Writing by hand is laborious, and that is why typewriters were invented. But I believe that the labor has virtue, because of its very physicality. For one thing it involves flesh, blood and the thingness of pen and paper, those anchors that remind us that, however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.
Novelist Mary Gordon wrote these words (presumably by hand) in her essay Putting Pen to Paper, But Not Just Any Pen or Just Any Paper. She writes of how she primes the well of her own imagination by copying out (by hand) the words of writers she admires. She tells of an elaborate system of notebooks she has kept over the years, "small soft-covered one, confectionary coloreds ones, square red-covered and long canary yellow ones," into which are delegated the different morsels of thought.
And she writes of her pen, that most important of tools for the hand-writing writer. It is a Waterman's, she says, "black enamel with a trim of gold. When I write with it, I feel as if I’m wearing a perfectly tailored suit, and my hair is flawlessly pulled back into a chignon."
Dare I say there is not a writer alive who doesn't thrill at these words, this intimate discussion of pens and paper? What was once the bare stock of our trade, their romance is now enhanced even further by the sad fact that they have all too often been forsaken for the glare of a computer screen and the clickety-clack of a wireless keyboard.
Like most writers, I have notebooks and pens galore. There are flimsy, cheap spiral notebooks such as I used in junior high school, the kind that cost ten cents each at the Back-to-School sales in August. There are pretty soft-covered journals embossed with arty pictures and life-affirming slogans. There are leather bound books which contain only the most profound of words, those first penned by my favorite authors, and that I've copied out laboriously in my own handwriting, hoping against hope that a smidgen of their genius will impart itself upon me.
Pens? Yes, I have those too, although I'm not as finicky about pens as Ms. Gordon purports to be. I do have a Waterman's pen, a gift from a favorite uncle who always seemed to divine the things I most coveted but would never buy for myself. Waterman pens. Coach purses and gloves. Waterford crystal paperweights and letter openers.
How I miss that man.
But I'm happy enough to write with a medium black Bic Ultra, or a fine tipped Pentel R.S.V.P. I confess to a newly developed a fondness for the Pilot G-2 (07) after accidentally walking off with one from a restaurant.
It is the physical act of writing itself that is so important, Gordon says, and I believe this to be true. The taking up of pen and putting it to paper seems akin to priming the pump, to blowing air through the billows of the pipe organ, to the singers diaphragmatic breath. What is most interesting to me is what Gordon writes to start her day - "copying out paragraphs whose heft and cadence she can learn from." Somewhat wistfully she says that "it is remarkably pleasant, before the failure starts, to use one’s hand and wrist, to hold and savor pleasant objects, for the purpose of copying in one’s own delightful penmanship the marks of those who have gone before."
It may sound silly, but it comforts me to know that while I'm sitting here in my small corner of the writer's world, scratching away in one notebook or another, Mary Gordon is doing the very same thing.
Just a couple of writers, writing by hand.
When an old woman is asked to recount the story of her life, she tells an intense and poignant tale about growing up in and surviving a warring suburban family during the 1950s and 60s. Written as a memoir, each chapter describes a particular incident in Lucia’s life which shows the constant struggle between her parents and the perverse effect it has on her and the family. From her complicated and unwanted birth, to her witnessing a suicide at age 3, to her stint as a runaway at age 14, the story progresses to the final crisis where as a young woman, she is turned out of her house and banished from her family forever.
