Lines – Reading Markson Reading

The Dedication to The Waste Land in David Markson’s copy of Poems by T. S. Eliot:

On which Markson has made a number of notes…

     He placed a line in the margin and wrote that the quote:
     “NAM Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.”
     Is from:
     “Petronius.”

     He underlined:
     “ἀποθανεῖν θέλω”
     And translated it as:
     “(I WISH TO DIE)”

     He underlined:
     “Il miglior fabbro”
     And translated it as:
     “(That greater magician)”

     He then created his own table of contents in the lower right corner, naming the five parts of The Waste Land:
     “I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
     II. A GAME OF CHESS
     III. THE FIRE SERMON
     IV. DEATH BY WATER
     V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID”

—-

Markson saw the four novels that make up the Notecard Quartet, his tetralogy, as somewhat similar, if still inferior, to Eliot’s The Waste Land.

     Markson claims This Is Not A Novel could be seen as:
     “An ersatz prose alternative to The Waste Land, if Writer so suggests.”
     – This Is Not A Novel, pg. 101.

Likewise, his friend and literary compatriot, Ann Beattie, wrote of Reader’s Block:
“Finally, a prose sequel to Eliot’s The Waste Land.”

Like Eliot’s The Waste Land, the novels in Markson’s Notecard Quartet warrant the kind of close reading, study and marginalia that Markson placed in his copy of Eliot’s master poem (as showcased in the above scan).

One wonders if Fannin, the detective in Markson’s Epitaph for a Tramp, did as close a reading of The Waste Land as Markson did…

“I sat around for a couple of hours, disciplining myself by not opening the next bottle until I could manage it without defacing the tax stamp, and trying to make sense of something called The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot which was the only book in the joint.”
– Epitaph for a Tramp, pg. 13 (of the collected Epitaph for a Tramp & Epitaph for a Dead Beat).

     “In such a misanthropic context, what better book to read than T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, given Fannin’s bittersweet humor?”
     A question asked by Françoise Palleau-Papin in her Markson study This Is Not A Tragedy.
     A question seconded by yours truly.

—-

Pg. 65 of David Markson’s copy of Mao II by Don DeLillo:

On which Markson placed a line next to the words:
“I think there’s an intensity that makes certain subjects a little dangerous. And we don’t have the camera between us. This changes everything, doesn’t it? Scott said six-thirty.”

He then responded to that passage by writing in the margins:
“Again the spurious mysticism.”

—-

Judging from the comments in the margins, Markson seems to find DeLillo’s whole book to be spurious.

In fact, bullshit.

As I’ve mentioned here many-a-times, he placed the word “Bullshit” in the margins of Mao II rather frequently.

Though I do not own his copy of DeLillo’s White Noise, Readers (of Markson Reading) familiar with the whole Markson Treasure Hunt also know that similar comments were written in Markson’s copy of that book as well.
Many of which can be found here: in the London Review of Books article by Alex Abramovich and in that article’s comments.

Markson’s DeLillo’s White Noise being, as the Abramovich article clearly shows, the book that began the whole Markson Treasure Hunt.

Some of his DeLillo comments in that White Noise…

     “I’ve finally solved this book—it’s sci-fi!”
     (Which was originally reported as “Oh I get it, it’s a sci-fi novel!” in the Abramovich article—hence the article’s title—but is corrected in the comments by the owner of the book Annecy Liddell.)
     (And which can be seen here.)

“Oh god the pomposity, the portentousness—the bullshit!”
(Which can be seen here.)

“Too cute.”
(Which can be seen here.)

“This book may have set the all-time record for boredom. At 1/3 of the length, it might have worked.”
(Which can be seen here.)

“D’ya ever fuck ‘er?”
(Which can be seen here.)

“Are we supposed to believe this?”
(Which can be seen here.)

“If this were not my first Delillo, I probably would have quit 100 pages ago. Surely now.”
(Which can be seen here.)

“Oh, wow! Big deal.”
(Which can be seen here.)

“This ‘ordinariness’ is just that—ordinary, i.e., a bore. Presumably it is meant as satire. Except, dammit, satire should be amusing!”
(Which can be seen here.)

“Boring boring boring.”
(Which can be seen here.)

“Once we get the point, it’s boring.”
(Which can be seen here.)

“I’ll say. Too bad you don’t convey them to us!”
(Which can be seen here.)

     “Oh God.”
     (Twice on one page.)
     (Which can be seen here.)

“Gawd. This is awful.”
(Which can be seen here.)

“We got the point of this stuff a long time ago. A long time ago. It’s now BORING! And has been.”
(Which can be seen here.)

Pg. 43 of David Markson’s copy of Conversations with Toscanini by B. H. Haggin:

     On which Markson has placed a line next to the following passage:
     “It is my impression that intelligent orchestra players didn’t regard Toscanini’s rages as mere self-indulgence by a man who could be reasonable and patient but felt privileged to…”
     The passage continues onto the next page which is not in the above scan:
     “…be unreasonable and impatient. I think they understood that he was, in his relation to music, a man obsessed and possessed, and that such a man was not rational and reasonable—not in music nor in anything else.”

—-

Toscanini was known for his “rages.”

And Markson made sure to mention these a few times in his tetralogy.

“Orchestra play like pig.
Being an Arturo Toscanini explanation of why he would not apologize to his Metropolitan Opera musicians after cursing at them in Italian.” (Vanishing Point, pg. 2).

“Orchestra play like pig.”
Markson repeated the line on pg. 191 of that same novel.

“When I die, I open a bordello. You know what is a bordello, no? But against every one of you—all—I lock shut the door.
Said Arturo Toscanini, to a recalcitrant orchestra.” (The Last Novel, pg. 1).

But as the above scan claims:
“It is my impression that intelligent orchestra players didn’t regard Toscanini’s rages as mere self-indulgence by a man who could be reasonable and patient but felt privileged to be unreasonable and impatient. I think they understood that he was, in his relation to music, a man obsessed and possessed, and that such a man was not rational and reasonable—not in music nor in anything else.”

A man obsessed and possessed…

Pg. 41 of David Markson’s copy of Mao II by Don DeLillo:

On which Markson wrote a note in the margins next to a passage in DeLillo’s novel.

The DeLillo passage reads:
“Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.”

Markson’s response?:
“Too facile.”

He placed a line next to the passage as well, and wrote something more, under “Too facile,” but then crossed out whatever he had written.

—-

This exchange reminds me of Markson making a similar connection between writers (as terrorists) and terrorists (as terrorists)…

In his novel Vanishing Point, Markson quoted a passage from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road:
“When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming to blow up New York.” (Pg. 169).

Immediately after that passage, Markson wrote this:
“Terrorists. Which was in fact the literary term chosen to categorize the earliest nineteenth-century female Gothic novelists.” (Pg. 169).

And throughout the entirety of Vanishing Point, the specter of 9/11 rears its head.

(After all, it was published in 2004, only a few short years after the towers fell.
And was being written when the towers fell.)

On pg. 8, Markson wrote:
“The greatest work of art ever, Karlheinz Stockhausen called the destruction of the World Trade Center.”

    On pg. 40, Markson used the quote:
    “Teacher, look! The birds are on fire!”
    Which had been said by a young, naive schoolgirl unknowingly commenting on the bodies falling from the burning buildings.

     On pg. 79, Markson let the Author assert his presence with:
     “Practically all those interviewed in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster agreed that they had never confronted anything more horrendous.
     Author’s curiosity as to whether anyone thought to inquire of the writer of Slaughterhouse-Five.”

     And on pg. 111, Markson connected:
     “Jack the Ripper was left-handed.
     Like Osama bin Laden.”

As Françoise Palleau-Papin explained in her study of Markson, This Is Not A Tragdy, re: Vanishing Point:
“The novel also deals with current affairs, but in a roundabout fashion, as when we are reminded of the nineteenth-century definition of the word ‘terrorist’: ‘Terrorists. Which was in fact the literary term chosen to categorize the earliest nineteenth-century female Gothic novelists’ (p. 169). To move implicitly to the political definition of terrorism from the word’s former literary sense draws our attention to the power of writing. Literary terror does not kill but thrills, and, presented in its uncanny, Gothic aspect, it questions our culture. But, implicitly, Author is also concerned with the contemporary definition of terrorists and feels terror when faced with the barbarity of his times, and wishes to impart his fears and views.” (Pg. 256).

No matter what our opinion as Readers (of Markson Reading) is of his assessment that DeLillo’s passage in Mao II on writers/terrorists is “too facile,” we can certainly agree that Markson’s wrestling with the same issue in Vanishing Point is anything but “facile.” The way the concept of terror in the post-9/11 world creeps up on you subtly by a few scattered mentions throughout Vanishing Point, and then comes to a crescendo on pg. 169 with him bringing it back to writers as terrorists is done without hammering it over the reader’s head whatsoever.

Pg. 284 of David Markson’s copy of Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

On which Markson placed a bracket and a line next to (and underlined the first sentence and last part of the last sentence of) the following paragraph from a letter from Fitzgerald to Hemingway discussing Hem’s For Whom the Bell Tolls:
“Congratulations too on your new book’s great success. I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this. I always liked Dostoiefski with his wide appeal more than any other European—and I envy you the time it will give you to do what you want.”

—-

Congratulations too on your new book’s great success.

I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this.

I envy you the time it will give you to do what you want

     Fitzgerald said other complimentary things of For Whom the Bell Tolls in the letter in the above scan too:
     – “It’s a fine novel, better than anybody else writing could do.”
     – “The massacre was magnificent and also the fight on the mountain and the actual dynamiting scene.”
     – “The scene in which the father says goodbye to his son is very powerful.”
     – “I’m going to read the whole thing again.”

     What’s interesting about these kind remarks is that when I went to Markson’s books to see if the marked quote was used by Markson—or if any of the other quotes were used—I found something quite fascinating:
     Fitzgerald’s sentiments on For Whom the Bell Tolls ARE mentioned in the tetralogy, but not the sentiments from the above letter. Instead apparently Fitzgerald thought differently of For Whom the Bell Tolls when not writing directly to Hemingway:
     “A thoroughly superficial book with all the profundity of Rebecca.
     Scott Fitzgerald called For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
     Markson tells us on pg. 135 of Vanishing Point.

Fitzgerald singing an altogether different tune…

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.”

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. 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).

Pg. 167 of David Markson’s copy of The Spirit of Tragedy by Herbert J. Muller:

On which Markson placed a line and a check in the margin next to this observation (anent Shakespeare):
“While his plays give no impression of ‘atheism’ or rebellion, they do suggest that he was much less concerned about God and Satan than Marlowe was. The wide-ranging thought of Hamlet barely touches on the religious problem.”

—-

In his novel Vanishing Point, Markson wrote the following:
“One’s delayed awareness that in Hamlet, Claudius prays. Or attempts to. And that Hamlet never does.” (Pg. 49).

     It is admittedly quite curious—and to me exciting—that Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, according to Herbert J. Muller in the above scan, “seldom express specifically Christian hopes and fears, and they go to their deaths with no chorus of Christian sentiments.”
    Of course, while I find comfort in Shakespeare’s seeming areligiousness, others find it troublesome:
     “T. S. Eliot has been as disturbed by the thought that the greatest of English poets lacked a Christian philosophy.”
     According to the above scan.

“The Reverend Eliot, Pound at times called him.”
Says pg. 110 of Markson’s Vanishing Point.

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