Checks – Reading Markson Reading

Pg. 237 of David Markson’s copy of Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk by Joseph Tabbi:

On which Markson placed a check in the margins of the book’s Works Cited next to mention of an essay on his own writing, namely:
“Wallace, David Foster. ‘The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s
Mistress.’ Review of Contemporary Fiction 10 (Summer 1990):217-39.”

—-

David Foster Wallace, a great novelist in his own right, wrote the essay “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress” exploring that masterpiece of Markson’s that he had called “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country” in a different article for Salon.

The entire text of David Foster Wallace’s “The Empty Plenum” can be read here.

But here is the opening bit of the essay which I thought I’d share for any of you Readers (of Markson Reading) out there who have never had the pleasure of coming across it:
“Certain novels not only cry out for critical interpretations but actually
try to direct them. This is probably analogous to a piece of music that both demands and defines the listener’s movements, say like a waltz. Frequently, too, those novels that direct their own critical reading concern themselves thematically with what we might consider highbrow or intellectual issues—stuff proper to art, engineering, antique lit., philosophy, etc. These novels carve out for themselves an interstice between flat-out fiction and a sort of weird cerebral roman à clef. When they fail, as my own first long thing did, they’re pretty dreadful. But when they succeed, as I claim David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress does, they serve the vital & vanishing function of reminding us of fiction’s limitless possibilities for reach & grasp, for making heads throb heartlike, & for sanctifying the marriages of cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life, transcendent truth-seeking & daily schlepping, marriages that in our happy epoch of technical occlusion & entertainment-marketing seem increasing consummatable only in the imagination. Books I tend to associate with this INTERPRET-ME phenomenon include stuff like Candide, Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’s Stranger. These five are works of genius of a particular kind: they shout their genius. Markson, in Wittgenstein’s Mistress, tends rather to whisper, but his w.o.g.’s no less successful; nor—particularly given the rabid anti-intellectualism of the contemporary fiction scene—seems it any less important. It’s become an important book to me, anyway. I’d never heard of this guy Markson, before, in ‘88. And have, still, read nothing else by him. I ordered the book mostly because of its eponymous title; I like to fancy myself a fan of the work of its namesake. Clearly the book was/is in some way ‘about’ Wittgenstein, given the title. This is one of the ways an INTERPRET-ME fiction clues the critical reader in on what the book’s to be seen as on a tertiary level ‘about’: the title: Ulysses’ title, its structure as Odyssean/Telemachean map (succeeds); R. Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem (really terrible); Cortázar’s Hopscotch (succeeds exactly to the extent one ignores the invitation to hop around in it); Burroughs’s Queer & Junkie (fail successfully (?)).”

The second page of the Foreword of David Markson’s copy of Dostoevsky: Works and Days by Avrahm Yarmolinsky:

On which Markson put a check next to Yarmolinsky writing:
“The author is greatly indebted to his wife, Babette Deutsch, for generous help in the preparation of this book.”

—-

Avrahm Yarmolinsky may be “greatly indebted to his wife,” but you know who else was?
David Markson.

Dedicating Going Down:
“To Elaine, my wife, and to the memory of Malcolm Lowry.”

David and Elaine Markson separated in 1982.

Markson didn’t release what is widely seen as his masterpiece—Wittgenstein’s Mistress—until 1988. Even though he supposedly finished it sometime around 1983.

“Although Elaine and David had separated by then, Elaine continued to represent her former husband’s work.”
Wrote Joanna Scott in her article “A Passionate Reader: On David Markson” in The Nation.

His late-life success he undeniably owes, at least in small part, to his literary agent:
His ex-wife Elaine Markson, from the Markson Thoma Literary Agency.

The author is greatly indebted to his wife.

Pg. 37 of David Markson’s copy of The World of Odysseus by M. I. Finley:

On which Markson placed a check next to and an underline underneath the information that Hissarlik (aka Troy) lies “some three miles from the Dardanelles.”

—-

     Markson on pg. 8 of Wittgenstein’s Mistress wrote:
     “From Hisarlik, the water is perhaps an hour’s walk away.”
     Which, of course, is basically saying that it is three miles away.
     Seeing as the average person’s walking pace is about 3 miles per hour.
     Thus making a three mile walk an hour walk.

Pg. 61 of David Markson’s copy of Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik & Stephen Toulmin:

On which Markson placed a check next to a Theodor Herzl quote regarding the creation of a Jewish state:
“If you wish it, it is no fairy tale,” and “If you don’t wish it, it is a fairy tale.”

—-

     The first of those two statements of Herzl’s re: the creation of a Jewish state:
     “If you wish it, it is no fairy tale.”
     Used in Markson’s This Is Not A Novel, albeit with a variation in the translation:
     “If you will it, it is no dream.
     Said Theodor Herzl.”
     Markson wrote on pg. 31.

If you wish it, it is no fairy tale.

If you will it, it is no dream.

If you build it, he will come.

Oh, sorry, that last one isn’t a translation of Herzl, but a quote from the movie Field of Dreams.

Who is the he that came in that movie?

“An old-time baseball player, wasn’t there?”
– Markson’s Going Down, pg. 13. (Obviously out of context).

John Kinsella. Fictitious baseball player.

Others came too: Shoeless Joe Jackson. Moonlight Graham. Both real.

Baseball is one of Markson’s main obsessions.
References to the sport can be found in just about every one of his novels.

     Baseball was likewise a major topic in the old literary haunts Markson frequented (like The Lion’s Head & The White Horse Tavern):
     “Joint’s awash in authors, prime theme indisputably’d be gelt. Pussy and/or baseball running a tight second, however.”
     – Springer’s Progress, pg. 3.

     Baseball held a special place in his heart:
     “Markson acknowledges his autobiographical bias and wonders about his own nostalgia for a bygone era of baseball before his time, asking the reader the question that troubles him and to which he gives no direct answer: ‘How does one explain baseball nostalgia?’”
     Says Françoise Papin-Pelleau in her Markson study This Is Not A Tragedy re: Markson’s “A Day for Addie Joss.”

     Perhaps some answer can be found in the movie I mentioned that caused this digression: Field of Dreams.
     In that movie James Earl Jones’ character says:
     “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.”

How does one explain baseball nostalgia?

Field of Dreams.

If you will it, it is no dream.

Pg. 17 of David Markson’s copy of Shakespeare: The Poet in His World by M. C. Bradbrook:

On which Markson placed a check next to the sentence:
“Shakespeare’s three younger brothers all died before him, and none was married—which prompts speculation.”

—-

     On pg. 11 of Markson’s The Last Novel:
     “Always give a moment’s pause when happening to remember—that Shakespeare had three brothers.
     One of whom was a haberdasher.”

     And later on down on the same page from the same novel:
     “Shakespeare’s sister Joan—the only sibling to survive him, and a relatively indigent widow.
     Whose welfare he took care to safeguard in his will.”

I can’t help, when discussing the siblings of Shakespeare, but immediately think of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, where she makes extensive mention of Shakespeare’s sister.

     In it Woolf wrote of an imaginary sister of Shakespeare’s named Judith (who would have possessed his genius but not his opportunities):
     “Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter—indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighboring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, loose-lipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting—no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted—you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last—for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows—at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.
     That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare’s day had had Shakespeare’s genius.”

Could Joan have been like Woolf’s imaginary Judith?

Could Joan have been as much a genius as her brother William?

Joan, the only sibling to survive him…

Pg. 36 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 passage:
“As we saw, Leonardo retained only one great line, the indispensable one of the table, yet even here there is something new. I do not mean the omission of the projecting ends—he is not the first to do that; the innovation lies in having the courage to depict a physical impossibility in order to obtain a heightened effect. The table is far too small. If the covers are counted it is clear that all the people there could not have sat down. Leonardo wishes to avoid the effect of the Disciples lost behind a long table, and the impression made by the figures is so strong that no one notices the lack of space.”

—-

The other day I created a post, using a scan from this same book by Wolfflin, re: the oddly large size of the hands and feet on Michelangelo’s David. In that post, I mentioned that Markson made note of this fact of the large extremities of Michelangelo’s David in a couple of his pre-tetralogy novels, and in both instances associated the largeness of David’s extremities with the smallness of the table in Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.

Perhaps this was because the information came from the same book?

Heinrich Wolfflin’s Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance.

Or perhaps—even more important than the source—he liked linking the largeness of the one with the smallness of the other?

“Table in The Last Supper’s too small. Hands and feet on Michelangelo’s David are too big.” (Springer’s Progress, Pg. 76).

“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).

Whether the extremities are too big, or whether the table is too small, the point is that art doesn’t have to accurately reflect reality.
(And actually couldn’t, even if it wanted to.)

“People speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting. Where and when has anyone ever seen a natural work of art?
Asked Picasso.” (The Last Novel, Pg. 9)

“No artist tolerates reality, Camus said.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 105).

“The act of painting transforms the painter’s mind into something similar to the mind of God.
Said Leonardo.” (This Is Not A Novel, Pg. 178).

The artist thus imagines and creates an alternative reality.

“This very sort of imagining being the artist’s privilege, obviously.
Well, it is what artists do.” (Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Pg. 148).

Art doesn’t have to accurately reflect reality.

“Art is not truth. Art is a lie that enables us to recognize truth.
Said Picasso.” (Vanishing Point, Pg. 108).

Pg. 287 of David Markson’s copy of The Spirit of Tragedy by Herbert J. Muller:

On which Markson placed a check next to a quote from a Chekhov play:
“I am old, I am tired, I am trivial; my sensibilities are dead.”

—-

“I am old, I am tired, I am trivial; my sensibilities are dead.”
Words said by Astroff in Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

Old. Tired. Trivial.

     Reminds me of:
     “Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.”
     – The Last Novel, pg. 2.

     “Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.
     All of which obviously means that this is the last book Novelist is going to write.”
     – The Last Novel, pg. 3.

“Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.”
– The Last Novel, pg. 190.

     “Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.”
     The title of Catherine Texier’s review of The Last Novel for the New York Times.
     Where she writes:
     “But what it resembles most is a long poem.
     In rhythm and tonality, if not in content, ‘The Last Novel’ hints at the incantations of the Kaddish—it sometimes evokes the beat of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ and ‘Howl’—and brings to mind the Renaissance complaints of the French poets Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay, François Villon’s famous ‘Ballad of the Ladies of Yore,’ mourning the loss of youth, and Shakespeare sonnets lamenting the specter of death.”

Mourning the loss of youth…lamenting the specter of death…

Catherine Texier was, of course, right to focus on the problems of old age in her review.
That is definitely one of the most prevalent of Markson’s obsessions in the tetralogy, and especially in The Last Novel (which “can be readily read by itself,” Markson wants me to emphasize, as seen on pg. 161 of that novel, and as discussed in yesterday’s post).

Between the “Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.” on pg. 2 and the one on pg. 190, there exists a number of times where Markson specifically broods over the aging process…

“Rereading a Raymond Chandler novel in which Philip Marlowe stops in for a ten-cent cup of coffee.
Old enough to remember when the coffee would have cost half that” (Pg. 18).

“Old enough to remember when they were still called penny postcards.
And a letter cost three cents.” (Pg. 23).

“Mithridates, he died old.” (Pg. 48).

“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.” (Pg. 79).

“Michelangelo’s Pieta—
Is the Virgin many years too young?” (Pg. 83).

“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?
Asked Satchel Paige.” (Pg. 92).

“Anton Bruckner, in old age, tells Gustav Mahler that he can readily foresee his coming interrogation by his Maker—
Why else have I given you talent, you son of a bitch, than that you should sing My praise and glory? But you have accomplished much too little.” (Pg. 95).

“I hope I never get so old I get religious.
Quoth Ingmar Bergman.” (Pg. 104).

“It’s a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
Quoth Grace Paley.” (Pg. 120).

“When I am eighty, my art may finally begin to cohere. By ninety, it may truly turn masterful.
Said Hokusai. At seventy-three.” (Pg. 151).

“A passage in Montaigne where he speaks of himself being well on the road to old age—having long since passed forty.” (Pg. 157).

“Old Hoss. Old Pete. Old Reliable. Old Folks. Old Aches and Pains.” (Pg. 175).

“Old age is not for sissies.
Said Bette Davis.” (Pg. 178).

“Freud, born in 1856, being asked in 1936 how he felt:
How a man of eighty feels is not a topic for conversation.” (Pg. 178).

“Shaw, at ninety-four, being asked the same:
At my age, one is either well or dead.” (Pg. 179).

“My old paintings no longer interest me. I’m much more curious about those I haven’t done yet.
Said Picasso, at seventy-nine.” (Pg. 184).

“You can tell from my handwriting that I am in the twenty-fourth hour. Not a single thought is born in me that does not have death graven within.
Wrote Michelangelo at eighty-one—himself with eight years remaining.” (Pg. 184).

“I’ve no more sight, no hand, nor pen, not inkwell. I lack everything. All I still possess is will.
Said Goya—nearing eighty.” (Pg. 186).

     “Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on.
     What happens in the end?
     Oh, in the end she dies.” (Pg. 186).

“Cézanne, who lived in greater and greater isolation, late in life.” (Pg. 186).

“Degas, who lived in greater and greater isolation, late in life.” (Pg. 187).

“Sophocles, re a tremor in his hand, as recorded by Aristotle:
He said he could not help it; he would happily rather not be ninety years old.” (Pg. 187).

“The old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Said Santayana.” (Pg. 189).

“Dispraised, infirm, unfriended age.
Sophocles calls it.” (Pg. 189).

“Unregarded age in corners thrown.
Shakespeare echoes.” (Pg. 189).

     The novel ends with:
     “Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.
     The old man who will not laugh is a fool.
     Als ick kan.” (Pg. 190).

I am old, I am tired, I am trivial; my sensibilities are dead.

Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.

Pgs. 66-67 of David Markson’s copy of His Exits and His Entrances: The Story of Shakespeare’s Reputation by Louis Marder:

     On which Markson placed two checks next to the following two sentences re: Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean:
     “Before the sun of Kemble had set, Edmund Kean (1789-1833) had already begun to take his place in the Shakespearean firmament.”
     And:
     “Every emotion was rendered naturalistically by Kean, about whom Coleridge made his famous comment that seeing him act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.”

—-

Markson mentions Edmund Kean, and Coleridge’s assessment of him on pg. 33 of his novel(?) This Is Not A Novel:
“Watching Edmund Kean. Like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning, Coleridge said.”

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. 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!