handwritten moods

One of things I most enjoy about doing archival research on writers is the discovery of their handwriting. C. S. Lewis wrote beautifully when he wanted to, though sometimes he was rushed and that affected legibility. But the Wade Center has Lewis’s copy of George Herbert’s collected poems, and in the back pages he has very carefully prepared a thematic index to the poems. It’s lovely to look at; perhaps Lewis felt that Herbert deserved his best. (And if you want to see how Lewis’s handwriting changed over the years, see this PDF.)

Auden’s hand is at best difficult to read, at worst — in his poetic notebooks — absolutely illegible. Edward Mendelson, who knows that hand better than anyone alive, has told me that he thinks Auden sometimes wasn’t trying to be legible, even to himself: he was merely using the action of writing to clarify certain choices of word and phrase and rhythm.

I’ve looked through hundreds of letters written by Dorothy L. Sayers, and it’s been fascinating to note the ways her handwriting develops. When she was an adolescent schoolgirl at the Godolphin School in Salisbury, she had a somewhat cramped and upright way of writing; almost as soon as she got to Somerville College, Oxford that changed: she adopted a looser, more freely flowing style, one with a certain horizontal energy.

Most of the surviving letters are to her parents, and she’s often apologizing for delay in answering their letters to her, and emphasizing her busyness. (She almost always addresses them collectively as “Dearest people,” and calls her mother simply “Mother”; her father, however, that dignified parish pastor in the Church of England, is to his only child “Tootles.” It’s interesting that when she writes only to her mother she is almost always more sober and serious than when she writes to the two of them, or to Tootles alone. I find it difficult to avoid the feeling that she is very much Papa’s girl.)

Perhaps the rush of her life helps to explain the look of her letters to them, but one thing seems quite clear to me: the loose, flowing hand is associated not just with hurry but also with happiness. Vera Brittain, who knew her at Somerville, referred to her as a “bouncing exuberant female,” and that comes across in her handwriting when she’s happy. When she is going through harder times, through romantic disappointments or vocational uncertainties or just plain poverty, her handwriting is neater, more uniform, more under control. I wouldn’t be surprised if her parents could tell her frame of mind just from looking at a page of one of her letters, before they had read even a word of it.

Sometimes she signs off simply with a huge sweeping “D.”

As she gets older her handwriting becomes much more consistent, no longer vacillating according to her mood. It is more like the “unhappy” hand of her youth than the “happy” hand, but I don’t think she was less happy as she aged. She just became slightly less exuberant, slightly more settled. Or that’s how I read it anyway.

These are my interpretations, not the facts. They are based on more than feelings, though: one of those unhappy letters is signed “Yours in disgust, Dorothy” — and then, written below the signature, “What a cross letter!”

And I can’t help thinking … Almost all of my correspondence — sent and received — has been typed. It is therefore informationally poor, lacking in richness and density, in comparison to the correspondence of the writers I work on. (Though it should be said that letters typed on a typewriter have more character than those printed from a modern printer or having a digital existence only.) I suspect that if I had big folders of letters from friends I’d look through them fairly often; searching Gmail does not promise the same reward.