A good-natured man of principle.
Pablo Neruda called Stalin.
A saint and a martyr.
Ezra Pound called Hitler.
Mark Twain died of a heart condition.
Rupert Brooke’s only brother died in World War I no more than weeks after Brooke himself.
Château-Thierry, La Fontaine was born in.
Realizing idly that every artist in history—until Writer’s own century—rode horseback.
For instance Keats doing so beside the Tiber each morning until not long before his death.
George Sand, disdaining sidesaddle on a favorite mare she by chance called Colette.
Or twenty-three centuries earlier Pindar even reassuring readers that there would be horses in heaven.
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three.
A monk asked Ts’ui-wei: For what purpose did the First Patriarch come from the West?
Ts’ui-wei answered: Pass me that chin rest.
As soon as the monk passed it, Ts’ui-wei thwacked him with it.
Any and all public gatherings were prohibited in Venice during a plague in 1576.
An edict that was unhesitatingly ignored at the death of Titian—so deserving was he felt to be of a state funeral.
To Helen. Poe was sixteen.
Le Bateau ivre. Rimbaud was sixteen.
Thanatopsis. Bryant was sixteen or seventeen.
Thomas Gray died of gout.
Jean Genet was a paid informer for the Nazis in World War II.
Colette the novelist died of cardiac arrest.
Salacious, bad-smelling, sick.
Said Van Wyck Brooks of Joyce.
While deriding Rimbaud as a neurasthenic little wretch.
Berlioz, on critics:
Where do they come from? At what age are they sent to the slaughterhouse?
Adam Mickiewicz died of cholera.
William Collins died mad.
Writer’s equally idle realization that all of those same equestrian artificers likewise went through life without flush toilets.
What type of outhouse had Peter Paul Rubens, for example?
What bedroom slop bucket disguised as a clothes chest had Jane Austen?
Chaim Soutine died of stomach ulcers.
John Steinbeck died of a heart condition, little tempered by acute emphysema.
Kandinsky once invited Arnold Schoenberg to join the faculty at the Bauhaus.
Indicating magnanimously that while Jews were normally not welcome, an exception would here be made.
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!
This is the lamentable condition of our times, that men of art must seek alms of cormorants, and those that deserve best, be kept under by dunces.
Said Thomas Nashe in 1592.
For two decades, starting at twenty-five, Paul Valéry did not publish a line.
Wagner died in 1883.
Cosima not until 1930.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti died of Bright’s disease.
Tennessee Williams choked to death on the plastic cap of a nasal spray.
Let’s choose executors, and talk of wills.
He is either mad, or he is reading Don Quixote.
Said Philip III, at the sight of a student banging himself on the head and doubling over in hysterics over a book.
Perugino probably died of plague.
There is no one so foolish as to praise Don Quixote.
Said Lope de Vega.
The Metropolitan Museum’s only Caravaggio, the early Allegory of Music, was not known of for more than three centuries.
And was walked off with for less than one hundred pounds when come upon in an English antique shop.
This can only be the devil or Bach himself!
No date will ever be available for Marian Anderson in Constitution Hall.
Said Constitution Hall.
Camus went through most of his adult life with recurrent tuberculosis.
Michael Tippett spent three months in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector in World War II.
The tail gunner on the Enola Gay wore a Brooklyn Dodgers cap.
Antonio Gaudí died after being hit by a streetcar in Barcelona.
Blaise Cendrars died after a series of strokes.
The worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918–1919 killed forty million people.
Including Apollinaire. And Egon Schiele.
And both of Mary McCarthy’s parents.
Descartes and Pascal met twice.
Neither being impressed.
David Hume was grossly fat, reported even to crack chairs.
Edward Gibbon became equally so.
Amy Lowell as well.
What sort of chamber pot had Bishop Berkeley?
Enoch Arden.
The kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled, George Orwell described Auden as.
Orwell on Sean O’Casey:
Very stupid.
On Steinbeck:
Spurious.
La Trahison des clercs.
Until he was forty, Hermann Broch was the manager of his family’s textile firm.
Grazia Deledda died of breast cancer.
Dost thou think Alexander look’t o’ this fashion i’ th’ earth? And smelt so? Pah!
Not even worth the trouble of condemning, said Gautier of Manet’s Olympia.
As late as in 1874, Jacob Burckhardt felt licensed to dismiss Jan Vermeer as inconsequential:
Women reading and writing letters and such things.
Archilochos is said to have died in battle.
The most acute thinker ever born, Kant called Kepler.
The first English translation of Madame Bovary was done by a daughter of Karl Marx.
Who would later take her own life much the way Emma does.
An extant letter of Michelangelo’s complains about money that Luca Signorelli borrowed and never repaid.
He was always strumming upon something—his hat, his watch fob, the table, the chair, as if they were the keyboard.
Said Constanze.
Far too many notes, my dear Mozart.
Quentin de La Tour died mad.
Charlie Parker died of pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, though with unquestioned contributions from alcohol and drugs.
Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir.
Boccaccio’s tale of Giotto, on horseback, caught in an August rainstorm.
Hunchback’d Papist, Pope was called in print.
Maeterlinck died of a heart condition.
Beethoven, preoccupied. Crossing to his washstand to pour water over his head oblivious of the fact that he is fully dresssed.
And even in the ages to come, men will make of us a song for telling.
Says Helen to Hector of their destiny.
Theodore Dreiser once tried to bribe H. L. Mencken to start a campaign promoting him for the Nobel Prize.
After the burning, Joan of Arc’s remains were dumped into the Seine.
After the burning, Savonarola’s remains were dumped into the Arno.
James Clerk Maxwell died of abdominal cancer.
During the thirty days’ grace between his conviction and the hemlock, Socrates memorized a long poem by Stesichorus.
I wish to die knowing one thing more.
You have only to walk about until your legs are heavy, and then to lie down, and the poison will act.
Explains the jailer in Phaedo.
What Pieter Bruegel knew about summer.
Kipling, in Sussex, may have been the first author to actually dispense with horses, owning a motorcar as early as in 1902.
Henry Adams owned a Mercedes in France in 1904.
John Fletcher died of plague. Beaumont’s death was apparently registered with no cause listed.
Trifles, Catullus waved away his verses as.
Two full thousand years ago.
The height of absurdity in s
erving up pure nonsense, or in stringing together senseless and extravagant masses of words, previously seen only in madhouses, was reached in Hegel.
Said Schopenhauer.
In or about December 1910 human character changed.
Yes, Virginia.
Ben Shahn was once an assistant to Diego Rivera.
Jackson Pollock was once an assistant to David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Richard Feynman’s roommate, when they were both working at Los Alamos, was Klaus Fuchs.
Raymond Carver died of lung cancer.
Last Week I saw a Woman flay’d, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her Person for the worse.
Why does there appear not to have been one word written about Jesus until he is mentioned by Josephus more than fifty years after his death?
Rembrandt’s father was a corn miller.
Corot more than once added a few brushstrokes and then signed his own name to the work of other painters—who would otherwise not have been able to sell.
The St. Vincent de Paul of painting, he came to be called.
Ned Ludd was feeble-minded.
By far, the two greatest stylists who ever wrote in German were Heine and Nietzsche.
Said Nietzsche.
I painted this from myself. I was six-and-twenty years old. Albrecht Dürer. 1498.
Nancy Barron, a madwoman at the poorhouse farm in Concord.
Immortalized because Emerson could hear her endless screaming from his study.
Racine died of an abscess of the liver.
A bigot and a sot, Thomas Babington Macaulay called James Boswell.
Simone de Beauvoir died of pneumonia.
Giambattista Vico died of what sounds to have been Alzheimer’s disease.
No great talent has ever existed without a tinge of madness, Seneca says Aristotle said.
All poets are mad, Robert Burton corroborated.
A fine madness, being how Michael Drayton read it in the case of Marlowe.
Gainsborough played the bass viol.
Laird of Auchinleck.
Written with the imagination of a drunken savage.
Said Voltaire of Hamlet.
There is no foulness conceivable to the mind of man that has not been poured forth into its imbecile pages.
Said Alfred Noyes of Ulysses.
Tom Macaulay, he was commonly called.
Jacques Offenbach died of a heart condition.
Jussi Bjoerling died of a heart condition.
Donatello kept extraordinary amounts of cash in a basket hung from the ceiling in his studio. Quite literally for his workmen or friends to take as they saw fit.
Seneca was a usurer.
Ammannato, Ammannato, che bel marmo hai rovinato!
What beautiful marble you have ruined. Said contemporary Florentines of his Neptune Fountain in the Piazza della Signoria.
Nothing but a continued Heap of Riddles, Theobald found in Donne.
And death i think is no parenthesis.
At least two people were drowned in the Seine because of the crush along the route of Victor Hugo’s funeral.
Antonello da Messina died of pleurisy.
The maniac who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pietà in 1972.
His counterpart who spray-painted Kill Lies All on the Guernica in 1974.
The second of whom actually later owned an art gallery in SoHo.
Knut Hamsun, at twenty-five, was told he had three months to live because of rampant tuberculosis.
And died at ninety-three.
Oscar Wilde wrote Salomé in French.
En attendant Godot.
Lawrence Tibbett died after an automobile crash.
If it is art it is not for all, and if it is for all it is not art.
Said Schoenberg.
Three or four years after the Civil War, Thomas Carlyle told the American Charles Eliot Norton that slavery should be reinstituted.
Or that blacks should be eliminated altogether.
Starvation and/or massacre being obligingly suggested.
Durendal. Olifant.
A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up and be shot at.
Said Hardy when he ceased writing novels after the exorbitant denunciations of Jude the Obscure.
Andrea del Sarto’s wife, Lucrezia.
Could she have conceivably for all the years been misabused?
Elizabeth Bishop died of a cerebral aneurysm.
Elizabeth Bishop’s mother died mad.
Lessing died of a stroke, though already wasted by severe asthma and damaged lungs.
Plotinus died of what was probably throat cancer.
Rafael Sabatini’s father was John McCormack’s singing teacher.
An unforgotten lifetime debt of Writer’s, since adolescence:
To Constance Garnett.
Half-cracked. Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s earliest evaluation of Emily Dickinson.
Cyrano de Bergerac died in an accident involving a falling beam.
Mitsubishi manufactured the torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor.
Porsche manufactured tanks.
O the Chimneys.
Robert Browning died of a heart attack.
This is also a continued heap of riddles, if Writer says so.
Simplify, simplify.
For a time, Rossetti, Swinburne, and George Meredith shared a house in Chelsea.
For a time, Domenichino, Guido Reni, and Francesco Albani roomed together in Rome.
The latter three later despising each other.
Whenever possible, Erasmus sought out Jewish physicians.
Whenever possible, Montaigne sought out Jewish physicians.
Rubens died of arteriosclerosis.
Orwell died of tuberculosis.
Kathleen Mavourneen.
Artemisia Gentileschi. Agostino Tassi.
Sir Thomas Wyatt died of an undiagnosed fever.
Heine died of the spinal paralysis, presumably syphilitic, that had confined him to what he referred to as his mattress-tomb for his last eight years.
Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Theseus.
Didier. Férol. Langlois.
The next shot went into a brain which was already dead.
Vicente Huidobro died of a stroke.
Did Ben Jonson have any notion that Drummond of Hawthornden was writing all that down?
Darling, you’ll never guess what happened in the men’s room at the New School for Social Research tonight!
Oh, dear. Not all the way down the inside of your pants leg again?
It is not necessary to have dandruff to be a genius, Puccini said.
I started walking home across the bridge.
Beethoven, Gluck, Schubert, and Brahms are buried in the same Vienna cemetery.
Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau are buried in the same one in Concord.
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s father was a rabbi.
Marc Chagall was the grandson of a shohet.
Braque, an image of Picasso at the moment of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon:
Drinking turpentine and spitting fire.
Writer reminding himself that the Avignon here was a brothel in Barcelona, not the city.
What artists do cannot be called work.
Says Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.
La Grosse Margot.
The precious, pinchbeck, ultimately often flat prose of Vladimir Nabokov.
The fundamentally uninteresting sum total of his work.
Some dozen years after Berlin Alexanderplatz, living on handouts as a wartime refugee in California, Alfred Doeblin applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. With a recommendation from Thomas Mann.
Guess.
The friendship of Lorca and Salvador Dali.
It may be for years, and it may be forever.
Or even a polyphonic opera of a kind, if Writer says that too.
André Chénier had published only two poems when he was guillotined.
Skepti
c: And can you possibly have read all these walls of books?
Anatole France: Not one tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?
Gabriele Münter.
Lise Meitner.
Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin.
Aldous Huxley died on the same day as John F. Kennedy.
Nathanael West died one day after F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Hemingway died one day after Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
West and Fitzgerald had had dinner together one week earlier.
Machado de Assis was an epileptic.
Twice as many baseball batters are hit by a pitch on days when the temperature is in the nineties as when it is in the seventies.
Rousseau was categorically convinced of the existence of vampires.
Gammer Gurton’s Needle.
Goldengrove unleaving.
It took Eliot forty years to allow that the word Jew in Gerontion might be capitalized.
Then Abraham fell upon his face and laughed.
June 16, 1904.
Stephen Dedalus has not had a bath since October 1903.
Transnistria.
Edward Teller lost a foot in a streetcar accident.
Pär Lagerkvist died of a stroke.
Howells and Mark Twain once canceled a dinner they had planned for Maxim Gorky—after discovering that the woman he had sailed from Russia with was not his wife.