LS: But you used the word “relationship.” You mean a novel about people, plural, instead of merely the isolated single individuals you’ve been dealing with? And not just in these four titles, but as long ago as in Wittgenstein’s Mistress as well?
DM: Yes. A man and a woman. A guy and a gal. Him, her. Them.
LS: I’m noticing that twinkle in your eye. You’re not by any chance talking about a love story?
DM: Who? Didn’t I tell you I’m a hundred and nine years old?
LS: You’re only seventy-nine.
DM: And devious, too. When else would you be tricked into calling someone “only” seventy-nine, except after he’d said he was that much older?
LS: I’m not forgetting that you also just now referred to a woman in your life. Which reminds me that I’d been intending to ask you about your reputation as an archetypal sort of recluse. May I presume you’re no longer quite that?
DM: She lives in Park Slope, in Brooklyn. It’s forty minutes, from here in Greenwich Village.
LS: Not a bad commute, especially considering the journey’s end. Do you read on the subway? Or just stare into space, lovesick?
DM: Can you indicate at this point that I just smacked you upside the head? Ask me something absolutely unrelated, you hear?
LS: Maybe not wholly unrelated. Since you want to smack somebody, tell me if you ever had a fistfight.
DM: Good lord. Though as a matter of fact, yes. Once. When I was about thirteen. For what seemed like practically an hour. Back and forth across front lawns, in and out of driveways, between parked cars — neither one of us willing to quit. This being back in Albany, where I grew up. Finally a couple of the older kids who’d been egging us on called it a draw. But what I’d not been aware of, and nobody’d said a word about, was that the other boy was wearing a ring. My face wound up looking as if I’d fallen under the proverbial lawn mower. I was reluctant to go to school for days.
LS: What is that new look of delight, suddenly?
DM: I only this instant realize. Ask me an irrelevant question and it turns out to have a literary connection after all. The very kid I fought with is quoted in my latest book.
LS: You’re not serious?
DM: Fact. We went on through high school together, and after that I think I saw him no more than two or three times, and not since around the Kennedy years. But lately he’s phoned me now and then. And somehow he stumbled onto one of the books, maybe Vanishing Point. How, I’ve no idea, since he turns out to be unquestionably not a reader. But he called me about it.
LS: And?
DM: I quote him without any sort of attribution, just the few words, in an isolated paragraph. He doesn’t even quite sense what he’s saying, or certainly not who he’s saying it to, meaning the author, but it’s extraordinarily appropriate to all the other typical dunderheaded critical put-downs of everybody that I make use of all the way through. The passage that says, “Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?”
LS: Oh god — what did you tell him?
DM: What could I say? Something like, “Yes, that’s all there is, those little things.”
LS: David, there’s more. Believe me, there’s rather more.
DM: Hey, I know. But thank you.
124 This interview appeared in Rain Taxi, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2007.
~ ~ ~
“In Celebration of David Markson,” AWP Conference, Chicago, February 2009
David’s introductory remarks, read aloud by Martha Cooley to the fifty-plus audience members:
From David Markson, in New York—
Just a few words of greeting — and regrets that I can’t be there, if only to lurk anonymously in a back corner.
To Laura Sims, a good buddy — and a good poet — even if I sometimes can’t understand half of what she writes.
To Francoise Palleau, a dear friend, who’s lucky I’m not 65 years younger — or I’d be chasing after
both
of her gorgeous daughters.
To Joe Tabbi, with whom I go back at least twenty years — even if he seems to have lost my address and phone number in the last several.
To Maria Fitzgerald and Brian Evenson, regrettably, neither of whom I’ve met. But, hell, I’m only 81—there’s plenty of time.
To Martha Cooley, with whom I’ve shared endless laughter — except when she’s proclaiming in despair, “David, you’ve told me that — three times, already!”
And to the audience, all two or three of you. It’s been a long haul for me to get to where things like this happen, but that only makes it all the more gratifying. My very best — and my thanks for your interest.
But one more moment, if I may, a note of an entirely different sort. If anyone is ever doing any work involving my novel
Reader’s Block
— writing about it — please, please, use the latest edition, the one with the blue-ish gray cover marked 3
rd
printing, 2007. Because of a horror story I won’t go into here, the 2
nd
printing, the one dated 2001—for years the most commonly available one — contains endless
egregious
errors. To this day I don’t know why I’m not serving 20 years to life for having committed homicide because of it. Again, please, quote only the 2007 edition — i.e., the one dated nearest to the time when you’re hearing this — which I believe is fully corrected. Thank you again.
~ ~ ~
David Markson by Ann Beattie
Of course I never thought I’d be writing about David Markson when he was no longer with us. I should have done it when he was alive, wondering in his bemused way if anyone who lived in his Greenwich Village apartment had any idea Writer lived in the building, let alone when his birthday was. I wrote a blurb for one of his books, and I had the honor of introducing him in his only reading at the 92nd Street Y, but in between times we just made plans to get together when I returned to the city, saying maybe, meeting — if it worked out — at a restaurant close to his apartment. A glass of wine at lunch, what the hell! And a steak to go with that. He absolutely would not let me pick him up by cab or car service the night he was reading at the Y, insisting he’d take the subway. He did let me hail a cab back to my hotel afterwards, and he came with me and had a drink at the bar, insisting he’d take the subway back to West 10th. You can’t do anything with people. He was set in his ways, but he liked his routines, his patterns, his freedom. Sometimes not spending money equals freedom, at least to a certain way of thinking: you’re not beholden; you’re used to the silence and the lack of eye contact on the subway, and who wants to have to sit in strained silence with a driver you don’t know? He had no cell phone to consult in the back seat. He probably wouldn’t have known the etiquette about opening a bottle of water. In a cab, he’d have had to listen to the cab driver speaking to someone in another language, or he might have been consulted about his preferred route home when, like any intelligent New Yorker, he knew whatever he said would only result in absolving the cab driver of responsibility if the street was blocked off because a movie was being shot, or if there was a bulldozer in the middle of Sixth Avenue, which no one local ever called “The Avenue of the Americas.”