The Devil's Details by Chuck Zerby

Author:Chuck Zerby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2003-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

1886: Heron-Allen’s translation of M. le Capitaine d’Arpentigny appears; the footnotes are at the foot of the pages.

1923: Belloc’s dramatic attack on the footnote appears.

1928: Heron-Allen’s Barnacles in Nature and in Myth appears; its footnotes are banished by the Oxford University Press to the end of the book.

This may be rubbishy guesswork. Though Belloc graduated from Oxford, none of his considerable output was published by Oxford, nor is there evidence of any influence exerted by him on the university or the press. We also must recognize that the essays of Belloc can seldom be taken at face value. The casting of Gibbon as Satan and himself as the archangel Michael may have been facetious, a spoof of the misuse of biblical metaphor.*

While this was going on in England, a full-scale assault on the dignity of the footnote was mounted in the United States. Frank Sullivan’s “A Garland of Ibids,” the most widely read of the attacks, may have appeared first as an anonymous note in The New Yorker,* whose urbane and unscholarly humorists were apparently hoping at that time finally to gain respectability by pretending to be literary. The short piece was then given weight and a broader readership by being included in a well-publicized anthology, A Subtreasury of American Humor, put out by two other employees of The New Yorker. (Even the Peoria bookstores and its library were likely to stock this anthology.) “A Garland” purports to be a review of Van Wyck Brooks’s New England: Indian Summer, a book Sullivan purports to have read, though not much of its themes or critical judgments are evident in his piece. He purports even to have liked the book, though his “review” is one long whine about the book’s numerous footnotes. “When you get to the footnote at the bottom of the page,” he tells us at one point, as if footnotes were not by definition as well as custom at the bottom of the page, “like as not all you find is ibid.”56 One of Sullivan’s own typical, surly footnotes adds: “So is cf.”57 Such is his scattershot criticism that he cannot, as the present writer has tried to do, distinguish between the convenience of the ibid. and the inconvenience of the cf.

Strangely enough, a careful thumbing through of New England: Indian Summer, my eye glued to the bottoms of the pages, turned up neither a single ibid. nor a single cf.

Such slovenly research habits carry over into a much more important topic. Sullivan asks rhetorically, “How come writers of fiction do not need footnotes?” and adds, “Take Edna Ferber. She doesn’t use footnotes.”58 Well, yes, Mr. Sullivan, the prosaic Ferber may not use notes, but surely (we might ask rhetorically) Mr. Sullivan has read Mr. Joyce. And you can’t browse Finnegan’s Wake for long without noticing the extravaganza of footnotes and margin notes that occurs a third of the way into the novel. Instead of Ferber, let Mr. Sullivan take just one of Joyce’s footnotes—the first one to appear,

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