Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson

Nov. 8 ’03

Dear Simsy¹⁴—

Hey, thank you for that copy of the RCF. I was pleased to see your essay,¹⁵ even though it’s hard as hell for me to read same intelligently, what with knowing absolutely nothing about Diane Williams¹⁶—not having read one word (of her or of anybody else under the age of seventy, it begins to seem). But you make it all about as vivid as it could be under such circumstances. In other words, you write nice. So indeed, yes, I want you “on my side.” For that matter, stop threatening and get to it, hear?

Yes, I know about that “other woman.”¹⁷ In fact she’s already delivered several essays at one conference or another in France. As did someone from Temple U. at an American Lit Ass’n thing in Boston last spring. Plus there’s the hombre presumably doing the one for RCF. So I repeat, kiddo — get to it.

You did see the Markson stuff in a much earlier (1990) RCF,¹⁸no? If we’ve mentioned this, excuse my ever more pervasive senility, eh?

Otherwise I wish I had some news — or at least something cheerful to say — but my under-the-weatherness is even more pervasive than my empty-headedness. Just awrful. DON’T GET OLD.

Speaking of which, it only lately occurred to me that tomorrow, around lunchtime, will be fifty years to the hour since Dylan Thomas died about four blocks from where I now sit. He was in a coma for approx. five days, and it was about three before that when I last chatted with him at the White Horse¹⁹ (also four blocks off). But good gawd — a half century ago?! Old, did I say?

Thine—

David

14 This was his first use of this nickname for me; for some reason he alternates, from here on out, between two spellings: “Simsy” and “Symsy.”

15 “Diane Williams.” RCF, Vol. XXIII, No. 3.

16 Diane Williams, American fiction writer, author of Romancer Erector and Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty.

17 FranÇoise Palleau-Papin, the French scholar who published This Is Not a Tragedy, the first book-length study on David Markson, in 2011 (Dalkey Archive Press).

18 “John Barth/David Markson.” RCF, Vol. X, No. 2.

19 The White Horse Tavern, at Hudson & 11^th Street, was a popular Greenwich Village gathering-place for writers and artists (including David, Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, James Baldwin, and Norman Mailer) during the 1950s and 60s.