Marginalia – 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. 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 (?)).”

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.)

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.

The table of contents of David Markson’s copy of A History of Latin Literature by Moses Hadas:

On which Markson wrote next to the chapter on “SATIRE”:
“—Juvenal, Martial”

—-

     Speaking of Latin satire, let us glance at something Françoise Palleau-Papin wrote about Markson’s one novel that is no longer in print: Miss Doll, Go Home:
     “Markson chose the killer for a literary mouthpiece because, ironically enough, the man who eventually murders all his accomplices is a free spirit like no other. His iconoclastic love for literature as well as people turns into hatred and destruction taken with the same pleasure, both love and hate being the proverbial two sides of the coin. The gangster’s favorite reading gives the key to the composition of the crime novel, which is akin to Latin satire, etymologically ‘a satire in the modern sense of the word, but also in the original Latin sense of a medley, a composite genre that mixes prose, verse, tragedy and comedy into a delightful motley of tones and genres.’ That satire takes delight in the grotesque mixing of tones, in incongruous borrowings and a well-crafted off-hand manner. In the Satyricon, Eumolpus, a serious-minded character, defines the work of a poet in such terms: ‘not can a mind, unless unricht with learning, be deliver’d of a birth of poetry.’ (p. 190). Miss Doll is so ‘enriched with learning’ that the delivery is a hilarious mixture of genres.”
     From Pg. 36 of This Is Not A Tragedy by Françoise Palleau-Papin.

All Markson’s novels in some sense a satire?

Lanx satura.

“An assemblage.” – Reader’s Block, pg. 140.

“Bricolage.” – Reader’s Block, pg. 141.

Lanx satura.

As in: “A full dish of various kinds of fruits.”

“A hilarious mixture of genres.”

Pg. 250 of David Markson’s copy of Man the Measure: A New Approach to History by Erich Kahler:

On which Markson placed an X next to the following information from a paragraph about the misuse of papal power by Popes that “did not behave at
all differently from the other Renaissance princes”:
“And Pope Leo X, the son of Lorenzo Medici, was credited with saying: ‘This story of Jesus has helped us a lot.’”

—-

     On pg. 184 of his novel (?) This Is Not A Novel, Markson made use of the above information:
     “This story of Jesus has helped us a lot.
     Allowed Pope Leo X.”

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. 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.