After I wrote the Faces in the Crowd piece on teaching penmanship in school, my mind drifted slightly sideways toward learning how to print in the first and second grade, and then cursive writing a year later. That class was worse than arithmetic and spelling combined. We had to practice making each letter of the alphabet, both in capital and lower case letters, and then string letters together to form words. Words had to be tied together into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs. The rough part about it was when our minds worked faster than our fingers and hands. Eventually, most of us caught on to the right pace, more or less.
After that, it was smooth sailing until I encountered the commandant of the junior high study hall. He had been a math teacher back in the time when my father was a student, and he despised my dad simply because he wrote with his left hand. Sure enough, one day he spotted me with a pencil in my left hand and moved in with a twenty-four-inch ruler to leave my fingers bruised. He shouted that like my father, I was sinister. Not knowing Latin at the time, I thought it meant I was a bad guy, not left-handed.
Among the swag I received for graduating from high school were truly wonderful gifts. An uncle gave me a Cross Pen he claimed was given to him by Gerald Murphy in 1919. My father gave me the pen and pencil set he and the other members of the Odd Fellow Lodge received when they enlisted in 1942. Mother gave me a Mont Blanc roller ball pen. They were all elegant gifts that had some personal connections which makes them all the more special. I still have them, but I have to confess I do not use them much anymore.
I knew from experience that pens have a nasty habit of ‘walking away.’ Set one down for a moment or two, and they are likely to get picked up by someone else. That explains why banks and post office branches have their pens locked onto a chain on the counter. And sometimes, things just plain get lost. I didn’t want to lose any of those gifts, so they stayed on my desk to use when I was studying at home. Nor did they go off to college with me.
Of all the manufacturers of luxury pens, perhaps none is better known that Montblanc, and for good reason. This year they are celebrating a century since first releasing their Meisterstuck (masterpiece) pen. Other companies also make wonderful pens, from solid precious metals to carefully crafted lava and obsidian.
Trust me; they are all well out of my price range!
Even so, I believe there is something elegant about pens, good ones, at least. And in an era when everyone seems to be exercising their thumbs while texting, or making the computer keys clatter away, there is something delightfully archaic about a pen. It’s like listening to music on a 78 RPM record being played on a wind-up Victrola. It is comparable to using a camera where apertures, distance, and light must be calculated before pushing the button to open the shutter to put the image on real film.
Banks, insurance agencies, and many commercial businesses helped keep the era of the pen alive, but even that is beginning to fade away. I stopped by my favorite bank a week or so ago and commented that I miss their bowl of pens. They were out. Whether or not they will get a fresh supply is another matter. Most of them end up, I suspect, in a desk drawer. We acquire and keep them out of fear that we won’t have one if we need it.
What has killed penmanship and cursive writing, and sounded the death knell for pens was best described by John Ruskin: “There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and people who consider price are his only lawful prey.”
There has long been a conflict between readable penmanship with a pen versus any form of mechanical writing machine. For centuries tonsured monks carefully and laboriously copied business documents and produced beautiful Bibles. With the rise of the Renaissance there was a constantly growing demand for young men with good handwriting to work in offices and businesses. Being a secretary was consider a “man’s job” until 1914 when World War One began and many of the men were conscripted. Women filled their places. Even when Gutenberg’s moveable type press was developed, the first draft was handwritten and then printed by machine.
The first shot was fired (and it was a big one) across bow of the pen in the 1884 when Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn. He kept his method a secret from everyone but his publisher and swore him to secrecy. The reason was that the manuscript was written on a typewriter. It was a clumsy, ugly, awkward device to use, but it was more efficient than pushing a pen. When word got out about the method he had used, many people were outraged, and there were debates whether or not it was even a legitimate book. Other writers soon followed. Others imitated the famous American author and bought a typewriter of their own.
Journalists, such as Hemingway, Edward R Murrow, and Andy Rooney and others went off to war carrying a portable typewriter in a small box. Ernie Pyle, who had survived the war in Europe, was killed while writing a column in the Pacific in 1945. And from more peaceful times, there are pictures of Will Rogers, sitting on the running board of his car, a small typewriter on his lap, writing his syndicated column. When someone criticized his fractured grammar, Rogers replied, “Thank you, but I get paid to write, not to read.” Mike Royko surpassed them all, tapping out 7500 columns during his career in Chicago.
Technology constantly changes the way we write communicate. That was inevitable, and I don’t think any of us want to spend much time using a small knife to shape the nib on a goose feather before dipping into an inkwell filled with homemade ink. That is how Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin wrote the Declaration of Independence. It isn’t for us.
Nor do I think we want to go back to an era of smudging our fingers by changing a typewriter ribbon, or using White-Out to repair a mistake on a page, or fiddle with carbon paper and try to line up a sandwich of two pieces of paper, one of carbon. As an aside, some office supply stores still carry boxes of carbon paper, but they are not bragging about their sales in that department.
The old manual typewriter was replaced with an electric one, and that was improved upon with the IBM Selectric with the “dancing ball.” Those are relics in museums now, as is a steam typewriter my brother-in-law made for me. It was the low-point in communication when he took an IBM Selectric whose motor had shorted out, affixed a wheel and pulley to the ‘works’ and attached the pulley to the fly wheel on a toy steam engine – all of it mounted on a board. I had to pour in the water, light the fuel, and wait for the steam. It did not work so well because it set off the smoke detector and sprinkler system. All of that greatly displeased the local fire and rescue brigade.
Still none of our mechanical writing machines will ever replace the sheer elegance of a good pen, and the soft sound of the ink being applied to paper. Let us be careful not to lose a long heritage merely in the name of efficiency.
