David Markson, the author of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, The Last Novel, and other works of postmodern fiction, has died, the Associated Press reports. Born in 1927, Markson had a relatively small but select audience. From the AP story:
Little known to the general public, Markson was idolized by a core of fans that included Ann Beattie and David Foster Wallace. He was celebrated for his insights and for how he expressed them, often in paragraphs lasting just a sentence or two. “Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” his most acclaimed work, and other novels were interior monologues on the state of the world and the state of the author’s mind. “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like” was how he summed up his approach, in the novel “Reader’s Block.”
Markson found at least one publishing outlet connected to academe: Dalkey Archive Press, affiliated with the University of Illinois at Champaign. Dalkey Archive published Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Reader’s Block, Springer’s Progress, and a collection of Markson’s poetry. This fall, it will publish a critical book on Markson, translated from the French: This Is Not a Tragedy by Françoise Pellou-Pepin.
The Chronicle asked Martin Riker, Dalkey Archive’s associate publisher, for his thoughts about the writer. “David was an important writer for us, and for everyone else, I think,” Riker said via email. “I’m confident his contribution to contemporary literature will be a lasting one.” The Chronicle wondered how well the writer’s books had done for the press. “Markson’s books have always sold well for us,” Riker said in response. “Wittgenstein’s Mistress was sort of a rags to riches story–rejected by over 50 publishers before Dalkey Archive took it on. Then it became a cultural phenomenon, in part because David Foster Wallace championed it. That was the book that really put David on the contemporary literary map.”
A couple of Markson-related tidbits from academe: 1) The University of Delaware has a collection of letters written to Markson from his fellow writer Gilbert Sorrentino between 1988 and 1998. 2) In this interview with Joseph Tabbi–now a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago–Markson recalls his friendship as a young man with Malcolm Lowry and the reaction at Columbia University when he decided to write his master’s thesis on Lowry’s Under the Volcano:
As a matter of fact I had to wander around the English department knocking on doors looking for someone to approve the project. I remember Lionel Trilling’s dismissal in particular: “What is all this drunkenness all about?” My whole object was to explain just that, obviously, but I decided to find less of a current to buck. Finally William York Tindall [another professor of English at Columbia] gave me a go-ahead.
In the interview, Markson also describes how he managed to write a “satirical Western” (The Ballad of Dingus McGee), what it feels like to have a book rejected dozens of times, and how other writers and their work influenced and sustained him. He also gives an endearingly self-deprecating explanation of why he didn’t start writing serious fiction until he was in his 30s:
My father would have called it sheer barnyard laziness and probably not have been far off the mark. In the beginning there might have been an element of fear in it too, very likely there was. But even now when I do have a moderately acceptable body of work behind me I can still go months, sometimes even years, without writing a solitary word. And of course I’m just baffled, baffled, by those people who seem to publish a new book every nineteen days. There’s a kind of compulsion there, or need, that I simply do not possess to any degree whatsoever.
For more on Markson, see this appreciation posted on the L.A. Times’s Jacket Copy blog, which called him “a serious writer with a sense of play.” Markson also wrote some detective novels (“entertainments,” he called them, a la Graham Greene) early in his career. Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Deadbeat were reissued a few years ago.
–Jennifer Howard
Follow PageView through your favorite RSS reader: 
