The Last Novel (10 page)

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 Review
called 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,
re
having 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.

Our sodomite-saint.

Malcolm Muggeridge called T. E. Lawrence.

Jack Daniel’s Tennessee sour mash whiskey.

Being the best thing he knew about America, Jacques Lacan said.

A London street called Ropemaker’s Lane, Daniel Defoe died in.

Gibbon, on Samuel Johnson:

Bigoted.

Boswell, on Gibbon:

Ugly, affected, disgusting.

It’s a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

Quoth Grace Paley.

Bertrand Russell was born ten years before James Joyce, and died on Joyce’s birthday — twenty-nine years after him.

Jane Avril died in an old people’s home. Forty-one years after the death of Toulouse-Lautrec.

Nietzsche, who proclaimed that God was dead — but whose own coffin was adorned with a silvered cross.

Damn, I’m almost sorry you called. Can you even begin to guess how many friends of mine that makes, just in the past year or so?

I assume you’re aware of something else too, chum? At our age, we don’t replace them.

The failure of the 1853 premiere of Verdi’s
La Traviatta
— essentially because the soprano was viewed as too plump for a heroine dying of tuberculosis.

Troppo prosperosa,
being the Italian.

I think
A Bend in the River
is much, much better than Conrad.

Pronounced the humility-drenched author of
A Bend in the River.

The acute suggestiveness in Pascal’s apology for having written a particularly long letter.

Because he hadn’t had the time to write a short one.

Peoples bore me,

literature bores me, especially great literature.

Says Henry in
The Dream Songs.

The Homer of painting, Reynolds called Michelangelo.

The Homer of painting, Delacroix called Rubens.

Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.

Said Maynard Keynes, at a 1929 return of Wittgenstein to Cambridge after fifteen years away.

An eclectic realist of disputed merit.

The actual
catalogue
of the Metropolitan Museum once called Manet.

Miles Davis’s speedometer had already reached 105 miles per hour, on New York’s West Side Highway, when one of the people with him asked if he should be driving so fast.

I’m in here too, Davis’s concept of reassurance was.

Corbière was dead at thirty.

Giorgione, at thirty-three or thirty-four.

Books weaken the memory.

Says Plato in the
Phaedrus.

Machines cannot think.

Charles Ives gave away the cash that came with his Pulitzer Prize.

Badges of mediocrity, dismissing such awards as.

Created only for imbeciles, rogues, and rascals, Cézanne had had it.

Conversely Edvard Grieg, who displayed his medals unabashedly — particularly since they sped him through customs with all complications waived, he discovered.

The meaningless oddity that one of Washington’s pet hounds at Mount Vernon — was named Truman.

The report that Turner, told he was dying, asked his doctor to leave the room for a glass of sherry and then to judge things again.

Which the doctor allegedly did — but with no change of diagnosis.

Amiri Baraka’s slapdash, banal, repetitious, self-contradictory, mendacious poem,
Somebody Blew Up America
.

Novelist is forgetting odious.

He who writes for fools will always find a large audience.

Said Schopenhauer.

Tertian malaria, Velazquez died of.

The words
honest
— or
honesty
— occur fifty-two times in
Othello.

Diodorus Siculus. Twelve volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

Dio Cassius. Nine volumes.

Freud’s first publication in English — via the Hogarth Press.

Which is to say, by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

There’s rosemary for you and rue for you.

Echoed John Webster — at most six years after Ophelia’s earlier usage.

Ted Williams, bedded after a stroke, seen reaching out to lightly bat away a child’s balloon — and missing.

Ted Williams.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

Said Cesare Pavese.

Les bourgeois, ce sont les autres.

Said Jules Renard.

Baudelaire wore rouge.

Because of global warming, the last snows will be gone from Kilimanjaro very possibly within Novelist’s own remaining lifetime.

January 5, 1942, Tina Modotti died on.

Cardinal Newman, being directed by Everett Millais to a tall chair atop a platform where he was to sit for his portrait:

Your Eminence, on that eminence, if you please.

Abject bottom-licking narcissism —

Martha Gellhorn found in Hemingway.

Bogus, Zelda Fitzgerald’s word for him was.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s addiction to chloral hydrate. And whiskey.

There will always be another poet.

Said Stevie Smith.

You never paint the Parthenon; you never paint a Louis XV armchair. You make pictures out of some little house in the Midi, a packet of tobacco, or an old chair.

Said Picasso.

Until the election of Marguerite Yourcenar, in 1981, no woman had ever been named to the French Academy.

On the original title pages of Jane Austen, before the posthumous disclosure of her identity:

By a Lady.

Ray Bradbury’s father was a telephone lineman.

His third wife, Lady Jean Campbell, in regard to life with Norman Mailer:

All we ever did was go to dinner with his mother.

No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

Constable. Etty. Haydon. Landseer. Leslie.

All of whom were pupils of Fuseli.

Pavel Tchelitchew. Wyndham Lewis. Roger Fry.

All of whom painted portraits of Edith Sitwell.

Jean Harlow was dead at twenty-six.

Old enough so that gradual loss of bone has left him at least two and a half inches shorter than he was when younger.

Life is a long process of getting tired.

Say Samuel Butler’s
Notebooks
.

This is the foul fiend, Fibbertigibbet.

The first Crusade fought its way into Jerusalem in July of 1099. Some seventy thousand surviving Muslims — the majority being women and children — were methodically slaughtered. Such Jews as remained were burned alive in a synagogue.

All this being God’s will, the Crusaders’ motto reassured them.

George Sand did virtually all of her writing between midnight and six AM — and then slept until three in the afternoon.

Four years before Haydn’s death in Vienna, somehow a rumor announcing same reached Paris — where Cherubini and Kreutzer composed music for a memorial.

What sport, if I had been able to appear and conduct the Mass myself, Haydn’s reaction was.

Andrew Jackson was twelve years old when he enlisted to fight in the Revolutionary War.

I will not believe that a woman can draw so well.

Said Degas at his first view of a Mary Cassatt.

Andreas Baader. Gudrun Ensslin. Ulrike Meinhof.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were Brooklyn Dodgers fans.

Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour of the United States — which brought him to St. Joseph, Missouri, only one week after the shooting of Jesse James.

That dirty little coward

Who shot Mister Howard

And laid poor Jesse in his grave.

Irving Berlin had no schooling after the fifth grade.

Thomas Edison had only three months of actual classroom time.

Agatha Christie had none whatsoever.

One would like to curse them so that thunder and lightning strike them, hell-fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them. Ignorant asses.

Being Luther, in a contemplative mood
re
the papal hierarchy.

Frida Kahlo’s amputated leg.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s.

The last words of Mr. Despondency were, Farewell night; welcome day! His daughter went through the river singing, but no one could understand what she said.

Dr. Donne’s verses are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding.

Said James I.

Among those mailing an order to Shakespeare and Company, in Paris, for an earliest copy of
Ulysses
— Winston Churchill.

July 17, 1974, Dizzy Dean died on.

Emerald eyes, Dante says Beatrice had.

While never telling us the color of her hair.

A writer of something occasionally like English — and a man of something occasionally like genius.

Swinburne called Whitman.

A man standing up to his neck in a cesspool — and adding to its contents.

Carlyle called Swinburne.

Jane Welsh Carlyle died a virgin.

The avant-garde. A kind of research and development arm of the culture industry, the critic Thomas Crowe called it.

It is utterly impossible to persuade an editor that he is nobody.

Said William Hazlitt.

Galen’s astonishingly voluminous medical knowledge — much of it acquired while working as the surgeon at a gladiatorial school.

Pontormo’s diary. Which generally concentrates more on the state of his bowels than on anything of interest in art history.

Among the worst books ever committed to paper.

An Archbishop of Canterbury called
Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

A child’s introduction to Nietzsche and Jung.

The Yale Review
categorized Hesse’s novels as.

The year lost to tuberculosis early in her career by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf — probably contracted in dank World War II Vienna air-raid shelters.

Mallarmé, never well-off, who nonetheless possessed works by Whistler, Monet, Berthe Morisot, Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Rodin — all personal gifts.

Of contemporary literature, philosophy, and politics he appeared to know next to nothing.

We are told by Dr. Watson about Holmes.

Karl Marx died sitting at his desk.

Antonin Artaud, sitting up at the foot of his bed.

People who actually believe that Christo’s tangerine-colored bedsheets fluttering about in New York’s Central Park had something even remotely to do with art.

Oranges and lemons,

Say the bells of St. Clement’s.

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin only because a bacteria culture with which he was experimenting became contaminated — by accident.

Chesterfield’s definition of the word
illiterate,
as a noun, 1748:

A man who is ignorant of Greek and Latin.

Matthew Arnold’s of
philistine,
ca. 1869:

A person who believes his greatness is proved by being rich.

Barbarous, Samuel Pepys called
Hamlet.

Jessica Lange was once a waitress in the Lion’s Head.

Eve Ensler was once a waitress in the Lion’s Head.

And yet it was impossible for me to say to men speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.

Mark Twain’s pronouncement that the personages in a novel should be alive, except in the instance of corpses — and that the reader should be able to tell the corpses from the others.

Unfortunately not the case in Fenimore Cooper, he determines.

When I was boy, the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land.

Said Sitting Bull.

When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches.

Said Cochise.

Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.

Said Geronimo.

Noting that the first word of English that Robinson Crusoe teaches his man Friday — after the name Friday itself — is
Master.

Nathanael West once applied for a Guggenheim fellowship with recommendations from Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and Malcolm Cowley.

Guess.

Novelist’s own Guggenheim applications, plural, with references equally as impressive.

Guess — six or seven times.

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, tragedy as better, than in actual life.

Says Aristotle.

Marco Polo died three years after Dante.