The Devil's Details

by Chuck Zerby

  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 drawing19 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.

  Character development can excuse many sins. In Updike’s In a Month of Sundays there is at least a week of footnotes. Some are inconsequential; the narrator, another minister, but this one with an exuberance that wins our trust, presents himself as “dwelling in outer darkness …” though, he adds, “I might be caught by the flare of a match or by a shouting[*] star ….” The asterisk attached to “shouting” is a terse and reluctant, “O.K. CF. Wm. Blake.”25 The point, of course, is not that we care that the narrator (or Updike, for that matter) has hijacked an adjective from the poet, but that the narrator (and
Updike, perhaps) thinks we might care. Other notes correct slips of the typewriter: “dry thoughts” brings us this: “Meant to type ‘throats,’ was thinking ‘thoughts,’ a happy Freudian, let it stand ….”26 In the same paragraph, nineteen lines later, “eriddence” brings us “Intentional this time: riddance applied to credence.”27 A note that the narrator could have avoided had he been more interested in clean copy than the murky unconscious. Later, “the parsonage yare*” brings us a regretful, “My first slip in a week of Sundays. My yard of yore?”28

  For exploiting notes at the bottom of the page as a place for quibbling (and in a contemporary context), Updike should get credit, of course, even in the face of his hostile remarks against the footnote. Art does not require consistency, and may despise it. Updike’s defenders undoubtedly will claim that it is his characters and not the author himself who send the head bobbing up and down the pages. Yes, but … Dostoyevsky chose spiritually tormented and morally conflicted characters because he himself was tormented and conflicted; Swann could scarcely have delighted in the madeleine had his creator disliked its taste; and does anyone seriously believe that Joseph Heller felt anything but fear and loathing when flying combat missions? No, Updike is drawn to characters who are drawn to footnotes; a fact that makes his screed against notes puzzling.*

  Updike’s own verse betrays a retrograde preference for rhyme, regular verse, and puns;* perhaps his judgment on poetic notes would have been different had he encountered them first in The Saga of Cap’n John Smith instead of in “The Waste Land.” Christopher Ward’s Saga is admittedly a parody, and a rather long one at that. Nevertheless, it hints of an even more exciting future for the footnote, for within it is one of the few existent rhymed footnotes. In the text Cap’n Smith appears naked on the poop deck of his ship.

  He takes the center of the stage.

  And holds it with a haughty glance.

  Beside him it must be confessed,

  His rival seems much over dressed.

  At the bottom of the page, Christopher Ward comments in a note:

  Good breeding is most manifest

  In people slightly underdressed.

  Indeed, did parvenus but know it

  That’s quite the easiest way to show it.29

  That more serious poets have not adopted the rhymed footnote probably has little to do with the skittishness of the tradition-bound artists such as Updike; however, if the current climate of opinion against the footnote is sustained, such experimentation is unlikely ever to be fully exploited. Poets have enough trouble finding publishers as it is; one could hardly blame them for refusing to challenge another of the publisher’s shibboleths.

  A parody, however, should not provide us with the last word on the poetic footnote; and, fortunately, we have the example of the prolific and complex and serious David Jones, son of a Welshman, casualty of World War I, and convert to Catholicism. Not one to take a lighthearted view of things, Jones’s poetry is not to be taken lightly either. T. S. Eliot himself saw to the publishing of Jones’s first major work, In Parenthesis: seinnyessit e gledyf ym penn mameu; for a later edition he supplied an introduction for the verse and placed a kind of High Anglican blessing on it. The notes for “In Parenthesis” at first may remind one of those of “The Waste Land” and, similarly, are confined to the back of the book. However much Eliot may have inspired Jones or given him license to annotate, Jones’s notes soon impress by their greater number, their greater length, and their greater variety. The notes do become, as Eliot’s do, a grab bag of odd, scholarly references; we pull out Y Gododdin, an early Welsh epical poem, Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Milton’s “Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” the title page of Seinnyessit e gledyf, Tolstoy, also the English carol “Green Grow the Rushes-o,” the German carol “Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen,” the American music-hall song “Casey Jones,” and, with perhaps a bow to T. S. Eliot, The Golden Bough. It is difficult to imagine, however, Eliot devoting a page to a detailed map of a war zone or becoming as personal as to refer to his mother. “My mother always says in February,” Jones writes, “as a proper check to undue optimism: ‘As the light lengthens / So the cold strengthens.’”30

  It was not until 1974 in his last book, The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments, that Jones was either willing or able to channel his annotational imagination into footnotes. An experiment that mixes what I take to be prose poetry with free verse, “The Tribune’s Visitation,” provides one example that I hope clinches my argument that the footnote is a dramatic device worthy of any contemporary poet’s consideration. War fills Jones with both pity and contempt; in this verse he wanders between Roman and more recent times: “… but must I do a corporal’s nagging, must I be scold, like a second cook … Are there no lance-jacks to demonstrate standing orders?” is a prose poetry introduction to the following verse:

  Does the legate need to do

  what he delegates?

  Must those with curial charge

  be ever prying on a swarm of vicars

  or nothing goes forward?

  Must tribunes bring gunfire to centurions or else there’s no

  Parade?31

  The poet is full of questions but so too is the reader. Jones has made us uneasy. In what era is the voice (or voices) placed, and is it anger, pity, or pride the voice(s) express? We are up in the air. A footnote at “gunfire” brings us down (literally) to earth: “This term that survived from the Regular Army and was familiar enough to soldiers of the new armies throughout the 1914-18 War, may by now be obsolete.” The First World War has soldiers of new armies! Jones, with a fist thumping on the page, is telling us war and its horror are always present tense, never past tense, never past. Gunfire may be obsolete. The word and the reality are deliberately merged here; the word is not obsolete nor will it be obsolete until the reality is obsolete. Jones’s blunt irony hits us—as the footnote intended it to—like a blunt instrument. Jones uses footnotes to multiply points of view and to gain emotional leverage. Poets are currently in doubt as how to proceed in a world in which there seems no place to stand, no lever long enough to move it; they would do worse than to go back to the brave poetry and brave annotations of David Jones. *

  7

  Toward the Virtual Footnote

  FOR DEVOTEES OF THE FOOTNOTE the new millennium deserved the fireworks and cork-popping of its start. The year 2000, despite its zeros, was not for nothing. A footnote made the front page of a major American newspaper. BUSH WINS ELECTION[*] was the Boston Globe banner headline for Monday, November 27, 2000. The asterisk led the eye to the subheadline [*]PENDING GORE CHALLENGES, POSSIBLE SUPREME COURT RULING.1 A more thorough search of newspaper files than this writer has conducted might reveal an earlier headline asterisk, but this is for now a footnote first.

  The parent company of the Globe, The New York Times, has carried on into the new millennium its habit of occasionally employing “footnotes” in the “Style” section of its Sunday magazine. Thus, the day before the Globe breakthrough, one could find in a “Style” caption nestled between two photos: “Linda McCartney [1,2] self-portrait and her picture of Mary, when she was a toddler.”2 The [1,2] references have to be tracked down across nine pages of ads and text until they show up later under the title “Footnotes” (sic). But the search rewards the dogged reader with notes of substance. [1] mutates into [1a] in the short time it takes to flip the pages; it allows us to view a picture of the grown-up Mary, and to learn she carries on her mother’s camera-toting tradition. Mary, we are told, has an upcoming assignment to shoot a portrait series for the mag Marie Claire. A further mutation takes place (because of absentminded proofing, we assume) and so we next have [1] becoming [7(b)]. An “updated Leica R8” is shown “available at B&H photo, 420 Ninth Avenue ($1,895, body only).”23 No price is offered for those who might want the Leica’s lens and moving parts as well as its body.

  So determined to encourage annotation are the Times editors that they also have been putting out
special magazine editions that contain dozens of “footnotes.” The contents page of their “Spring HomeDesign [sic],” for example, lists much that might be expected: “They Did Windows,” “Candyland,” “Ode a la Mode,” and so forth. Suddenly, in the midst of all of that, there it is: “Footnotes” with a byline, no less: Pilar Viladas. Two titles later is: “Footnotes” by Stephen Mihm.4 Flip past an ad featuring a spacious black-and-white kitchen to where the contents page continues and you find “Footnotes” by Marjorie Rosen.5

  Three writers have been given a chance to try their hand at annotating! Turn to page 78 and Ms. Viladas’s note tells us (among other things) that the photographers of the story were given “a breakfast on the terrace, with fresh guava juice.” Keep going to page 100 and Ms. Rosen tells us that Eleanor Lambert, “the doyenne of fashion publicists,” drinks for breakfast hot water and lemon juice from “a glass with two dice in its fake bottom … and orange juice in a larger Venetian glass.” Back on page 92 Mr. Mihm’s notes, featuring lamps ranging in price from $300 to $1,350,6 are tasteful, though they fail to mention breakfast.

  Admittedly, these notes refer to little squibs of photographs within the “footnote” page instead of going back directly to original story, but these “footnotes” as well as the previous notes clearly are The Times’ way of preparing public opinion for more extensive and genuine footnotes.* When Martin Amis’s heavily footnoted memoir, Experience: A Memoir, recently appeared, The Times greeted it with an enthusiastic review on the front page of its “The Arts” section. The reviewer begins by lauding Amis for his “dazzling, chameleonesque command of language” and “his willingness to tackle large issues” and for “his unforgiving, heat-seeking eye”; but by the third sentence she has a chance to applaud the book as an “entertainingly footnoted volume,”7 a placement in the hierarchy of praise that must hearten all literary annotators.