AN ARTICLE in a recent issue of the Women’s Quarterly bemoans the absence of the teaching of handwriting in schools, pointing out that this is especially a hardship on young boys. Handwriting apparently comes less easily for boys than it does for girls. “Boys are graphologically challenged,” the article reports; a professor of special education at the University of Maryland named Steve Graham adds that boys being poorer at penmanship than girls “is one of the better established facts in the literature.” The boys in my class in the Daniel Boone School in Chicago were certainly much worse penmen than the girls. I don’t remember any girls having a bad handwriting. For a girl in fifth or sixth grade to have a poor handwriting was, somehow, a judgment upon her. A girl with a wretched handwriting, during the ancien regime under which I grew up, was practically a slut; it was not done, unthinkable, impermissible. Being slobs and brutes, boys were also permitted to be wildly errant penmen. The highest most could hope to attain was a merely passable handwriting. Elegant penmanship might even have put in doubt one’s masculinity. Lessons in penmanship took place daily. We had workbooks, much wider than they were tall, with lines ruled like music paper. Instruction entailed making cursive letters, lower case and caps, twice or thrice the size of normal handwriting. The Palmer method was taught. I’m not entirely sure what old Palmer’s method was, except endless repetition of the construction of letters from models, and then the joining and spacing of these letters. Once a woman, sent by the workbook’s publisher, arrived to demonstrate how certain letters were made. She was large and zealous, and I can remember her doing the capital S over and over, singing out, with each perfect S she formed, “Swat, swat, swat [and then as she ended her stroke], swat that skeeter.” Her obvious insanity brought light comic relief to the general boredom of the subject. I don’t think I had the worst handwriting in the room, but mine was close to the bottom. Mildly precocious in learning to print letters, I adopted, as a child of three or four, a grip on the pencil in which the top of my pencil slanted off to the left, causing many people to take me for a lefty. As for grip itself, it resembled nothing quite so much as the Cobra Twist, a combination half-nelson and leg lock, the coup de grace hold of a handsome South American wrestler who went by the name of Cyclone Anaya. I didn’t have any difficulty with this rococo grip, but I knew my teacher would, and so, when she walked down my aisle during penmanship lessons, I changed to the conventional grip. When alone, though, I stayed with the Cobra Twist, which seemed to serve me well enough. But my writing never really attained the fluency that the Palmer method promised; try as I might, I could never quite achieve the old Palmer flow, and haven’t to this day. I admire people whose carefully measured penmanship suggests an orderly character. A deteriorating handwriting is often one of the signs of aging, yet I remember getting longhand letters in the most perfect penmanship written well into his eighties from the philosopher Sidney Hook. While still in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn is said to have written his books in the most astonishingly minute yet perfectly legible handwriting, leaving no margins whatsoever on the page. This made for the smallest possible manuscripts, all the better for smuggling out of the country. I have been working on my handwriting for better than half a century, making little alterations but with no real success. Over the years, I have changed the capital A’s, G’s, and S’s in my script; I have added a flourish to n’s that end words; I try to remind myself to cross my t’s in the upper middle rather than at the very top and to make my l’s, h’s, and b’s higher than my t’s, k’s, and f’s. I have bought expensive fountain pens and raffine inks to aid me in this effort. With ballpoint pens, I have always felt as if I were driving a car with bad tires and unreliable brakes, and, as would be the case in such a car, my handwriting was all over the road. What can be detected in my handwriting is a certain yearning for elegance that distinctly doesn’t come off. The general effect is rather like a hobo wearing an ascot. My handwriting always seems, somehow, out of uniform, even slightly unsober. Might it be that I do not take sufficient pains? Erik Satie took as much as twenty minutes to write a six-line postcard, sometimes more than half an hour to address a letter, but then he aimed at calligraphic works of art. So, in our own day, does Tom Wolfe, whose letters are not only amusing to read but pleasing to gaze upon. I, meanwhile, struggle for mere legibility. I can still read my own handwriting, but am not always certain others are able to do so. I should have swatted lots more of those flamin’ skeeters. -Joseph Epstein
