'It Was Written By a Madman'

Can we be privately embarrassed in the solitude of our skulls, without an audience? Embarrassment seems like a response to a social setting. In that sense, it resembles involuntary amusement. To laugh helplessly, out loud when alone, is rare among the sane. I think embarrassment is different, though perhaps more easily concealed. 

My handwriting has always been not only inelegant but often unreadable, even by me. A graphologist once described it as “bulbous.” She seemed to feel sorry for me. I had a friend, a fellow reporter, who since he was a boy had collected celebrity autographs. His proudest possession was a check written by Moe Howard of The Three Stooges to a dry cleaner in Los Angeles. Moe’s handwriting was draftsman-like, elegantly neat and utterly un-bulbous. That was privately embarrassing.

 

Reporters jealously guard their notes, made in those narrow, pocket-able, spiral-bound notebooks peculiar to journalism. I was less worried than others that someone might read my precious notes, which might as well have been encrypted. Here’s the story of an earlier journalist, Joseph Addison, as he reported it in the April 23, 1711, issue of The Spectator. He begins with the reporter’s perpetual quest for news:

 

“When I want Materials for this Paper, it is my Custom to go abroad in quest of Game; and when I meet any proper Subject, I take the first Opportunity of setting down an Hint of it upon Paper. . . . By this means I frequently carry about me a whole Sheetful of Hints, that would look like a Rhapsody of Nonsense to any Body but myself. There is nothing in them but Obscurity and Confusion, Raving and Inconsistency. In short, they are my Speculations in the first Principles, that (like the World in its Chaos) are void of all Light, Distinction, and Order.”

 

In other words, Addison makes notes, which are often fragmentary and seemingly random. He accidentally drops a sheet of his notes in a coffee house. A “Cluster of People,” he writes, find it and begin “diverting themselves with it.” In other words, reading it aloud. Addison reproduces some of his notes, including:

 

“Letters from Flower-Pots, Elbow-Chairs, Tapestry-Figures, Lion, Thunder–The Bell rings to the Puppet-Show–Old-Woman with a Beard married to a smock-faced Boy–My next Coat to be turned up with Blue–Fable of Tongs and Gridiron–Flower Dyers–The Soldier’s Prayer–Thank ye for nothing, says the Gally-Pot–Pactolus in Stockings, with golden Clocks to them–Bamboos, Cudgels, Drumsticks.”

 

It reads like a transcript of Yeats’ automatic writing or Allen Ginsberg on an especially garrulous day. I have no idea whether Addison is strictly reporting what happened or if he’s making it all up. “The reading of this Paper,” Addison tells us, “made the whole Coffee-house very merry; some of them concluded it was written by a Madman.” He must have had better penmanship than I do. He takes the paper from the boy who had read it aloud, pretends to read it attentively while shaking his head disapprovingly and . . .

 

“I twisted it into a kind of Match, and litt my Pipe with it. My profound Silence, together with the Steadiness of my Countenance, and the Gravity of my Behaviour during this whole Transaction, raised a very loud Laugh on all Sides of me; but as I had escaped all Suspicion of being the Author, I was very well satisfied, and applying myself to my Pipe, and the Post-man, took no [further] Notice of any thing that passed about me.”

 

Clearly, Addison was privately embarrassed but played the straight man and avoided public embarrassment. The few times I had to share notes with editors, who invariably enjoyed mocking my handwriting, my face burned red with embarrassment and I was back in second grade again.