Reader's Block (6 page)

And made uncountable revisions in the proof sheets of each.

Thomas Wolfe was an anti-Semite.

Robinson Crusoe is on his island for twenty-eight years, two months, and nineteen days.

Fray Luis de Leon.

Would Protagonist’s son or daughter one day want his books?

Thackeray’s wife was insane. But was cared for in a private home rather than an institution.

Judah Halevi.

Bitter Honeymoon.

Ella Ferris Pell was buried in a pauper’s grave.

Her
Salome.

Auschwitz. Dachau. Treblinka. Maidanek. Sobibor. Chelmno. Mauthausen. Ravensbriick. Birkenau. Belzec. Theresienstadt.

There is no verifiable portrait of Jane Austen.

An otherwise anonymous Madame Delphine Delamare, who after numerous adulteries as the wife of an inattentive country doctor committed suicide with poison in 1850.

And became the model for Emma Bovary.

I declare to you before God, and as an honest man, that your son is the greatest composer I know, either personally or by name.

And Buchenwald. Six miles from Weimar. On what had been a pleasant wooded hillside.

The more significant women in Protagonist’s life?

Once, obviously, more of an existence than his books and the headstones of strangers.

Children depart, miscellaneous relationships wither. Friends move to distant places.

Friends die.

Salman Rushdie lost the tip of one of his fingers as a boy. As does a character in
Midnight’s Children.

Tolstoy was twice cited for bravery as a cavalry officer in the Caucasus.

And Bergen-Belsen. Where Anne Frank died.

Of starvation and typhus.

God wrote the book. I took his dictation.

Cartons like an impermanent sculpture of found objects. On a stairway ending at a sealed-off door.

I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.

Non amo te, Sabidi.

Does a lone woman walk the beach, perhaps, and with a certain regularity, as Reader visualizes one visiting at one of the graves?

A less than anonymous Paris prostitute named Marie Du-plessis, who was dead at twenty-three.

And became the model for
La Dame anx Camelias.

Hart Crane committed suicide by jumping from a freighter in the Caribbean.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an anti-Semite.

Molloy. Malone. Estragon.

Simonetta Vespucci. Who was painted by Piero di Cosimo. And one of whose relatives the Americas are named after.

Ilya Ilych Oblomov.

D. S. Mirsky died in Siberia in one of Stalin’s purges.

Sempre libera.

The question of truth versus legend in Alexander’s having razed Persepolis at the bidding of Thais.

The fair certainty that excessive wine played a part.

Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye.

Maribarbola and Nicolasito.

Erostratus burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 B.C., so that his name would be remembered through history.

One of those who remembered it was Cervantes, who lets Don Quixote tell Sancho Panza the story.

And that Alexander was born on the same night.

Adrienne Monnier committed suicide.

Where Reader more broadly sees the cemetery is in a town that in its entirety is comprised of little other than those shoddy small brick row houses and fissured streets. And would seem as if perpetually guised in winter light.

A difficulty, however, being that Reader senses he is evoking the image from half a century or more ago. Where such today?

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Take courage, Charlotte.

Said Anne, dying only six months after Emily.

Back to the things themselves.

The baseball on Reader’s windowsill was hit foul by Ted Williams at Yankee Stadium. Also in antiquity. Reader was with a girl named Fern Winters when it ricocheted off a concrete step and the arm of a seat directly to him.

Sartre called John Dos Passos the greatest writer of their time.

Is Reader perhaps recalling older neighborhoods in certain middling Hudson River towns like Kingston or Catskill or Saugerties, which in those days he knew slightly?

Bucephalas.

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?

Thomas Traherne died in 1674. The manuscripts of his poems, never before published, were come upon on a bookseller’s cart in 1897.

Also in part a commonplace book?

Also in part a cento, as Burton would surely have had it?

The criminality at Aulis.

Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of
The Unquiet Grave?

A man will turn over half a library to make one book, Johnson said.

Lucian Freud was once married to Jacob Epstein’s daughter. And once to a woman who later married Robert Lowell.

The saints have their own country.

Said Pascal.

In an apartment far west in Greenwich Village. Heat. Molloy/Malone/Estragon sorting books and records, determining which he may dispose of before departing after all.

Elizabeth Siddal died from an overdose of laudanum, very probably a suicide.

Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch.

There is no doubt that an English winter would put an end to me.

Il Libro dell’ Arte.

Della Pittura.

Reader is well aware that sooner or later a decision had best be made between the cemetery and the beach.

D. H. Lawrence was an anti-Semite.

Petrarch owned a Virgin by Giotto. Leaving it to someone in his will, he felt it necessary to point out that the benighted would still not have learned to appreciate the artist.

Jean Genet was illegitimate.

H. H. Munro was killed by a sniper on the French front in 1916.

In Canto IV of the
Inferno,
which is to say with 96 percent of his chief work yet unwritten, Dante has the temerity to rank himself sixth in the company of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan.

Underestimating.

Hannah Arendt:

We cannot know if there is such a thing as altogether unappreciated genius, or whether it is the daydream of those who are not geniuses.

Will Watt ever actually meet or at least speak with the woman who comes to the cemetery?

Whose is the grave at which she visits?

Aubrey Beardsley was dead of tuberculosis at twenty-five.

Is it not passing brave to be a king,

And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

Melville worked as a customs inspector in Manhattan for nineteen years, out of an office on West Street near Gansevoort. His highest wage was never more than four dollars a day.

Gansevoort Street was named after a hero of the Revolutionary War. Melville’s maternal grandfather.

All life is sorrowful.

Are the Wandering Rocks in the
Odyssey
ice floes from the Dnieper or the Don that have drifted into the Black Sea?

Protagonist nodded hello to the woman from the grave in passing on the street yesterday.

Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.

In fact Protagonist has any number of friends.

Among the living and accessible.

Even if he has never quite been able to articulate for himself precisely why or even when it was that he commenced to fall out of touch.

With some of whom in what now appears a virtually separate incarnation he spent time endlessly.

Archimedes had to be dragged by main force to take a bath.

Sir John Denham once saved George Wither from being hanged by pleading that so long as Wither was alive, he, Denham, could never be the worst poet in England.

Paul de Man was an anti-Semite.

Except for Aquinas and the Bible, Descartes almost never read a word. He called the classics a waste of time.

The best critic and human being I’ve known in my life was my dear friend Paul de Man.

Had said Harold Bloom before de Man’s pro-Nazi World War II writings were discovered.

Kol Nidre.

Hadrian’s
Animula, vagula, blandula.
Which Reader was surprised to find Stevie Smith had done a translation of.

Though he remotely knew Byron’s.

Shall I, wasting in despair,

Die because a woman’s fair?

Keats may have been born above a livery stable.

Cennino d’Andrea Cennini.

Leon Battista Alberti.

Certain writers’ saloons near that Greenwich Village apartment would Protagonist have spent some of that other incarnation in?

Camus died in a car crash.

Ortwin de Graef.

A Yorkshire bishop convened a public burning of
Jude the Obscure.

Probably in his despair at not being able to burn me, Hardy said.

The White Horse Tavern?

The Lion’s Head?

Anne Sexton sexually abused her older daughter.

Skibet Guar Videre.

The Viareggio?

Gentlemen, old Bach is here!

Christopher Smart. Mad, lice-infested, incising
A Song to David
and the
Jubilate Agno
into the wainscotting of a jail cell.

Known before that for insisting upon being joined in prayer wherever the impulse struck him, even at street corners. Or more ideally in rain.

Frieda von Richthofen.

Legend eternally insists that Cleopatra committed suicide by pressing an asp to her bosom. Plutarch suggests that it may have been by taking poison, however.

Finnegans Wake,
sans apostrophe.
Finnegans
ergo a plural noun,
Wake
a verb.

Joyces write. Readers read.

Fernand Leger was gassed while serving as a stretcher-bearer in World War I.

Fuit Ilium,

I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone else, Johnson said.

What things have we seen

Done at the Mermaid!

Charmian and Iras committed suicide when Cleopatra did.

Lorenzo da Ponte ended his days teaching Italian at what would later become Columbia University.

Could Protagonist possibly have taught somewhere at some time also?

Columbia likewise?

Schopenhauer was an anti-Semite.

Austerlitz. Smolensk. Borodino.

Tycho Brahe wore a silver alloy nose. The bridge of his own had been severed in a duel.

Horseflies that keep the horse from plowing, Chekhov called critics.

Hendrickje Stoffels was illiterate.

Hailey, Idaho, Ezra Pound was born in.

Saskia.

August 2, 1492. The deadline set by Ferdinand and Isabella for the expulsion of all Jews who did not convert to Catholicism. August 3, 1492. Columbus sailed.

F. O. Matthiessen committed suicide in a plunge from a window.

Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton is on display at University College, London.

In Bentham’s clothes.

Protagonist’s son or daughter may one day want his books.

Some few? The better volumes of art reproductions?

Rudolf Nureyev was an anti-Semite.

Caddy held me. She smelled like trees.

Galileo had three illegitimate children.

From certain angles, the knotted root on Reader’s windowsill looks like a hand grasping in supplication. A woman named Kate Winter plucked it from an eddy at an embankment of the Ebro where Reader and she had paused during a long day’s driving.

Freud had thirty-three operations for cancer on his mouth and throat.

Joyce had twenty-five operations on his eyes.

Excluding the minor coincidence of their names, there is no connection between the Fern Winters at Yankee Stadium and the Kate Winter in Spain. Reader knew them decades apart.

No ideas but in things.

George Sanders committed suicide.

Gabriella Mistral once lived in Roslyn Harbor, Long Island.