Reader's Block, Page 2

  Flaubert's lamp burned with such regularity late at night in his workroom at Croisset that pilots on the Seine were able to take their bearings from it.

  Or would Raskolnikov surely at least sometimes see them from other vantage points?

  In this house the same initial impermanence, the same cartons.

  At twenty, Bach made a pilgrimage of more than two hundred miles, on foot, to hear Buxtehude play the organ.

  Ship me somewheres east of Suez.

  If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of little old ladies.

  A person on business from Porlock.

  Aldonza Lorenzo.

  Raskolnikov wrote some books once.

  Very little happened in connection with any of them. In any event that was long ago.

  Jack London committed suicide.

  Bruno Schulz was carrying home a loaf of bread when he was shot down in the street by the Gestapo.

  Protagonist reading. Hearing them, up above.

  Mussorgsky died raving mad from drink.

  A listing still exists of the winning runners in the Olympic Games from 776 B.C. through the next 993 years. Events in Greek history were dated by the Olympiad in which they occurred.

  Kant was an anti-Semite.

  That garage area, at the rear, looks out onto little more than scrub and brush. There is a path Raskolnikov/Bloom follows through the dunes, but heading away diagonally, so that he has almost no view of the upper story then either.

  Anaximander was sixty-four years old in the second year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad.

  Being how Diogenes Laertius once situates him.

  Would some sort of deck on the upper story face the ocean? How distantly perceived from the beach when Protagonist strolls there?

  Only a lunatic would dance when sober, said Cicero.

  Behold, I have heard that there is corn in Egypt.

  How many years have passed since the last burial in the cemetery? Do mourners still appear?

  Heraclitus did not say that one cannot step into the same river twice. One of his followers did.

  Heraclitus did say that praying to statues of the gods was like talking to a house instead of to its owner, however.

  And that souls smell in Hades.

  A. E. Housman never in his life lived in Shropshire.

  Ralph Roister-Doister.

  It took eight years to sell the first printing of six hundred copies of The Interpretation of Dreams.

  Our sister, death.

  Perhaps one solitary mourner appearing, regularly, at one grave. Here again, a woman. Young. In fact too young to have a connection with anyone buried here that Protagonist can fathom.

  Or are some few of the graves more recent?

  Roland Barthes died after being hit by a laundry truck.

  When Ovid was banished from Rome, it was to Tomi, on the Black Sea.

  Would Reader have otherwise ever heard of a city in Romania now called Constanta?

  Anne Bradstreet's first home in Massachusetts, a decade after the Mayflower, was at what later would become Harvard Square.

  Aesop was a slave. Terence was a slave. Epictetus was a slave.

  Protagonist watching the woman who appears?

  After a time, finding himself waiting for her almost unwittingly?

  Helen Frankenthaler Motherwell, her name legally once was.

  Frederic Chopin was an anti-Semite.

  Madame,

  If I interpret your letter right, you are ignominiously married; if it is yet undone, let us once talk together.

  Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an insane asylum.

  Someone will call. Surely someone will call.

  Aristotle's may have been the first purely private library.

  At forty-six, after an illness, Goya suddenly turned stone deaf.

  How long can Reader deal with Protagonist's isolation without explaining his background?

  How conceivable is it for the emptiness to simply exist?

  L’Être et le Néant.

  Blaise Cendrars lost an arm in World War I. As did one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's brothers, a concert pianist.

  Lice in the locks of literature, Tennyson called critics.

  Or will the question persist? Why does Protagonist have no life?

  Having written books of his own, would he have known other writers?

  Does he not, now?

  After Anne Sexton turned on her car's engine in a closed garage to commit suicide, she sat drinking vodka while waiting.

  Erinna of Telos, who died at nineteen.

  Twenty-three hundred years ago.

  Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.

  The woman at the grave.

  Brunelleschi was the first Renaissance artist about whom a full-length biography was written.

  I am weary, Ananda, and wish to lie down.

  June 22, 1633:

  With sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and abhor the aforesaid errors and heresies contrary to the Holy Church, and I swear that henceforward I will never again say or declare, verbally or in writing, anything that might bring about a similar suspicion toward me.

  Goethe did not go to bed with a woman until he was forty.

  Where would Protagonist's son and/or daughter be? How often would he see, hear from them?

  Will he?

  Samuel Beckett was once forced to hide for ten days under a false floor in Nathalie Sarraute's Paris attic while working for the Resistance in World War II.

  Eppur si muove.

  Armande Bejart.

  Tolstoy's wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times.

  An illiterate, underbred book.

  Said Virginia Woolf of Ulysses.

  I can't even pronounce the filthy thing.

  Said Wallace Stevens of the word womb in a poem.

  All legends to the contrary, Empedocles did not leap into Mount Etna. Or even die in Sicily.

  Byron was nine when he was introduced to sex by his nurse, one May Gray.

  How well insulated would the ceiling of a former garage be? Would Ishmael/Meursault/Kurtz be aware of virtually every movement on the floor above?

  Tony Trollope, he was naturally called.

  Madeleine Grey. The Chants d'Auvergne.

  Why is it never part of Reader's active memory that Helen of Troy was the daughter of a god and was hatched from an egg?

  Though Homer insists she was mortal.

  Aquinas knew almost nothing about history.

  Maigret.

  Does it go without saying that this upstairs presence would accentuate Protagonist's sense of his aloneness?

  Does it go without saying that he deplores being alone?

  Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself in the head. He may have been playing Russian roulette rather than definitely intending suicide.

  But in either event had put on a clean shirt first.

  Menin aei'de, tbea.

  George Gissing's first wife became a prostitute. His second wife went mad.

  No one nodding to him on the street in passing after all? Something more categorical?

  I am completely alone here now?

  Helen was not the first petticoat that caused a war.

  Says Burton in the Anatomy.

  Impoverished and freezing, Gerard de Nerval hanged himself near a cheap Paris doss-house after no one responded to his late-night knock.

  Alexander Pushkin was an anti-Semite.

  The Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.

  Hegel had an illegitimate son. At his wedding, the boy's mother showed up with a letter promising matrimony. And had to be bought off on the spot.

  Protagonist is completely alone here now.

  Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

  102 Boulevard Haussman.

  Even
on the coolest evenings, when she kneels at the grave, the woman is bareheaded.

  Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors. He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he wrote Cicero the news.

  Ananda. Having been Buddha's cousin, as well as his favorite pupil.

  The Gulf of Spezia.

  Masaccio died at twenty-seven. So suddenly that poison was not unsuspected, Vasari says.

  The eulogy at Puccini's funeral was delivered by Benito Mussolini.

  November 9, 1953. St. Vincent's Hospital, Seventh Avenue and West 11th Street, New York.

  Acute alcoholic insult to the brain.

  Taliesin.

  Willem de Kooning lived as an illegal immigrant for his first thirty years in the United States.

  On one of Reader's windowsills: framed photographs of his son and daughter, a scuffed baseball, a sunbleached knotted root plucked from the Ebro.

  Poe was expelled from West Point for refusing to obey military orders. Later, James McNeill Whistler would fail there academically.

  Why is it commonly referred to as the Arnolfini Marriage, or even the Arnolfini Betrothal, when she is seven months pregnant?

  Im Westen Nichts Neues.

  Decades afterward, locked indelibly in Reader's mind: the last two pages of Good Morning, Midnight

  Ernest Hemingway was an anti-Semite.

  Ingenious nonsense, Isaac Newton dismissed poetry as.

  Fernande Olivier.

  Dora Maar.

  Marie-Therese Walter.

  Olga Koklova.

  Françoise Gilot.

  Jacqueline Roque.

  Rabelais: As for you, little envious Prigs, snarling, bastard, puny Critics, you'll soon have railed your last: Go hang yourselves.

  A one-legged woman, in a conspicuously short skirt, manipulating swiftly on crutches along a crowded street.

  Why does Reader still recall having noticed her, quite some few years ago now in fact, and even somewhat distantly?

  On the actual night before her wedding, Edith Wharton had no idea of the facts of life.

  Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go.

  There is no mention of Ockham's Razor in anything Ock-ham ever wrote.

  Protagonist walking the beach, probably every day, at water's edge.

  Oddly, Reader for the moment viewing him particularly in harsh weather, huddled against winds.

  Snow in patches.

  Wittgenstein was cited for bravery three times during World War I.

  Fighting against the Allies.

  Goat song.

  How frequently would the women make use of that main upper section of the house in winter?

  What sort of heating arrangement does Protagonist have?

  Nelson Algren, not Sartre, gave Simone de Beauvoir her first orgasm.

  The interminable recitations on the part of the dying in the Iliad, even as they are being literally disemboweled.

  Then again Reader has also loved opera.

  Walter Benjamin committed suicide at the border between France and Spain in 1940.

  Fleeing the Nazis, he had been turned back by Spanish authorities.

  Alfred Thayer Mahan. Sir Edward S. Creasy.

  After fasting to a point of starvation, Gogol died in a religious delirium.

  And after having burned the only manuscript of part two of Dead Souls.

  The ladder! Quick! Pass me the ladder!

  Martin Luther was an anti-Semite.

  A Methodist parson in Bedlam, Horace Walpole called Dante.

  Le Douanier Rousseau: Who is Giotto?

  Ich kann nicht anders.

  To the best of his knowledge, Raskolnikov does not know a soul in this place.

  And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an eggshell, a bit of string.

  Jean Rhys would appear to have lived a life very like those of her several heroines, of cheap hotels and threadbare clothing in drearier neighborhoods of Paris and London. Reader has been drawn to an affecting photograph of her when young, the for-lornness already intimated.

  Protagonist has been drawn to a photograph of her?

  Who was M'Intosh?

  How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?

  By Wagner's lights, Nietzsche's many physical ailments were the result of excessive masturbation. Cold water being recommended.

  Would anyone else walk the beach at that time of year? In that sort of weather?

  Rilke died of leukemia.

  If Protagonist is in fact to have children, must anything be said about the years of his marriage?

  About other women in his life since?

  Martin Droeshout.

  Richard Lovelace spent his last years in unimaginable poverty, sometimes scavenging for garbage to subsist. And dying of consumption in a cellar.

  The vocabulary in Shakespeare's plays includes 29,066 different words. There are 29,899 different words in Ulysses.

  But at that moment the door opened and a personage entered who was a stranger to all present.

  Or does no one come to the cemetery?

  Protagonist kept company by sparrows. Field mice. A squirrel.

  Christopher Marlowe's father was a shoemaker.

  When W. H. Auden died, his future royalties were left to Chester Kallman. When Kallman died only sixteen months later, they went to the latter's father, a dentist.

  Then the dentist died and everything went to his second wife.

  Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

  Savonarola was burned at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence in 1498. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the Campo de Fiori in Rome in 1600.

  Savonarola was granted the kindness of being hanged beforehand. Bruno was alive and conscious.

  Amarantha sweet and fair,

  Ah, braid no more that shining hair!

  Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.

  The first lectures on Shakespeare at a British university were given at Oxford, by one William Hawkins, in 1751. In Latin.

  Sick, muddle-headed, sex-mad D. H. Lawrence, Robert Graves called him.

  May 30, 1593. Eleanor Bull's Tavern, Deptford Strand.

  Three weeks passed before Virginia Woolf s body was found after she committed suicide by walking into the River Ouse.

  Has Reader ever seen the Ouse named in any other regard, anywhere, except in Anna Livia Plurabelle?

  Not one of Thomas Hardy's first three novels sold more than twenty copies.

  Skeres. Poley. Ingram Frizer.

  In fact all of the women in Protagonist's life, from whenever.

  Should he remember?

  Shouldn't he?

  Chronometricals and Horologicals.

  Alma-Tadema.

  Sir Thomas More was beheaded at the Tower of London. The Earl of Surrey was beheaded at the Tower of London. Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded at the Tower of London.

  Life is a long preparation for something that never happens, Yeats said.

  Oremus.

  Coleridge was frequently bullied as a schoolboy. As was Shelley. Shelley once went after one of those baiting him with a pitchfork.

  Mark Rothko committed suicide by slashing the inside of his arms at the elbows with a double-edged razor blade.

  First folding Kleenex over one edge of the blade to keep from cutting his fingers.

  But who are you? You are not from the castle, you are not from the village, you aren't anything.

  Sgt. Joyce Kilmer. Alan Seeger. Lt. Col. John McCrae.

  Pergolesi wrote his Stabat Mater at twenty-six. And was dead in the same year.

  A one-legged woman in a conspicuously short skirt.

  In Rapallo, for years, Ezra Pound spent two nights a week with his wife Dorothy and five nights with Olga Rudge.

  And had children by both.

  Voltaire was an anti-Semite.