Dirty Dingus Magee was a 1970 comedy western starring that least credible of outdoors actors, Frank Sinatra, along with George Kennedy, one of several post-Mitchum supporting stars of that period – unlike Mitchum or Broderick Crawford, Kennedy could smile. The director, Burt Kennedy (no relation), was a second-tier talent at best who specialized in lighter western fair &, as horse operas faded, so did his career. I think I must have flipped the dial – something I do habitually when I see Sinatra in anything other than Manchurian Candidate, one of the half-dozen best American films ever made, & the rarely shown Man with a Golden Arm – dozens of times when Dingus Magee came on. For Sinatra buffs, the film is notable as Blue Eyes’ last hit movie, albeit a minor one. For writers, it has been better known as a film that Joseph Heller, of all people, was brought in on in order to rescue the script.

 

That script was adapted by its author, David Markson, from his novel, The Ballad of Dingus Magee. I note this by way of explanation as to why it has taken me so very long to get around to reading Markson’s books. Given my difficult relation to fiction as it is, I had a hard time imagining why I would want seriously now to read anything by a man whose work led to that film. Now I’m thinking, I may even get around to reading The Ballad of Dingus Magee.

 

I first began to reconsider my position after seeing some extravagant reviews of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Reader’s Block & This is Not a Novel. Given that I’ve read Wittgenstein’s Door (fascinating if problematic prose poems by Curtis Faville), Wittgenstein’s Ladder & Wittgenstein’s Vienna – I haven’t yet got to Wittgenstein’s Poker or Wittgenstein’s Nephew, let alone Wittgenstein’s Logical Atomism – I suspect I must be the right demographic for just about any book that uses the philosopher’s name in the possessive. Wittgenstein’s Pancreas and Wittgenstein’s Summer Salads, here I come.

 

I hesitated, though. One might use the phrase Wittgenstein’s mistress the way one would Frank O’Hara’s mistress or even Robert Duncan’s wife. The lives of gay men in the 20^th century were incredibly complex & women were sometimes involved. Yet to focus on that element struck me as curious & peripheral, not so terribly far from the summer salads idea. When I did pick up the book last winter, I noticed that the Dalkey Archive edition carefully omits just one of Markson’s novels on the back cover – The Ballad of Dingus Magee (they include it in the front matter, albeit misspelling Magee). As it so happen, Wittgenstein himself is barely a presence in this curious, often fascinating book, which is essentially a monolog told by a woman who believes that she is the only living person on the planet. I reviewed that novel on this blog on December 10^th. 

 

It led me to try This is Not a Novel this past month – any of the reservations I voiced about Wittgenstein’s Mistress simply drop away from this bravura performance. It’s right up there with Satanic Verses & Underworld in the world of post-Gravity’s Rainbow fiction. Unlike all three of these other works, it’s a relatively slender production, just 190 pages with gobs of white space.

This is Not a Novel consists almost entirely of snippets of anecdotes & quotations from various creative souls, interspersed with a series of statements that would be in the first person if the first person here did not refer so obsessively to itself as Writer, capital W. As in “Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing,” the first sentence in the book. At first, I found the artificiality of posing first-person statements in such a deliberately distanced fashion to be jarring, but as I read on & as I gradually got what the story was going to be – there’s a revelation on the last page that a reader will have figured out at least 50 pages earlier – this consciously Brechtian device began to make great sense.

 

The book both is & is not about the construction of character. Is not in the sense that Writer makes no visible effort to construct any of the little handholds for generating a history, gender, context for itself, indeed makes a point of declaring that “Writer is equally tired of inventing characters,” the work’s 10^th sentence (& the whole of its seventh paragraph). Is in the sense that the reader is presented a view that is entirely interior, an obsessive chronicle of the disabilities and dire fates of the world’s intellectuals (or at least mostly intellectuals – a few baseball players turn up):

 

Maxim Gorky died of tuberculosis.

Or was he murdered by Stalin?

 

Baudelaire died after being paralyzed and deprived of speech by syphilis.

 

Curiously enough, given the focus on death, which starts out as just part of the mix in these commentaries and gradually evolves to become its obsessive focus, this is a remarkably cheery production. What one gets, as the text accumulates, is a long view of the fate of thinking & doing in the history of Westciv. Whatever your troubles are, they generally aren’t much worse than that of Stendahl, whose funeral was attended by all of three people, two more than attended the funeral of Liebniz. Or all the artists who died at the hands of the church or the state.

 

Much of what makes This is Not a Novel so bracing is its juxtaposition of details, which I found constantly thrilling:

 

          Frank Lloyd Wright died of a heart attack after surgery.

 

          Hilda Doolittle died of the flu, although already assaulted by a heart attack and a stroke.

 

          Even after Einstein at the Beach had been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Philip Glass was driving a taxi in New York City.

 

Much of it is also quite funny:

 

          A kind of shopgirl’s philosophy, Lévi-Strauss dismissed much of Sartre as.

          An ecstatic schoolgirl antistyle, Leslie Fiedler accused Kerouac of.

 

Markson, if not Writer, being entirely aware of the grammatic violations here every bit as much as the class & gender aspersions being cast. As in “female-young” & “female-working class” being, by those features alone, dismissible. Thus we discover which writers & dictators typed with two fingers, how people thought that James Joyce smelled (not good), & so forth.

 

In spite of it’s title, the work is very much “a novel” in the sense that there is an inexorable logic toward a dramatic conclusion. Although “Writer is weary unto death of making up stories” – the book’s second sentence – there are, by my estimate, something on the order 2,000 different stories actually told during the course of this one short book – one could argue, I suppose, that most weren’t made up but already existed in public domain – & they all integrate upward into a single master narrative. As I suggested before, the key plot device on the final page is visible long before the final page itself is, and I think that this may be a strength of the book – it relieves Markson (if not “Writer”) from a charge of betrayal as the non-novel transforms itself into one at the last feasible moment & contributes instead to the book’s feel of plotlessness, a sense of an almost endless expanse of possibility as one wants to add all the other possible details that could have been in this book, e.g., poets with twins or the ways of death of so many other writers & artists or all the various jobs different poets & musicians have had. The instant one begins to think along these lines, the list becomes almost infinite in scope. That plotless prose (I’m borrowing the phrase from Shklovsky) is a space of vast potentiality – it’s an act of great generosity on the part of the artist (any artist) – but as a generation of abstract lyrics have demonstrated quite conclusively, it’s something achieved not by the subtraction of syntax but rather by directing the work toward a specific psychic locale, one in which possibility exists but is never checked.

 

This book could have gone on forever & I never would have complained.