Script and Scribble

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Now that most writers no longer labor over holograph manuscripts, there will come a time when this kind of magic will be gone. Little that’s new will be added to the vast store of manuscripts that have come down to us over the centuries. The shape of the letterforms, the cross-outs, the substitutions, the puzzling illegibilities, the changes of mind and slips of the pen, the color of the ink and the type of paper, the egotistical capital I’s and the randy loops on the g’s—gone, all of it.6 Someday the job applications and charge-card receipts of the famous may be all that’s preserved in manuscript collections.

  And then there’s the rather stunning idea that if you can’t write cursive, you have a lot of trouble reading it, too. Will my mother’s diaries look like Sanskrit to her great-grandchildren? Will it be only a small group of specialists who can make sense of the original handwritten manuscripts of Jim Harrison and Wendell Berry, the heartbreaking letters home from soldiers in the American Civil War, or artifacts like this Christmas note Walt Whitman sent to his publisher in 1879?

  Shakespeare reportedly wrote a sequel to Love’s Labors Lost, entitled Love’s Labors Won—what if, in 2108, it turns up in a dustbin somewhere in Warwickshire? Will there be anyone around who can decipher it? Who will be the last person to send a handwritten postcard? Who will read it?

  In an eloquent lament in the Oregonian (January 13, 2008) for the decline of the handwritten letter, Jim Carmin suggests: “Perhaps our many creative writing programs should emphasize that one of the important facets of being a writer is to express one’s thoughts in the writing of letters, and to remind authors that for history to have a more complete and accurate understanding of their work, the millennia-old tradition of letter writing is a good way to do it7.… Just as there is a ‘slow food’ movement, to counteract fast food and fast life, perhaps we should begin a slow writing movement, to regain the appreciation of writing letters as an important meditative and historically significant activity, especially to literary studies.”

  My own advice is: if you get a letter in the mail, save it! Posterity will thank you.

  One of the world’s most famous diaries

  DIARIES

  At this early-21st-century moment, diary-keeping seems to be a major industry. It’s easy to find not only actual diaries—usually leather-bound, gilt-edged, and posh, with dates and a fixed amount of space for each day—but also blank bound books that accommodate themselves to both natterers and minimalists. These come in all price ranges and styles, from the exotic (Tibetan Fair Trade Himalayan Lokta paper books handcrafted in Nepal) to the classic (Moleskines, “the legendary notebook used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries,” including Van Gogh and Hemingway), from the humdrum (the inexplicably popular “Anything Books” with their football-textured covers) to the gross (flimsy spiral ones with distorted, cartoony dog pictures on them at my local Stop & Shop).

  Keeping a diary is often referred to as “journaling,” and there are dozens of books and websites giving instructions for how to do it, and why, and with what.8 The activity is recommended for grieving, for “healing,” for recovering, for spiritual questing, for posterity, for “stress management,” for fun, for discipline, for publication. (One poignant title on the subject is Alexandra Johnson’s Leaving a Trace, which perhaps says it all.) There are tips for journaling with the Tarot or with the Bible, for overcoming “journaler’s block,” for digging into your dreams, for tapping your inner wisdom and getting it down on paper while it’s hot, for combining journaling with “scrapbooking.”

  The journaling advisers are sympathetic and understanding about bad penmanship. If your script is hard to read—widely discussed as a common problem—they advise typing your journal, maybe combining computer-generated text with some handwritten bits. One journaling coach humorously advises, “Include some of your own handwriting so your descendants will know why you decided to type,” but points out that, when we come across an old diary in the attic, we’re not usually overly concerned about whether Great-aunt Gertrude’s penmanship was any good—though it would be frustrating if it were completely illegible.9

  Aside from some avid computer journalers and a huge fad for not only blogs but intimate and personal online diaries—a growth industry for exhibitionists10—most diaries are written as they’ve always been, by hand. And rightly so. Writing in a little book, with an implement, invites contemplation, the kind of slow, far-ranging, digressive thinking that can clarify knotty problems or come up with a telling adjective. Some advocates of old-fashioned diary-keeping even believe that writing in a beautiful book inspires not only beautiful thoughts but beautiful script. (This can backfire: someone once brought me back from Venice a gorgeous hand-marbled notebook tied with a silky ribbon, and it took me about eight years to summon the nerve to use it.) Others feel that writing by hand is important as a reflection of your mood: the diary is the place for angry scribbles, dramatic underlining, forests of exclamation points. And now and then one might like to insert a drawing—impossible with a computer unless you draw it on paper and scan it in, which seems guaranteed to destroy the mood, whatever it was.

  One of the obvious advantages of the pen-and-notebook routine is its portability. I finally used the Venetian notebook, appropriately, as a travel journal when I was in Italy myself. Reading it now, I see the tiny red lizards that lived under the steps, smell the rosemary that grew three feet high along the stone path, hear the tourists next door arguing stridently in German about where to have dinner.…

  In a 2008 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the writer and professor Mark Edmundson writes about a friend who calls his forty-year-long diary a “life thickener.” Edmundson comments, “His quotations and pictures and clips and drawings and paintings give density and meaning to the blind onrush that life can be.” In a similar spirit, I have kept a diary for most of my life—a tendency I may have inherited from my mother. Mom strenuously denied that she kept a diary, which she seemed to consider a silly bit of self-indulgence. She always said, “I just jot things down.” She made her jottings on the grids of a wall calendar, quickly and informally. I have a stack of her old calendars—usually freebies given away by the bank—and she never wrote anything more personal than “Very bad cold! Stayed home from Mass!” or a notation every January 20 of exactly how many years my father had been dead. Her calendars from my babyhood record immunizations and solid food (“baby loves carrots!”) and the occasional adorable saying.

  I have a long shelf of published diaries—mostly those of writers, and therefore pretty well written, but I’m not fussy. I’ve seldom met a diary I didn’t like, and fame and a good prose style are not requirements. Years ago, a friend found a leather five-year “Line-a-Day” diary in a junk shop and, knowing I’m a diary nut, turned it over to me.

  The Latin inscription on the first page is “Nulla dies sine linea” (“No day without a line”), and it was indeed kept faithfully in flawless Palmer Method by a woman named Florence, who lived in Warren, Massachusetts. She had brown hair and light blue eyes, she was five feet four inches tall, and she had narrow little feet (her shoe size was 6½ AAA). She baked rolls on a regular basis, canned vegetables from her garden, made soap, played bridge, and sang in the choir. Her diary begins on January 1, 1940, with a chicken pie and a visit from Miss French, and ends on December 31, 1944, with rain and slush on “a very quiet day.” She writes about nothing very much, and her entries fascinate me.

  There’s an intriguing compromise available for someone who has terrific handwriting but is too lazy/tired/stressed/arthritic/technology-crazed to write by hand, an outfit called Fontifier (www.fontifier.com), which will—surprisingly cheaply—turn your script into a font you can install into your computer. Fontifier urges us to use their product to add a “personal touch” to journals, cards, letters, etc.—the only trouble being, of course, that the font will lack the variations of normal handwriting. In other words, it won’t fool anyone. But it’s an undeniably cool idea,
particularly their off-the-wall suggestion that you can use it for “secret writing systems,” something that would have enormous appeal for the average twelve-year-old.

  SYMPATHY NOTES, THANK-YOU NOTES, AND WEDDING INVITATIONS

  Handwritten letters are as rare as a purple three-cent Thomas Jefferson stamp from 1957. At this point, the only handwritten ones I receive are from a former aunt-in-law who’s well into her eighties. I suspect that there are some poor souls in this world who have never had their mailboxes graced with such a thing.

  I actually love email, which enables me to keep on top of a large correspondence easily and quickly. But the drab click of a key as you slump in front of the computer is a far cry from the happy slash of a letter opener as you sprawl on the sofa with your feet up. TV didn’t kill off radio, air-conditioning didn’t destroy electric fans, cars didn’t displace bicycles. But cheap long-distance rates and the ubiquity of email have sent letter-writing to the land of the dodo.

  And yet a long, chatty, funny letter full of private jokes and sly allusions and witty asides and low gossip is the pinnacle of postal bliss. No matter what its subject, a letter speaks in the writer’s voice, and it does it better than a phone call: you can’t sit down and reread a phone call.11

  However, although the “friendly letter” (as they called it in school back in the days when you’d be learning to write one in your best Palmer Method) is well on its way to biting the dust, the tradition of hand-writing certain specialized kinds of communications lingers, as a last desperate grasp at individuality and personal expression, a visible sign of caring in the midst of the vast impersonality that surrounds us.

  According to every etiquette book I’ve consulted, sympathy notes should always be written by hand. There are times when nothing can replace the sincerity of pen on paper, no matter how ugly the script or bad the punctuation. Those somber, white, be-lilied and be-prayered sympathy cards from the drugstore just don’t cut it: there’s no substitute, says the etiquette guru Amy Vanderbilt, for your own thoughts and feelings12 expressed on your personal stationery (meaning plain, white, and printed with your name) in black or blue-black ink only—and no smudgy ballpoints! If your handwriting tends to be sloppy—well, just try harder.

  Thank-you notes provide more leeway, though the official policy of the etiquette books is that if you send out a commercial thank-you card you’re a total clod. This is especially important for brides (grooms are apparently allowed to go out and play golf). Printed thank-you notes seem acceptable to me—jeez, people are busy—but Miss Manners says she’s “fussier than ever about letters of thanks being handwritten,” and even Etiquette for Dummies is surprisingly old-fashioned, coming down hard on the side of handwritten thank-you notes, “on good quality stationery,” with no smudges or crossings out, and preferably with a fountain pen—warning that you should never let anyone borrow yours because the nib wears down in an individual way and someone else’s handwriting will screw it up. (My Belgian friend Danièle tells me that, when she was around twelve and tried to borrow her father’s fountain pen, he handed her a biro and said, “There are three things a man never lends out: his car, his wife, or his fountain pen.”)

  Then there are hand-addressed wedding invitations. It’s always a shock—a rather happy one—to find, amidst the junk mail and the bills, one of those thick, creamy envelopes with its elegant script. Except for the outrageous price of the stamp, all of a sudden we’re back in 1953, or 1878. Awesomely beautiful handwriting! Right there in your mailbox!

  (image credits 4.10)

  Now there are “calligraphy style” computer fonts that approximate hand-lettering and are used by most commercial “invitation vendors.” But a surprising number of brides continue to employ a calligrapher, even if it’s only a friend with a broad-nib pen.

  CALLIGRAPHY

  True calligraphy (from the Greek for “beautiful writing”) becomes more endangered with every technological incursion into its traditional territory. But, like literary fiction and heirloom tomatoes, calligraphy survives as a niche market, supported by a small but fiercely enthusiastic band of practitioners and supporters.

  On a trip to New York City, I went to a show of the work of Saul Steinberg at the Morgan Library. Everyone loves Steinberg: his whimsical New Yorker covers, his wacky cats, the cartoon skyscrapers and strange geometries and witty maps. What I like most, though, is what he does with words, letters, numbers, music—and handwriting. I have hanging on my study wall a magnificent Steinberg poster—one of his celebrated phony documents, executed in elaborate script, stuck with official-looking stamps and seals, and signifying exactly nothing.

  (image credits 4.11)

  Steinberg (1914–1999), a Rumanian Jew living in Italy under the Fascist regime, escaped in 1941 thanks to a passport he doctored himself with a flurry of “official” red stamps; it enabled him to make his way, via Lisbon, to America. Since then, a stream of his dazzlingly unreadable calligraphy has adorned fake certificates, passports, and diplomas; it sprouts from the heads of humans and the mouths of dogs; it covers a pair of convincingly coffee-spotted and messy diary pages (which Steinberg playfully claimed were Rimbaud’s). “Calligraphy,” he once said, “is my true teacher.”

  The Steinberg selections at the Morgan were, in fact, full of handwriting. And, though Steinberg had no such intent—and died before the digital age was in full swing—the fact that most of it is meaningless and unreadable seems an emblem of the sorry situation handwriting is in today, when it’s seen as a useless archaic skill, a fading flower kept precariously in bloom.

  Among those tending it are the “real” calligraphers, the folks who bring you those hand-written envelopes. They also design logos, letter diplomas, produce menus for restaurants, and occasionally get some work creating film titles. The Queen of England has her own official scribe. The White House supports a hefty staff of calligraphers busy with invitations, place cards, award certificates, and various official documents. Greeting card companies employ crews of letterers and use hundreds of freelancers. And many calligraphers have moved beyond calligraphy into the realm of fine art, as in the work of Connecticut calligrapher Margaret Soucy, who prefers the term “lettering artist.”

  Calligraphy by Margaret Soucy (image credits 4.12)

  The English artist and calligrapher Sheila Waters studied for her Master’s degree at London’s Royal College of Art with Dorothy Mahoney, who was an assistant to the great lettering pioneer Edward Johnston. Johnston’s famous work Writing and Illuminating and Lettering, the “calligrapher’s bible,” has been called “the best handbook ever written on any subject” by Sir Sidney Cockerell, curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge—himself a prolific diarist and handwriting buff.

  Waters was only twenty-two when, in 1951, she was elected a Fellow of the Society of Scribes and Illuminators—meaning that, even at that youthful stage in her career, she was recognized by her peers to be “at the pinnacle of achievement.” She went on to an illustrious career doing commissions for royalty, museums, libraries, collectors, and publishers. Her book Foundations of Calligraphy has earned its own place as a classic text.

  When she moved to America in the 1970s Waters co-founded the Washington (D.C.) Calligraphers Guild and helped fuel what became a calligraphy mini-revival in this country. The ’70s represented the fading twilight of the pre-computer era, the last gasp of letter-writing, a time when it was far from unusual to open your mailbox and see the handwriting of a friend on an envelope. Calligraphy became briefly hot. Everyone was investing in a broad-nib pen. For a while we all improved our handwriting, producing a script that looked kind of like calligraphy, but was essentially our regular scrawl enhanced by shading. Most of us, needless to say, didn’t become professionals, and eventually our pens and ink bottles were left behind somewhere along with the bell-bottoms and love beads.

  But some people never looked back. As calligraphy courses proliferated, those who remained under the spell of letters perse
vered, studied, practiced, formed guilds, held conferences, founded newsletters, and sometimes began to make a living.

  The appeal of beautiful calligraphy comes, in part, from the astounding variety that can be spawned by a fixed collection of twenty-six letters and ten number forms, combining day-to-day familiarity with boundless possibilities—the meeting of the mundane and the magnificent.

  Calligraphy can be purely traditional, adhering strictly to some historical script or working subtle changes on it. Sheila Waters’s monumental illuminated calligraphic manuscript of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood was done in a variation on ninth-century Carolingian Minuscule. As she explained in an interview, “I sharpened the club-shaped ascender serifs, omitted archaic parts, and accentuated the ‘bounce’ of the italic-like branching in n and m by slanting the writing about four degrees.”

  From Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas (image credits 4.13)

  Or it can be an exuberantly original offspring of the calligrapher’s own sensibility. The astounding website www.omniglot.com, which is a guide to world writing systems, also includes a section of personal alphabets, among them the runelike “Runtrikha”:

  Translation: The more things change, the more they stay the same. (image credits 4.14)

  and “Vine,” a vertically arranged system that looks like intricate dangling earrings: