The Devil's Details (10 page)

Anyone who has been present at one of the well-liquored festivities of Scotland's annual birthday party for “Bobby” Burns knows what a sensitive issue a Burns forgery would be. Tucking it away in a footnote would be the better part of valor.

A similar discretion probably accounts for some of the footnotes found in Harold Murdock's vivid telling of the battle of Bunker Hill; Americans are as protective of their armed forebears as Scots are of their tipsy poets. A participant in the fight who had been up all night digging trenches complained in his diary that they were supplied with “… but little victuals, no Drink but Rum.” A reference dagger takes us down immediately to a note that begins: “This cannot be construed as the wail of a teetotaler. The men were up and down from Charlestown Village all the morning and had free access to the town wells. What Brown yearned for was a long drink of the wine of the country—that is cider and beer.”
⁴³
Murdock was writing during the Prohibition era and knew the subject of rum and wine, however tactfully handled, would stir controversy; footnotes, like entrenchments, may require some extra work for the writer but also supply some cover from critical bombardments.

A book that appeared in 1901,
Last Words (Real and Traditional) of Distinguished Men and Women
, exemplifies the footnote as a depository of delicate matters. The author, Frederic Rowland Marvin, is scrupulous to a fault; notice the parenthetical qualification to the title. Marvin does not want any customer buying his work with the mistaken notion that he or she will be getting the unvarnished truth; no, some famous last words are apocryphal—buyer beware. The title then adds that the words are “collected from various sources”; and the reader quickly discovers that citations of sources are entirely absent. This is a no-nonsense book, and Marvin intends to make sure his word is trusted.

The lack of citations in
Last Words
does not mean there is a lack of footnotes; there are several formidable ones that demonstrate just how useful sophisticated annotation can be. The book opens with Dr. Alexander Adam, a headmaster at the “High School in Edinburgh,” telling students, “It grows dark, boys. You may go.”
⁴⁴
It ends with the Swiss reformer Zwingle, as he receives a mortal wound in battle: “Well! they
[sic]
can, indeed, kill the body, but they are not able to kill the soul.”
⁴⁵
The prevailing tone of the pages in between has a similar decorum and seriousness as befits their subject; however, not every famous person manages to die with dignity. Marvin, to his credit, is unwilling to distort the truth even as he works to maintain an appropriate tone. A footnote comes to his aid.

A Marcus of Arethusa, dying, says, heroically, “How am I advanced, despising you that are upon the earth.” The manner of his death threatens his dignity, unfortunately, and, it has to be said, Marvin's tactful description just avoids being irreverent: Marcus, we are told, was “hung up in a basket smeared with honey” and “stung to death by bees ….”
⁴⁶
Recognizing the peril in which his preferred tone has been placed by these words, Marvin sensibly puts in a footnote recognizing the fact. “To some of the most distinguished of our race death has come in the strangest possible way, and so grotesquely as to subtract greatly from the dignity of the sorrow it must certainly have occasioned.”
⁴⁷
The ordinary author would have stopped with those words; Marvin is made of much sterner stuff. He goes on to provide a brave array of other examples: the tyrant Agathocles succumbing to a poisoned toothpick; Anacreon choking to death on a dried grape; and the Roman praetor Fabius on a “single goat hair”; Aeschylus, the tragedian, killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head; and a Prince of Wales felled by a cricket ball.
⁴⁸

The twentieth century has come upon our history with barely a nod from us, perhaps because we know it is a poor time for the footnote. Despite brave and imaginative annotators like Frederic Marvin, the worldwide “empire” of the footnote was as insecure as the British Empire—or for that matter any of the empires European nations put so much stock in. And in the same way that the Great War marks the beginning of the end of the domination of European countries, so too that disastrous war can conveniently mark the start of the footnote's decline—though many years were required for the implications of the decline to be felt.

By 1940 and the Second World War Edward Heron-Allen, gazing back on a life of annotation, was compelled to note with alarm that he might be one of the few, if not the only, genuinely passionate “foot-annotators” remaining.
⁴⁹
His credentials for speaking out were impeccable. In 1900 his translation from the French of M. le Capitaine d'Arpentigny's commentary (itself a kind of extended footnote) on Chirognomy's already abundantly footnoted
La Science de la Main
managed to find a need for an additional 460 of Heron-Allen's own footnotes. And as he carefully explained, within those notes were further “notesigns” referring the reader “to the original Latin, Greek, French, German, … Italian, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish passages which occurred in the upper part of the [footnotes].”
⁵⁰
*
All of these were where one should expect genuine footnotes to be: at the foot of the page.

Unfortunately, Heron-Allen's 1928 book,
Barnacles in Nature and in Myth
, was not as well served by its publisher, the respectable but cost-conscious (by now) Oxford Press. Three hundred annotations assisting one hundred pages of text were sequestered at the end of the book. “Making referring to them very tiring,” one reviewer said with unnecessary restraint.
*

The shift in the status of the footnote already had been signaled by Hilaire Belloc back in 1923. That year his essay “On Footnotes” (slipped into his book
On
)
⁵¹
†
constructed an elaborate demonology with—appropriately enough—Edward Gibbon cast as the originator of evil.

Belloc begins simply; he calls Gibbon a liar. The evidence? A single lapse in which the historian mistakes Saint George, a reputable slayer of dragons, for a “corrupt, disgraceful bacon contractor.”
⁵²
Gibbon relied on “a rubbish book of guess-work,”
⁵³
a book Belloc was able to track down only because of a conveniently placed reference at the foot of Gibbon's text.

His success in correcting Gibbon's error does not make Belloc grateful to the footnote; on the contrary, instead of blaming the book that misled Gibbon, Belloc strikes out at the bearer of bad tidings, the helpful footnote. In fact, he insists that with this “evil footnote” Gibbon “introduced the first considerable serpent”
⁵⁴
into some previously snake-free Eden of scholarship.

Having transformed Gibbon into Satan, Belloc claims for himself a role of similar stature. He will be the one to drive the footnote from the garden and put it at the end of the book, “in very small print indeed.”
⁵⁵

Perhaps he succeeded; the publishing dates are suggestive.

This may be rubbishy guesswork. Though Belloc graduated from Oxford, none of his considerable output was published by Oxford, nor is there evidence of any influence exerted by him on the university or the press. We also must recognize that the essays of Belloc can seldom be taken at face value. The casting of Gibbon as Satan and himself as the archangel Michael may have been facetious, a spoof of the misuse of biblical metaphor.
*

While this was going on in England, a full-scale assault on the dignity of the footnote was mounted in the United States. Frank Sullivan's “A Garland of Ibids,” the most widely read of the attacks, may have appeared first as an anonymous note in
The New Yorker
,
*
whose urbane and unscholarly humorists were apparently hoping at that time finally to gain respectability by pretending to be literary. The short piece was then given weight and a broader readership by being included in a well-publicized anthology,
A Subtreasury of American Humor
, put out by two other employees of
The New Yorker
. (Even the Peoria bookstores and its library were likely to stock this anthology.) “A Garland” purports to be a review of Van Wyck Brooks's
New England: Indian Summer
, a book Sullivan purports to have read, though not much of its themes or critical judgments are evident in his piece. He purports even to have liked the book, though his “review” is one long whine about the book's numerous footnotes. “When you get to the footnote at the bottom of the page,” he tells us at one point, as if footnotes were not by definition as well as custom at the bottom of the page, “like as not all you find is
ibid.
”
⁵⁶
One of Sullivan's own typical, surly footnotes adds: “So is
cf
.”
⁵⁷
Such is his scattershot criticism that he cannot, as the present writer has tried to do, distinguish between the convenience of the
ibid.
and the inconvenience of the
cf.

Strangely enough, a careful thumbing through of
New England: Indian Summer
, my eye glued to the bottoms of the pages, turned up neither a single
ibid.
nor a single
cf.

Such slovenly research habits carry over into a much more important topic. Sullivan asks rhetorically, “How come writers of fiction do not need footnotes?” and adds, “Take Edna Ferber. She doesn't use footnotes.”
⁵⁸
Well, yes, Mr. Sullivan, the prosaic Ferber may not use notes, but surely (
we
might ask rhetorically) Mr. Sullivan has read Mr. Joyce. And you can't browse
Finnegan's Wake
for long without noticing the extravaganza of footnotes and margin notes that occurs a third of the way into the novel. Instead of Ferber, let Mr. Sullivan take just one of Joyce's footnotes—the first one to appear, for example: “Am shot, says the bigguard” in the text, and a footnote down below says, “Rawmeash, quoshe with her girlic teangue. If old Herod with the Comwell's eczema was to go for me like he does Snuffler whatever about his blue canaries I'd do nine months for his beaver beard.”
⁵⁹
Now, that is more memorable than any of Ferber's dutiful sentences, and should take anti-footnoters like Sullivan down a rhetorical peg or two.

But lest
Finnegan's Wake
be dismissed as elitist stuff by the common folk at
The New Yorker
, and thus by association the footnote, let us ask our own rhetorical question: Have none of that crew taken time off from reading Ferber to dip into the detective novels of S. S. Van Dine?

Van Dine was the pseudonym of Willard Wright, who wasted the first half of his life writing poetry, philosophy, and art criticism; but he turned things around in the 1920s by making money out of a series of best-sellers featuring the brilliant man-about-town sleuth Philo Vance. Despite the sophistication of his fictional hero, Willard Wright was clearly intent on being no elitist James Joyce; “I Used to Be a Highbrow but Look at Me Now” was the title of an article he wrote for
American Magazine
in 1929.
⁶⁰
No highbrow, he nonetheless often engaged in footnoting, and we are the beneficiaries of his “stooping” to them. Vance, baffled early on in
The Benson Murder Case
, smokes a cigarette and looks out at a “hazy June sky.” For nearly a page he ruminates on the Shakespearean claim “murder will out,” finally being reduced to Latin. A footnote quickly brings him down to earth: A former assistant commissioner of Metropolitan Police, London, has written in
The Saturday Evening Post:
“It is because murder will not out that the pleasant shock of surprise when it does out calls for a proverb to enshrine the phenomenon. The poisoner who is brought to justice has almost invariably proved to have killed other victims without exciting suspicion ….”
⁶¹
What a comfort it is to know that this issue can be talked about without resort to a dead language.

The numerous examples of effective footnotes in novels and elsewhere do not seem to have slowed down the
New Yorker
gang;
*
they continued their harassment of annotators, as we will soon see when we turn our attention once more to the ongoing story of the poetic footnote.

T
HE NEED TO FOLLOW
the main stream of footnotes running into and through the twentieth century has led us to ignore the eddies and backwaters of modern poetry. Though no poetry, modern or traditional, has made much of a splash in recent decades, the footnote has been welcomed by some of the more innovative and courageous poets, a fact that predictably has made antiavant gardists nervous. As early as 1957 one of their leaders, the novelist John Updike, warned that unsettling Haley's comet would reappear in thirty years (he proved correct) and that, in the meantime, we should beware of Marianne Moore and John Berryman, both of whom had just published verse to which notes were attached. In Updike's sky these were apparently also omens of disaster. Updike predicted: “the poem of the future may well look like this.”
¹

The empty space below the title, Updike explains, is “where the reader imagines the poem. After all, he ought to do
something
.”
²
Then Updike supplies fourteen annotations of parodistic intent—precisely fourteen, a sonnet of notes.
*

So unnerved is Updike that he is unable to peer back into the past any farther than he is able to discern the future. (Unlike Haley's comet, no blank sonnet with footnotes has appeared.) He finds in the past a single precedent for annotated poetry in “the desultory remarks T. S. Eliot affixed to the corpus of ‘The Waste Land.'”
³
Updike then proceeds to make some desultory fun of one of the notes in particular: Eliot's explanation of the water-dripping song of the hermit thrush,
Turdus aonaldschkae pallasii
, is, according to Updike, “justly celebrated.”
⁴
Had Updike pursued the matter, he would have found much earlier experimentation with poetic notes, and even a possible inspiration for those in “The Waste Land.”

Updike would not have had to go back to our seventeenth-century pioneer of the footnote, Aphra Behn. A precedent can be found in the work of the Reverend George Crabbe, whose life extended into the nineteenth century, perhaps a century more understandable to someone like Updike, who has spent most of his time as a novelist. Despite his unfortunate name, Crabbe was a lyricist of some charm and a poet unafraid to take the reader into his confidence. His verse is always thoroughly annotated, many of the notes anticipating Eliot's regard for nature. To take one example: After mentioning “sampirebanks” in his verse, Crabbe carefully notes, “The jointed glasswort, Saliconia, is here meant, not the true sampire, the
crithmum maritimum
.”
⁵
Here one finds an honest workman at work: Unable to comfortably fit “jointed glass-wort” into his meter, Crabbe admits it, and then uses annotation to meet the demands of art
and
science.

The notes of Crabbe's poetry have an interesting publishing history. Over a period of time, five volumes of his collected works appeared. In the first two Crabbe's notes are placed at the end of sections or “letters”; they are essentially endnotes. With the third volume, the notes find their way to the foot of each page. Apparently the demand for his annotations was strong enough to influence the publisher and even to affect Crabbe's usual good humor. Introducing one note he writes: “I am informed that some explanation is here necessary, though I am ignorant for what class of my readers it can be required.”
⁶

Crabbe's testiness did not stop the demand for notes. An edition a decade later appeared in which all of Crabbe's notes have been shifted to the bottom of the page, where they are joined by an extravagant number of notes by friends and editors. Crabbe's footnotes prove convenient but also to be useful dramatic devices that enhance the poetic text. Take, for example, a tale of love with the evocative title “Procrastination.” A “prudent” woman, Dinah, promises her love to Rupert, a homespun man of good heart but little means. Over time she finds that her desire for romance is replaced by her desire for the finer things in life she enjoys while living with a well-to-do aunt:

Crabbe interjects “… av'rice, like the poison-tree, / Kills all beside it, and alone will be ….” (And indeed, by the end of “Procrastination” Dinah is alone and forlorn.) A footnote immediately makes avarice not only deadly but also foreign, definitely not homespun. “Allusion is here made,” the note tells us, “not to the well-known species of
sumach
, called the poison oak, or
toxicodendron
, but to the
upas
, or poison-tree of Java ….”
⁸
The close proximity to the text of this note is crucial; only the most determined reader would have wrenched himself away from the smooth and seductive tide of iambic pentameter to search out an
end
note. But with a
foot
note, even a reader who floats dreamily past the bobbing asterisk will be deposited eventually at the bottom of the page and be forced to confront the
unenglishness
of avarice.

Crabbe came from a background of little money and made himself into an apothecary and surgeon, an Anglican priest and chaplain, a student of botany and entomology, and a poet.
⁹
He was a serious, determined man, and so was his verse. Though appreciated by the eighteenth-century Doctor Johnson and the twentieth-century F. R. Leavis, Crabbe's verse produces a certain dutifulness in the responses of many conscientious readers.
*
One reader claims Crabbe makes Thomas Hardy seem cheerful.
¹⁰
William Hazlitt, a lighter-hearted contemporary of the poet, claimed Crabbe “rivets attention by being tedious.”
¹¹

But his verse does rivet attention, and so too do his footnotes, perhaps particularly his footnotes. “A Lover's Journey” is a tale in rhymed couplets with the simplest of plots. A lover, John, sets out on horseback to see his “Laura.” (Her given name is in fact Susan, but when he thinks of her he feels himself to be Petrarch; and she seeing him thinks of Shakespeare and calls him Orlando.) On the trip to see her, the landscape strikes Orlando as glorious; on the way back, having discovered she is “inconsistent” (as someone who has read Shakespeare is likely to be), this sudden, dear John finds the very same landscape to be gray and desolate. End of tale. “It is the soul that sees;” Crabbe writes, “the outward eyes / Present the object, but the mind descries ….”
¹²
A footnote to the poem performs this kind of mood change on the reader, thus making denial of Crabbe's metaphysical point impossible. The still happy Orlando comes across a patch of brown water stagnating in slimy mud. “Flora scarcely deigns to bloom ….”
¹³
but Orlando nonetheless exclaims: “Various as beauteous, Nature, is thy face … all that grows has grace ….”
¹⁴
A riveting footnote intervenes. “The ditches of a fen so near the ocean are lined with irregular patches of a coarse and stained lava; a muddy sediment rests on the horse-tail and other perennial herbs, which in part conceal the shallowness of the stream …” Had the footnote stopped here, it would simply have been an interruption; but it continues: “… a fat-leaved pale-flowering scurby-grass appears early in the year, and the razor-edged bull-rush in the summer and autumn.” Attention to details! “The fen itself has a dark and saline herbage; there are rushes and
arrow-head
, and in a few patches the flakes of the cotton grass are seen, but more commonly the
sea aster
, the dullest of that numerous and hardy genus …” A lesser artist would have been content to settle for the easy irony of dull sea aster becoming part of Orlando's beauteous Nature. Crabbe doesn't: “… a thrift blue in flower, but withering and remaining withered till the winter scatters it; the saltwort, both simple and shrubby; a few kinds of grass changed by their soil and atmosphere, and low plants of two or three denominations undistinguished in a general view of the scenery …” By now only the least attentive readers will fail to see that the footnote has wrenched us deliberately away from the poem with its echoes of the pastoral tradition and has placed us firmly in the grasp of the attentive botanist. Science is not art, Crabbe argues; the scientist is not the lover. Our mood has changed as dramatically as that of Orlando when he returns as the chastened John from the feckless Susan. With understandable pride, though perhaps unnecessary thoroughness, Crabbe drives his point home: “and in this case there arise from it effluvia strong and peculiar, half-saline, half-putrid, which would be considered by most people as offensive, and by some as dangerous; but there are others to whom singularity of taste or association of ideas has rendered it agreeable and pleasant.”
¹⁵
“[T]he adept in Dutch interiors, hovels, and pig-styes must find in Mr. Crabbe a man after his own heart,”
¹⁶
Dr. Johnson has said. That his remark is praise is made plausible by the “Lover's Journey” tour-de-force, tell-it-like-it-is footnote.
*

George Crabbe's heroic and dogged example did not establish the poetic usefulness of the footnote; quite to the contrary, most poets in the centuries that followed avoided them . Even the modern Updike's trio of fall guys, T. S. Eliot, John Berryman, and Marianne Moore, lack the courage of their convictions; their notes are never at the bottom of the page but always, and almost apologetically, at the end of the poem or the back of the book. Marianne Moore's timidity is the most puzzling. She was as famous for the boldness of her hats
*
as for the self-assurance of her verse. She had enough confidence in herself to suggest automobile names to the Ford Motor Company, and to receive a handsome emolument for her work.
†
Yet her notes do not receive the prominent placement that they clearly deserve. “A Note on the Notes” shows that she, and not just her publisher, was ambivalent about them. “[S]ince in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed … acknowledgments seem only honest.” But she finds herself unable to resist the Updike types who (she writes): “suggest that quotation marks are disruptive of pleasant progress” while others say they “are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task.” Her answer is to temporize by hiding the notes where they will not offend the peculiar sensibilities of those “annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts ….”
¹⁷
As if much of poetry, and much of life for that matter, didn't delight and instruct precisely with its provisos, detainments, and postscripts; getting to the end of a poem or a life expeditiously is just what we do not want to do.

John Updike himself cannot dismiss Moore's notes out of hand. With perhaps a bit of bourgeois unease, a sense of “waste not, want not,” he employs a domestic analogy and in the process turns the flamboyant Moore into a simple housewife doing chores next door. “[T]he effect of her poetry is that of a spanking-clean, well-swept attic, and naturally, if the attic is to stay tidy, there must exist a storeroom, under the eaves, where she can jumble the bulkier objects: the Webster's New International Dictionary's definition of ‘wen'tle-trap', with a pretty engraving; the abridged texts of two sports columns by Arthur Daley (New York Times
[sic]
, March 3, 1952, and March 1, 1955); a drawing from the hand of Giulio Gomez, a Spanish school child age 6….”
¹⁸

But stop right there. Six-year-old Giulio Gomez's drawing
¹⁹
is a wonder. An efficiently drawn snail with eyes popping up above its tiny head, forthright and assertive as one of Moore's tricornes, brings a mule skidding to a halt. Yes, the anatomy of the mule is suspiciously close to a horse's, but the ears are a small miracle of startledness, and the jockey crouched atop the mule has the confident ignorance that always precedes a pratfall. Gomez knows just what he is doing; this is a piece of art, not something to be tossed into an attic storeroom and forgotten.
*

Because the poem “Tom Fool at Jamaica” is presently laid out across two pages by its fulsome publishers, there is plenty of room for the drawing, if not for the two sports columns. There it would catch the eye of the reader first, and set a nicely ambitious tone for the subsequent reading, a tone that mingles a child's charm with a child's glee in the occurrence of any adult comeuppance: a Thurber moment. “Be infallible at your peril, as the poem says, ‘for your system will fail ….'”
²⁰
A good motto for jockeys, poets, and a novelist-turned-critic.

It is not as if John Updike does not know better. He himself has frequently used footnotes in his novels and short stories, though perhaps not always to great effect. In one example, a mention of a sea occasions the rather uninformative note: “The Caribbean—hence its idyllic aspect.”
²¹
In “Roger's Version” the narrator has mastered “a few dead languages” in order “to parade sequential moments of the obdurately enigmatic early history of Christianity before classrooms of the hopeful, the deluded, and the docile ….”
²²
His defensive, donnish, world-weary, adjective-buttressed irony may—in Updike's eyes—excuse the two forlorn footnotes that come halfway into the story: a Latin quotation in the text, “Rursusne omnia necessaria …,”
²³
and so forth, receives an unnecessary translation at the bottom of the page. (Unnecessary for the Latin scholar, of course, but also for the general reader, who simply wants to get on with a sensual, morally fraught episode.) The same is true when, only twelve pages later, an English passage, “Who ever is ashamed of Me ….”
²⁴
is taken to the bottom of the page and converted back into its Latin.