The Devil's Details by Chuck Zerby Read Free Book Online

John de Burg, son and heir of the Earl of Ulster, and daughter of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, by Joan of Acres ….” And so on for some dozen words and a couple of kings more. Back up in the verse we get to view a single comma and an “And Anjou’s” before being sent below again to learn that Anjou is “Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry the Sixth, foundress of Queen’s College.” A line and a half later … but the point is made. (See ibid., p. 95.) Had John Updike’s acidic remarks on notes been directed at this kind of performance, we all would applaud. Footnotes in works of literature must serve some dramatic—not simply informational—purpose.

* An enormous tricorne too large to pack was one of her favorites and a favorite of her readers. It identified her as surely as the boldly complicated line breaks of her verse. The first sentence of one of her stories is, “I was leaving Boston wearing two hats ….” See Michael Schmidt,
Lives of the Poets
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 631.

† That Ford did not adopt Moore’s suggestions does not lessen our sense of a poet unafraid. The company did not choose to name the new model the Resilient Bullet, The Intelligent Whale, Pastelogram, or Utopian Turtletop (to mention just a few of the poet’s suggestions) and instead named it after Edsel Ford. The Edsel’s spectacular failure to sell is poetic justice.

* This is a sore point with this writer. At college I was fortunate to become close friends with a gifted sculptor. His works were made from bits and pieces of scrap iron that had acquired a complex and arresting patina from days and nights spent outside weathering in the Vermont winters. A six-foot, sharp-edged figure particularly attracted me. My friend offered it to me with the proviso that I “keep it on view, don’t just stick it in some attic.” After several U-Haul moves and several awkward living arrangements the artwork ended up in my parents’ dark attic; I have had a guilty conscience ever since. If only those who toss out Gomez’s work would have had similar experiences.

* Updike’s Museums and Women and Other Stories has a set of endnotes as eclectic, if not as fulsome, as any employed by Marianne Moore. To my knowledge, Updike has never explained why notes are appropriate for fiction and yet not for poetry if that is, in fact, his belief. His ambivalence toward religion and sex has been studied at great length; one can hope some attention soon might be given to his apparent ambivalence toward footnotes.

* For example, the “low rumble” of the footnote could have been compared to the rumble of drums during an exciting passage of band music. The adjective nutritious or colorful could have been attached to the fish. And why should the introduction not be a “rambling, enthralling” one?

* This writer is not unaware of the aggressive group of poets who call themselves (sometimes) the New Formalists and who express a preference for traditional rhythm and even rhyme. In England such poets make up the mainstream of poetry; from their point of view, free verse and T. S. Eliot may appear retrograde. I won’t argue except to say that to insist, as I think Updike’s practices indicate he does, that rhyme and rhythm must be accompanied by punning traces back to the seventeenth century and thus is retrograde.

* The New York Times has been indefatigable. Anthony Grafton’s trailblazing work, The Footnote: A Curious History , was given not one but two deservedly laudatory reviews. (See Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,
The New York Times
, Thursday, 27 November 1997, p. E16, and David McKitterick, Sunday, 7 December 1997, section VIII, p. 86.) But years before that The Times fired a shot across the bow of the anti-footnote dreadnought by publishing a fervent pro-footnote op-ed piece of mine. (See
The New York Times
, Sunday, 23 August