Reader's Block (17 page)

Der Tod und das Madchen.

Who does walk the winter beach at water’s edge in the distance far ahead of Protagonist?

He is completely alone here now.

Memento mori.

Emmanuel Ringelblum and his wife and young son were executed in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944. Some of his
Notes
had been buried in milk cans.

Jane Ellen Harrison.

Courbet’s
Sleeping Women.

Bernard Buffet’s
Sleeping Women.

The Knave of Sceptres, Reversed: 111 News, Displeasure, Chagrin, Worry.

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

It is impossible for man’s happiness to be in this world. Said Aquinas.

Skokie, Illinois.

Missolonghi.

Jacqueline Picasso shot herself.

For Protagonist’s again distant literary past:

Malcolm Lowry: I have a funny story to tell you, about something that happened while you were out.

Protagonist: Happened? Oh, damn, I can smell it all over the apartment. You didn’t drink my shaving lotion?

Courbet’s
Origin of the World.

Carl Sandburg was the one poet who would probably gain from translation.

Said Frost.

Philip Larkin was an anti-Semite.

Areopagitica.

Heiligenstadt.

He hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination.

Francis William Bourdillon. Edward Rowland Sill. Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Winifred M. Letts.

Carel Fabritius was killed at thirty-two in a gunpowder depot explosion.

Not sorting books and phonograph records merely, but the narrowing residue of an entire life? Papers, files of correspondence?

Photographs of anyone other than his children, are there?

Are there manuscripts?

Pliny the Elder died of asphyxiation after landing a boat to get a closer view of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79
A.D.

Fritz Wunderlich died in a fall down a flight of stairs.

Is there a typewriter?

John Heminges and Henry Condell.

And why has Reader only this tardily determined that Protagonist will have had five or six books dedicated to him in that other incarnation also?

Even if he will not be certain he has copies of all of these in among his cartons any longer.

I think: Is it the blue dressing gown, or the white one? That’s very important. I must find that out—it’s very important.

Parmigianino died mad.

Anactoria.

Alan Ladd committed suicide.

My younger and shallower and vainer brother, William James spoke of Henry as.

So worthy a friend.

Chaucer was an anti-Semite.

Kafka died in 1924. All three of his younger sisters would later be incinerated by the Nazis.

Three.

Zinka Milanov. The Nile aria.

Christopher Caudwell was killed while covering a Loyalist retreat at the Jarama River in 1937. On his first day in combat.

Paideia.

Lucia Joyce, institutionalized, when told of her father’s death:

What is he doing underground, that idiot?

Henri Heine, he was naturally called in his decades in Paris.

Kneeling at a grave. Walking a beach.

Eternal devotion beside the point, after Beatrice’s death Dante had at least four children by the never-spoken-of Gemma Donati.

James Joyce’s daughter.

A forty-year-old Olympia portable, in fact. Not even electric.

Modeled after whose?

Pietro Torrigiano took a hammer to a Madonna he had sculpted in Seville when he was not paid what he anticipated.

And was jailed by the Inquisition for sacrilege.

Where in a masterpiece of spiting one’s face he starved himself to death.

Who’s the coon?

Asked Wallace Stevens
re
a photo of Gwendolyn Brooks.

Proust so admired Whistler that he once stole one of his gloves at a reception for a souvenir.

Gala Eluard, who became Gala Dali. Her affair with Max Ernst. Her affair with Giorgio de Chirico. And cetera, when married or otherwise.

When was the last time Protagonist actually did sit down to a full meal at a better restaurant?

When was the last time he let himself hail a taxi?

Edith Wharton was an anti-Semite.

Máquina de escribir.

Machine à écrire.

Macchina da scrivere.

Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent, Nabokov said.

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Fleeing the start of World War II, Gwen John collapsed and died on a street in Dieppe.

Josef Mengele, M.D.

John Gould Fletcher drowned himself.

Dickens was certain after reading only her first novel that the name George Eliot belonged to a woman.

O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

In a lawsuit that prevented him from teaching in New York in 1940, Bertrand Russell’s writings were described as lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber. Unquote.

May, 1886:

Little cousins,

Called back.

Emily

Vladimir Mayakovsky had an illegitimate daughter in the United States.

I am become death, the shatterer of worlds. Recited J. Robert Oppenheimer from the
Bhagavad-Gita
at Alamogordo.

Schreibmaschine.

When was the last time Protagonist took a trip? Simply went somewhere?

Principia Mathematica. Logic and Knowledge. The Analysis of Mind. The Analysis of Matter.

And over this loathsome and grotesque mask of death, the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed downwards in rippling gold.

Tolstoy thought
King Lear
so bad a play as to be not worth discussion.

Vachel Lindsay committed suicide by drinking Lysol.

Is it evident to Reader that he has lost interest in the idea of doing anything with the women upstairs?

Do you know that the king had not even heard of Wittgenstein!

Brahms died of cancer of the liver.

Why do you always wear black?

I am in mourning for my life.

There was once an actual portrait of Petrarch’s Laura, by Simone Martini. However it is long lost.

Within two years of Stephen Crane’s death in the Black Forest, Cora had returned to Jacksonville and opened a brothel.

Beyond the dunes. Flotsam. Odds and ends.

William the Conqueror came before Richard III. Announced Shakespeare through a dark window to Burbage.

Carlos Arruza died in a car crash.

In one of Protagonist’s own unread books, perhaps? Why does Reader think of him sensing he should remember something about someone else who often walked along a beach?

Teresa Stich-Randall.

Regine Olsen.

Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite.

All the Jew part of the Bible is black evil, an Ezra nicety.

Protagonist the Penniless. Protagonist the Hermit.

Deus vult?

Bachelard. Baudrillard. Blanchot. Barthes. Bataille.

Sorting, packing.

Toward what final bleak contemplation amid the disarray?

I have read Mr. Scott’s book fourteen times; and it is a rather tiresome book.

Said someone of
The Architecture of Humanism.

Condorcet probably committed suicide.

The first writer known to condemn slavery is Euripides.

We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.

If forced to choose, Reader assumes, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Giacometti.

September 28, 1891, 12:30
A.M.
104 East 26th Street, New York. Cardiac dilatation, mitral regurgitation, contributing asthenia.

Melville.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Va, pensiero, sull’ ali dorate.

Why is virtually all landscape in Andrea Mantegna comprised of rock?

How many times had Reader heard the Smetana before he discovered that the Moldau was a river?

Among the Ouses and the Ebros in
Anna Livia Plurabelle.

One has the right to expect ordinary decency even of a poet.

Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Gertrude Stein was born in.

Among the Meuses and the Marnes.

Allen Mandelbaum’s
Aeneid.
Mackail’s.

La Pasionaria.

Photographs of Protagonist with?

Jane Austen. Anne Bradstreet. Cervantes.

Pierre Menard.

Or actually some few with certain other writers at that? In antique five-and-ten-cent store frames?

And everyone young?

Cicero was an anti-Semite.

Certain legends would insist that Pontius Pilate committed suicide.

In last year’s nests there are no birds this year.

The beach, or the cemetery?

What follows for Protagonist in either case?

Patron saint of desperate causes?

In a dramatic and not narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and terror.

Still, for all slips of hers,

One of Eve’s family—

Wipe those poor lips of hers

Oozing so clammily.

Dorothy Dandridge committed suicide.

Hearing of acquaintances who have died, alone, to be found by strangers.

According to indictments of the time, on May 23, 1450, Sir Thomas Malory raped the wife, Joan, of one Hugh Smyth, in Warwickshire.

On August 6, Malory raped said Joan again.

Joyce called
How Much Land Does a Man Need?
the greatest of all short stories.

Gaspara Stampa. Mihri Hatun. Louise Labé.

I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.

Quelqu’un vit sur cetteplage.

Alguien vive en este play a.

The end of his life in a shabby furnished room across the street from the railroad station in Frankfurt. Oskar Schindler.

Bernard Berenson was an anti-Semite.

Bernard Berenson was born a Jew.

Character! What is character! It’s tone that matters!

How shall we sing the Lord’s song

In a strange land?

One minute she was standing in the door.

Passchendaele.

The Tunning of Elynour Rumming.

When Leonardo died in France, in 1519, it was in the arms of the king, Francis I, who had come to his bedside. Insists Vasari.

Ipse dixit.

February 2nd. Joyce’s birthday.

And Protagonist’s daughter’s.

October 25th. Picasso’s.

And Protagonist’s son’s.

The first edition of
Thus Spake Zarathustra
sold forty copies. Nietzsche had had to pay for publication.

I count religion but a childish toy,

And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

Once more before he dies Protagonist will read Aristophanes.

Delacroix, on Ingres:

His art is the complete expression of an incomplete intelligence.

Demosthenes committed suicide with poison.

In the same year that Aristotle may have done so.

Grieg wrote his piano concerto at twenty-five.

And would produce nothing else of significance on a large scale in almost forty more years of composing.

Arnold Toynbee was an anti-Semite.

Orde Wingate.