by Anne Fadiman
Alas, there is no twelve-step program for us. We must learn to live with our affliction. Perhaps we could even attempt to extract some social benefit from it by offering our faultfinding services on a pro bono basis. Had a Fadiman or a Bethell been present in 1986, when the New York law firm of Haight, Gardner, Poor & Havens misplaced a decimal point in a ship’s mortgage, we could have saved its client more than $11 million. Had we been present in 1962, when a computer programmer at NASA omitted a hyphen from Mariner 1’s flight program, we could have prevented the space probe from having to be destroyed when it headed off course, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $7 million.
And had we been present last year at the Tattoo Shoppe in Carlstadt, New Jersey, we could have saved Dan O’Connor, a twenty-two-year-old Notre Dame fan, from having Fighing Irish tattooed on his right arm. He has sued the employer of the tattooist who omitted the t for $250,000 in damages. I hope O’Connor wins. I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one’s life wearing a typo. As the authors of my brother’s software manual would agree, it would be so hard to insert a carrot.
ETERNAL INK
Thirty-three years ago, when I first laid eyes on it, my pen was already old. The barrel was a blue so uningratiatingly somber that in most lights it looked black. The cap, weathered from silver to gunmetal, had almost invisibly fine longitudinal striations and an opalescent ferrule that I imagined to be a precious jewel. The clip was gold and shaped like an arrow. To fill the pen, you unscrewed the last inch of barrel, submerged the nib in ink, and depressed a translucent plastic plunger—a sensuous advance over my previous pen’s flaccid ink bladder, which made rude noises when il was squeezed.
My pen was a gift from my fifth grade boyfriend Jeffrey Davison, a freckled redhead who excelled at spelling bees and handball: the prototype of all the smart jocks I would fall for over the years, culminating in my husband. I have the feeling Jeffrey stole it from his stepfather, but no mat ter. The pen was mine by virtue of Jeffrey’s love and by divine right. No one could have cherished it, for both its provenance and its attributes, more than I. Until I was in college, I reserved it for poetry—prose would have profaned it—and later, during my beginning years as a writer, I used it for every first draft. Like a dog that needs to circle three times before settling down to sleep, I could not write an opening sentence until I had uncapped the bottle of India ink, inhaled the narcotic fragrance of carbon soot and resin, dipped the nib, and pumped the plunger—one, two, three, four, five.
Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the void, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don’t blame me, blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself. During one dry period, Virginia Woolf wrote, “I am writing with a pen which is feeble and wispy”; during another, “What am I going to say with a defective nib?” Goethe, although he had learned elegant penmanship from a magister artis scribendi, dictated his great works to a copyist. This scriptorial remove only intensified his need to control the rituals of composition. He insisted that the quills be cut neither too long nor too short; that the feather plumes be removed; that the freshly inked pages be dried in front of the stove and not with sand; and that all of the above be done noiselessly, lest his concentration be broken.
Kipling was incapable of writing fiction with a pencil. Only ink would do, the blacker the better (“all ‘blue-blacks’ were an abomination to my Daemon”). His favorite pen, with which he wrote Plain Tales in Lahore, was “a slim, octagonal-sided, agate penholder with a Waverley nib.” It snapped one day, and although it was followed by a succession of dip pens, fountain pens, and pump pens, Kipling regarded these as “impersonal hirelings” and spent the rest of his life mourning the deceased Waverley.
I know how Kipling felt. Pen-bereavement is a serious matter. Ten years ago, my pen disappeared into thin air. Like a jealous lover, I never took it out of the house, so I have always believed that in rebellion against its purdah it rolled into a hidden crack in my desk. A thousand times have I been tempted to tear the desk apart; a thousand times have I resisted, fearing that the pen would not be there after all and that I would be forced to admit it was gone forever. For a time I haunted shops that sold secondhand pens, pathetically clutching an old writing sample and saying, “This is the width of the line I want.” I might as well have carried a photograph of a dead lover and said, “Find me another just like this.” Along the way I learned that my pen had been a Parker 51, circa 1945. Eventually I found one that matched mine not only in vintage but in color. But after this parvenu came home with me, it swung wantonly from scratching to spattering, unable, despite a series of expensive repairs, to find the silken mean its predecessor had so effortlessly achieved. Alas, it was not the reincarnation of my former love; it was a contemptible doppelganger. Of course, I continued to write, but ever after, the feat of conjuring the first word, the first sentence, the first paragraph, has seemed more like work and less like magic.
When my friend Adam was sixteen, he bought, for twenty dollars, the letter book in which an eighteenth-century Virginia merchant had copied his correspondence: reports on the price of tobacco, orders for molasses from the West Indies, letters to loyalist friends who had fled to Nova Scotia during the Revolutionary War. Stuck between the pages were hard yellowish scraps that Adam at first took to be fingernail parings. Then he noticed that one of the scraps had the barbs of a feather attached, and he realized that they were trimmings from a quill pen: fragments of a goose that had died during the reign of George III.
How inconvenient, but how glorious, it must have been to write with a feather (preferably the second or third follicle from a bird’s left wing, which curved away from a right-handed writer). An eighteenth-century inkstand—complete with quill holder, penknife, inkwell, pounce box (to hold the desiccant powder), and wafer box (to hold the paste sealing wafers)—was a monument to the physical act of writing. But if no inkstand was at hand, one could make do with temporary expedients. One day, when Sir Walter Scott was out hunting, a sentence he had been trying to compose all morning suddenly leapt into his head. Before it could fade, he shot a crow, plucked a feather, sharpened the tip, dipped it in crow’s blood, and captured the sentence.
For those who consider writing a form of romance, a Parker 51 can’t hold a candle to a crow’s feather, but it sure beats a cartridge pen, a ballpoint, a felt-tip, or a rollerball, especially those disposable models that proclaim, “Don’t get too attached, I’m only a one-night stand.” Pencils are fine in their way, but I prefer the immutability of ink. I still possess not only the poems I wrote at age ten but all the cross-outs: an even more telling index to my forgotten thought patterns. Richard Selzer, the surgeon-essayist, fills his fountain pen from a lacquered Chinese inkwell with a bronze dragon on its lid. To feed the genie that he says dwells therein, he mixes, from an old recipe, his own version of Higgins Eternal Ink, the brand he used when he learned to write sixty years ago. Eternal! To what other medium could that word possibly be applied?
A typewriter ribbon—if it’s not self-correcting and if you don’t use Wite-Out—may be permanent, but I would hardly call it eternal. The ichor of eternity belongs to India ink and crow’s blood, not to machines. I admit the possibility, however, that typewriters, especially ancient manuals, can inspire in their owners the kind of fierce monogamy my pen inspired in me. When I worked at Life magazine, a veteran writer named Paul O’Neil was occasionally brought in to write crime stories. Once I saw Paul standing at the end of one of Life’s long corridors, rolling something down the carpet. It turned out he was wedded to a typewriter so old that its ribbons were no longer available, so whenever one gave out, he held one end of the worn-out ribbon, unspooled it with a bowler’s underhand pitch, and then painstakingly rewound a fresh ribbon, cannibalized from another typewriter, onto the origina
l spool. My mother feels the same kind of devotion to her Underwood, a venerable concatenation of levers, bars, gears, shafts, and a tiny silver bell whose ding, tolling the end of each line of type, hovers in the background of many of my childhood memories. My mother is eighty. Her father owned the typewriter before she was born. It was cleaned and repaired once, forty years ago. In 1989, when my parents moved, it languished in storage for several months while my mother made do with a portable Hermes. I asked her how she felt when she retrieved the Underwood. “It was like being reunited with a long-lost love,” she said, “a love you’ve been married to all your life, but until you were parted you never realized how passionate you felt about him.”
These days I use a computer. I am using it to write this essay, even though I should really be using a hand-whittled crow’s feather. It is, as many writers have noted, unparalleled for revision. Because it makes resequencing so easy, it enables me to recognize structural flaws that once would have been invisible, blocked from my imagination by the effort and violence of the old cut-and-paste method. The Delete key is a boon to any writer who hates a cluttered page, although it makes the word processor the least eternal of all writing instruments. Cross-outs are usually consigned to oblivion. (I prefer to move the rejected phrases to the bottom of the screen, where they are continuously pushed ahead of the text-in-progress like an ever-burgeoning mound of snow before a plow.)
I am surprised by how much I like my computer, but I will never love it. I have used several; they seem indistinguishable. When you’ve seen one pixel you’ve seen them all. As a reader, I often feel I can detect the spoor of word processing in books, particularly long ones. The writers—no longer slowed by having to change their typewriter ribbons, fill their fountain pens, or sharpen their quills—tend to be prolix. I am especially suspicious of word-processed letters, which smell of boilerplate. Word-processed addresses are even worse. What a pleasure it is to open one’s mailbox and find a letter from an old friend whose handwriting on the envelope is as instantly recognizable as a face!
I recently finished writing a book. I wrote its first sentence with a pen on August 7, 1991. (I remember the date because it was my birthday.) The intervening years—during which, not coincidentally, my handwriting became virtually illegible—marked my transition from pen to word processor. I had planned to write the last page of the book in longhand, partly for the sake of sentiment, partly because I thought a pen might decelerate my prose and make me especially careful where it counted most. But when the morning finally arrived after a furious all-nighter, and I realized I was only an hour from the end, I could no more halt my pell-mell rush than a marathoner could be persuaded to sniff the roses that lined the last hundred yards of the racecourse. It was too late. My old pen may be buried somewhere in my desk, but my Daemon, who surely would never take up residence in a Compaq Deskpro 4/25 Model 120, has either fled the premises or is now—I’ve got my fingers crossed—living inside me.
THE LITERARY GLUTTON
When my son was eight months old, it could truthfully be said that he devoured literature. Presented with a book, he chewed it. A bit of Henry’s DNA has been permanently incorporated into the warped pages of Goodnight Moon, and the missing corners of pages 3 and 8 suggest that a bit of Goodnight Moon has been permanently incorporated into Henry. He was, of course, not the first child to indulge in bibliophagy. The great Philadelphia bookdealer A.S.W. Rosenbach deduced that one reason first editions of Alice in Wonderland were so scarce was that so many of them had been eaten.
Henry and his word-swallowing colleagues—they include a Wall Street Journal editor who absentmindedly tears off morsels from the newsroom dictionary, rolls them in little balls, and pops them in his mouth—are merely taking literally the metaphorical similarity between reading and eating, which makes us say, for instance, that we have browsed through a newspaper or had a hard time digesting an overlong biography. When we call people bookworms, we are likening them to the larvae of insects, chiefly members of the orders Thysanura and Psocoptera, whose entire diet may consist of paper and glue. “Books are food,” wrote the English critic Holbrook Jackson, “libraries so many dishes of meat, served out for several palates … . We eat them from love or necessity, as other foods, but most from love.” Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were described by a friend as savoring “the flavour of a rare passage of poetry with an exquisite relish, as though it were a morsel of ripe and juicy fruit.” Galileo compared Orlando Furioso to a melon field, Coventry Patmore compared Shakespeare to roast beef, and Edward FitzGerald compared Thucydides to Parmesan cheese.
If books are food, then books about food are the pièce de resistance of literary taste. Henry, who is now a year and a half, has graduated from actual page ingestion to this higher, more symbolic form of gourmandise. When he sees a picture of something toothsome, he pretends to snatch it off the page and gobble it up. He usually does this with items that are at least theoretically edible—wa—termelons, jars of honey, large birthday cakes—although, worrisomely, he did once try to wolf down a dental drill, which was yellow and may have resembled a banana. Later on, when Henry’s diet includes novels, I expect that, like his mother, he will assess the characters not by how they look, what they wear, or how they talk, but by what they eat. In Anna Karenina, all the essential differences between Oblonsky and Levin are laid out in the Moscow restaurant scene during which the former orders three dozen oysters, vegetable soup, turbot with thick sauce, capon with tarragon, and fruit macédoine, while the latter longs for cabbage soup and porridge.
I have always preferred Keats to Wordsworth, but I was never able to put my finger on why until I read that Wordsworth, according to a visitor, “will live for a month on cold beef, and the next on cold bacon,” whereas Keats once wrote his friend Charles Wentworth Dilke:
Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine—good God how fine. It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy—all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large Beatified strawberry.
I have never read two sexier sentences. You just know that when Keats got together with Fanny Brawne, there must have been fireworks, just as you know, in the famous eating scene in Tom Jones, that Tom’s appetite for Mrs. Waters will equal his appetite for his dinner, during which “three pounds at least of that flesh which formerly had contributed to the composition of an ox, was now honoured with becoming part of the individual Mr. Jones.”
When I read about food, sometimes a single word is enough to detonate a chain reaction of associative memories. I am like the shoe fetishist who, in order to become aroused, no longer needs to see the object of his desire; merely glimpsing the phrase “spectator pump, size 6½” is sufficient. Whenever I encounter the French word plein, which means “full,” I am instantly transported back to age fifteen, when, after eating a very large portion of poulet à l’estragon, I told my Parisian hosts that I was “pleine,” an adjective that I later learned is reserved for pregnant women and cows in need of milking. The word ptarmigan catapults me back ten years to an expedition I accompanied to the Canadian Arctic, during which a polar-bear biologist, tired of canned beans, shot a half dozen ptarmigans. We plucked them, fried them, and gnawed the bones with such ravening carnivorism that I knew on the spot I could never, ever become a vegetarian. Sometimes just the contiguous letters pt are enough to call up in me a nostalgic rush of guilt and greed. I may thus be the only person in the world who salivates when she reads the words “ptomaine poisoning.”
My most frequent response to gastronomic references in literature is an immediate urge to raid the refrigerator. When I happen to be reading in bed, the spoils are a source of marital strife. If I had married Charles Lamb, who once told Coleridge that he was especially fond of books containing traces of buttered muffins, I would have no problem, but instead I married George, to whom crumbs on the pillows—especially after we have brushed our teeth—are a sign of grave moral turpitude. (I am
fated to fall in love with men of the Levin rather than the Oblonsky type. Once I asked my college boyfriend what his favorite food was. He thought for a long moment, while I internally debated the relative merits of crème brûlée and runny Brie. “Well,” he said, “I like bread.”) But after reading M.F.K. Fisher’s description of scrambled eggs in How to Cook a Wolf, or Hemingway’s ode to sausages and potato salad in A Moveable Feast, or Thomas Wolfe’s inventory of the contents of Joel Pierce’s refrigerator in Of Time and the River, how could anyone in her right mind not bring a small snack to the matrimonial bed?
My friend Susan McCarthy, the co-author of When Elephants Weep, recently reminded me that reading about eating can occasionally send one running away from the kitchen. She mentioned a passage she had read about how killer whales feed on humpback whales. “They sort of peel them with their teeth,” she explained. Susan has considered posting this passage on her refrigerator as an appetite suppressant. I could do the same with the sentence in John Lanchester’s A Debt to Pleasure that describes a first course in a boys’ boarding school as “a soup in which pieces of undisguised and unabashed gristle floated in a mud-colored sauce whose texture and temperature were powerfully reminiscent of mucus.”
But I’m sure Susan and I will leave those passages right where they belong: on our bookshelves, not our refrigerators. Deep down, we know better than to subvert the glorious hunger that is whetted by the printed word. The art critic Eric Gibson once told me that one of the most frustrating experiences of his life was reading the description of chicken-and-sausage stew in A Moment of War, Laurie Lee’s memoir of the Spanish Civil War, while riding the Washington subway, at least a half hour’s ride from his kitchen.