FEED | Books - Writing for No One

THERE IS A GREAT IRONY at the center of all writing -- you write because you want to communicate, because you have ideas to express, experiences to relate, meanings to distill. In order to do all this, you gather supplies, lock yourself in a room, and get really angry with your friends if they call you from work.

And here are the first lines of David Markson's 1988 novel, Wittgenstein's Mistress:

"Nobody came," it turns out, because the narrator, Kate, is the last person on earth. But we don't know this; in fact, the initial impression is that she can live in museums because no one visits them anymore -- as if, some time in the future, the Met will be like a bodega where indigent artists sleep on cots in a back room. Eventually, as the novel's narration continues in the same short, unhurried, often self-interrupting sentence-paragraphs, it becomes clear that everyone else is simply gone. And then the museum loneliness is only amplified: If there is no one to read these pages, why does she bother to write at all? And why, in turn, does Markson? Why -- this is the question Markson has been asking with increasing desperation over the past twenty-five years -- does anyone?

The answer implicit in the chatty meandering by-the-way-ness of Wittgenstein's Mistress is that one writes merely to register one's presence. (David Foster Wallace has suggested that the book be called, simply, I EXIST.) But having asserted your existence, what then? Markson's next two novels, Reader's Block (1996) and This Is Not a Novel (due out April 1), have been little more than demonstrations of the futility of speech established by Wittgenstein's Mistress. Each consists almost exclusively of one-sentence anecdotes about the lives of artists; each (though not both) makes for excellent reading; each establishes beyond doubt that writing is a senseless act, a throwing of words into a void, an activity in which honest men can no longer participate. And if you've never heard of Markson, that merely proves his point. Roland Barthes once said that Voltaire was the last happy writer; perhaps Markson is the last unhappy writer, after whom no one who sets out seeking literary glory can claim that he was not warned.

MARKSON USED TO BE just like you: He wanted to live in New York and be a writer, and he wanted to hang out with other writers. So much did he want these things that he actually accomplished them. His first novel, The Ballad of Dingus Magee (1966), was a light-hearted and fairly amusing parody Western, a sort of harmless, small-scale Sot-Weed Factor. Published when he was forty and long after he'd established himself as a witty and literate presence in the Village, it was well received and even made into a film starring Frank Sinatra, for which Joseph Heller wrote the screenplay. Despite netting Markson some cash, though, the film was a disaster: Sinatra was fifty-four playing a nineteen-year-old Dingus, and Heller's screenplay was largely discarded. (Heller and Markson ran into one another shortly after the movie was released. Markson: "Joe, I just saw your movie." Heller: "No, David, I think it's yours.") His next two novels, Going Down (1970) and Springer's Progress (1977), were generally thrashed; the Partisan Review dismissed the former in one breathless, barely literate paragraph.

In 1955, Markson had written an early letter of support to William Gaddis, whom he'd never met but whose first novel, The Recognitions, was being roundly panned by the philistine press. "I'd just been infuriated by the rotten reviews," Markson later recalled, "and simply wanted to tell the man the hell with them all, that there were some few of us out there who did see what he's accomplished." (Gaddis was too depressed at the time to write back.) Markson's own reaction to the critical heat was to return to the fount of his ambition: The more abuse his books received, the more Markson seemed to write about...writing. In Springer's Progress, he made his hero, Lucien Springer, a struggling, middle-aged, adulterous, alcoholic (a designation for which there should be a macro, so book reviewers wouldn't be forced constantly to type the whole thing out) writer in the midst of a period most foul and fallow. The book is densely allusive, virtuosic, witty; it has some great coitus disputabilis, as when Springer admits an early climax to his mistress Jessie Cornford:

Toward the end of the novel, blocked-up Springer begins to work again, and it gradually becomes clear that he is writing the very novel we are reading. "About four hours at the desk tomorrow," he tells a friend, "and I'll be caught up to this very phone call. And then what? Can anybody in history ever have written anything this way?" ("Anne Frank," says the friend. "But for Christ's sake, give somebody else besides me credit for the line.")

The claustrophobia that would define Markson's next three novels is already in evidence in Springer's Progress. It is an extremely erudite and often funny book, but there is an odd quality to the brilliant, Joyce-inverted sentences, a certain lack of resonance. The book folds in on itself instead of outward, and as you realize that Springer is writing the novel you are reading, there is a sense of betrayal -- for all the noise about love, sex, adultery, all he cared about the whole time was writing a book.