But that cheerfulness was always breaking in.
Jacob Epstein, to a niece: Call me Epstein. Would you have called him Uncle Donatello?
Enrico Fermi: Where are they?
The books Shelley had with him when he drowned were a Keats and a Sophocles.
The Marquis de Sade died in a lunatic asylum.
Otherwise well-informed readers who would be surprised to learn that the site of ancient Troy is in Turkey.
Where Nazim Hikmet’s work was banned through virtually all of his writing life.
While being translated into more languages than probably any other twentieth-century poet’s.
Hilda Doolittle was once a patient of Freud’s.
Was Sir Thomas Wyatt one of Anne Boleyn’s lovers? Is it certain she had lovers?
Dollars damn me.
Fata morgana.
Some few friends, at least, from that earlier existence, with whom Reader should have Protagonist correspond?
Other writers?
She has no wit, but enough sound human sense to be able to fulfill her duties as a wife and mother.
Said Mozart of Constanze.
At Walden, Thoreau was borrowing land owned by Emerson.
And was no more than a ten-minute stroll from Concord.
Paul Celan drowned himself in the Seine.
I. G. Farben.
Delacroix was almost surely the illegitimate son of Talleyrand.
A gone shipmate, like any other man, is gone forever; and I never met one of them again.
Dear Cicero. Regards, Protagonist.
Philip Larkin: Who’s Jorge Luis Borges?
Are Protagonist’s few books known at all? Ever read?
Paul Ancel. Or Antschel.
They do not move.
Cervantes is buried at a convent in Madrid, though exactly where in its cemetery is not known. Nor is there a known portrait of him.
And she came through the mist and the rain to me
From the soft warm lights of the town.
Ingeborg Bachmann died at forty-seven after setting fire to a mattress with a cigarette.
Giacomo Casabianca.
Mystified by the ear of a poet who would call a volume Where Water Comes Together with Other Water.
La Vida Breve.
Roy Campbell was an anti-Semite.
And was one of the few writers or artists aligned with the fascists during the Spanish Civil War.
Like Dali.
Why is Reader always momentarily startled to recall that Keats was a fully licensed surgeon?
Does Protagonist even have a telephone?
Medieval legend says that Aquinas’s corpse was boiled and his bones preserved as relics. In actuality he was buried in Toulouse.
Ed Delehanty may have committed suicide. Having either jumped or fallen from a bridge at Niagara Falls.
El Greco would appear to have been almost impoverished at his death, though he left behind 147 canvases. Whether because he could not sell them, or would not, remains moot.
That man writes really too sloppily, said Joyce of D. H. Lawrence.
Sue Bridehead.
Hugo van der Goes died insane.
Haydn and Beethoven each nominated Handel as the greatest of composers.
Berlioz called him a tub of pork and beer.
Solomon Ibn Gabirol.
Wittgenstein had a close friend named Eccles.
Arnold Bennett died of typhoid fever after drinking Paris tap water. Deliberately drinking it, to prove to someone it was safe.
I’m Captain Jinks of the horse marines.
Yasnaya Polyana. Max Gate. Rowan Oak. Thoor Ballylee. I Tatti.
New Place.
Isaac Rosenberg was killed in France in World War I.
Charlotte Mew committed suicide by drinking creosote.
Alma Mahler was an anti-Semite.
Two of Alma Mahler’s three husbands, Mahler and Franz Werfel, were Jews.
Axel Springer Verlag.
Euripides was more frequently quoted by both Plato and Aristotle than was any other playwright. Plutarch says that Alexander quoted him repeatedly also. At a banquet not long before his death he recited an entire scene.
When John Stuart Mill’s maid inadvertently burned the only manuscript of the first volume of Carlyle’s French Revolution,Carlyle had already destroyed his notes. He would tell Tennyson that rewriting it was like swimming without water.
Oscar Wilde said that Henry James composed novels as if it were a painful duty.
Henry James said that Oscar Wilde was a fatuous fool. And an unclean beast.
Gropius.
Lou Andreas-Salome.
Before leaving New York: Protagonist wandering for some hours one afternoon along the Hudson River docks on West Street. Near Gansevoort.
Finding only that even the specific address no longer exists.
Vivaldi was buried in a pauper’s grave.
Alfred H. Hunter died in Dublin four years after the publication of Ulysses,forever unaware of his immortality.
Byron’s letters record approximately as many instances of gonorrhea as do Boswell’s journals.
Kant almost certainly died a virgin.
Daunty, Gouty, and Shopkeeper.
A Girl of the Limberlost.
To place our purpose within definite limits, we must first investigate the nature and domain of sacred doctrine.
It is the same old druid Time as ever.
Jascha Heifetz. David Oistrakh. Nathan Milstein. Isaac Stern. Benno Moiseiwitsch. Emil Gilels. Odessa, all.
René Crevel committed suicide.
Who is speaking, and says, We were in study-hall, in the first sentence of Madame Bovary?
Like Wallace Stevens, Charles Ives worked in insurance. Like Kafka.
Herder was an anti-Semite.
The poems of Catullus were lost for a millennium. Tradition has it that the single manuscript discovered in Verona in the fourteenth century had been used to stop a bunghole.