David Markson

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David Markson, 2007

David Merrill Markson (born December 20, 1927 in Albany , New York - † June 4, 2010 in Greenwich Village , Manhattan , New York City ) was an American writer whose ironic , elliptical novels probed the artist's absent-minded spirit irrepressible, almost always surprisingly appealing work of postmodern and experimental literature has often been underestimated.

Life

Studies and early literary work

The son of a journalist and a teacher studied after school and two years of military service at Union College in Schenectady and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts . A post-graduate studies at Columbia University , he graduated with a Master of Arts from where his thesis with the 1947 published novel Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry dealt. He has intermittently taught creative writing at Columbia University, Long Island University, and The New School .

Lowry became a friend of Markson's, as did other great writers such as Conrad Aiken and Jack Kerouac . The mid- 1950s he had a year love affair with the Playboy - Playmate Alice Denham , as, described him stud lover boy '.

His early works were hardly experimental. In the 1950s he was editor of detective novels in the publishing Dell Books , in which he himself author of detective novels like Epitaph for a Tramp (1959) and Epitaph for a Dead Beat (1961) about Harry Fannin ', a tough detective in Greenwich Village . He also wrote the western parody The Ballad of Dingus Magee (1965), which was based on the script adaptation by Joseph Heller with Frank Sinatra , Henry Jones and Willis Bouchey in 1970 under the title Dirty Dingus Magee (German title: The "sharpest" of all bandits ) was filmed .

Postmodern-experimental late works

Although his books - including Springer's Progress (1977), Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988), and This Is Not a Novel (2001) - received admiring reviews , Markson was a novelist who was mostly known only to other authors. This was partly because he was a central figure in the Greenwich Village literary scene in the 1960s , a "regular at literary watering holes like a lion's head," but also because he eschewed conventional novel forms. Like other experimentalists, he made the form of the novel, at least in part, its subject.

His books expressed, both mischievously and seriously, the opposite linguistic ("hem-and-saw") self-confidence of the eternal mind reader. He wrote mostly monologues, or at least the narrative seemed to start from a single voice, even if the books are not necessarily written in the first person; for example, the main character in This Is Not a Novel is called "Schreiber".

Markson didn't bother much developing the character or the plot; nor did he, in the further development of his works, pay great attention to the means of organizing chapters or paragraphs. Rather, he built his books through lumps and inscriptions, comical observations, and the discovery of strange facts to portray the mind of the narrator, who was usually the artist, in a state of mental distress.

He dug up the history of literature and art in a scary and often amusing way, adding petty or scandalous tidbits to the biography, and contrasting them with explanations of the narrator's mental state. For example, his novel Vanishing Point (2004), in which the hesitant author is only named author, begins with the words:

“The author has finally begun to put his notes into manuscript form,” and continues after a line break: “A seascape by Henri Matisse was once hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City - and remained that way for a month and a half . "
'Author has finally started to put his notes into manuscript form,' - 'A seascape by Henri Matisse was once hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art in New York - and left that way for a month and a half.'

This was followed by another line break, other notes (about the car accident in which Albert Camus was killed), another line break, and so on.

This was the form of many of his books. And while it may deter the reader who may desire the narrative, literary critics have always succumbed to what many have called a cumulative, hypnotic effect. His admirers include Amy Hempel , Ann Beattie, and David Foster Wallace , who consider Wittgenstein's Mistress (a monologue about an apparently mad painter who is the last living person to walk the earth) as the "probable climax of experimental fiction in the United States" ('pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country ').

His last novel was published in 2007 under the title The Last Novel , which is characteristic of him .

According to his agent and former wife, Elaine Markson, with whom he was married from 1956 to 1976, his two children found him lying dead in bed on June 4, 2010 in his apartment in New York's West Village .

The Strand Book Store, 828 Broadway / 12th St. Manhattan

In his will he bequeathed his entire personal library to the New York Beach Bookstore , one of his favorite places. The fact that several of his private volumes were now in the possession of this public and popular bookstore drove quite a number of literature lovers to the store in the following months to search for the author's extensive notes and comments in the volumes, which the local authorities believed Press would have reinforced its literary echo.

Appreciations

The writer and journalist Pete Hamill, also a longtime friend of Markson, said of him in an interview reported in The New York Times :

“The thrillers were very well done. But then he wrote those books that were over-literary in the best sense of the word. It was like John D. MacDonald was working in the Borges way . ”As well as“ He had read so damn much and he talked to you about making you go out and read these books. And he could find someone he liked, even if he had no desire to write in this way himself, and he did not mean that everyone else should be put against the wall and shot. "
'The thrillers were very well done. But then he also wrote these books that were superliterary, in the best sense of the word. It was as if John D. MacDonald was working in the manner of Borges. ' - 'He'd read so damned much and talk to you about it that he forced you to go out and read the books. And he'd find somebody he liked, even if he had no desire to write in that way, and he didn't think all the others should be put up against the wall and shot. '

plant

  • Epitaph for a Tramp . Dell, 1959.
  • Epitaph for a Dead Beat . Dell, 1961.
  • The Ballad of Dingus Magee; Being the Immortal True Saga of the Most Notorious and Desperate Bad Man of the Olden Days, His Blood-Shedding, His Ruination of Poor Helpless Females, & Cetera . Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.
  • Miss Doll, go home . Dell, 1965.
  • Going down . Holt Rinehart Winston, 1970.
  • Springer's Progress . Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977.
  • Malcolm Lowry's Volcano: Myth, Symbol, Meaning . Times Books, 1978.
  • Wittgenstein's Mistress . Dalkey Archives, 1988.
  • Collected poems . Dalkey Archive Press, 1993.
  • Reader's block . Dalkey Archive Press, 1996.
  • This is not a novel . Counterpoint, 2001.
  • Vanishing Point . Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004.
  • The Last Novel . Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007.
in German translation
  • David Markson: Obituary for a dead tramp . Detective novel. German by Ursula Bruns. Gütersloh: Signum Verlag 1963 (also published under the titles Death at 3 a.m. (1972) or Obituary for a Dead Beatnik (1962))
  • David Markson: Wittgenstein's mistress . Novel. German by Sissi Tax. Berlin Verlag 2013, ISBN 978-3-8270-0817-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_07_005963.php
  2. ↑ CATHERINE TEXIER: Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke . In: nytimes.com, July 8, 2007
  3. ↑ http://www.flubow.ch/krimiautoren.html
  4. ^ David Merrill Markson in Contemporary Authors Online, Thompson Gale, 2007.
  5. ↑ Alice Denham: Sleeping with Bad Boys: A Juicy Tell-All of Literary New York in the Fifties and Sixties (Autobiography, 2006)
  6. ↑ http://www.imdb.de/name/nm0548994/
  7. ↑ David Foster Wallace : The fun of it. All essays. Cologne 2018. pp. 188–221, 346 ("The fact that such an abstract, educational and avant-garde novel can be so moving at the same time makes Wittgenstein's mistress pretty much the climax of experimental literature in this country.")
  8. ↑ Long Island Press: David Markson, postmodern master, dead at age 82 ( Memento of the original from July 27, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.longislandpress.com
  9. ↑ Reading Markson Reading ( Memento of the original from July 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , a collection of Markson marginalia  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / readingmarksonreading.tumblr.com
  10. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/arts/08markson.html
  11. ^ David Markson: A Bibliography . Madinkbeard. April 20, 2007. Retrieved September 19, 2010.
personal data
SURNAME Markson, David
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Markson, David Merrill (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 20, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Albany , New York , United States
DATE OF DEATH June 4th 2010
Place of death Greenwich Village , Manhattan , New York City , New York , United States