a serf.

  The speculation that Horace’s father, himself a manumitted slave, might also have been a Jew.

  December 11, 1513, Pintoricchio died on.

  So excessively did Shaw admire Strindberg that he actually used the money from his Nobel Prize to arrange for better English translations of Strindberg’s plays.