This is Not a Novel (8 page)

Pergolesi died of consumption at twenty-six.

Laborare est Orare.
Work is Worship. Said the old monks.

Benedetto Croce died of a stroke.

Robert Schumann died mad, probably from syphilis.

Behold, this dreamer cometh.

Sophocles’ father manufactured swords.

John Dos Passos died of congestive heart failure.

Tyndale was permitted the indulgence of being strangled at the stake before they set fire to him.

A Farewell to Aims:

1590, George Peele’s version dating from.

Trying to imagine the shape of the modern world if Charles Martel had been defeated at Tours.

Simone Weil’s final hospitalization was ostensibly for tuberculosis and exhaustion. Nevertheless a coroner’s report labeled her death suicide by starvation.

The woman was mad, de Gaulle said.

Mantegna used a corpse as the model for one of his Crucifixions.

Gericault used several while painting
The Raft of the Medusa.

Veit Stoss died blind. And destitute.

The almost unparalleled contemporary popularity of Euripides.

Greek soldiers captured and held as slaves after the disastrous expedition at Syracuse were actually given their freedom if they could teach passages from his plays from memory.

Which
many
could.

George Eliot translated Spinoza. Emma Lazarus translated Judah Halevi.

Willem de Kooning’s father was a beer distributor.

An incidental notation of Malcolm Lowry’s, while describing a visit to a room used by De Quincey in the Lake District:

Smoking Prohibited.

She only said, My life is dreary

He cometh not, she said; She said, I am aweary, aweary

I would that I were dead.

Cousin Ruddy was habitually foul-mouthed.

Flannery O’Connor died of lupus.

In the century after their deaths, Ben Jonson’s name appeared in print three times as often as Shakespeare’s.

Salathiel Pavy.

Why does Joyce let Leopold Bloom think Saverio Mercadante was Jewish?

April 26, 1937. A Monday.

Which was also Guernica’s market day, drawing peasants in from the nearby countryside.

No matter how frequently, always given pause at remembering there is no color whatsoever in the canvas.

A little, plain, provincial, sickly-looking old maid. Being Charlotte Bronte, as seen by George Henry Lewes.

Robert Southey died of—quote—softening of the brain.

And what should they know of England who only England know?

Gauguin once tried to kill himself with arsenic. But vomited.

Do you think up that material when you’re drunk? Asked a cousin of Faulkner’s.

Dittersdorf, you’re not in tune.

Tintoretto died of what appears to have been stomach cancer.

Trollope died of a stroke.

Milledgeville, Georgia.

Tracts free as the Lord supplies the funds.

Frank Lloyd Wright died of a heart attack after surgery.

Hilda Doolittle died of the flu, though already assaulted by a heart attack and a stroke.

Even after
Einstein on the Beach
had been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Philip Glass was driving a taxi in New York City.

Hypatia, who was battered to death by Christian fanatics.

Tantum religio potuit suadere maloram,
Lucretius said.
Such are the evils that religion prompts.

Emotion recollected in tranquility.

The best words in the best order.

Vivaldi died of no one knows what. Of
internal fire,
the 1741 Vienna church registry having poetically settled for.

A social and moral pervert, Theodore Roosevelt called Tolstoy.

Roosevelt on Henry James: A miserable little snob.

On Thomas Paine: A filthy little atheist.

Spinoza’s tomb. At the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague.

It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.

S. Y. Agnon died of a heart attack.

Dostoievsky’s second wife, Anna, adding a note of charm to a recollection of Dostoievsky pawning something:

He sat there for over an hour—my poor, poor Fedya. So sweet, and so brilliant and altogether fine, and he had to sit and wait among a lot of Jews.

Stuck-groove music.

When the canvas is on the floor, I feel closer to it. Said Jackson Pollock.

Marie Corelli was Charles Mackay’s daughter. Marcia Davenport was Alma Gluck’s.

Robert Penn Warren died of prostate cancer.

Joshua Reynolds died blind.

After having been deaf through most of his life.

Only when the world itself is destroyed will the verses of Lucretius perish. Said Ovid.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan died profoundly in debt. Yet was granted a spectacular Westminster Abbey funeral.

Moliere died after bursting a blood vessel in a convulsive tubercular coughing fit and choking on his own blood.

Panta rei, ouden menel

It is very difficult to understand and appreciate the generation that follows you, Matisse said.

I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.

The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together in the eternal book.

The friendship of Byron and Stendhal.

According to Herodotus, Xerxes literally ordered that the Hellespont be given three hundred lashes when a storm washed away a bridge he had only then constructed for his invasion of the West.

And as an incidental afterthought also ordered his chief engineers beheaded.

Gary Cooper died of lung cancer.

Wilhelm Reich died in Lewisburg Penitentiary.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin died after giving birth to the infant girl who would one day marry Shelley.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin died after giving birth to the infant girl who would one day write
Frankenstein.

Fanny Brawne’s mother died in an accident in which her clothing caught on fire.

Things from which one would avert one’s eyes even in a brothel.

Said Aretino in a letter to Michelangelo condemning
The Last Judgment.

Which at least three different popes subsequently came close to having removed.

Rarely remembering that it was Congreve who said Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

Rarely remembering that it was Congreve who said Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. In the same play.

People none of whose business it is repeatedly excising the
Hughes
from the Yorkshire gravestone inscribed
Sylvia Plath Hughes.

Moses Mendelssohn died of a stroke.

Felix Mendelssohn died of a stroke.

Slabtown, Tennessee, Grace Moore was born in.

If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth Writer were to burn a Roy Lichtenstein—qualms?

Qualmless.

Kierkegaard was regularly beaten up by his schoolmates. Yeats
aussL

Christina Rossetti died while praying.

Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore.

The Muses’ darling, Peele called Marlowe.

O Rare Ben Jonson.

So it befell in that affray that the said Ingram, in defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid of the value of 12d. gave the said Christopher then & there a mortal wound over his right eye of the depth of two inches & of the width of one inch; of which mortal wound the aforesaid Christopher Morley then & there instantly died.

Negative capability.

Sartre died blind. Having been strabismic.

Like Menander.

Splendid rooms and elegant furnishings are for people who have no thoughts, Goethe said.

Even in a palace it is possible to live well, said Marcus Aurelius.

If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead.

Ludwig Boltzmann took piano lessons from Anton Bruckner.

Eleanor Bull’s. Deptford Strand.

Andrew Marvell died of what was called tertian ague. Probably meaning malaria.

Which his physician misdiagnosed.

Thackeray died of what was called a cerebral effusion. Meaning either a brain hemorrhage or a stroke.

Jacob Barsimson. New Amsterdam, August 1654.

Lasse Viren.

No one, in any language, has ever written a novel that equals or even approaches
Clarissa,
said Rousseau.

On a shelf with the Bible, Euripides, and Sophocles, said Diderot of the same book.

Hannah Arendt died of a heart attack.

Watteau died of tuberculosis.

The little Marcel, at fourteen, asked to name life’s greatest unhappiness:

To be separated from
maman.

Dear Sir:

I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. Your review is before me. Shortly it will be behind me.

Did the American Indian not have the wheel?

Dies Irae.

A presumptuous mediocrity, Tchaikovsky called Brahms.

Undoubtedly the best woman poet of our time, Hardy called Charlotte Mew.

How does Gertrude know all of the physical details of Ophelia’s death with such exactness?

Soldiers! An innocent man is being degraded! Soldiers! An innocent is dishonored! Long live France!

Zola never met Dreyfus.

Max Reger.

Petrarch’s copy of Virgil, with a marginal note in his own handwriting about the death of Laura in the Black Death, is still extant in a library in Milan.

The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead Did squeak and jibber in the Roman streets.

Or an ersatz prose alternative to
The Waste Land,
if Writer so suggests.

William of Ockham also died in the Black Death.

Robert Burns had nine illegitimate children.

Goya had nineteen
legitimate
children, by one wife. And several others otherwise.

Augustus John’s habit of patting every passing London youngster on the head: In case it is one of mine.

Brainsick.
Troilus’s word for Cassandra in
Troilus and Cressida.

Lowell, Massachusetts, James McNeill Whistler was born in.

Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac was born in.

Dies irae, dies ilia Solvet saeclum in favilla.

In one of his reincarnations, Pythagoras was a fish. And in another a bird. He said.

Met him pike hoses.

In 1537, Francois Rabelais taught a course on Hippocrates at the school of medicine in Montpellier. In Greek.

Diego Rivera’s affair with Paulette Goddard. Diego Rivera’s affair with Louise Nevelson.

Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: The Artist’s Mother.

To be precise.

You ever read that, that
Cousin Bettel
Should I go on with it?

Virtually every inadequacy in recent French literature is due to absinthe, Daudet said in the late 1800s.

Annals
165. Where Tacitus actually does, does, call a spade
an implement for digging earth and cutting turf.

Paul Klee died of cardiac arrest after years of enduring scleroderma.

Sarah Orne Jewett died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Thomas of Celano.

I have wasted all my youth chained to this tomb. Michelangelo protested to Julius n.

Uhomme est ne libre, et partout il est dans les fers.

Why hasn’t Writer ever known? What is the black liquid that spills out of the dead Emma Bovary’s mouth?

O death, where is thy sting at?

Les Rougon-Macquart.

Montesquieu died of pneumonia.

Eliot pursued graduate studies in the philosophy of E H. Bradley, in part at Merton College, Oxford, where Bradley was still a lifetime fellow.