When Daumier was sixty, destitute and almost blind, Corot bought the house Daumier was renting and gave it to him.
Der Untergang des Abendlandes.
Protagonist living near a disused cemetery, perhaps?
A sense somehow of total retreat? Abandonment?
Albert Camus’ father was killed in the Battle of the Marne when Camus was only months old. His mother was an illiterate charwoman.
Once, at dinner, with great delicacy Brahms told Tchaikovsky that he did not approve of his work.
With equal delicacy Tchaikovsky told Brahms that he did not approve of his.
After Byron and Leigh Hunt and Trelawny burned Shelley’s body on the beach at Viareggio, they got drunk. Boisterously, shouting and laughing and even singing.
Then again, they had been dealing with remains already five weeks bloated and decomposed. Byron had at least once turned sick.
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?
In Konigsberg, where he spent his entire life, Immanuel Kant had several sisters and a brother and did not see any of them for a quarter of a century. At one point he had a letter from the brother and did not answer it for two and a half years.
Nonlinear? Discontinuous? Collage-like?
An assemblage?
Knut Hamsun was once a horse-car conductor in Chicago.
Throughout the Middle Ages, often no more than a single manuscript of certain classics existed. One leaking monastery roof and the Satyriconcould have been lost forever, for instance.
Mallarme learned English specifically to read Poe.
Walter the Penniless. Peter the Hermit.
During the four years that Dostoievsky spent at hard labor in Siberia for political conspiracy, the only book he was allowed was the New Testament. Though once in a prison hospital he found Pickwick Papersand David Copperfield.
Deus vult.
Raymond Chandler lived with his mother until her death when he was thirty-five. And then almost immediately married a woman seventeen years older than he was.
An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.
Said Henry James.
George Bernard Shaw was an anti-Semite.
Protagonist first seen poised abstractedly amid a kind of transitory disarray? Cartons heaped and piled?
Innumerable books, Reader presumably means?
The name Kierkegaard translates from the Danish as churchyard.
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea.
Dickens, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Maxim Gorky never finished grade school. Sean O’Casey and Alberto Moravia did not either.
O’Casey, at forty-three, was working with a pick and shovel when his first play was produced.
Where precisely would Protagonist live, if near a derelict cemetery? Possibly some sort of structure just within the grounds themselves?
That building abandoned also? Protagonist possibly stealing electricity through wires connected to the base of a streetlamp outside?
Reader sees a red brick building, in fact. Fairly small and falling into ruin, but of two stories.
None of John Milton’s daughters was given an education, though two of the three were taught to read to him in his blindness.
In languages of which they did not understand one word.
Boethius was executed by having a thong inexorably tightened about his temples.
As a boy, Tennyson could recite all 103 of Horace’s odes from memory.
Montaigne claimed he knew those and the rest of Horace as well.
No life back there at all.
What life here, now?
John Donne posed for a painting in his own shroud. And kept it beside his bed during a long final illness.
Why is Reader always mildly incredulous at remembering that the decimal system arose from counting on one’s fingers?
Several ancient oaks, also within the grounds, partly obscure the house. At night, the single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window is extremely faint.
There are wire mesh fences, in jagged disrepair.
Kathe Kollwitz lost a son in World War I and a grandson in World War II.
Let us read Little Dorritagain. There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep.
According to medieval legend, his pupils stabbed John Scotus Erigena to death with their pens.
Could one, actually, rewire the connections of a streetlamp in that manner?
Salvador Dali’s perception of Jackson Pollock. Fish soup.
On a shelf beside Reader’s desk: a human skull, a reproduction of Giotto’s portrait of Dante, two small rough orange stones.
Hrotswitha van Gandersheim.
In his late sixties, Herman Melville took a four-year-old granddaughter to a park and then forgot her there.
Hospitals, Protagonist will have been in.
And grows older.
Dulcinea del Toboso.
Not far into the story, Robinson Crusoe swims out to the wreck of his ship with no clothes on.
In the selfsame paragraph Defoe has him filling his pockets with biscuits.
Should Reader determine a name for Protagonist at this juncture after all?
Ishmael. Meursault. Harry Haller.
Should he give him children, if he is still being in part autobiographical?
A son and a daughter, then?
Zeno hanged himself after breaking a toe. At ninety.
Alexander Selkirk.
Once, not knowing which of several houses was Bizet’s, Saint-Saens simply stood in the road singing an aria from Les Pecheurs de Perles.
Surely, a clerk from the liquor store where Protagonist had already stopped in two or three times for cheap wine, recognizing him?
At twenty, Joseph Conrad tried to commit suicide over gambling losses. In later life managing to let people believe the bullet wound had come from a duel.
The cemetery is in the oldest section of the town, and the few dwellings on the opposite side of the street, modest and rundown themselves, seem to house very few residents. A point being that no one questions Protagonist’s presence.
Nor is the fence mesh at that, rather it is a more traditional cemetery construction of tall iron spikes. The gate at the entrance is partly unhinged and askew.