The Devil's Details (11 page)

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.

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

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:

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.
*

F
OR 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.

And in fact
Experience
is just the book with which to start off the new millennium; its notes are as numerous as they are artful and dramatic. A simple example: Amis, well into the book, takes a look at the correspondence that passed between his aging father and the poet Philip Larkin and assesses their relationship. Kingsley Amis, novelist, and Larkin, poet, had a long, complicated, and competitive friendship. “But what stays with you is the sense that the two of them … are at last transparent to each other. They are finally equal, equal before God and a godless death, and also physically and—for the first time—sexually equal.”
⁸
An asterisk takes us to a note that begins: “In all likelihood this question deserves more attention than the longish footnote I am going to give it.”
⁹
The “longish” note continues for another 323 words, not one of which is wasted. We learn of Nabokov's division of all people between those who sleep well, “complacent dopes,” and those who are “great twisting insomniacs (like himself)….”
¹⁰
We hear a character in one of the many novels of Martin Amis's father divide humanity into the attractive and the unattractive; and we are presented with a Larkin unpublished poem that rings changes on the theme of “good-looking girls”; and then, and only then, we come to
The Nation, The National Review
, has failed to turn up any similar sputters; it is to be hoped that the liberal reputations of
The Times
and the
Globe
, and the cantankerous reputation of Kingsley Amis's wintry remark: “I am getting ugly now because I am getting old.”
¹¹

But Martin Amis is not done yet; his annotating art is sly. On the next page he quotes a letter of his; the name Sally
¹²
appears in it unadorned except for an asterisk. Below we find simply: “My sister,”
¹³
the shortest note of the book, and perhaps an unnecessary one—the information could have been supplied within the text, certainly. But a neat comic effect results in the short note coming after the long and winding road of the previous one, and after a long note that complains it may be in fact too short. In the silent movies a baggy-pants man or a beautifully polished grand piano may bump down a long, twisting staircase and come banging to a stop at the bottom step. A pause. Dead quiet. The pause stretches out. Then the man or piano bumps to the floor with one last, tired bang.

Amis is a self-conscious practitioner of his craft. He worries that life is “amorphous” and he admits to a “novelist's addiction to seeing parallels and making connections.” That and “an inner urgency,” he hopes, will allow
Experience
to “give a clear view of the geography of a writer's mind.”
¹⁴
Raw experience pulled into the mind is to be given shape; and what is revealed is the shape of the mind in the way molten ore reveals the mold into which it is poured. But Amis is not foolish enough to let it rest at that; he alludes parenthetically to his need also for footnotes “to preserve the collateral thought.”
¹⁵
Bayle and a thousand other earlier annotators should be imagined in the heavens above singing hosannas when they hear those words: collateral thought, exactly.

The mind may give shape to experience but it is not a mold, it is not neat, it never settles down; it disorganizes as it organizes; and, having blazed one trail, it instantly takes off in another direction. Its mother's milk is mixed metaphors, oxymorons, red herrings, the bumping into hornets' nests, and the stepping on toes. Footnotes can represent that trait of mind; in that sense footnotes represent organized confusion.
*

To appreciate fully the art of Martin Amis's annotation, we must force ourselves to look squarely at a sad and fearsome event in Amis's life. A cousin of Martin's, Lucy Partington, to whom he was very close and who was a remarkable woman by all accounts, disappeared when she was a young woman. For some twenty years her fate was unknown; then police discovered she had been grotesquely murdered by a serial killer, “… one of the most prolific … in British history ….”
¹⁶
Amis was deeply affected by the disappearance and the murder, and now is compelled to write about it. But how? How do you bring attention to the cousin you loved and the fearful facts of her death without ceding to the killer a tabloid prominence that overshadows the cousin and the grief? (Don't most news accounts of murder end up paying more attention to the grisly details of the murder scene than to the life of the victim and even more attention to the murderer than to the victim?)

Amis's moral and artistic dilemmas are solved by footnotes. Lucy Partington's disappearance is brought up early in the book; the killer's name, Frederick West, is briefly mentioned. From then on, as Lucy reappears in the text in many situations and under many lights, poignant and witty, counselor and tease, her killer for the next 120 pages or so is mentioned only in footnotes and only as a killer. And then, and only then, a chapter opens with: “1995 did not stand on ceremony. It announced itself, on the first of January, with the prison suicide of Frederick West. (And in death, as it were, he drifts up from the footnotes and into the text.) …”
¹⁷
(The ellipsis is Amis's as his voice trails off.) From then on the killer again is allowed a place only in footnotes.

The clear usefulness of footnotes that Amis has demonstrated has stimulated reviewers other than those in
The New York Times
to make special notice of them. In the
London Review of Books
John Lanchester, a novelist himself, mentions “… the antic parade of footnotes ….” found in
Experience
.
¹⁸
And sure enough, Lanchester employs his own asterisk; his note below begins, perhaps a trifle optimistically: “There are a lot of footnotes about at the moment, and I thought I'd hop onto the bandwagon before it gathered any more speed.”
¹⁹
And sure enough again: The footnote's subsequent mention of Dave Eggers's memoir,
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
, brings us a second asterisk and a simple note below the first one: “To be reviewed in a forthcoming issue of LRB.”
²⁰
No footnote devotee would want to shove anyone off any bandwagon, but Lanchester's enthusiasm should be greeted with some skepticism.

The “antic” possibilities of footnotes have blinded John Lanchester to their wide-ranging, serious, dramatic capabilities. “The footnotes in Amis's book,” he writes, “are often short diversions into memory or literary criticism away from the main emotional axis.”
²¹
No, this is to entirely miss the painful story of Lucy Partington and the importance of footnotes to its proper telling. Lanchester continues in his note with a mini review of
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
in which—he claims—footnotes are used “to deflect, or escape from, the strength of [the narrator's] own feelings; which isn't a zillion miles away from Amis's use of them.”
²²
The hyperbole of “zillion” suggests an unease on Lanchester's part, a need to shout when a quiet statement would do; and his unease is justified. Not only has he mischaracterized Amis's annotation, but he has overstated Eggers's use of them as well; a careful examination of
A Heartbreaking Work
has turned up only two footnotes, one of which is marginal at best.
*
Two footnotes! The “footnotes” of Lanchester's review barely earns its plural designation.

Lanchester includes footnotes among the “huge repertoire of Post-Modern tricks”
²³
used by Eggers; and certainly the Postmodern sensibility delights in double narrative, second thoughts, multivoice effects, palimpsests, distancing devices, disjunction, irony, and the jokey, all of which the footnote certainly facilitates. This tendency of the Postmodern to do the double take becomes “hyper” when it hooks up to computers with their frightening power to redo and undo, pop in, pop out, and pop up, and digress and wander. As the footnote reconfigures itself for the digital world, opportunity and danger are waiting side by side for it.

FORGET FOOTNOTES. HYPERLINK
.
²⁴
is the headline of the ever-alert
New York Times
; a subheading adds:
OLD MEDIA, MEET NEW MEDIA
. The alarming headline is somewhat misleading, though the reader is quite accurately informed that some publishers had been scrubbing their books clean of “messy” footnotes. “Annotation was out; breezy uninterrupted prose was in.”
²⁵
The reader has also been accurately informed that, after this cleansing had gone on for some time, a Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web. And because of that strange invention, Ms. Bader thinks she can say: “Soon the missing footnotes would have a home.” Now that the “old media” has met the “new media,” the footnote, when evicted from the book by publishers and lazy scholars, is not to be out in the street. No, it is to move into a nice tract house on the Web; it is to spend the new millennium sitting in an armchair in front of a warm fireplace, children's voices drifting down from upstairs, and reading a newspaper—
The New York Times
, presumably. The years ahead for the footnote are going to be the 1950s—but wired.