Reader's Block (15 page)

Michael Ventris died in a car crash.

Dorothea Lange’s
Migrant Mother.

Did the woman herself ever see the photograph?

Yeats died in southern France in 1939. His body was returned to Ireland on an Irish destroyer after World War II.

Pier Angeli committed suicide.

Joe Orton was murdered.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Bernal Diaz del Castillo.

Agnes von Kurowsky.

Now I know you. No field, no home, no wife, no woman—no friends, no love.

Jacques Louis David was repeatedly drawn to sketch prisoners being led to the guillotine.

Isadora Duncan was strangled when her long scarf became caught in a wheel of her open Bugatti.

God, children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!

Linear B.

Dear me, I am about to become a god.

Karl Marx was an anti-Semite.

Karl Marx was descended on both sides from long lines of rabbis and Talmudic scholars.

Zyklon B.

Charles Martel.

Benjamin Robert Haydon committed suicide.

On the evidence, Shakespeare’s
small Latin
was plainly more than that.

Oft did I weary of wrestling with thee.

Carved an unknown galley slave into an oar.

And Rudyard Kipling into his desk.

At the house on the beach, what becomes of Protagonist’s path to the highway when the snows are heavier than those Reader has visualized?

What is the winter really like, precisely at ocean’s edge?

He stank so badly, though we were great chums

I had to leave him; then rats ate his thumbs.

Watching abstractedly before the dunes as the entire shore commences to disappear?

Roger van der Weyden signed none of his paintings.

Either as Roger van der Weyden or Rogier de la Pasture.

J

oyce was influential enough to be able to aid at least a dozen Jews in escaping from Nazi Germany. Hermann Broch among them.

Tekiah. Shevarim. Teruah. Tekiab.

It remains a scandal to philosophy that there is as yet no satisfactory proof of an external world, Kant said.

Does Protagonist continue to walk the beach at his usual hour now also?

But surely not at this time of year a woman who does the same?

Robert Lowell died of a heart attack in a taxi.

After his cremation, Gandhi’s ashes were scattered into the Ganges, considered sacred. At Allahabad.

Where it and the Jumna conjoin.

Ruth Kligman, who was thrown clear in the crash that killed Jackson Pollock and a friend of hers, later had an affair with Willem de Kooning.

And later had an affair with Franz Kline.

Caponegro. Latiolais.

Darling Jill.

Robert Louis Stevenson died of a cerebral hemorrhage at forty-four, but had been emaciated by tuberculosis before that. A bundle of sticks in a bag, Henry Adams said he looked like.

Doch das Sein
—
was ist das Sein?

Isaac Babel disappeared in one of Stalin’s purges. Nothing whatsoever is known about his death.

Conversely, orders allegedly given by Stalin in regard to Pasternak: Don’t touch the cloud-dweller.

Women have, in general, no love of any art; they have no proper knowledge of any; and they have no genius.

Said Rousseau.

When Stalin himself was found dead, a recording of Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto lay on his turntable.

Kipling was an anti-Semite.

At thirty-five, Antonio Machado married a fifteen-year-old. Who died when Machado was thirty-eight.

Or possibly now someone he will never see closely at all, not coming toward him but moving in his same direction? And always a fair distance ahead?

Continuing on to become a kind of actualized vanishing point when Protagonist himself halts?

Stefan Zweig committed suicide.

Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.

John Masefield was fourteen when he first went to sea.

David Alfaro Siqueiros once attempted to assassinate Trotsky.

Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is right-wise king born of all England.

Verse deemed unsuitable to the state.

Is Noah’s drunkenness the earliest anywhere taken note of?

Avalokiteshvara.

Vanishing point.

She?

Marcel Proust collected signatures for petitions in protest against the conviction of Dreyfus.

Hugh Casey shot himself.

Saint John of Capistrano was an anti-Semite.

Fly’s Photograph Gallery.

Arthur Symons on Mallarme:

He made neither intrusion upon nor concession to those who, after all, were not obliged to read him.

Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe.

Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Even in the solemn moments of the mass, when prayer should be the purest… when I should groan for what I have done, I sigh for what I have lost.

Ramon Mercader.

Goethe, to Eckermann: Have all the nations of the world since Euripides produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?

Apollinaire came extremely close to being permanently paralyzed by a head wound in World War I.

Once more before he dies Protagonist will read
Moll Flanders.

My father’s a judge.

My mother pleaded her belly.

Sir Richard Burton, of the
Kama Sutra,
spoke twenty-nine languages.

Tchaikovsky was an anti-Semite.

Thomas Mann’s definition of a writer. Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Mrs. Hutchinson.

Harry Crosby shot himself in the head. After first shooting the young married woman with whom he was having an affair.

At sixteen, Montserrat Caballe was working in a handkerchief factory in Barcelona.

Plautus once worked in a flour mill.

Three years after Baudelaire’s death, the photographer Nadar glimpsed Jeanne Duval distantly, on crutches, on a Paris street.

There is no further word of her.

Protagonist obtusely hatless in these snows too?

Patterned after whom?

Faulkner died following a fall from a horse.

Like Keats’s father.

The
Aeneid
is rife with allusions to Homer, but also to Homeric criticism. It was Virgil’s assumption that his readers would recognize both.

Beiderbecke. Trumbauer.

The odd death of Emile Zola. From smoke inhalation, when a chimney in a bedroom fireplace backed up.

Dormir nonchalamment a V ombre de ses seins.

Hannibal committed suicide via poison.

Murray Gell-Mann.

The first person Dickens wanted to meet, on his first visit to America, was William Cullen Bryant.

Civilization and Its Distant Tents.

Cartons like an impermanent sculpture of found objects. On a stairway ending at a sealed-off door.

He had become a dirty bourgeois.

Lord, don’t help us. But don’t muck it up for us either.

Henry James most likely died a virgin. John Ruskin indisputably did.

Whistler was an anti-Semite.

Casals practiced Bach’s six suites for solo cello for twelve years before performing one in public.

Oh! do not add to my miseries by your constancy.

For Protagonist’s literary past:

Protagonist: Good Lord. Is that the same T-shirt of mine you put on when you were here six days ago?

Jack Kerouac: Oh, well. But I did have a shower.

Bhartrihari.

And money answereth all things.

Adrienne Rich’s husband committed suicide.

Elizabeth I did a translation of
The Consolation of Philosophy.

As had Chaucer.

As had King Alfred.

Though in the latter’s instance into Anglo-Saxon.

Tending to forget that the account of the Good Samaritan, in Luke, is an anti-Semitic parable.

Tending to forget that Plato advocated totalitarianism.

La Noche Triste.

Aharon Appelfeld escaped from a Nazi labor camp at the age of eight. Eight. And spent three years hiding in the forests of Romania and the Ukraine.

Jerzy Kosinski did nothing of the kind.

Edith Metzger.

Anaxagoras committed suicide by starving himself.

In the first year of the eighty-eighth Olympiad.

And when asked near the end how he wished to be commemorated, said schoolchildren should be given a holiday.

In 1811 a huge Cimabue altarpiece of a Madonna and angels, which has been the Louvre’s finest thirteenth-century offering ever since, was bought in Tuscany for five francs.

0 lente, lente currite, noctis equi!

Was the
diegetic diachrony
of narration truly damaged by Flaubert, as Lyotard says?

Diegetic, dialogic, hegemonic. Privilege, as a verb. Foreground, as a verb. Valorize. Praxis. Simulacra. Metafiction. Logocentrism. Phallocentrism. Discourse. Signifier/signified. Aporia.

Late capitalism. Gynophobia.

Text.

None of the above.

Lang, Leaf, and Myers; Butcher and Lang. The King James Homer.

The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

Also tending to forget that character in
The Plague,
Joseph Grand? Who rewrites the same opening sentence for a novel eternally, with only minimal variations?

Justinian was an anti-Semite.

In 1959, in Mexico City, Reader happened upon a Shakespeare and Company
Ulysses
for pennies in a thieves’ market. Its front cover had faded and was detached, the spine and back cover were missing. Nor was it a first printing.

Nonetheless.

Clinamen. Tessera. Kenosis.

Abednego.

Coleman Dowell committed suicide in a leap from a balcony.

As of 1994, after its restoration, seventeen of the draped figures in Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment
remained so. Presumably this time for curatorial reasons only, however.

Raskolnikov has come to this place. Bloom has come to this place. Rieux has come to this place.

Long hence, perhaps, Diotima,

I shall see you here.

Esther Johnson. Esther Vanhomrigh.

Vanishing point.

Melville and Whitman were born within two months of each other and died within six. And were in close proximity in or near New York through much of their lives.

Never meeting.

Mycenae.

As a master at a boy’s school in London during World War I, Eliot tried to teach his pupils baseball. John Betjeman included.

Sergei Esenin was an anti-Semite.

Kierkegaard was probably impotent.

Miss J. Hunter Dunn.

Longfellow’s first wife died young. The second, mother of grave Alice, laughing Allegra, and Edith with the golden hair, was burned to death when her clothing caught fire while she was melting sealing wax.

The name Salome translates from the Hebrew as
peaceful.

Robert Desnos, who had been tortured by the Gestapo for working with the French Resistance, survived periods in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But died of typhus just as the camps were being liberated.

Gib mir den Kopf des Jokanaan!

James Leo Herlihy committed suicide with sleeping pills.

The Martello tower at Sandycove is near Dalkey. Which is adjacent to Sallynoggin.

Horse Badorties.

A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so, Einstein said.

Confusing one’s mental picture of Marguerite Duras and Jeanne Moreau.

Don Bildow. At the Swiss end of the Simplon Tunnel.