The Margin Man

Every day, in the privacy of my study, I do something that, should they see it, would cause some to round their eyes in horror, extend their index finger, and shout “sacrilege.” I write in books. Yes, I am a serial annotator, a compulsively prodigious practitioner of marginal commentary. Oh, I use and abuse my books, embrace and deface them. I imperially claim the marginal space as my sovereign territory and colonize it. I oppress it to impress in it traces of myself. I leave fingerprints, footprints, evidence of a mind wishing, as Edgar Allan Poe says, “to unburthen itself of a thought.”

Poe published his marginalia in a lengthy series of magazine articles. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s marginalia fill five volumes. I have no such pretentions, but I do relish the idea that filling a book’s white space embeds me in the long history of the written word, and the large community of those who have commented on it. Many of the Christian codices, those precursor books of folded and bound parchment, featured spacious margins, inviting annotation the faithful. Toiling in their scriptoria, monks often left marginalia in the texts they were copying. The margins of the 1602 Bishop’s Bible, one of the source texts for the 1611 King James Version, teems with notes of translators and the scribes they employed. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Jane Austen, William Blake, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, David Foster Wallace—all have been margin writers. And then there are readers like me, and the millions like me, past and present, truants from the notice of history but nonetheless present in it, who have penciled and penned our thoughts and reactions, busily engaged, as C. S. Lewis puts it, in “making something all the time,” responding, always responding, as best we can, to words that stab at our ears until we understand them. If, as Nabokov says, the “ideal reader is someone who reads with a dictionary and a pencil,” we book markers, every single one of us, are Platonized.

Those who write marginalia know that it is one thing to possess books, quite another to own them. We draw books close to ourselves, so close we enter them, pass through their avenues and boulevards, always attentive, always willing to be hailed, always willing to respond. We read to be taught, but, as Whitman says, the best teachers teach “straying.” We encounter another mind, another perspective, and become mutually entailed, though sometimes we spin in another direction. We talk with and talk back—the arc of our covenant with the writer. Writing marginalia is active reading, proof that “we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages,” as Billy Collins says in his poem “Marginalia.” It is curious reading, the book “chewed and digested,” in Francis Bacon’s words. It is diligent reading, attentive reading, reading that notices what it is noticing. Writing marginalia is deep-brain stimulation without the impertinence of electrodes. It is attunement and wandering from the tune, a willingness to shift its key. It is our echoing reply to a writer’s shout across the gulfs of time and space.

Reading the marginalia others have left in their wake can prove a revealing look under the psychological hood. Famous or not, their markings are pieces of themselves left for posterity, indices of their personalites that sometimes provide all the satisfaction of voyeurism without its stigma of creepiness, but more often than not simply display our common humanity. One scribal monk, attesting to his tiresome task, scribbled “Only three fingers are working now.” Another, beset no doubt by a rumbling stomach, inscribed “I can’t wait for dinner time.” John Adams showed a smart-alecky side when he summarily dismissed Condorcet’s history of the human mind, writing on page 53, “Thou art a quack, Condorcet.” But the rectitudinous Adams is plainly visible in his marginal comment on de Gebelin’s golden-age-intoxicated descriptions of the primitive world: “Phallus. I hesitate to write the word, but the meaning of it is so important in allancient religions that it cannot be omitted.” Thanks to Thomas Jefferson, we know the authors of the Federalist Papers essays, for he included their initials in his copy. And to show that a serious annotator responds in the spirit of the text being read, Jefferson, reading Plutarch’s Lives in Greek, inserted between the leaves his commentary on slips of paper in neatly-written Greek.

Some writers have used the margins to vent. Working his way through suffragette Sarah Grand’s novel The Heavenly Twins, Mark Twain, whose books were not selling well at the time, stopped in a fit of pique to write “A cat can do better literature than this.” Poe, perhaps revealing the jealousy of many male writers at a time when female-authored novels ruled the best-seller lists, says of Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s Ellen Middleton, "A remarkable work, and one which I find much difficulty in admitting to be the composition of a woman." William Blake’s romanticism is in full view when he jots a two-line poem on the title page of the ultraconservative and classically trained portrait artist of the elite Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses, “Degrade first the arts if you’d mankind degrade,/Here idiots to paint with cold light and hot shade.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the letters L.M. to mark what he considered a “ludicrous metaphor,” and N. to indicate “nonsense”—a classier response, certainly, than my own B.S.

Often writers will mark books to reinforce a cherished belief, as in Jack Kerouac’s underlining and checkmarking of this passage from Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”: “The traveler must be born again on the road.” Some mark passages that explore themes of intense interest, as did Melville in those passages in Dante’s Divine Comedy dealing with original sin, free will, and necessity. Some writers’ marginalia expose anguished and aggrieved minds and hearts. Perhaps her troubled marriage prompted Sylvia Plath to set write at the end of Chapter 7 in The Great Gatsby, where Tom and Daisy Buchanan have come to an uncertain intimacy, and Gatsby stands alone in the moonlight gazing at their house: “knight waiting outside dragon goes to bed with princess.” David Foster Wallace marked this passage from Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, “Such a person is usually able to ward off threatening depression with increased displays of brilliance, thereby deceiving both himself and those around him” with the simple but telling notation “Amherst 80-85.” Wallace’s troubled relationship with his mother stands uncloaked when he writes beside another, heavily marked, passage, “Becoming what narcissistically-deprived Mom wants you to be—performer.” But minds and hearts are not always in conflict with themselves. There is the joyous, the rapturous, marginalia that Billy Collins describes finding in a library copy of Catcher in the Rye: “A few greasy looking smears/and next to them, written in soft pencil-/by a beautiful girl, I could tell,/whom I would never meet-/`Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.’"

My own annotations tend to aggregate around a central set of concerns. In fiction and poetry I typically mark passages that indicate how writers or their characters understand reality and express values, or what seem to be emerging thematic or stylistic patterns. In nonfiction, I note claims, arguments, reasons assumptions, and implications. Pretty standard stuff; not especially noteworthy notes. Of more interest to me, though, is the marginalia I have left in books read in both the far and near past. Such marginalia are an archeology of my intellectual interests at the time, the disclosing strata of what I understood, and what I failed to understand. In Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, marginal references to “plausibility structures” and “moral foundations,” indicating my reading of sociologist Peter Berger and psychologist Jonathan Haidt. On the title page of Jacques Lacan’s vexing Ecrits I wrote “labyrinth of murk; tasted but couldn’t get it down—sorry Sir Francis.” My conceptually muddled experience with the text itself is apparent in the frequently littered interjection “huh?”—a seemingly reflexive response in most of my literary theory books, which led me, in one, to plaintively write, “Is there a `Literary Theory for Dummies’ book?” and in another “Where are Strunk and White when you need them?” In Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, I scribbled on an endleaf, “I am smitten;” in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, “miraculous;” in the second volume of Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, “a soul right side up.” And sometimes, not often, but sometimes, in an act of ego-addled boldness, I have suggested a revision. Next to e. e. cummings’ lines “kisses are a better fate than wisdom,” I wrote “kisses are the better fate of wisdom.” Virtue, after all, should have a reward other than itself!

And always, always, when passages take such emotional possession of me that they would defy even the exorcising efforts of Fathers Merrin and Karras combined, when they stride right up to the door of magic and kick it in, when they are so buccaneeringly gorgeous that they glut the eye, when they are carpentered to a perfectly fitted joint with the idea they express, I underscore them and write in the margin the only thing I can think to write: “WOW!!!,” always capitalized, always tailing three exclamation points—hardly a learned response, but one wholly in keeping with the full-nelsoned tensile force with which such language grasps me.

I can understand the accusatory book-marking-as-sacrilege coming from librarians concerned with their patrons’ reading experience, or from bibliophiles who see books as art objects having qualities that may equal or even surpass their content. The choice of paper and typeface, for instance, or the manner in which the books are bound, designed, inked, and illustrated can all make books aesthetic artifacts in and of themselves, as the pre-Gutenberg illuminated manuscripts amply demonstrate. Mostly, though, I see books as objects to be consumed; objects meant to provide an absorptive, immersive, and powerfully intellectual experience; objects not simply to be looked at and looked into, but to be used. And that means wielding pencil or pen to record our experience of them, our collaboration with them, and, thereby, ourselves in them.