David Markson

This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

INTRODUCTION

Introductions, when read at all, might sometimes be considered as an afterthought to the reader’s own impressions after finishing the book. There’s nothing wrong with guarding one’s capacity for surprise when encountering the work of an author who’s new to you, nothing wrong with reading the review after seeing the movie. So, perhaps perversely, I hope you’ll read these three novels and form your own impression, and if my remarks suggest other things, or verify or call into question certain feelings, they’re only that: an appreciative reader’s observations.

But they’re fond remarks. What I have to say teeters between David’s having been my friend, and my awe and continued amazement at his work and what he achieved. Since now there will be no new work, I can only re-read — which might elicit the same responses, because of familiarity. Yet every time I pick up one of his books, I find it more exceptional than it seemed at first. I’m not alone in this response: it’s appreciated and discussed and is often spoken of as representing a leap forward for American literature. I’m still troubled that it wasn’t more appreciated in his lifetime, but I’m less sure that matters — except, obviously, for a writer being able to make a living, and for reinforcing the writer’s sense of self esteem, which are not minor matters. “Rediscoveries” are more and more a part of literary culture: Edith Pearlman; the re-issues in the wonderful New York Review of Books Classics series (don’t miss The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott, if The Great Gatsby initially gave you snow blindness). We’ve always had Counterpoint to thank for bringing forth unexpected texts, radical books for acute readers. That doesn’t mean that you have to be an expert to enjoy them.

I knew David in the early eighties in New York. He lived in Greenwich Village, I lived in Chelsea. We had a few mutual friends. When we were introduced, I hadn’t read his work, but I did know that Douglas Day, who’d also written about Malcolm Lowry, had the greatest respect for David’s Lowry book. I eventually read a couple of David’s early books, liked them but wasn’t over the moon, and as we got to know each other a bit better, he asked if I’d read a manuscript he was finishing called Wittgenstein’s Mistress. As I write, four extra copies are on my bookshelf, in case someone wants to read it. I took the manuscript home with me and read all night. I was speechless. Whatever I did finally manage to say on the phone no doubt let him know how astonished I was at what he’d done. In the back of my mind, I had feared reading a manuscript that would call on my nonexistent knowledge of Wittgenstein. And, as writers always fear, if they don’t like what they read, they have to figure out how honest to be in their response. I’m sure I fell all over myself, but he did understand that I thought it was one of the most moving, surprising books I’d ever read. And I’m sticking to that. The character in that novel is either the last person on Earth, or she believes she is. Absence throbs in the text. The last page is heartbreaking. And while that earlier book is quite distinct from these three, the idea of a solitary thinker, an artist (she is a painter) without reinforcement, but with many memories and confusions, going toward she knows not what, provides a kind of thematic undertow that This is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel crest above.

There is no possibility David Markson would have thought of being fashionable. But without any calculation, David’s writing has come to be considered very of-the-moment. I bring this up because for readers who’ve heard of him only recently, perhaps in on-line magazines or various blogs and literary sites, or because his books have been embraced in the academic world, his categorization as “postmodern” might come to mind. I can’t argue with that, though of course it was not the categorization that led David Foster Wallace to write him a fan letter. For Wallace, as for many other writers, it was for his unique mining of a territory that didn’t much exist — at least in the United States — until David asserted its presence. First he discovered the turf. Then he stood on it.

You have in front of you his last three books, which have often been addressed in terms of collage. We, in these fragmented times, with our reputed short attention spans and our belief that with enough intellectual coaxing anything can be made to fit with everything, react positively to “collage.” People love to compare writing to visual art, though I don’t think his work has much to do with collage. What I think is that he was his own perfect team of Eliot and Pound, a poet who displaced and projected emotions onto an opaque, little-peopled landscape that, after being re-arranged and judiciously edited, revealed the bones of a skeleton we knew existed, though not in this exact, surprising form. So, okay: I’d have it that he was a brilliant paleontologist as well as a fiction writer with the deft touch of a poet. Teamed with himself, he was absolutely brilliant. He really shuffled those cards: a quote from Diogenes; a little-known fact about Baudelaire (“Baudelaire wore rouge”). (They really were cards; his notes were kept on index cards. Many, many.) So in some ways he was a collector, and metaphorically speaking I suppose he had to eventually glue his sentences down in what he considered the best possible order. But they are all words, the images conjured up, but off the page, the collage — if it’s even an appropriate comparison — assembled horizontally, for the eye to scan from left to right.

Try to stop reading one of these three novels. Meanings accrue; mysteries arise; you laugh when you least expect to laugh; a character (or characters) are indelibly created (though in the Beckettian manner, he uses as few as possible). It’s often observed that when you compile a list, what is revealed transcends the individual notations. Write a play — in which you are primarily restricted to dialogue — and the problem is often that the dialogue takes on too much meaning. A writer as aware and purposeful as David would have been highly sensitized to that. By the time he finished, he knew what the books were. And then, I’d guess, he went on to write a second book in the same manner, because he also knew what the books were not. I’m not the one to say how many books by a writer are enough, too few, or too many. They’d have to all exist, to have a dialogue. There would have had to be many more in this series (how I wish they existed; he was working on another when he died) to know if they’d stretch all the way to the distant horizon line that existed, way in the distance, sometimes obscured by fog, as a definition of what the twentieth century was. He, himself, worried about doing the same old thing — but any serious writer becomes inhibited and nervous about that. He was a man of habits, of increasingly small geographical parameters (hey: he got old and wasn’t in perfect health. Also, his beloved Strand was nearby). But he read assiduously (who cares if he didn’t keep up with contemporary fiction? Even his own admission of deficiency seems half-hearted), and developed his book’s trajectories subtly but deliberately, working both on the level of the sentence and keeping in mind the book’s arc. Some sentences are inverted; many present the observation or statement, then fill us in on who said it (“He who writes for fools will always find a large audience/said Schopenhauer”). And then, when we are used to this system of presentation, he drops in a simple declarative sentence (“Marco Polo died three years after Dante”). Among the questions David implies is this: Does it matter who said what, or that the thing was said? For me, what’s stated, usually tersely, is like a balloon whose string dangles the name of the person being quoted. Interesting questions are raised: of the spoken word vs. the personality of the speaker; how one statement inadvertently continues or calls into question another. And throughout, a fictional persona co-exists with these usually famous artists and philosophers and musicians — a bare-bones sort of person sunk sometimes in a self-pity that seems simultaneously funny, or wandering alone through a maze of concepts that do and don’t have anything to do with his banal day, his banal (but human/therefore human) desires. What we have is fiction, comprised of fact and hearsay and words already written, whether transcribed exactly or not, repeated by David in a different order, appropriated for the purpose of making a new creature sent out to join up with those who already exist.

If at times that might have looked to the writer like a words only version of Exquisite Corpse (the old-fashioned game of two players drawing a figure, then folding the page over so the next person must continue drawing what they’ve never seen), that’s no different than the way a lot of writers work. Even writers who proceed from an outline often remark that as they wrote, something surprised them, or de-railed them, or that only as they got near the end of the first draft did they realize the larger meaning of what they were doing. I don’t mean to either disappear beneath the mask of metaphor, or to make an exact analogy, but David was a solitary man who read and wrote and lived alone (though he certainly missed the good old days at his favorite bar, The Lion’s Head). He could continue drawing his own invented figure (so to speak), but in juggling the contradictions, textures, and clashing philosophies of what he was creating, he must, at times, have had to resist forcing something into shape just because it was under his control. (Pound and Eliot hardly had the same sensibility.) You don’t live almost your whole life in New York City and not believe in chance.

To quote myself (he’d smile at the indulgence) with something I said when I introduced him for his reading at the 92nd St. Y: “We know that literature is always in dialogue with other literature, but it is our good fortune that David Markson has acted as a facilitator: the good host, introducing all the right people to the right people, while being puckish enough to introduce all the right people to the wrong people, as well. In-jokes appear sometimes as little grace-notes. The works and the remarks of visual artists and philosophers also figure in, as do characters who may not be fictional. In David Markson, backward motion is as important as forward motion.” So this doesn’t become abstract, let me make a few comments about a short sequence of paragraphs from Vanishing Point:

Scholars who are convinced that Shakespeare must certainly have been a military man. Or a lawyer. Or closely associated with royalty. Or even a Jew.

To which Ellen Terry: Or surely a woman.

Yup; the jury’s out. But the passage tells us so much more than the fact that Shakespeare remains a mystery. It mimics gossip. It addresses the serious issue of identity, and other people’s claim on it. The word “Even” is certainly revealing about someone’s attitude. We are (I assume) made uncomfortable by the distinction being drawn. The following paragraph (“To which Ellen Terry: Or surely a woman”) does several interesting things: the speculation resumes (and therefore, by extension, this determines a way of speech, and typifies a conversational mode), but we can’t quite recover from “Even a Jew,” although Ms. Terry’s remark — because we do not know her — might be read any number of ways: that she thinks Jews and women are both problematic; that she is a stereotype of a woman who reflexively mentions oft-forgotten women; that she truly believes that Shakespeare might have been female. These are just a few things to notice among many possibilities. But then we drop off into white space. The next paragraph concerns a painter. Since we have no other transition to the first word of the next paragraph (Michelangelo), we hear something discordant: the lingering voice of the last person to speak (Ellen Terry) butting up against Michelangelo. We don’t move from famous writer (Shakespeare) to famous painter (Michelangelo) and feel the coherence of the arts, though; rather, we hear that ambiguous pronouncement of the suddenly vanished Ellen Terry saying something that might have been fatuous, perhaps mocking, perhaps an announcement of a personal belief. . and a sort of echo chamber is set up, in which a voice doesn’t entirely vanish, but is merely supplanted. This happens in music all the time. I would suspect, though, that for those who care to hear it, there is Eliot’s famous line from Prufrock: “In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.” I’m only guessing, but the world-weariness of Eliot’s famous line seems to bond invisibly to the fact that between paragraphs, a breath has been taken (seen as white space and with no suggestion of a direct way to make the transition), so that we are surprised, yet not surprised, to suddenly be considering Michelangelo.

Michelangelo once criticized the fact that Raphael was unfailingly accompanied by an entourage of pupils and admirers, saying he went parading about like a general—

To which Raphael: And you go about alone like a hangman.

We smile at Raphael’s one-upsmanship. It’s one of those moments of quick riposte we so often wish we were capable of; someone does get the last, clever word. Add that to our Exquisite Corpse as it’s been shaping up, and the accordion (turn it on its side; then my analogy works!) lengthens so that we see that Shakespeare and Ellen Terry have been conjured up, to be followed by another eminence, who gets a put-down from yet another eminent painter. Here, we can laugh — even if a bit ruefully. But rarely does a conversation conclude with someone offering a bon mot. In dialogue, it’s never believable, because it seems like the writer is being too witty, or artificially ending on a high note. (We might get off a witty remark, but then fate seems to decree that the fire alarm goes off, or our belt breaks, and our pants fall down.)

But now here, here David Markson intervenes, with his character Author:

Not that rearranging his notes means that Author has any real idea where the book is headed, on the other hand.

Ideally, in fact, it will wind up someplace that will surprise even Author himself.

There’s the pre-emptive strike, in case we wondered on pages 10–11 where the book was going. Ah, Author does not know! That’s understandable, and part of the fun of writing is in the unexpected discoveries. Who’d begrudge someone that little treat? Author is self-deprecating, willing to confess to potential worries or inadequacies; Author is just like us. . except that Markson has interjected Author deliberately, for a little cameo that will grow into a larger role, later. We know that we are not supposed to be so unsophisticated as to believe that Philip Roth the character is Philip Roth the writer, or that the fictional Kathy Acker is Kathy Acker. Got it. Yet if some little part of our brain does conflate the two (privately, silently, as if with a flashlight beneath the sheets), the fictional character inevitably takes on more credibility and meaning because we see the superimposition: it’s a funhouse mirror that both distorts and also allows us to see right through it. Here, Author is released like a genie, and since what is supposedly “real” in fiction really makes us perk up, the writer can have it both ways. Author is David Markson, but Author is also just some guy. Author brings us back to Earth, in a departure that deliberately pricks the balloon that’s been sent up to ask us to consider The Great Men. Yet when we return to basics, when we touch base with an individual who is, after all, something of a guide, even if not an authority figure, Earth has become a bit defamiliarized. It’s slightly de-stabilized, a place not so much of sunrise and sunset, trees and bees, but a life of the mind, floated in white space for our perusal and contemplation, a concept accruing like a cloud. It’s suspended above us whether we see it or not, though if that cloud is cumulus, it’s rather reassuring that it was formed by one layer forming above another, all parts working together to give the impression of density, the flat surface from which it forms very much like the flatness of a book.

— Ann Beattie

THIS IS NOT A NOVEL

For Toby and Duncan Freeman and Sydney Markson

I am now trying an Experiment very

frequent among Modern Authors;

which is, to write upon Nothing.

— Swift

Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing.

Writer is weary unto death of making up stories.

Lord Byron died of either rheumatic fever, or typhus, or uremia, or malaria.

Or was inadvertently murdered by his doctors, who had bled him incessantly.

Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis in 1900. Granted an ordinary modern life span, he would have lived well into World War II.

This morning I walked to the place where the streetcleaners dump the rubbish. My God, it was beautiful.

Says a van Gogh letter.

Writer is equally tired of inventing characters.

Bertolt Brecht died of a stroke. Terrified of being buried alive, he had pleaded that a stiletto be driven through his heart once he was declared legally dead. An attending physician did so.

Mr. Coleridge, do not cry. If opium really does you any good, and you must have it, why do you not go and get it?

Asked Wilkie Collins’ mother.

William Blake lived and dressed in inconceivable filth, and virtually never bathed.

Mr. Blake’s skin don’t dirt, his wife Catherine contributed.

When I was their age I could draw like Raphael. But it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like they do.

Said Picasso at an exhibition of children’s art.

A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to contrive.

And with no characters. None.

The Globe Theatre burned to the ground on June 29, 1613. Did any new play of Shakespeare’s, not yet in quarto publication, perhaps burn with it?

Albert Camus, on the one occasion when he was introduced to William Faulkner:

The man did not say three words to me.

Nietzsche died after a sequence of strokes. But his final illness, and his madness, were almost surely the result of syphilis.

W. H. Auden was once arrested for urinating in a public park in Barcelona.

Frans Hals was once arrested for beating his wife.

Plotless. Characterless.

Yet seducing the reader into turning pages nonetheless.

No one was injured in the Globe Theatre calamity. One man’s breeches were set on fire, but it is on record that the flames were quenched with a tankard of ale.

When Dickens shocked Victorian London by separating from his wife, it was Thackeray who let slip that it was over an actress. Dickens did not speak to him for years.

Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon.

George Santayana, reading Moby Dick:

In spite of much skipping, I have got stuck in the middle.

Thales of Miletus died at his seat while watching an athletic contest.

But I knew that Monsieur Beyle quite well, and you will never convince me that a trifler like him could have written masterpieces.

Said Sainte-Beuve.

Actionless, Writer wants it.

Which is to say, with no sequence of events.

Which is to say, with no indicated passage of time.

Then again, getting somewhere in spite of this.

The old wives’ tale, repeated by Socrates, that Thales was also frequently so preoccupied with gazing up at the stars that he once tumbled into a well.

And was even laughed at by washerwomen.

Jack Donne, the young John Donne was commonly called.

Oedipus gouges out his eyes, Jocasta hangs herself, both guiltless; the play has come to a harmonious conclusion.

Wrote Schiller.

Verdi died of a stroke.

Puccini died of throat cancer.

Indeed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Even with a note of sadness at the end.

What porridge had John Keats?

Asked Browning.

What is the use of being kind to a poor man?

Asked Cicero.

Bertrand Russell was so inept, physically, that he could never learn to make a pot of tea.

Immanuel Kant could not manage to sharpen a quill pen with a penknife.

John Stuart Mill could barely tie a simple knot.

The sixth-century legend that St. Luke was a painter.

And did a portrait of the Virgin Mary.

Tartini’s violin.

Which shattered in its case at his death.

Insistently, Brahms wore his pants too short.

Sometimes actually taking a scissors to the bottoms.

A novel with no setting.

With no so-called furniture.

Ergo meaning finally without descriptions.

André Gide died of a disease of the lungs.

Rereading the Aeneid on his deathbed.

It was while they were making copies of the Masaccio frescoes in the Santa Maria del Carmine as young apprentices that Michelangelo criticized the draftsmanship of Pietro Torrigiano:

Bone and cartilage went down like biscuit, Torrigiano would later tell Benvenuto Cellini.

Re Michelangelo’s nose.

The greatest genius of our century, Goethe called Byron.

The greatest genius of our century, Byron called Goethe.

Ivan Turgenev, at nineteen, during a shipboard fire:

Save me! I am my mother’s only son!

Catullus, who loved a woman he called Lesbia, but whose real name may have been Clodia.

Propertius, who loved a woman he called Cynthia, but whose real name may have been Hostia.

Both, two full thousand years ago.

Gustav Mahler died of endocarditis.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline died of a brain aneurysm.

A novel with no overriding central motivations, Writer wants.

Hence with no conflicts and/or confrontations, similarly.

Rudolph Kreutzer never performed the Kreutzer sonata.

One of the ennobling delights of Paradise, as promised by Thomas Aquinas:

Viewing the condemned as they are tortured and broiled below.

The friendship of Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti.

Richard Strauss: Why do you have to write this way? You have talent.

Paul Hindemith: Herr Professor, you make your music and I’ll make mine.

Porto d’Ercole. Where Caravaggio died.

Most probably of malaria.

In a tavern.

Georgia O’Keeffe died blind.

I saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark played, but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age.

Says John Evelyn’s Diary for November 26, 1661.

With no social themes, i.e., no picture of society.

No depiction of contemporary manners and/or morals.

Categorically, with no politics.

Vulgar and dull, Ruskin dismissed Rembrandt as.

Brother to Dostoievsky, Malraux called him.

For whatever reason, Jean Sibelius did not write a note in the last thirty years of his life.

Kierkegaard died of a lung infection.

Or a disease of the spine.

Karl Barth’s surmise:

That while the angels may play only Bach in praising God, among themselves they play Mozart.

Theophrastus pronounced that flute music could cure sciatica.

Not to mention epilepsy.

Alexander Pope died of dropsy.

John Milton died of gout.

Theophrastus said flute music would have cured that, also.

No one ever painted a woman’s backside better than Boucher, said Renoir.

A novel entirely without symbols.

Robert of Naples: Giotto, if I were you, in this hot weather I would leave off painting for a while.

Giotto: So would I, assuredly — if I were you.

Matthew Arnold died of a heart attack while running for a streetcar in Liverpool.

Among Dickens’ children:

Alfred Tennyson Dickens. Henry Fielding Dickens. Edward Bulwer-Lytton Dickens. Walter Landor Dickens. Sydney Smith Dickens.

Among Walt Whitman’s brothers:

George Washington Whitman. Andrew Jackson Whitman. Thomas Jefferson Whitman.

Elizabeth I, visiting Cambridge University, delivered a lecture in Greek.

And then chatted less formally with students in Latin.

Thomas Mann died of phlebitis.

The likelihood that Anne Hathaway could not read.

Anne Hathaway.

The perhaps less than idle speculation that Columbus was a Jew.

Space is blue and birds fly through it.

Said Werner Heisenberg.

Ultimately, a work of art without even a subject, Writer wants.

There is no work of art without a subject, said Ortega.

A novel tells a story, said E. M. Forster.

If you can do it, it ain’t bragging, said Dizzy Dean.

Xenocrates died after stumbling against a brass pot in the dark and cracking his skull.

Brunelleschi had a temporary restaurant and wine shop constructed in the highest reaches of the Florence cathedral while building his great cupola — so his workmen did not have to negotiate all that distance for lunch.

Maxim Gorky died of tuberculosis.

Or was he ordered murdered by Stalin?

Baudelaire died after being paralyzed and deprived of speech by syphilis.

I was tired and ill. I stood looking out across the fjord. The sun was setting. The clouds were colored red. Like blood. I felt as though a scream went through nature.

Said Edvard Munch.

Can only have been painted by a madman.

Said Munch of the same canvas.

Pico della Mirandola, not yet thirty-one, died of an unidentified fever.

William Butler Yeats died of heart failure.

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Leigh Hunt once saw Charles Lamb kiss Chapman’s Homer.

Henry Crabb Robinson once saw Coleridge kiss a Spinoza.

Lamb was in fact known to pretend surprise that people did not say grace before reading.

Horse Cave Creek, Ohio, Ambrose Bierce was born in.

Giorgione probably died of plague.

Ninon de Lenclos.

The solitary, melancholy life of Matthias Grünewald. Was he wholly sane?

Is Writer, thinking he can bring off what he has in mind?

And anticipating that he will have any readers?

There is only one person who has the right to criticize me, do you understand? And that is Picasso.

Said Matisse late in life.

Arthur Koestler was an enemy alien in solitary confinement in a London prison at the beginning of World War II when Darkness at Noon was published.

Pope Joan, a.k.a. John VII, 855–858.

Who died when taken by childbirth during a papal procession between St. Peter’s and St. John Lateran.

There is no mention of writing in the Iliad. Any and all messages are passed along verbally.

Indicating incidentally that not one of the Greek warriors, during ten years at Troy, has ever sent a letter home.

Is John 8:6–8 the only place in the New Testament where Jesus is seen writing anything, if only marking on the ground with a finger?

The Salon des Refusés.

Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.

Joseph Conrad died of a heart seizure.

Does Writer even exist?

In a book without characters?

— And who are you? said he. — Don’t puzzle me; said I.

Says Tristram Shandy VII 33.

Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue, said Flaubert.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

As a sort of mantra, Kant would sometimes recite a list of people who had lived long lives, hoping to match them. He reached eighty.

Gluck’s face was pitted from smallpox.

Haydn’s face was pitted from smallpox.

Mozart’s face was pitted from smallpox.

Ludwig Wittgenstein died of prostate cancer.

My mind and fingers have worked like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, I devour them with fury.

Wrote Liszt at twenty.

Obviously Writer exists.

Not being a character but the author, here.

Writer is writing, for heaven’s sake.

Landscape of the Urinating Multitudes, Lorca called one of his New York poems.

Unmarried women should not bathe, said St. Jerome. Ever. And should embrace the most deliberate squalor.

The less to breed temptation in the world.

Sappho was small and dark.

Though is made blond and fleshy by Raphael in his Parnassus at the Vatican.

Horace was short and fat.

Admitting this himself in the Satires.

On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.

Paul Celan’s body was not found for eleven days after he stepped off the Pont Mirabeau.

Nelly Sachs died on the day of his funeral.

Only when Euripides was being performed would Socrates go to the theater.

Rossini, on the Symphony Fantastique:

What a good thing it isn’t music.

The Sabine farm.

Which is to say that Writer can even have headaches, then?

Writer can have headaches.

Walter Scott frequently manufactured chapter epigraphs out of whole cloth, saying what he wished said, and then wrote in either Old Play or Anon. as the alleged source.

Paul Robeson died of pneumonia and kidney failure.

The King James Bible, the First Folio — both during James I.

Who on the other hand did not pay Chapman the royal stipend due on his translations.

According to Plutarch, Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times at his death.

Dvořák, to Sibelius: I have composed too much.

Brahms, to Dvořák: You do write a bit hastily.

Norman Mailer’s sixth wife was the same age as his oldest daughter.

O, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

Writer does have headaches.

In fact so did Virgil.

And Wordsworth.

Robert Lowell was in and out of mental institutions repeatedly.

Theodore Roethke was in and out of mental institutions repeatedly.

Roethke at least once taken in in handcuffs.

Madame Butterfly is set in Nagasaki.

And they so eagerly pressed towards the body, and so many daggers were hacking together, that they cut one another; Brutus, particularly, received a wound in his hand, and all of them were besmeared with blood.

Anna Akhmatova died after a series of heart attacks.

A grace to say before reading the Oresteia?

Before Kafka?

Wee Willie Keeler was five feet four and a half inches tall.

Balzac was five feet two.

Schubert was five one and a half.

Keats was less than five one.

A hyena that writes poetry on tombs, Nietzsche called Dante.

Martin Luther’s own words, re the origin at Wittenberg Monastery of the key principles of the Protestant Reformation:

This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower.

Anne Bradstreet died of what was then called consumption.

Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou art sitting

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave.

Domenico Scarlatti was known to cross himself in veneration when talking about Handel’s skill at the organ.

This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.

Said Robert Rauschenberg in a telegram to a Paris art gallery.

Piero di Cosimo was found dead at the foot of a flight of stairs.

Hagia Sophia.

A woman named Mrs. Simon:

Who watched an elderly man on a train put his head out a window during an unrelenting November thunderstorm and hold it there for fully ten minutes.

And a year later at the Royal Academy came upon Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed on exhibition.

Chi son? Chi son? Son un poeta.

Che cosa faccio? Scrivo.

Lavoisier was guillotined in the Reign of Terror.

The holy curiosity of enquiry, Einstein spoke of.

Paul Gauguin apparently died of a heart attack.

I pray you, give me leave to go from hence;

I am not well: send the deed after me,

And I will sign it.

When I saw a performance of this play at Drury Lane, a beautiful pale-faced Englishwoman stood behind me in the box and wept profusely at the end of the fourth act, and called out repeatedly: The poor man is wronged.

Wrote Heinrich Heine.

The assumption that Shylock is the merchant meant by the title.

James Joyce and Isaac Babel were once guests at the same dinner party.

E come vivo? Vivo.

This is a novel if Writer or Robert Rauschenberg says so.

Golder’s Green, Sigmund Freud’s ashes were buried at.

In the Jewish cemetery where Conchita Supervia is also buried.

Before the Normans brought despair, the Anglo-Saxon word was wanhope.

Edmund Wilson once punched Mary McCarthy in the face.

The frequent stags and deer in Lucas Cranach. Dogs barked when they saw them, someone said.

As birds flying into the cathedral at Seville were said to peck at the fruit in Murillo’s St. Anthony of Padua.

Or other birds in an identical story about grapes in a panel by Zeuxis two millennia earlier.

Greater than any of us, Yeats called Rabindranath Tagore.

Descartes had an illegitimate daughter, named Francine, whom he loved dearly. And who died at five.

Wanhope.

Joan Sutherland’s mezzo, Marilyn Horne was sometimes mindlessly pigeonholed as, early on.

Wagner insisted that Christ was not a Jew.

Though that Brahms was.

Murillo died after a fall from a scaffold.

Rudyard Kipling and Angela Thirkell were cousins.

I am going to drink myself dead, Modigliani made it known.

But died of tubercular meningitis.

Numerus clausus.

Ludwig Geyer.

And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it.

Gladstone read the Iliad thirty times.

Defoe, of the same opus:

A Ballad-Singer’s Fable to get a Penny. All for the Rescue of a Whore.

Benny Goodman died of a heart attack while practicing Mozart.

Eleonora Duse died of pneumonia. In Pittsburgh.

There is no bay across from China, for the dawn to come up like thunder out of, anywhere near any road to Mandalay.

Cousin Ruddy.

I was twenty-five and he was sleeping with all the women, and at twenty-five you don’t stand for that, even from a poet.

Said Marie Laurencin, of a breakup with Apollinaire.

This is even an epic poem, if Writer says so.

Requiring no one’s corroboration.

Thomas Hardy was abusive to servants.

Tolstoy more so.

Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail. Being Samuel Johnson’s précis of the poet’s life.

Despondency and madness. Being Wordsworth’s summation of the end of same.

Henry James once hid behind a tree to avoid having to spend time with Ford Madox Ford.

The actress in Dickens’ life was Ellen Ternan, who was twenty-seven years younger than he. Dickens would leave her a thousand pounds in his will.

Virtually every home in Puritan America possessed a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Let the father of the baby gather cherries for thee!

Bernini walked to the Gesù to pray every evening for forty years.

Cranmer watched Latimer and Ridley being burned at the stake no more than five months before he would be put to death in the same manner himself.

Head Tide, Maine, Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in.

Cuchulain is illegitimate.

Arthur is illegitimate.

Gawain is illegitimate.

Roland is illegitimate.

What is this castle call’d that stands hard by?

They call it Agincourt.

The legend that Tycho Brahe died when his bladder burst after an interminable evening of drinking beer.

Djuna Barnes wrote in bed. Wearing makeup and with her hair done.

Edith Wharton wrote in bed. Scattering pages on the floor for a secretary to retrieve before typing.

Play the man, Master Ridley.

Hank Cinq.

Cavafy died of cancer of the larynx.

Pechorin.

Rarely, if ever, having had it come to mind:

That Marcel Proust constantly wheezed.

Did St. Augustine, who was asthmatic equally?

Ophir, from where gold and sandalwood and ivory and apes and precious jewels and peacocks came. Which is mentioned a dozen times in seven different books of the Old Testament.

And which no one has ever discovered the location of.

Also even a sequence of cantos awaiting numbering, if Writer says so.

Ingres spent fifteen years doing pencil portraits of tourists in Rome.

The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen-twenty.

Cellini’s narration of the casting of his Perseus.

The inexplicable logic by which Thackeray convinced himself that Desdemona actually did have an affair with Cassio.

Christopher Smart died mad. And in debtors’ prison.

The Gesù, where St. Ignatius Loyola is buried. Bernini’s unimpeachable piety—

Yet the indisputable insinuation of orgasm in his Ecstasy of St. Teresa.

Romain Rolland died of tuberculosis.

Sigrid Undset died of a stroke.

The friendship of Heine and Karl Marx.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir were once teachers in the same lycée.

The greatest lyric poet Germany ever knew, Gottfried Benn called Else Lasker-Schüler.

Who at sixty-four was beaten with an iron pipe by young Nazis on a street in Berlin.

Marianne Moore once read a book on the craft of pitching by Christy Mathewson.

The apparent evidence that Lawrence Durrell committed incest with one of his daughters. Who eventually killed herself.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu died of breast cancer.

La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes.

I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

Says Darwin’s Autobiography.

It is Arnaut Daniel, in Purgatorio XXVI, who was the original miglior fabbro.

Byron knew no music.

Pope knew no music.

Johnson knew no music and very little of art, either.

Ernest Hemingway once challenged Hugh Casey to a boxing match. Casey knocked Hemingway down repeatedly.

Hemingway kicked Casey in the groin.

On an ancient sundial in Ibiza: Ultima multis.

The last day for many.

Fayaway.

Much of what we have of Aristotle was not strictly speaking written by Aristotle at all. But would appear to be classroom notes taken down by others.

Both of Verdi’s parents were illiterate.

Like Abraham Lincoln’s.

Elegies to the Spanish Republic.

From Herodotus, on Thermopylae:

It chanced that at this time the Lacedaemonians held the outer guard and were seen by the spy. Some of them engaged in gymnastic exercises, others were combing their long hair. At this the spy greatly marveled.

The Spartans on the sea-wet rock

Sat down and combed their hair.

Roman Jakobson, when Mayakovsky once read him his newest poems:

Very good. But not as good as Mayakovsky.

For that matter Writer also has backaches.

As did Shelley.

A poet is a waste-good and an unthrift, in that he is born to make the taverns rich and himself a beggar.

Said Robert Greene.

But to speak plainly, I think him an honest man.

Greene also said.

One of Robert Frost’s daughters went insane.

One of his sons killed himself.

Christopher Marlowe, a stage direction:

The Pope crosses himself, and Faustus hits him a box on the ear.

Puccini, sipping coffee, once told Lucrezia Bori that her costume was too neat for the last act of Manon Lescaut, in which Manon is destitute.

And dumped the coffee on her gown.

Verses of Propertius were found copied out on walls in Pompeii.

The seemingly authentic report that a doctor performed an autopsy on the Abbé Prévost after a stroke — to discover that only the autopsy had killed him.

He who wrote that painting is a higher art than sculpture was as ignorant as a maidservant, said Michelangelo.

Meaning Leonardo.

Chopin died of tuberculosis.

Salvador Dali once gave a lecture in London while wearing a diving helmet.

And nearly suffocated.

Thomas Gainsborough, while painting Sarah Siddons:

Damn your nose, madame! There’s no end to it.

Katherine Anne Porter died of Alzheimer’s disease.

Palestrina’s tomb, once in St. Peter’s, for obscure reasons no longer exists.

Musicae Princeps, it had said. Prince of music.

Would Emily Dickinson have been aware that Lord Jeffrey Amherst arranged for blankets infected with smallpox to be set out for ill-clothed Indians to come upon during the French and Indian War?

The case for William Davenant having been Shakespeare’s illegitimate son.

A Novel Without a Hero. Being the subtitle of Vanity Fair.

Though there, at least in part, meaning only that the book has a heroine instead.

Catullus once wrote a poem criticizing Caesar.

And was invited to dinner.

Osip Mandelstam once wrote a poem criticizing Stalin.

And died in the gulag.

Martin Heidegger, in 1933:

The Führer, and he alone, is the sole German reality and law, today and in the future.

Henry Miller died of cardiovascular failure.

B. Traven died of prostate cancer and sclerosis of the kidneys.

If Stephen Crane had in fact lived on an additional forty-plus years, how different might the hierarchy of American letters have been in that period?

No water-drinker ever wrote a poem that lasted.

Says Horace in the Epistles.

Un livre, c’est la mort d’un arbre.

Said St.-John Perse.

If you find this work difficult, and wearisome to follow, take pity on me, for I have repeated these calculations seventy times.

Wrote Johannes Kepler.

Italo Calvino died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

There is no description of Helen’s beauty anywhere in the Iliad.

Strangely like is she to some deathless goddess to look upon, being all that is said.

Though the Trojan elders do acknowledge that no one could be blamed for having endured a war because of her.

Calderón de la Barca was once arrested for molesting nuns.

The John Dryden translation of Plutarch’s Lives, eternally in print.

Which Dryden evidently did not do, but farmed out.

A face to lose youth for, to occupy age

With the dream of.

The speculation in later antiquity that Euripides had had two wives at the same time.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day, Emerson said.

Jean-Paul Sartre played the piano.

George Eliot played the piano.

André Gide played the piano.

The painting has a life of its own, said Jackson Pollock.

Henri Bergson died of pulmonary congestion.

Paul Klee played the violin.

Matisse played the violin.

Jeremy Bentham played the violin, the harpsichord, and the organ.

Schopenhauer was found dead sitting at his breakfast.

All your better deeds / Shall be in water writ, wrote Beaumont and Fletcher, two hundred years before Keats.

Teach me to heare Mermaides singing, wrote Donne, three hundred years before Eliot.

Marie Antoinette sat for twenty portraits by Vigée-Lebrun.

Anne Boleyn played the lute, the harp, the flute, and the rebec. And sang.

Voltaire, in an amiable mood about Jews:

A brigand people, atrocious, loathsome, whose law is the law of savages, and whose history is a tissue of crimes against humanity.

If you will it, it is no dream.

Said Theodor Herzl.

The word Bible never appears in Shakespeare. Jesus Christ is mentioned eleven times.

Cy Young died of a heart attack.

Lou Stevenson, Robert Louis was commonly called.

Dante quotes The Consolation of Philosophy.

Chaucer quotes The Consolation of Philosophy.

Milton quotes The Consolation of Philosophy.

What is Hamlet reading, in Act II Scene ii, when Polonius inquires and Hamlet says Words, words, words?

Polybius died after a fall from a horse.

At eighty-two.

Anacreon choked to death on a grape seed.

At eighty-five.

Walter Scott walked with a limp from childhood polio.

The apparently never to be resolved question of whether it was Byron’s left foot that was crippled, or his right.

Edmund Wilson and a young Lionel Trilling once made use of adjacent urinals in a men’s room at the New School for Social Research. Trilling was thrilled when Wilson indicated familiarity with some of his work.

What tall building could who have shouted this from, that Writer knows it all these decades later?

St. Teresa of Ávila played the tambourine.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s spelling:

Ullyses.

John Galsworthy died of a brain tumor.

Could Richard the Lion-Hearted speak English?

The traveler with nothing in his pockets whistles indifferently as he strolls past the thief.

Says Juvenal X.

Kant kept a portrait of Rousseau on the wall of his study.

Tolstoy, as a student, wore a medallion portrait of him instead of his Orthodox cross.

His usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles.

Heinrich Schliemann died after collapsing with an unidentified fever on a street in Naples.

George Gissing died of pneumonia.

Watching Edmund Kean. Like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning, Coleridge said.

Donatello, at work on his Zuccone, heard muttering at the stone:

Speak, damn you, talk to me.

Pope Clement XIV, on Houdon’s St. Bruno:

That saint would talk, were it not that the rules of his order impose silence.

I gotta use words when I talk to you.

And Sir Launcelot awoke, and went and took his horse, and rode all that day and all night in a forest, weeping.

Sherwood Anderson died of peritonitis after swallowing a toothpick.

Remembering only belatedly re Houdon:

That the Jefferson on the American nickel and the Washington on the quarter are from likenesses of his, also.

For as long as a millennium, until well into the Middle Ages, Menander was the most widely quoted author in Western literature outside of Homer.

The greatest lesbian poet since Sappho, Auden called Rilke.

Teaching, Lilli Lehmann actually tied Geraldine Farrar’s hands behind her back to keep her from gesticulating.

And once threw a book at Olive Fremstad.

Was Moses an Egyptian?

As Manetho insisted twenty-two hundred years before Freud?

Fremstad. Who herself would later even visit a morgue to test the weight of an actual severed head before singing Salome.

A granddaughter of Wagner’s worked as a waitress at Schrafft’s in New York City during World War II.

Dinner at Benjamin Robert Haydon’s studio, St. John’s Wood, December 28, 1817:

Haydon. John Keats. Charles Lamb (drunk). William Wordsworth.

Gaily bedight,

A gallant knight

In sunshine and in shadow. .

Patched together from pieces filched here and there, Beethoven jestingly scribbled on the manuscript of the C-sharp Minor Quartet.

Affording his publisher a fit.

Leonardo is a bore, according to Renoir.

My cook knows more about counterpoint, said Handel the first time he heard Gluck.

Let us go closer to the fire and see what we are saying.

Thomas Girtin, who was dead of tuberculosis at twenty-seven:

Had he lived I should have starved, said Turner.

Flaubert died of what was then called apoplexy, i.e., presumably a stroke.

If its length is not considered a merit it has no other, said Edmund Waller of Paradise Lost.

Thomas Hardy wrote a carefully sanitized third-person biography of himself and left it behind for his widow to pretend she was the author of.

Not a soul to talk to about Bloom. Lent the chapter to one or two people but they know as much about it as the parliamentary side of my arse.

Wrote Joyce to Frank Budgen.

Sarah Bernhardt was known to sleep in an open coffin.

Pope offended so many people with the Dunciad that he subsequently never left home without pistols.

Or his Great Dane.

Philip Larkin died of cancer of the esophagus.

Only hours afterward, a twenty-five-volume diary that he had kept for almost fifty years was destroyed by one of his executors.

Less of a loss, Writer assumes, than the then-current last volume of Sylvia Plath’s that was destroyed by Ted Hughes.

Or the burning of Byron’s Memoirs.

Had journeyed long,

Singing a song,

In search of El Dorado.

This is even a mural of sorts, if Writer says so.

Marco Polo dictated the narrative of his travels to a fellow prisoner while in a jail in Genoa.

Jorge Luis Borges married a second wife at eighty-six.

John Dewey married a second wife at eighty-eight.

If it is just food you want, you will find that, she said in a voice calm, a little deep, quite cold.

Eugene O’Neill died of bronchial pneumonia in a Boston hotel room.

Albrecht Dürer died of malaria.

Sure I posed. I was hungry.

Caesar’s corpse lay at the Senate for some hours before slaves finally bore it away on a litter.

With one arm hanging down, Suetonius makes note of.

Enrico Caruso died of a minor pleural infection that became fatal only after an Italian physician evidently used an unsterilized instrument in examining him.

Xanadu. Kubla Khan. Writer’s tendency to misremember that they actually did exist.

Rustichello.

Opera bored me.

Said Helen Traubel.

Nobody knows the Traubel I’ve seen.

Said Rudolf Bing.

Jean Harlow died of cerebral edema brought on by uremic poisoning.

The friendship of Claude Monet and Georges Clemenceau.

Schubert could never afford a piano.

February 18, 1564. Michelangelo dies in Rome.

February 18, 1564. Galileo is born in Pisa.

Shakespeare is born that same year.

Isaac Newton is born the year Galileo dies.

The Amelia Curran portrait of Shelley, which has been Shelley since it was first reproduced via engraving in 1833.

But which was considered so unlifelike that Mary Shelley always intended to throw it out.

Galileo played the lute.

An Irish smut-dealer, Anthony Comstock called George Bernard Shaw.

This was Mr Bleaney’s room.

Einstein died of an abdominal aneurysm. Which one of his doctors said was the result of tertiary syphilis.

Caspar David Friedrich.

Diego Rivera very rarely bathed.

Said Lupe Marin, the second of his four wives.

Roger Bacon probably did not invent gunpowder.

Alexander the Great was once pontificating about art in Apelles’ studio. Apelles suggested that he change the subject — it being less than appropriate for the young apprentices to be tittering behind his back.

Ayot St. Lawrence.

The Delaware River, Einstein’s ashes were scattered in.

My son, think of the future! With genius, one may die. With money, one can eat.

Said Cézanne’s father.

No pasarán!

John Millington Synge died of lymph cancer.

Alexander also once commissioned Apelles to paint one of his mistresses, named Campaspe. Apelles fell in love with her. Alexander gave her to the artist.

Festina lente: Celerity should be contempered with cunctation.

Said Sir Thomas Browne.

Gustav Mahler’s father was a tavernkeeper.

Ivan Goncharov was essentially deranged in the last thirty years of his life.

And insisted that every word Turgenev published had been stolen from him.

Following the Restoration, Cromwell’s body was disinterred and hanged from a gibbet.

After his death in battle, Zwingli’s body was mutilated and burned on a heap of dung.

And the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.

Rossini said he wept, the first time he heard Paganini.

Josephus says that practically every subsequent ancient historian thought of Herodotus as a liar.

Geoffrey of Monmouth was called a shameless liar in his own lifetime.

Thomas Otway died destitute.

Dimitri Mitropoulos died of a heart attack while conducting at La Scala.

The death of Patroclus, Iliad XVI:

Even as he spoke, the shadow of death came over him. His soul fled from his limbs and went down to the house of Hades, bemoaning its fate, leaving manhood and youth.

The death of Hector, Iliad XXII:

Even as he spoke, the shadow of death came over him. His soul fled from his limbs and went down to the house of Hades, bemoaning its fate, leaving manhood and youth.

The word synagogue is actually Greek.

And originally meant a Christian assembly.

Minyan.

There was a large rock near. She hurled her head at the stone, so that she broke her skull and was dead.

Says the earliest version of Deirdre of the Sorrows.

John Lyly’s sonnet on Apelles and Campaspe.

The Tiepolo fresco showing Apelles painting her.

The semiliterary, semicolloquial, often tin-eared and generally annoying prose of H. L. Mencken.

Benjamin Britten died of a heart condition.

Aaron Copland died of respiratory failure brought on by pneumonia.

Virtually beyond Writer’s imagining:

The lost eighty or so plays, each, of Aeschylus and Euripides.

The lost one hundred and ten of Sophocles.

Tobias Smollett died of tuberculosis.

Botticelli seems to have signed only one painting in his life.

Simple Wordsworth and his childish verse, Byron called him and it.

Sartre’s father was a naval officer.

Lytton Strachey’s father was a general.

Flann O’Brien, on Brendan Behan:

A lout.

Congreve wrote The Way of the World at thirty. And lived twenty-nine more years without writing one further word for the stage.

Nikos Kazantzakis once spent two years as a contemplative on Mount Athos.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence.

Nietzsche, on George Sand:

A writing cow.

Thomas Hobbes was once Francis Bacon’s secretary.

Andrew Marvell was once John Milton’s.

In whatever version of the legend, Galahad is unvaryingly established as a direct descendant of Joseph of Arimathea.

Ergo as Jewish.

Perceval likewise.

Was Lorenzo Ghiberti the first artist of consequence to write an autobiography?

A friend, when Oliver Goldsmith briefly practiced medicine in London:

Kindly prescribe only for your enemies.

Louise Homer died of coronary thrombosis.

Matisse: In modern art, it is indubitably to Cézanne that I owe the most.

Picasso: He was my one and only master. Cézanne! It was the same with all of us — he was like our father.

Aeschylus never saw the Parthenon.

Zora Neale Hurston died in a welfare home.

And was buried in an unmarked grave.

André Malraux died from a blood clot on his lung.

On principle, Bertrand Russell gave away all of his considerable inherited wealth in his late twenties. And earned his own way thereafter.

Wagner was five months older than Verdi.

Wittgenstein was five months older Heidegger.

Elizabeth Barrett was six years older than Browning.

Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Enrique Grenados drowned while attempting to save his wife when their ship was torpedoed by a German submarine in the English Channel in World War I.

Pyrrhus died after being struck by a tile flung from a roof.

Hit Sign Win Suit.

Whitman said he had read The Heart of Midlothian a dozen or more times.

Among Wittgenstein’s spellings, when using English:

Anoied. Realy. Excelentely. Expences. Affraid. Cann’t.

Plotinus did not begin to write until he was fifty.

Goethe was seventy-eight before he started Part II of Faust.

Two millennia before Princess Diana, Virgil, visiting Rome, would be forced to flee even into the private homes of strangers because of admirers crowding after him on the streets.

And this when he had written only the Eclogues and the Georgics, the Aeneid to be posthumous.

I had but a glimpse of Virgil, Ovid himself, younger, had to say.

Fulke Greville was murdered by a disaffected servant.

Asculum.

Fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos.

Account for Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia.

Walter Johnson died of a brain tumor.

For we must consider that we shall be as a city on a hill.

Lice, Dickens labeled critics.

Swine, D. H. Lawrence preferred.

Samuel Barber was Louise Homer’s nephew.

Southwell was hanged and then drawn and quartered at Tyburn.

Palestrina’s Stabat Mater.

Pergolesi’s.

Without fail, given pause at recalling that Captain Ahab is a Quaker.

As similarly always needing a moment for the precise meaning of drawn and quartered to register.

Paracelsus may have died after a brawl in a tavern.

And his sandal shoon.

Gerhart Hauptmann was a supporter of the Nazis.

Igor Stravinsky admired Mussolini.

Stabat Mater dolorosa

Iuxta crucem lacrimosa

Vivaldi’s. Haydn’s. Rossini’s. Schubert’s.

Poulenc’s.

The legend that Gregory the Great had to be dragged to St. Peter’s by main force, when he was elected Pope.

No man will ever write a better tragedy than Lear, Shaw said.

The Burning Babe.

Orson Welles died of a heart attack.

Stephen Foster never learned which side won the Civil War.

Michelangelo. Piero di Cosimo. Guido Reni. Pontormo. Tintoretto.

All of whom wanted no one anywhere near them when working.

Piero and Pontormo becoming pathological about it.

Jacopone da Todi.

Anna Pavlova died of pneumonia.

Ronald Firbank died of pneumonia.

The little Marcel, Proust was called. All his life.

A. E. Housman, on the surest source of poetic inspiration:

A pint, at luncheon.

Kirsten Flagstad, on the most critical aspect of singing Wagner:

Comfortable shoes.

Les Saltimbanques, which inspired the fifth of the Duino Elegies:

Rilke in fact having been a guest in a home in Munich where the canvas hung above his desk for months.

Anthony Trollope wrote seven pages a day, seven days a week.

And would actually begin a new book if he came to the end of one before his day’s quota had been met.

Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint stool.

Eliot’s first wife, Vivien, insisted upon washing her own bedsheets.

Even when staying at a hotel.

My breviary, Montaigne referred to Plutarch as.

While frequently quoting him with no acknowledgment whatsoever.

Which Seneca had also long since made a practice of.

Sinclair Lewis died of a heart attack.

Thomas Eakins was once fired for removing a loincloth from a male model in a women’s life-drawing class in Philadelphia.

Defoe’s father was a butcher.

Sadi. Rumi. Hafiz.

Saul of Tarsus very likely participated in the stoning of St. Stephen.

Was he also an epileptic?

Was John the Baptist an Essene?

I was, with God’s help, born poor.

Ralph Ellison died of pancreatic cancer.

Tarsus. Being also where Cleopatra arrives, on her barge, to meet Mark Antony.

On the river Cydnus.

In Turkey.

Tommaso Campanella spent twenty-seven years in a papal dungeon for heresy.

An information bureau of the human condition, Theodor Adorno called Kafka.

Shelley, at nineteen, was sent down from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet on atheism.

Landor, at the same age, was expelled for shooting a fellow student in a political argument.

Two hundred and forty-three people die in the Iliad who are named by name.

One hundred and forty-seven separate wounds are mentioned.

The Graham Sutherland portrait of Winston Churchill.

Which Clementine Churchill cut into pieces and then burned.

Exsultate, Jubilate. K 165.

Maria Stader.

Writer’s tendency to forget that there were two other Brontë sisters, scarcely older, who died when Charlotte and Emily and Anne were eight and six and four.

Consumptive, the brood.

Boris Pasternak evidently died of lung cancer that had spread to the area of his heart.

Peredelkino.

I have never heard of any old man forgetting where he had hidden his money, Cicero said.

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror:

1524, Parmigianino’s version dating from.

Philip of Macedon: If I reach Lacedaemon, not one stone will I leave upon another.

The Spartans: If.

Enrico Fermi died of stomach cancer.

John von Neumann died of cancer of the brain.

Haworth Parsonage.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets / Never Before Imprinted. A small quarto, 1609:

Sixpence.

But on a May morwening upon Malverne hilles

Me befel a ferly, a fairye me thoughte.

Jenny Lind died in the Malvern Hills.

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

Said Thucydides.

Pierre Bonnard and Wassily Kandinsky were nearsighted.

As were Samuel Johnson and Tennyson.

And Nietzsche.

And Maria Callas.

Marshall McLuhan died of a stroke.

Robert Lowell once punched Jean Stafford in the face and broke her nose.

Which he had broken two years earlier by drunkenly smashing a car into a stone wall.

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

Bach and Handel, born twenty-six days apart.

And never once meeting.

Beethoven was left-handed.

Rembrandt worked so slowly, especially in his later years, that it became ever more difficult for him to find sitters.

In good part explaining the hundred-odd self-portraits.

Luisa Tetrazzini died penniless.

Tolstoy, asked if he had read a recent play by Maurice Maeterlinck:

Why should I? Have I committed a crime?

They who write ill, and they who ne’er durst wrote,

Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

— Said Dryden.

Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss.

— Added Pope.

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

Jacopo. Gentile. Giovanni.

Not to add sister Nicolosia, who married Andrea Mantegna.

Was Liszt the greatest pianist who ever lived?

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

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

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

Said Ingeborg Bachmann.

Rodin died of pulmonary congestion.

Anabasis.

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

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

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

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

At age sixty-eight, without spectacles.

Handel died blind.

Gaddo. Taddeo. Agnolo.

Lodovico. Agostino. Annibale.

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

Or John Bellini, as Ruskin insisted on calling him.

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

Has time pardoned Paul Claudel?

Ruskin died of influenza.

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

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

Kate Chopin died of what was apparently a brain hemorrhage.

Remind me to get some money from this bugger.

Piero della Francesca’s father was a shoemaker.

Joseph Cornell lived with his mother all his life.

Admire the martyrs of Bloody Mary’s reign.

D. H. Lawrence died of tuberculosis.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

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

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

Reading the Confessions at the peak of Mont Ventoux.

Romney painted Emma Hamilton nearly fifty times.

Clit lit.

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

Terence would appear to have died in a shipwreck.

The room was full of Sitwells. And Sacheverell others.

Jeanne Eagels died of an overdose of heroin.

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

A king sate on the rocky brow

Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis.

Did Kierkegaard’s father have venereal disease?

A good-natured man of principle.

Pablo Neruda called Stalin.

A saint and a martyr.

Ezra Pound called Hitler.

Mark Twain died of a heart condition.

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

Château-Thierry, La Fontaine was born in.

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

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

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

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

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three.

A monk asked Ts’ui-wei: For what purpose did the First Patriarch come from the West?

Ts’ui-wei answered: Pass me that chin rest.

As soon as the monk passed it, Ts’ui-wei thwacked him with it.

Any and all public gatherings were prohibited in Venice during a plague in 1576.

An edict that was unhesitatingly ignored at the death of Titian — so deserving was he felt to be of a state funeral.

To Helen. Poe was sixteen.

Le Bateau ivre. Rimbaud was sixteen.

Thanatopsis. Bryant was sixteen or seventeen.

Thomas Gray died of gout.

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

Colette the novelist died of cardiac arrest.

Salacious, bad-smelling, sick.

Said Van Wyck Brooks of Joyce.

While deriding Rimbaud as a neurasthenic little wretch.

Berlioz, on critics:

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

Adam Mickiewicz died of cholera.

William Collins died mad.

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

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

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

Chaim Soutine died of stomach ulcers.

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

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

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

Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!

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

Said Thomas Nashe in 1592.

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

Wagner died in 1883.

Cosima not until 1930.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti died of Bright’s disease.

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

Let’s choose executors, and talk of wills.

He is either mad, or he is reading Don Quixote.

Said Philip III, at the sight of a student banging himself on the head and doubling over in hysterics over a book.

Perugino probably died of plague.

There is no one so foolish as to praise Don Quixote.

Said Lope de Vega.

The Metropolitan Museum’s only Caravaggio, the early Allegory of Music, was not known of for more than three centuries.

And was walked off with for less than one hundred pounds when come upon in an English antique shop.

This can only be the devil or Bach himself!

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

Said Constitution Hall.

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

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

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

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

Blaise Cendrars died after a series of strokes.

The worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918–1919 killed forty million people.

Including Apollinaire. And Egon Schiele.

And both of Mary McCarthy’s parents.

Descartes and Pascal met twice.

Neither being impressed.

David Hume was grossly fat, reported even to crack chairs.

Edward Gibbon became equally so.

Amy Lowell as well.

What sort of chamber pot had Bishop Berkeley?

Enoch Arden.

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

Orwell on Sean O’Casey:

Very stupid.

On Steinbeck:

Spurious.

La Trahison des clercs.

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

Grazia Deledda died of breast cancer.

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

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

As late as in 1874, Jacob Burckhardt felt licensed to dismiss Jan Vermeer as inconsequential:

Women reading and writing letters and such things.

Archilochos is said to have died in battle.

The most acute thinker ever born, Kant called Kepler.

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

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

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

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

Said Constanze.

Far too many notes, my dear Mozart.

Quentin de La Tour died mad.

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

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir.

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

Hunchback’d Papist, Pope was called in print.

Maeterlinck died of a heart condition.

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

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

Says Helen to Hector of their destiny.

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

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

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

James Clerk Maxwell died of abdominal cancer.

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

I wish to die knowing one thing more.

You have only to walk about until your legs are heavy, and then to lie down, and the poison will act.

Explains the jailer in Phaedo.

What Pieter Bruegel knew about summer.

Kipling, in Sussex, may have been the first author to actually dispense with horses, owning a motorcar as early as in 1902.

Henry Adams owned a Mercedes in France in 1904.

John Fletcher died of plague. Beaumont’s death was apparently registered with no cause listed.

Trifles, Catullus waved away his verses as.

Two full thousand years ago.

The height of absurdity in serving up pure nonsense, or in stringing together senseless and extravagant masses of words, previously seen only in madhouses, was reached in Hegel.

Said Schopenhauer.

In or about December 1910 human character changed.

Yes, Virginia.

Ben Shahn was once an assistant to Diego Rivera.

Jackson Pollock was once an assistant to David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Richard Feynman’s roommate, when they were both working at Los Alamos, was Klaus Fuchs.

Raymond Carver died of lung cancer.

Last Week I saw a Woman flay’d, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her Person for the worse.

Why does there appear not to have been one word written about Jesus until he is mentioned by Josephus more than fifty years after his death?

Rembrandt’s father was a corn miller.

Corot more than once added a few brushstrokes and then signed his own name to the work of other painters — who would otherwise not have been able to sell.

The St. Vincent de Paul of painting, he came to be called.

Ned Ludd was feeble-minded.

By far, the two greatest stylists who ever wrote in German were Heine and Nietzsche.

Said Nietzsche.

I painted this from myself. I was six-and-twenty years old. Albrecht Dürer. 1498.

Nancy Barron, a madwoman at the poorhouse farm in Concord.

Immortalized because Emerson could hear her endless screaming from his study.

Racine died of an abscess of the liver.

A bigot and a sot, Thomas Babington Macaulay called James Boswell.

Simone de Beauvoir died of pneumonia.

Giambattista Vico died of what sounds to have been Alzheimer’s disease.

No great talent has ever existed without a tinge of madness, Seneca says Aristotle said.

All poets are mad, Robert Burton corroborated.

A fine madness, being how Michael Drayton read it in the case of Marlowe.

Gainsborough played the bass viol.

Laird of Auchinleck.

Written with the imagination of a drunken savage.

Said Voltaire of Hamlet.

There is no foulness conceivable to the mind of man that has not been poured forth into its imbecile pages.

Said Alfred Noyes of Ulysses.

Tom Macaulay, he was commonly called.

Jacques Offenbach died of a heart condition.

Jussi Bjoerling died of a heart condition.

Donatello kept extraordinary amounts of cash in a basket hung from the ceiling in his studio. Quite literally for his workmen or friends to take as they saw fit.

Seneca was a usurer.

Ammannato, Ammannato, che bel marmo hai rovinato!

What beautiful marble you have ruined. Said contemporary Florentines of his Neptune Fountain in the Piazza della Signoria.

Nothing but a continued Heap of Riddles, Theobald found in Donne.

And death i think is no parenthesis.

At least two people were drowned in the Seine because of the crush along the route of Victor Hugo’s funeral.

Antonello da Messina died of pleurisy.

The maniac who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pietà in 1972.

His counterpart who spray-painted Kill Lies All on the Guernica in 1974.

The second of whom actually later owned an art gallery in SoHo.

Knut Hamsun, at twenty-five, was told he had three months to live because of rampant tuberculosis.

And died at ninety-three.

Oscar Wilde wrote Salomé in French.

En attendant Godot.

Lawrence Tibbett died after an automobile crash.

If it is art it is not for all, and if it is for all it is not art.

Said Schoenberg.

Three or four years after the Civil War, Thomas Carlyle told the American Charles Eliot Norton that slavery should be reinstituted.

Or that blacks should be eliminated altogether.

Starvation and/or massacre being obligingly suggested.

Durendal. Olifant.

A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up and be shot at.

Said Hardy when he ceased writing novels after the exorbitant denunciations of Jude the Obscure.

Andrea del Sarto’s wife, Lucrezia.

Could she have conceivably for all the years been misabused?

Elizabeth Bishop died of a cerebral aneurysm.

Elizabeth Bishop’s mother died mad.

Lessing died of a stroke, though already wasted by severe asthma and damaged lungs.

Plotinus died of what was probably throat cancer.

Rafael Sabatini’s father was John McCormack’s singing teacher.

An unforgotten lifetime debt of Writer’s, since adolescence:

To Constance Garnett.

Half-cracked. Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s earliest evaluation of Emily Dickinson.

Cyrano de Bergerac died in an accident involving a falling beam.

Mitsubishi manufactured the torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor.

Porsche manufactured tanks.

O the Chimneys.

Robert Browning died of a heart attack.

This is also a continued heap of riddles, if Writer says so.

Simplify, simplify.

For a time, Rossetti, Swinburne, and George Meredith shared a house in Chelsea.

For a time, Domenichino, Guido Reni, and Francesco Albani roomed together in Rome.

The latter three later despising each other.

Whenever possible, Erasmus sought out Jewish physicians.

Whenever possible, Montaigne sought out Jewish physicians.

Rubens died of arteriosclerosis.

Orwell died of tuberculosis.

Kathleen Mavourneen.

Artemisia Gentileschi. Agostino Tassi.

Sir Thomas Wyatt died of an undiagnosed fever.

Heine died of the spinal paralysis, presumably syphilitic, that had confined him to what he referred to as his mattress-tomb for his last eight years.

Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Theseus.

Didier. Férol. Langlois.

The next shot went into a brain which was already dead.

Vicente Huidobro died of a stroke.

Did Ben Jonson have any notion that Drummond of Hawthornden was writing all that down?

Darling, you’ll never guess what happened in the men’s room at the New School for Social Research tonight!

Oh, dear. Not all the way down the inside of your pants leg again?

It is not necessary to have dandruff to be a genius, Puccini said.

I started walking home across the bridge.

Beethoven, Gluck, Schubert, and Brahms are buried in the same Vienna cemetery.

Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau are buried in the same one in Concord.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s father was a rabbi.

Marc Chagall was the grandson of a shohet.

Braque, an image of Picasso at the moment of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon:

Drinking turpentine and spitting fire.

Writer reminding himself that the Avignon here was a brothel in Barcelona, not the city.

What artists do cannot be called work.

Says Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.

La Grosse Margot.

The precious, pinchbeck, ultimately often flat prose of Vladimir Nabokov.

The fundamentally uninteresting sum total of his work.

Some dozen years after Berlin Alexanderplatz, living on handouts as a wartime refugee in California, Alfred Doeblin applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. With a recommendation from Thomas Mann.

Guess.

The friendship of Lorca and Salvador Dali.

It may be for years, and it may be forever.

Or even a polyphonic opera of a kind, if Writer says that too.

André Chénier had published only two poems when he was guillotined.

Skeptic: And can you possibly have read all these walls of books?

Anatole France: Not one tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?

Gabriele Münter.

Lise Meitner.

Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin.

Aldous Huxley died on the same day as John F. Kennedy.

Nathanael West died one day after F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Hemingway died one day after Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

West and Fitzgerald had had dinner together one week earlier.

Machado de Assis was an epileptic.

Twice as many baseball batters are hit by a pitch on days when the temperature is in the nineties as when it is in the seventies.

Rousseau was categorically convinced of the existence of vampires.

Gammer Gurton’s Needle.

Goldengrove unleaving.

It took Eliot forty years to allow that the word Jew in Gerontion might be capitalized.

Then Abraham fell upon his face and laughed.

June 16, 1904.

Stephen Dedalus has not had a bath since October 1903.

Transnistria.

Edward Teller lost a foot in a streetcar accident.

Pär Lagerkvist died of a stroke.

Howells and Mark Twain once canceled a dinner they had planned for Maxim Gorky — after discovering that the woman he had sailed from Russia with was not his wife.

Fra Angelico was said not to be able to paint a Christ without weeping.

For the World, I count it not an Inne, but an Hospitall; and a place not to live, but to Dye in.

Says Browne in the Religio Medici.

Cola di Rienzi’s father was a saloonkeeper.

Django Reinhardt spent his childhood in a Gypsy caravan.

And was considerably less than literate.

César Vallejo died of an intestinal infection.

I’ve been reading Cousin Bette. I’ve been reading it all summer. I may never finish.

William Kapell died in a plane crash.

Dinu Lipatti died of lymphogranulomatosis.

Archytas, who invented the baby’s rattle.

Which Aristotle actually takes note of. In Politics VIII 6, 1340b 25–28.

Chekhov died of consumption.

Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf at least once played the violin in a string quartet in which two of the other performers were Mozart and Haydn.

Beaumarchais died of a stroke.

Alain-Fournier was killed in action in France less than two months into World War I.

Protesilaus, in Iliad II. The first Greek to leap from the ships onto Trojan soil.

And the first slain.

Pylaemenes. Who is fatally speared at the collarbone by Menelaus in Iliad V.

And is inadvertently shown alive again in Iliad XIII.

He fell, immortal in a bulletin.

East Tenth Street in Manhattan, Adelina Patti grew up on.

There is no hippopotamus in this lecture room at the present moment.

Lamarck died blind.

And was buried in a pauper’s grave.

Gehenna.

Isaac Newton died of complications from a kidney stone.

Ramanujan died of tuberculosis.

Badges? I don’t have to show you no stinkin’ badges.

One of St. Jerome’s letters to St. Augustine took nine years to be delivered.

Capitoline. Palatine. Aventine. Caelian. Esquiline. Viminal. Quirinal.

What existed before the Big Bang?

Where?

Exclude God from your response.

Camille Pissarro was poverty-stricken for much of his working career.

Alfred Sisley was perhaps worse off, and for longer.

William Goyen died of leukemia.

Fragonard’s The Swing.

Which William Carlos Williams had the impression was Watteau’s.

Plato talked too much, Diogenes said.

While dismissing Socrates as a lunatic altogether.

Erasmus was indisputably the most famous author of his day. Thomas More even admitted to being thrilled that the very fact of their friendship would help keep his own name alive with posterity.

A piece of dreck, Luther on the other hand called him.

I, O Plato, see a table and a cup. But I see no tableness or cupness.

Dickens’ astonishing manic walks. Of as many as twenty-five miles — and at a headlong pace.

Oedipus Rex did not win first prize in the dramatic competition in the year when it was first presented.

Any contemporary philosopher who ventured to compare himself with Leibniz could at best wind up wishing he had a quiet corner to go die in, said Diderot.

William Wycherley married a second wife, far younger than he, at seventy-five.

And died eleven days later.

George Herbert died of consumption.

The most odious of small creeping things, Landor called critics.

A walk? What on earth for?

Asked Auden at someone’s country home.

Dizzy Dean had less than a fourth-grade education.

But a post-doctoral sense of the joys of that game, said Marianne Moore.

Hemingway, on Ezra Pound’s indictment for treason:

If Ezra has any sense he should shoot himself. Personally I think he should have shot himself somewhere along after the twelfth canto although maybe earlier.

Disraeli said he had read Pride and Prejudice at least sixteen times.

The straight line predominates in nature.

Ingres once said.

Only curved lines are to be found in nature.

Ingres once said.

Maud Gonne was six feet tall.

Akhmatova was five feet eleven.

Jessica Mitford died of brain cancer.

Ellen Glasgow was buried in the same coffin as the exhumed remains of her two favorite dogs.

Venus Pudica. Venus Anadyomene.

Absolute reason expired at eleven o’clock last night.

Think how many royal bones

Sleep within this heap of stones.

— Wrote Beaumont re Westminster Abbey.

Roger Martin du Gard died of a heart condition.

Arthur Honegger died of a heart condition.

Henry James ill-advisedly took an author’s curtain call on the opening night of his play Guy Domville.

And was hissed.

The Hebrew in Exodus 34:29–30 translates literally to say that after Moses came down from Sinai for the second time, the skin on his face sent forth beams, meaning it shone—

A mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate said he was horned.

Ergo Michelangelo. And cetera.

Rameau died of typhoid fever.

Lovis Corinth.

Rilke wrote standing up.

Lewis Carroll wrote standing up.

Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up.

Robert Lowell and Truman Capote wrote lying down.

Writer is sitting.

Jens Peter Jacobsen died of tuberculosis.

Balzac often worked for sixteen or eighteen hours consecutively, generally beginning at midnight.

Awash in coffee.

Gibbon died of infectious complications from hydrocele.

Contemporary architecture is basically a bore.

Writer sometimes also talks to himself.

As did Yeats.

As did Yeats even walking the streets of Dublin.

Mad as the mist and snow.

Writer sitting and/or talking to himself being no more than renewed verification that he exists.

In a book without characters.

As noted, not being a character but the author, here.

We are and we are not.

Said Heraclitus.

Even with innumerable obvious likes and/or dislikes and certain self-evident preoccupations.

How frequently was Anon. a woman?

Marcel Duchamp died of prostate cancer.

Already condemned by lung cancer, Duke Ellington died of pneumonia.

The word ghetto originally meant foundry.

Until the Jews of Venice were forced to live on an island that had previously been the site of one.

Knowledge is not intelligence.

Heraclitus additionally said.

Thales, solving the height of the pyramids:

Simply by measuring their shadows precisely when his own shadow matched his height.

The legend that as a young man Leonardo was so strong he could straighten a horseshoe with his bare hands.

Robert Capa was killed by a land mine in Vietnam.

Fray Luis de Léon, returning to his Salamanca classroom after five years of imprisonment by the Inquisition:

As I was saying. .

Hey, Dad, hot this for me, please?

A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity, Johnson said.

Disgusting eating habits, there or elsewhere, Boswell says Johnson had.

Roald Dahl died of leukemia.

There can be no doubt that there is something peculiar in the condition of the English retina.

Said Taine, viewing a first exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art.

I hear a white horse on the way.

G. K. Chesterton died of heart failure.

Hilaire Belloc died, senile, at eighty-three, when he set his clothing on fire by spilling coal from a grate.

Hardy’s father was a stonemason.

Turner’s mother died mad.

Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

On radio, the opening lines of Verlaine’s Chanson d’automne:

Being the signal to the European underground that the D-Day invasion was underway.

Jane! Jane! Jane!

Filippo Lippi died of quinsy.

Account for Joan of Arc.

According to Vasari, ordinary citizens in Florence were so impressed by a Madonna of Cimabue’s that it was actually carried in a procession from his workshop to Santa Trinità.

Heralded by trumpets.

It is an aspect of probability that many improbable things will happen.

Aristotle says Agathon said.

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

Aristotle himself added, re tragedy.

Wittgenstein had nephews fighting on both sides in World War II.

Meyerhold was executed by the Soviets.

He dug a grave of the same length as Pakhom’s form from head to heels — three Russian ells — and buried him.

Rubén Darío died of cirrhosis of the liver.

Diderot died of coronary thrombosis while sitting at dinner.

I used to say to them, Go boldly in among the English, and then I used to go boldly in myself.

Said Joan.

He could not get rid of the idea that he was damned, and he would have drowned himself if he had not been prevented by force.

Says a chronicle from the monastery where Hugo van der Goes was a lay brother.

He was known to drink, which made things worse.

Says the same.

This is even a disquisition on the maladies of the life of art, if Writer says so.

Wanhope.

John Reed died of typhus.

Louise Bryant died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Not even to a philosopher could old age be easy in the depths of poverty, Cicero said.

Nor could a fool find it anything but burdensome even amid ample wealth.

Maria Jeritza was the first Tosca to sing Vissi d’arte while lying on the floor.

Only because she had been elbowed off a couch by accident.

It was from God, Puccini decided.

Though with Jeritza also flaunting far too much obvious posterior, put in Geraldine Farrar.

Venus Callipyge.

Louise O’Murphy.

Tiepolo and Francesco Guardi were brothers-in-law.

Richard Wright died of a heart attack.

The question of Mikhail Sholokhov’s authorship of The Quiet Don.

The question of Dmitri Shostakovich’s authorship of his Memoirs.

St. Teresa of Lisieux knew The Imitation of Christ by heart.

John Masefield died of gangrene at eighty-eight when he refused to have an injured leg amputated.

Schopenhauer played the flute.

He has no insight into character. And no dramatic talent. His dialogue hardens to wood and stone.

Said Emerson about its author after reading Oliver Twist.

Camille Saint-Saëns talked with a lisp.

Mahler, discovering that Alma was having an affair with Walter Gropius.

And spending an entire day discussing it with Freud.

Is Macbeth impotent?

Hans Memling. That very model of a major minor master, as Erwin Panofsky had it.

The legend that as an impoverished, wounded soldier, Memling had begun to paint in gratitude to monks who sheltered him.

Edwin Arlington Robinson died of pancreatic cancer.

Warren’s Blacking.

30, Strand.

Carl Maria von Weber died of tuberculosis.

Ambrose Bierce fought at Shiloh, Stones River, and Chickamauga. And was wounded at Kenesaw Mountain.

The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters.

Leonidas and the Three Hundred, who would perish at Thermopylae.

Only men who had already fathered sons to leave behind had been permitted to join the command.

Said of George Washington, at the height of the war with the British:

He sometimes throws and catches a ball for whole hours with his aides-decamp.

Nabokov appears to have died of an infection caught in a hospital where he was being treated for the flu.

Paul Bowles died of a heart attack.

Jane Bowles died after a stroke.

Friday is on their island with Robinson Crusoe for thirteen out of Crusoe’s twenty-eight years.

Why does Defoe not let him ever learn to speak more than pidgin English?

Why does Stephen Crane never actually state that the battle in The Red Badge of Courage is Chancellorsville?

La Scala was severely bombed in World War II.

The Vienna Staatsoper was severely bombed in World War II.

There are so few people who know how to make art. — Julian Schnabel.

One less than he thinks. — Robert Hughes.

In Coriolanus, Shakespeare allows someone to mention Cato.

Three centuries ahead of time.

And I will come out to meet you

As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

Pericles died of plague.

Stefan Lochner purchased a house in Cologne in 1442.

Konrad Witz purchased a house in Basel in 1443.

Martin Schongauer purchased a house in Colmar in 1477.

Hans Baldung Grien purchased a house in Strasbourg in 1527.

Paganini died of what was evidently cancer of the larynx.

Walter Pater died of gout.

It is written in a careless and humble style, in the vulgar tongue, which even housewives speak.

Said Dante of the Comedy.

William Etty.

The Axion Esti.

All through the night Rome went burning. Put that in the noontide and it loses some of its age-old significance, does it not?

Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Gilgamesh.

Pergolesi died of consumption at twenty-six.

Laborare est Orare. Work is Worship.

Said the old monks.

Benedetto Croce died of a stroke.

Robert Schumann died mad, probably from syphilis.

Behold, this dreamer cometh.

Sophocles’ father manufactured swords.

John Dos Passos died of congestive heart failure.

Tyndale was permitted the indulgence of being strangled at the stake before they set fire to him.

A Farewell to Arms:

1590, George Peele’s version dating from.

Trying to imagine the shape of the modern world if Charles Martel had been defeated at Tours.

Simone Weil’s final hospitalization was ostensibly for tuberculosis and exhaustion. Nevertheless a coroner’s report labeled her death suicide by starvation.

The woman was mad, de Gaulle said.

Mantegna used a corpse as the model for one of his Crucifixions.

Géricault used several while painting The Raft of the Medusa.

Veit Stoss died blind. And destitute.

The almost unparalleled contemporary popularity of Euripides.

Greek soldiers captured and held as slaves after the disastrous expedition at Syracuse were actually given their freedom if they could teach passages from his plays from memory.

Which many could.

George Eliot translated Spinoza.

Emma Lazarus translated Judah Halevi.

Willem de Kooning’s father was a beer distributor.

An incidental notation of Malcolm Lowry’s, while describing a visit to a room used by De Quincey in the Lake District:

Smoking Prohibited.

She only said, My life is dreary,

He cometh not, she said;

She said, I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead.

Cousin Ruddy was habitually foul-mouthed.

Flannery O’Connor died of lupus.

In the century after their deaths, Ben Jonson’s name appeared in print three times as often as Shakespeare’s.

Salathiel Pavy.

Why does Joyce let Leopold Bloom think Saverio Mercadante was Jewish?

April 26, 1937. A Monday.

Which was also Guernica’s market day, drawing peasants in from the nearby countryside.

No matter how frequently, always given pause at remembering there is no color whatsoever in the canvas.

A little, plain, provincial, sickly-looking old maid.

Being Charlotte Brontë, as seen by George Henry Lewes.

Robert Southey died of — quote — softening of the brain.

And what should they know of England who only England know?

Gauguin once tried to kill himself with arsenic.

But vomited.

Do you think up that material when you’re drunk?

Asked a cousin of Faulkner’s.

Dittersdorf, you’re not in tune.

Tintoretto died of what appears to have been stomach cancer.

Trollope died of a stroke.

Milledgeville, Georgia.

Tracts free as the Lord supplies the funds.

Frank Lloyd Wright died of a heart attack after surgery.

Hilda Doolittle died of the flu, though already assaulted by a heart attack and a stroke.

Even after Einstein on the Beach had been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Philip Glass was driving a taxi in New York City.

Hypatia, who was battered to death by Christian fanatics.

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, Lucretius said.

Such are the evils that religion prompts.

Emotion recollected in tranquility.

The best words in the best order.

Vivaldi died of no one knows what.

Of internal fire, the 1741 Vienna church registry having poetically settled for.

A social and moral pervert, Theodore Roosevelt called Tolstoy.

Roosevelt on Henry James:

A miserable little snob.

On Thomas Paine:

A filthy little atheist.

Spinoza’s tomb. At the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague.

It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.

S. Y. Agnon died of a heart attack.

Dostoievsky’s second wife, Anna, adding a note of charm to a recollection of Dostoievsky pawning something:

He sat there for over an hour — my poor, poor Fedya. So sweet, and so brilliant and altogether fine, and he had to sit and wait among a lot of Jews.

Stuck-groove music.

When the canvas is on the floor, I feel closer to it.

Said Jackson Pollock.

Marie Corelli was Charles Mackay’s daughter.

Marcia Davenport was Alma Gluck’s.

Robert Penn Warren died of prostate cancer.

Joshua Reynolds died blind.

After having been deaf through most of his life.

Only when the world itself is destroyed will the verses of Lucretius perish.

Said Ovid.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan died profoundly in debt.

Yet was granted a spectacular Westminster Abbey funeral.

Molière died after bursting a blood vessel in a convulsive tubercular coughing fit and choking on his own blood.

Panta rei, ouden menei.

It is very difficult to understand and appreciate the generation that follows you, Matisse said.

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together in the eternal book.

The friendship of Byron and Stendhal.

According to Herodotus, Xerxes literally ordered that the Hellespont be given three hundred lashes when a storm washed away a bridge he had only then constructed for his invasion of the West.

And as an incidental afterthought also ordered his chief engineers beheaded.

Gary Cooper died of lung cancer.

Wilhelm Reich died in Lewisburg Penitentiary.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin died after giving birth to the infant girl who would one day marry Shelley.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin died after giving birth to the infant girl who would one day write Frankenstein.

Fanny Brawne’s mother died in an accident in which her clothing caught on fire.

Things from which one would avert one’s eyes even in a brothel.

Said Aretino in a letter to Michelangelo condemning The Last Judgment.

Which at least three different popes subsequently came close to having removed.

Rarely remembering that it was Congreve who said Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

Rarely remembering that it was Congreve who said Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

In the same play.

People none of whose business it is repeatedly excising the Hughes from the Yorkshire gravestone inscribed Sylvia Plath Hughes.

Moses Mendelssohn died of a stroke.

Felix Mendelssohn died of a stroke.

Slabtown, Tennessee, Grace Moore was born in.

If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth Writer were to burn a Roy Lichtenstein — qualms?

Qualmless.

Kierkegaard was regularly beaten up by his schoolmates.

Yeats aussi.

Christina Rossetti died while praying.

Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore.

The Muses’ darling, Peele called Marlowe.

O Rare Ben Jonson.

So it befell in that affray that the said Ingram, in defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid of the value of 12d. gave the said Christopher then & there a mortal wound over his right eye of the depth of two inches & of the width of one inch; of which mortal wound the aforesaid Christopher Morley then & there instantly died.

Negative capability.

Sartre died blind.

Having been strabismic.

Like Menander.

Splendid rooms and elegant furnishings are for people who have no thoughts, Goethe said.

Even in a palace it is possible to live well, said Marcus Aurelius.

If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead.

Ludwig Boltzmann took piano lessons from Anton Bruckner.

Eleanor Bull’s.

Deptford Strand.

Andrew Marvell died of what was called tertian ague. Probably meaning malaria.

Which his physician misdiagnosed.

Thackeray died of what was called a cerebral effusion. Meaning either a brain hemorrhage or a stroke.

Jacob Barsimson. New Amsterdam, August 1654.

Lasse Viren.

No one, in any language, has ever written a novel that equals or even approaches Clarissa, said Rousseau.

On a shelf with the Bible, Euripides, and Sophocles, said Diderot of the same book.

Hannah Arendt died of a heart attack.

Watteau died of tuberculosis.

The little Marcel, at fourteen, asked to name life’s greatest unhappiness:

To be separated from maman.

Dear Sir:

I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. Your review is before me. Shortly it will be behind me.

Did the American Indian not have the wheel?

Dies Irae.

A presumptuous mediocrity, Tchaikovsky called Brahms.

Undoubtedly the best woman poet of our time, Hardy called Charlotte Mew.

How does Gertrude know all of the physical details of Ophelia’s death with such exactness?

Soldiers! An innocent man is being degraded! Soldiers! An innocent is dishonored! Long live France!

Zola never met Dreyfus.

Max Reger.

Petrarch’s copy of Virgil, with a marginal note in his own handwriting about the death of Laura in the Black Death, is still extant in a library in Milan.

The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead

Did squeak and jibber in the Roman streets.

Or an ersatz prose alternative to The Waste Land, if Writer so suggests.

William of Ockham also died in the Black Death.

Robert Burns had nine illegitimate children.

Goya had nineteen legitimate children, by one wife.

And several others otherwise.

Augustus John’s habit of patting every passing London youngster on the head:

In case it is one of mine.

Brainsick. Troilus’s word for Cassandra in Troilus and Cressida.

Lowell, Massachusetts, James McNeill Whistler was born in.

Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac was born in.

Dies irae, dies illa

Solvet saeclum in favilla.

In one of his reincarnations, Pythagoras was a fish. And in another a bird.

He said.

Met him pike hoses.

In 1537, François Rabelais taught a course on Hippocrates at the school of medicine in Montpellier. In Greek.

Diego Rivera’s affair with Paulette Goddard.

Diego Rivera’s affair with Louise Nevelson.

Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: The Artist’s Mother.

To be precise.

You ever read that, that Cousin Bette? Should I go on with it?

Virtually every inadequacy in recent French literature is due to absinthe, Daudet said in the late 1800s.

Annals I 65. Where Tacitus actually does, does, call a spade an implement for digging earth and cutting turf.

Paul Klee died of cardiac arrest after years of enduring scleroderma.

Sarah Orne Jewett died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Thomas of Celano.

I have wasted all my youth chained to this tomb.

Michelangelo protested to Julius II.

L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.

Why hasn’t Writer ever known? What is the black liquid that spills out of the dead Emma Bovary’s mouth?

O death, where is thy sting at?

Les Rougon-Macquart.

Montesquieu died of pneumonia.

Eliot pursued graduate studies in the philosophy of F. H. Bradley, in part at Merton College, Oxford, where Bradley was still a lifetime fellow.

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

Wallace Stegner died after an automobile crash.

Bradley died of blood poisoning.

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

Roger Bacon probably did not invent eyeglasses.

Forgetting, when starting to reread The Hamlet, that her name before the end will become Eula Varner Snopes.

And that in a later Snopes novel she will shoot herself.

Richard Bentley died of pleurisy.

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

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

No one ever put up a statue of a critic.

Said Sibelius.

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

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

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

Frida Kahlo’s affair with Leon Trotsky.

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

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

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

Rilke was devoted to polishing furniture.

Jackson Pollock baked pies.

Origen castrated himself.

No artist tolerates reality, Camus said.

Virgil spent seven years writing the Georgics.

Meaning an average of one line per day.

Pablo Neruda died of leukemia.

Nazim Hikmet died of a heart attack.

How beautiful yellow is!

Says a van Gogh letter.

Sortes Virgilianae.

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight.

Dorothy L. Sayers died of a stroke.

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

Jack Johnson died in an automobile crash.

Nikos Kazantzakis died of the flu.

Jessie Laidlay Weston.

Laurence Sterne’s realization roughly a third of the way through Tristram Shandy that the book lacks a preface.

Whereupon he inserts one right where he is.

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

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

William Saroyan died of prostate cancer.

Somerset Maugham once had four plays running simultaneously in London.

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

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer died of throat cancer.

Maugham died of a stroke.

At last she grew common and infamous and gott the Pox, of which she died.

Says Aubrey’s Brief Lives of one Elizabeth Broughton.

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

Said Stalin.

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

But that he had no head for philosophy.

Kurt Weill died of a heart attack.

Turner was considerably less than fastidious about cleanliness.

The Reader.

Being Aristotle’s nickname at Plato’s Academy.

A colt that kicks its mother.

Being what Plato personally called him after an early disagreement.

Samuel ha-Nagid.

Say it out for God’s sake and have done with it.

Said William James to Henry.

Molokai. June 1885.

We lepers.

Anagnostes.

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

A Walk in the Sun.

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

Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Susan Sontag.

St. Catherine of Siena was illiterate.

Kafka was a vegetarian.

The English think soap is civilization.

Treitschke said.

Theodore Roethke died of a coronary occlusion.

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

Charlotte Salomon died in Auschwitz at twenty-six.

Pavel Friedman died in Auschwitz at nineteen. Or younger.

Would Moe Berg really have shot Heisenberg?

Góngora died of apoplexy.

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

There are 260,430 words in Ulysses.

Calvin died of hemorrhages of the lungs.

Oswiecim.

Exeunt.

Molière was never elected to the French Academy.

Balzac was never elected to the French Academy.

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

I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

Josquin des Prez.

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

Adelaide Procter. Mrs. Henry Wood.

Géricault died after a fall from a horse.

Hindemith died of a stroke.

Nebuchadnezzar. Who razed Jerusalem.

And went mad.

And ate grass.

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

Wyatt Earp died of chronic cystitis.

Because night is here and the barbarians have not appeared.

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

Frobisher. Hawkins. Drake.

Hitler typed with two fingers.

Mencken typed with two fingers.

Beethoven washed excessively.

Penthesilea.

The speculation that Dante spent time in Paris.

Or even at Oxford.

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

Charlotte Corday was a great-grandniece of Corneille.

And devoted the morning to reading Plutarch at his bloodiest before stabbing Marat.

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

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

Said Thomas Fuller.

Potatoes were not known in ancient Rome.

Tomatoes were not known in ancient Rome.

Oranges were not known in ancient Rome.

Hume died of what was probably colon cancer.

Edgar Degas never learned which side won World War I.

Piet Mondrian never learned which side won World War II.

Flicka von Stade.

Manet died of tertiary syphilis.

Truman Capote died of heart disease complicated by drug abuse.

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

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

Debussy’s first wife shot herself.

As had a mistress, earlier.

Caedmon was illiterate.

The rue Descartes, Paul Verlaine died in.

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

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

Herman Melville Boulevard is where, in Manhattan?

Twelve blocks north from the wishful-thinking intersection of Mark Rothko Road and Hart Crane Place.

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

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

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

The friendship of Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff.

Claudia Muzio was illegitimate.

Jenny Lind was illegitimate.

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

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

Do we know if she ever read a book?

Title of an unfinished composition by Charles Ives:

Giants vs. Cubs, August 1907, Polo Grounds.

Ives died of heart disease compounded by diabetes.

Well, Bourrienne, you too will be immortal.

Why, General Bonaparte?

Are you not my secretary?

Tell me the name of Alexander’s.

Hm, that is not bad, Bourrienne.

Haydn’s father was a wheelwright.

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

But go, and if you listen she will call.

Eight people appeared at Robert Musil’s funeral.

F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a sequence of heart attacks.

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

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

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

All studied with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau.

Dave Brubeck studied with Arnold Schoenberg and with Darius Milhaud.

Corbière died of tuberculosis at thirty.

Novalis died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight.

Laforgue was twenty-seven.

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

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

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

Ausonius once composed a poem to his writing paper.

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

Mary Mapes Dodge.

Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

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

Which Maria Callas vehemently denied having said to her mother.

The vasty hall of death.

Émile Verhaeren died in a fall under a train.

Arcangelo Corelli owned paintings by Bruegel and Poussin.

Adrienne Lecouvreur died of what was apparently rectal cancer.

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

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

Maria Caniglia. Magda Olivero. Renata Tebaldi.

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

Jongkind died mad.

Hugo Wolf died mad.

Blake, at their only meeting, re Constable’s pencil sketches: Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration.

I always meant it for drawing, Constable said.

The peculiar immortality of Sulpicia.

Six love poems, totaling only forty lines, and customarily tacked onto the collected work of Tibullus.

For two full thousand years.

Callas died in Paris, of a heart attack.

And was buried from a Greek Orthodox church on the rue Georges Bizet.

Tatiana Troyanos died of cervical cancer.

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

The Hay Wain.

Billie Holiday died of a kidney infection after years of heroin abuse.

Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.

Who but my darling Greensleeves?

And Arthur was so bloody, that by his shield there might no man know him, for all was blood and brains on his sword.

Sir Thomas Urquhart. Peter Motteux.

Did Miss Linda Stillwagon ever see the poem?

John Singer Sargent died reading Voltaire.

Please, sir, I want some more.

Does Temple Drake ever go back and graduate from the University of Mississippi?

Merle Hapes. Junie Hovious.

Is it in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Greensleeves is mentioned? Even twice?

Gluck died after a series of strokes.

Worms feed on Hector brave.

Siegfried Sassoon threw his Military Cross into the Mersey in disgust with the waste of war.

Mina Loy, already suffering advanced spinal osteoarthritis, died of pneumonia.

In one of his less balanced periods, Robert Lowell penciled in some revisions in Milton’s Lycidas.

And insisted he was the author of the entire poem.

An anthology of extraordinary suicide notes.

Or of any suicide notes. Is there such?

Dorothy Parker died of a heart attack.

Kenneth Tynan died of emphysema.

He doesn’t want me to have a life of my own.

Says Sonia Tolstoy’s Diary.

Machiavelli died of unidentified stomach spasms.

Addie Joss died of tubercular meningitis.

Are we ever told what Addie Bundren dies of?

Lawrence Durrell was found dead in a bathroom.

Paulette Goddard died of heart failure.

Why does Writer sometimes seem to admire the Iliad even more when he is thinking about it than when he is actually reading it?

Augustus Montague Toplady.

Ignorant asses, John Webster repudiated the Elizabethan theater audience as.

Get thee to a brewery.

Sailing the circumference of Lake Geneva, Byron and Shelley took time to pay homage at the house in Lausanne where Gibbon had written a great deal of The Decline and Fall.

Hey, Dad, sharp this for me, please?

Theodore Watts-Dunton was said to sometimes hide Swinburne’s shoes — as a way of keeping him from drinking.

From the King James Ecclesiastes:

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

From the Revised Standard Version:

A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.

From the King James Song of Solomon:

Our vines have tender grapes.

From the Revised Standard:

Our vineyards are in blossom.

James Baldwin died of cancer of the esophagus.

Michael Harrington died of cancer of the esophagus.

S. S. Orizaba.

You never have music here, do you.

It makes me nervous.

Mozart was addicted to billiards.

Frances Farmer died of throat cancer.

Martha Argerich.

André Breton died of heart failure precipitated by massive asthma attacks.

Eddie Poe, Edgar Allan was commonly called.

Leslie Howard died in a plane shot down by the Germans in World War II.

William Gaddis died of prostate cancer.

Velázquez was unconditionally dismissive of Raphael as a painter.

George Meredith died of what was called a chill.

Arrigo Boito died after catching the same in church.

John Gay died of what was called colic but was most probably stomach cancer.

Wallace Stevens once worked briefly as a newspaper reporter.

And was assigned to cover Stephen Crane’s funeral.

Zane Grey was a dentist.

This skull is Helen.

Divinités du Styx.

Art which is not propaganda is not art, said Diego Rivera.

Writer’s arse.

Edgairpo.

For a time as young men Delacroix and Bonington shared a studio.

Tony Lazzeri died in a fall down a flight of stairs during an epileptic seizure.

Early in the morning I go to the rear blackboard and draw a small dollar sign. No one notices. The janitor who washes the blackboards every night must surely guess why it’s there.

Rachel Carson died of breast cancer.

St. Perpetua. Requesting a pin to fasten her hair — before guiding the gladiator’s sword to her throat in the arena at Carthage.

Thomas More. Jesting on the scaffold and lifting aside his beard — before being beheaded.

Was Bede the first historian to date events BC and AD?

Lotte Lenya died of abdominal cancer.

Teresa Stratas had essentially camped out at her bedside for weeks, so that she would not die alone.

I shall not cease to fear Carthage until I know it is utterly destroyed, Cato said.

A son of Ring Lardner’s died fighting with the Lincoln Brigade in Spain in 1938.

A son of Ring Lardner’s died as a correspondent when his jeep hit a mine in World War II.

Sibelius died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Pauline Viardot. Who sang the first performance of Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody.

And may have had an illegitimate child by Turgenev.

Johann Uhr, the Royal Armorer.

Ford Madox Ford died of heart failure.

The Cartesian Soul of Frank Sinatra.

Having been the subtitle of an actual academic paper delivered at Hofstra University in 1998.

Dear God! the very houses seemed asleep.

A daughter of Theodor Herzl’s died in Theresienstadt.

A daughter of Theodor Herzl’s.

One of Edvard Munch’s sisters went mad.

Hogarth died of a ruptured artery.

I owe the discovery that I was a Jew more to Gentiles than Jews, Einstein said.

A public meeting was held in Florence in 1504 to decide on the placement of Michelangelo’s David. Detailed minutes still exist showing that Leonardo, Piero di Cosimo, Filippino Lippi, Sansovino, Botticelli, Lorenzo di Credi, and Perugino all had something to say.

The decision was finally left to Michelangelo.

A blessed thing.

Said Elizabeth Barrett Browning, of opium.

Half in love with easeful Death.

Vaslav Nijinsky died of kidney failure after decades of insanity.

O. Henry died penniless.

The North Sea, Karl Marx’s ashes were scattered in.

Djuna Barnes Drive. Anne Sexton Street.

Calcutta, Thackeray was born in.

Bombay, Kipling was.

Gaspara Stampa died of what may have been cancer of the womb.

Ovid left twice as much work as any other Roman poet.

And said he had destroyed endless pages more, as unsatisfactory.

Henry Purcell died of consumption.

Francis Thompson died of consumption.

Richard Savage died in debtors’ prison.

The volume of Sophocles from Shelley’s pocket when he was drowned is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

The Keats was burned with his corpse at Viareggio.

The Keats had been borrowed from Leigh Hunt.

Alejo Carpentier died of throat cancer.

Kant was never in his life in the vicinity of a mountain. It appears probable that he never saw the ocean either.

Venus clerk, Ovyde,

That hath ysowen wonder wyde

The grete god of Loves name.

Marilyn Horne’s tale that the first time she was asked to sing Semiramide the only way she could get her hands on a score was to steal it from the Los Angeles Public Library.

In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?

Asked Sydney Smith in 1819.

Melville’s father died mad.

Schopenhauer’s father jumped out of a window.

The long martyrdom of being trampled to death by geese, Kierkegaard called reading one’s reviews.

Berchtesgaden.

Juden raus!

The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.

Milo of Crotona.

The greatest painter of our era, Magritte called Giorgio de Chirico.

Unsurprisingly.

Jacob Epstein died of heart failure.

Carl Gustav Jung died of heart failure.

Every morning the author of Faust and Werther kisses me. In the afternoon I play for him for about two hours.

Noted Felix Mendelssohn, at twelve.

Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!

Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

Derek Lindsay was who?

Longfellow died of peritonitis.

Frank Norris died of peritonitis.

Selma Lagerlöf died of peritonitis.

Es inevitable la muerta del Papa.

Béla Bartók died of leukemia.

Charles Péguy was killed leading a charge in the first battle of the Marne.

Alexander, young, broke Bucephalus — whom no one else could sit — simply by perceiving that he balked at his own shadow and riding him into the sun.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Self-evident enough to scarcely need Writer’s say-so.

Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.

Here perhaps less than self-evident to the less than attentive.

Ulrich Friedrich Richard von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf.

Laurence Sterne died of pleurisy, after years of lung hemorrhages.

Rousseau died of a stroke.

The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.

Gilles de Rais. Who was a marshal of France at twenty-five.

And fought by Joan’s side at Orleans.

And.

Baudelaire often wore pink gloves.

Martha Constantine, a handsome young woman, was treated with great indecency and cruelty by several of the troops, who first ravished, and then killed her by cutting off her breasts. These they fried, and set before some of their comrades, who ate them without knowing what they were.

Records Fox’s Book of Martyrs.

Clausewitz died of cholera.

The Prince, the King, the Emperor, the God Almighty of novelists.

Wilkie Collins called Walter Scott.

Robin Vote.

Vom Kriege.

Walter Benjamin and Gertrud Kolmar were cousins.

Monet dropped from the skies on me with a collection of magnificent pictures. I am now lodging two impecunious artists, for Renoir is also here. It’s like a nursing home. I love it.

Said a letter of Frédéric Bazille’s — four years before he was killed at twenty-nine in the Franco-Prussian War.

Joe Tinker died of diabetes.

Johnny Evers died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Frank Chance died of tuberculosis.

The population of Athens at the height of its accomplishments was at best two hundred and seventy-five thousand.

The population of Dante’s Florence was probably forty thousand.

Abbotsford.

Piero della Francesca’s St. Agatha. Tiepolo’s. Zurbarán’s.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s.

Mary McCarthy died of lung cancer.

Hermann Prey died of a heart attack.

A double play gives you two twenty-sevenths of a ball game.

Pointed out Casey Stengel.

Harold Bloom’s claim to the New York Times that he could read at a rate of five hundred pages per hour.

Writer’s arse.

Spectacular exhibition! Right this way, ladies and gentlemen! See Professor Bloom read the 1961 corrected and reset Random House edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in one hour and thirty-three minutes. Not one page stinted. Unforgettable!

Parisian brothels. The only place where one’s shoes were ever properly shined.

Said Toulouse-Lautrec.

Dryden, to a publisher:

I find all your trade are sharpers.

Was Plutarch the first writer ever to counsel kindness to animals?

The William Wordsworth Funeral Home, in Hollywood, F. Scott Fitzgerald was buried from.

Leonardo played the lyre.

So astonishingly well that his patron the Duke of Milan initially admired him more for that than for his art.

Modigliani and Soutine were once living in such penury that they shared a single cot.

Sleeping in shifts.

A second-rate mind, T. E. Lawrence ranked Shakespeare’s as.

What’s this? Can’t spare an hour and a half? Wait, wait. Our matinee special, today only! Watch Professor Bloom eviscerate the Pears-McGuinness translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus — eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds flat! Guaranteed.

Mine eyes have seen the glory

Of Rabindranath Tagore.

Paul Celan’s visit to Todtnauberg.

Galileo died blind.

Journalist: May I see Georgia O’Keeffe?

Georgia O’Keeffe: You have.

Samuel Johnson, on criticism:

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince, but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

Gentes and laitymen, fullstoppers and semicolonials, hybreds and lubberds!

Louis Sockalexis was an epileptic.

Alfred Stieglitz died of a stroke.

The Samuel Butler who wrote Hudibras died in poverty.

A Latin translation of Marco Polo once belonging to Christopher Columbus is extant in Seville. With seventy marginal notes in Columbus’s handwriting.

Mainly in regard to the whereabouts of treasure.

Jim Thorpe died of a heart attack.

Allowed out of his steel military cage at Pisa for exercise, Ezra Pound sometimes swung a broom handle as if it were a baseball bat.

Who do you make believe is pitching to you, Uncle Ez?

Can’t you see Dizzy Dean out there, soldier?

From Suetonius, a description of Vespasian:

Habitually wearing the expression of someone who is straining at stool.

Meyer Lansky was a subscriber to the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Photography is not an art.

Writer talking to himself again.

As did Hölderlin, in addition to Yeats.

Writer suspects Hesoid likewise, even if long beyond any possibility of verification.

I bring you back Cathay!

Edwin Hubble died of a stroke.

Sir Alexander Fleming died of a heart attack.

The editor of Novy Mir began to read a prepublication copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in bed.

And then found himself so impressed that he not only got up but put on a suit and a necktie to finish with what he felt to be the requisite respect.

The Samuel Butler who wrote Erewhon died of pernicious anemia.

There seems to me too much misery in the world, said Darwin.

Cortés. 1519–1526:

Three hundred and fifteen soldiers. Sixteen horses. Seven cannon.

Of all books extant in all kinds, Homer is the first and best, Chapman said.

The sovereign poet, Dante called him.

Without being able to read Greek.

That fiery splendour of narrative which seems almost to have died out of the world when the Iliad was complete, Gilbert Murray talked of.

Irving Berlin’s father was a cantor.

Al Jolson’s father was a cantor.

Berlin died at one hundred. Of age alone, evidently.

George Santayana died of stomach cancer.

Having spent his last years attended by Irish nuns at a convent in Rome.

Will scholars of relatively recent English literature have any idea three or four centuries from now how differently the names Yeats and Keats were pronounced?

Suzanne Valadon’s affair with Puvis de Chavannes.

He fifty-seven. Valadon seventeen.

One of Wordsworth’s brothers died in a shipwreck.

Another became master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

A brother of Walt Whitman’s died mad.

Another was a lifelong imbecile.

Fragonard died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Chardin died of dropsy.

Cavendish, Vermont.

A pansy with hair on his chest, Zelda Fitzgerald called Hemingway.

Ninety percent Rotarian, supplied Gertrude Stein.

George Bernard Shaw died at ninety-four of complications after breaking a hip.

Valadon died of a stroke.

Brian Moore died of pulmonary fibrosis.

Papal censors in 1817 refused to allow the heroine in Rossini’s Cinderella opera to show her bare foot. The libretto had to be rewritten without the glass slippers.

Conchita Supervia. Teresa Berganza. Cecilia Bartoli.

Rarely remembering that it was Menander who said Whom the gods love die young.

Charles Brockden Brown sent Thomas Jefferson an inscribed copy of Wieland.

Telemann was Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s godfather.

It is noteworthy that on the whole children love their parents less than their parents love them.

Perceived Hegel.

Richard Burton died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Death-of-the-Month-Club.

Ensor died at eighty-nine.

Having done every bit of his significant work before he was forty.

Thomas Wolfe died of tuberculosis which had spread to the brain.

Clutching the stern of one of the withdrawing Persian galleys at Marathon, a brother of Aeschylus was killed when his hand was chopped off by an ax.

Giacomo Leopardi died of cholera.

C. Wright Mills died of a heart attack.

Tim the ostler.

St. Augustine’s admission that even he could not comprehend God’s purpose in creating flies.

Jan van Eyck died in Bruges in 1441.

Petrus Christus died in Bruges in 1472 or 1473.

Hans Memling died in Bruges in 1494.

Gerard David died in Bruges in 1523.

Through the dim purple air of Dante fly those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin.

Said Oscar Wilde.

Dante is not worth the pains necessary to understand him.

Said Chesterfield.

Wilde died of encephalitic meningitis, almost certainly connected with syphilis.

Meg Merrilies.

Ceci n’est pas un conte. Diderot, 1772.

Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Magritte, 1929.

Wilbur Wright died of typhoid fever.

Orville Wright died of a heart attack.

Thirty-six years later.

Melville’s spelling:

Don Quixotte.

August Strindberg was illegitimate.

Ulysses:

An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me, the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how depressing they are.

Yes, Virginia.

Port Arthur, Texas, Robert Rauschenberg was born in.

Thelonious Monk died of a stroke.

Charles Mingus died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The Oresteia. Aeschylus was sixty-seven.

Orestes. The Bacchae. Euripides was seventy-six and seventy-seven.

Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus. Sophocles was well past eighty.

Hillerich and Bradsby.

Gandhi suffered from chronic constipation.

Henry James suffered from chronic constipation.

Freud suffered from chronic constipation.

Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona, Horace said.

There were brave men living before Agamemnon.

Aretino died of apoplexy.

Ariosto died of tuberculosis.

Le Douanier Rousseau once informed Picasso that they two were the two greatest living painters:

I in the modern style and you in the Egyptian.

Nine in the third place indicates:

The ridge beam sags to the breaking point.

Adversity.

Renoir suffered from extreme rheumatism and threateningly congested lungs, but died of a heart attack.

Gaetano Donizetti died mad.

Branwell — Emily — Anne — are gone like dreams — gone as Maria and Elizabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm.

Said Charlotte, late along.

God is necessary and so must exist.

Well, that’s all right, then.

But I know He doesn’t and can’t.

That’s more likely.

Epis.

Eleven of Ernest Rutherford’s students became winners of the Nobel Prize.

Hermann Hesse died in his sleep at eighty-five.

Catullus died at thirty.

Pascal wrote certain of the Provincial Letters twelve times.

Tolstoy did nine versions of his Kreutzer Sonata.

Le Douanier played the violin.

Patrick White died of bronchial collapse resulting from pleurisy.

Manet and Mallarmé spent time together virtually every afternoon for twenty years.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was evidently the first person in England ever to receive a ticket for speeding.

Das Glasperlenspiel.

Wittgenstein, it is you who are creating all the confusion!

Suzette Gontard died of tuberculosis.

Thoreau:

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?

Marie Bashkirtseff died of consumption at twenty-four.

August Macke was killed in France in the first weeks of World War I.

Keith Douglas was killed by a mortar fragmentation bomb three days after the start of the Normandy Invasion.

Catalogue raisonné.

The scene in Hades in Odyssey XI where Odysseus tells Achilles of the extraordinary nervousness inside the Trojan Horse.

Except for Achilles’ own son Neoptolemus, who cannot wait to attack.

The assumption, even in much of antiquity itself, that the mythic Horse had actually been some sort of engineer’s device to breach the walls.

Arturo Toscanini died of a stroke.

Guido Cantelli died in an air crash.

Needing a few seconds to remember that it will be that same Neoptolemus who flings Hector’s infant son from the battlements after the Greek victory.

Anaïs Nin died of cardiorespiratory arrest while enduring metastatic vaginal cancer.

Robert Frost died of a pulmonary embolism while enduring metastatic prostate cancer.

What interests me is the anguish of van Gogh, Picasso said.

Sir James Frazer died blind.

Thoreau died of tuberculosis.

Turner left a serious fortune to a fund for indigent artists. Relatives fought the will and won the money for themselves.

Why does Writer sometimes seem to admire Ulysses even more when he is thinking about it than when he is actually reading it?

A grace to say before reading Elie Wiesel’s Night?

Before Celan’s Todesfuge?

Swinburne died of pneumonia.

Joseph Heller died of a heart attack.

Puccini and Mascagni were once roommates.

Mascagni would become a supporter of Mussolini. And finish his life in disgrace in a seedy Rome hotel.

Robert Burns was said to have died of alcoholism and/or venereal disease.

A hundred years later the symptoms were reread as those of heart disease stemming from childhood rheumatic fever.

Jean Armour.

John Bunyan died of an undiagnosed fever after being caught on horseback in a storm.

Kepler died of an undiagnosed fever after a considerable journey on horseback to collect money he was owed.

Whistler died of a heart condition.

Jack Kerouac died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage from cirrhosis of the liver.

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Astyanax.

As a Marine pilot in Korea, Ted Williams several times flew as Colonel John Glenn’s wing man.

Sophocles played ball with great skill, it says in Athenaeus.

He alters and retouches the same phrases incessantly, and paces up and down like a madman.

Reported a pupil of Chopin’s.

Stanislaus Joyce died of a heart condition at seventy. On Bloomsday.

James Thurber died of a brain tumor.

Beau Brummell died mad.

Antoine Roquentin.

Thomas Hobbes did translations of Homer into English in his late eighties.

Not particularly well.

Eight Miles of Books.

Aristotle, asked what grows old most swiftly:

Gratitude.

The Boudreau Shift.

Hobbes played the bass viol.

Ignazio Silone’s parents died in an earthquake.

James Laughlin once changed a flat tire for Gertrude Stein.

Samuel Beckett once sat through a New York vs. Houston doubleheader at Shea Stadium.

I could die to-day, if I wished, merely by making a little effort, if I could wish, if I could make an effort.

Blake’s insistence that at the age of four he had seen God watching him through a window.

Amy Lowell died of a stroke.

Vesalius was condemned to death by the Inquisition for dissecting humans. But was permitted to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in penance instead.

And then died en route home of overexposure after a shipwreck.

Sestos. Abydos.

St. Francis of Assisi probably died of malaria.

How vain it is, and how futile, to lament the dead.

Said Stesichorus.

William Burroughs killed his wife while trying to shoot a glass perched on her head à la William Tell.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead. From papyri and pyramid inscriptions dated as early as 1580 BC.

Or a contemporary variant on the latter, if Writer says so.

Writer incidentally doing his best here — insofar as his memory allows — not to repeat things he has included in his earlier work.

Meaning in this instance the four hundred and fifty or more deaths that were mentioned in his last book also.

Burroughs died of heart failure.

Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire.

Your last novel was a flop.

All of this preoccupation implying little more, presumably, than that Writer is turning older.

Stockholm, Greta Garbo’s ashes were buried near.

They’re going to cut a street through.

They would, Bill said.

Plutarch says that to force himself to study oratory, Demosthenes once shaved half his head — so that he would be too embarrassed to leave his house.

Though with Writer also now recalling the refrain from Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers, about the deaths of such as Chaucer and Lydgate and Henryson and Gower:

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The fear of death distresses me.

And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?

There is no such thing as a great movie. A Rembrandt is great. Mozart chamber music.

Said Marlon Brando.

Eliot died of emphysema in conjunction with a damaged heart.

Pound died of a blocked intestine.

Being less than surprised that Rouault began his career working at stained-glass windows.

She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

Otello. Verdi was seventy-four.

Falstaff. Verdi was eighty.

Office of the Dead.

The friendship of John Donne and Isaak Walton.

Rudolph Valentino died of a perforated ulcer.

Trollope, as remembered by a schoolmate at Harrow:

Without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met.

Ben Shahn died of a heart attack after surgery.

Andy Warhol died after gallbladder surgery.

East Coker, for Eliot’s ashes.

Roman Jakobson, in opposition to a novelist, namely Nabokov, teaching literature at Harvard:

Should an elephant teach zoology?

Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were tennis partners.

John Donne. Anne Donne. Undone.

Camoëns died unknown and penniless in a plague.

A lieutenant of Alexander’s, before the Battle of Arbela:

Don’t think we fear their vast numbers, Sire. They’ll not stand the stink of goat that clings to us.

For centuries, in England:

The burial of a suicide under a high road, ideally at a crossroads.

And with a wooden stake driven into his/her heart.

Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem about one of the Dempsey-Tunney fights.

Xanthippe was a shrew.

Living with her teaches me to get along with the rest of the world, Socrates said.

Gershwin died of a brain tumor.

Edward MacDowell died mad, probably from syphilis.

Manolete. Islero. Linares.

The wife of Johann Strauss, Jr., once asked Brahms for an autograph. Brahms sketched out the opening notations for the Blue Danube.

And signed them Alas, not by Johannes Brahms.

Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.

Wolfgang Pauli: You probably think these ideas are crazy.

Niels Bohr: Unfortunately they are not crazy enough.

Katyn.

Nanking.

Kyd’s scene in The Spanish Tragedy where Hieronimo finds the corpse of his son hanged from a tree in his garden.

Luciano Pavarotti’s inability to read music.

Ronsard died of gout.

Conan Doyle died of a heart condition.

Fichte once badly needed to borrow money from Kant.

Kant said no.

Frederick Exley died of a stroke.

Joanna Baillie.

Auden was known to show up at the opera in a stained tuxedo and bedroom slippers.

Samuel Johnson died of dropsy.

Gregor Mendel died of dropsy.

Albert Pinkham Ryder lived in such filth, with even his bed spilling over with rubbish, that he generally slept on a patch of rug on the floor.

Willie Maugham, he was commonly called.

Archie MacLeish.

Joe DiMaggio died on Al Gionfriddo’s birthday.

Scriabin died of a blood infection.

W. N. P. Barbellion.

Daydreaming of a MacArthur Foundation award.

Writer talking to himself yet another time.

As did Gogol, in addition to Yeats and Hölderlin and Hesiod.

Talkative, outgoing, inquisitive, formidably erudite, and sharp.

Stamford, Connecticut, Ezio Pinza died in.

Lakeville, Connecticut, Wanda Landowska died in.

That blockhead John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche anointed him.

Passage to India. 1871.

A Passage to India. 1924.

Then again Kant did help Fichte find a teaching post.

Jonas Salk died of heart failure.

O tu, Palermo.

George Gissing’s father was a druggist.

I am a lost man! I whispered to myself. Ladies and gentlemen, I am a lost man! And I repeated that over and over as I went on jumping on my hat.

Augusta Leigh died in poverty.

Ouida died in poverty.

Mary Webb died in poverty.

Jane Avril died in poverty.

Jane Avril.

Monk Lewis died of yellow fever on board a ship in the Atlantic.

Two of the Le Nains died within two days of each other.

The third would continue painting for twenty-nine more years.

Mill died of what was termed a local fever.

Hubert van Eyck died in 1426.

If there was a Hubert van Eyck.

Thorstein Veblen was once fired by the University of Chicago for — quote — womanizing.

Anaxagoras, in exile, when told that the Athenians had condemned him to death for impiety:

Nature long ago condemned them and me both.

Dashiell Hammett died of lung cancer.

Raymond Chandler died of pneumonia, hardly warded off by uncompromising alcoholism.

The Loss of the Eurydice.

Where Hopkins rhymes portholes and mortals.

Beckett died of complications from emphysema.

Einstein once gave private lectures to small groups in Prague.

Some of which included Kafka.

Montaigne could not swim.

Unfortunately neither could Shelley.

Dish-washings, Carlyle called Jane Austen’s novels.

Swill, Steve Crane called Tennyson.

Antoine. Louis. Mathieu.

Orfamay Quest.

Sir Thomas Malory may have died in prison.

Vincenzo Bellini died of tuberculosis.

Or of an intestinal inflammation.

Handel owned a number of Rembrandts.

Schoenberg taught at the University of California at Los Angeles for eight years after leaving Nazi Germany.

And then was made to retire on a pension of $38 per month.

Rome has spoken. The debate is concluded.

How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?

The suspicion that Ambrose Bierce was a suicide. And perhaps did not even go to Mexico.

Teresa Guiccioli had hemorrhoids.

Edith Wharton and her husband used separate bedrooms.

Jones Very spent time in the same Boston insane asylum where Robert Lowell would be a patient a century later.

Doak Walker died after being paralyzed in a skiing accident.

Abba Kovner.

Rimsky-Korsakov died of a heart attack.

Leonard Bernstein died of a heart attack though already doomed by lung cancer.

A kind of shopgirl’s philosophy, Lévi-Strauss dismissed much of Sartre as.

An ecstatic schoolgirl anti-style, Leslie Fiedler accused Kerouac of.

Wharton died of a series of strokes.

Burn down their synagogues. Banish them altogether. Pelt them with sow dung. I would rather be a pig than a Jewish Messiah.

Amiably pronounced Luther.

I told you not go with drunken goy ever.

Says the ghost of Leopold Bloom’s father.

What the world would know of the Holocaust if the Germans had won.

Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. 1495–1498.

The fellow that was pilloried, I have forgot his name.

You can actually draw so beautifully. Why do you spend your time making all these queer things?

Picasso: That’s why.

Give me a laundry list and I will set it to music.

Said Rossini.

The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.

The friendship of Menander and Epicurus.

St. Anthony was illiterate.

And did not bathe. Ever.

The exact route by which Hannibal crossed the Alps.

Which to this day historians have not determined.

Voltaire said he would believe in doctors when he met one who was a centenarian.

Dying himself at eighty-four, of uremia.

A hundred devils trample me down if old drunkards do not outnumber old doctors, Rabelais said.

Is Frans Hals the most documented drinker among earlier artists?

Is Addison close to it among writers?

Walker Percy died of prostate cancer.

Lillian Nordica. The first American to sing at Bayreuth.

George London. The first American to sing Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi.

Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis.

Rube Waddell died of tuberculosis.

July 14, 1789. There were seven prisoners, total, in the fortress.

A man can die but once; we owe God a death.

The Colossus of Rhodes crashed down in an earthquake in 224 BC Fully three centuries later Pliny the Elder would comment on the monstrous bronze fragments that still lay about the harbor.

George Herbert played the lute.

Nordica died of pneumonia after a shipwreck in the Malay Archipelago.

London died after years of paralysis from a stroke.

An intriguing speculation of La Fontaine’s:

Was St. Augustine as wise as Rabelais?

Then Werther blew his silly brains out — unquote — while Charlotte went on cutting bread and butter.

Chares of Lindus.

Ann Rutledge died of typhoid fever. At nineteen.

Auden died of a heart attack in a hotel room.

Richard Tucker died of a heart attack in a hotel room.

Dirty, dull, and false.

Said R. L. S. of Tom Jones.

Yeats and Pound married cousins.

Coleridge and Southey married sisters.

Domenico Scarlatti died penniless. Farinelli saw to it that his family was cared for.

Our American Cousin.

Stevie Smith died of a brain tumor.

Ava Gardner died of pneumonia.

1893. Sixty feet six inches.

Lillian Russell went out of her way to arrange to meet Amos Rusie.

The anti-Semitic clause in the Magna Carta.

And mighty poets in their misery dead.

Dreiser died of a heart attack.

Mencken died of a heart attack.

Barbaric degrees of drinking, Arrian says Alexander took to by the end.

Edward Hopper Highway. Susanne Langer Mews.

Even Homer sometimes nods, Horace said.

Wordsworth sometimes wakes, Byron allowed.

Wordsworth on Byron in turn:

Perverted.

E. M. Forster died of a massive stroke.

Solomon Grundy.

I suppose my main source of annoyance with him was his affectation of not being a writer, but a farmer; this would have been pretentious even had he been a farmer.

Said Allen Tate, re Faulkner.

Correggio died either of heat prostration or from drinking foul water to relieve it.

Correggiosity.

The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.

Said Orwell.

So certain was Pliny the Younger that the histories of Tacitus would last through the centuries that he pleaded with Tacitus to be mentioned in them.

The centuries presently numbering nineteen.

Runnymede.

Rydal Mount.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze died impoverished and forgotten.

Dawn Powell was buried in a potter’s field.

Writer had but a glimpse of Faulkner.

As it happens, of Hemingway también.

I see no point in reading, said Louis XIV.

Pliny the Younger having been a nephew, not a son.

Ty Cobb died of prostate cancer.

Faulkner, at a funeral. Small and beady-eyed.

Hemingway at ringside.

Was Shane his first name or his last?

Faulkner in fact looking like a Eula Varner in-law.

Sit not down on the bushel.

You are leaving the American Sector.

Miguel de Unamuno died of a stroke.

Glenn Gould died of a stroke.

When and where did the last person die who still believed in the existence of Zeus?

Time flies like an arrow.

Fruit flies like a cantaloupe.

Green-wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, Lola Montez is buried in.

Bronislaw Malinowski died of a heart attack.

Vittorio Gassman died of a heart attack.

Lincoln never saw Europe.

The one person in the world he would have liked to meet, Lenin said, was Charlie Chaplin.

The one person in the world he would have liked to meet, Eliot said, was Joe Louis.

Camille Pissarro died of blood poisoning.

Le Douanier died of blood poisoning after neglecting a cut.

Is there a single Jane Austen volume that manages not to bring up the subject of money before the end of page one?

The Odessa steps.

Isak Dinesen died of what was recorded as emaciation.

W. S. Gilbert died while trying to rescue someone from drowning.

How old was the Virgin Mary?

Rogier van der Weyden’s panel of St. Luke sketching her portrait.

Clay Allison died of a broken neck.

Was Glenn Gould someone else who talked to himself, or would he have only been singing along?

Kenneth Rexroth’s incomparably godawful verses on the premise that people who shopped at Brooks Brothers caused the death of Dylan Thomas.

Malcolm Lowry, on the same death:

We drank his health, poured a libation of gin to his memory, and for some reason cut down a tree, likewise dead, and an old friend.

Died on Saturday,

Buried on Sunday.

Rexroth died of a heart attack.

Jean Cocteau died of a heart attack.

The Brahms German Requiem:

Listening to it is a sacrifice that should be asked of a man only once in his life, Shaw said.

Overheard, frequently, by Xenophanes:

How old were you when the Persians came?

Writer has actually written some relatively traditional novels. Why is he spending his time doing this sort of thing?

That’s why.

But where is your friend, Daddy?

Melville’s lifetime earnings from his fiction — from more than forty-five years — would appear to barely exceed ten thousand dollars.

Minnie Hauk died blind. And living on charity.

Lenin died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Juvenal’s poetry is not mentioned anywhere, by anyone, during his lifetime or until almost two hundred years after his death.

By the era of Petrarch and Boccaccio and Chaucer, he has become O Master Juvenal.

Words, words, words.

Vous sortez du Secteur Americain.

Does Lunita Laredo desert Major Brian Tweedy, or does she die young?

What time was it forty-five minutes before the beginning of time?

Wanamaker’s department store, in Manhattan, Richard Strauss once conducted concerts in.

At Actium, what with the torching of a number of his ships, many of Antony’s troops were roasted alive in their own red-hot armor, says Dio Cassius.

What a coarse, immoral, mean, and senseless work Hamlet is, Tolstoy said.

By brooks too broad for leaping

The lightfoot boys are laid. .

Is Clarissa still the longest single novel in the language?

I must dye one day, and as good this day as another.

Says a suicide in Rowley.

Trade is wholly inconsistent with a gentleman’s calling.

Said John Locke.

Salamis, Solon’s ashes were scattered at.

Kipling died of a hemorrhage from duodenal ulcers.

Alfred de Musset died of heart failure.

Lope de Vega wrote what may have been as many as fifteen hundred plays. Of which almost a third survive.

Thomas Eakins made Walt Whitman’s death mask.

Camerado is in no one’s dictionary.

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

In fields where roses fade.

Edmund Wilson died of a coronary occlusion.

Sir Thomas Beecham died of a stroke.

Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.

Being a fictitious name once used by Coleridge in the dragoons.

Kilgore Rosewater.

Being one used by Kurt Vonnegut in a hospital.

Bix Beiderbecke died of pneumonia while also confronting delirium tremens.

Fichte died of an unspecified fever.

The friendship of René Char and Martin Heidegger.

Charlemagne could read but could not write.

Joan of Arc could do neither.

How old were you, what were you doing, when you heard Lord Byron was dead?

Geneviève de Galard-Terraube.

Oliver Goldsmith played the flute.

Hopp, hopp! Hopp, hopp! Hopp, hopp!

The Pervigilium Veneris.

Gertrude Stein, to Jacques Lipchitz:

Besides Shakespeare and me, who do you think there is?

Luis Buñuel died of cancer of the bile duct and the liver.

Tennyson, at fifteen, etched it with a sharp stone into the face of a boulder in the woods:

Byron is dead.

Samuel Pepys once smacked his wife in the eye.

In point of fact, on December 19, 1664.

And so to bed.

Salvatore Quasimodo died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

I shall look as if I were dead, and that will not be true.

Zara Dolukhanova. Irina Arkhipova.

Tchitchikov.

Stein died of cancer of the uterus.

Berthe Morisot was a great-granddaughter of Fragonard.

And married Manet’s younger brother.

Judah Halevi was trampled to death by an Arab horseman at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Or died in ways unknown at Damascus.

St. Lawrence was broiled on a gridiron in Rome.

Or was beheaded.

William Ernest Henley died of tuberculosis.

At fifty-nine, George Eliot married a man twenty-one years younger than she.

Who on their Venice honeymoon jumped from a hotel-room balcony into the Grand Canal.

Did Professor Bloom take any books with him, do you know?

Someone said he had a twenty-six-volume complete Joseph Conrad. It’s only a weekend cruise.

Conway, New Hampshire, E. E. Cummings died in.

Conway, Massachusetts, Jack Chesbro died in.

Eliot died within months of her wedding, after catching a cold at a concert.

The kingdom of heaven, as described to Rilke by Marina Tsvetayeva after a lifetime of deprivation:

Never again to sweep floors.

Pascal died of abdominal convulsions.

Valéry died of throat cancer.

La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu.

But I always think as we tumble into bed

Of little Willy Wee who is dead, dead, dead.

De Quincey was less than five feet tall.

Hogarth was less than five feet tall.

James Stephens was less than five feet tall.

This is also a kind of verbal fugue, if Writer says so.

If still perhaps less than self-evident to the less than attentive.

B-flat Major, Op. 133.

The realization that Joan was not canonized until two decades into the twentieth century.

Or Thomas More until 1935.

Jesus did not urinate or move his bowels, said Valentinus.

Erasmus died of dysentery.

Luther died of apoplexy.

Mordecai Anielewicz. April 19, 1943:

Nine rifles. Fifty-nine pistols.

These cool blond people make me feel uneasy, said Einstein.

In 1914.

Does Dante want the reader to suspect that Ugolino ate his sons, or not?

I am getting on with my job, said Bernadette of Lourdes.

What is that?

Being ill.

François Boucher died at his easel at sixty-seven.

Painting a backside of Venus.

You can never do too much drawing, Tintoretto said.

In a dramatic, not a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and terror.

Nonetheless this is also in many ways even a classic tragedy, if Writer says so.

He is dead and gone, lady,

He is dead and gone.

Don’t cheer, boys. The poor devils are dying.

As great an artist as ever lived, Mendelssohn called Jenny Lind.

The greatest singer of us all, Callas called Rosa Ponselle.

William Carlos Williams died after a series of strokes.

John Cheever died of cancer that spread from the kidney to the bone.

Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, Melville is buried in.

Woodlawn Cemetery, in Toledo, Ohio, Addie Joss is buried in.

Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!

Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

Disraeli was thoroughly convinced that Mozart was a Jew.

Cagliostro died in a dungeon of the Inquisition.

German beer music, Nietzsche called Die Meistersinger.

Sde Boker.

A. E. Housman died of a heart condition.

Shostakovich died of a heart condition.

Café Guerbois.

The Bateau-Lavoir.

News that stays news, Pound identified literature as.

Hectic red.

Henry Adams died of a stroke.

Addison died of dropsy.

In search of Eldorado.

And of Ophir. Which, still, no one has ever discovered the location of.

Horace’s father was a manumitted slave.

Chekhov’s grandfather was a serf.

Ivory. Apes. Precious jewels. Peacocks.

Sandalwood.

Bangkok, Thomas Merton died in.

After stumbling into an electric fan while wet from a shower.

Or on the other end of the scale even a volume entitled Writer’s Block — which Writer is willing to wager some petulant soul will have it.

Depraved May.

Zeno was a pupil of Parmenides.

Who was a pupil of Xenophanes.

Who was a pupil of Anaximander.

Says Diogenes Laërtius.

Kālidāsa was the adopted son of an oxcart driver.

Yossele Rosenblatt.

Jack Dempsey died of a heart attack.

Nelson Algren died of a heart attack.

Congreve died after a coach accident.

Why should we honor those that die upon the field of battle, a man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

Said Yeats.

February 23, 1821.

July 8, 1822.

April 19, 1824.

The calamitous last years of Swift:

Labyrinthine vertigo, deafness, paralysis, aphasia, insanity.

Of Carson McCullers:

Stroke, paralysis, heart attack, breast cancer, brain hemorrhage.

Bertrand Russell, at seventy-six, survived an ocean plane crash in which a number of other passengers were killed.

I know death hath ten thousand several doors

For men to take their exits.

— Says Webster.

James Clarence Mangan. Who died of alcohol or opium or poverty or neglect.

And is alluded to a dozen times in Ulysses.

Giulio Romano.

Who is mentioned in The Winter’s Tale.

Bizet died of heart disease.

Hobbes died of palsy. At ninety-one.

Russell died at ninety-eight, of bronchial pneumonia.

Janáček died of bronchial pneumonia.

Scott died of the effects of a stroke.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Said Cesare Pavese.

The chimney smokes and I leave the room. Why do you think it a great matter?

Asked Marcus Aurelius.

He was gone in time not to be old.

Said Henry James of Stevenson’s death at forty-four.

I have lived long enough: my way of life

Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf.

Smetana died mad. From syphilis.

James died of a stroke.

Gainsborough, on his deathbed, to Joshua Reynolds:

Goodbye till we meet in the hereafter — we and van Dyck.

Shaw, Kipling, Housman, and Stanley Baldwin were among Thomas Hardy’s pallbearers.

Chaucer may have died of plague.

Sir Philip Sidney died of a sword wound in the thigh.

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Lautréamont died of tuberculosis at twenty-four.

Bonington died of tuberculosis at twenty-six.

Delacroix died of what began as a neglected cold.

Wittgenstein played the clarinet.

Lowry played the ukulele.

Emmy Destinn died of a stroke at fifty-one. Toscanini, Puccini, and Caruso had all been in love with her.

Hic jacet Arthurus Rex, quondam Rex que futurus.

The last book Freud read before his death was La Peau de chagrin by Balzac.

The last book Kafka read before his death was Verdi by Franz Werfel.

A man without feet, walking on his ankles.

Someone insisted having seen at Hiroshima.

There is no drinking after death.

Say Beaumont and Fletcher.

We shall receive no letters in the grave.

Said Johnson.

Samuel Richardson died of a stroke.

Henry Fielding died of dropsy.

There he stood, suffering embarrassment for the mistake of thinking that one may pluck a single leaf from the laurel tree of art without paying for it with his life.

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

Georges Seurat died of what was probably meningitis.

Does Writer still have headaches? And/or backaches?

As from the start, affording no more than renewed verification that he exists.

In a book without characters.

Not being a character but the author, here.

Turning older or no.

Writer is writing, is all. Still.

Chi son? Chi son? Son un poeta.

Che cosa faccio? Scrivo.

The act of painting transforms the painter’s mind into something similar to the mind of God.

Said Leonardo.

God, that other craftsman.

Said Picasso.

I am God.

Said Matisse.

— And who are you? said he. — Don’t puzzle me; said I.

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

Copernicus died of apoplexy.

Rimbaud died of cancer of the bone.

Or of syphilis.

Farewell and be kind.

Say the last words of the original edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Farewell as many as wish me well.

Say the last words of The Unfortunate Traveler.

El Greco was buried in a Toledo monastery in 1614. Four years later, for reasons not recorded, his body was removed from its vault.

To where, no one has learned since.

Did you ever see anyone die? Well, then I pity you, poor Severn.

Everywhere have I sought peace and found it only in a corner with a book.

Said Thomas à Kempis.

Protagoras died in a shipwreck.

Frater, ave atque vale.

Charleville.

Also there is Writer’s tendonitis.

Likewise again merely serving to ratify his existence.

Ben Jonson died partly paralyzed from strokes.

And in penury.

Jane Austen died of what was called neuralgia.

More recent speculation leaning toward lymphoma.

Escritor. Scrittore. Écrivain. Scriptor.

Hugh of Lincoln.

Simon of Trent.

Six centuries after Marathon, Pausanias was still able to read the names of the Greek dead engraved on columns at the site.

Eight centuries after the death of Pindar he was able to visit his tomb in Thebes, still then extant.

And death shall have no dominion.

Grover Cleveland Alexander died alone in a Nebraska rooming house.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, as seen by John O’Hara in the year or two before his death:

A prematurely little old man haunting bookshops unrecognized.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death.

Said Hemingway.

Longfellow, Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Franklin Pierce were among Nathaniel Hawthorne’s pallbearers.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The fear of death distresses me.

Emerson also later attended Longfellow’s funeral, but after his own lights had dimmed:

The gentleman we have just been burying was a sweet and beautiful soul; but I forget his name.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

Watching the burning of Carthage in the Third Punic War, Scipio the Younger quoted Homer on the fall of Troy — and then wept.

At realization of Rome’s own mortality, Polybius says.

Longevity all too often means not a long life, but a long death.

Said Democritus.

We ought to leave when the play grows wearisome.

Said Cicero.

Likewise Writer’s pinched nerve.

We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

I am real! said Alice, and began to cry.

Cervantes died of diabetes.

Or of cirrhosis of the liver.

Blake died of gallstones.

Scipio the Younger having been a grandson, not a son.

The hearsay, first recorded by a Stratford vicar fifty years later, that Shakespeare died of a fever after a night’s carousing with Jonson and Michael Drayton.

Dostoievsky died of a lung hemorrhage.

Tolstoy died of pneumonia, with a nudge from age.

Sir Thomas Browne’s will asked that his copy of Horace be placed on his coffin in the grave.

Botticelli spent his last years on crutches.

And on charity.

Botticelli.

Niels Bohr died of a stroke.

Why is there no explanation in Deuteronomy for Moses being made to die after Pisgah and not being permitted to cross over into the Promised Land?

How many People of Israel were there, in the Exodus?

Picasso died of heart failure, in part brought on by acutely congested lungs.

Matisse died after years as an invalid following operations for duodenal cancer.

La Derelitta.

But no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.

Beethoven died of dropsy, after having gone through pneumonia and jaundice.

Franz Grillparzer wrote Beethoven’s eulogy. Schubert participated in the funeral.

Twenty months later Grillparzer wrote Schubert’s epitaph.

Schwanengesang.

The Grosse Fuge.

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.

So many are dead that were young.

Or yet again, Writer’s sciatica.

Plato died at eighty or eighty-one, while attending a wedding.

The sun is larger than the Peloponnesus.

Allowed Anaxagoras.

This story of Jesus has helped us a lot.

Allowed Pope Leo X.

Or sometimes of course even a comedy of a sort, if Writer says so.

Death’s Jest-Book.

Only three people followed Stendhal’s bier.

His longest obituary contained three lines.

One misspelled his name.

Three.

There is no contemporary reference to François Villon after January of 1463, when he was thirty-two and had already at least twice been arrested for having killed.

Nothing has ever modified the assumption that he died either at blade thrust or on a gallows, however.

François Villon.

Some few decades after its opening, the bones of Voltaire and Rousseau were stolen from the Panthéon.

And discarded no one knows where.

St. Teresa of Lisieux died of tuberculosis.

St. Teresa of Ávila died of a lung hemorrhage.

Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of.

Or even his synthetic personal Finnegans Wake, if Writer so decides.

If only by way of it fitting no other category anyone might suggest.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

It is difficult to find those places today, and you would be no better off if you did, because no one lives there.

Said Strabo of the lost past.

Possibly even then thinking of Ophir.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

Goethe died of what began as a chest cold.

Emily Dickinson died of Bright’s disease.

And how dieth the wise man? As the fool.

Writer’s silent heart attack.

The legend that Pythagoras starved himself to death.

The legend that Diogenes committed suicide simply by holding his breath.

Only against Death shall he call for aid in vain.

Says an Antigone chorus re man’s estate.

It seems to us that spring has gone out of the year.

Said Pericles, honoring war dead.

Dante probably died of malaria.

Raphael died of an unsolved fever.

Or more probably from excessive bloodletting by his physicians.

Ille hic est Raphael.

Virgil was known to cough blood, presumably from tuberculosis.

Which is almost certainly what killed him.

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

— Says Aeneid I. There are tears for passing things, and things mortal touch the mind.

Requiem. Threnody. Dead march.

Dickens died of a paralytic stroke. At dinner.

Mozart died of renal failure from nephritis. Or of a streptococcal infection. Or of rheumatic fever. Or of a cerebral hemorrhage. Or of mercury poisoning. Or of arsenic poisoning. Or of exhaustion.

Or of possible miscalculated bloodletting, like Raphael.

Like Byron.

What artists do cannot be called work.

Wanhope.

Only one person, his secretary, attended Liebniz’s funeral.

One.

Writer’s right-lung lobectomy and resected ribs.

The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things. These things made me a painter, and I am grateful.

Said Constable.

The little Marcel died of bronchial pneumonia, in addition to his eternal asthma.

Bach died of a stroke.

Donne died of consumption.

When the city I extol shall have perished, when the men to whom I sing shall have faded into oblivion, my words shall remain.

Said Pindar.

Non omnis moriar. I shall not wholly die.

Said Horace.

Per saecula omnia vivam. I shall live forever.

Said Ovid.

Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.

Tell me, I pray thee, how fares the human race? If new roofs be risen in the ancient cities? Whose empire is it that now sways the world?

— Asked one of the fourth-century desert monks, the names of most forever unrecorded.

The time is close when you will have forgotten all things; and when all things will have forgotten you.

Said Marcus Aurelius.

Western wind, when will thou blow

The small rain down can rain?

It is the business of the novelist to create characters.

Said Alphonse Daudet.

Action and plot may play a minor part in a modern novel, but they cannot be entirely dispensed with.

Said Ortega.

If you can do it, it ain’t bragging.

Or was it possibly nothing more than a fundamentally recognizable genre all the while, no matter what Writer averred?

Nothing more or less than a read?

Simply an unconventional, generally melancholy though sometimes even playful now-ending read?

About an old man’s preoccupations.

Dizzy Dean died of a heart attack.

Writer’s cancer.

Christ, if my love were in my arms

And I in my bed again!

Then I go out at night to paint the stars.

Says a van Gogh letter.

Farewell and be kind.

VANISHING POINT

For Johanna and Scott

For Nicole and Jed

Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting.

Cézanne did it. Picasso did it with cubism. Then Pollock did it.

He busted our idea of a picture all to hell.

— Willem de Kooning

As we get older we do not get any younger.

— Henry Reed, Chard Whitlow

~ ~ ~

Author has finally started to put his notes into manuscript form.

A seascape by Henri Matisse was once hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art in New York — and left that way for a month and a half.

The speedometer needle after the crash that killed Albert Camus was frozen at 145, in kilometers — meaning roughly ninety miles per hour.

The driver of another vehicle said the car had passed him going faster than that.

Leonardo da Vinci’s father had four wives.

Not one of whom was Leonardo’s mother.

An early intention was that Hector Berlioz would become a physician.

Until he went headlong out a hospital window during his first dissection.

Author had been scribbling the notes on three-by-five-inch index cards. They now come close to filling two shoebox tops taped together end to end.

Bertrand Russell was twenty-one years older than Wilfred Owen.

And would still be alive fifty-two years after Owen was machine-gunned in France in World War I.

Orchestra play like pig.

Being an Arturo Toscanini explanation of why he would not apologize to his Metropolitan Opera musicians after cursing at them in Italian.

Twenty-five years after she broke off their relationship, Charles Dickens had a tryst with Maria Beadnell, his still-remembered first love.

And found her fat and foolishly affected and wholly witless.

From the earliest biographical note on Rembrandt:

He could read only the simplest Dutch. And that haltingly.

Rembrandt.

Werner Heisenberg was thirty-one when he won the Nobel Prize.

And nine years earlier had been given a grade of C on his doctoral examinations.

By his own admission, William Butler Yeats, at twenty-seven, had not yet ever kissed a woman.

The Bodleian Library at Oxford, in the mid-seventeenth century, exchanged its First Folio Shakespeare for a Third — on the premise that the latter was more complete.

Actually, Author could have begun to type some weeks ago. For whatever reason, he’s been procrastinating.

Karl Marx never in his life saw the inside of a factory.

Visiting Maecenas at Rome, in the decades before the beginning of the common era, Virgil and Horace were able to use his heated swimming pool.

At thirty-seven, in Key West, Ernest Hemingway badly marked up Wallace Stevens’ face in a never fully explained fistfight.

Stevens was fifty-seven when it happened.

One hundred and sixteen thousand viewers had strolled past Le Bateau, the upside-down Matisse, without comment, before it was rehung correctly.

At the age of seven or eight, Sigmund Freud once deliberately urinated on the floor of his parents’ bedroom.

Aaron Copland, on listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony:

Like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.

Mark Twain forgot Becky Thatcher’s name in the eight years between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. And called her Bessie Thatcher in the later book.

Thomas Hardy’s anecdote about looking up a word in the dictionary because he wasn’t certain it existed — and finding that he himself was the only authority cited for its usage.

Realizing that all of Byron’s closest friends — Shelley, for instance — would have addressed him as my lord.

Corinna once defeated Pindar five times in a sequence of poetry contests at Thebes.

Pindar called her a sow.

Emerson was once quoted as having criticized Swinburne.

Swinburne called him a toothless baboon.

Stuff Melville dismissed Emerson as.

I.e., as in stuff and nonsense.

Conducting Don Giovanni in Boston in 1913, Felix Weingartner actually set aside his baton and joined in the applause after John McCormack’s II mio tesoro.

One reason for Author’s procrastination is that he seems not to have had much energy lately, to tell the truth.

For work, or for much of anything else.

At seventy-three, Charles Ives won a Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony.

Which he had written when he was thirty.

Keats. Wondering aloud where Shakespeare was sitting when he wrote To be or not to be.

Now and again, Picasso utilized the whitewashed walls of rented villas to sketch on. Once, a landlord demanded fifty francs for a fresh coat of paint—

Leaving for Picasso’s amusement years later the question of what the man had cost himself.

I can’t listen to music too often. It makes you want to say stupid, nice things.

Said Lenin.

The legend that nine months after his death, Dante appeared to one of his sons in a dream and told him where to find the last thirteen cantos of the Paradiso, until then believed to be unwritten.

Erwin Panofsky was on leave from Hamburg University in 1933, teaching in New York, when he received a telegram stating that as a Jew he was therewith dismissed from his German position.

Affixed to the message on a separate colored strip: Cordial Easter Greetings, Western Union.

Tolstoy, to Chekhov:

You know I can’t stand Shakespeare’s plays, but yours are worse.

A Joshua Reynolds self-portrait — with a bust of Michelangelo in the background.

A Hogarth — with his dog.

Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.

Determined Wernher von Braun.

Nikolay Gogol’s possessions at the time of his death were little better than those of a pauper.

But did include a gold watch that had been Pushkin’s.

In the week before his suicide at seventeen, Thomas Chatterton is known to have lived on a single loaf of stale bread — stale to begin with, being all he could get on credit.

Shakespeare’s first child, his daughter Susanna, was born one day less than six months after his and Anne Hathaway’s marriage license was issued.

Shakespeare’s twins, Hamnet and Judith, were born less than two years later — a little less than three months before he turned twenty-one.

Mozart’s marital infidelities.

The suspicion re Constanze’s.

Author assumes that much of his lack of energy is simply a matter of age. But it’s been excessive, most recently.

Saint Anselm was said to have frequently excused himself from critical church meetings — to sit and read.

Vivaldi was said to have several times abruptly left the altar in the middle of saying Mass — to scribble down musical notations.

Queen Victoria once wrote to Lewis Carroll, at Oxford, asking for a copy of his next book—

And received an inscribed edition of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.

I do at least three paintings a day in my head. What’s the use of spoiling canvas when nobody will buy anything?

Said Modigliani, penniless in Paris in his mid-twenties.

Anna Akhmatova’s memoir, fifty-four years later, of her affair with Modigliani in 1911. Sitting in the rain under an unreliable umbrella in the Luxembourg Gardens and reciting Verlaine to each other — unable to afford anything grander.

Bessie Smith may have been left to bleed to death at a Mississippi roadside after an automobile accident when an ambulance first took away a less severely injured white woman.

Or did she die en route to a second hospital after having been refused admittance at a first?

Winston Churchill failed Latin at Harrow.

As did Napoleon at Brienne.

Living in a single attic room in The Hague for the last seven years before his death at forty-four, Spinoza was known to sometimes go as long as three full months without once stepping out of doors.

Occasions on which the Nazis returned the ashes of murdered prisoners to their families.

Via parcel post.

From an early New York Times review of Prokofiev:

There are a few passages, but only a very few, that bear recognizable kinship with what has hitherto been considered music.

Balzac’s first noteworthy mistress was twenty-two years older than he.

And the mother of seven children.

Except in music, Beethoven had no schooling whatever after the age of eleven.

Having cut, burned, punctured, and tormented the patient, the physician then demands a fee that he does not deserve.

Said Heraclitus, twenty-five hundred years ago.

Equally long ago — when Xenophanes called it unjust that athletes were more highly honored than teachers.

Al Jolson’s first performances, when young and often hungry:

Singing Rosie, You Are My Posy in a Bowery saloon — for a free meal.

Then again, Author doesn’t feel he’s lost much time by not typing, since he’s done a good deal of shuffling and re-arranging of the index cards. Author is pretty sure that most of them are basically in the sequence he wants.

The greatest work of art ever, Karlheinz Stockhausen called the destruction of the World Trade Center.

On the wall in Gerhard Richter’s studio at the time also — a photo of the same event.

If you want to know how you really feel about someone, take note of the impression an unexpected letter from him makes on you when you first see it on the doormat.

Said Schopenhauer.

Alexander Pope, who was denied burial in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey:

Having been Catholic.

Byron, likewise:

Having been Byron.

Nothing preposterous can ever be said that hasn’t already been said by one of the philosophers.

Said Cicero.

The nunnery that was shut down in England in 1520 because — quote — of the dissolute disposition and incontinence of the religious women of the house, by reason of the vicinity of Cambridge University

All four of Richard Wright’s grandparents were former slaves.

Juvenal, explaining the impossibility of living in a second-century Rome rife with vulgarity, noise, theft, myriad nightmare dangers such as fires and/or roofs collapsing, et cetera:

Not to add poets endlessly reading their work even in the worst heat of August.

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.

Said Muhammad Ali.

What cause have I to war at thy decree?

The distant Trojans never injured me.

Says Achilles, in Pope’s translation of the Iliad.

Marthe Boursin, whom Pierre Bonnard used as his model for Blue Nude in 1899.

And for Nude in the Bath—finished in 1946.

Charles Darwin was known to slice a fat book in half, to make it easier to handle.

Or to rip out any sections he was not interested in.

According to a friend who was in the room, Schubert composed his setting for Goethe’s Erlkonig in virtually less time than it had taken him to read the poem.

Scholars who are convinced that Shakespeare must certainly have been a military man. Or a lawyer. Or closely associated with royalty. Or even a Jew.

To which Ellen Terry: Or surely a woman.

Michelangelo once criticized the fact that Raphael was unfailingly accompanied by an entourage of pupils and admirers, saying he went parading about like a general—

To which Raphael: And you go about alone like a hangman.

Not that rearranging his notes means that Author has any real idea where the book is headed, on the other hand.

Ideally, in fact, it will wind up someplace that will surprise even Author himself.

Among the graffiti at Pompeii: Sarnius, Cornelio, suspendere.

Samius to Cornelius — Go hang yourself.

As an avowed admirer, Benjamin Franklin greatly hoped to meet Edward Gibbon. Gibbon declined.

Unwilling, he said, to socialize with someone who had revolted against his king.

A woman named Lorna Wilmott, who once let Dylan Thomas borrow her London flat. And returned to find that he had pawned her typewriter, her phonograph, the silver and her fur coat.

Maxim Gorky was the grandson of a Volga boatman.

A last castrato could still be heard in the Sistine Chapel choir into the second decade of the twentieth century.

The world goeth fast from bad to worse, said John Gower. Ca. 1375.

Richard Wagner’s pink underwear.

William Blake, at thirty, witnessed the death from consumption of his younger brother Robert—

And insisted he had seen Robert’s soul rising through the ceiling and clapping its hands for joy.

Maurice Utrillo was in and out of insane asylums repeatedly, commencing as early as at eighteen.

A mass of soapsuds and whitewash, said a critic of a Turner painting of a storm at sea.

I wonder what they think the sea’s like, said Turner.

Shelley wrote most of Prometheus Unbound perched high up on the overgrown ruins of the Baths of Caracalla.

One hundred and seventy years too early to have found himself in an ideal seat for the first concert of the Three Tenors.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

As is already more than self-evident.

I am I because my little dog knows me.

Said Gertrude Stein.

Dope makes me come out all over in spots.

Allen Ginsberg says Dame Edith Sitwell said.

The first two publishers to whom Anne Frank’s father submitted her diary — turned it down.

Bysshe, everyone knew him as.

Momentarily startled to note that Luther’s wife was an ex-nun.

Then again recollecting that Luther in turn was an ex-monk.

Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were held in such esteem that in the century after their deaths Athens maintained official versions of their plays on file — and made it contrary to law to alter a single word in new productions.

Victor Hugo could never get past page four of Le Rouge et le Noir.

As he grew older, W. H. Auden was known for living in extraordinary filth. His own brother acknowledged that he frequently urinated in his kitchen sink.

He is the dirtiest man I have ever liked, Stravinsky said of him.

Was it Menander who announced that his new play was finished — all he had to do was write it?

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

This presumably by now self-evident also.

The Egyptians appear never in their history to have enjoyed one day of freedom.

Said Josephus, ca. 95 AD.

Beguiled by the romance of Gauguin’s removal to Tahiti.

Until remembering that the man deserted a wife and four young children at home.

I suppose all my books are gone.

Some, Dilly said. We had to.

Boccaccio’s last years were spent in enervating poverty.

In his will, Petrarch left him his own best heavy coat with which to confront the Tuscan winters.

Bach was once involved in a brawl in which he precipitously drew his sword.

Handel, the same. Though in both instances sensibleness prevailed.

Thomas Gainsborough, while an art student in London:

Deeply read in petticoats I am.

Dissection of corpses was not only illegal in Renaissance Florence, but punishable by death.

Leonardo managed to cleave into some thirty-odd nonetheless.

In his youth, Michelangelo performed some of his with a kitchen knife and household scissors.

Leonardo was also assiduous in attending executions — presumably to study the muscular contortions of the hanged.

Christopher Marlowe died at twenty-nine, leaving behind four younger sisters in Canterbury. All four probably had to make their mark instead of writing their name when signing a document.

The Captain Thomas Hardy — a relative — who was in command of Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar.

The Marshal Ludwig Wittgenstein — not related — who was the youngest of the opposition commanders during Napoleon’s Russian campaign.

How many things there are in this world that I do not want.

Said Socrates, strolling through a marketplace in Athens.

There was no English translation of Oedipus Rex until a full century after the death of Shakespeare.

Sydney, Australia, Nellie Melba died in.

A mention of Henry David Thoreau in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s diary: Mr. Thorow.

Ugly as sin, the same entry calls him.

T. S. Eliot was afraid of cows.

Actually, in addition to not knowing where things might be headed, Author has to wonder whether his very typewriter will get there in the process. His less and less dependable forty-plus-year-old manual portable.

Particularly with the once ubiquitous neighborhood repair shop seeming no longer to exist.

Samuel Johnson was forced to drop out of Oxford because his family could not manage the costs.

And became Doctor Johnson only at sixty-four when he was granted an honorary degree.

Haydn’s Oxford Symphony.

After an honorary degree of his own.

Filippo Lippi’s reputation as a womanizer. To the extent that Cosimo de’ Medici once had him locked in, in an effort to keep him at his pigments.

The legend that Goya, at twenty-four, in Rome, broke into a convent and abducted a nun.

Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were schoolboys together.

In later years, as a government clerk, Lamb stole as many as two hundred steel pens for Coleridge’s use.

Donatello. Brunelleschi. Uccello. Michelozzo. Antonio Pollaiuolo.

All of whom at one time or another assisted Lorenzo Ghiberti in designing or casting his doors for the Florence Baptistery

One London newspaper ran an actual news-style obituary when John Galsworthy killed off Soames Forsyte late in The Forsyte Saga.

Hannah Pritchard, the finest tragic actress of the eighteenth century — who allegedly never read a book.

An inspired idiot, Johnson called her.

Mr. Eliot’s work is no doubt brilliant, but it is not exactly the kind of material we care to add to our list.

Said the British publisher John Lane of a submission—after Eliot had published Prufrock.

The publisher did not care to add brilliant material to his list.

Ingram Frizer, who stabbed Marlowe, pleaded self-defense and went unpunished.

Superb administrative talent, Kafka’s superiors at the insurance company said he possessed.

Brahms so respected Dvořák as a colleague that he several times willingly assumed the chore of reading proofs of his scores for him.

Typewriter ribbons, too, Author finds it harder and harder to locate.

And typing erasers.

Did El Greco use hashish?

Tacitus, on Britain, a century after the Roman conquest:

A rude, scattered, and warlike people.

Hemingway was extremely slow to offer a guest a drink, said Virgil Thomson.

Schiller, writing to tell Goethe that Kant would contribute to a periodical he was editing—

And referring to Kant as the old bird.

Cleopatra never learned to speak Latin.

Evidently bedding Caesar and Antony via Greek.

The friendship of Picasso and Stravinsky.

Orbilius, a teacher of grammar. Remembered for two thousand years because Horace was one of his pupils — and named him the Whacker, for thrashings with his switch.

A letter written in Asia Minor, in 1615, and eventually delivered in London to:

The right worshipful fraternity of sirenical gentlemen, that meet the first Friday of every month, at the sign of the Mermaid in Bread Street.

January 1889, in Turin. Nietzsche, weeping, throws his arms around the neck of a mare being beaten by a coachman and then collapses in the street. Essentially the point of no return into his final madness.

To dress before her long-remembered 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, Marian Anderson had to seek out someone’s private home:

The Washington hotels would not take us.

Dostoievsky’s profound, criminal, saintly face, Thomas Mann remarks.

Trash, Lenin viewed him as.

A volume of Sherlock Holmes, which fictional Leopold Bloom has borrowed from a Dublin library and which is thirteen days overdue on fictional June 16, 1904, was listed as missing by the actual library in 1906.

380 AD Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Bishop of Constantinople — ordered Sappho’s poems to be burned.

1073 AD Pope Gregory VII — ordered Sappho’s poems to be burned.

Why is Orestes so central in so much of surviving Greek drama?

Or should the question be why bloodying one’s mother was so popular a topic?

The man’s simplicity was nothing short of astounding.

Said Abélard, regarding the uncle of Héloise who arranged for him to actually move into their home while tutoring her.

The inner truth and greatness of Nazism, Martin Heidegger spoke of.

A fatherly type, Knut Hamsun called Hitler.

Erich Kleiber held more than 130 rehearsals before conducting the world premiere of Wozzeck at the Berlin State Opera in 1925.

We are dealing here, from a musical viewpoint, with a capital offense, said one of the next morning’s reviews.

Youngsters, marching in what they announce as Indian file.

Who hearing them would know that the phrase comes from Fenimore Cooper?

Nahum Tate’s once regularly staged version of King Lear.

In which Cordelia and Edgar fall in love and live happily ever after.

I have met no one who has seen a sea on the west side of Europe. The truth is, no one has discovered if Europe is surrounded by water or not.

Said Herodotus, ca. 445 BC.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning so admired George Sand that she knelt and kissed her hand when they met.

Which Beethoven had once done with Haydn.

Geoffrey Chaucer was once accused of rape. And paid an unrecorded sum for the woman to withdraw her suit.

Coleridge, in acute financial need during a period of his severest addiction to opium, was given an anonymous gift of one hundred pounds.

From Thomas De Quincey.

Homer himself left no inheritance.

Said Ovid’s father, wishing his son might pursue a more remunerative occupation.

The erotic drawings that John Ruskin came upon in Turner’s studio after Turner’s funeral — and burned.

The seventy or more drawings by Degas of women from Paris brothels — with which one of Degas’ brothers did the same.

In research for his biography of Henry James, Leon Edel read fifteen thousand James letters.

Including those on which the frequent exhortation Burn this, please had obviously been ignored.

Why does it seem like the earliest fragment of American history that Author can remember ever having learned—

That Dolley Madison saved Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington when the British burned the White House in 1814?

Is Plautus the first author ever to refer to Alexander of Macedon as Alexander the Great?

Bach spent the last twenty-seven years of his life as cantor at the Thomasschule in Leipzig.

As the best musicians are not available, we must accept a man of moderate ability — had said a member of the Leipzig Municipal Council in hiring him.

Isadora Duncan lost two children when a chauffeur forgot to set the brake while cranking an automobile and it lurched into the Seine.

Alle Menschen müssen sterben.

In the First Pythian Ode, Pindar describes an eruption of Mount Etna.

In Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus describes an eruption of Mount Etna.

In Aeneid III, Virgil describes an eruption of Mount Etna.

But I will pull out of all this in Taormina. Under Etna, wait and see.

Said Malcolm Lowry, depressed after an eviction and awaiting freighter passage from New York to Sicily.

Asses loaded with books.

Mohammed, who could not read or write, dismissed the ews as.

Emily Dickinson left behind 1,775 poems.

Meaning a fraction less than one per week from every week of her adult life.

Dolley Madison also saved the silver.

How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?

Nothing written by Dante’s hand is known to exist — no manuscript, no document of any sort, nor is there even a signature.

Cf. six authenticated signatures of Shakespeare’s — among other items.

Athens, in the era of the ranking dramatists, or even as late as Plato, had no public library.

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture — for wild beasts to fight in.

Grumbled Voltaire.

At certain seasons he kept those boots on for such a length of time that when he drew them off, the skin came away altogether with the leather.

Said Ascanio Condivi, a friend of Michelangelo’s.

As if painted with mud. Hideous. Irremediable. Like the designs schoolchildren make by squeezing flies between the folds of a sheet of paper. Worse.

Being but few of the more typical critical comments on Cezanne in the year or so before his death.

Wallace Stevens’ wife Elsie had an eighth-grade education.

Nora Joyce had a year or two less.

Among Annabella Milbanke’s charges, when seeking a separation from Byron:

That he shot off pistols in a drawing room while she lay one floor above in labor.

Truman Capote could not publish In Cold Blood until the two murderers, with whom he had become inordinately intimate, were executed.

I’m beside myself with joy, he was heard to say when a date was set.

Billie Holiday sang with an Artie Shaw band in a New York hotel ballroom in 1938.

And was not only not allowed in the hotel dining room, but made to come and go through the hotel kitchen.

Hillel. Unable to afford tuition.

And who almost froze to death listening to classroom lectures on an outside window ledge.

Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which characters depart Verona by ship — when the city is nowhere near the sea.

Shakespeare’s King John — in which the Magna Carta is not once mentioned.

Santa Monica, California, Miles Davis died in.

At forty-two, teaching at the University of Chicago, Thorstein Veblen had still not been promoted above the rank of instructor.

Brahms was forty-three before he completed his first symphony.

A symphony is no joke — unquote.

This will never do.

Pronounced the opening sentence of a review by Francis Jeffrey of Wordsworth’s The Excursion.

It is rain upon rocks. Who can understand him. Said Byron of the same poem.

Five hundred years, virtually to the year, before the Taliban:

Ornaments, women’s jewelry, perfumes, mirrors, cosmetics, chessboards, playing cards, lutes, harps, carnival masks, books, illuminated manuscripts, paintings especially of women, more—

Into Savonarola’s Bonfires of the Vanities.

The friendship of Wittgenstein and John Maynard Keynes.

The many to whom, for years, Robert Schumann was known only as Clara Wieck’s husband.

And are you musical too, Mr. Schumann?

Melville, late along, possessed no copies of his own books.

Pope’s legs were so thin that he wore three pairs of stockings to partially disguise them.

Kant, in the same predicament, had to contrive special devices to keep his stockings up at all.

José da Silva, the Portuguese-Jewish playwright who was forcibly converted to Christianity — and then was burned alive by the Inquisition for secretly continuing to practice Judaism.

With one of his plays being performed in a Lisbon theater on the same afternoon.

Sophocles may have choked to death on a grape. Well past ninety.

Any number of literary works were flung into Savonarola’s conflagrations with the rest. With printing still in its essential infancy, how many irreplaceable single copies of Greek and Latin manuscripts were lost?

The fact that Isaac Babel was executed in a Moscow prison cellar.

The strong possibility that the manuscript of a novel confiscated at his arrest still exists in Stalin-era files.

William Harvey’s medical practice fell off radically after the publication of his treatise on the circulation of the blood.

’Twas believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained, explains John Aubrey.

Georges Seurat, who was dead at thirty-one.

And had sold only two paintings in his life.

Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein, who both studied under Leopold Auer.

Who studied under Joseph Joachim.

To whom Brahms dedicated his only violin concerto.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Said Cervantes, in Part II of Don Quixote in 1615.

Said Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621.

Said Saint Ambrose — in the late fourth century.

Raphael’s stanze in the Vatican—

Where horses were stabled during the sack of Rome by armies of Charles V.

Picasso, in his seventies, discussing form and structure in art.

Then tossing aside an ink-stained desk blotter with the comment: Jackson Pollock.

Author still uses a typewriter instead of a computer because?

Can he really say? Why does he still listen to music on 33⅓ rpm long-playing vinyl phonograph records?

The still extant bill of sale for fifty-eight pairs of gloves that Balzac purchased at one time.

Many of Ronsard’s poems were set to music in his lifetime.

Deaf from sixteen, he never heard them.

Giorgio de Chirico’s habit of doing new versions of his better known works, with faked dates decades after the fact, and then insisting that these were the originals.

Ouspensky, at the very commencement of World War I, taking note of a military truck loaded with crutches.

For limbs that had not yet been lost.

In 1827, an earliest Paris production of Hamlet, in English. With Hugo, Dumas, Eugene Delacroix, Berlioz, Alfred de Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, and Gerard de Nerval all known to have attended.

If it would please God that I might go and tend sheep with my sister and brother.

Said Joan of Arc, after her first several victories.

Clemenceau, to a new private secretary:

Certain letters you will have to draft yourself. Now listen: a sentence consists of a noun and a verb. If you want to use an adjective, come and ask me first.

Tolstoy kept a portrait of Dickens on the wall in his study.

Handel hung in Gluck’s bedroom.

Women, in ancient Greece, were not permitted to do the shopping.

Shakespeare’s sonnets, published in 1609, many probably written in the 1590s.

The realization that there had never been a sonnet in English at all until ca. 1540, when Sir Thomas Wyatt translated Petrarch.

Vaslav Nijinsky spent the last thirty-two years of his life in an insane asylum.

Thirty-two.

In addition to his native German, Heinrich Schliemann spoke English, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Russian, Arabic, and Latin.

Most of which he had taught himself.

In addition to his native French, Jean-Francois Champollion spoke Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Chaldean, Sanskrit, Persian, and Chinese.

And possibly others.

For some years, Marcel Duchamp was the second-ranked chess master in France.

Giordano’s Andrea Chénier—which concludes with Chénier and Madeleine di Coigny strolling off hand in hand toward the guillotine.

Who in real life probably never met.

Claudio Muzio. Elisabeth Rethberg. Rosa Ponselle. Zinka Milanov.

Jane Austen, at the thought of attending an opera:

Very tiresome.

Priests ought never to have children — except by married women.

Says Rousseau in the Confessions.

The lunatic woman’s suffrage demonstrator, affronted by its nudity, who repeatedly slashed the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery in London in 1914.

Lucrezia, wife of Andrea del Sarto, model for so many of his exotic Madonnas. Long after his death, a young apprentice is rendering a copy of one in a Tuscany church when an ancient shawled creature who had been at prayer pauses beside him. At last a hand lifts:

It was I, she says, and shuffles on.

Keats showed On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer to Cowden Clarke the morning after he wrote it.

Apparently Clarke did not know the difference between Cortés and Balboa either.

Chapman. Who in his day was far better known as a playwright than for his translations.

And yet existed at times in calamitous poverty.

I am merry when I have nere a penny in my purse.

Says a letter of Thomas Nashe, who himself saw moments that must have sometimes changed his tone.

Xenophanes, who lived to be one hundred.

And buried his sons.

As did Anaxagoras.

Maurice Ravel’s refusal of the Legion of Honor—

On the premise that government had no right to judge artists.

After a bench heaved from a window during a 1527 political uprising in Florence smashed the left arm of Michelangelo’s David, Giorgio Vasari was one of two sixteen-year-old boys who managed to salvage the pieces.

Alexander A. Alekhine.

Undesirable originality, Beethoven’s Eroica was once condemned for.

Obscure, uncouth, barbaric, and affected, someone labeled an early volume of Yeats.

Very great is the number of the stupid. Said Galileo.

There are always more fools in the majority than in the minority.

Said Anatole France.

One of C. P. Cavafy’s earliest pieces of writing, an essay, in English:

Give Back the Elgin Marbles.

I wish women would repeat the Lord’s Prayer before opening up their mouths.

Said Luther.

From a Hemingway letter, on T. S. Eliot:

A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man.

On Scott Fitzgerald:

A rummy and a liar.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

Begins an Orwell essay dated 1941.

Rank vegetable growth, Rebecca West called the sentences of Henry James. One feels that if one took cuttings of them one could raise a library in the garden.

Brussels, René Magritte died in.

O, what a number of lies this young man has told about me.

Said Socrates, the first time he heard Plato read one of his dialogues.

Says a legend recorded by Diogenes Laërtius.

Author’s pleasure in learning that the main thoroughfare through Copenhagen is named Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard.

The Marquis de Sade, a century and a half before On the Road:

Writing One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom on a single continuous forty-five-foot roll of paper.

Brahms had blond hair.

As did Mozart.

And Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Hemingway on Sherwood Anderson:

A slob.

The first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species sold out in one day.

Pope Sixtus IV, in the late fifteenth century, was forced to actually issue a bull threatening excommunication for anyone who did not return volumes borrowed from the Vatican library.

Bach had twenty children, of whom nine survived him.

Twenty.

Mozart had seven, of whom two lived.

Vladimir Mayakovsky in New York, in 1925: The filth is worse than in Minsk.

And it is unimaginably filthy in Minsk.

Dostoievsky wrote The Gambler in sixteen days.

Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage in ten. At twenty-one.

Donizetti wrote L’Elisir d’Amore in a week.

The friendship of Crane and Joseph Conrad.

The night before the audition that gained her admission into the Stockholm Academy of Music, Birgit Nilsson milked ten cows on her family’s farm.

The first signed work of visual art, a Greek vase, ca. 700 BC.

Its signature Aristonothos.

Caesar, asked to name the best death:

A sudden one.

Visiting friends, Cyril Connolly was known to mark his place in their books with anything from a string of spaghetti to a leaf of lettuce.

And to depart leaving it there.

Brahms had blue eyes.

As did Abraham Lincoln.

And Hitler.

Giacomo Meyerbeer selflessly gave Richard Wagner all manner of aid at the start of Wagner’s career.

For which in turn Wagner later scurrilously denigrated him in an anti-Semitic pamphlet.

Anonymously.

Rudyard Kipling’s only son was killed fighting with the Irish Guards in World War I.

We have the same job, Virginia.

Said Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to Virginia Woolf.

The only writing I have ever been jealous of.

Said Woolf of Mansfield.

The credible folktale that Marco Polo and his father and uncle, disreputable and queerly dressed, were not recognized and almost denied entry to the Venice family home on their return from the East — after twenty-four years.

Jorge Santayana, it originally was.

Josephine was six years older than Napoleon.

Keep apart, keep apart and preserve one’s soul alive — that is the teaching for the day. It is ill to have been born in these times, but one can make a world within a world.

Wrote George Gissing.

Je suis le savant au fauteuil sombre.

Painting at the court of Sultan Mohammed II in Constantinople, Gentile Bellini improvised a severed head of John the Baptist.

The sultan deemed it unrealistic — and on the spot had a passing slave decapitated for Bellini’s edification.

In his comick scenes he is seldom very successful.

Said Johnson of Shakespeare.

Spurinna.

Charlotte Brontë was four feet nine inches tall.

Sarah Bernhardt was illegitimate.

Marseilles, Rimbaud died in.

Wondering if youngsters still in fact read Marco Polo.

In 1490, a Rome census showed a population of roughly ninety thousand.

Including 6,800 registered prostitutes.

She wouldn’t care a straw whether her husband was an artist or a cobbler, said Haydn of his wife.

Whom he also called an infernal beast.

The Yannis Ritsos verses in which Greek antiquity and the present exist simultaneously — and Phaedra smokes too many cigarettes.

Robert Browning outlived Elizabeth by almost thirty years.

James Dickey flew more than one hundred combat missions in the Pacific in World War II.

Joseph Heller flew sixty in Europe.

Addison and Steele were schoolboys together.

As were Jonathan Swift and William Congreve.

As were John Dryden and John Locke.

Blake’s portraits of Mohammed, Canute, Owen Glendower, Wat Tyler, Lot, William Wallace, and others.

All of whom he insisted had posed for him, in visitations.

The occasions during their collaboration when Braque and Picasso could not always say with certainty which cubist canvas had been the work of whom.

My ex-wife, Picasso would later speak of Braque as.

Beethoven was once seen to throw a dish at a servant. And again at a waiter.

My musical career would no doubt at last become quite charming, if only I could live one hundred and fifty years.

Said Berlioz, when he finally began to receive the critical esteem he deserved.

François Villon’s mother was illiterate.

As was Walt Whitman’s.

As was D. H. Lawrence’s father.

Not long after Scott Fitzgerald’s death, Scribner’s let The Great Gatsby go out of print.

And then rejected the collection called The Crack-Up.

I am Cinna the poet. I am not Cinna the conspirator.

Claude Monet’s love of the sea:

When I die, I should like to be buried in a buoy.

Heinrich Heine’s grave in Montmartre was deliberately despoiled by the Nazis in World War II.

An image that has lingered in Author’s mind: Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, some few years afterward, silently bearing flowers to the site.

Almost nothing whatever is known about Livy.

Rome’s historian has no history, as Taine put it.

Virtually nothing is known about Lucretius either.

Ignoring Saint Jerome’s silliness about him having been driven mad by a love potion.

Zora Neale Hurston’s jesting claim that she once avoided a pedestrian traffic ticket by telling the police officer that since she always saw white people cross on green, she naturally therefore assumed the red was for her.

The Calvary sculpted by Claus Sluter in the late fourteenth century which included the figure of Jeremiah — wearing eyeglasses.

Be silent, good people. I am the Protestant whore.

Called Nell Gwyn out a carriage window to an anti-Catholic London mob.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Whose 1944 Free French reconnaissance flight went down without a sign somewhere off Corsica.

Where they burn books, they’ll end up burning people, said Heine.

In 1821.

The painter’s painter, Whistler called Velazquez.

Everything that Velazquez does may be regarded as absolutely right, said Ruskin.

Leopold Bloom, thinking of the overheard tinkle into a chamber pot as a kind of chamber music.

The likelihood that Joyce adopted the title for his poems from the same pun.

Tamerlane, in 1398, seeking justification in the Koran for an attack on Delhi and given a verse by the mullahs: 0 Prophet, make war upon the infidels and unbelievers, and treat them with harshness.

Whereupon he massacred one hundred thousand unarmed prisoners.

The First Crusade, achieving Jerusalem three hundred years before that, as witnessed by the priest Raymond of Agiles:

Wonderful things were to be viewed. Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded. Others were tortured for several days and then burned in flames. In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet.

A decorator tainted with insanity, Harper’s Weekly once called Gauguin.

Whitman never saw Europe.

Wallace Stevens did not either.

Thunder occurs when clouds collide.

Said Anaxagoras.

Teacher, look! The birds are on fire!

Fra Angelico. Who never painted without first offering a brief prayer.

Bach. Who would not compose without doing so also.

Thanks to God, I have always remained an athiest.

Said Luis Buñuel.

Euripides died in Macedonia. Athens subsequently sent formal emissaries asking that his remains be returned for burial in his homeland. Macedonia said no, electing to retain the honor.

Tchaikovsky’s utterly ill-conceived marriage, which lasted only weeks.

And in fleeing from which he initially attempted suicide — and then underwent a nervous breakdown.

Physics is much too difficult for me. I wish I were a film comedian.

Said Wolfgang Pauli.

Kuesnacht, near Zurich, Carl Jung died in.

The correspondence between T. S. Eliot and Groucho Marx.

Initiated by Eliot.

Vesalius passed his final examinations at the University of Padua with such astonishingly high grades that the following morning he was appointed a professor of surgery.

For all that later sensibilities would find it mawkish, Dickens himself always wept when he read the death of Little Nell in public.

Puccini admitted that he did the same after writing Mimi’s death in La Bohème.

From a letter of 1682, to the effect that a ship carrying Quakers is en route to Cape Cod:

Much spoil can be made of selling the whole lot to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar and we shall do the Lord great good by punishing the wicked. Yours in the bowels of Christ—

Cotton Mather.

Forks were first introduced in England in 1611.

Which is to say, about the time Shakespeare was writing The Winter’s Tale and/or The Tempest and preparing to retire to Stratford.

Milton treated his three daughters so sternly that when he decided to marry for a third time, one of them said that news of a wedding was of no consequence:

But might I hear of his death, that were something.

Realizing that through the entire Middle Ages, Italian merchants still kept their books in Roman numerals.

The curiosity that Jesus never appears to condemn slavery, though mentioning it in passing more than once.

The best-selling novels in five of the first fourteen years of the twentieth century were by Winston Churchill.

An earlier Winston Churchill.

There are eighty-six chapters in Middlemarch.

And eighty-six epigraphs.

For years, Vachel Lindsay sold his poetry on street corners. The first time he did so, in New York in 1905, he took in thirteen cents.

And was overjoyed.

No single book or manuscript is listed among Shakespeare’s possessions in his will.

There was a man and a dog too this time.

The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.

Hackenbush.

Hobbes. Descartes. Pascal. Spinoza. Locke. Leibniz. Hume. Kant. Schopenhauer. Kierkegaard. Nietzsche. Santayana. Wittgenstein.

Not one of whom ever married.

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,

He would have written sonnets all his life?

Clement Greenberg was asked to deliver the eulogy at Jackson Pollock’s funeral, but refused — outraged that Pollock had caused the death of an innocent passenger in the crash that killed him.

As if written illegally, under fear of the police.

Bertolt Brecht said of Kafka’s fiction.

Like a naked man among people wearing clothes.

Milena Jesenská perceived him.

An illegitimate wretch who is a scholar is more worthy than an ignorant high priest.

Said Maimonides.

The Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouse.

Hals himself was eighty-four.

Athens, 399 BC. A jury of 501 male citizens over the age of thirty.

Guilty, 281 to 220.

Goethe wrote Werther in four weeks.

Schiller wrote William Tell in six.

Laurence Olivier, shoring up the confidence of a young Alec Guinness during a rehearsal of Twelfth Night:

Fascinating. I’d never realized before that Malvolio could be played as a bore.

Agathon, the first Greek dramatist to write a tragedy without using a subject from myth, and at whose home Plato situates the Symposium — and by whom not one play remains.

Modern critical interpretations of Oedipus Rex that suggest Jocasta knows all along.

Commentary on the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco dates from as early as the mid-I200s.

Elie Wiesel’s advance against royalties for the first American edition of Night was $100.

Daniele da Volterra, who was commissioned by Pope Paul IV to conceal some of the nudity in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.

And was thereafter referred to as the Breeches-Maker.

Michelangelo was still alive at the time of the pope’s decision.

Tell his Holiness to look to setting the world in order. To reform a picture costs no great trouble.

Montaigne, in all of his autobiographical pages, mentions his wife only less than does Dante in his.

The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Hamburg in 1542, 1547, and 1564.

And in Vienna in 1599.

Caedmon, sing me something!

As Plutarch reports it, after Socrates’ trial — and his death — his accusers were looked upon with such disfavor that they eventually hanged themselves.

Alfred North Whitehead was made to retire at Imperial College, London, at the age of sixty-two.

Harvard was quite content to have him move there and teach for an additional thirteen years.

Rome, Ingeborg Bachmann died in.

Anthony Powell, George Orwell, Henry Green, and Cyril Connolly all attended Eton at the same time.

Along with Ian Fleming.

Malcolm Lowry, William Empson, Kathleen Raine, and Michael Redgrave were contemporaries at Cambridge.

Along with Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and Kim Philby.

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

The First Folio Shakespeare, in 1623, was only the second Workes of a playwright published in England. Ben Jonson’s had been the first, seven years earlier — and to a certain ridicule, for seeming pretentious.

Francis Beaumont, of Beaumont and. So astute a critical reader that even Jonson himself, according to Dryden, asked him to look through his manuscripts and suggest revisions.

The Black Death, 1348-49. Presumably brought to Europe on shipboard by rats from the Near East.

Nonetheless leading to tens of thousands of Jews being massacred across Spain and France and Germany, accused of poisoning wells.

Salvador Dali, once lecturing at the Sorbonne, began by removing his right shoe and sock — and then soaked his bare foot in a pan of milk throughout.

God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.

An anonymous Cynic philosopher, re the Odyssey:

I do not find that Odysseus the Wise does anything but dine and chase women.

T. E. Lawrence, who spent four years working on a new translation of same—

And then decided he fundamentally agreed with the antique earlier judgment.

D. H. Lawrence, on a difference between the novel and older poetic epics:

In a novel, you know there is a water closet on the premises.

In a letter from Florence Hardy, mentioning that her husband is at his desk:

Writing an intensely dismal poem with great spirits.

Eliot took private French lessons in Paris from Alain-Fournier, evidently just when the latter had begun writing Le Grand Meaulnes.

And four years before he would be shot and killed in a German ambush in World War I.

Remembering that a faithful small-scale copy of The Last Judgment by Marcello Venusti, made before garments were added, exists in Naples.

Gigantic Emily Brontë Emily Dickinson called her.

A Wayward Nun, Dickinson called herself.

David Garrick, retiring from the stage:

Now I will sit down and read Shakespeare.

Schrödinger’s cat.

Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good bye, good bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go.

Theories that Milton’s blindness was caused by glaucoma. Or by detached retinas.

Or congenital syphilis.

Above Rodin’s grave at Meudon:

A cast of The Thinker.

Like Alexander with the Iliad, Napoleon carried a copy of Plutarch’s Lives with him eternally.

Being reminded that Garrick would also later be buried adjacent to the Shakespeare monument in Westminster Abbey.

Max Beerbohm lived in Italy for most of forty-six years.

And never learned to speak Italian.

A Vatican cardinal, visiting Nicolas Poussin’s modest house in Rome: How distressing that you have no servant.

Poussin: How distressing that you have so many.

Tolstoy had an illegitimate son he never acknowledged.

Karl Marx had an illegitimate son he never acknowledged.

Henrik Ibsen had an illegitimate son he never acknowledged.

Teaching mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, Isaac Newton lectured so abstractly that often no students appeared at his classes at all.

That utterly dreary German scoundrel Wagner.

Dostoievsky called him.

Whose tale, locked for some decades, now, in Author’s memory?—

Of someone visiting at an old people’s home and noticing a woman beyond an unclosed bathroom door — scrubbing her face in a toilet bowl.

And why peculiarly indelible?

James Baldwin borrowed money from Marlon Brando with which to finish his first novel.

Phoenix, Arizona, Frank Lloyd Wright died in.

Learning from the Divine Comedy that one-way traffic had been established in thirteenth-century Rome.

Within weeks of John Berryman’s father’s suicide, when Berryman was twelve, his mother remarried. To their landlord.

Books agreeing with Copernicus or Kepler or Galileo — i.e., acknowledging that the earth moved around the sun — remained on the Catholic Index until as late as 1835.

One’s delayed awareness that in Hamlet, Claudius prays. Or attempts to.

And that Hamlet never does.

Are you actually the Arnold Schoenberg.

Somebody had to be.

Pliny the Younger was a pupil of Quintilian’s.

Years afterward, learning that Quintilian could not afford a proper dowry for his daughter, Pliny sent the money as a gift.

Dryden was England’s first official Poet Laureate.

One hundred and seventy-five years earlier, both Oxford and Cambridge had awarded the title to John Skelton.

Fifteen thousand children were among the prisoners who passed through Theresienstadt.

Ninety-some survived.

The probability that James Joyce and Lenin exchanged pleasantries.

In a Café Odéon in Zurich, in 1915, which both spent much time in.

Pascal could see no worth whatsoever in poetry.

The original of Lady Macbeth. Whose name was Gruoch.

Yeats, in the mid-1930s, noting that he had met Gerard Manley Hopkins several times more than fifty years earlier, but remembered almost nothing:

A boy of seventeen, Walt Whitman in his pocket, had little interest in a querulous, sensitive scholar.

At thirty-three, with a number of what would become his most famous poems already written, Edwin Arlington Robinson’s total lifetime earnings as an author came to seven dollars.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in the year 2000, on the Holocaust:

A fairy tale.

Handel wrote Messiah in twenty-two days.

I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it.

Said Gertrude Stein.

Vasari’s painful single-sentence description of an aging Piero di Cosimo, struggling to continue painting while suffering from palsy — and enraged when the maulstick and even his brushes would fall from his hand.

Renoir’s arthritis.

27, rue de Fleurus.

Benvenuto Cellini had at least six illegitimate children.

The proposal that Dylan Thomas would sleep on a couch in Stravinsky’s Los Angeles living room while they collaborated on an opera.

Precluded by Thomas’s death.

The King Lear that Verdi always hoped to write but didn’t.

Remembering that the Chinese invented moveable type well before Gutenberg.

As did the Koreans.

Poaching venison and rabbits from Sir Thomas Lucy.

Too raw for the majority of women.

Said Sainte-Beuve of Madame Bovary.

Writing in bed, Mark Twain preferred.

Fretful, timorous, and a tell-tale — Coleridge’s own description of his childhood self.

The schoolboys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me, and hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly.

Schrödinger’s equation.

Pausing to recall that before watches became commonplace, one told time by heeding church bells. Or when possible by sundial.

As in the London of John Donne or of Samuel Pepys, for example.

Copies of all of the now long lost plays of Sophocles and Euripides still existed at Constantinople until 1203.

When the city’s churches and libraries were indiscriminately ravaged and torched by the abortive Fourth Crusade.

According to Suetonius, Virgil first wrote the entire Aeneid in prose — and only then recast it into verse.

From an earliest major review of Jane Eyre:

Sheer rudeness and vulgarity. An anti-Christian composition.

Of Wuthering Heights:

Repulsive vulgarity. Odiously and abominably pagan.

Herefordshire, Jenny Lind died in.

Poor Tom’s a-cold.

At Lamb House, in Rye, Henry James had no fewer than eight writing desks.

And most often paced back and forth dictating.

Johnson. Boswell. Gibbon. Walpole. Goldsmith. Sterne. Garrick. Edmund Burke. Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Sarah Siddons.

All of whom sat for Joshua Reynolds.

Napoleon. Louis XVI. Catherine the Great. Rousseau. Voltaire. Washington. Jefferson. Franklin. John Paul Jones. Diderot. Lafayette.

All of whom sat for Jean-Antoine Houdon.

By order of the Council of Avignon, 1209, forbidden to handle bread or fruit set out for sale:

Harlots and Jews.

There were 945 booksellers in Paris in 1845.

Tolstoy carried on a vast correspondence. In 1908, Thomas Edison sent him an early dictaphone. Tolstoy learned to make great use of it, in the two years until his death.

Goethe’s English spelling:

I am luky.

The best dramatic writer since the days of Shakespeare and Massinger, Walter Scott called Joanna Baillie.

Who was forgotten before her death.

Fragonard was so little known at his death that there would appear to have been no obituary anywhere.

How many miles to Babylon?

Threescore miles and ten.

Beaumarchais, who wrote The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville—and who surreptitiously arranged for the sale of muskets and cannon and gunpowder to the Americans during the Revolution.

And was never paid until an Act of Congress compensated his heirs sixty years later.

Donne would not last, Drummond of Hawthornden says Ben Jonson said.

For not being understood.

An uninteresting, and one may almost say, a justly exterminated race.

The New York Times called the American Indian, in an 1855 review of Hiawatha.

An amiable barbarian. Voltaire called Shakespeare.

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

The reading or non-reading of a book — will never keep down a single petticoat.

Said Byron.

Stevie Smith’s cheerfully gruesome voice, Robert Lowell called it.

There are no English critics of weight or judgment who consider Mr. Joyce an author of any importance.

Said Edmund Gosse, two years after the publication of Ulysses.

Who can plow through such stuff?

Added George Moore.

The best thing that could happen to English literature is that a large number of our critics should be taken to a remote place in the country and locked up alone for six months with a volume of Wordsworth.

Concluded Alfred Noyes in the same regard.

Can I get there by candle-light?

Yes, and back again.

As his deafness progressively increased, Beethoven banged harder and harder on pianos. And made a total ruin of several.

Strabo’s Geography, dated 7 BC. Which states that the world is round and that one could reach India by sailing westward from Spain.

Plutarch read ceaselessly. Whether eating, having his haircut, being shaved, or even riding horseback, he says.

Shelley’s habit of reading everything aloud, whatever the circumstances so that his friend Hogg finally once yanked a book from his hands and flung it out a window.

For the first several centuries, the Mass in the Roman church was conducted in Greek, not Latin.

Rather than in shorthand, Henry James’s dictation at Lamb House was taken by his secretary on a Remington typewriter.

The universe was created on October 26, 4004 BC. At 9:00 AM.

Announced Archbishop Ussher, in 1645.

The death of Hector occurred on August 28, 1185 BC. Declared an equally perspicacious scholar.

Abu Said, a Sufi poet and saint.

Who sat in a recess in a chapel and said Allah! continually for seven years.

Beverly Hills, California, Sergei Rachmaninoff died in.

As did Bruno Walter.

Saint John of the Cross was exceptionally short and slight.

Half a friar, Saint Teresa of Avila playfully spoke of him as.

A half-bottle, Toulouse-Lautrec called himself because of his own stunted growth.

Washington had Tom Paine’s The Crisis—These are the times that try men’s souls — read to his troops.

Lafayette was nineteen when Washington made him a major general.

The value of a classical education, according to a mid-nineteenth-century dean of Christ Church, Oxford, one Thomas Gaisford:

That it enables us to look down with contempt on those who have not shared its advantages.

Oh, isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?

Says Polly Garter.

We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.

Said Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Fetch up Nell Gwyn, he says. They fetch her up. Next morning, Chop off her head! And they chop it off.

Outside of the family and attendants, Victor Hugo was the last person to see Balzac on the evening of his death:

The nurse and the servant stood in a kind of horrified silence as they listened to his dying rattle. An overpowering, sickening odor was wafted from the bed. Unquote.

Martha Washington could barely read or write.

Theodora Bosanquet.

The best work of the best poet.

Dryden called the Georgics.

The apocryphal notion that after four years on the Sistine ceiling scaffolding, Michelangelo could read only by holding pages above his head.

Kierkegaard’s father was fifty-seven when Kierkegaard was born.

Who could be more oppressive than the landlords?

Asked Saint John Chrysostom.

Ca. 400 AD.

These new composers seem to be satisfied only if they can produce the greatest possible tonal disturbance.

Said a critic of Claudio Monteverdi.

In 1603.

Dead! Dead! And never called me mother.

Evidently several life preservers were flung overboard only moments after Hart Crane’s suicide leap into the Gulf Stream. A boat was lowered and circled for an hour or more, before the freighter sailed on.

Adriaen Brouwer. Who was found dead outside a tavern at thirty-two.

But by whom Rembrandt had bought eight paintings. And Rubens as many as seventeen.

Lermontov. Whose first fame accrued to a poem condemning Pushkin’s death in a duel.

And who four years later was killed in a duel himself.

Where did Author learn that Boris Pasternak borrowed the name Zhivago from the manufacturer’s identification on a Moscow manhole cover?

Aware that the myth begins with the infant Oedipus being abandoned on a mountainside.

Not always remembering that in archaic Greece exposing unwanted children was common practice.

An honorary degree of Thomas Mann’s from the University of Bonn was formally rescinded when he condemned the Nazi regime and went into exile.

I find it impossible to take him seriously as a major writer and have never ceased to be amazed at the number of people who can.

Said Edmund Wilson of Kafka.

J. Edgar Hoover lived with his mother until her death when he was forty-three.

Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown.

Stephen Crane’s judgment that War and Peace should have been one third its length:

It goes on and on like Texas.

William Byrd. John Dowland. Thomas Campion.

The suggestion that most editors are failed writers.

To which Eliot: So are most writers.

Odious vermin, Henry Fielding called critics.

The first time Osip Mandelstam was arrested by Soviet authorities, Stalin himself phoned Pasternak to indicate that Mandelstam would be released. Pasternak then asked if he and Stalin might meet for a chat. A chat about what? Why, about life, about love, about death—

Stalin had already hung up.

There are more than 530 miles of bookshelves in the Library of Congress.

Most of Homer is trash, determined Walter Savage Landor.

Who felt the same way about Dante.

Two thousand years before Shakespeare, Aeschylus apparently acted in his own plays also.

And may have directed them as well.

No man has a right to set himself up as a lecturer at $50 per night who cannot for one minute take his eyes from his manuscript.

Said a Rockford, Illinois, newspaper about Melville.

Was Apollinaire the first to call it cubism in print?

Oh I have been to Ludlow fair

And left my necktie God knows where.

Oskar Kokoschka’s life-size effigy of Alma Mahler.

Which he sometimes slept with.

A cursed, conceited, wily heathen.

Being Aristotle as viewed by Luther.

Pontormo, who studied under Leonardo, Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea del Sarto.

Vasari, who studied under Andrea and Michelangelo.

Pierre Corneille died in poverty.

Buddha warned his disciples to avoid the company of women.

Asked his favorite pupil: What if one of them should speak to us?

Keep wide awake, Ananda.

Horace Walpole’s cautious suggestion to Gibbon that certain lesser technical portions of the Decline and Fall might be boring.

After which Gibbon never spoke to him again.

Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe all once worked together in the same German architectural studio.

For approximately a century and a half, Vivaldi was as little known and little rated among composers as was Vermeer for even longer among painters.

Vermeer having evidently been mentioned in print only three times in his life, and all three inconsequentially.

The friendship of Parson Malthus and David Ricardo.

Under the Caesars, a virgin could not be executed.

Thus any so sentenced were matter-of-factly deflowered beforehand.

At a doctor’s suggestion, Mozart went horseback riding every morning for four years.

Ceasing a month or two before his death when he was forced to sell his mount — for need of the few ducats.

Louvain, Dirck Bouts died in.

John Ruskin, educated at home, had no friends among boys of his own age.

John Stuart Mill, the same.

Much too early I came to many places, or too late: the beer was not yet ready, or was already drunk.

Says Odin, in the Elder Edda.

The era when postage was still paid for by the person who received the delivery.

And Scott said that his fan mail was driving him toward the poorhouse.

Byron, briefly, on Southey: Twaddle.

On Wordsworth: Drivel.

On Keats: Flay him alive.

At certain moments in his madness, John Clare was heard to hold conversations with Shakespeare.

When Hölderlin talked to himself it was often as if in a dialogue between two extraordinarily different personalities.

Thomas Love Peacock read voraciously in Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and of course English.

Having left school at thirteen.

There’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said before.

Says Terence in the Eunuch.

We can say nothing but what has been said; the composition and method is ours only.

Says Burton in the Anatomy.

Jonson’s To Celia—Drink to me only with thine eyes.

Which he contrived by juggling fragments from the Greek of Philostratus.

James Ensor’s portrait of himself as a beetle.

Drawn twenty-four years before The Metamorphosis.

Sakyamuni.

Mendelssohn, on Liszt:

Few brains.

On Berlioz:

One ought to wash one’s hands after handling one of his scores.

Paul Robeson’s father was a former slave.

Sigmund Freud was one of those who categorically refused to allow that the William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could have been the author of the plays.

And told Arnold Zweig that it almost made him angry that Zweig believed otherwise.

The Athenian general Phocion, who was interrupted by extraordinary cheering during a speech:

Have I inadvertently said something stupid?

Huckleberry Finn is thirteen.

Raskolnikov is twenty-three.

Winslow Homer was an artist-correspondent at the front during the Civil War.

Schopenhauer was someone else who talked to himself — loudly, on public thoroughfares.

In Wordsworth’s instance the talk meant that he was composing verses — which he completed in his head before putting them down on paper.

Entirely fourth-rate — Tchaikovsky re Handel.

Pushkin’s tentative English — much of it learned by struggling through Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

Molly Bloom is thirty-three.

Have the people who conclude that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the Earl of Oxford ever read the poetry Oxford actually did write?

The twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet. Ergo, the twenty-four books of the Iliad and of the Odyssey.

Arranged by editors at Alexandria centuries after the fact.

When you are going to bed on a sleeper car, put your wallet in a sock under your pillow. That way, in the morning you’ll never forget your wallet, because you’ll be looking for your sock.

Said Ping Bodie.

Eliot was not a very experienced writer, he didn’t write very much, he didn’t write very much poetry.

Said Allen Ginsberg.

Every poet is a fool. Which is not to say that every fool is a poet.

Said Coleridge.

Teresa Stratas, who in midcareer took time to work in Mother Teresa’s hospice in Calcutta.

And later in orphanages in Romania.

Was Stalin’s right arm withered, or was it his left?

Jerusalem, Martin Buber died in.

As did Else Lasker-Schiller.

And S. Y. Agnon.

And Yehuda Amichai.

Paradise Lost sold fewer than three hundred copies a year in its first ten years in print.

The Courtship of Miles Standish sold fifteen thousand copies on its first day.

Giacomo Puccini’s fanatic addiction to duck hunting.

There is no peace to be found except in the woods.

Said Michelangelo.

Herodotus claimed that Nebuchadnezzar’s walls at Babylon were thick enough so that two four-horse chariots could traverse them side by side. No one believed him for twenty-four hundred years — until excavation showed them thicker than that.

Swinburne suffered epileptic seizures. Once in the British Museum.

The United States Constitution was formally declared to be in effect in March of 1789. At a celebration in Philadelphia, provision was made for tables serving kosher food.

Van Dyck was known to do many of his portraits in no longer than an hour.

It is wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log hut on the frontier.

Said Emerson.

There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.

Said Tocqueville.

Is Suetonius the first writer ever known to make a reference to Christianity?

Revolting immorality.

Said an earliest Italian response to Rigoletto.

Like mending a sewer and setting it to music.

Said a New York newspaper of the Anvil Chorus in a first American review of Il Trovatore.

Are there still cedars in Lebanon?

Dionysius Exiguus, a monk in sixth-century Rome who calculated the birth of Christ as having occurred 531 years earlier — and for the first time designated the years since as anni Domini nostri.

Is this the little woman who made this great war?

Said Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe.

To celebrate my fiftieth birthday, Hemingway told Charles Scribner, I fucked three times, shot ten straight pigeons (very fast ones) at the club, drank with friends a case of Piper Heidsieck brut and looked the ocean for big fish all afternoon.

Why has Author always been suspicious that that parenthesis may be inadvertently modifying the wrong activity?

And looked the ocean?

For years, Stanley Spencer regularly put on his clothes over his pajamas.

And came and went that way no matter how formal the occasion.

Meleager, who compiled one of the earliest anthologies, indicating how many of Sappho’s verses he had included:

Few. But roses.

I shall never see Atthis again, and indeed, I really long to be dead.

The first painting Gauguin ever sold was to Degas.

Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!

Says Estragon.

Every man is as God made him, and often a good deal worse.

Says Sancho Panza.

William Carlos Williams died at seventy-nine — having lived virtually all of his life within a ten-minute walk of where he was born.

North’s translation of Plutarch, which Shakespeare so heavily depended upon.

And which was actually translated from the French version of Amyot.

Hermann Hesse was at one time a patient of Jung’s.

9 Ridge Road.

Rutherford, New Jersey.

The two hundred extant First Folios.

The forty-six Gutenberg Bibles.

Beethoven. Schubert. Liszt.

All pupils of Salieri.

Antigonus II, who drunkenly told Zeno the Stoic to make any request whatsoever and as king he would fulfill it.

At which Zeno requested that he step outside and vomit.

Baltimore, Edgar Allan Poe died in.

As Heraclitus saw it, Homer should have been driven from the lists and beaten with rods, for all the deceitful and adulterous acts he showed the gods involved in.

A mere trifle consoles us, a mere trifle distresses us.

Said Pascal.

Names are known to this day of artists who painted scenery for Aeschylus and Sophocles.

The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Lübeck in 1601 and 1603.

And in Paris in 1604.

If the sun were to go out, how long would we continue to see the sun?

Why has Author composed that line as a question when he would have known how to calculate the answer by the age of twelve or thirteen?

Eastward Ho! On which Jonson, Chapman, and John Marston collaborated.

And which for years the Oxford Companion to English Literature listed as Eastward Hoe.

Frederica von Stade’s father was killed in World War II. No more than weeks before her birth.

Sunt lacrimae rerum.

A hunchbacked toad.

The playwright-critic John Dennis called Pope.

Sickly, D. H. Lawrence called Yeats.

Mayakovsky angrily condemned the suicide of Sergei Essenin, in print, as an act of cowardice—

Five years before killing himself.

Agatha Christie has been translated into more languages than any other English author except Shakespeare.

Eight minutes, twenty seconds. Give or take.

Boccaccio offered a series of public lectures on the Divine Comedy in Florence as early as in 1373.

Electra, in blue jeans.

Which is not from a Yannis Ritsos poem.

Wordsworth’s illegitimate daughter.

Byron’s.

Shelley’s.

Schopenhauer’s.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

Being maried to an author is a very hard life.

Said Nora Joyce.

Saint Teresa’s corpse was twice stolen before it was at last returned to Ávila for burial.

Pindar was buried in Thebes.

According to Pausanias, at a racetrack.

Macaulay insisted he knew every word of Paradise Lost and of The Pilgrim’s Progress by heart.

Benjamin Britten was a conscientious objector in World War II.

Giambattista Vico’s mother was illiterate.

As was his wife.

Diana of the Crossways.

Defoe was nearing sixty when he published his first novel.

Hardy was nearing sixty when he published his first volume of poems.

Benjamin Franklin was still making marriage proposals to younger women in his mid-seventies.

Why should not old men be mad?

Darer, Holbein, and Quentin Massys all did portraits of Erasmus.

Diego Rivera’s 1932 mural in Rockefeller Center. With its portrait of Lenin that he refused to remove.

Whereupon the Rockefellers effaced the entire wall.

The Mexico City Rivera mural that included the phrase Dios no existe.

Which in that case he finally agreed to alter.

Marlowe was two months older than Shakespeare.

As recently as in the year 2000:

A small Cimabue panel of a Madonna and Child discovered under the stairs in a country manor in Suffolk.

Karl Marx reread the Oresteia once every year.

Soutine’s famous Carcass of Beef, which he painted from an actual eviscerated steer in his Paris studio.

And which decomposed to such a degree that neighbors finally brought the police.

Good Lord, how you have to mess about in life!

Said van Gogh.

I paint what I think, said Rivera.

Paganini, who owned a Stradivarius viola, commissioned Harold in Italy because he knew Berlioz needed the money.

And then never performed it because it wasn’t challenging enough.

Toronto, Glenn Gould died in.

Caravaggio’s father was a stonemason.

That lump, Ezra Pound called Robert Lowell.

Oscar Wilde died in 1900.

Bosie Douglas in 1945.

There are 16,696 lines in the Iliad.

I must die; must I then die complaining?

Asked Epictetus.

If your Hercules had his hair cropped, he would not show skull enough to hold his brains.

Said Cellini of a sculpture of Baccio Bandinelli’s.

Two of the thugs hired to castrate Abélard were themselves caught and mutilated. And also blinded.

Stravinsky, born near St. Petersburg, became a French citizen in 1934.

And an American in 1945.

In his manic, suicidal last year, Randall Jarrell was once called upon to introduce Hannah Arendt to a college gathering — and talked for twenty minutes about Johnny Unitas.

Without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew, said Byron after Shelley’s death.

Presumably not remembering that Shelley had deserted Harriet, nineteen and four months pregnant, to run off with Mary, also pregnant — and leaving Harriet to drown herself less than two years later.

Enrico Fermi’s wife was a Jew. When the family left an increasingly anti-Semitic Italy to accept his Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1938, instead of returning they sailed directly to New York — having made plans with virtually no word to anyone beforehand.

Edmund Spenser died in poverty.

But was buried in Westminster Abbey very near Chaucer.

Tom Paine died in poverty.

Five people attended his funeral.

For years, following Pearl Harbor, the Metropolitan Opera left Madame Butterfly off its schedule.

Why did Saint Paul not date any of his letters?

Heinrich Böll was wounded three times as a conscripted German infantryman in World War II.

Debussy, on the personality of Proust:

A bit of the concierge.

Louis Norman Newsom.

A past which was never a present, the historian Grote called the romanticized era of the Trojan War.

Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, and Muriel Rukeyser were at Vassar together.

Being annoyed at Aristotle for mentioning that someone once accused Euripides of having bad breath.

Or does Author more likely mean being amused at being annoyed?

Yet in either instance, why, still, is Author so lacking in energy?

In fact why has Author now and again even caught himself taking a nap, which he cannot recall having ever done before in his entire adult life?

Like his younger grandchildren, for heaven’s sake.

Yeats once proposed marriage to Maud Gonne and was turned down.

And in no time thereafter proposed to her daughter.

Whistler did not get married until he was fifty-four.

Edmund Wilson managed to go through life without reading Don Quixote.

And through a full ten-year period without paying his income tax.

Henriette Sontag, the soprano at the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth — who turned Beethoven to face the audience so that he might see the applause.

A fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.

Bertrand Russell called Christianity.

Emile Zola’s first English publisher spent three months in jail for obscenity.

Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata was once banned from the mails by the United States Postal Service.

Puppies and first operas should be drowned.

Said Carl Maria von Weber.

No painting by Rogier van der Weyden is signed.

No painting by Hugo van der Goes is signed.

William Faulkner once allowed himself to be interviewed on radio during a University of Virginia football game.

And was introduced as a winner of the Mobil Prize.

Gerard de Nerval spent much of the last decade and a half of his life in and out of mental institutions.

Antwerp, Rubens died in.

Tacitus, when young, defending other young writers against the eternal Old Guard:

What is different is not necessarily worse.

Julia Ward Howe was paid five dollars by the Atlantic Monthly for The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Eliot used custom-made umbrellas with deliberately outsize handles.

So that no one would take one from a cloakroom by mistake, he told Herbert Read.

Julian Schnabel’s claim to The New York Times that his peers among painters were Duccio, Giotto, and van Gogh.

Gabriele Fallopio.

Bartolommeo Eustachio.

Pomes, Bronson Alcott said Whitman pronounced it.

Why is it said of a batter in baseball that he flied out rather than that he flew out?

Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not until they examined the rings that they recognized who it was.

Tolstoy. Tchaikovsky. Lenin. Gorky. Rilke. Einstein.

Each of whom posed for a portrait by Leonid Pasternak.

Plutarch’s report of an epidemic of women’s suicides in Miletus.

And of a law enacted that all suicides must thenceforth be carried naked through the city before burial.

At which the suicides cease.

Theo van Gogh once asked Camille Pissarro to take in Vincent as a boarder.

Pissarro’s wife declined to have such an unbalanced individual at loose among her young children.

Amelia Earhart flied the Atlantic?

Wondering if youngsters still read The Count of Monte Cristo.

Practically all those interviewed in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster agreed that they had never confronted anything more horrendous.

Author’s curiosity as to whether anyone thought to inquire of the writer of Slaughterhouse-Five.

One should always read with a pen in one’s hand. Says Delacroix in the Journals.

Dickens’ best friend when, at twelve, he worked in the blacking factory:

A boy named Bob Fagin.

Verdi wrote Il Trovatore and La Traviata in less than a month each.

As to boundaries, the Great Spirit knows no boundaries, nor will his red children acknowledge them.

Said Tecumseh.

Several of Montaigne’s ancestors — Jews, on his mother’s side — had been burned at the stake in the Spanish Inquisition.

It is setting a high value on our opinions to roast people alive on account of them.

Said Montaigne himself not unreasonably.

Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Which Byron, Scott, Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, Thackeray, Rossetti, Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson all admired.

Picasso. Joan Mini. Philip Guston. Willem de Kooning.

Who were all devoted to Krazy Kat.

Pomes Penyeach.

Sophocles, in old age, on finally being free from sexual urgings:

Like escaping from bondage to a raving maniac.

Pope Leo X, to Sebastiano del Piombo, as to why he was holding off on commissions for Michelangelo:

There is absolutely no getting on with the man.

Pope Clement VII, a decade later:

When Buonarroti comes to see me, I always take a seat and bid him be seated himself at once — feeling positive that he will do so without leave or license otherwise.

On one of his visits to the wreck of his ship early in the novel, Robinson Crusoe finds gold — but quickly realizes it is of no value to him at all.

However, upon second thoughts, I took it away.

A fraud and a fake, Nabokov called Eliot.

Needing a moment to remember that Sir Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert and, was also the composer of Onward, Christian Soldiers.

And The Lost Chord.

Orchard Street, in Manhattan, Jan Peerce grew up on.

Heidelberg, Fritz Wunderlich died in.

Sarah Siddons was a member of the eminent eighteenth-century Kemble acting clan.

Born, naturally, in an obscure small-town inn while the family was on tour.

Alleged of a fellow violinist at the American debut of Jascha Heifetz. Is it warm in here?

To which the man next to him: Not for pianists.

Swift’s dedication in A Tale of a Tub:

To His Royal Highness Prince Posterity.

To feel pain at the misfortunes of others is a weakness unworthy of the wise man.

Said Seneca.

As late as well into the fifth century, Saint Augustine was finding it necessary to rebuke certain Christians for still celebrating December 25 as the winter solstice — i.e., the rebirth of the sun — rather than as the Nativity of Christ.

Chares of Lindus, who in 278 BC designed the great bronze Colossus of Rhodes. And then committed suicide when it far overran its construction budget.

In future we shall feel obliged if you will send us the milk and the water in separate cans.

Said Constable in a note to his dairyman.

Arthur Koestler was condemned to death as a spy by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War.

But released in a high-level prisoner exchange.

Paul Celan was apparently comfortable in translating verse from no fewer than eight languages.

Leonardo, explaining to the Duke of Milan how it occurred that he might sit in front of The Last Supper for hours and not add a single brushstroke:

Men of genius often are doing most when they work least.

To take charge of this post and all government property in view.

To walk my post in a military manner, keeping always on the alert and observing everything that takes place within sight or hearing.

The friendship of Babe Ruth and Bix Beiderbecke.

Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers are now in Hell. An old woman knows more about the Faith than Plato.

Said Savonarola.

Greta Garbo was never married.

I think it a very grievous punishment, in the liberal arts, to display oneself to fools, and to expose our compositions to the barbarous judgment of the stupid.

Said Molière.

Was Walter Benjamin the first to point out that where every home once possessed room after room in which people had died, in today’s world virtually everyone dies somewhere else?

A vulgar, brutal boor, wholly ignorant of political science, of military affairs, of everthing else which a statesman should know.

Said a London journal of Lincoln at the start of the Civil War.

Dostoievsky wrote The Eternal Husband in Dresden. And had to borrow the money to mail it to his publisher in St. Petersburg.

Two years earlier, while writing The Idiot:

They demand from me artistic finish, the purity of poetry, and they point to Turgenev and Goncharov. Let them take a look at the conditions under which I work.

Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,

Through which the living Homer begged his bread.

Tchaikovsky, leaving Bayreuth after the first full four-day performance of the Ring:

As if I’d been let out of prison.

Peg Woffington.

Habitual incest with his sisters, Suetonius says Caligula practiced.

When not prostituting them to his favorites.

Geraldine Farrar’s Carmen, where Caruso as Don José had to literally wrestle her away to avoid being kicked and punched in Act III, let alone continue to sing.

On the Continent the works of Shakespeare are honored in a double way; by the admiration of Italy and Germany, and by the contempt of the French.

Said Coleridge.

Xenophon, who learned that the older of his two sons had been killed in battle — and who did not weep.

I knew my son was mortal.

Roman Jews recited the Kaddish for three days at the site of Caesar’s funeral pyre — in gratitude for the freedom of worship he had granted them.

Locarno, Erich Maria Remarque died in.

Was Farrar the finest Carmen ever? Was Mary Garden the finest Salome?

Whose word can Author take that Emmy Destinn may have been the finest Cio-Cio-San?

An heroic mess, Victor Hugo called Delacroix.

Le grand Maître, Cézanne always spoke of him as.

John Gielgud was a great-nephew of Ellen Terry.

Twenty-one times, in the Iliad, the Trojans are labeled tamers of horses.

Not once is anyone ever seen halting to scrape off his sandals.

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, In the coming world, they will not ask me: Why were you not Moses? They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya?

Says a Hasidic tale.

One should never allow the impression of one’s body to remain in the bedclothes after arising.

Said Pythagoras.

Freud once attended a lecture by Mark Twain.

The French disease, syphilis was initially called in Europe.

The excellence of a poet is inseparably associated with the excellence of the man himself, and it is impossible for one to become a good poet unless he has previously become a good man.

Said Strabo.

He was a bum poet, of course, being a bum person.

Said Robert Graves of D. H. Lawrence.

The man is disreputable and his poems are among the worst ever seen.

Said Anatole France of Paul Verlaine.

A great deal of nuclear waste will still be lethal six times as far into the future as all of recorded history presently goes back into the past.

Tiglath-pileser. Sargon. Sennacherib. Ashurbanipal.

A tissue of puerilities, fables, inequities, insults, imprecations, heresies, and blasphemies.

Being the Talmud, as condemned by Justinian.

I don’t understand them. To me that’s not literature. Said Cormac McCarthy of Henry James and Marcel Proust.

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

Gustav Mahler was one of fourteen children.

Pliny the Younger’s assertion that reading the Greek and Latin orators could cure digestive problems.

Seventeen hundred years later, William Hazlitt’s that Tom Jones would do the same.

Tolstoy, in his diary, on George Bernard Shaw: His triviality is astounding.

By chance, Toscanini made an abrupt change of plans regarding a trip from New York to Italy in 1915.

And canceled passage on the Lusitania.

~ ~ ~

A reactionary bourgeois award, Pravda called Pasternak’s Nobel Prize.

Which he was forced to decline.

Jedwabne.

Evidently not one of the major Latin poets in Rome was born in Rome itself.

Among them, Seneca, Lucan, and Martial in fact came from Spain.

Vespasian, struggling to rise from his deathbed:

An emperor should die standing.

Saint Francis of Assisi, finding his own deathbed infested with mice—

Which he decided was amusing.

Sardanapalus.

If you’d like to hear something pleasant — the cost of living is very cheap in Hades.

Said Callimachus.

Leopold Bloom is not circumsized.

And has not had a bar mitzvah.

Salamanca, Unamuno died in.

Madrid, Ortega y Gasset.

Scriabin. Who would never handle money without first putting on gloves.

The legend that Diogenes, living in a barrel, saw a child drinking out of his hands — and threw away his cup.

The legend that Shakespeare began his London career by minding horses outside the theater.

A friend quotes from Macbeth: Is this a dagger which I see before me?

At which Malcolm Lowry: Naturally you realize he was tight as a tick when he wrote that?

Tennyson and Browning have adjacent graves in Westminster Abbey.

Pascal’s rotting teeth.

Van Gogh’s.

James Agee’s initial version of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was rejected by Fortune magazine — which had assigned it.

Unfailingly given pause in recalling that Melville left school at twelve.

Or that English was essentially Jack Kerouac’s second language.

Guido di Pietro. Who became Fra Giovanni da Fiesole. And whose paintings were termed angelic.

Ergo: Fra Angelico.

Without doubt the greatest intellect in Western philosophy.

Spengler called Leibniz.

Petrarch was so esteemed in his own day that decades before his death, Arezzo passed a law that the house where he was born was never to be altered.

Red Cloud, Nebraska, Willa Cather spent her childhood in.

A volume of Andrei Voznesensky’s verse, which appeared when he was thirty-two, sold three hundred thousand copies via subscription before official publication.

In 1817, being sent at the age of five from India to England for schooling, Thackeray was on a ship that stopped for provisions at an island west of Africa. A servant led him to a garden and impressed upon him to remember the man they saw strolling there.

The island being St. Helena.

Hegel, at Jena in his mid-thirties, had a view of Napoleon also, on horseback practically under his window — only a day before French soldiers would terrify him by entering his rented room while plundering the city.

The version of Cassius’s suicide after the defeat at Philippi that says he used the same dagger with which he had helped to assassinate Caesar.

Nine in the second place means:

The axletrees are removed from the wagon.

The sentries on guard near the decomposing corpse of Polyneices in Antigone—

Whom Sophocles lets remind us that they have situated themselves upwind.

Braque’s father was a housepainter.

Baudelaire, still basically unknown, once wrote to Wagner praising his music but not including a return address:

Lest you might think I wanted something from you.

Michelangelo, designing the dome of St. Peter’s — and responding to the suggestion that he might outdo Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence:

In size. Not in beauty.

The poet shall compose nothing contrary to the ideas of the lawful, or just, or beautiful, or good, which are allowed by the state.

Said Plato.

For what other reason, truly, would an educated man go to the theater, except to see Menander?

Asked Plutarch.

Santa Maria del Fiore.

André Gide was repeatedly beaten up as a schoolboy. François Mauriac aussi.

Robert Herrick so admired Ben Jonson that he regularly spoke of him as Saint Ben.

Jacques Barzun’s utterly mystifying insistence that virtually no one has ever heard of Vico.

They rowed her in across the rolling foam—

The cruel, crawling foam.

Wrote Kingsley.

The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. Wrote Ruskin.

Santiago, Chile, Pablo Neruda died in.

Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?

After Shelley’s corpse was burned on the beach at Viareggio, and his ashes transported for interment in the English Cemetery in Rome, Trelawny bought an adjacent plot.

And was buried there fifty-nine years later.

Joyce said he spent twenty thousand hours writing Ulysses.

Lakehurst, New Jersey. 7:25 P.M. May 6, 1937.

Carlyle, at eighty-four, reread all of Shakespeare.

Leonardo’s Paris Madonna of the Rocks. Leonardo’s London Madonna of the Rocks.

Delacroix’s Paris Medea. Delacroix’s Berlin Medea.

The Julian calendar lost eleven minutes and fourteen seconds each year. Adding up to approximately twelve days by the late sixteenth century.

The Gregorian calendar first began to replace the Julian in 1582. And will need one day’s correction 3,333 years from that date, which is to say in the year 4915.

Scapa Flow.

Reminding oneself that for all his lifelong pose of New England provincialism, Robert Frost not only spent two years in his mid-twenties as a special student at Harvard, but attended courses by George Santayana and William James.

Remembering that Gertrude Stein, at Radcliffe, studied with Santayana and James also.

I like it less than anything of yours I have read, Edmund Wilson told Nabokov re Lolita.

While later calling his translation of Eugene Onegin awkward, banal, clumsy, and disastrous.

Aeschylus was thirty years older than Sophocles. Sophocles was fifteen years older than Euripides.

Wondering what her stepbrothers Gerald and George Duckworth actually managed to do, sexually, to Virginia Woolf?

Schmucks with Underwoods, Jack Warner called writers.

Four different horses were shot out from under Ney at Waterloo.

I do not write for the public.

Said Hopkins.

I am not a poet by trade; I am a professor of Latin.

Said Housman.

A seminonfictional semifiction.

Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.

Probably by this point more than apparent — or surely for the attentive reader.

As should be Author’s experiment to see how little of his own presence he can get away with throughout.

At the recent millennium, Sylvia Plath would have been sixty-eight.

Anne Sexton, seventy-two.

Arnold Schoenberg’s father was a shoemaker.

Because of his death having been a suicide, the local curé would not allow the church hearse to be used for van Gogh’s funeral. One had to be requested from a neighboring village.

Isaac Bickerstaff, a pseudonym invented by Swift.

Which Steele borrowed to use as the name of the editor of the Tattler.

Jeffrey Broadbottom, one contrived by Chesterfield.

Jean Dubuffet started out as a wine merchant.

A good book is twice as good if it is short. Said Baltasar Gracián.

The world as perceived by Rimbaud: Full of grocers.

Degas’ misogyny.

John von Neumann, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner were schoolboys together.

Alessandro Manzoni once told Walter Scott that he was in Scott’s debt for everything he knew about writing fiction. To which Scott:

In that case, I Promessi Sposi is my finest work.

Siarö, near Stockholm, Jussi Bjoerling died in.

Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Dashiell Hammett.

All volunteer ambulance drivers in Europe in World War I.

Charlotte Brontë mailed off the unsolicited, pseudonymous manuscript of Jane Eyre to a London publisher on August 24, 1847.

And saw it in print seven weeks and four days later.

Maria Callas, on her conflicts with Rudolf Bing over repertory:

Those lousy Traviatas he wanted to make me do.

The Marquis de Sade’s will asked that his coffin not be sealed for at least forty-eight hours — to make certain he was dead.

Leopold Bloom’s notion, at Paddy Dignam’s funeral, that there ought to be a telephone in the grave. And an airhole.

Chopin. By whom the words Jew and pig were used interchangeably.

Yid, having been Dostoievsky’s choice.

Author is experimenting with keeping himself out of here as much as possible because?

Can he really say? Why does he still have no idea whatever where things are headed either?

Where can the book possibly wind up without him

I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.

Said Darwin.

All life is an experiment.

Said Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Ravel weighed less than one hundred pounds.

The standard Italian translation of Moby Dick is by Cesare Pavese.

Lex talionis.

In his later years, Titian was exempted from almost all taxes in Venice.

Out of regard for his rare excellence, the government decreed.

It depends on what the meaning of the word is is.

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

God does not inhabit healthy bodies.

Said Saint Hildegard of Bingen.

Under threat of arrest in the Reign of Terror, Chamfort shot himself in the head and cut his throat.

And died of pneumonia while recovering.

Antonio Gramsci spent most of the last eleven years of his life in a Mussolini prison.

The announcement at the Metropolitan Opera on December II, 1956, that the evening’s Lucia di Lammermoor would be sung by one Dolores Wilson and not, as scheduled, by Callas — which led to a virtual riot in the lobby.

Joseph Cornell lived in the same house in Queens for fifty-four years.

Descartes, in Holland, had twenty-four different addresses in twenty.

Thérèse Levasseur, Rousseau’s mistress and later wife.

Who could barely read. And never learned to count money or recite the names of the months in sequence.

Mary Kalogeropoulos.

The custom of an audience standing during the Hallelujah Chorus.

Because George II was spontaneously moved to do so at Messiah’s first London performance — meaning that everyone else in attendance had to also.

Though everyone was already on his feet when it was played by the organist at Fenway Park after Carlton Fisk’s home run in the 1975 World Series.

Was Callas the finest Lucia ever?

Lily Pons? Joan Sutherland?

The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Brussels in 1640.

And in Leipzig in 1642.

Callas.

The citizens of Athens commissioned a statue of Pindar by popular subscription. In Rhodes, one of his poems was inscribed in gold on the wall of a temple.

The prize windbag of all ages, Ezra Pound saw fit to anoint him twenty-five hundred years later.

Pound in the same mood on Milton:

Disgusting, coarse-minded, asinine.

On Dryden:

A lunkhead.

Suppose one woke and found oneself a fraud?

Asks Virginia Woolf’s Diary.

Puccini’s wife once accused him of having an affair with their housemaid — and so hounded the girl that she killed herself.

And then was sentenced to five months in prison when a postmortem indicated that the girl had been a virgin.

Hamburg, Telemann died in.

We all understand the meaning in ordinary life of the word is.

I remark to a neighbor, Today is Monday, and there are no questions asked, and none need to be asked, about the meaning of is.

Says William Barrett in a commentary on Heidegger.

Erasure is as important as writing.

Said Quintilian.

Who also said, Write quickly and you will never write well.

Luther. Erasmus. Thomas More. John Wesley. Calvin.

All of whom believed unconditionally in the powers of witches — and most of whom approved their execution. Luther indeed having burned several at Wittenberg.

The friendship of Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell.

Thomas Mann went out of his way to praise Hesse’s Magister Ludi.

And then admitted to his son Klaus that he had no idea what it was about.

Carthage burned for seventeen days, when razed by Scipio Africanus the Younger.

Rome burned for nine, in Nero’s conflagration.

By Horace’s lights, the fact that Homer commended wine made it self-evident that he was a tippler.

Why does it seem odd to Author that Yeats and Kipling were born in the same year?

The writer who first suggested in print, decades after the fact, that Byron had committed incest with his half sister Augusta Leigh, was Harriet Stowe.

Woolsthorpe. Where Newton did or did not have his attention caught by an apple falling from a branch.

I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly.

Said Freud, rejecting drugs while enduring the cancer that slowly took his life.

Sein und Zeit.

Pope Julius II, who commissioned the Sistine Chapel, and who hired Raphael — and who always sought out Jewish physicians.

Rembrandt’s connection with the Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam. Even living there, in the years after his bankruptcy and eviction.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

To salute all officers and all colors and standards not cased.

Leonardo’s long treatise on painting. In which the only one of his contemporaries he mentions by name is Botticelli.

New York City, Martha Graham died in.

L’être et le néant.

Oliver Goldsmith fled in panic into Saint James Park rather than sit through the opening night of She Stoops to Conquer.

Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and Joshua Reynolds were among those who went searching for him to announce its success.

To avoid confusion with the painter George Frederic Watts, the critic Theodore Watts changed his name to Watts-Dunton.

And received a telegram from Whistler: Theodore, What’s Dunton?

Sir Francis Bacon died of what began as a chill during an experiment to see how long he could preserve a fowl by freezing it in snow.

In 1626.

Hegel told himself he was depraved — his word — when he concluded he admired Rossini’s Figaro opera more than Mozart’s.

Daddy? Couldn’t that lady cut herself, standing on that seashell?

His mind and hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.

The multitudinous seas incarnadine.

The executioner I have heard to be very good, and I have a little neck.

Ventured Anne Boleyn.

Do it to Julia!

Jeanie Deans. Nelly Dean.

At the age of eight or nine, Richard Brautigan once returned home from school and found that his entire family had moved away without a word.

Still remembered from antiquity:

That Menander was extraordinarily handsome.

Xenophon the same.

Charlemagne had eight legitimate children from four wives.

And ten otherwise.

Caesar’s premature baldness.

Giacomo Meyerbeer, in his early twenties, played the bass drum in a performance of something of Beethoven’s.

And never once came in at the right time, Beethoven said.

Being reminded that the earliest use of writing was in making lists.

For commerce.

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

In contemplation of experiments with a new soporific drug, we would appreciate your procuring for us a number of women.

Langston Hughes was a busboy in a Washington hotel when he left three poems beside Vachel Lindsay’s dinner plate — which led to his first publication in white periodicals.

Brautigan lived alone in an empty house for a week before neighbors tracked down an address and took up a collection for bus fare.

The version of the myth that has Odysseus sail far enough beyond the Pillars of Hercules to found what becomes Lisbon.

Richard M. Nixon, after the shooting by National Guardsmen of four undergraduates at Kent State University, re college students protesting the Vietnam War:

Bums.

Was Andrea Mantegna’s Padua fresco The Martyrdom of Saint James, destroyed by a bomb in 1944, perhaps the greatest single loss to art in World War II?

Thomas Hardy’s ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey — but his heart was buried in the Dorchester countryside that he had called Wessex in the novels.

Louis Aragon once threatened to beat up any Paris critic who reviewed his next book. None did.

Chekhov wrote as many as eight hundred short stories.

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

We consider the price of two hundred marks per woman excessive. We propose to pay not more than 170 per head. We need approximately 150 women.

The greatest living Englishman, C. P. Snow called Paul Dirac in the early 1970s.

Everything vital in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded religions and composed our masterpieces.

Said Proust.

We owe the invention of the arts to deranged imaginations.

Said Saint-Évremond.

If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth Author were to burn a Julian Schnabel, qualms?

Qualmless.

Marianne Moore wore a Nixon campaign button.

Umberto Eco, asked about the impulse behind writing The Name of the Rose.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

Auden’s Manhattan residence, for years, was in a shoddy apartment building on St. Mark’s Place in Greenwich Village.

Where an earlier tenant had been Trotsky.

Luciano Pavarotti’s apartment on Central Park South had earlier been Sophia Loren’s.

Christmas Day, 800 AD.

Frozen music, Schelling called architecture.

Anne Boleyn’s daughter.

Göttingen, Max Planck died in.

How near to where Anne Hutchinson and fourteen out of fifteen of her family members were massacred by Indians does the Hutchinson River Parkway run?

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

We acknowledge your accord. Prepare for us 150 women in the best possible health.

Reichenbach Falls.

A Lucas Cranach woodcut, illustrating a corrosive anti-Catholic tract of Luther’s:

The Pope, athwart a pig, blessing a pile of dung.

At a memorial Mass for Beethoven a week after his death, the music chosen was Mozart’s Requiem.

The report that Ben Jonson could recite verbatim every word he had ever written.

Leibniz died sitting up with a copy of John Barclay’s Argenis in his lap.

E. E. Cummings died after chopping firewood.

Saint Catherine of Siena could read but not write. Her letters and other works were dictated.

A brother of Gaetano Donizetti’s became the ranking bandsman in the Ottoman army.

Donizetti Pasha, being known as.

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

Received consignment of 150 women. Despite emaciated condition they were found satisfactory. We will keep you posted regarding the experiment.

Evidently more truth than legend: Euripides, in his seventies, and before his final two years in Macedonia, living in a cave on Salamis with an extraordinary view of the sea, very much alone, disliking visitors, surrounded by books. Quote:

Thinking to himself, and writing.

Elnora Comstock, have you lost your senses?

Tardily realizing — qualms after all.

Author would undeniably be distressed at the loss of Schnabel’s portrait of William Gaddis.

Georg Trakl was a pharmacist.

E. T. A. Hoffmann was a lawyer.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we are abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

Says Walden.

During his first half-dozen years in New York, Jasper Johns worked as a window dresser.

Applying for a job at Time magazine, John Berryman was asked to submit writing samples.

And was not hired.

At huge expense, the remains of Saint Luke were purchased from Bosnia by the City of Venice in the early Renaissance and received by the Doge in the most solemn of ceremonies.

Whereupon a Benedictine monastery in Padua claimed they already had them.

Kate Smith could not read music.

Whistler, on failing chemistry and flunking out of West Point:

If silicon had been a gas, I would have been a major general.

Middleton Murry’s suspicion that D. H. Lawrence was impotent.

Similar speculations regarding Swift.

And Kierkegaard.

And Thoreau.

And Henry James.

The Metropolitan Opera was on tour in San Francisco at the time of the 1906 earthquake. Awakened at 5:13 A.M., Caruso would later say his first thought was that he was back home in Naples and Vesuvius had erupted. Olive Fremstad would be found in a park clutching roses that had been flung to her on stage the evening before.

Art is not truth. Art is a lie that enables us to recognize truth.

Said Picasso.

If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow, and if half the Russians were to starve to death the day after, it would not matter to me in the least. My sole interest lies in writing.

Said the long-since unread George Jean Nathan.

There are no women subjects in Plutarch’s Lives.

White does not exist in nature, said Renoir.

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

The tests have been completed. All subjects died. We will contact you regarding a further shipment.

Three full days of national mourning were declared in Chile at the death of Gabriela Mistral.

Gogol briefly taught history at the University of St. Petersburg. One of his students was Turgenev — who later said he had known less than nothing about his subject.

Translator’s English, John Wain called Susan Sontag’s prose.

Glen Ellen, California, Jack London died in.

Tennyson’s father was severely epileptic.

The friendship of Brahms and Johann Strauss, Jr.

Heisenberg, why have you been dancing all evening?

Why not, Dirac? The party is filled with nice girls.

How did you know they were nice before you danced with them?

Paul Morphy died insane. Buddy Bolden también.

I don’t believe in all that creeping Jesus stuff. But the public likes it.

Said Massenet of his religious compositions.

When cohabitating, neither husband nor wife should be in a state of intoxication, lethargy, or melancholy. The wife should not be asleep at the time.

Said Maimonides.

Adolf Eichmann read Lolita while awaiting trial in Jerusalem.

And was indignant over what he termed its unwholesomeness.

Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers.

Says Hemingway in a letter.

This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.

The winter during which Shelley and Thomas Love Peacock attended at least six performances of Don Giovanni.

There is nothing perfect in this world, Peacock said. Except Mozart.

Thackeray started out as an artist.

And was rejected when an illustrator was being sought for the first installments of Pickwick Papers by the equally young Dickens.

The Reverend Eliot, Pound at times called him.

The Tsetse, Conrad Aiken had it.

The main house on Horace’s Sabine farm, given to him by Maecenas, was a mansion of no less than twenty-four rooms.

Voltaire’s mansion at Ferney had fourteen bedrooms.

Jack the Ripper was left-handed.

Like Osama bin Laden.

Incredibly shallow, Wittgenstein called A. J. Ayer.

While also dismissing Plato as a frightful waste of time — unquote.

Does anyone ever die who is not remembered through the remainder of at least one other entire lifetime by someone?

From future transmigrations save my soul.

Thales of Miletus, asked why he never became a father:

Because I love children.

Asked to name the easiest task in life:

To give advice.

Trying to recall a single view of landscape — or just once a patch of sunlight — in a Dostoievsky novel.

Trying to recall a single scene in all of Jane Austen showing male characters only, without a woman present.

Mantua, Giulio Romano died in.

Bologna, Guido Reni.

Dating from as long ago as 1600—complaints about pollution of the air in London from excessive industrial use of coal. Inquinating the blood, said Sir Thomas Browne, causing catarrhs and coughs.

A traveler smelled London before he saw it, said John Evelyn.

And somebody’s gotta pay the rent.

It isn’t sex that causes trouble for young ballplayers. It’s staying up all night looking for it.

Said Casey Stengel.

Doomsday accounts of our souls, Ibsen called poetry.

Now Barabbas was a robber.

Says John 18:40.

Now Barabbas was a publisher.

Said Byron.

Delacroix posed for one of the figures in Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa.

Géricault’s portraits of the mad. Done at the Salpetrière asylum and elsewhere — via special permission.

The legend that Aesop was thrown to his death over a cliff at Delphi by priests — because of blasphemy.

Ad Reinhardt, on why so many painters did their drinking at the Cedar Tavern:

To run into the people they most disliked. Other painters.

Boccaccio’s eyewitness description of the Black Death. Samuel Pepys’ of the Fire of London.

Emile Durkheim was the son of a rabbi.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was the grandson of a rabbi.

The last recorded execution for witchcraft in Europe occurred in Switzerland, in 1782.

I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.

Said Brendan Behan.

Michael Puchberg.

Reggio nell’Emilia, Ferruccio Tagliavini died in.

The myth that in the Elysian Fields, Helen marries Achilles.

The myth that in the Elysian Fields, Medea marries Achilles.

The myth that Helen is hanged from a tree by envious women.

Nothing but a bunch of damned bullshit.

Said Harry Truman of Douglas MacArthur’s Old Soldiers Never Die speech.

Evidently not one word was said in print in Milton’s lifetime about Lycidas, L’Allegro, or Il Penseroso.

Persistently lingering, why? — that image of that woman washing her face in a toilet bowl.

And when once she was young and delicate and fair?

But having nothing to do with the question of why, again, still, is Author so often so damnably tired?

La chair est triste, hélas! et fai lu tous les livres.

At seventy-seven, Georges Rouault burned no less than 315 canvases that he felt were not as good as they might be — and that he would never find time to do more work on.

Johann Theophilus Goldberg.

The cloudy perception that labels Hardy a better poet than novelist.

Lessing wrote Laocoön without ever having seen the sculpture.

Hegel and Fichte are buried next to each other in Berlin.

Edmund Wilson once proposed marriage to Edna St. Vincent Millay—

And only afterward became aware that she was sleeping with at least four other men at the same time that she was seeing him.

Eugene O’Neill, who died rich, left not one cent in his will to any of his three children.

Einstein. Churchill. Shaw.

All of whom went out of their way to meet Charlie Chaplin.

Never seeming to remember that Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes is based on a poem by George Crabbe.

Francois Villon’s heatless garret near the Sorbonne — where his inkwell froze solid.

Saint Anthony lived 105 years.

Without ever learning to read or write.

Perfection in life is to carry out in maturity the dreams of one’s youth.

Said Alfred de Vigny.

When Chagall paints you do not know if he is asleep or awake. Somewhere or other inside his head there must be an angel.

Said Picasso.

Let us indulge our own lunacy.

Said Chagall.

Guido of Arezzo. Who gave the names to the first six notes of the scale.

Ca. 1040 AD.

Willem de Kooning did not have his first one-man show until he was forty-three.

From Seneca, writing to a friend about suicide:

But I am running on too long. How can a man end his life if he cannot end a letter?

Edith Stein.

Endlösung.

Gauguin fathered at least four illegitimate children in Tahiti.

In addition to the legitimate clan he had deserted at home.

Zeuxis, who ultimately began to give away his paintings — because they had simply become beyond price.

Though Aristotle would call Polygnotus the greater artist.

Bordeaux, Goya died in.

Truman Capote’s mother was a suicide. His adoptive father, whose name he had taken, went to prison for grand larceny.

Vaness, sí. Battle, no.

Schumann’s ever-increasing intermittent madness.

Once being visited by the spirits of Schubert and Mendelssohn — and making note of a theme he insisted they had given him.

Demons and hyenas at the worst of it, he also saw.

Always acknowledge the gift of a book before there has been time to read it, said Eliot.

If you wait you will have to commit yourself to an opinion.

There are many Nobel Prize winners I wouldn’t want as friends.

Said a member of the Swedish Academy after the award to V. S. Naipaul.

Karl Marx learned Russian mainly to read Pushkin. Joyce learned Norwegian to read Ibsen.

At the age of three, Jeremy Bentham read a then-current eight-volume history of England.

Joseph Brodsky had no schooling after the age of fifteen.

Lawrence Sterne’s love letters to his mistress:

Which he sometimes copied word for word from letters he had earlier written to his wife.

According to Castiglione, two self-important Vatican cardinals once informed Raphael that the faces of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in one of his paintings were too red.

And were informed by Raphael in turn that he had given the matter much thought — and was convinced the saints would be blushing in heaven to see their church governed by men such as themselves.

Shakespeare’s equal, Voltaire called Lope de Vega.

Six in the fifth place means:

Repeatedly ill, nonetheless does not die.

Ernest, don’t you think that Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?

Ernest insisted Zelda Fitzgerald said.

Évariste Galois.

Kalamazoo, Michigan, Richard Tucker died in.

The mackerel-crowded seas.

Maynard Keynes was born in the year Marx died.

Paparazzo, which in the plural becomes paparazzi — but which was originally the name of a character in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.

And which Fellini himself took from the name of an actual person in a travel book of Gissing’s.

Leonhard Euler.

Anton Bruckner was so completely the socially inept rustic that he once handed a tip to a conductor who had rehearsed one of his compositions.

We talk about our assholes, and we talk about our cocks, and we talk about who we fucked last night, or who we’re gonna fuck tomorrow, or when we got drunk, or when we stuck a broom in our ass in the Hotel Ambassador in Prague — anybody tells one’s friends about that.

Said Allen Ginsberg in an anthologized interview.

Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

Said Dorothy Parker, about something else altogether.

When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.

I have now done nothing for fifty years but earn and spend money, and it has become clear to me that spending money gives more pleasure than earning it.

Said Lorenzo de’ Medici.

Titian. Tintoretto. Veronese. Bellini. Giorgione. Canaletto. Piazzetta. Guardi. Longhi. Verrocchio. Antonello da Massina.

All deaths in Venice.

Beethoven. Brahms. Gluck. Haydn. Mahler. Mozart. Schubert. Strauss. Vivaldi. Wolf. Bruckner. Berg.

All in Vienna.

That malignant deity criticism, Swift named it.

Florence Foster Jenkins was seven when she made the recording.

Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, from the William Carlos Williams poem.

Which Williams wrote at the corner of West Fifteenth Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan.

The used dressing gown of Flaubert’s that Sacha Guitry bought at auction in 1930.

A tacky raincoat of Jack Kerouac’s, did Author read something similar about?

Take care, you who call yourself my judge. Take care what you do. For the truth is that I have my mission from God, and you put yourself in great danger.

Said Joan of Arc to her chief Inquisitor.

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.

Said Giordano Bruno to the several of his.

No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied.

Says a peasant woman in Synge, after a last son has been drowned.

A critic once told Whistler that one of his paintings wasn’t good. Whistler told the critic he shouldn’t say it wasn’t good, only that he didn’t like it:

And then, you know, you are perfectly safe.

It has also been adopted by the Freudians as the supreme glory of their dirty and degraded cult—

Noted an early London article re Ulysses.

Now Barabbas was a book reviewer.

Rarely did any friend or other person eat at his table. Says Vasari of Michelangelo.

Spinoza’s queer insistence that he found it almost impossible to believe he had ever been a child.

An obnoxious squeak, Charles Lamb heard in Shelley.

A latrine, Baudelaire called George Sand.

Frederick Delius for a time taught music in Jacksonville, Florida.

Cicero’s ironic view of philosophers who preach that men should repudiate ambition — but who sign their books.

Roger Clemens was discarding that splintered bat.

William Wycherley’s seven years in debtors’ prison.

A great mind unequaled anywhere, Goethe said of Scott.

While of Byron:

Only Shakespeare and the Ancients his superior.

The realization that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all wrote between forty and seventy years after the events in question.

Cavafy worked for the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria for thirty years.

Anthony Trollope worked for the British Post Office for thirty-three.

Jeanne la Pucelle.

Dickens, in America, met Kate Douglas Wiggin, then twelve.

The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.

Crucifixion, for example.

Woodland Hills, California, Buster Keaton died in.

Emily Sarah Sellwood.

Cyril Connolly once snuffed out a cigar in his chocolate mousse at the New York apartment of Diana and Lionel Trilling. Diana Trilling took it as a deliberate affront.

What high rooftop could who have shouted this from, that Author knows it all these years later?

The friendship of Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin.

Puella.

Thomas Nashe, informing Gabriel Harvey of Robert Greene’s drinking habits:

In one yeare he pist as much against the walls, as thou and thy two brothers in three.

Theo van Gogh died within six months of Vincent.

August 6th, 1916, Officer previously reported died of wounds now reported wounded, Graves, Capt. R., Royal Welsh Fus.

The greatest artist who has ever written, George Eliot called Jane Austen.

A prose Shakespeare, agreed Macaulay.

Without poetry — Charlotte Brontë’s dissent.

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?

Asked Johnson of the American Revolution.

The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Munich in 1721.

The extent to which Aristophanes quotes or parodies Euripides — so that he appears to know much of the work by heart.

The extraordinary implication that the audience is thus assumed to know it too.

Lenin saw Sarah Bernhardt in La Dame aux Camélias—and admitted that he wept.

Stephen Crane, on horseback. Happiest there, said Conrad.

The legend that Bucephalus whinnied at sight of himself in a painting by Apelles that Alexander did not like.

Your Majesty’s horse knows more about art than you do, the artist is said to have said.

Attila could not read or write.

A madman, a charlatan, and a miserable fool. Being Rousseau, via Voltaire.

Seventy-two virgins.

Brahms was twice offered an honorary degree by Cambridge and twice declined.

For fear of crossing the Channel, friends suspected.

From Nightwood:

Pray to the good God; she will keep you.

From The Recognitions:

Just ask God, baby, She’ll protect you.

Chet Baker died on a sidewalk in Amsterdam. Almost surely from drugs.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

Said Pound.

Seventy-two white raisins?

Modernsky, Schoenberg mocked Stravinsky as.

The infantrymen who during combat took time to set up a marker where Ernie Pyle was killed in the Pacific in 1945.

Wondering idly how many people who live in Rochester — have read Rochester.

One hundred and fifty carriages followed Washington Irving’s funeral procession in New York in 1859.

Apelles’ explanation for his mastery:

Knowing when to take his hand from the picture.

To know when to stop is of the same importance as to know when to begin.

Said Paul Klee, twenty-two hundred years later.

Missa Papae Marcelli.

The computer analysis that says readings in modern high school senior honors classes are less difficult than those used by people Author’s age when they were in the eighth grade.

Alleged of Einstein, when he was given the news of Hiroshima:

Oy, vey.

Salzburg, Paracelsus died in.

There lived a singer in France of old,

By the tideless, dolorous midland sea.

Eliot, John Reed, Alan Seeger, and Walter Lippmann were in the same class at Harvard.

112 Mercer Street.

Princeton, New Jersey.

Rudyard Kipling was so repeatedly abused when farmed out to relatives as a child that when his mother finally reappeared and entered his bedroom for the first time to kiss him good night, he flung up his hands — to protect himself from the anticipated blow.

How often, if ever, pausing to remember?—

Museum, i.e., place of the muses.

An honest man but no poet.

Ben Jonson called Samuel Daniel.

A good rhymester but no poet.

Milton called Dryden.

No trace of Apelles’ work has come down from Greek antiquity — though it remained enormously valued in the Rome of the Caesars and beyond.

Elmhurst, New York, Albert Pinkham Ryder died in.

Proust’s deathbed photo. By Man Ray.

Joyce, asked to compare D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley:

Huxley at least dresses decently.

Eileen Farrell’s husband was a New York City policeman.

The redheaded maniac, van Gogh was called by the youngsters at Arles.

Il prete rosso—having been Vivaldi.

3.14159.

Clara Schumann’s letters to Brahms:

More interesting than Brahms’ to her.

Hey, Dads, will you take us to that new movie, what’s it called—Apoplexy Now?

I can control the flow of paint. There is no accident.

Said Jackson Pollock.

Hemingway made a display of announcing to friends how frequently he bedded his wives. Someone asked Mary Hemingway about this later on.

If only, Mary Hemingway said.

Dost thou call me fool, boy?

All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.

Untalented and entirely lacking in ear.

Said a Baltimore music school, expelling Larry Adler.

Crapulous, John Adams called Paine’s Common Sense.

Neil Shicoff’s two-word telegram to a New York Times music reviewer who had disapproved of one of his performances.

Archimedes was able to calculate pi to one decimal place. Roughly four hundred years later, Ptolemy managed three.

The fact that Socrates wrote nothing.

The fact that Jesus wrote nothing.

The fact that Buddha wrote nothing.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s fluency in as many as eight languages, including Hebrew.

Including Portuguese.

The friendship of Freud and Wittgenstein’s sister Margarete.

Sir Edward Elgar flew kites.

Cuidado con el Ganado.

Hart Crane’s At Melville’s Tomb.

Is there evidence that Crane ever actually made the pilgrimage — to the northern reaches of the Bronx?

Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel—

Rarely remembering that the film is based on a novel by Heinrich Mann.

Munich, Oswald Spengler died in.

John Masefield, off a ship at eighteen, worked for a time in a Greenwich Village saloon.

Henry Fuseli taught drawing at the Royal Academy. Among others, to Blake.

The fifteen young Muslim girls who were left to burn to death in a school fire in Mecca when vice police drove off those coming to their aid — lest they be seen by men while not wearing their head scarves.

In 2002.

The woman in Pakistan who was raped — and under Muslim law was convicted of adultery and sentenced to be stoned to death.

In 2002.

There was no word for war in Yiddish.

Oscar Wilde, reading Marie Corelli while in Reading Gaol:

The way she writes, she ought to be in here.

It was James Laughlin who was called upon to make an official identification at the morgue after the death of Dylan Thomas.

To write only according to the rules laid down by previous classics signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.

Said Prokofiev.

Caruso was the eighteenth of twenty children. The two following him were the only others to live past infancy.

A man can be a grandfather in thirty years.

Pointed out Heraclitus.

Shakespeare became one at forty-three.

Doña Jeronima de las Cuevas, El Greco’s mistress — whose face he used for most of his Virgins.

Bulwer Lytton once threatened his wife with a carving knife.

Because she didn’t answer when he spoke to her, she claimed.

You better be careful what you are saying, if it is a white man you are talking about, the marshal says. I don’t care if he is a murderer or not.

At sixty-eight, Hans Sachs married a second wife. Of twenty-seven.

Vaughan Williams married a second wife at eighty.

Max Beerbohm married a second wife at eighty-four.

And died a month later.

Strangling is a very quiet death.

Says Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi.

Willem de Kooning’s Light in August. Oil and enamel on paper, 42 by 55 inches, ca. 1946.

Indianapolis, Indiana, Frances Farmer died in.

Carl Maria von Weber once unwittingly swallowed nitric acid — and for the rest of his life could speak only with difficulty.

Decades before it became commonplace, Joyce was generally most comfortable in tennis shoes.

Wittgenstein almost never wore a necktie.

Seventy thousand people died in London in the Great Plague of 1665.

Seventy thousand.

Two hundred thousand lost their homes in the Great Fire of one year later.

Gluck at one time gave singing lessons to an eight-year-old Marie Antoinette.

The brownstone in Brooklyn Heights where Auden, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Carson McCullers, Paul and Jane Bowles, and Gypsy Rose Lee all once shared boarding-house style meals — with Auden performing as housemother.

Ford Madox Ford was a nephew of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Jacques-Louis David was a great-nephew of François Boucher.

If Anne Brontë had not been Anne Brontë, would she still be Anne Brontë?

Such hard work it is to die? Such hard work?

Exceptionally shy, Virgil was known to be. In part because of a stutter.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s first teacher was the portrait painter Bonnat.

Who called his efforts abominable.

An explosion in a cesspool, Paul Elmer More called Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer.

The G-String Murders.

Why does Author not know if what used to be named Arbor Day is still celebrated?

Until he was almost fifty, Rousseau was forced to earn a living as a music copyist.

At least four popes have been assassinated.

Historical details regarding the Amazons were left by both the Greeks and the Persians but ceased with the Romans — as if they had abruptly disappeared.

Has it ever been verified that they existed?

Simone de Beauvoir was one inch taller that Sartre.

Luca Signorelli, at the sudden death of a young son — having the corpse stripped and making a full-length drawing of the boy for remembrance.

And with extraordinary fortitude, shedding not a tear, Vasari says.

Haarlem, Frans Hals died in.

This book on which I have grown thin through all these years, Dante speaks of.

A strict accounting of even the most trivial household expense, Hegel was said to keep.

To the last pfennig.

Cleopatra, in a burka.

Joan, in a burka.

Marilyn.

Albert Camus was having lunch in a Paris restaurant when he was informed he had won the Nobel Prize. By his waiter.

The pretense in speaking of second-rate 1940s Hollywood melodramas as film noir classics.

Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle.

Oscar Williams’ long-popular Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, dated 1946.

Containing five poems by Wallace Stevens, four by Ezra Pound, four by Marianne Moore, two by William Carlos Williams — and nine by Oscar Williams.

But I kissed her little sister,

And forgot my Clementine.

Gus Broberg. Bob Davies. Arnold Ferrin.

He who follows another will never overtake him.

Said Michelangelo.

If you are alone, you are wholly your own.

Said Leonardo.

Swinburne’s pronouncement that he was a better poetic dramatist than Euripides.

Scott, proposed as Poet Laureate — but calling the entire concept ridiculous.

Byron, mocking Southey for accepting the position.

Browning condemning Wordsworth for the same.

Saussure’s doctoral dissertation: On the use of the genitive case in Sanskrit.

Madame Tussaud began a death mask of Robespierre only instants after his severed head was handed down from the guillotine.

The era when books were still chained to desks or lecterns in certain libraries.

Hashshasheen. Assassin.

Diogenes, explaining why people give to beggars, but not to philosophers:

Because they think it possible that they themselves might become lame or blind, but they do not expect to turn out philosophers.

New Haven, Connecticut, Hermann Broch died in.

A thoroughly superficial book with all the profundity of Rebecca.

Scott Fitzgerald called For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s father was a rabbi.

The insistence of both Plutarch and Arrian that the Persians under Darius III at Issus lost 120,000 men — to Alexander’s 450.

The feminist character in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm whose name Cicily Isabel Fairfield borrowed as a pseudonym — to become Rebecca West.

Philomela.

To spend too much time in Studies is Sloth; To use them too much for Ornament is Affectation.

Said Bacon.

Janet Baker. Marilyn Horne. Grace Bumbry.

All of whom attended master classes with Lotte Lehmann.

Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston went to high school together.

I certify that this vehicle has been inspected and that there are no children left on board.

Auden’s first volume of poems — and Stephen Spender’s — were both published by Spender himself on a small hand-operated press.

Charon. Who charged an obolus for the ferry ride across the Styx.

Christina Rossetti’s pet wombat.

Disappointment to this day that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau never sang at the Metropolitan.

Genghis Khan had five hundred wives and/or concubines.

Moe Berg and Allen Ginsberg were distant cousins.

Toby Greene. Who jumped ship with Melville in the South Pacific and later reappeared — as a housepainter in Buffalo — to verify events in Typee.

These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big black bucks.

Being Dwight D. Eisenhower — edifying someone re Southerners opposed to desegregation.

William Faulkner voted for Adlai Stevenson.

An obolus. Six of same having equaled one ancient drachma.

Ivan the Terrible died while playing chess with Boris Godunov.

Dante tires one quickly; it is like looking at the sun.

Said Joyce.

Lavinia.

One of Melville’s grandfathers took part in the Boston Tea Party.

As did one of Edith Wharton’s great-grandfathers.

An uncle of Kafka’s was the director general of the Spanish railway system.

Henry, why are you here?

Waldo, why are you not here?

A pack of lies, Carlyle dismissed poetry as.

Stone dolls, Isaac Newton called sculpture.

You cannot trust the ones who are too careful. As writers or drinkers. Old Goethe cannot have been so good a man as Keats or Chatterton or Rimbaud. The ones that burn.

Said Lowry.

Mark Twain’s was the first house in Hartford with a telephone.

Norway’s king attended Kirsten Flagstad’s funeral.

Do certain people actually remember learning to read?

Monte Carlo, Lillie Langtry died in.

Louis MacNeice died of pneumonia after descending into a mine to check on sound effects while producing a program for the BBC.

Glee-wood, the harp was called in Anglo-Saxon.

Harry Haller, in Steppenwolf—in a setting based on Zurich, ca. 1920—speaks of three mail deliveries each day.

Leopold Bloom, in the Ulysses set a decade and a half earlier, notes the nine o’clock evening postman meaning the last delivery of what in Dublin at that time would have been five.

Haller even then complains of junk mail.

Kurt Weill’s father was a cantor.

James Levine’s grandfather was one.

They said I was mad, and I said they were mad, and, damn them, they outvoted me.

Said Dryden’s sometime collaborator Nathaniel Lee, upon being confined to Bedlam.

Titian might have become an even greater painter if he had ever really learned elementary draftsmanship i.e., if he had ever really learned to draw.

Michelangelo evidently suggested.

Ellen Terry once refused the lead in a play Henry James had written particularly with her in mind.

James called her a hag.

Pliny the Younger’s detail-by-detail letter of 79 AD to Tacitus about the death of his uncle in the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii.

The claim that Vicente Huidobro’s mother could trace her ancestry back to El Cid.

I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.

Begins Malone Dies.

Two of Jane Austen’s brothers became admirals in the Royal Navy.

Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.

The Persistence of Memory.

Itzhak Perlman. Nigel Kennedy. Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. Midori. Shlomo Mintz.

Who all studied under Dorothy DeLay.

An appointment with E. M. Forster that Tennessee Williams once canceled.

Because he could not abide old men with urine stains on their trousers, Gore Vidal said Williams said.

Nabokov once dismissed Don Quixote as overrated during a lecture at Harvard.

Harvard thinks otherwise, he was complacently informed by Harry Levin.

Michael Praetorius.

Simone Signoret.

They are hardly more obscure than Hegel or Swedenborg. Said Nerval, refusing to explain the meaning of some sonnets.

The possibility that Phidias died in jail.

Now, listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face.

Nazim Hikmet was buried in Moscow. Thirty-eight years later a tree from Turkey was transplanted beside his grave.

Not long after Byron’s death, Teresa Guiccioli had an affair with Lamartine.

Was E. T. A. Hoffmann the first writer to use the word Philistine in its modern cultural sense?

What might Johannes Kepler have been allergic to, that his nose ran eternally?

Remembering that Bedlam is a contraction of Bethlehem, from London’s Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, since approximately 1400 an asylum.

Where in the eighteenth century tours were conducted — to view the chained inmates.

Only three former baseball players appeared at Ty Cobb’s funeral.

Litheck, Dietrich Buxtehude died in.

Josephine Baker’s mother was an East St. Louis washerwoman.

Omar Khayyám. Which translates as Omar the Tentmaker.

Though in fact he was a mathematician and astronomer.

Saint-Rémy.

Perhaps the greatest woman poet since Sappho, Harriet Monroe called Edna Millay.

I think she is every bit as good as Elizabeth Browning, acknowledged Hart Crane.

I can only say I do not greatly care for Madame Browning.

Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlstein were once apartment mates.

Rubáiyát. Which itself means nothing more exotic than quatrains.

Jascha Heifetz once composed a piece of popular music under the pseudonym Jim Hoyle — and was called Jim by his friends from then on.

Fritz, Nietzsche was known as among intimates.

Point Barrow, Alaska. August 15, 1935.

Once more before he dies Author will reread Huckleberry Finn.

Alprazolam.

Demosthenes, to conquer his speech impediment:

Shouting orations into the surf with a mouth full of pebbles — or declaiming while running up and down hills.

Does anyone in Shakespeare have more lines than Hamlet?

Lily Tomlin’s program note that the understudy for her one-woman show was Zinka Milanov.

Who sued for two million dollars.

More than 60 percent of the people in the United States have not read a book from beginning to end since adolescence.

If then.

I sometimes think that never blows so red

The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled.

Mickey Cochrane. Ray Schalk. Nap Rucker.

Peggy Mitchell, the author of Gone with the Wind was commonly called.

Nate West, the author of Miss Lonelyhearts.

I have not for these things fished in other men’s waters; my Bible and my Concordance are my only library in my writing.

Said John Bunyan.

Isocrates, who starved himself to death. At ninety-eight.

Johnson wrote Rasselas in one week of evenings to pay for his mother’s funeral.

John Cleland wrote Fanny Hill to keep himself out of debtors’ prison.

Arcetri, near Florence, Galileo died in.

You can’t see out of the back of your head. I do not think there is any record of a man being able to criticize the people that came after him.

Said Pound.

Impecunitis.

What a joy — that syntax is no longer subversive in the White House.

Said John Steinbeck after the election of John F. Kennedy.

Yeats had his tonsils removed at fifty-five — by Dr. Oliver St. John Gogarty.

Tom Eliot. Wally Stevens.

At twenty-nine, Toscanini conducted the world premiere of La Bohème.

And conducted it again on its fiftieth anniversary.

The first occasion on which the word shit appeared in the New Yorker:

Quoting Richard M. Nixon.

Forgetting by now that Frieda Lawrence’s brother was Baron Manfred von Richthofen.

What Palestrina would have made of a Stockhausen score.

What Giotto would make of a Gerhard Richter canvas.

When you have a tan, she said, what have you got?

Dottie Parker.

Schopenhauer on critics:

Mistaking their own toy trumpets for the trombones of fame.

During the night after Modigliani’s death, and before her suicide from a fifth-floor window, Jeanne Hébuterne repeatedly sketched self-portraits that showed her stabbing herself with a knife.

Samuel Pepys owned 2,474 books.

De Quincey owned five thousand.

Wordsworth fewer than three hundred.

Jim Farrell.

Jim Agee.

Naomi Ginsberg’s lobotomy.

Rosemary Kennedy’s.

The wagon train moved slowly westward.

William Empson: You could do that with any poetry, couldn’t you?

I. A. Richards: You’d better go off and do it, hadn’t you?

The reaction when sudden sunshine on a late winter afternoon brings with it a first unanticipated hint of spring. At Dachau.

Al Naharot Bavel.

I see only a heap of white clothes, like a snowdrift. O God, she moves her arm!

Tertullian’s father was a Roman centurion.

Silver Spring, Maryland, Rachel Carson died in.

Garden Spring Valley, Maryland, Rosa Ponselle.

We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above others.

Concluded Machiavelli.

I was once in Italie myself, but I thanke God my abode there was but IX days. And yet I saw in that litle tyme, in one Citie, more libertie to sinne, than I ever hard tell of in our noble Citie of London in IX years.

Added Roger Ascham, in 1563.

A country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels.

Being Horatio Nelson’s subsequent two cents’ worth.

Ted Hughes writes the kind of stuff I throw away.

Said James Dickey.

I did greatly enjoy the first few years of Act I.

Said Alexander Woollcott of an operetta by Rudolf Friml.

The title for Vanity Fair came to Thackeray when he was almost asleep. And sent him literally bounding around his bedroom in delight.

The Republicans are as wicked as they are stupid, which is saying a great deal.

Said Bertrand Russell after a visit.

What Balzac would make of a novel of Author’s.

Bill de Kooning.

On Lucas Cranach’s tombstone: Pictor Celerrimus, the fastest painter.

Camilo José Cela fought on the side of the fascists during the Spanish Civil War.

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

Macedonian barber: How would you like your hair cut?

King Archelaus: In silence.

Ariosto spent twenty-six years writing and revising Orlando Furioso.

Frank, the Francis Beaumont of Beaumont and Fletcher was known as.

Charley Dickens, to Wilkie Collins and others.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem about having seen an older man in the Copenhagen airport who was the very image of Hemingway.

And only later learning that it was.

Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo made their Metropolitan Opera debuts within eight weeks of each other.

Acute lymphocytic leukemia, José Carreras recovered from.

Hadrian, at fifty, climbed Etna to watch the sunrise. Goethe climbed Vesuvius twice.

Wondering if youngsters still read Beau Geste.

Actually, more than his persistent tiredness, what has started to distress Author lately is the way he has found himself scuffing his feet when he walks.

But also the singular small missteps he sometimes unexpectedly takes. As if his Adidas have whims of their own.

Literature is what gets taught, Roland Barthes said.

Ridgfield, Connecticut, Geraldine Farrar died in.

Jimmy Whistler.

Opera is opera, symphony is symphony—

Said Verdi, in an ultimate judgment on Wagner.

Author is likewise not particularly gladdened by the several times in recent weeks that he has tripped at a curb. Or at the outside steps of his apartment building.

The Norman Rockwell of the intelligentsia, Robert Hughes called Alex Katz.

Liber scriptus proferetur,

In quo toturn continetur.

The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Newcastle in 1790.

And in London in 1818.

Farinelli was at one period commissioned to sing to Philip V of Spain every evening for a decade.

Giambattista Tiepolo was buried in Madrid, in a church that would later be destroyed.

The whereabouts of his remains having been unknown ever since.

They were overjoyed when the first plane hit the building; so I said to them: Be patient.

The sky will burn at forty-five degrees. Fire approaches the great new City. In an instant a huge scattered flame leaps up.

Why, with few exceptions, is the average painter so much more literate than the average actor?

Vaughan Williams went through life supported by a private income.

William Burroughs had a regular monthly allowance from his parents for twenty-five years after graduating from Harvard.

Where the last stand was made, the Long Hair stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him.

Said Sitting Bull.

From a description in Plutarch of a drinking bout:

As if one were laying in provisions for a siege.

Linares, Granada, Andrés Segovia was born in.

Linares, Granada, Manolete died in.

I feel like I’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition — unquote.

What news on the Rialto?

Realizing only after the fact that Miss Lonelyhearts’ real name is never mentioned.

Mademoiselle Côeur-Brisé.

Considering her inordinate reclusiveness, who then walked Emily Dickinson’s huge dog?

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

Said Johnson.

Major Marcus Reno. Captain Frederick Benteen.

Or yet again, Author simply passing casually through his apartment — with one foot or the other now and then not quite touching down where it should.

And was it yesterday that Author’s right shoulder thumped into the corridor wall just outside his bedroom?

A passage he has normally navigated ten thousand times without a second thought?

There was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile.

Drawing unsatisfactory.

Say Hitler’s records at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts — where he failed the admittance exams.

Was Chardin the greatest still-life painter ever?

In the meanwhile another of the actors conquers Poland.

Southey’s several old-fashioned epic poems which Richard Porson suggested would be read after Homer and Virgil were forgotten:

But not until then.

Empson’s uncounted misquotations.

Stanley Kunitz delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Mark Rothko.

After Nero arranged the murder of his own mother, Seneca shamelessly wrote the letter to the Senate for him declaring that she had committed suicide.

Eliot’s ashes were buried at East Coker — though there is a cenotaph at Westminster Abbey.

Devon, Jean Rhys died in.

The myriad Anna Akhmatova poems, written over decades, which she or friends were forced to immediately memorize.

Because under Soviet rule she was afraid to put them on paper.

Sick-of-it-all. Desperate. Brokenhearted. Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband.

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They’ve seen it done every day of the week, but they can’t do it themselves.

Said Brendan Behan.

Utterly remote from the interests of the people and the state.

Being a typical party functionary’s comment on Akhmatova’s work when she was expelled from the Writers’ Union.

The rioting at the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913—

Cocteau’s recollection of himself, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Nijinsky holding an exhausted postmortem on a carriage ride through the Bois de Boulogne in the hours afterward.

Who wrote this fiendish Rite of Spring.

What right had he to write the thing?

Jackson Pollock was classified 4F because of psychiatric problems and thus never drafted in World War II.

Jack Kerouac was given a Section Eight discharge from the army for mental instability but subsequently served in the merchant marine.

Pietro Spina.

Forgetting to remember that Tintoretto’s name comes from the fact that his father was a dyer.

Or that Correggio’s comes from the name of the small town where he was born.

Moll Flanders, in a burka.

Anna Karenina, in a burka.

Scarlett.

Bernini once sculpted a marble bust of Charles I of England whom he had never seen.

Van Dyck had done portraits at three different angles — which were shipped to Rome for Bernini’s use.

It cautioned all ladies of quality not to run off with blackamoors and it warned all good wives to look well to their linen.

Said Thomas Rymer, finding at least some trifling merit in Othello.

Motiveless malignity.

Our first aim is to serve God and spread the Christian faith.

Said Cortés.

I have come to take away their gold.

Said Pizarro.

Max Beckmann was severely shell-shocked in World War I.

David Jones the same.

Palma, Majorca, Joan Miró died in.

Diderot, who was known to gesticulate excessively in conversation — and was seen to slap Catherine the Great repeatedly on the thighs.

At which the empress was merely amused.

Amy Levy. At twenty-eight. In 1889.

Blake was given a pauper’s funeral.

And buried without a headstone.

Scott Fitzgerald was three years older than Hemingway.

And one year older than Faulkner.

Dylan Thomas was one day older than John Berryman.

Anne Hathaway died seven years after her husband, at sixty-seven.

The first pianist to perform with the side of the piano facing the audience was Liszt.

Out of vanity over his profile.

Dame Myra Hess. Her recitals in London during the Blitz.

Not only eager to talk about himself, but reluctant to have the conversation stray from the subject.

Said Thoreau of Whitman.

As overrated as Citizen Kane.

Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd were for a time roommates.

Nikos Kazantzakis was a pupil of Henri Bergson’s.

Otherwise presumably educated souls who could not for the life of them point out Thermopylae on a map.

Or the Rubicon. Or Trafalgar.

Nathaniel Hawthorne never learned which side won the Civil War.

John Gower died blind.

So much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.

The London Athenaeum called Moby Dick.

Schoolboy drivel.

Edith Wharton called Ulysses.

Lynwood Thomas Rowe.

George Orwell’s decision that his real name should be used on his grave.

Gabriel Fauré played the organ at the funeral of Paul Verlaine.

Sviatoslav Richter sat at the piano for hours as mourners viewed Pasternak’s open coffin.

The legend that Diogenes died in Corinth on the same day as Alexander the Great in Babylon.

Kiss me, Hardy.

How long did Schiller leave the rotten apples in his desk before replacing them with less-rotten apples?

Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time—which was composed and first performed in a German prisoner-of-war camp.

October 25, 1400. The death of Chaucer. October 25, 1415. Agincourt.

Billie Holiday’s bank balance at her death registered a total of seventy cents.

Though hospital attendants found $750 taped to her leg.

Saint Jerome slept with works of Aristotle under his pillow.

Taking it for granted for so long that one no longer thinks to be astonished—

That Milton, blind, dictated Paradise Lost.

Biblia Graeca Septuaginta, fol. 1594, Frankfurt.

The volume with which Johnson once knocked down his bookseller employer Thomas Osborne during an argument.

Lex clavatoris designati rescindenda est.

Remembering that Bizet’s Carmen is based on a novel by Prosper Mérimée.

Not remembering that the Mérimée is in turn based on a narrative poem by Pushkin.

Do you lack anything?

I do. That you stand out of my sunlight a little.

Statius, today unread.

Who is given more space in the Divine Comedy than anyone except Virgil or Beatrice.

Recanati, near Ancona, Beniamino Gigli died in.

Michael Faraday’s father was a blacksmith.

Sarah Josepha Hale.

As a form of preventive medicine, Voltaire took an enema at least three times a week.

Hart Crane did not finish high school.

George Gershwin did not finish high school.

John Cheever did not finish high school.

Marlon Brando did not finish high school.

‘Twas brillig.

Albert Einstein’s estate came to no more than $65,000.

Karl Marx left less than two hundred and fifty pounds.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

Gigli’s legato.

There is such a thing in this state of Louisiana as the Napoleonic code, according to which whatever belongs to my wife is mine also — and vice versa.

One’s response if asked to answer quickly: What language did Jesus speak?

Homeric beer drinking, Brahms was credited with.

A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

Said Russell.

Flowing with milk and honey, the Old Testament promised the Promised Land would be.

Utterly barren, Strabo found it.

Heidegger was buried in the same small-town German cemetery he had passed every day on his way to school eight decades before.

Rémy de Gourmont’s perception that there are two kinds of writers:

Writers who can write and writers who cannot.

Edward I banished all Jews from England in 1290. None were allowed back until 1655, under Cromwell.

Shakespeare found Shylock where?

His books are to be eradicated from the memory of man. Said the Edict of Worms re Luther.

1915. The first use of poison gas in battle, at Ypres on the Western Front. By the Germans.

1939. The first use of gas chambers for the execution of civilians, commencing with experiments on retarded children. By the Germans.

Boccherini. At one point so influenced by Haydn that he was spoken of as Haydn’s mistress.

Samuel Beckett was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his work with the French Resistance in World War II.

Leopold Bloom is five feet nine and one-half inches tall.

Dasein.

Einsatzgruppen.

Monteverdi was seventy-five when he wrote The Coronation of Poppea.

Vienna, Schrödinger died in.

Jim should have stuck to music instead of bothering with writing. To think he was once on the same platform with John McCormack.

Said Nora.

Was The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction the most frequently cited critical essay in the second half of the twentieth century?

Howland Island. July 2, 1937.

Catullus, dead at thirty, was wealthy enough to have owned a custom-built yacht.

What did you bring that book I didn’t want to be read to out of up for?

Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.

La Jolla, California, Amelita Galli-Curci died in.

As did Raymond Chandler.

As did Leo Szilard.

How many Cy Young Awards would Cy Young have won?

But now the garret is a thing of the past. A good writer is a rich writer, and a rich writer is a good writer.

Proclaimed an awesomely cognizant, incomparably discerning magazine editor named Lewis Lapham ca. 2001.

And burbled as it came.

At least once, Descartes was involved in a duel with swords over a woman.

Arnold Schoenberg, who had converted to Christianity, deliberately reaffirmed his Jewishness in formal ceremonies in Paris after having had to flee the rise of Hitler.

Marc Chagall stood as witness to the reconversion.

David Hockney’s rationalization that because he himself could never draw like an Old Master, most of the Old Masters really could not either, but gained an edge by manipulating images via optical devices.

The fact that Thomas Wolfe was the only significant American novelist of his time more drawn to Munich or Berlin than to Paris.

His unappetizing politics.

Watson, you idiot, somebody stole our tent.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

Marat’s skin disease — which could be salved by soaking in warm water.

Explaining why Charlotte Corday found him in his bath.

Jacques-Louis David, who had visited him at his same bath only a day earlier — ergo the realism in the canvas of the murder.

615 Cahuenga Building.

Hollywood Boulevard.

Earlier versions of the myth of Troy — predating the Iliad—in which Hector is still alive when Achilles lashes him to his chariot and drags him around the walls.

Guarneri was a pupil of Stradivari.

The Guarneri that Heifetz had used was appraised after his death at six million dollars.

Mistinguett.

One hundred and eighty different plants are referred to in Shakespeare.

There’s fennel for you, and columbines.

Every bride is beautiful, Hillel said.

The myth that Dionysus invented wine.

On Mount Nysa.

In Libya.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows.

Nietzsche’s insomnia. Jorge Luis Borges’.

God-almighty rubbish, Leo Stein called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse — who through fifty years of correspondence continued to greet each other as Herr Mann and Herr Hesse.

Gertrud Kolmar was at forced labor in a Berlin factory until transported to her death in Auschwitz in 1943.

Eglantine.

The original manuscript of I Stood Tip-toe upon a Little Hill—which Cowden Clarke cut up into a dozen or more fragments for admirers of Keats who wanted keepsakes.

Alice B. Toklas survived Gertrude Stein by twenty-one years.

But was buried beside her in Père Lachaise.

Reno, Nevada, Dizzy Dean died in.

El Greco ended his days the equivalent of bankrupt.

While living in twenty-plus rooms.

John Huss is said to have chanted hymns as he was being burned alive.

Auden’s conviction that Beethoven was homosexual.

Joseph Brodsky and a friend were asked to select Akhmatova’s burial site at a Leningrad cemetery.

And could locate only drunken gravediggers to deal with.

It is not disorderly and slovenly carriage which makes us sages.

Said Spinoza, even in poverty always formally dressed.

The runners return to their respectable bases.

Hon. John M. Woolsey.

The likely presence of Laurel and Hardy in the background of Waiting for Godot—is the notion Hugh Kenner’s?

The Aegean, Callas’s ashes were scattered in.

According to Tacitus, Petronius slept all day. And some-way lounged into fame in spite of profoundest indolence.

D’où venons nous?

Que sommes nous?

Où allous nous?

Someone once actually gave Picasso credit — in print — for the discovery that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.

The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.

Said Dali.

The friendship of Strindberg and Gauguin.

Tintoretto’s Susanna and the Elders.

In which Susanna looks to weigh in at close to two hundred pounds.

Santayana’s annoyance at the perpetual tremblings and tears and fainting fits in Dante. This shivering and swooning philosopher — unquote.

Wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him.

Says Byron in his journal regarding Scott.

Manzoni was so revered throughout Italy by the end of his life that parents recognizing him in public would ask him to literally bless their children.

Alberto Moravia’s suggestion that a woman’s body is all that modern man any longer possesses of nature.

Verte desnuda es recordar la tierra.

Contributed Lorca.

Aristotle’s conclusion that one could tell how bad a play was by the amount of food eaten in the audience during the performance.

Inverurie, near Aberdeen, Mary Garden died in.

Jules Laforgue died four days after his twenty-seventh birthday. His wife of less than eight months would die a year later. Tubercular both.

Edward Jenner.

In the era of the desert anchorites of fourth-century Egypt and the Near East, one convent is chronicled as having housed 130 nuns — not one of whom ever bathed.

Socrates’ father was a sculptor.

Scott Joplin’s father was a former slave.

Nominative. Genitive. Dative. Accusative. Ablative.

Stop giving instructions to God.

Niels Bohr once told Einstein.

Aposiopesis.

The George Grosz drawing of Jesus, crucified, wearing a gas mask and combat boots, and captioned Shut up and carry out your orders.

Dated 1928.

The Max Ernst painting of the Virgin Mary spanking the infant Jesus.

If anyone pilfer this, may he die the death, be boiled in a cauldron, may epilepsy and fever overtake him, may he be broken on the wheel and hanged. Amen.

Says the Latin inscription on an extant hand-copied twelfth-century church Bible.

For the work of the pen let the writer be sent a beautiful girl.

Says a copyist’s note at the end of a different manuscript from the same period.

But look where sadly the poor wretch comes reading.

The happenstance that Lorca and Hart Crane once met — briefly, during Lorca’s stay in New York. Unfortunately with neither really knowing anything about the other’s work.

Hath the rain a father?

Corona, Queens, Louis Armstrong died in.

Sunnyside, Queens, Bix.

At sixty-seven, Paul Robeson was mugged on a New York street.

He must be some escaped lunatic.

Said an early Boston review of Leaves of Grass.

Getting and spending.

Freud waved his rights to royalties on translations of his work into Hebrew or Yiddish.

The letters of Voltaire take up a total of ninety-eight volumes.

Chamfort’s ironic distillation of the essential attitudes in the French Revolution:

Be my brother or I’ll kill you.

The one experience I shall never describe, Virginia Woolf called her intended suicide.

I have the feeling that I shall go mad. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it, but cannot fight any longer.

The morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before.

Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come.

The last book Einstein had been reading when he died was Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision.

Blaise Cendrars once played the piano in a silent-movie theater on the Bowery.

Not very many years after Al Jolson had been singing for his supper nearby.

When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.

Terrorists. Which was in fact the literary term chosen to categorize the earliest nineteenth-century female Gothic novelists.

Tchaikovsky. Glinka. Borodin. Mussorgsky.

Who are buried in the same St. Petersburg cemetery.

Pollock. De Kooning. Frank O’Hara. Ad Reinhardt. Jean Stafford. Maggie Oldring.

Who are buried in the same one in East Hampton.

In a more traditional sort of novel, would it be time here for Author to bring back that obscure, lorn creature performing her ablutions at a toilet bowl?

Avec what startling dramatic revelation appended?

Langston Hughes’ request that a particular Duke Ellington composition be played at his funeral:

Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me.

Drumcliff churchyard.

All I can do is be kind to my husband and grow up children. Movie is nothing but exhibition dancing. What is the meaning of dancing and songs?

Aristophanes of Byzantium, asked which poem by Archilochos he most admired:

The longest.

Diogenes, asked what sort of wine he preferred:

That which belongs to another.

What a man does is all that counts, not what he intends to do.

Said Picasso.

The friendship of Felix Mendelssohn and Queen Victoria.

The red and roundy sun, John Clare called it.

Milan, Eugenio Montale died in.

Giuseppe Ungaretti anche.

Naples, Salvatore Quasimodo.

No woman ever created a single permanent work of art.

Said Schopenhauer.

Dylan Thomas was asked to be best man at Vernon Watkins’ wedding.

And managed not to get there.

Constantin Brancusi studied under Rodin.

Isamu Noguchi studied under Brancusi.

Anselm Kiefer studied under Joseph Beuys.

El Greco was a pupil of Titian’s.

The younger Pliny’s tale of the reader from Cadiz who so admired Livy that he traveled the full distance to Rome simply to have one view of him in the flesh — and then immediately left again.

Kurt Vonnegut once played chess against Garry Kasparov. And was cunning enough to resign after very few moves.

Even though Kasparov was playing a dozen or more games simultaneously.

Spain sent 130 ships to England in the Armada.

Fifty-four limped back.

Doll Tearsheet.

The only thing that we learn from history — is that we never learn anything from history.

Hegel said.

Gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts. Reads a Faulkner description of Tennyson.

Thirteen pages in seven weeks. Five days on one page. Three days on eight lines.

Read random notations in Flaubert’s letters re progress on Madame Bovary.

Moritzburg, near Dresden, Kaethe Kollwitz died in.

One of the influences on Dvořák’s New World symphony was Hiawatha. Which Dvořák had no less first read in Czech.

Children, be comforted. I am well.

Being Haydn’s last words.

Mahler’s — singular — in a context which made no sense:

Mozart.

I hate to see him eating so many dinners and writing so few books.

Said William Dean Howells, of the extent to which Mark Twain was celebrated in his later years.

A complete absence of aesthetic feeling — unquote — Tolstoy found in Shakespeare.

Ernest Jones and Stefan Zweig spoke at Freud’s funeral.

Donatello died paralyzed.

Donatello.

The illusion that Deep Blue was somehow thinking.

Armageddon. At the hill of Megiddo — in the plains of Jezreel.

In southern Galilee.

I have traveled a good deal in Concord.

Raphael appears to have painted a total of exactly fifty Madonnas.

Has anyone ever identified manna?

Et in Arcadia ego.

Chopin was buried in concert dress.

Delacroix was one of his pallbearers.

Solon, hearing a new poem of Sappho’s, saying he wished to memorize it:

Once I possess it fully, I can happily die.

The Leucadian Rock.

The Tarpeian Rock.

And it was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.

George Moore’s assertion that he had in effect invented adultery.

Which he said had not occurred in any English novels before his own.

Sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum.

Said Propertius: Among the dead there are thousands of beautiful women.

Thomas Mann’s claim that everything Bertolt Brecht wrote adhered far too predictably to the Communist party line.

Brecht’s response that Mann was a half-wit.

Auden’s response when asked if he believed in capital punishment:

That he would definitely approve of it in regard to Brecht.

Diderot, writing art criticism, and finding fault with a nude of Boucher’s:

All the same, just let me possess her as she is, and I do not think I shall waste time complaining that her hair is too dark.

Black Drop. Four ounces @ eleven shillings.

Being the brand of opium most favored by De Quincey and Coleridge. By Byron not infrequently also.

At one’s local apothecary.

Bert Brecht.

A faint sound to the praise of God, Hrotswitha von Gandersheim described her Latin comedies as.

Evidently wholly unaware of their sexual connotations.

Tomis, on the Black Sea, Ovid died in.

Cristoforo Colombo. Cristóbal Colon.

Sprawling, ignorant, indecent, unmelodious, seldom metrical.

Robert Graves called Pound’s Cantos.

A barbarian loose in a museum, Yvor Winters called Pound himself.

Shepherd of adulterers, a heretical older Tertullian called the pope.

Wittgenstein’s Vienna. Wittgenstein’s Nephew. Wittgenstein’s Ladder. Wittgenstein’s Poker.

Ferdinand and Isabella, los reyes católicos.

The former of whom had Jewish ancestry.

The likelihood that Torquemada did also.

Bah! For me it is simply allegro con brio.

Said Toscanini about critics reading politics into the Eroica.

Le Douanier Rousseau, who insisted he served with troops sent to Mexico to aid the Emperor Maximilian and actually saw those jungles.

But lied.

We killed him,

signed,

Morty.

Rubens attended Mass seven days a week.

Miroslav Holub and Zbigniew Herbert died within days of each other.

Author’s continuing sometime missteps.

His awareness that he probably ought to see a neurologist about same.

Crooked man, crooked mile.

Conversely, Author is still essentially willing to dismiss all of that as no more than age, the problems with his balance as well as the damnable obstinate weariness.

A Portrait of the Artist as an Alter Kocker.

Indeed. Old enough in fact to remember when Ted Williams was not the last baseball player to bat.400, but merely the most recent.

For that matter old enough to remember when the last player to bat.400 was Memphis Bill Terry.

Camden, New Jersey, Walt Whitman died in.

Given pause by the coincidence of the Declaration of Independence having been signed in the same year as the publication of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Carlyle once sent Edward Fitzgerald a copy of his latest book — with a note suggesting he should either read it or use the pages for lighting his pipe.

From far back in dimmest childhood he had been my ideal Elder Brother, and I still, through the years, saw in him, even as a small timorous boy yet, my protector, my backer, my authority and my pride.

Said Henry James, at the death of William.

The letters of Hélöise and Abélard. Forgeries or no?

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Said Nietzsche.

Music is neither good nor bad — to the deaf.

Said Spinoza.

Voltaire’s corpse had to be secretly driven out of Paris — sitting upright in a carriage — to be given a Christian burial.

Sartre’s impression that there was once an English author named Foe — who wrote such books as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.

Weimar, Nietzsche died in.

The black bat, night.

I have never killed a man. But I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure.

Said Clarence Darrow.

The friendship of Monet and Clemenceau.

A little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair and a face with no good feature.

Being Emily of Amherst, as seen by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Selah, which marks the ends of verses in the Psalms, but the Hebrew meaning of which is unknown.

And probably indicates no more than pause, or rest.

Why does Author wish it implied more — or might stand for some ultimate effacement, even?

The 1953 Victor De Sabata La Scala Tosca, with Callas, Giuseppe di Stefano, and Tito Gobbi — is it the greatest single opera recording ever made?

The greatest anything recording?

Selah. Absolutely, all the illimitable connotations of Einstein’s cosmic Oy, vey Author hereby personally endows it with — a terminal desolation and despair.

Done? Done. Beware Selah.

Ravenna, Dante died in.

Brundisium, Virgil.

Chalcis, in Euboea — Aristotle.

For decades, at his most famous, Isaac Bashevis Singer kept his number listed in the Manhattan telephone directory.

As did Auden. And Allen Ginsberg.

Walter Pater’s habit of sometimes muttering Botticelli to himself — over and over — almost as a kind of incantation.

Molly Bloom’s familiarity with at least one episode in Rabelais — whom Joyce would nonetheless later persist in denying he had ever read.

Obscure, muddled, nervous, and confused.

Stated an official Prussian academic assessment of Hegel’s lectures.

Putridity and corruption.

Stated Kierkegaard re their published versions.

King Oliver. Who spent the last years of his life as a pool-hall attendant.

A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.

Said Kenneth Tynan.

Salt Lake City, 1868—evidently the last insistently voiced claim of having seen the Wandering Jew.

Bessie Smith’s grave in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania — which was without a headstone for thirty-three years. One of those who finally arranged for one having been Janis Joplin.

Inverness, Florida, Ted Williams died in.

Age.

Dammit.

Also being the cause of this new recent lightheadedness, Author is certain.

Moments in which whatever he’d had in mind seems to have almost sneakily floated off someplace just out of reach, flickering there — even taunting him.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

An upside-down Matisse.

Beethoven’s Tenth, Brahms’ First was spoken of as.

For all the renown achieved by many, painters and sculptors in antiquity were considered little better than manual workers on a level with blacksmiths or shoemakers.

Cf. Plutarch: No well-born youth would want to be Phidias or Polyclitus, however much he may admire their art.

Or even in the Renaissance, the difference between a sculptor and a common stonecutter, which eluded Michelangelo’s magistrate father — and who considered his son’s elected career demeaning.

Muddling among old books has the quality of a sedative, and saves the tear and wear of an overwrought brain.

Said Scott.

The tradition that there was no one in fourteenth-century Florence who could not read — that even the donkey-cart driver could recite Dante.

The legend that a popular early Italian typeface, not too long after Gutenberg, was based on the handwriting of Petrarch.

Is my swan costume ready, please?

Asked Anna Pavlova on her deathbed.

According to his own wish, Liszt’s funeral was conducted without music.

Liszt’s.

Mais toujours seul; sans famine; même, quelle langue parlais-je?

An Oldsmobile convertible, Jackson Pollock was driving.

A Facel Vega, Camus was riding in. Michel Gallimard was doing the driving.

Fireplace Road, East Hampton. 10:15 P.M. August II, 1956.

National Route 5, Petit-Villeblevin. 1:54 P.M. January 4, 1960.

How long did the Virgin Mary survive Jesus?

How long before the Crucifixion had her husband, Joseph, died?

Theodore Roethke’s poem about the possibility that he would spend time locked away for madness in heaven as he did in life.

But there sharing it with the likes of Blake, and Clare, and Christopher Smart.

Gissing, clenching his teeth in despair at sight of a Tibullus priced at sixpence on a bookstall — sixpence being every cent he owned in the world.

The architect of Chartres Cathedral.

Unknown.

The invention of the compass, in use ca. 1200.

Unattributed.

Constable’s habit of frequently making detailed notes on the reverse of his sketches for landscapes — place, date, time, weather. And once:

Lovely. So much so that I could not paint for looking.

Somebody is living on this beach.

Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.

Said Wittgenstein, leaving it.

Rossini, shown a Mozart score in Mozart’s own hand:

And going to his knees to kiss the sheets.

Education is the best viaticum for old age.

Diogenes Laërtius says Aristotle said.

Dickens was the last mourner to turn aside from Thackeray’s grave.

And then walked off alone.

For there is such a little time that your youth will last — such a little time.

Says someone in Dorian Gray.

The legend that Rilke died after being pricked by the thorn of a rose.

Actually, from leukemia.

Valmont, near Glion, Switzerland. 3:30 A.M. December 29, 1926.

Where are those who were in this world before us? Go to the cemetery and look at them.

Said Anon. in the twelfth century.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

Methinks I have the keys of my prison in my own hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword.

Said Donne, in Biathanatos.

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story

Said Isak Dinesen.

On the tomb of Esteban Murillo in Seville: Vive moriturus. Live as though about to die.

No one truly believes in his own death.

Said Freud.

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own. Says someone in The Magic Mountain.

As many as thirty thousand people may have attended Beethoven’s funeral.

Brancusi. Soutine. Léger. Vlaminck. André Derain. Jacques Lipchitz. Suzanne Valadon. Kees van Dongen. Picasso.

All of whom attended Modigliani’s — after his death in a paupers’ ward.

I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanatoriums.

Said Scott.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Says William Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers: The fear of death distresses me.

Which Author suspects he has quoted before in his life.

As late as in the mid-nineteenth century, shepherds in the neighborhood of Marathon insisted that the clash of swords and the cries of horses could still be heard after the fall of darkness on the plain.

Mougins, near Cannes. Late morning. April 8, 1973.

Oxford, Mississippi. 2:30 A.M. July 6, 1962.

Ketchum, Idaho. Soon after dawn. July 2, 1961.

St. Vincent’s Hospital, Greenwich Village. Ca. 1 P.M. November 9, 1953.

Schwesterhaus vom Roten Kreuz, Zurich. 2:15 A.M. January 13, 1941.

Hollywood, California. 5:15 P.M. December 21, 1940.

Kierling, near Vienna. Noon. June 3, 1924.

Railroad station, Astapovo. 5:45 A.M. November 7, 1910.

East Twenty-sixth Street, Manhattan. 12:30 A.M. September 28, 1891.

Auvers-sur-Oise. 1:30 A.M. July 29, 1890.

Gad’s Hill, Kent. 6:10 P.M. June 9, 1870.

Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire. Ca. 2 A.M. March 31, 1855.

Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire. 2 P.M. December 19, 1848.

Vienna. Amid lightning, late afternoon. March 26, 1827.

Missolonghi. 6 P.M. April 19, 1824.

Bay of Spezia. Hour unknown. July 8, 1822.

Piazza di Spagna, Rome. II P.M. February 23, 1821.

Stratford-upon-Avon. Hour unrecorded. April 23, 1616.

Madrid. Hour unrecorded. Identical with the foregoing.

Eleanor Bull’s tavern, Deptford. Perhaps 7 P.M. May 30, 1593.

Castle of Cloux, near Amboise. Hour unrecorded. May 2, 1519.

Age. Age.

Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself about.

Said Marcus Aurelius.

Sophocles dressed the chorus of his next play in mourning, after the death of Euripides.

Or are all these nuisance disabilities somehow more serious than Author acknowledges?

So persistently worn out. And that peculiar lightheadedness still, his sense almost of something beckoning from just beyond the edges of vision.

Threescore miles and ten.

Edgar Allan Poe’s wife Virginia, dying of tuberculosis in their Fordham cottage — and having to be swaddled in his old army greatcoat because Poe could not afford firewood.

The same coat Poe then wore to the funeral.

My memory and intellect have gone to wait for me elsewhere.

Wrote Michelangelo to Vasari at eighty-three.

I know the color of that blood. It is arterial blood — I cannot be deceived in that color. That drop of blood is my death warrant.

And a sensation even of gaps in his consciousness? As if moments have sometimes bolted past that Author has somehow managed not to be aware of until they are gone? Recently, did one?

Thunder occurs when clouds collide.

Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye.

Which Chaucer says in Troilus and Criseyde.

Having appropriated it from Ovid’s Tristia.

And with brightness involved? A flooding of stunning light?

Velazquez was in the employ of Philip IV for almost forty years.

I am utterly crushed, wrote the king in the margin of a document dealing with his death.

Light. Terrifically, it seems.

But why in heaven’s name is Author convinced that he only hours ago abruptly stopped working and went in to lie down? In the middle of the day? Another nap? Could Author have taken a nap almost without realizing that he did?

The legend that Ibsen, dying, lay near a window and confused the people passing on the street with characters from his plays.

The legend that Mozart, dying, asked that a canary be removed from his room — unable to abide its song.

And Author’s shoulder smacking against the corridor wall again?

A passage he has normally navigated ten thousand times without a second thought?

You and I must always remain young, and you shall always be beautiful to me. We must keep no count of the years.

Wrote Ausonius to his wife.

Wrote Ausonius — whom Gibbon disparaged as a second-rate poet.

As if Author’s Adidas have whims of their own.

Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.

I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it.

His secretary’s recollection that in his last moments Henry James asked to hear the sounds of her Remington — typing one of his manuscripts.

And after the corridor? This even newer image of Author’s bed having gotten to be such a vast distance across the room?

Why can’t Author tell whether he is imagining that or remembering it?

Among the wreaths and bouquets at the funeral of Verlaine — one nodding bunch of violets.

Brought by Mallarmé.

Plus the sense that Author could also not seem quite able to make his way across?

Hovering there, did he almost seem to be?

O God! O God! That it were possible

To undo things done; to call back yesterday

Says someone in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness.

Your Majesty’s horse knows more about art than you do.

But the brightness, was that when the brightness occurred?

Going in to take a nap he is now not sure he is really remembering having gone in to take at all?

That terrificness, that extraordinary flooding.

I have wasted my hours.

Said Leonardo at the end of his life.

Leonardo.

When, dammit, that terrificness?

Does anyone know any longer where Spinoza is buried?

Where Rembrandt?

Where Marlowe?

Did anyone essentially ever know, with Mozart?

Light? Brightness?

“Dad? Dad? Say something.”

Rosie, You Are My Posy.

A sentence consists of a noun and a verb. If you want to use an adjective, come and ask me first.

Orchestra play like pig.

“Dad? Please? You can’t just sit there and stare. Talk to us. Answer us, Dad. We love you, you know?”

I do at least three paintings a day in my head. What s the use of spoiling canvas when nobody will buy anything?

A symphony is no joke.

You know I can’t stand Shakespeare’s plays, but yours are worse.

“Dad? We truly want to bring the children. But they won’t understand at all, if you just sit and don’t say anything. They’ll be frightened. Dad?”

Couldn’t that lady cut herself, standing on that seashell?

Go, litel bok.

“Oh, Dad. Oh, Dad.”

Selah.

THE LAST NOVEL

Again—

For Sydney, for Duncan, for Toby

And for Trish Hoard

Painting is not done to decorate apartments.

— Picasso

If there wasn’t death, I think you couldn’t go on.

— Stevie Smith

~ ~ ~

There are six floors in Novelist’s apartment building. Then again, the paved inner airshaft courtyard is at basement level, making seven.

And then the roof.

From high up on the Sistine ceiling scaffolding, Michelangelo was known to now and then drop things — brooms, even fairly long boards.

Most frequently, it appeared, when the pope happened to be lurking below for a glimpse at his latest efforts.

When I die, I open a bordello. You know what is a bordello, no? But against every one of you — all — I lock shut the door.

Said Arturo Toscanini, to a recalcitrant orchestra.

As a talisman for the future while still young and penniless, Balzac once sketched a large blank representation of a picture frame on one of his garret walls — and designated it Painting by Raphael.

Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.

A Frenchman in Delft in 1663, looking to purchase inexpensive art, was shown a Vermeer — on display in a pastry shop.

Almost certainly being held there as security for a debt of Vermeer’s to the baker.

Keats stayed up all night on the occasion when he actually did first look into Chapman’s Homer — and then composed his sonnet so swiftly that he was able to messenger it to a friend to read before breakfast.

Van Gogh, in a letter from Arles, some few weeks after having presented a piece of his ear to a woman in a brothel:

I went yesterday to see the girl I had gone to when I went astray in my wits. They told me that in this country things like that are not out of the ordinary.

Shelley, in a letter from Venice, on Byron’s local innamorati:

The most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted; countesses smell so strongly of garlic, that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, L.B. is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets.

The unimaginably cramped cell in which St. John of the Cross was once imprisoned for months, beaten repeatedly and virtually starved, but where he nonetheless managed to compose some of his finest verses.

In a building that no longer exists — but can still be seen in El Greco’s View of Toledo.

At least once, Flaubert informs readers that Emma Bovary’s eyes are brown.

And several other times that they are black.

Sigmund Freud ran his household in such a rigidly patriarchal manner that his wife was literally expected to have spread the toothpaste on his brush each morning.

Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.

All of which obviously means that this is the last book Novelist is going to write.

Anton Chekhov died in Germany. His coffin arrived in Moscow in a freight car — distinctly labeled Oysters.

During their first four years in the East Hampton farmhouse where they would live until Pollock’s death eleven years later, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner could not afford to install plumbing for heat and hot water.

Clarence Darrow went out of his way to inform A. E. Housman that he had recited two pieces of Housman’s verse in avoiding the death penalty for Leopold and Loeb, even presenting Housman with a copy of the courtroom summation — which showed he had misquoted both.

Claude Monet’s admission, after standing beside the deathbed of someone he had loved — that in spite of his grief he had spent much of the time analyzing which pigments comprised the color of her eyelids.

That day being come, Caesar going into the Senate house and speaking merrily unto the soothsayer, told him, The Ides of March be come. So be they, softly answered the soothsayer, but they are not yet past.

Says North’s Plutarch.

A woman’s body is not a mass of flesh in a state of decomposition, on which the green and purplish spots denote a complete state of cadaveric putrefaction.

An early critic presumed to inform Renoir.

The devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac’d loon;

Where gott’st thou that goose look?

— Wrote Shakespeare in Macbeth.

Now friend, what means thy change of countenance?

— Substituted William Davenant, in a rewritten version that was played for almost a century.

His last book. All of which also then gives Novelist carte blanche to do anything here he damned well pleases.

Which is to say, writing in his own personal genre, as it were.

The first one-man artist’s exhibition on record — put together by Gustave Courbet in Paris in 1855.

In a tent just outside the official group show that had rejected him.

Preoccupied with a poem-in-progress, Paul Valéry once paused to glance at a proof sheet in the window of a printing shop, and then without quite realizing it began to mentally revise the lines.

Until it embarrassingly dawned on him that he was rewriting Racine and not himself.

Vermeer died in 1675. At which time one of his largest debts was, in fact, to a Delft baker.

For bread to feed a family of thirteen.

In November 1919, after a solar eclipse had irrefutably verified Einstein’s concept of relativity, British physicists convened a major press gathering to announce it. The New York Times assigned the story to a man named Henry Crouch — a golf reporter.

An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar. Oblivion lurks in the immediate neighborhood.

Said Thomas Bailey Aldrich of Emily Dickinson.

The William Sakspere of Gloucestershire — who was hanged as a thief in 1248.

Along with a letter of homage, Berlioz sent copies of the score of The Damnation of Faust to Goethe.

Who never responded.

Venomously malignant. Noxious. Blasphemous. Grotesque. Disgusting. Repulsive. Entirely bestial. Indecent.

Being among the critical greetings for Leaves of Grass.

Not to omit ithyphallic audacity.

Plus garbage.

Profound stupidity. Maniacal raving. Pure nonsense.

Among some for the best of Shelley.

Which was also called abominable.

Infantile. Absurd. Driveling. Nauseating.

Reserved for Wordsworth.

For the rain it raineth every day.

Actually, Goethe had been gratified by Berlioz’ letter. But then showed the Faust score to a now long-forgotten minor German composer — who informed him it was valueless.

After the 1953 Laurence Olivier film of The Beggar’s Opera, Britain’s Inland Revenue Service repeatedly sent inquiries regarding an address for John Gay — from whom they had not received income tax returns.

1732, Gay was buried at Westminster Abbey in.

I like Mr. Dickens’ books much better than yours, Papa.

Said one of Thackeray’s daughters.

At the height of his career, Richard Brinsley Sheridan had become the owner of the Drury Lane Theater. And subsequently astonished everyone concerned by calmly drinking in a nearby coffeehouse when it went up in flames:

Surely a man may be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside?

What would you think this artist puts on canvas? Whatever fills his mind. And what can be in the mind of a man who spends his life in the company of prostitutes of the lowest order?

Inquired a review of François Boucher by Denis Diderot in 1765 — when libel was evidently an absent concept.

An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing house.

Auden called Poe.

After having been driven to distraction by an organ grinder across the street from his Rome apartment, Pietro Mascagni finally politely demonstrated to the man how to operate the instrument less loudly.

Later to find him wearing a sign while performing: Pupil of Mascagni.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

Said Gertrude Stein.

It is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for one’s mind.

Said T. S. Eliot — re Stein’s prose.

Whistler, intending to show someone a new painting in his studio — who would always step in first and turn every other canvas to the wall.

Jackie Robinson had already played major league baseball for eight years before the Metropolitan Opera saw fit to ask Marian Anderson, then fifty-seven, to become its first black performer.

A full half-century after Marie Curie died from exposure to radiation, the very cookbooks she had once used were found to remain contaminated.

The courtesan Laïs, who once asserted that she knew nothing at all about the alleged wisdom of poets and philosophers — except that they knocked at her door as frequently as anyone else.

No philosopher has ever influenced the attitudes of even the street he lived on.

Said Voltaire.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

I do not see why exposition and description are a necessary part of a novel.

Said Ivy Compton-Burnett.

I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man.

Said Joyce.

Rilke was raised as a girl — in girl’s clothing — until he started school at the age of seven.

The Rilke who would later devotedly collect lace.

And maintain apartments habitually overflowing with roses.

García Lorca’s ten or eleven months in New York City — during which he apparently did not learn two dozen words of English.

I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it.

Said Gorky re Tolstoy.

What sort of Christian life is this, I should like to know? He hasn’t a drop of love for his children, for me, or for anyone but himself.

Reads a contrasting view from Sofia Tolstoy’s diary.

People speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting. Where and when has anyone ever seen a natural work of art?

Asked Picasso.

How miraculous it was, noted Diogenes, that whenever one felt that sort of urge, one could readily masturbate.

But conversely how disheartening that one could not simply rub one’s stomach when hungry.

The very possibly not apocryphal tale that David Hume, always grossly overweight, once went down on one knee to propose marriage — and could not get back up.

Dante walked with a stoop.

Said Boccaccio.

Coleridge fell off horses.

Albert Camus had already purchased a train ticket, between the Vaucluse and Paris, when he made a last-minute decision to accept a ride with Michel Gallimard — which would end in the crash that killed them both.

How many times before his own death twenty-eight years later would René Char recall that Camus and Gallimard had invited him to drive north with them also — but that he had decided their car would be too crowded?

An upstart crow, Robert Greene famously called Shakespeare in 1592.

A pair of crows, Pindar called Simonides and Bacchylides — two millennia earlier.

As Lucian wrote of Helen’s face having launched a thousand ships — 1,400 years before Marlowe.

I am he that aches with amorous love.

Wrote Whitman.

Walter, leave off.

Wrote D. H. Lawrence.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s son Pen slept in her bedroom until her death. When he was twelve.

This man will never accomplish anything.

Said Pope Leo X — of Leonardo da Vinci.

This boy will come to nothing.

Said Freud’s father.

The cave on Salamis where for a time, ca. 410 BC, Euripides lived and wrote.

The ancient clay pot discovered there in 1997 — inscribed with the first six letters of his name.

That scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard!

Tchaikovsky’s diary says.

Always give a moment’s pause when happening to remember — that Shakespeare had three brothers.

One of whom was a haberdasher.

The justice Abe Fortas, once doing Pablo Cassals the favor of transporting his cello from San Juan to New York for repairs —

And purchasing two adjacent first-class seats for the flight.

Le Douanier Rousseau, contemplating Cézanne’s work for the first time, at a memorial exhibition in 1907:

I could have finished those paintings for him.

Men who do not devote their lives to pursuing wisdom will be reborn as women.

Determined Plato.

People who marry young will have female children.

Determined Aristotle.

So difficult and opaque it is, I am not certain what it is I print.

Said John Donne’s very publisher about the first edition of his verse.

Modigliani’s repeated insistence that Rembrandt was a Jew.

The possibility that his own mother was a collateral descendant of Spinoza.

Shakespeare’s sister Joan — the only sibling to survive him, and a relatively indigent widow.

Whose welfare he took care to safeguard in his will.

Oliver Goldsmith, who was well-liked by virtually everyone who knew him — and died owing money to all of them.

Was ever a poet so trusted before? asked Samuel Johnson.

As a schoolboy, Luther was once flogged fifteen times in one morning for being unprepared with a conjunction.

Bizet died only three months after the premiere of Carmen — convinced it was an irremediable failure.

Next to the originator of a great sentence is the first quoter of it.

Said Emerson.

Stories happen only to people who know how to tell them.

Said Thucydides.

Depressed at the apparent lack of interest in one of his early still lifes, Matisse visited his dealer to retrieve it, only to learn that it had been purchased after all.

By Picasso.

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

And thus in which Novelist will say more about himself only when he finds no way to evade doing so, but rarely otherwise.

A time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it.

Mark Rothko once said.

Rupert Brooke’s obituary in the London Times, at his death in the Aegean in World War I, was written by Winston Churchill.

Dostoievsky’s four years as a convict at hard labor in Siberia — where he lived always in a barracks.

Meaning that for four full years he essentially never had one moment to himself.

He is not writing about something; he is writing something.

Said Samuel Beckett, re Joyce.

He never thinks about something; he thinks something.

Said Hannah Arendt, re Heidegger.

Not bright colors. Good drawing.

Titian said.

The great early nineteenth-century diva Catalani, in retirement in Paris, is told she has an anonymous visitor. At the door, a young woman bows her head in modesty:

Madame, I have come to ask your blessing. My name is Jenny Lind.

Fragonard, ignored and forgotten in later life, but painting nonetheless:

I would paint with my backside if necessary.

Realizing that as recently as in the case of Haydn, musicians under the patronage of royalty were still treated as servants — and still wore livery.

An even earlier dismayed recognition of Dürer’s, while visiting in Venice in 1506:

Here I am a gentleman — and at home a mere parasite.

We advise no woman to read this book.

Said a first review of Père Goriot.

Truly, young girls and women about to become mothers would do well, if they are wise, to run away from this spectacle.

Said another, of Manet’s Olympia.

At twenty-two, William Faulkner was a special student for a semester at the University of Mississippi — and was given a grade of D in English.

Corresponding with him in later years, Allen Tate became aware that Faulkner habitually signed his letters with only his last name — and mentioned that English nobility signed letters that way.

Faulkner never wrote to Tate again.

The sun is as wide as a man’s foot.

Judged Heraclitus.

The size of a foot soldier’s shield.

Lucretius decided.

Einstein was reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at thirteen.

Kant died in 1804. More than seven hundred different authors had published books and/or essays on his work in the preceding two decades.

Clodia, whom Catullus immortalized as Lesbia in his verse — and Cicero dismissed as what can best be translated as that farthing whore.

Every half-quarter of an Hour, a glass of Sack must be sent of an errand into his Guts, to tell his Brains they must come up quickly, and help out with a line.

Said a minor poet named Robert Wilde of Ben Jonson at work.

He kept bottles of wine at his lodgeing, and many times he would drinke liberally by himselfe to refresh his spirits, and exalt his Muse.

Similarly said John Aubrey of Andrew Marvell.

Christina Rossetti’s practice of pasting heavy paper over irreligious passages in Swinburne.

E.g., a line referring to the supreme evil, God, unquote, in Atalanta in Calydon.

January 23, 1931, Anna Pavlova died on.

Renoir, well into his forties and still impoverished.

So thin it wrung your heart, a woman friend remembered.

Yehudi Menuhin performed as a soloist with the San Francisco Orchestra at the age of seven.

A dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud.

E. M. Forster called Ulysses.

Conscious and calculated indecency.

Virginia Woolf settled for.

Along with tosh — presumably signifying something akin to twaddle.

So preoccupied was Thomas Hobbes with geometry that he sometimes diagrammed propositions on his bedsheets.

Or inked them on his thigh.

Unendurable to the music lover, Beethoven was becoming.

Said a contemporary critic — of the Eroica.

A depraved ear.

Said one of the same — of Mozart’s D-minor quartet.

Item, I give unto my wife my second-best bed with the furniture.

So often unnoted — that by law Anne automatically also received one-third of the estate.

Hart Crane’s leap into the Caribbean —

And the insistence of one of the witnesses that he was pulled under by sharks.

I was much impressed by the chalk-white face with the swollen purple lips, and felt confident he had been brooding over the Crucifixion all night, or some other holy torture.

Said William Empson re sightings of Eliot, ca. 1930.

Who will buy me, who will buy me,

rid me of my cares?

Very nearly three hundred times, in Oliver Twist, Fagin is referred to as the Jew.

Curiously leaving Dickens nonetheless distressed when the book was taken as anti-Semitic.

Hegel, asking Schelling’s advice about a town to settle in, and listing his chief requirements:

A good library and ein gutes Bier — a good beer.

Women were not granted degrees at Oxford until as late as 1920.

A head of hair like an umbrella.

Someone said Berlioz had.

Like a great primeval forest.

Heinrich Heine made it.

Schopenhauer’s mother Johanna wrote novels. When she playfully belittled his own first book, Schopenhauer told her it would still be available long after hers were forgotten.

Indeed, the entire first printing would still be, Johanna Schopenhauer said.

Rodin’s monument to Victor Hugo — which was rejected by the group that commissioned it.

Rodin’s monument to Balzac — which was rejected by the group that commissioned it.

Rodin’s monument to Whistler — et cetera.

Quoth Charlie Parker, showing someone the veins at which he injected heroin:

This one’s my Cadillac —

And this one’s my house.

Adolf Hitler’s occupation, as listed on his tax returns until such time as he officially became Germany’s chancellor:

Writer.

Madame Butterfly is fifteen years old.

Rereading a Raymond Chandler novel in which Philip Marlowe stops in for a ten-cent cup of coffee.

Old enough to remember when the coffee would have cost half that.

Vosdanig Manoog Adoian, who changed his name to Arshile Gorky — and simultaneously announced that he was a nephew of the writer.

Not knowing that the other Gorky was not really named Gorky either.

Lying on his back in a field for hours, sometimes from almost before dawn or until latest evening, memorizing the light in the sky.

Reads a friend’s recollection of Claude Lorrain.

The sky can never be merely a background.

Said Alfred Sisley.

Imperialist bourgeois and decadent counterrevolutionary tendencies.

Both Shostakovich and Prokofiev were accused of at one time or another by Soviet authorities.

God gave me the money.

Unquote. John D. Rockefeller.

The noblest title in the world is that of having been born a Frenchman, said Napoleon.

Born in Corsica — of Italian ancestry.

Alexei Maximovitch Peshkov.

Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. I have seen nothing like it, but indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything.

Said Charlotte Brontë of Emily.

Vespasian, who is remembered for having built the Colosseum.

But who also established Rome’s first public urinals.

The interrelationship of Picasso and Braque during Cubism:

Like being roped together on a mountain, Braque said.

Stalin read Hemingway.

His ferocious egoism revolts me every time I think of it.

Said the wife Gauguin left behind.

Cézanne’s Old Woman of the Beads —

Posed for by a servant he took in basically out of charity, and who then stole and shredded much of his underwear — which he allowed her to sell back to him as rags for his brushes.

Almost forgetting Emily Brontë’s mastiff — which slept at the door of her room for years, after her death.

That harmonious plagiary and miserable flatterer, whose cursed hexameters were drilled into me at Harrow.

Byron spoke of Virgil as.

Benny Goodman once cancelled an engagement at the Hotel New Yorker on the very day it was scheduled to start — when he was informed that all black musicians connected with his band would have to come and go through the hotel kitchen.

It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.

Said Mark Twain — of Jane Austen.

I’ve been shitting, so ’tis said, nigh twenty-two years through the same old hole, which is not yet frayed one bit.

Wrote Mozart to his cousin Anna Maria Thekla.

With whom he may or may not have had an affair.

Émile Zola’s terror of thunder and lightning — so extreme that he not only shut all windows and lit every nearby lamp, but even sometimes blindfolded himself.

Human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind.

Tom Paine called religions.

Senseless and criminal bigotry.

Nehru saw in them.

I thought I had done that already.

Said Mallarmé — at the first talk of Debussy setting L’Après-midi d’un Faune to music.

Einstein’s honorary degree from Harvard.

Evidently at the recommendation of an alumnus named Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I wish you good night, but first shit into your bed.

Reads another Mozart letter to Anna Maria.

Leering effrontery, Harper’s Weekly once accused Matisse of.

He’ll probably never write a good play again.

Responded George Bernard Shaw — on being told that Eugene O’Neill had given up drinking.

Willem de Kooning was twenty-two when he emigrated to the United States from Rotterdam — as a stowaway on a British freighter.

The oddity that Velazquez and Picasso, surely two of the three greatest Spanish-born painters, each used his mother’s name rather than his father’s.

Among the fragments of ancient Greek literature unearthed in Egypt, where the climate and the soil preserve them extraordinarily, there is almost twice as much material about Homer as anyone else.

And five times as much Plato as Aristotle.

Andrew Lang’s indignation over a mild blasphemy in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

A gentleman who turned Christian for half an hour, Hardy dismissed him as.

Spinoza, who spent his last years in a single attic room in The Hague — and slept in some variant or other of what is now called a Murphy bed.

Spinoza. Shoving or yanking or hoisting or whatever, to force the unstable whatchamacallit up against the wall each morning.

Unworthy of the poets’ corner of a country newspaper.

Yeats called Wilfred Owen.

No one expressed interest in publishing Shelley’s Defense of Poetry until almost twenty years after his death.

No one expressed interest in publishing Billy Budd until thirty-three years after Melville’s.

Every Grass, Emily Dickinson once refers to.

While also contriving:

The Grass so little has to do

I wish I were a Hay —

Balzac had written eighty-five novels in his Comédie humaine — with fifty more already planned — before dying at the age of fifty-one.

Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together.

Said Kierkegaard.

Amid the clutter of multilingual graffiti beside the door to the St. Petersburg garret that is alleged to be the one Dostoievsky used as a model for Raskolnikov’s:

Don’t do it, Rodya!

Old enough to remember when they were still called penny postcards.

And a letter cost three cents.

Like the daily New York Times.

Trying to calculate the odds against two poets as talented as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton taking part in the same university writing workshop at the same time — and with an instructor of the stature of Robert Lowell.

And/or the chances that within a decade and a half both would be suicides.

The next best thing to God.

Edna O’Brien called literature.

Manet made two separate copies of Delacroix’s Dante and Virgil in Hell.

Cézanne made six.

July 6, 1971, Louis Armstrong died on.

In Elizabethan London — the heads of executed criminals on spikes on London Bridge.

Wondering how frequently Shakespeare or Marlowe or Jonson might have paused to watch their eyeballs being plucked out by kites or crows.

Bertrand Russell wrote his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy while serving six months in Brixton prison for pacifist protests during World War I.

Enrico Fermi once wrote an entire full-length textbook on atomic physics in pencil — without an eraser.

Eighty-eight years after his death, almost fifty Turner canvases, rolled up and inexplicably mislabeled as tarpaulins, were come upon by sheerest chance in National Gallery storage rooms.

Valladolid, Christopher Columbus died in.

After drinking heavily, Philip of Macedon once pronounced a judgment that an elderly woman said she would appeal.

Appeal to whom, when I am your king?

To my king when he is sober.

Philip reversed his judgment.

Ambition for wealth is the enemy of artistic excellence.

Warned Leon Battista Alberti — in 1436.

O painter, take care lest the greed for gain prove a stronger incentive than the desire for renown, for this latter achievement is a far greater thing than riches.

Wrote Leonardo two generations afterward.

George Moore once walked in on Swinburne, uninvited, to find him striding back and forth declaiming Aeschylus at the top of his voice — stark naked.

The first opera Toscanini ever saw, at the age of four, was Un Ballo in Maschera.

The last opera Toscanini ever conducted, at the age of eighty-seven, was Un Ballo in Maschera.

A sixth-century AD sporting event, as Novelist remembers it from Beowulf:

Holding one’s opponent under water until he is drowned.

Fenimore Cooper used almost eleven hundred Shakespeare quotations as epigraphs and/or chapter headings in his thirty-plus novels.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Said Stravinsky.

The thought of Rembrandt’s bankruptcy, at fifty. Of his possessions — his paintings — being sold for whatever pittance they might bring. Of Rembrandt himself being evicted from his home.

Rembrandt.

Now Dawn arose from her couch beside the lordly Tithonos, to bear light to the immortals and to mortal men.

Says the opening of Book XI of the Iliad.

Now Dawn arose from her couch beside the lordly Tithonos, to bear light to the immortals and to mortal men.

Says the opening of Book V of the Odyssey.

He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest.

Said Auden of Tennyson.

Not conspicuously intelligent.

Auden added re Yeats.

Advice from Arthur Schnabel to the younger Vladimir Horowitz:

When a piece gets difficult, make faces.

The greatest love specialist in the world, Samuel Goldwyn called Freud.

While offering him $100,000 to supervise or even write a romantic story for Hollywood.

Freud at the time was asking fees of twenty dollars an hour. He dismissed Goldwyn with a one-sentence note.

Discovering that the Cynara to whom Ernest Dowson had been faithful in his fashion was in fact a London waitress.

Wagner has some fine moments. But some bad quarters of an hour.

Said Rossini.

The color of cognac.

Rodin described Suzanne Valadon’s hair as.

The imagination will not perform until it has been flooded by a vast torrent of reading.

Announced Petronius.

You have to read fifteen hundred books in order to write one.

Flaubert put it.

Fra Filippo Lippi was past fifty, and the chaplain of a convent, when he abducted the nun by whom he would have two children — one of the same being the Filippino who would follow him as an artist.

Albert Pinkham Ryder dressed so shabbily that now and again people attempted to hand him loose change as he walked the streets near Greenwich Village.

The artist must live to paint and not paint to live. He should not sacrifice his ideals to a landlord.

Ryder said.

Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.

Said Flannery O’Connor — apropos of being a Southern writer as a contemporary of Faulkner’s.

Among the many paintings in her Paris flat, Gertrude Stein had two exceptional Picassos.

If there were a fire, and I could save only one picture, it would be those two. Unquote.

August 15, 1967, René Magritte died on.

Victor Hugo constantly made notes about everything — and would turn aside in the middle of a conversation to scribble down something he himself had just said that he realized he might possibly later be able to use.

O Lord, who art hidden in the clouds and behind the cobbler’s house —

Commenced a prayer voiced by Marc Chagall as a boy in Vitebsk.

The nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

Said Louis Aragon.

Novelist’s isolation — ever increasing as the years pass also.

Days on which he is aware of speaking to no one at all, for example, except perhaps a checkout clerk, or his letter carrier, or some basically anonymous fellow tenant in the elevator.

Matt Arnold, he was commonly called.

Jack Galsworthy.

The grete poete of Ytaille.

Chaucer referred to Dante as — in the late fourteenth century.

Though there would be no English translation of the Divine Comedy until 1785.

Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.

Insisted Byron.

Was he Christian, Jewish, or atheist? Samuel Beckett was once asked in a Dublin courtroom. To which:

None of the three.

The extant application for a reader’s ticket at the British Museum signed by Arthur Rimbaud on March 25, 1873, attesting that he has read the regulations for the Reading Room and that he is not under twenty-one years of age — when in truth he was still only eighteen.

Catullus, informing friends that he is broke:

With nothing but cobwebs in my wallet.

The Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum.

An early French critic called Dostoievsky.

Foul. Like a rat, slithering along in hate. He is not nice.

Being D. H. Lawrence’s later view.

The concept of life after death should be empathically promulgated by the state, Plato said.

If only so that soldiers would be willing to die in battle.

George Washington left no children of his own.

A great-granddaughter of Martha’s, by way of her earlier marriage, married Robert E. Lee.

The most repulsive thing I ever saw or heard in my life.

Said Clara Schumann of Tristan und Isolde.

Plutarch, who relinquished fame and power in Rome to live quietly and do his writing in Chaeronea, near Delphi.

A small town that would have been even smaller if I left.

Brave translunary things.

Michael Drayton saw in Marlowe.

Intemperate & of a cruel hart.

Thomas Kyd noted of him instead.

For half a dozen years, in his middle and late fifties, Oskar Kokoschka was forced to turn out little other than watercolors — because he generally could not spare the few dollars for oils and canvas.

Cry, art, cry, and loudly lament.

No one, any longer, desires you.

Woe is me.

— Lettered Lucas Moser, a minor German painter, onto an altarpiece in 1431.

Fortune favors the brave, says Virgil.

Presumably aware that Terence had said it earlier.

Brunelleschi once carved a wood crucifix by which Donatello was so impressed that he could only gape in astonishment — while also spilling the apron full of eggs he had been bringing to Brunelleschi’s studio for their lunch.

Tennyson was once so drunk at the end of a London dinner that he started to leave by way of the fireplace.

I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.

El Greco. Vermeer. Dieric Bouts. Frans Hals.

Each of whom was essentially forgotten for at least two centuries.

Or longer.

Bombastic nonsense. Concepts bordering on madness. Humbug.

Schopenhauer found in Hegel.

The anecdote, passed on as genuine, about Beaumont and Fletcher once being angrily accused of high treason by strangers in a tavern who had become convinced they were plotting to kill the king — when in actuality they had been discussing the outline of a new play.

He had often regretted opening his mouth, said Simonides.

But he could not recall having ever caused any major catastrophe by keeping it shut.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

Said Cyril Connolly.

England expects that every man will do his duty.

Every man, on Nelson’s flagship the Victory, incidentally including boys of ten and twelve, some having been caught up by press gangs.

During most of his adult life, Joshua Reynolds made use of an ear trumpet.

And in his final years became almost totally blind.

Beethoven’s unkempt, laundry-strewn Vienna flat.

While beneath the piano, recollected at least one visitor, his chamber pot — unemptied.

John Locke died while sitting in a drawing room listening to someone read from the Psalms.

Novalis died while listening to a relative play the piano.

The wintry conscience of a generation.

V. S. Pritchett called George Orwell.

A poem by Theocritus written in Alexandria ca. 270 BC —

Complaining that the streets were too crowded.

Antonin Artaud spent nine of his last eleven years in insane asylums.

For decades, next door to the building in The Hague that had housed Spinoza’s attic:

The Spinoza Saloon.

Man is the only animal that knows he must die.

Said Voltaire.

St.-John Perse. Who was translated into English by Eliot.

And into German by Rilke.

September 9, 1960, Jussi Bjoerling died on.

Looked into by church authorities at Arnstadt in 1706, where Bach at twenty was organist:

By what right he had recently caused the strange maiden to be invited into the organ loft?

One day I wrote her name upon the strand.

A Man of Genius whose heart is perverted.

Wordsworth called Byron.

The most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a great effect in literature.

George Eliot phrased it.

After devoting years to the score for Pelléas et Méllisande, Debussy played it through for Maurice Maeterlinck, on whose play it was based. Maeterlinck repeatedly dozed off in his chair.

Henry Moore was gassed in the trenches in World War I.

The Bateau-Lavoir, the legendary former Montmartre piano factory broken up into artists’ studios, where Picasso contrived any number of his early masterpieces — while living with no running water and only one communal toilet.

And which sixty years later was named a national historical monument — only to burn to the ground a few months afterward.

Continental degeneracy, Thomas Jefferson was several times condemned for.

Because of a chef who had been trained in Paris, Patrick Henry explained.

The bleak image Novelist is granted of himself as he asks a question of a local pharmacist — and becomes aware of the woman contemplating the conspicuously threadbare and even ragged ends of his coat sleeves.

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

Said Jules Renard.

Gilda, in Rigoletto. Whom Mattiwilda Dobbs sang as at the Metropolitan two years after Marian Anderson had done Ulrica in Un Ballo in Maschera — making her the first black soprano to perform there in a romantic role opposite a white tenor.

Jack Dempsey’s claim that he was partly Jewish.

Via a great-great-grandmother named Rachael Solomon.

Chaucer’s personal library. The guess being forty volumes, presumably most of them in Latin.

Leonardo’s. Known to have contained thirty-seven.

Joseph Conrad spoke English with such a thick, partially French accent that people often had extraordinary difficulty in understanding him.

Le Bateau ivre.

Margot Fonteyn, in an early discussion of women’s liberation:

Will it mean I have to lift Nureyev, instead of vice versa?

Xerxes: Go, and tell those madmen to deliver up their arms.

Leonidas: Go, and tell Xerxes to come and take them.

George Sand, re an 1873 literary evening:

Flaubert talks with animation and humor, but all to do with himself. Turgenev, who is much more interesting, can hardly get a word in.

Parodying without taste or skill. Very near the limits of coherence.

Said the Times Literary Supplement of The Waste Land.

Unintelligible, the borrowings cheap and the notes useless.

Said the New Statesman and Nation.

So much waste paper.

Summed up the Manchester Guardian.

Kant’s irrationally compulsive 3:30 PM walk, which it is said he forswore only once in thirty years — on the day when the post brought him a first copy of Rousseau’s Émile.

A German singer! I would as soon hear my horse neigh.

Said Frederick the Great, insisting upon Italian performers for opera in Berlin.

A. E. Housman. Who spent most of his adult life as a professor of Latin.

After originally failing his final exams at Oxford.

What, still alive at twenty-two,

A fine upstanding lad like you?

From the beginnings of the legend of Michelangelo’s sense of his own worth:

He treats the Pope as the King of France himself would not dare to treat him — unquote.

John Donne, near death, as recorded by Izaak Walton:

His sickness had left him but so much flesh as did only cover his bones.

Pausing to speculate about the plumbing of the era — and wondering how frequently Shakespeare might have bathed.

Or even two centuries later, Jane Austen.

Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski.

Rat-eyed, Virginia Woolf called Somerset Maugham.

An old parrot, Christopher Isherwood saw instead.

February 6, 1916, Rubén Darío died on.

Everyone honors the wise. The citizens of Mytilene honored Sappho even though she was a woman.

Said Aristotle.

He who has money is wise. And handsome. And can sing well also.

Says a Yiddish proverb.

Walt Whitman’s claim — never in any way verified — that he had fathered at least six illegitimate children.

The woman named Mercy Rogers, who in the early 1920s when the subject was relatively new, read practically every available book on psychoanalysis — and then put her head into the oven.

Certain men have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously, at their pleasure, so as to produce the effect of singing.

Insisted Saint Augustine.

Englishwomen have big feet.

Nietzsche determined.

Man: But a little soul bearing about a corpse.

Marcus Aurelius says Epictetus said.

Richie Wagner, Charles Ives amused himself by calling him.

Truman Streckfus Persons, Truman Capote’s birth-certificate name was.

He wore a grey suit, black shoes, white shirt, tie and vest. His appearance never changed. He came down in the morning in this suit, and he would still be wearing it the last thing at night.

Said John Huston, re Sartre.

Einstein often went without socks.

The final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.

Clifton Fadiman said of Absalom, Absalom!

Curiously dull, furiously commonplace, and often meaningless.

Alfred Kazin said of Faulkner in general.

Me, tell you? I don’t know anything about it. I laid down face up and began to sing. Children came like water.

British troops reached Belsen, the first Nazi concentration camp to be reported on, in April of 1945. Forty thousand starving and/or dying prisoners. Ten thousand unburied corpses, corded like wood.

It is my duty to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind, began the dispatch to the London Times.

I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald.

Pleaded Edward R. Murrow, on trans-Atlantic radio, after reporting much the same soon thereafter.

Our worst century so far.

Elizabeth Bishop called that one.

Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

Says a line in Slaughterhouse-Five.

Huckleberry Finn was once banned from the children’s room of the Brooklyn Public Library because — Novelist is quoting here — Huck said sweat when he should have said perspiration.

Wondering if the myth of Dedalus and Icarus has ever been thought of as the first science fiction story?

The only thing that could sound worse in an orchestra than a flute — would be two flutes.

Said Cherubini.

Jean Genet was arrested for the first time — for theft — at the age of ten.

David Garrick’s explanation for the excessive number of bawdy plays on the late eighteenth-century English stage:

Because the first great ruling passion of actors is to eat.

E. M. Forster’s astonishment at learning that telephone wires were not hollow.

Old enough to remember when any number of people seemed to believe something similar — or at the least felt it necessary to shout, when confronted with long distance.

Five or six lunatics, the contributors to the first Impressionist exhibition were called by Le Figaro.

Heine read Plutarch’s Lives for the first time when quite young.

And said it made him wish to leap onto a stallion and ride off to conquer France.

William Blake’s emphatically avowed lack of interest in sex.

The Red and the Black, John F. Kennedy’s favorite novel was.

According to Vasari, Leonardo devoted four full years to painting the Mona Lisa.

The Mona Lisa covers a slight fraction more than five and one-half square feet of surface.

Sarah Bernhardt lost a leg at seventy-one.

And one year later was performing for French troops at the front in World War I.

On a wall in Freud’s waiting room in Vienna:

Bernhardt’s photo.

A man either utterly devoid of sense or one who takes his listeners for fools.

An early critic called Schoenberg.

A debris of sour jokes, stage anger, dirty words, synthetic loneliness, and the sort of antic behavior children fall into when they know they are losing our attention.

The New Yorker called Catch-22.

Lo, there is just appeared a truly classic work.

Wrote Horace Walpole — within one day of the publication of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

Rhoda Broughton’s Dear Faustina, from 1897. Is it the first lesbian novel in English?

Jean Cocteau’s addiction to opium.

Francis Thompson’s.

Modigliani’s. To opium, hashish, and drink.

People who more immediately think of Meursault as a character in Camus rather than as a dry white Burgundy.

Czar Alexis, father of Peter the Great, who in the mid — seventeenth century ordered the destruction of all musical instruments in Russia.

Pope Leo XII. Who in the 1820s issued an edict forbidding the waltz in Rome.

Magnificently, awe-inspiringly ugly.

Henry James called George Eliot.

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.

Not until a year after his burial at Sag Harbor did someone notice that the title of The Recognitions was misspelled on the back of William Gaddis’s headstone.

The true/untrue/pleasant-in-either-case tale that Salvador Dalí had been noticed gazing in almost hypnotic fascination at a melting wedge of Camembert on a dinner table not long before painting the limp watches in The Persistence of Memory.

I am extremely happy — until further notice.

Says a letter of Berlioz about his romance with Harriet Smithson.

An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks almost as much as you do.

Said Dylan Thomas.

But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

Suggested J. C. Squire.

The seeming likelihood that Pythagoras is implying that the world is round — in the mid — sixth century BC.

He had not escaped the common penalties of transgressing the laws of strict purity, wrote Alexander Thayer re Beethoven.

Which is to say — he had syphilis.

Guillaume Apollinaire authored a considerable amount of art criticism, particularly as an early champion of Cubism.

While at the same time being incapable of distinguishing a Rubens from a Rembrandt, Braque commented.

Thales of Miletus, when his mother begged him to marry: It is too soon.

After she permitted him some delay: It is too late.

Once, watching a ceremonial procession near the Vatican, Samuel Morse failed to remove his hat — and had it roughly knocked off by a papal guard.

And became vociferously anti-Catholic thereafter.

June 7, 1843, Friedrich Hölderlin died on.

Be informed, Christian, that after the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous, more violent, than the Jew.

Pronounced Luther.

World War II — started by sixty kikes.

Pronounced Ezra Pound.

Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God.

Pronounced the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem — well before a State of Israel existed.

While also citing Adolf Eichmann as both gallant and noble.

To sit for John Singer Sargent, Yeats appeared in a velvet coat and a billowing bow tie — and then carefully arranged a lock of hair to fall across his forehead.

All this to remind himself of his importance as an artist, Sargent said he said.

The last time anyone mentioned William Saroyan.

Eleusis, Aeschylus was born in.

Colonus, Sophocles.

Salamis, Euripides.

T. S. Eliot missed military service in World War I because of a hernia.

Pound had astigmatism.

Andrea del Castagno’s masterwork, a last supper, was painted at the Convent of Sant’Apollonia in Florence in 1447.

And was not seen by other artists for four hundred years — because of the convent being closed to laypersons.

The state should keep me, Schubert once suggested. I have come into the world for no purpose but to compose.

Now that a certain portion of mankind does not believe at all in the existence of the gods, a rational legislation ought to do away with the oaths.

Wrote Plato — 2,310 years before an act of the United States Congress added the phrase under God to the Pledge of Allegiance.

Suddenly taking a moment to wonder — does anyone any longer make use of Morse code?

I pay well. But the wenches are all whores and pigs.

Says a Michelangelo letter about a servant problem.

André Malraux had reached Spain within two days of the start of the Civil War in 1936.

Living the classic impoverished artist’s life while a student in Milan, Giacomo Puccini was once forced to pawn his overcoat— as he allows one of his characters to do in La Bohème.

In El Diario de Madrid, February 1799, a first advertisement for prints of Goya’s Caprichos:

On sale at No. 1 Calle del Desengaño, the perfume and liquor store.

Beatrix Potter had to pay to publish The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

I am hungry. I am cold. When I grow up I want to be a German, and then I shall no longer be hungry and cold.

Wrote a Jewish youngster in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Not long before his death, Toulouse-Lautrec spent several months in a mental institution, being released only in care of a guardian whose portrait he then painted.

My keeper when I was mad, he inscribed it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s shockingly limited aesthetic sensibilities in every area except music. His virtual consecration of third-rate American pulp fiction detective stories, for instance.

Or his unashamed admission that Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton ranked as his two favorite film actresses.

The earliest known reference to London by name, dated as long ago as 61 AD — in Tacitus.

Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams was born in.

In an Episcopal rectory.

Moments in which Novelist does something like leaving his desk to retrieve a book from across the room — and finding himself staring vacantly into the refrigerator.

Or tossing his keys into a drawer — without having opened the drawer.

In Meleager’s first-century BC anthology of Greek verse, an epigram in honor of an extraordinary woman —

The one who slept with only one man in her life.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, on realizing that he feels a certain kinship with Whitman:

As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a very pleasant confession.

Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: your father had an accident there.

John von Neumann was twenty-nine when he was appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton — for life.

André Gide had a sexless marriage with a first cousin.

In spite of his admitted homosexuality, he also had an illegitimate child by another woman.

In Vermeer’s paintings, repeatedly, letters being read or written.

In the real world — not one known word of any sort in Vermeer’s own hand.

Manet’s earliest major canvas, The Absinthe Drinker.

The only absinthe drinker here is the painter who perpetrated this madness, said Couture.

I’d rather not sing than sing quiet.

Janis Joplin said.

The Hiroshima survivor who remembered rushing into the street amid the chaos and tripping over someone’s severed head.

And hysterically calling out Excuse me.

A stark naked man standing in the rain with his eyeball in his hand.

Another survivor recalled.

The ashes of Shelley’s heart. Which Trelawney had scooped from the flames when the corpse was burned on the beach at Viareggio in 1822, and which were passed on to Mary — and were found in her copy of Adonais after her death in 1851.

Any asino can conduct. But to make music, eh? Is difficile!

Said Toscanini.

Rubens, in his early sixties — with arthritis so severe that both hands were paralyzed.

Rubens.

I’ve never read Shakespeare because the print’s too small.

Says someone in Odets.

Wondering how things worked at the Institute for Advanced Study. Come noon, might von Neumann casually poke his head into Einstein’s office and ask if he felt like lunch?

J. D. Salinger was awarded five battle stars as a staff sergeant in the European Theater in World War II.

Evelyn Waugh saw combat as a major with British commando units in North Africa, Crete, and Yugoslavia.

The Medieval poet Probus, whom Walafrid Strabo deemed superior to Virgil or Horace or Ovid — and whom no one any longer knows anything whatsoever about.

Paganini’s legendary showmanship. Which included sometimes deliberately breaking a string midway through a performance — and going on with only the remaining three.

Wallpaper, George Steiner dismissed much of Jackson Pollock as.

Extremely expensive wallpaper, Kenneth Rexroth made it.

Someone once asked Caruso if he considered himself the world’s greatest tenor.

Not unless John McCormack has suddenly become a baritone, Caruso said.

Why Diogenes had been noticed begging alms from a statue, a citizen wished to know.

To get into practice at being ignored, Diogenes explained.

The so-called Wicked Bible. Dated London 1632.

In which the word not was omitted in the seventh commandment.

Samuel Johnson’s compulsive inability to stroll past a picket fence without superstitiously touching each separate picket as he went.

Remembering that in the Odyssey Odysseus himself is not first seen until Book V.

And then is seen weeping.

Rudolph Valentino was dead at thirty-one.

Mithridates, he died old.

If you think you understand it, that only shows you don’t know the first thing about it.

Said Niels Bohr re quantum mechanics.

In an era when singers frequently embellished music to their own taste, Rossini once complimented Adelina Patti on an aria from The Barber of Seville — and then asked her who the composer was.

Claude Lorrain’s Coast View with Acis and Galatea, which Dostoievsky once saw in Dresden and writes in A Raw Youth of having dreamed about.

And writes in The Possessed of having dreamed about.

And writes in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man of having dreamed about.

Emily Dickinson’s refusal to sit for a photographer.

Henrik Ibsen was virtually never known to take off his hat without immediately combing his hair — having even glued a small mirror inside the hat to make use of when he did so.

September 23, 1835, Vincenzo Bellini died on.

April 8, 1848, Gaetano Donizetti died on.

There was no memorial of any sort for Byron in Westminster Abbey until 1969.

Still always slightly surprised to recall — that John McCormack died an American citizen.

The so-called anarchist artist who in 1988 smeared a large X in his own blood on a wall in the Museum of Modern Art — and in the process splattered an adjacent Picasso.

I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems; it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

Quoth Philip Larkin.

The sound of Bix Beiderbecke’s cornet:

Like a girl saying yes, Eddie Condon said.

The sound of Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone:

Like a dry martini, being what Desmond himself said he wanted.

Exactly the right tone of thought and feeling to appeal to grocers.

Leslie Stephen credited Dickens with.

Napoleon was five feet six inches tall.

A dozen or fifteen years before much of the nudity in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment would be concealed by papal order, a ranking Vatican cardinal voiced the first complaint about same.

And shortly discovered his own portrait on the wall — in hell.

As almost happened similarly to a prior in Milan after his complaints about Leonardo’s apparent desultoriness in work on The Last Supper — complaints that abruptly ceased at Leonardo’s hint regarding who might become the model for Judas.

Kindly see me safe up. As for coming down I shall shift for myself.

Said Sir Thomas More — being led to the gallows.

In Robert Schumann’s diary, after a first meeting with Berlioz:

There is something very pleasant about his laugh.

Thou shalt commit adultery.

The brains of a ram, Shaw attributed to Sophocles.

Of a third-rate village policeman — to Brahms.

Poor England, when such a despicable abortion is named genius.

Said Thomas Carlyle of Charles Lamb.

Anybody can be nobody.

Said Eugene V. Debs.

Novelist’s personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.

Wondering why one is surprised to realize that Thoreau was dead at forty-five.

A lament of Schopenhauer’s:

Over how frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the appropriation of its contents.

Two pages of The Mill on the Floss are enough to start me crying.

Said Proust.

Sour of speech, averse to laughter, unable to be merry even over the wine, but what he writes is full of honey and the Sirens.

Says a line of uncertain attribution re Euripides.

Lope de Vega had at least three illegitimate children.

Gustav Klimt may have had as many as fourteen.

Though the courts recognized only four, in regard to his estate.

Utterly crazy about women.

Suidas says of Menander.

Looking at them in society, one fancies there’s something in them, but there’s nothing, nothing, nothing. No, don’t marry, my dear fellow, don’t marry.

Repulsive, an early New York Times review called Degas.

Pigs at the pastry cart.

John Updike called critics.

Says a 1796 London jestbook:

Shakespear seeing Ben Jonson in a necessary-house, with a book in his hand reading it very attentively, said he was sorry his memory was so bad, that he could not sh-te without a Book.

Dürer’s hausfrau wife.

Whom he on occasion remanded to eat with their maid.

Lenin played tennis.

The sign in the window says Pants Pressed Here. But when you bring in your pants, you discover that it is the sign that is for sale.

Being Kierkegaard — on the typical obscurity of what normally passes for philosophy.

The first use of the phrase stream of consciousness.

In a review by May Sinclair of Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs — in April 1918.

The remedies of all our diseases will be discovered after we are dead.

Assumed John Stuart Mill.

Charlotte has been writing a book, and it is much better than likely.

Announced the Reverend Patrick Brontë, in the mid-1840s, to his other offspring.

Karl Marx was for some years a London correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune.

Attempting to detour the young Thomas Aquinas from a career in the church, his family once arranged for a seductive woman to be sent to his rooms.

Whom he chased off with a flaming brand from his hearth.

Maid of Athens, ere we part,

Give, oh give me back my heart!

For a time, Rilke and Cocteau had apartments in the same Paris building — evidently without ever becoming acquainted.

Every passenger in the non-smoking section of a plane that crashed off Norway in 1948 was killed.

Bertrand Russell had been smoking — and was one of those able to swim to safety.

Ravel once composed music for Diaghilev that Diaghilev never used.

And which almost led to a duel between them.

April 23, 1554, Gaspara Stampa died on.

I don’t very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them.

Said Georgia O’Keeffe.

Harvard was founded in 1636.

The University of Mexico — in 1553.

One of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published.

Edmund Wilson called This Side of Paradise.

Not a lovable man.

John O’Hara said of Scott Fitzgerald himself.

Occasions on which one has seen it transliterated as Theodor Dostoievsky.

A tea-time bore.

Dylan Thomas called Wordsworth.

A son of Einstein’s died in a mental institution at fifty-five — having been confined there for a third of a century.

The relatively recent revelation that Einstein had also had an illegitimate daughter.

Unhesitatingly specifying Pound’s anti-Semitism as the reason, Yevgeny Yevtushenko once refused to appear on the same podium with him at a literary event.

Teddy Dostoievsky?

The Duccio Madonna and Child purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in 2004 for more than $45,000,000.

Which is eight inches wide and eleven inches high.

Jan Peerce. Leonard Warren. Richard Tucker. Robert Merrill.

The Lower East Side. The Bronx. Williamsburg. Williamsburg.

Jacques Derrida failed his entrance exams to the École Normal Supérieure. Twice.

People are exasperated by poetry which they do not understand, and contemptuous of poetry which they understand without effort.

Said Eliot.

We cease to wonder at what we understand.

Said Johnson.

Sir Thomas Beecham once told an orchestra that a certain passage in Mozart should sound innocent — quote — like a breath of spring. It should float on the air like a voice from another world.

When the musicians stared emptily:

Oh, well, anyway, play it legato.

A real good guy.

William Carlos Williams called Emily Dickinson.

A bitchy little spinster.

Denise Levertov saw her as instead.

Géricault’s intensity when at work on The Raft of the Medusa:

The mere sound of a smile could prevent him from painting, someone said.

Ingres’ judgment that the finished version ought to have been removed from the Louvre or even hidden away altogether:

Is it in such horrors that we should find pleasure? Art should teach us nothing but the Beautiful!

If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.

Said a 1920s Texas governor opposed to the teaching of foreign languages.

Persia, as it was still then called, Doris Lessing was born in.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

Because bookshops are among the very few places where one can spend time without spending any money, George Orwell noted, any number of practically certifiable lunatics are guaranteed to be regularly found in most of them.

I’ve finished that chapel I was painting. The Pope is quite satisfied.

Wrote Michelangelo to his father, after four years’ effort — and with no further need to let fall brooms or lumber.

So impoverished was Linnaeus as a university student that the closest he could come to repairing worn-out shoes was to stuff the holes with paper.

The general acceptance that it was Antonello da Messina who taught Venice the Flemish method of painting with oils rather than with tempera.

Venice — and thus Italy.

More floggings than meals.

Haydn remembered from his childhood.

Trying to imagine E. M. Forster, who found Ulysses indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruce — to which in fact he was once taken.

Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorne — who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked at the profusion of naked statues.

January 22, 1945, Else Lasker-Schüler died on.

Raskolnikov. Minus the last two letters, the word translates as dissenter.

While the pseudonym Gorky means the bitter.

Fifty years after combat in World War I, David Jones could still be momentarily panicked by an unexpected explosive sound like that of a backfiring truck.

And now we three in Euston waiting-room.

Latin, Greek, Italian, and German, George Eliot read.

Latin, Greek, Italian, and French — Mary Shelley.

Hindi, not English, Rudyard Kipling’s first language was.

People who pronounce the word ask as if it were spelled with an x.

As for that matter it was, until the late sixteenth century.

If God had not created breasts, I would not have become a painter.

Renoir once unseriously announced.

A woman’s breast or a commonplace milk bottle — my feelings remained the same when painting either.

Corot soberly insisted.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls —

Which Novelist after a moment realizes may sound like a line of Beckett’s, but is actually something he himself has said in an earlier book.

The name Copperfield came from a sign Dickens had noticed on a shop in a London slum.

Chuzzlewit likewise.

Nothing but obscenities and filth.

Being all Conrad could find in D. H. Lawrence.

Disgust and horror, recorded Abigail Adams after a blackface performance of Othello:

My whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona.

The revolver with which van Gogh shot himself had been borrowed. Van Gogh having claimed he wished to fire at crows that were annoying him as he painted.

The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

Said Arthur Honegger.

Remembering that before writing Ben Hur, Lew Wallace had been a Union general during the Civil War.

Remembering that Abner Doubleday had been the same.

The endless commentary, and analysis, and even retelling, in Clarissa. Anyone reading it just for the story would hang himself, Johnson said.

Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?

James Thurber said Harold Ross had to ask.

Roughly two-thirds of the paintings described in the corrected second edition of Vasari’s Lives — finished in 1567 — would appear to no longer exist.

Hamlet. A boring play full of quotations.

Swinburne’s delirium-tremendous imagination, Hopkins called it.

Grant Wood’s sister, Nan, and a dentist named McKeeby. Who posed for American Gothic.

In Cedar Rapids.

July 4, 1934, Hayyim Bialik died on.

The letter announcing the first acceptance of a poem by Francis Thompson never reached him.

Thompson being so indigent at the time that he literally had no address.

Poe, in his late thirties a half-century earlier —

Unable even to afford postage to put his manuscripts in the mail.

For poor people, sick or lame, or travelers.

Advertised the Savoy, a charitable residence in sixteenth-century London — which also saw fit to take in struggling authors.

Thinking of them for so long as essentially literary characters that one has to force oneself to recall that Dante actually knew the Paolo of Paolo and Francesca.

Goya died at eighty-three.

Having had to read lips for the last thirty-six years of his life.

Borges at eighty-six.

Having had to be read aloud to for almost as long.

Ovid’s poem about his sweetheart Corinna’s near-fatal abortion — dated ca. 23 BC.

The child was mine — or so I at least

do think.

Baudelaire’s addiction to laudanum.

Coleridge’s. De Quincey’s.

Poe’s.

The Nike of Samothrace, in the Louvre, which was excavated in 1863 — in more than one hundred fragments.

Newspapers expressed such indignation over the ostensible immorality in Richard Strauss’s Salome at its 1907 American premiere that the opera was withdrawn after a single performance and not produced again at the Metropolitan until 1934.

Diseased and polluted. Indescribably, yes, inconceivably, gross and abominable. Unspeakable.

Read a small portion of what the New York Times had to contribute.

Aristide Maillol’s practice of repeatedly urinating on his bronze sculptures.

To add patina.

If you value my work, please, do not knock.

Requested a notice on Hermann Hesse’s door in Ticino.

Gérard de Nerval, in some of the milder moments of his madness — known to toss such money as he possessed into the air for anyone’s taking in restaurants and coffeehouses.

Anne Sexton’s periods in mental institutions.

Only native-born citizens in ancient Athens were allowed to own property.

Meaning that no less a personage than Aristotle, from Stagira, could not.

The nunnery on Montmartre, mentioned a few years earlier by François Villon, where in 1503 it was discovered that the abbess and several nuns had borne children — and still others were pregnant.

A fiend of a book. The action is laid in Hell — only it seems places and people have English names there.

Said Dante Gabriel Rossetti of Wuthering Heights.

Olive Fremstad. Mary Garden. Ljuba Welitsch. Karita Matilla.

Wagner played the piano badly.

Berlioz not at all.

For safety’s sake during the bombings of World War II, the Elgin Marbles were removed from the British Museum and stored deep in the London subway system.

While the French Resistance during those same years was using the Lascaux cave as a place in which to cache weapons.

Tchaikovsky was found weeping after he had written the death of Lisa in The Queen of Spades.

Georges Bernanos was married to a direct descendant of a brother of Joan of Arc.

A simple creature unlettyrde.

Julian of Norwich called herself.

The most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.

Echoed Jane Austen — four hundred years afterward.

Pastor Martin Niemöller — who spent seven years at Sachsenhausen and Dachau.

After having been a German U-boat commander in World War I.

April 13, 1945, Ernst Cassirer died on.

Ivan Goncharov worked in the Russian Civil Service for his entire adult life.

Mussorgsky, the same.

Then again, quoting himself or not, Novelist naturally does receive some few phone calls after all.

All too often in these years with news of someone’s death, however.

Leonardo’s peculiar habit of surreptitiously following interesting-looking strangers on the street.

To be able to sketch them from memory later, the contemporary assumption was.

Christianity must be divine, since it has lasted seventeen hundred years despite the fact of being so full of villainy and absurdity.

Voltaire said.

The first priest was the first rogue who crossed paths with the first fool.

Voltaire also said.

Slop, Pound was calling Yeats’s recent verse in the mid-1930s— after having been best man at Yeats’s wedding two decades earlier.

The influence of Donne upon the literature of England was singularly wide and deep — although almost wholly malign.

Said Edmund Gosse.

There is no indication whatsoever of anything even remotely resembling a State of Israel on the maps in most contemporary Arab schoolbooks.

Sixty-seven, Cézanne died at.

Some few days after having been caught for hours in a sudden downpour where he had been at work on a landscape.

A sort of God of painting.

Matisse was to call him.

One can now hear famous pieces of music as easily as one can buy a glass of beer.

Proclaimed Debussy in delight at the advent of the phonograph.

They who drink beer will think beer.

Said Washington Irving.

Cracked, Edith Sitwell called Blake.

Flaubert’s outrage at the notion of an illustrated edition of Bovary.

Jane, Jane,

Tall as a crane,

The morning light creaks down again.

Still the most avant-garde book ever written.

Anthony Burgess said of Tristram Shandy.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

Johnson said.

Mahler died in 1911. Alma not until 1964.

Beckett, on the posthumous publication of letters or other papers that their authors might not have approved of:

When a writer dies his widow should be burned on his funeral pyre.

To publish one line of an author which he himself did not intend for publication — especially letters — is a despicable act.

Had said Heine earlier.

What the dickens, lower case — which has nothing to do with the author of Great Expectations.

I cannot tell what the dickens his name is, says someone in The Merry Wives of Windsor, on stage by 1601.

It is never difficult to paint, said Dalí.

It is either easy or impossible.

Willie Yeats, he was frequently called.

William Cuthbert Faulkner, his full name was.

Christopher Marlowe evidently wrote Tamburlaine while still a student at Cambridge.

Learn or leave. A third alternative is to be flogged.

Declared a Latin inscription at the entrance to a church-sponsored Medieval English elementary school.

Rousseau’s father was a watchmaker.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu died of breast cancer.

Too much interest in music could turn one effeminate.

Kant said.

Tolstoy’s certainty that Darwin was already beginning to be forgotten.

As early as in 1903.

Hugh Kenner’s sense of the same re Freud.

Whom he called already nearly as dated as Trilby — in 1958.

Goyisher kopf.

Byron, with amiable confidence, to friends whose silence suggested that they did not particularly admire Don Juan:

I wish you all better taste.

The ugliness of some of his music is really masterly.

Stated a London journal after an early Delius concert.

Andromache. Alcestis. Helen. Medea. The Bacchae.

Each of which Euripides ends with his chorus speaking an identical verse — to the effect that the ways of the gods are unpredictable.

Helen, the most famous woman in Greek mythology — whose name is not a Greek name.

The curiosity that we possess copies of ten evidently authentic letters of Dante’s — and not one of Shakespeare’s.

August 11, 1494, Hans Memling died on.

Dylan Thomas’s eighteenth birthday, Sylvia Plath was born on.

I hate that dreadful hollow behind the little wood.

Strolling on Park Avenue in New York, John Gielgud unexpectedly runs into Greta Garbo —

Looking like a displaced charwoman, he later reports.

Edgell Rickword lost an eye as an officer in France in World War I.

Siegfried Sassoon was wounded twice.

Thinking with someone else’s brain.

Schopenhauer called reading.

In the late spring of 1944, at the height of their efficiency, the forty-six ovens in the crematoriums at Auschwitz were incinerating as many as twelve thousand corpses per day.

The word genocide had not existed until being coined by a Polish scholar in that same year.

Italo Svevo had to pay to publish Confessions of Zeno.

Stratford-on-Avon, Marie Corelli died in.

I say that if you can tell a story in a picture and if a reasonable number of people like your work, it is art.

Said Norman Rockwell.

If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting it should be burned.

Said Shaw.

Ronald Reagan was a clandestine informer for the FBI when it was investigating so-called left-wing influences in Hollywood in the 1940s.

Confucius was illegitimate.

Michelangelo’s passing comment to Raphael, at the Vatican, that there was a young painter in Florence who would bring sweat to his brow — unquote — if he ever fulfilled himself.

Meaning Andrea del Sarto.

Michelangelo, who was incidentally eight years older than Raphael — and would outlive him by forty-four.

And Andrea by thirty-three.

The paper shit is endless.

Quoth a 1911 letter of Einstein’s re university teaching.

Reviewers who have accused Novelist of inventing some of his anecdotes and/or quotations — without the elemental responsibility to do the checking that would verify every one of them.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.

Said John Osborne.

Sein oder nicht sein — ja, dass ist die Frage.

Reads Schlegel’s translation.

March 3, 1996, Marguerite Duras died on.

Simonides once rejected a meager fee to compose an ode to the winner of a mule race, insisting he did not write about jackasses.

The fee was increased. Wind-swift steeds, the jackasses miraculously became.

Isamu Noguchi’s sets for Martha Graham.

Eva Hesse was dead at thirty-four.

The fact is, I did not eat every day during that period of my life.

Said André Breton, explaining a possible origin for some of his earliest surrealist writings.

The Pope may judge all and be judged by no man.

Said Innocent III.

Pericles’ mistress Aspasia, who ran a school for courtesans — and was comfortably at home in intellectual discussion with Socrates.

No different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation.

Said someone on radio named Rush Limbaugh about American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

People having a good time.

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

On exhibition in a New York gallery in 2005, a portrait of Seamus Heaney — by Derek Walcott.

Which would barely pass muster in an undergraduate painting class, according to the New York Times.

Curiously impressed by the fact that Auden paid every one of his bills — electric, phone, whatever — on the same day that it arrived.

Boccaccio, one of the few intellectuals in the late Middle Ages determined to recover ancient manuscripts — but all too often coming upon them in monastery storerooms never locked, with pages torn out by the fistful, with what remains refuse-strewn and indecipherable. At Monte Cassino grass even grows in the loft where windows stand open.

Boccaccio bursts into tears.

Cavafy was forty-one before his first book was published — containing fourteen poems.

Remembering that in the Iliad, as rife with detailed violence as any war narrative ever written, not one captured Greek or Trojan is ever tortured.

— And that the only Southerner hanged by the Union during the Civil War was the commanding officer at Andersonville — where inconceivably barbarous conditions had cost 12,000 incarcerated Northerners their lives.

Teaching at New York University before its graduate art program had been fully established, during Prohibition, Erwin Panofsky sometimes met with students at a Fifty-Second Street speakeasy.

Juvenile trash.

Edmund Wilson dismissed the sum of J. R. R. Tolkien as.

Alicia Markova almost never in her career weighed more than ninety-eight pounds.

Was it Brigid Brophy who gave up on a certain Virginia Woolf novel when she discovered that Woolf believed one needed a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne?

February 25, 1547, Vittoria Collona died on.

The first time that Ethel Waters sang Stormy Weather, in a show at the Cotton Club, she was given no fewer than twelve encores.

A Metropolitan Opera audience once demanded so many curtain calls after a Renata Tebaldi Desdemona that she finally came back out with her coat and hat on.

All the fruit will fall from any tree beneath which a menstruating woman happens to sit.

~ ~ ~

Says Pliny’s Natural History.

While also announcing that women who sneeze after making love are almost certain to miscarry.

The film Carmen Jones, with Dorothy Dandridge.

In which the dubbed lyric soprano voice is that of a very young Marilyn Horne.

The 1915 Cecil B. DeMille film of Carmen itself, with Geraldine Farrar.

Silent.

Stephen Crane was officially cited for bravery while a foreign correspondent during the Spanish-American War. At Guantánamo.

Will no one free me of this turbulent priest?

Canterbury, Joseph Conrad is buried in.

The only exercise I get these days is walking behind the coffins of my friends who took exercise.

Said Peter O’Toole in his late sixties.

Karl Marx regularly read Shakespeare aloud to his young children.

A scheme of Robert Boyle’s, roughly 330 years ago, as recounted in Aubrey’s Brief Lives:

At his owne costs and chardges, he gott translated and printed the New Testament into Arabique, to send into the Mahometan countreys.

Every word of importance is already in the Koran. Anything in any other books can only be pernicious.

Having been the Muslim rationalization for destroying all 700,000 volumes in the great library at Alexandria in 642.

Is T. S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three — and managed to have no sexual encounters whatever?

You have but two topics, yourself and me, and I’m sick of both.

Johnson once told Boswell.

I come of a people who do not even acknowledge Jesus Christ. Why am I supposed to acknowledge Abstract Expressionism?

Asked Jack Levine.

The porphyry disc near the center of the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, marking the spot where Savonarola was burned at the stake in 1498.

The statue of Giordano Bruno on the spot in the Piazza Campo de’ Fiori, in Rome, where he was burned in 1600.

Not distinguished looking in any way — neither handsome nor ugly, neither fat nor thin, neither tall nor short.

Said George Eliot of Dickens.

A peculiar face — not handsome, very ugly indeed.

Said Charlotte Brontë — of Thackeray.

No course in Shakespeare was taught at Harvard until as late as the 1870s.

Quentin de La Tour, harmlessly deranged in his later years — and frequently seen talking to trees.

Another of Novelist’s economic-status epiphanies:

Walking four or five blocks out of his way, and back, to save little more than nickels on some common household item.

While needing to stop to rest at least two or three times en route.

Writers are the beggars of Western society.

Said Octavio Paz.

There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser.

Said Nelson Algren.

Finding oneself momentarily startled by a reference in Gorky’s diaries to Tolstoy chatting with Chekhov.

On the telephone.

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night.

Says the King James translation of Psalms 91:5.

Thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night.

Says Miles Coverdale’s earlier version.

A designated area for booksellers existed in the central market in Athens as far back as in the fifth century BC.

The report from that same era to the effect that Aeschylus gave up writing after members of an audience were killed when a tier of wooden benches collapsed during a performance of his work.

At least one of Modigliani’s sculptures was carved from a discarded construction-site stone — because he could not afford to pay money for something better.

Jean-Baptiste Lully’s confessor once refused to grant him absolution unless Lully agreed to destroy the score of a recent opera, which the confessor believed blasphemous. Lully let the work be burned and was properly shrived.

With an extra copy safely set aside.

Neither Graham Greene nor Evelyn Waugh ever learned to drive a car.

I always said God was against art and I still believe it.

Said Edward Elgar — while impatiently awaiting acclaim.

All artists are bores.

Unquote. Clement Greenberg.

By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we anathematize, execrate, curse, and cast out Baruch Spinoza, the whole of the sacred community assenting —

This trivial and vulgar way of union; it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.

Declaimed Sir Thomas Browne — about sex.

Organized Christian denominations and their individual congregations:

Chain stores and their retail outlets, Thorstein Veblen called them.

Duke Ellington and Miles Davis are buried in the same Bronx cemetery.

Chopin was buried in Père Lachaise in Paris — but with Polish earth later sprinkled on the grave.

— There shall be no man speak to him, no man write to him, no man show him any kindness, no man stay under the same roof with him, no man come nigh him.

The greatest novel ever written.

Kingsley called Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

November 6 or 7, 1944, Hannah Senesch was executed on.

As his once extraordinary fame in France’s literary world faded, Chateaubriand also became extremely hard of hearing.

He only thinks he is deaf because he no longer hears himself talked about, Talleyrand said.

Virgil was five years older than Horace.

Wondering when and where the last casual streetcorner conversation in Latin might have taken place.

Norma loquendi.

The rumor that Frieda Lawrence’s lover after Lawrence’s death, whom she asked to transport Lawrence’s ashes from France to New Mexico, indifferently dumped them — and substituted no one knows what before the Taos reburial.

Mouse-poor, Robert Graves describes John Clare as having been.

Drunk as a mouse.

Chaucer somewhere writes.

A sub-human species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time.

General George S. Patton compassionately described Jewish concentration-camp survivors as.

Picasso. Cézanne. Matisse. Braque. Bonnard. Renoir.

All of whom painted portraits of Ambroise Vollard.

Cartier-Bresson. Brassaï. Man Ray. Lee Miller. Robert

Doisneau. Robert Capa. David Douglas Duncan. Cecil Beaton.

All of whom photographed Picasso.

George Washington’s will called for the freeing of his slaves.

As had Aristotle’s for the freeing of most of his — 2,100 years earlier.

More’s Utopia, in which women are granted full and equal rights to education with men — dated 1516.

Pulmonary fibrosis, Marlon Brando died of.

Don’t keep talking to me about nature, said Corot. All I see out there are Corots.

A 1940 letter from Béla Bartók, new in New York, about attempting to go by subway from Forest Hills, in Queens, to lower Manhattan —

And spending three mystified hours underground before sneaking shamefacedly home — his words — without ever achieving his destination.

Turner’s eternal stovepipe hat.

Eliot’s bowler.

Saul Bellow’s fedora.

A precious, priestly, hothouse darling.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch dismissed Hopkins as.

Revolting, the London Times called Millais’ Christ in the House of His Parents.

The occasion, soon after Vladimir Horowitz became Toscanini’s son-in-law, on which Toscanini leaned from the podium and patted him on the head at the end of a performance.

Green eyes, the self-portraits indicate van Gogh had.

It has been possible for a long time to conceive of a poet who has never written a poem.

Leslie Fiedler once said.

Debussy never learned which side won World War I.

Old enough to have started coming upon likenesses on postage stamps of other writers he had known personally or had at least met in passing.

Anthony Trollope was once told by an acquaintance that one of his recurring serialized characters had become boring.

Trollope killed her off in the next installment.

The misfortunate, otherwise unknown first-century BC Roman Egnatius — remembered because of a poem in which Catullus accuses him of cleaning his teeth with urine.

The only excuse for the suffering that God allows in the world — is that he does not exist.

Stendhal said.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s addiction to morphine.

And/or ether.

Is there one major Dostoievsky novel in which no one commits suicide?

Dostoievsky gave me more than any thinker, more even than Gauss.

Einstein said.

Former Naval Person —

Winston Churchill’s code name having been in World War II.

Colonel Berger —

Malraux’s, in the Resistance.

Kipling, who was forty-two, remains the youngest author to win the Nobel Prize.

Camus was forty-four.

July 17, 1967, John Coltrane died on.

Aspen, Colorado, Mina Loy died in.

Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, kept a twenty-year diary that was evidently devoted almost entirely to the evisceration of his character.

Hardy burned every word of it at her death.

A second wife, Florence, once accused him of not having spoken to anyone outside of their house in twelve days. Hardy insisted he had.

He had said good morning to the manure-cart driver.

O body, mass of corruptions, what have I to do with thee?

Asked Augustine.

The proper study of mankind is books.

Said Aldous Huxley.

Benoit Mandelbrot.

Benoit de Sainte-Maure.

Émile Zola’s certainty that after a hundred years Les Fleurs du Mal would be no more than a footnoted curiosity in literary history.

Maugham’s — that there was nothing to be found in Mallarmé but pretense and platitudes.

The identity of the Immortal Beloved.

Keep hold of my arm, they must make room for us, not we for them.

Shortly after its publication, Robert McAlmon informed Joyce that he planned to throw his copy of Ulysses out the window. Joyce told him not to:

Socrates might be passing in the street.

E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot.

Said Katherine Mansfield.

The early Shakespearean Betterton, distressed over foreign intrusions onto the late seventeenth-century London stage:

By squeaking Italians and capering monsieurs, end quote.

Shakespeare’s birthday, Turner was born on.

More greatness in this man than in any other born in our times. Vasari saw in Donatello.

What needs to be said is best said twice.

Said Empedocles.

At one point near the end of the Reign of Terror, more than 1,300 guillotined prisoners were flung into the same single Paris mass grave — one of the 1,300 having been André Chénier.

Continued speculation that Abraham Lincoln was homosexual.

Bologna, Lodovico Carracci died in.

Parma, Agostino.

Rome, Annibale.

Theodore Dreiser’s general preference for the word kike, rather than Jew.

If it were up to me, I would have wiped my behind with his last decree.

Said Mozart — after a demand by the Archbishop of Salzburg for more brevity in his church compositions.

Fish feel pain.

A seminonfictional semifiction.

And with its interspersed unattributed quotations at roughest count adding up to a hundred or more.

Good lord, Willie, you are drunk. Either that or you’re writing for a very small audience.

Is Sir Walter Raleigh and his cloak the oldest tale from English history that children still remember?

Or King Alfred and the cakes?

’Tis such a task as scarce leaves a man time to be a good neighbour, an useful friend, nay, to plant a tree, much less to save his soul.

Said Pope, re writing well.

Michelangelo’s Pietà —

Is the Virgin many years too young?

Dante will always remain popular because nobody ever reads him.

Said Voltaire.

Approximately seventy-five years before Blake learned Italian to do so — at sixty.

The cocktail party at Peggy Guggenheim’s Manhattan townhouse during which Jackson Pollock casually urinated into the fireplace.

At more than nine thousand published pages, does Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics have any competition as the longest unfinished book of the twentieth century?

Is I Samuel 18:20, where it is stated that King Saul’s daughter Michal loves David, the only place in the Old Testament where a woman is reported to actually love a man?

Even if by II Samuel 6:16 we find her learning to despise him?

The paintings of a drunken privy cleaner.

A Cézanne critic spoke of.

The two younger brothers of William and Henry James — both of whom were wounded while fighting for the Union during the Civil War.

I have never been surprised to find men wicked, but I have often been surprised to find them not ashamed.

Said Swift.

Even though they had dedicated poems to each other, because of the conditions of life in Russia Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetayeva managed to meet only once — little more than a year before Tsvetayeva would hang herself.

Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.

Stalin once actually ventured.

No girl was ever seduced by a book.

Postulated Jimmy Walker.

Briseis, in the Iliad, who is not identified at all except as the captive maiden taken by Agamemnon from Achilles.

But who over the centuries is transformed into the Cressida of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

And whose name is in fact not a name — but means only the woman from Brisa, a town in Lesbos.

If the Republicans would stop telling lies about the Democrats, we would stop telling the truth about them.

Adlai Stevenson said.

It Ain’t Necessarily So. In Danish.

Which was piped into Danish radio by the underground whenever announcements were made of German victories in World War II.

Baldur von Schirach, one of the chief Nazi war criminals tried at Nuremberg, on the origin of his anti-Semitism:

From a book about the Jews by Henry Ford.

The woman sleeping on the sofa dreams that she is transported into the forest, hearing the music of the snake charmer’s instrument. This explains why the sofa is in the picture.

Unquote — Le Douanier.

Looking is not as simple as it looks.

Said Ad Reinhardt.

Eighty sopranos. Eighty contraltos. Seventy basses. Sixty tenors.

— Called for in Belioz’ Grande Messe des Mortes.

Over the hill to the poorhouse

I’m trudgin’ my weary way.

He is the handsomest man in England, and he wears the most beautiful shirts.

Said Yeats of Rupert Brooke.

If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth, Novelist were to burn an Andy Warhol, qualms?

Qualmless.

Jane Ellen Harrison was proficient in fourteen languages.

Utrillo, on the occasion of one of his several arrests for drunkenness — trying to commit suicide by smashing his head against the walls of his Montmartre jail cell.

Housman, in the early 1920s, re what may have been the first flight taken by an author:

The machine required repairs, having been damaged on the previous day by a passenger who butted his head through a window to be sick.

We should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity, though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature.

Determined Aristotle.

Brendan Behan, to a nun caring for him in a Catholic hospital:

Bless you, Sister. May all your sons be bishops.

Starting out, George Gershwin sold his first two songs for a total of twelve dollars.

October 24, 1725, Alessandro Scarlatti died on.

July 23, 1757, Domenico.

The curious theatrical superstition that insists it is unlucky to talk about Macbeth by name — the Scottish play, being how it is usually referred to instead.

King Lear’s wife. Goneril’s mother, Regan’s, Cordelia’s.

How often does it occur to anyone that there is not one remotest allusion to her in the text?

Gravesend, on the Thames, Pocahontas died in.

The last time anyone mentioned Sherwood Anderson.

There are so many ways of earning a living, and most of them are failures.

Wrote Gertrude Stein.

Alice B. Toklas did the cooking.

Moments in which Novelist does something like searching interminably at every hook and hanger in the apartment for his shirt — and only at the point of utter bewilderment realizing that he is wearing it.

Pushkin’s beautiful seventeen-year-old wife Nathalie, whom he married at thirty-one — and whom he said was the one hundred and thirteenth woman he had been in love with.

As a student, Anna Netrebko scrubbed floors in a St. Petersburg opera house.

The word agnostic.

Coined by Thomas Henry Huxley during the early debates on Darwinism.

Norbert Wiener graduated from Tufts University at fourteen. And owned a Ph.D. from Harvard four years later.

Wonderful news —

Said meringue-brained Bobby Fischer at the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Did Toulouse-Lautrec die from a sequence of strokes — or from syphilitic paralysis?

1922. Ulysses.

1922. The Waste Land.

1922. Reader’s Digest.

The first English novel for adults, Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch.

There are 773,692 words in the King James Bible.

Or 773,746.

The wastepaper basket is the author’s best friend.

Noted Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Wondering by what date the last survivor of the Holocaust will have died.

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

Said Billie Holiday.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal.

Conversely offered Zora Neale Hurston.

Pietro Aretino died in the midst of a hysterical fit of laughter that apparently turned into an apoplectic stroke.

As had the Athenian comic playwright Philemon — at ninety-nine.

Or one hundred and one.

Lord Byron by the kilo, Dumas père described George Sand’s early romantic novels as.

Renaissance paintings on which Bernard Berenson falsified the attributions — when handed money under the table by the dealer Duveen.

Jude the Obscene, someone called it.

As an apprentice, Claude Lorrain worked with the landscape painter Agostino Tassi — who a few years earlier had earned such small art-world immortality as he possesses by raping Artemisia Gentileschi.

Artemisia. Who is granted only one sentence in Novelist’s two-volume 1962 Everyman’s Dictionary of Pictorial Art — at the end of the entry on her father.

All female artists are sluts.

Quoth Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.

I leave before being left. I decide.

Said Brigitte Bardot.

Winslow Homer spent his last twenty-seven years on the isolated Maine peninsula of Prout’s Neck.

— My nearest neighbor is half a mile away. I am four miles from the PO and under a snowbank most of the time. Night before last it was twelve below zero.

January 13, 1864, Stephen Foster died on.

Little Friend, Little Friend, I got two engines on fire. Can you see me, Little Friend?

I’m crossing right over you. Let’s go home.

Guido Reni’s abnormally exaggerated terror of witchcraft.

To the extent that the mere sight of an old woman at a market could send him rushing away.

Losing her sight in later life, Constance Garnett arranged to have Russian books read aloud — and then dictated her translations.

A quack, Vladimir Nabokov called Thomas Mann.

A complete mediocrity — D. H. Lawrence.

That total fake — Ezra Pound.

Despicable, loathsome, sick, third-rate — Dostoievsky.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

John Steinbeck said.

The severest test of the imagination — is to name a cat.

Said Samuel Butler.

Schopenhauer’s poodle.

Called Atma.

Picasso’s play, Desire Caught by the Tail — which could be performed for the first time only privately, because of the Nazi occupation of Paris.

But avec Camus, Sartre, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau, Dora Maar, Pierre Reverdy, Simone de Beauvoir.

The short story by one Heinz von Lichberg, published in Berlin six years before Nabokov would live there for a decade and a half — about an older man’s obsession with a young girl.

— And entitled Lolita.

There are four chances in 2,598,960 of being dealt a royal flush in a hand of poker.

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?

Asked Satchel Paige.

Baudelaire wrote a poem about Watteau.

Verlaine wrote a poem about Watteau.

Proust wrote a poem about Watteau.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, long since categorically exposed as a fraud.

Nonetheless incessantly reprinted throughout the Muslim world — not to add dramatized on television.

Kant’s father was a saddle maker.

If you are going to make a book end badly, Robert Louis Stevenson once pointed out, it must end badly from the beginning —

Such as by mentioning an eighth-story roof in its very first paragraphs.

And which should presumably call to mind Chekhov’s admonition that if a pistol is displayed in a first act, it had damned well better be fired by the last.

Raphael died on his thirty-seventh birthday.

Always young in men’s memories, someone thought to say.

Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.

Only days before Edna St. Vincent Millay’s birth, her mother’s brother’s life was saved in a New York hospital. Millay’s middle name, those few days later, was taken from the name of the hospital.

Florence Nightingale.

Simply because she was born there.

Canon in D Major for Strings and Continuo.

By Johann Pachelbel.

Does having been six feet eight inches tall make Charles Olson the tallest known poet?

How tall was William Langland, who because of his height was called Long Will?

One half of the children born die before their eighth year. This is nature’s law; why try to contradict it?

Inquired Rousseau.

John Jay Chapman’s conclusion that a visiting Martian would come away with a more critical lesson about life on earth from attending an Italian opera than from reading Emerson.

The lesson that there are two sexes.

September 13, 1506, Andrea Mantegna died on.

Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Lente currite noctis equi.

Says Ovid in the Amores.

O lente lente currite noctis equi.

Says Marlowe, at the end of Faustus.

Of no significance whatsoever. But the hospital where Dylan Thomas would die, sixty-one years after the fact, was the one after which Edna Millay had been named.

O run slowly, slowly, horses of the night.

Pandora’s box. Which in the first written version of the tale, in Hesiod, is in fact a jar.

A reference to the good old hearty female stench, unquote.

Which Pound excised from Eliot’s manuscript of The Waste Land.

Sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.

Said Luther, dismissing this fool, Copernicus.

Flat, clumsy, labored, and embarrassingly crude, Isaac Deutscher called Doctor Zhivago.

Which Akhmatova found so intermittently inept that she refused to believe Pasternak had written it all.

Like Benedetto Croce earlier, Ignazio Silone lost both of his parents in an earthquake.

Paul Robeson’s Othello.

With José Ferrer as Iago.

Renée Fleming’s Metropolitan opening-night Desdemona — sung only three weeks after having given birth to a second child.

Because of a promise to his mother, Jorge Luis Borges recited the Lord’s Prayer every night of his life:

Even though I don’t know whether there’s anybody at the other end of the line.

God seems to have left the receiver off the hook.

Once suggested Arthur Koestler — in more general political terms.

And prayers have no power the Plague to stay.

Wrote Long Will.

Montaigne was taught to read and speak Latin before he knew French.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was reading Plato and Aristophanes, in Latin translations, at the age of eight.

Anton Bruckner, in old age, tells Gustav Mahler that he can readily foresee his coming interrogation by his Maker —

Why else have I given you talent, you son of a bitch, than that you should sing My praise and glory? But you have accomplished much too little.

Cosima Wagner’s Jewish great-grandmother.

Egon Schiele was once briefly jailed — but then not prosecuted — on allegations of abducting and molesting a girl of thirteen.

Q. Who is the Buddha?

A. Three pounds of flax.

After a performance, Queen Victoria once ventured to inform Paderewski that he was a genius.

To which: Perhaps, Your Majesty. But before that I was a drudge.

The word nihilism.

Coined by Turgenev, for use in Fathers and Sons.

The next night he did not know where he was, did not feel the cold. The wind blew dust along the ground and into his mouth as he sang.

Nelson, at Trafalgar. Who had a horseshoe nailed to the mainmast of the Victory before the battle.

Niels Bohr — who kept one above a door in his vacation home.

Niels Bohr.

I would rather have a drop of luck than a barrel of brains.

Allegedly said Diogenes.

Franco Zeffirelli’s Taming of the Shrew. In which Zeffirelli’s name in the credits was larger than Shakespeare’s.

Please return this book. I find that though many of my friends are poor mathematicians, they are nearly all good bookkeepers.

Read Walter Scott’s bookplate.

January 14, 2005, Victoria de los Angeles died on.

Ivor Gurney, who was both wounded and gassed at Passchendaele, spent the last fifteen of his remaining twenty years in a mental institution — convinced that the war was still going on.

Italo Calvino died after a cerebral hemorrhage suffered while sitting in a garden.

A portable fatherland, Heine called the Torah.

From a letter of Petrarch’s, ca. 1352, in which he mentions having been reminded of some task or other by the town clock:

By this recent invention we now measure time in almost all of the cities of northern Italy.

Eliot’s second marriage, in 1957, took place in the same Kensington church where Jules Laforgue had been married seventy-one years earlier — which Eliot claimed not to have known beforehand.

How can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?

Asked the principal headline in the London Daily Mirror after the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004.

G. E. Moore was known to appear at his Cambridge classroom in bedroom slippers.

Father, dear father, come home with me now!

The clock in the steeple strikes one.

I don’t go upstairs two nights out of seven without taking Washington Irving under my arm.

Said Dickens.

Actually, the door to Novelist’s roof is connected to an alarm. Workmen unable to locate the building superintendent now and again trip it. No one pays any attention, however.

Jean Giraudoux spent two very brief periods, when young, as an instructor at Harvard.

And for years thereafter kept a Harvard pennant above the bed in his Paris apartment.

The writer Bret Easton Ellis, who imparted to a New York Times reporter that he had been reading the Bible — but then seemed uncertain as to whether in the Old Testament or the New.

Were the stories about Moses or Jesus?

Jesus. I think.

The frequent blind beggars in Euripides, particularly in plays now lost.

The crutch and cripple playwright, Aristophanes called him.

August Strindberg’s mother had been a barmaid.

The marriage of Roberta Peters and Robert Merrill — which lasted three months.

The Greatest Novel Reader in the World.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning suggested her own epitaph could well be.

Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose. At twenty-seven.

Sir Thomas Bodley, who organized the Oxford library subsequently named the Bodleian, permitted the inclusion of no such idle bookes and riffe raffes — unquote — as writings for the current theater.

Including of course those of his almost exact contemporary Shakespeare.

Allen Ginsberg’s insistence that he was once accosted by the apparitional voice of William Blake — immediately after masturbating.

How now! Whose mare’s dead?

The extraordinary fame of Menander in antiquity — to the point where he is even quoted by Saint Paul.

Robert Graves’ claim that as an infant at Wimbledon he had been occasionally patted on the head by Swinburne — he himself being wheeled by his nurse, Swinburne en route to his pub.

Theodore Watts-Dunton’s wife’s claim that when the monumentally alcoholic Swinburne was finally weaned away from brandy, he initially drank port because Tennyson did, then burgundy because of the Musketeers in Dumas, and at last ale — because of Shakespeare.

What a pleasant party, Plutarch records someone commenting to Timon of Athens.

It would be, if you were gone, Timon responds.

If there is anyone here I have forgotten to insult, I apologize.

Announced Brahms, exiting somewhere — 2,300 years later.

Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad.

No battleship has yet been sunk by bombs.

Said the caption on a photograph of the USS Arizona in the program for the 1941 Army-Navy football game — eight days before Pearl Harbor.

Ovid’s banishment from Rome by Augustus — which meant that his books were automatically removed from the city’s libraries as well.

The similar banning of Virgil’s and Livy’s three decades later — by Caligula, who simply did not like them.

May the devil bung a cesspool with his skull.

Requested John Millington Synge, re a dim-witted reviewer.

One of us was once in love for eight days with a woman of fairly easy virtue, and the other for three days with a ten-franc whore. Altogether, eleven days of love between the two of us.

Being Edmond and Jules Goncourt, elucidating their relationships with the opposite sex.

Longfellow published his first poem at thirteen.

Bryant wrote Thanatopsis at seventeen — and after publication several years later was to hear it called a hoax.

No one, on this side of the Atlantic, is capable of writing such verses, insisted Richard Henry Dana.

Never having realized that there originally once was an actual troublemaking Irish family named Hooligan.

Or a military officer named Shrapnel.

The John Cage composition entitled 4’33”.

In which the performer sits at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds — and plays nothing.

Cervantes was fifty-eight when Part I of Don Quixote was published.

And sixty-eight at Part II.

Finding the earliest hints of a theory of evolution in Anaximander.

In the sixth century BC.

I never knew a writer’s wife who wasn’t beautiful.

Said Kurt Vonnegut.

Has Novelist ever known many who could not contrive some way to keep the pot boiling during fallow stretches?

General Mikhail T. Kalashnikov.

Joseph Ignace Guillotin.

Sir Rudolf Bing was once robbed of a cheap watch he wore only for sentimental reasons. Zinka Milanov was infuriated:

The General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera does not display a twenty-dollar wristwatch!

The mugging in which Giuseppe di Stefano, at eighty-three, was quite badly injured — while being stripped of a gold chain he had been given by Maria Callas.

It was Beckett’s wife who took the call informing them that Beckett had won the Nobel Prize. Her first reaction, even as she turned to tell him:

Quelle catastrophe!

Toledo, Judah Halevi was born in.

Córdoba, Maimonides.

Saint Benedict, essentially the founder of moderate monastic rule.

Whose earliest regulations as an abbot were so harsh that the monks tried to poison his wine.

In the dense mist

What is being shouted

Between hill and boat?

Beethoven’s brief period as a pupil of Hadyn’s:

I never learned anything from the man.

There is no such thing as abstract art, said Picasso.

You always have to start somewhere or other.

Inconceivable nonsense.

Tchaikovsky called Das Rheingold.

Machiavelli’s interminable visits to prostitutes — described in unexpurgated detail in his correspondence.

Graham Greene’s — so compulsive that a biographer was able to reproduce a cryptic list, in Greene’s handwriting, of a favorite forty-seven.

Georges Simenon’s — whose autobiography speaks of as many as a thousand.

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

Says a Flaubert letter.

Yeats evidently knew no music.

The word serendipity.

Coined by Horace Walpole, in a 1754 fairy story.

August 22, 1904, Kate Chopin died on.

August 17, 1935, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

George Eliot’s instantaneous anger over any sort of anti-Semitic reference or joke.

Molière was on stage, performing in the role of the hypochondriac in his own last play Le Malade imaginaire, when he was stricken by the bursting blood vessel that caused his death a day later.

I hope I never get so old I get religious.

Quoth Ingmar Bergman.

Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over.

Like their grandly perspicacious uncles — who groused that Monet had done those damnable water lilies nine dozen times already also.

When a head and a book collide, and one sounds hollow — is it always the book?

Asked Lichtenberg.

Owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.

Milton labeled critics.

Ménière’s disease, Swift suffered from.

Erysipelas, Herman Melville.

Chopin’s phthisis — which left him weighing less than one hundred pounds.

They told me I was everything; ’tis a lie — I am not ague-proof.

Realizes Lear.

The central railway-station platform of destinies.

Blaise Cendrars called early twentieth-century Bohemian Paris.

Virginia Woolf’s suicide, for which she filled her pockets with stones before walking into the Ouse.

Wondering if anyone has ever noted how many stones — and what they might possibly have weighed?

Sleet falling;

Fathomless, infinite

Loneliness.

Verlaine was at most eight or nine feet away when he famously fired three shots at Rimbaud with a revolver — fortunately no more than wounding him in the wrist with the first and missing completely with the next two.

The painter of painters.

Manet called Velazquez.

A German equivalent of Tubby, Schubert’s nickname was, among his friends.

Not to be born is far best.

Wrote Sophocles.

Not to be born at all would be the best thing.

Wrote Theognis, at least a half-century earlier.

Richard Feynman’s conviction that as the perspective grows more and more distant, James Clerk Maxwell will loom ever larger as the single towering eminence of the nineteenth century.

The one truly great political figure of our age.

Einstein called Gandhi.

Dostoievsky’s graduation from an engineering institute.

Achieved only after having first failed elementary algebra.

A cobbler makes a greater contribution to society than does a Homer or a Plato.

Asserted Proudhon.

Katherine Mansfield was dead at thirty-five.

March 7, 1944, Emmanuel Ringelbaum died on.

Ballplayers on the road live together. It won’t work.

Said Rogers Hornsby re the signing of Jackie Robinson.

I only wished to tell people honestly: Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live!

Said Chekhov, late along.

Tirso de Molina, who wrote the first dramatic version of the Don Juan legend — in which he allows someone to ask the stone Commendatore if there are taverns in the underworld.

And can poets down there still win prizes?

John Ruskin’s insistence that he could never live in America — a country so miserable as to possess no castles, as he put it.

Freud’s addiction to cocaine.

Sherlock Holmes’.

Contemporary college students — college students — who when asked to identify Joan of Arc have supposed her to be a character in the Biblical story of Noah and the flood.

Or indeed Noah’s wife.

The first hospital in Europe was opened in Paris in the seventh century AD.

At least four hundred years after such things existed in Hindu India.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

America is now given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.

Determined Hawthorne, in 1855.

The greatest achievement for a woman is to be as seldom as possible spoken of, said Thucydides.

Who mentions not one of them in his history.

Johnson’s Lives of the Poets — which mentions none either.

Yasser Arafat was reported not to have read one book in the last forty years of his life.

But to have spent innumerable hours enrapt by Tom and Jerry cartoons.

The man who has seen a truly beautiful woman has seen God.

Said Rumi.

a pretty girl who naked is

is worth a million statues

Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, John Cowper Powys died in.

By her own count, Vigée-Lebrun produced six hundred and sixty-two portraits.

Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.

Wrote Dickens.

Butterfly, my child.

Puccini spoke of her as.

William Faulkner. Seated on a park bench near City Hall in today’s Oxford, Mississippi — in bronze.

Thomas Eakins was once accused of incest with a sister.

And a niece.

Henry Roth acknowledged the same with a sister — and for over a period of years.

Contemplating several of Turner’s early watercolors, a prospective buyer implies that he has recently seen better.

Which has to mean you’ve been looking at Tom Girtin, Turner tells him.

Wondering if there can be any other ranking twentieth-century American poet whose body of work contains even half the percentage of pure drivel as Wallace Stevens’.

Novelist’s calendar, which he leafs through idly to verify something he already suspected — that he has been out to dinner a grand total of three times in the entire past year, and then only when taken by some book person with an expense account.

The unceasing preoccupation with marriageableness and/or the economics of same in Jane Austen.

Suicide is more respectable, Emerson said.

Rarely remembering that the first translation from ancient Greek any of us learn to quote is of Pythagoras.

Kierkegaard’s mother had originally been the family maid, whom his father married after the death of an earlier wife. There is not one word about her in anything Kierkegaard ever wrote, his journals included.

Henry Fielding’s wife’s maid — whom he likewise married after the wife’s death.

Rembrandt’s — who became his mistress.

Handel spent almost fifty years in London — and to the end spoke only broken English.

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the et cetera.

Hideous, Hume condemned much of Spinoza as.

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

Said Voltaire — describing opera.

Unlike most Italians, Joe DiMaggio never reeks of garlic.

Life magazine matter-of-factly took note of in 1939.

Not to add that he keeps his hair slick with water instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease — unquote, additionally.

And so to Mrs. Martin and there did what je voudrais avec her, both devante and backward.

Reads an entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary for early June, 1666.

An earlier tenant in the same London building where Sylvia Plath would commit suicide — had been Yeats.

Pelion and Ossa. In Odyssey XI. In Georgics I. In Horace’s Odes III.

With small Latin and less Greek, Shakespeare found them for Hamlet where?

The thirteen extant letters of Plato.

Did Plato write any of the thirteen?

Gertrude Stein once delighted Picasso by reporting that a collector had been dumbfounded, years afterward, to hear that Picasso had given her her portrait as a gift, rather than asking payment.

Not understanding that that early in Picasso’s career, the difference had been next to negligible.

I don’t think anybody should write his autobiography until after he’s dead.

Said Samuel Goldwyn.

One author pilfers the best of another.

And calls it tradition.

Says a fragment of Bacchylides, ca. 450 BC.

Brooklyn, Leonard Bernstein is buried in.

February 22, 1913, Saussure died on.

Too lazy to copy down passages he thought he might later wish to quote, De Quincey often simply ripped them out of the book at hand.

Even when the book was someone else’s.

A photo of Lillie Langtry, as Rosalind in As You Like It, taken in 1882.

How can Novelist have fallen in love with someone dead since 1929?

Henry James, addressing Joseph Conrad: Mon cher confrère.

Conrad, addressing James: Mon cher maître.

Both, repeatedly, when in conversation, said Ford Madox Ford.

More than fifty relatives of Bach, whose names remain on record, were musicians.

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

Guy Davenport’s account of a lunch with Thomas Merton — at which Merton devoured six martinis.

Spinach, fruit, water.

Having been Mahler’s unvarying diet.

Ethiopians have black sperm, believed Herodotus.

A sort of gutless Kipling.

Orwell called Auden.

Ernest Poole. Margaret Wilson. Julia M. Peterkin. Margaret Ayer Barnes. T. S. Stribling.

Being five of the first fifteen winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Caroline Miller. Josephine W. Johnson. Harold L. Davis.

Being the next three.

Ted Hughes’s father was one of only seventeen survivors from an entire regiment annihilated at Gallipoli.

No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more.

Said Seamus Heaney at the 1998 funeral of Hughes himself.

I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion, I loathe the country.

Says someone in Congreve’s The Way of the World.

I’m going. I find the company very uncongenital.

Says someone in a Gypsy Rose Lee mystery.

He had abroun hayre. His complexion exceeding faire — he was so faire they called him the Lady of Christ’s College.

Being Milton, as reported by John Aubrey.

Paavo Nurmi died partially paralyzed.

Paavo Nurmi.

The French government provides the Paris Opera a subsidy of roughly $135,000,000 each year.

The United States gives the Metropolitan Opera less than $1,000,000.

At eighteen, John Stuart Mill spent several nights in jail for having distributed birth control pamphlets in a London slum.

Delmore Schwartz, in his disturbed final years, hearing voices — and insisting that they were directed at him from the spire of the Empire State Building.

The Book of Margery Kempe, evidently the first autobiography in English by a woman.

Surely the first to have been dictated — by an illiterate author.

Martin Heidegger’s affair with Hannah Arendt — conducted in the main at a squalid hotel next to the Marburg railroad station.

Sainte-Beuve’s affair with Victor Hugo’s wife.

Teilhard de Chardin was forbidden by the Jesuits to publish any of his philosophical writings while he lived.

November 30, 1935, Fernando Pessoa died on.

Leuprolide acetate. Metoprolol. Hydrochlorothiazide. Atorva-statin. Aspirin. Salmeterol xinafoate. Flunisolide. Omeprazole. Loperamide hydrochloride. Simethicone. Calcium carbonate.

Or is Novelist forgetting one or two.

It is really most unfortunate that she rules out copulation.

Said Lytton Strachey of Virginia Woolf’s major novels.

Jeanne Eagels. As the original Sadie Thompson.

Irene Papas, as Antigone.

Irene Papas, as Helen.

Stainless maiden amid the stain of blood.

Lucretius calls Iphigenia.

You never hear of a novel-wright or a picture-wright or a poem-wright — why a playwright?

Asked W. S. Gilbert.

When the stove is clean enough I shall turn on the gas.

Wrote Anna Wickham — twelve years before she hanged herself instead.

Where the synecdoche of tessera made a totality, however illusive, the metonymy of kenosis breaks this up into discontinuous fragments.

Somewhere declareth Harold Bloom.

It may be essential to Harold Bloom that his audience not know quite what he is talking about.

Commenteth Alfred Kazin — pointing out other immortal phrasings altogether.

How many of you are there in the quartet?

The affecting ancient legend that when Pindar was a youngster, bees once coated his lips with honey while he slept.

Alprazolam.

Robert Pershing Doerr.

Pausing to remember that no fewer than eight characters in Hamlet — eight — die violently.

The Theatre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris.

Whose name the Nazis changed during the occupation because of her having been a Jew.

174517 —

Which Primo Levi could read tattooed on his left forearm from Auschwitz onward.

Light from the lighthouse at Alexandria, one of antiquity’s Seven Wonders, was visible from as far as twenty miles at sea.

Helmut Newton died in a car crash. At eighty-three.

Trying to conceive of having attended Georgia State College for Women in the mid-1940s.

And wondering who in heaven’s name there was for Flannery O’Connor to have a conversation with.

Paul Valéry’s wife was a niece of Berthe Morisot — and had in fact posed for Morisot any number of times.

Alexander Blok’s wife was the daughter of the chemist Mendeleyev.

Morningless sleep.

Epicurus called death.

Leonardo. Michelangelo. Botticelli. Raphael. Watteau. Claude. Van Dyck. Guido Reni. Pontormo. Poussin. Donatello. Reynolds.

Being but a handful among artists who never married.

An unpurchasable mind.

Shelley credited himself with.

Baudelaire, twice — in print — called upon Poe as a kind of patron saint to intercede for him during a prayer.

Malcolm Lowry, seemingly serious himself, told a friend he had once prayed to Kafka:

And he answered my prayer.

In addition to French, Delacroix read fluently in Greek, Latin, Italian, English, and evidently German.

Latin, French, Italian, and Flemish.

Rubens wrote letters in.

Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben.

Pigalle’s sculpture of a naked eighty-plus-year-old Voltaire — for which the body was posed for by a different elderly man altogether.

Saul Kripke had mastered advanced calculus before finishing grammar school.

In Omaha.

She Who Was Once the Helmet-Maker’s Beautiful Wife.

Readers who assume that the title Samson Agonistes means something about Samson in pain.

After the breakthrough by Marian Anderson and Mattiwilda Dobbs, the next two dominant black singers at the Metropolitan were Leontyne Price and Martina Arroyo. Arroyo was frequently mistaken for Price. I’m the other one, love, she told the Met doorkeeper who got it wrong one morning.

Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.

Fanny Burney’s account of her surgery for breast cancer at fifty-nine, in 1811.

Before anesthesia.

Dwight Eisenhower was once asked by an assistant if he would like to meet Robert Frost, who happened to be visiting someone else at the White House.

Eisenhower could not think of a reason why he should bother.

A hetaera named Cyrene, remembered for 2,400 years — because Aristophanes indicates that she could perform in a dozen different positions.

Theoris and Archippe, two others remembered for slightly longer.

Because Sophocles had affairs with each.

Apelles’ long-lost Birth of Venus, painted 1,800 years before Botticelli’s — and said to have been a likeness of Phryne, the most beautiful of them all.

And all of whom must surely have been included in an equally irretrievable work by Suetonius —

His lost book entitled On Famous Courtesans.

Shakespeare’s younger sister.

The Westminster Review called Emily Brontë.

Cervantes was a relative of his.

Kipling said of Mark Twain.

I think what attracted me was less art itself than the artist’s life, the freedom to live as one pleased.

Said Bonnard, re having become a painter.

Nulla dies sine linea.

Not a day without a line, Pliny says Apelles said.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was wounded three times in the Civil War.

John Simon’s verdict that there were two things he was able to say about the poems of Robert Creeley:

They are short; they are not short enough.

It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.

March 13, 1979, Madeleine Grey died on.

Contemporary art criticism, second decade, fourteenth century. From the Purgatorio:

In painting Cimabue was thought to hold the field, but now Giotto has the cry, so that the other’s fame grows dim.

Our sodomite-saint.

Malcolm Muggeridge called T. E. Lawrence.

Jack Daniel’s Tennessee sour mash whiskey.

Being the best thing he knew about America, Jacques Lacan said.

A London street called Ropemaker’s Lane, Daniel Defoe died in.

Gibbon, on Samuel Johnson:

Bigoted.

Boswell, on Gibbon:

Ugly, affected, disgusting.

It’s a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

Quoth Grace Paley.

Bertrand Russell was born ten years before James Joyce, and died on Joyce’s birthday — twenty-nine years after him.

Jane Avril died in an old people’s home. Forty-one years after the death of Toulouse-Lautrec.

Nietzsche, who proclaimed that God was dead — but whose own coffin was adorned with a silvered cross.

Damn, I’m almost sorry you called. Can you even begin to guess how many friends of mine that makes, just in the past year or so?

I assume you’re aware of something else too, chum? At our age, we don’t replace them.

The failure of the 1853 premiere of Verdi’s La Traviatta — essentially because the soprano was viewed as too plump for a heroine dying of tuberculosis.

Troppo prosperosa, being the Italian.

I think A Bend in the River is much, much better than Conrad.

Pronounced the humility-drenched author of A Bend in the River.

The acute suggestiveness in Pascal’s apology for having written a particularly long letter.

Because he hadn’t had the time to write a short one.

Peoples bore me,

literature bores me, especially great literature.

Says Henry in The Dream Songs.

The Homer of painting, Reynolds called Michelangelo.

The Homer of painting, Delacroix called Rubens.

Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.

Said Maynard Keynes, at a 1929 return of Wittgenstein to Cambridge after fifteen years away.

An eclectic realist of disputed merit.

The actual catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum once called Manet.

Miles Davis’s speedometer had already reached 105 miles per hour, on New York’s West Side Highway, when one of the people with him asked if he should be driving so fast.

I’m in here too, Davis’s concept of reassurance was.

Corbière was dead at thirty.

Giorgione, at thirty-three or thirty-four.

Books weaken the memory.

Says Plato in the Phaedrus.

Machines cannot think.

Charles Ives gave away the cash that came with his Pulitzer Prize.

Badges of mediocrity, dismissing such awards as.

Created only for imbeciles, rogues, and rascals, Cézanne had had it.

Conversely Edvard Grieg, who displayed his medals unabashedly — particularly since they sped him through customs with all complications waived, he discovered.

The meaningless oddity that one of Washington’s pet hounds at Mount Vernon — was named Truman.

The report that Turner, told he was dying, asked his doctor to leave the room for a glass of sherry and then to judge things again.

Which the doctor allegedly did — but with no change of diagnosis.

Amiri Baraka’s slapdash, banal, repetitious, self-contradictory, mendacious poem, Somebody Blew Up America.

Novelist is forgetting odious.

He who writes for fools will always find a large audience.

Said Schopenhauer.

Tertian malaria, Velazquez died of.

The words honest — or honesty — occur fifty-two times in Othello.

Diodorus Siculus. Twelve volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

Dio Cassius. Nine volumes.

Freud’s first publication in English — via the Hogarth Press.

Which is to say, by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

There’s rosemary for you and rue for you.

Echoed John Webster — at most six years after Ophelia’s earlier usage.

Ted Williams, bedded after a stroke, seen reaching out to lightly bat away a child’s balloon — and missing.

Ted Williams.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

Said Cesare Pavese.

Les bourgeois, ce sont les autres.

Said Jules Renard.

Baudelaire wore rouge.

Because of global warming, the last snows will be gone from Kilimanjaro very possibly within Novelist’s own remaining lifetime.

January 5, 1942, Tina Modotti died on.

Cardinal Newman, being directed by Everett Millais to a tall chair atop a platform where he was to sit for his portrait:

Your Eminence, on that eminence, if you please.

Abject bottom-licking narcissism —

Martha Gellhorn found in Hemingway.

Bogus, Zelda Fitzgerald’s word for him was.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s addiction to chloral hydrate. And whiskey.

There will always be another poet.

Said Stevie Smith.

You never paint the Parthenon; you never paint a Louis XV armchair. You make pictures out of some little house in the Midi, a packet of tobacco, or an old chair.

Said Picasso.

Until the election of Marguerite Yourcenar, in 1981, no woman had ever been named to the French Academy.

On the original title pages of Jane Austen, before the posthumous disclosure of her identity:

By a Lady.

Ray Bradbury’s father was a telephone lineman.

His third wife, Lady Jean Campbell, in regard to life with Norman Mailer:

All we ever did was go to dinner with his mother.

No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

Constable. Etty. Haydon. Landseer. Leslie.

All of whom were pupils of Fuseli.

Pavel Tchelitchew. Wyndham Lewis. Roger Fry.

All of whom painted portraits of Edith Sitwell.

Jean Harlow was dead at twenty-six.

Old enough so that gradual loss of bone has left him at least two and a half inches shorter than he was when younger.

Life is a long process of getting tired.

Say Samuel Butler’s Notebooks.

This is the foul fiend, Fibbertigibbet.

The first Crusade fought its way into Jerusalem in July of 1099. Some seventy thousand surviving Muslims — the majority being women and children — were methodically slaughtered. Such Jews as remained were burned alive in a synagogue.

All this being God’s will, the Crusaders’ motto reassured them.

George Sand did virtually all of her writing between midnight and six AM — and then slept until three in the afternoon.

Four years before Haydn’s death in Vienna, somehow a rumor announcing same reached Paris — where Cherubini and Kreutzer composed music for a memorial.

What sport, if I had been able to appear and conduct the Mass myself, Haydn’s reaction was.

Andrew Jackson was twelve years old when he enlisted to fight in the Revolutionary War.

I will not believe that a woman can draw so well.

Said Degas at his first view of a Mary Cassatt.

Andreas Baader. Gudrun Ensslin. Ulrike Meinhof.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were Brooklyn Dodgers fans.

Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour of the United States — which brought him to St. Joseph, Missouri, only one week after the shooting of Jesse James.

That dirty little coward

Who shot Mister Howard

And laid poor Jesse in his grave.

Irving Berlin had no schooling after the fifth grade.

Thomas Edison had only three months of actual classroom time.

Agatha Christie had none whatsoever.

One would like to curse them so that thunder and lightning strike them, hell-fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them. Ignorant asses.

Being Luther, in a contemplative mood re the papal hierarchy.

Frida Kahlo’s amputated leg.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s.

The last words of Mr. Despondency were, Farewell night; welcome day! His daughter went through the river singing, but no one could understand what she said.

Dr. Donne’s verses are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding.

Said James I.

Among those mailing an order to Shakespeare and Company, in Paris, for an earliest copy of Ulysses — Winston Churchill.

July 17, 1974, Dizzy Dean died on.

Emerald eyes, Dante says Beatrice had.

While never telling us the color of her hair.

A writer of something occasionally like English — and a man of something occasionally like genius.

Swinburne called Whitman.

A man standing up to his neck in a cesspool — and adding to its contents.

Carlyle called Swinburne.

Jane Welsh Carlyle died a virgin.

The avant-garde. A kind of research and development arm of the culture industry, the critic Thomas Crowe called it.

It is utterly impossible to persuade an editor that he is nobody.

Said William Hazlitt.

Galen’s astonishingly voluminous medical knowledge — much of it acquired while working as the surgeon at a gladiatorial school.

Pontormo’s diary. Which generally concentrates more on the state of his bowels than on anything of interest in art history.

Among the worst books ever committed to paper.

An Archbishop of Canterbury called Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

A child’s introduction to Nietzsche and Jung.

The Yale Review categorized Hesse’s novels as.

The year lost to tuberculosis early in her career by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf — probably contracted in dank World War II Vienna air-raid shelters.

Mallarmé, never well-off, who nonetheless possessed works by Whistler, Monet, Berthe Morisot, Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Rodin — all personal gifts.

Of contemporary literature, philosophy, and politics he appeared to know next to nothing.

We are told by Dr. Watson about Holmes.

Karl Marx died sitting at his desk.

Antonin Artaud, sitting up at the foot of his bed.

People who actually believe that Christo’s tangerine-colored bedsheets fluttering about in New York’s Central Park had something even remotely to do with art.

Oranges and lemons,

Say the bells of St. Clement’s.

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin only because a bacteria culture with which he was experimenting became contaminated — by accident.

Chesterfield’s definition of the word illiterate, as a noun, 1748:

A man who is ignorant of Greek and Latin.

Matthew Arnold’s of philistine, ca. 1869:

A person who believes his greatness is proved by being rich.

Barbarous, Samuel Pepys called Hamlet.

Jessica Lange was once a waitress in the Lion’s Head.

Eve Ensler was once a waitress in the Lion’s Head.

And yet it was impossible for me to say to men speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.

Mark Twain’s pronouncement that the personages in a novel should be alive, except in the instance of corpses — and that the reader should be able to tell the corpses from the others.

Unfortunately not the case in Fenimore Cooper, he determines.

When I was boy, the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land.

Said Sitting Bull.

When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches.

Said Cochise.

Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.

Said Geronimo.

Noting that the first word of English that Robinson Crusoe teaches his man Friday — after the name Friday itself — is Master.

Nathanael West once applied for a Guggenheim fellowship with recommendations from Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and Malcolm Cowley.

Guess.

Novelist’s own Guggenheim applications, plural, with references equally as impressive.

Guess — six or seven times.

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, tragedy as better, than in actual life.

Says Aristotle.

Marco Polo died three years after Dante.

Horace Greeley died insane.

Future generations will regard Bob Dylan with the awe reserved for Blake, Whitman, Picasso and the like.

Said an otherwise seemingly rational writer named Jonathan Lethem.

D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow.

The 1940s network radio broadcast of La Bohème in which Toscanini could be distinctly heard humming along with Licia Albanese and Jan Peerce as he conducted.

Karl Popper claimed he had written the 480-plus pages of The Open Society and Its Enemies more than thirty times.

We did not ask you white men to come here.

Said Crazy Horse.

A heart attack while swimming, Theodore Roethke died of.

The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government, said Martin Luther King.

In 1967.

Georges Rouault was born during a bombardment in the Franco-Prussian War — in a Paris cellar.

Bob Dylan, as poet:

Sophomoric and obvious, said Ned Rorem.

Bob Dylan, as composer:

Banal and unmemorable, Rorem aussi.

April 21, 1924, Eleonora Duse died on.

For no reason whatsoever, Novelist has just flung his cat out one of his four-flights-up front windows.

Saint-Exupéry wrote Le Petit Prince while living on Long Island.

Well past fifty, Tolstoy began an intensive study of Hebrew with a Moscow rabbi — not very many years after having devoted similar concentration to mastering Greek.

The awareness of not having accomplished anything, and not expecting to accomplish anything in the future, is not so terrible because Tolstoy makes up for all of us.

Concluded Chekhov.

When will you pay me?

Say the bells of Old Bailey.

You go wherever you like. I’m not about to get myself killed for that wife Helen of yours.

Says Agamemnon to Menelaus — essentially about commencing the Trojan War — in the little that remains of a lost play by Euripides.

Act. Then call upon the gods.

Says another Euripides fragment.

That tampon painter.

Joan Mitchel called Helen Frankenthaler.

The friendship of Zola and Cézanne.

Tracing back to when they were boys of twelve and thirteen.

The big tragedy for the poet is poverty.

Said Patrick Kavanagh.

Try to get a living by the Truth — and go to the Soup Societies.

Lamented Melville rather earlier.

Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.

Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.

For a time, at the Tuileries, Napoleon kept the Mona Lisa in his bedroom.

Only this tardily realizing — that if he had not made use of his middle name, among the better-known twentieth-century American poets would be a William Williams.

One of the two listed witnesses at the wedding of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, was the church janitor.

Turgenev was sentenced to a month in jail, and subsequent banishment from St. Petersburg, for the simple act of having written an obituary of Gogol, whose work was considered subversive by czarist authorities.

I absolutely cannot do without it.

Says Tchaikovsky’s diary, about alcohol.

Veronese’s Finding of Moses, at the Prado.

In which Pharaoh’s daughter and her handmaidens are shown in clothing not worn until the Renaissance.

The last time anyone mentioned Erskine Caldwell.

Lorca was thirty-eight when he was murdered.

Everywhere Lorca went he found a piano.

Rafael Alberti remembered of him.

Met him pike hoses.

Had Sir Thomas Beecham ever conducted any Stockhausen?

No. But he believed he had trodden in some.

Before the Euro, the portrait of Yeats on Ireland’s twenty-pound note.

America’s Whitman twenty-dollar bill, when?

The Melville ten?

One of the rare pieces of expository writing by a woman in antiquity — a list of rules for behavior when visiting an exclusive house of prostitution.

Left by one Gnathaena, in third-century Athens, and actually catalogued in the great library of Alexandria until its destruction.

No more than ten or twelve weeks after an actress he had been living with took her own life, Gottfried Benn was engaged to another woman.

1427–1429. Being the closest one can evidently come to a date for the death of Masaccio.

The Threepenny Opera. For which Brecht stole much of the language from someone else’s German translation of the original John Gay version — and for which he was ultimately forced to surrender part of his royalties.

Truth lies at the bottom of a well.

Cicero says Democritus said.

Truth lies at the bottom of a well.

Rabelais says Heraclitus said.

I’ve had it with those cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

Growled Kenneth Rexroth.

Novelist does not own a cat, and thus most certainly could not have thrown one out a window.

Nonetheless he would lay odds that more than one hopscotching reviewer will be reading carelessly enough here to never notice these two sentences and announce that he did so.

God help us, did I not tell your Grace that those were nothing but windmills?

All cats are grey in the dark.

What would non-creative writing be?

George Steiner once casually wondered.

Musicke, the Elizabethan spelling was.

Hydeous. Swolne. Perswasion. Sinne. Subtill.

Brightnesse falls from the ayre.

He would not blow his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry.

Said Cyril Connolly of Orwell.

Billy Graham’s anti-Semitic exchange with Richard Nixon, as preserved on White House tapes.

E. M. Forster lived with his mother until her death when he was sixty-six.

Children of Palestrina, Verdi referred to Italian composers as.

Bastien-Lepage was dead at thirty-six.

Aubrey Beardsley was dead at twenty-five.

The somewhat notorious soprano Susanna Cibber. Who sang so movingly in an early performance of Handel’s Messiah that a Dublin bishop informed her afterward that any and all of her earthly sins were therewith irrevocably forgiven.

Charlotte Brontë died in March of 1855.

The Reverend Arthur Nicholls, whom she had married nine months before, would live until 1906.

A daughter of Dickens lived until 1929.

After Jean Stafford, vacationing, had explained to a weathered Wyoming ranch hand how she made her living:

That’s real nice work. I reckon you can even always arrange to do it in the shade.

Wondering why it always seems somehow not quite accurate — that Mozart was born only fourteen years before Beethoven.

Now I’ll have eine kleine pause.

Said Kathleen Ferrier — dying.

British cavalry in the Crimean War were so scandalously ill-supplied and neglected that many starved to death — as did the very horses that had survived the Charge of the Light Brigade.

February 2, 1940, Meyerhold was executed on.

Picasso, avec laughter, after being asked if he had used models for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon:

Where would I have found them?

A dreadful old fraud.

Edmund Wilson called Robert Frost.

A sententious, holding-forth old bore who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal little twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word.

James Dickey would elaborate subsequently.

Edith Piaf was four feet eight inches tall.

George Lyman Kittredge, who taught Shakespeare at Harvard for forty-eight years — and demanded that all of his students memorize at least six hundred lines per semester.

Six hundred lines. The student reciting the entire To be or not to be soliloquy has mastered all of thirty-five.

Alexander the Great once watched in puzzlement as Diogenes sifted through a heap of human bones.

How strange, Diogenes finally decided — that I cannot make a distinction between those of your father and those of his slaves.

Ephesus, Mary Magdalen died in.

Ephesus, the Virgin Mary may have died in.

José Clemente Orozco lost his left hand in a college chemistry explosion.

Mr. McChoakumchild, Dickens names the demanding schoolmaster in Hard Times.

Almost an insult to the serious reader, Shaw said.

An abridged, accelerated, night-school course.

Eugenio Montale saw in Pound’s version of culture in the Cantos.

Oh, Aaron Burr, what hast thou done?

Thou hast shooted dead that great Hamilton.

For a millennium, or longer, Greek and then Roman seamen along the coast of the Troad repeatedly insisted they had seen the ghosts of Achilles and/or Hector in full armor at the shore.

After Vicente Aleixandre’s Nobel Prize, Madrid renamed the street on which he lived in his honor.

Which was to say that one could then write to Sr. Vicente Aleixandre — on Calle Vicente Aleixandre.

There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet.

Suspected Elizabeth Bishop.

A remedy once suggested by Camille Pissarro for the betterment of French art:

Burn down the Louvre.

What I have always liked about this place are the windows.

Determined Bonnard, strolling through the same museum.

Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.

A quirky new impulse of Novelist’s, at news of several recent deaths —

Dialing the deceased, in the likelihood that no one would have yet disconnected their answering machines — and contemplating their voices one eerie final time.

A trampish sort of appearance.

Iris Murdoch recalled re Wittgenstein.

Joyce himself is an insignificant man, wearing very thick eyeglasses, dull, self-centered.

Says Virginia Woolf’s diary.

Reality is under no obligation to be interesting.

Said Borges.

December 31, 1936, Unamuno died on.

October 18, 1955, Ortega.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, well into his political career, at least once wrote a book review.

Bach was fifteen when he began his professional music career.

As a boy soprano.

A quart or more of alcohol per day, uncounted amphetamines, uncounted aspirin, uncounted barbiturates — and at a minimum two packs of cigarettes.

Being Sartre in his most productive years.

The novels of Paul de Kock, which are admired by Molly Bloom.

As they were in fact by Karl Marx.

Dear President George W. Bush:

Herewith please find uncorrected proofs for the newly discovered rewritten version of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Kindly limit your review to twelve thousand words. Thank you.

John Kenneth Galbraith was made to repeat his senior year in high school.

Scarcely intelligible, Dryden labeled Shakespeare’s language.

Quote: His whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is coarse.

A jockey can earn more in one race than a schoolteacher is paid in an entire year.

Objected Juvenal — close to nineteen hundred years ago.

He who today writes artistically dies without recognition or reward.

Complained Lope de Vega — in 1609.

Landlords in lower Manhattan who were shrewd enough, over the years, to accept recent work by moneyless young artists instead of rent.

One of those, in the late 1940s, who wasn’t — and rather than two paintings by Robert Rauschenberg insisted upon the month’s $15.

Jaroslav Seifert, like Dostoievsky earlier, who once eluded execution only moments before the shots were to be fired.

Yet afterward insisted he was no more traumatized by the recollection than a youngster remembering last year’s measles.

The nephew of Aeschylus named Philocles, also a playwright, all of whose plays are lost.

But who was talented enough to gain the prize for tragedy in the year when Sophocles presented Oedipus Rex.

A cask of brandy, Nelson’s corpse was brought back to London in, after Trafalgar.

To slow decomposition.

Agonies of galloping speechlessness.

Beckett once talked of a writer’s block as.

When you can see the bandwagon, it’s already gone.

Said de Kooning.

Late-life Nietzsche postcards — that he signed Kaiser Nietzsche.

Freakish, Voltaire called the Divine Comedy.

Extravagant, absurd, disgusting.

Horace Walpole made it.

According to Ford Madox Ford, Flaubert once opened his front door to Henry James and Ivan Turgenev in his dressing gown — and thus offended James’s sensibilities virtually beyond redemption.

The nicest old lady I ever met.

Faulkner decided to christen James.

Multiple surgical chain staples are evident in the right lung, consistent with prior resections.

Reads a recurrent notation in reports on Novelist’s chest x-rays.

A post-Mao version of the Long March — which implies that forcibly conscripted porters carried him on a litter for much of the 5,000 miles.

All the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution.

Said William Jennings Bryan — in 1924.

Abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians — all in good part responsible for 9/11, said Jerry Falwell.

I totally concur. Said Pat Robertson.

David Gascoyne’s addiction to Benzedrene. And lighter-fluid fumes.

Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars.

Remembering that Charles Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Fundamentalismbecility.

Django Reinhardt died of a cerebral hemorrhage — while fishing in the Seine.

People who actually believe that Damien Hirst’s fourteen-foot shark in a tank of formaldehyde has something even remotely to do with art.

Our father who art in heaven

Stay there.

Requested Jacques Prévert.

Tamara Geva. Vera Zorina. Maria Tallchief. Tanaquil Le Clercq.

All of whom married George Balanchine.

Offensive, ill-written, mechanical. All in all, detestable.

Sainte-Beuve called the novels of Stendhal.

I count only on being reprinted in 1900.

Said Stendhal himself, who died in 1842.

I shall hear in heaven.

Which Beethoven did or did not say, nearing death.

Do Not Leave Car Unattendant.

Jean Giono was twice imprisoned for collaboration with the Nazis in World War II.

Englishing Pindar is so exacting, concluded Abraham Cowley, that if one were to attempt it literally it would sound as if one certifiable lunatic had translated another.

Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov were for a time roommates.

The first use of the word classic in its long since traditional sense — by the Latin critic Aulus Gellius, ca. 180 AD.

I am no Einstein.

Once said Einstein.

Pope Eliot.

Dylan Thomas called him.

Michelangelo’s David stood on the open porch of the Palazzo Vecchio, where Michelangelo had asked that it be placed, from 1504 until 1873 — when Florence moved it into the Academy and out of the weather.

And to where some cretin a hundred and twenty years later would take a hammer to its left foot.

Only a single, incomplete manuscript of the Annals of Tacitus remained extant after the Dark Ages.

August 21, 2005, Dahlia Ravikovitch died on.

Pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world —

Reads an Isak Dinesen description of a herd of elephants.

The ménage à trois involving Paul and Gala Eluard and Max Ernst —

After which Gala became Gala Dalí.

Simone de Beauvoir’s affair with Nelson Algren.

Which she later infuriated him by writing about.

A leper and a sodomite.

Emerson called Swinburne.

Like a vile scum on a pond.

Pound viewed G. K. Chesterton.

Landskip, painters long spoke of it as.

Dreiser, years in advance, telling H. L. Mencken that he has already prepared his dying words:

Shakespeare, I come.

Alan Turing was dead at forty-one.

You don’t have a computer? So how do you write your books? You don’t still use a typing machine?

Wondering if anyone, ever, has listened to Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march without repeated irrepressible grins of delight?

I fear that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.

Said Sarah Bernhardt of Nijinsky.

He eats with his knife and accompanies every gesture, every movement of his hand, with that implement, which he grasps firmly when he commences his meal and never puts down until he leaves the table.

Said Mary Cassatt re Cézanne — and what she also described as his total disregard for the dictionary of manners, unquote.

The likelihood that Lenin died of syphilis.

Raymond Chandler did not publish his first novel until he was fifty.

Dashiell Hammett published his fifth novel at thirty-nine — and not one thing else in the remaining twenty-seven years of his life.

Great Empedocles, that ardent soul,

Leapt into Etna, and was roasted whole.

Oh, that flagon, that wicked flagon! thought Rip — what excuse shall I make to Dame Van Winkle?

Chekhov’s grandfather had been a serf.

The speculation that Horace’s father, himself a manumitted slave, might also have been a Jew.

December 11, 1513, Pintoricchio died on.

So excessively did Shaw admire Strindberg that he actually used the money from his Nobel Prize to arrange for better English translations of Strindberg’s plays.

John Steinbeck, asked if he felt he had in fact deserved his own Nobel Prize:

Frankly, no.

Thomas Nashe was dead at thirty-one. Where, of what, or even exactly when, remains unknown.

Zapata was thirty-nine when he was murdered.

Stephen Dedalus, at Sandymount, in 1904.

Is he aware that Yeats was born there?

Trollope’s declaration that he wrote with his watch on the desk in front of him — so that he could be certain he had produced at least two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour.

The measure of a man’s greatness would be in terms of what his work cost him.

Wittgenstein once told someone.

Picasso’s admiration for Charlie Chaplin.

Diego Rivera’s.

Stalin’s.

As early as in Plutarch:

Let them who can do nothing better, teach.

Mr. Churchill, you are drunk.

And you, Madame, are ugly. But I shall be sober tomorrow.

The novels of Susan Sontag:

Self-indulgent overrated crap, the Kevin Costner character calls them in the movie Bull Durham.

From a letter of Balzac’s, in his mid-thirties, recording that in a fit of creative frenzy he had just spent twenty-six consecutive days without once leaving his study:

Sometimes it seems to me that my very brain is on fire.

No further martinis after dinner, Conrad Aiken’s physician once commanded.

Following which Aiken frequently refused to eat until practically bedtime.

If they do see fields blue, they are deranged, and should go to an asylum. If they only pretend to see them blue, they are criminals, and should go to prison.

Being Hitler — re artists he categorized as degenerate.

I shall fight as long as I live. And I shall not consider it more important to be alive than to be free.

Rang the first words of an oath taken by Athenians before battle.

The eighteenth-century evangelist George Whitefield. Whose pulpit voice was so effective, said David Garrick, that he could make listeners laugh or cry by no more than pronouncing the word Mesopotamia.

Gertrude Stein’s Model T style, Elizabeth Hardwick called it.

There is one rule that can render your hand so light that the brush will float, says Cennino Cennini’s handbook for painters, ca. 1435:

Do not enjoy too much the company of women.

Every drop of sperm spilled is a masterpiece lost.

Said Piet Mondrian, five hundred years later.

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw.

Piero della Francesca’s Nativity. In which Joseph has removed the saddle of an ass to use as a seat — while the ass itself brays in the background.

Erik Satie lived the entire later half of his life in extreme indigence.

Incredulity that Schubert’s Eighth Symphony — the Unfinished — was not once performed until thirty-seven years after his death.

Toasted Susie is my ice cream.

Pythagoras’s insistence that in one of his earlier incarnations he had fought in the Trojan War.

In fact that he had been Euphorbus, who in the Iliad wounds Patroclus and is in turn killed by Menelaus.

Borges’ vision of Paradise:

A kind of library.

The long-hoped-for opportunity to meet Byron that Schopenhauer turned away from at the last moment — when the woman he was with evinced far too much enthusiasm of her own about it.

Epi oinopa ponton.

Walter Scott’s novels generally cost him innumerable hours of hunting through reference books.

Which were forever heaped up precariously on the floor below his desk.

In addition to Italian, Leopardi possessed effortless mastery of Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, English, and Hebrew — by the age of sixteen.

October 21, 1969, Jack Kerouac died on.

Romain Rolland never learned which side won World War II.

Wondering how many lifetime scribes and/or manuscript copyists were put out of work in the decades immediately after Gutenberg?

Wondering why the plural of still life is still lifes and not still lives?

Sofa-size.

Simone Weil was dead at thirty-four.

You have reached Ned Klein. Please leave a message after the beep.

When I am eighty, my art may finally begin to cohere. By ninety, it may truly turn masterful.

Said Hokusai. At seventy-three.

Windy humbuggeries.

Mark Twain found in Scott.

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth-rate in Europe.

Faulkner once called Twain in turn.

The 2005 Vienna exhibition featuring erotic paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele — at which patrons arriving nude or in skimpy bathing suits were admitted free.

Colossal ennui. It seems to me that I could write something like it tomorrow by taking inspiration from the cat walking over the keyboard on my piano.

Said Prosper Mérimée of Tannhäuser.

It is impossible to finish any of his plays, they are pitiful.

Claimed Napoleon re Shakespeare.

A lot of twaddle.

Confirmed George III.

More than sixty percent of the people in the United States do not know what the capitalized word Holocaust in its common contemporary usage stands for.

Assuming that Saul Bellow was aware of the Moses Herzog mentioned in passing in Ulysses?

A desperate Stevie Smith addict.

Sylvia Plath called herself.

April 16, 1958, Rosalind Franklin died on.

Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.

Declared a Utah senator named Orrin Hatch — presumably a former honors student in Logic 101.

Clov: What is there to keep me here?

Hamm: The dialogue.

The Girl of the Golden West, Act III — in which the soprano arrives on stage on horseback.

Renata Tebaldi was petrified.

One of the earliest translations of the Bible in America — into Mohawk.

At one juncture during his years as a customs inspector on the New York docks, Melville was forced to take a cut in salary — from $4.00 to $3.60 per day.

Oscar Hammerstein’s first job in America, in a cigar factory, paid him two dollars a week.

Andrew Carnegie’s, in a cotton mill, had paid $1.50 — for twelve-hour days.

Washington Square, in Greenwich Village, Edward Hopper died in.

Washington Square, in Greenwich Village, Novelist also happens to be typing this last book only short blocks away from.

Lorenzo de’ Medici, who commissioned Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, ca. 1485.

And a dozen or so years later sent Amerigo Vespucci sailing westward.

To cause justice to prevail in the land.

To prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.

To better the welfare of the people.

— Read portions of the Code of Hammurabi — from what may have been as early as 1800 BC.

Anthony Burgess’s bad eyesight.

Which permitted him to once enter a bank in Stratford-on-Avon — and order a drink.

Lloyd George knew my father,

Father knew Lloyd George.

In 1907, Caruso was being paid $2,000 per performance at the Metropolitan.

$2,000 in 1907 currency.

The uncanny sense of atmosphere in certain Constable landscapes.

So that looking at them could make one worry that he might need an umbrella, Fuseli said.

Remembering next to nothing about The Courtship of Miles Standish — except that Longfellow himself was in fact descended from Priscilla and John Alden.

Mozart wrote his Thirty-Sixth Symphony, the Linz, in at most three days.

In the period when artists of stature were called upon to paint likenesses of hunted murderers on the walls of Florentine buildings, Andrea del Castagno’s led to so many captures that he became known as Andrea degli Impiccati — Andrea of the Hanged.

Bach almost persuades me to be a Christian.

Roger Fry said.

January 11, 1966, Giacometti died on.

The Marquis de Sade was at least once arrested for sodomy. And once for severely beating a young woman.

While also being implicated in the deaths of two prostitutes after an overdose of aphrodisiacs during an orgy.

Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after about six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?

We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.

Said Richard Serra.

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.

Said Wayne Gretzky.

Ivy Compton-Burnett died after a bronchitis attack.

Martin Luther King’s seminary studies — during which he received a grade of C in public speaking.

A street in Nice is named after Marie Bashkirtseff.

Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.

Said Rebecca West.

He started off writing very well, then you can see his going mad with vanity. He ends up a lunatic.

Added Evelyn Waugh.

Very dirty and completely worthless.

Edith Sitwell called Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Wholly ignorant.

Waugh called Sitwell.

Wonderful, this death.

Allegedly said William Etty, as it occurred.

Oliver Goldsmith was the oldest member of his graduating class at Trinity College, Dublin.

And the lowest ranked.

Proust, in the equivalent of basic training during his one year of military service at eighteen, was ranked seventy-third in a platoon of seventy-four.

An incomparable painting by Apelles, which Augustus brought from Cos to Rome, where it was slightly damaged.

And where not one contemporary Roman artist had the confidence to attempt to restore it.

Auden’s notion that one could readily imagine a young Tolstoy or Stendhal or Dostoievsky in a bar fight.

But Henry James, never.

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.

Concluded Kelvin. In 1900.

I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid his company.

Quoth John Cheever — re John Updike.

Euripides’ father may have been a tavern-keeper.

Still curious all these years later as to why Faulkner would have given two of his major characters names then current in widely syndicated comic strips.

Though for that matter he gave three others the names of buildings on the University of Mississippi campus.

A passage in Montaigne where he speaks of himself as being well on the road to old age — having long since passed forty.

Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of forty-two.

Writes Daisy Ashford.

Anacreon, so highly acclaimed as a poet that the Athenians placed a statue of him on the Acropolis.

And so well known for other proclivities that Pausanias says the statue showed him drunk.

November 30, 1943, Etty Hillesum died on.

I become insane, with long intervals of horrible insanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drink, God only knows how often or how much.

Wrote Poe to a friend.

Reading a book in translation:

Like gazing at a Flemish tapestry with the wrong side turned out, said Cervantes.

Traduttore, traditore — translator, traitor, the Italian has it.

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, his full name was.

Frank Raymond Leavis.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

A century before Alcoholics Anonymous, something called the Sons of Temperance, Poe did make a stab at. To no avail.

Inscribed on a painting by Jacob Jordaens:

Nihil similius insano quam ebrius — Nothing is more similar to a lunatic than a drunkard.

According to Liszt, Chopin had blue eyes.

According to everyone else they were brown.

The man who eats in idleness what he has not earned is a thief.

Wrote Rousseau.

Catherine the Great died after having suffered a stroke and fallen from a commode in the royal water closet.

Eric Andrews here. Well, actually not here. But I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Please wait for the signal.

Giuseppe Ungaretti’s father was a construction worker on the Suez Canal.

The Homeric combat between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal at a 1977 cocktail party —

In which Mailer threw a drink into Vidal’s face — and Vidal bit Mailer on the finger.

Chipping Sodbury General Hospital, near Bristol, J. K. Rowling was born at.

Rilke’s over-sentimentalizing of the poor.

Did he ever once sit shivering in an attic? Kurt Tucholsky asked.

Why did Harper Lee never write another novel?

First, check the acoustics. Then make sure you know where the fire axe is.

Being Charles Mingus — offering advice re performing in unfamiliar basement jazz clubs.

Intellectual — hen-pecked you all.

Being Byron — reaching about as far as possible for a rhyme in Don Juan.

So exhaustive was Raphael’s study of ancient sculpture in Rome that the city itself named him Keeper of Inscriptions and Remains.

Prokofiev was fifteen years older than Shostakovich.

The presumably apocryphal tale about a production of Othello by touring actors in the nineteenth-century American West — near the last lines of which a cowboy in the audience shot Iago dead on the spot.

Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, Warren Spahn died in.

Because of having lived openly with George Henry Lewes, who was married, George Eliot was denied burial in Westminster Abbey.

I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

The last time anyone mentioned James Jones.

March 22, 1417, Nicolas Flamel died on.

In 1760, one year after Handel’s death, a biography by a Reverend John Mainwaring.

Apparently the first ever written of a composer.

Like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

Says an Anthony Powell character about growing old.

Toscanini’s seven-year affair with Geraldine Farrar — which he ended only when Farrar finally insisted that he leave his wife.

Ernest Hemingway’s entire front-line service in Italy in World War I, before he was wounded by shell fragments, had added up to less than one week.

Handing out cigarettes and chocolate at a Red Cross canteen.

The greatest kindness we can show some of the authors of our youth is not to reread them.

Said François Mauriac.

Being reminded that Fermat was a magistrate — for whom mathematics was fundamentally a hobby.

I am half sick of shadows, said

The Lady of Shalott.

Tirra lirra, by the river

Sang Sir Lancelot.

Wondering if there is any viable way to convince critics never to use the word tetralogy without also adding that each volume can be readily read by itself?

Alessandro Manzoni spent five years on the first two drafts of I Promessi Sposi — and twelve more on the final version.

Lulu slept naked because she liked to feel the sheets caressing her body and also because laundry was expensive.

Readily read?

A drawing by Rubens, in Rotterdam, of Achilles driving his spear into Hector’s throat — with his left hand.

When Homer specifically describes him as using his right.

The Trojan War will not take place, Cassandra!

I will make you a bet on that, Andromache.

— Reads an exchange in Tiger at the Gates.

I just pretend.

Explained Laurence Olivier.

A pale, gentle, frightened little man.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife described a not yet middle-aged Thomas Hardy as.

Berlioz read every Fenimore Cooper novel as quickly as it appeared.

And admitted that fully four hours after he finished The Prairie he was still weeping over the death of Natty Bumppo.

The classic orator Hyperides, who divided his time between homes in Athens, Piraeus, and Eleusis.

Depending upon which of his mistresses he felt like visiting.

Georges Simenon’s affair with Josephine Baker.

Chardin died at eighty — without ever once in his life having ventured farther away from Paris than the forty miles to Fontainebleau.

Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.

Johnson told Boswell.

Chingachgook —

Pronounced Chicago, I think, said Mark Twain.

Altogether impoverished in his early years in Paris, for a time Juan Gris did not even possess a bed — and slept on newspapers.

Kees van Dongen’s admission that there were occasions during his own early Montmartre years when he was forced to filch milk and/or bread from neighborhood doorsteps — with an accomplice named Picasso.

Let there be Maecenases and there will be no lack of Virgils.

Said Martial.

Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it — that’s all right.

Says a last unfinished letter of van Gogh’s found after his death.

The poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of inspired madness.

Said Socrates.

Gris was dead at forty. Of uremia.

August 28, 1947, Manolete died on.

Recalled from Eastern European ghettos, virtually until the very last residents were evacuated to Nazi death camps — schoolchildren reading Yiddish editions of The Prince and the Pauper and Around the World in Eighty Days.

God of forgiveness, do not forgive those murderers of Jewish children here.

Said Elie Wiesel, visiting at Auschwitz a half-century later.

Wait. Don’t carry away that arm till I’ve taken off my ring.

Said Raglan during surgery after Waterloo.

Learning that there actually was an apple tree outside Newton’s window at his mother’s home.

Indeed an entire apple orchard.

Not a composer. A kleptomaniac.

Stravinsky called Benjamin Britten.

The appointment of a woman to public office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.

Determined Jefferson.

As many as five little-documented years passed between Shakespeare’s departure from the Globe, at forty-seven or forty-eight, and his death in Stratford.

After thirty-seven plays, and probably parts of others, plus the poems — did he have no inclination to write anything in those last years?

Or does there appear a possibility that he sometimes collaborated with others and/or doctored their work anonymously?

Poetry makes nothing happen.

Auden said.

I will not go down to posterity speaking bad grammar.

Said Disraeli, correcting one of his final speeches.

Whether posterity will give us a thought I don’t know. But we surely deserve one.

Wrote Pliny the Younger to Tacitus — in the early second century AD.

I’m a poet, I’m life. You’re an editor, you’re death.

Proclaimed Gregory Corso to someone in the White Horse Tavern — who shortly commenced punching him through the door and across the sidewalk.

Taking no more account of the wind that comes out of their mouths than that which they expel from their lower parts.

Leonardo described his response to critics as.

Ancora imparo, said Michelangelo at eighty-seven.

Still, I’m learning.

More true poetical genius as a painter than possessed by perhaps any other.

Joshua Reynolds saw in Julio Romano.

Me retracto de todo lo dicho, I take back everything I told you.

Announced Nicanor Parra at the end of each of his poetry readings.

Everything useful is ugly.

Said Gautier.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life.

Said Constable.

The rumor that Gainsborough deliberately painted his Blue Boy to mock Reynolds’ academic insistence that blue was a color for use in backgrounds only.

Nicanor Parra’s day job —

Professor of theoretical physics at the University of Chile.

Miroslav Holub’s —

Chief research immunologist at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Franz Kafka, the gravestone names him.

Apropos of his Doctor of Laws degree.

Superimposed metastatic disease would be difficult to exclude in this region.

Reads a gladsome evaluation in the analysis of Novelist’s most recent bone scan.

So debilitatingly paranoid was Kurt Gödel in his later years, over imagined plots to poison him, that he essentially refused to eat.

And died weighing no more than sixty-five pounds.

Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.

Says the narrator of a Gilbert Sorrentino story.

The world has no pity on a man who can’t do or produce something it thinks worth money.

Says Gissing in New Grub Street.

And to this day is every scholar poor:

Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor.

Says Marlowe, in Hero and Leander.

October 8, 1963, Remedios Varo died on.

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant.

Pointed out the disaffected Muslim Wafa Sultan in 2006.

As Dickensian as anything Dickens ever wrote.

Graham Greene labeled W. C. Fields.

Maidservant gallantries, Constanza accused Mozart of.

Flaubert soils the brook in which he washes.

Said the critic Saint-Victor of L’Éducation sentimentale.

M. Flaubert n’est pas un écrivain.

Said Le Figaro of Madame Bovary.

Why, this is very midsummer madness.

We live not as we will — but as we can.

Said Menander.

Cocteau, meeting Diaghilev for the first time, and asking what he might do to involve himself in ballet —

Astonish me, Diaghilev tells him.

Demodocus, the blind bard whose songs of the fall of Troy evoke tears in Odyssey VIII.

Could he have perhaps been the source of the legend that Homer himself was blind?

Languidezza per il caldo — Languidly, because of the heat.

Suggests Vivaldi’s notation over the Summer segment of The Four Seasons.

For several hundred years, more than half a millennium after her death, coins bearing Sappho’s likeness were minted on Lesbos.

In all the centuries since history began, we know of no woman who can truly be said to rival her as a poet.

Said Strabo, equally as long after her era.

Rheumatic fever, Robert Burns died of.

The report that to keep him from sitting with a book for sixteen hours a day, Edmund Wilson’s parents bought him a baseball uniform. Which he happily put on — and sat in with a book for sixteen hours a day.

By way of an inheritance, Carl Jung’s wife was one of the most wealthy women in Europe.

Anyone who would employ the word diarrheic to describe a book as exactingly crafted in every line as Ulysses has either never read eleven consecutive words or possesses the literary perception of a rutabaga.

Ulysses. Diarrheic, unquote. Dale Peck.

Somewhat similarly, Roddy Doyle. A complete waste of time — Finnegans Wake.

Though in his instance at least acknowledging that he had read only three pages.

America’s Emily Dickinson dime?

Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.

Once said Richard Brinsley Sheridan to a pretty girl.

My whole life is messed up with people falling in love with me.

Once said Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Even more incomprehensible than the two-century neglect of a painter like Vermeer — the three centuries in which the music of Monteverdi was all but forgotten.

January 10, 1957, Gabriela Mistral died on.

Tolstoy’s ruined teeth.

Gogol’s.

Admire a small ship, but put your cargo in a large one.

Hesiod said.

Savonarola, in one of his inflammatory sermons, directs his words at contemporary artists:

I tell you, the Virgin dressed herself as a poor woman. And you represent her as a whore.

This approximately one hundred years before he might have been able to view Caravaggio’s version of her death — effected with such prototypal naturalism that her feet are not clean.

A critic. Someone who meddles with something that is none of his business.

Gauguin says Mallarmé said.

In flight from the Gestapo while a member of the French Resistance, Paul Eluard at one point hid for two months in an insane asylum.

Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute was first produced in Paris precisely in the middle of a campaign against immorality.

And had to be advertised with the word Putain blacked out.

Homer. Euripides. Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Being the works that Milton, blind, most frequently asked to have read to him.

Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

The last one that Borges asked to hear before his death.

October 17, 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann died on.

Sit in thy cell — and thy cell shall teach thee all things.

Said Saint Anthony.

Who evidently sat in his own for as long as twenty years without once taking any sort of bath — or even washing his face.

Lauritz Melchior and Helen Traubel, for years two of the Metropolitan’s central Wagnerians — who expended endless ingenuity in forever attempting to make each other break up into onstage laughter.

Trying to think of a single book by a significant writer as transparently spurious throughout as A Moveable Feast.

Wine, the title of John Gay’s first published poem was.

In which he insisted that no one who drank only water could ever become an author.

One’s first glass of the day is a great event.

Acknowledged Thackeray.

Not drunk is he who from the floor

Can rise alone and still drink more.

Contributed Thomas Love Peacock.

Bo-ray pri ha-gofen.

A manual-winding pocket watch, Einstein carried.

Snivel in a wet hanky, D. H. Lawrence called Lord Jim.

At fifty-eight, two years before his death, Chaucer was sued over a debt of fourteen pounds.

And did not have the money.

Gide-ists. Rilke-ists. Fraudulent existential witch doctors. Pallid worms in the cheese of capitalism. Intellectuals.

Being among Pablo Neruda’s more kindly appellations for authors not concerned with politics.

Little more than a device for getting revenge upon those who are having a better time on earth.

Mencken called the Christian concept of immortality.

Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?

Inquired someone’s palindrome — after use of a bathroom at Faber and Faber.

Well over a century after Dostoievsky’s death in St. Petersburg, a great-grandson named Dmitri Dostoievsky still lived there — working as a tram driver.

Twenty-some years after Missolonghi, Teresa Guiccioli married a Parisian marquis — who was known to habitually introduce her as Ma femme, ancienne maîtresse de Byron.

August Comte married a prostitute.

Ibsen’s terror of even the smallest dog.

The morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before.

Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come.

Zurbarán died penniless.

The final entry re Frans Hals, dated September 1, 1666, in the records of the Haarlem Paupers’ Fund — listing four florins for a gravedigger.

An immense nausea of billboards, Baudelaire spoke of.

A century and a half ago.

Closing time in the gardens of the West, Cyril Connolly called it.

A century after that.

What can be the sufficient reason for this phenomenon? said Pangloss.

It is the Last Day! cried Candide.

A man may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

Said Samuel Butler.

Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.

Said Wittgenstein.

Versailles, Edith Wharton was buried in.

January 8, 1713, Arcangelo Corelli died on.

Blake’s bust in Westminster Abbey.

By Jacob Epstein.

Epstein is a great sculptor. I wish he would wash.

Said Pound.

The limpest of handshakes, Robert Graves said Pound had.

The mirror will not be looked into until you have returned.

Says a letter from the wife of an ancient Chinese poet.

Incapacitated by Alzheimer’s disease, de Kooning was once discovered about to spike his coffee with weed killer — presumably thinking it whiskey.

Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

The only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to be, Johnson said.

Chloroform in print.

Mark Twain called the Book of Mormon.

Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me.

Unquote, Gertrude Stein.

Oh, dear —

Reportedly having been David Garrick’s dying words.

Eddie Grant, the pre — World War I third baseman, who graduated from Harvard — and who insisted on shouting I have it instead of I got it when chasing a fly ball.

And who as an infantry captain would be killed by machine gun fire in the Argonne Forest.

Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become.

Said Mary McGrory.

Far too much music finishes far too long after the end.

Judged Stravinsky.

Still to be read in the blank spaces on some of Raphael’s preliminary sketches for his Vatican stanze frescoes — drafts of love poems to his latest mistress.

Will Durant’s amusingly unworldly conclusion that the Sappho in Raphael’s Parnassus is — quote — too beautiful to be a lesbian.

Hark, Hark, the Lark! and Who Is Sylvia?

Which Schubert set on the same single afternoon.

The word plagiarism — from the Latin for kidnapping.

To kidnap another writer’s brains, Martial had it.

Old Hoss. Old Pete. Old Reliable. Old Folks. Old Aches and Pains.

Novelist’s personal genre. In which part of the experiment is to continue keeping him offstage to the greatest extent possible — while compelling the attentive reader to perhaps catch his breath when things achieve an ending nonetheless.

Conclusions are the weak point of most authors.

George Eliot said.

If you know what you’re doing, you don’t get intercepted.

Said Johnny Unitas.

Eugene Sue, most of whose widely read novels dealt with the poor and downtrodden.

And thereby made him a millionaire, Kierkegaard noted.

Picasso, in Paris during the Nazi occupation and learning that someone had accused him of having Jewish blood:

I wish I had.

Drawing, for an artist:

A way of thinking, Valéry termed it.

February 23, 1931, Nellie Melba died on.

Let me alone. Good day.

Said Tom Paine — to the two clergymen who had contrived to make their way to his bedside when he lay dying.

How long the days for the wretched, how swift for the favored.

Said Publilius Syrus.

’Tis their will — that thy son from this crested wall of Troy be dashed to death.

The most tragic of the poets.

Aristotle called Euripides.

Proust’s excessively lavish over-tipping.

Gide’s reputation as a cheapskate.

Coryate, the English traveler, in Venice in 1611:

When I went to the theatre, I observed certain things I never saw before; for I saw women acte.

Reminding one that Ophelia, Juliet, Rosalind, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth — were all written to be portrayed by adolescent boys.

Until 1660, when one Margaret Hughes broke the English barrier as Desdemona.

Typhus, or his syphilis, caused Beethoven’s deafness — question mark.

A rejection of all that civilization has done.

Said the London Times of a first Post-Impressionist exhibition, in 1910 — which included Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, others.

Just an old queen, Auden spoke of himself as.

While also referring to Miss God.

One never steps twice into the same Auden.

Randall Jarrell said.

Seneca’s Thyestes, in which Thyestes unknowingly eats the flesh of his own children.

And is described as belching contentedly.

Twickenham, Alexander Pope was buried in.

Wondering how on earth one remembers — that when St. John of the Cross escaped after his near death by starvation in a Toledo prison, the first meal he was given, at a discalced Carmelite convent — was of pears simmered with cinnamon.

A good man — but he did not know how to paint.

Said El Greco of Michelangelo.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., at eighty-seven, seen turning to gaze after an attractive girl:

Oh, to be seventy again!

I must ever have some Dulcinea in my head — it harmonises the soul.

Said Laurence Sterne.

The pain of rereading Twelfth Night after far too many years and coming upon the end of the Clown’s song in II.iii —

Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Old age is not for sissies.

Said Bette Davis.

Tell me honestly, Cal. Am I as good a poet as Shelley?

Asked William Carlos Williams, not long before his death, of Robert Lowell.

Freud, born in 1856, being asked in 1936 how he felt:

How a man of eighty feels is not a topic for conversation.

Shaw, at ninety-four, being asked the same:

At my age, one is either well or dead.

Leukemia, Ernestine Schumann-Heink died of.

He was greater than we thought.

Said Degas at the funeral of Manet.

Apollinaire, who was severely wounded in World War I.

And then died of influenza two days before the Armistice.

December 8, 1918, Cpl. David Markson died on.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

Declares a line in Rasselas.

The Rokeby Venus. Which was purchased in Yorkshire in the early 1800s for five hundred pounds.

And sold to the National Gallery in 1906 for ninety times that amount.

Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson died in.

The Marquesas, Gauguin.

Tchaikovsky, Glinka, Borodin, Mussorgsky — all buried in the same St. Petersburg cemetery.

Diogenes, asking to be buried face downward —

Because the world will soon enough be turned upside down.

Every man is condemned to death — but with an indefinite reprieve.

Hugo said.

Those who know do not speak.

Those who speak do not know.

Forty-two, Kierkegaard died at.

There’s nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

Said Paul Celan.

It would have been our pleasure to be bombed.

Said a survivor of Auschwitz.

August 8, 1596, Hamnet Shakespeare died on.

July 11, 1649, Susanna Shakespeare Hall died on.

February 7, 1662, Judith Shakespeare Quinney died on.

Virgil’s ceaseless revisions of the Aeneid.

Writing only a few lines at a time and then licking them into shape as the she-bear does its cubs, Suetonius says he said.

One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

Said Benjamin Jowett.

To an astronomer, man is but an insignificant dot in an infinite universe — said whoever.

Though that insignificant dot is also the astronomer — said Einstein.

Please don’t get up, I’m only passing through.

No more firing was heard at Brussels — the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

What he had seen, was it a battle? And if so, was that battle Waterloo?

Thy labours shall outlive thee.

Wrote John Fletcher in lines dedicated to Ben Jonson.

Who spent his last years partially paralyzed and virtually alone — and in calamitous want.

Wondering when the last day may have passed — anywhere in the world — during which someone did not die in an act of religion-inspired terrorism.

Just glance around you: wars, catastrophes and disasters, hatreds and persecutions, death awaiting us at every side.

Commented Ionesco.

Acheron. Cocytus. Styx. Phlegethon. Pyriphlegethon. Lethe.

Late February or early March, 1945.

Anne Frank.

What see’st thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

His powers of mind have almost entirely left him; his late paintings are miserable; it is really a lamentable thing that a man should outlive his faculties.

Said Samuel Morse after a visit with an elderly John Singleton Copley.

You don’t always make an out. Sometimes the pitcher gets you out.

Said Carl Yastrzemski.

In the long run we are all dead.

Noted Keynes.

When I went to America, my very first inquiry was concerning Melville. There was some slight evidence that he was alive, and I heard from Mr. E. C. Stedman, who seemed much astonished at my interest in the subject, that Melville was dwelling somewhere in New York.

Charidas, what is it like down there?

All darkness.

And resurrection?

All a lie.

— Quoth Callimachus.

Minor authors — who lived, men knew not how, and died obscure, men marked not when.

Roger Ascham takes notice of.

Those rare intellects who, not only without reward, but in miserable poverty, brought forth their works.

Vasari likewise commemorates.

One must go on working. And one must have patience.

Rodin told Rilke.

My time will come.

Said Gregor Mendel, ignored throughout his life.

On van Gogh’s bier at Auvers-sur-Oise — clusters of golden sunflowers.

Brought by Dr. Gachet.

The report that Osip Mandelstam spent the last hours before his death in Siberia reading Petrarch — by firelight.

O lente lente currite noctis equi.

Verdi’s funeral — which according to his own wishes was conducted without music.

Verdi’s.

Though in fact he had asked that the score of his Te Deum, one of the Four Sacred Pieces, be placed in his coffin.

Regensburg, Johannes Kepler was buried in.

Where there, long unknown.

My old paintings no longer interest me. I’m much more curious about those I haven’t done yet.

Said Picasso, at seventy-nine.

Kynge Arthur is nat dede but shall come agayne.

I’m cold, Snowden said. I’m cold.

For sundry doctrinal reasons, the Archbishop of Paris refused to sanction a Catholic burial for Colette.

Conversely, France itself granted her a state funeral — making her the first woman ever so honored.

Give me your arm, old toad;

Help me down Cemetery Road.

I have often thought of death, but now it is never out of mind.

Said Swift, in his late sixties — a decade before it actually occurred.

You can tell from my handwriting that I am in the twenty-fourth hour. Not a single thought is born in me that does not have death graven within.

Wrote Michelangelo at eighty-one — himself with eight years remaining.

The long littleness of life.

Frances Cornford speaks of.

As he reclined at table, there arose a question what sort of death was best. At which he immediately, before anyone could speak, said, A sudden one.

Says Dryden’s Plutarch, re Caesar.

Philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

Wittgenstein once suggested.

Merde pour la poésie.

Decided Rimbaud.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Being William Dunbar — The fear of death distresses me.

And which Novelist is quite certain he has quoted before in his life.

Memento mori.

Any man if he is all alone becomes more aware of being lonely as he ages.

Said Eliot.

Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death; yet there is no man, says Tully, who does not believe that he may yet live another year.

Johnson is somewhere reminded.

The last act is tragic, however happy all the rest of the play.

Perceives Pascal.

Lorenzo da Ponte’s memoirs — in which Mozart is practically never mentioned.

I’ve no more sight, no hand, nor pen, nor inkwell. I lack everything. All I still possess is will.

Said Goya — nearing eighty.

With an ink too thick, with foul pens, with bad sight, in gloomy weather, under a dim lamp, I have composed these pages. Do not scold me for it!

Appended Telemann to the score of some light soprano airs — written at eighty-one.

Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on.

What happens in the end?

Oh, in the end she dies.

Twenty-five years after his death, Poe’s remains were disinterred from what had been little better than a pauper’s grave and reburied more formally.

Walt Whitman, who made the journey from Camden to Baltimore in spite of being disabled from a recent stroke, was the only literary figure to appear at the ceremonies.

O that it were possible

We might but hold some two days’ conference

With the dead.

— Laments Webster’s Duchess.

Celan’s recollection that his mother had never had white hair.

Because of having been murdered in a concentration camp while still too young.

Cézanne, who lived in greater and greater isolation, late in life.

Degas, who lived in greater and greater isolation, late in life.

A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles, and is there one who understands me?

dein goldenes Haar Margarete

dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

In addition to his name and date on the frame of a portrait by Jan van Eyck:

Als ick kan — The best I can do.

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

Saint Gildas the Wise, of Wales, who asked that at his death he be placed in a small boat and set adrift at sea.

Sophocles, re a tremor in his hand, as recorded by Aristotle:

He said he could not help it; he would happily rather not be ninety years old.

It is later than you know.

Printed Baudelaire onto the face of his clock — after having broken off its hands.

There is always more time than you anticipate.

Said Malcolm Lowry. For whom there wasn’t.

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

— Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.

I too have written some good books.

Said Nietzsche, overhearing someone’s reference to literature in a fleeting moment’s lucidity during his final madness.

Having died they are not dead.

Wrote Simonides of the Spartans slain at Plataea.

Keats, in a last letter some weeks before the end, telling a friend it is difficult to say goodbye:

I always made an awkward bow.

Tiny drops of water will hollow out a rock.

Lucretius wrote.

Als ick kan. Which Novelist finds himself several times repeating, even while not even sure in what language — is it six-hundred-year-old Flemish? And uncertain as to why he is caught up by van Eyck’s use of it. That’s it, I can do no more? All I have left? I can go no further?

Als ick kan?

Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.

Said H. G. Wells.

The world began without man, and it will end without him.

Said Lévi-Strauss.

Swiftly the years, beyond recall.

Solemn the stillness of this spring morning.

— Reads the Arthur Waley translation of a Chinese fragment.

One man is born; another dies.

Being Euripides.

After death, nothing is.

Being Seneca.

The old man who will not laugh is a fool.

Said Santayana.

When Grandpa dies and his ashes are dropped into the ocean, may I have just a little bit of them? To put into something nice, so I can keep Grandpa with me for all time?

Pulvis et umbra sumus.

Quoth Horace. We are but dust and a shadow.

Dispraised, infirm, unfriended age.

Sophocles calls it.

Unregarded age in corners thrown.

Shakespeare echoes.

The worn copy of Donne’s verses, inked throughout with notes in Coleridge’s handwriting. And at the rear:

I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb, and then you will not be sorry that I bescribbled your book.

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

Bhartrihari, fully fourteen hundred years ago, bemoaning the poverty of poets — in Sanskrit.

Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Be patient now, my soul, thou hast endured worse than this.

Odysseus once says.

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?

Is it true then, what they say — that we become stars in the sky when we die? Asks someone in Aristophanes.

Access to Roof for Emergency Only.

Alarm Will Sound if Door Opened.

Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.

The old man who will not laugh is a fool.

Als ick kan.

Content

David Markson
This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

INTRODUCTION

THIS IS NOT A NOVEL

VANISHING POINT

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THE LAST NOVEL

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