It was I, she says, and shuffles on.
Keats showed On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer to Cowden Clarke the morning after he wrote it.
Apparently Clarke did not know the difference between Cortés and Balboa either.
Chapman. Who in his day was far better known as a playwright than for his translations.
And yet existed at times in calamitous poverty.
I am merry when I have nere a penny in my purse.
Says a letter of Thomas Nashe, who himself saw moments that must have sometimes changed his tone.
Xenophanes, who lived to be one hundred.
And buried his sons.
As did Anaxagoras.
Maurice Ravel’s refusal of the Legion of Honor—
On the premise that government had no right to judge artists.
After a bench heaved from a window during a 1527 political uprising in Florence smashed the left arm of Michelangelo’s David, Giorgio Vasari was one of two sixteen-year-old boys who managed to salvage the pieces.
Alexander A. Alekhine.
Undesirable originality, Beethoven’s Eroica was once condemned for.
Obscure, uncouth, barbaric, and affected, someone labeled an early volume of Yeats.
Very great is the number of the stupid. Said Galileo.
There are always more fools in the majority than in the minority.
Said Anatole France.
One of C. P. Cavafy’s earliest pieces of writing, an essay, in English:
Give Back the Elgin Marbles.
I wish women would repeat the Lord’s Prayer before opening up their mouths.
Said Luther.
From a Hemingway letter, on T. S. Eliot:
A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man.
On Scott Fitzgerald:
A rummy and a liar.
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
Begins an Orwell essay dated 1941.
Rank vegetable growth, Rebecca West called the sentences of Henry James. One feels that if one took cuttings of them one could raise a library in the garden.
Brussels, René Magritte died in.
O, what a number of lies this young man has told about me.
Said Socrates, the first time he heard Plato read one of his dialogues.
Says a legend recorded by Diogenes Laërtius.
Author’s pleasure in learning that the main thoroughfare through Copenhagen is named Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard.
The Marquis de Sade, a century and a half before On the Road:
Writing One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom on a single continuous forty-five-foot roll of paper.
Brahms had blond hair.
As did Mozart.
And Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Hemingway on Sherwood Anderson:
A slob.
The first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species sold out in one day.
Pope Sixtus IV, in the late fifteenth century, was forced to actually issue a bull threatening excommunication for anyone who did not return volumes borrowed from the Vatican library.
Bach had twenty children, of whom nine survived him.
Twenty.
Mozart had seven, of whom two lived.
Vladimir Mayakovsky in New York, in 1925: The filth is worse than in Minsk.
And it is unimaginably filthy in Minsk.
Dostoievsky wrote The Gambler in sixteen days.
Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage in ten. At twenty-one.
Donizetti wrote L’Elisir d’Amore in a week.
The friendship of Crane and Joseph Conrad.
The night before the audition that gained her admission into the Stockholm Academy of Music, Birgit Nilsson milked ten cows on her family’s farm.
The first signed work of visual art, a Greek vase, ca. 700 BC.
Its signature Aristonothos.
Caesar, asked to name the best death:
A sudden one.
Visiting friends, Cyril Connolly was known to mark his place in their books with anything from a string of spaghetti to a leaf of lettuce.
And to depart leaving it there.
Brahms had blue eyes.
As did Abraham Lincoln.
And Hitler.
Giacomo Meyerbeer selflessly gave Richard Wagner all manner of aid at the start of Wagner’s career.
For which in turn Wagner later scurrilously denigrated him in an anti-Semitic pamphlet.
Anonymously.
Rudyard Kipling’s only son was killed fighting with the Irish Guards in World War I.
We have the same job, Virginia.
Said Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to Virginia Woolf.
The only writing I have ever been jealous of.
Said Woolf of Mansfield.
The credible folktale that Marco Polo and his father and uncle, disreputable and queerly dressed, were not recognized and almost denied entry to the Venice family home on their return from the East — after twenty-four years.
Jorge Santayana, it originally was.
Josephine was six years older than Napoleon.
Keep apart, keep apart and preserve one’s soul alive — that is the teaching for the day. It is ill to have been born in these times, but one can make a world within a world.
Wrote George Gissing.
Je suis le savant au fauteuil sombre.
Painting at the court of Sultan Mohammed II in Constantinople, Gentile Bellini improvised a severed head of John the Baptist.
The sultan deemed it unrealistic — and on the spot had a passing slave decapitated for Bellini’s edification.
In his comick scenes he is seldom very successful.
Said Johnson of Shakespeare.
Spurinna.
Charlotte Brontë was four feet nine inches tall.
Sarah Bernhardt was illegitimate.
Marseilles, Rimbaud died in.
Wondering if youngsters still in fact read Marco Polo.
In 1490, a Rome census showed a population of roughly ninety thousand.
Including 6,800 registered prostitutes.
She wouldn’t care a straw whether her husband was an artist or a cobbler, said Haydn of his wife.
Whom he also called an infernal beast.
The Yannis Ritsos verses in which Greek antiquity and the present exist simultaneously — and Phaedra smokes too many cigarettes.
Robert Browning outlived Elizabeth by almost thirty years.
James Dickey flew more than one hundred combat missions in the Pacific in World War II.
Joseph Heller flew sixty in Europe.