The Devil's Details (17 page)

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Particularly one, we should add, who before the days of the computer produced eleven hundred typed pages and a thousand notes to accompany them. Anyone who doubts the heroism of the precomputer scholar should try for a day inserting footnotes without the aid of his digital machine.

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As a Roman Catholic in Protestant England, Belloc's position must have been ambivalent at best. Though graduating honorably from Oxford University, he never attained the scholarly positions one might have expected—of course, it did not help that in addition to being a practicing Catholic, he was a practicing humorist.

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This writer confesses he has not wandered back through the thickets of parodies and shopping hints
The New Yorker
consisted of before the war in order to pin down the first appearance of “The Garland of Ibids”; but the anthology thanks the magazine for the thing, and Frank Sullivan is known to have written many of its unsigned “Talk of the Town” pieces. So taken was Sullivan with
The New Yorker
and its suspect values that he once claimed to be the son of its famous editor, Harold W. Ross. The claim has Freudian significance at least, even if we assume that the brief bio in which it appeared was a spoof, as he also claimed in it to have authored a well-received novel titled
What Makes Martin Chuzzlewit Run
. See Frank Sullivan,
A Pearl in Every Oyster
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1962), p. 291.

^*
We should note, however, the strange case of one of
The New Yorker
's most esteemed writers, J. D. Salinger.
Franny and Zooey
, his interlocking stories, first appeared in the magazine; a few pages into “Zooey” a footnote, of all things, pushes its way into the narrative, in fact sprawling across the bottom of two pages. Salinger is suitably embarrassed; he begins, “The aesthetic evil of a footnote seems in order just here, I'm afraid.” He then continues with information about the prior lives of the Glass children that the reader “may care to know ….” By no means do I want to suggest that the embarrassment explains
even in part
Salinger's subsequent years of seclusion in New Hampshire. J. D. Salinger,
Franny and Zooey
(Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1961), pp. 52-3.

^*
These footnotes are desultory entertainment rather like overheard cocktail talk. A lot of names are dropped but little real elucidation occurs. Hans Fehn, Baudelaire, John H. Trueman, and Branch Rickey and “a friend,” Ruby Water, are mentioned without full identification, as if they are all equally well known. Would Gibbon have let Branch Rickey appear in a note without some sly reference to the artful Dodgers absconding to Los Angeles? Undoubtedly, we would have learned with gratitude his opinion of earthquakes and Bugs Bunny and much else. And think what Bayle would have extracted from Baudelaire's life. Would he have made do, as Updike does, with simply a quote?

^*
F. R. Leavis became notorious for asserting that there were four and only four great novelists in the English language prior to the twentieth century. Neither Laurence Sterne nor Charles Dickens make the list, though one of Dickens's novels is included in the canon.
If only Dickens had been more serious
seems to have been Leavis's sigh. For such a critic to take notice of Crabbe is high praise.

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A traditional use of the footnote has been as a depository of invidious comparisons. That encourages me here. Thomas Gray, the poet of the “country churchyard,” died in 1771 when George Crabbe was seventeen and as yet unpublished. Gray shared with Crabbe a deep seriousness and some of the same sympathy for those who—as he put it—“kept the noiseless tenor of their way.” He also employed footnotes at times and thus might be considered by some Crabbe's predecessor. Nothing could be farther from the case. Crabbe's notes, as we have seen, are part of the drama of the poem; Gray's simply supply information of the sort one might find on a playbill. They are for the most part, in fact, a species of name-dropping. (Those who believe name-dropping to be the coin of the literary world might hold that Gray's footnotes are a kind of specie.) The verse mentions a “grave Lord-Keeper” and a note tells us this is “Hatton, prefe'd by Queen Elizabeth for his graceful Person and fine Dancing ….” A certain Styack is named in the verse and a note gives him standing as “The House-Keeper ….” A character stands “as mute as ‘poor Macleane,'” and we are dropped down to the bottom of the page to hear that Macleane is a famous “Highwayman hang'd the week before.” (In this case it is notable that Gray, a facetious poet, keeps his iambic pentameter going by an elision of
hanged
.) The notes come in a rather short poem titled “A Long Story.” (See Edmund Gosse, ed.,
The Works of Thomas Gray
(New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1885), pp. 83, 88, 89, respectively.) On a single page of “The Installation Ode,” a “sad Chatillon” becomes (down below) “Mary de Valentia, Countess of Pembroke, daughter of Guy de Chatillon, Comte de St. Paul in France; of whom tradition says that her husband, Audemar De Valentia, Earl of Pembroke, was slain at a tournament on the day of nuptials. She was the foundress of Pembroke College or Hall, under the name of Aula Mariae de Valentia.” On the next line we are hurried below to hear that “Elizabeth de Burg, Countess of Clare, … wife of John de Burg, son and heir of the Earl of Ulster, and daughter of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, by Joan of Acres ….” And so on for some dozen words and a couple of kings more. Back up in the verse we get to view a single comma and an “And Anjou's” before being sent below again to learn that Anjou is “Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry the Sixth, foundress of Queen's College.” A line and a half later … but the point is made. (See ibid., p. 95.) Had John Updike's acidic remarks on notes been directed at this kind of performance, we all would applaud. Footnotes in works of literature must serve some dramatic—not simply informational—purpose.

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An enormous tricorne too large to pack was one of her favorites and a favorite of her readers. It identified her as surely as the boldly complicated line breaks of her verse. The first sentence of one of her stories is, “I was leaving Boston wearing two hats ….” See Michael Schmidt,
Lives of the Poets
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 631.

^†
That Ford did not adopt Moore's suggestions does not lessen our sense of a poet unafraid. The company did not choose to name the new model the Resilient Bullet, The Intelligent Whale, Pastelogram, or Utopian Turtletop (to mention just a few of the poet's suggestions) and instead named it after Edsel Ford. The Edsel's spectacular failure to sell is poetic justice.

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This is a sore point with this writer. At college I was fortunate to become close friends with a gifted sculptor. His works were made from bits and pieces of scrap iron that had acquired a complex and arresting patina from days and nights spent outside weathering in the Vermont winters. A six-foot, sharp-edged figure particularly attracted me. My friend offered it to me with the proviso that I “keep it on view, don't just stick it in some attic.” After several U-Haul moves and several awkward living arrangements the artwork ended up in my parents' dark attic; I have had a guilty conscience ever since. If only those who toss out Gomez's work would have had similar experiences.

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Updike's
Museums and Women and Other Stories
has a set of endnotes as eclectic, if not as fulsome, as any employed by Marianne Moore. To my knowledge, Updike has never explained why notes are appropriate for fiction and yet not for poetry if that is, in fact, his belief. His ambivalence toward religion and sex has been studied at great length; one can hope some attention soon might be given to his apparent ambivalence toward footnotes.

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For example, the “low rumble” of the footnote could have been compared to the rumble of drums during an exciting passage of band music. The adjective
nutritious
or
colorful
could have been attached to the fish. And why should the introduction not be a “rambling, enthralling” one?

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This writer is not unaware of the aggressive group of poets who call themselves (sometimes) the New Formalists and who express a preference for traditional rhythm and even rhyme. In England such poets make up the mainstream of poetry; from their point of view, free verse and T. S. Eliot may appear retrograde. I won't argue except to say that to insist, as I think Updike's practices indicate he does, that rhyme and rhythm must be accompanied by punning traces back to the seventeenth century and thus
is
retrograde.

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A fine and adventuresome prose poet, a friend of mine, recently brought my attention to the work of Gad Hollander, whose annotation and prose poems deserve close analysis—which, unfortunately, they will not receive here. See Gad Hollander, “From /?e buk uv kraiz/” (
untitled: a magazine of prose poetry
,
www.poetrypress.com
, 2000), pp. 11-25. It may be that prose poets are particularly attracted to annotation, though my prose poet friend is adamantly against their use; the reason for his opposition is the stale one that anything important can and should be in the text proper. (That argument would apply to parentheses as well; anything important can and should be said unparenthetically. I have not consulted my friend about parentheses, however.) This particular prose poet is a publisher as well as a poet, which may explain his antagonism to the footnote.

^*
The
New York Times
has been indefatigable. Anthony Grafton's trailblazing work,
The Footnote: A Curious History
, was given not one but two deservedly laudatory reviews. (See Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,
The New York Times
, Thursday, 27 November 1997, p. E16, and David McKitterick, Sunday, 7 December 1997, section VIII, p. 86.) But years before that
The Times
fired a shot across the bow of the anti-footnote dreadnought by publishing a fervent pro-footnote op-ed piece of mine. (See
The New York Times
, Sunday, 23 August 1981.) Lest anyone think this has lent a bias to my view of the newspaper, let me say that the two reviews of The Footnote shared a serious failing: Neither one of them picked up on the unconscious hostility toward the footnote exhibited by Anthony Grafton (see chapter 1, “The Endangered Footnote”).
More recently
The Times
footnote campaign has remained enthusiastic but has become rather clumsy, perhaps. A prominent, front-page story recounts sympathetically the bold attempt of some American lawyers and judges to remove citations from within legal texts and affix them to the bottom of the pages. Such sensible depositions of notes should be applauded; unfortunately, the whole affair associates in the public mind the footnote with a profession held by the general public in quite low esteem. The
O.E.D
. informs us that
lawyer
refers—in an English dialect—to “a long bramble” and in New Zealand to “certain creeping plants.” Enemies of the footnote are masters of guilt by association; they easily would stoop to making an association by way of lawyers between the footnote and scratchy, creepy low life. (See William Glaberson,
The New York Times
, Sunday, 8 July 2001, p.1).
The reader might also want to take a look at Jennifer Dunning, “Dance Review: An Incomprehensible Work? How About Some Footnotes?” The
New York Times
, Monday, 15 January 2001, p. B10. The review says Gabriele Kroos's dance program in Soho “tackled large themes, complete with the dance equivalent of footnotes.” Dance, of course, cannot present footnotes in any literal sense without appearing simply silly; that Dunning finds the footnote analogy compelling, however, suggests that “annotation” is a very useful metaphor in these days of Postmodern thought and art. One of the dances, Dunning claims, “… proved that the incomprehensible can be made enticing”; no better summary statement of the Postmodern program can be made. The apotheosis of the footnote took place on April 17, 2001. On that date a clue to
The New York Times
Crossword Puzzle was “Where a star might lead?” The answer to this poetic hint will come as no surprise to the reader—a footnote. Notice also should be taken of
The Times
' urban neighbor,
The Nation
. This outspoken magazine is not given to either qualifying or footnoting its arguments. The contested presidential election, though, so stimulated it that at least one of its articles sputtered into notes. See Vincent Bugliosi, “
None Dare Call It Treason
,”
The Nation
, 5 February 2001. A cursory search through recent copies of the right-wing counterpart to
The Nation
, do not convince conservatives that the footnote's defense is solely a left-wing cause.