The Last Novel - By David Markson Page 0,1

without quite realizing it began to mentally revise the lines.

Until it embarrassingly dawned on him that he was rewriting Racine and not himself.

Vermeer died in 1675. At which time one of his largest debts was, in fact, to a Delft baker.

For bread to feed a family of thirteen.

In November 1919, after a solar eclipse had irrefutably verified Einstein’s concept of relativity, British physicists convened a major press gathering to announce it. The New York Times assigned the story to a man named Henry Crouch — a golf reporter.

An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar. Oblivion lurks in the immediate neighborhood.

Said Thomas Bailey Aldrich of Emily Dickinson.

The William Sakspere of Gloucestershire — who was hanged as a thief in 1248.

Along with a letter of homage, Berlioz sent copies of the score of The Damnation of Faust to Goethe.

Who never responded.

Venomously malignant. Noxious. Blasphemous. Grotesque. Disgusting. Repulsive. Entirely bestial. Indecent.

Being among the critical greetings for Leaves of Grass.

Not to omit ithyphallic audacity.

Plus garbage.

Profound stupidity. Maniacal raving. Pure nonsense.

Among some for the best of Shelley.

Which was also called abominable.

Infantile. Absurd. Driveling. Nauseating.

Reserved for Wordsworth.

For the rain it raineth every day.

Actually, Goethe had been gratified by Berlioz’ letter. But then showed the Faust score to a now long-forgotten minor German composer — who informed him it was valueless.

After the 1953 Laurence Olivier film of The Beggar’s Opera, Britain’s Inland Revenue Service repeatedly sent inquiries regarding an address for John Gay — from whom they had not received income tax returns.

1732, Gay was buried at Westminster Abbey in.

I like Mr. Dickens’ books much better than yours, Papa.

Said one of Thackeray’s daughters.

At the height of his career, Richard Brinsley Sheridan had become the owner of the Drury Lane Theater. And subsequently astonished everyone concerned by calmly drinking in a nearby coffeehouse when it went up in flames:

Surely a man may be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside?

What would you think this artist puts on canvas? Whatever fills his mind. And what can be in the mind of a man who spends his life in the company of prostitutes of the lowest order?

Inquired a review of François Boucher by Denis Diderot in 1765 — when libel was evidently an absent concept.

An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing house.

Auden called Poe.

After having been driven to distraction by an organ grinder across the street from his Rome apartment, Pietro Mascagni finally politely demonstrated to the man how to operate the instrument less loudly.

Later to find him wearing a sign while performing: Pupil of Mascagni.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

Said Gertrude Stein.

It is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for one’s mind.

Said T. S. Eliot — re Stein’s prose.

Whistler, intending to show someone a new painting in his studio — who would always step in first and turn every other canvas to the wall.

Jackie Robinson had already played major league baseball for eight years before the Metropolitan Opera saw fit to ask Marian Anderson, then fifty-seven, to become its first black performer.

A full half-century after Marie Curie died from exposure to radiation, the very cookbooks she had once used were found to remain contaminated.

The courtesan Laïs, who once asserted that she knew nothing at all about the alleged wisdom of poets and philosophers — except that they knocked at her door as frequently as anyone else.

No philosopher has ever influenced the attitudes of even the street he lived on.

Said Voltaire.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

I do not see why exposition and description are a necessary part of a novel.

Said Ivy Compton-Burnett.

I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man.

Said Joyce.

Rilke was raised as a girl — in girl’s clothing — until he started school at the age of seven.

The Rilke who would later devotedly collect lace.

And maintain apartments habitually overflowing with roses.

García Lorca’s ten or eleven months in New York City — during which he apparently did not learn two dozen words of English.

I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it.

Said Gorky re Tolstoy.

What sort of Christian life is this, I should like to know? He hasn’t a drop of love for his children, for me, or for anyone but himself.

Reads a contrasting