This is Not a Novel (9 page)

Presumably ignoring the rumor that Bradley went about at night shooting people’s cats.

Wallace Stegner died after an automobile crash.

Bradley died of blood poisoning.

Liam O’Flaherty was shell-shocked on the Western Front in World War I.

Roger Bacon probably did not invent eyeglasses.

Forgetting, when starting to reread
The Hamlet,
that her name before the end will become Eula Varner Snopes. And that in a later Snopes novel she will shoot herself.

Richard Bentley died of pleurisy.

The maniac who went at Rembrandt’s
Night Watch
with a bread knife in the Rijksmuseum in 1975.

His counterpart who slashed a Barnett Newman in a different Amsterdam museum in 1986—and another Newman in the same museum a decade later.

No one ever put up a statue of a critic. Said Sibelius.

Elderly, shabby, obscure, disreputable, pursued by debts, with only a noisy tenement room to work in.

Being a description by Gerald Brenan of the man who was writing
Don Quixote.

The apparent evidence that two of Cervantes’ sisters, and a niece, and his illegitimate daughter, became prostitutes—and in the very period of the book’s first success.

Frida Kahlo’s affair with Leon Trotsky.

The best French novelist of their era, Gide called Simenon.

Leaving moot the question of which of the man’s more than five hundred novels he had in mind.

Stop pawing me, she said. You old headless horseman Ichabod Crane.

Rilke was devoted to polishing furniture. Jackson Pollock baked pies.

Origen castrated himself.

No artist tolerates reality, Camus said.

Virgil spent seven years writing the
Georgics.
Meaning an average of one line per day.

Pablo Neruda died of leukemia.

Nazim Hikmet died of a heart attack.

How beautiful yellow is! Says a van Gogh letter.

Sortes Virgilianae.

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight.

Dorothy L. Sayers died of a stroke.

If we regard the Fish as a Divine Life symbol of immemorial antiquity, we shall not go very far astray.

Jack Johnson died in an automobile crash.

Nikos Kazantzakis died of the flu.

Jessie Laidlay Weston.

Laurence Sterne’s realization roughly a third of the way through
Tristram Shandy
that the book lacks a preface. Whereupon he inserts one right where he is.

Jack Donne’s transparently excessive eulogy for his patron’s young daughter—whom he had never met or even seen.

If it had been written of ye Virgin Marie it had been something, Jonson told him.

William Saroyan died of prostate cancer.

Somerset Maugham once had four plays running simultaneously in London.

How much greater than it already is would the
Odyssey
seem if there had never happened to be an
Iliad
for it to be compared with?

St. John of the Cross was the son of a weaver.

J. Robert Oppenheimer died of throat cancer.

Maugham died of a stroke.

At last she grew common and infamous and gott the Pox, of which she died.
Says Aubrey’s
Brief Lives
of one Elizabeth Broughton.

Paper will put up with anything that’s written on it. Said Stalin.

The best geometer in the world, Hobbes claimed Descartes could have become.

But that he had no head for philosophy.

Kurt Weill died of a heart attack.

Turner was considerably less than fastidious about cleanliness.

The Reader.

Being Aristotle’s nickname at Plato’s Academy.

A colt that kicks its mother.

Being what Plato personally called him after an early disagreement.

Samuel ha-Nagid.

Say it
out
for God’s sake and have done with it. Said William James to Henry.

Molokai. June 1885. We lepers.

Anagnostes.

No Man is my name, and No Man they call me.

A Walk in the Sun.

A decade after Nelson’s death at Trafalgar, Emma Hamilton died in poverty.

Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Susan Sontag.

St. Catherine of Siena was illiterate.

Kafka was a vegetarian.

The English think soap is civilization. Treitschke said.

Theodore Roethke died of a coronary occlusion.

At least one Boston newspaper suggested in all seriousness that Whitman should be horsewhipped for
Leaves of Grass.

Charlotte Salomon died in Auschwitz at twenty-six.

Pavel Friedman died in Auschwitz at nineteen. Or younger.

Would Moe Berg really have shot Heisenberg?

Gongora died of apoplexy.

Balzac wrote more than two thousand characters into his
Comedie humaine.

There are 260,430 words in
Ulysses.

Calvin died of hemorrhages of the lungs.

Oswiecim.

Exeunt.

Moliere was never elected to the French Academy. Balzac was never elected to the French Academy.

Was it John Searle who called Jacques Derrida the sort of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name?

I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

Josquin des Prez.

It took ten years after her suicide for Jeanne Hebuterne’s family to allow her remains to be reburied beside Modigliani’s in the Jewish section of Père Lachaise.

Adelaide Procter. Mrs. Henry Wood.

Gericault died after a fall from a horse.

Hindemith died of a stroke.

Nebuchadnezzar. Who razed Jerusalem. And went mad. And ate grass.

Cardinal Spellman of New York once sent Pope Pius XII a Cadillac automobile with solid gold door handles.

Wyatt Earp died of chronic cystitis.

Because night is here and the barbarians have not appeared.

Charles Lamb’s insuperable proclivity to gin, Carlyle termed it.

Frobisher. Hawkins. Drake.

Hitler typed with two fingers. Mencken typed with two fingers.

Beethoven washed excessively.

Penthesilea.

The speculation that Dante spent time in Paris. Or even at Oxford.

The possibility that on a political mission that took him to Florence, Chaucer met Boccaccio.

Charlotte Corday was a great-grandniece of Corneille. And devoted the morning to reading Plutarch at his bloodiest before stabbing Marat.

Or a treatise on the nature of man, if Writer so labels it.

He had catched a great cold, had he no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed. Said Thomas Fuller.

Potatoes were not known in ancient Rome. Tomatoes were not known in ancient Rome. Oranges were not known in ancient Rome.

Hume died of what was probably colon cancer.

Edgar Degas never learned which side won World War I. Piet Mondrian never learned which side won World Warn.

Flicka von Stade.

Manet died of tertiary syphilis.

Truman Capote died of heart disease complicated by drug abuse.

Marianne Moore taught stenography at the Carlisle Indian School, in Pennsylvania, when Jim Thorpe was a student.

And fifty years later would remember that he held a door for her.

Debussy’s first wife shot herself. As had a mistress, earlier.

Caedmon was illiterate.

The rue Descartes, Paul Verlaine died in.

Avenue Emile Zola, Paul Celan’s last Paris address was on.

A
calle
in Madrid was renamed in honor of Vicente Aleixandre while he was still living there.

Herman Melville Boulevard is where, in Manhattan? Twelve blocks north from the wishful-thinking intersection of Mark Rothko Road and Hart Crane Place.

The poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age, Gibbon said.

But specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she that was very ambitious, burning in unquenchable desire to bear the name of a Queen.

—Adding up to the sum total of what Shakespeare found in Holinshed from which he created Lady Macbeth.

The friendship of Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff.

Claudia Muzio was illegitimate. Jenny Lind was illegitimate.

Voltaire’s second wife was his own sister’s daughter.

A passing thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s,
re
Princess Diana:

Do we know if she ever read a book?

Title of an unfinished composition by Charles Ives:
Giants vs. Cubs, August 1907, Polo Grounds.

Ives died of heart disease compounded by diabetes.

Well, Bourrienne, you too will be immortal.

Why, General Bonaparte?

Are you not my secretary?

Tell me the name of Alexander’s.

Hm, that is not bad, Bourrienne.

Haydn’s father was a wheelwright.

The legend that Donatello almost supernaturally refused to die until his commonplace crucifix could be replaced by one carved by Brunelleschi.

But go, and if you listen she will call.

Eight people appeared at Robert Musil’s funeral.

E Scott Fitzgerald died of a sequence of heart attacks.

His most recent royalty statement showed seven copies of
The Great Gatsby
sold during the preceding six months.

The claim that John Wesley preached more than forty thousand sermons.

Marc Blitzstein. Elliott Carter. Aaron Copland. David Diamond. Roy Harris. Walter Piston. Roger Sessions. Virgil Thomson.

All studied with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau.

Dave Brubeck studied with Arnold Schoenberg and with Darius Milhaud.

Corbiere died of tuberculosis at thirty.

Novalis died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight.

Laforgue was twenty-seven.

Basically every justification for persecution on the part of the Inquisition was at hand in St. Augustine.

As anyone’s justification for censorship is ready in Plato.

J. R. R. Tolkien died of a chest infection while hospitalized for something else.

Ausonius once composed a poem to his writing paper.

The literary fame of
The Bonfire of the Vanities
condemns the taste of its age.

Mary Mapes Dodge.

Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Don’t come to us with your troubles. If you can’t make enough money to live on, you can jump out the window or drown yourself.

Which Maria Callas vehemently denied having said to her mother.

The vasty hall of death.

Emile Verhaeren died in a fall under a train.

Arcangelo Corelli owned paintings by Bruegel and Poussin.

Adrienne Lecouvreur died of what was apparently rectal cancer.

Though in the Cilea opera is poisoned, which had been a rumor.

But in either event was buried by torchlight in a field beside the Seine—as an actress, forbidden sanctified ground.

Maria Caniglia. Magda Olivero. Renata Tebaldi.

One of St. Teresa of Avila’s grandfathers was Jewish.

Jongkind died mad.

Hugo Wolf died mad.

Blake, at their only meeting,
re
Constable’s pencil sketches: Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration. I always meant it for drawing, Constable said.

The peculiar immortality of Sulpicia. Six love poems, totaling only forty lines, and customarily tacked onto the collected work of Tibullus. For two full thousand years.

Callas died in Paris, of a heart attack. And was buried from a Greek Orthodox church on the rue Georges Bizet.

Tatiana Troyanos died of cervical cancer.

Writer’s pleasure in realizing that the translation of Rabelais he most recently read was done by the father of Tanaquil LeClercq.