Script and Scribble

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Until then, my husband thinks someone should do personality readings from the things people stick up on their refrigerators with magnets. In our own case, the town dump schedule, the library hours, the vet’s phone number, and our basic Margarita recipe pretty much say it all.

  1 Dreyfus was exonerated in 1905, but his conviction and incarceration led to an international scandal, thanks partly to the novelist Emile Zola’s famous “J’accuse” letter, published in a Parisian newspaper, which charged the French government with a gross miscarriage of justice.

  2 The censorship represented by the Index was in effect until 1966. When I was in high school, I defiantly read Madame Bovary and Les Miserables, both of which were put on the Index because they were “sensual, libidinous or lascivious”—which of course was one reason I adored them both, although Peyton Place, which didn’t make it onto the Index, was certainly dirtier than either.

  3 The Stanford-Binet Test evaluates, among other things, vocabulary, comprehension, pattern analysis, equation building, and memory for digits; it is hotly disputed as to its impartiality and usefulness but is still administered routinely in American schools.

  4 Bryant (1794–1878), also an abolitionist, lived on Long Island but was a Big Apple booster: it was Bryant who chose Calvert Vaux and William Law Olmstead as the designers of Central Park. He was the author of the surprisingly cheery poem “Thanatopsis,” a meditation on death that ends with the image of “one who wraps the drapery of his couch/About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.”

  5 Emerson (1803–1882)—Transcendentalist, essayist, poet, radical atheist, and lender of land on Walden Pond to his friend Thoreau on which he built his famous cabin—is now considered one of the great American writers. (In his eulogy at Thoreau’s funeral, Emerson approvingly mentioned his friend’s pencil-making accomplishments.)

  6 When I was in school, we were beaten over the head with Longfellow (1807–1882), who wrote “The Song of Hiawatha”—of which we all remember the lines “By the shores of Giche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea Water,” and not much else. However, one of the poems I memorized was his charming “The Children’s Hour,” written for his three daughters, which gallops along wonderfully and is really fun to read aloud. Longfellow is now invariably called, rather condescendingly, “one of America’s most beloved poets”—also perhaps one of its most unread.

  7 Lowell (1819–1891) was a poet, diplomat, and abolitionist, first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and the godfather of Virginia Woolf. His most famous line is probably “And what is so rare as a day in June?” but a better one is “Democracy is the form of government that gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.”

  8 The Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane didn’t change its name to the American Psychiatric Association until 1921.

  9 Dues today are $90 a year. There are 6,000 members.

  10 “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,” according to H. L. Mencken. As part of the American public, I’ve always thought that was a bit unwarranted, but, on the other hand, 12 percent of Americans today are apparently convinced that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.

  11 Rice charged Odets $20 for her analysis, but added, “If the studio is paying for it, I will leave the price up to you as you know what the traffic will stand better than I do.”

  12 One problem with the test was the difficulty of monitoring subjects to make sure they were elevated precisely one-quarter of an inch—picture graduate students creeping around on the floor with tiny rulers.

  13 In the movie The Three Faces of Eve—for which Joanne Woodward won a well-deserved Oscar for her portrayal of mousy Eve White, slutty Eve Black, and sublimely well-adjusted Jane—the first indication of Eve’s split personality comes when her adult handwriting suddenly changes to that of a disturbed child.

  14 Brussel also claimed that Metesky didn’t have much of a sex life as evidenced by the rounded bottoms on his W’s, which resembled female breasts—this also seemed to be true. But in retrospect, as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in an article on criminal profiling in The New Yorker (November 12, 2007), Brussel’s miraculous feat might have been exaggerated: “He seems to have understood only that, if you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous.”

  15 An “ancient art” revived by, among others (though not many), Jacqueline Stallone, mother of Sylvester: send her a photo of your naked butt (at least 800 pixels, please), and she will tell you who you are. (Hint: the left side reveals your past, the right side your future.)

  16 Widmer, who died in 2006, was the author of several books, including one with the wonderful title Crime and Penmanship, about forensic graphology.

  17 Poe, in his early musings on writers’ signatures, was not aware of this distinction.

  It’s interesting how the vocabulary of writing in ink with a pen on paper persists. Just as we say we send someone a “carbon copy” or “dial” a phone number (or, even more weirdly, use a “dial-up” computer connection), people still “turn over a new leaf” and try to avoid a “blot” on their record. Books continue to be “penned by” their authors.

  We talk about “blank slates,” even though the only remaining tabula rasa (technically, “scraped slate”) may be the name of the round of pizza dough you can buy at Trader Joe’s. We still quote Omar Khayaam: “The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on.” And we keep insisting that the pen is mightier than the sword, even though the sword was long ago beaten into computer parts.

  But I am not alone in believing (at the risk of sounding like Platt Rogers Spencer ambling along the lakeshore with his pointed stick) that the aesthetic appeal of good handwriting is something we should not cease to value. A lot of people are sick of making excuses for their own handwriting, and even sicker of struggling to read the writing of others. Many parents would be delighted if their son or daughter left high school not only typing up a storm but writing a fluent, pleasing script. Receiving a handwritten note remains a small but definite pleasure. Even seeing attractive writing on a dental-appointment reminder card or a Post-It or—dare I say it?—a prescription pad is a nice moment in the day.

  I’m aware that it’s not for everyone. People who grind their teeth in exasperation at the very idea will ask: What’s all the fuss about? Give doctors computers! Write slower when you need legibility! What’s wrong with block printing? Illegible signatures are harder to forge! Leave the damn kids alone, they’ve got enough problems without learning some obsolete fancy-schmancy writing! Who cares about a bunch of effete sixteenth-century Italians? Elitist! Time-wasting! Silly!

  For the rest of us, the fact that handwriting does hang on—despite everything—seems hopeful and comforting.

  There are plenty of diehard scriptomaniacs out there, and—whether they defend the Palmer Method to the death or crave a signature like the first Queen Elizabeth’s

  A modern interpretation of the signature of Elizabeth I (image credits 4.1)

  or just enjoy curling up with a diary and a fountain pen and hoping for the best—this chapter is for them, bless their ink-stained hearts.

  MANUSCRIPTS

  At my school, we learned touch-typing in twelfth grade from Sister Joseph Paul (fondly known as “J.P.”), who was tall and intimidating, stood for no nonsense, and made us type to music.1 While “Stars and Stripes Forever” and the Schubert “March Militaire” rattled the windows of the typing room, we hammered out j-u-j-space and f-r-f-space until we could do it in our sleep (and, being teenagers, we often did). I’m not particularly manually adroit, but I got perfect grades in typing, a feat I ascribe partly to J.P.’s coaching, partly to my years of bad but determined piano playing, and partly to my ambition to become a writer. Even in those days, I knew that required typing.

  I was wrong, though. There are writers who persist in writing their books in longhand,
rejecting the computer and even the typewriter for various idiosyncratic reasons.

  Mary Gordon remembers “the thrill of the Palmer method” and, according to the New York Times, to this day writes with a black-and-gold Waterman fountain pen: “Writing by hand is laborious,” she says, “but … it involves flesh, blood, and the thingness of pen and paper, those anchors that remind us that however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.”

  J. K. Rowling has written all her mega-selling Harry Potter books by hand—the first, famously, in a café. (She has also confessed that, when she was making up the names of the characters, she jotted them down on the back of an airplane sick bag.) Once, when she complained on her website that she hadn’t been able to find any “normal, lined paper” in Edinburgh (“What is a writer who likes to write longhand supposed to do when she hits her stride and then realises, to her horror, that she has covered every bit of blank paper in her bag?”), she was deluged with paper from her trillions of fans all over the world—from single sheets to a stack of notebooks embossed with her name.

  Rowling does eventually type it all into a computer. Many writers work this way, advancing along the winding path from scrawled rough draft to printer-ready copy. Joyce Carol Oates begins “the old-fashioned way,” then turns reluctantly to her laptop, as does Toni Morrison (pencil and yellow pad), and the English writers William Boyd (“there is something special about the brain-hand interface”) and Martin Amis (longhand for fiction, straight into the computer for non-). John Updike begins with pen and paper because he says he needs to hear his thoughts. Stephen King likes to write in longhand: he was forced to do so when sitting at the computer became painful after he was struck by a car in 1999, and continues to prefer it. But in his book On Writing, he says, “The only problem is that … I can’t keep up with the lines forming in my head and I get frazzled”2—and so he also has a computer.

  John Irving, however, doesn’t own one of those blasted newfangled devices. According to an interview with Salon.com, he types up his longhand drafts on an old IBM Selectric (he has six working ones, plus three others as sources of replacement parts). Paul Auster goes him one better: like Mark Twain, whose Life on the Mississippi (1883) was the first typewritten manuscript to be submitted to a publisher, Auster uses a manual typewriter.

  Auster has typed all his twenty-odd books and screenplays on an Olympia portable that he bought second-hand in 1974. In his book The Story of My Typewriter, which features paintings and drawings of the Auster machine by the artist Sam Messer, the author refers to himself as “the last pagan holdout in a world of digital converts,” and tells us that in the year 2000 he ordered fifty ribbons for his Olympia, which he hoards, using them until the type is barely legible—and he can only hope they’ll last out his writing life.

  Even more eccentrically—but understandably—one of my favorite travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor, born in 1915, was ninety-two when he decided that his handwriting had deteriorated into illegibility and acquired a typewriter, a 1951 Olivetti.

  But Jim Harrison beats them all, writing with a pen in a notebook in a house that, according to the New York Times reporter who interviewed him in 2007, “looks like a time capsule from the early 1950s,” and which Harrison says, “has absolutely nothing to do with life in our time.” Not only no computer, but no trendy typewriting machines, either. He must have a writer’s bump like a pistachio nut.

  The 1951 Olivetti “Scribe”

  Wendell Berry got some flak for his 1987 essay, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” in which he revealed that he writes with a pencil or a pen on paper, and that his wife types it up on “a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then.” He uses this method for many reasons, among them his refusal to support the energy industry any more than he has to (he doesn’t own a television, either), his dependence on his wife’s editing as she types, and the fact that the two of them simply like working this way: “If you don’t have a problem, why pay for a solution?” The flak was, of course, because of the spouse/secretary situation. People called his wife his “energy-saving device” and implied that she could be doing “more meaningful work.”3

  Well, it’s true that not every writer is married to a willing typist. Nor do we have the advantages of, say, Bill Clinton, who composed his autobiography in longhand (twenty-two thick notebooks) and had an aide type it up.

  For a lucky few writers, there’s an additional consideration: book signings, which involve the horrors of not only writer’s cramp but the twenty-city tour. Among them are the Canadian Booker Prize–winning writer Margaret Atwood, who is probably asked to sign about eighty kabillion books a year.

  Understandably, Atwood finds touring burdensome. As she said in an interview, “As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, ‘There must be a better way of doing this.’ ”

  Up to that point there wasn’t, but Atwood devised her own solution: a cyber-object called LongPen™.

  Long Pen™ (image credits 4.4)

  Atwood sits at home in Toronto and writes on an electronic tablet that’s a bit like Jefferson’s “polygraph machine,” but perhaps even more like the thingie UPS uses to get our signature verifying delivery. What she writes is conveyed over the Internet to a robotic “arm” that copies it into a book someone has purchased.4 There’s a TV screen attached: Atwood can see her fans, and the fans can see her. To people who object that this is perhaps a tad impersonal/insulting/elitist, Atwood points out that it’s handy not only for overburdened authors and the publishers who have to cough up their travel expenses, but for those who may not be well enough to travel, who are afraid to fly, who want to be environmentally correct and not waste jet fuel, who can’t accomodate all the bookstores and colleges and groups that want them to appear in person. (Presumably, it also benefits the agoraphobic, the paranoid, and the pathologically shy, as well as writers in the Witness Protection Program.) Instead of jetting over to the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2007, Norman Mailer LongPenned it (his last book-signing before his death on November 10 of that year), as did Dean Koontz at BookExpo America. The novelists Anita Shreve (“I’d do it again in a heartbeat”) and Tracy Chevalier (“Everybody wins!”) are advocates. LongPen is now being marketed not only to best-selling writers but to movie stars, sports figures, and other celebs who don’t have time to face their fans in the flesh. Shortly before his death, the computer-hating and amusingly crotchety English writer Auberon Waugh (1939–2001) noted, “One can live a happy and fulfilled life without having anything to do with these machines, which grow more unpleasant and threatening every day.” It’s easy to imagine what he would think of such a gizmo.

  As a writer, I have to admit that I’m wedded to my computer. But as a reader, I find it difficult to describe the exact nature of the excitement I feel when I encounter a favorite writer’s signature—the real, immediate, spontaneous thing, done with a hand and a pen—or better yet, the original manuscript of some work I love. When I’m on vacation, one of my great treats is to seek out writers’ houses. I especially love the Maine home of Sarah Orne Jewett, whose The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is a charming and intimate chronicle that begins quietly (“There was something about the coast town of Dunnet which made it seem more attractive than other maritime villages of eastern Maine”) and continues quietly, and as a re-creation of American country life that, even then, was fast disappearing, it’s one of the most delightful books I know.

  The manuscript is at Harvard, but at her house in South Berwick bits of Jewett’s writing have been preserved, and it was wonderful—to me, at least—to get a glimpse of her vibrant, confident hand.

  Jack Kerouac’s handwritten diary at the New
York Public Library,5 begun when he was seventeen, is recent enough that it looks like anyone’s diary, with its neat, undistinguished handwriting, suitably flourished for the period. And yet, somehow, as we imagine the young, earnest hand that penned it, it’s hard not to find it a deeply moving document. Years ago, in England, I remember seeing a George Eliot exhibit at the British Museum that included the manuscript of Middlemarch—far and away my favorite Victorian novel. The Berg Collection at the New York Public Library owns—among other wonders—Virginia Woolf’s incomparable diaries and many of her letters.

  From Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (image credits 4.5)

  The point is that these manuscripts are written with pen and ink on paper. Yes, it’s interesting to see Toni Morrison’s meticulously penned-in changes to her typescript of “The Art of Fiction,” but it’s nothing compared to getting a look at, for example, Dickens’s endlessly corrected, sublimely messy manuscript of Our Mutual Friend—both at the Morgan Library:

  (image credits 4.6)

  All these—and much, much more—are there for the ogling in libraries and museums all over the world.

  Even more than a personal possession, a writer’s script, with its smears, crossings out, second thoughts, and marginal notes, seems to take the viewer directly into his or her mind. The poet Philip Larkin once said, “All literary manuscripts have two kinds of value: what might be called the magical value and the meaningful value. The magical value is the older and more universal: this is the paper he wrote on, these are the words as he wrote them, emerging for the first time in this particular miraculous combination. The meaningful value is of much more recent origin, and is the degree to which a manuscript helps to enlarge our knowledge and understanding of a writer’s life and work.” In the words of the poet and former NEA chairman Dana Gioia, “Reading is never more intimate than with script. The hand of the poet reaches out to greet the reader.” When you see the manuscript of a work that’s important to you, it’s difficult not to be very aware of that hand holding the pen and forming the letters—and to feel a bit closer to the mind behind it all.