Reading Markson Reading

Pg. 257 of David Markson’s copy of The Complete Greek Drama: Volume Two by Various (Ed. Whitney J. Oates & Eugene O’Neill, Jr.):

On which Markson placed a check next to and underlined a stage direction in Euripides’ The Bacchae:
“(who during the rest of this scene, with a few exceptions, simply speaks the thoughts that Dionysus puts into him, losing power over his own mind)”

In addition to some other underlining of lines by Dionysus and Pentheus.

—

Speaking of Dionysus putting thoughts into one’s head and losing power over one’s own mind…

     “The myth that Dionysus invented wine.
     On Mount Nysa.
     In Libya.”
     Wrote Markson on pg. 163 of Vanishing Point.

Pg. 55 of David Markson’s copy of A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers by Hugh Kenner:

On which Markson placed a line in the margin next to part of a quote from poet Wallace Stevens on his contemporary William Carlos Williams:
“I have not read Paterson. I have the greatest respect for him, although there is the contrast difficulty that he is more interested in the way of saying things than in what he has to say. The fact remains that we are always fundamentally interested in what a writer has to say. When we are sure of that, we pay attention to the way in which he says it, not often before.”

And then Markson puts a squiggle to the sentence that Kenner writes in response to Stevens’ reading of Williams:
“This is one of the most extraordinary misunderstandings in literary history.”

—

So what does Markson think of “one of the most extraordinary misunderstandings in literary history”?

Where would Markson stand in a Stevens v. Williams deathmatch?

     Well, though we should be careful not to completely conflate the “Novelist” persona in The Last Novel with Markson himself, there are obvious points of similarity between character and author, and the Novelist might offer a point of entry into the novelist’s (Markson’s) thoughts on Wallace Stevens:
     The Novelist in The Last Novel (and perhaps Markson himself) thought this of Stevens:
     “Wondering if there can be any other ranking twentieth-century American poet whose body of work contains even half the percentage of pure drivel as Wallace Stevens’.” (Pg. 109)

     And yet, Markson’s thoughts on William Carlos Williams also seem to be less than enthusiastic—and we don’t have to use the filter of one of his characters to discover his thoughts here:
     On another page in this Hugh Kenner book, once owned by David Markson, Markson wrote in the margin his thoughts on William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore:
     “Not if your poetry is not very good—which theirs isn’t.”

     “Tell me honestly, Cal. Am I as good a poet as Shelley?
     Asked William Carlos Williams, not long before his death, of Robert Lowell.”
     An anecdote found on pg. 178 of The Last Novel.

     Makes me imagine my own scene of WCW on his deathbed:
     “Tell me honestly, Dave. Am I as good a poet as Stevens?
     Asked William Carlos Williams, not long before his death, of David Markson.”
     What would Markson have said?

—

Pg. 164 of David Markson’s copy of A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers by Hugh Kenner:

On which Markson placed a check next to a mention of writer Louis Zukofsky.

—

Louis Zukofsky was an American poet, born just a few months before fictional Leopold Bloom took his fictional stroll.

Zukofsky, born Jan 23rd, 1904, and died May 12th, 1978, is probably best remembered for his long poem “A”.

“A” is an 826-page poem that took Zukofsky pretty much his entire lifetime to complete.

He seems like just the kind of interesting yet underappreciated and oft-overlooked writer that Markson would have found things to say about in his Notecard Quartet.

To my surprise, Zukofsky was not written about anywhere in Markson’s books.

In fact, the only spot where he appears in any of Markson’s novels are his mentions at the very back of the book in Markson’s two Dalkey Archive releases. And this is solely because in the back of their publications Dalkey has a page of “Selected Dalkey Archive Paperbacks” and Louis Zukofsky’s Collected Fictions is one of those listed.

But in Markson’s actual writing, he is conspicuously absent.

—

Pg. 259 of David Markson’s copy of Pasternak: A Biography by Ronald Hingley:

On which David Markson placed two lines and a check in the margin next to the following paragraph re: how compared to other Russian writers Pasternak didn’t have it so rough:
“Akhmatova was to carry her resentment of Pasternak beyond the grave. Shortly after his death she exploded with indignation on hearing one of his admirers describe him as a martyr to persecution. This was stuff and nonsense, she told Chukovskaya. Far from being a sacrificial victim, Boris Leonidovich had been extraordinarily lucky. His temperament had ensured that he always enjoyed himself in any circumstances whatever. Almost all his writings achieved publication in the Soviet Union or abroad, and the rest had been eagerly passed from hand to hand in manuscript. Pasternak had always had money; Akhmatova had long been desperately poor. Neither of Pasternak’s sons had ever been arrested; Akhmatova’s son had served long terms in labour camps. One had only to compare Pasternak’s fate with Mandelstam’s and Tsvetayeva’s to see how fortunate he had been. And Chukovskaya could not help reflecting that Pasternak’s sufferings over the Nobel Prize affair had been a mere ‘butterflies’ duel’ in comparison with the persecution of Akhmatova and of Zoshchenko from 1946 onwards.”

—-

The “Nobel Prize affair” mentioned in the marked paragraph is in reference to Pasternak receiving the prize in 1958, and his subsequent threatening by the Soviet government to the point that he was forced to renounce the prize.

     As Markson puts it in Vanishing Point on pg. 87:
     “A reactionary bourgeois award, Pravda called Pasternak’s Nobel Prize.
     Which he was forced to decline.”

And yet, Ahkmatova is right.
Sure, Pasternak didn’t necessarily have it easy—no one would say having to renounce one of the most prestigious awards in the world is easy—but compared to most other Russian writers of the time period, it’s tough to see him as “a martyr to persecution.”

     “The myriad Anna Akhmatova poems, written over decades, which she or friends were forced to immediately memorize.
     Because under Soviet rule she was afraid to put them on paper.”
     Markson explains on pg. 152 of Vanishing Point.

     On pg. 26 of the same book:
     “The fact that Isaac Babel was executed in a Moscow prison cellar.
     The strong possibility that the manuscript of a novel confiscated at his arrest still exists in Stalin-era files.”

Also in Vanishing Point, on pg. 60, Markson makes mention of “the first time Osip Mandelstam was arrested by Soviet authorities.”
The operative word, of course, being first.

     “Osip Mandelstam once wrote a poem criticizing Stalin.
     And died in a Gulag.”
     Markson quite succinctly put it in This Is Not A Novel on pg. 28.

Also in that book, on pg. 55:
“In his mid-twenties, Joseph Brodsky was sentenced to five years shoveling manure at the White Sea for what the Soviet Union saw as social parasitism.”

And on pg. 85 of same:
“Meyerhold was executed by the Soviets.”

     Pg. 10 of This Is Not A Novel also questions the death of Gorky:
     “Maxim Gorky died of tuberculosis.
     Or was he ordered murdered by Stalin?”

     “Imperialist bourgeois and decadent counterrevolutionary tendencies.
     Both Shostakovich and Prokofiev were accused of at one time or another by Soviet authorities.”
     Markson writes in The Last Novel, on pg. 19.

     “Through much of her life, Marina Tsvetayeva was forced to endure practically a beggar’s existence. And with her nearest relatives repeatedly imprisoned.
     Akhmatova fared little better, confronted by the same family jailings, often subsisting for long periods on little more than black bread.”
     Wrote Markson on pg. 53 of Reader’s Block.

A few pages before that, on 51, a mention of Mandelstam in the Soviet camps:
“Convinced he was being poisoned, Osip Mandelstam may have sometimes stolen food from other inmates in his Soviet prison camp. And been beaten for it. At the end he survived on scraps from a garbage heap.”

“D. S. Mirsky died in Siberia in one of Stalin’s purges.”
Markson wrote in Reader’s Block on pg. 59.

     On pg. 91 of the same book:
     “Irina Ratushinskaya. At twenty-eight, as late as in 1982, sentenced to seven years in the strictest of Russian prison camps.
     For writing verse deemed unsuitable to the state.”

A few pages later on 105:
“Hayim Lenski died of starvation in a Soviet labor camp. Sent there for having written poems in Hebrew.”

     Further on in Reader’s Block on pg. 151:
     “Isaac Babel disappeared in one of Stalin’s purges. Nothing whatsoever is known about his death.
     Conversely, orders allegedly given by Stalin in regard to Pasternak: Don’t touch the cloud-dweller.”

     “Cloud-dweller.”
     Possibly a reference to Pasternak’s poetry collection Twin in the Clouds.
     In addition, obviously, to the “head in the clouds” lyrical romantic poet implication.

The cloud-dweller “a martyr to persecution”?

I think I’d go with Ahkmatova on this one:
Stuff and nonsense.

Pg. 73 of David Markson’s copy of Picturing Will by Ann Beattie:

On which Markson placed a check in the margins next to the first mention of a character who shares his last name:
“History was personified in the form of Luther, a.k.a. Jake Markson from Brooklyn, an overweight overachiever from the Queens College art program whose talent Haveabud knew he could market.”

—

     Ann Beattie wrote:
     “No one but Beckett can be quite as sad and funny at the same time as Markson can.”
     Only here she is not referring to her character in Picturing Will, but actually to David Markson.

They were close.

In fact, she was one of the first people to read Wittgenstein’s Mistress before it was published, as it was being rejected left and right.

In an interview on The Leonard Lopate Show, Beattie was asked about her falling in love Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and she responded:
“Falling in love is a perfectly okay way to talk about it because in a way the book is an enormous seduction. You know as another writer occasionally you read something that just comes so much from somewhere else that it really just blows you away. You think, you know, this isn’t even any standard to aspire to—I mean this really has nothing to do with what I’ve been reading for most of my life. I think more than just falling in love with it, or whatever, though—and I don’t mean to say this kept me removed from the book—but there was a kind of writerly awe that anybody would dare to be so uncompromising.”

Pg. 252 of David Markson’s copy of Eating of the Gods by Jan Kott:

On which Markson has placed a line in the margin next to a paragraph about Electra.

—

“Electra is a king’s daughter, deprived of all the privileges of her birth and station.”
So the paragraph that Markson marked in the margins in the above scan begins…

Electra…

Markson lists her in his list of archetypal women that constitutes chapter 23 of part 2 of Springer’s Progress.

In Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Markson has Kate say:
“Poor Electra. To wish to murder one’s own mother.” (Pg. 25)

“Electra has been placed in an enforced situation, having to make the fundamental choice between total acceptance and total refusal; acceptance of her fate, or refusal to accept it; acceptance of a world in which her mother has murdered her father, or rejection of that world with all the consequences of such a decision.”
From the above scan.

Electra.

Poor Electra. To wish to murder one’s own mother.

     On pgs. 197-198 of Wittgenstein’s Mistress:
     “Daddy murdered our sister to raise wind for his silly ships, being what any person in her right mind must surely imagine that Electra and Orestes would have thought.
     Mommy murdered our daddy, being all that they think in the play instead.
     Moreover in this case there are plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles as well, even before Euripides.
     Nonetheless one is still categorically forced to believe that Electra and Orestes would have never felt that way in the least.
     In fact what I have more than once suspected is that the whole story about the two of them taking their own revenge on Clytemnestra was another lie altogether. More than likely all three of them together would have felt nothing except good riddance.
     Or certainly once the bathroom had been cleaned up.
     And then lived happily ever after, even.”

     “Electra, in blue jeans.
     Which is not from a Yannis Ritsos poem.”
     - Markson, Vanishing Point, pg. 71.

     “As a matter of fact what I would now be perfectly willing to wager is not only that Clytemnestra and Electra and Orestes lived happily together ever after, but that Cassandra eventually even came to be thought of as one of the family herself.
     Moreover I can even further imagine all four of them happily traipsing off now and again to visit Helen, once all of this had been settled.”
     - Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, pgs. 198-199.

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. 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. 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.

The first page of David Markson’s copy of Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett:

On which Markson wrote his last name as an inscription, in addition to some squiggles and crosshatching.

—

William Barrett (1913-1992) was an American existential philosopher.

Interesting fact not found in Markson’s books, but feels like it should be:
William Barrett attended City College of New York when he was just 15 years old.

Precocious little bugger, apparently.

     His one mention in Markson’s novels is a quote from Irrational Man, the book from which the above scan was taken, and the book for which William Barrett is best known:
     “We all understand the meaning in ordinary life of the word is.
     I remark to a neighbor, Today is Monday, and there are no questions asked, and none need to be asked, about the meaning of is.
     Says William Barrett in a commentary on Heidegger.”
     (Pg. 99 of Vanishing Point.)