The Last Novel by David Markson Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    The child was mine — or so I at least
do think.
    Baudelaire’s addiction to laudanum.
    Coleridge’s. De Quincey’s.
    Poe’s.
    The Nike of Samothrace, in the Louvre, which was excavated in 1863 — in more than one hundred fragments.
    Newspapers expressed such indignation over the ostensible immorality in Richard Strauss’s Salome at its 1907 American premiere that the opera was withdrawn after a single performance and not produced again at the Metropolitan until 1934.
    Diseased and polluted. Indescribably, yes, inconceivably, gross and abominable. Unspeakable.
    Read a small portion of what the New York Times had to contribute.
    Aristide Maillol’s practice of repeatedly urinating on his bronze sculptures.
    To add patina.
    If you value my work, please, do not knock.
    Requested a notice on Hermann Hesse’s door in Ticino.
    Gérard de Nerval, in some of the milder moments of his madness — known to toss such money as he possessed into the air for anyone’s taking in restaurants and coffeehouses.
    Anne Sexton’s periods in mental institutions.
    Only native-born citizens in ancient Athens were allowed to own property.
    Meaning that no less a personage than Aristotle, from Stagira, could not.
    The nunnery on Montmartre, mentioned a few years earlier by François Villon, where in 1503 it was discovered that the abbess and several nuns had borne children — and still others were pregnant.
    A fiend of a book. The action is laid in Hell — only it seems places and people have English names there.
    Said Dante Gabriel Rossetti of Wuthering Heights.
    Olive Fremstad. Mary Garden. Ljuba Welitsch. Karita Matilla.
    Wagner played the piano badly.
    Berlioz not at all.
    For safety’s sake during the bombings of World War II, the Elgin Marbles were removed from the British Museum and stored deep in the London subway system.
    While the French Resistance during those same years was using the Lascaux cave as a place in which to cache weapons.
    Tchaikovsky was found weeping after he had written the death of Lisa in The Queen of Spades.
    Georges Bernanos was married to a direct descendant of a brother of Joan of Arc.
    A simple creature unlettyrde.
    Julian of Norwich called herself.
    The most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.
    Echoed Jane Austen — four hundred years afterward.
    Pastor Martin Niemöller — who spent seven years at Sachsenhausen and Dachau.
    After having been a German U-boat commander in World War I.
    April 13, 1945, Ernst Cassirer died on.
    Ivan Goncharov worked in the Russian Civil Service for his entire adult life.
    Mussorgsky, the same.
    Then again, quoting himself or not, Novelist naturally does receive some few phone calls after all.
    All too often in these years with news of someone’s death, however.
    Leonardo’s peculiar habit of surreptitiously following interesting-looking strangers on the street.
    To be able to sketch them from memory later, the contemporary assumption was.
    Christianity must be divine, since it has lasted seventeen hundred years despite the fact of being so full of villainy and absurdity.
    Voltaire said.
    The first priest was the first rogue who crossed paths with the first fool.
    Voltaire also said.
    Slop, Pound was calling Yeats’s recent verse in the mid-1930s — after having been best man at Yeats’s wedding two decades