Текст книги "The Last Novel"

Автор книги: David Markson

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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 knewthe 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 Salomeat 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 Timeshad 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 Tamburlainewhile 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 reFreud.

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 identicalverse – 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 genocidehad 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 reuniversity 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 Carmenitself, 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 Timescalled 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 Malwould 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 Ulyssesout 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, rewriting 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 Dogmaticshave any competition as the longest unfinishedbook 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, rewhat 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 Macbethby 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.