Footnotes

Footnotes matter more than they used to. I don't know if I reported below that the recent essay The Importance of Elsewhere, in About Larkin 53, required 25 in a piece of 3000 words. It's no longer good enough to sling together a bibiliography of anything one might have looked at. We must protect ourselves against any accusation of plagiarism and quote our sources. The academic process might seem to be putting the cart before the horse in valuing itself above anything an essay might have to say. Long gone are the days of my 1981 undergraduate dissertation on Marvell which was 15000 words with a bibliography and only 4 footnotes.

I was well aware then that I couldn't attribute an idea I'd read somewhere to its proper source but it would have been in the bibilography somewhere. 40-odd years later, that's far too lax and not acceptable. In the follow-up essay that I surely hope is all but finished now I've had to replace the citation I wanted to use with another by the same critic about the same poet that says much the same thing because I'm afraid I'll be asked to say where it says that and, having looked everywhere it might be, I can't find it.

It feels like a minor tyranny having to remember exactly where you read everything you ever read but that's how it is. We'll get by. I've spent too much of my life scanning pages of books trying to find lines to quote.

I'm sure it was around about page 60, in chapter 3, towards the bottom of the left-hand page.

It often isn't, if I find it at all.

By now one is aware that one needs an old envelope on which to note page numbers of anything one might want to refer to in a book one might write about but that's not much help for lines one read 20, 30 or 40 years ago, still vividly remember, but can't now find.

I've long acknowledged that I'd have made a terrible librarian. I would have been no better as an academic.

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Daphne's I'll Never be Young Again went on its other two adventures in its second half. Whether it is love or infatuation that Dick goes through with Hesta it comes to its natural end, as does his burning ambition to be a writer, his father having been a big, famous and important one but, despite having the head start of access to a publisher, it isn't to be.

In the end, it's a better novel than it looks, maybe not as spell-binding as her best books were to be but with a gloriously deflating truth to it.

 

Meanwhile, a little walk to a local library to fetch the copy of the Martin Amis Larkin Poems, so why not enjoy the few hours it takes to read Peter Ackroyd's short life of Chaucer which was nearby. 

My Larkin shelf is already overcrowded and doesn't need the fifth or sixth iteration of the same poems for the sake of Martin's introduction which is appreciative of the poems but fails to notice, like many swaggering men who fancy themselves as 'alpha' types, that not everybody shares their needs.

But Ackroyd's 'brief life' of Chaucer is as concise and sensible as one could have in under 200 pages, evaluating speculation and anecdote, and arriving at an account of a man who had a job, ostensibly in royal or courtly service from the age of 14, and also wrote poems. Not, as we are somehow led to believe of poets, that the writing of poems was the main thing and, oh yes, they also had a job. 

That's not what it's like and neither should it be. Now that I have all day to write as many poems as I like, I don't. I might, just about, maintain the long-established average of four poems a year but, with more time to think about it, one also has more time to see through it, wonder how much it really matters and then not bother.