The Devil's Details

by Chuck Zerby

  31. David Jones, The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), p. 48.

  Chapter 7

  1. The Boston Globe, Monday, 27 November 2000, p. 1. Some readers may question whether a note at the bottom of a headline instead of at the bottom of the page constitutes a proper footnote; however, this writer believes a certain latitude should be given the trailblazing editors at the Globe.

  2. The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, 26 November 2000, p. 131. See also the “footnotes” in “Men’s Fashions of the Times,” The New York Times Magazine, Part 2, fall 2000.

  3. The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, 26 November 2000, p. 140.

  4. The New York Times Magazine, Part 2, spring 2000, p. 16.

  5. Ibid., p. 20. For the record, Ms. Viladas is also listed as editor of the magazine; I am curious as to whether she originated the Times footnote page, and how much (if any) encouragement she received.

  6. Ibid., in order of appearance above, pp. 78, 100, 92. No art form is without its awkward moments, and this is one for the footnote. The page numbers all appear in the paragraph above; nevertheless, some readers intending to check sources may expect to find the numbers in a citation. This writer prefers to risk the slight annoyance of redundancy rather than take the larger risk of inadequate annotation.

  7. Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times: For Writers, Father and Son, Out of Conflict Grew Love,” The New York Times, Tuesday, 23 May 2000, p. B1.

  8. Martin Amis, Experience (New York: Hyperion, 2000), p. 245.

  9. Ibid., note.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Ibid., p.246, continuation of note.

  12. Ibid., p. 246.

  13. Ibid., note, marked by an asterisk and directly below the continuation of the previous page’s note; it is easy to overlook, which may be intended by Martin Amis as part of the joke.

  14. Ibid., p. 7.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Martin Amis, Experience (New York: Hyperion, 2000), p. 62.

  17. Ibid., p. 195.

  18. John Lanchester, “Be Interesting!” London Review of Books, 6 July 2000, p. 6.

  19. Ibid., note.

  20. Ibid., note to first note. Of course, it might be the LRB editors’ doing; they may have seized the chance for a free plug for an upcoming is sue. Money talks, and even The New Yorker, which normally keeps its page bottoms immaculate, may listen: An ad in a recent issue asserts: “Money management is what we do.” And a large, easily visible, red asterisk floats above the period; it leads the reader to the next page and below a photo of a white-haired Odysseus type hugging a surfboard. The note says: “Technically speaking, we can also make dreams come true.” See The New Yorker, 12 February 2001, pp. 14, 15.

  21. Ibid., first note.

  22. Ibid., note.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Jenny Lyn Bader, “Forget Footnotes. Hyperlink.” The New York Times, Sunday, 16 July 2000, Section 4 (Week in Review), p. 1.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Joseph Conrad (no date), Heart of Darkness [Originally published in Blackwood Magazine in 1899, February, March, and April. Subsequently published in 1902 in Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories.] Available: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/csicseri.com [10 February 2001]. For the most part the annotation’s format follows the suggestions of Xia Li and Nancy B. Crane, Electronic Styles: A Handbook for Citing Electronic Information (Medford, N.J.: Information Today, 1996). Nothing shows the growth and seriousness of the hyperlink challenge to the footnote more clearly than a comparison of this recent edition of Electronic Styles with an earlier one. A 1993 edition ran to 65 pages; the 1996 edition needed 213 pages.

  28.Philip M. Davis and Suzanne Cohen, “The Effect of the Web on Undergraduate Citation Behavior 1996-1999,” available: http://www.people.cornell. edu/pages/pmd8.com/ [14 February 2001]. The article should also be available in vol. 52, no. 4 (15 February 2001), of The Journal of the American Association for Information Science. This author wishes to thank Nancy Thompson for bringing this article to his attention as well as for her many other helpful e-mailed suggestions—and yes, this author, for all his worries about the Web, appreciates its convenience and speed.

  29. Personal communication (e-mail) to this writer, available only on nonvellum paper insecurely filed.

  30. Personal communication (e-mail) to this writer.

  Note: Readers desiring a bibliography to this work should look for my next book, A History of Bibliographies.

  * An adequate history will be a humanistic history: one that does not restrict the footnote to the bare-bones function of referring the reader to cited material. Such a restricted view of the footnote is as inadequate as would be the notion that an X ray of the human body reveals the full import of the human being.

  * Academics and workmen may lack understanding of each other. Every so often I have heard one faculty member complain to another about the amount of time custodians or electricians or security guards or—less often—student dishwashers spend just standing around “doing nothing,” this while standing around waiting for a meeting or a class or lunch to start. It seems to escape them that work requiring hands and backs also can require the planning and coordinated efforts that necessitate standing around and talking. Workmen, of course, often show a reciprocal disdain for academics. Talking to students, lecturing, writing and reading, staring off into space in search of an idea do not look like “real work.” I sometimes tell them that a study once compared occupations and calorie expenditure; writers proved to have used up more calories per hour than longshoremen. Disbelief is the usual reaction and, because I cannot “access” the study, the disbelief usually remains. Both sides misunderstand each other’s work, I think, but as academics write much more about workers than workers write about academics, the former lend permanence to their errors and bear a heavier responsibility to generalize with care. See D. F. McKenzie, “Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices,” Studies in Bibliography, vol. 22, 1969, note 17, p. 11.

  * Historians are always suspicious of the kind of “color commentary” supplied in this paragraph. Assertions that are not based on firm evidence or, at least, derived from a plausible argument are not admitted to Clio’s noisy court. And this author readily admits there is no evidence Jugge saw, smelled, or thought what is attributed to him, nor that he worried or sniffled on the day he arrived at a solution for the overcrowded margin. However, to present the invention of the footnote as if it were achieved in a disembodied mind, a vacuum, would also be a distortion. We must not let our admiration for the abstract acrobatics of brilliant minds allow us to overlook the pull, the dragging down of daily life. Thought must contend with gravity sooner or later. Einstein had to have his wisdom teeth pulled. Newton once in a while must have had a runny nose, a sore throat. Charles Dickens took long compulsive walks and hid out with a mistress. We know for a fact that Archimedes took baths. Their genius was to defy gravity, not escape it. If the particular details we have supplied Jugge hang on him like a misfitted suit, well, we mustn’t let him walk the streets naked. He must be seen to have invented the footnote with his feet on the ground and his head filled with distractions if we are to honor him properly.

  * Just as astronomers know that earlier and earlier stars will be found, we expect someday our research will be superseded by the discovery of an earlier footnote. The exploration of the bottom of early book pages should be encouraged. This author with the cooperation of Simon & Schuster is offering a modest but appropriate recognition for the first discoverer of a qualified footnote that appears in history prior to the (f), and which is used in any future edition of this book: A footnote will record the name of the discoverer, who will be given a celebratory dinner at a restaurant of his or her choice for up to one hundred dollars.

  * Young boys were usually employed for this work, but a girl was not unknown.

  * See the Oxford English Dictionary: “Tang … I. 1. A projecting p
ointed part or instrument. a. The tongue of a serpent formerly thought to be the stinging organ ….” E. Rayher assures me that type once removed from the mold cools quickly. A child’s fingers would not be burned; but the tang’s rough edge could prick a daydreaming child.

  * Tweezers were called botkins; specialized printing terminology has been avoided when possible. Annotation, not the printed book, is our subject; printers enter only because they are necessary to a full understanding of the wonder of the first footnote.

  * Sometimes the effort to contain margin notes and repress footnotes is even more obviously connected to the issue of maintaining law and order in an age of exuberance and gunpowder. A dismal treatise on the laws of Moses by John Weemes jumps to mind. Weemes should have been saved by providence for our current era, when he would have served splendidly in traffic court; he delights in minutiae and in the pounding of a gavel. A right-hand column appears in the pages of his book but is used solely for emphasis, never for amplification. No footnotes are allowed, of course. While detailing lawful ceremonies, Weemes confronts a biblical text in which “Lions, Oxen & Cherubims” appear. The cherubims make him nervous. He immediately describes an elaborate system of wings. Wings cover their faces and feet. Two wings stretch out to cover whatever is in between. The text tells us “the Lord would not have them to appeare naked ….” And the margin note echoes shrilly, “The Lord would have the Cherubims covered and not to appeare naked.” A cigar is sometimes a cigar but this kind of excess of decorum registers as almost certainly more than merely an excess of decorum. See John Weemes, An Exposition of the Lawes of Moses (no city given: J. Dawson, F. J. Bellamie, 1632), p. 36.

  * Cowley’s biographer, Thomas Sprat, betrays some annoyance with Cowley’s failure to employ his gardening skills “for Practice and Profit” but instead “presently digested it into the Form which we behold ….” The bottom line, though, is that his spying remained a secret. See Janet Todd, ed., The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 1 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), p. 443.

  * Her translation does not include those notes either because her publisher was frightened by the added expense or because her Latin was not up to it. John Dryden questioned her Latin skills. See Janet Todd, ed., The Works of Aphra Behn (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), p. 443.

  * Anyone may be tempted to extend the analysis of this ingenious “reversal of the hero’s fortune.” The tabernacle is often thought of as the “temporary abode of the soul,” a notion that Behn’s two-directional asterisk makes nicely ambiguous. The tabernacle was crucial during the Israelites’ years of wandering; Behn’s displeasure that the “brother” for whom she obviously has affection “went wandering” is evident. The attentive reader will notice that this critic has put such perhaps salacious speculations down here rather than in the “body” of the text. For uses of the word tabernacle see Stuart Berg Flexnor, editor in chief, The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 1933.

  * There is no need for flow charts if the convenience of the reader is kept firmly in mind. The present writer has used reference marks to indicate explanatory notes; he has used numerals to indicate notes that are wholly or in large part references. Thus these later can be easily skipped should the reader be uninterested in checking the author’s scholarship. Also for the convenience of the reader, ibid. is used but not op. cit. or loc. cit. A cluster of ibids is decorative and alerts the reader to a cluster of references to the same title. However, op. cit. and loc. cit. often entail a frustrating retreat back through pages already read in order to find the necessary reference.,

  *Layabouts may strike some as too harsh a term for Pope’s coterie. They did some writing certainly, and took long walks, but spent an awful lot of their time lying around Pope’s living room gossiping and joking.

  * The count was achieved in the following manner. A page was found to have 7¼ inches of usable space. Seventy-nine pages provide 572 inches of usable space. Each inch of page space can accommodate four lines of verse; the 358 lines of the poem, therefore, take 89½ inches, which was rounded to 90, leaving 482 inches for the notes. The notes in smaller print and double columns fit sixteen lines into an inch. Four hundred eighty-two inches of page space could house up to 7,712 lines of notes; this has been rounded off to account for the unused space between notes. A precise count would be of interest but seems beyond this present writer’s patience.

  * Commentators have, of course, always paid attention to the use of the footnote in The Dunciad Variorum as a satirical weapon employed against certain scholars, writers, and publishers. Peter W. Cosgrove, in 1991, is the first to properly emphasize that Pope was using the footnote against itself. “Pope’s real intent may be seen, … not as a defense of individual word but as a defense of poetry in general against textual criticism.” P. W. Cosgrove, “Undermining the Text: Edward Gibbon, Alexander Pope, and the Anti-Authenticating Footnote in Annotation and Its Texts,” ed. Stephen A. Barney (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 138. See also Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 111-8.

  * Bentley, it has to be said, deserved some firm correction, if not Pope’s bullying. Milton has Adam and Eve leave Eden with some reluctance. “They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.” Bentley, a stickler for facts, reminds us that Eve “had professed her Readiness and Alacrity for the journey …” and that “there were only the two of them in Eden, and they were not more solitary now than they had been before.” But facts are not drama, and Bentley’s revision of Milton’s verse loses something:

  Then hand in hand with social steps their way

  Through Eden took, with Heav’ly Comfort Cheer’d.

  See R. J. White, Dr. Bentley: A Study in Academic Scarlet (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965), p. 216.

  * For the sake of comparison: A two-volume edition of the nineteenth-century heavyweight War and Peace weighs three and a half pounds; a Remembrance of Things Past edition is four pounds. The latter, opened, is a perfectly adequate eight by twelve inches.

  * The story of Bardot’s disrobing is part of moviemaking lore. Apparently Goddard’s financial backers insisted on it; they undoubtedly had in mind the American market of young, intellectual males.

  * Contemporary writers might well envy the seventeenth century’s orthographic independence; to separate everybody into every body in this context supplies a sensuous reverberation that has to be appreciated by the most intellectualized reader (or film critic).

  * The source of this quotation eludes me. To ask readers for help is one of the best uses to which a footnote can be put. Ignorance is as much a part of scholarship as knowledge; both should be acknowledged.

  * Gibbon wasn’t about to let his bête noire rest with just one sour note. Several volumes later, immersed in the Crusades when so much un Christian behavior was exercised on behalf of Christian doctrine, a note turns the reader to Shakespeare’s Henry IV for a more genuine and appropriate expression of love for country and mayhem. Fair enough, until he manufactures an excuse to refer to Dr. Johnson’s edition of the play, and to Dr. Johnson’s own notes, “the workings of a bigoted though vigorous mind, greedy of every pretense to hate and persecute those who dissent from his creed.”

  * Hume would have labeled this digression “commentary” and hustled it to the back of the book. But digression, as Bayle demonstrated conclusively, is as much a part of the thought process as a metaphor or a well-chosen example or, for that matter, logic’s excluded middle, which Hume was so inordinately fond of.

  * That the footnote is not just an artifact of scholarship nor its survival the concern of the scholar is a major theme of this book. Humanism and the layperson have as much at stake as scholars in the struggle to keep the footnote alive.

  * Poor Tom Jones has had questions raised about his picaresque status—he seems always to have his status questioned.
Common sense, however, should convince us that a hero who travels as much as Tom, and who suffers as many pratfalls as Tom, is picaresque. For a contrary view and fuller discussion of this, see Stuart Miller, The Picaresque Novel (Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1967), pp. 131-5.

  * “Indeed, [Abelard] communicates a singing quality to topics ordinarily unmelodious. Few other Scholastics remain as readable and alive”: Paul Edwards, editor in chief, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York and London: Macmillan and The Free Press, Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1967), vol. 1, p. 6.

  * Ranke after a time became a firm supporter of the footnote; but his policies, if not his intentions, undid the footnote, as we will see. His subconscious must take some of the blame.

  * A single citation could have been inserted at the end of this paragraph; some writers, pulling Ranke, would have done just that. However, making the author work rather than the reader is a firm principle of this book even at the risk of unnecessary duplication. Judgment is required, of course; for example, no citation was given for the single word formidable, an elision some might regret.