The Devil's Details (2 page)

McFarland's charming self-doubts have had a profound influence on him. He more recently tried to persuade his publisher to put out a book of his without any notes at all—no footnotes, no endnotes, no excursus notes, just the plain, unadorned, continuous text. A brave move for a scholar, one akin to an actor appearing on stage alone,
sans
costume,
sans
makeup,
sans
props, just the actor, his script, and his audience. McFarland's courage is of less immediate interest to us, however, than the reasons he gives for his proud nakedness. His explanation takes us back to his school days when he, as he puts it with commendable meticulousness, “was unusually erratic or, not to put too firm a point on it, decidedly neurotic.”
¹⁵
The academic label given him, he says (with what we imagine is a slight wince), was “brilliant but unsound.”
¹⁶
Thus he piled up footnotes to defend his arguments “much as a soldier at the front might throw up earthworks ….”
¹⁷
Earthworks: After years of labor any scholar
*
might delight in tossing away notes, much as a kid runs along the beach kicking down sand castles and squealing. What a sense of freedom they both must feel, the wind whipping their hair, squinty-eyed onlookers muttering.

But then in another place in his confession, McFarland changes himself from a free spirit running along the beach to a suspicious miser looking over his shoulder. “To be quite cynical,” he quotes himself as having written his publisher at the time, “I really see no other need for footnotes than to allow scholarly readers to purloin my citations without having to give
me
a reference. Certainly the average interested reader … is pleased rather than put off by the absence of footnotes. It is only other scholars who cry for footnotes, for reasons that they would be hard put to defend.”
¹⁸

As tempting as it is to ascribe a hard-nosed, even commercial, motive to scholarly antagonism to footnotes, that is too easy. Anyone who has been around a practicing scholar knows there is more of the kid in his soul than the banker. (Many of them, for example, take summers off.) And always we should keep in mind that the footnote, like the haiku or terza rima, makes difficult and strict demands on the writer, however much pleasure it may give the reader. Impatience, even resentment, and certainly ambiguous feelings on the part of writers toward footnotes are to be expected.

McFarland expresses ambiguities not just in his autobiography but also in his metaphors and analogies; they are deeply set in his psyche indeed. Footnotes, on the one hand, are intended to be “an impregnable fortification”;
¹⁹
on the other hand, they turn out not to be “steel cables woven into a gigantic interconnection of meaning” but in fact “connected to nothing.”
²⁰
They are “short and localized outriggers.”
²¹
They come in and out of fashion as do bell-bottoms or stovepipes.
²²
However, to try to ignore “footnote indicators” when reading can be “something like driving over a road with innumerable potholes.”
²³
The feeling that footnotes are trouble (and bone-rattling trouble at that)—maybe more trouble than they are worth—is unmistakable.

Scholars are often viewed as park rangers of footnotes; the notes are on their preserve and in their charge. But scholars are not entirely to be trusted. A notable example is the pioneering historian of the footnote, Anthony Grafton. His
The Footnote: A Curious History
is solid scholarship, an entertaining read, and a sophisticated defense of the footnote as scholarly tool. Alerted by our experience with McFarland to the fact that hidden and ambiguous feelings may be expressed in metaphor as they are in dreams, we can “psyche out” Grafton.

He turns out to be a terribly conflicted supporter of the footnote; his mind says one thing, his dreams something else. Early on a peculiar “low rumble” is ascribed to the footnote and the “rumble” compared to the dentist's drill's “high whine”;
²⁴
enthusiastic annotators then are compared to “dentists who have become inured to inflicting pain and shedding blood ….”
²⁵
We leave the dentist's office only to hear that the “production of footnotes” resembles “the disposal of waste products.”
²⁶
Next comes a comparison of the footnote to a fish that few readers bother to trawl for, then to a shabby podium, a carafe of water, a “rambling, inaccurate introduction.”
²⁷
That each of these comparisons is in the service of a legitimate insight and that each extends our understanding of the footnote does not conceal the “low rumble” of hostility emanating from this scholar's prose.
*

It is true that when Grafton's story reaches the eighteenth century, the seductiveness of that century's footnotes moves him to say that “footnotes burgeoned and propagated like branches and leaves in a William Morris wallpaper.”
²⁸
A lovely comparison that is preceded, however, by a comparison of footnotes to the “impregnably armored bottom” of a tank
²⁹
and succeeded by a scholar who uses a footnote the way “the hockey-masked villain in an American horror film uses a chain saw: to dismember his opponents, leaving their gory limbs scattered across the landscape.”
³⁰
The Rabelaisian glee that one feels when thumbing one's nose at the footnote is nicely caught by a Noël Coward quip that Grafton joins many other scholars in retelling. “Having to read a footnote,” the lyric dramatist claimed, “resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.”
³¹
Scholars, as Coward understood, tend to become infatuated with their prose, though that sometimes astonishes their readers; and so when in the midst of crafting a subtly curving thought, the scholar may very easily feel the footnote is merely an inopportune interruption.

That is sad.

The footnote is just as likely to bring to the door a welcome visitor, perhaps handsome or pretty, sometimes garrulous but often pleasantly sociable. Many a somnolent reader has (metaphorically) hugged such a visitor and hoped many more would come to the door: A text sometimes is something only a scholar can love; a footnote, however, is like a blind date, threatening and exciting, dreary occasionally but often entertaining. And a footnote does not require or expect a long-term commitment.

The current climate of opinion of footnotes is ambiguous at best. With the advent of the personal computer, writers find it easier to arrange the “blind date”; publishers can also use the computer to take the guesswork out of the layout. But some writers and publishers have used the Internet as an excuse to eliminate the notes from the published book, offering instead a Web site to which an interested reader can go for the annotations. Virtual reality is a treacherous place, however, filled with black holes and out-of-control meteors; Web sites can go
poof
in a day, a year, a decade, a century. A book then will be left without notes, an argument without documentation, a scholar without credibility. And the relegation of notes to the Internet forecloses any of the dramatic possibility that the footnote's proximity to the text encourages.

Opinion and practice will not be changed simply by pointing out the speciousness of the arguments against the footnote. They will not be changed simply because the footnote has clearly demonstrated its usefulness in the past or because its future holds such promise. They will not be changed simply because scholars, humanists, literate laypersons, and experimental poets
*
have a stake in its continued survival. Appreciation must be informed with knowledge; individual protest must find a common voice. Quite some time ago a scholar called for—in a footnote, of course—“some organization devoted to agitating for the return of footnotes to the place they belong.”
³²
With the possibility of annotations being rocketed into a virtual space, untended and forgotten, the need for organized agitation is even more pressing. But first we must have a full account of the adventuresome history of the footnote and the many ways it has proved beautiful and desirable. The book is a step in fulfilling that obvious need.

T
HE FIRST FOOTNOTE DRIFTS
somewhere in a universe of manuscripts and books, eluding our discovery the way the original bright star of the skies eludes astronomers. But those astronomers have something to teach us: They have not let the vastness of their subject matter discourage them. Sensibly, they made some educated guesses as to the likely conditions that produce stars, then they probed space with telescopes and poked around it with giant radio antennas. And sure enough, they turned up immense, interstellar realms of vast, diffused clouds of gas and dust,
star-forming regions
, within which stars even now are being formed. Observations of these clouds have allowed them to make reasonable guesses as to how the first star must have come into being. And so, if the first star is yet to be found, it still can be described with reasonable accuracy.

We will take our cue from stargazers. Extrapolation is the mind's telescope, and we will use it to reconstruct the beginnings of footnotes. Our
footnote-forming region
will not, of course, be some gas-and-dust cloud in space; it will be in a very human place, where intellectual controversy swirls and where the cut and thrust of argument is most likely to be realized in a flurry of annotations and commentary. We will assume that Gutenberg and his first printed books had to appear before the arrival of the first footnote. Scholars of the Middle Ages were just as choleric as their later colleagues, but their disagreements, their anger, could be easily expressed in manuscripts by handwritten comments inserted directly into the text or scrawled in the left or right margins. It was the printed book that brought a need for order and predictability, space allocation, and the formal apparatus of reference marks. So for our likely
footnote-forming region
, we turn to England of the sixteenth century.

No place was ever more contentious than Elizabethan London, with its jumble of poets and con artists, smoky chimneys and church towers, diseases and ideas, with its masques, sword fights, sonnets, Black Death, with its William Shakespeare, in whose every couplet order fought with disorder, its John Donne, whose jostling metaphors only occasionally succeeded in making sense of his conflicted emotions and contesting ideas, and its Bull, the Tyburn hangman, a deft hand at cutting a body from the rope while still alive so as to “open the victim's belly, pull out his entrails and show them to him before his eyes closed in death.”
¹
Bull's brother-in-law was Laurence Pickering, King of Cutpurses, whose hand was deft at cutting a purse from a gentleman's body,
²
a nice demonstration of the close relationship of law and order and lawlessness and disorder in Elizabethan times.

London was a crude place. And it is only by letting this crowded, crime- and disease-ridden city become real to us that we can properly appreciate what thoughtful and fine character was required to create the early footnotes. In the city, sometime before 1568, we can zero in on Richard Jugge, senior Queen's Printer, and give ourselves license to imagine him distractedly strolling the streets, worried sick over a small printed letter, an
f
, cupped between frail slivers of parentheses: (f).

Jugge
³
has been put in charge of printing the Bishops' Bible, a Bible that receives its nickname because it is the bishop-run Church of England's response to the dangerously popular and subversive Calvinist import, the Geneva Bible. Jugge himself appears to have been a deeply religious soul. He started his career selling books near the north door of St. Paul's under a conspicuous sign picturing a Bible. He then turned to the printing of books, concentrating first on godly tracts and editions of the New Testament. The Archbishop of Canterbury was fond of him, or at least respected him.

“… [W]ithout doubt [Jugge] hath well deserved to be preferred,” the archbishop was to write when asking the government to compensate Jugge for his work on the Bishops' Bible. The job had not been easy, a fact the archbishop recognized when he quickly added: “A man wold not thinke that Jugge had devoured so much pain as he hath sustained.”
*
⁴

Religion could offer comfort to a devout man in the privacy of his home, and provide companionship and uplift in a church where people agreed to sing the same hymns, pray the same prayers, recite the same creed. But in the fierce market of ideas introduced to Europe by Luther and Calvin and the Reformation, religion was contentious and dangerous. Voices were often raised, pamphlets usually scurrilous. A man's head could be at stake—metaphorically or literally. In etchings and woodcuts the pope became a three-headed beast, a seven-headed beast, a demon, the
Anti-Christi;
Luther became a cook brewing up lies, heresy, unchastity. He morphed into a two-headed fool, a seven-headed monster, a winesack. The spirit of
Beavis and Butthead
was afoot. “Luther often spoke of Germany as the ‘papal sow', to be force-fed papal lies for the pope's sole gain.”
⁵
A woodcut shows the pope holding out a papal bull; two peasants moon him and fart. Several of Luther's admirers, offended by a pamphlet put out by the other side, took turns with it in the men's room and, having “illustrated” it, returned it to its author.
⁶

If our Richard Jugge was careless enough to let his stroll take him to London Bridge, he may have shuddered; as many as thirty or thirty-five rotting heads might look down on him from there. Thievery, treason, the wrong faith, or perhaps a sloppy printing job on a Bible might put a man's head on a pike.
⁷
Bibles were battlefields; their left and right margins were the trenches from which scriptural annotations and citations were lobbed at previous Bibles' misinterpretations: Catholics against Lutherans, Lutherans against Calvinists, Calvinists against the Church of England, and the Church of England against everyone else, and against the noise, the confusion, the lack of decorum. The enormously popular Geneva Bible,
*
for example, uses Revelation 17:4 to toss a sexually charged grenade at the Pope. Into the text walks a woman “arrayed in purple and skarlat, & guilded with golde, & precious stones, and pearles, [who] had a cup of golde in her hand, full of abominations.” The grenade explodes with: “This woman is the Antichrist, that is, the Pope with ye whole bodie of his filthy creatures, … whose beauty onely standeth in outwarde pompe & imprudence and craft like a strumpet ….”
⁸

The margins of the Geneva Bible could at times look like a muddy cascade of wordy water, tumbling and splashing. On one page the stream of explanation is so great it curls around a corner and pools at the bottom of the page. Someone with less rigorous standards than this author may be tempted to identify this as the first footnote; lacking an independent existence from the margin, however, such overflow is precedent but not fulfillment.

Elizabeth's predecessor, Henry the Eighth, lost his patience with such splashings. Like a talk-show host determined to keep control of discussions that threaten to disintegrate into shouting matches and fisticuffs, the king in 1538 ordered that scripture “in the english tonge” be allowed to speak for itself without “any annotations in the margyn,” or for that matter any prologues or additions to calendars and so forth—unless, of course, he approved of them.
*

The Bishops' Bible was intended to be as much about decorum as about doctrine. The first edition was handsomely illustrated with engravings, woodcuts, and maps. Dignified portraits of Queen Elizabeth and the earl of Leicester lent weight to the work. Controversy was to be avoided—and also private readings by laypersons. It was intended for use of the clergy; paragraph signs red-flagged unsuitable passages, and clergymen were urged to seek out and read other scripture chapters “makying more to [the people's] edification ….”
⁹
Should the laity get their hands on the books, the bishops wanted to be sure there was nothing indiscreet or messy in the margins. Annotations were deliberately “moderate in tone … guiding interpretation without invoking the controversy that [might] lie behind the passage.”
¹⁰
Every other Protestant Bible was tempted to use the book of Revelation to slam the pope. Not this one.

The margins are like carefully constructed, thoughtfully stocked cupboards where good china—but not the finest—waits to be pulled out and used. Nothing glitters but everything is clean and bright.

The day we catch up with Richard Jugge, the book of Job in the Bishops' Bible has been reached. What Jugge may have thought of as the “Geneva Bible problem” is upon him: Annotations threaten to overrun the margins. We should hasten to add that this is probably not his only problem. Jugge in fact might very well have some visceral sympathy with Job; this possibility is worth some extended attention.

Costs were high, his investment great. As yet there was no assurance that he would be granted exclusive rights to the sale of the finished book, and this presented the only possibility of recouping his investment. His workmen were not necessarily reliable. Though no direct evidence of his employees' habits is available, historians and economists have been quick to make judgments about the general attitudes of workmen at the time. One of them writes: “The English laborer … responded when prices fell or wages rose, so that he could satisfy his wants with diminished effort, by keeping holiday the remainder of his time.” (References in this paragraph will be grouped together in a footnote at the end of the paragraph. An explanation for this delay is made there.) A commentator, Thomas Manly, closer in time to Jugge (1669), noted: “They work so much fewer days by how much the more they exact in wages ….” A harsher (and anonymous) comment was made in 1728: “People in low life who work only for their daily bread, if they can get it by three days work in a week will many of them make holiday the other three or set their own price on their labour.” D. F. McKenzie speculates that early printers may sometimes have preferred apprentices to journeymen precisely because apprentices could be ordered to work and journeymen could not. “Such an argument was in fact used in litigation in 1592 [twenty-four years after the first Bishops' Bible appeared] when Benjamin Prince, a journeyman … said he need only do what he could whereas Parker, an apprentice had to do as his master bade him.”
¹¹

One rightly may be suspicious of an argument that attributes tardiness and absenteeism solely to the fickleness of employees. A hundred good reasons can excuse someone's absence: a wife in labor, a mother dying, a child gone missing, a squabble with a landlord, fear of a plague or of a witch, a broken foot, a cold (especially in the damp London winters), and so forth. Even D. F. McKenzie admits the discussion must be related to what we know of journeymen's grievances. “It may be that under conditions of widespread unemployment an increase in part-time work is to be expected rather than a severe restriction of the labour force to the few men of highest efficiency.”
*
Whatever the reasons, workmen for whom we happen to have production figures show widely varying degrees of diligence. In 1702 Thomas Pokins, a compositor at the University of Cambridge press, set type at an exceptional rate: an average of 6,307 characters a day. His colleagues' averages were well behind. A William Bertram composed 5,700 a day; one Clement Knell did just 5,603 on an average day.
¹²

Pay was tied to production, ensuring fits of jealousy, backstabbing, maybe even subtle forms of sabotage. (I write from personal experience on this matter. As the supervisor of an all-female assembly line paid piecework wages for assembling fluorescent lights, I witnessed acts of sabotage and retaliation. One assembler hoarded parts, hiding them from her colleagues—and from me. All had fits of anger, some tossed things—occasionally at me—as the pressure to produce squeezed them into harridans entirely different from the people they were outside of work. On the street they always waved and hallooed to me pleasantly. I do not believe sixteenth-century workers would be much different from their modern-day counterparts in this regard.) One has to believe Jugge had personnel problems weighing on him most days.

And he must have had personal problems as well. As he walks along the Thames we cannot have him simply worrying about wages and absenteeism and the overcrowded margins of Job. The intense odors of garbage and offal, dumped unceremoniously into the street by every homeowner, the scavenging kites swooping down to dine, also must be allowed to distract him. We will give him the sniffles. And because we can, we will let him scan the city's horizon. London was then a low-lying, horizontal city with St. Paul's (a stubby, inelegant early version of the present-day cathedral) and the Tower of London reaching up and calling attention to themselves. These last two were reminders of church and government that he does not particularly welcome this day, we presume. Several criminals tied up by the riverside will add a nice touch, and a passing chimney sweep's cry: “Sweep chimney sweep mistress, with a hey derry sweep from the bottom to top, sweep chimney sweep.” But amid the noise and smells and dangers, the (f) and the (g) nag him like a persistent cough.
*

Space is the problem. Half of the first page of the book of Job is taken up by titles and by an elaborate illustration of a semi-naked man receiving counsel from four fashionably dressed men whose helmets and turbans bloom on their head like orchids. Seven notes need to be accommodated on the left margin. Five, (a), (b), (c), (d), and (e), can be accommodated by starting the (a) to the side of and halfway down the illustration, an awkward intrusion into the decorated space but tolerable. The (f) and the (g) are left orphans, however. The solution found in the Geneva Bible, the curling of the notes into the bottom of the page, had to be rejected by Jugge; the disorder of that Bible was just what the bishops had instructed him to avoid. The answer Jugge came up with was, like many of the advances made in book design over the years, subtle: (f) and (g) did end up on the bottom of the page, but a small, meaningful space was left between them and their descending companions. Avoided was any appearance that (f) and (g) had been shoved into their place; instead, like sunbathers on a crowded beach who manage to set themselves off from the others by carefully placing their blanket to one side (and perhaps by adopting a certain sang froid), the notes at the bottom of the page appear to have the space solely to themselves. They bring the exclusivity of the Hamptons to Jones Beach. Jugge, snapping his fingers perhaps, has found a way to include an abundance of notes yet maintain decorum.