Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (11 page)

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hirty-three years ago, when I first laid eyes on it, my pen was already old. The barrel was a blue so uningratiatingly somber that in most lights it looked black. The cap, weathered from silver to gunmetal, had almost invisibly fine longitudinal striations and an opalescent ferrule that I imagined to be a precious jewel. The clip was gold and shaped like an arrow. To fill the pen, you unscrewed the last inch of barrel, submerged the nib in ink, and depressed a translucent plastic plunger—a sensuous advance over my previous pen’s flaccid ink bladder, which made rude noises when it was squeezed.

My pen was a gift from my fifth-grade boyfriend, Jeffrey Davidson, a freckled redhead who excelled at spelling bees and handball: the prototype of all the smart jocks I would fall for over the years, culminating in my husband. I have the feeling Jeffrey stole it from his stepfather, but no matter. The pen was mine by virtue of Jeffrey’s love and by divine right. No one could have cherished it, for both its provenance and its attributes, more than I. Until I was in college, I reserved it for poetry—prose would have profaned it—and later, during my beginning years as a writer, I used it for every first draft. Like a dog that needs to circle three times before settling down to sleep, I could not write an opening sentence until I had uncapped the bottle of India ink, inhaled the narcotic fragrance of carbon soot and resin, dipped the nib, and pumped the plunger—one, two, three, four, five.

Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the void, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don’t blame me, blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself. During one dry period, Virginia Woolf wrote, “I am writing with a pen which is feeble and wispy”; during another, “What am I going to say with a defective nib?” Goethe, although he had learned elegant penmanship from a
magister artis scribendi
, dictated his great works to a copyist. This scriptorial remove only intensified his need to control the rituals of composition. He insisted that the quills be cut neither too long nor too short; that the feather plumes be removed; that the freshly inked pages be dried in front of the stove and not with sand; and that all of the above be done noiselessly, lest his concentration be broken.

Kipling was incapable of writing fiction with a pencil. Only ink would do, the blacker the better (“all ‘blue-blacks’ were an abomination to my Daemon”). His favorite pen, with which he wrote
Plain Tales
in Lahore, was “a slim, octagonal-sided, agate penholder with a Waverley nib.” It snapped one day, and although it was followed by a succession of dip pens, fountain pens, and pump pens, Kipling regarded these as “impersonal hirelings” and spent the rest of his life mourning the deceased Waverley.

I know how Kipling felt. Pen-bereavement is a serious matter. Ten years ago, my pen disappeared into thin air. Like a jealous lover, I never took it out of the house, so I have always believed that in rebellion against its purdah it rolled into a hidden crack in my desk. A thousand times have I been tempted to tear the desk apart; a thousand times have I resisted, fearing that the pen would not be there after all and that I would have to admit it was gone forever. For a time I haunted shops that sold secondhand pens, pathetically clutching an old writing sample and saying, “This is the width of the line I want.” I might as “well have carried a photograph of a dead lover and said, “Find me another just like this.” Along the way I learned that my pen had been a Parker 51, circa 1945. Eventually I found one that matched mine not only in vintage but in color. But after this parvenu came home with me, it swung wantonly from scratching to spattering, unable, despite a series of expensive repairs, to find the silken mean its predecessor had so effortlessly achieved. Alas, it was not the reincarnation of my former love; it was a contemptible doppelganger. Of course, I continued to write, but ever after, the feat of conjuring the first word, the first sentence, the first paragraph, has seemed more like work and less like magic.

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hen my friend Adam was sixteen, he bought, for twenty dollars, the letter book in which an eighteenth-century Virginia merchant had copied his correspondence: reports on the price of tobacco, orders for molasses from the West Indies, letters to loyalist friends who had fled to Nova Scotia during the Revolutionary War. Stuck between the pages were hard yellowish scraps that Adam at first took to be fingernail parings. Then he noticed that one of the scraps had the barbs of a feather attached, and he realized that they were trimmings from a quill pen: fragments of a goose that had died during the reign of George III.

How inconvenient, but how glorious, it must have been to write with a feather (preferably the second or third follicle from a bird’s left wing, which curved away from a right-handed “writer). An eighteenth-century inkstand—complete with quill holder, penknife, inkwell, pounce box (to hold the desiccant powder), and wafer box (to hold the paste sealing wafers)—was a monument to the physical act of writing. But if no inkstand was at hand, one could make do with temporary expedients. One day, when Sir Walter Scott was out hunting, a sentence he had been trying to compose all morning suddenly leapt into his head. Before it could fade, he shot a crow, plucked a feather, sharpened the tip, dipped it in crow’s blood, and captured the sentence.

For those who consider writing a form of romance, a Parker 51 can’t hold a candle to a crow’s feather, but it sure beats a cartridge pen, a ballpoint, a felt-tip, or a rollerball, especially those disposable models that proclaim, “Don’t get too attached, I’m only a one-night stand.” Pencils are fine in their way, but I prefer the immutability of ink. I still possess not only the poems I wrote at age ten but all the cross-outs: an even more telling index to my forgotten thought patterns. Richard Selzer, the surgeonessayist, fills his fountain pen from a lacquered Chinese inkwell with a bronze dragon on its lid. To feed the genie that he says dwells therein, he mixes, from an old recipe, his own version of Higgins Eternal Ink, the brand he used when he learned to write sixty years ago. Eternal! To what other medium could that word possibly be applied?

A typewriter ribbon—if it’s not self-correcting and if you don’t use Wite-Out—may be permanent, but I would hardly call it eternal. The ichor of eternity belongs to India ink and crow’s blood, not to machines. I admit the possibility, however, that typewriters, especially ancient manuals, can inspire in their owners the kind of fierce monogamy my pen inspired in me. When I worked at
Life
magazine, a veteran ‘tvriter named Paul O’Neil was occasionally brought in to write crime stories. Once I saw Paul standing at the end of one of
Life
‘s long corridors, rolling something down the carpet. It turned out he was wedded to a typewriter so old that its ribbons were no longer available, so whenever one gave out, he held one end of the worn-out ribbon, unspooled it with a bowler’s underhand pitch, and then painstakingly rewound a fresh ribbon, cannibalized from another typewriter, onto the original spool. My mother feels the same kind of devotion to her Underwood, a venerable concatenation of levers, bars, gears, shafts, and a tiny silver bell whose ding, tolling the end of each line of type, hovers in the background of many of my childhood memories. My mother is eighty. Her father owned the typewriter before she was born. It was cleaned and repaired once, forty years ago. In 1989, when my parents moved, it languished in storage for several months while my mother made do with a portable Hermes. I asked her how she felt when she retrieved the Underwood. “It was like being reunited with a long-lost love,” she said, “a love you’ve been married to all your life, but until you were parted you never realized how passionate you felt about him.”

These days I use a computer. I am using it to write this essay, even though I should really be using a hand-whittled crow’s feather. It is, as many writers have noted, unparalleled for revision. Because it makes resequencing so easy, it enables me to recognize structural flaws that once would have been invisible, blocked from my imagination by the effort and violence of the old cut-and-paste method. The Delete key is a boon to any writer who hates a cluttered page, although it makes the word processor the least eternal of all writing instruments. Cross-outs are usually consigned to oblivion. (I prefer to move the rejected phrases to the bottom of the screen, where they are continuously pushed ahead of the text-in-progress like an ever-burgeoning mound of snow before a plow.)

I am surprised by how much I like my computer, but I will never love it. I have used several; they seem indistinguishable. When you’ve seen one pixel you’ve seen them all. As a reader, I often feel I can detect the spoor of word processing in books, particularly long ones. The writers, no longer slowed by having to change their typewriter ribbons, fill their fountain pens, or sharpen their quills, tend to be prolix. I am especially suspicious of word-processed letters, which smell of boilerplate. Word-processed addresses are even worse. What a pleasure it is to open one’s mailbox and find a letter from an old friend whose handwriting on the envelope is as instantly recognizable as a face!

I recently finished writing a book. I wrote its first sentence with a pen on August 7, 1991. (I remember the date because it was my birthday.) The intervening years—during which, not coincidentally, my handwriting became virtually illegible—marked my transition from pen to word processor. I had planned to write the last page of the book in longhand, partly for the sake of sentiment, partly because I thought a pen might decelerate my prose and make me especially careful where it counted most. But when the morning finally arrived after a furious all-nighter, and I realized I was only an hour from the end, I could no more halt my pell-mell rush than a marathoner could be persuaded to sniff the roses that lined the last hundred yards of the racecourse. It was too late. My old pen may be buried somewhere in my desk, but my Daemon, who surely would never take up residence in a Compaq Deskpro 4/25 Model 120, has either fled the premises or is now—I’ve got my fingers crossed—living inside me.

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