The Devil's Details

by Chuck Zerby

  38. Patricia B. Craddock, Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian, 1772-1794 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 8.

  39. Ibid., p. 93.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Quoted in Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 103. Grafton practices a kind of truncated footnoting that reflects, I think, the scholarly bias of his view of footnotes. His citation reads: “The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford, 1932), II, 313.”

  42. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Methuen, 1896), vol. I, p. 94. From the many editions of the History, I have chosen the one edited by J. B. Bury. It is a classic edition, of course, but its compact format, into which so many footnotes and marginality are given just enough but not more space than absolutely necessary, may alert the reader unfamiliar with Gibbon as to exactly how magnificent was his accomplishment. Not only did he master the voluminous and unreliable sources of Rome’s history, not only did he manage to lay down parallel after parallel sentence with scarcely a dull paragraph—or at least without an entirely dull page—but he did it at a time when London lacked public libraries and when publishers lacked the resources that those of today often enjoy, and who were always tempted to make the page do more than it comfortably can do. One is hard pressed to choose Gibbon’s primary virtue: his resilience, his reliability, or his readability.

  43. Ibid., note 35.

  44. Ibid., note 36.

  45. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Methuen, 1896), vol. IV, p. 153, note 151.

  46.Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Methuen, 1896), vol. VII, p. 281.

  47. Ibid., p. 256.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Patricia B. Craddock, Young Edward Gibbon: Gentleman of Letters (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 107.

  50. Ibid., p. 110.

  51. No love affair, however brief and however young the participants, can ever be summarized in a few lines. For a more complete, complicated, and painful account of this affair, see Patricia B. Craddock, Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian, 1772-1794 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), especially pp. 136-7, 156-7, 172-4.

  52. See Patricia B. Craddock, Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian, 1772-1794 (Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 84. Craddock is no better served by her publisher in this second volume of her luminous (to borrow the adjective she applies to Gibbon’s work) biography than she was in her first volume. Note 10 in her text sends us to the back of the book where, under the general heading of “Notes to Pages 80-91,” we find “10. Gibbon 1814, 2:177.” To learn more we must proceed even further into the appendices’ dungeon. Under the general heading of “Works Frequently Cited” and specifically under the entry for Gibbon, Edward, we are informed of a “---, 1814, The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon. Edited by John, Lord Sheffield. 5 vols. London: Cadell & Davies.” The letter from Suzanne Necker is presumably part of that collection, but one feels less a scholar checking a source than a child sent out on a scavenger hunt by a baby-sitter who is particularly imaginative and resourceful.

  53. Patricia B. Craddock, Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian, 1772-1794 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 84.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Ibid., but be alert. The baby-sitting publisher’s scavenger hunt leads us to a slightly different reference: Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works, 1814, 2:179, 178.

  56. Ibid., note 12.

  57. Ibid., p. 84.

  Chapter 5

  1. Peter Gay, Style in History (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 74.

  2. L. von Ranke, Idas Brifwerk, ed. W. P. Fuchs (Hamburg, 1949), p. 194. Quoted in Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 36. (Grafton’s annotation is not as fulsome as one might wish, as I indicated before.) With Ranke, Grafton gives another one of those succinct tour-de-force descriptions of a life, work, and personality that appear throughout The Footnote. I have borrowed a great number of his facts and antidotes; our interpretations of them differ dramatically: For the most part, he approves of what happened to the footnote in Ranke’s hands; I entirely disapprove.

  3. G. Stanton Ford, “A Ranke Letter,” Journal of Modern History 32 (1960), p. 143. Quoted in Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 64. Many writers, and particularly many scholarly writers, might not feel the need to repeat the Grafton citation in full even though the reader may have to hunt a bit for it. That parsimony is a mistake. Notes should be reader-friendly; a book should not emulate a supermarket in which the bread is at one end of the store and another common purchase—say, cheese—is at the other. A reader is not a customer who may buy on impulse if required to wander the store (or story). When in doubt, footnote fully.

  4. For a full account of this episode, see Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 40-4.

  5. Ranke, Tagebucher, p. 233. Quoted in Peter Gay, Style in History (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 68. Gay’s citations can be as terse as Grafton’s.

  6. Peter Gay, Style in History (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 64.

  7. Quoted in Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 66. In one library copy of The Footnote I found scrawled in pencil after “learned ladies” a sarcastic “Thanks a lot.” The writer, presumably a woman, was quite justified. Though the long-dead Leo will not benefit, other readers, myself included, can only benefit from the highlighting of such egregious sexism. In a wonderfully digressive footnote, Grafton goes from Ranke’s note-taking to the Renaissance historian Jacob Burckhardt’s note-taking to the suggestion: “Next to the unwritten history of annotation that haunts historical libraries’ walls is the ghost of the even thicker history of note-taking ….” (p. 46, note 19). Such a history ought to pay some attention to the note making of anonymous readers who in a more modern age imitate the commentary found scrawled on medieval manuscripts.

  8. L. Ranke, “Replik,” Intelligenzblatt der Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung 131 (May 1828), cols. 193-199, at 195-196 n. Quoted in Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 66. English translation by Grafton.

  9. Leopold von Ranke, History of the Popes: Their Church and State, vol. 3, trans. E. Fowler (New York and London: The Co-Operative Publication Society, 1901), p. 220.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Ibid., p. 220.

  12. Ibid., p. 221.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Leopold von Ranke, History of the Popes: Their Church and State, vol. 2, trans. E. Fowler (New York and London: The Co-Operative Publication Society, 1901), p. 265.

  15. Ibid.

  16. See the editor’s forward to Leopold von Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History, ed. Georg G. Iggers and Konrad von Moltke (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), p. vii. Note also Grafton’s comment “… Ranke became the academic historian par excellence ….” Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 34.

  17. Peter [sic] Bayle, The Dictionary, Historical and Critical (London: printed for J. J. and P. Knapton; D. Midwinter; J. Brotherton; A. Bettesworth, C. Hitch … [and 25 others], 1734-1738), 2nd ed., vol. 2, p. 606, note [C]. Let me remind the reader that S’s have been modernized.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Leopold von Ranke, The Oldest Historical Group of Nations and the Greeks, ed. G. W. Prothero (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1985), p. 44. This, of course, is a translation, the only volume of three to be published in English.

  20. Ibid., note.

  21. Wolfgang Menzel, The History of Germany, from the Earliest Period to the Present
Time, vol. 3, trans. Mrs. George Horrocks (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), p. 62.

  22. Ibid., note, p. 62.

  23. John S. C. Abbott, The History of the Civil War in America; Comprising a Full and Impartial Account of the Origin and Progress of the Rebellion of the Various Naval and Military Engagements, of the Heroic Deeds Performed By Armies and Individuals, and of Touching Scenes in the Field, the Camp, the Hospital, and the Cabin, vol. 2 (New York: Ledyard Bill, 1866), note, p. 414, italics in the original. The original source is given as simply: “What We Did at Gettysburg, p. 14.” The story is introduced in a way that might make contemporary readers long for that female reader of Grafton’s work who did not let pass a sexist remark. (From a cited source, not Grafton’s own words, I should remind the reader.) See above, note 7, page 92.

  24. Peter Gay, Style in History (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 97-8. This present writer confesses to a certain fondness for Macaulay that might make it too easy to forgive his faults. In my first year of college, I had an English teacher who was devoted to the historian. He spent two terms drumming into our heads the beauty of the balanced sentence. I turned out to have some facility at that narrow part of styling: If I mentioned black birds in the snow, I quickly revised the phrase to “black birds in the white snow.” If I gave three examples of poor behavior of kings of England, I would follow it with three, not two or four, examples of good behavior. The A that teacher delightedly gave me was one of the few I received at that institution, perhaps the reason I am reluctant to accept that Macaulay is “verbose” or “irritating.”

  25. R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Victorian Radical (1960), p. 11. Quoted in Peter Gay, Style in History (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 127. (Gay is responsible for the abbreviated citation to Webb.)

  26. The Works of Lord Macaulay: History of England, vol. VI (London: Longman’s, Green, 1898), p. 89, note 2.

  27. Richard F. Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1956), p. 17.

  28. Ibid., p. 112.

  29. Ibid., p. 113.

  30. Ibid., p. xiv. This characterization of Mohammed is by Bayard Taylor, who, caught up in the adventure, is harshly critical of someone threatening the hero; Burton himself is more judicious.

  31. Ibid, pp. 112-3, note s.

  32. Ibid., p. 380.

  33. Ibid., note.

  34. E. H. Shackleton, The Heart of the Antarctic; Being the Story of the British Antarctic Expedition 1907-1909 (London: William Heinemann, 1909), p. 237.

  35. Ibid., p. 238.

  36. Ibid., note.

  37. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1981), p. 552. This edition is being used for reasons that soon will become obvious.

  38. Ibid., p. 209-10, note.

  39. See ibid., p. 178, both text and two notes.

  40. Ibid., p. 22. She had some excuse for wishing to avoid controversy; The Scottish Chiefs along with works by Madame de Staël were banned in France at one time. See ibid., p. 23.

  41. Elizabeth Bisland, The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 34, note 1.

  42. Harold William Thompson, A Scottish Man of Feeling: Some Account of Henry Mackenzie, Esq. of Edinburgh and of the Golden Age of Burns and Scott (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1931).

  43. Harold Murdock, Bunker Hill: Notes and Queries on a Famous Battle (Boston: Mifflin, 1927), p. 61, second note. Murdock’s numerous footnotes deserve consideration by anyone interested in the art of annotation; unfortunately, the edition to which I refer (and the only one as far as I am aware) was limited to 535 copies. No evidence has appeared to suggest that the footnotes were responsible for the publisher’s parsimony, though it is natural to harbor suspicions.

  44. Frederic Rowland Marvin, The Last Words (Real and Traditional) of Distinguished Men and Women, Collected from Various Sources (New York, Chicago, and Toronto: Fleming H. Revell, 1902), p. 1.

  45. Ibid., p. 318.

  46. Ibid., p. 180.

  47. Ibid., note 1.

  48. Ibid.

  49. See Edward Heron-Allen, “Footnotes,” Notes and Queries, 26 October 1940, p. 300.

  50. Ibid., pp. 301-2.

  51. Hilaire Belloc, On (New York: George H. Doran, 1923).

  52. Hilaire Belloc, On (New York: George H. Doran, 1923), p. 45.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Ibid., p. 43.

  55. Ibid., p. 51.

  56. E. B. White and Katharine S. White, eds., A Subtreasury of American Humor (New York: Coward-McCann, 1941), p. 265.

  57. Ibid., note 15. This writer is aware the previous note might well have been combined with this one; the temptation to show the convenience of the ibid. was too great, along with the demonstration that not much time is lost in moving the eyes from the text to the page bottom and back.

  58. Ibid., (within text).

  59. James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 260, text and note 1. The poetic and footnote experimentation of Finnegan’s Wake has never been successfully imitated; it has not been without influence, however. Lawrence Norfolk’s recent novel In the Shape of a Boar has footnotes that echo distantly (to this ear) some of Joyce’s alchemy. Take this example, in which Norfolk transforms the ordinary stuff of his research into prose poetry: A pre-Homeric hero in the text muses about the “early drop” of apples. A footnote below begins, “Summer, even late summer, is not autumn. An apple is not a quince ….” That the note continues on with a sober, scholarly justification of those introductory sentences does not diminish our pleasure in their initial, strange beauty. See Lawrence Norfolk, In the Shape of a Boar (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), p. 23, note 88. (The text of In the Shape of a Boar, incidentally, has a double narrative: One story set in ancient Greece is followed by another set in the last months of the Second World War. Footnotes come frequently at first and then die out as we leave Greece—the accusatory implication being that we are more familiar with the Nazis of Germany than with the heroes of Greece.)

  60. Available: http://www.britannica.com [26 February 2001].

  61. S. S. Van Dine, The Benson Murder Case: A Philo Vance Story (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), p. 112, note.

  Chapter 6

  1. John Updike, “Notes,” The New Yorker, 26 January 1957, p. 28.

  2. Ibid., p. 29.

  3. John Updike, “Notes,” The New Yorker, 26 January 1957, p. 28.

  4. Ibid.

  5. George Crabbe, The Works of The Rev. George Crabbe, vol. II (London: John Murray, 1823), note 2, p. 17.

  6. Ibid., note 1, p. 89.

  7. George Crabbe, The Works of The Rev. George Crabbe, vol. III (London: John Murray, 1823), p. 76.

  8. Ibid.

  9. These details of Crabbe’s life, and the ones that follow, have been lifted (as in shoplifted, perhaps) from a consistently amusing thumbnail sketch of him by Michael Schmidt. See Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), pp. 340-5.

  10. Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 340.

  11. Quoted in ibid.

  12. George Crabbe, The Works of The Rev. George Crabbe, vol. III (London: John Murray, 1823), p. 197.

  13. Ibid., p. 201.

  14. Ibid., p. 202.

  15. Ibid., p. 201.

  16. Quoted in Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 340.

  17. Marianne Moore, The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan, Viking Press, 1958), p. 262.

  18. John Updike, “Notes,” The New Yorker, 26 January 1957, p. 27.

  19. See Marianne Moore, The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan, Viking Press, 1958), p. 284.

  20. See Marianne Moore, The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan, Viking Press, 1958), p. 162.

  21. John Updike, Museums and Women and Other Stories (Ne
w York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 159.

  22. John Updike, Roger’s Version (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), p. 3.

  23. Ibid., p. 157.

  24. Ibid., p. 169. Nor is the plot furthered by a later footnote of twelve lines of sprawling Latin in small print. A still later note simply confirms what is already abundantly clear: The narrator’s mind is hospitable to bawdy thoughts in two languages. See ibid., pp. 175-6 and 190.

  25. John Updike, A Month of Sundays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 15.

  26. Ibid., p. 5.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Ibid., p. 180. See also pp. 14, 117, 180, and 201.

  29. Christopher Ward, The Saga of Cap’n John Smith: Being an account of His Service in the Warre in Hungaria with the Turks; his Single Combats with three Turkish Champions, wherein he was victorious, and how he was taken Prisoner by the Turks and Sold for a Slave and of his Escape therefrom. Also his Expedition into Virginia and his Adventures there among the Savages; being in Peril of his life, but saved by an Indian Princess. Furthermore his Observations in New England (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), p. 24.

  30. See David Jones, In Parenthesis: seinnyessit e gledf ym penn mameu (New York: Chilmark Press, 1961), p. 191, note 4; p. 195, note 15; p. 193, note 5; p. 191, note 1; p. 196, note 2; p. 203, note 11; p. 205, note 17 (for two of the references); p. 204, note 15; p. 192; and p. 194, note 12.