The Last Novel (5 page)

Said Niels Bohr
re
quantum mechanics.

In an era when singers frequently embellished music to their own taste, Rossini once complimented Adelina Patti on an aria from
The Barber of Seville
— and then asked her who the composer was.

Claude Lorrain’s
Coast View with Acis and Galatea,
which Dostoievsky once saw in Dresden and writes in
A Raw Youth
of having dreamed about.

And writes in
The Possessed
of having dreamed about.

And writes in
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
of having dreamed about.

Emily Dickinson’s refusal to sit for a photographer.

Henrik Ibsen was virtually never known to take off his hat without immediately combing his hair — having even glued a small mirror inside the hat to make use of when he did so.

September 23, 1835, Vincenzo Bellini died on.

April 8, 1848, Gaetano Donizetti died on.

There was no memorial of any sort for Byron in Westminster Abbey until 1969.

Still always slightly surprised to recall — that John McCormack died an American citizen.

The so-called anarchist artist who in 1988 smeared a large X in his own blood on a wall in the Museum of Modern Art — and in the process splattered an adjacent Picasso.

I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems; it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

Quoth Philip Larkin.

The sound of Bix Beiderbecke’s cornet:

Like a girl saying yes, Eddie Condon said.

The sound of Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone:

Like a dry martini, being what Desmond himself said he wanted.

Exactly the right tone of thought and feeling to appeal to grocers.

Leslie Stephen credited Dickens with.

Napoleon was five feet six inches tall.

A dozen or fifteen years before much of the nudity in Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment
would be concealed by papal order, a ranking Vatican cardinal voiced the first complaint about same.

And shortly discovered his own portrait on the wall — in hell.

As almost happened similarly to a prior in Milan after his complaints about Leonardo’s apparent desultoriness in work on
The Last Supper
— complaints that abruptly ceased at Leonardo’s hint regarding who might become the model for Judas.

Kindly see me safe up. As for coming down I shall shift for myself.

Said Sir Thomas More — being led to the gallows.

In Robert Schumann’s diary, after a first meeting with Berlioz:

There is something very pleasant about his laugh.

Thou shalt commit adultery.

The brains of a ram, Shaw attributed to Sophocles.

Of a third-rate village policeman — to Brahms.

Poor England, when such a despicable abortion is named genius.

Said Thomas Carlyle of Charles Lamb.

Anybody can be nobody.

Said Eugene V. Debs.

Novelist’s personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.

Wondering why one is surprised to realize that Thoreau was dead at forty-five.

A lament of Schopenhauer’s:

Over how frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the appropriation of its contents.

Two pages of
The Mill on the Floss
are enough to start me crying.

Said Proust.

Sour of speech, averse to laughter, unable to be merry even over the wine, but what he writes is full of honey and the Sirens.

Says a line of uncertain attribution
re
Euripides.

Lope de Vega had at least three illegitimate children.

Gustav Klimt may have had as many as fourteen.

Though the courts recognized only four, in regard to his estate.

Utterly crazy about women.

Suidas says of Menander.

Looking at them in society, one fancies there’s something in them, but there’s nothing, nothing, nothing. No, don’t marry, my dear fellow, don’t marry.

Repulsive, an early
New York Times
review called Degas.

Pigs at the pastry cart.

John Updike called critics.

Says a 1796 London jestbook:

Shakespear seeing Ben Jonson in a necessary-house, with a book in his hand reading it very attentively, said he was sorry his memory was so bad, that he could not
sh-te
without a Book.

Dürer’s
hausfrau
wife.

Whom he on occasion remanded to eat with their maid.

Lenin played tennis.

The sign in the window says
Pants Pressed Here.
But when you bring in your pants, you discover that it is the sign that is for sale.

Being Kierkegaard — on the typical obscurity of what normally passes for philosophy.

The first use of the phrase
stream of consciousness.

In a review by May Sinclair of Dorothy Richardson’s
Pointed Roofs
— in April 1918.

The remedies of all our diseases will be discovered after we are dead.

Assumed John Stuart Mill.

Charlotte has been writing a book, and it is much better than likely.

Announced the Reverend Patrick Brontë, in the mid-1840s, to his other offspring.

Karl Marx was for some years a London correspondent for Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune.

Attempting to detour the young Thomas Aquinas from a career in the church, his family once arranged for a seductive woman to be sent to his rooms.

Whom he chased off with a flaming brand from his hearth.

Maid of Athens, ere we part,

Give, oh give me back my heart!

For a time, Rilke and Cocteau had apartments in the same Paris building — evidently without ever becoming acquainted.

Every passenger in the non-smoking section of a plane that crashed off Norway in 1948 was killed.

Bertrand Russell had been smoking — and was one of those able to swim to safety.

Ravel once composed music for Diaghilev that Diaghilev never used.

And which almost led to a duel between them.

April 23, 1554, Gaspara Stampa died on.

I don’t very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them.

Said Georgia O’Keeffe.

Harvard was founded in 1636.

The University of Mexico — in 1553.

One of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published.

Edmund Wilson called
This Side of Paradise.

Not a lovable man.

John O’Hara said of Scott Fitzgerald himself.

Occasions on which one has seen it transliterated as
Theodor
Dostoievsky.

A tea-time bore.

Dylan Thomas called Wordsworth.

A son of Einstein’s died in a mental institution at fifty-five — having been confined there for a third of a century.

The relatively recent revelation that Einstein had also had an illegitimate daughter.

Unhesitatingly specifying Pound’s anti-Semitism as the reason, Yevgeny Yevtushenko once refused to appear on the same podium with him at a literary event.

Teddy Dostoievsky?

The Duccio
Madonna and Child
purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in 2004 for more than $45,000,000.

Which is eight inches wide and eleven inches high.

Jan Peerce. Leonard Warren. Richard Tucker. Robert Merrill.

The Lower East Side. The Bronx. Williamsburg. Williamsburg.

Jacques Derrida failed his entrance exams to the École Normal Supérieure. Twice.

People are exasperated by poetry which they do not understand, and contemptuous of poetry which they understand without effort.

Said Eliot.

We cease to wonder at what we understand.

Said Johnson.

Sir Thomas Beecham once told an orchestra that a certain passage in Mozart should sound innocent — quote — like a breath of spring. It should float on the air like a voice from another world.

When the musicians stared emptily:

Oh, well, anyway, play it legato.

A real good guy.

William Carlos Williams called Emily Dickinson.

A bitchy little spinster.

Denise Levertov saw her as instead.

Géricault’s intensity when at work on
The Raft of the Medusa:

The mere sound of a smile could prevent him from painting, someone said.

Ingres’ judgment that the finished version ought to have been removed from the Louvre or even hidden away altogether:

Is it in such horrors that we should find pleasure? Art should teach us nothing but the Beautiful!

If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.

Said a 1920s Texas governor opposed to the teaching of foreign languages.

Persia, as it was still then called, Doris Lessing was born in.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

Because bookshops are among the very few places where one can spend time without spending any money, George Orwell noted, any number of practically certifiable lunatics are guaranteed to be regularly found in most of them.

I’ve finished that chapel I was painting. The Pope is quite satisfied.

Wrote Michelangelo to his father, after four years’ effort — and with no further need to let fall brooms or lumber.

So impoverished was Linnaeus as a university student that the closest he could come to repairing worn-out shoes was to stuff the holes with paper.

The general acceptance that it was Antonello da Messina who taught Venice the Flemish method of painting with oils rather than with tempera.

Venice — and thus Italy.

More floggings than meals.

Haydn remembered from his childhood.

Trying to imagine E. M. Forster, who found
Ulysses
indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruce — to which in fact he was once taken.

Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorne — who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked at the profusion of naked statues.

January 22, 1945, Else Lasker-Schüler died on.

Raskolnikov.
Minus the last two letters, the word translates as
dissenter.

While the pseudonym
Gorky
means
the bitter.

Fifty years after combat in World War I, David Jones could still be momentarily panicked by an unexpected explosive sound like that of a backfiring truck.

And now we three in Euston waiting-room.

Latin, Greek, Italian, and German, George Eliot read.

Latin, Greek, Italian, and French — Mary Shelley.

Hindi, not English, Rudyard Kipling’s first language was.

People who pronounce the word
ask
as if it were spelled with an
x.

As for that matter it was, until the late sixteenth century.

If God had not created breasts, I would not have become a painter.

Renoir once unseriously announced.

A woman’s breast or a commonplace milk bottle — my feelings remained the same when painting either.

Corot soberly insisted.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls —

Which Novelist after a moment realizes may sound like a line of Beckett’s, but is actually something he himself has said in an earlier book.

The name Copperfield came from a sign Dickens had noticed on a shop in a London slum.

Chuzzlewit likewise.

Nothing but obscenities and filth.

Being all Conrad could find in D. H. Lawrence.

Disgust and horror, recorded Abigail Adams after a blackface performance of
Othello:

My whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona.

The revolver with which van Gogh shot himself had been borrowed. Van Gogh having claimed he wished to fire at crows that were annoying him as he painted.

The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

Said Arthur Honegger.

Remembering that before writing
Ben Hur,
Lew Wallace had been a Union general during the Civil War.

Remembering that Abner Doubleday had been the same.

The endless commentary, and analysis, and even retelling, in
Clarissa.
Anyone reading it just for the story would hang himself, Johnson said.

Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?

James Thurber said Harold Ross had to ask.

Roughly two-thirds of the paintings described in the corrected second edition of Vasari’s
Lives
— finished in 1567 — would appear to no longer exist.

Hamlet.
A boring play full of quotations.

Swinburne’s delirium-tremendous imagination, Hopkins called it.

Grant Wood’s sister, Nan, and a dentist named McKeeby. Who posed for
American Gothic.

In Cedar Rapids.

July 4, 1934, Hayyim Bialik died on.

The letter announcing the first acceptance of a poem by Francis Thompson never reached him.

Thompson being so indigent at the time that he literally had no address.

Poe, in his late thirties a half-century earlier — Unable even to afford postage to put his manuscripts in the mail.

For poor people, sick or lame, or travelers.

Advertised the Savoy, a charitable residence in sixteenth-century London — which also saw fit to take in struggling authors.

Thinking of them for so long as essentially literary characters that one has to force oneself to recall that Dante actually
knew
the Paolo of Paolo and Francesca.

Goya died at eighty-three.

Having had to read lips for the last thirty-six years of his life.

Borges at eighty-six.

Having had to be read aloud to for almost as long.

Ovid’s poem about his sweetheart Corinna’s near-fatal abortion — dated ca. 23 BC.