The Last Novel by David Markson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Semifictional Semifiction

The Last Novel is a compendium of apparently disconnected facts, aphorisms, anecdotes, and assorted witticisms. Mostly these are about writers and other artists but also includes other notables like scientists and politicians. All are delivered in the best traditions of WC Fields and Henny Youngman as perfectly crafted one-liners. The effect is startling - as if Markson first wrote something of high literary density - like a Finnegans Wake or an Under the Volcano - and then stripped away all the narrative to reveal only the allusions and references that were embedded in it. What remains serves the same function as a Russian icon - pointing beyond itself to some other reality. Markson refers to this as semifictional semifiction in the text, an outstandingly accurate description.

Quite apart from the technique, the sheer scholarship required to produce such a work appears overwhelming to anyone less well-read than Markson, the presumed Novelist of the piece, who pops up sporadically throughout. Novelist is a witty magpie who collects only interesting, offbeat shiny things for his nest: pithy insults, fascinating oddities, intimate flaws, passing remarks, and little known biographical details from the lives of Dante and Shakespeare to those of Waugh and Vonnegut. Collectively these tidbits form a sort of cultural detritus which Novelist excavates layer by layer. The things we forgot we knew about and how these things connect to what we do remember seems the implicit story line.

Novelist particularly likes contradictions and euphemisms. “Gerard Manley Hopkins, on realizing that he feels a certain kinship with Whitman: As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a very pleasant confession.” And “He had not escaped the common penalties of transgressing the laws of strict purity, wrote Alexander Thayer re Beethoven. Which is to say — he had syphilis.” In fact most of his observations are ironic ( “Lenin played tennis”), although I don’t detect any sarcasm. He is an observer rather than a critic or a judge, as in “In an era when singers frequently embellished music to their own taste, Rossini once complimented Adelina Patti on an aria from The Barber of Seville — and then asked her who the composer was.”

Novelist creates fascinating grammatical constructions: “Wallpaper, George Steiner dismissed much of Jackson Pollock as.” And then resolves the tension this creates: “Extremely expensive wallpaper, Kenneth Rexroth made it.” This rivets the reader as if he’s riding a skittish horse which demands constant attention. Every step has to be monitored; and watching the twitching of the ears is crucial lest one miss the intention. The narrator admits to his apparent unreliability. “Novelist’s personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.”

I’m convinced that much of Novelist’s style is shaped by ancient Hebrew poetry. His repetition of a point with variations is typical:
“The sound of Bix Beiderbecke’s cornet:
Like a girl saying yes, Eddie Condon said.
The sound of Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone:
Like a dry martini, being what Desmond himself said he wanted.”
And the piece also frequently involves interesting reversals in which the reference is purposely ambiguous:
“One of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published.
Edmund Wilson called This Side of Paradise.
Not a lovable man.
John O’Hara said of Scott Fitzgerald himself.”

Novelist’s trains of thought are wonderful to experience:
“Latin, Greek, Italian, and German, George Eliot read.
Latin, Greek, Italian, and French — Mary Shelley.
Hindi, not English, Rudyard Kipling’s first language was.
People who pronounce the word ask as if it were spelled with an x.
As for that matter it was, until the late sixteenth century.”
Often the connections demand participative thought by the reader:
“The name Copperfield came from a sign Dickens had noticed on a shop in a London slum.
Chuzzlewit likewise.
Nothing but obscenities and filth.
Being all Conrad could find in D. H. Lawrence.
Disgust and horror, recorded Abigail Adams after a blackface performance of Othello:
My whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona.”

And then, of course, there are the straightforward literary gags: “I come of a people who do not even acknowledge Jesus Christ. Why am I supposed to acknowledge Abstract Expressionism? Asked Jack Levine.” Or: “Good lord, Willie, you are drunk. Either that or you’re writing for a very small audience.” This could refer to William Faulkner or perhaps William Yeats; it’s probably better to leave it up in the air.

Novelist ends with a Flemish phrase - “Als ick kan”- which can be variously translated as ‘If I am able,’ ‘The best I can do,’ or perhaps simply ‘Perhaps’. In any case it’s tentative. The novel is billed as ‘Last’ but that can only mean ‘most recent’. Perhaps it’s simply a summary of Novelist’s knowledge of the world at some arbitrary point. And the same might be said of any interpretation of what Novelist has to say - only more or less recent; never definitive.

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