This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Frank Lloyd Wright died of a heart attack after surgery.

  Hilda Doolittle died of the flu, though already assaulted by a heart attack and a stroke.

  Even after Einstein on the Beach had been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Philip Glass was driving a taxi in New York City.

  Hypatia, who was battered to death by Christian fanatics.

  Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, Lucretius said.

  Such are the evils that religion prompts.

  Emotion recollected in tranquility.

  The best words in the best order.

  Vivaldi died of no one knows what.

  Of internal fire, the 1741 Vienna church registry having poetically settled for.

  A social and moral pervert, Theodore Roosevelt called Tolstoy.

  Roosevelt on Henry James:

  A miserable little snob.

  On Thomas Paine:

  A filthy little atheist.

  Spinoza’s tomb. At the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague.

  It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.

  S. Y. Agnon died of a heart attack.

  Dostoievsky’s second wife, Anna, adding a note of charm to a recollection of Dostoievsky pawning something:

  He sat there for over an hour—my poor, poor Fedya. So sweet, and so brilliant and altogether fine, and he had to sit and wait among a lot of Jews.

  Stuck-groove music.

  When the canvas is on the floor, I feel closer to it.

  Said Jackson Pollock.

  Marie Corelli was Charles Mackay’s daughter.

  Marcia Davenport was Alma Gluck’s.

  Robert Penn Warren died of prostate cancer.

  Joshua Reynolds died blind.

  After having been deaf through most of his life.

  Only when the world itself is destroyed will the verses of Lucretius perish.

  Said Ovid.

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan died profoundly in debt.

  Yet was granted a spectacular Westminster Abbey funeral.

  Molière died after bursting a blood vessel in a convulsive tubercular coughing fit and choking on his own blood.

  Panta rei, ouden menei.

  It is very difficult to understand and appreciate the generation that follows you, Matisse said.

  I only know that summer sang in me

  A little while, that in me sings no more.

  The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together in the eternal book.

  The friendship of Byron and Stendhal.

  According to Herodotus, Xerxes literally ordered that the Hellespont be given three hundred lashes when a storm washed away a bridge he had only then constructed for his invasion of the West.

  And as an incidental afterthought also ordered his chief engineers beheaded.

  Gary Cooper died of lung cancer.

  Wilhelm Reich died in Lewisburg Penitentiary.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin died after giving birth to the infant girl who would one day marry Shelley.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin died after giving birth to the infant girl who would one day write Frankenstein.

  Fanny Brawne’s mother died in an accident in which her clothing caught on fire.

  Things from which one would avert one’s eyes even in a brothel.

  Said Aretino in a letter to Michelangelo condemning The Last Judgment.

  Which at least three different popes subsequently came close to having removed.

  Rarely remembering that it was Congreve who said Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

  Rarely remembering that it was Congreve who said Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

  In the same play.

  People none of whose business it is repeatedly excising the Hughes from the Yorkshire gravestone inscribed Sylvia Plath Hughes.

  Moses Mendelssohn died of a stroke.

  Felix Mendelssohn died of a stroke.

  Slabtown, Tennessee, Grace Moore was born in.

  If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth Writer were to burn a Roy Lichtenstein—qualms?

  Qualmless.

  Kierkegaard was regularly beaten up by his schoolmates.

  Yeats aussi.

  Christina Rossetti died while praying.

  Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore.

  The Muses’ darling, Peele called Marlowe.

  O Rare Ben Jonson.

  So it befell in that affray that the said Ingram, in defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid of the value of 12d. gave the said Christopher then & there a mortal wound over his right eye of the depth of two inches & of the width of one inch; of which mortal wound the aforesaid Christopher Morley then & there instantly died.

  Negative capability.

  Sartre died blind.

  Having been strabismic.

  Like Menander.

  Splendid rooms and elegant furnishings are for people who have no thoughts, Goethe said.

  Even in a palace it is possible to live well, said Marcus Aurelius.

  If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead.

  Ludwig Boltzmann took piano lessons from Anton Bruckner.

  Eleanor Bull’s.

  Deptford Strand.

  Andrew Marvell died of what was called tertian ague. Probably meaning malaria.

  Which his physician misdiagnosed.

  Thackeray died of what was called a cerebral effusion. Meaning either a brain hemorrhage or a stroke.

  Jacob Barsimson. New Amsterdam, August 1654.

  Lasse Viren.

  No one, in any language, has ever written a novel that equals or even approaches Clarissa, said Rousseau.

  On a shelf with the Bible, Euripides, and Sophocles, said Diderot of the same book.

  Hannah Arendt died of a heart attack.

  Watteau died of tuberculosis.

  The little Marcel, at fourteen, asked to name life’s greatest unhappiness:

  To be separated from maman.

  Dear Sir:

  I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. Your review is before me. Shortly it will be behind me.

  Did the American Indian not have the wheel?

  Dies Irae.

  A presumptuous mediocrity, Tchaikovsky called Brahms.

  Undoubtedly the best woman poet of our time, Hardy called Charlotte Mew.

  How does Gertrude know all of the physical details of Ophelia’s death with such exactness?

  Soldiers! An innocent man is being degraded! Soldiers! An innocent is dishonored! Long live France!

  Zola never met Dreyfus.

  Max Reger.

  Petrarch’s copy of Virgil, with a marginal note in his own handwriting about the death of Laura in the Black Death, is still extant in a library in Milan.

  The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead

  Did squeak and jibber in the Roman streets.

  Or an ersatz prose alternative to The Waste Land, if Writer so suggests.

  William of Ockham also died in the Black Death.

  Robert Burns had nine illegitimate children.

  Goya had nineteen legitimate children, by one wife.

  And several others otherwise.

  Augustus John’s habit of patting every passing London youngster on the head:

  In case it is one of mine.

  Brainsick. Troilus’s word for Cassandra in Troilus and Cressida.

  Lowell, Massachusetts, James McNeill Whistler was born in.

  Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac was born in.

  Dies irae, dies illa

  Solvet saeclum in favilla.

  In one of his reincarnations, Pythagoras was a fish. And in another a bird.

  He said.

  Met him pike hoses.

  In 1537, François Rabelais taught a course on Hippocrates at the school of medicine in Montpellier. In Greek.
r />   Diego Rivera’s affair with Paulette Goddard.

  Diego Rivera’s affair with Louise Nevelson.

  Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: The Artist’s Mother.

  To be precise.

  You ever read that, that Cousin Bette? Should I go on with it?

  Virtually every inadequacy in recent French literature is due to absinthe, Daudet said in the late 1800s.

  Annals I 65. Where Tacitus actually does, does, call a spade an implement for digging earth and cutting turf.

  Paul Klee died of cardiac arrest after years of enduring scleroderma.

  Sarah Orne Jewett died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Thomas of Celano.

  I have wasted all my youth chained to this tomb.

  Michelangelo protested to Julius II.

  L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.

  Why hasn’t Writer ever known? What is the black liquid that spills out of the dead Emma Bovary’s mouth?

  O death, where is thy sting at?

  Les Rougon-Macquart.

  Montesquieu died of pneumonia.

  Eliot pursued graduate studies in the philosophy of F. H. Bradley, in part at Merton College, Oxford, where Bradley was still a lifetime fellow.

  Presumably ignoring the rumor that Bradley went about at night shooting people’s cats.

  Wallace Stegner died after an automobile crash.

  Bradley died of blood poisoning.

  Liam O’Flaherty was shell-shocked on the Western Front in World War I.

  Roger Bacon probably did not invent eyeglasses.

  Forgetting, when starting to reread The Hamlet, that her name before the end will become Eula Varner Snopes.

  And that in a later Snopes novel she will shoot herself.

  Richard Bentley died of pleurisy.

  The maniac who went at Rembrandt’s Night Watch with a bread knife in the Rijksmuseum in 1975.

  His counterpart who slashed a Barnett Newman in a different Amsterdam museum in 1986—and another Newman in the same museum a decade later.

  No one ever put up a statue of a critic.

  Said Sibelius.

  Elderly, shabby, obscure, disreputable, pursued by debts, with only a noisy tenement room to work in.

  Being a description by Gerald Brenan of the man who was writing Don Quixote.

  The apparent evidence that two of Cervantes’ sisters, and a niece, and his illegitimate daughter, became prostitutes—and in the very period of the book’s first success.

  Frida Kahlo’s affair with Leon Trotsky.

  The best French novelist of their era, Gide called Simenon.

  Leaving moot the question of which of the man’s more than five hundred novels he had in mind.

  Stop pawing me, she said. You old headless horseman Ichabod Crane.

  Rilke was devoted to polishing furniture.

  Jackson Pollock baked pies.

  Origen castrated himself.

  No artist tolerates reality, Camus said.

  Virgil spent seven years writing the Georgics.

  Meaning an average of one line per day.

  Pablo Neruda died of leukemia.

  Nazim Hikmet died of a heart attack.

  How beautiful yellow is!

  Says a van Gogh letter.

  Sortes Virgilianae.

  Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

  Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight.

  Dorothy L. Sayers died of a stroke.

  If we regard the Fish as a Divine Life symbol of immemorial antiquity, we shall not go very far astray.

  Jack Johnson died in an automobile crash.

  Nikos Kazantzakis died of the flu.

  Jessie Laidlay Weston.

  Laurence Sterne’s realization roughly a third of the way through Tristram Shandy that the book lacks a preface.

  Whereupon he inserts one right where he is.

  Jack Donne’s transparently excessive eulogy for his patron’s young daughter—whom he had never met or even seen.

  If it had been written of ye Virgin Marie it had been something, Jonson told him.

  William Saroyan died of prostate cancer.

  Somerset Maugham once had four plays running simultaneously in London.

  How much greater than it already is would the Odyssey seem if there had never happened to be an Iliad for it to be compared with?

  St. John of the Cross was the son of a weaver.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer died of throat cancer.

  Maugham died of a stroke.

  At last she grew common and infamous and gott the Pox, of which she died.

  Says Aubrey’s Brief Lives of one Elizabeth Broughton.

  Paper will put up with anything that’s written on it.

  Said Stalin.

  The best geometer in the world, Hobbes claimed Descartes could have become.

  But that he had no head for philosophy.

  Kurt Weill died of a heart attack.

  Turner was considerably less than fastidious about cleanliness.

  The Reader.

  Being Aristotle’s nickname at Plato’s Academy.

  A colt that kicks its mother.

  Being what Plato personally called him after an early disagreement.

  Samuel ha-Nagid.

  Say it out for God’s sake and have done with it.

  Said William James to Henry.

  Molokai. June 1885.

  We lepers.

  Anagnostes.

  No Man is my name, and No Man they call me.

  A Walk in the Sun.

  A decade after Nelson’s death at Trafalgar, Emma Hamilton died in poverty.

  Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Susan Sontag.

  St. Catherine of Siena was illiterate.

  Kafka was a vegetarian.

  The English think soap is civilization.

  Treitschke said.

  Theodore Roethke died of a coronary occlusion.

  At least one Boston newspaper suggested in all seriousness that Whitman should be horsewhipped for Leaves of Grass.

  Charlotte Salomon died in Auschwitz at twenty-six.

  Pavel Friedman died in Auschwitz at nineteen. Or younger.

  Would Moe Berg really have shot Heisenberg?

  Góngora died of apoplexy.

  Balzac wrote more than two thousand characters into his Comédie humaine.

  There are 260,430 words in Ulysses.

  Calvin died of hemorrhages of the lungs.

  Oswiecim.

  Exeunt.

  Molière was never elected to the French Academy.

  Balzac was never elected to the French Academy.

  Was it John Searle who called Jacques Derrida the sort of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name?

  I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

  Josquin des Prez.

  It took ten years after her suicide for Jeanne Hébuterne’s family to allow her remains to be reburied beside Modigliani’s in the Jewish section of Père Lachaise.

  Adelaide Procter. Mrs. Henry Wood.

  Géricault died after a fall from a horse.

  Hindemith died of a stroke.

  Nebuchadnezzar. Who razed Jerusalem.

  And went mad.

  And ate grass.

  Cardinal Spellman of New York once sent Pope Pius XII a Cadillac automobile with solid gold door handles.

  Wyatt Earp died of chronic cystitis.

  Because night is here and the barbarians have not appeared.

  Charles Lamb’s insuperable proclivity to gin, Carlyle termed it.

  Frobisher. Hawkins. Drake.

  Hitler typed with two fingers.

  Mencken typed with two fingers.

  Beethoven washed excessively.

  Penthesilea.

  The speculation that Dante spent time in Paris.

  Or even at Oxford.

  The possibility that on a political mission that took him to Florence, Chaucer met Boccaccio.

  Charlotte Corday was
a great-grandniece of Corneille.

  And devoted the morning to reading Plutarch at his bloodiest before stabbing Marat.

  Or a treatise on the nature of man, if Writer so labels it.

  He had catched a great cold, had he no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed.

  Said Thomas Fuller.

  Potatoes were not known in ancient Rome.

  Tomatoes were not known in ancient Rome.

  Oranges were not known in ancient Rome.

  Hume died of what was probably colon cancer.

  Edgar Degas never learned which side won World War I.

  Piet Mondrian never learned which side won World War II.

  Flicka von Stade.

  Manet died of tertiary syphilis.

  Truman Capote died of heart disease complicated by drug abuse.

  Marianne Moore taught stenography at the Carlisle Indian School, in Pennsylvania, when Jim Thorpe was a student.

  And fifty years later would remember that he held a door for her.

  Debussy’s first wife shot herself.

  As had a mistress, earlier.

  Caedmon was illiterate.

  The rue Descartes, Paul Verlaine died in.

  Avenue Émile Zola, Paul Celan’s last Paris address was on.

  A calle in Madrid was renamed in honor of Vicente Aleixandre while he was still living there.