A Place to Read by Michael Cohen

Author:Michael Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: essays;literary essays;philosophy;humor;humour;American author;religious essays;philosophical essays
Publisher: IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)
Published: 2014-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

12. A Fountain Pen of Good Repute

Writers of all sorts fetishize their tools. Hannah Arendt apologized to Martin Heidegger for using a typewriter for her letter (9 February 1950); “because my fountain pen is broken and my handwriting has become illegible.” Roland Barthes wrote everything by hand, using different fountain pens from his collection, often switching from one pen to another, as he told an interviewer, “just for the pleasure of it.”

A more practical inclination is that expressed by Joseph Conrad in a letter to his agent, J. B. Pinker (21 February 1906), begging for a good fountain pen. Conrad sends part of what would become The Secret Agent and adds this postscript:

PS Would you have the extreme kindness to buy for me and send out [Conrad was in Montpellier, in the south of France] by parcel post a fountain pen of good repute—even if it has to cost 10/6. I am doing much of my writing in the gardens of Peyron under a sunny wall and the horrible stylo I’ve got with me is a nuisance.

The stylographic pen to which Conrad refers was an early forerunner of the ballpoint: a cylinder of ink had a hole at the bottom closed with a pointed metal pin. Pressure on the pen pushed the pin up into the barrel, releasing ink. When the pressure eased, the pin resealed the hole. A stylographic pen is also mentioned in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912).

Beyond aesthetics and convenience comes an identification of writer with pen: the feeling that the pen itself is somehow doing some of the creative work of the person who wields it, or that the pen is an extension of the self and actually gleans thoughts from the teeming brain faster than the brain can provide them. “My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain,” Graham Greene said, “My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.” There are no doubt analogies in the way wooden-boat builders feel about their hand planes or spoke shaves, or carpenters about their favorite hammers. “I am a man-pen,” wrote Flaubert, “I feel through the pen, because of the pen.”

The Montblanc fountain pen I hold in my hand—a retirement gift from my wife—bears little resemblance to the instruments people have used to get ink on parchment or paper before the modern pen was invented, yet functionally and structurally, it is remarkably like a quill or feather pen (the word pen derives from the Latin word penna, or feather; the augmentative form of the Latin word gives us pinion, or wing). Quill pens were ordinarily made from the large primary wing feathers of geese. The hollow shaft of these feathers was big enough to serve as an ink reservoir for several minutes of writing. After hardening the quills in hot water, ashes, or sand, the pen-maker cut the quill’s tip diagonally from its bottom (the inner curve of the feather) toward its top.

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