Notes – Page 3 – Reading Markson Reading

Pg. 376 of David Markson’s copy of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia:

     On which Markson responds to Camille Paglia writing:
     “I have seen with my own eye the humiliating changes life works on the personality of high glamour.”
     By writing in the margin the following:
     “You have, truly? Golly!”

—

Sometimes with Markson marginalia, all you can do is smile.

And I certainly did smile when I found this gem.

Luckily ole Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault wasn’t near me when I read it.

     “Géricault’s intensity when at work on The Raft of the Medusa:
     The mere sound of a smile could prevent him from painting, someone said.”
     – Markson, The Last Novel, pg. 56.

The sound of a smile?

Golly.

Pg. 199 of David Markson’s copy of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia:

On which Markson responds to a mention of Patrick Dennis’ Auntie Mame by asking in the margins:
“Yeah, but is the book (play?) any good?”

—

Though now mostly forgotten, in 1955, Patrick Dennis’ novel Auntie Mame set records on the New York Times bestseller list.

It was adapted for the stage the following year in 1956, and adapted for the silver screen in 1958.
Both the play and film starred Rosalind Russell.

In 1966, the play was turned into a musical, Mame, this time starring Angela Lansbury (who won the Tony Award for her role).
Mame then became a film in 1974, starring Lucille Ball.

Oh, Auntie Mame.

As Camille Paglia wrote on the page in the above scan, “Above all is Patrick Dennis’ breezy Auntie Mame, lavish practitioner of multiple personae, whose cult status among male homosexuals is the unmistakable sign of her cross-sexual character.”

Yeah, but is the book (play?) any good?

Good question, Dave. Good question.

Pg. 291 of David Markson’s copy of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia:

On which Markson responds to Paglia’s discussion of “the films All About Eve and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” by asking of the latter:
“A play first, no?”

—

Indeed. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a play first, written by Edward Albee, and Paglia neglects that fact and goes straight on to talking about the film as though it is not adapted from literary source material.

Also of note, All About Eve is likewise adapted from source material: a short story titled “The Wisdom of Eve” by Mary Orr.

Elizabeth Taylor starred in the film adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with her then-husband Richard Burton.

It was 1966.

The next year, Taylor starred in another movie adapted from literary source material:
Reflections in a Golden Eye.

That time opposite Marlon Brando.

     Markson tells us a surprising quote from Brando re: the movies in This Is Not A Novel:
     “There is no such thing as a great movie. A Rembrandt is great. Mozart chamber music.
     Said Marlon Brando.”

The inside back cover of David Markson’s copy of James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism by Various (Ed. Seon Givens):

     On which Markson wrote:
     “See Wm. Empson
     = Kenyon Rev., Winter 1956”

—

In the Winter 1956 edition of the Kenyon Review, William Empson wrote a piece called “The Theme of Ulysses.”

      The same William Empson, I might add, mentioned by Markson on pg. 146 of his novel Vanishing Point:
     “William Empson: You could do that with any poetry, couldn’t you?
     I. A. Richards: You’d better go off and do it, hadn’t you?”

     And also mentioned elsewhere on pg. 16 of his The Last Novel:
     “I was much impressed by the chalk-white face with the swollen purple lips, and felt confident he had been brooding over the Crucifixion all night, or some other holy torture.
     Said William Empson re sightings of Eliot, ca. 1930.”

Wm. Empson’s “The Theme of Ulysses“…

Which appeared in the Kenyon Review, where also, years later, in 2010, upon Markson’s death, an interesting piece by William Walsh was published, entitled “Dead Beat,” which is an “excised narrative” that Marksonizes Markson’s early detective novel Epitaph for a Dead Beat, bringing out of the original text certain themes and styles that Markson would later focus on in his Notecard Quartet.

Pg. 106 of David Markson’s copy of A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers by Hugh Kenner:

On which Kenner claims re: Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams:
     “She and a frantically busy physician who kept a typewriter screwed to a hinged leaf of his consulting-room desk, to be banged up into typing position between patients: not ‘poets,’ not professionals of the word, save for their passion: they were the inventors of an American poetry. The fact is instructive.”
     Next to which Markson places some lines and replies:
     “Not if your poetry is not very good—which theirs isn’t.”

—

Surprisingly, even though they are both mentioned in his last four novels often enough, Markson was apparently not very fond of the poetry of two of the biggest Modernist poets:
Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams.

When Markson criticizes authors in the margins, such as in this instance, or the constant barrage in the margins of his DeLillo novels, I think of something he said in his KCRW interview about what most of the little “intellectual odds-and-ends” are in his tetralogy:
“Most frequently it’s despairs and defeats, or sometimes even rotten reviews, and sometimes even from their peers (who should be kinder).”

“Not if your poetry is not very good—which theirs isn’t.”

Should Markson have been kinder in the margins of his books?

Eh, I prefer knowing his honest opinion…

—

Pg. 340 of David Markson’s copy of Forces in Modern British Literature: 1885-1946 by William York Tindall:

     On which Marksonunderlines the names “Bruno” and “Vico,” making lines out to the margins that connect:
     Bruno with “Opposites.”
     And Vico with “Cycles.”

—

The theories of Bruno and Vico, and their relation to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, are explored by Samuel Beckett in his early defense of Joyce’sWork in Progress titled “Dante…Bruno. Vico..Joyce.”

“Dante…Bruno. Vico..Joyce.” was published amongst a number of other defenses of Joyce’s Work in Progress / Finnegans Wake in the book Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (the title of which is mentioned on pg. 183 of Markson’s Reader’s Block).

Simplified, as Markson’s notes make it in the margins, Bruno’s theories can be represented by “opposites,” or contraries, and Vico’s by “cycles.”

Joyce plays with opposites and cycles, as Markson does in his writing a well.

Yet, as Beckett says in the beginning of that defense of Joyce:
“The danger is in the neatness of identifications.”

     As Markson noted on pg. 13 of The Last Novel:
     “He is not writing about something; he is writing something.
     Said Samuel Beckett re Joyce.”

The full quote from Beckett goes something like this:
“You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.”

It is to be looked at and listened to.

     At the end of his study on Lowry, Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth Symbol Meaning, Markson has a reminiscence of Lowry as an appendix.
     In it one finds this gem re: Lowry:
     “He shakes his head wistfully over a copy of Finnegans Wake: ‘I did not give this as much time as I should have.” (Pg. 226)

Not enough looking at and listening to?

He is not writing about something; he is writing something.

Pg. 135 of David Markson’s copy of A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers by Hugh Kenner:

On which Kenner wrote:
     “Robert Cohn, for instance, is presented in the second sentence of The Sun Also Rises as a man insufficiently aware of pugilistic hierarchies:
     Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.”
     To which Markson responded:
     “That’s hardly the meaning.”

—

That first sentence of The Sun Also Rises (“Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton”) can be found on pg. 199 of Markson’s Springer’s Progress amongst a number of other first sentences of famous novels.
Had he made a list of second sentences of famous novels, I wonder if that of The Sun Also Rises (“Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn”) would have made the cut.

In that second sentence, according to Hugh Kenner, Cohn is presented as “a man insufficiently aware of pugilistic hierarchies.”
But if you side with Markson, and I tend to, “that’s hardly the meaning.”

—

Pg. 125 of David Markson’s copy of In Defence of Imagination by Helen Gardner:

     On which Markson responded to Gardner’s assertion:
     “In prison even Wilde would hardly have wanted to shock a warder, and the point becomes that Wilde really had managed to escape knowledge of the story of the Passion.”
     Markson’s marginal response:
     “No no no.”

—

What Gardner is referencing is a story about Wilde, which had been told in various ways:

The first came from The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes:
“In his viva voce examination for ‘Divvers’ at Oxford, Oscar Wilde was required to translate from the Greek version of the New Testament, which was one of the set books. The passage chosen was from the story of the Passion. Wilde began to translate easily and accurately. The examiners were satisfied, and told him that was enough. Wilde ignored them and continued to translate. After another attempt the examiners succeeded in stopping him, and told him they were satisfied with his translation. ‘Oh, do let me go on’, said Wilde, ‘I want to see how it ends.’”

The second version is told to Gardner by Professor Louis Martz, and he said:
“The incident, as he was told it, occurred on Wilde’s first night in gaol. He was reading the Gospel of St. Mark, and when the warder came in with his supper Oscar cried out, ‘Go away, Go away—I want to see how it ends.’”

Gardner determines:
“The words are unchanged, but the point has become different. In the Oxford version, the remark is a piece of impertinence; Wilde is trying to shock his examiners by pretending not to have read the Gospels. In prison even Wilde would hardly have wanted to shock a warder, and the point becomes that Wilde really had managed to escape knowledge of the story of the Passion.”

Is that really the point of the second version?

I would disagree. And Markson’s “No no no” obviously shows his disagreement in her analysis of what the second version means as well.

Of course, as a reader of Markson marginalia, few discoveries are more satisfying than finding he’s thrown in an Amy Winehouse-esque “No no no” in the margins.

That and “Bullshit”—two of my favorite things to see when I open up a book once owned by Markson.

Gardner’s Wilde mention here though brings up vague images of Markson mentioning Oscar Wilde under arrest in his book on Lowry, Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth Symbol Meaning:
“‘Vague images of grief and tragedy’ next pass through the Consul’s mind, among them a vision of Oscar Wilde under arrest—Wilde readily taking a place in Lowry’s ‘cuckoo poet’ syndrome, and perhaps additionally because it was in prison that he wrote his own De Profundis.” (Pg. 49)

Yes yes yes.

Pg. 351 of David Markson’s copy of Forces in Modern British Literature: 1885-1946 by William York Tindall:

On which Markson made a line in the margin and wrote the name of his friend “Dylan Thomas” to mark where Tindall’s discussion of Thomas begins.

—

This seems like the right time to share a piece Markson wrote re: Thomas, in prose, that became one of the appendices for Markson’s own Collected Poems:

APPENDIX B

DYLAN THOMAS
TWENTY YEARS LATER

     For weeks now, I have been scowling over the premise behind this essay. Can it truly be possible that twenty full years have passed—to the day, come Friday—since Dylan Thomas died on West Eleventh Street? My lord, I think I saw him yesternight. And out of what ineluctable, startling legerdemain can I myself actually be older now than he was then?
     Dylan, you randy, rumpled, boilermaker-chugging young dog…twenty years?
     There he stands, in the White Horse Tavern. Though I have been to Laugharne as well, in southern Wales the color of owls, and seen where he rests in country sleep….
     So what words then, to mark the day? That for many of us he remains the truest poet in the language since Yeats? Even were there point in such a judgment, just who am I to venture it?
     I had thought of a reminiscence also, possessed of the trivial fond records of some eight or ten Dylan-soaked nights—but time, I am sure, must long since have distorted most. Did he and I really once race, mad as birds, some several staggered blocks along Hudson Street after a midnight’s glorious lying about our boyhood heroism at track? Or have I been making up most of that story for years?
     But perhaps I find something I can trust. I have letters that I wrote about him, that seem in retrospect a fair accounting of what one casual acquaintance saw and felt, back then—and worth a modest footnote’s pause, as it were, for today. (The letters were to Malcolm Lowry, then in British Columbia; they were returned to me after Lowry’s death later on. If I abridge them considerably, often without ellipses, the only other very few changes will be for clarity.) Thomas died on November 9, 1953; the date on the earliest excerpt, at the time but incidental intelligence, is November 3:

Dylan is here again—kind of painful. He has been setting records with the bottle, unfortunately—doesn’t focus, moves about as if hypnotized, speaks past you into the emptiness of a limbo all his own—and is apparently writing nothing. I love the bastard’s stuff, and have for years; and liked him much when I was seeing him about a year and a half ago. Then, even in the drunkenness there was a kind of wit and vitality and stimulation that means life in abundance; but now he seems a caricature of himself, even in appearance. A dirty shame….

Even youth, it strikes me now, is flimsy excuse for that sort of prose—though there would appear more insight back of it than I knew. Before writing, I’d seen Thomas only once during the two weeks of his then-current visit; yet within days I was to send Lowry the following:

A brief and terribly painful follow-up to something in my letter of a couple days ago. I learned just now that Dylan collapsed at the Chelsea (his hotel) yesterday, and is in a local hospital with a serious brain ailment. Precisely what it means I don’t know, but will let you know as soon as I hear anything. Christ.

Typing hurriedly, I contrived to write “brail” instead of “brain.” In a reply he started before taking things quite seriously, Lowry asked if I meant to intimate “an ailment as of one slightly blind.” There was no returning the jest when I wrote again, however; I would post the letter only a few hours before Thomas “expired,” as the hospital switchboard was to have it that evening:

What to tell you, but the facts? There is no change in Dylan’s condition: five days in a coma, still critical. He has a brain hemorrhage and they have no idea what is keeping him alive. Caitlin flew in yesterday.
   The facts. And your damned guts turn over. The young men already composing their elegies, and a disgraceful mob of them mills around the corridors of St. Vincent’s holding a premature wake. To be able to tell their tavern friends: look on Shelley plain? Hell, I was in the hospital the day he died….
   I remember your story about him as a kid, hacking his lungs out, breaking bottles, declaiming on death. And so it’s taken twenty years. I guess he must have known—or knows, whatever the damned tense—his position. At the time I got to know him best, he was caught up in a whirlwind in which he seemed indifferently content. On the trip before, he had wondered, honestly, if he would be liked or understood. And on these later visits it was the purest degradation. They liked him, all right, all the fawning, uncreative sycophants who robbed him of his time and his energy and every other damned thing until even the person was gone and only the “personality” remained. What matter if he is mesmerized, mechanical, inarticulate? Hell, ma, look at me, sitting here buying beers for Dylan Thomas…and I also, those months in 1952. The mob that will feed upon him even in death—or what is worse, right now….
   I saw a manuscript of his once, a poem of about thirty lines that made a sheaf as thick as a fist. I wonder, after the early romanticism passed, what he was like alone, working that way, doing “Fern Hill” and “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” the others that will last. When he was his own, I mean, and belonged to himself. The picture I have now is so cluttered, so unclean. But there is such a damned impossible purity and vitality in some of his things that probably it is that, even now, that is keeping him alive this long. It is the thing that made him, and will remain….
   “When he walked with his mother through the parables of sunlight and the legends of the green chapels….” “And death shall have no dominion.” Jesus Jesus Jesus.
   Two years ago the White Horse Tavern was an empty, unknown seamen’s bar where old men played chess, peripheral to the Village, nowhere. And now, because Dylan found it and had the instinct to make it a refuge in the beginning, it is the most mobbed, crawling bar downtown, the place to be. They came like flies, now like jackals. And now for a while it will be hushed, somber, a kind of shrine….
   Balls. I’ll have a drink there with you one day. Meanwhile I’m sorry, with both of you out there, who knew him so long. I wish I had, before….

Pg. 173 of David Markson’s copy of A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke by Donald Prater:

On which David Markson wrote “oh bullshit” in the margins in response to a comment by Prater comparing the difficulties of reading Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge to those of reading Joyce’s Ulysses:
“With Malte Laurids Brigge, in the form he had chosen of heterogeneous and disconnected passages in a notebook, he had gone to another extreme, with an esoteric composition as difficult for the reader to follow in its allusiveness as that of Joyce would be—an anti-novel before its time.”

—

Ulysses, to Markson, was something special. It’s not that books like Malte Laurids Brigge weren’t novels worthy of praise, but more that, to him, nothing seemed comparable to Joyce’s masterpiece, which he maintained was the only fiction book that in his old age he felt compelled to continue to re-read.

As Markson explained in a 1996 interview with Alexander Laurence:
“I don’t read fiction anymore because it bores me. It’s like that line in Paul Valery that’s quoted in Reader’s Block: ‘He couldn’t write a novel because he couldn’t put down ‘The Marquis went out at five.” The minute I read ‘Joe walked across the street to say hello to Charlie’ I’m bored. Books that I loved, I can’t get into again. Sometimes it’s 30 or 40 years later. So I said let me see with Ulysses, it’s about time. Then I read it once and cursed about how much I didn’t get, or didn’t understand, and had to look up words, and then I read it a second time and felt I had mastered it. I was exchanging letters with Gilbert Sorrentino and we were asking each other ‘I wonder what Joyce meant by this’ or ‘I can’t solve this.’ I have a shelf and a half of Joyce scholarship, and I read most of it over the years, and the stuff that Sorrentino and I were asking each other weren’t solved there either. I have to say that Ulysses holds up: it’s a great book. Joyce does everything. I love the complexities. I don’t want to make a bad joke but anyone can write Crime and Punishment.”

Ulysses, to Markson, was the book that earned its re-readings by continually rewarding the re-reader by re-puzzling him, by making him look at things in a new light, by always offering some new view or some new mystery—by allowing language to be something magical, something more. In Ulysses, Joyce is not so much a writer, more an acrobat, performing difficult tricks in language, and somehow pulling each off brilliantly.

What Markson seemed to love about Ulysses is that it is “alive with the pleasures of language.”
(A line Jonathan Yardley actually wrote of Markson’s Springer’s Progress.)

It’s not that Markson doesn’t respect Malte Laurids Brigge when he writes “oh bullshit” in the margins, but that, to him, saying that Rilke’s book is “as difficult for the reader to follow in its allusiveness as that of Joyce would be” warrants some major marginal skepticism.

“I can always reread Ulysses. In fact I went through it twice, consecutively, just a few years ago. But hell, that’s not like reading a novel, it’s more like reading the King James Bible. Or Shakespeare. You’re at it for the language.”
(From his Bookslut interview.)

Alive with the pleasures of language.

—

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