This is Not a Novel (5 page)

Jenny Lind died in the Malvern Hills.

My work is not a prize composition done to be heard for the moment, but was designed to last forever. Said Thucydides.

Pierre Bonnard and Wassily Kandinsky were nearsighted.
As were Samuel Johnson and Tennyson.
And Nietzsche.

And Maria Callas.

Marshall McLuhan died of a stroke.

Robert Lowell once punched Jean Stafford in the face and broke her nose. Which he had broken two years earlier by drunkenly smashing a car into a stone wall.

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

Bach and Handel, born twenty-six days apart. And never once meeting.

Beethoven was left-handed.

Rembrandt worked so slowly, especially in his later years, that it became ever more difficult for him to find sitters. In good part explaining the hundred-odd self-portraits.

Luisa Tetrazzini died penniless.

Tolstoy, asked if he had read a recent play by Maurice Maeterlinck: Why should I? Have I committed a crime?

They who write ill, and they who ne’er durst wrote,
Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.
—Said Dryden.

Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss.
—Added Pope.

He was being called
Papa
Haydn well before he was thirty.

Jacopo. Gentile. Giovanni.

Not to add sister Nicolosia, who married Andrea Man-tegna.

Was Liszt the greatest pianist who ever lived?

Planning his
Balzac,
Rodin went so far as to search out a tailor the novelist had used forty years before—and had a suit made to the dead measurements.

Birgit Nilsson’s debut at the Metropolitan Opera, as Isolde, was reviewed on the front page of the
New York Times.

I am not overly fond of poetry and I do not read it willingly. In my reading, poems take up a very small space. Said Ingeborg Bachmann.

Rodin died of pulmonary congestion.

Anabasis.

Your last novel was a flop. You’ve got two wonderful children depending on you. Don’t you think it’s time to consider doing something more financially responsible in your life?

This is also even an autobiography, if Writer says so.

Come away
_;
poverty’s catching. Wrote Aphra Behn.

Anni 68 Cenzza Ochiali,
Canaletto signed a drawing in 1766.

At age sixty-eight, without spectacles.

Handel died blind.

Gaddo. Taddeo. Agnolo.

Lodovico. Agostino. Annibale.

Liszt sat down and played at sight what the rest of us toil over and in the end still get nowhere with, Clara Schumann said.

Or John Bellini, as Ruskin insisted on calling him.

Maria Malibran died at twenty-eight after being thrown from a horse.

Has
time pardoned Paul Claudel?

Ruskin died of influenza.

Anton Webern was shot and killed by an American soldier in Austria at the end of World War II. Wholly by error.

There should be nothing in a novel that the author would not say out loud in the presence of a young girl, said William Dean Howells.

Kate Chopin died of what was apparently a brain hemorrhage.

Remind me to get some money from this bugger.

Piero della Francesca’s father was a shoemaker.

Joseph Cornell lived with his mother all his life.

Admire the martyrs of Bloody Mary’s reign.

D. H. Lawrence died of tuberculosis.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

In his mid-twenties, Joseph Brodsky was sentenced to five years shoveling manure at the White Sea for what the Soviet Union saw as social parasitism.

Petrarch—and the St. Augustine eternally in his pocket.

Reading the
Confessions
at the peak of Mont Ventoux.

. Romney painted Emma Hamilton nearly fifty times.

Clit lit.

Appointed
maestro di cappella
at St. Mark’s in 1613, Monteverdi was robbed by highwaymen while moving there from Cremona.

Terence would appear to have died in a shipwreck.

The room was full of Sitwells. And Sacheverell others.

Jeanne Eagels died of an overdose of heroin.

Plutarch says Xerxes watched the debacle at Salamis from a golden throne on a hilltop above the strait—surrounded by scribes meant to record the trappings of a victory.

A king sate on the rocky brow
Which looks o
^f
er sea-born Salamis.

Did Kierkegaard’s father have venereal disease?

A good-natured man of principle.
Pablo Neruda called Stalin.

A saint and a martyr. Ezra Pound called Hitler.

Mark Twain died of a heart condition.

Rupert Brooke’s only brother died in World War I no more than weeks after Brooke himself.

Chateau-Thierry, La Fontaine was born in.

Realizing idly that every artist in history—until Writer’s own century—rode horseback.

For instance Keats doing so beside the Tiber each morning until not long before his death.

George Sand, disdaining sidesaddle on a favorite mare she by chance called Colette.

Or twenty-three centuries earlier Pindar even reassuring readers that there would be horses in heaven.

I sprang to the stirrup, and Jons, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three.

A monk asked Ts’ui-wei: For what purpose did the First Patriarch come from the West?
Ts’ui-wei answered: Pass me that chin rest.
As soon as the monk passed it, Ts’ui-wei thwacked him with it.

Any and all public gatherings were prohibited in Venice during a plague in 1576.
An edict that was unhesitatingly ignored at the death of Titian—so deserving was he felt to be of a state funeral.

To Helen.
Poe was sixteen.
Le Bateau ivre.
Rimbaud was sixteen.
Thanatopsis.
Bryant was sixteen or seventeen.

Thomas Gray died of gout.

Jean Genet was a paid informer for the Nazis in World Warn.

Colette the novelist died of cardiac arrest.

Salacious, bad-smelling, sick. Said Van Wyck Brooks of Joyce.

While deriding Rimbaud as a neurasthenic little wretch.

Berlioz, on critics:

Where do they come from? At what age are they sentto the slaughterhouse?

Adam Mickiewicz died of cholera.

William Collins died mad.

Writer’s equally idle realization that all of those same equestrian artificers likewise went through life without flush toilets.

What type of outhouse had Peter Paul Rubens, for example?

What bedroom slop bucket disguised as a clothes chest had Jane Austen?

Chaim Soutine died of stomach ulcers.

John Steinbeck died of a heart condition, little tempered by acute emphysema.

Kandinsky once invited Arnold Schoenberg to join the faculty at the Bauhaus.

Indicating magnanimously that while Jews were normally not welcome, an exception would here be made.

Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!

This is the lamentable condition of our times, that men of art must seek alms of cormorants, and those that deserve best, be kept under by dunces.

Said Thomas Nashe in 1592.

For two decades, starting at twenty-five, Paul Valery did not publish a line.

Wagner died in 1883. Cosima not until 1930.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti died of Bright’s disease.

Tennessee Williams choked to death on the plastic cap of a nasal spray.

Let’s choose executors, and talk of wills.

He is either mad, or he is reading
Don Quixote.
Said Philip HI, at the sight of a student banging himself on the head and doubling over in hysterics over a book.

Perugino probably died of plague.

There is no one so foolish as to praise
Don Quixote.
Said Lope de Vega.

The Metropolitan Museum’s only Caravaggio, the early
Allegory of Music,
was not known of for more than three centuries.
And was walked off with for less than one hundred pounds when come upon in an English antique shop.

This can only be the devil or Bach himself!

No date will ever be available for Marian Anderson in Constitution Hall.
Said Constitution Hall.

Camus went through most of his adult life with recurrent tuberculosis.

Michael Tippett spent three months in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector in World War II.

The tail gunner on the
Enola Gay
wore a Brooklyn Dodgers cap.

Antonio Gaudi died after being hit by a streetcar in Barcelona.

Blaise Cendrars died after a series of strokes.

The worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 killed forty million people.
Including Apollinaire. And Egon Schiele.

And both of Mary McCarthy’s parents.

Descartes and Pascal met twice.
Neither being impressed.

David Hume was grossly fat, reported even to crack chairs.
Edward Gibbon became equally so.
Amy Lowell as well.

What sort of chamber pot had Bishop Berkeley?

Enoch Aiden.

The kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled, George Orwell described Auden as.

Orwell on Sean O’Casey:
Very stupid.

On Steinbeck:
Spurious.

La Ttahison des oleics.

Until he was forty, Hermann Broch was the manager of his family’s textile firm.

Grazia Deledda died of breast cancer.

Dost thou think Alexander look’t o’ this fashion i’ th’ earth? And smelt so? Pah!

Not even worth the trouble of condemning, said Gautier of Manet’s
Olympia.

As late as in 1874, Jacob Burckhardt felt licensed to dismiss Jan Vermeer as inconsequential:
Women reading and writing letters and such things.

Archilochos is said to have died in battle.

The most acute thinker ever born, Kant called Kepler.

The first English translation of
Madame Bovary
was done by a daughter of Karl Marx.

Who would later take her own life much the way Emma does.

An extant letter of Michelangelo’s complains about money that Luca Signorelli borrowed and never repaid.

He was always strumming upon something—his hat, his watch fob, the table, the chair, as if they were the keyboard.
Said Constanze.

Far too many notes, my dear Mozart.

Quentin de La Tour died mad.

Charlie Parker died of pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, though with unquestioned contributions from alcohol and drugs.

Quinquiieme of Nineveh from distant Ophir.

Boccaccio’s tale of Giotto, on horseback, caught in an August rainstorm.

Hunchback’d Papist, Pope was called in print.

Maeterlinck died of a heart condition.

Beethoven, preoccupied. Crossing to his washstand to pour water over his head oblivious of the fact that he is fully dresssed.

And even in the ages to come, men will make of us a song for telling.

Says Helen to Hector of their destiny.

Theodore Dreiser once tried to bribe H. L. Mencken to start a campaign promoting him for the Nobel Prize.

After the burning, Joan of Arc’s remains were dumped into the Seine.

After the burning, Savonarola’s remains were dumped into the Arno.

James Clerk Maxwell died of abdominal cancer.

During the thirty days’ grace between his conviction and the hemlock, Socrates memorized a long poem by Stesichorus.