The Devil's Details (4 page)

To return to outer space for a comparison, the sun is such a familiar object we scarcely think of it for days at a time, and when we stop to watch a sunset or sunrise, we are unlikely to remember its history: the explosions of gas and dust eons ago that produced this miracle. Harried scholars, eyes squinting in the fluorescent light of some library's stacks, are even less likely to think of the unique wonder of the footnote's journey to their mind, but their search would have more zest and “truth” if they did.

We need to guard the concept of invention against another common distortion. Take the airplane, for example. We often say casually that the Wright brothers “invented the airplane,” and the word
airplane
these days unpacks a sleepy Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic, British pilots scrambling into Spitfires, a Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, and the SST becoming a commonplace to the very wealthy and to crossword puzzle devotees. This
airplane
contains a series of inventions and a multitude of inventors and heroes who can be admitted without diminishing the splendor of Kitty Hawk and the tiny biplane that fluttered a few feet that spring day in 1903.

But failures should also be present in any successful “invention.” The oversized wood-and-paper wings early pilots strapped to their chests and frantically beat the air with, the lumbering machines that never got off the ground or fell like rocks off the side of a cliff, all the strange contraptions that ended as tangled heaps are as much a part of the invention of the airplane as the successes. (In some areas of science we are accustomed to the usualness and need of failed experiments; it is part of the serious daily work of a physicist or chemist. Failure in technology can be too easily a visual comedy, a pratfall, and lead to a dismissal of its necessity in the inventive process.) For the footnote, too, failure is an integral part of its progress; we will keep that in mind.

Jugge's footnote was a convenience; it was not yet a research tool or humanizing aside. In the years that followed, the English establishment seems to have corralled margin notes as if they were stampeding cows and stamped out footnotes as if noxious weeds. Neatness was everything. A book of biographies of English kings written by William Martyn, Esq., and printed by James Boler in 1628 can represent any number of tidy printings of the post-Jugge era.

The title page of the Boler book gives the game away. A Roman archway attempts to be gay and voluptuous: vines heavy with grapes and broad leaves circle the twin columns; an odd pairing—a bemused lion and a contented unicorn—appear opposite each other at the spring line. Behind them, a thorny rose and bristling thistle thrust and curl to the top, where a jeweled crown rests on the keystone like a keystone itself. The title is more reserved than the expansive rule of its time:
The Historie and Lives of the Kings of England: From William the Conqueror, unto the end of the Raigne of King Henry the Eighth. With other useful observations.
²⁸
Everything is in a container: the title in the archway, the flowers and animals within severe borders. The effect is a repressed sensuality seldom associated with the irrepressible royalty that is the subject of the book; it is as if Martyn is insisting
he
rules over Henry the Eighth and company, not they over him.

This emotional tightfistedness is confirmed by the introduction. “Worthie Gentlemen (omitting all elaborated Eloquence which oftentimes is used as a varnish to cover unprofitable labours; As cunning Goldsmithes doe enrich their basest Silver, when they Gilt it with their purest Gold) I purpose to render to you an account of two reasons, which induced mee to take this paine, and to publish this worke.”
²⁹
The containment within parentheses of an eloquent rejection of elaborate eloquence shows Martyn at his slyest, a deliberate craftsman of repression.
*

This tactic may be less well advised further into the work. The text is bordered on the left and at the bottom by a thin, tight line—no room is provided for even the tiniest note. (One can almost see Martyn's equally thin smile as he persuades Boler to add the lines or, alternatively, he hears his publisher suggest them.) On the right are two such insistent lines an inch apart; they are elevator shafts.

Page after page goes by with no traffic up or down the shaft, just emptiness. When one does finally appear, at page 191, for example, the results are frustrating. Martyn has gotten us to France as its royalty gears up for battle with Henry the Fifth and his archers. Money is in short supply. Charles, the dauphin, with help from the high constable of France, weasels from his mother, the queen, “a great Masse of silver and of gold, which for many yeares she had scraped, scratched, and hoarded up together.”
³⁰
The queen is inwardly “enraged” and plans “to bee revenged”
³¹
but she apparently does not refuse. Can she not say no to her son? The reader stops, stands there motionless as if waiting for an elevator door to open. The door opens to a closed-mouth repetition: “She voweth deep revenge.”
³²

The ruling out (in a literal sense) of footnotes and even of margin notes that add rather than just repeat is a common occurrence during this period. But there are also small outbreaks of rebellion; the English after the death of Elizabeth the First were not obstreperous just as subjects but as writers too.

Some of the rebellious notes are simply the broken china or spilled drink of passionate speech at a tea. In 1613, for example, Roger Widdrington, an English Catholic, tosses his drink into the air. This is startling because Widdrington appears to be usually a restrained, meticulous man, the kind of person who unobtrusively straightens pictures if they lean to one side and goes for water if an elder or a vase of fresh flowers seems in need. Again the title page says it all; it is thorough and thoughtful at the risk of being long-winded: “A Theologicall Disputation Concerning the Oath of Allegiance, dedicated to the most Holy Father Pope Paul
the fifth
, Wherein All The Principall arguments which have hitherto beene brought by Cardinall
Bellarmine, Leonard Leffius, Martin Becanus
, and divers others, against the new
Oath of Allegiance
, lately established in England by Act of Parliament, are sincerely,
perspicuously, and exactly examined
.” Widdrington catches his breath and, still not satisfied, adds: “Translated out of Latin into English by the Author himselfe, where unto hee hath also added
An Appendix
, wherein all the arguments, which the most learned Divine
Franciscus Surarez
, hath lately brought for the Popes power to depose Princes, and against the aforesaid
Oath of Allegiance
, are sincerely rehearsed, and answered.”
³³
The pages that follow reflect the neat and judicious temperament of Widdrington. He chooses his words with care, balances his sentences, uses italics and capitals sparingly and appropriately for emphasis. Though lined margins on both sides of the text are available for notes, he uses them judiciously. He provides no space at all at the bottom of the page for notes. He would have thought none necessary.

But by page 45, the fierce dispute between Anglicans and Roman Catholics and the terrible weight of religious and political responsibility bring this dignified and considerate man to a fighting pitch. A suggestion that “some worthie men, among whom some also were Popes”
³⁴
so distresses him that his response spills over in to the left margin and the note, churning and foaming, tumbles down to the bottom, a waterfall of choler. It has no choice but to force its way back under the text: welling passion undermining reasoned argument.

Poor John Rainolds, another writer at a different time, comes to be equally incensed. His objections to the public stage earned him letters of “reprove” from a Mr. Gager, and a copy of that gentleman's new “Trageie
[sic]
”—one presumes this last the more offensive communication. Though his text turns harsh at times, it strives to be considerate of others' feelings. In previous correspondence Rainolds has advanced the argument that stage plays waste money better spent to aid the poor.

The money spent on plays would never reach the poor in any case is the reply; the money presumably would go for gambling or fine clothes or the funding of armadas. A case in point is given: Nero, who “being tickled with desire of praise; and loving to heare men approve his playing on the stage with clapping of their hands, and crying out,
Excellent, Excellent
, did choose a lusty band of valiant youths to doe it, whole captianes he gave three hundred pound a piece, or better”
³⁵
—not money, however, that Nero would have directed to good works. “Waste is waste,” Rainolds in effect is reduced to arguing, and his frustration spills out into thirteen sputtering Latin notes in the margin and at the bottom of the page.
³⁶
A confusion of reference marks betrays his agitation: d, e, f, *, d, *, e, f, g, h, i, *, l. Further along Rainolds, the classicist, so loses control of himself that he breaks out with an occasional note in English.

Sixteen hundred twenty-nine was a watershed year in British history: Charles the First dissolved Parliament, a first step down a path that soon brought him face to face with Oliver Cromwell, and which twenty years later put his head under the ax. The year will serve as well as any other to mark the end of the early era of the footnote. Like the English people, the footnote was in for tumultuous times, days that tested people's values and set one against the other. Without overdramatizing the role of the footnote in political and social history, we can claim for it some importance in the working out of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' values. It became a field of battle on which—perhaps with more clarity than on the fields where Cromwell and Charles the First fought—exuberance tested restraint, exploration assaulted stay-at-homeness, and fecundity lay siege to tidiness.

T
HE EXHILARATION WE FEEL
when suddenly coming upon a fecund (if tangled) garden of scholarly notes should not keep us from registering how dark were the surrounding woods where the footnote of poetry wandered throughout the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. In that wood of spies and feuds and character assassins, the footnote was waylaid and mugged. The mugger, a professional, was Alexander Pope; his weapon
The DUNCIAD VARIORUM with the PROLEGOMENA of SCRIBLERUS
, a poem stuffed with satirical comments and remarks like an old sock with rocks. It is a devious story.

We pick up the trail in France, in the 1640s, at the court of the exiled English king. Abraham Cowley prepares to return to England as a royalist spy. He is “advis'd to dissemble the main Intention of his coming over, under the Disguise of applying himself to some settled Profession.” That of “Physick” is “thought most proper.”
¹
He makes his way to a “fruitful part of Kent” fully intending (we can suppose) to follow instructions. The profusion of herbs, bushes, and trees he finds in Kent, however, seduces him; he becomes a gardener and poet, occupations that do not make quite as effective a cover story as physician, perhaps, but which seem to have served.
*
What role his secret work played in the eventual defeat of Cromwell and the restoration of the English monarchy is difficult to judge. Not difficult to judge is his poetry, which brings us pleasure as it also brings us an elaborate apparatus of notes. His cautious placement of them at the end of the poem rather than at the foot of the page (which appears to be still a somewhat controversial positioning in those days) is understandable; a secret agent, risking his head for king and country, surely has an incentive to act timidly in other parts of his life.

We can pause only for a few examples of his work.
Davideis, a Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David in Four Books
, begins with a traditional “proposition”:

The very first line inspires two notes. The second one—a thorough explanation of his substitution of
Judah
for the more expected
Israel
—will be passed over; but the first note is a gem. It exhibits the mix of pride and humility that so becomes this man, and demonstrates once again the humanizing value of a note, even a note inconveniently situated. “The custom of beginning all
Poems
, with a
Proposition
of the whole work, and Invocation of some God for his assistance to go through with it, is solemnly and religiously observed by all the ancient Poets, that though I could have found out a better way, I should not (I think) have ventured upon it.”
³
This is a fine expression of the tension between custom and innovation that affects a poet at every turn, whether when paying appropriate dues to the muse or when simply searching for a word that both rhymes and makes sense.

The first book of
Davideis
has the satisfying ratio of sixteen pages of notes to twenty-four pages of verse; the three following books have a similar ratio, but we will restrict ourselves to one or two more samples. Line after line of tightly constructed couplets delight us, each meeting the requirements of five stressed syllables per line and ending with a welcome clink-clink of rhyme. Suddenly, Cowley puzzles us with an apparent lapse:

Cowley anticipates our ear's earnest objections, answering them with this note: “I am sorry that it is necessary to admonish the most part of Readers, that it is not by negligence that this verse is so loose, long, and as it were Vast; I would have observed in divers other places of this Poem, that else will ask for very careless verses ….” Here Cowley provides a list of other extra-long lines, and then continues, “The thing is, that the disposition of words and numbers should be such, as that out of the order and sound of them, the things themselves may be represented ….”
⁵
The reader is thus reassured that Cowley has planned his extra syllables in advance, and that once having written his lines he has—with a discriminating ear—reread them.

This fine annotator's limitations must be mentioned. His splendid notes inform, instruct, and contain entertaining digressions and meticulous scholarship; but they remain the notes of a careful reader, albeit a reader of his own work. The notes do not function
within
the drama of the poem. When, for example, Cowley has
Envy
“crawl” out onto his iambic pentameter stage, all eyes are instantly drawn to her, for “… her black locks hung long, / Attir'd with curling
Serpents
… at her breast stuck
Vipers
which did prey / Upon her panting heart, … sucking black
blood
from thence.” Her only slightly overlong speech carries the readers—that is, the audience—along with its vivid depiction of the power of envy and of her “faithful
Snakes
,” which “
Fires
” and “proud
Element
affright.”
⁶
Nearing the conclusion, Envy hisses, “By Me
Cain
Offer'd up his Brothers gore ….” A tiny margin note directing us to Genesis 4:8 is a slight distraction at this tense moment—a low whisper, say, from some scholar sitting a row behind. But the reference mark [#16] directing us to the back of the book is a less forgivable intrusion.
⁷

The note in and of itself is of interest. Cowley carefully details the limits of our knowledge about the murderous Cain, and the poetic license that it necessitated. The Bible gives us no clue as to “what manner he slew his
Brother
; And therefore I had the Liberty to chuse that which I thought the most probable; which is, that he knockt him on the head with some great stone ….” And the poet insists also: “That this stone was big enough to be the
Monument
or
Tombstone
of
Abel
, is not so
Hyperbolical
….”
⁸
Whatever the note's inherent interest, however, it fails to push forward the plot, it fails to take its place on the main stage of this drama. The note is a serious distraction: a knowledgeable friend, we will say, who whispers into our ears, or who else simply sits muttering to himself, so overflowing with information is he.

Several decades and a good deal of spying must pass before the note will play an active role in poetry's drama. England's Civil War will have petered out, Charles the First's head and Cromwell's pretensions been disposed of, the era of James the Second and Alexander Pope come into view, and then will come Aphra Behn, who makes the note (and the footnote, at that) a fully functioning actor in a poem.

Aphra Behn is generally thought of as the first female professional writer to produce a substantial body of work in English. Her reputation suffered among her contemporaries because she was unmarried for most of her life and because she had a room of her own. Disdain was furthered by a murky past, and by her profusion of names. She was variously referred to as Affara, Ann, Anne, or Aphra, the last the name the patron saint of prostitutes; she herself seems to have preferred Astrea, the “ambivalent virginal and fecund goddess of justice.”
⁹
This confusion may have been deliberate on her part, for like her contemporary Abraham Cowley, she was a royalist spy, in her case sent to Antwerp to contact a prospective double agent.
¹⁰

That she was directly influenced by Abraham Cowley's verse or annotation isn't certain; she did, though, translate some of his
Sylva
from the Latin into English, and would have recognized the effectiveness and limitations of the many margin notes and footnotes found in that work.
*
What
is
certain is that in time she did him one better with her own footnotes in
A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation
. In this poem the footnote is more than a helpful (if distracting) member of the audience; it takes on a role analogous to the magician's stooge, apparently one of us, when in fact a partner in the creation of an illusion—a double agent of the theater.

The urgency of three short sentences and the compact “Is't ev'n” can be expected from a practiced pro; the asterisk, though, is sublime. A tabernacle has deeply religious connotations; the asterisk (little star) we might expect to direct us toward the heavens. But no, of course not. Rather than upward, this star leads us to the bottom of the page, where we find “[*]So he called a Sweating-Tub.”
¹²
This tabernacler isn't at prayers at all; he is “taking the cure” for pox.
*
Two lines later, Behn ensures that even the most ordinary reader will not mistake this as a religious offering:

The perhaps unnecessary footnote is “[a] Lent.”
¹⁴
No one has yet given a persuasive reason why Behn employs [a] instead of the dagger or double asterisk as modern readers would expect; she may have wished to recognize the lesser importance of this note. However, subsequent notes, though undoubtedly of importance, continue to use the lowercase letter; most likely Behn, like Homer, occasionally nodded. Those subsequent notes make the crucial point that she has a professional and not simply a personal relationship with her “Brother of the Pen.” To her complaint that the brother is fooling around “… Just when the Wits had greatest [b] need of you ….” is attached the note “[b] I wanted a Prologue to a Play” followed up by a second note “[c] He [the brother] pretended to Retire to Write.”
¹⁵
His betrayal was of the word, not the body, and hell hath no fury like a writer scorned—as Pope almost said.

Behn could easily have dispensed with her notes. The verse “Art thou become a *Tabernacler too?” could have become “You must sit in Sweating-Tubs too?” without much damage to rhythm and rhyme. But Behn sets up the reader like a good comedian: “this is a religious poem,” she hints. A pause as the reader finds the bottom of the page. Then the footnote, “no this is a poem about pox,” is delivered like a punch line. The timing is everything.

Sadly, Aphra Behn died in 1689 at the age of forty-nine without fully developing her annotative skills; left wandering, the footnote fell into the unkind hands of Alexander Pope and his gang of literate layabouts.
*
Pope seems to have taken an instant dislike to Behn and her poetic experiments. He was a person of strict couplets and pruned bushes and well-tended lawns; she was not. She loved to travel, to sightsee, and to have the chance to spy; he preferred Twickenham and the gossip of close friends. She was attractive; he was not. Long after her death, when she surely offered no competition to him for a patron's notice or the scarce publisher's shilling, Pope included her in his catalog of poetic lapses,
Peri Bathous: or, Martinus Scriblerus, His Treatise of the Art of Sinking in Poetry
. He shoehorns a bit of her expansive
The Golden Age: A Paraphrase on a Translation of French
into the narrow confines of his couplet bias and prods it to stand up and dance. A grove in Eden is the location of her poem. There the flowers twined, and then:

Here Pope nudges the reader with his elbow, whispering, “which indeed most branches do.”
¹⁶
If Behn, indeed, has made a slightly unnecessary observation, one senses from Pope an unnecessary severity. That could be attributed, perhaps, to the extra—and in Pope's eyes untidy—syllable of
kisses
or even, one supposes, to the word
kisses
itself, given Pope's romantic troubles. Confirmation of this comes in a mean-spirited couplet in which Pope takes advantage of his era's prejudice that women found loitering near theaters are “loose.” A play of Behn's having had success, Pope hisses (using one of her pen names, Astrea):

Such versified pettiness would matter little if Pope had not followed up with
The Dunciad Variorum
. We are forced to leave the inventive Behn for the moment to confront Pope's scurrilous and scattershot attack on footnotes disguised as a satire of women poets—and of most of the male poets of the time as well. Commentary on the poem has concentrated on the extravagant conceits of this mock epic. Writers of any stripe find it hard to resist the scene in which publishers, desperate to sign up some of the women writers of popular romances, engage in a contest to see who can urinate the farthest.
¹⁸
Publishers, in turn, must find it hard to resist the scene in which Pope brings several writers to the middle of a London bridge. The writers peer down into what is essentially an open sewer in whose “disemboguing streams / Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thamses.”
¹⁹
A Pope footnote tells everyone that the writers “delight in flinging dirt,” at which point they obligingly dive headfirst toward the dogs, and Pope washes his hands of them.
²⁰