The Art of The Footnote

Kevin D’Lefty mentions a rather damning review of Christopher Hitchens’ new book here. It is a salutary reminder of how a fine mind can, with or without the aid of alcohol, paint itself into a corner.

A subscription to the online edition of the New York Review of Books is a wonderful thing to have (though no substitute for a subscription to the paper edition, with its endearingly awful front cover design), largely for the access it provides to the Review’s august archives. For example, here (sorry, subscribers only) is F.S.L. Lyons’ biography of Parnell reviewed by Conor Cruise O’Brien, back when the Cruiser not only had all of his now-missing marbles, but was indeed at the height of his then-magisterial powers. The footnotes alone are worth the trip. Having seen our hero described as an “uncommunicative, uncultivated, unscrupulous Wicklow squire???, we note a footnote for the word “unscrupulous??? and drop to the bottom of the page to find the following gem:

“Joseph Chamberlain found Parnell “unscrupulous like all great men.” There is an Irish proverb: “One beetle recognizes another beetle.”???

A proverb which always brings to my mind a faded Conradh na Gaeilge cartoon, framed in my primary school classroom, of two anthropomorphic beetles raising hats to one another on the street, is here deployed to delightful effect to a presumably baffled audience. But an even better droplet of sly, knowing, uniquely Irish wit pours forth when O’Brien mentions, almost in passing, Yeats’ poem, “Parnell’s Funeral???, and our eyes are directed to the following:

“Yeats had gone to the boat to meet Maud Gonne and met, as he recalled later, “what I thought much less of at the time, the body of Parnell.” Maud Gonne had traveled over with the coffin. Her biographer, Samuel Levenson, thinks this was a coincidence, but I doubt this. Her banshee instincts were always strong.???