March 14, 2020
NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 9
On the occasion of a reading I did at Books & Books in Coral Gables last October, my husband bought me an elegant gold-colored fountain pen that fills with cartridges of brown ink. It makes me think of Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging” – “Between my finger and my thumb/ the squat pen rests./ I’ll dig with it.”
Dear All,
On the occasion of a reading I did at Books & Books in Coral Gables last October, my husband bought me an elegant gold-colored fountain pen that fills with cartridges of brown ink. It makes me think of Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging” – “Between my finger and my thumb/ the squat pen rests./ I’ll dig with it.” It reminds me of my ink-stained school days, my right-hand middle finger perpetually swollen and stained with blue ink. I remember having to write exam questions, my hand flying, aching, across the page; having to stop like a long-distance runner for a quick drink, to fill my pen with a squelch. I remember school desks with rusty ink in their inkwells, and bottles of blue-black Quink, and blotting paper – remember blotting paper? For so many people, these things will now seem as remote as having to cut your own goose feather to the right sharpness for a quill, or having to write by candlelight. All writers, for many centuries wrote this way. No wonder fewer people wanted to be novelists, or even write at all.
But it didn’t change all that much with the arrival of the typewriter. I remember getting my first one, inherited from my grandmother, an Olivetti portable with which I was going to conquer the literary world. I remember carbon paper, how it folded on itself and wrinkled and stained your fingers if you wanted more than one copy. I remember white-out if you wanted to change a word or correct a mistake. Starting over again if you wanted to rewrite or correct; writing out a whole novel three or four times at least. And then there was the schlepping off to the Post Office, the agony of handing over the hefty parcel to be shipped to an agent or editor, the going home empty-handed as if you had just given up a baby for adoption. There were the horror stories of leaving a manuscript on a train – (Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley.) Or having it burned after your death by your surviving spouse - (Richard Burton’s wife, Isabel. Not the actor, the other one - explorer and translator of The Perfumed Garden). Wives! Or having it burned for you in revenge (see Hedda Gabler, Jo March). Books, especially novels, were fragile, easily lost or destroyed, hostages to fortune. In movies, the energetic writer pounded away in a garret to produce the pages, and heart in mouth, with brown paper wrapping the precious thing, sent it out hundreds of miles away across an ocean or the Australian outback to seek its fortune – as in the film My Brilliant Career – to hear weeks or months later that it had been accepted and was a work of genius. The myth was strong: this thing is a part of you, and easily lost or destroyed, like a part of your soul. But it also houses genius, as your soul no doubt does too.
Do we feel the same way as we write on our computers, cut and paste, make copies, save to the Cloud or wherever, fiddle away easily editing, correcting, cutting, adding? When we press SEND to propel our baby out into the world? Where nobody can steal, burn, cut up or otherwise attack what we have written – only ignore it?
I’m profoundly grateful, in my advancing age, for my laptop computer. It’s like switching on a light as opposed to heaving coal. And, though I do love the feeling of the soft giving nib of my fountain pen as it slides across paper and the Treasure-Island-ish dried-blood look of the brown ink, an affectation I adopted in my early twenties, I don’t use it all that much except for signing books or birthday cards. It just reminds me of how a writing life used to be, with its lost pleasures and deep anxieties, and that nightmare I still have, of having lost my only copy. Did Hemingway never even consider carbon paper? Or was it a manly thing to go unprotected? But I ramble. It’s easy to do, the way we write now.
Affectionately, Ros