This is Not a Novel (2 page)

Indicating incidentally that not one of the Greek warriors, during ten years at Troy, has ever sent a letter home.

Is John 8:6-8 the only place in the New Testament where Jesus is seen writing anything, if only marking on the ground with a finger?

The
Salon des Refuses.

Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe.

Joseph Conrad died of a heart seizure.

Does Writer even exist?

In a book without characters?

—And who are you? said he.—Don’t puzzle me; said I. Says
Tristram Shandy
VII 33.

Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue, said Flaubert.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

As
a sort of mantra, Kant would sometimes recite a list of people who had lived long lives, hoping to match them. He reached eighty.

Gluck’s face was pitted from smallpox.
Haydn’s face was pitted from smallpox.
Mozart’s face was pitted from smallpox.

Ludwig Wittgenstein died of prostate cancer.

My mind and fingers have worked like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, I devour them with fury. Wrote Liszt at twenty.

Obviously Writer exists.

Not being a character but the author, here.

Writer is
writing,
for heaven’s sake.

Landscape of the Urinating Multitudes,
Lorca called one of his New York poems.

Unmarried women should not bathe, said St. Jerome. Ever. And should embrace the most deliberate squalor. The less to breed temptation in the world.

Sappho was small and dark. Though is made blond and fleshy by Raphael in his
Parnassus
at the Vatican.

Horace was short and fat. Admitting this himself in the
Satires.

On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.

Paul Celan’s body was not found for eleven days after he stepped off the Pont Mirabeau. Nelly Sachs died on the day of his funeral.

Only when Euripides was being performed would Socrates go to the theater.

Rossini, on the
Symphony Fantastique:
What a good thing it isn’t music.

The Sabine farm.

Which is to say that Writer can even have headaches, then?

Writer can have headaches.

Walter Scott frequently manufactured chapter epigraphs out of whole cloth, saying what he wished said, and then wrote in either
Old Play or Anon,
as the alleged source.

Paul Robeson died of pneumonia and kidney failure.

The King James Bible, the First Folio—both during James I.

Who on the other hand did not pay Chapman the royal stipend due on his translations.

According to Plutarch, Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times at his death.

Dvorak, to Sibelius: I have composed too much. Brahms, to Dvorak: You do write a bit hastily.

Norman Mailer’s sixth wife was the same age as his oldest daughter.

O, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

Writer does have headaches.

In fact so did Virgil.

And Wordsworth.

Robert Lowell was in and out of mental institutions repeatedly.
Theodore Roethke was in and out of mental institutions repeatedly.
Roethke at least once taken in in handcuffs.

Madame Butterfly
is set in Nagasaki.

And they so eagerly pressed towards the body, and so many daggers were hacking together, that they cut one another; Brutus, particularly, received a wound in his hand, and all of them were besmeared with blood.

Anna Akhmatova died after a series of heart attacks.

A grace to say before reading the
Oiesteia
?
Before Kafka?

Wee Willie Keeler was five feet four and a half inches tall.
Balzac was five feet two.
Schubert was five one and a half.
Keats was less than five one.

A hyena that writes poetry on tombs, Nietzsche called Dante.

Martin Luther’s own words,
re
the origin at Wittenberg Monastery of the key principles of the Protestant Reformation:
This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower.

Anne Bradstreet died of what was then called consumption.

Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave.

Domenico Scarlatti was known to cross himself in veneration when taking about Handel’s skill at the organ.

This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.
Said Robert Rauschenberg in a telegram to a Paris art gallery.

Piero di Cosimo was found dead at the foot of a flight of stairs.

Hagia Sophia.

A woman named Mrs. Simon: Who watched an elderly man on a train put his head out a window during an unrelenting November thunderstorm and hold it there for fully ten minutes.

And a year later at the Royal Academy came upon Turner’s
Rain, Steam, and Speed
on exhibition.

Chi son? Chi son? Son un poeta. Che cosa faccio? Scrivo.

Lavoisier was guillotined in the Reign of Terror.

The holy curiosity of enquiry, Einstein spoke of.

Paul Gauguin apparently died of a heart attack.

I pray you, give me leave to go from hence;
I am not well: send the deed after me,
And I will sign it.

When I saw a performance of this play at Drury Lane, a beautiful pale-faced Englishwoman stood behind me in the box and wept profusely at the end of the fourth act, and called out repeatedly: The poor man is wronged. Wrote Heinrich Heine.

The assumption that Shylock is the merchant meant by the title.

James Joyce and Isaac Babel were once guests at the same dinner party.

E come vivo? Vivo.

This is a novel if Writer or Robert Rauschenberg says so.

Golder’s Green, Sigmund Freud’s ashes were buried at. In the Jewish cemetery where Conchita Supervia is also buried.

Before the Normans brought
despair,
the Anglo-Saxon word was
wanhope.

Edmund Wilson once punched Mary McCarthy in the face.

The frequent stags and deer in Lucas Cranach. Dogs barked when they saw them, someone said. As birds flying into the cathedral at Seville were said to peck at the fruit in Murillo’s
St. Anthony of Padua.
Or other birds in an identical story about grapes in a panel by Zeuxis two millennia earlier.

Greater than any of us, Yeats called Rabindranath Tagore.

Descartes had an illegitimate daughter, named Francine, whom he loved dearly. And who died at five.

Wanhope.

Joan Sutherland’s mezzo, Marilyn Home was sometimes mindlessly pigeonholed as, early on.

Wagner insisted that Christ was not a Jew. Though that Brahms was.

Murillo died after a fall from a scaffold.

Rudyard Kipling and Angela Thirkell were cousins.

I am going to drink myself dead, Modigliani made it known.

But died of tubercular meningitis.

Numerus clausus.

Ludwig Geyer.

And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it.

Gladstone read the
Iliad
thirty times.

Defoe, of the same opus:

A Ballad-Singer’s Fable to get a Penny. All for the Rescue of a Whore.

Benny Goodman died of a heart attack while practicing Mozart.

Eleonora Duse died of pneumonia. In Pittsburgh.

There is no bay across from China, for the dawn to come up like thunder out of, anywhere near any road to Mandalay. Cousin Ruddy.

I was twenty-five and he was sleeping with all the women, and at twenty-five you don’t stand for that, even from a poet. Said Marie Laurencin, of a breakup with Apollinaire.

This is even an epic poem, if Writer says so. Requiring no one’s corroboration.

Thomas Hardy was abusive to servants. Tolstoy more so.

Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail. Being Samuel Johnson’s précis of the poet’s life.
Despondency and madness. Being Wordsworth’s summation of the end of same.

Henry James once hid behind a tree to avoid having to spend time with Ford Madox Ford.

The actress in Dickens’ life was Ellen Ternan, who was twenty-seven years younger than he. Dickens would leave her a thousand pounds in his will.

Virtually every home in Puritan America possessed a copy of
The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Let the father of the baby gather cherries for thee!

Bernini walked to the Gesù to pray every evening for forty years.

Cranmer watched Latimer and Ridley being burned at the stake no more than five months before he would be put to death in the same manner himself.

Head Tide, Maine, Edward Arlington Robinson was born in.

Cuchulain is illegitimate.

Arthur is illegitimate.

Gawain is illegitimate.

Roland is illegitimate.

What is this castle call’d that stands hard by? They call it Agincourt.

The legend that Tycho Brahe died when his bladder burst after an interminable evening of drinking beer.

Djuna Barnes wrote in bed. Wearing makeup and with her hair done.
Edith Wharton wrote in bed. Scattering pages on the floor for a secretary to retrieve before typing.

Play the man, Master Ridley.

Hank Cinq.

Cavafy died of cancer of the larynx.

Pechorin.

Rarely, if ever, having had it come to mind: That Marcel Proust constantly wheezed.

Did St. Augustine, who was asthmatic equally?

Ophir, from where gold and sandalwood and ivory and apes and precious jewels and peacocks came. Which is mentioned a dozen times in seven different books of the Old Testament. And which no one has ever discovered the location of.

Also even a sequence of cantos awaiting numbering, if Writer says so.

Ingres spent fifteen years doing pencil portraits of tourists in Rome.

The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen-twenty.

Cellini’s narration of the casting of his
Perseus.

The inexplicable logic by which Thackeray convinced himself that Desdemona actually did have an affair with Cassio.

Christopher Smart died mad. And in debtors’ prison.

The Gesu, where St. Ignatius Loyola is buried. Bernini’s unimpeachable piety—

Yet the indisputable insinuation of orgasm in his
Ecstasy of St. Teresa.

Romain Holland died of tuberculosis.

Sigrid Undset died of a stroke.

The friendship of Heine and Karl Marx.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir were once teachers in the same
lycée.

The greatest lyric poet Germany ever knew, Gottfried Benn called Elsé Lasker-Schüler. Who at sixty-four was beaten with an iron pipe by young Nazis on a street in Berlin.

Marianne Moore once read a book on the craft of pitching by Christy Mathewson.

The apparent evidence that Lawrence Durrell committed incest with one of his daughters. Who eventually killed herself.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu died of breast cancer.

La vida de Lazarillo de Toimes.

I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. Says Darwin’s
Autobiography.

It is Arnaut Daniel, in
Purgatorio
XXVI, who was the original
miglior fabbro.

Byron knew no music.
Pope knew no music.
Johnson knew no music and very little of art, either.