This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

  Says a last unfinished letter of van Gogh’s found after his death.

  The poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of inspired madness.

  Said Socrates.

  Gris was dead at forty. Of uremia.

  August 28, 1947, Manolete died on.

  Recalled from Eastern European ghettos, virtually until the very last residents were evacuated to Nazi death camps — schoolchildren reading Yiddish editions of The Prince and the Pauper and Around the World in Eighty Days.

  God of forgiveness, do not forgive those murderers of Jewish children here.

  Said Elie Wiesel, visiting at Auschwitz a half-century later.

  Wait. Don’t carry away that arm till I’ve taken off my ring.

  Said Raglan during surgery after Waterloo.

  Learning that there actually was an apple tree outside Newton’s window at his mother’s home.

  Indeed an entire apple orchard.

  Not a composer. A kleptomaniac.

  Stravinsky called Benjamin Britten.

  The appointment of a woman to public office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.

  Determined Jefferson.

  As many as five little-documented years passed between Shakespeare’s departure from the Globe, at forty-seven or forty-eight, and his death in Stratford.

  After thirty-seven plays, and probably parts of others, plus the poems — did he have no inclination to write anything in those last years?

  Or does there appear a possibility that he sometimes collaborated with others and/or doctored their work anonymously?

  Poetry makes nothing happen.

  Auden said.

  I will not go down to posterity speaking bad grammar.

  Said Disraeli, correcting one of his final speeches.

  Whether posterity will give us a thought I don’t know. But we surely deserve one.

  Wrote Pliny the Younger to Tacitus — in the early second century AD.

  I’m a poet, I’m life. You’re an editor, you’re death.

  Proclaimed Gregory Corso to someone in the White Horse Tavern — who shortly commenced punching him through the door and across the sidewalk.

  Taking no more account of the wind that comes out of their mouths than that which they expel from their lower parts.

  Leonardo described his response to critics as.

  Ancora imparo, said Michelangelo at eighty-seven.

  Still, I’m learning.

  More true poetical genius as a painter than possessed by perhaps any other.

  Joshua Reynolds saw in Julio Romano.

  Me retracto de todo lo dicho, I take back everything I told you.

  Announced Nicanor Parra at the end of each of his poetry readings.

  Everything useful is ugly.

  Said Gautier.

  I never saw an ugly thing in my life.

  Said Constable.

  The rumor that Gainsborough deliberately painted his Blue Boy to mock Reynolds’ academic insistence that blue was a color for use in backgrounds only.

  Nicanor Parra’s day job —

  Professor of theoretical physics at the University of Chile.

  Miroslav Holub’s —

  Chief research immunologist at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.

  Dr. Franz Kafka, the gravestone names him.

  Apropos of his Doctor of Laws degree.

  Superimposed metastatic disease would be difficult to exclude in this region.

  Reads a gladsome evaluation in the analysis of Novelist’s most recent bone scan.

  So debilitatingly paranoid was Kurt Gödel in his later years, over imagined plots to poison him, that he essentially refused to eat.

  And died weighing no more than sixty-five pounds.

  Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.

  Says the narrator of a Gilbert Sorrentino story.

  The world has no pity on a man who can’t do or produce something it thinks worth money.

  Says Gissing in New Grub Street.

  And to this day is every scholar poor:

  Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor.

  Says Marlowe, in Hero and Leander.

  October 8, 1963, Remedios Varo died on.

  We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant.

  Pointed out the disaffected Muslim Wafa Sultan in 2006.

  As Dickensian as anything Dickens ever wrote.

  Graham Greene labeled W. C. Fields.

  Maidservant gallantries, Constanza accused Mozart of.

  Flaubert soils the brook in which he washes.

  Said the critic Saint-Victor of L’Éducation sentimentale.

  M. Flaubert n’est pas un écrivain.

  Said Le Figaro of Madame Bovary.

  Why, this is very midsummer madness.

  We live not as we will — but as we can.

  Said Menander.

  Cocteau, meeting Diaghilev for the first time, and asking what he might do to involve himself in ballet —

  Astonish me, Diaghilev tells him.

  Demodocus, the blind bard whose songs of the fall of Troy evoke tears in Odyssey VIII.

  Could he have perhaps been the source of the legend that Homer himself was blind?

  Languidezza per il caldo — Languidly, because of the heat.

  Suggests Vivaldi’s notation over the Summer segment of The Four Seasons.

  For several hundred years, more than half a millennium after her death, coins bearing Sappho’s likeness were minted on Lesbos.

  In all the centuries since history began, we know of no woman who can truly be said to rival her as a poet.

  Said Strabo, equally as long after her era.

  Rheumatic fever, Robert Burns died of.

  The report that to keep him from sitting with a book for sixteen hours a day, Edmund Wilson’s parents bought him a baseball uniform. Which he happily put on — and sat in with a book for sixteen hours a day.

  By way of an inheritance, Carl Jung’s wife was one of the most wealthy women in Europe.

  Anyone who would employ the word diarrheic to describe a book as exactingly crafted in every line as Ulysses has either never read eleven consecutive words or possesses the literary perception of a rutabaga.

  Ulysses. Diarrheic, unquote. Dale Peck.

  Somewhat similarly, Roddy Doyle. A complete waste of time — Finnegans Wake.

  Though in his instance at least acknowledging that he had read only three pages.

  America’s Emily Dickinson dime?

  Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.

  Once said Richard Brinsley Sheridan to a pretty girl.

  My whole life is messed up with people falling in love with me.

  Once said Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  Even more incomprehensible than the two-century neglect of a painter like Vermeer — the three centuries in which the music of Monteverdi was all but forgotten.

  January 10, 1957, Gabriela Mistral died on.

  Tolstoy’s ruined teeth.

  Gogol’s.

  Admire a small ship, but put your cargo in a large one.

  Hesiod said.

  Savonarola, in one of his inflammatory sermons, directs his words at contemporary artists:

  I tell you, the Virgin dressed herself as a poor woman. And you represent her as a whore.

  This approximately one hundred years before he might have been able to view Caravaggio’s version of her death — effected with such prototypal naturalism that her feet are not clean.

  A critic. Someone who meddles with something that is none of his business.

  Gauguin says Mallarmé said.

  In flight from the Gestapo while a member of the French Resistance, Paul Eluard at one point hid for two months in an insane asylum.

  Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute was first produced in Paris precisely in the middle of a campaign against immorality.

  And had to be advertised w
ith the word Putain blacked out.

  Homer. Euripides. Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  Being the works that Milton, blind, most frequently asked to have read to him.

  Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

  The last one that Borges asked to hear before his death.

  October 17, 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann died on.

  Sit in thy cell — and thy cell shall teach thee all things.

  Said Saint Anthony.

  Who evidently sat in his own for as long as twenty years without once taking any sort of bath — or even washing his face.

  Lauritz Melchior and Helen Traubel, for years two of the Metropolitan’s central Wagnerians — who expended endless ingenuity in forever attempting to make each other break up into onstage laughter.

  Trying to think of a single book by a significant writer as transparently spurious throughout as A Moveable Feast.

  Wine, the title of John Gay’s first published poem was.

  In which he insisted that no one who drank only water could ever become an author.

  One’s first glass of the day is a great event.

  Acknowledged Thackeray.

  Not drunk is he who from the floor

  Can rise alone and still drink more.

  Contributed Thomas Love Peacock.

  Bo-ray pri ha-gofen.

  A manual-winding pocket watch, Einstein carried.

  Snivel in a wet hanky, D. H. Lawrence called Lord Jim.

  At fifty-eight, two years before his death, Chaucer was sued over a debt of fourteen pounds.

  And did not have the money.

  Gide-ists. Rilke-ists. Fraudulent existential witch doctors. Pallid worms in the cheese of capitalism. Intellectuals.

  Being among Pablo Neruda’s more kindly appellations for authors not concerned with politics.

  Little more than a device for getting revenge upon those who are having a better time on earth.

  Mencken called the Christian concept of immortality.

  Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?

  Inquired someone’s palindrome — after use of a bathroom at Faber and Faber.

  Well over a century after Dostoievsky’s death in St. Petersburg, a great-grandson named Dmitri Dostoievsky still lived there — working as a tram driver.

  Twenty-some years after Missolonghi, Teresa Guiccioli married a Parisian marquis — who was known to habitually introduce her as Ma femme, ancienne maîtresse de Byron.

  August Comte married a prostitute.

  Ibsen’s terror of even the smallest dog.

  The morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before.

  Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come.

  Zurbarán died penniless.

  The final entry re Frans Hals, dated September 1, 1666, in the records of the Haarlem Paupers’ Fund — listing four florins for a gravedigger.

  An immense nausea of billboards, Baudelaire spoke of.

  A century and a half ago.

  Closing time in the gardens of the West, Cyril Connolly called it.

  A century after that.

  What can be the sufficient reason for this phenomenon? said Pangloss.

  It is the Last Day! cried Candide.

  A man may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

  Said Samuel Butler.

  Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.

  Said Wittgenstein.

  Versailles, Edith Wharton was buried in.

  January 8, 1713, Arcangelo Corelli died on.

  Blake’s bust in Westminster Abbey.

  By Jacob Epstein.

  Epstein is a great sculptor. I wish he would wash.

  Said Pound.

  The limpest of handshakes, Robert Graves said Pound had.

  The mirror will not be looked into until you have returned.

  Says a letter from the wife of an ancient Chinese poet.

  Incapacitated by Alzheimer’s disease, de Kooning was once discovered about to spike his coffee with weed killer — presumably thinking it whiskey.

  Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

  The only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to be, Johnson said.

  Chloroform in print.

  Mark Twain called the Book of Mormon.

  Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me.

  Unquote, Gertrude Stein.

  Oh, dear —

  Reportedly having been David Garrick’s dying words.

  Eddie Grant, the pre–World War I third baseman, who graduated from Harvard — and who insisted on shouting I have it instead of I got it when chasing a fly ball.

  And who as an infantry captain would be killed by machine gun fire in the Argonne Forest.

  Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become.

  Said Mary McGrory.

  Far too much music finishes far too long after the end.

  Judged Stravinsky.

  Still to be read in the blank spaces on some of Raphael’s preliminary sketches for his Vatican stanze frescoes — drafts of love poems to his latest mistress.

  Will Durant’s amusingly unworldly conclusion that the Sappho in Raphael’s Parnassus is — quote — too beautiful to be a lesbian.

  Hark, Hark, the Lark! and Who Is Sylvia?

  Which Schubert set on the same single afternoon.

  The word plagiarism — from the Latin for kidnapping.

  To kidnap another writer’s brains, Martial had it.

  Old Hoss. Old Pete. Old Reliable. Old Folks. Old Aches and Pains.

  Novelist’s personal genre. In which part of the experiment is to continue keeping him offstage to the greatest extent possible — while compelling the attentive reader to perhaps catch his breath when things achieve an ending nonetheless.

  Conclusions are the weak point of most authors.

  George Eliot said.

  If you know what you’re doing, you don’t get intercepted.

  Said Johnny Unitas.

  Eugene Sue, most of whose widely read novels dealt with the poor and downtrodden.

  And thereby made him a millionaire, Kierkegaard noted.

  Picasso, in Paris during the Nazi occupation and learning that someone had accused him of having Jewish blood:

  I wish I had.

  Drawing, for an artist:

  A way of thinking, Valéry termed it.

  February 23, 1931, Nellie Melba died on.

  Let me alone. Good day.

  Said Tom Paine — to the two clergymen who had contrived to make their way to his bedside when he lay dying.

  How long the days for the wretched, how swift for the favored.

  Said Publilius Syrus.

  ’Tis their will — that thy son from this crested wall of Troy be dashed to death.

  The most tragic of the poets.

  Aristotle called Euripides.

  Proust’s excessively lavish over-tipping.

  Gide’s reputation as a cheapskate.

  Coryate, the English traveler, in Venice in 1611:

  When I went to the theatre, I observed certain things I never saw before; for I saw women acte.

  Reminding one that Ophelia, Juliet, Rosalind, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth — were all written to be portrayed by adolescent boys.

  Until 1660, when one Margaret Hughes broke the English barrier as Desdemona.

  Typhus, or his syphilis, caused Beethoven’s deafness — question mark.

  A rejection of all that civilization has done.

  Said the London Times of a first Post-Impressionist exhibition, in 1910 — which included Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, others.

  Just an old queen, Auden spoke of himself as.

  While also referring to Miss God.

  One never steps twice into the same Auden.

  Randall Jarrell said.

  Seneca’s Thyestes, in which Thyestes unknowingly eats the flesh of his own children.
br />   And is described as belching contentedly.

  Twickenham, Alexander Pope was buried in.

  Wondering how on earth one remembers — that when St. John of the Cross escaped after his near death by starvation in a Toledo prison, the first meal he was given, at a discalced Carmelite convent — was of pears simmered with cinnamon.

  A good man — but he did not know how to paint.

  Said El Greco of Michelangelo.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., at eighty-seven, seen turning to gaze after an attractive girl:

  Oh, to be seventy again!

  I must ever have some Dulcinea in my head — it harmonises the soul.

  Said Laurence Sterne.

  The pain of rereading Twelfth Night after far too many years and coming upon the end of the Clown’s song in II.iii —

  Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,

  Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

  Old age is not for sissies.

  Said Bette Davis.

  Tell me honestly, Cal. Am I as good a poet as Shelley?

  Asked William Carlos Williams, not long before his death, of Robert Lowell.

  Freud, born in 1856, being asked in 1936 how he felt:

  How a man of eighty feels is not a topic for conversation.

  Shaw, at ninety-four, being asked the same:

  At my age, one is either well or dead.

  Leukemia, Ernestine Schumann-Heink died of.

  He was greater than we thought.

  Said Degas at the funeral of Manet.