Reader's Block (8 page)

Or may have died a natural death at eighty-four.

I cannot survive on a miserable organist’s job, as your Master Bach did.

Johnny Keats’s piss-a-bed poetry, Byron called it.

Other women for Protagonist’s background, should Reader add?

A lithe, dark-eyed girl named Christine, who danced? And even in repose seemed always moving?

Becky Sharp. Maggie Tulliver.

How many years past? How recently will Protagonist have ever seen her since?

Philip Rahv committed suicide.

Aesop was executed for embezzlement.

By the early Middle Ages, every third church in Europe claimed to possess splinters from the True Cross. Or the nails. Or thorns from the Crown of Thorns. Several heads of John the Baptist existed, and at least as many corpses of Mary Magdalen.

Not to add Christ’s foreskin.

Philip Larkin:

I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.

Kristallnacht.

Edna St. Vincent Millay died at the first light of morning after having sat up all night reading a new translation of the
Aeneid.

I have a narrative. But you will be put to it to find it.

None of Andrew Marvell’s best poems was published in his lifetime.

The Queen of Pentacles, Reversed: Certain Evil, a suspicious Woman, a Woman justly regarded with Suspicion, Doubt, Mistrust.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine was an anti-Semite.

Who even well into World War II was still calling for the extermination of every Jew in Europe.

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart.

Alcuin.

Because of Homer, Troy exerted such an enduring appeal that Julius Caesar contrived to trace his lineage back to its supposed survivors.

A millennium later Geoffrey of Monmouth would do the same for the kings of England.

At thirty-six, Dante was banished from Florence under penalty of death. In his twenty remaining years he would never be back.

Renzo and Lucia.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

The
Laocobn
was come upon by workmen digging in a vineyard not far from the Colosseum in 1506. In no time, Michelangelo was at the scene. And identified it at once, from descriptions in the elder Pliny.

Shakespeare wanted art.

Nietzsche lost his reason because he thought too much. I do not think and therefore cannot go mad.

Said Nijinsky, mad.

J. Alfred Prufrock: full of high sentence.

Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford: ful of hy sentence.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Said Eliot.

Sartre and Albert Schweitzer were cousins.

William Inge committed suicide.

Kiri Te Kanawa. Keri Hulme.

Did Protagonist leave a forwarding address?

Once, certainly, more of an existence than these cartons and the caw of seagulls?

Beckett wrote
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable,
and
Waiting for Godot
in less than two years in the late 1940s.

While living on virtually no money other than the few centimes his wife earned by dressmaking.

Napoleon and Karl Marx had hemorrhoids.

As did Wordsworth.

As did Tennessee Williams.

The Unnamed.

In the house on the beach Protagonist is naturally paying rent. In the house at the cemetery, which Reader has thought of as abandoned, is he living more or less illegally?

Protagonist as a squatter?

Jim don’t know nobody in China.

When Dickens, at twelve, worked from 8
A.M.
until 8 P.M., six days a week, at the blacking factory, he also walked an hour each way to and from his family’s Camden Town slum.

And spent Sunday visiting his father in debtor’s prison.

What shall I do for pretty girls

Now my old bawd is dead?

Mahatma Gandhi: I see no virtue in being uninformed.

One of Max Planck’s sons was executed for plotting against Hitler.

Housman published a volume entitled
Last Poems
in 1922.

And lived until 1936.

I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.

Or could Protagonist have been given use of the gatehouse in return for essentially nonexistent custodial duties?

Watchman, what of the night?

Richard Strauss was an anti-Semite.

Brutus committed suicide after the defeat by Antony and Octavian by throwing himself on his sword. Antony removed his own cape to cover the body.

Cassius forced a servant to kill him after the same rout.

I am completely alone here now.

Captured by Moorish pirates at sea, Cervantes spent five years as a slave before being ransomed.

Plato finished the
Laws
in his late seventies, among other things sanctioning the death penalty for those who question the state religion.

Did he stop to remember how and why Socrates had died fifty years before?

Brandeis. Cardozo. Frankfurter.

Readers were so anxious over the fate of Little Nell in
The Old Curiosity Shop
that six thousand of them in New York alone actually met the ship carrying the novel’s final installment.

Sir Thomas Browne wished that men could reproduce without intercourse. Like trees, he suggested. Fathering twelve children nevertheless.

Why, I will see thee at Philippi, then.

There is no known portrait of Anne Bradstreet.

Horace was in fact one of Brutus’s officers in Macedonia. But made his way back to Italy safely.

Erasmus was an anti-Semite.

Photographs of Protagonist with?

Tiresias concluded that 90 percent of the pleasure in sex was woman’s.

For which presumption Hera blinded him. Though in compensation Zeus gave him second sight.

Someone else for Protagonist’s past?

Also from some time ago. A woman named Josie, who taught. And so reminded him of a certain Modigliani nude that he tacked up a reproduction of the painting as a kind of talisman.

Molly Bloom. Daisy Buchanan. Isabel Archer.

Euripides’ mother was a fruit seller.

For years, Defoe was a hosier.

Where was Jesus between the ages of twelve and twenty-nine?

The mobled queen.

Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman went to Dodger games at Ebbets Field together.

Kant was only five feet tall. Wagner was very little taller.

En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat.

Elfriede Heidegger would appear to have been a considerably better-looking woman than Hannah Arendt.

Quanah Parker.

Byron went into permanent exile from England in late April of 1816, near Passover. One of the last London friends he saw was the composer Isaac Nathan.

Who brought him a farewell gift of matzos.

Romain Gary committed suicide. As had his wife Jean Seberg a year earlier.

If there’s no God, how can I be a captain then?

Montcorbier.

Jussi Bjoerling’s D-flat in the
Cuius animam
of Rossini’s
Stabat Mater,

October 7, 1849. At forty, in Baltimore. Filthy, starving, drunk and/or with delirium tremens, crying out at unseen creatures.

For the love of God, Montresor!

Valerie Solanis. Ruth Steinhagen.

Henry Adams was an anti-Semite.

Pound put his son Omar into other people’s care as an infant. He saw him once, for a few hours, when the boy was twelve. And not again until he was twenty.

Stalin was one of Maxim Gorky’s pallbearers.

Hegel died in a cholera epidemic.

Florence Margaret Smith.

Not squatter but caretaker? Guardian of the deceased?

Yad Vashem.

Mount Abora is in no atlas.

Once, at a formal Nobel Prize occasion, Knut Hamsun snapped Selma Lagerlof s garter.

Fragonard died completely forgotten.

Nicholas de Stael committed suicide.

The first time Elgar’s
Pomp and Circumstance
March No. 1 was performed in London, in 1901, the audience literally stood up and cheered. The orchestra played it again and the same thing happened. It had to be played yet a third time before the program could go on.

Augusta Leigh. Incest consummated or not?

Demosthenes copied out Thucydides eight times, in determination to emulate the prose.

Damon Rutherford.

How long, O Catiline?

Could there for that matter be thefts in the cemetery? Intruders?

Of or in regard to what?

Reader’s mental wastebasket, a thought for.

Tanaquil Le Clercq. Performing major roles for Balanchine at seventeen.

And in a wheelchair from polio not ten years later.

Delmore Schwartz died of a heart attack in a seedy Times Square hotel. Three days passed before anyone could be found to claim his body.

James Baldwin was an anti-Semite.

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

Are there manuscripts?

The Blotner biography says that although he was in New York, Faulkner did not attend the memorial service held after Dylan Thomas’s death. In fact he wore a gray tweed jacket, an emerald vest, and a Tyrolean hat. With a feather.

But how is Reader aware that like Tarquin, Tanaquil is an Etruscan name?

Like Lars Porsena.

An enormous dungheap, Voltaire dismissed the sum of Shakespeare as.

Pisistratus.

Involved with Madame Blavatsky, Yeats once burned a rose and seriously watched all night for its ghost to appear.

Was Brahms the father of Clara Schumann’s last child?

Vittoria Colonna. To whom Michelangelo wrote sonnets.

John Donne delivered George Herbert’s mother’s funeral sermon.

Malcolm Lowry probably died from an overdose of sodium amytal tablets. A coroner’s verdict read
misadventure
rather than suicide, however, because, drunk, he had also choked on his own vomit.

Robert Walser spent his last twenty-seven years in a mental institution.

Rousseau’s mistress, Therese Levasseur, was an illiterate hotel maid. She and Rousseau had five children, all of whom he left anonymously at orphanages.

She also went to bed with James Boswell. Exactly thirteen times, according to the latter’s compulsive journal-keeping.

Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre.

As a writer, he chews more than he bites off. Said Whistler of Henry James.

Diva. Thea.

Brahma. Vishnu. Shiva.

Joyce, Hesse, Mann, and Rilke all died in Switzerland. Stefan George, Robert Musil, and Erich Maria Remarque all died in Switzerland.

Myth, Religion, and Mother Right.

Robert Burns’s wife not only made light of his interminable infidelities, and took in one of his illegitimate children, but ventured that he should have had at least two wives to begin with.

Thalatta, thalatta!

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing, Wilde said.

When Hemingway committed suicide, it was by leaning to press his forehead against the barrels of a shotgun braced at the floor.

Thirty-odd years earlier his father had used a revolver.

Thomas Babington Macaulay and Horatius at that bridge to the contrary, Lars Porsena did conquer Rome.

By the nine gods he swore.

Has Reader made any sort of decision about how long Protagonist’s small money will last?

And?

Else Lasker-Schuler’s tombstone at the Mount of Olives was uprooted when that part of Jerusalem was taken by Arab forces in 1948. The grave was never again located.

In his mid-twenties, Verdi lost his wife and two infant children within a space of two years.

In the decade before his death, Ad Reinhardt painted nothing but black canvases.

Alessandro Stradella was murdered.