A Short Dialogue with David Markson

 

Salinger, wasn’t it, who said the sign of really good book is that you want to call the writer up on the phone when you’re finished reading it?  The strange thing is that now you can almost do it—you can find writers through the internet, send them a note.

 

Unless they’re dead, of course, like David Markson is. Sad, because there’s so much I want to talk to him about. In the tetralogy he addresses Reader and identifies himself as Writer or Protagonist

 

Bahktin, wasn’t it, who said that all texts are a dialogue?

 

David Markson and I share most of a name: Mark and Steven distinguish us. Also his erudition, compared to which mine is nearly nonexistent.

 

Here is our dialogue:

 

Reader’s Block, 1996

 

A used book once property of the Linn State Technical College Library of Linn, Missouri.  Checked out once and due back 11/21/04.

 

M: If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a car from a burning building before a Rembrandt.

 

S: That time my friend Tom Hazuka was visiting and reading from his work in the art gallery and a tornado was upon us. The building had no basement so we hid in an interior closet and the gallery director gave us each a valuable painting to hold on to.  My friend Tama hugged a Rembrandt.

 

M: Impoverished and freezing, Gerad de Nerval hanged himself near a cheap Paris doss-house after no one responded to his late night knock.

 

S: Once I got a message from my son in which he was desperate, hungry, sleeping in his car, near the end.  I was able to answer that particular late night knock.

 

M: Will Protagonist have sold any of his books before moving?  Could he be selling some of them now, piecemeal, as it were for pocket money?

 

S: I am now trying to reduce my personal library by two-thirds. Most of these books have no resale value whatsoever, no value at all, except to me.

 

M: Does Reader still possess recordings?

 

S: I just gave away all the classical vinyl, sold sixty more (all they’d take) and donated the rest. I own CDs, also an anachronistic technology.

 

M: Protagonist’s son or daughter may one day want his books. (Double book-marked)

 

S: My son once said he would keep my mountaineering book collection (considerable in number) intact after I was gone. He had no interest in reading them, only in comforting me.  But, alas, I have outlived him.  Markson’s books, by his direction, were somewhat mysteriously bequeathed to The Strand bookstore in New York.  Some learned of his death by finding copies of his books on The Strand’s shelves.

 

M: Are any of the books Protagonist is packing inscribed by their authors? Or are those the ones he is more likely selling, for their added value?

 

S: My scenario is different. I just don’t have room.

 

M: Protagonist’s obsolescent phonograph. And scarred long-playing records, never surrendered for compact discs.

 

S: I saved about thirty vinyl albums, to play on my simple department store record player.

 

M: Robert Louis Stevenson died of a cerebral hemorrhage at forty-four, but had been emaciated by tuberculosis before that.  A bundle of sticks in a bag, Henry Adams said he looked like.

 

S: Tuberculosis plagued my grandparents all their lives. I am writing about it in an essay-in-progress, so noted this.

 

M: Not sorting books and phonograph records merely, but the narrowing residue of an entire life? Papers, files of correspondence?  

 

S: “The narrowing residue of an entire life.”  I tried to throw away a couple stacks of letters and ended up retrieving them from the recycling bin.  I found a 15-page letter written in 1985 by a dear friend who died last summer.

 

 

This is Not a Novel, l 2001

 

M: Space is blue and birds fly through it.

      Said Werner Heisenberg.

 

S: Of every entry in all four books, I love this one most.

 

 

M: Philip Larkin died of cancer of the esophagus

Only hours afterward, a twenty-volume diary that he had kept for almost fifty years was destroyed by one of his executors.

 

S: My father died of same.  He left no writing, very few material possessions, too, took his secrets with him.  Was much nicer person than Larkin.

 

M: Caesar’s corpse lay in Senate for some hours before slaves finally bore it away on a litter. 

With one arm hanging down, Suetonius makes note of.

 

S: After my friend died last summer, two women arrived with a litter to bear him away in a hearse.  His sister reported to me that when they negotiated the front porch, they dropped the litter and his body rolled into the bushes.

 

P 48/49 have a bookmark.  Why?

 

M: No matter how frequently, always given pause at remembering there is no color whatsoever in the canvas.

 

S: No color whatsoever?

 

Pages 100/109 have bookmark from an earlier reading. Again, why?

 

Pages 110/11 have our son’s counselor’s business card as a bookmark.  Perhaps, random?

 

M: Writer incidentally doing his best here—insofar as his memory allows—not to repeat things he has included in his earlier work,

Meaning in this instance the four hundred and fifty or more deaths that were mentioned in his last book also.

 

S: Because of my interest in tuberculosis, I tallied the number of deaths M mentions in this volume alone, by tuberculosis.  39.

 

 

Vanishing Point 2004

 

M: William Faulkner once allowed himself to be interviewed on radio during a University of Virginia football game.

And was announced as the winner of the Mobil Prize.

 

S: America.

 

M: White does not exist in nature, said Renoir.

 

S: Renoir should have been in Anchorage on Wednesday when sixteen inches of snow fell.

 

M: Does anyone ever die who is not remembered through the remainder of at least one other entire lifetime by someone?

 

S: We hope not, but wonder, don’t we? I remember my friend, typed out his 15-page letter. 

 

M: Luca Signorelli, at the sudden death of a young son—having the corpse stripped and making a full-length drawing of the boy for remembrance.

And with extraordinary fortitude, shedding not a tear.

 

S: I write often about the sudden death of my young son. I can do so without shedding a tear.  But if I try to read the words aloud, to an audience, there are tears.

 

Bookmark 170/171.  Not sure why.

 

Bookmark: The train ticket Chicago to Macomb Jan 14. Does not specify the year.  Departs 5:55 p.m.

 

M: According to his own wish, Liszt’s funeral was conducted without music.

 

S: My son had made it known that he wanted Townes Van Zandt’s cover of Jagger and Richard’s Dead Flowers to play at his funeral.  The priest did not care for it, but the wish was granted.

 

 

The Last Novel, 2007

 

M:  In November 1919, after a solar eclipse had irrefutably verified Einstein’s concept of Relativity, British physicists convened a major press gathering to announce it.  The New York Times assigned the story to a man named Henry Crouch—a golf reporter.

 

S: America!  Again.

 

M:        What, still alive at twenty-two,

 A fine upstanding lad like you?

 

S: Kingsmill’s parody of A.E. Housman, misquoted; it’s clean not fine.  In any case, twenty-two, being the year my son did not surpass.

 

A Prairie Lights Books receipt indicating the book was purchased on 9/17/08. Remembering that, although I have been in Prairie Lights dozens of times, I was definitely not in Iowa City in September of 2008.

 

A receipt indicating I purchased it from aa internet bookseller called HollyLooyaBooks on 1/11/10.

 

M: Books weaken the memory.

      Says Plato in the Phaedrus.

 

S: Imagine what Plato would think of computers, the internet.

 

M: Future generations will regard Bob Dylan with the awe reserved for Blake, Whitman, Picasso, and the like.

Said an otherwise seemingly rational writer named Jonathan Lethem.

 

S: I wonder what M would think of Dylan receiving the Mobil Prize.  Actually, I guess we know.  I wonder if Lethem has seen this?  Will ask him–he’s one of the writers I have conversed with over the internet.

 

 

Markson died, alone, in 2010, three years after he finished The Last Novel, the fourth of what critics have informally titled The Notecard Quartet.  He feels alive in these pages, as long as readers keep him so.