This is Not a Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

twenty-five, Paul Valery did not publish a line.
    Wagner died in 1883. Cosima not until 1930.
    Dante Gabriel Rossetti died of Bright’s disease.
    Tennessee Williams choked to death on the plastic cap of a nasal spray.
    Let’s choose executors, and talk of wills.
    He is either mad, or he is reading Don Quixote. Said Philip HI, at the sight of a student banging himself on the head and doubling over in hysterics over a book.
    Perugino probably died of plague.
    There is no one so foolish as to praise Don Quixote. Said Lope de Vega.
The Metropolitan Museum’s only Caravaggio, the early Allegory of Music, was not known of for more than three centuries.
And was walked off with for less than one hundred pounds when come upon in an English antique shop.
    This can only be the devil or Bach himself!
No date will ever be available for Marian Anderson in Constitution Hall.
Said Constitution Hall.
    Camus went through most of his adult life with recurrent tuberculosis.
    Michael Tippett spent three months in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector in World War II.
    The tail gunner on the Enola Gay wore a Brooklyn Dodgers cap.
    Antonio Gaudi died after being hit by a streetcar in Barcelona.
    Blaise Cendrars died after a series of strokes.
The worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 killed forty million people.
Including Apollinaire. And Egon Schiele.
    And both of Mary McCarthy’s parents.
Descartes and Pascal met twice.
Neither being impressed.
David Hume was grossly fat, reported even to crack chairs.
Edward Gibbon became equally so.
Amy Lowell as well.
    What sort of chamber pot had Bishop Berkeley?
    Enoch Aiden.
    The kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled, George Orwell described Auden as.
Orwell on Sean O’Casey:
Very stupid.
On Steinbeck:
Spurious.
    La Ttahison des oleics.
    Until he was forty, Hermann Broch was the manager of his family’s textile firm.
    Grazia Deledda died of breast cancer.
    Dost thou think Alexander look’t o’ this fashion i’ th’ earth? And smelt so? Pah!
    Not even worth the trouble of condemning, said Gautier of Manet’s Olympia.
As late as in 1874, Jacob Burckhardt felt licensed to dismiss Jan Vermeer as inconsequential:
Women reading and writing letters and such things.
    Archilochos is said to have died in battle.
    The most acute thinker ever born, Kant called Kepler.
    The first English translation of Madame Bovary was done by a daughter of Karl Marx.
    Who would later take her own life much the way Emma does.
    An extant letter of Michelangelo’s complains about money that Luca Signorelli borrowed and never repaid.
He was always strumming upon something—his hat, his watch fob, the table, the chair, as if they were the keyboard.
Said Constanze.
    Far too many notes, my dear Mozart.
    Quentin de La Tour died mad.
    Charlie Parker died of pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, though with unquestioned contributions from alcohol and drugs.
    Quinquiieme of Nineveh from distant Ophir.
    Boccaccio’s tale of Giotto, on horseback, caught in an August rainstorm.
    Hunchback’d Papist, Pope was called in print.
    Maeterlinck died of a heart condition.
    Beethoven, preoccupied. Crossing to his washstand to pour water over his head oblivious of the fact that he is fully dresssed.
    And even in the ages to come, men will make of us a song for telling.
    Says Helen to Hector of their destiny.
    Theodore Dreiser once tried to bribe H. L. Mencken to start a campaign promoting him for the Nobel Prize.
    After the burning, Joan of Arc’s remains were dumped into the Seine.
    After the burning, Savonarola’s remains were dumped into the Arno.
    James Clerk Maxwell died of abdominal cancer.
    During the thirty days’ grace between his conviction and the hemlock, Socrates memorized a long poem by Stesichorus.
    I wish to die knowing one thing more.
    You have only to walk about until your legs are heavy, and then to lie down, and the poison will act. Explains the jailer in Phaedo.
    What Pieter