Reader's Block (12 page)

Wood corded near the base of the dune outside?

Dieu me pardonnera. C’est son metier.

Ludwig Boltzmann committed suicide.

Wilkie Collins maintained two households simultaneously. Both with mistresses.

Lunar caustic.

Zbigniew Herbert.

Degas was an anti-Semite.

Protagonist also recalling sweltering recent summers when imprisoned in the city? Surely the beach, but even the gatehouse, a significant reprieve?

He has licked dust from the floor of every third-rate hostess in England.

Said Harold Frederic of Henry James.

Stendhal was an officer with Napoleon’s armies in the retreat from Moscow in 1812.

Sebastian Dangerfield.

Jack London was illegitimate.

In Act II of
Troilus and Cressida,
Shakespeare allows Hector to mention Aristotle. Who will not be born until some nine hundred years after the fact.

dein goldenes Haar Margarete

dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

According to legend, Li Po drowned when he fell out of a boat, drunk, leaning to kiss a reflection of the moon.

If a picture of the Virgin is to be any good, I must paint it from a drawing of a woman I sleep with. Said Stanley Spencer.

Mythologies and Me.

Che farò senza Euridice?

Eduard Marxsen.

Anselm Kiefer.

Only the Americans didn’t give me a visa.

Standing a little apart, Wilhelm began to cry.

Milton suffered from constipation.

Kathleen Ferrier. Dame Janet Baker. General Jackie Home.

Jack Kerouac lived with his mother for most of the last twenty years of his life.

Samuel Pepys attended a performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at the King’s Theater in 1662.

The most ridiculous, insipid play I ever saw in my life.

Paul Christman. Jack Crain. Bill Dudley. John Kimbrough.

That’s not writing, that’s typing.

She is older than the rocks among which she sits.

From Michelangelo:

Messer Giorgio Vasari—Many days ago I received a letter from you; I did not reply at once in order not to behave like a merchant.

César Vallejo wrote more than half of the
Poemas Humanos
during four months very near his death.

Renan, at the unveiling of a statue of Spinoza:

Woe to him who in passing should hurl an insult at this gentle and pensive head.

And my poor fool is hang’d!

Sir John Suckling committed suicide.

Babi Yar.

Gabriel Spencer.

Fifteen years after
Moby Dick,
Melville had to pay to publish
Clarel
With borrowed money.

Fichte was an anti-Semite.

Stravinsky studied composition under Rimsky-Korsakov. As did Glazunov. As did Respighi.

Eliot wore a truss.

Robert Greene died after overindulging on pickled herring and Rhenish wine.

Kuznetsov.

Yevtushenko. The Shostakovich Thirteenth.

Edgar Lee Masters was once the law partner of Clarence Darrow.

Mathis Neithardt-Gothardt.

Frank Frisch’s name was misspelled in the first edition of
The Sun Also Rises
in 1926 and not corrected in any later edition Reader ever glanced into.

E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!

Alys Smith.

Dora Black.

Patricia Spence.

Edith Finch.

Suppose the woman should cease to come to the grave?

What happens in regard to the woman in any event?

Or is Reader again envisioning some sort of similar situation at the ocean?

Protagonist walking the beach, at water’s edge, perhaps at a certain hour each day? Here a woman who does the same?

Vereda de Santa Fe.

Piazza San Francesco di Paola.

Leonardo’s notebooks indicate familiarity with at least five different works by Aristotle.

Lenin wrote a foreword for
Ten Days that Shook the World,

Sing at noon? Madame, at noon I am happy to be able to spit.

Said Chaliapin.

Obviously, a nod. Fairly soon an innocuous comment in passing?

John Ringo committed suicide.

Were Jesus and Mary Magdalen lovers? In the Gnostic Gospels, the specific word for her relationship with him translates from the Greek as
consort.

Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Juan de Yepes.

Louise Colet’s affair with Flaubert. Louise Colet’s affair with Musset. Louise Colet’s affair with Cousin. Louise Colet’s affair with Vigny.

And cetera.

the year is full of unforseen happenings

and the time of earthquakes is at hand

An upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.

Rousseau was an anti-Semite.

And/or in harsh weather? Huddled against winds? Snow in patches, Reader again sees.

Max Beckmann died of a heart attack while strolling in Central Park in Manhattan.

Praxiteles’ mistress/model Phryne was once on the verge of being convicted of impiety. It appears factual that the orator Hyperides, defending her, signaled for her to bare her bosom.

And won acquittal.

At Amherst, ca. 1880:

Emily, you wretch! None of this nonsense! I’ve traveled all the way from Springfield to see you. Come down at once.

Mai Zetterling.

Ypres.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Gestapo.

In his
Beheading of John the Baptist,
Caravaggio spells out his name in some of the Baptist’s spilled blood at the lower edge of the canvas. Otherwise he signed no paintings.

All ages are contemporaneous.

Dante married a woman named Gemma Donati at eighteen or twenty after a formal family betrothal of years earlier. For all his repeated use of autobiography, he makes no single reference to her anywhere.

Gaudeamus igitur.

Are there two women upstairs, or more?

Even without seeing them come and go, conscious instantly of the first footfalls.

If to no other end, surely accentuating the isolation?

P

ier Paolo Pasolini was murdered.

Dino Campana died mad.

Paul Feyerabend was crippled from a wound as a German officer on the Russian front in World War II.

Narciso Yepes.

Protagonist kept company by chipmunks? By field mice? By the gulls?

Isocrates committed suicide by starving himself.

Living in slums, literally pawning clothes to buy food, at times Karl Marx could not afford paper to write on. Between 1850 and 1855 three of his children died. For one he had to beg a loan for a coffin.

H. L. Mencken was an anti-Semite.

Qumran.

Samuel Beckett was the best man at the wedding of Joyce’s grandson Stephen.

I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.

The same Antony who covered Brutus’s body with his own robe at Philippi had had Cicero’s head and right hand nailed up in the Forum only a year before.

Michelangelo Merisi.

Is there such a word as
grue
if Nelson Goodman invented it to illustrate a philosophic point but it has no other application beyond that classroom context whatsoever?

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Panem et circenses.

Marie-Therese Walter hanged herself in a garage.

Women at the time of Troy wore only a single garment. Which is to say, no underclothing.

And did not bathe with any frequency.

John Bunyan wrote the better part of
Pilgrim’s Progress
while in jail for illegal preaching.

One kid, one kid, that father bought for two zuzim.

Should it be at least three years since Protagonist has been involved with a woman? Longer?

Why would he have become involved with no one since?

Or does the withdrawal obviously feed on itself and increasingly preclude even the chance of meeting someone to start with?

Helen unwashed? Andromache?

Moritz Schlick was shot and killed on the steps of the university library in Vienna by a student whose thesis he had failed.

Conchita Supervia died in childbirth.

Etienne Joseph Theophile Thore.

Who resurrected Vermeer after two full centuries of disregard.

Jules Bastien-Lepage.

For whom Reader can still sometimes be the fool.

Mill was reading Plato at seven. In Greek.

Heraclitus once had himself buried in cow dung when ill. For purposes of drawing out the fluids of dropsy, Diogenes Laertius
says.

Grace Moore died in a plane crash.

Niels Lyhne.
Which Joyce, Ibsen, Hesse, Mann, Strindberg, Rilke, Freud, were all profound admirers of. Rilke calling all of Jacobsen’s work as indispensable to him as the Bible.

Kilgore, Texas.

If indeed three or four years, will Protagonist have at least begun to become accustomed to the solitude?

Accustomed, or wearily acquiescent, does Reader mean?

I hope the bourgeoisie as long as they exist will have cause to remember my carbuncles.

Handel, born in central Germany, is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Henry Fielding is buried in Portugal.

Sophocles and Herodotus were intimate friends.

Solange Raytchine.

Attorney General: So then it is for the labour of two days that you ask a fee of two hundred guineas?

Whistler: No. I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.

When Queen Christina of Sweden hired Descartes as a personal philosophy tutor in 1649, she dispatched a warship under a full admiral to convey him to Stockholm.

But then demanded daily instruction at 5
A.M.
in the Scandinavian winter. Descartes caught pneumonia and died.

Renoir, Manet, Gauguin, and Edvard Munch all did portraits of Mallarmé.

Gurre-Lieder.

Frederick Delius was paralyzed and blinded by syphilis.

Tradition says that Saint Paul was decapitated.

John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow.

Sir James Frazer spent as many as fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, at his desk at Cambridge. Throughout his life. It eventually cost him his eyesight.

What sort of bargain can Reader turn Protagonist into if he does allow him to meet someone?

How little money does he in fact live on?

Would he even be able to pick up a dinner check for two people at a respectable restaurant?

Emanuel de Witte drowned himself.

Gertrude Stein had to pay to publish
Three Lives,

And if I, Fern, would remember Lee Suffridge Priest for so long as I lived, who when I too was dead would remember me?

Oskar Kokoschka and Siegfried Sassoon were both wounded twice in World War I.

Fighting on opposite sides.

Dante and Duns Scotus were born in the same year.

There is no mystery in human creation. Will performs this miracle.

Said Camus.

Salvador de Madariaga propounds strongly suggestive evidence that Cervantes may have been a Sephardic Jew.

And how is Protagonist’s health, what with hospitalizations being mentioned?

Does Reader see any point in perhaps contriving current medical difficulties for him?

Major?

Protagonist has come to this place because he was told he has a limited time to live?

Doctor Subtilis.

To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.

Valéry said he could never write a novel for one insurmountable reason. He would have to include sentences like The Marquise went out at five.

Protagonist has cancer, but it is for the moment in remission?