David Markson: some notes and selections

I first found David Markson without seek­ing him. I was thir­teen, and read­ing a new bio­graphy of the great writer Malcolm Lowry by Douglas Day. Lowry, the author of Under the Volcano, was what you’d call a hope­less alco­hol­ic by the time he befriended the young writer Markson, who gave an account of his friend to The Nation in 1966, almost ten years after Lowry’s death in 1957:

The man could not shave him­self. In lieu of a belt, he knot­ted a rope or a dis­carded neck­tie around his waist. Mornings, he needed two or three ounces of gin in his orange juice if he was to steady his hand to eat the break­fast that would very likely prove his only meal of the day. Thereafter a dimin­ish­ing yel­low tint in the glass might belie the fact that now he was drink­ing the gin neat, which he did for as many hours as it took him to. Ultimately he would collapse—sometimes sens­ible enough of his con­di­tion to lurch toward a bed, though more often he would crash down into a chair, and once it was across my phono­graph. Then he would hack and sput­ter through the night like some great defect­ive machine fall­ing apart.

That was in 1973. I was ignor­ant of the fact that in 1970 Markson had pub­lished his own nov­el of Mexico and mad­ness, Going Down, and ded­ic­ated it to Lowry. Here is a pas­sage from that book:

But then how strange, how inex­plic­ably unreal, the façade of the church seem­ing to waver and recede, the silvered cru­ci­fix at its spire melt­ing dis­tantly into the drift­ing morn­ing’s mists, and the square itself as it came alive both famil­iarly lovely and des­ol­ately ali­en at once, some glor­i­ously insane Turner sud­denly con­ceiv­ing the sky now too, until I felt queerly tense, queerly expect­ant, and with some­thing exult­ant in my head as well, Bach-like, the ter­rible beauty of some pas­sion or requiem or credo nev­er before heard, and with a sense of infin­ite peace also, as in that cease­less ebb and drift of love, or the Tao, where some­thing unima­gin­ably mira­cu­lous was surely about to occur, or even lay upon me, myself, so that in that very moment I might have raised my lamed hand to deliv­er all, might have cried forth the dead, invoked radi­ance before the blind! Or was I only mad yet once again, and lost, as forever, lost?

Markson spent a lot of time as a jour­ney­man writer, doing genre fic­tion for dough. He wrote the nov­el upon which Dirty Dingus Magee, a bizarre foot­note in Frank Sinatra’s film career, had been based; and scrip­ted anoth­er very pecu­li­ar Western, 1972’s Cry For Me, Billy. In his own nov­els he became more pre­oc­cu­pied with the cre­at­ive act. In the below pas­sage from 1977’s Springer’s Progress, the book’s tit­u­lar not-successfully-progressing writer con­ducts a com­ic self-interrogation:

Listen, blot­ter­brain, try to be sober for sev­en­teen seconds. Your prob­lem­at­ic­al end­ing beside the point, what do you ulti­mately want out of this cop­ro­phag­ous excursus?

Oh, words, obviously.

Meaning?

Play a little. With luck a phrase or three worth some lonely pretty girl’s mid­night underlining.

What’ve phrases got to do with the cost of smoked sal­mon in Abu Dhabi?

Haven’t I acknow­ledged that? Just once, can­’t a char­ac­ter be the product of his own fucked-up head rather than society?

That account for all the pre­ten­tious lit­er­ary dis­jecta mem­bra in there too?

Don’t call me pre­ten­tious to vin­dic­ate your own long-rationalized sur­renders, mate. What should occupy him instead, how many cit­izens of Warsaw does it take to change a light­bulb? In any case he him­self won’t be writ­ing for people who can only read long books because they haven’t the time to read short ones.

Neat line, except you even bor­rowed that. Pascal? Meanwhile what about read­ers who’ll splut­ter over vocab­u­lary words?

Again, what are you accus­ing me of except the cor­ro­sion of your own tool chest?

Now tell me that a book is a mir­ror and if a jack­ass looks in a wit can scarcely be expec­ted to look out.[…]

Wittgenstein’s Mistress is the most often-cited of Markson’s later works, a dev­ast­at­ingly mov­ing book that cre­ated a tem­plate of sorts for Markson’s sub­sequent works. (It was a favor­ite of David Foster Wallace’s, and one of the hand­ful of books he gladly blurbed.) What seems a ran­dom, slightly demen­ted col­lec­tion of obser­va­tions and aph­or­isms and fact­oids and descrip­tions coalesces into some­thing more sol­id but also more enig­mat­ic. A post-apocalyptic chron­icle of loneli­ness? A mad­wo­man’s lament? Both? Neither? In any event, a mas­ter­piece. I say a “tem­plate of sorts” because in sub­sequent works Markson laid aside notions of char­ac­ter and nar­rat­ive and became increas­ingly, insist­ently aph­or­ist­ic, and each of his dazzlingly ori­gin­al and eru­dite (Wallace speaks of how a nov­el­ist has to “give the impression—both in lines and between the lines—of know­ing an enorm­ous amount;” Markson was cer­tainly the man for that job) books hit with the force and form­al pre­ci­sion of an exact inver­sion of the “Dictionary of Recieved Ideas” con­ceived by Bouvard and Pecuchet. Here, from the sadly-aptly titled The Last Novel:

    Wine, the title of John Gay’s first pub­lished poem was. In which he insisted that n
o one who drank only water could become an author.

One’s first glass of the day is a great event. Acknowledged Thackaray.

“Not drunk is he who from the floor/Can rise alone and still drink more.” Contributed Thomas Love Peacock.

Bo-ray pri ha-gofen.

A manual-winding pock­et watch, Einstein carried.

Snivel in a wet hankie, D.H. Lawrence called Lord Jim.

At fifty-eight, two year before his death, Chaucer was sued over a debt of four­teen pounds.

And did not have the money. 

Markson died yes­ter­day at age 83. Thanks to Evelyn Roak, a fre­quent com­menter on this blog, for bring­ing the news.