Flann O’Brien, on Brendan Behan:
A lout.
Congreve wrote The Way of the World at thirty. And lived twenty-nine more years without writing one further word for the stage.
Nikos Kazantzakis once spent two years as a contemplative on Mount Athos.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
Nietzsche, on George Sand:
A writing cow.
Thomas Hobbes was once Francis Bacon’s secretary.
Andrew Marvell was once John Milton’s.
In whatever version of the legend, Galahad is unvaryingly established as a direct descendant of Joseph of Arimathea.
Ergo as Jewish.
Perceval likewise.
Was Lorenzo Ghiberti the first artist of consequence to write an autobiography?
A friend, when Oliver Goldsmith briefly practiced medicine in London:
Kindly prescribe only for your enemies.
Louise Homer died of coronary thrombosis.
Matisse: In modern art, it is indubitably to Cézanne that I owe the most.
Picasso: He was my one and only master. Cézanne! It was the same with all of us — he was like our father.
Aeschylus never saw the Parthenon.
Zora Neale Hurston died in a welfare home.
And was buried in an unmarked grave.
André Malraux died from a blood clot on his lung.
On principle, Bertrand Russell gave away all of his considerable inherited wealth in his late twenties. And earned his own way thereafter.
Wagner was five months older than Verdi.
Wittgenstein was five months older Heidegger.
Elizabeth Barrett was six years older than Browning.
Mont Sainte-Victoire.
Enrique Grenados drowned while attempting to save his wife when their ship was torpedoed by a German submarine in the English Channel in World War I.
Pyrrhus died after being struck by a tile flung from a roof.
Hit Sign Win Suit.
Whitman said he had read The Heart of Midlothian a dozen or more times.
Among Wittgenstein’s spellings, when using English:
Anoied. Realy. Excelentely. Expences. Affraid. Cann’t.
Plotinus did not begin to write until he was fifty.
Goethe was seventy-eight before he started Part II of Faust.
Two millennia before Princess Diana, Virgil, visiting Rome, would be forced to flee even into the private homes of strangers because of admirers crowding after him on the streets.
And this when he had written only the Eclogues and the Georgics, the Aeneid to be posthumous.
I had but a glimpse of Virgil, Ovid himself, younger, had to say.
Fulke Greville was murdered by a disaffected servant.
Asculum.
Fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos.
Account for Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia.
Walter Johnson died of a brain tumor.
For we must consider that we shall be as a city on a hill.
Lice, Dickens labeled critics.
Swine, D. H. Lawrence preferred.
Samuel Barber was Louise Homer’s nephew.
Southwell was hanged and then drawn and quartered at Tyburn.
Palestrina’s Stabat Mater.
Pergolesi’s.
Without fail, given pause at recalling that Captain Ahab is a Quaker.
As similarly always needing a moment for the precise meaning of drawn and quartered to register.
Paracelsus may have died after a brawl in a tavern.
And his sandal shoon.
Gerhart Hauptmann was a supporter of the Nazis.
Igor Stravinsky admired Mussolini.
Stabat Mater dolorosa
Iuxta crucem lacrimosa
Vivaldi’s. Haydn’s. Rossini’s. Schubert’s.
Poulenc’s.
The legend that Gregory the Great had to be dragged to St. Peter’s by main force, when he was elected Pope.
No man will ever write a better tragedy than Lear, Shaw said.
The Burning Babe.
Orson Welles died of a heart attack.
Stephen Foster never learned which side won the Civil War.
Michelangelo. Piero di Cosimo. Guido Reni. Pontormo. Tintoretto.
All of whom wanted no one anywhere near them when working.
Piero and Pontormo becoming pathological about it.
Jacopone da Todi.
Anna Pavlova died of pneumonia.
Ronald Firbank died of pneumonia.
The little Marcel, Proust was called. All his life.
A. E. Housman, on the surest source of poetic inspiration:
A pint, at luncheon.
Kirsten Flagstad, on the most critical aspect of singing Wagner:
Comfortable shoes.
Les Saltimbanques, which inspired the fifth of the Duino Elegies:
Rilke in fact having been a guest in a home in Munich where the canvas hung above his desk for months.
Anthony Trollope wrote seven pages a day, seven days a week.
And would actually begin a new book if he came to the end of one before his day’s quota had been met.
Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint stool.
Eliot’s first wife, Vivien, insisted upon washing her own bedsheets.
Even when staying at a hotel.
My breviary, Montaigne referred to Plutarch as.
While frequently quoting him with no acknowledgment whatsoever.
Which Seneca had also long since made a practice of.
Sinclair Lewis died of a heart attack.
Thomas Eakins was once fired for removing a loincloth from a male model in a women’s life-drawing class in Philadelphia.
Defoe’s father was a butcher.
Sadi. Rumi. Hafiz.
Saul of Tarsus very likely participated in the stoning of St. Stephen.
Was he also an epileptic?
Was John the Baptist an Essene?
I was, with God’s help, born poor.
Ralph Ellison died of pancreatic cancer.
Tarsus. Being also where Cleopatra arrives, on her barge, to meet Mark Antony.
On the river Cydnus.
In Turkey.
Tommaso Campanella spent twenty-seven years in a papal dungeon for heresy.
An information bureau of the human condition, Theodor Adorno called Kafka.
Shelley, at nineteen, was sent down from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet on atheism.
Landor, at the same age, was expelled for shooting a fellow student in a political argument.
Two hundred and forty-three people die in the Iliad who are named by name.