Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson

July 20 ’04

Dear Simsy—

Forgive the yeller-paper scrawl. Your cheery, enthusiastic — nay, even bubbly letter — deserves better. And sure does indicate you had a smashing time.³⁶ Travel’s good — says he who once had three years in Mexico, and more than a year and a half in Europe, but lately hasn’t been farther away from the Village than Jim Edmonds³⁷ can throw a baseball. (Then again I’ve taken the Weehawken ferry a few times, en route to where my son lives in NJ — right past where Aaron Burr shot that guy on the $10 bill.)

Where was I? About to say thanx for the photos,³⁸ too, making you less than the wraith you’ve been up ’til now. Corey likewise. I do find it Bishop Berkeley-ish³⁹ that you visited the houses where two people (three) who never lived, lived. (I say three because Lizaveta was of course the old panwbroker lady’s sister; though, hmm, there’s RRR’s⁴⁰ landlady too, no? Tons of people who never lived, lived there.)

A couple of years ago I paused to look at a building on an obscure street not far from here that I’d had in mind, all those decades ago, as the home of my man Chance in Going Down; the gal Fern sees him through a window, goes into the building, raps at an apartment door to her left. All these years (earliest drafts, ca. 1960) she’s gone into a door at her left. Only in 2003 or so do I discover that everything to the left is another building altogether. To get into the apartment I’ve visualized her looking into, she’d have to step around the corner! So much for fictional reality!

Golly, what a profoundly metaphysical moment in the creative history of David M — and nobody knows it but Simsy.

Hey, again, pardon the scrawl. Already more’n I’d anticipated.

I’m delighted that you had such a great time. Pomes that you’ve never given a thought to will be lurking because of it, who knows when?

Thine—

David

P.S. “If there is no God, how can I be a captain, then?” says somebody in The Possessed. If there was no landlady on the floor below, who did Raskolnikov owe the rent on his garret to — and what was the exchange rate on the make-believe roubles?

36 In St. Petersburg.

37 Jim Edmonds, retired center fielder.

38 In one photo, I’m standing next to the door of Raskolnikov’s supposed apartment; another shows the graffiti scrawled on the wall outside the door of the apartment, including the phrase, “Don’t do it, Rodya!” (in French and English).

39 George Berkeley, a.k.a. Bishop Berkeley, a proponent of idealism, the belief that reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas.

40 Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov.