An elegy for handwriting?
DAVID RUNDLE
Is it time to compose an elegy for handwriting? Anne Trubek thinks so – indeed, hopes so. She deems the ability to form a cursive script "merely emblematic", and dreams of a future in which the school curriculum will include it only for art classes. It will remain solely the domain of calligraphers such as Patricia Lovett, who is herself probably Britain's best-known practitioner, teacher and advocate. Lovett's latest book is a gorgeously presented survey of the work of masterly scribes from the third century AD to the twenty-first, culminating, appropriately (and with no false modesty), with her own work. Though Lovett would undoubtedly baulk at such a description, her volume constitutes, in Trubek's logic, an alluring swansong of an "antiquated" skill.
If script is dying, it cannot complain that its day has been short. Its solitary reign may have been ended by the printing press, but it lived on as a citizen in the new republic of letters: official records, account books, botanical drawings, not to mention works for private circulation and personal epistles, continued to be produced by hand for centuries. Then came the typewriter, but even its keys could not strike the death knell of handwriting. Perhaps that machine's close descendants, the keyboards of our computers and their avatars on our screens, are administering the coup de grâce. Perhaps.
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Even if handwriting were to wither away, that would not, of course, herald the end of writing. Trubek asserts that we are in a "golden age": "most Americans write hundreds if not thousands more words a day than they did ten or twenty years ago". She is thinking of email, texts and Twitter. New technologies reinforce an old truth: the application of ink via pen to writing surface has always been one among several media for textual expression. The most formal script of ancient Rome, square capitals, was itself an emulation of epigraphical inscriptions, epitomized by the beautifully chiselled lettering on Trajan's Column. Meanwhile and for a millennium later, the common method of making a temporary record was to incise a wax tablet with a stylus (witness the early medieval examples found in Springmount Bog, County Antrim, now in the National Museum of Ireland). The empire of the Roman alphabet is not about to fall, fads such as emoji and emoticons notwithstanding (see the TLS of September 22, 2017). The issue, rather, is whether, if handwriting were to be no more than a heritage craft, our culture would be substantially poorer. Trubek acknowledges that there would be losses, but urges us to celebrate the advances "in accessibility, in democratization" that are coming.
Trubek provides a stimulating essay that begins as a history of script; it is as impressively swift as it is, in places, toe-curlingly bad. She rightly distinguishes between majuscule alphabets (ALLCAPS) and those written in what, in print terminology, are called lower case, only then to confuse the issue by stating that Carolingian minuscule was a reinvention of Roman capitals. Similarly, she discusses the medieval scriptorium where monks, "sublimating their individuality to authority", served as "human Xerox machines". It is a characteristically memorable turn of phrase but one that relies on assumptions closer to the film of The Name of the Rose than to the notably few visual depictions of a scriptorium we have from the Middle Ages. Making a hash of the pedigree of scripts is unfortunate; misrepresenting the activity of monastic scribes proves more problematic for her argument.
That argument comes into focus as she directs her attention to the United States in the past 200 years. Her span encompasses the masters of nineteenth-century penmanship and the success of the typewriter as well as the rise of autograph-hunters and, later, of calligraphers. Certain nineteenth-century graphologists insisted that the psyche was revealed by pen strokes, and Trubek identifies this as a key moment when handwriting became seen as expressive of personality. She in fact postdates the phenomenon by several centuries. If she had been able to consult Lovett's book, she would have encountered scribes such as Godeman of Winchester in the tenth century or Eadwig Basan of Canterbury in the next; both were much more than mechanical replicators. Closer to the period Trubek pinpoints, but still a couple of hundred years earlier, we might recall Malvolio becoming convinced that his mistress loves him by divining that a note is in her hand: "and thus makes she her great Ps". The humour lies not in his assuming that handwriting is individual but in his being fooled by a fake. What was new with the graphologists was not the assumption that script was personal but that the product of the arm's movement could reveal the working of the subconscious.
Trubek also collapses time when she asserts that "the history of the signature as legal proof of identity is short". What, though, is more revealing, is the statement that follows: "for most of Western history", she says, making one's mark with a cross has been sufficient. That is true, but only for those who were not capable of writing. Of course, the illiterate have been, for most of the longue durée of Western civilization since the fall of Rome, the marginalized majority. The slow spread of literacy is a dimension missing from her analysis. That may be because she concentrates on American culture, which prides itself on having historically had very high levels of literacy – as long as one overlooks (for the eighteenth century) women and (for a longer period) those who were enslaved. In twenty-first-century America, there are few who are completely without reading skills – in contrast to the global figure of 17 per cent (with a substantial gender divergence) – but recent estimates by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are sobering: 18 per cent achieve only, or struggle to achieve, the lowest level in assessments of literacy.
Trubek foresees a time in the US when those for whom writing by hand is a painful chore will be liberated from its tyranny and when no one need be judged by the quality of their script. These are her hoped-for improvements in accessibility and in democratization, but they are dependent on universal access to computers and mobile phones from a young age. Perhaps the Trump administration can assure that for all its citizens. In less affluent parts of the world, it is a greater challenge. Trubek's democracy sounds to be the winners' gilded enclosure in the global market economy, and the death of script a First World problem.
Pen and paper, then, will remain because they are cheap. Meanwhile, in the West, many of us may fret over the scrawl we inflict on the page, but we can reassure ourselves that bad handwriting is not an invention of modernity: ask anybody who has tried to decipher pages written by Thomas Aquinas. He would certainly not make it into a gallery such as that Patricia Lovett provides. Her selection of scribes necessarily concentrates on those with the most skill, but enough specimens survive to remind us that few mastered that level of artistry. Many wrote less accurately, less consistently and simply less presentably. If they had been Xerox machines, they would have been the ones in urgent need of a visit from the engineer.
A volume chronicling cacography – poor handwriting – might not sell as well as one on calligraphy, but it deserves its history too, and will certainly have its future. For those who are truly latter-day Aquinases, with a natural difficulty in being legible, the keyboard is a saving grace. Others too prefer it as their medium of self-expression. Yet, it is a "self" sublimated to the font choices of the corporation whose software you use. Of course, when we write by hand, we are also confined, individuality restrained by the requirements of the script, but there is a certain licence for variation and idiosyncrasy, however badly it is executed. Many may find such latitude engenders lassitude and choose to allow the computer to decide for them. That is not a freedom available to everyone in our world – if true freedom it is.
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