The following is an excerpt from Vanishing Point by David Markson, published by Shoemaker and Hoard in February 2004.
Author
has finally started to put his notes into manuscript form.
A
seascape by Henry Matisse was once hung upside down in
the Museum of Modern Art in New York—and left that
way for a month and a half.
The
speedometer after the crash that killed Albert Camus was
frozen at 145, in kilometers—meaning roughly ninety
miles per hour.
The
driver of another vehicle said the car had passed him going
faster than that.
Leonardo
da Vinci's father had four wives.
Not
one of whom was Leonardo's mother.
An
early intention was that Hector Berlioz would become a
physician.
Until
he went headlong out a hospital window during his first dissection.
Author
had been scribbling notes on three-by-five-inch index cards.
They now come close to filling two shoebox tops taped together
end to end.
Bertrand
Russell was twenty-one years older than Wilfred Owen.
And
would still be alive fifty-two years after Owen was machine-gunned
in France in World War I.
Orchestra
play like pig.
Being
an Arturo Toscanini explanation of why he would not apologize
to his Metropolitan Opera musicians after cursing at them
in Italian.
Twenty-five
years after she broke off their relationship, Charles Dickens
had a tryst with Maria Beadnell, his still-remembered first
love.
And
found her fat and foolishly affected and wholly witless.
From
the earliest biographical note on Rembrandt:
He could
read only the simplest Dutch. And that haltingly.
Rembrandt.
Werner
Heisenberg was thirty-one when he won the Nobel Prize.
And
nine years earlier had been given a grade of C on his doctoral
examinations.
By
his own admission, William Butler Yeats, at twenty-seven,
had not yet ever kissed a woman.
The
Bodleian Library at Oxford, in the mid-seventeenth century,
exchanged its First Folio Shakespeare for a Third—on
the premise that the latter was more complete.
Actually,
Author could have begun to type some weeks ago. For whatever
reason, he's been procrastinating.
Karl
Marx never in his life saw the inside of a factory.
Visiting
Maecenas at Rome, in the decades before the beginning of
the common era, Virgil and Horace were able to use his heated swimming
pool.
At
thirty-seven, in Key West, Ernest Hemingway badly marked
up Wallace Stevens' face in a never fully explained fistfight.
Stevens
was fifty-seven when it happened.
One
hundred and sixteen thousand visitors had strolled past Le
Bateau, the upside-down Matisse, without comment, before
it was rehung correctly.
At
the age of seven or eight, Sigmund Freud once delibrately
urinated on the floor of his parents' bedroom.
Aaron
Copland, on listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fifth Symphony:
Like
staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.
Mark
Twain forgot Becky Thatcher's name in the eight years between Tom
Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. And called her Bessie
Thatcher in the later book.
Thomas
Hardy's anecdote about looking up a word in the dictionary
because he wasn't certain it existed—and finding that
he himself was the only authority cited for its usage.
Realizing
that all of Byron's closest friends—Shelley, for instance—would
have addressed him as my lord.
Corinna
once defeated Pindar five times in a sequence of poetry contests
at Thebes.
Pindar
called her a sow.
Emerson
was once quoted as having criticized Swinburne.
Swinburne
called him a toothless baboon.
Stuff,
Melville dismissed Emerson as.
I.e.,
as in stuff and nonsense.
Conducting Don
Giovanni in Boston in 1913, Felix Weingartner actually
set aside his baton and joined in the applause after John
McCormack's Il mio tesoro.
One
reason for Author's procrastination is that he seems to not
to have had much energy lately, to tell the truth.
For
work, or for much of anything else.
—Excerpted from Vanishing Point by David Markson. © 2004 by David Markson. Excerpted by permission of Shoemaker and Hoard. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.