1941
My mother’s penmanship was lucid, swift-flowing, expressive. It always looked to me like the rhythmic, vigorous handwriting of a singer, and, in fact, Mom had a strong alto and sang in her church choir until she was well into her eighties. There was a famous incident in the ’30s involving a slinky dress, one too many whiskey sours, a grand piano someone hoisted her up on in a Chicago bar, and a rendition of “Moonglow” that brought down the house.
In her widowed old age, year after year, my mother was re-elected secretary of her senior center, possibly because she truly enjoyed taking notes every week and “respectfully submitting” them. Her handwriting never changed much:
Mom, 1935
1993
Finally, when Mom was close to ninety and nearly blind, her writing developed a wobble and tended to go uphill instead of marching straight across the page. In her last years, even though we talked on the phone all the time, she still wrote me letters, and she never failed to apologize for her penmanship.
My father had idiosyncratic handwriting that retained an untamed angularity over the course of his short life. (He died in 1957, at the age of forty-six, from rheumatic heart disease.) If my mother was a Palmer Method poster child, my father was a wild ‘n’ crazy guy:
1943
1955
His handwriting was very much like him: smart, handsome, and rather dashing.
My dad had an artistic side that found its outlet mainly in his cooking7 and in his meticulous and beautiful architectural drawings—usually of improvements he’d like to make to our house (a workshop, a garage, an attic study), but also of fantastic imaginary buildings, precisely measured out on graph paper. I don’t think he ever told anyone about them—maybe no one even knew about them but me (I was a snooper: my parents’ bureau drawers and closets drew me like magnets)—and none of them, alas, has survived. But I have a stash of cards and letters written in his quick, spiky script that’s as much like him as his image in photographs. If they didn’t exist, my world would be a poorer one.
PALMER AND LEFTIES
My two best friends in high school were Eileen and Rosamond, and both were left-handed.
Dad, 1940
Right-handedness was not forced on the lefties in our school. For years, many left-handers had been persecuted into conformity under the twisted logic that writing with your right hand is easier. (Perhaps inevitably, this has come to be known as the “vast right-hand conspiracy.”) If they couldn’t adjust they were routinely scolded, ridiculed, dunce-capped, knuckle-rapped, and confined in the coat closet. Neither Spencer nor Palmer even acknowledged the fact that there might be lefties in this world.
But Sisters Victorine et al. were progressive on this point. None of this happened to Rosamond, though she says, nonetheless:
(image credits 2.38)
She goes on, “When I was younger (and very shy) I hated anything that made me unlike all the Marys, Susans, etc. Left-handedness made me even more different, and we all know that survival meant blending in.”
Aside from those right-hand inkwells, there are other leftie difficulties Rosamond told me about that wouldn’t occur to a “normal” person: your hand smears the ink as you write, notebook binding gets in your way (three-ring binders are a special hell), you have to slant your paper toward the right instead of the left. Receiving change, she says, can be problematic (in a way she can’t explain but probably any leftie could sympathize with). If her left-handed scissors aren’t handy, she cuts holding the scissors upside down. And as a sort of culmination of all that’s difficult about being left-handed, she often has to consciously think which way is left and which way is right—it has never come naturally.
Perhaps astonishingly for a left-hander, Eileen was the acknowledged penmanship goddess at St. John’s. She didn’t show up until seventh grade. Before that, she was in public school, where, she recalls, in first grade she had to bring from home an official “letter of permission” to the principal (whose name was Miss Wright—I am not making this up) stating that no, it was not okay for her teacher to tie Eileen’s left hand down so that she’d learn to print the alphabet right-handed. The superintendent of schools got involved, and finally she was grudgingly permitted to be a leftie. Eileen received consistent A’s in Handwriting, and, just to spite them all, won a city-wide handwriting contest when she was in fourth grade.
Eileen receives handwriting certificate from the superintendent of schools (image credits 2.39)
Unlike most lefties, who angle the paper to the right, Eileen stubbornly places her paper in “rightie position” and curves her left arm around so that she’s actually writing upside-down. The script she produces in this unlikely posture has always been gorgeous and distinctive, a kind of casually florid Palmerized Spencerian that has changed little over the years, except perhaps to become moreso:
(image credits 2.40)
The concept of handedness is odd and mysterious. For the survival of the human race, you’d think it would be best if we were all ambidextrous, so that if we lost the use of one hand, we could carry on just as well with the other. So why is an estimated ten to twelve percent of the population left-handed?8 Despite a lot of research, much of it conflicting, no one seems to have the answer to that.
Left-handers were once considered (at best) severely disturbed or (at worst) agents of Satan. If the Spanish Inquisition found out you were left-handed, your chances of being questioned, tortured, and/or exterminated were immensely enhanced. Nearly all languages contain expressions that reflect the ancient prejudice against left-handers. The word sinister, with all its evil connotations, is simply the Latin word for left; our much more complimentary word dexterous, on the other hand, comes from the Latin for right. Is it a coincidence that right also means correct? And it’s worth thinking about that there are no left angles, only right ones, no matter which way they turn.
For the record, notable left-handers include Judy Garland, Harry S. Truman, much of the English royal family, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama, John McCain, Osama Bin Laden, the Boston Strangler, Michelangelo (who was left-handed but taught himself to draw with his right), Leonardo da Vinci (in Italian lefties are called mancini, literally crooked), Marilyn Monroe, Paul Prud’homme (the French have their own insulting word for left: gauche), Darryl Strawberry, Matt Groening, Bart Simpson, and both Everly Brothers.
Whether lefties or righties, once our Palmer Method years were over, we indoctrinees went our own ways. Most Americans over the age of thirty-five probably write some version of the Method. I doubt there’s anyone left on earth making the Palmer Q, but those florid capital L’s, for example, have persisted in many people’s handwriting. Palmer is like many other skills: it gives you the basics and you run with them. Lots of jazz musicians were trained at Juilliard, and Picasso knew how to draw.
As handwriting instruction waned, the A. N. Palmer Co. fell on hard times and finally went bankrupt in 1987. Today, when handwriting is taught in schools, teachers turn to a variety of systems, most of them Palmer-derived.9
But handwriting is often simply neglected. Kids learn to print, a few might get some rudimentary Palmer-based cursive, and that’s considered enough. Not only is it not thought to be a crucial skill, but teachers now are forced to “teach to the test”—and there is, needless to say, no standardized handwriting test. In the world of incessant testing and “No Child Left Behind,” there’s scant time for handwriting instruction. For the most part, beautiful penmanship now lives on the planet where people gather around the piano and sing, watch Gunsmoke on TV, and go to major-league baseball games in the afternoon: it’s the planet of nostalgia.
1 He was an equally unusual adult: once, having no paper or pen, he demonstrated his script for a visitor with a broomstraw and the blood from his finger.
2 His sister was the head of the “ladies’ division” of a Spencer school in Washington, D.C., that provided training for government work.
3 Spencer’s youngest
child, Ellen, tried to enroll at the law school at Georgetown, but was refused because she was female. Being her father’s daughter, she studied law on her own and was admitted to the Washington, D.C., bar when she was forty-two.
4 Bryant & Stratton was a major chain of business colleges; bookkeepers and accountants, of course, were expected to be not only quick with figures but proficient with a pen. B&S still exists, with fifteen campus locations and “a contemporary career-focused format” that does not, alas, include penmanship instruction.
5 Interestingly, the Q is believed to be the origin of the question mark, beginning as the word questio (Latin: question) at the end of a sentence, which was abbreviated to a q over an o, which evolved into the simplified doodle-over-dot form that we know today.
6 Pepsi too had a lovely Spencerian logo, which persisted until the ’50s.
7 In the ’50s, my father cooked eggplant (which no one else I knew had ever heard of), made a wickedly delicious dish of lamb kidneys and heavy cream—unimaginable now!—and, when I had sleepovers, charmed my friends by turning out batch after batch of pancakes shaped like our initials.
8 We are also right- or left-eyed. Make a circle with your thumb and first finger around an object in the distance. Now close one eye, and then the other. The object has become invisible with one of your eyes: if it’s the left, you’re left-eyed. If you’re right-handed but left-eyed (or vice-versa), your “cross dominance” could cause problems, according to some scientists, that include being over-emotional, easily upset, forgetful, angry, and possibly paranoid schizophrenic. But cross-dominance can also help you bat better, hit the golf ball further, shoot more accurately, and recall more trivia.
9 See Chapter Five.
You think you’re just making a list or writing a letter, but what you’re really doing is drawing a portrait of who you are. Lettuce, dog biscuits, oatmeal, sour cream: give it to a graphologist for analysis, and what you’ll get back is not a bag of groceries but a look into your psyche—or so says the world of graphology.
No matter what method you were taught, or when you learned it, there’s something almost universally irresistible about having your handwriting analyzed—particularly in view of the standardizations the schools have traditionally imposed on our script. While the Palmer Method was tightening its grip on the hands of Americans, handwriting analysis was thriving right alongside it—and cheerfully throwing a monkey wrench into Palmer’s beautifully mechanical works. Try though you will to make that lower-case g according to the book, there is room for endless variation in those three or four little strokes. And that’s where graphology comes in.
Graphology is the analysis of handwriting with the purpose of revealing personality and character. It’s sometimes confused with forensic document evaluation, which, while fascinating, is an entirely different discipline. Forensic specialists are certified by the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners; graphologists, on the other hand, may be part of an organization of like-minded people but there is no board that confers official recognition. And while graphology sees handwriting as a window into the subtleties of personality, the role of forensic experts is more cut and dried: they’re brought in when a court of law needs a document authenticated—usually in cases of forgery or to determine whether two documents were written by the same hand.
In the famous Dreyfus case in the late nineteenth century, in which a captain in the French army was wrongly convicted of treason based on a note purported to be in his handwriting, forensic experts never did reach an agreement.1 Closer to home, Bruno Hauptmann, the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby in 1932, was convicted and sentenced to death partly through identification of the handwriting on the ransom note. The ransom note in the JonBenét Ramsey murder case was also subjected to forensic analysis—though no helpful conclusion was reached.
For the average law-abiding citizen, however, it’s graphology that’s intriguing. One thing that makes humans different from other animals is our interest in ourselves. What makes us tick? We love anything that provides clues about who we are—who we really really are, deep down in that murky place we call our soul. And, as Tamara Plakins Thornton points out in her excellent Handwriting in America, when people turn to any kind of character reading—including handwriting analysis—what they are looking for isn’t proof that they’re extraordinary, or gifted with genius, or destined for great things. It’s a big world: all they really want is an assertion of their individuality, whether the individual revealed is brave or cowardly, outgoing or a loner, highly intelligent or just a capable grind. It’s fine to be an ordinary Joe, as long as the ordinary Joe is you.
The history of handwriting has comprised many distinct styles, but for centuries none of them was about letting the world know that the writer was a unique and creative individual. There are a few early references to this idea: Aristotle commented on the uniqueness of handwriting, the Chinese noted it, a few Romans were mildly intrigued, but among the ancients it went no further. In fact, it was originally considered necessary to sign a legal document before a witness because handwriting could so easily be faked: it was assumed that everyone who could write had an essentially similar script. As Thornton puts it, men and women of early America “regarded handwriting as a form of self-presentation but not self-expression.” Differences in hands revealed other things: gender, social class, or occupation. Aside from the how-to manuals of the writing masters, hardly any books were written about any aspect of handwriting at all until the late nineteenth century, when graphology suddenly bloomed, first in France and then in Germany. The idea that each person’s handwriting was not only unique but also an indicator of personality traits—the whole notion of self-expression through handwriting—was startling, particularly in conservative scientific circles. But it made sense to a lot of people, and it caught on.
GRAPHOLOGY’S EARLY DAYS
Camillo Baldi, an Italian physician, was the first observer to write about the fact that—like snowflakes, fingerprints, and faces—no two hands are alike. In 1625 he published a pamphlet called A Method to Recognize the Nature and Quality of a Writer from His Letters.
Mostly, the work is concerned with literary style, with figures of speech and general tone, and with—bless his heart—spelling and punctuation. But he also included a short, rambling section that’s a sort of proto-graphological treatise. He claimed that each person’s scribble “preserves a certain quality by which his writing differs from that of others,” and he gave a few (somewhat bizarre) examples. Alas, there are no illustrations, but he assures us that “rigidly twisted” characters indicate too much enthusiasm; a regular but rushed script suggests imprudence and lack of judgment; a person shows his age by “brutal …, badly formed” writing. But he didn’t explore the concept in any depth, and the idea failed to intrigue anyone but a few random scholars who took it no further.
Abbé Hyppolyte Michon (image credits 3.1)
It didn’t begin to catch the public imagination until, 250 years later, a Parisian priest, Abbé Jean-Hyppolyte Michon, seized on it with enthusiasm.
A moralist and reformer, Michon was the first to see handwriting as a wide-open window into the nature of the soul. “The slightest movement of the pen is a vibration of the soul,” he claimed, and insisted on the intimate connection between “each sign … which emanates from the human personality, and the soul, which is the substance of that personality.” In 1875, Michon coined a word for the study of writing: graphology. After studying thousands of samples—many gleaned on his tours of Europe preaching the gospel of graphology to eager audiences—he formulated a code that assigned personality traits to various letter forms, for example, “All weak-willed people cross their t’s feebly,” whereas “The cheerful cross the t with a curved and delicate bar.”
Michon was a fascinating and many-faceted man, and a magnetically handsome one—a persuasive preacher whose progressive leanings kept him in constant conflict with the Church. His 1860 treatise advocating a kind of early
ecumenicalism was placed on the list of forbidden books known as the Index.2 He was a noted historian, archaeologist, and botanist—and he was, for forty years, passionately but chastely in love with a woman named Emilie DeVars who, just as chastely, returned his ardor (“a thousand times we were saved when we were aflame with desire”) and assisted him with his graphological work. Presumably, neither of them was a feeble t-crosser.
A few years later, J. Crépieux-Jamin—an ex-dentist and one of Michon’s students—further classified handwriting according to seven quantifiable characteristics: speed, letter shapes, pen pressure, direction (slant), dimension (letter size), continuity (connectors between letters), and organization (the way the writing is laid out on the page). Graphology started to gain momentum. In 1886, the Scientific Congress of the Sorbonne declared it a legitimate science.
At first, the only adherents were European—mostly French and German. One of them was the French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911). He became excited about graphology when he devised an experiment in which Crépieux-Jamin achieved 91.6 percent correctness in differentiating the handwriting of brilliant contemporary philosophers like the historian Ernest Renan and the philosopher Henri Bergson from that of average folks who had accomplished little. Once his own daughters were born, Binet began to focus on the intellectual development of children, and in 1904 was asked by the French government to study the education of retarded children—specifically, to identify which children were in need of special help. Binet tried using graphology to distinguish the intelligent from the slow, but as he explored it further, he was dissatisfied with graphology’s lack of scientific rigor, and a bit disheartened that amateurs without graphological training could make correct judgments more than half the time. Binet also tried cranium measurement and palmistry. None of them filled the bill, and what he eventually came up with became the basis for the Stanford-Binet IQ Test.3
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