Текст книги "The Last Novel"

Автор книги: David Markson

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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 dictatedher 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 avecCamus, 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 Victorybefore 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 Mirrorafter 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 Timesreporter 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 Arizonain 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, rea 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 Thanatopsisat 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 Quixotewas 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 rethe 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 acknowledgedthe 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 drivelas 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.

Lifemagazine 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 avecher, both devanteand 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 OdysseyXI. In GeorgicsI. In Horace’s OdesIII.

With small Latin and less Greek, Shakespeare found them for Hamletwhere?

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 regimentannihilated 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 tesseramade a totality, however illusive, the metonymy of kenosisbreaks 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 Agonistesmeans 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 Reviewcalled 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, rehaving 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.