Lives and Letters

Hiding wisdom in plain sight – the joy of the handwritten text

I don’t know when I first encountered the work of David Jones (1895 –1974), but his distinctive calligraphy has been a backdrop in my life for a long time. With Edward Johnston, and the more problematic artist and calligrapher Eric Gill, with whom he worked, Jones pioneered a new kind of calligraphic script in the early 20th century, which found its roots deep in the past. There are his long and complex poems, most famously The Anathemata and In Parenthesis, the latter his dramatization of the First World War in both image and word. There is a complex and intense relationship with his Catholic faith. But it is his inscriptions, such as the one above created to commemorate the baptism of Sabine Grisewood, which seem to me to hold, with the concentration of a miniature, much of his secret gift.

Most recently, the exhibition of his work at the Pallant Gallery David Jones: Vision and Memory in Chichester gathered together some of Jones’ most striking drawings and calligraphy, showcasing in Latin text the Roman lettering he reinvented with his own Celtic spirit to create a beauty of form and colour it is hard to describe. This kind of formal lettering cannot but draw our attention to the miracle of writing itself, the artistry of the way in which letters are shaped, endlessly forming themselves into words whose meaning gathers pace on the page, whether that ‘page’ is made of paper or vellum, wood or stone. When Keats famously wrote for his epitaph that ‘here lies one whose name was writ in water’, he perhaps hadn’t fully imagined how long it would endure in stone as a site of poetic pilgrimage.

The written word has never really been ephemeral. Long before the array of fonts and calligraphic effects available in the virtual world, the scribe worked with angle and weight at the point where ink met the page. Raw materials from the natural world made all of it possible, requiring the long preparation of animal skin, goose quill, inks made from a mixture of gallnuts, vitriol and gum arabic, even rainwater and wine. It was more than a day’s work just to get started, and very few people could even write. And perhaps this was even part of its magic. Seeing him taking his place in this long tradition, it is fascinating to watch Ewan Clayton, who was commissioned to illustrate David Jones’ long poem In Parenthesis for the Folio Society, talk about the preparation of ink and discuss his own, and Jones’s creative process as calligraphers here.

My own calligraphic education began early, in the Welsh valley where I spent part of my somewhat peripatetic childhood. At the small village school there, with its two classrooms, our education had barely come into the twentieth century. It seemed largely to consist - in my memory at least - of handwriting and geometry practice. On Wednesday afternoons all the girls gathered in the Infants classroom to do knitting, and in the other, Junior, classroom, the boys gathered to make toby jugs out of paper mâché. I longed to make a toby jug. We learnt Welsh and did nature study, which consisted of walking the nearby lanes and examining hedgerows - we once found a papery hornet’s nest buried there. But more to the calligraphy point, our days were so filled with the deliberate practice of handwriting that I soon came second in a national handwriting competition. Because everything happened more or less in one classroom, all the various events have also become conflated in memory. We certainly had a magician who came to school one day, filled a cake tin with sawdust and shaving foam, put it with a flourish into a cardboard oven with a door that opened and closed, performed a magic spell abracadabra and brought out a Cadbury’s chocolate cake. It was truly stunning. But this and the day I was given the handwriting prize certificate are indelibly one - perhaps the magician really had come to work his magic just on that special day, a kind of literary cause and effect.

Lettering also came to signify for me the entry into that other world of imagination – not just the shape of letters on the page, but stories too. When we’d finished our handwriting exercises, we could take a book from the teacher’s shelf behind his desk to read - this was our only library – and I soon learned that if I worked quickly, I had plenty of time to read. One unforeseen outcome of all this was that I was barely numerate by the time we moved to London when I was almost nine. In addition, decimalisation had arrived when no one in that valley was looking. The new school text books measured everything in multiples of ten - pounds, pence, millimetres - and the new school - long Victorian corridors, high ceilings, tall windows, more classrooms than you could count - opened out on to a vast playground where we now played Planet of the Apes, imagined ourselves as the Bay City Rollers and were made to drink the small, lukewarm bottles of milk that sat in crates outside until break - in summer the experience was almost unbearable. A new friend whose father was a member of the TUC had ‘Margaret Thatcher - milk snatcher’ stickers on her bedroom window, which confused me, though the rhyme stuck. But spelling came easy. I loved those tests, writing the words in a neat column on the page, all floating free from their contexts in easy patterns. 

Later I found my way to a more formal practice of calligraphy, and loved it, but over the years I have taught many people for whom writing is a laborious, and sometimes even excruciating, or embarrassing, experience. There are many reasons why this is the case, but one is definitely that not enough time is given to the development of a good hand - how many of our grandparents had a neat, traditional script? My maternal grandfather, who in his youth kept a ledger for a bank, had immaculate copperplate writing, surely achieved through repetition. Many children write neatly until suddenly the curriculum explodes in multiple directions, and they have to write at greater length with far less time to shape their words, and the daily practice of writing for its own sake no longer takes place at all. In addition, in our 21st century lives the uses of handwriting are increasingly diminished. At some schools, children as young as six and seven are assessed on the basis of their ability to answer multiple choice questions on an iPad. Even signatures on important documents can be parroted in a choice of faux ‘hand-drawn’ digital fonts. I made this, wrote the Renaissance artists on their work, with a certain sign - for a reason.  

Back to David Jones. His eclectic and colourful lettering drew on Roman and Celtic influences, but his inscriptions express a deeply personal signature. He packed them with secret layers, arcane significations that reveal a complex mind using lettering to shape and illuminate his own thought - not just poem as image, but image as poem. He opens the Preface to The Anathemata with a quotation from the ninth century writer Nennius, saying ‘I have made a heap of all that I could find’, and, like Nennius, who wrote a History of the Britons (he was Welsh, but wrote in Latin), Jones feared that if he did not somehow create a repository of the linguistic, religious and cultural treasures dear to him, they might be lost. Jones’s work echoes the history of the carved letter and illuminated text, but is also deeply modern with its spare line and search for coherence in the gathering of parts.

This process is particularly evident in the distinctive inscription illustrated above. Commissioned in 1956, it commemorates the baptism of Sabina Grisewood, from whose many names Jones carefully wove the blessing which forms a border for the central text, Accendat in nobis Dominus ignem sui amoris et flammam aeternae caritatis. But this border is not merely decorative. I was excited to discover Colin Wilcockson’s account of his own understanding of the text, arrived at through his long friendship with Jones and an appreciation of his complex imagination. He reveals the subtlety with which Jones created his designs to articulate the meanings he wanted to embed there, and the fact that the central text itself departs from that traditionally used for baptism, indicates his deeper purpose in conjuring another, stronger kind of heat. While it reads May the Lord enkindle in us the fire of his love and the flame of everlasting charity, the border also evokes the tutelary protective power of ‘grey eyed Sisley’, Sisley being another spelling of Cicely, itself derived from Caecilia, the Latin name associated with the goddess Athene.

Naming is everything. In another layer of complexity, Athene’s homeric epithet is ‘grey-eyed’, revealing another of the clues by which Jones tucks in this particular resonance. Sabina, the girl’s first name, captures yet another layer of meaning, Wilcockson summarising it thus:

The inscription is written for a girl, whose first name commemorates the Sabine virgin priestesses and who is protected by the maiden-goddess Athene, the preserver of culture. All of this surrounds a prayer that her heart will burn with the love of God.

Not content to leave it there, Jones embellished the word ‘tutelary’ with five gold stars, quietly signifying the five wounds of Christ, and inviting the association of the Virgin Mary as Stella Maris to enter, the star of the sea which guided and protected sailors. It is clear from Jones’s text that the deep satisfaction to be found in the artistic form of the lettering itself cannot be separated from the inner life of the words formed, their etymologies and cultural histories, their hidden spiritual energies. Somewhere between ink and paper the numinous might enter. Names might come alive.

For Caecilia is also the patron saint of music and composition, she of John Dryden’s Song for Saint Cecilia’s Day, and Paul Simon’s heart-breaking muse. Creating the space and catching the words– these are always the challenges of any creative work. So sometimes when I’m working with younger writers, I let them first recount their story to me while I play scribe, because they have not yet developed the skill and speed that they need to track the detail of their story as it flies out of their imagination. Of course, it is not just children who feel this gap. But for children, the deep satisfaction of finding that their own story has taken a real shape on the page is always evident, and almost unfailingly inspires an enthusiasm for developing the handwriting skill needed to catch the stories yet to be told. And it also seems, at least from the sales figures, that most of us still want to handwrite, and send by physical post, those personal notes – for a birthday, a thank you, an invitation - something which holds to the particular shape of our own names, and those of the people dear to us. We want text as texture, physical, inky fabrications made with the line of pen. Lettering as more than utility.