"I'm not going to read," David Markson said, after introductions from Strand general manager Eddie Sutton. "It bores me to read," he explained, "and it bores me to hear others. Most readers really aren't all that good. Something Willy Gaddis said: 'What is all this reading.' Writers write."
Other authors might disappoint an audience of adoring readers with this sort of thing, but Markson, who is 79 and has published 13 books since the 1950s, appears rarely in public and his fans were eager to ask questions. They devoured his anecdotes, on friendships with Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac to a botched Hollywood adaptation of his first novel, a satirical western, which nevertheless afforded him time to travel and to begin writing experimental fiction. His new book, The Last Novel, is the fourth in a series compiled of aphoristic quotes, facts, and references to literature, art history, and other subjects that comprise an intellectual's conscience, and they seem to suggest in the end that all art and philosophy is drawn from a previous source, whether intended or attributed.
I confess never to have read any of Markson's books before this event (though I am currently reading his latest), and was drawn simply because I had not been to a reading or literary talk for some weeks and thought it would be fitting to start off the fall with something new.
The podium used for readings on the second floor art book section of the store is high, on a platform a good three feet above the floor. But Markson was anything but imposing. He wore jeans and an crisp but untucked blue shirt, front pocket full of index cards1 and a pen, and he smiled warmly. His explanation that he is becoming senile ("I do repeat myself now") was itself repeated enough to beg the question of whether it was a joke or evidence of such senility, but he completed all responses to questions put forth with a lucid answer, no matter how long he meandered.
It was when he was brought to the subject of teaching that his age began to speak for him, beginning with a jest that Long Island University offered "nothing but C students." He then discussed Columbia, and his eyes wilted grandfatherly as he recalled the success of former students, and then the New School, where "the kids were coming from nowhere" (he was incredulous by one group's inability to recognize lines from "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening").2
"How are you going to write," he rhetorized to us, now, "if you haven't read anything?" And sitting there I remembered how his talk began, and 'what is all this reading,' and then onto the mystical drunkenness of Thomas, Kerouac, Frederick Exley and himself (he claims to have spent 25% of his life in saloons). Though the romance of writer as drunk has become tired, I was charmed to see and hear a rare surviving vestige of this period, and somewhere in between I became confused. Doesn't Markson intend to have us think of writers as writing, and drinking? And then I remembered that the Gaddis quote was more about writers' preoccupation with giving readings, and perhaps readers who flock to a performance in lieu of reading for themselves. More like, "Hey Joe, get off that podium and go write your next book." Not "Hey Jude, what are you doing in the library?" Jude is okay (as long as she knows her Frost).3
1 At one point Markson explained that he carried notecards so that he could write down facts and quotes as they struck him, but he did not gesture to the cards in his pocket and I only noticed them later, and he also said that he is finished with writing books in this style.
2 Dwight Eisenhower was once asked by an assistant if he would like to meet Robert Frost, who happened to be visiting someone else at the White House.
Eisenhower could not think of a reason why he should bother.
--Markson, David. The Last Novel. (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007), 118.
3 Final thought originally stemmed from a conversation with a good cobbler.