by John Updike
Well, with such a benignly cosmic conclusion, and so many insights, apt quotations, and provocative facts along the way, why did I have such a heavy time with this book, my distracting personal circumstances and possible Octavian resistances aside? Especially in its first sections, Cleopatra has the dogged, adviser-approved aura of a Ph.D. thesis, chewing up the centuries and spitting out word bites in a spirit of obligatory erudition. The appearance of so many plays, novels, and histories in chopstick-friendly fragments leaves one with an empty feeling that nothing, not even Shakespeare, could be a meal in itself. “The deconstruction of ancient narratives is a late twentieth-century practice,” Ms. Hughes-Hallet says in her introduction. Deconstruction sets out to relieve literary works of their intended content, substituting instead the subliminal messages the author did not intend. The old-fashioned reader expects to confront, between the Nile-green covers, Cleopatra herself, the reality of her, or an earnest estimate of that reality, and what he gets instead are images of her, generated by the delusions and neuroses of bygone generations. This makes for a faintly monotonous flutter. “I do not know her,” the author confesses cheerfully. “I, like all the other writers whose works I have dissected, know only her depictions and descriptions, masks made by others in her image.”
The notion that an image might be “true to life,” or some images less untrue than others, is not entertained. But surely there is something about the story of Antony and Cleopatra that was real, and is real, and accounts for its perpetuation these two millennia. Isn’t it the story, in a sense, of every small-town boy who, at the moment when he plans to set out to conquer the world, falls in love with a local girl and stays, to reap the harvest of children, of drudging days, of relative failure? Biologically, a woman is a Venus’s-flytrap of sorts, holding her Antony, for the moments of seduction and enthrallment, in what Ms. Hughes-Hallet nicely calls “a bewildering swamp of instinctual pleasure.” Is Rider Haggard, hysterical old imperialist though he was, to be denied the element of truth in his remark “Woman, in her weakness, is yet the strongest force upon the earth … for Nature fights ever on her side”? Since Ms. Hughes-Hallet, out of the thousands of pages she read, chose that sentence to quote, she, too, must have quickened to something in it, something possibly that helps us see, that helps us grasp our condition, that helps us live. Cleopatra’s air of enervation stems from deconstruction’s fatiguing premise that art has no health in it, it is all cultural pathology.
* Since the writing of this biography and this review he has been lovingly, voluminously ungagged, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume I, 1898–1922, edited by Valerie Eliot (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988). The editing, footnoting, printing, and binding couldn’t be more handsome; but the avid peak of our curiosity about Eliot may have passed. The tenor of the reviews, at any rate, was rather cool. No major revelations forthcame, and most reviewers seemed merely confirmed in their previous bad impressions.
† Some of the ideas, indeed, expressed in “The Idea of a Christian Society” (1939) have a surprisingly contemporary, ecological ring. From his peroration: “We are becoming aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. I need only mention, as an instance now very much before the public eye, the results of ‘soil-erosion’—the exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale for two generations, for commercial profit: immediate benefits leading to dearth and desert.… For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet. And without sentimentalizing the life of the savage, we might practise the humility to observe, in some of the societies upon which we look down as primitive or backward, the operation of a social-religious-artistic complex which we should emulate upon a higher plane.”
‡ Her mother’s last words could also have been hers: Bessie Sergeant, dying at forty-one, had said to her sister from her bed of agony, “Nobody can say I didn’t have courage.”
§ In E. B. White’s wartime essay, “Aunt Poo,” reprinted in One Man’s Meat, he also italicizes the name of the author of the eleventh-century The Tale of Genji, as if she were a book herself, and gives the Japanese earthquake year as 1922, in which Miss Davis follows him.
‖ Or, in Mr. Simpson’s unwontedly rude language: “Isabella was to continue as an occasional milch cow until she died.”
HARD FACTS
Something Substantial and Useful About It
THE PENCIL: A History of Design and Circumstance, by Henry Petroski. 434 pp. Knopf, 1990.
The history of the pencil has rather few highlights. The first picture of one appears in a book on collecting fossils, written in Latin by the German Swiss physician and naturalist Konrad von Gesner, and printed in Zurich in 1565; a woodcut depicts a rather ornately turned tube of wood holding a tapered piece of a substance Gesner terms “a sort of lead (which I have heard some call English antimony).” Before then, English shepherds in Cumberland had been marking their sheep with chunks of a black substance discovered, legend had it, in the roots of a large tree that a storm had felled. This substance, locally called “wadd,” was also called “black lead” and “plumbago” after the metal (in Latin, plumbum) that for millennia had been used, for want of a better, to make marks on pale surfaces. Wadd—given in 1789 its current name of “graphite,” from the Greek graphein, “to write”—was found in exceptionally pure form at Borrowdale, near Keswick. Until the deposit’s final exhaustion, in the nineteenth century, “Borrowdale lead” was the by-word for quality in this matter of making a mark; the mine, operated as a crown monopoly, was closed for years at a time to conserve the precious mineral, and security precautions were taken worthy of diamonds, a more compact form of carbon. A mouthful of smuggled wadd, the miners used to say, was as good as a day’s wage.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the substance was known all over Europe and used by artists and others. To keep the hands clean, black lead could be wrapped in string or vines or held in elongate holders called porte-crayons. The idea of permanently encasing a rod of wadd in wood is, like so much else about the pencil* industry, obscure in origin; some credit a joiner in Keswick, and others claim priority for the carpenters of Nuremberg. In the German city, one Friedrich Staedtler is identified as early as 1662 as a pencil-maker. The first pencil leads were square, cut from a slice of raw graphite to fit a grooved strip of wood; the “lead,” commonly in a number of pieces laid end-to-end, was sealed in place by a glued strip of wood. The resulting implement, square in cross-section, could then be planed at the corners into an octagon, or fully rounded.
The pulverization, melting, and reconstitution, with sulphur added, of fragments of graphite is described as early as 1726, in Berlin; but the major breakthrough in pencil-lead technology occurred in France, where Nicolas-Jacques Conté (whose name is remembered by the Conté crayon), under pressure of the severe graphite shortage occasioned by the Napoleonic Wars, quickly developed, and in 1795 patented, a process for mixing powdered graphite and clay, shaping the paste in long molds and firing it at a high temperature, producing ceramic leads. Borrowdale wadd had been taken as it came, but now the hardness of pencil lead could be graded by the proportions of the clay-graphite mixture; the basic chemistry of pencil lead was established. Mechanical pencils, which needed extruded leads of very precise diameter, were first patented in 1822 but have never supplanted the wood-encased, repeatedly sharpened, disposable pencil. Red cedar was early recognized as the ideally strong, straight-grained, easily shaved pencil wood; no substitute quite matches slow-growing red cedar’s pleasant tint and odor. As the cedar forests, mostly American, ran out, pencil manufacturers sent agents all through the South buy
ing up fences, railroad ties, and log cabins made of the once-abundant wood. Rubber got its name (supposedly from the English chemist Joseph Priestley, in 1770) for its ability to rub out pencil marks. The first patent for an attached rubber eraser was issued in 1858 to Hyman Lipman, of Philadelphia. The pencil-sharpener as we know it—consisting of two revolving bevelled cutters—dates from the early twentieth century, thanks to the Automatic Pencil Sharpener Company (Apsco) of Chicago. Yellow became the favored color of paint for pencils with the Austrian firm of L. & C. Hardmuth’s introduction, in 1890, of the Koh-I-Noor model, exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. The rest is chemistry (most recently, polymerization) and forestry—what can pencil-makers cut down when all the red cedar is gone?—and corporate rivalry. Industrial competition pitted Faber against Faber—Johann against Lothar, the firm of Anton Wilhelm against that of Eberhard—and saw early English supremacy give way to French inventiveness and German organization and American mass production, all now threatened by the pencil-fabricating hordes of Japan. Present global production amounts to fourteen billion pencils a year.
Well, if the tale can be told, with but a few trifling omissions, so concisely, why has Henry Petroski, in The Pencil, given us a chubby book of over four hundred pages, including a twenty-two-page bibliography, an eighteen-page index, and five tightly printed pages of grateful acknowledgments? The answer, I think, belongs, like certain aspects of the standard pencil’s scale and texture, to the subjective realm of marketability. A book of a mere two hundred pages entitled The Pencil might appear to be merely informative. A book twice that size, though not twice as informative, is a feat, a prank; it has a certain mysterious majesty, a material mysticism, like that fondly remembered best-seller of yesteryear, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Such a swelling, looming, teasingly excessive book promises to lift us high from its quaintly specific base. With its striking blue jacket, which successfully imitates pencil sheen, and its unusual shape—tall, thick, but not wide—the artifact beckons. We want to seize it, to hold it. Mr. Petroski has an engineer’s light touch upon his own pencil. He writes a relaxed, translucent, spun-glass kind of prose, with a not inconsiderable percentage of pure air betwixt its twirled filaments. A good deal of flourish accompanies his deliveries. Here is a fair specimen of a paragraph revving up:
How does a lump of lead that draws a creditable line evolve into a modern pencil? How does a rounded rock turn into a wheel? How does a dream become a flying machine? The process by which ideas and artifacts come into being and mature is essentially what is now known as the engineering method, and the method, like engineering itself, is really as old as Homo sapiens—or at least Homo faber—and the process is about as hard to pin down and as idiosyncratic in each of its peculiar applications as is the individual of the species. But while each invention and artifact has its unique aspects, there is also a certain sameness about the evolutionary way in which a stylus develops into a pencil, a sketch into a palace, or an arrow into a rocket. And this observation itself is as old as Ecclesiastes, who may have been the first to record, but probably was not the first to observe, that “what has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.”
Beneath this long “Ahem” may be heard the hum of a theme—the nature of engineering, with the pencil as a paradigm of the process whereby men invent, manufacture, and improve things. Pencils, so lowly and common that antique dealers chuck them out with the shavings when they acquire a box of old tools, are yet put together with a hard-won precision. The two halves of the pencil case must fit tightly enough against each other and around the centered lead to form a bond that withstands warpage and the spasmodic pressure of writing; the woodworking machinery of pencil-making operates “to perhaps the highest tolerance of any woodworking equipment”—a tolerance as small as five ten-thousandths of an inch. The leads, extruded through sapphire or diamond dies to similarly strict tolerances, are composed of graphite and clay particles of a marvellous fineness; a sifting process through a series of tubs, usually six in number, is followed by a grinding together that, in the case of Koh-I-Noor leads, lasts for an average of two weeks. The proportions of clay and graphite and lesser, waxy constituents derive from formulae as jealously guarded as the secrets of alchemy. A pencil lead that writes smoothly, with a consistent darkness, soft enough to leave a mark yet tough enough not to break, is a mundane miracle that readers of The Pencil will never again take casually for granted.
Mr. Petroski’s attempted dramatization of engineers as cultural heroes suffers from their professional habit of taciturnity; they figure and sketch with their pencils but rarely confide autobiography to paper. Like the heroes of old-fashioned Westerns, they solve the problem and ride on. Conté is the central figure in Mr. Petroski’s posse of engineers, yet he scarcely leaps off the page. A portrait painter driven by the Revolution into science, he was said to have “every science in his head and every art in his hands.” This paragon “promoted the military use of balloons, and he was apparently working on some experiments with hydrogen when an explosion injured his left eye.” He was familiar with the use of graphite to make crucibles in which to melt metals, and from this experience, presumably, he reasoned and experimented his way to the baked, part-clay pencil lead that was his great innovation. Yet, oddly, his breakthrough was not soon disseminated through the pencil industry:
While it has been said that German pencils made by the Faber family were the models that Thoreau was trying to emulate in the mid-1830s, there is some question whether many German pencils themselves were then being manufactured by the Conté process.… German pencils were not at all common in America when young Thoreau first sought to improve his father’s product, and any German pencils that did exist may not even have been made by the superior Conté process. What Henry Thoreau may have been hoping to do was emulate a French pencil.
The designation of Henry David Thoreau (who was, we are told in one of Mr. Petroski’s flourishes of fact, named David Henry up through his Harvard degree) as a significant pencil engineer will surprise those who know him only as a monument of American literature and libertarian thought. His father, John Thoreau, had been invited by his brother-in-law, Charles Dunbar, to join in the exploitation of a lode of graphite that Dunbar, his family’s black sheep, had stumbled upon in Bristol, New Hampshire, in 1821. The senior Thoreau may have learned the rudiments of pencil manufacture from one of the first Americans in the business, Joseph Dixon, of Marblehead. Ceylonese graphite was brought back as ballast in New England sailing vessels and dumped; Dixon, the son of a shipowner, learned to utilize the graphite in crucibles, shoe polish, and pencils—the last so gritty and brittle that merchants told him “he would have to put foreign labels on them if he expected to make sales.” Long after Conté, American pencil-makers “continued to mix their inadequately purified and ground graphite with such substances as glue, adding a little bayberry wax or spermaceti.” Nevertheless, John Thoreau’s pencils were superior to those of rival companies, and were sold under his own label—a photograph of a wrapped bundle of them appears in The Pencil. When David Henry graduated from Harvard in 1837, he began to teach at the Center School in Concord, but his resistance to applying corporal punishment led to his rapid resignation, which, “coupled with his insistence on reversing his names,” earned him a local reputation for eccentricity. Like many another young individualist, he found refuge in the family business; at the Harvard library he set about a course of research to improve the product.
Mr. Petroski delves deeply into what was then available about pencil-making in existing reference works, and concludes that the Encyclopaedia Perthensis, published in Edinburgh, may have furnished the crucial hint at the concoction of ceramic lead. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau was enough of a pencil man to be able to pick up twelve at a grab (a trick common in the trade, since they were sold in packages of a dozen), and according to Emerson’s son, Edward, it was Thoreau who
invented and worked out the details of a machine for producing finer graphite, by means of encasing the grinder in a seven-foot-high box and trapping the finest dust at the top, to which only it would rise. Certainly Thoreau was capable of what we now call mechanical drawing, and the sensibility behind Walden relishes construction and quantification. Yet in the two million words of the journal that he began at the same time as entering his father’s business Thoreau almost never mentions pencil-making. There is no mention of it in Walden, and pencils were so little on his mind that he left them off a list he prepared of everything needed for an excursion to the Maine woods. The humanistic poetry of invention and technology, though apparent to Benjamin Franklin and the French Encyclopedists, has waited until our century for its full due; the century of Romanticism may have sketched and made notes with pencils, but it reserved its odes for nightingales and untransmuted Nature. However, a fresh pointedness and a cedarish pungence characterize Walden, and by the time Thoreau retired to his cabin (where he purportedly invented raisin bread), his father’s company was making the best pencils in America. Emerson sent some to a friend in Boston, and she replied, “The pencils are excellent,—worthy of Concord art & artists and indeed one of the best productions I ever saw from there—something substantial & useful about it.” As opposed to, the implication is, most Transcendentalist productions.
The failure or refusal of a passionate self-describer like Thoreau to commit to paper anything about his own genuine engineering achievements is symptomatic of the elusive transparency of engineering in general. We see around us, as modest as pencils and as grand as bridges, the work of engineers, but their language is largely beyond us; it is like those sacred languages addressed to gods who respond only in the thumping vocabulary of earthquakes and thunderstorms. A popularization like Mr. Petroski’s, taking as its field of interest the furtive advances of applied chemistry and the tidal shifts of competitive capitalism (one of his most charming episodes describes the American Armand Hammer’s successful importation of an entire German pencil factory to Soviet Russia), is more of a tour de force than, say, a popularization of contemporary cosmology. Investigations of Nature fascinate us with their possibility of displaying, at the last peel of the onion, the Creator. “To see a World in a Grain of Sand, / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower” remains our romantic, quasi-theological ambition. An annual fourteen billion is the closest the pencil will bring us to infinity, and instead of Heaven we see, peering closely in, the rackety gray hell of the assembly line. Homo faber knows himself too well. Microcosms of which man is the creator rather repel our gaze, even as we hold them in our fingers. The green plastic garbage bag, for instance, is nothing but deplored these days, though hardly a household can manage without it. The Pencil, with its airy prose contortions—
