Pg. 479 of David Markson’s copy of James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism by Various (Ed. Seon Givens):
On which Markson placed checks in the margin next to various works on Joyce in the book’s bibliography. (Presumably next to the books he owned?)
Also: On which Markson wrote next to a mention of William York Tindall’s Forces in Modern British Literature 1885-1946 (which I own Markson’s copy of):
“Also: James Joyce”
—
On pg. 55 of David Markson’s Vanishing Point:
“There are no English critics of weight or judgment who consider Mr. Joyce an author of any importance.
Said Edmund Gosse, two years after the publication of Ulysses.”
Just using Markson’s own personal library Edmund Gosse can be proven wrong.
“I have a shelf and a half of Joyce scholarship.”
Explained Markson in an interview with Alexander Laurence.
The Joyce Industry, even almost 90 years after the publication of Ulysses, is alive and well.
And there’s one major reason for that:
“I have to say that Ulysses holds up: it’s a great book. Joyce does everything.”
Markson said further on in that Alexander Laurence interview.
Pg. 472 of David Markson’s copy of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia:
On which Markson placed two checks, and wrote a note.
The first check is next to a mention of Swinburne’s masochistic tendencies (i.e. “he liked to be whipped by women and visited brothels for this purpose”).
The second check is next to a mention of Sappho’s lover Anactoria (i.e. “a name from the Sapphic fragments”).
At the bottom of the page, Markson reiterates this notion of Anactoria being a lover of Sappho by writing the simple equation:
“Anactoria = One of Sappho’s lovers.”
—
I can’t seem to find any reference to Swinburne’s masochism in any of Markson’s texts, nor can I find any reference to his apparent brothel visits in them either, but there is a reference to the lover of Sappho from the above scan in Markson’s Reader’s Block.
On pg. 171 of that book her name appears devoid of context:
“Anactoria.”
Anactoria = One of Sappho’s lovers.
“Anactoria.”
A name from the Sapphic fragments.
A name from the Marksonian fragments.
Pg. 131 of David Markson’s copy of I, Michelangelo, Sculptor by Michelangelo:
On which Markson wrote in the margins next to a mention in a letter of “Sebastiano”:
“(Sebastian del Piombo)”
—
Sebastian del Piombo is mentioned in one of Markson’s books—also, no surprise, in relation to Michelangelo.
On pg. 80 of Vanishing Point:
“Pope Leo X, to Sebastiano del Piombo, as to why he was holding off on commissions for Michelangelo:
There is absolutely no getting on with the man.”
From pg. 192 of Wittgenstein’s Mistress:
“Certainly I would have found it more than agreeable to shake Michelangelo’s hand, no matter how the pope or Louis Pasteur might have felt about this.
In fact I would have been excited just to see the hand that had taken away superfluous material in the way that Michelangelo had taken it away.
Actually, I would have been pleased to tell Michelangelo how fond I am of his sentence that I once underlined, too.
Perhaps I have not mentioned having once underlined a sentence by Michelangelo.
I once underlined a sentence by Michelangelo.
This was a sentence that Michelangelo once wrote in a letter, when he had lived almost seventy-five years.
You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.
On my honor, Michelangelo once wrote that.
As a matter of fact I am next to positive I would have liked Michelangelo.”
There is absolutely no getting on with the man.
Pg. 385 of David Markson’s copy of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia:
On which Paglia, discussing the John Keats poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” wrote:
“The poem’s sexual personae puzzled me for a decade.”
To which Markson responded:
“A decade! Not nine years, not eleven?”
—
Oh Markson, and his marginalia. It’s always funny to make note of the things he decided to take issue with.
“The poem’s sexual personae puzzled me for a decade.”
A decade! Not nine years, not eleven?
The poem of which Paglia wrote, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” is mentioned by Markson in one of his mid-career novels: Springer’s Progress.
On pg. 66, he uses the Keats poem, and the female figure in the poem, to describe Jessica Cornford, the young girl who is the object of the titular Springer’s affections in his novel:
“Omophagic, only word for her labia. How’s he even remember, means eating raw flesh? Springer’s havocked.
‘My God. La Belle Dame sans Merci. Inquisitors be after you.’
‘What did I do?’
‘Black Mass. Jessica the depraved prioress.’”
Sexual personae.
Pg. 635 of David Markson’s copy of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia:
On which Paglia quotes an insult from the show Welcome Back, Kotter, when she writes:
“Heidi Jon Schmidt told me this sounds like a street insult, like ‘Up your nose with a rubber hose!’”
To which Markson responded:
“Huh?
(Oh, TV)”
—
“Up your nose with a rubber hose!”
Huh?
Markson did not have a computer or use the internet, so if he didn’t know something that he couldn’t look up in a book, he would often call or write his friends.
I imagine him calling someone—maybe one of his kids, or maybe a fellow writer like Rick Moody or Gilbert Sorrentino—and asking, what is the phrase “Up your nose with a rubber hose!” from?
Welcome Back, Kotter, the answer.
Oh, TV.
Pg. 594 of David Markson’s copy of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia:
On which Paglia quotes W. H. Auden as saying:
“It is not an accident that many homosexuals should show a special preference for sailors, for the sailor on shore is symbolically the innocent god from the sea who is not bound by the law of the land and can therefore do anything without guilt.”
To which Markson replies:
“Oh, Jesus. Plus that he’s probably horny….plus that he’s used to homosexuality in a womanless world at sea.”
—-
In a womanless world at sea…
“Just an old queen, Auden spoke of himself as.”
According to Markson’s novel The Last Novel. On pg. 177.
“It is not an accident that many homosexuals should show a special preference for sailors, for the sailor on shore is symbolically the innocent god from the sea who is not bound by the law of the land and can therefore do anything without guilt.”
Speaking of the water v. the land:
Old saying: One never steps into the same river twice.
Which Markson reports was converted into:
“One never steps twice into the same Auden.
Said Randall Jarrell.”
On pg. 177 of The Last Novel.
One ever step twice into the same sailor?
Can therefore do anything without guilt.
Pg. 260 of David Markson’s copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein:
On which Markson placed a line and an arrow, above which he wrote:
“HEMINGWAY:
10 pages.”
—
“Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers.
Says Hemingway in a letter.”
Found on pg. 110 of Markson’s Vanishing Point.
Obviously the above scan shows the page which begins the section of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas where Stein discusses her “brother” Ernest Hemingway.
On pg. 136 of This Is Not A Novel, Markson relays one of the things Stein says of Hemingway in this section of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:
“A pansy with hair on his chest, Zelda Fitzgerald called Hemingway.
Ninety percent Rotarian, supplied Gertrude Stein.”
The full quote from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas reads:
“They sat and talked a long time. Finally I heard her say, Hemingway, after all you are ninety percent Rotarian. Can’t you, he said, make it eighty percent. No, said she regretfully, I can’t. After all, as she always says, he did, and I may say, he does have moments of disinterestedness.”
Brothers.
Pg. 254 of David Markson’s copy of Forces in Modern British Literature: 1885-1946 by William York Tindall:
On which Markson placed the text of the entire page in a bracket and wrote:
“See Edmund Wilson = Axel’s Castle.”
—
Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 is a book of literary criticism by Edmund Wilson. First published in 1931, it is a survey of Symbolism from the last 30 years of the 19th century and the first 30 years of the 20th century. It dealt with poets and novelists as varied as Arthur Rimbaud, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein.
Edmund Wilson, like many a literary critic, was known as a voracious reader.
My favorite of his mentions in Markson’s Notecard Quartet comes towards the end of the final book of the tetralogy and deals with this inexhaustible appetite for reading of Wilson’s:
“The report that to keep him from sitting with a book for sixteen hours a day. Edmund Wilson’s parents bought him a baseball uniform. Which he happily put on—and sat in with a book for sixteen hours a day.”
– The Last Novel, pg. 168.
Pg. 364 of David Markson’s copy of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia:
On which Markson responded with the words:
“That’s pretty damned irrelevant.”
To the paragraph:
“Byron, the Romantic exile, did England a favor. Energy and beauty together are burning, godlike, destructive. Byron created the youth-cult that would sweep Elvis Presley to uncomfortable fame. In our affluent commercial culture, this man of beauty was able to ignore politics and build his empire elsewhere. A ritual function of contemporary popular culture: to parallel and purify government. The modern charismatic personality has access to movies, television, and music, with their enormous reach. Mass media act as a barrier protecting politics, which would otherwise be unbalanced by the entrance of men of epochal narcissistic glamour. Today’s Byronic man of beauty is a Presley who dominates the imagination, not a Buckingham who disorders a state.”
—
The “irrelevance” of the Elvis Presley mention aside, here are a couple things about “Byron, the Romantic exile” that Markson thought to put in Reader’s Block:
“Byron went into permanent exile from England in late April of 1816, near Passover. One of the last London friends he saw was the composer Isaac Nathan.
Who brought him a farewell gift of matzos.” (Pg. 83)
“Byron was only thirty-six when he died, yet had already grown overweight and flaccid, with thinning hair and abominable teeth.
Nonetheless every second town in Greece would name a public square after him.” (Pg. 42)
Pg. 121 of David Markson’s copy of The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature by Gilbert Highet:
On which Markson crossed out the information that Plautus’ Amphitryon was translated “into English by W. Courtney in 1562-63.”
He then wrote in the margins:
“No.”
—
Though I can’t seem to find a copy of this translation anywhere, it is quite simple to find other books that mention the same “fact.”
I’m unsure why Markson decided that this was untrue, or otherwise warranted being crossed out and engendering an emphatic “No” in the margins.
Plautus is lesser known than a number of the other Greek and Latin playwrights. But his comedies are the earliest in tact works in Latin literature.
And though Amphitryon escapes mention in Markson’s Notecard Quartet, another work of his, Mostellaria, is referenced, though goes unnamed.
In Vanishing Point, on pg. 21, Markson asks:
“Is Plautus the first author ever to refer to Alexander of Macedon as Alexander the Great?”
As far as we know, the answer to this question is an emphatic “Yes.”
The earliest known reference to the “Alexander the Great” name comes from Mostellaria by Plautus.
