The Missing Ink

by Philip Hensher

  * What do you mean, why does a u or a double n have a line above it at all? And what do you mean, what happens when the u with a line above it also needs an umlaut above it?

  * I am sorry to say that when I said the words ‘Iserlohner Schreibkreis’ to an educated German friend to ask his opinion of this important moment in postwar German history, he immediately burst out laughing, which just goes to show that it is perfectly possible to get too close to one’s subject.

  * An impressive delay, given that since 1968, Germany has been simply stuffed with people insisting on their right to insult all forms of authority and, in extreme cases, put a bomb underneath it for no very obvious reason. I know quite a lot of people from Berlin days who regard any form of housework as kleinbürgerlich in the extreme – one dear old friend confided in me that he thought only pathetically materialistic people ever cleaned their bathrooms, though he admitted that he had, in ten years, cleaned his lavatory three times. Quite a lot of them made a point of addressing their best friends as ‘arschloch’, which means ‘arsehole’, as a clean break from bourgeois conventions. It is odd that they seem not to have succeeded in making a serious dent on national models of handwriting until the other day.

  * Wittgenstein and Hitler were the same age, but as Wittgenstein was advanced a year and Hitler held back, they were two classes apart, and no one knows if they ever really encountered each other.

  * His dad was Antony Buckeridge, who wrote the Jennings books. I was massively impressed, having cast myself and my best friend as Jennings and Darbyshire years before in a playground game.

  * One of the amiable things about the home-weave, hand-carpentry, pottage-and-pottery movement of this time is that some of them decided that Latin words were no good and not homespun enough, and ought to be replaced where possible with Anglo-Saxon invented equivalents. The most amusing of these individuals was the enchanting Australian composer Percy Grainger, who put a good deal of effort extirpating any taint of Italian instruction from his scores, replacing, for instance, ‘Crescendo molto’ with ‘Louden Lots’.

  * If you want to know what that sort of person was like, there is no better evocation that A.S. Byatt’s superb novel The Children’s Book.

  * Brother of Anthony, the expert on Poussin and traitor. Not Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, an independently fascinating person of rather an earlier date, who as far as I know had nothing to say about handwriting. Robert Conquest wrote a limerick about that Blunt: ‘Once Wilfrid Scawen Blunt / While taking some boys out in a punt / Was about to be struck / But by calling out ‘Duck’! / Saved the life of the fellow in front.’

  † Sir Howard has a great collection of Indian painting, which was exhibited as a whole for the first time in spring 2012 at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

  * Yeah, that’s a word.

  * That’s a familiar name. I hope not the Nicolas Bentley that did the illustrations for Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales.

  * This is what the witness said. However, he must have left school in 1950, so I think the ballpoint may in fact have arrived in his life a year or two after that.

  * The witness means Gourdie. He gave me a second-hand copy of Gourdie’s book as a Christmas present the day before I recorded this conversation.

  * Just how big was that mirror? Salinger tells us that the author of this message had ‘minute handwriting’, but had the author ever tried to write anything on a mirror with soap? There is a size of writing below which soap on glass just will not go. The story is Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters.

  * English festival on 5 November. Celebrates the occasion when a Roman Catholic called Guy Fawkes failed to blow up parliament, by burning him in effigy, in mild disgust, and letting off a lot of bangers.

  † Where I grew up.

  ** The painters were Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth. The story comes, unexpectedly, from Stravinsky’s brilliantly funny conversations with Robert Craft.

  * This is nothing to do with anything, but searching for narratives about handwriting and food, I discovered a gloriously mad blog about how you can improve your handwriting by changing your diet. ‘The treatment I gave Jayson was ridiculously simple. Before even getting his tests back, I knew that he needed to be put on an elimination diet. That meant getting rid of the most common food allergens – dairy, gluten, eggs, and yeast. I also had him get off junk foods and sugar and eat real, whole food. I treated his yeast problem with an antifungal medication for one month. I gave him a daily multivitamin, and supplemental zinc, magnesium, and fish oil, as well as acidophilus to improve his gut and immune system. By getting rid of the things that were keeping him out of balance (food allergies and yeast) and by giving his body the things it needed to function and thrive (good food, fish oil, zinc, magnesium, and healthy bacteria for the gut) Jayson was able to recover his health. Two months later, Jayson returned to my office a new and happy boy. And remarkably, his writing went from illegible to perfect.’

  * Smith is worth our attention. One of the British Museum’s first keepers, he spent most of his life sucking up to the notoriously miserly sculptor Nollekens the Younger in the hope of a massive bequest at his death. When Nollekens died, he left Smith all of £50 out of an estate of £200,000. Smith spent years subsequently writing a viciously offensive biography of Nollekens in revenge. Nollekens and His Times contains, among other things, a deathless scene in which Nollekens and his equally awful wife ask ten people to dinner and serve them two mackerel and a plate of mashed turnip, half an inch deep.

  * Still do. In May 2012, a reader of the Daily Telegraph, a Mr Robin Chapman, wrote to the paper to contribute to a discussion about the ongoing survival of fountain pens to say, ‘I use a quill; always have done, always will. Those from a peacock’s wing feather are both sturdy and well balanced, and in plentiful supply about my garden.’

  * Seriously, this passage makes me want to cry with frustration, and I haven’t even gone through the horrible procedure of fixing the bits together, only to find that the Porte-Craion has not stopped the Mouth of the Piece F, and the Ink has run out upon my Wife’s finest Carpet, ruining it forever and causing my Wife to belabour me about the Head with Cudgels.

  * Those were the days. Most 18-year-olds today would regard sitting through an episode of Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman for their Media Studies A level as enough of an intellectual challenge.

  * A formal chemical synthesis of quinine was only accomplished in 1944 by two American chemists. I don’t know what new colours they discovered on the way.

  * I see they haven’t changed in thirty years and more, and I hope they never do.

  † A note about writing in coloured inks. There are strange prejudices at work here which ought not to bear much examination, but seem more or less insuperable. The colours of inks have proper associations, and proper standing in the world, not limited to inks used for writing. I was deeply, inexplicably shocked the first time I saw one of Joseph Beuys’s drawings executed in blue ballpoint pen – the medium and the colour clearly and unarguably limited to doodling in a meeting, not for something to be exhibited in a gallery. Not for the first time, but very economically, Beuys is doing your head in with this one.

  I’m not quite convinced about writing with blue ink, either. It is cosy and friendly, but perhaps not very serious – I wouldn’t mind it from a friend on a postcard, but I think if I saw a student essay written in it, I would have to make an effort not to deduct three or four points absent-mindedly. Black, or blue-black is the neutral choice. You’re allowed to make marginalia, and to comment rebarbatively, in red, but you wouldn’t write a letter in the stuff, surely?

  Beyond that, we are really into exotic and faintly frightening territory. I had heard the phrase ‘green-ink letter’ before I started work in the public service in 1990, but I didn’t realize it was literally true that eccentrics despatched letters to authority in emerald shades. One gentleman used to write to us weekly – I was working as a clerk on the House of Commons’s Energy Select Committee a
t the time – in green. His complaint was that he lived on the borders of Scotland, on the English side, and had discovered that his electricity was being supplied by Scottish generators. As a patriot, he objected to his kettle and lights being powered by Scottish electricity. Moreover, he went on to explain, he was strongly of the opinion that the Scottish electricity companies were using the opportunity to influence his thoughts and indeed alter his personality for the worse, and he was already finding himself saying ‘McTavish, the noo’ on unexpected occasions. Could we, as the ENGLISH parliament, take up his cause?

  A reply went out, wearily, weekly, regretting that the committee could take no action regarding this situation, and signed by the most junior member of staff, i.e. me, in black ink.

  The Prince of Wales is said to send out long letters to government ministers debating policy, written in purple ink. Whether we can draw any conclusions from the sorts of people who use eccentric inks to write letters with is unclear, but I can’t resist sharing this lovely paragraph from Piggott’s Survey. After receiving 25,000 samples of handwriting, he analysed them according to the colour of ink used – as well as many other factors – and concluded that they could be assigned as follows. ‘I find generally that blue is favoured by the ladies whilst the men prefer the non-committal blue-black. The majority of those using black were artists, architects, university lecturers, R.C. priests, students, and upper-form grammar-school boys. Brown ink was used in the ratio of 1:1,600 chiefly by typographers; violet ink, 1:4,500 by ballet dancers and entertainers; and green by lady novelists (1:1,950).’ I have more than a few lady novelists among my acquaintance, and I am pretty sure that none of them ever write a word in green ink. When did this interesting tendency, if it ever was a tendency, die out, to be handed on exclusively to total loonies?

  Mr Piggott goes on to complain about ‘names almost household words’ writing to him in ‘combinations of red ink on bright blue paper, green ink on brilliant yellow paper and blue ink on blue paper of almost, but not quite, the same shade’, but I think those people must have been having the poor man on.

  * Her DNB entry doesn’t mention her handwriting project at all.

  * This is what distinguishes Richardson from Maria Montessori, whose ideas were transforming education across Europe. Montessori, too, believed firmly in the child directing the pace of his own education, and had all sorts of ingenious ideas about how to introduce children to letters – famously, she would let them handle letters made out of sandpaper to impress the shape on their hands. Her letterforms, however, are very curious. They maintain some elaborate loops on the ascenders and descenders, but, weirdly, don’t use the loops for the purposes of joining up the letters. What the point of loops in print writing might be, I can’t understand. I guess the intention was that children could make the loop and then, at some later point, would find it easier to join letters up – the leap from print to cursive would be much less in the Montessori models. The cost, however, is that children start to write with an obviously and completely irrational style of writing. The looped print hand of Montessori schools, however, does have a distinct charm, suggesting to me all sorts of flavours of a European childhood, including wooden toys on strings, cobbled streets, being sent at six to fetch a baguette and a litre of red wine, and 14-year-old thugs still obliged to wear grey shorts and possibly even capes to school. Look at it, see if I’m not right.

  * This is cheating. I once read it in a ‘How To Graphologize Yourself And Others’ popular guide. I can’t remember anything else from the book, but I remember this, largely because my g’s gape like a yawning whale, and I am, indeed, pathologically incapable of keeping a secret if it’s remotely interesting. At the time, an interesting question arose, which I still haven’t had an answer to: if I took to closing my g’s scrupulously, would I start to be able to keep other people’s secrets?

  † A terrifying example here is the last letter written by one of the 11 September hijackers to his girlfriend, reproduced in Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, The Eleventh Day, p. 350. Ziad Jarrah has no idea at all which way his letters might slope, and where he might want to join them up. Plenty of people have handwriting like this and don’t go on to do anything very bad at all, but anyone looking at Jarrah’s handwriting would have realized how unstable and insecure he was.

  * Sheer prejudice, not backed up by any evidence at all.

  † Not necessarily a bad thing. Actually, I do it, in my conceited way. But just think of Elizabeth I’s signature, wending its way downwards through a sequence of ornamental underlinings like the path through the Red Queen’s garden. Some of Dickens’s signatures are underlined seven or eight times, but then you may feel he had a point in conceding his own excellence.

  ** Also prejudice. Everyone agrees on this one, to the point where one could say that the prejudice happens to correspond to the truth. You would think the word had got back by now.

  †† Look at Mrs Thatcher’s signature, and see if there’s not a point to this one.

  * Number 11 is principally a girl called Amanda I used to know.

  * Well, it’s a slight improvement on some of Shakespeare’s jokes, such as this stinker from Love’s Labours Lost: ‘“I love not to be crossed.” “He speaks the mere contrary – crosses love not him.”’

  † Still believed in by many people, including my favourite novelist: ‘The fleshy fold under his eyes denoted sensuality, and she had never, never been wrong about that, she was sure . . . There was an arrogance about the deep lines from nostrils to mouth, and in the set of his lips.’ Elizabeth Taylor, Blaming.

  ** Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his son, often seems to regard the personality as something to be suppressed under a facade of gentlemanly behaviour – standing correctly, speaking correctly, and indeed writing correctly, just as other gentlemen do. A particular low point is his suggestion that it is frightfully common to laugh.

  * Doe vs Suckamore. The judge was Coleridge’s nephew.

  * This is not the place to go into it, but many people in the past did firmly believe that the characters of individuals had a rigid predominant mood which could be defined by their dark faces, their posture, even their dress. Deriving ultimately from Greek theories of the humours, it emerges in refined and complex forms in the eighteenth century. Alexander Pope believed that everyone had a sort of guiding spirit which defined them, and when he came across a class of human beings which he felt could not be explained away like that, he airily remarked that ‘Most women have no characters at all’, meaning that they had no fixed characters. The Swiss pre-anthropologist Lavater started a hare running in the 1770s with his Essays on Physiognomy, explaining how people’s fixed personalities were exhibited in their equally fixed faces.

  * Something many people forget. There may still be a fundamentalist sect of Holmesians who flatly deny the existence of Conan Doyle, as there is an extremist wing of Archers observers, for whom any denial of the existence of Ambridge or the profound reality of Linda Snell is the utmost blasphemy.

  * The whole point of many Sherlock Holmes stories could be summed up as ‘My Wife Married a Darky’ or ‘My Boy’s a Secret Murderer’; someone you thought you knew turns out to be a near-complete stranger, with long stretches of history unaccounted for.

  * The reader may wonder what the difference between ‘regularity’ and ‘rhythm’ is. This writer assigns to ‘regularity’ things like the size of small letters, the angle of writing and the distance between downstrokes, which, if constant, can term the writing ‘regular’. Rhythmic writing is ‘when the tendency of the writing, whether regular or irregular, is maintained from beginning to end’.

  * The other day I was in New York and staying in a hotel called the Eventi Kimpton, a name which no taxi driver could understand when spoken in English, by an Englishman (me), from England, which of course is just another exotic accent nowadays, and good luck to us. After three fruitless days of me saying Eventi Kimpton to a response from the front seat of silent, pu
zzled idling, I started saying Uh’venny Kinduhn, which proved more like the correct pronunciation. Often, abroad, I hand over the job of explaining where we want to go to my husband, who is Bengali and has a much more universally acceptable and understandable English accent, though even he drew a blank when the hotel we were once staying in in Houston was the Warwick, pronounced War Wick.

  * I hate to be cynical, but it does cross my mind that one person the Countess Sophie Torby may be ‘generous’ and ‘a true friend’ to is the Princess Marie Bariatinsky. Is a Princess paying a Countess back cheaply for hundreds of sponged lunches at Lyons’s? Some of those expelled Russian princesses were pretty hard up in the 1920s, and might even, I suppose, have resorted to performing a party turn called Revealing Character Through Handwriting at tea parties for a bob or two.

  * Set out in Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, full of tales of people hoping to say ‘Pass the salt, Father’, but mistakenly saying ‘Rape the innocent child, arsehole’, instead.

  † In the course of preparing this book for publication, my lovely editor, Mr Jon Butler, flagged up this comment with the words ‘Sorry, P: I may be slow but I can’t for the life of me work out what this means.’ That makes two of us.

  * Billie Pesen Rosen, The Science of Handwriting Analysis, p.188. This last one, so airily despatched, I don’t think any responsible psychiatrist would nowadays risk – the possibility of a law suit is just too strong if the suicide threat proved more genuine than the handwriting suggested. Also, I have to say, I wouldn’t trust Ms Pesen Rosen from the moment she kicks off with the imprecation, ‘Supplement your knowledge of human nature with the rich revelations of graphology!’ She is, too, the only graphologist-psychologist I found who seriously revived the Spencerian suggestion that handwriting was not just a way of analysing your character defects, but that through making conscious changes in your handwriting, you could actually improve your character, in this case by boosting your self-esteem: ‘To prove to yourself that you have faith in the well-known power of the will, and to encourage the fruition of this plan, remember to raise the height of the personal pronoun I while you are writing. After a while your unconscious mind will accept this new concept of yourself, and when you write, the letter I will take on new height without any conscious effort on your part.’ [p.35].