David Markson - The Last Novel

PRAISE FOR DAVID MARKSON VANISHING POINT Breathtakingly seamless perfection... brilliant, high, fine, masterful, deep. Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Striking, devilishly playful... and with a deeply philosophical core, this novel proves once more that Markson deserves his accolades and then some. Publishers Weekly (starred review) David Marksons books are stunningly true and wildly inventive. They are unsettling and consoling.

They are full of strange echoes, paradoxes, and hilarious stories, and in their accumulations they are great homages to great art, celebrating the work of the imagination and at the same time reminding us of swift time and the fragility of cultural memory. Joanna Scott Irresistible... a marvelous, page-turning read... uncommon brilliance... a novel of immense drama... explosively artful.

Baltimore Sun THIS IS NOT A NOVEL Magnificent... its almost impossible to stop turning pages... my soul was humming. Sven Birkerts, New York Observer Reads as addictively as an airport thriller... masterful. Bookforum Mesmerizing.

Newsday Triumphant... plangent verbal music... altogether wonderful. Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World No, its not a novel, but it is a masterwork. Publishers Weekly READERS BLOCK Alarmingly moving... yes, you should read this book.

Believer No one but Beckett can be quite as sad and funny at the same time as Markson can. Ann Beattie One of the most original novels of its time... unputdownable. American Book Review WITTGENSTEINS MISTRESS Addresses formidable philosophic questions with tremendous wit. Remarkable. Amy Hempel, New York Times Book Review A work of genius...

An erudite, breathtakingly cerebral novel whose prose is crystal and whose voice rivets and whose conclusion defies you not to cry. David Foster Wallace, Review of Contemporary Fiction Provocative, learned, wacko, brilliant, and extravagantly comic. William Kennedy The novel I liked best this year... one dizzying, delightful, funny passage after another. Washington Times SPRINGERS PROGRESS An exuberantly Joycean, yes, Joycean celebration of carnality and creativity an everything-goes, risk-taking, manically wild and funny and painful novel... brilliant.

New York Times Book Review Alive with the pleasures of language... terribly funny, formidably intelligent. Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post The most honest and stunning Greenwich Village novel of my time. Seymour Krim GOING DOWN Beautifully constructed. One of the most important books published in America in years. Frederick Exley A beauty.

A haunting story of passion and flesh. An erotic work of art. William Goyen A book we will come back to as we do with The Recognitions and Under the Volcano . An unquestioned masterpiece. Les Whitten Leaves me woozy with sex and death and Mexico. Highly recommended.

Kurt Vonnegut A contemporary, very literate record of despair; all of it in fact seems to be taking place in darkness, in shadows, in the rain, or in the secret criminal places of the heart... supremely successful. Village Voice The Last Novel Also by David Markson NOVELS The Ballad of Dingus Magee Going Down Springers Progress Wittgensteins Mistress Readers Block This Is Not a Novel Vanishing Point CRITICISM Malcolm Lowrys Volcano: Myth, Symbol, Meaning POETRY Collected Poems ENTERTAINMENTS Epitaph for a Tramp Epitaph for a Dead Beat Miss Doll, Go Home THE LAST NOVEL DAVID MARKSON
Copyright 2007 by David Markson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Markson, David. p. cm. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-1-59376-143-1 ISBN-10: 1-59376-143-0 1. NovelistsFiction. 2. FictionAuthorshipFiction. 3. I. Title. Title.

PS3563.A67L37 2007 813'.54dc22 2006038793 Cover design by Kimberly Glyder Design Interior design by David Bullen Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Painting is not done to decorate apartments. PICASSO If there wasnt death, I think you couldnt go on. STEVIE SMITH Content And then the roof. From high up on the Sistine ceiling scaffolding, Michelangelo was known to now and then drop things brooms, even fairly long boards. Most frequently, it appeared, when the pope happened to be lurking below for a glimpse at his latest efforts. When I die, I open a bordello.

You know what is a bordello, no? But against every one of you all I lock shut the door. Said Arturo Toscanini, to a recalcitrant orchestra. As a talisman for the future while still young and penniless, Balzac once sketched a large blank representation of a picture frame on one of his garret walls and designated it Painting by Raphael. Old. Tired. Alone. Broke. Broke.

A Frenchman in Delft in 1663, looking to purchase inexpensive art, was shown a Vermeer on display in a pastry shop. Almost certainly being held there as security for a debt of Vermeers to the baker. Keats stayed up all night on the occasion when he actually did first look into Chapmans Homer and then composed his sonnet so swiftly that he was able to messenger it to a friend to read before breakfast. Van Gogh, in a letter from Arles, some few weeks after having presented a piece of his ear to a woman in a brothel: I went yesterday to see the girl I had gone to when I went astray in my wits. They told me that in this country things like that are not out of the ordinary. Well, L.B. is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets.

The unimaginably cramped cell in which St. John of the Cross was once imprisoned for months, beaten repeatedly and virtually starved, but where he nonetheless managed to compose some of his finest verses. In a building that no longer exists but can still be seen in El Grecos View of Toledo. At least once, Flaubert informs readers that Emma Bovarys eyes are brown. And several other times that they are black. Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke. Broke.

All of which obviously means that this is the last book Novelist is going to write. Anton Chekhov died in Germany. His coffin arrived in Moscow in a freight car distinctly labeled Oysters. During their first four years in the East Hampton farmhouse where they would live until Pollocks death eleven years later, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner could not afford to install plumbing for heat and hot water. Clarence Darrow went out of his way to inform A. E.

Housman that he had recited two pieces of Housmans verse in avoiding the death penalty for Leopold and Loeb, even presenting Housman with a copy of the courtroom summation which showed he had misquoted both. Claude Monets admission, after standing beside the deathbed of someone he had loved that in spite of his grief he had spent much of the time analyzing which pigments comprised the color of her eyelids. That day being come, Caesar going into the Senate house and speaking merrily unto the soothsayer, told him, The Ides of March be come. So be they, softly answered the soothsayer, but they are not yet past. Says Norths Plutarch. A womans body is not a mass of flesh in a state of decomposition, on which the green and purplish spots denote a complete state of cadaveric putrefaction.

An early critic presumed to inform Renoir. The devil damn thee black, thou cream-facd loon; Where gottst thou that goose look? Wrote Shakespeare in Macbeth. Now friend, what means thy change of countenance? Substituted William Davenant, in a rewritten version that was played for almost a century. His last book. All of which also then gives Novelist carte blanche to do anything here he damned well pleases. Which is to say, writing in his own personal genre, as it were.

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