Authors: David Markson
Reader's Block (10 page)
Dies Irae.
Kafka laughed repeatedly when he was reading his own work.
Milena Jesenska died at Ravensbriick.
The one describes what has happened, the other what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophical and serious than history.
Dasjudentum in derMusik.
Humphrey Cobb was wounded, and gassed twice, in World War I.
Paths of Glory
was his only book.
At the gatehouse, the window near which Protagonist generally chooses to sit looks out on the graves rather than on the street.
With snow, the ranks of still white stone can assume an almost occult unreality.
Frequently he will walk the nearby deserted streets in snow.
Ignis fatuus.
Moses spoke with a stutter. As did Virgil.
And Somerset Maugham. And Philip Larkin.
Raphael’s birth and death both occurred on Good Friday.
I hope you are getting some exercise and listening to music, dear Salman.
Early in the
Iliad,
on the battlements above the Scaean Gate, Helen points out the several Greek chieftains for the benefit of King Priam.
After the siege has ostensibly been in effect for a decade.
Bartlebooth.
Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire in a mental hospital in Ashe-ville, North Carolina.
Our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko was once married to Bella Akhmadulina.
Does one know today with whom Columbus sailed when he discovered America?
Said Freud after his break with Jung.
The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines.
Beatrice Silverman.
Adele Morales.
Lady Jean Campbell.
Beverly Bentley.
Carol Stevens.
Norris Church.
Romain Roiland, on Kathe KoUwitz: the voice of the silence of the sacrificed.
Leave the bum be. He’s just drunk.
October 12, 1492. At 2
A.M.,
the lookout on the
Pinta.
Named Rodrigo de Triana.
No light; but rather darkness visible.
Leonard Warren collapsed and died, on stage, during a performance of
La Forza del Destino
at the Metropolitan Opera.
Even in the worst of snows, Protagonist is hatless.
Elizabeth Shaw Melville:
Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.
Watching abstractedly among the ancient oaks as the entire cemetery commences to disappear.
Bertha Mason. Thornfield Hall.
Semper incumbebat libris.
Spoken of Abelard.
Not realizing that one’s future is already one’s present even as that too is dissolving into past.
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Two years after the book’s appearance Borowski committed suicide.
Via gas.
Raymond Chandler was so obsessive about typo-free manuscripts that to cut down on the amount of his retyping he finally worked on half pages.
Edmund Wilson once proposed marriage to Djuna Barnes.
How often does the woman come to the grave?
What sort of regularity is there in the visits?
Does she sometimes fail to come?
Roald Dahl was an anti-Semite.
The 1941
Concise Cambridge History of English Literature
said that no one would ever read
Ulysses
even if copies were given away.
Protagonist shoveling some of the snow? Into and along the pathways?
Hers?
Gitanjalu
Soutine died in Paris in 1943. As a Jew under the German occupation he could be given only the most unobtrusive of funerals. Picasso and Cocteau followed his coffin, however.
Simonides concluded it was better to be rich than wise.
Since I notice that the wise spend most of their time at the doorsteps of the rich.
Paula Modersohn-Becker was dead at thirty-one.
Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, so that he may be smitten, and die.
Beniamino Gigli was once an apprentice in a tailor shop.
Benjamin Jowett said he read
Pickwick Papers
at least twice every year.
Not one of the philosophic essays of Charles Sanders Peirce appeared in book form in his lifetime.
Fatwa.
Myles na Gopaleen.
The opening sentence of Bulwer-Lytton’s
Paul Clifford.
Proust and Henri Bergson were cousins by marriage.
Kant knew no music. And said that reading novels diluted the mind.
Though I never saw him, or had any personal communication with him, now that he is suddenly dead I realize that he was nearer, dearer, and more important to me than anyone else.
Said Tolstoy of Dostoievsky.
No greater man ever walked the earth than he.
Said Michelangelo of Dante.
Can Reader do anything unusual with the name he puts on the stone at which the woman kneels?
How recent will he make its dates?
Has he even yet determined the age of the woman herself?
Or whether Protagonist does in fact catch sight of her elsewhere?
Counterfactual conditionals.
Beckett’s
Murphy
was rejected by forty-two publishers.
Gilles Deleuze committed suicide.
Factoryville, Pennsylvania. Donora, Pennsylvania. Gretna, Louisiana. Van Meter, Iowa.
Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.
Gabriele D’Annunzio lost an eye in combat with the Italian air force in World War I.
Thrushcross Grange.
Lautréamont was born in Montevideo. Jules Laforgue was born in Montevideo. Jules Supervielie was born in Montevideo.
Once more before I die I will read
Don Quixote,
said Gissing.
Graham Greene was an anti-Semite.
I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me.
O yes! I am poison’d; mother, make my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wald lie down.
Born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad, and that was his only patrimony.
Has Reader made note of enough women for Protagonist’s background? Considering all the years involved?
Remembering any number of others who could readily be appropriated.
Though leaving the critical question for Protagonist’s situation still.
Why this solitude now?
Where the Catherine Earnshaw or the Maggie Tulliver or the Sara Monday for these denatured days?
Rabbi Akiba was flayed alive.
Valéry, to Gide: Do you know anything more boring than the
Iliad?
William Sidney Porter became O. Henry while sitting out three years in jail for embezzlement.
Muschg.
Skoonj.
El Caballero de la Triste Figura.
Gerard Manley Hopkins is buried in Prospect Cemetery, Glasnevin. As is Maud Gonne.
As is Paddy Dignam.
Mrs. Maj. John MacBride.
Remembering a Rachel and an Anne and a Lisa and an Irene.
And an Andrea and a Judith.
And a second Susan.
Among more.
Kay Sage committed suicide.
Andre Chénier died on the guillotine.
Come un bel dì di maggio.
Walafrid Strabo drowned in the Loire.
Siger of Brabant was stabbed to death by a deranged scribe.
Either it is raining or it is not raining.
Habitually, Protagonist brings a newspaper or a book when he eats at the restaurant. Although he is no more intruded upon here than at the saloon.
There being only a lunch counter and several booths in any case. Normally an indifferent short-order cook and one graying waitress. Protagonist will puzzle at how they remain in business.
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
The curse is come upon me, cried
The Lady of Shalott.
Saint John Chrysostom was an anti-Semite.
And insisted that Jesus had never laughed.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Nine volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.
Philip Freneau died after becoming lost in a snowstorm. On his way home from a tavern.
Milton was paid five pounds for
Paradise Lost.
Yeats once asked Hardy how he coped with the endless copies of his books sent to him with requests for inscriptions.
Hardy led Yeats to a back closet. Piled from floor to ceiling.
Even with the idea of feeble stolen electricity at the gatehouse dismissed, Reader remains locked in on a nighttime image of only the faintest glow from a single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window.
Protagonist squinting beneath the dimmest of reading lamps.
The restaurant in the same Hopper wintry-sun mode as the saloon, however.
Isabel Rawsthorne.
According to Kenneth Tynan, a
corrida
with Antonio Ordonez was more stirring than any other performance by any other sort of artist he might name.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner committed suicide.
Los Pasos Perdidos.
Rosalba Camera was blind in the last years of her life. Mary Cassatt was blind in the last years of her life.
Chidiock Tichborne. Who may have been as young as eighteen when he was executed at the Tower for plotting against Elizabeth in 1586.
And was disemboweled before he was extinct, as the Tower’s report had it.
Jean Francois Champollion.
Hayim Lenski died of starvation in a Soviet labor camp. Sent there for having written poems in Hebrew.
Die Zauberflöte.
Der Zauberberg.
For a certain period in his mid-twenties Vincent Van Gogh could not pass a church without breaking into tears.
And went unbathed, which he construed as sanctifying.
I want to be buried with this novel clasped to my heart.
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide by asphyxiating himself with a plastic bag.
Giuseppe Berto was a prisoner of war in Texas at the end of World War II.
Wyndham Lewis was an anti-Semite.
An audience of fully three thousand gave Akhmatova a standing ovation after a reading in Moscow in 1944.
About which Stalin, hearing of it: Who
organized
this response?
Nobody comes. Nobody calls.
Giuseppina Strepponi. Busseto.
Poe was probably impotent.
Byron, Scott, Shelley, and Wordsworth all particularly admired the poetry of Felicia Dorothea Hemans.
Felicia Dorothea Hemans wrote The boy stood on the burning deck.
We had roast pig to eat before Pickett’s charge.
Samuel Johnson’s acquaintance Oliver Edwards, who might have been a philosopher.
But that cheerfulness was always breaking in.
Jacob Epstein, to a niece: Call me Epstein. Would you have called him Uncle Donatello?
Enrico Fermi: Where are they?
The books Shelley had with him when he drowned were a Keats and a Sophocles.
The Marquis de Sade died in a lunatic asylum.
Otherwise well-informed readers who would be surprised to learn that the site of ancient Troy is in Turkey.
Where Nazim Hikmet’s work was banned through virtually all of his writing life.
While being translated into more languages than probably any other twentieth-century poet’s.
Hilda Doolittle was once a patient of Freud’s.
Was Sir Thomas Wyatt one of Anne Boleyn’s lovers? Is it certain she had lovers?
Dollars damn me.
Fata morgana.
Some few friends, at least, from that earlier existence, with whom Reader should have Protagonist correspond?