2 ~ Introduction

About six months ago, I realized that I had no idea what the handwriting of a good friend of mine looked like. I had known him for over a decade, but somehow we had never communicated using handwritten notes. He had left messages for me, e-mailed me, sent text messages galore. But I don’t think I had ever had a letter from him written by hand, a postcard from his holidays, a reminder of something pushed through my letterbox. I had no idea whether his handwriting was bold or crabbed, sloping or upright, italic or rounded, elegant or slapdash.

The odd thing is this. It had never struck me as strange before, and there was no particular reason why it had suddenly come to mind. We could have gone on like this forever, hardly noticing that we had no need of handwriting any more.

This book has been written at a moment when, it seems, handwriting is about to vanish from our lives altogether. Is anything going to be lost apart from the habit of writing with pen on paper? Will some part of our humanity, as we have always understood it, disappear as well? To answer these questions, I’ve gone back to look at some aspects of writing with a pen on paper. I’m going to talk about the pioneers who interested themselves in teaching handwriting, and in particular styles: in the nineteenth century, the Americans Platt Rogers Spencer and A.N. Palmer, with their corporate copperplate, and the English inventor of efficient ‘civil service’ hand, Vere Foster. There are the revivers of the elegant italic style in the twentieth century, and the great proponent of child-centred art and writing, Marion Richardson, who transformed the study of handwriting in the 1930s. This book also talks about what handwriting has meant to us. And I’m going to talk about the sometimes-eccentric conclusions about personality, illness, psychosis and even suitability for employment which students of the pseudo-science of graphology have tried to draw from a close study of handwriting. We’ll hear about writing implements, including both the nineteenth-century fountain pen, and that wonderful thing, the Bic Cristal ballpoint, and some varieties of ink. I wanted to convey a sense of how much handwriting can mean to any of us, and from time to time I set up a tape recorder in front of friends and family and asked them to talk about handwriting. Sometimes it gave a surprising insight into an individual life. And actually, writing this book has given me a surprising insight into my own life. I felt, after writing it, that some of my personal values had been clarified.

The book had better be written while it still makes some sense. At some point in recent years, handwriting has stopped being a necessary and inevitable intermediary between people – something by which individuals communicate with each other, putting a little bit of their personality into the form of their message as they press the ink-bearing point onto the paper. It has started to become an option, and often an unattractive, elaborate one. Before handwriting goes altogether, we might look at what it has meant to us, and what we have put into it.

For each of us, the act of putting marks on paper with ink goes back as far as we can probably remember. At some point, somebody comes along and tells us that if you make a rounded shape and then join it to a straight vertical line, that means the letter ‘a’, just like the ones you see in the book. (But the ones in the book have a little umbrella over the top, don’t they? Never mind that, for the moment: this is how we make them for ourselves.) If you make a different rounded shape, in the opposite direction, and a taller vertical line, then that means the letter ‘b’. Do you see? And then a rounded shape, in the same direction as the first letter, but not joined to anything – that makes a c. And off you go.

Actually, I don’t think I have any memory of this initial introduction to the art of writing letters on paper with a pen. It was just there, hovering before the limits of conscious memory, like the day on which the letters in the book swam out of incoherence and into sensible words. That day must have existed, and must have been momentous. I just don’t remember it, and as far as I can tell from my memory, I’ve always been able to read and to write. When, as an adult, I went to Japan or to an Arabic-speaking country, and found myself functionally illiterate in the face of signs, it woke no deep memory in me of earliest childhood. It was just extremely strange.

But if I don’t have any memory of that first instruction in writing, I have a clear memory of what followed: instructions in refinements, suggestions of how to purify the forms of your handwriting. There was the element of aspiration, too. You longed to do ‘joined-up writing’, as we used to call the cursive hand when we were young. Instructed in print letters, I looked forward to the ability to join one letter to another as a mark of huge sophistication. Adult handwriting was unreadable, true, but perhaps that was its point. I saw the loops and impatient dashes of the adult hand as a secret and untrustworthy way of communicating that one day I would master. Unable to bear it any longer, I took a pen and covered a whole page of my school exercise book with grown-up writing, joined-up writing. There were no letters there to be read, still less words; just diagonal strokes linked each to the next in a bold series of gestures. That, I thought, was grown-up writing, if only it could be made to mean something, too.

There was, also, wanting to make your handwriting more like other people’s. Often, this started with a single letter or figure. In the second year at school, our form teacher had a way of writing a 7 in the European way, with a cross-bar. A world of glamour and sophistication hung on that cross-bar; it might as well have had a beret on, be smoking Gitanes in the maths cupboard.* Later, there was rather a dubious fellow with queasy ‘favourites’ in the class: his face would shine as he drawled out the name of the class tart. He must have been removed from the teaching profession by the forces of law and order sometime in the 1980s; still, the uncial E’s which have a knack of creeping in and out of my adult handwriting were spurred by what then seemed supreme elegance.*

Your hand is formed by aspiration to others – by the beautiful strokes of an italic hand of a friend which seems altogether wasted on a mere postcard, or a note on your door reading ‘Dropped by – will come back later’. It’s formed, too, by anti-aspiration, the desire not to be like fat Denise in the desk behind who reads with her mouth open and whose similarly obese writing, all bulging m’s and looping p’s, contains the atrocity of a little circle on top of every i. Or still more horrible, on occasion, (usually when she signs her name) a heart.†

These are the things we remember: the attempts to modify ourselves through our handwriting, and not what came first. Our handwriting, like ourselves, seems always to have been there.

The rituals and pleasurable pieces of small behaviour attached to writing with a pen are the next thing we remember. On a finger of my right hand, just on the joint, there is a callus which has been there for forty years, where my pen rests. For some reason, I used to call it ‘my carbuncle’ when I thought of it – I discovered that a carbuncle is something different and more unpleasant, and I don’t know who taught me the lovely but incorrect word. It has been there so long that I had it before I knew the difference between right and left, and used it to remind myself. ‘Turn right’ someone would say, and I would feel the hard little lump, like a leather pad, ink-stained, which showed what side that was on. And between words or sentences, to encourage thought, I might give it a small, comforting rub with my thumb.

In the same way, you could call up exactly the right word by pen chewing, an entertainment which every different pen contributed to in its own way. The clear-cased plastic ballpoint, the Bic Cristal, had a plug you could work free with your teeth and discard, or spit competitive distances. The casing was the perfect shape to turn into an Amazonian blowpipe for spitting wet paper at your enemies.* Or you would find that the plastic bit would quickly shatter with a light pressure of the pensive molars; first holding together, then splintering, leaving shards in the mouth and the ink-tube poking out in a foolish way. Pretty soon you would be attempting to write with only an inch of casing, stabbing painfully into the mound of your thumb. The green rollerballs and felt-tips, on the other hand, had a more resistant casing, and gratefully took the disgusting imprint of your teeth. They had a knack of leaking backwards, onto your tongue, to spectacular effect at break-time in the playground. I could write a whole book about ink-staining; the way, at the end of the morning, you went to the bathroom and, with that gritty coal-tar soap with the school-smell – you never saw it anywhere else – scrubbed the residue of the morning’s labours from the entire outer ridge on the little finger of your right hand. Bliss.

There were other rituals. If you were allowed a fountain pen, the private joy of slotting in the ink reservoir: the small resistance, and then as the plastic broke, the reservoir settling into its secure place with a silent plop. The ink never flowed immediately, and there was the gesture of flicking downwards in the air above the desk or floor to pull it towards the nib. Somehow, it never occurred to you to cover the nib with a tissue or handkerchief; somehow, there was always a reason to go on flicking downwards even after the first sign of the appearance of ink, just to flick that satisfying spattering Jackson Pollock line of ink. And when the ink ran out or wouldn’t flow, whether from ballpoint or nib, the series of solutions you attempted: the movement of the pen over the paper in loops and hooks, first patiently then with a frenzied scribble, like a mid-period Twombly. When it failed again, you might daringly take the pen in your mouth and suck – it worked better with a fountain pen than with a ballpoint, but both were just as liable to stain your tongue black, and bring forward the sage observation from the boy sitting next to you that ‘My aunty died of ink poisoning, it’s deadly if you take enough of it inside you.’

Technologies are either warm or cold, either attached to us with their own personalities, or simple, dead, replaceable tools to be picked up and discarded. The pen has been with us for so many millennia that it seems not just warm but almost alive, like another finger. These rituals are signs of the intimacy of that relationship. They seem like ges-tures of grooming or of small-scale playing rather than the mending or maintenance of a tool. Sometimes, the pen has actually been referred to as a ‘finger’, and everyone knows what is meant: ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on,’ Omar Khayyam writes in Edward Fitzgerald’s translation. It has sometimes been considered improper, indecent, unhygienic to lend a pen. There is a nineteenth-century bon mot, which you will sometimes hear even now, that there are three things that a gentleman never lends, a wife, a pipe and a pen, rather like a lady never lending her hairbrush. Among other occupations, I teach creative writing at a university in the West of England, and my students know, to their cost, that the prejudice has its point. If I borrow a ballpoint from one of them, within half an hour it is apt to creep towards my mouth, and by the end of a two-hour seminar it is often not in a returnable condition.

When the machines first came into our lives, they probably seemed as warm and humane as any other way of writing. I can only explain this by reference to my own history of engagement with writing with machines. When I was a boy, people occasionally asked me ‘What do you want to do, when you grow up?’ I always took this question seriously. Like other remarks adults made to children – what year are you in at school? I’ve been hearing a lot about your new digital watch – this seemed to me a real remark which looked for a real answer.

My family had a great friend called Tony Peagam, who was the editor at various times of different magazines. One was the AA magazine – the Automobile Association, not the twelve-step recovering pisshead one – and once he put my dad on the cover. It was in relation to a story about car insurance. It seemed extraordinary to me that our family name might appear in print on a bright-red cover. Afterwards, for years, when people asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I would say ‘I want to be a freelance journalist’. (Where I got ‘freelance’ from, I don’t know. But it was so.)

After hearing this for a few years, my mother said that, if I wanted to become a journalist, I should learn shorthand and learn to type. For my thirteenth birthday, I had a typewriter: an orange portable Olivetti, with its own tightly fitting case, closing with a satisfying click. I sat and conscientiously learnt to type. At first, the knowledge of the alphabet and the arrangement of the keyboard meshed in an ugly way.* My fingers hovered over it as I searched for a letter – Q, so oddly positioned at the start of everything. But I persevered, and soon I knew where everything was, mastering those interestingly dull exercises – glad had fad sad had shall gad hall. There were, I know now, people advocating at the time that children should be taught to type in school, but it certainly never got as far as Tapton School in Sheffield. We had two blind children in our class whose Braille-printing machines made an unholy racket, so what twenty-five typewriters of the early 1980s would have done to the nerves of the poor teacher can perhaps explain why typewriting lessons in schools never took off. For me, certainly, learning to type was a home-time endeavour. I never quite learnt to touch-type, but I could soon type, after a fashion, with alacrity. Even now, the odd person will remark on what a fast typist I am. Perhaps less so, nowadays.

In the 1970s, the ability to type was a special skill, to be acquired for a particular purpose. But now everyone can type.

Think of the last thing you wrote. The odds are that you sent an SMS text on your mobile phone with your thumbs working like fury.* Or perhaps you sent an e-mail, or just typed something on your laptop. Now, there are computers activated by voice recognition, and subsequently a television you can shout at to change channels, thus saving you the massive labour of pressing a button on a remote control.† Soon, we may not need the keyboard, or, perhaps, our hands at all. But for the moment, it is the way we write. It is much less likely that, instead of SMS-ing, or e-mailing, or typing, you took a pen and wrote something on paper, with ink. The quick movement of thumbs over a miniature keypad, or of fingertips over a QWERTY keyboard, is the way that writing almost always begins now. This is quite a recent change. Until the year 1978, I never wrote anything other than with a pen and paper. For another ten years, I never wrote anything that counted in any other way. I can identify the exact moment of transition, when I submitted the first chapter of my PhD to my supervisor in Cambridge, in 1987. I had handwritten it, not affectedly, but just because that was how I had always written essays. He marked it, sighed, handed it back and said ‘In future, could you just type your work?’ I did so, with no real sense of how things were to be from then on.

The rituals and sensory engagement with the pen bind us to it. The other ways in which we write nowadays, however, don’t bind us in the same way. Like everyone else, I write a lot on a computer, and have done for over twenty years. In all that time, I’ve evolved exactly two pieces of ancillary, grooming-type behaviour towards the thing. Every so often, I take one of those cloths that you clean your glasses with, and wipe the screen clean of dust. (Sometimes I spray the screen first with glass-cleaning fluid). And there’s the quite enjoyable ritual of taking a sharp object and poking in the gaps between the keys, chasing the little balls of dust and crud and dropped crumbs of sandwiches eaten with one hand while typing with the other, out from where they have unhygienically lurked for weeks.

That, really, is the extent of any auxiliary play-type behaviour induced by a computer, and it’s no wonder if we haven’t yet evolved many warm sensations towards the object, being unable to suck it, enjoy the sensory quality of its minor operations, or regard it as a direct extension of our being. Those other writing apparatuses, mobile telephones, occupy a little bit more of the same psychological space as the pen. Ten years ago, people kept their mobile phone in their pockets. Now, they hold them permanently in their hand like a small angry animal, gazing crossly into our faces, in apparent need of constant placation. Clearly, people do regard their mobile phones as, in some degree, an extension of themselves. There is, for instance, an unwillingness to lend a mobile phone, a sense that a request to borrow one in other than the direst emergency is in some degree overstepping the mark; a sense that is not to do with the fear that the lender may take the opportunity to telephone his aunt in Peru. And yet we have not evolved any of those small, pleasurable pieces of behaviour towards it that seem so ordinary in the case of our pens. We text, and let it rest again in the palm of the hand, and don’t quite know what to do with it: an extension of our being, but inert, meaningless, in no particular need of our ongoing attention. It doesn’t need to be cleaned, or cared for, and if you saw someone sucking one while they thought of the next phrase to text, you would think them dangerously insane.

Probably at some point in the future, we will start thinking of our communication devices as warm, in the way that we think, or used to think, of our pens. But in the meantime, we have surrendered our handwriting for something more mechanical, less distinctively human, less telling about ourselves and less present in our moments of the highest happiness and the deepest emotion. Ink runs in our veins, and shows the world what we are like.

This is a book about the disappearance of handwriting. We don’t quite know what will take its place – the transmission of thought via a keyboard into words; the rendering of voice commands into action; the understanding by a piece of technology of a gesture or, conceivably, a thought. The shaping of thought and written language by a pen, moved by a hand to register marks of ink on paper has for centuries, millennia, been regarded as key to our existence as human beings. In the past, handwriting has been regarded as almost the most powerful sign of our individuality. In 1847, in an American case, a witness testified without hesitation that a signature was genuine, though he had not seen an example of the handwriting for sixty-three years: the court accepted his testimony.1 Handwriting is what registers our individuality, and the mark which our culture has made on us. It has been regarded as the path to riches, merit, honour; it has been seen as the unknowing key to our souls and our innermost nature. It has been regarded as a sign of our health as a society, of our intelligence, and as an object of simplicity, grace, fantasy and beauty in its own right. At some point, the ordinary pleasures and dignity of handwriting are going to be replaced permanently. What is going to replace them is a man in a well-connected electric room, waving frantically at a screen and saying, to nobody in particular, ‘Why won’t this effing thing work?’ Before that happens, perhaps we should take a look at what we’re so rapidly doing away with.