The Last Novel - By David Markson Page 0,12

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