{"id":57633,"date":"2013-08-12T11:12:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-12T15:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=57633"},"modified":"2016-02-23T14:48:39","modified_gmt":"2016-02-23T19:48:39","slug":"footnotes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/08\/12\/footnotes\/","title":{"rendered":"Footnotes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

Like every other person in school, I hated footnotes. That was what you\u2019d be quizzed on and lose out, having watched the soaring bird while forgetting the gnat. They were a trap. Boring. Even the texts were boring (I thought then, along with my teachers being bizarre). I\u2019m not kidding about this: to avoid classroom giggling (or worse), my high school English teacher referred to Melville\u2019s book as \u201cMoby Richard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, now I\u2019m a convert. Recently, there\u2019s been a trend for writers to footnote fiction (Nicholson Baker; Tim O\u2019Brien)\u2013it\u2019s the idea of footnotes as a continuation of the text, or, sometimes, perhaps a preemptive strike, using the gnat-gems to discourage academic pedants.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve just finished reading (belatedly\u2014it was published in 2007) a book I love, The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman<\/i>, that wouldn\u2019t be the same book without the footnotes, though they are not Lerman\u2019s, but made by his former assistant, Stephen Pascal (apparently, with help from Lerman\u2019s nearest and dearest, Richard Hunter and Gray Foy), when Pascal put the book together posthumously. In a certain world (primarily New York), at a certain time (from the forties on through 1993), there was hardly anyone Leo didn\u2019t know, or know of, and that is in large part why he had the career he did, at Vogue<\/i>, Mademoiselle<\/i>, etc., which were not then the magazines they\u2019ve become. Here, I must digress and say that along with a new enthusiasm for footnotes, I also love the use of brackets. Consider this, from Lerman\u2019s book (brackets added by Pascal), about a once much-discussed writer who resists paraphrase but whose reputation always<\/i> existed in anecdote, so what the hell: \u201c[Writer Harold] Brodkey came to Diana Trilling bringing [his] forty-page manuscript written in \u2018defense\u2019 of her, against critics of her Mrs. Harris<\/i>. He insisted she read this; she retaliated with the first chapter of her memoir. Harold then told Diana that she had no taste, she lived with \u2018mail-order\u2019 furniture, and a collection of \u2018cheap\u2019 third-rate drawings and Japanese woodcuts typical of academe house furnishings. He ended, as he left, saying out of nowhere, \u2018Give my love to Leo Lerman!\u2019\u201d A footnote identifies Mrs Harris: \u201cDiana Trilling\u2019s book Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor<\/i> (1981) depicted the trial and conviction of headmistress Jean Harris for the murder of Dr. Herman Tarnover.\u201d (Alas, sic<\/i>: Tarnower.) Since I remember this incident well, I doubted the footnote would contain anything essential to continuing my riveted reading of this excellent book, so I delayed receiving further information until I reached the end of the page, though I\u2019d read the previous footnotes as I came to them. Somehow, as a group of four, the footnotes seemed to tell in microcosm little stories that echoed the expansive, main trajectory of the book: many people, almost all of a certain social class (or aspiring to it), quite mix-n-match, except that Lerman\u2019s consciousness united them. The first footnote: \u201cRomance novelist Judith Krantz\u2019s 1978 book, Scruples<\/i>, had been a huge seller.\u201d Next footnote, about Lerman\u2019s longtime companion: \u201cTiffany and Co. annually invited guests to style tabletops displaying its wares. Gray had done one that year.\u201d (From Leo, we know it was \u201cA pre-Hibernation Tea for Bears \u2013 Grizzly Delights.\u201d) The mind boggles. Wouldn\u2019t you love<\/i> to have wandered into Tiffany\u2019s and seen this? But the footnotes continue: \u201cSylvia Townsend Warner (1893\u20131978) was a British novelist, poet, and short-story writer.\u201d Well, she was<\/i>, but here I had to pause and remember how very many stories she\u2019d published in The New Yorker<\/i>, and really, what a surprise that she\u2019d been born in 1893, making her a literary contemporary of Mrs. Wharton, for heaven\u2019s sake (also: the brilliant The Age of Innocence<\/i>, which won the Pulitzer in 1921, was published only five years before Gatsby<\/i> and wowza, are those depictions of life in NYC and its environs worlds apart!) Then follows the footnote about Diana Trilling that, with its pitch-perfect use of the word \u201cdepicted\u201d rather than the more usual \u201cabout\u201d makes you envision<\/i> whatever this trial was, while the omission of the name of the school where \u201cheadmistress\u201d (what a concept!) Harris was employed shows you there\u2019s got to be some limit to the facts of these footnotes, though independently, as well as collectively, they create their own momentarily cohesive, yet ironic world. (Digression: don\u2019t fail to look at the index of first lines of James Wright\u2019s Collected Poems<\/i>. Successively, any half dozen or so make a poem of their own.)<\/p>\n

Sure, some footnotes merely offer information, telling us that a town is in the northwest of Ireland (ho-hum; bring on the GPS). But others stun with information as sharp as a bee sting: you find out the people whose romantic wedding you\u2019ve just read about divorced<\/i>; that everything you just read was denied by authorities<\/i>; that someone was one of nine<\/i> children! In Richard Nixon\u2019s Six Crises<\/i>, which is rarely footnoted because he thinks he\u2019s so thorough and so inevitably right, we read in the main text that after the riots that happened when Nixon went to Caracas, he and his wife were \u201capplauded by spectators in hotel lobbies,\u201d though what really bothers him is that newspaper columnists \u201csitting at their desks in Washington, wrote their \u2018interpretations\u2019 of what the South American trip meant. One wrote that the riots were directed against me as an individual \u2026 the attempts to stir up trouble against the United States could not be blamed on the Communists.\u201d Here we get one of the rare footnotes: \u201cNot all the rioters, of course, were Communists. But this misses the major point: there can be no doubt that the riots were Communist-planned, Communist-led, and Communist-controlled. Fresh evidence of this fact keeps turning up. Just a few months ago \u2026 two Peruvian students\u2013self-confessed former Communists\u2013told of Communist organizations of the San Marcos riots in Lima and also publicly apologized to me for their own part in these demonstrations.\u201d So, you see?<\/i> Nixon was and is<\/i> correct. Do you believe it now, since it\u2019s even in the footnotes<\/i>?<\/p>\n

In so many cases mysteries prevail, even in footnotes, or the footnotes raise little mysteries. In his impressive biography Koestler<\/i>, Michael Scammell offers this chapter 11 footnote (quoted in part): \u201cAlthough Koestler doesn\u2019t say so, both he and Bihalj-Merin went to Switzerland for Maria\u2019s funeral. According to the Swiss writer Werner Mittenzwei, who was also there, Maria had divided her estate among the poor \u00e9migr\u00e9 writers who had been her guests. N\u00e9meth was one of the beneficiaries, but Koestler apparently wasn\u2019t. See Tvertoda, 176-8, and Mittenzwei, 269.\u201d Here is an author who could add much to the text, if so inclined, and who wants you to take notice of the complexity of some matters.<\/p>\n

Today I sent an account of last night\u2019s dinner with friends to another friend. I cooked; I got praised for it; I had a good time. I knew the friend receiving it would understand the context about which I wrote, quickly get the tenor of the evening (there aren\u2019t that<\/i> many tones at Camp Beattie-Perry), that I could communicate some funny things by shorthand. But having read with intense pleasure Leo Lerman\u2019s cogent assessments much of the day, I was mentally footnoting at the same time I was writing my e-mail. To be honest, I\u2019d started composing imaginary footnotes during dinner, thinking just how funny they might be, explaining my insecurity, my husband\u2019s withheld thoughts (he insists on putting a positive spin on three weeks of rain on our recent Italian vacation). But don\u2019t we all deal with what\u2019s said vs. what\u2019s unsaid? If I wrote autobiographically, should I be the one to write the footnotes, or would they best be left to someone else? Of our guests last night, someone might footnote \u201cA well-known painter whose subject was often the marshes in Maine,\u201d though mine would read, \u201cThe painter\u2019s wife asked him to consider two things when getting a dog: not a large dog, not a white dog. Their dog is very large and white.\u201d Leo Lerman was himself so astonishingly astute (read him on Susan Sontag), but the footnote pas de deux with Stephen Pascal or others who contributed to this book is perfect: a mixture of information, implied amusement, judicious word choices that subtly convey commentary. It\u2019s the book I\u2019ll read aloud to houseguests, sparing them the audio of Mel Gibson\u2019s phone call to his ex-girlfriend Oksana that we taped from the Internet before access to it quickly disappeared. (If you know what I\u2019m talking about, imagine the footnote to the next generation for that one).<\/p>\n

P.S. \u201cAcknowledgements\u201d can be most<\/i> informative, as in Levi Johnston\u2019s (no, I\u2019m not going to footnote him) Deer in the Headlights<\/i>. From Levi: \u201cThe Cowans had seen me out there on TV, read about me\u2013and thought I was getting the shaft. I already knew I had to do something before I was suffocated by half-truths and outright lies.\u201d From the Cowans: \u201cThis book was researched, organized, and written on a tight schedule.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh, but that tragedy\/comedy is all so \u2026 last summer<\/i>. Move on immediately to The Grand<\/i> Surprise<\/i>, which was written over a lifetime by a keen observer and world-class self-doubter who took Proust as his model, a book beautifully edited, assembled, and produced.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Ann Beattie\u2019s story \u201cJanus\u201d was included in John Updike\u2019s <\/em>The Best American Short Stories of the Century. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like every other person in school, I hated footnotes. That was what you\u2019d be quizzed on and lose out, having watched the soaring bird while forgetting the gnat. They were a trap. Boring. Even the texts were boring (I thought then, along with my teachers being bizarre). I\u2019m not kidding about this: to avoid classroom […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":579,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[1392,11582,11585,11583,11586,6850,11584],"class_list":["post-57633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-ann-beattie","tag-footnotes","tag-james-wright","tag-leo-lerman","tag-michael-scammell","tag-richard-nixon","tag-stephen-pascal"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn Footnotes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Ann Beattie on the form, function, and enduring appeal of footnotes.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/08\/12\/footnotes\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Footnotes by Ann Beattie\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 12, 2013 \u2013 Like every other person in school, I hated footnotes. 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