`The Point of Style is Character'

In elementary school they graded us “A” through “E” in the major subjects – Reading, Arithmetic, Science – and “S” (“Satisfactory”) and “U” (“Unsatisfactory”) for the minors – Physical Education, Art and Writing. The last referred to handwriting or penmanship, and was the only subject in which I consistently earned awful grades, a long line of “U’s.” My mother sat me at the kitchen table with the day’s Cleveland Press (R.I.P., 1982), and had me transcribe the front page in longhand with a pencil. Despite her efforts, I became a newspaper reporter and my handwriting remains wretched. Naturally, I take pride in my illegibility, detest those who possess a calligrapher’s hand and can’t help but sympathize with my 8-year-old whose penmanship is even more aesthetically offensive than mine.

My wife has hired a handwriting tutor for Michael. She visits for an hour once a week and I supervise the daily exercises, feeling like a hypocrite. Michael inscribes his letters and numbers from the bottom up – bad form, apparently – so my job is to reinforce the down stroke. Habit is hard, even at 8. He asks, “Who cares? Why’s it so important?” I tell him he’ll be judged by his handwriting, as we’re judged by our manner of speaking. If the teacher can’t read what you’ve written, etc., etc. I don’t believe it either but we’ve entered into a conspiracy of contemptuous resignation and have agreed to play along with the game. This, too, is an important lesson for children.

Howard Nemerov looks at it otherwise. In “Writing,” from his 1958 collection Mirrors and Windows, he celebrates elegant handwriting – and by extension, all writing – as an aesthetic/moral/spiritual exercise, at least for the purposes of his poem:

“The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger's to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.

“Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing: continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.”

This is a beautiful poem, one of Nemerov’s best, though his conceit means more to me than the acts of writing he describes. Those final four lines remind me of Keats’ “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” I’ve never skated or watched others do so, except in movies and on television. The notion of incisions left by skates on ice as a form of script is new to me, but apparently not to others. In the title poem from his 2003 collection The Calligrapher’s Shop, Ben Downing writes:
“As if on ice
A figure skating rubricant had mapped

“his arabesques with slathered blades, the rise
and roller-coaster dip of letters swelled
even past my ignorance; my eyes

“alone could estimate, yet not quite melt,
The igneous devotion frozen there.”

Sometimes, a metaphor possesses more beauty and meaning than its referent. For that to be true and for the poem to remain beautiful and meaningful, as it is with Nemerov’s and Downing’s, seems like an unlikely triumph.

There’s too much to learn and enjoy to worry about trifles. I’m pleased Michael is writing stories and drawing comic strips (he posts a new episode of “Space Man Stiff” every day on the bulletin board in the kitchen), and don’t care that I can’t decrypt some of them because of his handwriting. Before we were married, my wife and I worked for the same newspaper, and she interviewed a handwriting analyst who requested writing samples from three co-workers. Mine came back described as “bulbous,” which was gratifying because it reminded me of Captain Beefheart’s line on Trout Mask Replica: “A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast ‘n’ bulbous. Got me?” Despite all that we celebrate our 10th anniversary next week.