The Missing Ink

by Philip Hensher

  Another question to the same graphologist, in the copy I read, inspires an interesting marginal addition from a reader: ‘I met this man, but I think he is married. Is he?’ Sara responds lapidarily: ‘The graphologist cannot know, as handwriting does not reveal if a person is single or married.’ Where the published author can only venture so far, the author of marginalia can speculate without bounds. On this page of the London Library copy I consulted, someone has written ‘But one can discover whether he is sexually satisfied, which in America is almost as good.’* I notice, incidentally, that this writer’s D has a particular shape, which according to Eric Singer’s catalogue suggests ‘erotic dreams, lowered resistance to sex excesses and perversions’, which is either a vindication of the science of graphology, or proves that experts in graphology alter their handwriting to prove a point. Take your pick.

  23 ~ Not Being Able to Read: Proust

  Proust, as a novelist, has been rightly praised for his psychological penetration. But for the most part, he doesn’t explore the minds of his characters directly, as Joyce or Virginia Woolf do. The first-person narrator of his novel In Search of Lost Time tells us a certain amount about what he thinks and feels. Only occasionally do the thoughts and feelings of other characters dominate his fictional texture. Otherwise, Proust explores the great surface of things. Nobody has ever gone more deeply into the superficial than Proust did. Take the moment when the narrator first sees the Baron de Charlus, the great sensuous villain of the whole piece, in In the Shade of Young Girls in Bloom:

  I had a sudden feeling of being looked at by someone at quite close quarters. I glanced round and saw a very tall, rather stout man of about forty, with a jet black moustache, who stood there nervously flicking a cane against the leg of his trousers and staring at me with eyes dilated by the strain of attention. At times, they seemed shot through with intense darting glances of a sort which, when directed towards a total stranger, can only ever be seen from a man whose mind is visited by thoughts that would never occur to anyone else, a madman, say, or a spy. He flashed a final look at me, like the parting shot of one who turns to run, daring, cautious, swift and searching, then, having gazed all about, with a sudden air of idle haughtiness, his whole body made a quick side turn and he began a close study of a poster, humming the while and rearranging the moss rose in his buttonhole. From his pocket he produced a little notebook, and appeared to write down the title of the performance advertised; he looked a couple of times at his fob watch; he pulled his black straw hat lower on his brow and held his hand to the rim of it like a visor, as though looking out for someone he was expecting; he made the gesture of irritation meant to suggest that one has had enough of waiting about, but which one never makes when one has really been waiting; then, pushing back his hat to reveal close-cropped hair with rather long, waved sidewings, he breathed out noisily as people do, not when they are too hot, but when they wish it to be thought they are too hot.1 *

  A scrupulous observer of the externals like Proust will, naturally, be fascinated by moments of illegibility, of which this is one – the narrator completely fails to realize that Charlus’s performance is entirely directed towards the end of trying to pick him up. A novelist interested by how people send themselves out into the world, either through choice or inadvertently, was always going to focus at that particular moment in time on handwriting, legible and illegible. What is peculiar and near-unique in Proust is the erotic thrill attached to the literal illegibility of handwriting, as well as the illegibility of people as a whole.

  In his voluminous correspondence, Proust often finds the time to reply flatteringly and volubly to letters which, he says, he can’t actually read at all; it is sometimes difficult to pick up his exact tone of flirtatiousness and comedy when he writes to Emmanuel Berl about ‘the mysterious arabesques which you ironically call handwriting . . . [the] signs which, though devoid of rational meaning, nevertheless conjure up your face.’2 Only occasionally does he express some sharpness, writing to the Princess Soutzo that ‘you wrote very illegibly and the little I was able to decipher seemed to me rather offensive.’3 We know that, for practical purposes, Proust liked, or at least valued, legible handwriting up to a point; we are told that his awful secretary Henri Rochat ‘had only one thing in his favour: he had beautiful handwriting . . . [and M. Proust] soon got tired even of the beautiful handwriting.’4 Rochat is partly skewered in the novel as the appalling Morel, who has ‘a magnificent handwriting marred by the crudest spelling mistakes.’5 With his correspondents, moreover, Proust could give signs of actually preferring illegible hands, writing to Anna de Noailles, ‘What a resurrection of joy after so many years to see that Handwriting, whose wondrous machicolations would seemingly suffice to protect the Garden of Eden, where the Angel (now redundant) bearer of the flaming sword, stands sentinel . . . Need I tell you that your wonderful letter is no more than an exquisite drawing as far as I’m concerned, and I can’t make out a single word.’6

  To judge from the completed novel, Proust was much more fascinated by the illegible, in every sense, than by the readable and lucid. He often links this to handwriting, and once or twice expresses his boredom at the perfectly legible. He compares, for instance, the dull face of the hotel manager at Balbec to a legible text:

  As I passed the office, I gave the manager a smile and received one in return, signalled by his face, which, since the beginning of our stay at Balbec, my studious attentiveness had been injecting and gradually transforming as though it was a specimen in natural history. The features of his face had become nondescript, expressive of a meaning which, though mediocre, was as intelligible as handwriting one can read.’7

  The action of In Search of Lost Time turns on a moment when handwriting at its most intimate is misread by an anonymous reader in the shape of a telegram operator. After the death of the narrator’s lover, Albertine, he receives this telegram while trying to recover in Venice: ‘Dear friend you believe me dead my apologies never more alive would like to see you to discuss marriage when do you return affectionately Albertine.’8 In fact, the person who handed a written form to the operator to transcribe was not Albertine at all, who really is dead, but the narrator’s old friend Gilberte. The telegram operator has misread Gilberte’s absurd and affected handwriting on the initial form, which makes her signature open to mistake. We have long ago been told, when Gilberte was a girl, that she was in the habit of drawing her capital G’s into near circles (‘the G leaning against an undotted i was so embellished that it looked more like an a’)9 and writing in ‘an expansive hand, which seemed to have underlined nearly all the sentences because the cross-bar of every t was dashed above the letter and not through it’10: now, many years and thousands of pages after that initial observation, we are reminded that a telegram clerk has misread a signature with tragic, grotesque consequences.

  Initially, however, that illegibility of writing exerts a powerfully seductive spell, as Gilberte writes on a series of grotesque notepapers: ‘Once, the monogram G.S., hugely magnified and elongated, was bounded by a rectangle running right down the page from top to bottom; on other occasions, it would be the name Gilberte either scrawled across one corner in golden letters imitating her signature and final flourish, and sheltering under an open umbrella printed in black, or else enclosed inside a motif in the shape of a Chinaman’s hat, on which the name figured in capital letters none of which was individually legible.’11

  Illegibility and legibility play seductive tricks with the reader and the narrator, not in predictable ways; legibility may have something shallow and cruel about it. There is something instantly peculiar and untrustworthy about Albertine’s first romantic communication with the narrator, a message where

  ‘she took much trouble over shaping each letter, resting the paper on her knees; then she handed it to me, saying, ‘Make sure no one can read this.’ I unfolded it and read the words she had written: I like you.’12 Mostly, the narrator finds erotic satisfaction in letters where n
o one has to say ‘make sure no one can read this’, because no one can anyway: the letters from mistresses where the phrase we know by heart is pleasant to reread, and with those we have learned less literally, we want to verify the degree of affection in a certain expression. Did she write ‘your dear letter’? A small disappointment in the sweetness we are breathing in, to be attributed either to our having read too fast or to our correspondent’s illegible handwriting; she has not put ‘and your dear letter’ but ‘on seeing your letter’. But the rest is so affectionate.13

  Charlus finds a letter immensely erotically exciting when he cannot guess who has written it – a special form of illegibility, like the tragic error between Gilberte’s and Albertine’s signature.

  About this time, M de Charlus received a letter written in these terms: ‘Dear Palamède, when am I going to see you? I’m missing you ever so much and thinking about you all the time [etc.] your loving PIERRE.’ M de Charlus racked his brains to discover which of his relatives had dared to write to him in so familiar a style; it must be someone he knew very well, and yet he did not recognize the writing . . . at last, suddenly, an address written on the back of the letter gave him the answer; it was the work of the pageboy at a gaming club where M de Charlus occasionally called.14

  Passionate handwriting is always cast down at great speed, like Charlus’s glimpsed eight-page letter to Morel, written ‘with a strange rapidity. As he covered sheet after sheet, his eyes were flashing with some furious daydream,’15 or at great extent, like the child narrator preceding his declaration of feelings for Gilberte by writing ‘on every page of my notebooks . . . her name and address endlessly . . . those indeterminate lines which I wrote without asking her to think any more of me because of that.’16 When the same name, in the same handwriting, goes out into the world written on an envelope, it instantly becomes strange and unimportant. ‘I had addressed an express letter to her, writing on the envelope that name, Gilberte Swann, which I had so often copied out in my notebooks . . . on the address of the pneumatic [response] . . . it was hard for me to recognize the insignificant, solitary lines of my handwriting under the printed circles apposed to it by the post office . . .’17 Perhaps it is the act of being read, of being shown to be legible by strangers, which robs the individual handwriting of its erotic magic, even for its author.

  Proust lived at a time when handwriting, as well as many other things he was passionately interested in, was undergoing a pseudo-scientific change, and he was clearly interested in the systematic analysis of handwriting. He is from one of the first generations of thinkers to stress that handwriting is utterly individual, saying that ‘everyone, however humble, is a master of those familiar little household creatures whose life lies as it were suspended on the paper, that is, the unique characters of his handwriting which he alone possesses.’18 He accepts that handwriting is a guide to the personality, once comparing it to hereditary features – ‘the features that made [aristocratic women’s] faces distinctive were a big red nose next to a harelip, or two wrinkled cheeks and a faint moustache. Such features cast their own spell well enough since, like a merely conventional form of handwriting, they enabled one to read a famous and impressive name . . .’19 When handwriting, through extraordinary circumstances, alters, it is as deeply disturbing and unnatural as a character change, as in the case of a manservant of Mme Verdurin who, after a fire, ‘became a changed man with a handwriting so altered that when his master and mistress, then in Normandy, received his first letter informing them of the occurrence, they imagined it to be the work of a practical joker.’20 The manservant’s personality, too, changes, and he becomes a drunkard. Writing, for Proust, can be a means of registering the most deeply held thoughts, just as the most fundamental nature of a human being can be compared to an act of writing which has long ago been formed in habit: repeating the name of a woman ‘seems as if you are writing it inside yourself.’21

  We know that Proust in real life liked to cast his eye over correspondence, trying to guess the author before knowing for certain; he ‘would examine the envelope or the writing, trying to guess who it was from.’22 In the novel that same art of divination is practised by the family servant Francoise when she examines the fatal letter which the child narrator wants her to deliver to his mother at the dining table at the very beginning of the book: ‘She looked at the envelope for five minutes as if the examination of the paper and the appearance of the writing would inform her about the nature of the contents or tell her which article of her code she ought to apply.’23 Many years later, the same servant is caused great distress by being ‘obliged one morning to hand me among others a letter where she had recognized Albertine’s handwriting on the envelope’24 after Albertine had precipitously departed. When the narrator sets the Balbec maître d’, Aimé, on to tracking down the reality of Albertine’s sex life, we are told that the arrival of a letter with his handwriting on it ‘was enough to make me tremble . . . I knew it was from Aimé.’25 The legibility of handwriting as a guide not just to character but to the specific intention is frequently demonstrated by the writing on an envelope; this is taken up by the narrator’s grandfather who on ‘recognizing his friend’s handwriting on the envelope, would exclaim, “It’s Swann, about to ask for something: on guard!”’26

  When the narrator comments on Gilberte’s handwriting that ‘the rather factitious originality of Gilberte’s handwriting consisted principally in placing, in the line above the line she was writing, the crosses on her t’s, making them look as if they were underlining the words higher up, or making the dots on her i’s look as if they were breaks in the sentences of the line above, and on the other hand to insert in the lines below the tails and the curlicues of the words that were written above,’27 he is clearly drawing on the systematic analysis of recent French theorists of psychology in handwriting strokes like Michon. The particular strokes he observes have specific, rather deplorable meanings for Gilberte’s personality, as well as for the plot – ‘it was natural that a telegraph clerk should have read the scrolls of the s’s or the y’s of the upper line as a final ‘ine’ closing the name of Gilberte . . . as for her G, it had the appearance of an A in Gothic script.’28 As a final cruel touch, this is another of those moments when a character is excited by the appearance of a recognized handwriting on an envelope – this time, the narrator’s mother recognizes Gilberte’s handwriting on the envelope of a follow-up letter. Only rarely do these specific observations take on a cultural dimension – the curious comment about Odette’s handwriting ‘in which an affectation of British stiffness imposed an appearance of discipline on ill-formed letters that would perhaps have signified, to less prejudiced eyes, an untidiness of mind, an insufficient education, a lack of frankness and resolution.’29* Odette knows that handwriting can be read, as in her observation, rather like Sherlock Holmes talking about the letter written on the train, that ‘my dear, my hand is shaking so hard I can scarcely write.’30 The novelist-narrator, however, sees beyond her self-analysis, and through it. The analysis can go further than many later graphologists would like. Mme de Cambremer’s handwriting spurs the narrator on to make an observation not just about family resemblances of handwriting, but of similarities in social class; that ‘in these few lines of ink, the handwriting betrayed an individuality recognizable for me from now on among all others, without there being any need to resort to the hypothesis of special pens any more than rare pigments of mysterious manufacture are necessary to the painter to express his original vision. Even a paralytic, suffering from agraphia after a stroke, and reduced to seeing the characters as a pattern without being able to read them, would have realized that Mme de Cambremer belonged to an old family in which the enthusiastic cultivation of literature and the arts had let some air into its aristocratic traditions.’31 *

  But what was Proust’s handwriting itself like? In the novel itself, Francoise complains about the narrator’s paperoles, the little pieces of manuscript which the narrator sticks toge
ther, and the manuscript eaten away ‘like wood that insects have got into.’32 About his own handwriting, the narrator has nothing to say. We have to go to the lovely memoir of Proust’s devoted servant, Celeste Albaret, to discover that ‘his writing wasn’t easy to decipher’, and this magical account, practical and specific, of what a great writer writes with:

  The pen flew along, line after line of his fine cursive writing. He always used Sergeant-Major nibs, which were plain and pointed, with a little hollow underneath to hold the ink. I never saw him use a fountain pen, though they were becoming popular at the time. I used to buy stocks of nibs, several boxes at a time. He always had fifteen or so pen holders within reach, because if he dropped the one he was using it could only be picked up when he wasn’t there, because of the dust. They were just little bits of wood with a metal holder for the nib – the ordinary kind used in schools, like the inkwell, which was a glass square with fan grooves to rest the pen and a little round opening with a stopper. ‘Some people need a beautiful pen to write with, but all I need is ink and paper. If I didn’t have a pen holder, I would manage with a stick.’33