The Pen Friend

Eine kleine nachtmusik

I wonder what you wonder, when you wonder how your postcards might affect me. After your last card I was tempted to buy a flacon of Après l’Ondée, to experience your mother’s perfume, but that would have been trespass, and I am content to make do with your remembered words, for I think you must intend me to find a narrative in your semi-disconnected messages, and so arrive at an understanding of our time together that has long been hidden deep in my memory. And your fifth card made me remember something I had forgotten. For when I read the words, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, I heard them playing the acoustic perfume of Mozart that night in New York, and I could hear the top-note clarity of newly rinsed hawthorns and violets shimmering over the bass cellos of the musk-roses that crowded the great bay window. And when you told me of your mother’s suicide, I imagined I could smell her perfume, emanating from you as you spoke those words, as if you had enfolded her aura within you, and had taken on her spirit as it left her.

The classical ensemble had been hired by you, as style consultant for the evening. You had stipulated that there was to be no Irish music. We want to throw them off balance a little, you said, skew the received ideas a little. It’ll be warm, but we won’t have the air-conditioning all the way up as they come in, we want it just a little sultry, and then when it starts to feel a little stuffy, we’ll turn it up, and introduce a little apple-blossom scent into the air, it’ll be like an Irish spring evening. We want muted Irish, no Paddywhackery. I’ll have a little pale shamrock motif in the table-linen, more apple-green than shamrock, you said. You chose the flowers, the silverware, the menu. It was to be a stand-up buffet affair, you wanted good circulation, when people have to juggle drink and food and talk they’re put off their dignity a little, you said, and if a little champagne is spilled so much the better. Helps them unwind.

I’d been sceptical of your plans. These are not only hard-nosed businessmen, I said, but sentimental bigots, they don’t want their preconceptions upset. Yes, you said, so we won’t give them any. But we’ll give them something else, an aesthetic experience. No one is immune to beauty. You had the whole place lit with candles, candelabras with real candles that formed cataracts of wax as the evening progressed, and the scent of candle-wax and apple-blossom wafted through the pools of light and shade in the room and flickered on the silverware and linen with an almost ecclesiastical aura, and it occurred to me that some of these hard-nosed businessmen would have been altar-boys once and that you had taken that into consideration. Yes, you said, I want to remind them of the numinous, the things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Let them think they are cardinals, you said, not gombeen men, as I watched them form little dark-suited groups and eddies of conspiracy, well-fed faces nodding and smiling in the shadows and oases of light thrown by the candles amid the cut-glass vases full of white gardenias.

And, thinking of your mother’s otherworldly perfume, I was reminded of the nineteeth-century mediums who specialised in olfactory effects. The Rev. Moses Stainton, for one, who in the course of his séances would produce liquid scents, sometimes of familiar perfumes, such as jasmine, heliotrope, verbena, sandalwood, new-mown hay, sometimes of perfumes unrecognised. Sometimes it appeared sprayed from the air, sometimes poured as if from a vial into the cupped palms of the sitters; often it would be found oozing from the medium’s head and running down into his beard. Stainton was also capable of introducing objects into the room, seemingly from mid-air — pearls, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, as well as more common objects such as books, opera-glasses, gloves, pin-cushions, shells, thimbles, snuff-boxes, kitchen knives, and candlesticks. The celebrated medium Mrs Guppy once asked each of the nineteen people present at a séance to wish for a fruit. First a banana appeared, then two oranges, a bunch of white grapes, a bunch of black grapes, a cluster of filberts, three walnuts, thirteen damsons, a slice of candied apple peel, three figs, two apples, an onion, a peach, five almonds, four very large grapes, three dried dates, a potato, two Conference pears, a pomegranate, two crystallised greengages, a pile of dried currants, a lemon, and a bunch of raisins, all in the order in which they had been wished for.

There were various theories to account for these phenomena: some thought them to be ectoplasmic emanations, or that they had been transported from another corner of the universe, or from another plane, or that they had been produced from Platonic forms. Whatever the case, the raps and levitating tables of the Goligher Circle paled beside these baroque manifestations. Yet the Goligher phenomena were perhaps all the more mysterious for their banal austerity. After examining them closely for some six years, W.J. Crawford claimed to have found no evidence of imposture. However, on 30th July 1920 he committed suicide, and the suspicion that his action had something to do with a discovery about the Golighers is unavoidable. A few days before his death he wrote to a friend:

My psychic work was done when my brain was working perfectly. I derived great happiness from it, and it could not be responsible for what has occurred. Possibly some anatomical change has suddenly taken place in the brain substance which would have occurred in any case. We are such complicated bits of mechanism that it does not require much to put us out of action. I wish to reaffirm my belief that the grave does not finish all. I trust that I will find myself with a renewed energy, and able still to further the work in which we are both interested. With regard to my present condition, I feel there is absolutely no hope. The breakdown is making further way and I am getting worse daily. I feel that in a short time I might become a danger to those I love. You may think it strange that all this could take place inside a couple of weeks, but so it is. But what I wish to affirm now with all my strength is that the whole thing is due to natural causes and that the psychic work is in no way responsible.

Crawford had been found lying dead on the rocks of the foreshore of Belfast Lough, a blue poison bottle beside him, and I remember the little silver-mounted blue glass salt cruets you had placed on the table like sacramental receptacles that evening in New York.

I cannot remember what scent you wore that night, so firm is my recall of those imaginary musk-roses, violets and hawthorns. But I can see your jade pendant with the amber fleck in it that matched your eye, and the faint sheen of your pale green linen suit, and I was proud of you as you flitted in your Gemini mode from group to group, directing the waiters with discreet attention, chatting to the musicians when they took a break. And though, as a Libra, I am one who always seeks another for balance, I knew from experience when to leave you alone, and when to wait for you to come to me, for a Libra, according to the books, is also harmonious, diplomatic, and peacemaking — ambassadorial qualities, though I doubt if I ever could have made an ambassador. I was, however, tempted to write this letter with an Ambassador pen, made in the USA in the late 1930s or early 40s, to judge from its looks. Not that any ambassador would be seen dead with such a pen: like the Wearever De Luxe, this Ambassador’s name belies its low cost. It might be a Dollar Pen, maybe a dollar fifty. It’s modelled on the much more expensive Conklin pens of the same era, with a streamlined cap reminiscent of the nose of an airplane or a locomotive; but the clip is a little flimsy, brushed with a gold wash rather than gold-plated, and the nib, too, is gold-washed steel, rather than solid gold.

Nevertheless, like the Wearever, it has a lovely bright jazzy feel to it, the body patterned in black ‘railroad tracks’ laid on to an iridescent red ground. But I chose instead a Conway Stewart 58, top of their range in the late 1950s, as being more appropriate to your ‘muted Irish’ theme: the pattern is called Green Hatch in the catalogues, and it’s a patchwork of subtle Connemara marble greens overlaid with wavy black cross-hatched lines. It’s chunkier and heavier than most Conways, and the three gold bands on the cap give it a magisterial air: I can see this pen clipped into the breast pocket of a 1950s Irish senator or ambassador, and I wonder what pen, if any, the Irish Ambassador sported that night of the reception in New York. If I could go back in time, with what I now know, I would know, but I would not have known then. I was not a collector then, and, beyond your Dinkie, I was oblivious to pens, and what they might signify about their owners.

I am pleased to write with the Conway Stewart 58 Green Hatch because when it first came to me, it would not write properly. The ink flow was reluctant, the writing had a dry, parsimonious feel to it. So I read up on it and discovered what had to be done. First I unscrewed the section — the bit that holds the nib — from the barrel with a pair of rubber-covered section pliers. I took the ink-sac, that’s the closed rubber tube that holds the ink, off the end of the section, they call it the section nipple, where it fits into the barrel. Then I got what they call a knock-out jig, that’s a metal cylinder closed at one end, with holes of various diameters drilled in it to accommodate the various section sizes, and I matched the section up with the correct hole, and with a tack hammer and a brass rod I knocked out the nib and the feed, that’s the black plastic bit at the back of the nib, that has a capillary groove to carry ink from the sac to the nib. So now the pen is broken down into its component parts: barrel, sac, section, feed, nib. I hold the gold nib between my finger and my thumb — how delicate and light it is, divorced from its body, like a child’s fingernail! — and I wash it under a tap, for there’s ink encrusted on it where it fitted into the section, until it glitters. I look at it through a loupe and I see that it is as the book said, the slit between the tines of the nib is too tight, it needs opened up, so I take a scalpel and ease it between the tines, gently, for I don’t want to break off the iridium on the tip, and I work the scalpel backwards and forwards a little to widen the slit sufficiently to ease the flow of ink.

I put the nib to one side for a while. There’s a residue of hard shellac on the section nipple, where the sac was attached, so I scrape that off with the scalpel, and smooth it off with a nail-file, and wipe it with a damp cloth till it looks clean and shiny, then I dry it, and paint a little fresh shellac on to it, it comes in a bottle like nail-varnish, with a tiny integral brush that is also its cap. That done, I screw the brush back into the bottle. I’ve already prepared a new ink-sac which I’ve cut to the proper length, making sure it doesn’t press against the end of the barrel when I try it for size. I take the section in my left hand as I ease the end of the sac on to the nipple with my right thumb and forefinger — a tricky operation this, I have to use the left thumb as well, but I manage it. I straighten it up, give it a quarter turn to spread the sealant, and I put it aside for ten minutes or so to dry.

Then I push the section with sac attached back into the barrel, and twist it with the pliers to a tight fit. Now it’s time for the nib. I fit the feed to its back and put the ensemble into a nib-fitting vice, and tighten the vice on it, and push the open section end on to it, making sure the nib is not set too deep nor too high into the section, and it’s done. I open a bottle of Conway Stewart ink — the name, like Onoto, is back in business again, making expensive status symbol pens — and I fill the pen. I take a clean sheet of paper and begin to write, Gabriel Conway, and lo and behold! it works perfectly, not too wet and not too dry, nice and smooth, Gabriel Conway, I write, 41 Ophir Gardens, Belfast … and I feel pleased with myself at having resolved this problem, as I am pleased to write now of our time together in New York twenty-two years ago, when I did not know what I know now.

I did not know then, for example, that Conway Stewart was founded in 1905 — the same year as Onoto — by Frank Garner and Tommy Jarvis, who, reluctant for whatever reason to give the firm their own names, purportedly called it after a music-hall double act, Conway and Stewart, who regularly performed in London at the time. You remember that George Sweetser, the inventor of the Onoto plunger system, appeared on the stage as a roller-skating female impersonator, and you will wonder, with me, at this curious fellowship of music-hall performers and pen manufacturers.

Nor did I know, in 1983, that many fountain pens, and Conway Stewart pens in particular, were made not only from Celluloid, but from a plastic called casein, a by-product of the dairy industry. Casein is made from milk curd. A basic casein can be made in the home with milk and vinegar. Bring a cup of milk to a simmer and slowly dribble in twelve tablespoons of vinegar, stirring all the time as if you were making mayonnaise. When lumps begin to form and coagulate, drain off the excess liquid. When these curds have cooled, form them into whatever shape or shapes you please — milk buttons, perhaps — and leave overnight, by which time they will have set rock solid. Casein can be made into sheets, rods and tubes. It has been used for imitation jade, tortoiseshell, and lapis lazuli, and in the manufacture of various articles besides pens, such as buttons, buckles, knitting needles, combs, hair-slides, pocket mirrors, door handles, knife handles, walking-stick handles, cigarette cases, radio cabinets, and electrical plugs, sockets and jacks. And that, until some hours ago, was the extent of my knowledge of casein, so I decided to research it on the Internet. This is what I found.

Casein was first developed and patented by two Germans, Spitteler and Kirsch, in 1899. It was then taken up by firms in Germany and France and used for industrial purposes under the name Galalith. Subsequently other countries produced their own casein under a range of names: Aralac, Aladdanite, Ameroid and Pearlolith in the USA, Akalit in Germany, Ambloid and Ambroid in Japan, Beroleit and Casolith in the Netherlands, and Estolit in Estonia, to name a few. In Britain, casein was produced under the name Syrolit by Syrolit Limited, in their factory at Enfield, North London, the home of the Lee-Enfield rifle. In 1911, the firm moved to Lightpill in the town of Stroud, Gloucestershire, where it set up in a derelict cloth mill once used for making ‘scarlet’ for British Army uniforms. In 1913 the firm renamed itself Erinoid because the raw milk solids used in the process were imported from Ireland through the nearby port of Bristol, and I thought of boats crossing the heaving green Irish Sea with their holds full of a pale green cheese that would end up as buttons, fountain pens, and electrical plugs. With the onset of the Great War, supplies of Galalith from Europe ceased, and Erinoid found a ready home market. Soldiers’ uniform buttons were made from Erinoid.

And then I remembered your third card had been posted in Stroud, and wondered how I could have forgotten the Stroud connection. But then we were more than a little drunk by then, that night in New York when you told me of your mother’s suicide, and the next morning I had forgotten some of the salient details. After the war, you said, your father emigrated from the Netherlands to take up a position in the London branch of Philips, and it was in London that he met your mother. In 1958 or so — you were seven or eight — your father was assigned to the Lightpill factory in Stroud to oversee the production of a new design of light-switch; he worked there for two years, sometimes staying all week, sometimes commuting home in the evenings, for London was only two and half hours from Bristol on the Great Western Railway, and as I try to piece together your story from my fragmentary recollection, more lines from Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ come into my head:

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,Receipted bills and invitationsTo inspect new stock or visit relations,And applications for situationsAnd timid lovers’ declarations …

and I think of the train bearing its long plume of smoke through the darkness.

Where’s Daddy? you used to ask, when you woke from one of your nightmares. You slept badly for those two years. Daddy’s in Lightpill, your mother would reply, and you would envisage him standing in a pool of light, near yet far away, bent over a workbench, and he would turn his head as if he heard something, and look into the distance with a puzzled look, and then he would smile as if he had seen you, and he would wave his hand. And sometimes you thought Lightpill was a holiday resort, like Blackpool, and you were angry with him because he’d gone on holiday without you. Daddy’s in Lightpill, your mother would say, he’s just telephoned to say he’s working late. That was in the days when you said ‘telephoned’, you said. Sometimes the phone would ring when you were still up, and you would answer it, and he would say, I’m sorry I can’t be at home, Nina, darling, but I’ll be home soon, and he would tell you stories about Stroud. Did you know that the man who wrote the Thomas the Tank Engine stories came from Stroud? you said. The Reverend Wilbert Awdry. My father would tell me how the Reverend Awdry used to live beside the railway depot at Stroud as a child, and he would lie awake at night listening to the groans and clanks of the goods trains, their whistles sounding in the dark like cries of happiness or sadness, and how he imagined personalities for them, and made up stories for them, you said. It was funny, because as a child I never thought of the stories as having an author, you said. And when I remember these details I find it difficult to understand how I could have forgotten Stroud. Then your mother would come in and say, Miranda, is that your father? And she would talk to him then, but sometimes not for long.

Sometimes she would appear upset, but maybe that’s only in retrospect, you said, after I got the postcard. The postcard? I said. It was long after my mother’s death, you said, about 1975, eight, nine years ago, I got a card from Stroud. I hadn’t thought about Stroud for about fifteen years, you know? A typical postcard image, it showed the vicarage and church in Stroud, very idyllic, and on the back it read, Dear Nina, maybe see you some day. And that was all, it was creepy, no signature, but it was a woman’s writing. No one else called me Nina, only my father, and by then he was dead too. And then I began to think that maybe he hadn’t always been working late in Lightpill, you said.

I look at your own postcard again, trying to glean what I can from the image. Berlin. Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse. Berlin/ Historisches Stadbilt, 1930, it says on the back. The station is thus in Berlin, not East Berlin as it would become. The stamp hadn’t been postmarked, it was one of those that sometimes slips through the franking machine, so I had no idea where you were when you sent it. We’d gone together to West Berlin in November 1982, I was curating a show by a young Belfast painter, Gerry Byrne, at an obscure gallery called Kunstwerkstatt, run by a group of West Berliners who had contacts with the East, and they managed to get us into East Berlin for a day. You remember. It is a summer’s day in 1930 in the photograph. On the viaduct above Friedrichstrasse a massive steam locomotive is about to pull a train out of Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse. Because I come from a city in which there are no elevated tracks, such a sight always seems magically incongruous to me, it adds another dimension to the cityscape. The train has a massive, spectacular presence, and I study it for some time before my eye is drawn to the details of the street. There is a Parfumerie in the left foreground, and I wonder what fragrances were in vogue in Berlin in 1930, and further on in, in the shade of the viaduct, is a Foto sign, and a row of boutique windows, and a stream of passers-by, and when I examine their clothes and their faces through the loupe, the closer I get the more abstract they become, because everything — shops, people, signs, traffic, clouds — is composed of the same matrix of black and white dots, yet I am still convinced of the solidity of that world as it registers the light that fell on it then, that summery moment in 1930 when the number 10 bus is passing under the viaduct, with the word JUNO inscribed on its brow. I take it to be a brand name rather than a destination. Soap, perhaps. But Juno is also the moon-goddess, wife of Jupiter. She is the goddess of war, but also of married women and of children born in wedlock. And in East Berlin we’d been taken to the Pergamon Museum. You’d been impressed by a sculpture of the Babylonian fertility goddess Astarte, with whom Juno is associated, and you bought a postcard of it, you remember. Wedlock, you said, what a strange word. I take it you were born in wedlock, Gabriel. Oh, my father and mother wouldn’t have had it any other way, I said. My father especially was a devout Catholic. Tell me about him, you said, I wonder if he was anything like my father. Remember?

As I write this with the Conway Stewart pen I am reminded that casein has one weakness as a material: it becomes unstable when it comes into prolonged contact with moisture. In the manufacturing process, the casein is laid down in very thin slabs like sedimentary rock, at the rate of one millimetre per week, so it takes sixteen weeks to build up the sufficient thickness required for a pen casing. The material is then hardened by placing it in a solution of dilute formaldehyde, the chemical used for embalming; this can take up to five months, so that the whole process, like human gestation, takes nine months. If a casein pen is placed in water for any length of time, it will soften and warp, as it tries to return to its original slab shape, to the womb of the vat in which it was formed. Casein has a memory. I write through the layers of intervening time, and find it difficult to separate what I might have told you about my father then, or what I might have already told you, or what you might have known without my telling you, from what I know now. So much has been laid down in the meantime.

My father, like others of his social class, left school at fourteen and joined the Post Office. It was there that he first heard Irish spoken by two fellow workers. By eighteen he was fluent in Irish and began teaching the language. He met my mother, Mary Ellen Hanrahan, in 1942 when she began attending his classes, and they married in 1944, just before the end of the Second World War. They brought up their children in Irish, so Irish was my first language, though I hesitate to say that it is my first language now, so deeply am I imbued with English. In the meantime my father had learned Esperanto. A certain Willie Tomelty, an Esperantist, came to my father’s Irish class. He kept badgering my father to learn Esperanto but my father had no initial interest. However: Tomelty had lots of pen-friends throughout Europe, one of whom was a Dutchman, Johann Wouters, who lived in your father’s native town of Delft. As you know, Delft is a small place, and I wonder if Wouters and your father knew each other.

After a while the Dutchman began to express an interest in Irish affairs, and he asked Tomelty to teach him Irish through the medium of Esperanto. Tomelty was ashamed to admit he was only a beginner at Irish himself, so one day he asked my father if he would teach Irish to the Dutchman. My father agreed; Tomelty gave his address to the Dutchman, and the next week my father got a letter, in English, from the Dutchman, saying he hoped my father had English, and if my father would teach him Irish, the Dutchman would teach him Esperanto as a recompense. So they began to write to each other. In a couple of months my father had learned Esperanto, he sported the Esperantist green star on the lapel of his postman’s uniform, and Johann Wouters was making good progress in Irish. English was soon dispensed with. They corresponded for some fifty years.

As I write this account I wonder, as I have always done, what sort of single-minded young man my father was. To learn Irish was regarded as eccentric then, even among the Nationalist population; Esperanto even more so. And Esperanto brought my father into contact with some strange people, notably Harry Foster, a spiritualist whom my father would engage in endless theological wrangles in the study of Ophir Gardens, where I am writing now. My father, as a fervent Catholic, subscribed to the Church’s orthodoxy that the supposedly paranormal phenomena produced by spiritualism were cheap conjuring tricks devised for the gullible, and that in the few instances where the phenomena were inexplicable by science, they were likely to be the work of the devil. Yet my father, as a Catholic, believed in the communion of saints, and looked forward to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come, a position, it seemed to me even then, to be not so far removed from that of the spiritualists. The relationship between Foster and my father was complicated by Foster’s claim that Esperanto was making great progress in the afterlife, and that the spirits of the dead had spoken in Esperanto to him and to others through Foster’s wife, a medium of some repute in spiritualist circles. And I wondered if the green star was in heaven as it is on earth, an emblem of the communion that is still possible after the fall of Babel.

And now I remember what perfume you wore that night in New York, chosen to go with the muted Irish theme. It begins as a powerful evocation of newly cut grass, a flower-strewn field of oakmoss, bergamot and orange blossom, sandalwood and fern, and there’s a whisper of a breeze carrying it elsewhere, a spicy note of cinnamon that clings as the bright green image fades: Vent Vert by Pierre Balmain. Green Wind. Though Green Breeze would sound better.