Mathew Weitman
What I Remember from the 19th Century: An Annotated Bibliography
Austin, Jane. Mansfield Park. Penguin, 2003.
The garden fence is called a ha-ha. Everyone climbs it except for James Rushworth, who returns to the house to get the key.
Austin, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Penguin, 2005.
The Coming-Out Party.
Balzac, Honoré. Cousin Bette. Translated by Kathleen Raine, Random House, 2002.
Two characters are named Lisbeth. Nothing else, really.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Penguin, 2003.
Fog everywhere. Spontaneous Combustion. The doorknob turning. Mr. Guppy.
Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. Penguin, 2004.
His bearded stepfather. Peggotty. Mr. Macawber singing “Auld Lang Syne” around the punchbowl. Uriah Heap reading— he drags his finger across the page, and it leaves a snail trail. Steerforth’s epic death. The tempest. At one point, David and his vacuous wife buy oysters but not oyster shuckers, so they break them open with a hammer.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Dover, 2001.
The fugitive. Miss Havisham’s “sick fancy to see some play.” A fire.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, FSG, 2002.
Father Feramont exorcising devils from the corners of his ascetic hovel. The smell of Father Zosima’s corpse. Unbaptized babies go to heaven. A man gets dragged out of his house by his beard, and the children mockingly call him “Whiskbroom.” That poor dog that eats a pin. And the courtroom drama that ends with “Hurray for Karamazov!”
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage, 1993.
That essay Raskolnikov wrote about the Übermensch (how it came back to haunt him, not all together unlike his dream of the beaten horse).
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage, 1994.
The opening: “I am a sick man, I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts…” Or something like that.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Penguin, 2011.
Casaubon’s shrug.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Translated by Geoffrey Wall, Penguin, 2002.
Charles Bovary’s hat. The opera. The medicine vials. The clouds.
Gide, Andre. Marshlands. Translated by Damion Searls, NYRB Classics, 2021.
“So, hard at work?”
Gogol, Nicolai. Dead Souls. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage, 1997.
The antisemitism. Or maybe that was in “The Overcoat”—or some other story, or some other novel.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Dover Publications, 2001.
The carriage ride. The wedding night.
James, Henry. The Golden Bowl. Penguin, 2009.
“Some small ricordo.” The glass’s flaw beneath the gilding. At the time, the scene on the balcony reminded me of a Wallace Stevens poem, but I don’t remember the scene itself—or which Stevens poem I was reminded of.
James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. W.W. Norton, 2018.
Ned Rossier’s fine laces & bibelots. Madam Merle at the piano: her practiced nonchalance. Warburton’s monolithic sisters
amid the tapestries & crewels. Ralph—gazing at a painting of a guitar player and a marble nymph—remarks “That’s my
ideal of a regular occupation!” The fireside scene. The crude light.
James, Henry. What Maisie Knew. Penguin, 2013.
A lecture series is a pretense for a lover’s tryst. Her mother’s necklaces. That final scene of Maisie & Sir Claude wandering the city, buying newspapers, & missing trains to put off their inevitable parting.
Melville, Herman. Pierre: or, the Ambiguities. Penguin, 1996.
The book is dedicated to a mountain. Pierre’s mother throws a fork at her portrait, and it sticks in her painted cleavage. The tears on Isabel’s letter make the ink look like blood. The “thou’s” & “thee’s” they say. The mythic rock.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick: or, the Whale. W.W. Norton, 2017.
Bedfellows. The monkey-rope & the crow’s nest. Cetology: the whale is a fish (am I the only one who read the whole thing?). Methinks what they call my shadow here on earth is my truer substance… As the ship sinks, Stubb longs to taste strawberries one last time.
Shelly, Mary. Frankenstein. Dover, 1994.
It ends in the North Pole. I always liked that.
Stendhal. The Red and the Black. Translated by Roger Gard, Penguin, 2002.
Almost all of the chapters have fictional epigraphs, but they’re attributed to people like Kant & Hume. I remember looking them up.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Penguin, 2003.
It’s all about moving, really—it’s all about the passage of stuff. Materials tell the story: letters, journals, legal documents; and on the freighter, the Count (sleeping in his coffin) is just another object lost among his ancient things.
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Penguin Classics, 2004.
Anna’s orgasm on the train. The artist’s house. Levin reaching enlightenment with his scythe then quickly relapsing into irrational anger. Laska: the greatest dog in all of western literature.
Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession. Translated by Peter Carson, Liveright, 2013.
He dies giving birth to himself.
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage, 2011.
A policeman is tied to a bear & thrown into a river. Count Rostov dances the mazurka. On the battlefield, Nicolai thinks his mother’s love will save him.
Turgenev, Ivan. Fathers and Sons. Translated by Peter Carson, Penguin, 2009.
The father plays the cello & the son’s nihilistic friend laughs.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Penguin, 2014.
Huck says the worst part of being civilized is that everything has to be eaten separately—you can’t mix the juices together. He knows his father’s footprints from the crosses on his boot soles. Huck scares Jim with a snake. The Edenic river leads to that awful town where people light dogs on fire. “She had a lot of sand in her craw.” It’s wonderful to live on a raft.
Quodlibet
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth. —Philip Larkin
Ambivalence is for me what deprivation was for Larkin.
Mimesis is for me what imagination was for Stevens.
Typography is for me what breath was for Olson.
The eye is for me what the ear was for Levertov.
Form is for me what persona was for Berryman.
Marginalia is for me what a grecian urn was for Keats.
Blight is for me what a rose was for Stein.
The literal is for me what the literary was for Melville.
Sentimentality is for me what god was for Nietzsche.
The Cloud is for me what papyrus was for Sappho.
Narrative is for me what poetry was for Moore.
Tomorrow is for me what a myrtle was for Ashbery.
Intertextuality is for me what translation was for Frost.
Tautology is for me what despair was for Kirkegaard.
A litany is for me what an image was for Pound.
The lyric is for me what suicide was for Camus.
The indicative is for me what the subjunctive was for James.
Craft is for me what a legendary head was for Rilke.
Drunkenness is for me what suffering was for Auden.
A sonnet is for me what a urinal was for Duchamp.
Footnotes are for me what butterflies were for Nabokov.
A scam call is for me what a radio was for Spicer.
Movies are for me what transliteration was for Zukofsky.
Syntax is for me what the objective correlative was for Eliot.
A syllabus is for me what the I Ching was for Cage.
Tenure is for me what the Civil Service Exam was for Tu Fu.
Kitsch is for me what love was for Creeley.
Axioms are for me what the tarot was for Duncan.
Zoom is for me what the Old Manse was for Hawthorne.
Nonsense is for me what the Brooklyn Bridge was for Crane.
Wikipedia is for me what the planchet was for Merrill.
Theory is for me what cataracts were to Monet.
Anecdotes are for me what envelopes were for Dickinson.
An owl is for me what an owl was for Niedecker.