The first page of David Markson’s copy of Herman Melville by Newton Arvin:

     On which Markson has placed as an inscription:
     “Markson N.Y.C.”

—-

     Though this scan is just an inscription of Markson’s in a book about Melville, I thought I’d use this chance to peak into an interesting mention of Melville in Markson…

     Nope, not in Markson’s tetralogy…

     Not in his Wittgenstein’s Mistress either…

     Nor Springer’s or Going Down…

     In Markson’s book on his mentor Lowry’s Under the Volcano, he spoke of the link between Lowry’s book and Melville’s Moby Dick:
     “Irrelevant to a symbolic ‘reading’ of Under the Volcano as such terminology might be, it can also serve as a point of departure for another incidental connection which must somewhere be made, between the limping Consul and the perhaps equally ‘castrated’ Captain Ahab. Where the Consul must substitute tom-cats for nightingales, his monomania correspondingly concerns bottles instead of any white whale, but mania it remains. Direct reference will occur when Hugh recalls having once felt, ‘for a moment asleep, like Melville, the world hurling from all heavens astern,’ and again when we are told that he has read the man. Less in terms of deliberate parallel, however, Moby-Dick must assert itself as ‘influence,’ surely in such matters as Melville’s genius for surrealistic foreshadowing, configurations of darkness and superstition and doom, even for such weighted symbols as funerals and devils. And at one point in the present chapter the Consul finds the summit of Popocatepetl lifting above the clouds ‘like a gigantic surfacing whale’—whereas in the original short story version of the novel (published for the first time in the Winter 1963/64 Prairie Schooner) the mountain is categorically recorded as ‘a sort of Moby Dick.’”
     From pgs. 50-51 of Markson’s Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth Symbol Meaning.

     Moby Dick, one of many literary masterpieces that was savaged by Melville’s contemporary critics…

     “So much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.
     The London Anthenaeum called Moby Dick.”
     – Vanishing Point, pg. 156.

     Though it later, of course, came to be hailed as one of the “Great American Novels”…

     Markson, for one, thought of it as one of the books he most admired:
     “Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights are high on the list [of books I admire]”
     He said in an interview with Joseph Tabbi.

     And just look at the praise it gets from a character in Markson’s Epitaph for a Tramp:
     “And thus it is my conclusion that The Recognitions by William Gaddis is not merely the best American first novel of our time, but perhaps the most significant single volume in all American fiction since Moby Dick, a book so broad in scope, so rich in comedy and so profound in symbolic inference…”
     – Epitaph for a Tramp / Epitaph for a Deadbeat, pg. 32

     And in Epitaph for a Dead Beat:    
     “I crawled to the studio. It didn’t take any longer than the voyage of the Pequod. I was carrying Moby Dick on my back and Moby was carrying Captain Ahab on his. Why the hell should I carry Ahab? All he had to complain about was a wooden leg, and I had a wooden head. Splintered. I dragged myself through the door, across a large room which reeked of turpentine, into a bathroom. Ahab, you hab, he hab. All God’s chillun hab, except Harry.”
     – Epitaph for a Tramp / Epitaph for a Dead Beat, pg. 327.

     The “Ahab, you hab…” word play Markson reused with slight variation in his novel Springer’s Progress:
     “Ahab, you hab, Springer hab. Oh, true, right here beside’s where the great whale ariseth.
     Moby Buttocks. While so much for thee indeed, young Rosen, Springer’s felicitations to the polliwogs and the sardines.”
     – Springer’s Progress, pg. 180.

     “‘The theme. Just from the feel of your thighs alone. Be the same as in Moby Dick.’
     ‘Oh, now for heaven’s sake, how?’
     ‘Captain Ahab. One pair like these in Nantucket and he’d have stayed home nights.’”
     – Springer’s Progress, pg. 140.    

     All this talk of Melville begs the question…

     “These streets, Steve, did Herman Melville walk these streets?”
     A question asked in Markson’s Going Down on pg. 158.

     Did

     Herman

     Melville

     Walk

     These

     Streets?

     “Certain questions would appear unanswerable.”
     –Wittgenstein’s Mistress, pg. 39

     “Evidently not every question falls into the category of questions that would appear to remain unanswerable, however.”
     –Wittgenstein’s Mistress, pg. 65

     Ahab, you hab, he hab, Springer hab, all God’s chillun hab…

     Pg. 37 of David Markson’s copy of The Failure of Criticism by Henri Peyre:    

     On which Markson placed two checks next to the following two sentences:
     “‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ did not receive the humble honor of one allusion in any text printed in Milton’s lifetime.”
     And:
     “Not a single contemporary apparently praised or even mentioned Lycidas.”

—-

     In his novel Vanishing Point, Markson reminds us of this:
     “Evidently not one word was said in print in Milton’s lifetime about Lycidas, L’Allegro, or Il Penseroso.” (Pg. 114).

     Rejection.
     Specifically the rejection of great works of art.
     And of the artists that make such great works.
     A common theme in Markson’s tetralogy.

     Pg. 296 of David Markson’s copy of Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

     On which Markson put a bracket around a letter that Francis Scott Fitzgerald sent to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald:
     “I wonder if you’ve read anything this summer—I mean any one good book like The Brothers Karamazov or Ten Days That Shook the World or Renan’s Life of Christ. You never speak of your reading except the excerpts you do in college, the little short bits that they must perforce give you. I know you have read a few of the books I gave you last summer—then I have heard nothing from you on the subject. Have you ever, for example, read Pere Goriot or Crime and Punishment or even The Doll’s House or St. Matthew or Sons and Lovers? A good style simply doesn’t form unless you absorb half a dozen top-flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journalese.”

—-

     I absolutely love those last two lines:
     “A good style simply doesn’t form unless you absorb half a dozen top-flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journalese.”

     Great wisdom to impart to your daughter. And to your readers, by way of Crack-Up.

     It is also interesting to know what books Fitzgerald suggests to his daughter.
     Ones mentioned in the above letter:
     The Brothers Karamazov
     Ten Days That Shook the World
     Life of Christ
     Père Goriot
     Crime and Punishment
     The Doll’s House
     St. Matthew
     Sons and Lovers

     A similar letter from Markson to his daughter Johanna, which I was able to get a sneak peak of at the Markson Memorial last year, speaks of novels he recommends she read.
     It says:
     “Dear Johanna—
     I can’t make you a list of my 100—or even 50—top 20th-Century novels. It would take me a  month.
     Instead here are just some of those that have meant the most to me—or which I’ve truly enjoyed. (I take them from a list I’ve actually scribbled into the back of an old Faulkner novel + added to over the years—though the original includes some older stuff—Dostoievsky, etc.—that I’ll leave out.) These are not in any special order.
                                                                                          xxx Dad
     Joyce – Ulysses
                 Finnegans Wake
     Lowry – Under the Volcano
     Gaddis – The Recognitions
     Djuna Barnes – Nightwood
     Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises
     West – Miss Lonelyhearts
     Cary – The Horse’s Mouth
     Camus – The Stranger
     Barth – The Sot-Weed Factor
     Grass – The Tin Drum
     Duras – The Lover
     Carpentier – The Lost Steps
     Faulkner – Light in August
                      The Sound + the Fury
                      Absalom, Absalom
                      As I Lay Dying
     Beckett – Malloy
                    Malone Dies
                    The Unnamable
     Hesse – Steppenwolf
                 Magister Ludi
     Celine – Journey to the End of the Night
                  Death on the Installment Plan
     Donleavy – The Ginger Man
     Rhys – Good Morning, Midnight
     Rushdie – Midnight’s Children
     Conrad – Lord Jim
                    Heart of Darkness
                    The Secret Agent
     PS—You’ll notice that Salman’s is the only one less than 20 yrs. old, alas. Forgive.”

     A good style simply doesn’t form unless you absorb half a dozen top-flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journalese.

     The epigraph of the first book in Markson’s tetralogy, Reader’s Block:
     “First and foremost, I think of myself as a reader.”

     “I have characters sitting alone in a bedroom with a head full of everything he’s ever read.”
     Markson explained of his tetralogy in his portable-infinite interview.

     Pg. 187 of David Markson’s copy of The Failure of Criticism by Henri Peyre:

     On which Markson put a vertical line in the margins next to a paragraph about the prevalence of madness, illness, drug addiction and homosexuality in great artists, or “great creators,” as the paragraph specifically calls them.

—-

     These are all important fascinations of Markson in his tetralogy:
     – Artists’ sanity
     – Artists’ health
     – Artists’ drug use
     – Artists’ sex lives

     The one I’d like to explore in this post is the first:
     – Artists’ sanity

     Artists that went mad are mentioned quite often in Markson’s tetralogy…

     “Mussorgsky died raving mad from drink.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 22).

     “Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an insane asylum.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 24).

     “Mary Lamb stabbed her mother to death. She was in and out of an institution all her life.
     When a new fit of madness seemed imminent, Charles calmly led her back into custody.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 43).

     “Hölderlin was insane, if harmlessly so, for more than thirty-five years. Frequently he improvised odd tunes at the piano for hours, or sang in what seemed an indecipherable combination of Latin, Greek, and German simultaneously.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 46).

     “Nietzsche played the piano endlessly in his own eleven years of madness. Once, at least, with his elbows.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 46).

     “David Gascoyne spent two decades in mental hospitals.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 68).

     “Nietzsche lost his reason because he thought too much. I do not think and therefore cannot go mad.
     Said Nijinsky, mad.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 79).

     “Robert Walser spent his last twenty-seven years in a mental institution.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 86).

     “Jonathan Swift left his money to found a hospital for the insane.
     And died mad.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 115).

     “Louis Althusser spent four years in a psychiatric hospital after strangling his wife.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 134).

     “Lucia Joyce, institutionalized, when told of her father’s death:
     What is he doing underground, that idiot?” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 171).

     “The solitary, melancholy life of Matthias Grünewald. Was he wholly sane?” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 11).

     “Christopher Smart died mad. And in debtors’ prison.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 23).

     “Ivan Goncharov was essentially deranged in the last thirty years of his life.
     And insisted that every word Turgenev published has been stolen from him.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 40).

     “No great talent has ever existed without a tinge of madness, Seneca says Aristotle said.
     All poets are mad, Robert Burton corroborated.
     A fine madness, being how Michael Drayton read it in the case of Marlowe.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 67).

     “Nebuchadnezzar. Who razed Jerusalem.
     And went mad.
     And ate grass.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 110).

     “Edward MacDowell died mad, probably from syphilis.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 150).

     “Jones Very spent time in the same Boston insane asylum where Robert Lowell would be a patient a century later.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 155).

     “Maurice Utrillo was in and out of insane asylums repeatedly, commencing as early as at eighteen.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 12).

     “January 1889, in Turin. Nietzsche, weeping, throws his arms around the neck of a mare being beaten by a coachman and then collapses in the street. Essentially the point of no return into his final madness.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 18).

     “At certain moments in his madness, John Clare was heard to hold conversations with Shakespeare.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 63).

     “Paul Morphy died insane.
     Buddy Bolden también.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 109).

     “Géricault’s portraits of the mad. Done at Salpetrière asylum and elsewhere—via special permission.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 112).

    “They said I was mad, and I said they were mad, and, damn them, they outvoted me.
     Said Dryden’s sometime collaborator Nathaniel Lee, upon being confined to Bedlam.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 139)

     “The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.
     Said Dali.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 165).

     “Antonin Artaud spent nine of his last eleven years in insane asylums.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 32).

     “Gérard de Nerval, in some of the milder moments of his madness—known to toss such money as he possessed into the air for anyone’s taking in restaurants and coffeehouses.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 61).

     “Quentin de La Tour, harmlessly deranged in his later years—and frequently seen talking to trees.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 74).

     “Delmore Schwartz, in his disturbed final years, hearing voices—and insisting that they were directed at him from the spire of the Empire State Building.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 113).

     “Horace Greeley died insane.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 130).

     “I too have written some good books.
     Said Nietzsche, overhearing someone’s reference to literature in a fleeting moment’s lucidity during his final madness.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 188).

     These are just a few of the many, many mentions of madness in Markson’s tetralogy…

     And madness is not just found in the tetralogy, but two of his other novels deal specifically with their main characters losing their sanity: Going Down and Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

     When Markson was asked about this in his Bookslut interview, and specifically asked whether or not “there is something about people at the edge of sanity” that appealed to him, he responded:
     “No, not at all, it’s just inviting. What the hell, craziness is a lot more dramatic to handle than sanity. Which Dostoevsky proved all those years ago—trying to write a book about a perfectly good person and it’s the one volume among all his major works that’s a total botch. Unlike all his others, filled with lunacy and suicide and murder, et cetera. Or think about ninety percent of all the literary protagonists we find most memorable—Ahab, Heathcliff, Stavrogin, even all the way back to Don Quixote—every one of them is certifiable.”

     The first page of David Markson’s copy of Picasso Drawings by Maurice Jardot:

     On which Markson wrote as an inscription:
     “—Markson, London 1967”

—-

     Seeing that this is a book specifically of drawings by Picasso, I thought I’d post this scan with a quote of Picasso’s re: drawing (as retold on pg. 2 of Markson’s This Is Not A Novel):
     “When I was their age I could draw like Raphael. But it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like they do.
     Said Picasso at an exhibition of children’s art.”

     Because it is Easter, I thought I’d include a Picasso drawing of the crucifixion to show how after a lifetime he could “draw like they do”…

     Also, since it is Easter today, I thought I’d add to today’s post a line from Springer’s Progress (one of my favorite Markson novels which I discussed a bit yesterday):
     “Writing one more poem too. Happy Easter, dear keester.” (Pg. 82).

     I am not a religious man, but I do wish all my fellow readers (of Markson reading) a sincere happy holiday:
     Happy Easter, dear keester.

     Pg. 426 of David Markson’s copy of James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism by Various (Ed. Seon Givens):

     On which Markson placed a check next to an explanation of Joycean punning in Finnegans Wake:
     “In another instance it uses the same devices to convert a religious line (the first line of the Confiteor) into a disguised sexual reference:
     mea culpa mea culpa
     May he colp, may he colp her
     mea maxima culpa
     may he mixandmass colp her!”

—-

     May he colp her?

     “Mea culpa. Anyway, what’s your news?”
     Says Springer in Springer’s Progress. (Pg. 109).

     Springer’s Progress: A novel in which Markson writes many of the same kind of playful sexual lines that Joyce does in the above scan—to the point where, because of such wordplay, it is often described as “Joycean,” even though it has a style all its own.

     “Joycean wordplay,” Les Whitten said it contains.

     And the New York Times wrote of it:
     “An exuberantly Joycean, yes, Joycean, celebration of carnality and creativity—and everything-goes, risk-taking, maniacally wild and funny and painful novel.”

     Though it is often overshadowed by Wittgenstein’s MIstress and the Notecard Quartet (my name for the tetralogy: Reader’s Block, This Is Not A Novel, Vanishing Point and The Last Novel), Springer’s Progress is no less breathtaking.

     It is what I would call a sex story, rather than a love story.
     Or as it is called on the back of the book: “a mature love story.”

     It is one of the best novels about sex (and specifically a protracted sexual affair) in existence.

     “Springer at least cognizant of the signal themes in that giglot manuscript of his, is he?
     Indubitably. Uno: he ever going to make Jess come again? Dos: how’s she really feel about all this bilge?
     Anything else perhaps subordinate and/or ancillary yet permeative?
     Indubitably. Whatever happened to that south slope and the Sherpa porters?
     Any titles pending which allude to or insinuate the foregoing, preferably in corresponding sequence if so?
     Indubitably. The Once and Future Orgasm. Cornfroy’s Complaint. Sometimes a Great Keester.” (Springer’s Progress, Pg. 217).

     May he colp her?

     Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Oh, hold me anyway, try to!

     Pg. 102 of David Markson’s copy of Heroes and Heretics by Barrows Dunham:

     On which Markson has placed multiple marks (checks/lines/underlines) next to a quote by Lucretius from Book I of his De Rerum Natura:
     “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.”
     Which translates to:
     “So great the evils to which religion could prompt.”

—-

     Markson utilized this quote of Lucretius on pg. 94 of This Is Not A Novel:
     “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, Lucretius said.
     Such are the evils that religion prompts.”
     And I utilized his utilization of said quote in a previous post in which I listed a bunch of instances in his novel Vanishing Point where he emphasized the “evils that religion prompts.”

     This time I thought I’d list some such instances from the other three novels of Markson’s tetralogy…

     “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.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 32).

     “The Second Commandment was taken so literally in the Lithuanian ghetto when Chaim Soutine was a boy that he was physically beaten when he tried to draw.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 38).

     “Auschwitz. Dachau. Treblinka. Maidanek. Sobibor. Chelmno. Mauthausen. Ravensbrück, Birkenai. Belzec. Theresienstadt.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 58).

     “Dante situates Mohammed in the ninth chasm of the Malebolge for having sown division in the Church. He is seen slashed open from his chin to his anus and with his innards spilling out.
     In retaliation, Muslim fundamentalists in the early 1990s threatened to blow up Dante’s tomb in Ravenna.
     Seven hundred years after the fact.” (Reader’s Blocks, Pg. 68).

     “Plato finished the Laws in his late seventies, among other things sanctioning the death penalty for those who question the state religion.
     Did he stop to remember how and why Socrates has died fifty years before?” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 81).

     “In 1666, a committee in the House of Commons was ready to call both the Plague and the Great Fire God’s retribution against England for harboring an athiest such as Thomas Hobbes.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 144).

     “Pietro Torrigiano took a hammer to a Madonna he had sculpted in Seville when he was not paid what he anticipated.
     And was jailed by the Inquisition for sacrilege.” (Reader’s Block, Pg. 172).

     “One of the ennobling delights of Paradise, as promised by Thomas Aquinas:
     Viewing the condemned as they are tortured and broiled below.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 7).

     “Tommaso Campanella spent twenty-seven years in a papal dungeon for heresy.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 49).

     “Hypatia, who was battered to death by Christian fanatics.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 94).

     “Basically every justification for persecution on the part of the Inquisition was at hand in St. Augustine.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 115).

     “Burn down their synagogues. Banish them altogether. Pelt them with sow dung. I would rather be a pig than a Jewish Messiah.
     Amiably pronounced Luther.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 156).

     “Pope Leo XII. Who in the 1820s issued an edict forbidding the waltz in Rome.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 41).

     “Be informed, Christian, that after the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous, more violent, then the Jew.
     Proclaimed Luther.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 42).

     “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God.
     Pronounced the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem—well before a State of Israel existed.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 42).

     “There is no indication whatsoever of anything even remotely resembling a State of Israel on the maps in most contemporary Arab schoolbooks.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 64)

     “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 Last Novel, Pg. 68).

     “Sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.
     Said Luther, dismissing this fool, Copernicus.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 94).

     “Teilhard de Chardin was forbidden by the Jesuits to publish any of his philosophical writings while he lived.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 113).

     “The first Crusade fought its way into Jerusalem in July of 1099. Some seventy thousand surviving Muslims—the majority being women and children—were methodically slaughtered. Such Jews as remained were burned alive in a synagogue.
     All this being God’s will, the Crusaders’ motto reassured them.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 125).

     “One would like to curse them so that thunder and lightning strike them, hell-fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them. Ignorant asses.
     Being Luther, in a contemplative mood re the papal hierarchy.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 126).

     “Billy Graham’s anti-Semitic exchange with Richard Nixon as preserved on White House tapes.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 136).

     “We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant.
     Pointed out the disaffected Muslim Wafa Sultan in 2006.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 167).

     Such are the evils that religion prompts…

     “Christianity must be divine, since it has lasted seventeen hundred years despite the fact of being so full of villainy and absurdity.
     Voltaire said.”
     Wrote Markson in The Last Novel on pg. 63.

     Villainy and absurdity…

     “Men never do evil so completely and so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
     Said Pascal.”
     According to pg. 94 of Markson’s Reader’s Block.

     Evil so completely and so cheerfully…

     “Human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind.
     Tom Paine called religions.
     Senseless and criminal bigotry.
     Nehru saw in them.”
     Wrote Markson in The Last Novel on pgs. 20-21.

     Pgs. 10 & 11 of David Markson’s copy of Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature by L. D. Reynolds & N. G. Wilson:

     On which Markson placed a check next to the information that Aristarchus “produced complete editions of both Iliad and Odyssey,” and then Markson also placed a line next to the entire paragraph where there is discussion of the marginalia signs used by Aristarchus in ancient copies of his Homeric texts.
     He then also numbered the six different signs used in the Aristarchus system:
     1) obelos – “indicated the verse was spurious”
     2) diple – “indicated any noteworthy point of language or content”
     3) dotted diple – “referred to a verse where Aristarchus differed in his text from Zenodotus”
     4) asterikos – “marked a verse incorrectly repeated in another passage”
     5) asterikos in conjunction with an obelos – “marked the interpolation of verses from another passage”
     6) antisigma – “marked passages in which the order of the lines had been disturbed”

—-

     Markson himself has six main signs he uses in the margins of the books he owned (many of which I now own) which I have gotten quite used to (yet I still don’t know exactly what they mean necessarily):
     1) checks – generally checks seem to be for anything of note (often things he then used in his tetralogy, but not always)
     2) lines – vertical lines in the margins (sometimes just one, sometimes two or more) appear to highlight major passages in a text (they usually don’t have anything to do with things that appear in his tetralogy, unless there are also checks next to them)
     3) dashes – dashes tend to be found in tables of contents next to, it seems, certain essays/chapters/stories/sections that Markson found important (or liked best)
     4) xs – xs are hard to figure out—at first I thought they might be things he disagreed with, but I no longer think that and now wonder if it is just an alternative to the check?
     5) underlines – when Markson underlines something it is usually a specific short passage in an otherwise marked up passage (with either lines, checks or xs).
     6) squiggles – a somewhat rare marking, and one that is even more enigmatic than the x.

     There are also some other random things that are much less used by Markson—sometimes brackets appear, and then there are just random markings that show up here and there.

     And, of course, the greatest marginal treats for Reader (of Markson Reading) are the notes, where he writes specific comments on the text (sometimes humorous, sometimes angry, sometimes unsure, sometimes disappointed, sometimes contrarian, etc.)…

     Pg. 69 of David Markson’s copy of The Failure of Criticism by Henri Peyre:

     On which Markson placed a check next to the following information:
     “[George] Meredith, reader for Chapman and Hall, made some brilliant discoveries, but rejected Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh as not worth a publisher’s attention.”

—-

     Markson was undeniably interested in the rejections of great authors.

     This is showcased in his tetralogy, of course.
     But also in the very first scan I ever posted on this blog—which comes from the same book as the above scan and contains an entire list of author rejections.

     The specific checked information from the above scan re: George Meredith rejecting The Way of All Flesh can be found in that list from that very first scan:
     “George Meredith, as reader, rejected The Way of All Flesh”

     It can also be found in the first book of Markson’s tetralogy Reader’s Block:
     “Working as a publisher’s reader, George Meredith rejected The Way of All Flesh.” (Pg. 20).

     So why was Markson so interested in the rejections of great authors?
     Well, besides the fact that the tetralogy is often focused on the poor ways in which our society treats its great artists, the more personal reason can be found as the last item on that list of rejections:
     “Wittgenstein’s Mistress—54 rejections!”

     As Markson explains in his interview with Tayt Harlin:
     “I think it set a world record for rejections. You’re not going to believe this, but it had fifty-four rejections. Fifty-four. Some editors are not particularly bright, so some of them didn’t understand it and wrote stupid letters. Some liked it, but felt it wasn’t publishable. And others wrote letters that sounded like Nobel Prize citations, but the kicker always was, ‘I can’t get it past the sales people.’”

     Pg. 1 of David Markson’s copy of Ulysses on the Liffey by Richard Ellmann:  

     On which Markson responded to the following assertion of Ellmann’s:
     “Homer had used twenty-four books, divided into three parts of four, eight, and twelve books.”
     By writing in the margins:
     “Hardly by Homer himself.”

—-

     Very true, Mr. Markson, very true.

     “The twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet. Ergo, the twenty-four books of the Iliad and of the Odyssey.
     Arranged by editors at Alexandria centuries after the fact.”
    Wrote Markson in Vanishing Point on pg. 65.

     The “writings” of Homer are actually the writings of those that came later, attempting to capture in text form the oral epics as originally told—perhaps—by Homer.

     Is it not easy to forget that though Homer is often ranked amongst the “greatest writers of all time,” everything we have that is “written” by him, was not written, but spoken?

     In fact, it is probable that Homer did not even know how to write:
     “Homer was blind too, of course.
     Although possibly this was only something that was said, insofar as Homer was concerned.
     I believe I have already mentioned that there were no pencils, then.
     Which is to say that when people said Homer was blind, it was because what they really did not wish to say was that Homer did not know how to write.”
     Says Kate in Markson’s masterpiece Wittgenstein’s Mistress. (Pgs. 125-126).

     Later on Kate adds:
     “Even if on third thought what one is only now forced to suspect is that there could have been still a different reason entirely, for the wrong number of ships in the Iliad.
     Which is to say that since Homer did not know how to write, very possibly he did not know how to add, either.” (Pg. 196).

     Not only did Homer not write, but there is no mention of writing in his masterpiece the Iliad:
     “There is no mention of writing in the Iliad. Any and all messages are passed along verbally.
     Indicating incidentally that not one of the Greek warriors, during then years at Troy, has ever sent a letter home.”
     A fact Markson passes along to us in his This Is Not A Novel. (Pg. 12).

     So who is Homer?

     There unfortunately is no reliable biographical information of the man handed down from classical antiquity.

     No reliable biographical information of the man?

     The man?

     “Meanwhile, Samuel Butler, the author of The Way of All Flesh, has suggested that the Odyssey was written by a woman, I am assuming the footnote said.
     Although doubtless there was rather more to it than that, it being a fairly safe guess that one does not change Homer from a man to a woman after three thousand years without including some sort of interesting explanation.
     I have no idea what that explanation may have been, however.
     Even though any number of people often insisted that there had never been any Homer to begin with, but were only various bards.”
     Reads a part of Wittgenstein’s Mistress on pgs. 103-104.

     The Homeric question…

     God above, is there anyone else alive who would ask a question like that at a moment like this?