The Missing Ink

by Philip Hensher

  To go back a little, the Arts and Crafts movement, in the later-nineteenth century aimed to influence everything in people’s lives. Under the direction of John Ruskin’s jeremiads against mechanized, soulless production, it hoped to give back to people’s lives something of the honesty and solidity of handmade objects. The movement had an effect on almost every area of life. It was never very practical – it is all very well talking about handmade furniture and handprinted books in a sixteenth-century town of a few thousand people, most of whom are illiterate anyway, but in the hugely expanding London of the last decades of the nineteenth century, it was a total absurdity. Still, though Arts and Crafts was, inevitably, a rich man’s occupation and the Arts and Crafts figures the original champagne socialists, the movement exerted an important influence on continental figures belonging to the Vienna Workshop and subsequently the Bauhaus, and all of our lives. The Arts and Crafts motto, ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’, is a good enough one, and it ultimately resulted in the lovely interiors we English live among today. Go on, look around you. Gorgeous, isn’t it?

  The chief figure in all of this, William Morris, was very interested in small-scale artisanal printing, setting up his own Kelmscott Press for the purpose. In the first half of the 1870s, he also decided to explore the possibility of reviving the mediaeval art of illuminating manuscripts, which he called ‘painted books’.*

  ‘Meeting in Winter’ by William Morris, 1870.

  Obviously, a new ‘painted book’ could not be executed in Vere Foster copperplate. The stripped-down copperplate style, now referred to as ‘civil service’ hand, was not nearly picturesque enough – it suggested South London clerks, not elegance and an age of leisure detached from base mechanical concerns. With characteristic thoroughness, Morris acquired a volume made up of four Italian sixteenth-century writing books, and studied a master called Arrighi with considerable care.1 Morris evolved his own version of the italic hand, using it to transcribe some ancient narratives for the interest of his own circle. Unlike leaning, looping copperplate, it was upright, made with individual strokes, not a super-efficient, word-in-a-single-movement, and had no particular interest in ligatures or in speed of execution. It is, from the start, legible in every letter.

  It was not for twenty years, however, that the possibilities of the italic hand for general, everyday use were pointed out. In a book of 1898, Monica Bridges, the daughter of the great architect Alfred Waterhouse and wife of the then-celebrated poet Robert Bridges, tried to indicate how italic handwriting could be taught in schools. From that point, disciples and serious fanatics started to gather.

  Looking at the first attempts of Morris and Bridges,2 it is surprising that their style gathered followers at all. Though legible, neither of them is very attractive. Morris’s is very unlike the airy perfection of Arrighi’s, crabbed and stubby where the classic italic hand soars gracefully. His letter sizes seem completely irrational – the ascenders of his d’s, b’s and l’s make up three quarters of the letters, but the f’s are half the height, and the t’s just sit there blankly. His links and ligatures seem very awkward – you can see that Morris has more or less worked them out for himself – and the direction of the strokes is really quite chaotic. It is a consciously archaic hand, impressing rather by its difference from the everyday sloping cursive hand deriving from copperplate than by its inherent coherence or elegance. It is also, actually, quite ugly – the really beautiful italic hands still lay in the future.

  Monica Bridges must have been an interesting woman. Her upbringing and marriage placed her firmly in one of those engagingly eccentric turn-of-the-century milieux that got interested in more or less any passing fad, plotting ineffectually to reform anything from spelling to dress and the vote.* Her interests, we are told, ‘ranged from music to modifications of spelling with a set of phonetic fonts based on Anglo-Saxon letters, and development of typeface . . . she helped Harry Ellis Wooldridge to provide Palestrinal harmonization for nearly eighty plainsong melodies used in the hymnal.’3 Restricting ourselves to her interests in handwriting reform, her surviving work is more rational in the way she links letters and establishes proportions between letters, but she clearly feels the strain. Look at the word ‘believe’ as written by her, and the strain is obvious. The handwriting has a definite tendency to waver between upright and right-leaning, and the spacing between letters never really establishes a natural rhythm – sometimes they are congested, sometimes more loosely gathered.

  Italic is performed with an italic nib, wider at its point than the usual nib, and the whole point of the style is the alternation between thick and thin strokes as the pen moves through a letter. Look at a word written in an italic hand, and you will see that parts of an s are thick, and others thin. The ligatures between letters are generally very thin, executed with the side of the pen. There is also no fear of lifting the pen between, or even during letters – the italic calligrapher’s lower-case e may be performed with two entirely different movements of the pen, with a lift in between. We are back to the Coca-Cola logo. This is not a style for people in a hurry.

  It is, and has pretty well always been, a European and predominantly an English style. There have been periodic attempts to wean North Americans away from their loops and curlicues and whole-arm movements, but never very successful. An inadvertently hilarious 1998 piece of journalism from Ottawa explains, despite itself, some of the difficulties. Italic is a ‘less fancy handwriting’ than what the author calls ‘regular handwriting’, or, mysteriously, ‘cursive handwriting’. The school board ‘gets regular complaints from parents, who are suspicious of the [italic] system [sic].’ Italic is ‘kinder to left-handed people than traditional handwriting. It’s also easier on children with learning disabilities.’ There seems to be absolutely no hope here.4

  As the italic hand took hold, its proponents made ever-bolder claims for it, often seizing on the fact that many schoolmasters had adopted it as evidence that it could be practised from the first days of education. ‘The italic school of handwriting is being taught in many schools and as it is traditional, sensible and pleasing, it seems likely that it will establish itself in England and probably in the USA also. If one scans the horizon for a glimpse of any future style that may follow and displace it there is none.’5 Reginald Piggott, in his 1950s Survey, pretends that ‘many younger teachers see in italic the key to legibility, and those who use it in class find that children take to it readily . . . some speak of [italic’s] beauty, sharpness and legibility and the ease with which it may be written.’6 Italic was spread not through commercial writing masters, but through pressure groups, calligraphers’ associations and enthusiasts. The Society for Italic Handwriting was founded in 1951, for which Piggott’s Survey is a perfunctorily disguised recruiting programme.

  The italic style was spread by a few art-school types such as Wilfrid Blunt,* who, as drawing master at Eton, encouraged a circle of boys to adopt an ornamental italic style. I spoke to one of Blunt’s pupils, the great painter Sir Howard Hodgkin, about Blunt’s teaching, and about his engagement with a correspondent, who Blunt said, replying to a letter, had ‘“the worst handwriting I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how you manage daily life with writing like that. It was totally appalling.” This man replied on a piece of white paper, the same text in perfect copperplate. Wilfrid felt rather put down by this. The man said, “It’s not the pen, it’s the concentration that does it.” Which of course is true. He encouraged the boys to take up italic handwriting. Oh, very much so. Some of the boys complained that if they didn’t turn in their homework in perfect italic, it would be ignored. He introduced me to Indian painting.† And to something more questionable, aggressive interior decoration which I had never come across before, and he loved the idea of upsetting the parents. Which he did with great success. He had, hanging in the middle of his room, a splendid wooden dog with a gigantic erection. It was hung at eye level. So that was a grea
t success. I asked him about his interior decoration, and he said I only did that because it would really annoy the man upstairs. There was plenty of scope for upsetting with interior decoration. I didn’t really understand about people being gay. My father was not sure about Wilfrid. He thought he had a very unhealthy relationship with . . . Queen Mary. And that was true. There’s a wonderful photograph of them looking at a flower book together. It was very eloquent. But he also had an amazing girlfriend whose name . . . I’m afraid I’ve forgotten it. She was the wife of a very aggressively outdoorsy housemaster and she was quite the opposite, very beautiful and exotic. She may have been either French or Russian, and they had a long affair; which all the boys talked about.

  ‘He was very charming to me. He took me to pick some flowers, and I thought how nice, how kind. He on the other hand was rather un-relaxed. This is all quite separate from his introducing me to Indian painting. Life was so complicated anyway.’

  The circle influenced by Blunt no doubt went on to teach and influence whole new circles of boys in their handwriting. Blunt wrote an unmistakably top-person’s book about italic, Sweet Roman Hand, which contains some very daunting examples of 12-year-olds writing extraordinarily supercilious letters, boasting about the beauty of their handwriting. Sweet Roman Hand must have been a minor hit among the sort of public-schoolmasters just beginning their careers in the 1950s. I imagine the very dubious young man depicted in Molesworth saying, ‘And when I asked him the supine stem of confiteor the fool didn’t know’ had almost certainly read Blunt, had probably corresponded with him, and did all his marking with a square italic nib, much admired and imitated by a small coterie in the lower fourth. In any case, there doesn’t seem to be much doubt that whoever the Ampleforth schoolmaster who so impressed my friend Paul im Thurn was, he certainly possessed a copy of Sweet Roman Hand.

  Were there many state schools that found the time to teach italic? Certainly, there were some. But most of the centres of young italic excellence were, surely, to be found in the art rooms of public schools. I doubt, too, that anyone ever had much success in teaching very young children to write italic from the start – it is really difficult to envisage a 5-year-old having anything near the motor skills to even begin on those complex patterns. Italic belongs to a particular stage of development. Often, talking to people about their handwriting for this book, I heard them say that they had deliberately learnt italic in their teenage years – sometimes as a response to an impressive master at school, sometimes independently, in their spare time at their desk in their bedroom, just wanting to be as elegant as possible. It’s an aspirational and showy hand, and it comes from very much the same stage of life as sudden conversions to socialism or Roman Catholicism, eating obscene amounts of sweets, and the passionate devotion of unsupervised hours to masturbation, Clearasil and Mahler. Still, it leaves a much more benevolent trace in the lives of its disciples. If you were struck by the italic bug at fourteen, your handwriting at forty will qualify you to be asked regularly to write the inscription on Sue’s leaving card by the deputy head of HR.

  I don’t know. There may be plenty of wonderful people who write in an italic hand – actually, I know there are, some of whom are my dearest friends – but it just seems to me . . . Well. I didn’t really pin this unenthusiastic feeling down until I came across a grim book by Tom Gourdie, a pillar of the italic movement, intended to promote italic handwriting.7 Italic Handwriting, published four years after the founding of the Italic Handwriting society, evidently invited letters from all sorts of italic folk, many of which are reproduced therein, as Mr Gourdie would probably put it. What is fascinating is not so much the handwriting reproduced, but the prose style of the letters. If there was ever any doubt that italic is quite a precious style of writing, and that people who went for that sort of thing went for preciousness in other areas, here is proof. ‘When I survey the long list of that hand’s more distinguished practitioners, I marvel at the continuing reluctance of educationalists to introduce it, at least on trial, with adequate “control” groups of uncontaminated pupils, to guard against any precipitate acceptance of this clearest and flowingest* of all western hands.’ (Paul Standard, NY, USA.) ‘I’m afraid I make no claim to being a scribe, and when you see this heavy hand – which has been my everyday one for some years – I doubt whether you will feel inclined to include it.’ (Some bloke from Chippenham.) ‘I have upon occasion made spasmodic attempts to interest the lower forms in the italic hand. There are, I find, many difficulties in the way – notably the prevalent liking for fountain pens [we do not allow ball pens, thank goodness!]’ (Someone called Trodd from Ipswich – seriously, what with the square brackets, the words ‘upon occasion’ and ‘I find’ and, worst of all, the exclamation mark, I want to give that one such a slap.) ‘I must beg you to forgive me my apparent rudeness in failing to answer your kind letter.’ (Nicolas Bentley, W7.)*

  Apparently every single one of Gourdie’s correspondents was under the impression that ‘most’ is how the English usually say ‘very’. What came first – being an arse, or writing in italics? Did they decide to write in italics because they were arses, or did the habit of writing with ovals and italic flourishes take root and encourage them into arse-like tendencies?

  One should perhaps pass on a report of Tom Gourdie’s last days, recorded without source by Kitty Burns Florey and, astonishingly, not disapprovingly, either. ‘The legendary Tom Gourdie died in 1995 at age ninety-one. In the hospital during his last illness, disturbed by the sloppiness of the name-label attached to his bed, he reportedly began instructing the nurses in the proper way to hold a pen.’8

  Pass the morphine, Matron.

  15 ~ Witness

  ‘At junior school, we learnt what we used to call copperplate. We had a copybook. There was a line, and we copied underneath it, in unison, as a class. That’s the sort of style I wrote, though it got worse and worse as time went on. To be honest, nothing was fun at my junior school. It was a very miserable school, with a very miserable head teacher, dressed like old Queen Victoria with an old black dress on. Quite apart from the fact that I was bullied from day one.

  ‘The copperplate didn’t seem old-fashioned – it seemed normal. Because my parents wrote the same way. My uncle Arthur, who lived with us, he had really good handwriting. My mother’s handwriting was quite legible, though it wasn’t as formal as Arthur’s. Arthur worked as a coffee-roaster at the Co-op, so he didn’t need such nice handwriting, and then later on, when he got a clerking job there, he still wrote in the same fashion, always very clear.

  ‘I never practised my handwriting. When I went to grammar school, it just deteriorated. And of course, towards the end of my school days, biros came in.* It wasn’t so important to write well, to get a job, as you’d think – I don’t think so. So long as you could write legibly. I was working at the [Midland] Bank, and my handwriting got disgusting, and I decided to write italic. It was illegible. I don’t know why I learnt it. I think I must have seen examples of it, or something – perhaps I saw somebody that had got nice handwriting. Actually, I think it was one of my girlfriends now I come to think of it. I bought an italic fountain pen, and a book by Gowrie – Gowrie?* I was a clerk in the Midland Bank, late fifties, early sixties. I’d devote ten minutes a day, when things were quiet, to practising a letter, one at a time. I got to be quite good at it.

  ‘I still didn’t use it all the time. I used it when I’d got time to do it. I had to be writing things in a hurry, and you couldn’t be writing with that, I can tell you. It’s not a fast hand. I had to write all the names of the banks that we were going to be sending money to, abroad, and I’d have to decide which banks to send the money to, it was – in the case of America, it was a lot. I had to do something like six hundred or seven hundred of those a day. So you had to get a move on because they had to be done after that by the typists, the machine operators, well before the end of the day. They were dependent on me to turn the work out very quickly and very accura
tely. The machines were too difficult for us to operate ourselves. In those days, too, it was for you to make the decisions, who would get the business. You learnt all the names and the telegraphic addresses off by heart, from Australia to Spitzbergen. You got to be very good at geography.

  ‘I did it all in my scrappy – well, you couldn’t call it copperplate any more – it was just a scribble. There were shortened forms of banks’ names, such as Amsterdam, it would be Amrabank. I used my italic only if I wanted to do some nice writing. And also – well, people used to come and ask me to do bits of stuff. And then every year, the Midland Bank had its art exhibition, and they sent out very posh invitations to all the magnates in the City of London, like the head of the Stock Exchange. Me and another fellow would sit down for a couple of days and write invitations to Sir This and Lord This. And we would write their names in the space – the rest was gold-edged and printed. We didn’t get paid extra, it was part of the job. I used to be able to do all of them without spoiling any. Five or six hundred invites. And I used italic if I wanted to write a private letter, because then I’d have time to do it. I didn’t have a typewriter.

  ‘Italic looks nicer when you’re finished, and it’s always legible. It’s nice to receive a letter like that, when somebody’s taken the effort. If it was a letter I had to do in a hurry, I wouldn’t bother. I don’t really join up my letters, not really – it’s a sort of painted style. I used to join up some letters. I can’t remember – I don’t use it so much now. I’m not too sure about joining up letters. I try to get my letters as square as possible, especially the lower-case ones – they’ve got to be square. When you do an a, you just go along the top, down to the bottom, then almost diagonally, up, then down, so it ends up square. That’s the style I picked up from the book. My friend Dennis, who used to do the invitations with me, he had a more round style, slightly more florid. It was a sort of combination of copperplate and italic. It had a few more flounces. Dennis Coote, he was a very good painter, he died about five years ago. He made a card for you when you went to Oxford, do you remember? His handwriting slanted, I used to try to make mine upright. Everyone’s got a different . . .