Reader's Block (4 page)

Lorine Niedecker spent years of her adult life scrubbing floors in a Wisconsin hospital.

Names of the dead.

A lifelong rumor insisted that Guillaume Apollinaire was the son of a cardinal, or even of the Pope. His mother’s father had been a ranking officer in the Papal Guard.

The Second Commandment was taken so literally in the Lithuanian ghetto when Chaim Soutine was a boy that he was physically beaten when he tried to draw.

The graves of strangers.

Martin Heidegger was an anti-Semite.

Who kept a portrait of Pascal in his study. While signing his letters
Heil Hitler.

Maya Lin.

John Berryman committed suicide at fifty-seven by jumping from a bridge. Forty-five years earlier his father had shot himself outside Berryman’s window.

Horace dictated that a writer should set aside a finished poem for nine years. And only then decide if it is worth publishing.

A block or two past the grocery, where the neighborhood declines into even more evident abandonment, is a dingy saloon frequented only by a remnant of elderly men. The television, if on, is tuned only to sports events. No one intrudes if Protagonist sits wordlessly with a single drink. He does not go often in any case.

Soutine was in fact once beaten so badly for sketching someone’s portrait that he was able to collect damages.

And used the money to leave his village and attend art school.

Catherine Blake: I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company. He is always in Paradise.

Exit, pursued by a bear.

Berryman’s name was originally John Smith. He adopted his stepfather’s name when his mother remarried.

Walt Whitman more than once wrote anonymous favorable reviews of his own work.

Unquestionably it would have been Mary Magdalen who did the dishes at the Last Supper.

Concluded Marguerite Yourcenar.

Meursault is fairly sure it was no one from the saloon or the restaurant who nodded hello to him on the street yesterday.

Toynbee finds more than twice as many civilizations in history than Spengler did.

Mina Loy.

Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely when his mother became hysterical at the approach of the Spanish Armada.

Legend says Virgil was born in a ditch.

Protagonist has not quite enough money to get by on. Or rather he has just enough, now. Even with extreme frugality he is eating into it, however.

So that it diminishes steadily.

Toward a logical inevitability that he does his best not to think about.

Jean-Baptiste Lully died from gangrene after stabbing himself with a baton while conducting.

Mantua me genuit.

Picasso, when told that Gertrude Stein did not look like her portrait:

Never mind. She will.

Except for fragments quoted by others, everything of Menander’s disappeared utterly in the Dark Ages. A first complete play was not discovered until excavations in Egypt during Reader’s own lifetime.

Eliot was a virgin until his marriage at twenty-six. And possibly thereafter.

Erasmus was illegitimate.

Will Protagonist have sold any of his books before moving? Could he be selling some of them now, piecemeal, as it were for pocket money?

Would Reader?

H. L. Mencken called Lizette Woodworth Reese the finest American poet of his time.

Sergei Esenin committed suicide in a Moscow hotel by hanging himself with a strap from a suitcase.

John Everett Millais once painted advertisements for Pears Soap.

Why does Reader rarely remember that the Septuagint is so called because seventy scholars allegedly translated it from Hebrew into Greek in seventy-two days?

Geoffrey of Monmouth. Wace. Layamon. Marie de France. Chretien de Troyes. Malory.

Nora Barnacle was a hotel chambermaid when Joyce met her.

Eva Hesse was dead of a brain tumor at thirty-four.

When Rembrandt’s possessions were sold at bankruptcy in 1656, they included paintings by Raphael, Giorgione, and van Eyck. And seventy-five Rembrandts.

And did not bring in enough to discharge the bankruptcy.

Theodore Dreiser was an anti-Semite.

Bathsheba Everdene.

Lidice.

The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time.

Said Einstein.

Inside the basement section of the house at the dunes, a stairway climbs to the floor above. Because of the subdivision, the entrance at the top of the stairs has been sealed. In effect, the stairs now mount to nowhere.

Protagonist has set up the first of his unpacked books on some of the steps.

What you get married for if you don’t want children?

Georges Braque came extremely close to losing his sight from a head wound in World War I.

Or perhaps not a novel?

Is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography?

Reader and his mind full of clutter?

No one can steal my words. These are the words of Theognis.

Should Reader bring in the most recent woman in Protagonist’s life?

From how long ago?

Does the end of that relationship have anything to do with the declension into now?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman committed suicide.

Sparafucile.

Assuming sufficient time, why will Protagonist have become involved with no one since?

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

Shut up, he explained.

Byron was only thirty-six when he died, yet had already grown overweight and flaccid, with thinning hair and abominable teeth.

Nonetheless every second town in Greece would name a public square after him.

Moses Maimonides wrote in Arabic.

Lullaby. One Autumn Night.

Blessed Mary went a-walking.

At thirty-nine, Cezanne had a mistress and an infant son he was forced to keep hidden from his banker father.

Who was still sending him an allowance.

Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.

Antonin Artaud spent most of his last decade in insane asylums.

Botticelli, who never married, once dreamed he had.

And walked the streets of Florence until dawn, to keep from dreaming it again.

Somerset Maugham was a British secret agent in Russia in World War I and again in France at the start of World War II.

Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger.

Sholom Aleichem never submitted a manuscript containing a page numbered thirteen.

The mountains look on Marathon,

And Marathon looks on the sea.

Mary Lamb stabbed her mother to death. She was in and out of an institution all her life.

When a new fit of madness seemed imminent, Charles calmly led her back into custody.

Would the stairway climb to a permanently locked door or in some way simply end abruptly at a reconstructed ceiling?

Wide plank steps, Reader sees.

The law is a ass.

Yehuda Amichai fought with the British army in World War II, with the Haganah in Israel’s War of Independence, and with the Israeli army in both the Sinai Campaign and the Yom Kip-pur War. By the fourth time, younger Israeli soldiers were said to be carrying his poems in their gear.

There is no god, and Mary is his mother.

Mithridates. Who as Housman says took poison in small doses, to build an immunity.

And was run through by a sword.

When Arturo Toscanini had an affair with Geraldine Farrar, would he have known that her father had been a major league baseball player in the 1880s?

John Stuart Mill read Alexander Pope’s translation of the
Iliad
thirty times.

E. E. Cummings was an anti-Semite.

Poor Tom’s a-cold.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau suffered a constant need to urinate.

Heinrich von Kleist shot himself.

Reading romance into the relatively early death, speeding, of Jackson Pollock.

Ignoring that he killed a terrified young woman passenger in the process.

Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you wretch! You’ve kept on your black shoes! With a red dress!

Has Reader decided that Protagonist has definitely been in hospitals?

Should the problems be named?

Major?

Archaeologists found Praxiteles’
Hermes
under centuries of rubble at Olympia in 1877.

Exactly where Pausanias had told them to look for it in his
Description of Greece
almost two thousand years before.

Come Back to the RaftAg’in, Huck Honey!

Bertrand Russell,
re
having contemplated suicide at sixteen:

I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more about mathematics.

I want to wash when I meet a poet.

During his interlude with George Sand, Alfred de Musset more than once woke up not long after exhausting sex to find her gone from bed.

Intently at work on a novel.

Et Verbum caro factum est.

Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus
was damningly abused by reviewers. Once he became famous he had it reissued. And included the reviews as an appendix.

A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope. But you must not call it Homer.

Protagonist wrote a few books once. It is some years since he has seen a copy of any of them.

Fra Angelico wept while painting certain of his Christs. Giovanni Bellini once did so while painting a Pieta.

Plato founded his academy in Athens in approximately 387 B.C. and taught there for forty years. Aristotle studied and taught there for nineteen years as well.

Ferruccio Tagliavini.

Lorca was murdered by fascists at the start of the Spanish Civil War. His body was flung into an unmarked grave and never found.

Every word she writes is a lie, including
and
and
the.

Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin.

A roundup of Denmark’s eight thousand Jews was ordered by the Nazis in 1943. The Danes smuggled virtually every one of them to Sweden on fishing boats instead.

¡Que no quiero verla!

Holderlin was insane, if harmlessly so, for more than thirty-five years. Frequently he improvised odd tunes at the piano for hours, or sang in what seemed an indecipherable combination of Latin, Greek, and German simultaneously.

Nietzsche played the piano endlessly in his own eleven years of madness. Once, at least, with his elbows.

Robert Lowell was an anti-Semite.

Milton once visited Galileo.

Shakespeare died in Stratford on April 23, 1616, a Tuesday.

Cervantes died in Madrid on April 23, 1616, a Saturday.

The difference being between the Julian calendar and the Gregorian. Cervantes died ten days earlier.

Thackeray had to pay to publish
Vanity Fair.
Sterne had to pay to publish
Tristram Shandy.
Defoe had to pay to publish
Moll Flanders.

Our life is but a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn.

Said Marcus Aurelius.

A year before his death, already ill and with his recent work finding rejection, Baudelaire was shown essays eulogizing him by two poets in their early twenties. Neither of them had yet produced a book of his own, making their names meaningless.

Paul Verlaine. Stephane Mallarme.

Chaucer’s father was a vitner.

Pasternak’s popularity was such that if he stumbled over a line while reciting, most of his Moscow audience was generally able to prompt him from memory.

Franz Sussmayr. The D Minor Requiem.

Michelangelo finished
The Last Judgment
in 1541. Fourteen years later Pope Paul IV ordered Daniele da Volterra to drape forty of the naked figures.

Which Salvator Rosa would subsequently suggest made the whole wall look like a public bath.

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

Charles Boyer committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates.

7 Eccles Street.

The
Carmina Burana.
Any and all names of the original vagabond thirteenth-century poets long forgotten.