ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

These two books on the subject of handwriting were side-by-side at the library, and I read them one after the other, so I think they belong together in a review…

I read The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting first, expecting to be unconvinced, but Trubek makes a plausible argument that the handwriting many of us value so much, is doomed.  She begins the book with the example of a child learning handwriting in a classroom today.  The child initially says that she likes handwriting best because she doesn’t have to search for the letters on the keyboard, but she changes her mind later and says that handwriting makes her hand hurt.  This anecdote shows just how fast things have moved in just a few short years since the book was published in 2016:  if what I see around me is any guide, then children start school already adept with screens of one sort or another and won’t be troubled by needing to search for letters at all.  What’s more, ‘intelligent personal assistants’ that go by names like Lisa, Alexa, Genie and Siri are activated by oral commands.  There’s even a voice-command thingy on the steering-wheel of my car.  No need even to type…

Trubek’s book takes the reader through the development of writing, from the earliest cuneiform tablets and hieroglyphs, to the Roman capitalis alphabet, and a myriad of scripts through the Middle Ages and beyond.  (There are six pages of colour images, but it would have been a good idea, IMO, to include more images of these scripts, because I’d never heard of most of them.  LOL Perhaps she intended that I should use my phone to Google them?)

Anyway, all of these scripts, until the advent of mass literary, were practised by only a small minority of people.  Even among those who could read, writers were a minority subset, and most of the writing that was done was mere copying, not creating and recording new ideas.  In 19th and 20th century America, a neat and accurate hand was a sign of good character and an industrious attitude.  These attributes were very important for the type of (very boring) clerical work that was needed. But, Trubek argues, they are not necessary now.  People today have screens as an alternative.  What writing is done, uses the thumbs not a pen.  Scanners record sales and stock movements, not clerks placing numbers in columns and adding them up afterwards.  We can order digital devices to do things for us with just verbal instructions, and there are authors who dictate their entire book to a computer faithfully recording every word that is said, just the way that authors of the past dictated to a secretary.

If you are reading the above with a sense of rebellion or dismay, then it is possibly because you still ascribe certain values to the acquisition of handwriting. Just the other day I was told that I had beautiful handwriting, and I admit to feeling pleasure at this compliment.  But why is it a compliment?  Why is having good handwriting considered a virtue or a sign of intelligence?  Trubek also covers the fad for character analysis using handwriting, and the difficulties of assessing the individuality of any particular hand (as for example when judging the authenticity of a signature on a Will).  Her style is light, and not overly academic but the book has an index and footnotes.

Philip Hensher takes the opposite tack, and he makes objections to the death of handwriting that had sprung to mind as I was reading the Trubek book.  I like this one:

Here’s a thing.  You’re driving down an Indiana track when out of nowhere comes a tractor into the side of your Subaru.  Neither of you have ever been able to write anything but your own names.  The farmhand don’t be holding with them thar smart phones nor with that new-fangled Internet.  (Or he does, but the battery on your smartphone has died a death – take your pick of disastrous scenarios).  So there the two of you stand, helpless, in an Indiana field, trying to work out which way up to hold a pen and cursing the idiotic name of Dr Scott Hamilton who landed you in this mess.  (p.23)

Dr Scott Hamilton is a psychologist who said it made sense to only teach children how to sign their names in joined-up writing.  

It seems to me that there are many scenarios like this, and you don’t need to be in the backblocks of Indiana to encounter them.  (For lousy Internet reception, you only need to be on the Gold Coast, the Hunter Valley, or anywhere that they are installing the NBN for days at a time.)  I write reminders to myself all the time, on scraps of paper that I leave in conspicuous places so that I remember to collect/return library books, buy strawberries, take the dog to the vet and hang out the washing that I pre-programmed to operate overnight on the low electricity tariff.  What use is it to me to have a reminder on my laptop/desktop/phone if I am not in the same place as they are? (Which, I am mostly not, because I am mostly somewhere else, reading a book.)  What about the thoughts I scrawl on whatever paper is to hand when I’m reading in a coffee shop, on a train, or in a doctor’s waiting room?  Or when I have a speech to make, and just before delivering it I realise I’ve forgotten to mention some VIP and I hastily scribble a note in the margins of my neatly typed speech?  And how do teachers and university professors deliver their feedback to students if they can’t write on the assignment?  Would an Apple watch obviate this problem?  Can you tell it what to do, or can it tell you what to do unobtrusively, or must you shout at it the way people shout their private business into phones all over railway carriages?  (Imagine being at a funeral and your watch starts shouting about remembering to buy toilet paper and petrol on the way home!  But no, of course, you’d turn it off, and (unless you wrote a note to remind yourself to turn it back on afterwards) then you’d forget to buy the toilet rolls and to fill up the car…  Would swearing at the voice-command thingy on the steering-wheel help when you’ve run out of petrol on the highway in peak hour?)

Hensher makes the point that sometimes, in some situations, only handwriting will do.  He gives the example of condolence letters sent by the UK prime minister to the parents of soldiers killed in Afghanistan.  Someone perceived, quite rightly, that a computer-generated letter with a digital prime ministerial signature would be recognised as the work of an underling, and dismissed as worthless.  So Gordon Brown handwrote a rather kind and thoughtful letter to one of the bereaved.  Who promptly took it to the newspaper because it didn’t meet her standards of spelling and penmanship.  It turns out that this was a bit mean because Gordon Brown was at that time having difficulty with his sight, but Hensher uses this example to make a wider point:

… the Brown episode shows that, sometimes, we expect people to write well.  In certain circumstances, we deplore had writing: the bad, ugly, illiterate, ill-formed writing of someone who has never practised writing, never considered that it might be a duty to write in ways which people can read and take some pleasure from.  If we expect good writing on elevated occasions, is it not reasonable to expect people to write reasonably well all the time?  It is not reasonable to think that people can write terribly, illegibly badly almost all the time and then elevate their handwriting for special purposes.  Sometimes, it clearly matters a good deal. (p.26)

(I hope I’m not the only person left in the world who sends hand-written condolence cards.)

The style of the Hensher book is a bit scatty. Some chapters consist of numbered points on a common theme rather than a considered argument.  For example, in ‘What’s My Handwriting Like?’ this is the last one:

10.  2008.  A creative-writing student tells me that she is unable to carry a notebook around with her to make notes in with a pen (for the overheard dialogue on buses, characteristic small pieces of behaviour among strangers) because she can’t write with a pen on paper.  Can’t? ‘It really hurts.’ And, by the way, the student finds my handwriting really difficult to read, so could I give all feedback in typing?  Yes, that too. (p. 37)

Hensher also has ‘witnesses’ who he’s interviewed about how they learned and use handwriting, and then there are chapters about, for example, copperplate (which is more or less what I write in, mangled somewhat by having to teach the truly awful Victorian Cursive). This chapter covers some of the same ground as the Trubek book, assigning American scripts to the ‘moral improvement’ brigade but also acknowledging that its flowing hand can be written swiftly.

BTW My Grade Six teacher Mrs Sheedy would have rapped us very smartly over the knuckles if we had lifted our pens the way this writer in this video does! If she had heard of Edward Johnston who created the sans serif font for the Underground during WWI, she clearly dismissed his ideas about unnecessary joins as heretical.

There’s also a chapter on Vere Foster (UK) and A N Palmer (US) whose less florid and more quickly executed styles you can also find with a Google search; and one on Dickens: one of the great unreadable nineteenth-century handwritings. Dickens, says Hensher, shows in his novels that he subscribed to the view that a characteristic handwriting displays a social condition and the pencil is often a harbinger of horror like the horrible letter scrawled to Old Riah in Our Mutual Friend.  There is a chapter about French handwriting which contrasts their dedication to the development of handwriting, to the 1980s and 1990s in the UK as English handwriting lessons slid further and further down the agenda. This chapter also references the German transition from the Sütterlin script called Fraktur (which Hitler liked for its Germanic purity); to the post-Hitler era when they began the Model Latin Script in the West and the Model School Script in the GDR; and finally the 1993 Simplified Model Script after reunification.  However *gasp!* it remains controversial:

The German national union of primary school teachers started a campaign in 2011 to abolish the teaching of the national cursive model nationwide. The forces of conservatism and the sixty-eight-ish forces of child-centred freedom square up against each other; the forces of nationhood and duty, impressed upon an increasingly multicultural nation, seem to many an absurd thing to hope to embody in loops and curves, or in a decision about whether your letters should join according to the Model Latin Script or not. (p.106)

But the point is well made that handwriting has always been subject to change – and that reminds me that just last week my French teacher told us sacre bleu! that in France they have abandoned the circumflex! (â ê î ô û).

There’s a chapter about the invention of Italic and the William Morris movement (which Hensher dismisses as a total absurdity and a rich man’s occupation for the original champagne socialists.  But the Morris version of Italic (though not very attractive in H’s opinion, scroll down this link to see it for yourself) gathered disciples and serious fanatics to promote it…

The chapter called ‘Ink’ reminds us that writing can be done by any number of substances:

There is also the story which comes up from time to time about a very helpful and kindly German prisoner of war in Ipswich who announced that he was a gardener in private life.  Would the town council like him to plant some bulbs?  Oh yes, please, that would be very nice, as all the town gardeners had been called up.  The POW worked very hard, to the delight of all the town.  You see, they’re not all bad, those Germans, and when the war’s over we’ll all be friends again.  They missed him a little bit when he was transferred to another camp in a month or two.  Then spring came and a vast array of crocuses came up, when it became apparent that the German gardener had planted them in the shape of a giant swastika. (p.136)

The chapter about pens shares the delightful snippet that when you are elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, you get to choose whether you sign the Book with either Byron’s pen or Dickens’ quill.  (Yes, I would have chosen the Dickens’ implement, as Hensher did.)  What will become of this illustrious Book if writers abandon the pen entirely?  I also enjoyed the chapter about the invention of the biro a.k.a. ballpoint pen, which is a reminder of what a miracle these things are compared to ink which Hensher has timed at taking 9 seconds to dry! (So I don’t really understand his compulsion to buy a new fountain pen and the trouble he had getting what he wanted at Harrods.  Except of course, that even now, as you can tell from the ads in the glossy weekend magazines, having a posh fountain pen to flourish is like having a posh watch even if you’d rather really have an Apple iWatch which probably costs more.  It’s all about prestige.)

There’s also a fascinating chapter about Proust which will appeal to aficionados of In Search of Lost Time.  I wish I’d had this to hand when I was reading Brian Nelson’s new translation of Swann in Love.  I think I might photocopy these few pages and tuck them into my copy for future reference.)

Hensher thinks that Marion Richardson is the hero of handwriting because she promoted child-centred art and writing, and made learning to write fun.  (See a sample here.)  She abandoned the pseudo-militaristic approach which culminated in Palmer and began instead with what the child can do, and what he will enjoy doing.  I wonder if this approach still holds true with kids hooked on screens from the time they are able to hold one in their chubby little hands?

The chapter called ‘Reading Your Mind’ is hilarious, not at all like Trubek’s serious analysis of the dubious ‘science’ of graphology.  For example, from Hensher’s self-confessed list of things he believes about handwriting comes #3 People who don’t close up their lower-case g’s are very bad at keeping secrets and #12: A handwriting where the crossbar of the t doesn’t touch the upright is that of an impatient person.  Hire them.  They get stuff done.  (This belief he attributes to Mrs Thatcher’s signature!)

The last chapter is lovely: it’s a plea to resurrect handwriting, and it has 10 suggestions for reintroducing it into your life, my favourite of which is #8 Write to other people.  How I miss writing to my parents, and receiving their letters in reply!

*****

Now… the problem with reviewing two books in one post is that it makes the post rather long.  But if you’re still with me, I’m curious.  When was the last time you wrote something by hand? And what do you think:  Is handwriting dead?  Does it matter?

For the record: Yesterday I hand-wrote some thoughts about the book I was reading, I hand-wrote a brief shopping list, and I hand-annotated my hand-written recipe for spanakopita to record how many the recipe makes.  And today I hand-wrote a postcard to the neighbour to whom I lent my copy of Jane Rawson’s The Handbook asking for it back. (Do you agree with me that an SMS or a typed note would seem to be a more aggressive reminder that he’s had it for months?) Oh yes, and I also hand-wrote the publishing details of Chapter 23 of the Hensher book onto the photocopy I made which is going to be tucked into Book One of In Search of Lost Time.  

Author: Anne Trubek
Title: The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2016, 177 pages
ISBN: 9781620402153 (hbk.)
Source: Bayside: Library

Author: Philip Hensher
Title: The Lost Art of Handwriting (And Why It Still Matters)
Publisher: Macmillan (Pan Macmillan UK), 2012
ISBN: 9780230767126 (hbk.)
Source: Bayside Library