Annotation

I've been thinking a lot about annotations lately. Partly, I guess, it's because I have my students annotating books for their summer reading assignments, but mainly it's because I feel like I learn a bit about people when I see their marginalia.

For instance, I have a photocopy of some pages of "Spring" from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek from a friend. She's marked paragraphs in their entirety, nearly the entire chapter in fact, with square brackets, broad vertical lines in the margins. But what gives it away is the question in script that begins the chapter: "Why such extravagance?" Ah, I want to say, of course it's the extravagance that has you. The extravagance is what compelled you to mark nearly the entire chapter. And the extravagance is what took you to the photocopier, book in hand, to make this copy for me.

I even like my own annotations, as if they offer some vision of myself in the past, a sort of time-travel mirror in which I get to see my younger self. Many of my notes seem utilitarian, place-holders I suppose, but they also serve as some indication of what I believed to be important at the time. A note in "Bartleby" reads "unmanned" next to a repetition of the word in the text. Another states simply, "Bartleby stops writing," at the appropriate point in the text.

I tend to by cheaper copies of books, especially of the books that I teach—mostly, that's my way of encouraging students to buy them and write in them. I figure that if a novel costs ten or fifteen dollars, most of my students aren't going to buy it and write in it, but if it costs two bucks, more of them will. But unfortunately, the margins are always small in those cheaper editions, and I find it's difficult to write more than a word or two at a time there.

In my buck-and-a-half copy of The Awakening, I find my note "like the parrot" next to some French: Robert recalls Madame Ratignolle's spurning his prior year's advances: "Passez! Adieu! Allez vous-en!" (The parrot, of course you've not forgotten, opens the novel with the repeated exclamation "Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That's all right!") And I wrote "Edna's coup d'etat—Her last supper" at the beginning of chapter 30.

Sometimes, I wish that they would make my favorite books with huge margins, maybe just print the text of the book on the left-hand page and leave the facing right-hand page for notes. I wonder, in a world where the Kindle threatens to supplant the printed page, if there's a market for this sort of thing. I can imagine it, though, the entire book a sort of dialectical journal.

To be fair, the annotations sometimes give us insights into people's minds that we probably would have preferred not to have. Thumbing through a used copy of Portrait, I found where Joyce wrote this:

Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and arid grasses of his bed glowed no longer. He rose slowly and, recalling the rapture of his sleep, sighed at its joy.

He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky line, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand: and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.

Sadly, someone has written in the margin, "These sentances barely make sence."

(Sigh.)

But sometimes, I find things so wonderful I can't let go of them.

In a heavily-annotated 1927 edition of Howard Judson Hall's Types of Poetry that I bought for three and a half dollars from an antique store in Savannah—or perhaps it was somewhere else; the place where I found this one escapes my certainty—there are notes in pencil about odes, about the rhyme schemes of sonnets, Italian and Shakespearean. There is a pressed flower in an advanced state of decay between pages 282 and 283, in the middle of James Russell Lowell's "Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration." There is a bid card from Kappa Kappa Iota dated March 1934. By Amy Lowell's "Patterns," the note reads, "No poem expresses more vividly beauty of words." There is a record of grades earned, all of them high marks, in literature, contemporary poetry, interior decorating, and architecture. By John Donne's sonnet "Death," the note: "Defiance. Pity. Triumph."

But before that, and really, what I keep coming back to, is the address of one Mrs. L. H. Pechacek of Oklahoma City, and a circled note: "DO NOT SELL. Keep for Larry always."