David Markson

Reader's Block

For Steven Moore

This the way to the museyroom. Mind your hats goan in!

— Joyce

First and foremost, I think of myself as a reader.

— Borges

Someone nodded hello to me on the street yesterday.

To me, or to him?

Someone nodded hello to Reader on the street yesterday.

Church bells were already ringing, to announce the Armistice in November 1918, when word reached Wilfred Owen’s family that he had been killed in battle one week before.

Picasso made Gertrude Stein sit more than eighty times for her portrait.

And then painted out the head and redid it three months later without having seen her again.

Pablo Casals began each day for more than seventy years by playing Bach.

I have come to this place because I had no life back there at all.

I have, Reader has?

Reader has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

Someone nodded hello to him on the street yesterday.

Anna Akhmatova had an affair with Amedeo Modigliani in Paris in 1910 and 1911. Late in life, not having left Russia again in a third of a century, she would be astonished to learn how famous he had become.

In 1579, when Shakespeare was fifteen, the population of Stratford would have been little more than fifteen hundred. Is it a safe assumption that he knew the woman named Katherine Hamlet who fell into the Avon that summer and drowned?

Emily Dickinson became so extravagantly reclusive in the second half of her life that for the last ten years she did not once leave her house.

Even among the most tentative first thoughts about a first draft, why is Reader thinking of his central character as Reader?

Gray’s Elegy is 128 lines long. Gray spent seven years writing it.

If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Rembrandt.

I am growing older. I have been in hospitals. Do I wish to put certain things down?

Granted, Reader is essentially the I in instances such as that. Presumably in most others he will not be the I at all, however.

Fighting with his wife, drunk, Paul Verlaine once threw their three-month-old son against a wall.

Thumbed pages: read and read. Who has passed here before me?

Saint Thomas Aquinas was an anti-Semite.

Only Bianchon can save me, said Balzac, near death.

Bianchon being a doctor in Le Père Goriot.

His life evidently static. Alone, seemingly without occupation or achievement, his means meager.

Emptiness.

Anthony Trollope said he had read Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie at least three dozen times.

Protagonist?

Perhaps someone from a shop Protagonist had stopped in at, a clerk? Or merely someone in a friendly mood in passing?

Severn, lift me up, I am dying.

Don’t breathe on me, it comes like ice.

The world is my idea.

Saint Augustine said his first teacher was also the first person he ever saw who could read without moving his lips.

Saxo Grammaticus.

It is not impossible that the young actress Moliere married when he was forty, and with whose family he had been closely connected in the theater for years, was his own illegitimate daughter.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

At the age of seven, Giambattista Vico fell from a ladder and fractured his skull so severely that his parents were told to anticipate feeblemindedness.

Where, this isolation?

Giorgione and Titian were pupils of Giovanni Bellini’s in Venice together. Giorgione was dead in his early thirties, in 1510. Titian was still painting sixty-six years later.

What has happened? It is life that has happened; and I am old.

Said Louis Aragon.

If an ox could paint a picture, his god would look like an ox.

Said Xenophanes.

26 Piazza di Spagna.

Laurence Sterne’s corpse was sold to a medical school by grave robbers. It had been almost completely dissected before someone chanced to recognize it.

How much of Reader’s own circumstances or past would he in fact give to Protagonist in such a novel?

Tolle lege, tolle lege.

Wherever conquest led him, Alexander the Great made it a point to have botanical specimens sent back to Aristotle, who had been his tutor. A copy of the Iliad that he carried in a jeweled chest contained emendations in Aristotle’s handwriting.

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.

Leonardo’s notebooks indicate that he knew the sun did not move before Copernicus did.

Nobody came. Nobody called.

Despite decades of self-analysis, Freud was forever so anxiety-ridden about missing trains that he would arrive at a station as much as an hour ahead of time.

Freud.

Joseph Beuys was a Stuka pilot in World War II. Monet, visiting London: This brown thing? This is your Turner?

Rene Descartes was born in a hayfield.

Ultimately, Emily Dickinson would even hide from visitors at her house itself.

Reader and this notion of his.

Reader and his mind full of clutter.

What is a novel in any case?

Or is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography after all?

Bohemia. A desert country near the sea.

In 1911, an Italian house painter named Vincenzo Perruggia who had been working at the Louvre managed to remove the Mona Lisa from its frame and walk out with it under his overalls.

And to go unsuspected until he tried to sell it two years later.

Before Sylvia Plath turned on her oven to commit suicide, she left bread and butter and milk in the bedroom where her two children were sleeping.

Leibniz: Why is there anything at all rather than nothing?

When Daumier was sixty, destitute and almost blind, Corot bought the house Daumier was renting and gave it to him.

Der Untergang des Abendlandes.

Protagonist living near a disused cemetery, perhaps?

A sense somehow of total retreat? Abandonment?

Albert Camus’ father was killed in the Battle of the Marne when Camus was only months old. His mother was an illiterate charwoman.

Once, at dinner, with great delicacy Brahms told Tchaikovsky that he did not approve of his work.

With equal delicacy Tchaikovsky told Brahms that he did not approve of his.

After Byron and Leigh Hunt and Trelawny burned Shelley’s body on the beach at Viareggio, they got drunk. Boisterously, shouting and laughing and even singing.

Then again, they had been dealing with remains already five weeks bloated and decomposed. Byron had at least once turned sick.

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?

In Konigsberg, where he spent his entire life, Immanuel Kant had several sisters and a brother and did not see any of them for a quarter of a century. At one point he had a letter from the brother and did not answer it for two and a half years.

Nonlinear? Discontinuous? Collage-like?

An assemblage?

Knut Hamsun was once a horse-car conductor in Chicago.

Throughout the Middle Ages, often no more than a single manuscript of certain classics existed. One leaking monastery roof and the Satyricon could have been lost forever, for instance.

Mallarme learned English specifically to read Poe.

Walter the Penniless. Peter the Hermit.

During the four years that Dostoievsky spent at hard labor in Siberia for political conspiracy, the only book he was allowed was the New Testament. Though once in a prison hospital he found Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield.

Deus vult.

Raymond Chandler lived with his mother until her death when he was thirty-five. And then almost immediately married a woman seventeen years older than he was.

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.

Said Henry James.

George Bernard Shaw was an anti-Semite.

Protagonist first seen poised abstractedly amid a kind of transitory disarray? Cartons heaped and piled?

Innumerable books, Reader presumably means?

The name Kierkegaard translates from the Danish as churchyard.

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea.

Dickens, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Maxim Gorky never finished grade school. Sean O’Casey and Alberto Moravia did not either.

O’Casey, at forty-three, was working with a pick and shovel when his first play was produced.

Where precisely would Protagonist live, if near a derelict cemetery? Possibly some sort of structure just within the grounds themselves?

That building abandoned also? Protagonist possibly stealing electricity through wires connected to the base of a streetlamp outside?

Reader sees a red brick building, in fact. Fairly small and falling into ruin, but of two stories.

None of John Milton’s daughters was given an education, though two of the three were taught to read to him in his blindness.

In languages of which they did not understand one word.

Boethius was executed by having a thong inexorably tightened about his temples.

As a boy, Tennyson could recite all 103 of Horace’s odes from memory.

Montaigne claimed he knew those and the rest of Horace as well.

No life back there at all.

What life here, now?

John Donne posed for a painting in his own shroud. And kept it beside his bed during a long final illness.

Why is Reader always mildly incredulous at remembering that the decimal system arose from counting on one’s fingers?

Several ancient oaks, also within the grounds, partly obscure the house. At night, the single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window is extremely faint.

There are wire mesh fences, in jagged disrepair.

Kathe Kollwitz lost a son in World War I and a grandson in World War II.

Let us read Little Dorrit again. There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep.

According to medieval legend, his pupils stabbed John Scotus Erigena to death with their pens.

Could one, actually, rewire the connections of a streetlamp in that manner?

Salvador Dali’s perception of Jackson Pollock. Fish soup.

On a shelf beside Reader’s desk: a human skull, a reproduction of Giotto’s portrait of Dante, two small rough orange stones.

Hrotswitha van Gandersheim.

In his late sixties, Herman Melville took a four-year-old granddaughter to a park and then forgot her there.

Hospitals, Protagonist will have been in.

And grows older.

Dulcinea del Toboso.

Not far into the story, Robinson Crusoe swims out to the wreck of his ship with no clothes on.

In the selfsame paragraph Defoe has him filling his pockets with biscuits.

Should Reader determine a name for Protagonist at this juncture after all?

Ishmael. Meursault. Harry Haller.

Should he give him children, if he is still being in part autobiographical?

A son and a daughter, then?

Zeno hanged himself after breaking a toe. At ninety.

Alexander Selkirk.

Once, not knowing which of several houses was Bizet’s, Saint-Saens simply stood in the road singing an aria from Les Pecheurs de Perles.

Surely, a clerk from the liquor store where Protagonist had already stopped in two or three times for cheap wine, recognizing him?

At twenty, Joseph Conrad tried to commit suicide over gambling losses. In later life managing to let people believe the bullet wound had come from a duel.

The cemetery is in the oldest section of the town, and the few dwellings on the opposite side of the street, modest and rundown themselves, seem to house very few residents. A point being that no one questions Protagonist’s presence.

Nor is the fence mesh at that, rather it is a more traditional cemetery construction of tall iron spikes. The gate at the entrance is partly unhinged and askew.

The paths inside are of gravel, or were, long since thinned and scattered.

Is there a need to explain the house’s availability?

Obviously a former gatekeeper’s or superintendent’s.

William Butler Yeats was an anti-Semite.

A neighbor once came upon William Blake and his wife Catherine reading Paradise Lost aloud in their garden. Sitting naked.

Robert Moses Grove.

Manet was so vituperatively condemned by critics that for a time he was too embarrassed to ask anyone to pose for him.

Before Cezanne had gained any recognition he once burst into tears when someone sincerely admired his work.

Nothing now, but my books.

Haller’s books? Selkirk’s?

The Persians deployed so many bowmen at Thermopylae that it was said their arrows would blot out the sun.

To which a Spartan commander: All the better, then we will be fighting in the shade.

In his mid-thirties, T. S. Eliot was known to wear pale green face powder. One of the Sitwells said it was to make him look as if he were suffering.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was an American prisoner of war in Italy at the end of World War II.

Should Protagonist possibly have written books of his own once? Unnamed and undescribed, mentioned almost incidentally?

Once, he wrote a few books. That was long ago.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

Rossini wore a wig. In chilly weather he sometimes wore two.

In fact only two Spartans survived Thermopylae. One was killed in battle elsewhere. The other hanged himself in disgrace.

Cervantes was a tax collector during the outfitting of the Armada.

And was imprisoned when his accounts did not balance.

Je crois entendre encore.

Early on, Protagonist will naturally become familiar with most of the gravestones.

Both of Paul Celan’s parents went to their deaths in German concentration camps.

Rudyard Kipling once lived in Vermont.

After Cesare Pavese committed suicide, several young women none of his friends had ever seen before appeared at his funeral weeping, in the hope of being taken for former mistresses.

They make a desert and they call it peace.

The Knight of Pentacles, Reversed: A brave Man, but out of Employment, Idle, Negligent.

Boris Pasternak so admired Rilke that he carried two letters from him in his wallet for decades.

Nothing now, but Protagonist’s books.

Those, and the graves of strangers.

Working as a publisher’s reader, George Meredith rejected The Way of All Flesh.

Working as a publisher’s reader, Andre Gide rejected Swann’s Way.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen.

Or would Reader rather see Protagonist live somewhere else entirely?

An isolated house at a beach, for instance?

Although perhaps without the even more absolute solitude that might establish?

At least with others on a floor above? A woman? Women?

Tomorrow it will rain in Bouville.

Preferably separate entrances. The house on a dune, possibly, with Protagonist and the others coming and going along opposite sides of the slope.

And with Protagonist’s entrance in the rear, a sort of basement? Possibly what had once been an indoor garage?

Ergo almost never seeing these women, merely being aware of their proximity. Or hearing them, on occasion.

Raskolnikov. Bloom. Mr. Kurtz.

Rochester died in 1680. A full collection of his verse was not published until 1926.

And even then was not allowed into the United States.

Flaubert’s lamp burned with such regularity late at night in his workroom at Croisset that pilots on the Seine were able to take their bearings from it.

Or would Raskolnikov surely at least sometimes see them from other vantage points?

In this house the same initial impermanence, the same cartons.

At twenty, Bach made a pilgrimage of more than two hundred miles, on foot, to hear Buxtehude play the organ.

Ship me somewheres east of Suez.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of little old ladies.

A person on business from Porlock.

Aldonza Lorenzo.

Raskolnikov wrote some books once.

Very little happened in connection with any of them. In any event that was long ago.

Jack London committed suicide.

Bruno Schulz was carrying home a loaf of bread when he was shot down in the street by the Gestapo.

Protagonist reading. Hearing them, up above.

Mussorgsky died raving mad from drink.

A listing still exists of the winning runners in the Olympic Games from 776 B.C. through the next 993 years. Events in Greek history were dated by the Olympiad in which they occurred.

Kant was an anti-Semite.

That garage area, at the rear, looks out onto little more than scrub and brush. There is a path Raskolnikov/Bloom follows through the dunes, but heading away diagonally, so that he has almost no view of the upper story then either.

Anaximander was sixty-four years old in the second year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad.

Being how Diogenes Laertius once situates him.

Would some sort of deck on the upper story face the ocean? How distantly perceived from the beach when Protagonist strolls there?

Only a lunatic would dance when sober, said Cicero.

Behold, I have heard that there is corn in Egypt.

How many years have passed since the last burial in the cemetery? Do mourners still appear?

Heraclitus did not say that one cannot step into the same river twice. One of his followers did.

Heraclitus did say that praying to statues of the gods was like talking to a house instead of to its owner, however.

And that souls smell in Hades.

A. E. Housman never in his life lived in Shropshire.

Ralph Roister-Doister.

It took eight years to sell the first printing of six hundred copies of The Interpretation of Dreams.

Our sister, death.

Perhaps one solitary mourner appearing, regularly, at one grave. Here again, a woman. Young. In fact too young to have a connection with anyone buried here that Protagonist can fathom.

Or are some few of the graves more recent?

Roland Barthes died after being hit by a laundry truck.

When Ovid was banished from Rome, it was to Tomi, on the Black Sea.

Would Reader have otherwise ever heard of a city in Romania now called Constanta?

Anne Bradstreet’s first home in Massachusetts, a decade after the Mayflower, was at what later would become Harvard Square.

Aesop was a slave. Terence was a slave. Epictetus was a slave.

Protagonist watching the woman who appears?

After a time, finding himself waiting for her almost unwittingly?

Helen Frankenthaler Motherwell, her name legally once was.

Frederic Chopin was an anti-Semite.

Madame,

If I interpret your letter right, you are ignominiously married; if it is yet undone, let us once talk together.

Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an insane asylum.

Someone will call. Surely someone will call.

Aristotle’s may have been the first purely private library.

At forty-six, after an illness, Goya suddenly turned stone deaf.

How long can Reader deal with Protagonist’s isolation without explaining his background?

How conceivable is it for the emptiness to simply exist?

L’Être et le Néant.

Blaise Cendrars lost an arm in World War I. As did one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brothers, a concert pianist.

Lice in the locks of literature, Tennyson called critics.

Or will the question persist? Why does Protagonist have no life?

Having written books of his own, would he have known other writers?

Does he not, now?

After Anne Sexton turned on her car’s engine in a closed garage to commit suicide, she sat drinking vodka while waiting.

Erinna of Telos, who died at nineteen.

Twenty-three hundred years ago.

Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.

The woman at the grave.

Brunelleschi was the first Renaissance artist about whom a full-length biography was written.

I am weary, Ananda, and wish to lie down.

June 22, 1633:

With sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and abhor the aforesaid errors and heresies contrary to the Holy Church, and I swear that henceforward I will never again say or declare, verbally or in writing, anything that might bring about a similar suspicion toward me.

Goethe did not go to bed with a woman until he was forty.

Where would Protagonist’s son and/or daughter be? How often would he see, hear from them?

Will he?

Samuel Beckett was once forced to hide for ten days under a false floor in Nathalie Sarraute’s Paris attic while working for the Resistance in World War II.

Eppur si muove.

Armande Bejart.

Tolstoy’s wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times.

An illiterate, underbred book.

Said Virginia Woolf of Ulysses.

I can’t even pronounce the filthy thing.

Said Wallace Stevens of the word womb in a poem.

All legends to the contrary, Empedocles did not leap into Mount Etna. Or even die in Sicily.

Byron was nine when he was introduced to sex by his nurse, one May Gray.

How well insulated would the ceiling of a former garage be? Would Ishmael/Meursault/Kurtz be aware of virtually every movement on the floor above?

Tony Trollope, he was naturally called.

Madeleine Grey. The Chants d’Auvergne.

Why is it never part of Reader’s active memory that Helen of Troy was the daughter of a god and was hatched from an egg?

Though Homer insists she was mortal.

Aquinas knew almost nothing about history.

Maigret.

Does it go without saying that this upstairs presence would accentuate Protagonist’s sense of his aloneness?

Does it go without saying that he deplores being alone?

Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself in the head. He may have been playing Russian roulette rather than definitely intending suicide.

But in either event had put on a clean shirt first.

Menin aei’de, tbea.

George Gissing’s first wife became a prostitute. His second wife went mad.

No one nodding to him on the street in passing after all? Something more categorical?

I am completely alone here now?

Helen was not the first petticoat that caused a war.

Says Burton in the Anatomy.

Impoverished and freezing, Gerard de Nerval hanged himself near a cheap Paris doss-house after no one responded to his late-night knock.

Alexander Pushkin was an anti-Semite.

The Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.

Hegel had an illegitimate son. At his wedding, the boy’s mother showed up with a letter promising matrimony. And had to be bought off on the spot.

Protagonist is completely alone here now.

Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

102 Boulevard Haussman.

Even on the coolest evenings, when she kneels at the grave, the woman is bareheaded.

Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors. He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he wrote Cicero the news.

Ananda. Having been Buddha’s cousin, as well as his favorite pupil.

The Gulf of Spezia.

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.

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.

The soprano arias in the Cour d’Amour section can fill Reader with heartache.

The soprano arias in the Cour d*Amour section can fill Protagonist with heartache?

Poised abstractedly amid a kind of transitory disarray. Cartons heaped and piled.

Pausing among the graves.

Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

Boccaccio was illegitimate. And had five illegitimate children of his own by several mistresses.

Repentant in later life, regretting even having written The Decameron, he contemplated taking Holy Orders.

But permitted himself to be talked out of this by Petrarch.

Sweet the nails, sweet the wood,

Which bore so sweet a burden.

In truth Protagonist has also come to this place because he can live infinitely more cheaply here.

Hannah Senesch.

Carl Orff was an anti-Semite.

Henry James paid for lessons to ride a bicycle.

Then we will have Homer and Don Quixote, and then we will have saunter and chat, and one more laugh before we die.

Said William Cowper, who was mad through most of his life.

Escaping after the German invasion of France, at seventy, Heinrich Mann crossed the Pyrenees on foot.

Ellen Ternan. Ellen Terry.

A one-word inquiry Reader discovers on a note sheet, its meaning now lost to him completely: Dead?

Yukio Mishima committed suicide samurai-style.

Having first arranged to be instantly beheaded thereafter.

Kawabata committed suicide also.

Goliards.

Giotto’s portrait of Dante, a reproduction of which tilts on a shelf beside Reader’s desk, was probably painted after Dante died. Nonetheless it is the only one by someone who knew him.

One does not finish a poem, one only abandons it.

Patience, and shuffle the cards.

An equally inexplicable similar sheet: She?

Bjornstjerne Bjornson. Rudolf Eucken. Frans Sillanpaa. Verner von Heidenstam. Halldor Laxness. Pearl Buck. Karl Gjellerup.

Toni Morrison.

Because we were young and drunk and twenty, and could never die.

Wallace Stevens was an anti-Semite.

Tevya der Milchiger.

Names for Protagonist’s children? If such?

Whereabouts? If known?

Suzette Gontard, who became the Diotima of Holderlin’s Hyperion after their few years of clandestine trysts, died in 1802. Holderlin lived on until 1843.

Ah, my Diotima, thirteen sons she bore me. One is the Pope, another is the Sultan, a third is Emperor of Russia.

May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?

No, it did lots of other things too.

Augustine vehemently condemned all study except the Scriptures. Which is to say no natural science, no philosophy, no poetry.

But acknowledged weeping at the death of Dido in the Aeneid.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz.

Has it been convincingly established that Sylvia Plath did not expect her suicide to be successful?

Brunetto Latini. At Dante’s right in the Giotto fresco.

Jacqueline du Pre, who did not play Bach every morning for seventy years.

But was found to have multiple sclerosis at twenty-seven.

Does Reader still possess recordings?

Weldon Kees committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. Presumably. His car was at the site, though his body was never recovered.

How old is Hamlet?

If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now.

Said Emily Bronte, an hour before her death.

December 19, 1848.

A Tuesday.

You are no a de wrider, you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in Mejico.

The two small rough orange stones beside the Dante portrait are from Masada. Once brought to Reader as a souvenir by his daughter.

The original Diotima was a presumably legendary priestess said to have been Socrates’ teacher. In the Symposium Plato lets her voice his metaphysic of love. There would appear to be no other classical references to her.

Eliot was an anti-Semite.

Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

Ariosto wrote fifty-six versions of the opening of Orlando Furioso.

A poor virgin, sir, an ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own.

Dead?

She?

Charles V once bent and picked up a paintbrush that Titian had dropped, at the time an extraordinary gesture of respect for an artist.

Convinced he was being poisoned, Osip Mandelstam may have sometimes stolen food from other inmates in his Soviet prison camp. And been beaten for it. At the end he survived on scraps from a garbage heap.

Twice, Remedios Varo lived with two lovers at the same time.

Along the beach beyond the dimes. Flotsam. Odds and ends.

A French word for such, is Reader trying to recall?

A young child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or broiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or ragout.

Verweihle doch, du hist so schön.

Fray Bernardino de Sahagun.

Lemmings from Norway have been reported to migrate to a particular area in the Atlantic and then swim in circles until they drown. Flocks of birds have gone to their deaths in the same spot. Is archaic instinct drawing them back to Atlantis?

Of ladies, knights, of love and arms,

Of chivalry and boldest deeds I sing.

Velazquez painted Philip IV more than forty times.

Longinus. About whom nothing whatever is known.

Including his real name.

Carole Landis committed suicide.

Biographers who conclude at the death of their subject and do not at least briefly discuss the survivors.

Joseph Severn, who would remain in Rome through most of the next six decades. Eventually even serving as British Consul.

Claire Clairmont, who outlived Byron by fifty-five years.

Dora Diamant, who died in England well after World War II.

The historical Troy, aka Troy Vila. Specified as having fallen between 1240 and 1230 B.C. Bones of prototypal Hectors lie in the roadways, and there is evidence of step-by-step destruction.

After which the site was entirely abandoned for centuries.

Spinoza died at forty-four of tuberculosis, surely aggravated by glass dust in his lungs from twenty years of grinding lenses for a living.

Ben Richards.

The Aspern Papers.

Juana de Asbaje was illegitimate.

Hardy may have had an illegitimate son by a cousin named Tryphena Sparks.

The Sangreal. And/or Sangrail.

Dost know this water-fly?

Torquato Tasso was twice locked away as insane.

All of Plato came down from antiquity in less maimed form than any other writings, an undeniable sign of the esteem in which it was held.

Nonetheless when Aquinas and other medieval thinkers referred to the philosopher, with no additional identification, it was universally understood that Aristotle was meant.

Il maestro di color che sanno.

Primo Levi committed suicide by throwing himself down a stairwell.

Through much of her life, Marina Tsvetayeva was forced to endure practically a beggar’s existence. And with her nearest relatives repeatedly imprisoned.

Akhmatova fared little better, confronted by the same family jailings, often subsisting for long periods on little more than black bread.

Frangois Villon’s mother was illiterate.

As Nietzsche saw it, the last Christian died on the Cross.

Ebenezer Cooke.

Tecumseh.

The Wittgenstein pianist/brother, Paul, who lost his right arm in World War I, subsequently commissioned Prokofiev and Ravel and Richard Strauss to compose one-handed works for him. Actually he appears to have been an unexceptional performer.

Surely someone will call?

Legend says that Hesiod was murdered because of seducing a friend’s daughter, who had then hanged herself.

And that when his corpse was discarded at sea it was brought back by dolphins.

T. E. Hulme was killed in action in Flanders in 1917.

Obviously in town, but even at the beach, Protagonist has no car. There are stores on a highway not far from the latter, however. From his entrance at the rear of the house there is a path through the brush leading that way.

The nearest village is only a short walk also.

One follows the highway or for that matter the beach itself to get to it.

Tecmessa.

Isaac Newton died a virgin.

In Brussels, in 1873, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist and was sentenced to two years at hard labor.

Not long thereafter Rimbaud burned all of his remaining manuscripts. At nineteen. And insofar as is known wrote no more verse.

Mary Shelley was nineteen when she finished Frankenstein.

Je finis par trouver sacré le désordre de mon esprit.

Risë Stevens.

Dewey Dell.

Simeon Stylites, who spent thirty-six years on top of a sixty-foot pillar in the Syrian desert. For most of that time his body a mass of maggot-infested sores.

The maggots no more than eating what God had intended for them, he said.

Henry James was an anti-Semite.

René Char was a saboteur for the Resistance in World War II.

The human skull on that same shelf was given to Reader in Mexico by an archaeologist who had come upon several during a dig.

Its origin should be more intriguing if Reader gives it to Protagonist.

Must We Mean What We Say?

Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius were all ordered to commit suicide by Nero. Each opened a vein.

Lucan was twenty-five. He recited his own verses as he bled to death.

Three years later Nero would be a suicide on his own part.

Presumably Reader will give Protagonist photographs of his son and daughter also. Should he possess certain others?

What mail does he receive?

Anglican. Royalist. Classicist.

Degas was probably impotent.

Berlioz fell in love with Harriet Smithson when he saw her as Ophelia in Kemble’s Hamlet In later life she became a shrew.

Ah, what an artist dies with me!

Rossini wrote The Barber of Seville in less than two weeks.

Welshman. Drunkard. Heterosexual.

Oliver Goldsmith was almost always indigent. Samuel Johnson once rushed money to keep him from being evicted. Goldsmith spent it on drink.

Rilke was eternally someone’s houseguest. Once he had fifty different addresses in four years.

Kätchen Schönkopf.

Frederike Brion.

Lotte Buff.

Lili Schönemann.

Charlotte von Stein.

Christiane Vulpius.

Marianne von Willemer.

Lorenzo Ghiberti devoted twenty-eight years to the East Door of the Florence Baptistry. Michelangelo would say it could have served as the entrance to Paradise.

Five hundred years later, Reader would stand staring where five of the door’s ten panels lay heaped amid muck after having been wrenched away in the Great Flood of November 4, 1966. The night before.

The honor of having been the first documented alcoholic author evidently falls to Aeschylus.

Shaw lived with his mother until he was forty-two. And then had an unconsummated marriage.

John Stuart Mill was Bertrand Russell’s godfather.

James Russell Lowell was Virginia Woolf s.

Maurice Ravel died of a brain tumor.

Will Protagonist have spent time in Italy?

In Mexico?

At seventeen, when she became Abelard’s pupil, Heloise was already fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

Balzac wrote eighty-five novels in twenty years.

And made uncountable revisions in the proof sheets of each.

Thomas Wolfe was an anti-Semite.

Robinson Crusoe is on his island for twenty-eight years, two months, and nineteen days.

Fray Luis de Leon.

Would Protagonist’s son or daughter one day want his books?

Thackeray’s wife was insane. But was cared for in a private home rather than an institution.

Judah Halevi.

Bitter Honeymoon.

Ella Ferris Pell was buried in a pauper’s grave.

Her Salome.

Auschwitz. Dachau. Treblinka. Maidanek. Sobibor. Chelmno. Mauthausen. Ravensbriick. Birkenau. Belzec. Theresienstadt.

There is no verifiable portrait of Jane Austen.

An otherwise anonymous Madame Delphine Delamare, who after numerous adulteries as the wife of an inattentive country doctor committed suicide with poison in 1850.

And became the model for Emma Bovary.

I declare to you before God, and as an honest man, that your son is the greatest composer I know, either personally or by name.

And Buchenwald. Six miles from Weimar. On what had been a pleasant wooded hillside.

The more significant women in Protagonist’s life?

Once, obviously, more of an existence than his books and the headstones of strangers.

Children depart, miscellaneous relationships wither. Friends move to distant places.

Friends die.

Salman Rushdie lost the tip of one of his fingers as a boy. As does a character in Midnight’s Children.

Tolstoy was twice cited for bravery as a cavalry officer in the Caucasus.

And Bergen-Belsen. Where Anne Frank died.

Of starvation and typhus.

God wrote the book. I took his dictation.

Cartons like an impermanent sculpture of found objects. On a stairway ending at a sealed-off door.

I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.

Non amo te, Sabidi.

Does a lone woman walk the beach, perhaps, and with a certain regularity, as Reader visualizes one visiting at one of the graves?

A less than anonymous Paris prostitute named Marie Du-plessis, who was dead at twenty-three.

And became the model for La Dame anx Camelias.

Hart Crane committed suicide by jumping from a freighter in the Caribbean.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an anti-Semite.

Molloy. Malone. Estragon.

Simonetta Vespucci. Who was painted by Piero di Cosimo. And one of whose relatives the Americas are named after.

Ilya Ilych Oblomov.

D. S. Mirsky died in Siberia in one of Stalin’s purges.

Sempre libera.

The question of truth versus legend in Alexander’s having razed Persepolis at the bidding of Thais.

The fair certainty that excessive wine played a part.

Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye.

Maribarbola and Nicolasito.

Erostratus burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 B.C., so that his name would be remembered through history.

One of those who remembered it was Cervantes, who lets Don Quixote tell Sancho Panza the story.

And that Alexander was born on the same night.

Adrienne Monnier committed suicide.

Where Reader more broadly sees the cemetery is in a town that in its entirety is comprised of little other than those shoddy small brick row houses and fissured streets. And would seem as if perpetually guised in winter light.

A difficulty, however, being that Reader senses he is evoking the image from half a century or more ago. Where such today?

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Take courage, Charlotte.

Said Anne, dying only six months after Emily.

Back to the things themselves.

The baseball on Reader’s windowsill was hit foul by Ted Williams at Yankee Stadium. Also in antiquity. Reader was with a girl named Fern Winters when it ricocheted off a concrete step and the arm of a seat directly to him.

Sartre called John Dos Passos the greatest writer of their time.

Is Reader perhaps recalling older neighborhoods in certain middling Hudson River towns like Kingston or Catskill or Saugerties, which in those days he knew slightly?

Bucephalas.

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?

Thomas Traherne died in 1674. The manuscripts of his poems, never before published, were come upon on a bookseller’s cart in 1897.

Also in part a commonplace book?

Also in part a cento, as Burton would surely have had it?

The criminality at Aulis.

Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of The Unquiet Grave?

A man will turn over half a library to make one book, Johnson said.

Lucian Freud was once married to Jacob Epstein’s daughter. And once to a woman who later married Robert Lowell.

The saints have their own country.

Said Pascal.

In an apartment far west in Greenwich Village. Heat. Molloy/Malone/Estragon sorting books and records, determining which he may dispose of before departing after all.

Elizabeth Siddal died from an overdose of laudanum, very probably a suicide.

Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch.

There is no doubt that an English winter would put an end to me.

Il Libro dell’ Arte.

Della Pittura.

Reader is well aware that sooner or later a decision had best be made between the cemetery and the beach.

D. H. Lawrence was an anti-Semite.

Petrarch owned a Virgin by Giotto. Leaving it to someone in his will, he felt it necessary to point out that the benighted would still not have learned to appreciate the artist.

Jean Genet was illegitimate.

H. H. Munro was killed by a sniper on the French front in 1916.

In Canto IV of the Inferno, which is to say with 96 percent of his chief work yet unwritten, Dante has the temerity to rank himself sixth in the company of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan.

Underestimating.

Hannah Arendt:

We cannot know if there is such a thing as altogether unappreciated genius, or whether it is the daydream of those who are not geniuses.

Will Watt ever actually meet or at least speak with the woman who comes to the cemetery?

Whose is the grave at which she visits?

Aubrey Beardsley was dead of tuberculosis at twenty-five.

Is it not passing brave to be a king,

And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

Melville worked as a customs inspector in Manhattan for nineteen years, out of an office on West Street near Gansevoort. His highest wage was never more than four dollars a day.

Gansevoort Street was named after a hero of the Revolutionary War. Melville’s maternal grandfather.

All life is sorrowful.

Are the Wandering Rocks in the Odyssey ice floes from the Dnieper or the Don that have drifted into the Black Sea?

Protagonist nodded hello to the woman from the grave in passing on the street yesterday.

Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.

In fact Protagonist has any number of friends.

Among the living and accessible.

Even if he has never quite been able to articulate for himself precisely why or even when it was that he commenced to fall out of touch.

With some of whom in what now appears a virtually separate incarnation he spent time endlessly.

Archimedes had to be dragged by main force to take a bath.

Sir John Denham once saved George Wither from being hanged by pleading that so long as Wither was alive, he, Denham, could never be the worst poet in England.

Paul de Man was an anti-Semite.

Except for Aquinas and the Bible, Descartes almost never read a word. He called the classics a waste of time.

The best critic and human being I’ve known in my life was my dear friend Paul de Man.

Had said Harold Bloom before de Man’s pro-Nazi World War II writings were discovered.

Kol Nidre.

Hadrian’s Animula, vagula, blandula. Which Reader was surprised to find Stevie Smith had done a translation of.

Though he remotely knew Byron’s.

Shall I, wasting in despair,

Die because a woman’s fair?

Keats may have been born above a livery stable.

Cennino d’Andrea Cennini.

Leon Battista Alberti.

Certain writers’ saloons near that Greenwich Village apartment would Protagonist have spent some of that other incarnation in?

Camus died in a car crash.

Ortwin de Graef.

A Yorkshire bishop convened a public burning of Jude the Obscure.

Probably in his despair at not being able to burn me, Hardy said.

The White Horse Tavern?

The Lion’s Head?

Anne Sexton sexually abused her older daughter.

Skibet Guar Videre.

The Viareggio?

Gentlemen, old Bach is here!

Christopher Smart. Mad, lice-infested, incising A Song to David and the Jubilate Agno into the wainscotting of a jail cell.

Known before that for insisting upon being joined in prayer wherever the impulse struck him, even at street corners. Or more ideally in rain.

Frieda von Richthofen.

Legend eternally insists that Cleopatra committed suicide by pressing an asp to her bosom. Plutarch suggests that it may have been by taking poison, however.

Finnegans Wake, sans apostrophe. Finnegans ergo a plural noun, Wake a verb.

Joyces write. Readers read.

Fernand Leger was gassed while serving as a stretcher-bearer in World War I.

Fuit Ilium,

I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone else, Johnson said.

What things have we seen

Done at the Mermaid!

Charmian and Iras committed suicide when Cleopatra did.

Lorenzo da Ponte ended his days teaching Italian at what would later become Columbia University.

Could Protagonist possibly have taught somewhere at some time also?

Columbia likewise?

Schopenhauer was an anti-Semite.

Austerlitz. Smolensk. Borodino.

Tycho Brahe wore a silver alloy nose. The bridge of his own had been severed in a duel.

Horseflies that keep the horse from plowing, Chekhov called critics.

Hendrickje Stoffels was illiterate.

Hailey, Idaho, Ezra Pound was born in.

Saskia.

August 2, 1492. The deadline set by Ferdinand and Isabella for the expulsion of all Jews who did not convert to Catholicism. August 3, 1492. Columbus sailed.

F. O. Matthiessen committed suicide in a plunge from a window.

Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton is on display at University College, London.

In Bentham’s clothes.

Protagonist’s son or daughter may one day want his books.

Some few? The better volumes of art reproductions?

Rudolf Nureyev was an anti-Semite.

Caddy held me. She smelled like trees.

Galileo had three illegitimate children.

From certain angles, the knotted root on Reader’s windowsill looks like a hand grasping in supplication. A woman named Kate Winter plucked it from an eddy at an embankment of the Ebro where Reader and she had paused during a long day’s driving.

Freud had thirty-three operations for cancer on his mouth and throat.

Joyce had twenty-five operations on his eyes.

Excluding the minor coincidence of their names, there is no connection between the Fern Winters at Yankee Stadium and the Kate Winter in Spain. Reader knew them decades apart.

No ideas but in things.

George Sanders committed suicide.

Gabriella Mistral once lived in Roslyn Harbor, Long Island.

Bach and Handel were born in the same year.

Wagner and Verdi were born in the same year.

François Villon was born in the year Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.

On mourra seul.

Could a woman with one leg, on crutches, navigate in the sand of a beach?

The word philosopher translates from the Greek as lover of wisdom. Pythagoras is credited with having originated its usage.

Auden married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika, whom he had never until then met, so that she could evade the Nazis through British citizenship.

Djuna Barnes had no formal education whatsoever.

Will Protagonist have spent time in Spain also?

Dostoievsky’s father was the resident physician at a hospital for the poor. But treated his own serfs so abusively that a group of them ultimately murdered him.

I would prefer not to.

Roncesvalles. The story perhaps not being entirely mythical. An actual nephew of Charlemagne’s named Roland in fact probably having existed.

To reproduce the exterminating gesture.

When Poe, at twenty-seven, married his cousin Virginia Clemm, she was thirteen. And consumptive.

In Germany not much earlier Novalis had been engaged to a girl of twelve. Who died, however.

David Gascoyne spent two decades in mental hospitals.

We have too many things and not enough forms, Flaubert said.

H. G. Wells was an anti-Semite.

Manitas de Plata.

Dante situates Mohammed in the ninth chasm of the Malebolge for having sown division in the Church. He is seen slashed open from his chin to his anus and with his innards spilling out.

In retaliation, Muslim fundamentalists in the early 1990s threatened to blow up Dante’s tomb in Ravenna.

Seven hundred years after the fact.

Rosso Fiorentino committed suicide.

Benedetto Croce’s parents were killed in an earthquake.

Will Reader make anything out of that notion of Protagonist having seen the woman from the grave on the street?

Contrive something with more immediacy than that?

Bertrand Russell and Basil Bunting were conscientious objectors in World War I.

Robert Lowell and Kenneth Rexroth were conscientious objectors in World War II.

Here. This isn’t a musical peepshow. And don’t you smash that piano. Who’s paying here?

The first books printed in England, roughly four decades after Gutenberg, were a history of the Trojan War and a volume on chess. Both set by Caxton.

Raoul le Fevre. Guido della Colonne. Benoit de Sainte-Maure.

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.

The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.

If Protagonist has in fact taught, it will have been only briefly. And/or part-time. Possibly in writing programs.

That and his few other past employments leaving him with no kind of retirement benefits.

And no more than minimal Social Security.

Caxton me fieri fecit.

The primary aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at Aricia.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul

When hot for certainties in this our life!

Not one of the violent moments in Greek tragedy occurs on stage. Medea murdering her sons, for instance. Or Orestes bloodying Clytemnestra.

Does Reader yet know how long Protagonist has now been alone?

Who, when, the last woman in his life will have been?

Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.

Pio Baroja was an anti-Semite.

Magdalena Abakanowicz.

Melville. A little heterodox in the matter of clean linen.

Said Hawthorne.

Coleridge. Considerably more so.

Said several.

Sara Teasdale committed suicide with sleeping pills.

Could the woman who appears at the grave be the woman with one leg?

What belated queer obsession of Reader’s is this?

Jacqueline du Pre’s cello was a Stradivarius.

And was later Yo-Yo Ma’s.

Balzac called Ann Radcliffe a better novelist than Stendhal.

God is dead, everything is permitted.

Preoccupied, Beethoven was known to lather his face and then forget to shave.

He also possessed an unstrung piano, adequate in his deafness.

Ernst Toller hanged himself.

Mr. Earbrass.

Jim Thorpe is buried in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania.

Isaac Newton’s father was illiterate.

Curiously, there is no refrigeration in that part of Kingston as Reader sees it, instead there are old-fashioned iceboxes. Meaning deliveries by truck of blocks of ice.

Does Reader now have some notion of setting his novel back practically a lifetime ago?

Or is memory merely getting in the way of imagination for a minute?

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

Said Faulkner.

Probably it will not be Kingston in any case.

Frank Plumpton Ramsey was dead at twenty-six.

Robert Frost had exactly five poems accepted in the first seventeen years in which he was submitting.

Heinrich Schliemann. Sir Arthur Evans. Carl Blegen.

Saint Augustine was an anti-Semite.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

From Rabelais’s will:

I have nothing. I owe much. The rest I leave to the poor.

Shelley once insisted he had seen the devil leaning against a tree on his lawn.

And eyes staring at him from Mary’s breasts.

Hippo is now a town in Algeria called Bone.

Willard Hershberger slashed his throat with a straight razor in a Boston hotel room.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Which would have been virtually the day before yesterday, in the period Reader is thinking of.

Thales of Miletus was believed to have predicted an eclipse of the sun for May 28, 585 B.C.

Evident as it is, why is Reader surprised to so rarely make the connection between aphrodisiac and Aphrodite?

Mathilde Wesendonck.

Nadezhda von Meek.

A miniature American flag, fixed beside one of the graves.

A completely unabridged performance of Les Troy ens was not given until 1969, exactly one hundred years after Berlioz died.

It had taken almost that long for Bach’s Mass in B Minor to be done completely also.

For Protagonist’s past. The girl named Fern Winters, lovely though fragile, who tolerated baseball games? Was she twenty-two when Reader last saw her?

Also Kate Winter then, strikingly handsome. And some few years more than twice Fern’s age, meaning a good deal nearer to Protagonist’s present.

Plus fictionalized names for each, if only provisionally?

Sonia Marmeladov. Catherine Earnshaw.

Matisse called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon a hoax.

Thales might have been a Hebrew, Herodotus thought.

I do not believe in God, though I believe in Picasso, said Diego Rivera.

Gerard Manley Hopkins died of typhoid fever in 1889. One of his brothers would live into the 1950s.

A verray, parfit gentil knyght.

And as for Protagonist’s former wife?

Reader has decided to let her look like Simonetta Vespucci.

Who may have been painted by Botticelli as well as by Piero di Cosimo.

Christina Rossetti almost certainly died a virgin.

The undeniable sexual attraction that Dorothy Wordsworth felt for William.

What is all this about Irish wit and humor? Have we any book in the house with any of it in? I’d like to read a page or two.

Are any of the books Protagonist is packing inscribed by their authors?

Or are those the ones he is more likely selling, for their added value?

Sapere aude.

Nerval once tried to lead a lobster by a ribbon through a public garden in Paris.

Tristan Corbiere did the same with a pig in Rome. In evening clothes.

Thy necessity is greater than mine.

Said Philip Sidney, in passing a drink to a dying soldier while dying himself.

Gottlob Frege.

The saloon that Protagonist now and again stops in at is an Edward Hopper.

Its name in semicircular lettering on the windows, Reader sees, viewed backwards from at the bar against wintry late afternoon sunlight.

Hilaire Belloc was an anti-Semite.

John Clare spent his last twenty-three years in an asylum. Not recognizing his own wife. At times claiming to be Byron. Or Nelson at Trafalgar.

No needle marks on your Annunciation’s arm, now.

We do not come to thoughts. They come to us.

Thought Heidegger.

The first translation of major length for purely literary purposes was a Latin Iliad, ca. 250 B.C., by Livius Andronicus.

Sheri Martinelli.

Diane Arbus committed suicide by opening her wrists in a bathtub.

Clare’s parents had been illiterate. He himself never revised a line.

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?

My friends forsake me like a memory lost.

I am the self-consumer of my woes.

In Joseph Conrad’s view there is not a single sincere line, unquote, in Moby Dick.

Boris Christoff and Tito Gobbi were brothers-in-law.

Richard Tucker and Jan Peerce were also.

When Sophocles was nearing ninety, his sons tried to have him declared incompetent. Sophocles won easy dismissal by reading to the jury from Oedipus at Colonus.

Which he was only then finishing.

Schleiermacher.

Then again, Reader may let Protagonist’s ex-wife look like Isabella d’Este.

Who was painted by both Leonardo and Titian.

The termites has got me, Mr. Mack.

Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie was the model for the face on the United States dime and half-dollar.

Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie and Wallace Stevens had separate bedrooms.

Hopkins to Robert Bridges: I am a eunuch, but it is for the Kingdom of God’s sake.

Baudelaire spent two hours a day getting dressed.

Irgun.

Honor, power, wealth, fame, love of women.

Algernon Swinburne’s father was an admiral.

When I could have used a wife, I could not support one; when I could support one, I no longer needed any.

Said Kant.

Why has Reader always automatically assumed that the skull beside his desk is a man’s?

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Ernestine Schumann-Heink. Elisabeth Schumann. Eleanor Steber. Elisabeth Soderstrom. Ebe Stignani. Elena Suliotis. Erna Sack.

Being a successful reader of poetry on stage, said Akhmatova, is not necessarily the same as being a writer of successful poetry.

Snorri Sturluson was assassinated.

Twenty American publishers rejected Elie WiesePs Night.

Browning’s Sordello contains 5983 lines. Tennyson said he understood two of them.

Holbein died of plague.

Percy Bridgman committed suicide.

Photographs of anyone other than his children, has Protagonist kept?

Of himself with?

T. E. Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash.

Thomas Campion’s songs were essentially forgotten for well over two centuries.

But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house.

Igor Stravinsky was an anti-Semite.

Being sent to a dictionary at fifteen for eleemosynary on the first page of Tom Jones. Has Reader come upon the word twice since?

Give him a jugful and he will write one hundred poems. Said Tu Fu of Li Po.

He dozes in a wine shop

On a city street in Chang-an.

Saint Luke was hanged from an olive tree.

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.

no symbols where none intended

Benvenuto Cellini was once released from prison, after having killed, because a Pope needed some engraving.

And was thrown back in after insulting the Pope’s taste.

Degas’s mother was born in New Orleans.

Thou sayest it.

Protagonist’s obsolescent phonograph. And scarred long-playing records, never surrendered for compact discs.

Nor will there be a VCR.

Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?

Ecole Normale Superieure.

May 30, 1431:

Rouen, Rouen, O thou, my last dwelling place!

The devious-cruising Rachel.

Pierre Reverdy spent thirty years as a lay brother in a Benedictine monastery.

Though with his Poems in Frank O’Hara’s pocket.

From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.

The Bay Psalm Book.

Keats wrote the four great odes in one month.

Taking details for the urn from a painting by Claude Lorrain.

Ernestine Schumann-Heink had sons fighting on both sides in World War I.

The son fighting for the Germans was killed.

We are lost. We have burned a saint.

Guido Cavalcanti died of malaria.

Kazantzakis’s sequel to the Odyssey contains 33,333 lines.

Clara Westhoff.

Emily Dickinson told Thomas Wentworth Higginson that she had not read Whitman. But had heard he was disgraceful.

Has Reader decided if Protagonist will have ever seen Becky Sharp in later life? When did he last see Daisy Buchanan?

Another, for him?

Here, from not that long ago. A woman named Liz, who sculpted. And with a face so finely boned that even past midlife the chiaroscuro in certain light could make his breath catch.

Temple Drake. Constance Chatterley.

Though where now is Connie Chatterley too then?

Plato left behind seven different versions of the opening sentence of the Republic.

André Gide was an anti-Semite.

Vitelli.

Chick Stahl committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid.

In his mid-thirties, Edwin Arlington Robinson was working ten hours a day on the construction of a New York subway. Checking materials for twenty cents an hour.

Bishop Berkeley once lived in Rhode Island.

Franz Marc was killed by a grenade at Verdun.

Youth.

For Exmoor.

Could the entire town to all intents have become a depressed area? Any local industry extinct, stores or even certain private dwellings boarded up?

Surely then conveying a sense almost of recession into the past?

The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree.

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing.

Jonathan Edwards was an anti-Semite.

While acknowledging he had never met one.

It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.

The only twentieth-century novelist from whom he always learned something, Lionel Trilling called E. M. Forster.

E. M. Forster was thirty years old before he knew the facts of life.

Infinite riches in a little room.

Menander would drown at the Piraeus.

Virgil worked on the Aeneid for eleven years.

And said near his death that it was not finished and should be burned.

Joseph Michael Medwick.

Clover Adams committed suicide.

Basquiat.

Sinon. Who lied.

The Lover, which Reader little more than skimmed. Yet tones, images of light and shadow, loss. Abstractly lingering.

Gulley Jimson.

The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass all the time.

Quintus of Smyrna, the Posthomerica. Which is to say, what happened next. From the burial of Hector to the shipwreck of the Greeks en route home. Thought to be fourth century A.D.

There is no death and art can prove it.

Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.

Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

I came to Comala because I was told that my father, a certain Pedro Paramo, was living here.

Irina Ratushinskaya. At twenty-eight, as late as in 1982, sentenced to seven years in the strictest of Russian prison camps.

For writing verse deemed unsuitable to the state.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

Some of the battle descriptions in the later books of the Aeneid do perhaps come off as perfunctory.

If that was what Virgil had in mind?

For reasons unknown, John Wycliffe escaped being burned as a heretic. Though forty years after his death his remains were dug up and dumped into the River Swift.

Which flows into the Avon.

Jimmy Whistler, he was naturally called.

Rubens often had the Latin classics read to him while he was working.

Canova later did the same.

Schopenhauer’s first published work was his dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

His novelist mother said it sounded like something for druggists.

George Santayana was an anti-Semite.

It is virtually certain that Lucrezia Borgia never poisoned anyone. Or committed incest. Victor Hugo and Gaetano Donizetti notwithstanding.

Why is the red wheelbarrow beside the white chickens rather than vice versa?

Enter Caesar, in his nightgown.

Hannah Wilke’s final exhibition.

Randall Jarrell is assumed a suicide. He would appear to have stepped quite deliberately into the path of the car that killed him.

Well he kept her there in a bath

With a gallon of lysol in a bath

Gerald died that afternoon.

Victor Hugo, hélas!

Utrillo once pawned Modigliani’s only decent clothes to buy wine.

Ernest L. Thayer majored in philosophy under William James at Harvard.

C. P. Cavafy lived with his mother until he was thirty-six.

No, no! said the Queen. Sentence first — verdict afterwards.

The man himself lay in the bed.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in an infantry charge in France in 1915.

T. S. Eliot’s father manufactured bricks.

William H. McGuffey.

William H. Bonney.

Levi-Strauss:

The invention of melody is the supreme mystery of man.

Jackson Pollock once held a job cleaning bird droppings from statues in New York parks.

Work out your own salvation with diligence.

For all his madness, it would turn out that Holderlin had furtively kept all of Suzette Gontard’s letters throughout the forty years between her death and his own. Eighty years after that they would come to be published.

And somewhere men are laughing, and

somewhere children shout.

Tennyson said that scissors was the one word in the English language he could not rhyme.

Raphael, Caravaggio, Watteau, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec each died at thirty-seven.

Ronsard was so prodigally admired during his lifetime that both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots sent him gifts. And then was unread for two centuries.

Boswell’s practice of scribbling down every other word Johnson said irritated any number of their acquaintances. Ill-bred, Hester Thrale called him.

W. H. Davies lost a foot while jumping a freight train.

Men never do evil so completely and so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Said Pascal.

Pythagoras claimed to remember visiting Hades between his several alleged reincarnations.

And having seen Homer hanging from a tree and Hesiod in chains because of their disrespect for the gods.

In Gargantua, Epistemon makes the same visit. Reporting that Achilles is a beggar, Hector supports himself by scraping pots in a kitchen, Helen is a madame, Alexander darns socks, Cleopatra sells onions, and King Arthur cleans grease out of hatbands.

According to Xenophanes, Pythagoras also once asked someone to stop striking a puppy because he recognized the voice of a dead friend in its yelping.

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

At least one more for Protagonist’s background?

Again then, not infinitely long past. A woman named Susan, who edited books. But also snapped some photographs of him that will presumably now remain the last he will ever have had taken.

Brett Ashley.

Anna Wickham committed suicide.

Stephen Foster died after a fall in a rooming house on the Bowery.

He owned thirty-eight cents.

Seneca was an anti-Semite.

Jacques Derrida. Roland Barthes. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Roman Jakobson. Michel Leiris. Julia Kristeva. Phillipe Sollers. Louis Althusser. Paul Ricoeur.

All variously attended seminars of Jacques Lacan’s.

Yannis Ritsos. Iannis Xenakis.

Jeanne Hebuterne, with child, jumped from a window on the morning after Modigliani’s death.

I am growing older. I have been in hospitals. Are there things to be put down?

David Smith died in a car crash.

The sitter for the Mona Lisa was one Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Francesco del Giocondo.

Presumably her eyebrows were plucked.

James Russell Lowell was an anti-Semite.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Napoleon told Goethe he had read The Sorrows of Young Werther seven times.

Trying to articulate for himself precisely why or even when it was that he commenced to fall out of touch.

Not to call. Not to go. Not to do.

Or was he not even that fully aware of the process until he found it to be a fait accompli?

The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.

Cosimo Tura died in a poorhouse.

Discordia concors.

Anne Hathaway was twenty-six when she told Shakespeare she was pregnant.

Shakespeare was eighteen.

Casta diva.

Aristotle was born in the first year of the ninety-ninth Olympiad and died in the third year of the hundred and fourteenth.

Ergo having been either sixty-two or sixty-three.

He may also have died a suicide. Diogenes Laertius says he drank wolfsbane. Though most other sources blame chronic indigestion.

The Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell sold two copies.

Guido Reni.

Who was once as widely admired as Ronsard.

The reign of the shopwindow, Ortega called it as long ago as in 1930.

Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels — bring home.

It cost Baudelaire five years of letters and poems to coax Madame Sabatier into bed. Once. Whatever calamity occurred, the affair was terminated on the same night.

Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers

From those brown hills have melted into spring.

Arnold Schoenberg was once turned down for a Guggenheim fellowship.

Pier della Vigna committed suicide after Frederick II had him blinded. Dante confronts him with much sympathy in the Inferno.

Raymond Radiguet wrote Devil in the Flesh at seventeen. And was dead at twenty.

Henry James was bored by Crime and Punishment.

Wagner was an anti-Semite.

Mariano Azuela, as a physician, rode with Pancho Villa.

Dies Irae.

Kafka laughed repeatedly when he was reading his own work.

Milena Jesenska died at Ravensbriick.

The one describes what has happened, the other what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophical and serious than history.

Dasjudentum in derMusik.

Humphrey Cobb was wounded, and gassed twice, in World War I. Paths of Glory was his only book.

At the gatehouse, the window near which Protagonist generally chooses to sit looks out on the graves rather than on the street.

With snow, the ranks of still white stone can assume an almost occult unreality.

Frequently he will walk the nearby deserted streets in snow.

Ignis fatuus.

Moses spoke with a stutter. As did Virgil.

And Somerset Maugham. And Philip Larkin.

Raphael’s birth and death both occurred on Good Friday.

I hope you are getting some exercise and listening to music, dear Salman.

Early in the Iliad, on the battlements above the Scaean Gate, Helen points out the several Greek chieftains for the benefit of King Priam.

After the siege has ostensibly been in effect for a decade.

Bartlebooth.

Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire in a mental hospital in Ashe-ville, North Carolina.

Our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was once married to Bella Akhmadulina.

Does one know today with whom Columbus sailed when he discovered America?

Said Freud after his break with Jung.

The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines.

Beatrice Silverman.

Adele Morales.

Lady Jean Campbell.

Beverly Bentley.

Carol Stevens.

Norris Church.

Romain Roiland, on Kathe KoUwitz: the voice of the silence of the sacrificed.

Leave the bum be. He’s just drunk.

October 12, 1492. At 2 A.M., the lookout on the Pinta.

Named Rodrigo de Triana.

No light; but rather darkness visible.

Leonard Warren collapsed and died, on stage, during a performance of La Forza del Destino at the Metropolitan Opera.

Even in the worst of snows, Protagonist is hatless.

Elizabeth Shaw Melville:

Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.

Watching abstractedly among the ancient oaks as the entire cemetery commences to disappear.

Bertha Mason. Thornfield Hall.

Semper incumbebat libris. Spoken of Abelard.

Not realizing that one’s future is already one’s present even as that too is dissolving into past.

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Two years after the book’s appearance Borowski committed suicide.

Via gas.

Raymond Chandler was so obsessive about typo-free manuscripts that to cut down on the amount of his retyping he finally worked on half pages.

Edmund Wilson once proposed marriage to Djuna Barnes.

How often does the woman come to the grave?

What sort of regularity is there in the visits?

Does she sometimes fail to come?

Roald Dahl was an anti-Semite.

The 1941 Concise Cambridge History of English Literature said that no one would ever read Ulysses even if copies were given away.

Protagonist shoveling some of the snow? Into and along the pathways?

Hers?

Gitanjalu

Soutine died in Paris in 1943. As a Jew under the German occupation he could be given only the most unobtrusive of funerals. Picasso and Cocteau followed his coffin, however.

Simonides concluded it was better to be rich than wise.

Since I notice that the wise spend most of their time at the doorsteps of the rich.

Paula Modersohn-Becker was dead at thirty-one.

Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, so that he may be smitten, and die.

Beniamino Gigli was once an apprentice in a tailor shop.

Benjamin Jowett said he read Pickwick Papers at least twice every year.

Not one of the philosophic essays of Charles Sanders Peirce appeared in book form in his lifetime.

Fatwa.

Myles na Gopaleen.

The opening sentence of Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford.

Proust and Henri Bergson were cousins by marriage.

Kant knew no music. And said that reading novels diluted the mind.

Though I never saw him, or had any personal communication with him, now that he is suddenly dead I realize that he was nearer, dearer, and more important to me than anyone else.

Said Tolstoy of Dostoievsky.

No greater man ever walked the earth than he.

Said Michelangelo of Dante.

Can Reader do anything unusual with the name he puts on the stone at which the woman kneels?

How recent will he make its dates?

Has he even yet determined the age of the woman herself?

Or whether Protagonist does in fact catch sight of her elsewhere?

Counterfactual conditionals.

Beckett’s Murphy was rejected by forty-two publishers.

Gilles Deleuze committed suicide.

Factoryville, Pennsylvania. Donora, Pennsylvania. Gretna, Louisiana. Van Meter, Iowa.

Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

Gabriele D’Annunzio lost an eye in combat with the Italian air force in World War I.

Thrushcross Grange.

Lautréamont was born in Montevideo. Jules Laforgue was born in Montevideo. Jules Supervielie was born in Montevideo.

Once more before I die I will read Don Quixote, said Gissing.

Graham Greene was an anti-Semite.

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me.

O yes! I am poison’d; mother, make my bed soon,

For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wald lie down.

Born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad, and that was his only patrimony.

Has Reader made note of enough women for Protagonist’s background? Considering all the years involved?

Remembering any number of others who could readily be appropriated.

Though leaving the critical question for Protagonist’s situation still.

Why this solitude now?

Where the Catherine Earnshaw or the Maggie Tulliver or the Sara Monday for these denatured days?

Rabbi Akiba was flayed alive.

Valéry, to Gide: Do you know anything more boring than the Iliad?

William Sidney Porter became O. Henry while sitting out three years in jail for embezzlement.

Muschg.

Skoonj.

El Caballero de la Triste Figura.

Gerard Manley Hopkins is buried in Prospect Cemetery, Glasnevin. As is Maud Gonne.

As is Paddy Dignam.

Mrs. Maj. John MacBride.

Remembering a Rachel and an Anne and a Lisa and an Irene.

And an Andrea and a Judith.

And a second Susan.

Among more.

Kay Sage committed suicide.

Andre Chénier died on the guillotine.

Come un bel dì di maggio.

Walafrid Strabo drowned in the Loire.

Siger of Brabant was stabbed to death by a deranged scribe.

Either it is raining or it is not raining.

Habitually, Protagonist brings a newspaper or a book when he eats at the restaurant. Although he is no more intruded upon here than at the saloon.

There being only a lunch counter and several booths in any case. Normally an indifferent short-order cook and one graying waitress. Protagonist will puzzle at how they remain in business.

The mirror crack’d from side to side;

The curse is come upon me, cried

The Lady of Shalott.

Saint John Chrysostom was an anti-Semite.

And insisted that Jesus had never laughed.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Nine volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

Philip Freneau died after becoming lost in a snowstorm. On his way home from a tavern.

Milton was paid five pounds for Paradise Lost.

Yeats once asked Hardy how he coped with the endless copies of his books sent to him with requests for inscriptions.

Hardy led Yeats to a back closet. Piled from floor to ceiling.

Even with the idea of feeble stolen electricity at the gatehouse dismissed, Reader remains locked in on a nighttime image of only the faintest glow from a single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window.

Protagonist squinting beneath the dimmest of reading lamps.

The restaurant in the same Hopper wintry-sun mode as the saloon, however.

Isabel Rawsthorne.

According to Kenneth Tynan, a corrida with Antonio Ordonez was more stirring than any other performance by any other sort of artist he might name.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner committed suicide.

Los Pasos Perdidos.

Rosalba Camera was blind in the last years of her life. Mary Cassatt was blind in the last years of her life.

Chidiock Tichborne. Who may have been as young as eighteen when he was executed at the Tower for plotting against Elizabeth in 1586.

And was disemboweled before he was extinct, as the Tower’s report had it.

Jean Francois Champollion.

Hayim Lenski died of starvation in a Soviet labor camp. Sent there for having written poems in Hebrew.

Die Zauberflöte.

Der Zauberberg.

For a certain period in his mid-twenties Vincent Van Gogh could not pass a church without breaking into tears.

And went unbathed, which he construed as sanctifying.

I want to be buried with this novel clasped to my heart.

The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide by asphyxiating himself with a plastic bag.

Giuseppe Berto was a prisoner of war in Texas at the end of World War II.

Wyndham Lewis was an anti-Semite.

An audience of fully three thousand gave Akhmatova a standing ovation after a reading in Moscow in 1944.

About which Stalin, hearing of it: Who organized this response?

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

Giuseppina Strepponi. Busseto.

Poe was probably impotent.

Byron, Scott, Shelley, and Wordsworth all particularly admired the poetry of Felicia Dorothea Hemans.

Felicia Dorothea Hemans wrote The boy stood on the burning deck.

We had roast pig to eat before Pickett’s charge.

Samuel Johnson’s acquaintance Oliver Edwards, who might have been a philosopher.

But that cheerfulness was always breaking in.

Jacob Epstein, to a niece: Call me Epstein. Would you have called him Uncle Donatello?

Enrico Fermi: Where are they?

The books Shelley had with him when he drowned were a Keats and a Sophocles.

The Marquis de Sade died in a lunatic asylum.

Otherwise well-informed readers who would be surprised to learn that the site of ancient Troy is in Turkey.

Where Nazim Hikmet’s work was banned through virtually all of his writing life.

While being translated into more languages than probably any other twentieth-century poet’s.

Hilda Doolittle was once a patient of Freud’s.

Was Sir Thomas Wyatt one of Anne Boleyn’s lovers? Is it certain she had lovers?

Dollars damn me.

Fata morgana.

Some few friends, at least, from that earlier existence, with whom Reader should have Protagonist correspond?

Other writers?

She has no wit, but enough sound human sense to be able to fulfill her duties as a wife and mother.

Said Mozart of Constanze.

At Walden, Thoreau was borrowing land owned by Emerson.

And was no more than a ten-minute stroll from Concord.

Paul Celan drowned himself in the Seine.

I. G. Farben.

Delacroix was almost surely the illegitimate son of Talleyrand.

A gone shipmate, like any other man, is gone forever; and I never met one of them again.

Dear Cicero. Regards, Protagonist.

Philip Larkin: Who’s Jorge Luis Borges?

Are Protagonist’s few books known at all? Ever read?

Paul Ancel. Or Antschel.

They do not move.

Cervantes is buried at a convent in Madrid, though exactly where in its cemetery is not known. Nor is there a known portrait of him.

And she came through the mist and the rain to me

From the soft warm lights of the town.

Ingeborg Bachmann died at forty-seven after setting fire to a mattress with a cigarette.

Giacomo Casabianca.

Mystified by the ear of a poet who would call a volume Where Water Comes Together with Other Water.

La Vida Breve.

Roy Campbell was an anti-Semite.

And was one of the few writers or artists aligned with the fascists during the Spanish Civil War.

Like Dali.

Why is Reader always momentarily startled to recall that Keats was a fully licensed surgeon?

Does Protagonist even have a telephone?

Medieval legend says that Aquinas’s corpse was boiled and his bones preserved as relics. In actuality he was buried in Toulouse.

Ed Delehanty may have committed suicide. Having either jumped or fallen from a bridge at Niagara Falls.

El Greco would appear to have been almost impoverished at his death, though he left behind 147 canvases. Whether because he could not sell them, or would not, remains moot.

That man writes really too sloppily, said Joyce of D. H. Lawrence.

Sue Bridehead.

Hugo van der Goes died insane.

Haydn and Beethoven each nominated Handel as the greatest of composers.

Berlioz called him a tub of pork and beer.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol.

Wittgenstein had a close friend named Eccles.

Arnold Bennett died of typhoid fever after drinking Paris tap water. Deliberately drinking it, to prove to someone it was safe.

I’m Captain Jinks of the horse marines.

Yasnaya Polyana. Max Gate. Rowan Oak. Thoor Ballylee. I Tatti.

New Place.

Isaac Rosenberg was killed in France in World War I.

Charlotte Mew committed suicide by drinking creosote.

Alma Mahler was an anti-Semite.

Two of Alma Mahler’s three husbands, Mahler and Franz Werfel, were Jews.

Axel Springer Verlag.

Euripides was more frequently quoted by both Plato and Aristotle than was any other playwright. Plutarch says that Alexander quoted him repeatedly also. At a banquet not long before his death he recited an entire scene.

When John Stuart Mill’s maid inadvertently burned the only manuscript of the first volume of Carlyle’s French Revolution, Carlyle had already destroyed his notes. He would tell Tennyson that rewriting it was like swimming without water.

Oscar Wilde said that Henry James composed novels as if it were a painful duty.

Henry James said that Oscar Wilde was a fatuous fool. And an unclean beast.

Gropius.

Lou Andreas-Salome.

Before leaving New York: Protagonist wandering for some hours one afternoon along the Hudson River docks on West Street. Near Gansevoort.

Finding only that even the specific address no longer exists.

Vivaldi was buried in a pauper’s grave.

Alfred H. Hunter died in Dublin four years after the publication of Ulysses, forever unaware of his immortality.

Byron’s letters record approximately as many instances of gonorrhea as do Boswell’s journals.

Kant almost certainly died a virgin.

Daunty, Gouty, and Shopkeeper.

A Girl of the Limberlost.

To place our purpose within definite limits, we must first investigate the nature and domain of sacred doctrine.

It is the same old druid Time as ever.

Jascha Heifetz. David Oistrakh. Nathan Milstein. Isaac Stern. Benno Moiseiwitsch. Emil Gilels. Odessa, all.

René Crevel committed suicide.

Who is speaking, and says, We were in study-hall, in the first sentence of Madame Bovary?

Like Wallace Stevens, Charles Ives worked in insurance. Like Kafka.

Herder was an anti-Semite.

The poems of Catullus were lost for a millennium. Tradition has it that the single manuscript discovered in Verona in the fourteenth century had been used to stop a bunghole.

Kneeling at the grave, or standing head bowed?

And why does Reader always envision dusk?

Irony and Pity, Inc.

Yvor Winters called T. Sturge Moore a better poet than Yeats.

And Elizabeth Daryush as good or better than either.

The Pali canon.

Remembering a Sarah.

And a Robin and a Beth.

And a Karen, who wrote verse.

Some undeniably casual, some fugitive.

And over so many years.

Nonetheless.

And can any of them, with whom he has mostly long now lost touch, be even now dead?

She?

This is just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.

Wolfram von Eschenbach.

A letter of Baudelaire’s intimates that his mistress Jeanne Duval was sleeping with her own brother when the brother once moved in with them.

If die I must, let me die drinking in an inn, said Walter Map.

Patrick Kavanagh was married for the first time at sixty-three. And died the same year.

Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo,

Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi.

Good Master Schoolmaster, do not English this.

T. S. Eliot and William Burroughs’ mother walked to dancing classes together as children in St. Louis.

Along the way passing Prufrock’s Furniture Store.

General Jacques Aupick.

The phrase down these mean streets comes from an essay by Raymond Chandler.

And is an allusion to Tales of Mean Streets by Arthur Morrison.

René Magritte’s mother drowned herself.

At twenty-six, Ben Jonson barely escaped being hanged for killing a fellow actor in a duel.

Shakespeare was in the cast of Jonson’s first play the same year.

Paolo Veronese was called before the Inquisition because of clowns, drunkards, and other extraneous individuals in a version of the Last Supper. Veronese convivially determined that the painting was really of a different meal altogether.

Schopenhauer:

I admire and love Mozart, and go to all concerts where Beethoven’s symphonies are played, but — when one has heard much Rossini, everything else is ponderous in contrast.

Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.

Said Robert Southey to Charlotte Bronte.

Chekhov was an anti-Semite.

Edith Wharton’s family owned the Chemical Bank of New York. Wharton lived with an entourage virtually like royalty.

Old enough to remember when more people could still quote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow than any other American poet.

Longfellow to the contrary, however, Paul Revere never reached Lexington. In fact he was captured.

In another ostensibly religious work, Veronese included portraits of Titian, Tintoretto, Jacopo Bassano, and himself dressed as musicians.

Not to add several instantaneously recognizable Venetian courtesans.

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five.

Pliny the Elder advised sexual activity as a remedy for weak eyesight.

And for hoarseness.

Twenty-five hundred years of Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato, Whitehead said.

It is my general impression that the editors of Partisan Review are capable, educated, intelligent, but have nothing to say. Said Leon Trotsky.

Cesar Franck died after being run down by a bus. His best pupil, Chausson, would be killed nine years later in a bicycle accident.

Richard Brautigan committed suicide.

In his late twenties Francis Thompson endured an almost dehumanizing poverty. At times, like Lovelace two-and-a-half centuries earlier, he picked through garbage to survive.

Hölderlin was read aloud at Hitler’s fiftieth birthday party.

Kol od ba-le-vah p’ni-mah

Ne-fesh y’hu-di bo-mi-ya.

Never to have been born is best.

Naming and Necessity.

Jonathan Swift left his money to found a hospital for the insane.

And died mad.

All art is quite useless.

Chancellor Rolin.

Walt Whitman’s mother was illiterate.

Carl Andre once ate a five-dollar bill at the Cedar Tavern.

La Dama de Elche. Persephone’s thigh where Pluto clutches it in the Bernini. The right hand of Michelangelo’s David.

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

I couldn’t read it. The human mind isn’t that complex.

Said Einstein, returning a Kafka to Thomas Mann.

Lev Davidovich Bronstein.

Katie King. The few extant photographs, ca. 1898.

And as fast as her time came she was delivered of a fair child, and they christened him Galahad.

Donatello’s Magdalen.

Alexander Pope was four and one-half feet tall. And a hunchback. And a cripple.

Leopardi was a hunchback and an invalid.

Pascal was a hypochondriac.

Cuautla, in Morelos. Where Zapata’s body was flung into the zocalo after his murder.

Forty years later Reader knew a young Indian woman from the same state who would insist he was still alive in the Sierras.

Quintilian was an anti-Semite.

Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney died in a car crash.

This long disease, my life.

That long malaise, my life.

Unquestionably, Protagonist will have lived in Mexico.

Palestrina. Being the town near Rome where he was born. His real name having been Giovanni Pierluigi.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

Unerased for Reader even after fifty full years without once having looked at it again: the final description in Nana.

Lucretius committed suicide.

Eliot’s first wife Vivien was in a mental institution for the nine years before her death in 1947.

Joyce’s daughter Lucia was in a mental institution for the forty-six years before her death in 1982.

James Joyce’s daughter.

Thersites. Who mocked.

It was the first Ptolemy, Ptolemy Soter, who was told by Euclid that there was no royal road to geometry.

Rilke never read a daily newspaper.

The man who is tired of London is tired of life.

Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi.

Pons asinorum.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

One of Sergei Esenin’s wives was Isadora Duncan. Another later married Meyerhold. The third was a granddaughter of Tolstoy.

Cithaeron.

Sappho’s poetry was burned at least three times by the Church. Fewer than seven hundred lines remain out of probably twelve thousand, with most of those forming only fragments.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters coming from one of such.

In the basement of the house on the beach, an old-style wood stove?

A fireplace, presumably part of the renovation?

Wood corded near the base of the dune outside?

Dieu me pardonnera. C’est son metier.

Ludwig Boltzmann committed suicide.

Wilkie Collins maintained two households simultaneously. Both with mistresses.

Lunar caustic.

Zbigniew Herbert.

Degas was an anti-Semite.

Protagonist also recalling sweltering recent summers when imprisoned in the city? Surely the beach, but even the gatehouse, a significant reprieve?

He has licked dust from the floor of every third-rate hostess in England.

Said Harold Frederic of Henry James.

Stendhal was an officer with Napoleon’s armies in the retreat from Moscow in 1812.

Sebastian Dangerfield.

Jack London was illegitimate.

In Act II of Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare allows Hector to mention Aristotle. Who will not be born until some nine hundred years after the fact.

dein goldenes Haar Margarete

dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

According to legend, Li Po drowned when he fell out of a boat, drunk, leaning to kiss a reflection of the moon.

If a picture of the Virgin is to be any good, I must paint it from a drawing of a woman I sleep with. Said Stanley Spencer.

Mythologies and Me.

Che farò senza Euridice?

Eduard Marxsen.

Anselm Kiefer.

Only the Americans didn’t give me a visa.

Standing a little apart, Wilhelm began to cry.

Milton suffered from constipation.

Kathleen Ferrier. Dame Janet Baker. General Jackie Home.

Jack Kerouac lived with his mother for most of the last twenty years of his life.

Samuel Pepys attended a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the King’s Theater in 1662.

The most ridiculous, insipid play I ever saw in my life.

Paul Christman. Jack Crain. Bill Dudley. John Kimbrough.

That’s not writing, that’s typing.

She is older than the rocks among which she sits.

From Michelangelo:

Messer Giorgio Vasari — Many days ago I received a letter from you; I did not reply at once in order not to behave like a merchant.

César Vallejo wrote more than half of the Poemas Humanos during four months very near his death.

Renan, at the unveiling of a statue of Spinoza:

Woe to him who in passing should hurl an insult at this gentle and pensive head.

And my poor fool is hang’d!

Sir John Suckling committed suicide.

Babi Yar.

Gabriel Spencer.

Fifteen years after Moby Dick, Melville had to pay to publish Clarel With borrowed money.

Fichte was an anti-Semite.

Stravinsky studied composition under Rimsky-Korsakov. As did Glazunov. As did Respighi.

Eliot wore a truss.

Robert Greene died after overindulging on pickled herring and Rhenish wine.

Kuznetsov.

Yevtushenko. The Shostakovich Thirteenth.

Edgar Lee Masters was once the law partner of Clarence Darrow.

Mathis Neithardt-Gothardt.

Frank Frisch’s name was misspelled in the first edition of The Sun Also Rises in 1926 and not corrected in any later edition Reader ever glanced into.

E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!

Alys Smith.

Dora Black.

Patricia Spence.

Edith Finch.

Suppose the woman should cease to come to the grave?

What happens in regard to the woman in any event?

Or is Reader again envisioning some sort of similar situation at the ocean?

Protagonist walking the beach, at water’s edge, perhaps at a certain hour each day? Here a woman who does the same?

Vereda de Santa Fe.

Piazza San Francesco di Paola.

Leonardo’s notebooks indicate familiarity with at least five different works by Aristotle.

Lenin wrote a foreword for Ten Days that Shook the World,

Sing at noon? Madame, at noon I am happy to be able to spit.

Said Chaliapin.

Obviously, a nod. Fairly soon an innocuous comment in passing?

John Ringo committed suicide.

Were Jesus and Mary Magdalen lovers? In the Gnostic Gospels, the specific word for her relationship with him translates from the Greek as consort.

Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Juan de Yepes.

Louise Colet’s affair with Flaubert. Louise Colet’s affair with Musset. Louise Colet’s affair with Cousin. Louise Colet’s affair with Vigny.

And cetera.

the year is full of unforseen happenings

and the time of earthquakes is at hand

An upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.

Rousseau was an anti-Semite.

And/or in harsh weather? Huddled against winds? Snow in patches, Reader again sees.

Max Beckmann died of a heart attack while strolling in Central Park in Manhattan.

Praxiteles’ mistress/model Phryne was once on the verge of being convicted of impiety. It appears factual that the orator Hyperides, defending her, signaled for her to bare her bosom.

And won acquittal.

At Amherst, ca. 1880:

Emily, you wretch! None of this nonsense! I’ve traveled all the way from Springfield to see you. Come down at once.

Mai Zetterling.

Ypres.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Gestapo.

In his Beheading of John the Baptist, Caravaggio spells out his name in some of the Baptist’s spilled blood at the lower edge of the canvas. Otherwise he signed no paintings.

All ages are contemporaneous.

Dante married a woman named Gemma Donati at eighteen or twenty after a formal family betrothal of years earlier. For all his repeated use of autobiography, he makes no single reference to her anywhere.

Gaudeamus igitur.

Are there two women upstairs, or more?

Even without seeing them come and go, conscious instantly of the first footfalls.

If to no other end, surely accentuating the isolation?

P

ier Paolo Pasolini was murdered.

Dino Campana died mad.

Paul Feyerabend was crippled from a wound as a German officer on the Russian front in World War II.

Narciso Yepes.

Protagonist kept company by chipmunks? By field mice? By the gulls?

Isocrates committed suicide by starving himself.

Living in slums, literally pawning clothes to buy food, at times Karl Marx could not afford paper to write on. Between 1850 and 1855 three of his children died. For one he had to beg a loan for a coffin.

H. L. Mencken was an anti-Semite.

Qumran.

Samuel Beckett was the best man at the wedding of Joyce’s grandson Stephen.

I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.

The same Antony who covered Brutus’s body with his own robe at Philippi had had Cicero’s head and right hand nailed up in the Forum only a year before.

Michelangelo Merisi.

Is there such a word as grue if Nelson Goodman invented it to illustrate a philosophic point but it has no other application beyond that classroom context whatsoever?

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Panem et circenses.

Marie-Therese Walter hanged herself in a garage.

Women at the time of Troy wore only a single garment. Which is to say, no underclothing.

And did not bathe with any frequency.

John Bunyan wrote the better part of Pilgrim’s Progress while in jail for illegal preaching.

One kid, one kid, that father bought for two zuzim.

Should it be at least three years since Protagonist has been involved with a woman? Longer?

Why would he have become involved with no one since?

Or does the withdrawal obviously feed on itself and increasingly preclude even the chance of meeting someone to start with?

Helen unwashed? Andromache?

Moritz Schlick was shot and killed on the steps of the university library in Vienna by a student whose thesis he had failed.

Conchita Supervia died in childbirth.

Etienne Joseph Theophile Thore.

Who resurrected Vermeer after two full centuries of disregard.

Jules Bastien-Lepage.

For whom Reader can still sometimes be the fool.

Mill was reading Plato at seven. In Greek.

Heraclitus once had himself buried in cow dung when ill. For purposes of drawing out the fluids of dropsy, Diogenes Laertius says.

Grace Moore died in a plane crash.

Niels Lyhne. Which Joyce, Ibsen, Hesse, Mann, Strindberg, Rilke, Freud, were all profound admirers of. Rilke calling all of Jacobsen’s work as indispensable to him as the Bible.

Kilgore, Texas.

If indeed three or four years, will Protagonist have at least begun to become accustomed to the solitude?

Accustomed, or wearily acquiescent, does Reader mean?

I hope the bourgeoisie as long as they exist will have cause to remember my carbuncles.

Handel, born in central Germany, is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Henry Fielding is buried in Portugal.

Sophocles and Herodotus were intimate friends.

Solange Raytchine.

Attorney General: So then it is for the labour of two days that you ask a fee of two hundred guineas?

Whistler: No. I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.

When Queen Christina of Sweden hired Descartes as a personal philosophy tutor in 1649, she dispatched a warship under a full admiral to convey him to Stockholm.

But then demanded daily instruction at 5 A.M. in the Scandinavian winter. Descartes caught pneumonia and died.

Renoir, Manet, Gauguin, and Edvard Munch all did portraits of Mallarmé.

Gurre-Lieder.

Frederick Delius was paralyzed and blinded by syphilis.

Tradition says that Saint Paul was decapitated.

John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow.

Sir James Frazer spent as many as fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, at his desk at Cambridge. Throughout his life. It eventually cost him his eyesight.

What sort of bargain can Reader turn Protagonist into if he does allow him to meet someone?

How little money does he in fact live on?

Would he even be able to pick up a dinner check for two people at a respectable restaurant?

Emanuel de Witte drowned himself.

Gertrude Stein had to pay to publish Three Lives,

And if I, Fern, would remember Lee Suffridge Priest for so long as I lived, who when I too was dead would remember me?

Oskar Kokoschka and Siegfried Sassoon were both wounded twice in World War I.

Fighting on opposite sides.

Dante and Duns Scotus were born in the same year.

There is no mystery in human creation. Will performs this miracle.

Said Camus.

Salvador de Madariaga propounds strongly suggestive evidence that Cervantes may have been a Sephardic Jew.

And how is Protagonist’s health, what with hospitalizations being mentioned?

Does Reader see any point in perhaps contriving current medical difficulties for him?

Major?

Protagonist has come to this place because he was told he has a limited time to live?

Doctor Subtilis.

To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.

Valéry said he could never write a novel for one insurmountable reason. He would have to include sentences like The Marquise went out at five.

Protagonist has cancer, but it is for the moment in remission?

Anaximander did or did not invent the gnomon.

Saint Ambrose was an anti-Semite.

Stranger, go tell the Spartans that we lie here in obedience to their bidding.

Pushkin and Lermontov were killed in duels less than five years apart.

Stephen Crane was the catcher on his Syracuse University baseball team.

Marsilio Ficino.

Leonidas. 480 B.C.

Arthur Koestler committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates. His wife joined him.

St. Martin’s Churchyard, Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, Wales.

Mozart composed his last three symphonies in six weeks.

Plutarch: When the candles are out, all women are fair.

One of the titles on an extant bookseller’s bill to Joyce from Trieste, dated 1914, is Pinocchio.

Nirvana means without wind, or blown out. In the sense that desire no longer exists.

A railroad siding, the Astapovo station. November 7, 1910.

Ombra maifu.

Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks.

Bitburg.

George Eastman committed suicide.

Djuna Barnes spent her last forty years as a near recluse in a one-room mews apartment in Greenwich Village. She died there at ninety.

Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,

I have not slept.

Conrad Aiken’s gravestone is a stone bench. With its inscription on the seat.

Incitatus.

The duel in which Pushkin was killed took place in 1837. The man who killed him, a French officer named Georges d’Anthes, lived another fifty-eight years.

Rupert Brooke was an anti-Semite.

R. B. Kitaj.

Protagonist went out at five?

Constance Mayer committed suicide by slashing her throat with Pierre Paul Prud’hon’s razor.

They are losing the Battle of the Ebro.

Psychic distance. Synesthetic equilibrium.

The Divine Comedy contains 14,230 lines.

Most of which Goethe described as repulsive.

Thucydides Mythistoricus.

Renoir’s father was a tailor.

There is no there there.

Why has Reader decided that Protagonist once worked as a logger? In prehistory. And near a town called Molalla, Oregon?

Tzeitl. Hodel. Chava.

A curator, showing Rodin certain of Blake’s drawings: He actually saw those things.

Rodin: He should have seen them three or four times.

Tennyson was reading Cymbeline when he died. His copy of the play was put into his coffin.

Was Freud sleeping with his wife’s sister?

Eulalia of Merida.

Hey, Djuna, are you still alive over there?

That great solemn ass Goethe, Claudel called him.

And can any of them, with whom he has mostly long now lost touch, be even now dead?

Becky Sharp? Sonia Marmeladov? Daisy Buchanan?

Whistle, and she’ll come to you, wrote John Fletcher, of Beaumont and Fletcher, three hundred years before Lauren Bacall.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Two of Thomas Mann’s sons committed suicide.

As did two of Marx’s daughters.

T. E. Lawrence was illegitimate.

Louis Aragon won the Croix de Guerre in World War I and again in World War II.

Delacroix’s Journals. Berlioz’s Memoirs.

Thomas Gray was one of twelve children. All eleven others died as infants.

El Greco had to sue the Toledo Cathedral to be paid for his Disrobing of Christ. Which the Cathedral had commissioned.

Ljuba Welitsch was married to a traffic policeman.

Denis Diderot was an anti-Semite.

Hayim Bialik.

Lionel Johnson died after falling off a barstool.

Seymour Krim committed suicide.

Gepetto.

Or is it less the women than what the women represent? The years that have departed as well?

A life, that was?

Where there is no now now?

It was Dumas pere, not Dumas fits, who said that after God Shakespeare had created most. John Eglinton at the National Library in Ulysses is not sure.

Taine said he had read The Charterhouse of Parma fifty times.

The drawing of Michelangelo and the colors of Titian! Wrote Tintoretto on the wall of his studio.

A good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler.

Anaximander did or did not introduce the gnomon into Greece from Egypt.

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.

Eliot, as an editor, rejected Animal Farm,

Another damned thick square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?

The Metropolitan Opera once threatened to write it into Rosa Ponselle’s contract that she could not ride her bicycle through the streets of Manhattan to rehearsals.

Naturally there is a statue of Ovid on the shore of the Black Sea in Constanta. Naturally gazing Romeward.

Treitschke was an anti-Semite.

Robert Burton may have committed suicide. Legend has him having predicted the date of his death through astrology. Then making certain it was correct.

Miroslav Holub.

The British army sustained sixty thousand casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

The Middle Parts of Fortune.

There is no mention of Achilles’ heel in Homer. In fact there is no mention of it by anyone until Statius, in Latin, nine hundred years later.

Protagonist’s threadbare jeans and faded workshirts. Some few more presentable remnants hanging, virtually never any longer worn.

Spent Adidas.

Alan Turing committed suicide.

Swyne and Dour.

Azucena.

What Horace defined as a kind of uncontrolled energy in Pindar.

Possibly explaining why he sometimes makes no sense whatsoever.

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

Can Protagonist even any longer afford to buy books?

Cézanne needed as many as five hundred sittings for a portrait. After a hundred and fifteen by Ambroise Vollard, he was willing to concede that the front of VoUard’s shirt was possibly acceptable.

He doesn’t come in here disguised like Westminster Abbey.

Gordon Bunshaft.

Gustave Courbet died at fifty-eight. Late along, he was drinking a full dozen bottles of wine a day.

Odi et amo.

Tell the people it is no use to depend on me any more now. Said Crazy Horse, bayoneted in the back at Fort Robinson.

Plaza El Toreo, Mexico, D.F., October 30, 1960. Carlos Arruza (rejoneador), Juan Silveti, Joselito Huerta, Manuel Capetillo, others, siete orejas y dos rabos. A benefit for Curro Ortega, who some weeks earlier had lost a leg when gored.

Protagonist will have watched that, also.

Louis Althusser spent four years in a psychiatric hospital after strangling his wife.

Marxist. Structuralist. Manic-depressive.

This sentence is a lie.

The question of Hans Walter Gabler’s command of colloquial English.

Honorificabilitudinitatibus.

In 1886, believing him dead, Verlaine published an edition of Rimbaud’s poems. Rimbaud was running guns and trading slaves in Abyssinia.

Ancient rumor insisted, seemingly wrongly, that Euripides was killed by dogs set at him by a rival playwright.

Hapax legomenon?

Considering marriage with the daughter of the King of Portugal, Philip the Good of Burgundy sent Jan van Eyck to paint her portrait. Surreptitiously.

The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail.

John Howard Payne once proposed marriage to Mary Shelley.

Vigée-Lebrun.

Winthrop Mackworth Praed. Richard Monckton Milnes. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.

A las cinco de la tarde.

A las cinco en punto de la tarde.

Has anyone ever discovered precisely what good news was brought from Ghent to Aix?

Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.

Said cousin Dryden.

John Kennedy Toole committed suicide by running a hose from his exhaust pipe into his car.

Saint Jerome was an anti-Semite.

Der Stürmer.

I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room.

Albany, New York, Bret Harte was born in.

One of Franz Schubert’s last requests, while already feverish from the typhoid that would kill him six days later, was for a copy of the latest Fenimore Cooper.

Where will Protagonist have been born?

Francis Phelan.

Tolstoy ranked Guy de Maupassant second only to Hugo as the great European writer of his day.

The eruption of Santorin, ca. 1475 B.C., with its inconceivable tidal waves, is almost surely what ended Minoan civilization in Crete. Was it also the pillar of fire and the parting of the waters during the Exodus from Egypt?

Pharaoh’s pursuing host inundated on lower ground?

Egon Schiele died in an influenza epidemic.

Mel Ott died in a car crash.

Whisky per tutti!

Like Socrates, Aristotle was charged with impiety late in life. But went into exile rather than stand trial.

Refusing to allow Athens to sin twice against philosophy, being how he put it.

Ye gods, what sound is this?

Can Chloe, heavenly Chloe, piss?

Nobody ever laid it down without wishing it were longer. Said Johnson of Robinson Crusoe.

Now and again, a fragment, still, flitting through Protagonist’s consciousness? Jacqueline du Pre, a Boccherini concerto?

Assia Wevill, for whom Ted Hughes left Sylvia Plath, committed suicide the same way Plath did.

With the difference that she gassed the child she had had by Hughes as well.

Homo Ludens.

Columbus swore to the end he was in India.

Xanthippe.

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?

Or is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography?

Saint Jude, patron saint of desperate causes.

Profoundly dependent on chloral, Dante Gabriel Rossetti barely skirted madness in his later years.

Or did not always skirt it.

Every character in Hamlet.

If not crazy, then criminal, Chateaubriand said.

Did or did not Dostoievsky once rape a young girl in a bathhouse?

As long ago as in 1350, in Florence, Taddeo Gaddi could complain that the art of painting was in pathetic decline.

Since the death of Giotto, he would have been talking about.

Heloise and Abelard are buried in a single sepulchre at Père Lachaise.

In Book XVI of the Iliad, Apollo wrenches off Patroclus’s armor, leading to the latter’s death.

Little more than two hundred lines later, Hector is shown stripping the same armor from Patroclus’s corpse.

Music has here entombed a rich treasure but still fairer hopes.

O happy dagger!

It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulses who could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged race.

Said Schopenhauer.

Three of Wittgenstein’s brothers committed suicide.

Three of Wittgenstein’s father’s sons committed suicide.

There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. Said Mark Rothko.

Polly Garter. Rosie Probert. Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard.

Alone, what did Bloom feel?

Tulsi Das was born into a family of beggars, and abandoned. And said that as a boy he sometimes lived on scraps thrown to dogs.

Frans Hals was eighty-five when he painted The Regents of the Old Men ys Almshouse.

And living on charity himself.

Delenda est Carthago.

Tacitus was an anti-Semite.

How would the woman have lost her leg?

Does Reader remember with any certainty which leg it was?

Was Santorin also the origin of the Atlantis myth?

In Walter Scott’s The Antiquary, there are two Tuesdays in one week.

And the sun once sets in the east.

Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief

The name of the slough was Despond.

Blake was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.

Kavitavali.

For six years, in his twenties, Edward Elgar conducted a band in a lunatic asylum.

Rilke wrote most of the Duino Elegies, and the Sonnets to Orpheus, in less than one month.

Thera.

Enrico Caruso was once arrested for pinching a woman in the monkey house of the Central Park Zoo.

Has it crossed Reader’s mind to let someone Protagonist had known be buried at the cemetery?

Who?

Protagonist drawn there out of what unlikely sentiment?

Wastebasket.

Nordahl Grieg failed to return from a bombing mission over Berlin in 1943.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery failed to return from a reconnaissance flight over occupied France in 1944.

V. Gordon Childe committed suicide.

The bass arias of Sarastro in The Magic Flute. Which Shaw called the only music that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God.

San Pedro de Macon’s, Dominican Republic. Where Leroy Paige and Joshua Gibson, Jr., and James Bell and others spent a winter in 1937.

Erastus Corning II.

Colley Cibber. Nicholas Rowe. Laurence Eusden. Nahum Tate. Thomas Warton. William Whitehead. Thomas Shad-well. Henry J. Pye.

Laureates, all.

Someone nodded hello to Raskolnikov on the street yesterday.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Or of no describable genre?

A seminonfictional semifiction? Cubist?

Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake?

Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax in any case.

And as an incidental personal challenge, letting none of its intellectual mishegaas be material Reader has ever used anywhere else.

Lector Ludens.

Henry Purcell was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s favorite composer.

Bricolage.

Yeats could never finish reading Ulysses.

Poetry is not written with ideas, Degas, it is written with words.

Mohammed was an anti-Semite.

Literate people who can spend hours in one’s home without a single glance at the titles on the bookshelves.

F. R. Leavis was so severely shell-shocked as a stretcher-bearer in World War I that for a time he was incapable of speech.

Gypo Nolan.

Ite, missa est.

You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.

Said Charles Darwin’s father.

Robin Hyde committed suicide.

Evelyn Waugh was found dead on a bathroom floor.

Protagonist having come upon his own name on one of the graves, though with meaningless remote dates?

And?

Wastebasket.

The Lord of the Flies was rejected by twenty-one publishers.

The first time I saw Wystan Auden his socks didn’t match.

Herophilia, the Sibyl at Cumae, who lived a thousand years. And wished to die.

As Eliot discovered in Petronius.

Though how is Reader aware that while Cumae no longer exists the Sibyl’s cave still does?

Where Aeneas visited it. Northwest of Naples.

Johan Emanuel Schikaneder.

Spatial Form in Modern Literature.

Protagonist’s friends. From that life that was.

And among those who had moved to distant places and one had gradually ceased to hear from even then?

At Protagonist’s age, how long before one begins to suspect that some of them, also, are even now dead?

We are now able to suggest an explanation for the proverb There are many Manii in Aricia.

Hemingway: I just called to tell you I got that thing.

General Buck Lanham: That thing? What thing?

Hemingway: That Swedish thing, you know?

That Swedish thing. The Nobel Prize for Horses’ Backsides.

Voltaire was illegitimate.

Late in her career, Kirsten Flagstad recorded a Tristan und Isolde in which the high Cs she had been missing repeatedly on stage were all reached magnificently.

Having been sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and dubbed in.

August Heat.

At Protagonist’s age, how long before one realizes that more of the people one had ever known anywhere are in fact now dead than alive?

Mary Powell.

Katherine Woodcock.

Elizabeth Minshull.

A title for all this, has Reader by chance yet given any thought to?

Thomas Heggen committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills.

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail.

Tess Durbeyfield.

Mr. Flood’s Party?

Not Waving but Drowning?

The Shrine of the Little Flower. Royal Oak, Michigan.

The Temptation to Exist?

In 1666, a committee in the House of Commons was ready to call both the Plague and the Great Fire God’s retribution against England for harboring an atheist such as Thomas Hobbes.

Who played tennis until he was seventy-five.

Jung was an anti-Semite.

Antony threw himself on his sword after the defeat at Actium and the subsequent desertion of most of his troops.

Go faster, Jesus, why dost thou linger?

I indeed am going, but thou shalt tarry till I come.

Right Views.

Right Intentions.

Right Speech.

Right Conduct.

Right Livelihood.

Right Effort.

Right Remembrance.

Right Contemplation.

Avicenna studied Aristotle’s Metaphysics so exhaustively and for so long that when he believed he finally fully understood it he handed out gifts to the poor in celebration.

Joaquin Rodrigo was blind from the age of three.

Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Now and again, an image, still, flitting into Protagonist’s consciousness? Tanaquil Le Clercq, Ravel’s La Valse?

At thirty-nine, when his first wife died, Monet was so poverty-stricken he could not afford the few centimes to redeem a pawned locket that he knew she wished to be buried with, and had to borrow.

Heifetz was playing the Mendelssohn E minor concerto by the age of six.

Joyce had lost all his teeth by the age of forty-one.

More than one owner of a significant personal library, in the early years after Gutenberg, made it plain that no printed volume would ever be a part of it.

The Times of London officially listed Robert Graves as killed in action in 1916.

Graves would live until 1985.

Ella Sagersdorf.

For most of his life, Beethoven changed addresses on an average of more than twice a year.

And was more than once sued by landlords for having scribbled notations all over his walls.

All men by nature desire to know.

Krakatoa.

Eliot was sixty-eight when he married his second wife Valerie. Who was thirty.

Du musst dein Leben andern.

Leigh Hunt once went to jail for libel.

Virginia Hill committed suicide.

Concierto de Aranjuez.

You wanna walk in a parade? Everybody’s lonely.

Xerxes, invading Greece, halted at the site of Troy in homage to its heroes. Looking on the Trojan War as a European invasion of Asia which justified Persia’s own present aggression.

Seven centuries afterward.

Karl Barth was an anti-Semite.

Là ci darem la mano.

How is Protagonist’s eyesight?

Apparently no one has ever believed Vasari’s story that Filippo Lippi was once held prisoner by Barbary pirates but released when he astonished their leader by drawing his portrait.

Has Reader at least made a decision about giving Protagonist some sort of literary past?

Even if only from a good number of years back?

The leprosy of letters, Flaubert called critics.

Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly.

Arshile Gorky hanged himself.

Initially, the word metaphysics meant only that which came behind the Physics in the Aristotle canon. An early editor made use of it for lack of better.

Tertullian has it that Democritus deliberately blinded himself in old age by staring into the sun. So as not to suffer the sight of beautiful women he could no longer possess.

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms!

Two years after that condemnation of Hobbes, Samuel Pepys would find Leviathan selling, secondhand, for four times its original price:

It being a book the Bishops will not let be printed again.

Gidon Kremer.

For Protagonist’s literary past:

Protagonist: Isn’t it awfully long since Caitlin went to the ladies’ room?

Dylan Thomas: She’s probably in that other saloon across the street. Go buy her a drink and tell her I apologize for ignoring her, will you? She’ll let off less steam if it’s you instead of me.

William Ernest Henley lost a leg to bone disease.

Mikhail Bakhtin lost a leg to bone disease.

Melville’s older son Malcolm committed suicide at eighteen.

Sarah Gamp was William Faulkner’s favorite fictional character.

Dirty stinking Degenerate Bobs was here from Boston, North End, Mass. Warp son of a bitch.

The Duchess of Medina Sidonia. Whom Reader once saw at zparador on the Costa del Sol, being escorted to jail after political protest.

Young Lochinvar.

Frank O’Hara died after being hit by a jeep on the beach at Fire Island.

Unquestionably, Protagonist will have spent time in Spain.

Wolf Solent.

La Duquesa Roja.

Claude Lorrain was very nearly illiterate.

John Greenleaf Whittier to the contrary, the woman in Frederick, Maryland, who displayed a Union flag when Stonewall Jackson entered the town was a Mrs. Mary Quantrell.

Pushkin’s dramatic poem in which an envious Salieri poisons Mozart.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera based on same.

Dan Pagis. Nathan Zach.

Frank Stella: What you see is what you see.

Georg Buchner died of typhus in 1837, at twenty-three. Woyzeck would not be published until forty-two years later.

Who touches a hair of yon grey head

Dies like a dog! March on! he said.

Malcolm Melville had played on a local baseball team. This when Melville himself was already in the customs sheds, and with virtually all of his fiction ten and fifteen years behind him.

No image arises of the somber, disregarded author rooting on the sidelines at a game.

Michael Ventris died in a car crash.

Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother.

Did the woman herself ever see the photograph?

Yeats died in southern France in 1939. His body was returned to Ireland on an Irish destroyer after World War II.

Pier Angeli committed suicide.

Joe Orton was murdered.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Bernal Diaz del Castillo.

Agnes von Kurowsky.

Now I know you. No field, no home, no wife, no woman — no friends, no love.

Jacques Louis David was repeatedly drawn to sketch prisoners being led to the guillotine.

Isadora Duncan was strangled when her long scarf became caught in a wheel of her open Bugatti.

God, children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!

Linear B.

Dear me, I am about to become a god.

Karl Marx was an anti-Semite.

Karl Marx was descended on both sides from long lines of rabbis and Talmudic scholars.

Zyklon B.

Charles Martel.

Benjamin Robert Haydon committed suicide.

On the evidence, Shakespeare’s small Latin was plainly more than that.

Oft did I weary of wrestling with thee.

Carved an unknown galley slave into an oar.

And Rudyard Kipling into his desk.

At the house on the beach, what becomes of Protagonist’s path to the highway when the snows are heavier than those Reader has visualized?

What is the winter really like, precisely at ocean’s edge?

He stank so badly, though we were great chums

I had to leave him; then rats ate his thumbs.

Watching abstractedly before the dunes as the entire shore commences to disappear?

Roger van der Weyden signed none of his paintings.

Either as Roger van der Weyden or Rogier de la Pasture.

J

oyce was influential enough to be able to aid at least a dozen Jews in escaping from Nazi Germany. Hermann Broch among them.

Tekiah. Shevarim. Teruah. Tekiab.

It remains a scandal to philosophy that there is as yet no satisfactory proof of an external world, Kant said.

Does Protagonist continue to walk the beach at his usual hour now also?

But surely not at this time of year a woman who does the same?

Robert Lowell died of a heart attack in a taxi.

After his cremation, Gandhi’s ashes were scattered into the Ganges, considered sacred. At Allahabad.

Where it and the Jumna conjoin.

Ruth Kligman, who was thrown clear in the crash that killed Jackson Pollock and a friend of hers, later had an affair with Willem de Kooning.

And later had an affair with Franz Kline.

Caponegro. Latiolais.

Darling Jill.

Robert Louis Stevenson died of a cerebral hemorrhage at forty-four, but had been emaciated by tuberculosis before that. A bundle of sticks in a bag, Henry Adams said he looked like.

Doch das Sein — was ist das Sein?

Isaac Babel disappeared in one of Stalin’s purges. Nothing whatsoever is known about his death.

Conversely, orders allegedly given by Stalin in regard to Pasternak: Don’t touch the cloud-dweller.

Women have, in general, no love of any art; they have no proper knowledge of any; and they have no genius.

Said Rousseau.

When Stalin himself was found dead, a recording of Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto lay on his turntable.

Kipling was an anti-Semite.

At thirty-five, Antonio Machado married a fifteen-year-old. Who died when Machado was thirty-eight.

Or possibly now someone he will never see closely at all, not coming toward him but moving in his same direction? And always a fair distance ahead?

Continuing on to become a kind of actualized vanishing point when Protagonist himself halts?

Stefan Zweig committed suicide.

Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.

John Masefield was fourteen when he first went to sea.

David Alfaro Siqueiros once attempted to assassinate Trotsky.

Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is right-wise king born of all England.

Verse deemed unsuitable to the state.

Is Noah’s drunkenness the earliest anywhere taken note of?

Avalokiteshvara.

Vanishing point.

She?

Marcel Proust collected signatures for petitions in protest against the conviction of Dreyfus.

Hugh Casey shot himself.

Saint John of Capistrano was an anti-Semite.

Fly’s Photograph Gallery.

Arthur Symons on Mallarme:

He made neither intrusion upon nor concession to those who, after all, were not obliged to read him.

Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe.

Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Even in the solemn moments of the mass, when prayer should be the purest… when I should groan for what I have done, I sigh for what I have lost.

Ramon Mercader.

Goethe, to Eckermann: Have all the nations of the world since Euripides produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?

Apollinaire came extremely close to being permanently paralyzed by a head wound in World War I.

Once more before he dies Protagonist will read Moll Flanders.

My father’s a judge.

My mother pleaded her belly.

Sir Richard Burton, of the Kama Sutra, spoke twenty-nine languages.

Tchaikovsky was an anti-Semite.

Thomas Mann’s definition of a writer. Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Mrs. Hutchinson.

Harry Crosby shot himself in the head. After first shooting the young married woman with whom he was having an affair.

At sixteen, Montserrat Caballe was working in a handkerchief factory in Barcelona.

Plautus once worked in a flour mill.

Three years after Baudelaire’s death, the photographer Nadar glimpsed Jeanne Duval distantly, on crutches, on a Paris street.

There is no further word of her.

Protagonist obtusely hatless in these snows too?

Patterned after whom?

Faulkner died following a fall from a horse.

Like Keats’s father.

The Aeneid is rife with allusions to Homer, but also to Homeric criticism. It was Virgil’s assumption that his readers would recognize both.

Beiderbecke. Trumbauer.

The odd death of Emile Zola. From smoke inhalation, when a chimney in a bedroom fireplace backed up.

Dormir nonchalamment a V ombre de ses seins.

Hannibal committed suicide via poison.

Murray Gell-Mann.

The first person Dickens wanted to meet, on his first visit to America, was William Cullen Bryant.

Civilization and Its Distant Tents.

Cartons like an impermanent sculpture of found objects. On a stairway ending at a sealed-off door.

He had become a dirty bourgeois.

Lord, don’t help us. But don’t muck it up for us either.

Henry James most likely died a virgin. John Ruskin indisputably did.

Whistler was an anti-Semite.

Casals practiced Bach’s six suites for solo cello for twelve years before performing one in public.

Oh! do not add to my miseries by your constancy.

For Protagonist’s literary past:

Protagonist: Good Lord. Is that the same T-shirt of mine you put on when you were here six days ago?

Jack Kerouac: Oh, well. But I did have a shower.

Bhartrihari.

And money answereth all things.

Adrienne Rich’s husband committed suicide.

Elizabeth I did a translation of The Consolation of Philosophy.

As had Chaucer.

As had King Alfred.

Though in the latter’s instance into Anglo-Saxon.

Tending to forget that the account of the Good Samaritan, in Luke, is an anti-Semitic parable.

Tending to forget that Plato advocated totalitarianism.

La Noche Triste.

Aharon Appelfeld escaped from a Nazi labor camp at the age of eight. Eight. And spent three years hiding in the forests of Romania and the Ukraine.

Jerzy Kosinski did nothing of the kind.

Edith Metzger.

Anaxagoras committed suicide by starving himself.

In the first year of the eighty-eighth Olympiad.

And when asked near the end how he wished to be commemorated, said schoolchildren should be given a holiday.

In 1811 a huge Cimabue altarpiece of a Madonna and angels, which has been the Louvre’s finest thirteenth-century offering ever since, was bought in Tuscany for five francs.

0 lente, lente currite, noctis equi!

Was the diegetic diachrony of narration truly damaged by Flaubert, as Lyotard says?

Diegetic, dialogic, hegemonic. Privilege, as a verb. Foreground, as a verb. Valorize. Praxis. Simulacra. Metafiction. Logocentrism. Phallocentrism. Discourse. Signifier/signified. Aporia.

Late capitalism. Gynophobia.

Text.

None of the above.

Lang, Leaf, and Myers; Butcher and Lang. The King James Homer.

The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

Also tending to forget that character in The Plague, Joseph Grand? Who rewrites the same opening sentence for a novel eternally, with only minimal variations?

Justinian was an anti-Semite.

In 1959, in Mexico City, Reader happened upon a Shakespeare and Company Ulysses for pennies in a thieves’ market. Its front cover had faded and was detached, the spine and back cover were missing. Nor was it a first printing.

Nonetheless.

Clinamen. Tessera. Kenosis.

Abednego.

Coleman Dowell committed suicide in a leap from a balcony.

As of 1994, after its restoration, seventeen of the draped figures in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment remained so. Presumably this time for curatorial reasons only, however.

Raskolnikov has come to this place. Bloom has come to this place. Rieux has come to this place.

Long hence, perhaps, Diotima,

I shall see you here.

Esther Johnson. Esther Vanhomrigh.

Vanishing point.

Melville and Whitman were born within two months of each other and died within six. And were in close proximity in or near New York through much of their lives.

Never meeting.

Mycenae.

As a master at a boy’s school in London during World War I, Eliot tried to teach his pupils baseball. John Betjeman included.

Sergei Esenin was an anti-Semite.

Kierkegaard was probably impotent.

Miss J. Hunter Dunn.

Longfellow’s first wife died young. The second, mother of grave Alice, laughing Allegra, and Edith with the golden hair, was burned to death when her clothing caught fire while she was melting sealing wax.

The name Salome translates from the Hebrew as peaceful.

Robert Desnos, who had been tortured by the Gestapo for working with the French Resistance, survived periods in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But died of typhus just as the camps were being liberated.

Gib mir den Kopf des Jokanaan!

James Leo Herlihy committed suicide with sleeping pills.

The Martello tower at Sandycove is near Dalkey. Which is adjacent to Sallynoggin.

Horse Badorties.

A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so, Einstein said.

Confusing one’s mental picture of Marguerite Duras and Jeanne Moreau.

Don Bildow. At the Swiss end of the Simplon Tunnel.

Vico Road.

La Vestale was Napoleon’s favorite opera.

There is no such thing as literal meaning.

There is no such thing as intrinsic merit.

Fish and guests in three days are stale, says Lyly in Euphues.

El sueno de la razon produce monstruos.

Walter Slezak committed suicide.

One of Shelley’s grandfathers was born in New Jersey.

Tall but pot-bellied, Chaucer describes himself as.

Knut Hamsun was an anti-Semite.

And was so blatantly sympathetic with the Germans in both world wars that thousands of Norwegians mailed him back copies of his novels in contempt.

De Kooning: Some guy came into my studio for fifteen minutes and wrote something it took six hours to read.

Belmonte. Joselito. Manolete. Dominguin.

Ilse Koch.

Otto Weininger shot himself.

For Protagonist’s less distant literary past:

Donald Barthelme: Tell me what you’ve been up to.

Protagonist: You’ll be sorry you asked. Do you want to hear about the lung cancer surgery I just had, or the prostate cancer surgery I’m going to have?

Barthelme: Talk. And then I’ll tell you about my throat cancer.

Gondal. Angria.

Andrea del Sarto was sometimes hired to paint the equivalent of wanted posters on the walls of Florentine buildings.

As were Andrea del Castagno and Botticelli.

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.

Virgil died in 19 B.C. Augustine is but one of many who appear to have sincerely believed that his fourth eclogue, which talks of the birth of a divine child, prophesied the coming of Christ.

Medieval legend would add that Saint Paul wept at his tomb for not having had an opportunity to convert him.

Caligula and his sister.

The line Les lauriers sont coupes is from a verse by Theodore de Banville.

Who filched it from an old nursery rhyme.

John Marston complained mockingly about the excessive scholarly allusions in the work of his Elizabethan contemporaries. Though proving readily able to refer to the most common current sources himself while doing so, including Vencenzo Cartari, Natale Conti, and Jean Tixier de Ravisi.

Has Reader sometimes felt he has spent his entire life as if preparing for doctoral orals?

In 1985, in 653 at bats, Wade Boggs swung and missed at a first pitch exactly once.

One of Gottfried Benn’s wives committed suicide.

So did one of his mistresses.

Schopenhauer once pushed an elderly seamstress down a flight of stairs because she had been talking loudly outside the door to his flat.

And was forced to pay her an annuity for the twenty years until her death.

Unlike the case with the Metaphysics, the title of the Nicomachean Ethics came from either its editor’s name, or its dedicatee’s. One or both having been Aristotle’s son. Nicomachus.

Brundisium.

Dear Sir, — I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are. You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell you of & why I am shut up I don’t know I have nothing to say so I conclude

Yours respectfully

John Clare

Cato the Younger committed suicide with a dagger. He spent the night before contemplating Socrates’ death in the Phaedo.

Protagonist has had surgery for cancer twice?

Protagonist has prostate cancer still, but it is for the moment under control?

Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandy did not last.

Said Johnson.

Who also determined that time was too precious to be wasted on such as Fielding.

All of Heinrich Heine was banned by the Nazis. When something like Die Lorelei refused to go quietly, it miraculously became the work of Author Unknown.

Joyce died of a perforated ulcer.

Herrenvolk.

Naphtali Herz Imber.

The foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses. Thus Mark Twain on Titian’s Venus of Urbino.

Whose fingertips rest almost unwittingly at her groin.

For whatever aesthete’s reasons, Rilke could not be troubled to attend his own daughter’s wedding.

As a boy, Dmitri Shostakovich played the piano in theaters showing silent movies.

As did Protagonist’s mother, at approximately the same date in time.

In Kingston, New York.

Catherine Tekakwitha.

Richard Tucker was once a cantor in Brooklyn.

The greatest music critic who ever lived, Auden called Shaw.

Galgenlieder.

Jean Genet was an anti-Semite.

Elpenor. Whom Odysseus forgot to bury.

Palinurus. Whom Aeneas remembered to.

Drusilla.

Would Reader look at the skull beside his desk differently if he decided it was a woman’s?

Protagonist has it. On a windowsill. On the windowsill of the window that looks out onto the graves.

Et in Arcadia ego.

King Saul committed suicide.

Every Man desires to live long; but no Man would be old. Said Swift.

Isaac Newton was idiosyncratic enough to say no when Voltaire wanted to meet him. And again with Benjamin Franklin.

How Beautiful with Shoes.

Akhmatova, in Leningrad, her son in prison, waiting in line daily, in the hope of at least being allowed to pass in a parcel. Can you put this into words? And I said: I can.

John Berryman:

Rilke was a jerk.

Margo Adams.

Concerning whom I may truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best.

I guess maybe there are two kinds of writers, writers who write stories and writers who write writing.

Said Raymond Chandler.

Garbo with no eyebrows?

Cal Lowell.

One fine morning in May a slim young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.

John Davidson drowned himself.

Simeon Solomon died in a workhouse.

Did ever a woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?

Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

Protagonist has also had cataract surgery?

Gretcben am Spinnrade.

Picasso had two children in his late sixties.

It is patently more sensible, in this workaday world, to be a James Jones than a James Joyce. Said Protagonist’s father.

Mussorgsky was an anti-Semite.

The Sallynoggin Archive.

Norma Jean Baker committed suicide.

The cemetery framed beyond the window in January light. The skull, lower left foreground, a redundant nearer memento mori.

The eschatology of the still white stones in snow.

Is there a woman again after all?

Price of Admission Your Mind. Not for Everybody.

Alborak.

A man should never face the sun when urinating, Hesiod says.

Not to offend the sun god Helios, presumably being why.

Madame de La Fayette. Madame de Sévigné. Madame de Staël.

The Rev. G. A. Studdert Kennedy.

For forty-some years, Valéry awoke at 5 A.M. to make notes on what he thought of as the dawning of consciousness.

A big book, a big evil.

Said Callimachus.

During a literary dispute about epic poetry with Apollonius of Rhodes.

Who had once been his pupil.

At Alexandria.

The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint your intellect imposes on your imagination. Said Schiller to a friend who had difficulty writing.

Sappho with white hair?

Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.

Said Barnett Newman.

What moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?

Dora Carrington committed suicide with a borrowed revolver.

Leonora Carrington was a better painter.

Ma in Ispagna son già milk e tre!

Capodistria.

The Laura whom Petrarch saw in a church at Avignon at twenty-three, and spent the rest of his life writing poems about, may very likely have never given him a thought.

Not only having been married, but already in progress toward eleven children.

Though Dante claims to have seen Beatrice no more than twice himself. While immortalizing her even more extraordinarily.

Boadicea committed suicide with poison.

Athenaeus. Seven volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of the Tibetan Book of the Dead?

Of the cataloguing of the Cairo Geniza?

Reader and this notion of his.

Or does the absence of narrative progression plus that cross-circuited schematism possibly render it even a poem of sorts?

Not to add avec exactly 333 interspersed unattributed quotations awaiting annotation?

For a time, Beaumont and Fletcher actually lived together. Evidently so intimate that they indiscriminately wore each other’s clothing.

And with but one wench in the house between them, in John Aubrey’s phrase.

Fletcher alone being a cousin of Phineas and Giles, however.

A recording of Bella figlia deWamore, with Beniamino Gigli, Amelita Galli-Curci, Louise Homer, and Giuseppe de Luca. Dated December 1927.

Ergo, by one chance in thirty-one, possibly recorded on the day Protagonist was born.

Hugo de Sade. S

imon de’ Bardi.

Camus called Faulkner the greatest modern novelist.

But then named Pylon and Sanctuary as the best of his books.

Living a full life span, parents who will still have died too soon to learn what their children will truly become.

The identities of their ultimate defeats.

Han Van Meegeren was found out only when he was accused of having sold Dutch masterpieces to Hermann Goering in World War II. To prove they had been rather less than that, he diligently forged one additional Vermeer.

A. E. Ellis was who?

Harold Patrick Reiser.

Carrying groceries, a newspaper, an inexpensive bottle of wine. Protagonist evading splattered slush from passing vehicles at the highway.

Then along the barely discernable path to the room that had once been a garage at the rear of the less than beguiling house.

Room, or rooms?

Conrad Aiken’s father shot his wife and then himself. Leaving it to Aiken, at eleven, to climb a flight of stairs after hearing the shots and walk in on the bodies.

Katherine Anne Porter was an anti-Semite.

Lady Caroline Lamb.

Annabella Milbanke.

Jane Elizabeth Scott, Lady Oxford.

Augusta Leigh.

Claire Clairmont.

Marianna Segati.

Margarita Cogni.

Teresa Guiccioli.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was so depressed at the failure of his first symphony that he gave up composing. And had to undergo hypnosis to start again.

D. H. Lawrence’s father was a coal miner.

Henry Moore’s father likewise.

Much as the Nazis tried to make use of him, Nietzsche had in fact referred to earlier German anti-Semitism as both damnable and poisonous.

Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot in French, not English. Godot does not verbally suggest Dieu.

Laura and Beatrice. The latter having died at twenty-four.

A woman kneeling at a grave. A woman walking on a beach.

Der Tod und das Madchen.

Who does walk the winter beach at water’s edge in the distance far ahead of Protagonist?

He is completely alone here now.

Memento mori.

Emmanuel Ringelblum and his wife and young son were executed in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944. Some of his Notes had been buried in milk cans.

Jane Ellen Harrison.

Courbet’s Sleeping Women.

Bernard Buffet’s Sleeping Women.

The Knave of Sceptres, Reversed: 111 News, Displeasure, Chagrin, Worry.

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

It is impossible for man’s happiness to be in this world. Said Aquinas.

Skokie, Illinois.

Missolonghi.

Jacqueline Picasso shot herself.

For Protagonist’s again distant literary past:

Malcolm Lowry: I have a funny story to tell you, about something that happened while you were out.

Protagonist: Happened? Oh, damn, I can smell it all over the apartment. You didn’t drink my shaving lotion?

Courbet’s Origin of the World.

Carl Sandburg was the one poet who would probably gain from translation.

Said Frost.

Philip Larkin was an anti-Semite.

Areopagitica.

Heiligenstadt.

He hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination.

Francis William Bourdillon. Edward Rowland Sill. Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Winifred M. Letts.

Carel Fabritius was killed at thirty-two in a gunpowder depot explosion.

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

Photographs of anyone other than his children, are there?

Are there manuscripts?

Pliny the Elder died of asphyxiation after landing a boat to get a closer view of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

Fritz Wunderlich died in a fall down a flight of stairs.

Is there a typewriter?

John Heminges and Henry Condell.

And why has Reader only this tardily determined that Protagonist will have had five or six books dedicated to him in that other incarnation also?

Even if he will not be certain he has copies of all of these in among his cartons any longer.

I think: Is it the blue dressing gown, or the white one? That’s very important. I must find that out — it’s very important.

Parmigianino died mad.

Anactoria.

Alan Ladd committed suicide.

My younger and shallower and vainer brother, William James spoke of Henry as.

So worthy a friend.

Chaucer was an anti-Semite.

Kafka died in 1924. All three of his younger sisters would later be incinerated by the Nazis.

Three.

Zinka Milanov. The Nile aria.

Christopher Caudwell was killed while covering a Loyalist retreat at the Jarama River in 1937. On his first day in combat.

Paideia.

Lucia Joyce, institutionalized, when told of her father’s death:

What is he doing underground, that idiot?

Henri Heine, he was naturally called in his decades in Paris.

Kneeling at a grave. Walking a beach.

Eternal devotion beside the point, after Beatrice’s death Dante had at least four children by the never-spoken-of Gemma Donati.

James Joyce’s daughter.

A forty-year-old Olympia portable, in fact. Not even electric.

Modeled after whose?

Pietro Torrigiano took a hammer to a Madonna he had sculpted in Seville when he was not paid what he anticipated.

And was jailed by the Inquisition for sacrilege.

Where in a masterpiece of spiting one’s face he starved himself to death.

Who’s the coon?

Asked Wallace Stevens re a photo of Gwendolyn Brooks.

Proust so admired Whistler that he once stole one of his gloves at a reception for a souvenir.

Gala Eluard, who became Gala Dali. Her affair with Max Ernst. Her affair with Giorgio de Chirico. And cetera, when married or otherwise.

When was the last time Protagonist actually did sit down to a full meal at a better restaurant?

When was the last time he let himself hail a taxi?

Edith Wharton was an anti-Semite.

Máquina de escribir.

Machine à écrire.

Macchina da scrivere.

Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent, Nabokov said.

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Fleeing the start of World War II, Gwen John collapsed and died on a street in Dieppe.

Josef Mengele, M.D.

John Gould Fletcher drowned himself.

Dickens was certain after reading only her first novel that the name George Eliot belonged to a woman.

O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

In a lawsuit that prevented him from teaching in New York in 1940, Bertrand Russell’s writings were described as lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber. Unquote.

May, 1886:

Little cousins,

Called back.

Emily

Vladimir Mayakovsky had an illegitimate daughter in the United States.

I am become death, the shatterer of worlds. Recited J. Robert Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad-Gita at Alamogordo.

Schreibmaschine.

When was the last time Protagonist took a trip? Simply went somewhere?

Principia Mathematica. Logic and Knowledge. The Analysis of Mind. The Analysis of Matter.

And over this loathsome and grotesque mask of death, the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed downwards in rippling gold.

Tolstoy thought King Lear so bad a play as to be not worth discussion.

Vachel Lindsay committed suicide by drinking Lysol.

Is it evident to Reader that he has lost interest in the idea of doing anything with the women upstairs?

Do you know that the king had not even heard of Wittgenstein!

Brahms died of cancer of the liver.

Why do you always wear black?

I am in mourning for my life.

There was once an actual portrait of Petrarch’s Laura, by Simone Martini. However it is long lost.

Within two years of Stephen Crane’s death in the Black Forest, Cora had returned to Jacksonville and opened a brothel.

Beyond the dunes. Flotsam. Odds and ends.

William the Conqueror came before Richard III. Announced Shakespeare through a dark window to Burbage.

Carlos Arruza died in a car crash.

In one of Protagonist’s own unread books, perhaps? Why does Reader think of him sensing he should remember something about someone else who often walked along a beach?

Teresa Stich-Randall.

Regine Olsen.

Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite.

All the Jew part of the Bible is black evil, an Ezra nicety.

Protagonist the Penniless. Protagonist the Hermit.

Deus vult?

Bachelard. Baudrillard. Blanchot. Barthes. Bataille.

Sorting, packing.

Toward what final bleak contemplation amid the disarray?

I have read Mr. Scott’s book fourteen times; and it is a rather tiresome book.

Said someone of The Architecture of Humanism.

Condorcet probably committed suicide.

The first writer known to condemn slavery is Euripides.

We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.

If forced to choose, Reader assumes, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Giacometti.

September 28, 1891, 12:30 A.M. 104 East 26th Street, New York. Cardiac dilatation, mitral regurgitation, contributing asthenia.

Melville.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Va, pensiero, sull’ ali dorate.

Why is virtually all landscape in Andrea Mantegna comprised of rock?

How many times had Reader heard the Smetana before he discovered that the Moldau was a river?

Among the Ouses and the Ebros in Anna Livia Plurabelle.

One has the right to expect ordinary decency even of a poet.

Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Gertrude Stein was born in.

Among the Meuses and the Marnes.

Allen Mandelbaum’s Aeneid. Mackail’s.

La Pasionaria.

Photographs of Protagonist with?

Jane Austen. Anne Bradstreet. Cervantes.

Pierre Menard.

Or actually some few with certain other writers at that? In antique five-and-ten-cent store frames?

And everyone young?

Cicero was an anti-Semite.

Certain legends would insist that Pontius Pilate committed suicide.

In last year’s nests there are no birds this year.

The beach, or the cemetery?

What follows for Protagonist in either case?

Patron saint of desperate causes?

In a dramatic and not narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and terror.

Still, for all slips of hers,

One of Eve’s family—

Wipe those poor lips of hers

Oozing so clammily.

Dorothy Dandridge committed suicide.

Hearing of acquaintances who have died, alone, to be found by strangers.

According to indictments of the time, on May 23, 1450, Sir Thomas Malory raped the wife, Joan, of one Hugh Smyth, in Warwickshire.

On August 6, Malory raped said Joan again.

Joyce called How Much Land Does a Man Need? the greatest of all short stories.

Gaspara Stampa. Mihri Hatun. Louise Labé.

I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.

Quelqu’un vit sur cetteplage.

Alguien vive en este play a.

The end of his life in a shabby furnished room across the street from the railroad station in Frankfurt. Oskar Schindler.

Bernard Berenson was an anti-Semite.

Bernard Berenson was born a Jew.

Character! What is character! It’s tone that matters!

How shall we sing the Lord’s song

In a strange land?

One minute she was standing in the door.

Passchendaele.

The Tunning of Elynour Rumming.

When Leonardo died in France, in 1519, it was in the arms of the king, Francis I, who had come to his bedside. Insists Vasari.

Ipse dixit.

February 2nd. Joyce’s birthday.

And Protagonist’s daughter’s.

October 25th. Picasso’s.

And Protagonist’s son’s.

The first edition of Thus Spake Zarathustra sold forty copies. Nietzsche had had to pay for publication.

I count religion but a childish toy,

And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

Once more before he dies Protagonist will read Aristophanes.

Delacroix, on Ingres:

His art is the complete expression of an incomplete intelligence.

Demosthenes committed suicide with poison.

In the same year that Aristotle may have done so.

Grieg wrote his piano concerto at twenty-five.

And would produce nothing else of significance on a large scale in almost forty more years of composing.

Arnold Toynbee was an anti-Semite.

Orde Wingate.

I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent, Scott Fitzgerald said.

Capt. Wilfred Owen was an acting company commander, attempting to cross an enemy-held canal, when he was machine-gunned.

Wilhelm Furtwangler. Herbert von Karajan. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Alfred Cortot. Kirsten Flagstad. Walter Gieseking. Inextricably bedfellowed with the Nazis.

As was Gigli with the Italian fascists.

That nearby, Protagonist awakening mornings to the wash of the surf?

Mitigating, will it, the morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before?

Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come?

Thesmophoriazusae.

Anne Sexton sometimes allowed a recording of the Bachianas Brasileiras to replay itself endlessly when she was writing.

But now they that are younger than I have me

in derision,

Whose fathers I disdained to set with the dogs

of my flock.

The Virgin for those who have nobody them with.

André Malraux flew sixty-five missions as the commander of the Loyalist air force. And in World War II was captured twice by the Germans while a leader of the Resistance, and twice escaped.

Was Moses murdered in the wilderness?

Was willst duy fremder Mensch?

Bidú Sayão.

Freud and Frazer were immediate contemporaries. Freud read a good deal of Frazer. Frazer did not read one word of Freud.

Kurt Tucholsky committed suicide.

Henry Miller was an anti-Semite.

Les Nuits d’Été. The poems Gautier’s.

Whittier threw Leaves of Grass into a fire.

Suffering Alzheimer’s disease, de Kooning once had to be prevented from eating a cigarette.

With kings and counsellors, murmured I.

Xanthus.

Why does it sadden Reader to realize he will almost certainly never know what book will turn out to be the last he ever read?

What piece of music, the last he ever heard?

Matthew 27:3–5 says that Judas hanged himself.

I am old, and can no longer work, and am without means of livelihood, and my wife is ill.

Said Paolo Uccello on a tax declaration in Florence in 1469.

Un grand peut-être.

Sacajawea.

Fanny Imlay committed suicide with laudanum.

Rubens was fifty-three when he married his second wife Hélène. Who was sixteen.

No more behind

But such a day tomorrow as today

And to be boy eternal.

The second Brandenburg concerto, on an indestructible phonograph disc, is drifting eternally in space affixed to Voyager II

Anna Comnena.

Alfonsina Storni drowned herself in the Mar del Plata. Having mailed off her final manuscript that morning.

Ninety feet between bases is the greatest invention of Western man.

Jean Giraudoux was an anti-Semite.

Cavafy, acknowledged as the great Greek poet of his time. Who lived his entire writing life in Egypt.

The names of the dead.

Stanley Badner.

Carlo Crivelli was once imprisoned in Venice for kidnapping and rape.

And later knighted in Naples for creating altarpieces like the Madonna della Rondine.

Bruno Bettelheim committed suicide.

The shaving lotion that Malcolm Lowry drank in Manhattan in 1954 was Mennen Skin Bracer.

Protagonist will still have the same brand on a shelf at the cemetery.

O che dolce cosa è questa prospettiva!

1 couldn’t do that to him.

Said Nora, at the suggestion that Joyce be given a Catholic funeral.

The several ancient oaks. Reader’s nighttime image of only the faintest glow from a single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window.

And?

Saint Jude?

Gertrud Kolmar died at Auschwitz.

Etty Hillesum died at Auschwitz.

Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress.

And curst be he that moves my bones.

Remedios Varo was rumored to have committed suicide.

The ghost in the machine.

Alexander died in bed. Legend says that near the end he tried to drown himself in the Euphrates, hoping his body would be lost and his legions would believe he had been carried off as a god.

Roxane found him and shooed him back.

How does Protagonist spend a day like Thanksgiving?

Or any holiday?

How does Protagonist spend a simple Sunday?

Juvenal was an anti-Semite.

And can you not understand that having told you all this, I shall forever despise you for having heard it?

Someone wished Protagonist a merry Christmas in passing on the street yesterday?

Potestas Clavium.

Botticelli’s father was a tanner.

Maria Callas was rumored to have committed suicide.

Nelly Sachs was gotten out of Nazi Germany at the last possible moment. On a flight to Stockholm arranged by Selma Lagerlof.

With Reader well aware that he has still not satisfactorily thought Protagonist through.

Once, indisputably, more of an existence than his cartons and the recusant weeds amid the headstones of strangers.

How has Protagonist managed to so calamitously fuck up his life?

More than fifty thousand people followed Sartre’s cortege to Montparnasse Cemetery.

Where someone in the crowd fell into the grave on top of his coffin.

Truman Capote was an anti-Semite.

Or is he in some peculiar way perhaps thinking of an autobiography?

Did Jesus ever laugh?

Thirty-six publishers rejected The Ginger Man.

Houses. Automobiles. Summer homes.

Indulgences.

Jules Pascin committed suicide by slashing his wrists. And wrote, Lucy, forgiveness, to his mistress in blood on a wall.

Flaubert and Baudelaire were prosecuted for immorality in the same year.

Y la vida no es noble, ni buena, ni sagrada.

The skull, lower left foreground, a redundant nearer memento mori.

He was a moment in the conscience of mankind.

A one-legged woman in a conspicuously short skirt.

Kant’s habits were so precise that shopkeepers in Konigsberg adjusted their clocks by his daily three-thirty walk.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes committed suicide.

A Christ of our neighborhood, Ortega called Don Quixote.

Can Reader force any of it all?

Or will memory still persist in sidetracking imagination?

A Wehrmacht officer in Picasso’s studio during the occupation of Paris, re a photograph of Guernica: Did you do this?

To which Picasso: No, you did.

I grow older ever learning many things.

Said Solon.

Abraham Cowley died after sleeping off a drunk in a damp pasture.

As above, so below.

Remembering a Fern, lovely though fragile, who tolerated baseball games.

Remembering a Kate, strikingly handsome, who plucked a knotted root from a river in Spain.

Renoir was an anti-Semite.

Michelangelo died in Rome. And had to be smuggled out, quite literally wrapped like merchandise, to be buried at Florence rather than in St. Peter’s.

Vasari’s reportage in this instance authoritative.

Oh my God I am heartily sorry for having offended thee and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell.

Ross Lockridge committed suicide by running a hose from his exhaust pipe into his car.

Books are a load of crap, a Larkin line says.

Ernest Dowson was dead, penniless, at thirty-two. Of absinthe and influenza.

Nero kicked Poppaea in the stomach when she was pregnant. And killed her. The Monteverdi Poppaea opera concluding rather earlier in her biography than this.

Remembering a lithe, dark-eyed girl named Christine, who danced.

Remembering a Josie. And a Liz. And a Susan.

Marina Tsvetayeva hanged herself. And was buried no one knows where.

C. S. Lewis, on overly romanticizing the distant past: Think of a world without anesthetics.

A miniature American flag, fixed beside one of the graves.

Will Protagonist have ever found flowers?

The woman, bearing any?

Four of Freud’s five sisters were incinerated by the Germans in 1944.

Four.

Aeschylus was a foot soldier at Marathon. And wanted that, rather than his plays, noted in his epitaph.

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

And only the day before yesterday, once having seemed.

Remembering a Rachel and an Anne and a Lisa.

Remembering Piero di Cosimo’s Simonetta Vespucci.

By the rivers of Babylon,

There we sat down, yea, we wept.

Was Peter Warlock the only serious composer who ever committed suicide?

Tchaikovsky and Schumann and Hugo Wolf having tried, but unsuccessfully.

Berlioz also, though being histrionic only.

Who is the woman at the grave?

Erinna ofTelos.

Chaucer was the first poet buried in Westminster Abbey. Simply having lived in Westminster.

I have come to this place because.

Are Saint Francis of Assisi’s stigmata the earliest ever recorded?

Shakespeare’s mother and father were illiterate. And only one of his two daughters, Susanna, could sign her name. The other, Judith, made a mark.

Shakespeare’s daughters. His one son, Hamnet, Judith’s twin, died at eleven.

Before certain dawns at the gatehouse, like a windborne echo out of Protagonist’s own childhood, the wailing of a far-off train?

Mitigating, will it, the morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before?

Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come?

Remembering yet others?

Some undeniably casual, some fugitive.

Some even now dead?

Nonetheless.

Did it ever, once, enter even Protagonist’s bleakest conjecturings that he would finish out his life alone?

Katherine Hamlet.

Of making many books there is no end.

I have not read a novel in any language in very many years, Joyce once mentioned.

Van Gogh shot himself in the chest.

And then walked home and took two days to die.

No survivor could recall having ever seen a single bird flying near any of the Nazi death camps.

Arbeit macht frei.

Mozart, the Ave, verum corpus.

A street in Paris, the late 1890s:

Madame Melba, you don’t know who I am? I’m Oscar Wilde, and I’m going to do a terrible thing. I’m going to ask you for money.

Dostoievsky was an anti-Semite.

Who does walk the winter beach at water’s edge in the distance far ahead of Protagonist?

Emma Bovary.

Anna Karenina.

Othello.

Jocasta.

Brünnhilde.

Hedda Gabler.

Romeo and Juliet.

Werther.

Dido.

Cio-Cio-San.

Antigone and Haemon.

Miss Julie.

Axel Heyst.

Quentin Compson.

Aïda.

Inspector Javert.

Mynheer Peeperkorn. Leo Naphta.

Smerdyakov.

Rudolf Virag.

Edna Pontellier.

Hero.

Manrico’s Leonora.

Cheri.

Goneril.

Richard Cory.

McWatt.

Tosca.

Stavrogin. Kirillov.

Martin Eden.

Hurstwood.

Pyramus and Thisbe.

Roithamer.

Pierre Glendinning.

Winnie Verloc.

George Wilson.

Hedvig Ekdal.

Christine Mannon. Orin Mannon.

Willy Loman.

Senta.

Peter Kien.

Maggie Johnson.

Peter Grimes.

Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter.

Svidrigailov.

James O. Incandenza.

Konstantin Treplev.

Bartleby.

Septimus Smith.

Deirdre.

Seymour Glass.

Ophelia.

Samson.

Eustacia Vye.

Phaedra.

Alcestis.

Launcelot.

Shakespeare’s daughters. His last surviving grandchild, Susanna’s daughter Elizabeth, would live until 1670.

But leaving no further descendants.

A daughter of Dante’s, called Antonia, went into a nunnery at his death.

And adopted the name Sister Beatrice.

Virtually every second book in every library in the world is irreparably deteriorating because of brittle paper and acid content.

Jesus? he murmured, Jesus — of Nazareth? I cannot call him to mind.

Protagonist’s children?

With Reader well aware that he has categorically not thought that through either.

As with how much monumentally else?

Nine hundred and sixty Jews committed suicide at Masada, in 73 A.D., rather than surrender to the Roman legions that had lately sacked Jerusalem.

Two small rough orange stones.

Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

Virgil died at fifty. Shakespeare was fifty-two. Dante, fifty-six.

Petrarch, seventy, died at his desk. Having been reading.

Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.

At modest estimate, at least 40 percent of the entire population of Europe was annihilated during the four years of the Black Death.

His inevitable portage of cartons? Beside a stairway to no passage?

In accommodations at a derelict graveyard? Where nobody comes, where nobody calls?

Now are fields of corn where Troy once was.

Dead?

She?

I would give you some violets, but they withered all, when my father died.

Vanishing point.

Toward what final grievous contemplation amid the disarray?

The sun will run out of hydrogen and commence to die in approximately one billion, one hundred million years.

In the interim, what more for the elderly man in the house at the beach but to saunter out among the sandpipers and the gulls one afternoon, and stand for a time abstractedly in late autumn solitude, and then walk unremarkably into the sea?

In the interim, what more for the elderly man in the house at the cemetery but to pause at his accustomed window one afternoon, and gaze for a time abstractedly at the ranks of still white stone beyond, and then turn unremarkably to the gas?

And Reader? And Reader?

In the end one experiences only one’s self.

Said Nietzsche.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Wastebasket.

Content

David Markson
Reader's Block