This is Not a Novel Read Free Page B

nuns.
    The John Dryden translation of Plutarch’s Lives, eternally in print.
    Which Dryden evidently did not do, but farmed out.
A face to lose youth for, to occupy age
With the dream of.
    The speculation in later antiquity that Euripides had had two wives at the same time.
    Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day, Emerson said.
Jean-Paul Sartre played the piano.
George Eliot played the piano.
Andre Gide played the piano.
    The painting has a life of its own, said Jackson Pollock.
    Henri Bergson died of pulmonary congestion.
Paul Klee played the violin.
Matisse played the violin.
Jeremy Bentham played the violin, the harpsichord, and the organ.
    Schopenhauer was found dead sitting at his breakfast.
    All your better deeds / Shall be in water writ, wrote Beaumont and Fletcher, two hundred years before Keats.
    Teach me to heare Mermaides singing, wrote Donne, three hundred years before Eliot.
    Marie Antoinette sat for twenty portraits by Vigée-Lebrun.
    Anne Boleyn played the lute, the harp, the flute, and the rebec. And sang.
    Voltaire, in an amiable mood about Jews: A brigand people, atrocious, loathsome, whose law is the law of savages, and whose history is a tissue of crimes against humanity.
    If you will it, it is no dream. Said Theodor Herzl.
    The word Bible never appears in Shakespeare. Jesus Christ is mentioned eleven times.
    Cy Young died of a heart attack.
    Lou Stevenson, Robert Louis was commonly called.
Dante quotes The Consolation of Philosophy.
Chaucer quotes The Consolation of Philosophy.
Milton quotes The Consolation of Philosophy.
    What is Hamlet reading, in Act II Scene ii, when Polo-nius inquires and Hamlet says Words, words, words?
    Polybius died after a fall from a horse. At eighty-two.
    Anacreon choked to death on a grape seed. At eighty-five.
    Walter Scott walked with a limp from childhood polio.
    The apparently never to be resolved question of whether it was Byron’s left foot that was crippled, or his right.
    Edmund Wilson and a young Lionel Trilling once made use of adjacent urinals in a men’s room at the New School for Social Research. Trilling was thrilled when Wilson indicated familiarity with some of his work.
    What tall building could who have shouted this from, that Writer knows it all these decades later?
    St. Teresa of Avila played the tambourine.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald’s spelling: Ullyses.
    John Galsworthy died of a brain tumor.
    Could Richard the Lion-Hearted speak English?
    The traveler with nothing in his pockets whistles indifferently as he strolls past the thief. Says Juvenal X.
    Kant kept a portrait of Rousseau on the wall of his study. Tolstoy, as a student, wore a medallion portrait of him instead of his Orthodox cross.
    His usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles.
    Heinrich Schliemann died after collapsing with an unidentified fever on a street in Naples.
    George Gissing died of pneumonia.
    Watching Edmund Kean. Like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning, Coleridge said.
    Donatello, at work on his Zuccone, heard muttering at the stone:
    Speak, damn you, talk to me.
    Pope Clement XIV, on Houdon’s St. Bruno: That saint would talk, were it not that the rules of his order impose silence.
    I gotta use words when I talk to you.
    And Sir Launcelot awoke, and went and took his horse, and rode all that day and all night in a forest, weeping.
    Sherwood Anderson died of peritonitis after swallowing a toothpick.
    Remembering only belatedly re Houdon: That the Jefferson on the American nickel and the Washington on the quarter are from likenesses of his, also.
    For as long as a millennium, until well into the Middle Ages, Menander was the most widely quoted author in Western literature outside of Homer.
    The greatest lesbian poet since Sappho, Auden called Rilke.
    Teaching, Lilli Lehmann actually tied Geraldine Far-rar’s hands behind her back to keep her from gesticulating.
    And once threw a book at Olive Fremstad.
    Was Moses an Egyptian?
    As Manetho insisted