Spotlight on … David Markson This Is Not A Novel (2001)

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‘Though his books — including Springer’s Progress (1977), Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988) and This Is Not a Novel (2001) — were often admiringly reviewed, Mr. Markson was a novelist well known largely to other novelists. This was partly because he was a central figure in the Village writing scene in the 1960s, a frequenter of literary watering holes like the Lion’s Head, but also because he eschewed conventional novelistic forms and tropes. Like other experimentalists, he made the form of the novel, at least in part, its subject.

‘Mr. Markson’s books expressed, both mischievously and earnestly, the hem-and-haw self-consciousness of the perpetual thought-reviser. He wrote mostly monologues, or at least the narration seemed to emanate from a single voice, though the books were not necessarily narrated in the first person. (The writer at the focus of This Is Not a Novel, for instance, is called Writer.)

‘Mr. Markson did not much bother with character development or plot; nor, as his work evolved, did he care much for devices of organization like chapters, or even paragraphs. Rather, he built his books in nuggets and epigraphs, oddball observation by peculiar found fact, to portray the mind of the narrator, who was generally an artist in some state of mental distress.

‘True to its title, This Is Not A Novel doesn’t, at first glance, appear to be a novel at all. As in his 1996 book “Reader’s Block,” Markson assembles a series of notebook-like entries that relate historical facts, philosophical observations and nasty gossip about the lives of great writers and artists throughout history. A typical item: “Trollope, as remembered by a schoolmate at Harrow: Without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I have ever met.” The book begins with an entry that declares, “Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing,” which is followed by “Writer is weary unto death of making up stories.” “Writer,” whoever he is, pops up now and then after that, complaining more about his writerly ennui and various physical ailments and declaring his determination to create a book that lacks every standard feature of the traditional novel, from story to setting to social themes, but — through sheer force of Writer’s will, perhaps — will somehow still be a novel.

‘Several themes recur; we read of coincidences involving well-known artists, writers and other historical figures, and of their personal hygiene and causes of death. “Pound died of a blocked intestine,” we learn, and “Tennessee Williams choked to death on the plastic cap of a nasal spray,” and “The first English translation of Madame Bovary was done by a daughter of Karl Marx. Who would later take her own life much the way Emma does.” With what seems a special delight, Writer also makes us privy to famous artists’ stingy estimations of other artists’ talents and achievements: “What a coarse, immoral, mean and senseless work Hamlet is, Tolstoy said,” for example.

‘The mix includes a few aphorisms and odd facts that don’t quite fit any pattern but share the mischievous, curious, witty and unapologetically dark spirit of the whole enterprise. “A double play gives you two twenty-sevenths of a ballgame. Pointed out Casey Stengel”; “Was Plutarch the first writer ever to counsel kindness to animals?” There are a few running jokes. “Writer’s arse,” runs a line that recurs after entries that relate preposterous assertions, such as Harold Bloom’s claim that he can read 500 pages in an hour.

‘The challenge he’s taken on, Writer says early in the book, is to make readers keep turning pages even while denying them all the traditional pleasures they open novels expecting. “Is Writer thinking he can bring off what he has in mind?” he asks early in the game, but the reader is left with few doubts. Somehow, the momentum of the book is as forward-moving as any narrative. As you turn the pages, you realize that there is a story being told, the story of a character you come to care deeply about. When Writer reveals a devastating truth on the book’s very last page, one that puts in context all the preceding preoccupations, your heart wrenches.

‘Mr. Markson excavated the history of literature and art for eerily resonant and often amusing, petty or scandalous tidbits of biography and juxtaposed them with declarations about the narrator’s state of mind. Such was the form of many of Mr. Markson’s books. And though readers who crave narrative may have been put off by them, reviewers almost always found themselves succumbing to what many referred to as a cumulative, hypnotic effect. His admirers included Amy Hempel, Ann Beattie and David Foster Wallace, who referred to Wittgenstein’s Mistress — a monologue by a female painter, evidently mad, wandering the globe as the last surviving person on earth — as “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.”’ — Maria Russo & The New York Times

 

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Further

‘David Markson: Address Unknown’
David Markson: An Introduction
Buy David Markson’s books
‘An Author’s Personal Library: Lost & Found’
David Markson Page @ Facebook
‘A Passionate Reader: On DavidMarkson
‘TINAN’ Resource Page
Stephen Mitchelmore on ‘TINAN’ @ Spike Magazine
‘TINAN’ reviewed @ Salon
‘TINAN’ @ Goodreads

 

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Media

David Markson reads @ the 92nd Street Y

D.M. on drinking w/ Malcom Lowry & Dylan Thomas

Neil Halstead – David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Arm

Inspired by This Is Not A Novel, authors of non-traditional fictions discuss their work.

 

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Interview
from Bookslut

 

Is there something about people at the edge of sanity that appeals to you?

No, not at all, it’s just inviting. What the hell, craziness is a lot more dramatic to handle than sanity. Which Dostoevsky proved all those years ago — trying to write a book about a perfectly good person and it’s the one volume among all his major works that’s a total botch. Unlike all his others, filled with lunacy and suicide and murder, et cetera. Or think about ninety percent of all the literary protagonists we find most memorable — Ahab, Heathcliff, Stavrogin, even all the way back to Don Quixote — every one of them is certifiable.

Madness and religion do often get coupled too, as a literary theme — in your work as well as in those.

It’s much more symbolic than real, of course. When Fern lifts her hand in front of the blind infant and its eyes seem to move — as if she’s some sort of sainted prostitute out of old hagiography or some such. But of course it’s just that she has turpentine all over her hands, from her painting, which I mention several times. I didn’t do that in Wittgenstein’s Mistress, I don’t think, because I was too preoccupied with all the philosophy that’s buried in there. Wittgenstein himself, but Heidegger also, though nobody’s picked up on him. But with Going Down, yes, even if it’s frequently a matter of local Mexican superstition rather than religious per se. I had a head full of it, after three full years in the country. Indeed, one of the loveliest compliments I ever got was from a bright Mexican gal who used to call me “el estúpido gringo” because my Spanish was so bum — but when the book came out all those years later she said, “All you ever seemed to do down here for three years was drink, but damn it, you were paying attention.”

You’re something of a token underappreciated author. How do you feel about that?

Token, I love the word, yes. I seem to get written about that way, lately. Somebody sent me a clipping from the Los Angeles Times, and somebody else sent the same thing from The Chicago Tribune, about some bloggers banding together to promote authors they feel haven’t reached the audience they deserve — such as “the David Markson’s of our world,” or something like that. And then in the Times here in New York there was something similar, a passing mention of little-recognized writers, and naming me among them. One of my friends told me to be careful before I become well known for being unknown.

How does it make you feel, not being as widely acclaimed as many of us believe you should be? Is it frustrating?

Listen, you write the way you do because you have to, and because it’s who you are. But nice things happen too, reputation or no. Just recently, for example, a letter from someone here in town, whom I don’t know at all, wanting nothing, simply telling me that if I need anything — if I want to say “lift this” or “move that” — I should give him a call. Or someone else, saying that he’s recently read Wittgenstein for a second time, and that he did it aloud, sitting alone in his apartment and speaking the entire book to himself, simply to capture the rhythms and taking two days to do so. Or then again, on a much more concrete level, at least two books about my work are being written that I’m aware of, and several essays or chapters in critical studies, and so forth. What more can someone in my position ask for? In some small way you’re finally paying back the debt you owe to those books that moved you and got you started in the first place — books like Lowry’s, in my case, Willie Gaddis’ The Recognitions, Joyce, any number of others. Or am I making all this sound precious, here?

Speaking of influences, of other books — I want to make a point to mention the size of your personal library, hanging on all the walls surrounding us, floor to ceiling.

Actually, there were more. I’ve sold off quite a few in the last ten years or so, just for breathing space. And in all honesty, I’ve been very tempted lately to dump the whole lot of them.

Wow. Why would you do that?

For starters, I’m seventy-seven — toward what eventuality am I holding onto them? How many of them am I going to reread? Over there to your right, the fiction — Hardy, George Eliot, Dickens, even Faulkner, whom I once worshipped — am I ever going to open 99% of them again?

Some of them might be worth money?

No, virtually none. If you look closely you’ll see that they’re all worn and faded — well, I’ve never kept dust jackets — plus, they’re written-in and whatnot. A lot of the spines are even so tattered that they’re scotch-taped to hold them on.

First editions?

Oh, sure, some. My Catch-22, probably. I knew Joe Heller before he wrote it, so I bought it as soon as it came out. Portnoy’s Complaint also, since I’d read excerpts beforehand. Four or five Faulkners. And others, I’m sure. But they’re all in the same beat-up condition as the rest.

Are any of them inscribed?

Some are, yes. But I’ve generally been so broke that the most valuable of those I’ve sold long since. Like my Under The Volcano, say, or Dylan Thomas. Or an On the Road. Which, incidentally, Jack was so drunk when I asked him to sign it that he jammed the pen right through the flyleaf.

Kerouac, Lowry, Gaddis, man. Quite a roster of past masters. Where did I read that you no longer pay attention to more recent fiction?

It’s true. Any fiction, really. I hate to admit it, and I don’t really understand it, but it’s some years now — it just seems to have gone dead for me. Not just recent stuff, but even novels that I’ve deeply cared about — I try to reread and there’s none of the reaction I used to get, none of the aesthetic excitement or whatever one wants to call it, all a blank. With one exception of course — 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. But even The Recognitions, which I think is categorically the best American novel of the twentieth century, just doesn’t do anything similar for me. It did, the first four times I read it — and four is not an exaggeration, by the way, in spite of its length — but the last time out it just went flat. It’s not the books, I’m sure, it’s me — I’m just not bringing the same receptiveness to them that I used to.

No other exceptions?

Oh, well, there are books by friends, that you do give yourself to. You approach them with a different psychological stance, somehow, wanting to enjoy. And doing so. As with the most recent Gil Sorrentino, for instance. Or Ann Beattie’s new collection of stories. But there’s simply no impulse toward anything else, and certainly not toward the latest generation. They all seem like they shouldn’t have driver’s licenses, even. You do become aware of the names, of course. Who are they, Lethem, Foer, Eggers? Are they mostly named Jonathan?

You know of them, but you’re not interested in reading them?

Seriously — to paraphrase Ezra Pound, there’s no record of a critic ever saying anything significant about a writer who came later than he did. You grow up getting interested in books, and the writers of your own generation or the generation or two before your own are the ones you pay most attention to. But listen, I’m scarcely as bad as some of the people I know. But good lord, some of the people I went to college or even graduate school with pretty much quit about nine days after they got their diplomas. And haven’t read a poet since Auden, or a novelist since Hemingway. There was one fat novel I did read. In 1996, in fact. I remember the date because my novel Reader’s Block had also just been published: Infinite Jest. Before I’d heard of David Foster Wallace, way back in 1990, he’d written a very perceptive long essay on Wittgenstein’s Mistress for a periodical. Even though I was never able to solve the structure of his novel, to understand why it ended where it did, I admired the hell out of it. Eight or nine years ago even, I wasn’t reading with the equipment I possessed when I was younger. But pat me on the head, I did manage to get through one novel that long in the past decade.

 

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Book

David Markson This Is Not A Novel
Counterpoint Press

‘The novel, as a literary form, relies on a number of strategies to tell its story. Plot, characters, and settings are just a few of the formal qualities that we expect when we pick one up. But consider, for a moment, the word “novel” itself. It is ironic that what we call a “novel” is bound up in a relatively stable set of conventions which belie the novelty or newness its namesake suggests. It is this tension that makes David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel an ambitious and compelling postmodern work that makes one think about the process of reading itself.

‘Markson’s text begins, “Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing,” and from there the reader is presented with 190 pages of anecdotes, quotes, and the “Writer’s” comments on his own writing. As a whole, the book presents an interesting collage of the history of art and literature, peppered with artistic and literary obituaries like “Tennessee Williams choked to death on the plastic cap of a nasal spray.” This litany of figures is both humorous and depressing, considering that many of the writers and artists eulogized died miserable or unheroic deaths. When one considers the juxtaposition of the “Writer” who chimes in from time to time, it becomes clear that he acknowledges that he too will someday be added the catalog of the dead.’ — Davin Heckman, PopMatters

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Excerpt
borrowed from The Evening Redness in the West

Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing.

Writer is weary unto death of making up stories.

Lord Byron died of either rheumatic fever, or typhus, or uremia, or malaria. Or was inadvertently murdered by his doctors, who had bled him incessantly.

Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis in 1900. Granted an ordinary modern life span, he would have lived well into World War II.

This morning I walked to the place where the street-cleaners dump the rubbish. My God, it was beautiful. Says a van Gogh letter.

Writer is equally tired of inventing characters.

Bertolt Brecht died of a stroke. Terrified of being buried alive, he had pleaded that a stiletto be driven through his heart once he was declared legally dead. An attending physician did so.

Mr. Coleridge, do not cry. If opium really does you any good, and you must have it, why do you not go and get it? Asked Wilkie Collins’ mother.

William Blake lived and dressed in inconceivable filth, and virtually never bathed. Mr. Blake’s skin don’t dirt, his wife Catherine contributed.

When I was their age I could draw like Raphael. But it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like they do. Said Picasso at an exhibition of children’s art.

A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to contrive.

And with no characters. None.

The Globe Theatre burned to the ground on June 29, 1613. Did any new play of Shakespeare’s, not yet in quarto publication, perhaps burn with it?

Albert Camus, on the one occasion when he was introduced to William Faulkner: The man did not say three words to me.

Nietzsche died after a sequence of strokes. But his final illness, and his madness, were almost surely the result of syphilis.

W. H. Auden was once arrested for urinating in a public park in Barcelona.

Frans Hals was once arrested for beating his wife.

Plotless. Characterless.

Yet seducing the reader into turning pages nonetheless.

No one was injured in the Globe Theatre calamity. One man’s breeches were set on fire, but it is on record that the flames were quenched with a tankard of ale.

When Dickens shocked Victorian London by separating from his wife, it was Thackeray who let slip that it was over an actress. Dickens did not speak to him for years.

Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon.

George Santayana, reading Moby Dick: In spite of much skipping, I have got stuck in the middle.

Thales of Miletus died at his seat while watching an athletic contest.

But I knew that Monsieur Beyle quite well, and you will never convince me that a trifler like him could have written masterpieces. Said Sainte-Beuve.

Actionless, Writer wants it.

Which is to say, with no sequence of events.

Which is to say, with no indicated passage of time.

Then again, getting somewhere in spite of this.

The old wives’ tale, repeated by Socrates, that Thales was also frequently so preoccupied with gazing up at the stars that he once tumbled into a well. And was even laughed at by washerwomen.

Jack Donne, the young John Donne was commonly called.

Oedipus gouges out his eyes, Jocasta hangs herself, both guiltless; the play has come to a harmonious conclusion. Wrote Schiller.

Verdi died of a stroke.

Puccini died of throat cancer.

Indeed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Even with a note of sadness at the end.

What porridge had John Keats? Asked Browning.

What is the use of being kind to a poor man? Asked Cicero.

Bertrand Russell was so inept, physically, that he could never learn to make a pot of tea. Immanuel Kant could not manage to sharpen a quill pen with a penknife. John Stuart Mill could barely tie a simple knot.

The sixth-century legend that St. Luke was a painter. And did a portrait of the Virgin Mary.

Tartini’s violin. Which shattered in its case at his death.

Insistently, Brahms wore his pants too short. Sometimes actually taking a scissors to the bottoms.

A novel with no setting.

With no so-called furniture.

Ergo meaning finally without descriptions.

André Gide died of a disease of the lungs. Rereading the Aeneid on his deathbed.

It was while they were making copies of the Masaccio frescoes in the Santa Maria del Carmine as young apprentices that Michelangelo criticized the draftsmanship of Pietro Torrigiano: Bone and cartilage went down like biscuit, Torrigiano would later tell Benvenuto Cellini. Re Michelangelo’s nose.

The greatest genius of our century, Goethe called Byron. The greatest genius of our century, Byron called Goethe.

Ivan Turgenev, at nineteen, during a shipboard fire: Save me! I am my mother’s only son!

Catullus, who loved a woman he called Lesbia, but whose real name may have been Clodia. Propertius, who loved a woman he called Cynthia, but whose real name may have been Hostia. Both, two full thousand years ago.

Gustav Mahler died of endocarditis.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline died of a brain aneurism.

A novel with no overriding central motivations, Writer wants.

Hence with no conflicts and/or confrontations, similarly.

Rudolph Kreutzer never performed the Kreutzer Sonata.

One of the ennobling delights of Paradise, as promised by Thomas Aquinas: Viewing the condemned as they are tortured and broiled below.

The friendship of Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti.

Richard Strauss: Why do you have to write this way? You have talent. Paul Hindemith: Herr Professor, you make your music and I’ll make mine.

Porto d’Ercole. Where Caravaggio died. Most probably of malaria. In a tavern.

Georgia O’Keeffe died blind.

I saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played, but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age. Says John Evelyn’s Diary for November 26, 1661.

With no social themes, i. e., no pictures of society.

No depiction of contemporary manners and/or morals.

Categorically, with no politics.

Vulgar and dull, Ruskin dismissed Rembrandt as. Brother to Dostoievsky, Malraux called him.

For whatever reason, Jean Sibelius did not write a note in the last thirty years of his life.

Kierkegaard died of a lung infection. Or a disease of the spine.

Karl Barth’s surmise: That while the angels may play only Bach in praising God, among themselves they play Mozart.

Theophrastus pronounced that flute music could cure sciatica. Not to mention epilepsy.

Alexander Pope died of dropsy.

John Milton died of gout.

Theophrastus said flute music would have cured that, also.

No one ever painted a woman’s backside better than Boucher, said Renoir.

A novel entirely without symbols.

Robert of Naples: Giotto, if I were you, in this hot weather I would leave off painting for a while. Giotto: So would I, assuredly—if I were you.

Matthew Arnold died of a heart attack while running for a streetcar in Liverpool.

Among Dickens’ children: Alfred Tennyson Dickens. Henry Fielding Dickens. Edward Bulwer-Lytton Dickens. Walter Landor Dickens. Sydney Smith Dickens.

Among Walt Whitman’s brothers: George Washington Whitman. Andrew Jackson Whitman. Thomas Jefferson Whitman.

Elizabeth I, visiting Cambridge University, delivered a lecture in Greek. And then chatted less formally with students in Latin.

Thomas Mann died of phlebitis.

The likelihood that Anne Hathaway could not read.

Anne Hathaway.

The perhaps less than idle speculation that Columbus was a Jew.

Space is blue and birds fly through it. Said Werner Heisenberg.

Ultimately, a work of art without even a subject, Writer wants.

There is no work of art without a subject, said Ortega.

A novel tells a story, said E. M. Forster.

If you can do it, it ain’t bragging, said Dizzy Dean.

Xenocrates died after stumbling into a brass pot in the dark and cracking his skull.

Brunelleschi had a temporary restaurant and wine shop constructed in the highest reaches of the Florence cathedral while building his great cupola—so his workmen did not have to negotiate all that distance for lunch.

Maxim Gorky died of tuberculosis.

Or was he ordered murdered by Stalin?

Baudelaire died after being paralyzed and deprived of speech by syphilis.

I was tired and ill. I stood looking out across the fjord. The sun was setting. The clouds were colored red. Like blood. I felt as though a scream went through nature. Said Edvard Munch.

Can only have been painted by a madman. Said Munch of the same canvas.

Pico della Mirandola, not yet thirty-one, died of an unidentified fever.

William Butler Yeats died of heart failure.

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Leigh Hunt once saw Charles Lamb kiss Chapman’s Homer. Henry Crabb Robinson once saw Coleridge kiss a Spinoza.

Lamb was in fact known to pretend surprise that people did not say grace before reading.

Horse Cave Creek, Ohio, Ambrose Bierce was born in.

Giorgione probably died of plague.

Ninon de Lenclos.

The solitary, melancholy life of Matthias Grünewald. Was he wholly sane?

Is Writer, thinking he can bring off what he has in mind?

And anticipating that he will have any readers?
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*

p.s. Hey. ** Ferdinand, Hi. Sorry, I haven’t given your piece my full brain yet. I had a last minute deadline hit me, but I will. Thanks about the gif thing. That was just a simple toss off, but I’m into the medium for sure. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you for the very kind words, sir. And ‘TMS’ and ‘PGL’ are probably my favorite things I’ve made, plus maybe ‘ZDB’, so that makes me happy. xo. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Thanks, man. I’m very appreciative of Diarmuid’s book in all respects plus that it exists at all. My read on my work is just that, and I have zero interest in writing any kind of autobio/memoir kind of thing — even though ‘I Wished’ is very me and about me — so I’m just interested to see what people think about what I do whether it aligns with my intentions or not. I appreciate you using your barely caffeined mind to be here. It’s interesting: in my writing back and forth and Zooming with US friends, those based in LA seem the most hard hit and suffering under the pandemic, and I think about why that would be a lot, and the answer is ever-formulating but quite fascinating. And sad, unfair, painful to watch and feel. You putting a new book together and writing is clearly the rich way to get through this. I’m happy to hear it, T. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Bracing: I think that’s kind of the most I hoped for. Same in the US: the election and etc. has revealed disturbing new interior lives of people and turned many against each other. I’ve had to rethink a number of acquaintanceships of mine. It’s a telling and very unpretty time. ** JM, Hi. That is really lucky. I had the huge luck of growing up in LA at a time when there were two incredible film series dedicated to experimental film. Discovering and getting to concentrate on that work as a teen literally shaped me as a person and artist in a vast way. I saw an email from you! Thank you, thank you. I’m excited to get into it and put it up. Have a great, great one. ** G, Thanks, pal. I was kind of imagining that all of the explosions were repeats of the bottom one but with its star getting blown into tinier and tinier bits over and over. Happy Friday. ** Steve Erickson, It won’t surprise you, I’m sure, that I know about that doc and am anxiously awaiting the opportunity to see it. I did a post about the park that doc is about here ages ago, which also won’t surprise you either. Thanks for the heads-up and your thoughts. ** Okay. Today I’m directing you at another book, this time the great and seminal ‘po-mo’ classic ‘This Is Not a Novel’ by the general maestro scribe David Markson. If you don’t already know it, I’m very pleased to make the introduction. See you tomorrow.