Reading Markson Reading

The last page 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 wrote at the bottom of the page:
     “LO, I HAVE SEEN THE OPEN HAND OF GOD
     AND IN IT NOTHING, NOTHING, SAVE THE ROD
     OF MINE AFFLICTION……
                                   —THE TROJAN WOMEN”

—

     “Lo, I have seen the open hand of God;
     And in it nothing, nothing, save the rod
     Of mine affliction…”
     Words spoken by Hecuba in The Trojan Women by Euripides.

     Hecuba, to whom Markson makes mention on pgs. 93-94 of his masterpiece Wittgenstein’s Mistress:
     “But what I am actually now thinking about, for some reason, is the scene in The Trojan Women where the Greek soldiers throw Hector’s poor baby boy over the city’s walls, so that he will not grow up to take revenge for his father or for Troy.
     God, the thing men used to do.
     Irene Papas was an effective Helen in the film of The Trojan Women, however.
     Katharine Hepburn was an effective Hecuba, as well.
     Hecuba was Hector’s mother. Well, which is to say she was the baby boy’s grandmother also, of course.
     Just imagine how Katharine Hepburn must have felt.”

Nothing, nothing, save the rod of mine affliction……

The first page of David Markson’s copy of Tevye’s Daughters: Collected Stories of Sholom Aleichem by Sholom Aleichem:

     On which Markson wrote, as an inscription:
     “Markson
     —-NYC”

—

Good thing this is the first page and not the thirteenth.

“Sholom Aleichem never submitted a manuscript containing a page numbered thirteen.”
- Markson, Reader’s Block, pg. 43.

A postcard sent to Charles J. Shields from David Markson re: the biography of Kurt Vonnegut that Shields has written.

     On which Markson wrote:
     “Dear Charles—                                                                 11/15/07
     I’ve a list—everybody’s birthdays—kids, grandchildren, miscl. chums—and at the start of every new yr. I copy them into the new calendar—to remember to send cards, etc. Ergo, when was it?—exactly 4 days ago—what did I see scribbled in at the bottom of 11/11?—“KV B’day.” Meaning, as in recent yrs., I’d have called him in the a.m., just to wish him well. Alas.
     (Though 10 days earlier I was still able to phone Knox Burger. You do know the lovely dedication in Monkey House?)
     Stay well. My best again—-
                                                                                                         Dave M.”

—

Over this Veterans Day holiday weekend was the late, great Kurt Vonnegut’s bday.

The above is a postcard that David Markson sent to Vonnegut’s biographer Charles J. Shields a few days after Vonnegut’s birthday in 2007.
That was his first birthday after Vonnegut’s death earlier that year in April.

If Vonnegut had been alive, Markson’d “have called him in the a.m., just to wish him well.”

Instead, the classic Marksonian refrain:
“Nobody comes. Nobody calls.”

     “Novelist naturally does receive some few phone calls after all.
     All too often in these years with news of someone’s death however.”
     - David Markson, The Last Novel, pg. 63.

Alas.

One call between Markson and Vonnegut that took place in the 90s was discussed by Markson in his Conjunctions interview:
“It’s funny. When Reader’s Block came out, Kurt Vonnegut called me, two-thirds of the way through, and said, ‘David, what kind of computer did you use to juggle this stuff?’ I told him what I’d done, and he called me when he finished it and said, ‘David, I’m worried about your mental condition.’”

    And other more melancholy calls made my by Markson:
     “He explains that his friends die one after the other, and that he calls their telephone numbers to hear their voices on their answering machines one last time, like voices from the great beyond.”
     Wrote Françoise Palleau-Papin on pg. 258 of her book on Markson and his writing: This Is Not A Tragedy.

     “A quirky new impulse of Novelist’s, at news of several recent deaths—
     Dialing the deceased, in the likelihood that no one would have yet disconnected their answering machines—and contemplating their voices one eerie final time.”
     - David Markson, The Last Novel, pg. 139.

Reading Markson’s postcards.

Like a voice from the great beyond.

Contemplating that voice one eerie final time.

—

Pg. 135 of David Markson’s copy of A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke by Donald Prater:

On which David Markson put a check next to a mention of Gwendolen John:
“Augustus John’s sister Gwen, who had often posed for Rodin.”

—

The same Gwen about whom Markson says…

“Fleeing the start of World War II, Gwen John collapsed and died on a street in Dieppe.”
From pg. 173 of Reader’s Block.

—

Pg. 175 of David Markson’s copy of Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation by Marvin Magalaner & Richard M. Kain:

On which Markson placed an x and a check in the margins next to the following Joyce anecdote re: something he said to Al Laney (whose name Markson has also underlined):
“An acquaintance of Joyce in Paris during the early twenties has recalled to the author of the present study an unpublished anecdote, in which Joyce used a similar figure to describe his view of religion. Men, he said to Al Laney, then a correspondent for the Paris Herald, are like deep-sea fish, swimming in water that is mysteriously irradiated with light from above the surface but unable to rise to the surface to see—a characteristic figure in its grotesquerie and its relevance to Joyce’s own limited sight.”

—

Swimming in water that is mysteriously irradiated with light from above the surface…

     “A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles, and is there one who understands me?”
     From Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
     From Markson’s The Last Novel. (Pg. 187)

Unable to rise to the surface to see…

“Joyce had twenty-five operations on his eyes.”
According to Markson on pg. 67 of Reader’s Block.

Its relevance to Joyce’s own limited sight…

The first page of David Markson’s copy of Michelangelo by Ludwig Goldscheider:

     On which Markson wrote as an inscription:
     “Markson N.Y.C.
     ————___1964”

—

As any reader of Markson’s late novels knows, they are filled with what he told Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm were “incidental odds and ends, intellectual snippets—whatever you might call them—about literary people, about artists, about composers, about even sometimes sports figures.”

And Markson always threw in these little “incidental odds and ends,” even in his early books, even though they have more of a narrative.
Going all the way back to his early detective novels you can already see his interests and obsessions with intellectual trivia forming.

Though all Markson’s books are filled with these little bits of information, he rarely repeated the same tidbit twice.

     Also in the Silverblatt interview, Markson said:
     “I try not to repeat anecdotes.”
     And when further talking with Silverblatt about why he doesn’t put the same anecdotes in different books:
     “I don’t want people to be stumbling over the same story.”

True, a handful reoccur in a couple books, but for the most part, each little nugget is entirely unique in every new book.

One of the few tidbits used more than twice though is one about Michelangelo—specifically about him never taking off his boots, even to bed.

Some iteration of this information appears in four of Markson’s books (only one of these appearances is in his final tetralogy The Notecard Quartet though).

     The first mention of this story of Michelangelo and his boots is all the way back in Markson’s 1970 novel Going Down.
     On pg. 187:
     “And yet all I remember half the time are things like Michelangelo wearing his boots to bed.”

This factoid is mentioned again on pg. 7 of Markson’s next novel Springer’s Progress:
“Dana get authentically grieved at him, find himself pondering that Michelangelo wore his boots to bed.”

     And on pg. 185 of Wittgenstein’s Mistress:
     “Have I ever mentioned that Michelangelo practically never took a bath in his life, by the way?
     And even wore his boots to bed?
     On my honor, it is a well known item in the history of art that Michelangelo was not somebody one would particularly wish to sit too close to.
     Which on second thought could very well change one’s view as to why all of those Medici kept telling him don’t bother to get up, as a matter of fact.”

     Lastly, in The Notecard Quartet, on pg. 23 of Vanishing Point, Michelangelo and his boots reappear:
     “At certain seasons he kept those boots on for such a length of time that when he drew them off, the skin came away altogether with the leather.
     Said Ascanio Condivi, a friend of Michelangelo’s.”

The first page of David Markson’s copy of Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education, and the Arts by Roger Shattuck:

On which Markson wrote his last name as an inscription, and underlined it.

—

Soon after Roger Shattuck died on December 8th, 2005, his colleague Harold Bloom said of his fellow critic: “He was an old-fashioned, in a good sense, man of letters. He incarnated his love for literature.”

Same could have been said of David Markson, who died four and a half years later on June 4th, 2010.

He was an old-fashioned, in a good sense, man of letters. He incarnated his love for literature.

The first page / title page of David Markson’s copy of Satan in a Barrel and Other Early Stories by Malcolm Lowry:

     On which the editor of the collection, Sherrill E. Grace, presumably wrote Markson the inscription:
     “For David
     With love—
          Sherrill
          31/03/99.”

—

Sherrill E. Grace, in addition to her great work on Malcolm Lowry and Margaret Atwood, actually wrote a short piece on Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress titled “Messages: Reading Wittgenstein’s Mistress.”

Some excerpts from that piece will follow…

“‘In the beginning,’ that is, on my first reading of David Markson’s fourth novel, I knew I was missing many of the messages. They were there before me all right—in the street, in the sand, on the page, and I thought I knew the language (both the signs and the game)—but I had little idea what they meant.”

“Wittgenstein’s Mistress was a beautiful, an important book, a book that meant to mean (a book about meaning and the importance of making meaning) and, thus, a book to reward richly my subsequent readings.”

“Kate’s mind is a storehouse of Wittgensteinian facts that she has some difficulty sorting into chronological or biographical categories.”

“Choose almost any passage of Wittgenstein’s Mistress at random and you will discover that it operates through repetition: repetition of words, hence of syllables, sounds and stresses, repetition of phrases, grammatical constructions (or misconstructions), repetition of names, facts, descriptions, quotations, and, of course, repetition of events such as writing those messages, visiting Simon’s grave, going to Hisarlik, burning books page by page, leaving food for a cat in the Colosseum, bouncing tennis balls down…Small wonder Kate’s favorite composer is Bach; her monologue could be called the Wittgenstein Variations.”

“After my first reading, I felt (as I suggested above) that in creating Kate, Markson had out-Mollied Joyce because his woman was so much more complex.”

“My third reading of Wittgenstein’s Mistress only confirmed my belief that the entire text was somehow contained, adumbrated in its first sentence: ‘In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.’”

“The mystery story she gives us is, I would suggest, the very grail she is looking for: Dasein.”

“Kate’s readers must be prepared to become her co-creators and co-curators.”

“Markson’s Kate is waiting, still, time out of mind, for me to start reading again.”

The second page of the Table of Contents of David Markson’s copy of Tevye’s Daughters: Collected Stories of Sholom Aleichem by Sholom Aleichem:

     On which Markson has placed two dashes/marks in the margin next to two stories:
     1) “Tevye Goes to Palestine”
     2) “Get Thee Out”

—

Both of these stories feature the character Tevye the Milkman.

Yes, also of The Fiddler on the Roof fame.
(The landmark Broadway musical was based on Sholom Aleichem’s stories.)

     Otherwise known as:
     “Tevya der Milchiger”
     A name mentioned on pg. 49 of Markson’s novel Reader’s Block.

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.