Reader's Block (3 page)

Masaccio died at twenty-seven. So suddenly that poison was not unsuspected, Vasari says.

The eulogy at Puccini’s funeral was delivered by Benito Mussolini.

November 9, 1953. St. Vincent’s Hospital, Seventh Avenue and West 11th Street, New York.

Acute alcoholic insult to the brain.

Taliesin.

Willem de Kooning lived as an illegal immigrant for his first thirty years in the United States.

On one of Reader’s windowsills: framed photographs of his son and daughter, a scuffed baseball, a sunbleached knotted root plucked from the Ebro.

Poe was expelled from West Point for refusing to obey military orders. Later, James McNeill Whistler would fail there academically.

Why is it commonly referred to as the
Arnolfini Marriage,
or even the
Arnolfini Betrothal,
when she is seven months pregnant?

Im Westen Nichts Neues.

Decades afterward, locked indelibly in Reader’s mind: the last two pages of
Good Morning, Midnight

Ernest Hemingway was an anti-Semite.

Ingenious nonsense, Isaac Newton dismissed poetry as.

Fernande Olivier.

Dora Maar.

Marie-Therese Walter.

Olga Koklova.

Françoise Gilot.

Jacqueline Roque.

Rabelais: As for you, little envious Prigs, snarling, bastard, puny Critics, you’ll soon have railed your last: Go hang yourselves.

A one-legged woman, in a conspicuously short skirt, manipulating swiftly on crutches along a crowded street.

Why does Reader still recall having noticed her, quite some few years ago now in fact, and even somewhat distantly?

On the actual night before her wedding, Edith Wharton had no idea of the facts of life.

Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go.

There is no mention of Ockham’s Razor in anything Ock-ham ever wrote.

Protagonist walking the beach, probably every day, at water’s edge.

Oddly, Reader for the moment viewing him particularly in harsh weather, huddled against winds.

Snow in patches.

Wittgenstein was cited for bravery three times during World War I.

Fighting against the Allies.

Goat song.

How frequently would the women make use of that main upper section of the house in winter?

What sort of heating arrangement does Protagonist have?

Nelson Algren, not Sartre, gave Simone de Beauvoir her first orgasm.

The interminable recitations on the part of the dying in the
Iliad,
even as they are being literally disemboweled.

Then again Reader has also loved opera.

Walter Benjamin committed suicide at the border between France and Spain in 1940.

Fleeing the Nazis, he had been turned back by Spanish authorities.

Alfred Thayer Mahan. Sir Edward S. Creasy.

After fasting to a point of starvation, Gogol died in a religious delirium.

And after having burned the only manuscript of part two of
Dead Souls.

The ladder! Quick! Pass me the ladder!

Martin Luther was an anti-Semite.

A Methodist parson in Bedlam, Horace Walpole called Dante.

Le Douanier Rousseau: Who is Giotto?

Ich kann nicht anders.

To the best of his knowledge, Raskolnikov does not know a soul in this place.

And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an eggshell, a bit of string.

Jean Rhys would appear to have lived a life very like those of her several heroines, of cheap hotels and threadbare clothing in drearier neighborhoods of Paris and London. Reader has been drawn to an affecting photograph of her when young, the for-lornness already intimated.

Protagonist has been drawn to a photograph of her?

Who was M’Intosh?

How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?

By Wagner’s lights, Nietzsche’s many physical ailments were the result of excessive masturbation. Cold water being recommended.

Would anyone else walk the beach at that time of year? In that sort of weather?

Rilke died of leukemia.

If Protagonist is in fact to have children, must anything be said about the years of his marriage?

About other women in his life since?

Martin Droeshout.

Richard Lovelace spent his last years in unimaginable poverty, sometimes scavenging for garbage to subsist. And dying of consumption in a cellar.

The vocabulary in Shakespeare’s plays includes 29,066 different words. There are 29,899 different words in
Ulysses.

But at that moment the door opened and a personage entered who was a stranger to all present.

Or does no one come to the cemetery?

Protagonist kept company by sparrows. Field mice. A squirrel.

Christopher Marlowe’s father was a shoemaker.

When W. H. Auden died, his future royalties were left to Chester Kallman. When Kallman died only sixteen months later, they went to the latter’s father, a dentist.

Then the dentist died and everything went to his second wife.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

Savonarola was burned at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence in 1498. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the Campo de Fiori in Rome in 1600.

Savonarola was granted the kindness of being hanged beforehand. Bruno was alive and conscious.

Amarantha sweet and fair,

Ah, braid no more that shining hair!

Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.

The first lectures on Shakespeare at a British university were given at Oxford, by one William Hawkins, in 1751. In Latin.

Sick, muddle-headed, sex-mad D. H. Lawrence, Robert Graves called him.

May 30, 1593. Eleanor Bull’s Tavern, Deptford Strand.

Three weeks passed before Virginia Woolf s body was found after she committed suicide by walking into the River Ouse.

Has Reader ever seen the Ouse named in any other regard, anywhere, except in
Anna Livia Plurabelle?

Not one of Thomas Hardy’s first three novels sold more than twenty copies.

Skeres. Poley. Ingram Frizer.

In fact all of the women in Protagonist’s life, from whenever.

Should he remember?

Shouldn’t he?

Chronometricals and Horologicals.

Alma-Tadema.

Sir Thomas More was beheaded at the Tower of London. The Earl of Surrey was beheaded at the Tower of London. Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded at the Tower of London.

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens, Yeats said.

Oremus.

Coleridge was frequently bullied as a schoolboy. As was Shelley. Shelley once went after one of those baiting him with a pitchfork.

Mark Rothko committed suicide by slashing the inside of his arms at the elbows with a double-edged razor blade.

First folding Kleenex over one edge of the blade to keep from cutting his fingers.

But who are you? You are not from the castle, you are not from the village, you aren’t anything.

Sgt. Joyce Kilmer. Alan Seeger. Lt. Col. John McCrae.

Pergolesi wrote his
Stabat Mater
at twenty-six. And was dead in the same year.

A one-legged woman in a conspicuously short skirt.

In Rapallo, for years, Ezra Pound spent two nights a week with his wife Dorothy and five nights with Olga Rudge.

And had children by both.

Voltaire was an anti-Semite.

Does it alter the tone of the solitude if Protagonist does have children?

Enhance it, if they are perhaps somewhere far off?

Is it workable for Protagonist to be out of touch with them altogether?

Why didn’t Kafka, once, call him a Jew and be done with it?

How different would one’s perceptions be of the entire body of work if he had?

Matisse, questioned about green flesh:

I am not painting a woman. I am painting a picture.

Rupert Brooke died from an insect bite. Alban Berg did also.

Hegel, Schelling, and Holderlin were roommates while studying theology.

Jacques Louis David’s
Death of Socrates
shows Plato seated at the scene in despair. In the
Phaedo,
Plato says he was sick and not there.

François Marie Arouet.

Well, I am completely alone here now.

Georg Trakl died from an overdose of cocaine, presumed deliberate. Trakl’s sister Margarete committed suicide also.

There seems evidence of incest.

Modigliani died of tuberculosis in a pauper’s ward.

Whistler was convinced that Bret Harte was a better writer than Dickens or Thackeray.

According to legend, Sappho threw herself into the Aegean after being spurned by a lover. Nothing is known about her age. Though in fact her hair had begun to turn white.

R. is completely alone here now?

Yesterday at eight o’clock Madame Berenge, the concierge, died.

One of James Joyce’s patrons offered to pay for analysis for him under Jung. Joyce waved away the thought of it.

Later on, unsuccessfully, Jung would work with Joyce’s disturbed daughter Lucia, however.

Aristotle presumed that women have fewer teeth than men.

Now and again: Protagonist seen pausing distractedly among the graves. Few of the stones are at all elaborate. Weeds abound. Leaves accumulate.

Names have already become familiar.

Very many of the dates of death are extremely distant.

A scattering, not.

Surprisingly, Protagonist comes upon a miniature American flag fixed beside one of the latter one afternoon. No one has come or gone who might have put it there that he saw.

Once I loved thee, Atthis, long ago.

Discovering that his wife had a lover, Carlo Gesualdo had the man murdered, then killed his wife himself.

And then their youngest son, on the chance that the boy was not his.

While writing madrigals still sung.

Throughout the desert campaigns, T. E. Lawrence carried an Aeschylus and an Aristophanes in his kitbag, both in Greek. Also a
Morte d?Arthur
and the Quiller-Couch
Oxford Book of English Verse.

He was able to read while riding camelback.

Dante refers to it as his
Commedia
only. It was Boccaccio who would call it
Divina.

Will Protagonist ever speak to the woman?

Is there a woman?

All of us have come out from under
The Overcoat.

Chi il bel sogno di Doretta.

Caravaggio incorporated several unappetizing self-portraits into his canvases. The grotesquely glazed-eyed face on the dissevered head of his Goliath is one.

Harriet Shelley drowned herself.

Can Grande della Scala.

G. K. Chesterton was an anti-Semite.

There are 107,000 rhymed couplets in the
Mahabharata.
In sum it is almost fifteen times as long as the
Iliad.

For a woman to study the Vedas is a signal of confusion in the realm. It says.

Swellfoot the Tyrant.

Short blocks away in that same deteriorating cemetery neighborhood, a lone ill-lit small grocery. There is one drab restaurant also, with few patrons.

Protagonist eats mainly out of cans.

Meaning the gatehouse will need gas as well as electricity.

Thomas Chatterton was seventeen when he bought arsenic, on credit, to commit suicide. He was buried in a potter’s field.

A bracelet of bright haire about the bone.

Wallace Stevens told Robert Frost his poems were too often about
things.

Frost told Stevens his were about bric-a-brac.

Tolstoy and Gandhi corresponded.

Tchaikovsky died of cholera, in St. Petersburg, after drinking tap water that had not been boiled.

Among Protagonist’s cartons, several containing phonograph records rather than books.