The Missing Ink Read online

  The advertising of the first years was at pains to suggest the technical breakthrough of the Bic Cristal. This advert suggests the almost inexhaustible ink supplies of the Cristal – it can write, the company has established, a line two kilometres long, which is surely long enough for anyone to expect for 15p. Other print advertisements draw attention to its indifference to gravity, as people write standing on their head – a Pierre Fix-Masseau print to the slogan ‘J’écris aisement avec Bic’.

  It’s only when Bic moves into America in the 1960s, however, that its advertising reveals the full scale of its confidence in its products, with an unmissable series about the indestructibility of a pen retailing, at the time, for 19 cents for a medium-point pen.* In one madly sadistic advert, a BIC pen is strapped to the boot of an ice skater. After twirling about the ice for a bit, the ball of the pen taking the full brunt of the punishment, she unstraps the pen and thrusts it into a burning brazier which just happens to be sitting on the ice. She takes the pen and writes BIC on a sheet of paper on a desk which, also conveniently, is by the side of the brazier. Works first time. In another advert, a BIC pen is loaded into a gun and fired directly at, we are told, ‘SOLID OAK’. The plastic casing disintegrates; the cartridge and nib penetrate the SOLID OAK. It writes, First Time, Every Time. Don’t try this with your Mont Blanc. It’s easy to be amused by these ancient product demonstrations, but in a world where you had grown up with expensive, laborious, endlessly refilling fountain pens, the appeal of a 19-cent Bic Cristal pen which couldn’t be destroyed by fire, ice or being shot through SOLID OAK by a rifle obviously spoke for itself.

  Not for the first time, advertising reveals the curious impression that, for many American businessmen, like the handwriting gurus Spencer and Palmer, writing is something you do in the office. Under that slogan ‘Writes First Time, Writes Every Time’, Bic sells the Cristal pen with photographs of office situations, mostly of people leaning over each other’s desks and a loaf-haired secretary taking notes. ‘There Is Nothing More We Can Say About BIC Pens That Using One Doesn’t Say Better’, an advert tells us, and it seems fair enough as a claim. The product – cheap, beautifully designed, working every time – just sold itself to business. Another advert in the late 1960s places the business appeal in a global setting – there are successive vignettes in the Far East, the Middle East, Africa and Europe. Tellingly, the camera ventures into the picturesque sights of Bangkok, Cairo and an African souk before zooming in on, in each case, a modern skyscraper with, inside, a secretary in Western dress taking dictation. The message: BIC is modern! BIC is business! Why the crooks in the souk couldn’t sign an invoice with a BIC pen is not made clear. The fact is that the crooks in the souk did use BIC pens as well as the beautifully dressed secretaries in the Bangkok skyscrapers. They were, and are, completely universal. In the rest of the world, it doesn’t seem amusing to claim, as the company did in one African advert, that ‘Dans le monde entier, les hommes d’action écrivent avec un BIC.’ In a later emission of fairly sickening sentimentality, an African couple getting married take a blue Bic pen to sign the register, turning to smile at each other first. It was simply what people with an idea of modernity in their heads wrote with. The savages were rather closer to home. It is said that it took until 1965 for the French state to acknowledge the Bic Cristal as an officially sanctioned writing implement in schools because, as we all did, French schoolchildren had discovered on day one that the Bic casing, with cartridge removed, made an absolutely perfect blowpipe for back-of-the-classroom missiles.

  ‘Ballpens are not recommended for good writing,’ one handwriting guru wrote as late as 1970.7 Resistance to the ballpoint pen had been strong from the start. Reginald Piggott dramatically claimed that ‘wherever the ballpoint replaces the fountain pen illegibility ensues, for used at excessive speeds the point goes out of control lacking even the stability of the pencil.’8 Even in 1958 this must have been bollocks. It’s worth noting that the anti-ballpoint brigade can’t agree on this simple point, either. Where Piggott says that ballpoint pens produce a patchy supply and a ‘broken line’ through changes of direction, another eminence tells us that ‘Ballpoint pens produce a monotonous even line which, lacking the discipline of resistance between pen and paper, tends to degenerate into a formless scrawl.’9

  But it hardly matters. From the moment that Bich issued a press advertisement for a cheap, reliable ballpoint pen under the slogan ‘Madame, I’ve already written it’, the battle, from the point of view of many handwriting enthusiasts, was lost. They would have been much better off taking the ecological route in protesting against its spread – after all, those 100 billion pens have to go somewhere, and it’s mostly to landfill, despite the best efforts of the Bic corporation to persuade us to recycle, and to use our Bic Cristals to the very end of its allotted two kilometres. A fountain pen, with all its difficulties, is a much more ecologically sound writing implement, which will last a lifetime, where nobody much cares whether a Bic Cristal lasts an afternoon. All the same, the Bic Cristal is one of the great designs of the century, and one of the greatest aids to communication and civilization ever conceived.

  27 ~ Witness

  A: ‘I find my father’s handwriting interesting, particularly since he’s died recently and so you kind of find bits of his handwriting, and you think you must save it because . . . it’s him, it’s an extension of him. But also because he’s got this incredible, beautiful script. He was an art dealer and had an eye for beautiful things. He’s got this very old-fashioned handwriting with lots of loops – almost impossible to read, unless you know him – had known him for a long time. And I’ve always found it odd that, in comparison to his beautiful long hand, I’ve got constricted, bad, mashed-up handwriting. It’s quite embarrassing. I got very bad marks at school for it. And I’m very bad at spelling.’

  B: ‘They gave you marks at school for handwriting?’

  A: ‘Yes, oh yes. I couldn’t copy a joined-up e from the chalkboard. This is in a private, all-girls’ school in London. I have revolting handwriting. It looks like a . . .’

  B: (Inaudible)

  A: ‘Yes, but you – you’ve got your own special way. You’re very good at typing.’

  B: ‘My friend said of me, that my handwriting looks like a disabled child holding a pen in their mouth during an earthquake.’

  A: ‘B— does have special handwriting. You can always tell that it’s B—’s handwriting. I feel mine is just generic.’

  B: ‘You know, if it was Jack The Ripper’s handwriting, you’d say to him, that’s very, very special handwriting.’

  C: ‘I think we’re using “special” in the same sense as “special needs” here. There’s typing too. I’ve got such an aggressive typing style – my keyboard, all the letters are erased from the keys.’

  D: ‘I can hear him from upstairs.’

  Interviewer: ‘How do you feel about your handwriting, C—?’

  C: ‘I don’t actually feel too embarrassed about it. I don’t have many feelings about it. I don’t think it’s very good.’

  Interviewer: ‘Do you admire other people’s handwriting, or is it something you don’t care about?’

  C: ‘Yes. I quite admire yours.’

  Interviewer: ‘Yes, I’ve got extraordinarily beautiful handwriting, it’s true.’

  D: ‘When you send a postcard to us, C— has to read it.’

  C: ‘Yes, he says, “Tell me, tell me, what Philip says.”’

  D: I know it’s Philip, because I can recognize it, but I can’t read it.’

  Interviewer: ‘I don’t really have beautiful handwriting.’

  A: ‘My father’s grandfather was the Dean of Windsor –’

  Interviewer: ‘No!’

  A: ‘– he’s in the Coronation, walking along, wearing a dress, going hur-di-hur-di-hur, you know, the recent Queen’s one, the coronation, and so I’ve always assumed that my father’s handwriting, it’s sort of Biblical, it’s so beautiful. You’ve seen
it, haven’t you, B—? It’s almost illegible. I showed you that Christmas list. My dad died in November, and before he died, for some reason he tried to remember every single Christmas since my brother and me had been alive. He wrote down the dates, and he tried to remember backwards. Dickensian. It’s hard to read.’

  Interviewer: ‘But . . . he must have known what the date of Christmas was.’

  A: ‘Yes, the twenty-fifth . . . etc. Writing down the details of the turkey. Sometimes we were in Australia, sometimes we were in Peckham, sometimes we were in Efford. But yes, generally Christmas was at Christmas.’

  D: ‘When I was younger, I used to admire my mother’s handwriting. But now it’s more like my father’s. I can’t read my own handwriting, and my father can’t read his handwriting, either. Maybe to you, it would look like the handwriting of every other French person, but to my eyes, it’s all different.’

  A: ‘French people have the most enviable handwriting. The little grids, amazing. With a proper pen.’

  D: ‘For me, all English handwriting looks the same.’

  B: ‘Do you join up? Because I made a very conscious decision not to join up.’

  A: ‘Conscious decision!’

  C: ‘My mother did calligraphy and so all her writing was in italic. Every morning she would be doing Sanskrit calligraphy by candlelight in the kitchen with an italic pen.’

  A: ‘My Australian grandfather was a sign-maker, but for things like pie shops, so he would use these neon colours, the most gross colours to write with. There is just so, much, pie in my family.’

  C: ‘What is pie? Where does it come from?’

  A: ‘There’s beautiful versions of writing, like your mother, and then my grandfather who did incredibly ugly writing, but all by hand, so you think if it’s done by hand, it must be worth something. And still in the town where he lived in – he died about fifteen years ago – still at Christmas, they bring out the same banner with the same horrible 1950s-style Father Christmas face on, all in neon yellow and orange. Look at your pens, Philip!’

  A: E.W., novelist, female, 31.

  B: J.C., literary agent, male, 31.

  C: Y.A., charity administrator, male, 48.

  D: R.H., financier, male, 39.

  28 ~ My Italic Nightmare

  So. Two days after Christmas, I suddenly decided that I wanted to upgrade my italic fountain pen. The one I had been using was a perfectly good, highly functional pen made by the German firm Lamy, in brushed steel. It had a refillable, pump-action reservoir which I hadn’t used before I’d bought this pen, six months before. The whole process of refilling the reservoir was a pleasant one, new to me – when I had used fountain pens before, even when quite young, they had had cartridges to be plugged in and then thrown away when empty. With this one, the familiar-unfamiliar addition of a bottle of ink was necessary, and I had taken the advice of the pen merchant, and bought a bottle of Waterman’s ink.* The top half of the pen was removed; the lid of the ink was taken off, carefully, reverently, and the nib lowered fully into the ink.† The screw-top of the reservoir was turned in a counter-intuitive direction, downwards, and when it was quite empty, it was turned in the opposite direction, to refill it. I loved the magical rise of the ink against the screw – I know, hydraulics which everyone has known about for three thousand years, but I like it when it happens on so tiny a scale. The new process, done three times a day, was a whole new pleasure to me.

  Nevertheless, it occurring to me that, for once in my life, I could justify the purchase of a rather posh new pen of the sort advertised in the New Yorker and the Spectator to their supposedly plutocratic readerships, I set off to get an upgrade. My demands were simple. I wanted a solid fountain pen that would last me for years. I wanted an italic nib. I also wanted a refillable, pump-action, hydraulic-type reservoir. I hadn’t known I wanted one of those last ones a month before, but now I wanted a refillable, pump-action, hydraulic-type reservoir. That’s how capitalism works. I set off for Peter Jones.

  Peter Jones, for anyone who doesn’t happen to live in London SW-something, as I do, is the best department store in the world.* John Betjeman, the poet laureate, is said to have remarked that if he heard the siren going off warning of imminent nuclear destruction, he would head to Peter Jones on the grounds that nothing really awful could ever happen there. It caters to the English gentry, is run along the lines of a co-operative, with the assistants called Partners, and is not a bad place for a first port of call. Personally, when Christmas approaches, I decant myself into a taxi with eight hundred quid, go up the road to Peter Jones and emerge several hours later with presents for everyone I know and love. Of course I would go to Peter Jones to buy a fountain pen with an italic nib and a refillable, pump-action, hydraulic-type reservoir.

  Peter Jones’s pen desk is on the fourth floor. There is a glass kiosk, under which the better class of pen are displayed under lock and key. You have to summon a shop assistant, and engage with them, tell them precisely what you want to look at. To one side, there is the cheaper sort of pen. Those you can pick up and put down, poke and rifle among the stock to your heart’s content, and take yourself and your new purchase to the till without troubling the Partners at all. Peter Jones’s pen lady was engaging with an elderly mother of commanding appearance and her middle-aged failed son, still evidently having his clothes bought for him by his military-widow mother. The mother had decided that the time had come for Nigel, nearly forty, to write with a proper pen. She was going through all the possibilities. ‘Now this,’ she said. ‘This is what I call a pen. That really is a pen. Go on, Nigel, write with it.’ ‘Is it a fountain pen?’ ‘Yes, it’s a fountain pen. Look at it. It’s just like your father’s pen, I must say. Now. Can he write with that on something or other – do you have a sort of scrap of paper?’ The engaged assistant produced a pad, encased for some reason in a leather binding, to suggest the gravity of the task. I stood by with that fixed half-smile with which you try to suggest Yes, I’m waiting, No, I’m not in a particular hurry, Yes, I’m quite patient with my lot for the moment and Yes, it would be nice to be served at some point, I must say. ‘I can’t write with that,’ Nigel said, defeated. ‘Don’t be absurd,’ the mother said. ‘Try again.’ ‘Oh, there’s no ink in it,’ the assistant said, and produced a bottle of ink and a rag. Without looking at me, she reached across the counter and rang a bell. I went on looking at cripplingly expensive pens under glass. ‘I don’t know, Mummy,’ the man said. ‘I think I’d honestly be much better off with a biro, really, I’ve never written with anything else.’ ‘A biro!’ the mother said, attempting to make common ground with the shop assistant. ‘He wants a biro!’ ‘There are lovely ballpoints, too,’ the shop assistant said, reprovingly, meaning ones which cost a packet, rather than the useful 15p Bics we all use. I had a vision of this pair’s Chelsea terraced house, pastel blue on the outside, ramrod standard bay trees guarding the French windows behind, and filled to the brim with Christmas objects which might improve the lot in life of poor old Nigel. The assistant rang the bell again.

  The sub-assistant who arrived was not, I am sorry to say, up to the standard of Peter Jones’s staff. He had so very revolting a cold that I took two steps back, involuntarily. ‘I am looking,’ I said carefully, ‘for a fountain pen with an italic nib and a refillable reservoir.’ ‘We don’t stock italic pens,’ he said. ‘Really?’ ‘No. All our fountain pens have fine-point nibs.’ ‘Don’t the manufacturers supply a range of nibs?’ ‘We only stock fountain pens with fine-point nibs.’ ‘No, I understand that. What I meant was, could I buy a fountain pen from your stock and then have an italic nib fitted?’ ‘We don’t do that. All we stock are fountain pens with fine-point nibs.’ ‘Yes, I understand that, now. Could you tell me if there is anyone nearby who might stock italic pens?’ ‘You could try Rymans.’ ‘And if I wanted a good quality pen, for instance?’ ‘Well,’ he said, and sniffed gigantically, a sputum-reversing inhalation of epic proportions, ‘there’s always Harrods. T
hey’ve got a pen shop, I reckon.’

  Across the counter, the mother and her son were still at it. ‘Now that – that is what I really call – a pen,’ the mother was crying. She was going to get her way.

  Harrods is not a shop that caters to the English gentry. There had been a lot of comment in the papers that year about shopping expeditions mounted from remote corners of the world into the luxury-goods quarters of London. It was a sort of reverse colonialism: just as we had once descended on the courts of Asia to offer them an overelaborate civil-service model, a long-lasting sense of inferiority and the interesting idea that it might be sensible to stop burning widows, taking from them in exchange various gross baubles and an ingrained sense of post-colonial guilt, so our unfortunate subjects’ descendants were now turning up in Knightsbridge with fully charged credit cards to acquire some tat. One newspaper had tried to interview some of these shoppers, and had got hold of a Singaporean fashion queen, a Chinese woman, the chauffeur of a Dubai property magnate lovingly ladling shopping bags into the boot, and, disappointingly, a man who may have looked Indian but was in fact a third-generation German citizen. Harrods is the centre of the international shopping trip. I had heard stories of its sheer horror after Christmas, though, like everyone else, I don’t suppose I had stepped through its doors for ten years.