The Missing Ink

by Philip Hensher

  Still, it had a pen shop, and, as the saying went, you can buy anything at all in Harrods, even fountain pens with an italic nib. I walked up Sloane Street from Peter Jones in the direction of Knightsbridge. On the right, there is a shop of the luxury goods firm, Mont Blanc, which of course sells fountain pens. I did not go in. In part, I wanted to see a range of manufacturers; in part, I had the idea that Mont Blanc pens were dizzyingly expensive. The make is one of those luxury-goods brands with a supposedly telling logo – in this case, I discover, a sort of white splodge on the top of the case, by the clip. To master all such telling logos from the world of luxury goods would take a lifetime, to the preclusion of any other intellectual activity, and I’m not sure how many people one would ever meet who would see the splodge on the end of your pen and say ‘Ah – Mont Blanc’.* So I went onwards, to Harrods.

  The layout of Harrods is constantly confusing, laid out in a kind of spiral which leads you from one chamber to another, round and round. Hellish as it normally must be, two days after Christmas, with great mobs of monoglot Chinese punching each other to get to the Crème de la Mer concession proved almost too much. There are no maps of the shop anywhere, and since the whole thing is sold off to individual stall-holders, none of whom have any grasp at all of the layout of the shop, you wander about pointlessly until you happen upon one of the lifts. The stationery is on the lower ground floor, and to reach it you need to pass through a Disco Street Youth concession blasting hip hop at full volume, and harassed shop assistants carrying armfuls of shawl-collared cardigans from the changing cubicles back to the racks. Then there is the bold monument to Diana Wales and Dodi Fayed, the son of the shop’s previous owner, Mohammed Fayed – the shop is now owned by the princes of Qatar, who haven’t found the right moment to remove this extravaganza.* And finally you get to the pen department.

  The pen department was a comparatively quiet patch, with thick carpets underfoot, and smooth young men standing behind glass cases. It was the Peter Jones pen desk in large – the cheap pens were in a busier room next door. I spoke to an assistant. ‘I am looking for a fountain pen, with an italic nib, and a refillable, pump-action, hydraulic-sort of reservoir thingy,’ I said. The lady looked doubtful. ‘I’m not sure that we stock anything like that,’ she said. ‘Parker do the biggest range of nibs, but you have to order one especially – I’m not sure how long it would take. And Mont Blanc do an oblique nib – I would have to pass you over to my colleague Mr Assad. Mr Assad, could you help this gentleman?’ I repeated my request at the Mont Blanc desk. Mr Assad produced an elegant case of ten black Mont Blanc pens, each labelled with a cryptic designation. He handed me one labelled OB, and a leather-bound notebook to scribble on. He explained the difference between an oblique nib and an italic nib – I saw that the oblique, slanting nib produced a more subtle variation between thick and thin strokes than the italic nib, and spent a few pleasant minutes writing my favourite pangram, ‘TV quiz jock, Mr PhD, bags few lynx.’* I tried a thicker oblique nib, this one labelled OBB, and this pen, curiously, was filled with brown ink, like a typesetter’s.† The oblique effect was not what I had been looking for, exactly, but it was very pleasing. ‘How much was that?’ Well, the oblique nib could be fitted to any of the Mont Blanc range. How much? Well, the range started at WHITE NOISE. Look, see, this one here, it’s roughly the size of an eyebrow pencil, though a proper Mont Blanc pen. Yes, all very well, but I’m not going to write a great novel with a pen the size of an eyebrow pencil. How much was the one I was writing with, the one that fit so nicely into my hand and made my handwriting so very elegant? Well, that one would probably be WHITE NOISE. Thank you very much, Mr Assad. I am so sorry to have taken up your time. ‘You could try next door,’ Mr Assad said, genuinely helpfully.

  The distinction between glass-case Writing Instruments, as some manufacturers term their products, and the things you can pick up without an invitation is one jealously preserved by department stores. Where the distinction lies is not altogether clear, or what it is based on. In part, it rests on the different cost. Harrods goes further than Peter Jones, and has two entirely separate rooms. It was to the second that I went now. Strangely, within this second room, there was also a glass-countered element, and a woman standing behind it waiting to serve the customers. Something about it was subtly different from the magnificently leisured offerings being prepared next door, however. I approached and, for the third time, explained that I wanted a fountain pen with an italic nib and a refillable, pump-action, hydraulic-type reservoir. The girl behind the counter listened. ‘Yes, this range does do something like that,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if we’ve got one in stock, though.’ I looked down at the range. It was Lamy, the German brand that I already had.

  Lamy’s range is, I think, a complete knockout. They have obviously thought through about as full a range of possibilities as a schoolful of idiosyncratic writers might want. Their range goes from a beginner’s fountain pen in more-or-less indestructible rubber and steel at £11.23, if you buy it online, to a rather wonderful bit of German design in the form of a pen with a retractable nib at a hundred quid or a touch over. There is something perverse about turning the barrel and watching the nib emerge, like the tip of a ballpoint. Lamy’s selling point is that it produces nibs in a range of sizes and shapes, including a number of italic nibs. The disadvantage was that I had a Lamy already – in fact more than one. I had started with a bright-red model with a plastic barrel, moving on to the brushed-steel example after a month or so. I reminded myself that I had come out to buy a long-lasting, good-quality, slightly flash model, not another perfectly serviceable pen from the Lamy range. ‘Does nobody else do a range of nibs?’ I asked the girl behind the counter. ‘Well, Parker do. But we don’t stock Parkers with italic nibs. You’d have to order one from next door.’ ‘Do you know anyone else in London that might stock them?’ She thought, and suggested a shop called the Pen Shop. There were branches in different parts of London. There was one on Regent Street, definitely. There was one in a shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush. And she thought there might be one in South Kensington. But she wasn’t at all sure. ‘I don’t live round here,’ she said helplessly. I decided to go to Regent Street.

  And at Regent’s Street, I queued behind a Japanese tourist who spent £250 on a Graf von Faber Castell pen, and was offered a Lamy with an italic nib, exactly the same as the one I already had. For some reason, when on these fruitless shopping expeditions, you feel the obligation to feign a lack of experience. It would feel wrong, somehow, to start sharing the findings which you had amassed in previous emporia; you feel you have to keep up some kind of pretence, out of politeness, that this is the first shop that you have gone into, and listen to the same information with a double ear: with the first, you assess any chink of difference which might suggest that you have been misled, that some overlooked brand does a perfectly good italic version; with the other, you listen for confirmation of what you already know. At the Pen Shop, I said with a concealed vagueness that I was surprised that Mont Blanc didn’t make an italic version. ‘Oh, no, they don’t,’ the assistant said. That was surprising, I said. Then, as if a random thought had come to me, I said I thought I had heard that they did a, what was it called, an oblique nib. Yes, that was true; they did do an oblique nib, she told me. However, they didn’t stock it: there was very little call for such a thing. I could try Harrods. What, I said, was the difference between an italic and an oblique nib? But at this point, two days after Christmas, I had outworn her patience, and the shop was busy. Like most people who work in specialized shops, she must have been able to recognize the difference between a real inquiry after knowledge and one where the inquirer is just asking to preserve the social niceties and pretend he knows less than he does. She must have seen that this was the third shop of my morning. ‘One goes like that,’ she said, making a horizontal chopping gesture, ‘and the other,’ she sliced at an angle, ‘goes like that.’ Something about her warned me not to pursue th
e matter further, with airy questions about whether it mattered if you bought a right-hand or a left-hand nib. I took a Lamy, exactly the same as the one I already had. I asked if they had a slightly wider italic nib that I could try. I dipped the pen in an open bottle of ink, and wrote on a pad on the desk; this one without benefit of leather casing. I wrote a pangram; I signed my name; I handed over forty quid. There had been a murder on Oxford Street the day before, a boy being stabbed among the crowds in Foot Locker, the shop for teenage sports shoes. It had made no difference to the flood of shoppers. I stood for some time with my arm outstretched, outside the Pen Shop, before a taxi drew up.

  It had taken me all morning and half an afternoon to establish definitely that there was only one pen to be bought in London which fit my description: a fountain pen with an italic nib and a refillable, pump-action, hydraulic-type reservoir. That pen had to be made by Lamy, and I already had one. I had gone about in a bus and the tube and a taxi. I had had a cup of coffee at one point. It was one of the most crowded days of the year in that corner between Chelsea, Knightsbridge and the West End of London. I had seen tens of thousands of people. All about me, they had been engaged in the act of writing, of sending messages. People had been gazing into their small electronic devices and pumping away with their opposable thumbs. Customers in shops had been paying by putting their cards into machines and pressing their four-digit code. In Caffè Nero, the faces had been down at the portable screens, and three different people had been checking and resending their e-mails. Probably at no time in human history had so much writing in public gone on: it was like an eighteenth-century coffee house, with small corners of scribble and despatch. All morning, I had seen exactly four acts of writing with a pen on paper. They had been performed three times by me, on scribble pads, leather-bound or not, in Peter Jones, Harrods, and the Pen Shop, and once by poor Nigel, being forced to buy a fountain pen and to try it out. At no other point did it seem normal or natural to anyone to write anything by hand, in handwriting. A visitor from another place would have concluded that handwriting with a fountain pen was exclusively something that you did in a shop, when you wanted to try out a fountain pen.

  29 ~ What is To Be Done

  From 1989, two professors of education at the University of Washington, Virginia Berninger and Robert Abbott, carried out research on the knock-on effects of good handwriting. They examined beginning pupils at eight state schools in the greater Seattle area, and took a sample of 700 children, of whom 144 had been identified with writing problems. The problem children were divided into groups, and subjected to a variety of remedial approaches. One group did very much better than the others, and not just in writing. Berninger and Abbott found that the group with improved handwriting also had improved reading skills, better word recognition, better compositional skills, and better recall from memory. They began to enjoy learning more: they certainly took more pleasure in writing. They were just much better students. Would the same have been true of skilled keyboard operators? Berninger and Abbott didn’t think so. ‘Handwriting is not just a motor process; it is also a memory process for letters – the building blocks of written language.’ And what happened to these students later on? ‘Older students who have done poorly from the beginning come to think of themselves as not being writers, so they don’t like writing and avoid it. As a result, their higher-level composing skills don’t get developed,’ Berninger says. ‘We think that if we intervene early with handwriting and spelling instruction, we can prevent problems with written expression later.’*

  And what if there is no intervention – no teaching – no effective engagement with pen and ink on paper? What problems arise in later life? What diminishment of a human being takes place?

  Writing this book, I’ve come to the conclusion that handwriting is good for us. It involves us in a relationship with the written word which is sensuous, immediate, and individual. It opens our personality out to the world, and gives us a means of reading other people. It gives pleasure when you communicate with it; when done at all well, it is a source of pleasure to the user. No one is ever going to recommend that we surrender the convenience and speed of electronic communications to pen and paper. Once typed into cyberspace, information remains there for ever, infinitely retrievable by typing a few key words into a search engine. By contrast, handwritten communication can only disappear into an archive, awaiting its transcription into type. Though it would make no sense to give up the clarity and authority of print which is available to anyone with a keyboard, to continue to diminish the place of the handwritten in our lives is to diminish, in a small but real way, our humanity.

  In all sorts of areas of our life, we enhance the quality of our lives by going for the slow option, the path which takes a little bit of effort. Sometimes, we don’t spend an evening watching Kim Kardashian falling over on YouTube: we read a book. Sometimes, we don’t just push a pre-prepared meal into the oven and take it out some time later. We chop and prepare vegetables; we follow a recipe, or some procedure we remember from our family kitchens, and we make dinner from scratch, with pleasure. We often do this because we love people, and think they are worthy of our effort from time to time. Sometimes we don’t get in a car and get to where we have to go as soon as we possibly can. Sometimes we open our front doors, and go for a walk in the spring sunshine. We might not get anywhere very far in two or three hours on foot, whereas in three hours by mechanical means you can get to Yorkshire (by car) or Paris (by train) or Istanbul (by air). But on the other hand, you’ve had a nice walk in the spring sunshine for very little expenditure, and you feel better for it.

  Perhaps that is the way to get handwriting back into our lives – as something which is a pleasure, which is good for us, and which is human in ways not all communication systems manage to be. It will never again have the place in people’s lives that it had in 1850. But it should, like good food or the capacity to take a walk, have some place in our lives from which it is not going to be dislodged. I want to know what people are like from their handwriting – friends, intimates, acquaintances, strangers, and people I can never and will never meet. I want everyone to maintain an intimate and unique connection with words and ink and paper and the movement of hand and arm. I would love people to lose shame in their own handwriting, and develop an interest in the varieties of writing instead – something which might lead them to do something about their handwriting, rather than regarding it with despair. I want people to write, not on special occasions, but daily. I want to maintain a variety of ways to engage with the silent word and the considered record of a sentence – typed on keyboards, thumbed on keypads, handwritten – and to enrich our relationship with language through a variety of means. We are fighting a losing battle. Few people gave up writing by hand before the last decade or two – perhaps only odd people like Hitler here and there. I heard, repeatedly, in talking to people, the claim that they ‘never wrote anything’ these days. The unconsidered movement away from handwriting is gathering pace, without anyone really deciding to stop, and once it’s gone we will have to ask whether we really wanted to lose the modest, pleasurable, private skill.

  I don’t believe that it needs to be like this. We can let handwriting maintain a special place in our lives, if we choose. If someone we knew died, I think most of us would still write our letters of condolences on paper, with a pen. And perhaps there are other occasions when we still have a choice whether to write with pen and paper or with electronic means, and we should make the right, human choice. I dream of creating a space every day where we write with pen on paper, whether for ourselves or to communicate with other people. I think we would feel happier about ourselves, and I think we would feel more secure in our relationships with those around us. Here are some small suggestions of ways in which we could reintroduce handwriting back into our lives.

  1. Handwriting should be taught in schools. This seems obvious. Too much time has been spent discussing what letterforms are best for children to learn. I
n my opinion, it hardly matters. Schools should be offered a choice of Palmer-derived script, italic, Marion Richardson, ball-and-stick, and any other style that comes to mind. Let schools compete over the best method; let some boast to parents that they produce children with the most beautiful handwriting in Hampshire. Children will move from school to school and be confused when they encounter a completely new model. So what? Children are small bouncy things. They’ll catch up.

  2. The teaching of handwriting doesn’t have to take up much time, but it has to be bound into something meaningful. The laborious performance of pothooks and ovals to a set rhythm by Palmer and his disciples seems abstract, militaristic and pointless, and in the end gave handwriting lessons a bad name. If you want to subject small children to your will, make them take up drill practice. Better still, examine your own motivation and think better of it. There are three useful points of contact with the rest of the school calendar. The rooting of handwriting in dance and movement that the French curriculum insists on, making rhythmic movement the basis of every movement of the pen, is bound to create confident writers. Many of the best handwriting reformers came out of the school art room, such as Marion Richardson and Blunt. The love of shape-making and patterning, which every child understands, easily relates to the making of letters in the early years. Finally, the study of language could be so much more imaginatively linked to the writing of letters and words in schools. But why make a choice? Why should handwriting be only taught from one angle?