The Last Novel - By David Markson Page 0,14

an author which he himself did not intend for publication — especially letters — is a despicable act.

Had said Heine earlier.

What the dickens, lower case — which has nothing to do with the author of Great Expectations.

I cannot tell what the dickens his name is, says someone in The Merry Wives of Windsor, on stage by 1601.

It is never difficult to paint, said Dalí.

It is either easy or impossible.

Willie Yeats, he was frequently called.

William Cuthbert Faulkner, his full name was.

Christopher Marlowe evidently wrote Tamburlaine while still a student at Cambridge.

Learn or leave. A third alternative is to be flogged.

Declared a Latin inscription at the entrance to a church-sponsored Medieval English elementary school.

Rousseau’s father was a watchmaker.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu died of breast cancer.

Too much interest in music could turn one effeminate.

Kant said.

Tolstoy’s certainty that Darwin was already beginning to be forgotten.

As early as in 1903.

Hugh Kenner’s sense of the same re Freud.

Whom he called already nearly as dated as Trilby — in 1958.

Goyisher kopf.

Byron, with amiable confidence, to friends whose silence suggested that they did not particularly admire Don Juan:

I wish you all better taste.

The ugliness of some of his music is really masterly.

Stated a London journal after an early Delius concert.

Andromache. Alcestis. Helen. Medea. The Bacchae.

Each of which Euripides ends with his chorus speaking an identical verse — to the effect that the ways of the gods are unpredictable.

Helen, the most famous woman in Greek mythology — whose name is not a Greek name.

The curiosity that we possess copies of ten evidently authentic letters of Dante’s — and not one of Shakespeare’s.

August 11, 1494, Hans Memling died on.

Dylan Thomas’s eighteenth birthday, Sylvia Plath was born on.

I hate that dreadful hollow behind the little wood.

Strolling on Park Avenue in New York, John Gielgud unexpectedly runs into Greta Garbo — Looking like a displaced charwoman, he later reports.

Edgell Rickword lost an eye as an officer in France in World War I.

Siegfried Sassoon was wounded twice.

Thinking with someone else’s brain.

Schopenhauer called reading.

In the late spring of 1944, at the height of their efficiency, the forty-six ovens in the crematoriums at Auschwitz were incinerating as many as twelve thousand corpses per day.

The word genocide had not existed until being coined by a Polish scholar in that same year.

Italo Svevo had to pay to publish Confessions of Zeno.

Stratford-on-Avon, Marie Corelli died in.

I say that if you can tell a story in a picture and if a reasonable number of people like your work, it is art.

Said Norman Rockwell.

If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting it should be burned.

Said Shaw.

Ronald Reagan was a clandestine informer for the FBI when it was investigating so-called left-wing influences in Hollywood in the 1940s.

Confucius was illegitimate.

Michelangelo’s passing comment to Raphael, at the Vatican, that there was a young painter in Florence who would bring sweat to his brow — unquote — if he ever fulfilled himself.

Meaning Andrea del Sarto.

Michelangelo, who was incidentally eight years older than Raphael — and would outlive him by forty-four.

And Andrea by thirty-three.

The paper shit is endless.

Quoth a 1911 letter of Einstein’s re university teaching.

Reviewers who have accused Novelist of inventing some of his anecdotes and/or quotations — without the elemental responsibility to do the checking that would verify every one of them.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.

Said John Osborne.

Sein oder nicht sein — ja, dass ist die Frage.

Reads Schlegel’s translation.

March 3, 1996, Marguerite Duras died on.

Simonides once rejected a meager fee to compose an ode to the winner of a mule race, insisting he did not write about jackasses.

The fee was increased. Wind-swift steeds, the jackasses miraculously became.

Isamu Noguchi’s sets for Martha Graham.

Eva Hesse was dead at thirty-four.

The fact is, I did not eat every day during that period of my life.

Said André Breton, explaining a possible origin for some of his earliest surrealist writings.

The Pope may judge all and be judged by no man.

Said Innocent III.

Pericles’ mistress Aspasia, who ran a school for courtesans — and was comfortably at home in intellectual discussion with Socrates.

No different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation.

Said someone on radio named Rush Limbaugh about American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

People having a good time.

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

On exhibition in a New York gallery in 2005, a portrait of Seamus Heaney — by Derek Walcott.

Which would barely pass muster in an undergraduate painting class, according to the New York Times.

Curiously impressed by the fact that Auden paid