Текст книги "The Last Novel"

Автор книги: David Markson

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David Markson
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 gondolieripick 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 Timesassigned 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 Faustto 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 Faustscore 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 – reStein’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 reTolstoy.

What sort of Christianlife 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, reJoyce.

He never thinks aboutsomething; he thinks something.

Said Hannah Arendt, reHeidegger.

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 Reasonat 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 resightings 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 Fauneto 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 Weeklyonce 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 Poetryuntil almost twenty years after his death.

No one expressed interest in publishing Billy Budduntil 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 fiftymore 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 Philosophywhile 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 reYeats.

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 Comedyuntil 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.