The Devil's Details (9 page)

Not much later, in the United States, another historian, John S. C. Abbott, also used footnotes to good advantage. The Civil War had ended just two years before when Abbott managed to put out a history of it, a history whose pages are filled with asterisks, daggers, and double daggers. The war is covered briskly, and soon the Blue and the Gray arrive at Gettysburg, the Union digs in, Joshua Chamberlain, the dour professor, and his Maine brigade hold on to Little Round Top, the flamboyant Pickett and his division make their famous charge, and then there are the dead to be buried and the wounded to be tended. Abbott calculates that the scene shocks and depresses us. Perhaps we will turn away,
†
so he uses a footnote to dispel some of the gloom while keeping us “at war.” A “red-cheeked, strong country girl” was asked if she was “‘… frightened when the shells began flying?'” “‘Well, no,' she said, ‘you see we was all a-baking bread round here … and had our dough a-rising … I couldn't leave my bread.'” An officer tells her to go to the cellar but: “‘I told him I
could not
leave my bread.'”
²³

In England, too, historians carried on the Gibbon annotating tradition; Lord Macaulay leaps to mind. Not a very sensible choice, many would immediately say, for Macaulay's reputation is tarnished; in fact, one entertaining essay on the historian begins with a list of great writers who could not stand the man: Thomas Carlyle, Walter Bagehot, Matthew Arnold, Lord Morley, Sir Leslie Stephen, Sir Charles Firth. A list of condemning adjectives follows:
verbose, artificial, overemphatic, wearisome
, and, finally, just plain
irritating
. “With Macaulay,” comes the conclusion of the case against him, “clarity somehow becomes a vice.”
²⁴

Macaulay
was
a talker—something also held against him, though not by me. A Sydney Smith reported a dream in which he “was chained to a rock and being talked to death by Harriet Martineau and Macaulay.”
²⁵
Good talkers, though, have a high tolerance for digression and quips, and Macaulay's notes delight us with both. In
History of England
he lets himself go on a bit too long about the minting of money; he may have noticed some of his listeners' eyelids half closed. Abruptly a footnote clears its throat and says loudly and opinionatedly: “The first writer who notices the fact that, when good money and bad money are thrown into circulation together, the bad money drives out the good money, was Aristophanes.” A sudden change, in this case the leap from Restoration England to the great age of Greece, inevitably wakens an audience, “Aristophanes?” a drifting mind asks, and the eyes open wide. That's a trick known by any two-bit orator, but Macaulay is much more than that; he uses the newly honed attention to make an unexpected point. Aristophanes attributes his fellow citizens' preference for bad money to their bad taste, or so Macaulay claims; this allows him to say: “But, though his political economy will not bear examination, his verses are excellent ….”
²⁶
Notice the sly innuendo employed by this nineteenth-century Whig, one of England's most fervent patriots; “verses are excellent,” this at a time when the Greek classics were idolized by most college-educated Englishmen. But “excellent” puts Aristophanes in his place; the country of Shakespeare and Tennyson is not going to take a backseat to anyone while Macaulay is in charge. Is it too glib to suggest that Macaulay's genius, as this footnote demonstrates, was to combine balanced sentences with unbalanced enthusiasms?

That there were historians who offered an alternative to the restrictive annotating practices of Ranke is easy to demonstrate; we must not stop there, however. Footnotes should never be viewed only as a scholarly tool to be used by professionals.

Richard F. Burton, though a clear and entertaining storyteller, was not a professional writer by any means; he was a professional soldier, a British lieutenant stationed in Bombay. In the middle of the nineteenth century Lieutenant Burton volunteered to trek through the eastern and central regions of Arabia, at the time a “huge white blot”
²⁷
on English maps, and to sneak into “El-Medinah”
[sic]
and “Meccah”
[sic]
in disguise. A disguise requires imitation, and imitation requires—if it is to succeed as it did for Burton—close observation of habits; for Burton the footnote became a place where exquisitely detailed observations could be exhibited like exotic footwear or fragile mummies in a glass case without cluttering up the narrative adventures of the text.

Arab friends in the text sneer at his poor-looking “copper-cased watch”;
²⁸
the text takes no notice but continues on to his sextant, the ownership of which turns out to be a near disastrous mistake. Sextants would be carried only by “infidels from India,”
²⁹
a “young Meccan rogue, Mohammed,”
³⁰
insists. Readers like myself will also continue on with the narrative until we are sure Burton is safe from discovery, in this case thanks to the intervention and vigorous advocacy of an influential Arab friend. Only then will we turn back to the watch and admire the careful footnote it occasions. A watch “being an indispensable instrument for measuring distances,” Burton explains in the note, “I had it divested of gold case, and provided with a facing carefully stained and figured with Arabic numerals …. The watches worn by respectable people in El Hefaz are almost always old silver pieces, of the turnip shape, with hunting cases and an outer
etui
of thick leather ….”
³¹

The art of this kind of annotation, of adding information without interrupting the pleasure of the story, demands a finely tuned sense of timing and of narrative
pull;
the pull must be strong enough to carry the reader past the reference mark, but a pause in the story, a diminishing of excitement, must occur soon enough for the reader to remember the footnote and want to return to it.

Lieutenant Burton, the amateur writer, doesn't always get the balance right. Well into his travels, having arrived at some of the most holy places of the Moslems, at a time when the reader is conscious of the utmost peril for Burton, the lieutenant keeps his story going for the most part. Then he descends a flight of steps to a hall at the entrance of the Bab el Ziyadah. Here pilgrims must remove their slippers, “… it not being considered decorous to hold them when circumambulating the Kaabah.”
³²
We are immersed in the exotic, danger-tinged wonder of the culture, when an asterisk sends us to “An old pair of slippers is here what the ‘shocking bad hat' is at a crowded house in Europe, a self-preserver. Burckhardt [a previous European pilgrim] lost three pair. I, more fortunate or less wealthy, only one.”
³³
A nice bit of cultural translation, perhaps, a useful reminder that all countries have their thieves, but do we really want to be awakened from the nearly dreamlike foreignness in which the text has enveloped us?

Another nonprofessional, E. H. Shackleton, the legendary explorer, uses a footnote for the most extraordinary effect. His account of his 1907-1909 journey to the South Pole has almost no notes; the page bottoms are as featureless as ice fields to the unobservant. Far into the account, Shackleton describes with amazement the ability of life to survive in that harsh cold. Stones are found “covered by bright red patches, as though they had been sprinkled with blood.”
³⁴
Rotifers, microscopic animals, somehow have survived the brutal climate; the excited explorers collected some to take back home. Unfortunately, on the trip back to Australia the weather turned nearly tropical for several weeks and the valuable animals “were found to be all dead when they reached Sydney.”
³⁵
A sad business. But then one of the text's rare asterisks is encountered; its note informs us: “Since this was written, examination of the rotifers in London … has shown that they are still living.”
³⁶
The brief moment we have between the text's obit and the note's correction, that brief lowering of the head, allows us to experience the disappointment of Shackleton's crew and then their elation, an experience we would have missed had the text simply been corrected. A sophisticated annotator is at work here.

There are also attempts to make use of the footnote in the novel, attempts not entirely satisfactory in some cases. Herman Melville and his
Moby-Dick
have become so famous we forget how easily he was dismissed while living in western Massachusetts, as he did much of the time. His house, a tourist attraction (and a short drive from where I happen to live), probably receives more visitors now than it did when he still occupied it. For such a marginal writer to use footnotes in his magnum opus required courage, and we should honor him for that. But the notes disappoint; they are not the notes of a novelist but of a pedant, if a strangely entertaining pedant at times.

An example: Moby-Dick has been found; Ahab and his crew have given chase in three small boats; the whale submerges and then rises, mouth agape, to smash the boat Ahab commands. Ahab is in the water, the novel is rushing toward one of its climaxes as Moby-Dick thrusts his head up and down while revolving his body at the same time. An asterisk intervenes. “This motion,” the note unnecessarily tells us, “is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation (pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary upand down poise of the whale-lance …,”
³⁷
but the reader can be spared the remaining two dozen words; the point is made.

Melville's annotating efforts have not been a total loss, however. Much earlier in the novel is a discussion of some of the fierce habits of sperm whales; in a footnote Melville calls upon a chief mate of a ship sunk by a whale to confirm the assault was intentional. Some of what the mate has to say is affecting: “The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing …,” he says at one point, “the dismal looking wreck, and
the horrid aspect and revenge of the whale
, wholly engrossed my reflections ….”
³⁸
But this bit of emotion hardly merits calling special attention to this note; the justification is what a twentieth-century artist made of the nineteenth-century novelist. Barry Moser is the artist. His 1979 edition of
Moby-Dick
inserts one of his engravings into the footnote itself. A malevolent black shape thrusts across the page and stoves in a ship; the ship is pressed hard against the illustration's frame, its hull compressing, its sails collapsing: a wonderful picture that should encourage other adventuresome artists to seek out footnotes as galleries for the visual arts.

A much more popular novelist, Miss Jane Porter of Scotland, lost her nerve employing footnotes. Her
The Scottish Chiefs: A Romance
, which enjoyed for a time an international readership,
*
has some tentative notes. Sir William Wallace knights a follower and a note informs us that it takes three “strokes” of the sword to accomplish this. The young man gets up with “all the roses of his springing fame glowing in his countenance ….” and almost immediately a note informs us a new knight received a sword, spurs, and a girdle.
³⁹
Other footnotes are similar: terse, matter-of-fact, undramatic. An introduction suggests the reason for her timidity. She intended to use many more notes in order to assure us of the authenticity of the historical event occurring in her novel; but that would have required so many footnotes as to “swell each volume beyond its proper size.”
⁴⁰

It rankles, this association of footnotes with scientific scholarship, and the tendency to restrict notes to mere citation that Ranke did so much to foster. As early as the 1850s it already had disarmed a popular novelist.

Fortunately, writers of other genres were not as easily intimidated. Some still used the footnote as a safe place for controversial material—apparently under the assumption that censorious types would assume notes simply cited sources or engaged in other unexceptional behavior. A biographer of Lafcadio Hearn put into a note reminiscences by a cousin that might have drawn clerical censure. The cousin recalls visiting Hearn at his “priest's college.” She was taken upstairs “and on the way [he bade] me bow to an image of the Virgin, which I refused to do.”
⁴¹
That refusal could have caused trouble, one supposes, but at the bottom of the page has the hope of being overlooked.

An equally telling example comes from a biographer of Henry Mackenzie, Esq. After nearly four hundred pages of Mackenzie's life and of his great admiration and fondness for Robert Burns, a footnote tells us, “Mackenzie's reverence for the memory of Burns did not prevent a playful use of the poet's name that was of doubtful taste.” It seems that Mackenzie forged a Burns poem protesting the cutting down of trees by “the old Duke of Queensberry” and read it before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, giving out the story that the poem had been found “pasted on a window shutter in an old inn or tollhouse near the scene of the desolation.”
⁴²
(Those unconversant with the Burns mythology may not understand this tale's implication: Burns would have had to be falling-down drunk to have disposed of a poem of his in this careless way; he had a keen appreciation for the worth of his work. Against all the evidence, Scots resent any hint that their great poet's verse was inspired by booze.) The forgery made it into one edition of Burn's complete works.