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

     On which Markson wrote:
     “How can anyone so well known write so badly?”

—-

     Oh, come on, Dave: How can anyone so well-known write so badly? Really?

     Mr. Markson, you have oft pointed out how great writers tend to get overlooked (yourself included) and terrible writers sometimes happen to be quite popular—so of all people you should know that popularity has little to do with talent.

     There are plenty of writers, much more popular than Richard Ellmann, who write prose that even is inferior to his.

     The test for greatness is not gauged by a popularity contest.
Or at least it shouldn’t be.

     Pg. 96 of David Markson’s copy of Three Classical Poets: Sappho, Catullus, and Juvenal by Richard Jenkyns:

     On which Markson has written:
     “Which is perfectly fine, George.”
     In the margins next to a complaint from George Orwell re: other writers in the 1920s:
     “What is noticeable about all these writers is that what ‘purpose’ they have is very much up in the air. There is no attention to the problems of the moment, above all no politics in the narrower sense. Our eyes are directed to Rome, to Byzantium, to Montparnasse, to Mexico, to the Etruscans… —to everywhere except the places where things are actually happening.”

—-

     Reader (of Markson Reading) would have to agree here with Markson that it is “perfectly fine” for a writer to pay “no attention to the problems of the moment, above all no politics in the narrower sense.”
     And I say that as a rather political person.

     “Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.”
     A line used by Markson in Reader’s Block on pg. 25, which is an uncited quote by Stendhal.

     I don’t agree with that sentiment though—I think politics are “perfectly fine” to have in your work of art or not.

     “Categorically, with no politics.”
     Markson wrote of This Is Not A Novel in This Is Not A Novel. (Pg. 7).

     But though Markson often expressed his wish to keep politics out of his art, one notices, especially by The Last Novel, they ended up creeping right on in.
     How else can one explain:
     —“No different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation.
     Said someone on the radio named Rush Limbaugh about American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
     People having a good time.” (Pg. 70).
     —“Dear President George W. Bush:
     Herewith please find uncorrected proofs for the newly discovered rewritten version of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Kindly limit your review to twelve thousand words. Thank you.” (Pg. 140).
     —“Abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians—all in good part responsible for 9/11, said Jerry Falwell.
     I totally concur. Said Pat Robertson.” (Pg. 142).
     —“Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.
     Declared a Utah senator named Orrin Hatch—presumably a former honors student in Logic 101.” (Pg. 152).
     Etc.

     In the Conjunctions interview with Tayt Harlin, this was brought up to Markson, the mention of current political figures and situations:
     “There are some contemporary references in this book. You mention the Iraq war a couple of times, George W. Bush, and even Rush Limbaugh.”
     Markson’s response:
     “I hesitated about that; I usually don’t do it. My attitude is that everybody should know even the most obscure painter or composer. But fucking George W. Bush? A hundred years from now? Who will know him any more than they know Chester Alan Arthur? Well, no, it’s different, because he may end the world. But I think I released some braces with this book when I let myself mention those few people.”

     Françoise Palleau-Papin’s take on this new foray into the realm of contemporary politics, that is pretty much completely missing from his previous books, can be found on pg. 258 of her book This Is Not A Tragedy:
     “The narrator chooses to set his narrative more in contemporary history, mentioning George W. Bush and the Abu Ghraib jail (p. 70), global warming (p. 123), and mad cow disease, given in its medical name forming a sentence in the entirety of a paragraph: ‘Bovine spongiform encephalopathy’ (p. 70). This is how he settles accounts with the crimes of our times.” (Pg. 258).

     The truth is politics were always underlying Markson’s work—perhaps not specific contemporary politics, but these are books that say and do something.

     And anything said or done is a political act, whether you want it to be or not.

     Not saying or doing anything, also a political act.

     Art must be political, by accident if not by design..

     “And so. And so. End his book with right now, at least solder in its subtle, unsuspected political motif?”
     Says Spinger’s Progress, on pg. 209.

     The inside front cover of David Markson’s copy of Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation by Marvin Magalaner & Richard M. Kain:

     On which Markson placed a one cent Margaret Mitchell stamp.

—-

     “Old enough to have started coming upon likenesses on postage stamps of other writers he had known personally or had at least met in passing.”
     Is a line from pg. 79 of Markson’s The Last Novel.

     Was Margaret Mitchell one such writer whom he had “at least met in passing”?

     Highly unlikely.

     She died in 1949. He was born in 1927. So it would have had to happen by the time he was 22, ten years before he published his own first novel.

     I wonder which authors he was speaking of when he wrote that line:
     “Old enough to have started coming upon likenesses on postage stamps of other writers he had known personally or had at least met in passing.”

     Does Malcolm Lowry have a stamp? Or Jack Kerouac? Or William Gaddis? Or Dylan Thomas? Or Conrad Aiken? We can be certain he met them.
     Barthelme? Vonnegut?

     Is he counting authors whom he “had but a glimpse of”?

     “Writer had but a glimpse of Faulkner.
     As it happens, of Hemingway también.”
     Markson announced on pg. 161 of This Is Not A Novel.
     And then went on to describe:
     “Faulkner, at a funeral. Small and beady-eyed.
     Hemingway at ringside.”

     Realizing we will probably never know exactly whose likeness on a stamp triggered the inclusion of that line in The Last Novel.

     If such an event even occurred.
     Which itself can be assumed, but most likely never known for certain.

     Pg. 75 of David Markson’s copy of The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

     On which Markson underlined a passage in red:
     “And in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”

—-

     The term “dark night of the soul” dates back to the 16th century, from a poem entitled “Dark Night of the Soul” by Saint John of the Cross.

     St. John of the Cross.
     Who was, unsurprisingly, mentioned multiple times in Markson’s oeuvre.

     Kate, in Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, writes of the saint a few times, but there is one particular exchange I love:
     “Though as a matter of fact there are also certain things that one remembers while one is writing that one did not remember one remembered but does not happen to put down, either.
     For instance when I was writing about the fact that Rembrandt and Spinoza had lived in Amsterdam at the same time, which I had learned from a footnote, I suddenly remembered from a different footnote entirely that when El Greco had lived in Toledo such people as St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross had lived there, too.
     Even though I remembered that, however, I did not put it down.
     Basically my reason for not doing so may have been because I do not know one solitary thing about either St. Teresa or St. John of the Cross.
     Except obviously that they were both in Toledo when El Greco was in Toledo.” (Pgs. 156-157).

     Though Kate may not know anything of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross except that they lived in Toledo in the time of El Greco, Markson surely knows much more than that.

     In The Last Novel, Markson writes of:
     “The unimaginably cramped cell in which St. John of the Cross was once imprisoned for months, beaten repeatedly and virtually starved, but where he nonetheless managed to compose some of his finest verses.” (Pg. 2).   

     “Saint John of the Cross was short and slight.”
     We learn on pg. 56 of Vanishing Point.
     And then are told:
     “Half a friar, Saint Teresa of Ávila playfully spoke of him as.”

     Markson also clearly knows of the St. John of the Cross term: “dark night of the soul.”
     Which has become a recurring metaphor for the trying times of a spiritual journey.
     And which Markson used in one of his early detective novels:
     “He digs his doom better in the depths. He communes with the dark night of his soul.”
     From Epitaph for a Dead Beat (on pg. 242 of the combined: Epitaph for a Tramp & Epitaph for a Dead Beat).

     In Markson’s analysis of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth Symbol Meaning), he also uses the term, when he explains:
     “The Consul has just now endured the latter illusion; and since it will be death at the hands of a pistol that ends his larger ‘dark night of the soul,’ also to be noted is a pistol once described here as ‘a bright jewel.’” (Pg. 197).

     Other scholars have discussed Lowry’s masterpiece, and especially his personal experience in writing it, in the terms of “a dark night of the soul”:
     As we learn from Sherrill Grace’s Regression and Apocalypse: Studies in North American Literary Expressionism:
     “Malcolm Lowry (1909-57) began Under the Volcano shortly after arriving in Cuernavaca, Mexico, with his first wife, Jan Gabrial, in 1936. Before he left Mexico in July 1938 he had separated from Jan, failed to drink himself into total oblivion, generally experienced every horror associated with the dark night of the soul, and completed a first draft (there would be three more, and even then he was not satisfied) of the Volcano.” (Pg. 164).
     Barry Wood mentions in his Malcolm Lowry: The Writer & His Critics:
     “According to his letters—to John Davenport, Conrad Aiken, James Stern (SL, pp. 11-13, 15, 27-30)—the next few weeks were a truly dark night of the soul, full of hallucinations, suspicions, horrible dangers, ‘an absolutely fantastic tragedy’ of isolation (SL, p. 11).” (Pg. 256).

     Lowry saw the book in terms of “a dark night of the soul”—obviously knowing the St. John of the Cross origin of the term, but not realizing Fitzgerald had also used the term in Crack-Up until years later, as he relays in a letter to Robert Giroux (from his Selected Letters on pg. 303):
     “What remains of this moral obligation I now apply to yourself, to think of at 4 o’clock in the morning, which I had not known Fitzgerald had advanced as the real dark night of the soul when I wrote the Volcano, and it may be that it is 3 o’clock or even 5 o’clock.”

     He digs his doom better in the depths. He communes with the dark night of his soul.

     And in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

     Pg. 63 of David Markson’s copy of The World of Odysseus by M. I. Finley:

     On which Markson has left us a check and a line next to a discussion of gift-giving in Ancient Greek culture.
     The line is next to:
     “Telemachus had said nothing about a counter-gift. Yet he and ‘Mentes’ understood each other perfectly: the counter-gift was as expected as the original gift at parting. That was what gift-giving was in this society.”
     The check is next to:
     “No single detail in the life of the heroes receives so much attention in the Iliad and the Odyssey as gift-giving, and always there is frank reference to adequacy, appropriateness, recompense.”

—-

     The funny thing about Greeks and gift-giving is that our modern-day immediate response to the two is to quote the classic maxim:
     “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”
     Or as Markson joking plays with the phrase in Springer’s Progress:
     “Beware of Greeks bearing fulcrums.” (Pg. 38).

     The truth is that in the Ancient times, these societies were known for their gift-giving, as is stated in the above scan.

     An example of the charitable spirit of the Greeks can be seen in this little nugget on pg. 49 of Markson’s Vanishing Point:
     “Pliny the Younger was a pupil of Quintilian’s.
     Years afterward, learning that Quintilian could not afford a proper dowry for his daughter, Pliny sent the money as a gift.”

     Markson touches upon this subject of Greek gift-giving in his novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress as well:
     “Well, and most probably Cassandra would have brought gifts also, to smooth things over.
     Trojans having been known for bearing gifts whenever they went anyplace in either case.
     Actually, a cat would have been thoughtful. Even if a cat would have perhaps been more appropriate as a gift for Helen, rather than for Menelaus.” (Pgs. 199-200).

     The Table of Contents of David Markson’s copy of Literary Essays by Ezra Pound:

     On which Markson placed dashes next to four essays:
     1) “Arnaud Daniel”
     2) “Cavalcanti”
     3) “Notes on Elizabethan Classicists”
     4) “Translators of Greek: Early Translators of Homer”

—-

     One of those essays, “Notes on Elizabethan Classicists,” ends with a line in which Pound says:
     “That editors, publishers, and universities loathe the inquisitive spirit.” (Pg. 248).

     When reading Markson’s tetralogy, I find that society as a whole seems to loathe the inquisitive spirit, the artistic spirit, the creative spirit and the intellectual spirit.

     It is as though society thinks the same as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who, as Markson explains in his The Last Novel, asserted:
     “A cobbler makes a greater contribution to society than does a Homer or a Plato.” (Pg. 106).

     Interestingly, elsewhere in Markson’s tetralogy we again hear about cobblers and artists:
     “She wouldn’t care a straw whether her husband was an artist or a cobbler, said Haydn of his wife.
     Whom he also called an infernal beast.” (Pg. 36 of Vanishing Point).

     I apologize to cobblers everywhere, for their profession having been apparently chosen to represent the opposite of artistic and intellectual endeavors, but if I am allowed to continue with those poles—cobbler vs. artist—may I ask how does a cobbler contribute to society more?

     Admittedly, I love the comfort of shoes, but I’d go my whole life without any shoes before I’d go my whole life without any art.

     Shoes may keep your feet warm and clean and comfortable, but art does so much more:
     “For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”
     Which is a quote from Markson’s Vanishing Point. On pg. 54.
     And which Markson borrowed/stole from Walter Pater.

     I would gladly go shoeless, if a choice had to be made…

     But wait…how did I get from Pound essays to shoeless?

     Reader (of Markson Reading) often finds himself confused as to his own thought processes, and how one thing trails to another with seemingly the most tenuous of connections…

     But then discovering often greater connections in the trajectory of the movement.

     Always coming back around, and focusing on some key themes and ideas.

     Has he read too much Markson?

     Is he attempting, if admittedly failing in the task, to emulate him in some way?

     Regardless, now I’m shoeless…

     Granted, Reader (of Markson Reading) is essentially the I in instances such as that.

     “Shoeless” Joe Jackson.

     Pg. 127 of David Markson’s copy of Fates Worse than Death by Kurt Vonnegut:

     On which Markson placed a check next to Vonnegut’s mention of Donald Barthelme’s memorial.

—-

     I do not know whether or not Markson attended Barthelme’s memorial, but Markson was friendly with the writer.

     Markson mentioned Barthelme in his novel Reader’s Block:
     “For Protagonist’s less distant literary past:
     Donald Barthelme: Tell me what you’ve been up to.
     Protagonist: You’ll be sorry you asked. Do you want to hear about the lung cancer surgery I just had, or the prostate cancer surgery I’m going to have?
     Donald Barthelme: Talk. And then I’ll tell you about my throat cancer.” (Pg. 160).

     Markson further spoke of his relationship with Barthelme:
     “I lived over near Sixth, and so I’d frequently walk up West Eleventh and we’d run into each other. He was a famous writer, and I had no reputation at all, so I was always kind of quiet around him. He was the Donald Barthelme”
     As quoted in Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme by Tracy Daugherty. (Pg. 412).

     Markson then goes on to tell, in that Barthelme biography, a nice little story about Donald Barthelme wanting to “tell David Markson that he’s not always coming out of that liquor store.”
     And Markson’s reply:
     “I, of course, went to a different liquor store, and was probably there more often than Don was in his!” (Pg. 412).

     Pg. 173 of David Markson’s copy of Prophets Without Honour: Freud, Kafka, Einstein, and Their World by Frederic V. Grunfeld:

     On which Markson wrote under a picture of Alfred Doeblin:
     “Is there no better photo than this?”

—-

     Well, there’s this one:
    

     Is that better, Dave?

     Pg. 47 of David Markson’s copy of Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance by Heinrich Wolfflin:

     On which Markson put a check next to the following sentence:
     “What is Michelangelo’s ideal of youthful beauty? A gigantic hobbledehoy, neither man nor boy, a stripling at the age when the body stretches itself and the huge hands and feet seem to have no relation to the size of the limbs.”

—-

     The oddly large size of the hands and feet on Michelangelo’s David was mentioned by Markson in his pre-tetralogy novels Springer’s Progress and Wittgenstein’s Mistress (and in both instances this was done in conjunction with a mention of the oddly small size of the table in Leonardo’s The Last Supper):
     “Table in The Last Supper’s too small. Hands and feet on Michelangelo’s David are too big.” (Springer’s Progress, Pg. 76).
     And:
     “In fact it was similarly Leonardo’s own doing when he made the table in The Last Supper far too small for all of those Jewish people who are supposed to be eating at it.
     Or Michelangelo’s, when he took away superfluous material on his David but left the hands and feet too big.” (Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Pg. 148).

     Pg. 220 of David Markson’s copy of Prophets Without Honour: Freud, Kafka, Einstein, and Their World by Frederic V. Grunfeld:

     On which Markson translated the title of Chapter VII (“ULTIMA MULTIS”) as:
     “(The last day for many)”

—-

     On pg. 25 of This Is Not A Novel, Markson uses this chapter title (with an explanation as to its original source):
     “On an ancient sundial in Ibiza: Ultima multis.
     The last day for many.”

     Though the phrase is supposedly from that ancient sundial in Ibiza, how it finds its way to us in modern times (and presumably to Markson) is through a mention in a passage in Walter Benjamin’s The Storyteller:
     “And in the course of the nineteenth century, bourgeois society—by means of medical and social, private and public institutions—realized a secondary effect, which may have been its subconscious main purpose: to enable people to avoid the site of the dying. Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual, and a most exemplary one; think of the medieval pictures in which the deathbed has turned into a throne that people come toward through the wide-open doors of the dying person’s house. In the course of modern times, dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. It used to be that there was not a single house, hardly a single room, in which someone had not once died. (The Middle Ages also experienced spatially what makes the inscription Ultima multis—which adorns a sundial on Ibiza—significant as an expression of the time.)”

     “Was Walter Benjamin the first to point out that where every home once possessed room after room in which people had died, in today’s world virtually everyone dies somewhere else?”
     Asked Markson in Vanishing Point on pg. 83.

     Ultima Multis.