My 99-year-old great-aunt Nina gave me her husband’s fountain pen when I was visiting her in Greece this summer. A widow for 20 years, and despairing with what feels to her like a punishing longevity, she is divesting herself of important keepsakes, as if to expedite her reunion with her dead husband Kostakis. Nina wanted to give Kostakis’s pen to me because I am, as she puts it, the only Lazaridis left.
I told Nina that, beyond the honor of being entrusted with the pen, I would take pride in using it in my work. What mattered most to her was that I accept it as an emblem. Together with his pocket watch, which she also gave me, it was my uncle’s trademark, as much symbols for him as the orb and scepter of a monarch.
I’m a longtime longhand writer. I’m old enough to remember writing by hand when it was the only choice. Then I fell to the seductions of these newfangled things called laptops, like so many others. I was delighted by the convenience and by the final-draft look of even the messiest prose. But I switched back to longhand several years ago, and now it’s the only way I write my drafts. When I returned to pen and paper, I did so with the zeal of a convert. Not content to have just one or two good pens, I’ve amassed a small collection of mostly fountain pens. I’m catholic in my tastes, and cherish my Paper Mate Ink Joy, Pilot G-1, and Pilot Varsity, along with two ‘40s-era Parker 51s, one of which belonged to my father. But it’s the fountain pens I really prefer to use when writing first drafts.
Writing with a fountain pen is longhand taken to the next level. You can’t just pluck off the cap and go. Before you can write even the first letter, you have to unscrew the top of your ink bottle, unscrew the end of the barrel on the pen, fiddle with each pen’s particular filling mechanism, blot the ink on the blotting paper. And once you actually begin to write, you have to pay attention to the wet ink—especially if you’re a lefty like me—and take note of its gradually fading color as a signal that you are about to run completely dry and need to start the filling process all over again.
When you write with a fountain pen, you experience writing as a truly physical activity, one that affects all your senses. There’s the sort of chalky, silty smell of the ink; the scratch of the pen dragging across the page; the feel of the barrel and the cap you screw on at every pause in writing lest the ink dry faster; the glint of the wet ink that goes to matte while you examine your words. The only sense you don’t experience with a fountain pen is taste—at least I’d hope not. Having to attend to all these sensations, I think you can come close to the sort of improved mental processing neurologists ascribe to walking. And you can do it without even leaving your desk.
The pen Nina gave me is a Sheaffer Snorkel pen. Kostakis kept it on his desk in its original case, which announces it as “Sheaffer’s new Snorkel pen.” New in 1952. I’m used to the various filling mechanisms of a range of fountain pens, from eyedropper to squeeze chamber to disposable cartridge. But I’d never seen anything like the Snorkel, whose mechanism works like a miniature version of its name that pushes out from beneath the nib as you turn the knob built into the pen’s back end. You dip only the snorkel into the ink, let it suck up the liquid for a few seconds, and then retract it. The theory is that the nib itself stays dry and your fingers never risk the ink stains that I, for one, regularly accumulate during a day of longhand writing. Apparently, when the pens were first introduced, school children discovered how to use the Snorkel in reverse and shoot jets of ink out at each other. The mechanism was quickly redesigned. I know from the graffiti carved into door jambs of my family’s ancestral home that my uncle Kostakis was unruly as a child. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t try to shoot ink from his pen in 1952 as a 40-year-old man.
As soon as I returned to the States from this year’s trip to Greece, I brought out my pen-cleaning liquid and ink blotter and did my best to clear the Snorkel’s mechanism of 20 years’ worth of dry ink. I looked up the instructions for the Snorkel and made my first attempt to fill the pen. It worked and I began to write. But after just a few sentences, the ink ran out. I tried again, with the same result. Looking at those notebook pages, I can see the evidence of my thwarted determination in the lines of writing whose color goes from deep blue to grey and then vanishes to scratch marks in the paper. This pattern repeats to fill an entire page.
I realize I need to have professionals look at Kostakis’s pen. There is, I’ve learned, a bladder that may have dried and thus be unable to suck up the full amount of ink. But I keep trying every now and then, in hopes that something will have changed. I want to be able to write with my uncle’s pen. Even in my frustrated beginnings with the Snorkel, once I saw my own letters in the ink’s deep blue, in the precise and sharp lettering the nib requires of its writer, I recognized my uncle’s hand. I saw in my own English print the Greek cursive of Kostakis’s letters to me, letters in which he congratulated me on various academic milestones or filled me in on family legal issues (if you’re a Greek family with any property at all, you have legal issues). I still have the letter in which he confirms my membership in the alpine club of our ancestral village of Papingo, which conferred on me the chance to join the Greek ski team for training. Kostakis’s letters spoke to me of my heritage and nudged and encouraged me toward opportunities, even those that I passed up. He’d already owned the Snorkel for nearly two decades before he wrote his first letter to me.
Perhaps Nina knew something when she gave me Kostakis’s pen, regardless of whether I’d use it. She’d given me the pocket watch too, after all, and surely didn’t imagine I’d be clipping its chain to my jeans. Perhaps she understood that simply having the pen would be meaningful enough for me, that I wouldn’t need to be able to write with it, even though I’d want to. I haven’t made the time to take the Snorkel to my local pen-repair store; for now the pen sits between my laptop and my stack of notebooks. Sometimes I just sit and hold the pen and admire it. I sometimes unscrew the cap and put it back on just for the satisfaction of hearing the little snick and churning sound it makes. I hold it in my palm as if it were not a writing implement to be set between index and third finger but a tool you grasp with your whole hand. And I don’t think that’s the wrong way to use it at all.
