Reader's Block (11 page)

Other writers?

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

Said Mozart of Constanze.

At Walden, Thoreau was borrowing land owned by Emerson.

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

Paul Celan drowned himself in the Seine.

I. G. Farben.

Delacroix was almost surely the illegitimate son of Talleyrand.

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

Dear Cicero. Regards, Protagonist.

Philip Larkin: Who’s Jorge Luis Borges?

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

Paul Ancel. Or Antschel.

They do not move.

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

And she came through the mist and the rain to me

From the soft warm lights of the town.

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

Giacomo Casabianca.

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

La Vida Breve.

Roy Campbell was an anti-Semite.

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

Like Dali.

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

Does Protagonist even have a telephone?

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

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

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

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

Sue Bridehead.

Hugo van der Goes died insane.

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

Berlioz called him a tub of pork and beer.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol.

Wittgenstein had a close friend named Eccles.

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

I’m Captain Jinks of the horse marines.

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

New Place.

Isaac Rosenberg was killed in France in World War I.

Charlotte Mew committed suicide by drinking creosote.

Alma Mahler was an anti-Semite.

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

Axel Springer Verlag.

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

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

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

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

Gropius.

Lou Andreas-Salome.

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

Finding only that even the specific address no longer exists.

Vivaldi was buried in a pauper’s grave.

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

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

Kant almost certainly died a virgin.

Daunty, Gouty, and Shopkeeper.

A Girl of the Limberlost.

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

It is the same old druid Time as ever.

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

René Crevel committed suicide.

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

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

Herder was an anti-Semite.

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

Kneeling at the grave, or standing head bowed?

And why does Reader always envision dusk?

Irony and Pity, Inc.

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

And Elizabeth Daryush as good or better than either.

The Pali canon.

Remembering a Sarah.

And a Robin and a Beth.

And a Karen, who wrote verse.

Some undeniably casual, some fugitive.

And over so many years.

Nonetheless.

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

She?

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

Wolfram von Eschenbach.

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

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

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

Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo,

Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi.

Good Master Schoolmaster, do not English this.

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

Along the way passing Prufrock’s Furniture Store.

General Jacques Aupick.

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

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

René Magritte’s mother drowned herself.

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

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

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

Schopenhauer:

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

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

Said Robert Southey to Charlotte Bronte.

Chekhov was an anti-Semite.

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

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

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

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

Not to add several instantaneously recognizable Venetian courtesans.

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five.

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

And for hoarseness.

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

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

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

Richard Brautigan committed suicide.

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

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

Kol od ba-le-vah p’ni-mah

Ne-fesh y’hu-di bo-mi-ya.

Never to have been born is best.

Naming and Necessity.

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

And died mad.

All art is quite useless.

Chancellor Rolin.

Walt Whitman’s mother was illiterate.

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

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

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

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

Said Einstein, returning a Kafka to Thomas Mann.

Lev Davidovich Bronstein.

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

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

Donatello’s
Magdalen.

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

Leopardi was a hunchback and an invalid.

Pascal was a hypochondriac.

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

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

Quintilian was an anti-Semite.

Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney died in a car crash.

This long disease, my life.

That long malaise, my life.

Unquestionably, Protagonist will have lived in Mexico.

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

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

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

Lucretius committed suicide.

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

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

James Joyce’s daughter.

Thersites. Who mocked.

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

Rilke never read a daily newspaper.

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

Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi.

Pons asinorum.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

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

Cithaeron.

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

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

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

A fireplace, presumably part of the renovation?