The Last Novel - By David Markson Page 0,4
knowing that the other Gorky was not really named Gorky either.
Lying on his back in a field for hours, sometimes from almost before dawn or until latest evening, memorizing the light in the sky.
Reads a friend’s recollection of Claude Lorrain.
The sky can never be merely a background.
Said Alfred Sisley.
Imperialist bourgeois and decadent counterrevolutionary tendencies.
Both Shostakovich and Prokofiev were accused of at one time or another by Soviet authorities.
God gave me the money.
Unquote. John D. Rockefeller.
The noblest title in the world is that of having been born a Frenchman, said Napoleon.
Born in Corsica — of Italian ancestry.
Alexei Maximovitch Peshkov.
Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. I have seen nothing like it, but indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything.
Said Charlotte Brontë of Emily.
Vespasian, who is remembered for having built the Colosseum.
But who also established Rome’s first public urinals.
The interrelationship of Picasso and Braque during Cubism:
Like being roped together on a mountain, Braque said.
Stalin read Hemingway.
His ferocious egoism revolts me every time I think of it.
Said the wife Gauguin left behind.
Cézanne’s Old Woman of the Beads —
Posed for by a servant he took in basically out of charity, and who then stole and shredded much of his underwear — which he allowed her to sell back to him as rags for his brushes.
Almost forgetting Emily Brontë’s mastiff — which slept at the door of her room for years, after her death.
That harmonious plagiary and miserable flatterer, whose cursed hexameters were drilled into me at Harrow.
Byron spoke of Virgil as.
Benny Goodman once cancelled an engagement at the Hotel New Yorker on the very day it was scheduled to start — when he was informed that all black musicians connected with his band would have to come and go through the hotel kitchen.
It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
Said Mark Twain — of Jane Austen.
I’ve been shitting, so ’tis said, nigh twenty-two years through the same old hole, which is not yet frayed one bit.
Wrote Mozart to his cousin Anna Maria Thekla.
With whom he may or may not have had an affair.
Émile Zola’s terror of thunder and lightning — so extreme that he not only shut all windows and lit every nearby lamp, but even sometimes blindfolded himself.
Human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind.
Tom Paine called religions.
Senseless and criminal bigotry.
Nehru saw in them.
I thought I had done that already.
Said Mallarmé — at the first talk of Debussy setting L’Après-midi d’un Faune to music.
Einstein’s honorary degree from Harvard.
Evidently at the recommendation of an alumnus named Franklin D. Roosevelt.
I wish you good night, but first shit into your bed.
Reads another Mozart letter to Anna Maria.
Leering effrontery, Harper’s Weekly once accused Matisse of.
He’ll probably never write a good play again.
Responded George Bernard Shaw — on being told that Eugene O’Neill had given up drinking.
Willem de Kooning was twenty-two when he emigrated to the United States from Rotterdam — as a stowaway on a British freighter.
The oddity that Velazquez and Picasso, surely two of the three greatest Spanish-born painters, each used his mother’s name rather than his father’s.
Among the fragments of ancient Greek literature unearthed in Egypt, where the climate and the soil preserve them extraordinarily, there is almost twice as much material about Homer as anyone else.
And five times as much Plato as Aristotle.
Andrew Lang’s indignation over a mild blasphemy in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
A gentleman who turned Christian for half an hour, Hardy dismissed him as.
Spinoza, who spent his last years in a single attic room in The Hague — and slept in some variant or other of what is now called a Murphy bed.
Spinoza. Shoving or yanking or hoisting or whatever, to force the unstable whatchamacallit up against the wall each morning.
Unworthy of the poets’ corner of a country newspaper.
Yeats called Wilfred Owen.
No one expressed interest in publishing Shelley’s Defense of Poetry until almost twenty years after his death.
No one expressed interest in publishing Billy Budd until thirty-three years after Melville’s.
Every Grass, Emily Dickinson once refers to.
While also contriving:
The Grass so little has to do
I wish I were a Hay —
Balzac had written eighty-five novels in his Comédie humaine — with fifty more already planned — before dying at the age of fifty-one.
Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together.
Said Kierkegaard.
Amid the clutter of multilingual graffiti beside the door to the St. Petersburg garret that is alleged to be the one Dostoievsky used as a model for Raskolnikov’s:
Don’t do it, Rodya!
Old enough to remember when they