I have long harbored the notion, no doubt foolishly, that incarceration wouldn’t be all that particularly bad. To the contrary. It would give me time to catch up on my reading. In this fanciful scenario I place myself in a minimum security facility. Anything other than that and the advantages quickly disappear. It was in prison that Genet discovered Proust. Edmund White relates that Genet once arrived late to the weekly prison book exchange and was resigned to the picked-over shelves. Proust had been summarily rejected by all the other prisoners. He took the book, read the opening: “For a long time I would go to bed early.” then shut it, savoring it. “Now I’m tranquil,” he said to himself. “I know I’m going to go from marvel to marvel.” That is how it seems to me prison would be: tranquil and full of good reads. Marvel to marvel. Indeed, self-proclaimed “Prison Writer” Kenneth Hartman notes, “In my six by ten foot cell, the locker bolted to the concrete wall is loaded down with books. Big, fat hard-bound reference titles, philosophy, and writing mechanics books. I can’t conceive of a life absent the comfortable solidity of a book held in my hands.”
There are many prison reading projects. There is a Great Books Prison Project and a Prisoners’ Reading Encouragement Project, Books Behind Bars project. Prison literacy programs abound. As they should. Recidivism rates lower in accord with inmate education. This begs the question of what I’d be doing in prison in the first place, being educated and well-read enough to presumably know better. Obviously, I must be a victim of a trumped up charge. And one I would not necessarily quibble with, assuming the prison library was sufficiently stocked and I had time available. I wouldn’t want to waste valuable reading time in prison making license plates. That goes without saying.
It was the Bible that saved souls in the England of the Industrial Revolution, so into the prisons they flowed. Eventually other books were brought in, and, oddly, coded so that the criminal library was distinct from the debtor’s library, the Catholic from the Protestant, prompting some prisoners to switch religions in favor of the better stocked library. To this last point, Janet Fyfe, a scholar who has spent some time studying the history of prison libraries shares that Dundalk Prison, in Ireland, inventoried only religious books, separated by creed. “This is because when they were mixed…prisoners would profess themselves as of whatever creed would yield them the best selection of books!”
Whereas, Genet discovered Proust in prison, William Sydney Porter discovered O. Henry. Porter, while working as a bank teller at the First National Bank of Austin, in Houston, was accused of embezzling several thousand dollars. He fled the country, returning years later to visit his dying wife. He was picked up and thrown in the slammer. It was there he assumed the pen name O. Henry. He was released after three years and died in 1910 with just 33 cents to his name. O. Henry lives on. If there is any credibility to the immortality of the arts, he invested the absconded funds well.
Reading and writing go hand-in-glove. Many readers remain readers only. But seldom does a writer not read. There are, of course, exceptions. E.B. White once commented that he “was never a voracious reader and, in fact, have done little reading in my life. There are too many other things I would rather do than read.” This disappoints me, White being a favorite writer. Perhaps he would have been well served to do a little time in the big house, though one can hardly argue with either the quality or the quantity of his work. (I will resist the temptation to prison-riff on his marvelous collection of essays, One Man’s Meat.)
I recall the movie, Sabrina, the original 1954 Billy Wilder version, starting Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. The tag line to the movie was, “the chauffeur’s daughter who learned her stuff in Paris!” Sabrina’s father, played by John Williams, is the chauffeur. What is so remarkable about the character of the chauffeur is that he chose the profession because it would afford him time to read. It seems a remarkable decision in this day to parlay to the screen, in an age when reading seems so off-center of life choices to so vastly many. I am still amazed when I consider this idea, of a life carved out of reading, And even more astounding, that a screenwriter employed the motif. Dad’s great line in the movie, delivered to his daughter Sabrina, is, “He’s still David Larrabee [William Holden], and you’re still the chauffeur’s daughter. And you’re still reaching for the moon.” To which she smartly replied, “No, father. The moon is reaching for me.” Being a chauffeur and reading during curbside breaks appears a sure winner over doing time.
Two of my literary heroes, Michel de Montaigne and Henry David Thoreau, enjoyed a self-imposed prison cell, as it were, in pursuit of their discipline. Montaigne retired to the tower of his family castle in Bordeaux. It was 1571, February 28, his thirty-eighth birthday. Above his library, he had inscribed on the ceiling Pliny’s remark: “There is nothing certain but uncertainty, and nothing more miserable and arrogant than man.” One scholar, writing of Montaigne in his tower, entitled his dissertation, The Prison-House of Writing. Montaigne said he was intent on spending the second half of his life studying the Myself of the first half. A man requires a prison cell to accomplish such things–or a castle tower in Bordeaux. His library was well stocked with what we would today call the classics. It was, in essence, the rediscovery of these works, the Greeks in particular, which fueled the Renaissance, of which Montaigne was a bleeding-edge participant.
Henry David too, famously, went into a loose-knit confined self-exile. His cabin cost him $28 and 12 ½ cents and measured ten feet by fifteen feet, more than twice the size of “Prison Writer” Ken Hartman’s cell. He moved to his cabin at Walden Pond July 4, 1845. He was 28. Thoreau was not at Walden to read, per se. He was seeking solitude. “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude,” he wrote. Like Montaigne, Thoreau was a reader of classic literature, preferring, the original Greek or Latin. He recorded that at Walden he had a copy of The Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu story of Lord Krishna, a selection perhaps not unusual for the quintessential American Transcendentalist. He warned against relying too much on literature as a means of transcendence and found the common literature of the day annoyingly unsophisticated. There is that famous night he spent in jail, in protest of poll taxes, used as a means to finance efforts with which he disagreed, specifically slavery and the American-Mexican War. I am uncertain as to whether he had anything to read in his cell. When Emerson visited him in jail, the poet asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” To which Thoreau replied, “Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?” He lived at Walden two years, two months and two days. I was reminded of this once, while traveling in Tibet. Peering up a Himalayan cliff I spotted the pitched cave of a meditating monk, a receding dark mouth agape against the bleached crag face. I was told that a monk, in order to become a lama, must meditate in solitude for three years, three months and three days. It does not feel at all awkward to think of Thoreau as an American lama. To the contrary. Years later, on his deathbed Thoreau’s last words were, “Indian…moose.”
The other thing about prison I deem appealing is the apparent outright lack of responsibility required. Like travel, incarceration should afford one the relief of worrying about one’s obligations. There is no grass to cut presumably, rent to pay or dinner to prepare. The roof is not in disrepair, nor do the windows need replacing. I don’t want to minimize the experience, but on one level it seems a stupidly idyllic existence. There are many things Thoreau has taught me, perhaps most famously, his admonition to, “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” If one could really learn this lesson–easier said than done–one could avoid prison altogether, as well as avoid the roof and the window, the grass and possibly walking the dog. A simple existence should be devoid of most of the existential trappings that call for our attention and sap our energies. To this end, I made a list not long ago of things I deemed wasteful of my time and things I deemed worthy of my time. Philosophically, I am more interested in understanding what is possible than understanding what is true. Consequently, my list made no accommodation for the niggling things one is compelled to do. You can be compelled to do something, but it still be a waste of time. If it’s a waste time maybe you should either 1.) drop your compulsion, 2.) become a monk, or 3.) simplify. One entry on my list that made it to both columns, the waste of time column and the worthy column, was technology. This is a reminder that life cannot always be so easily parsed or simplified. Sometimes a thing is a plus and a minus simultaneously. That is itself a complexity one would be well served to better understand.
I have determined that in prison I would not want an electronic book reader. Putting aside the possible problems with downloading books through the thick prison walls, an electronic reader would not keep me company. Books keep me company. They warm me with their presence on cold winter nights and their iridescent bright spines bring me joy on balmy summer mornings. I would want them as my companions in my prison abode. As a young man I used to want my shelves full because the books in place there spoke to my intelligence. Now I understand that its not the evidence of intelligence I seek, but intelligence itself. That is something altogether different and is itself, I hope, a sign of the intelligence I seek. Regardless, books would warm up the cell nicely.
I understand that when you go to prison you walk in with just the clothes on your back. But they don’t stay your clothes for long. You are issued correct attire for occasion, again simplifying things. For argument’s sake, it is a worthy exercise to ask yourself what books you would take with you, if you could. It is similar to the parlor game–now there is an antiquated notion–of asking what you would take from your burning home if you just had two minutes to escape the flames. What would be worse than going to an English prison 150 years ago and discovering that the only books available were dusty religious tomes? Perhaps that was the redeeming intention of punishment by incarceration. If the rules changed and one could bring, say, five books, what would they be? It is an intensely personal question and I suggest you take it up for consideration. Likewise, when traveling, which books make it to your carry-on? Consider for a moment, should the plane have to ditch over an expanse of water and you were to end up on a deserted island with nothing but the contents of your pockets and your carry-on. It would be a pity should your books sink to the depths in the fuselage belly along with your neatly folded underwear. It could happen.
Oscar Wilde was imprisoned at Reading Gaol (Reading!) after committing the federal crime of “gross indecency.” He was 41. There he wrote De Profundis (From the Depths) which included these sentences:
…I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world… And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom.
Reading this, it would appear that prison had the desired effect on Wilde. He fled England upon release and never returned.
I have a friend who has climbed Mt. Everest and K2, as well as a host of other peaks. He spends a lot of time at elevation in a tent acclimatizing, manufacturing red blood cells. I once asked him how he entertains himself while waiting weeks until a summit push. He reads, he told me. He said that reading is a “zone activity” for him. He was referring to the notion of a mental state whereby a person is so fully immersed in what he is doing, in his case reading, that time ceases and energy is focused. You sometimes hear of “being in the zone,” or achieving a state of flow, in relation to sports.
A zen master once told me that flow is akin to enlightenment, a state of consciousness where everything is at once realized yet not transformed. I like the sound of that very much, but I cannot tell you what it means.
Prison cells. Towers in Bordeaux. Cabins in the woods, and tents on the sides of mountains. At work behind the scene is the argument that life can be forced into an edifying and redeeming corner. It is a persuasive, if not compelling notion: That when everything is lost or set aside or taken from you, only then do you have the opportunity to do what it is you truly wish to do, to review your list of what is worthy and what is wasteful. The theme rings true. “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, To put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die discover that I had not lived.” I never grow tired of this quote. Thoreau’s desire to live deliberately resonates and is at the heart of Socrates’ observation that the unexamined life is not worth living. Although I cannot personally attest to its efficacy, it carries weight that I suggest prison a good thing because it would strip one of everything extraneous. Extraneous to reading, of course.
Another benefit is that when I write by hand, there’s no temptation to fiddle with the page margin sizes or font. I don’t switch to another window to look for more suitable background music. There are no brightness or color saturation controls to tweak until the work area looks “just right”.
Think of great literature written hundreds of years ago. Those authors wrote by hand and we’re still reading their books today.
My friend passed along this essay and I’m glad I read it–keep up the writing by hand. (By the by, I wrote this comment directly on my computer. It might have been more interesting if I wrote it by hand, but I have to leave for work in a minute. ;) )
Thanks for this essay. I always wrote journals by hand in college and never strayed from it as I got into fiction and poetry. Someone early on in my writing life told me studies had been done where writing by hand created 20 percent more brain activity. Something like that. Aside from this, though, I find the computer difficult to look at for too long (especially after looking at it all day at work), and writing by hand feels like meditation, especially in the early morning or late at night.
Two benefits from writing by hand that weren’t noted. First, the crossed-out words are still visible, and available for inspiration (they came from somewhere, didn’t they?), unlike deletions on the computer, which are gone forever. Second, the juicy visual placement of words on the page — those insertions that scale the right-hand margin, in the tiniest font, their smallness somehow related to their urgency.
I like to write first drafts by hand and then put the handwritten paper on my copy stand while I type the second draft. A triangle forms between the paper, the screen, and my mind, and there’s energy there.
Even as someone heavily immersed in digital publishing, I think writing by hand makes a lot of sense. It imposes another level of editorial where you are probably more closely reading the piece than you would had you first typed it out.
Here I thought I was the only one with this problem. I always find that I start my written work by writing it by hand or I do all of it by hand first before entering it on the computer. For some reason, when I look at a blank screen I can’t seem to get anything out. I feel the slower pace of writing allows me to process my thoughts before I get them out, while when I type everything moves so fast that I don’t get to process it all as thoroughly as I hope. So I find myself stopping to think about what I was trying to write, and it all goes downhill from there.
I also find I become distracted with the formatting and the misspelled words underlined in red, and the spacing, and the periods and the…you get my drift. It could be a matter of conditioning. Most people currently in their late 20’s and above were taught to write out their rough draft first and then type their final copy on the computer. It is possible that going to the computer first to type your first draft still feels foreign or not natural. Some theorizing…great post!
Am certainly in sympathy with this. Last year I went to a specialist pen shop and said, “This is how I hold a pen, this is how I write: what’s the best pen for me?” They sold me a fountain pen for £16 (approx $25) and it’s turned out to be one of best productivity aids. Overall, I don’t think it’s ‘handwriting good, word-processing bad’ – it’s more a case of the two technologies each having their own strengths and uses.
I guess it is more of a personal choice. I don’t exactly agree that your brain is stimulated better when in front of paper – depends on how you train your brain.
I prefer writing when I’m composing something big needing footnotes, to-dos, etc. However, while blogging or writing one-page articles, I do prefer typing. Basically, if something ends up typed (soon after), why write first? Especially, if it needs online research.
It is just a choice.
I enjoyed the essay very much. The biggest draw back writing by hand for me is my penmanship. I have found that I try to write as fast as I think, and therefore the quality of my penmanship gets kicked down the rabbit hole with Alice and strange things along with it. I had a professor in college give me an A on a term paper with a note saying, “If the half of the paper I could not read is of the same quality of the half I could make out, you did very well. Slow down!” Perhaps I should try again slowing down my brain, or at least my writing speed.
Great essay! I also have often thought about the differences and benefits between methods of writing. I prefer to draft on my typewriter and up until a year ago I even wrote blog posts and articles there that would eventually see light on the computer screen. But that took a lot of time. Besides from my more personal work, I use the typewriter when I have to work out a problem in my writing, the kinks seem to untie more easily—I think there is more space for my thoughts to flow. I love the tangibility and that my fingers get inky.
There is a certain pleasure in the act of writing with a good instrument and the right sized notebook and quality of paper. Positive associations that can only serve to make the process more enjoyable.
I only write by hand–at least the things that I’m trying to make count–unless I’m in a hurry, which usually doesn’t bode well for the writing anyway. But there’s also something to the process of allowing yourself to get it all down on the page without pre-editing as you compose. The real editing comes through in the drafting and re-drafting, I think, which is a process of taking the typed up copy and writing all over it about seventeen times. Ultimately, the computer is a tool for translating the work to a readable format.
Come to think of it, I don’t really like reading words on a screen, either, so call me a luddite.
So, yes, it does take more time, but what’s the hurry? Ars longa, vita brevis (I did have to look that up, one of the benefits of typing on a laptop.)
I really enjoyed this essay. In a writing courses several years back, my instructor made the point that …”to backspace is to interrupt the natural flow”. Well, I believe that, and have developed a habit never to do it.
This is not to say that I think it’s better to write- at least, to create- with some sort of word processor. Quite the opposite, I value the pen and paper- or graphite pencil, or colored pencils and or inks- yes, I really value the essence of the hand-to-paper experience.
My problem with hand-to-paper when dealing with words is that I become so frustrated with not being able to write quickly enough. Everything tends to become such scribble, and then there’s the re-write- at which point I am thankful for modern word processing.
Not to suggest that I’ve devalued the other- on the contrary, I’ve decided it should be better training for me to dedicate more time to handwritten story telling. Not only this, but to dedicate myself to doing it deliberately enough so that it remain very neat in hand. Forcing my mind to slow this way while constructing may eventually lead to more good surprises.
RE: “Think of great literature written hundreds of years ago. Those authors wrote by hand and we’re still reading their books today. ”
Actually, there is very little of what was written hundreds of years ago that we’re still reading today. So you could also make the case that writing by hand produces ephemeral creations that are doomed to disappear.
For some processes I find writing on the computer more useful and for other processes writing in long hand. It’s just a matter of the right tool for the right job.
I’m part of the last generation to have written its first fiction on the typewriter. The beauty of that process — as with handwriting–was how it slowed you down and made you more familiar with your work, its scale and iterations. I find it hard to have that sense of familiarity with a screen and the virtual pages lurking behind the current page you’re typing on at any given moment. For the most part I treat the laptop as a typewriter, printing out pages for review, making multiple versions of everything, editing by hand. I often find that when I’m really stuck with a passage it pays to write it out by hand. It must engage your mind and imagination in a way that the computer does not. I also have the need to spread pages all over the floor when really grappling with a work as a whole or in pieces.
neophyte: three syllables.
inexperienced: five syllables.
Garrulous: three syllables
Annoying son of a bitch: seven syllables.
I have a question: Do you think your writing by hand makes your prose more embodied? And if so, how would that manifest itself?
Can you explain what you mean by embodied?
As Egypt Steve mentioned…. not one of your examples for words chosen due to writing by hand is actually shorter than the computer-written words.
Bravo! I for one would write by hand other than for the problem of not being able to decipher it afterward (a genetic flaw in the basal ganglia).
I am ancient enough to have attended college several years before personal computers were conceived for 99% of the population, to have had a penmanship teacher visit my first grade and teach us how to print and write cursive properly, putting us through gymnastic exercises to combat writer’s cramp and promote muscular development. So, writing by hand is not alien to me and it is how I have kept book and cooking journals for the past 35 years. It is how I begin the process of all writing, but it is not how I finish: word processing promotes faster, tighter editing. Despite the journaling, my penmanship has deteriorated to the point that personal letters are best generated on the computer if they are to be comprehended by the recipient. But in the end, writing by hand creates an irreproducible bond with thought and words that binds them to memory, and that’s why we should all keep at it some way.
hi,
Well said. Intreated writing long hand for all of those reasons, but reverted back to the computer after the first draft of my short story collection. It just is too cumbersome to have it later all converted to a digital file.
Thanks for the article.
Johanna van Zanten
I loved this article. Thank you for sharing! I have been thinking the same thing for years, but thought it was my imagination until reading this. What a relief.
If so many great works were written by hand, the only gadgets we still need are pen and paper. Nothing else.
And to that I say just one word: Amen.
If you don’t handwrite it first, then you miss out on the jolt of moving it into type.
Writers need that jolt.
We need all the jolts we can get.
On 4/16 I asked if you thought your handwritten prose was more embodied and if so, how would that manifest itself? You then asked what I meant by “embodied prose.” To me ep is less abstract, more concrete; it appeals to our senses with descriptive images that evoke touch, taste, smell; it can be intensely visual but also visceral; nouns can literally refer to the body; action verbs can physicalize experience. Sports writing falls into this category; ditto fiction and reviews that require bringing experiences to life. Embodied prose can also be poetic; e.g., he punched her in the arm until her mind turned blue. To these questions let me add another: You have said that the relative slowness of handwriting seems to produce writing that is simpler and more direct. I’m also wondering if writing by hand gives you more direct access to your thoughts and feelings—for better and for worse—because there is no digital interface to distance you from your material. By distancing I refer to your editing your sentences before you complete them. Your article made me wonder if the body’s processes could be argued to be more efficient/economical than our speedy, time-saving computers.
Great article! I just have 2 suggestions. The first is to use draftin.com as it is amazing for writers who want to write without having the need to delete words. The website also saves drafts of your work so you can compare your work. Also it is free. Second suggestion is to use a program like Dark Room to have a distraction free writing environment set up. It can be downloaded from cnet and is free. I use both to write and it has helped me very much when I write. I no longer need paper and pens.
Thank you very much for your insights.
I used to write a lot, always by hand, when I was a kid or teenager, and I’m on a personal project of going back to this habit, maybe start publishing. I also noticed that writing by hand was more creative for me too… of course it’s a matter of choice, but you explained very well your feelings about it and I think you are right.
That said, I think it’s possible to take the same writing workflow for good writing software (maybe not a word processor), yet that requires discipline and clear thinking. For example, training oneself to think a full sentence before typing instead of being compelled by the keyboard to type all the time.
In any case, I’m learning a lot from your article, thank you. (Sorry, english is not my native language).