The Missing Ink

by Philip Hensher

  3. Enjoy your own handwriting. Start from the good psychic point that you can always value it, because it has so much of you in it.

  4. Rediscover the joy of writing by hand, all for yourself. Go and find some writing equipment – a 15p Bic Cristal pen, one black, one red (let’s say). Get a couple of pencils – a soft 2B pencil, a hard 2H. A fountain pen, a felt-tip pen, preferably in a garish colour. Get a whiteboard marker – those joyous things with a blunt tip. Anything else you can think of – I like those green Pentel pens with a rollerball at the tip. Get some paper – cheap, shiny, ordinary, handmade, recycled, writing paper, nothing remarkable. Just write on them, one after the other. Enjoy that slightly chocolate-bar softness of the 2B pencil under the hand, the faint greasiness of it; the floppily spongy way the felt-tip pen squeaks over the cheaper, shinier paper, giving way under pressure; enjoy what we take for granted, the super-efficient, disposable, space-age design of the Bic Cristal, mastering kilometres of line under its tungsten ball; the elegant swoop of the fountain pen over good-quality paper. Nice, isn’t it? Write anything you like; write a pangram about jocks or discotheques or lynx or anything you like, and then sign your name, unembarrassedly, with a big gesture. Write your name on the wall with the whiteboard marker. That was fun! It’s washable, isn’t it? Whoops. Well, it was fun, anyway, and the dining room probably needed redecorating, I dare say.

  5. Play with your letterforms. Do you like your handwriting? If not, do something about it. Whose handwriting do you like? Copy it. The other day I was overcome with jealousy at the terrific swoop and hook of a friend’s y, and promptly started trying it out on paper. It looked completely absurd, and nothing to do with my handwriting at all. Doesn’t matter. Your handwriting is a living thing, or should be – if it looks the same as it did ten years ago, even, give way to boredom – do something about it. Mix it up a bit. After all, do you still have the same haircut that you did ten years ago? You do? Nutter.

  6. There are some ways to reintroduce handwriting into our regular daily lives. The first is to make space in the day to write notes for yourself. When you go to the supermarket, make a shopping list with a pen on a scrap of paper. As you go round, buying your stuff, tick it off – ‘Does that say “rosemary” or “Ryvita”?’ – resting on the bar of the shopping trolley, probably tearing through the paper with the tungsten ball as you go. Write notes on the kitchen corkboard; enjoy the sensuous pre-Gutenberg quality of the scribbled reminder, to yourself, to your nearest and dearest, to the cleaner. Make lists by hand. Keep a small volume for thoughts and observations, small enough to keep in a pocket or a coat.* Great for passing reflections, ideas, plans, recording those kind of idle wonderings which come in a moment and which you promise yourself you’ll look up next time you’re in a library and of course forget because you don’t write it down. There’s really nothing nicer than looking back through a notebook full of a year’s casual thoughts. I personally don’t keep a diary, but who could doubt that a diary, written by hand, is a million times nicer than a bloody blog?* The nicest of all private, handwritten journals is a dream diary; you keep it on your bedside table, and when you wake, you write down what you’ve been dreaming about. It looks so odd after a few weeks; your handwriting in such a state, all manner of sizes, and full of things which you can’t remember why you felt so intensely about them. A dream diary belonging to somebody else would in the end be the most fascinating thing in the world.

  7. When something important that you need to understand and remember is being said to you, make a note of it by hand. To be able to write down a summary with pen and paper is, I’m convinced, a quite different and superior skill to making notes in any other way. I talk regularly to a lot of students on academic themes, and, despite institutional pressure, don’t use anything like Powerpoint to get my argument across. I write with a marker on a whiteboard. It forces everyone into a more active engagement. From the other side, the students who make no record, but stare astonished into space, wishing they were still on the ski slopes, do worst in the end. The second worst are the ones who plonk a tape recorder on the desk in front of them and record everything you say with the firm and honourable intention of listening to it again later. The worst ones after that are the ones who get out their laptops, and type furiously as you speak. Those, I have to say, are often still pretty bad students, because typing as someone talks encourages transcription without much thought. That’s great if what you are hoping to do with your laptop is to transcribe a stretch of overheard dialogue, not so great if you are trying to understand what people say. But the very best students are the ones who take out a piece of paper and a pen, and write down the things that they think are interesting as you talk, making sense of it as they go. Those are the good students. Yes, you should make notes of anything important, because that’s how the mind works.

  8. Write to other people. Write to people you love, people you like, people you work with. Write postcards. When you go somewhere remotely interesting – when you drop into the National Gallery, when you have a nice day out,* when you go away for a weekend or an overnight, when the firm sends you to Crawley or Khartoum or New York for one of those dull/frightening conferences – find some postcards and send three to your mum and dad, your siblings and nieces, your significant other, your best friend or that old friend you haven’t seen for a while. What could be better than to know that you’ll be the only nice thing in your old friend’s postal delivery that day? Is there anything that gives such pleasure so cheaply as an amusing postcard with thirty sharp words about the delights of Crawley on the back? Make a habit of it. Send letters on special occasions. Write to your husband or wife or children and tell them that you love them. Or tell them they’re arseholes. It will have a lot more impact than a text message either way, perhaps usefully keeping them on their toes. Keep a supply of postcards handy, and a book of stamps. Scribble away. It doesn’t cost much.

  9. Don’t be in a rush. Why are you in a rush? Why don’t you have two minutes to write something down? Why is your pen dashing in that awful way over the paper? Whoever described, or thought of describing, their handwriting as executing so many w.p.m.? Why can’t you breathe, and lift, and take a moment to enjoy this small sensuous act? Do you stuff food pointlessly in your mouth, hoping to get it over with as soon as possible? Or do you hope to enjoy it? Writing can be like that. Sometimes, all we have is two minutes to eat a sandwich or we aren’t going to get anything to eat until six. At other times – let’s hope at least once a day – we like to sit down in company, and take a little bit of time to chew and anticipate and sit afterwards. That would improve our lives, just as taking a moment to write something by hand, to ourselves, to friends, to our families, is always going to improve their lives and ours.

  10. Let’s not be snobs about implements. Let’s enjoy the pleasure of nice paper, and using a nice pen, and writing well and carefully, but let’s not insist on it. There are pleasures, too, in the torn-off piece of paper bearing a few words of casual reminder in hasty blue ballpoint, if we recognize the hand of the person we love best in the world in it. The simplest writing implement is as wonderful an object, properly regarded, as the most luxurious fountain pen; the most casual note, pinned to the fridge, can bear as much of the writer’s humanity as the most carefully scripted e-mail.

  That’s my list for improvement. Take what appeals, and leave the rest. It’s a free country.

  Here is a story about how handwriting can still be important, and why we shouldn’t let it go. In the university where I teach, one undergraduate creative module contains a specific task, a ‘writer’s notebook’. The students have to make notes on all sorts of things – observations, passing fancies, plot ideas, scribbled asides, as well as sketches and drafts of poems, short stories, perhaps bits of drama. When I explain this task to the students, invariably someone says, ‘Can I type it all on the computer and hand it in because I can’t write any other way?’ I give in, having been instructed that I have to, but
I do encourage students to write as much as they can by hand. It makes you think, I say. It looks less permanent. It has more of you in it. Most students, even now, take this advice and do produce volumes which are full of work written by hand, notes and thoughts and inventions both casual and highly developed. When they have been a student’s constant companion over four months or so, they are, I have to say, a total joy.

  Last month a student of mine died, quite suddenly. It was a terrible shock to everyone who knew her: she was a grand girl all round. She had done this module, and had produced a fat notebook in which every word was written by hand – you would recognize her handwriting as soon as you knew her. It bulged with invention, and cutouts, and marginalia, and massive crossings-out, and all manner of things. After I heard that she had died, I went down to the cellar where these things are stored, and, with a little difficulty from the administration, extracted her writer’s notebook from the archive.

  It was just full of her. You could see where her pen had moved across the page, only months before; you could see her good creative days and the days where nothing much had come; you could see what she had written quickly, in inspiration, and the bits she had gone over and over. I only taught her, but I was moved by it, and felt a connection with the poor girl, whom I had liked a great deal.

  The department in which I work had created great difficulties in letting me see it at all. Administrators who had never met the girl had pretended that it was locked up and could not now be unlocked. Looking at it, I could understand why it had created such nervousness in them. It frightened people who were frightened of literature, and humanity, and the texture of life. Written at length, in hand, it just was my student. It was going to be a precious thing to hand over, and I hoped the administrators would be up to the task in the end. Some part of the writer’s spirit had passed into the handwriting, and had stayed there. Her humanity and her hand overlapped, and something remained, indelibly, in these physical traces. I handed it back to the administrator, and she locked it up again, safely, in her cupboard.

  Notes

  2. INTRODUCTION

  1 Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America, p.90.

  3. THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH MY HANDWRITING

  1 Times Higher Education Supplement, 23 February 2012.

  2 ‘Write and wrong’, Guardian, 14 April 1987.

  3 Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun.

  4 PR Newswire, 26 May 1994.

  5 ‘Many believe penmanship is losing out to technology,’ Detroit News, 3 January 2000.

  6 ‘Poor handwriting led to fatal dose,’ The Times, 9 December 2005.

  7 Times Higher Education Supplement, 15 April 2010.

  8 Caron Dann, ‘From Where I Sit – A sad loss of literacy Down Under’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 11 September 2008.

  9http:­//www.­education.­gov.uk­/schools/­teachingandlearning/­curriculum­/secondary/­b00199101/­english­/ks3/­attainment/­writing, retrieved 1 February 2012.

  10 ‘Pupils’ handwriting is not up to scratch’, The Times, 9 June 2006.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Letters Written To His Son, letter LVI.

  14 ‘Indiana schools to teach children to type instead of joined-up handwriting’, Daily Telegraph, 7 July 2011.

  15 ‘Teachers say good penmanship is a thing of the past’, AP State and Local Wire, 23 June 2001.

  16 ‘Pupils get black marks for standard of writing’, Scotland on Sunday, 17 October 2010.

  17 ‘Whatever became of Palmer?’ New York Times, 8 January 1984.

  18 ‘P is for penmanship’, Chicago Daily Herald, 15 November 2006.

  19 ‘Can you read this?’ New York Times, 25 January 1995.

  20 ‘Teaching the Write Stuff’, Detroit News, 8 May 2007.

  21 ‘Righting writing wrongs’, Washington Times, 11 July 2000.

  22 ‘Write and wrong’, Guardian, 14 April 1987.

  23 ‘The death of handwriting’, Guardian, 14 February 2006.

  24 ‘Joined up letters, at a stroke’, Independent, 30 May 1996.

  25 ‘Between the lines’, Guardian, 8 April 1997.

  4. A HISTORY OF HANDWRITING FROM STRING ONWARDS

  1 Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Writing, p.30.

  7. OUT OF THE BILLIARD HALLS

  1 Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America, p.49.

  2 Reproduced in Rosemary Sassoon, Handwriting of the Twentieth Century, p.23.

  3 http://www.spencerian.com

  4 Kitty Burns Florey, Script and Scribble, p.71.

  5 Ibid, p.25.

  6 H.C. Spencer, Spencerian Key To Practical Penmanship, pp.39–40.

  7 Thornton, Handwriting in America, p.48.

  8 H.C. Spencer, Spencerian Key To Practical Handwriting, cited in Thornton, Handwriting in America, p.50.

  9 Rosemary Sassoon, Handwriting of the Twentieth Century, p.20.

  10 Henry Gordon, Handwriting and How To Teach It (circa 1875), quoted in Rosemary Sassoon, Handwriting of the Twentieth Century, p.35.

  11 Rosemary Sassoon, Handwriting of the Twentieth Century, p.27–9.

  12 Kitty Burns Florey, Script and Scribble.

  8. VERE FOSTER AND A.N. PALMER

  1 Thornton, Handwriting in America, p.67.

  2 Thornton, Handwriting in America, p.68.

  3 ‘Many believe penmanship is losing out to technology’, The Detroit News, 3 January 2000.

  4 Alfred Mendel, Personality in Handwriting, pp.304–5.

  10. PRINT AND MANUSCRIPT AND BALL AND STICK

  1 Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, Molesworth, Penguin Modern Classics, p. 118.

  2 Priscilla Johnston, Edward Johnston.

  3 Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall.

  4 Rosemary Sassoon, Handwriting of the Twentieth Century, p.74.

  5 Ibid, p.64.

  6 Donald Jackson, The Story of Writing.

  11. ‘UNE QUESTION DE WRITING’

  1 To be found on http://www.laserlearning.tv

  2 ‘Can you read this?’, New York Times, 25 January 1995.

  3 Paul R. Pope, ‘Deutsche oder Lateinische Schrift?’, The German Quarterly, May 1931.

  4 ‘German teachers campaign to simplify handwriting in schools’, Guardian, 29 June 2011.

  5 Rosemary Sassoon, Handwriting of the Twentieth Century, p. 72.

  13. HITLER’S HANDWRITING

  1 Gerhard L.Weinberg, ‘Hitler’s Memorandum on the Four Year Plan: A Note’, German Studies Review, February 1988.

  2 Gerhard L.Weinberg, ‘Hitler’s Private Testament of May 2nd, 1938’, The Journal of Modern History, December 1955.

  3 Robert Harris, Selling Hitler, p.180.

  4 Ibid, p.193.

  5 Ibid, p.353.

  14. PREPARING THE BOYS FOR DEATH

  1 Alfred Fairbank, The Story of Handwriting, p.61.

  2 Examples shown in ibid, plates 37 and 38 and fig. 7.

  3 Dictionary of National Biography.

  4 ‘Duelling handwriting styles’, The Ottawa Citizen, 15 March 1998.

  5 Alfred Fairbank, The Story of Handwriting, p.66.

  6 Reginald Piggott, Survey, p.31.

  7 Tom Gourdie, Italic Handwriting.

  8 Kitty Burns Florey, Script and Scribble, p.166.

  16. INK

  1 Eric Singer, A Manual of Graphology.

  2 The British Bellman, 1648. Charles Hindley, A History of the Cries of London, p.41.

  3 Joyce Irene Whalley, Writing Implements and Accessories, p.80.

  4 The British Bellman, 1648. Charles Hindley, A History of the Cries of London, pp.100–1.

  18. PENS

  1 Joyce Irene Whalley, Writing Implements and Accessories, pp.41–2.

  2 Ibid, p.44.

  3 Ibid, pp.52–4.

  4 Ibid, p.67.

  5 Ibid, p.65.

  6 Joyce Irene Whalley, Writing Implements and Accessories, p.83.

  19. MARION RICHARDSON

  1 Dictionary of
National Biography.

  2 Marion Richardson, Writing and Writing Patterns: Teacher’s Book, p.3.

  3 Ibid, p.4.

  4 Ibid, pp.21–41.

  20. READING YOUR MIND

  1 Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America, p. 88.

  22. VITATIVENESS

  1 Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America, p.97.

  2 Ibid, pp.110–12.

  3 ‘On Autographs’, from Curiosities of Literature: Second Series.

  4 Eric Singer, A Manual of Graphology.

  5 Singer, p.169.

  6 Rosa Baughan, Character Indicated by Handwriting.

  7 Dorothy Sara, Handwriting Analysis for the Millions.

  8 Rosa Baughan, Character Indicated by Handwriting, p.32.

  9 Stephen Kurdsen, Reading Character from Handwriting, p.53.

  10 Princess Anatole Marie Bariatinsky, Character As Revealed by Handwriting, p.26.

  11 Nadya Olyanova, Handwriting Tells, p.235.

  12 Alfred O. Mendel, Personality in Handwriting, p.33.

  13 Irene Marcuse, Guide to the Disturbed Personality Through Handwriting.

  14 Stephen Kurdsen, Reading Character from Handwriting, p.17.

  15 Translated in Singer, p.30.

  16 Ben-Shakhar, ‘Can Graphology predict occupational success?’