The Last Novel - By David Markson Page 0,30

repeated irrepressible grins of delight?

I fear that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.

Said Sarah Bernhardt of Nijinsky.

He eats with his knife and accompanies every gesture, every movement of his hand, with that implement, which he grasps firmly when he commences his meal and never puts down until he leaves the table.

Said Mary Cassatt re Cézanne — and what she also described as his total disregard for the dictionary of manners, unquote.

The likelihood that Lenin died of syphilis.

Raymond Chandler did not publish his first novel until he was fifty.

Dashiell Hammett published his fifth novel at thirty-nine — and not one thing else in the remaining twenty-seven years of his life.

Great Empedocles, that ardent soul,

Leapt into Etna, and was roasted whole.

Oh, that flagon, that wicked flagon! thought Rip — what excuse shall I make to Dame Van Winkle?

Chekhov’s grandfather had been a serf.

The speculation that Horace’s father, himself a manumitted slave, might also have been a Jew.

December 11, 1513, Pintoricchio died on.

So excessively did Shaw admire Strindberg that he actually used the money from his Nobel Prize to arrange for better English translations of Strindberg’s plays.

John Steinbeck, asked if he felt he had in fact deserved his own Nobel Prize:

Frankly, no.

Thomas Nashe was dead at thirty-one. Where, of what, or even exactly when, remains unknown.

Zapata was thirty-nine when he was murdered.

Stephen Dedalus, at Sandymount, in 1904.

Is he aware that Yeats was born there?

Trollope’s declaration that he wrote with his watch on the desk in front of him — so that he could be certain he had produced at least two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour.

The measure of a man’s greatness would be in terms of what his work cost him.

Wittgenstein once told someone.

Picasso’s admiration for Charlie Chaplin.

Diego Rivera’s.

Stalin’s.

As early as in Plutarch:

Let them who can do nothing better, teach.

Mr. Churchill, you are drunk.

And you, Madame, are ugly. But I shall be sober tomorrow.

The novels of Susan Sontag:

Self-indulgent overrated crap, the Kevin Costner character calls them in the movie Bull Durham.

From a letter of Balzac’s, in his mid-thirties, recording that in a fit of creative frenzy he had just spent twenty-six consecutive days without once leaving his study:

Sometimes it seems to me that my very brain is on fire.

No further martinis after dinner, Conrad Aiken’s physician once commanded.

Following which Aiken frequently refused to eat until practically bedtime.

If they do see fields blue, they are deranged, and should go to an asylum. If they only pretend to see them blue, they are criminals, and should go to prison.

Being Hitler — re artists he categorized as degenerate.

I shall fight as long as I live. And I shall not consider it more important to be alive than to be free.

Rang the first words of an oath taken by Athenians before battle.

The eighteenth-century evangelist George Whitefield. Whose pulpit voice was so effective, said David Garrick, that he could make listeners laugh or cry by no more than pronouncing the word Mesopotamia.

Gertrude Stein’s Model T style, Elizabeth Hardwick called it.

There is one rule that can render your hand so light that the brush will float, says Cennino Cennini’s handbook for painters, ca. 1435:

Do not enjoy too much the company of women.

Every drop of sperm spilled is a masterpiece lost.

Said Piet Mondrian, five hundred years later.

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw.

Piero della Francesca’s Nativity. In which Joseph has removed the saddle of an ass to use as a seat — while the ass itself brays in the background.

Erik Satie lived the entire later half of his life in extreme indigence.

Incredulity that Schubert’s Eighth Symphony — the Unfinished — was not once performed until thirty-seven years after his death.

Toasted Susie is my ice cream.

Pythagoras’s insistence that in one of his earlier incarnations he had fought in the Trojan War.

In fact that he had been Euphorbus, who in the Iliad wounds Patroclus and is in turn killed by Menelaus.

Borges’ vision of Paradise:

A kind of library.

The long-hoped-for opportunity to meet Byron that Schopenhauer turned away from at the last moment — when the woman he was with evinced far too much enthusiasm of her own about it.

Epi oinopa ponton.

Walter Scott’s novels generally cost him innumerable hours of hunting through reference books.

Which were forever heaped up precariously on the floor below his desk.

In addition to Italian, Leopardi possessed effortless mastery of Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, English, and Hebrew — by the age of sixteen.

October 21, 1969, Jack Kerouac died on.

Romain Rolland never learned which side won World War II.

Wondering how many