The Pen Friend Read online

  It was July in New York, and I had never experienced such heat, such humidity. But it was my first time in America and everything was beautiful to me, and as you conducted me through the sweltering, claustrophobic underground that smelled of metal, electricity and sweat, I was fascinated by the trains as they drew groaning and trembling into the stations emitting blue sparks from their undercarriages, their cars emblazoned with elaborate graffiti tags of letters amplified and puzzled nearly to deliberate illegibility, yet still names, their forms grappling with themselves in lime greens, glowing yellows and acid blues moving as if animated across the walls of the cars, blossoming from two dimensions into a thought-bubble cycloidal realm, or break-dancing as human figures sculpt the space around themselves, sometimes resembling the flight of birds above the city, or the intertwining pythons of the subterranean world, jagged as a city skyline sometimes, or nebulous as cloudscapes, flickering like neon in a baroque spectacle that belied the curt syllables they had been evolved from – ZINK, SHARP, TAKI 183, SKEME, STITCH, KASS, DAZE, DEAL, DURO, BAN 2, KIST, KEL, SLAVE, CRIME 79, MIN, KASE 2, SEEN. On one car I saw a Campbell’s soup tin the size of a door, but the writing read ZIP.

  In the numbered grid of the streets above, everything was sign, from the cupolas of the water-towers stilted on the flat roofs to the fire escapes that ran zigzag down the walls of tenement buildings and the subway trains glimpsed momentarily between buildings on elevated sections of the track. Underfoot there was writing in the shape of the manhole covers embedded in the sidewalk, massive cast-iron shields embossed with their makers’ identities, Abbott Hardware Company Ironworks, Marcy Foundry, Etna Iron Works, Madison Ironworks, Cornell’s Iron Works, long-gone companies that that made their names felt under our bootsoles as we walked over them.

  I wandered the time-warp of the Garment District with you, engrossed by the window displays of haberdashery shops, with their cards of loom elastic, buttons, needles, pins and hair-clips, and the reels of cotton threads arrayed like colour charts, past run-down diners, delis, anonymous shops with windows of opaque glass, and high gables bearing the names of defunct businesses in letters of peeling paint, Mutual Storage Company, Kozma Bakery, Moyel Bros Fine Menswear, Arcadian Soup Company, Dubal Loans, Kitzler Cheap Novelties and Fancy Goods.

  In Greenwich Village you brought me to a dark little ink emporium, a cornucopia of inks in hues of violet and pale green and bright orange and sepia, red inks and black inks, gold and silver inks, and you told me that every colour smelled differently. Try this, you said, and unscrewed a bottle, and another, and held them to my nose like perfumes. From the red there came an almost vinous odour, and the violet seemed imbued with tar. Like perfumes? I said, and you said, Yes, and I said, holding a bottle of black, If this was a perfume, what would you call it? and you said, Oh, I don’t know, why don’t we call it Styx? Then we went off the beaten track and in Alphabet City in a street between Avenues B and C we saw an elaborate BELFAST in graffito of green and gold on a gable wall, the cross-stroke of the T elongated into an arrow that doubled back on itself to emerge from the belly of the B, and I knew it must signify something different to the name of the city I came from.

  New York was beautiful to me because of its difference, and in memory of that difference I am writing this with an American Esterbrook pen, American as Chevrolet, a 1939 model in iridescent red feathered lines with steel trim. It gleams as brightly as it must have done back then, like a red car parked on the lit forecourt of a filling (gas) station. The Esterbrook, like the Wearever I began with, was advertised as the Dollar Pen, but its selling point was a system of interchangeable nibs which could be unscrewed and screwed in at will, not gold but hard steel, sometimes tipped with iridium but more generally with just the steel rolled into an equally durable ball, and by the 1950s there were more than thirty different points, Firm Medium, Flexible Stub, The Right Point For the Way You Write, Extra Fine, Bold Signatures, For Easier More Comfortable Writing, Falcon Stub For Backhand Writing, Manifold For Carbon Copies, The World’s Most Personal Fountain Pen, Bookkeeping, Firm Fine Clerical, Affordable Writing Pleasure, slogans I gleaned from a run of National Geographic magazines from 1955 that I got from Beringer many years ago and unearthed for this purpose, because when I began writing with the Esterbrook I remembered the name from the pages of the National Geographic, interleaved with ads for Mosler Safe and Western Union, Zenith Radio, Kodak, Zeiss, Hartford Insurance, not to mention the sleek low-slung chrome-trimmed automobiles, Pontiac and Buick and Thunderbird and Cadillac and Chrysler, Put New Fun Under Your Foot, Spectacular from Takeoff to Top Performance, Long Sweeping Lines with Purposeful Meaning, in vivid reds and bright yellows and pastel blues and greens, occupied by proud smiling new owners who signed the ‘check’ with an Esterbrook, Every Inch Your Personal Pen – All Ways and Always. The nibs were numbered. I’m writing this with a Firm Medium, 2668, and the Esterbrook glides across the page as smoothly as a pen costing many times as much, epitomising Affordable Writing Pleasure. And before I flew to meet you in New York I perused the National Geographics for their bright promise of an America in which everything could be bought.

  I bought the Esterbrook on eBay. You might have wondered where I get all my pens. There are not that many outlets in Belfast for my passion. Beringer usually has a nice piece or two that he picks up at estate auctions, dead men’s pens, he calls them, and I still browse the antique stalls of Smithfield and Donegall Pass, though with diminishing frequency. Most of my stylophiliac transactions are now conducted on eBay. Before I ventured into that virtual market-place, my computer literacy had been confined mainly to the word-processing I used for my Esperanto book. I supposed the Internet to be a realm of dubious informational value, full of snares and pitfalls for the unwary, and I was nervous at first of entering a realm where the usual physical delineators of a transaction – speech, body language, facial expression – are absent, and where one cannot handle or examine in detail the item one is bidding on. But then I considered that those qualities of verbal and non-verbal language were precisely those used by any con man in the course of his profession, and that people can lie as readily as they tell the truth.

  So I entered eBay cautiously, and over the next few weeks I bought a 1930s Conway Stewart Scribe in Green and Black Candle-Flame, a 1920s Gold Medal ladies’ ring-top in Lapis Lazuli, and a 1940s Burnham in beautifully patterned Celluloid with lighter and darker shades of rose pink pearl outlined with black veins; as my confidence with these transactions increased, I became more and more drawn into the invisible international web.

  Now that I have bought some two hundred pens on eBay my opinion of humanity has been revised upwardly: some people might lie as readily as they tell the truth; but the vast majority of them are honest, and are anxious to be seen as such. The pens come packaged with loving care, taped up in layers of kitchen roll inserted into plastic tubing which is then enclosed in a Jiffy bag, or enclosed in a pen-sized box surrounded by a cushion of polystyrene beans within a much larger box secured by layers of parcel tape that make access sometimes endearingly difficult, accompanied by handwritten notes, Hi, Gabriel, hope you enjoy the pen, have left you good feedback, hope you do the same for me, warm regards, and here the seller would sign themselves by their given name, Paul, Mary, George, whatever, to show that there was a human being behind their adopted eBay user IDs, semi-humorous tags like wadatz9, pentopl, bjaune, livia4, leftyy, mcgrrkk, xklepper, mrknipl, dizmusch, from which one could form some mental picture of the person – bjaune I saw as a yellow-haired Frenchman, or Francophile, maybe he was called Bernard, livia4 had to be a buxom Irishwoman, Anna Livia, and mrknipl was a New York Jewish marriage broker, Mr Knipl – while others called themselves by impenetrable strings of letters and numerals, 56mxot99f, xh17mq555, pp97304, and from these I deduced either that they were nervous individuals, overly security-conscious, or were so secure in themselves that they did not feel the need to present an almost recognisable face to the virtual world.
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br />   At any rate, the whole eBay system is based on mutual trust. You bid, you buy, you sell, and every one of these transactions receives Feedback, so that a cumulative profile of your honesty is built up which can be consulted by any other eBay member at any time. In this manner I have bought pens from people all over the world, from Kansas, Minnesota, Taiwan, Paris, Augsburg, York, Swanage, Brighton, Hamburg, Greece, New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Balearic Islands. You could say that eBay is a kind of Esperanto, or free-market communism, except its members are invisible.

  My own eBay ID is goligher. In the course of my Esperanto researches I had been following a tenuous link between Esperanto and spiritualism, and I’d taken the name from a spiritualist group known as the Goligher Circle, of Belfast, who between 1915 and 1920 were the subject of investigation by W.J. Crawford, a lecturer in Engineering at Queen’s University. The Circle was essentially a family affair. Mr Morrison, in the attic of whose home the Circle met, was a hard-working committee member of the Spiritualist Society. Mrs Morrison was a sister of the principal medium, Kathleen Goligher. The other participants were Mr Goligher, Kathleen’s father; Kathleen’s older sisters, Lily and Anna; and her younger brother Samuel, who was thought to have some mediumistic gifts. There is no mention of a Mrs Goligher. I first came across the case when I picked up Crawford’s book, The Reality of Psychic Phenomena (1916), in the Excelsior Book Store in Skipper Street. Over the next few months I managed to get my hands on the rest of Crawford’s oeuvre: Hints and Observations for Those Investigating the Phenomena of Spiritualism (1918), Experiments in Psychical Science (1919) and The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle, published posthumously in 1920. Crawford, after many painstaking experiments, concluded that Kathleen in particular was a medium of extraordinary power, and that the phenomena were genuine.

  As described by him, the séances which produced the phenomena differed little from those conducted all over Europe and America at the time, when spiritualism was re-energised by the grief of those who lost their loved ones in the Great War. The participants would enter an attic room, and form a circle around the séance table. The room would be illuminated by a dim red light, in this instance a gas jet ensconced in a lantern having a red glass sliding front, for normal light was thought to be injurious to the phenomena. The sitters, said Crawford, clasp each other’s hands in chain order, and the séance begins. One of the members of the circle begins the proceedings with a prayer, and then a hymn is sung. Within a few minutes, sounds – tap, tap, tap – are heard on the floor close to the medium. They soon become louder and stronger, and occur right out in the circle space, on the table, and on the chairs of the sitters. Their magnitude varies in intensity from barely audible ticks to blows which might well be produced by a sledgehammer, the latter being really awe-inspiring and easily heard two storeys below, and even outside the house. The loud blows perceptibly shake the floor and chairs. Sometimes the raps keep time to hymns sung by the members of the circle; sometimes they tap out of themselves complicated tunes and popular dances on the top of the table or on the floor.

  Other extraordinary effects include imitations of a bouncing ball – one would really think there was a ball in the room – the sawing of the table leg, the striking of a match, the walking of a man, and the trotting of a horse. Sometimes the raps sound perfect fusillades, for all the world like gunshots. After a quarter of an hour or so the rapping stops, and another type of phenomenon takes place. Remember, said Crawford, that the members of the Circle are simply sitting in their chairs holding each other’s hands in chain order. The little table is standing on the floor within the circle, and is not in contact with any of them, or any portion of their clothing. Suddenly the table gives a lurch, or it moves along the floor. It lifts two of its legs into the air. Then all four. The table rises completely into the air of itself, where it remains suspended for several minutes without support, said Crawford.

  According to Crawford, the phenomena were produced by ‘psychic rods’, which emerged from the orifices of Kathleen Goligher’s body, and, anxious to verify their physical existence, he made several attempts to photograph them. On 23rd October 1915, as described by him in The Reality of Psychic Phenomena, he succeeded in obtaining an image which seemed to corroborate his theory. On the developed plate, plainly visible within the Goligher Circle, was a vertical column of whitish translucent material, about four inches in diameter and rising to a height of about five feet. The pattern of the wallpaper was quite easily seen through it, said Crawford. At its summit, however, it appeared quite opaque, as if the psychic stuff, issuing from its source, had exhausted its velocity at the top, and had doubled over on itself. The column, moreover, had several arms or branches, one of which appeared to terminate in or emanate from the chest of the medium. Others were joined to Miss Anna Goligher and Master S. Goligher. The whole photograph suggested to Crawford that the medium was in reality a psychic pump, with a complete pressure system. Perhaps, during levitation, the vertical column was under the table, in which case the pressure range would appear much greater. As it was, the psychic fluid appeared to be losing its energy much in the same way as a vertical jet of water, projected upwards against its own weight only, inevitably loses impetus and falls back.

  Interestingly, Crawford failed to reproduce the photograph to support his verbal account, though it appeared in his posthumous book, The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle. In like manner, wanting to show that the sounds produced by the Circle were not the result of a collective hallucination, he hired a phonograph – an Edison Standard model – from a local dealer and, on 14th April 1916, ten days before the Easter Rising in Dublin, he successfully recorded the phenomena, which according to Crawford were produced by spiritual ‘operators’ who manipulated the psychic rods that emanated from Kathleen Goligher’s body.

  I was struck not so much by this alleged proof as by the fact that the recording session took place on the same day that my father was born, and I was struck by a powerful nostalgia for a time I had never known. The Golighers were textile workers, and I imagined Belfast as it would have been then, its air trembling with noise from the linen mills which were then producing fabric for British aeroplanes in the Great War, and I indulged myself in a fancy that, since everything affects everything else, so Crawford’s phonograph had recorded not only the sound of the psychic raps but a trace, however subliminal, of the whole aural hinterland of Belfast, including the voices of its people, and that the wax cylinder contained in one of its grooves a series of infinitesimal pits and tics, a wavering scratch a fraction of a micron deep, caused by the first cry of my father as he came into the world.

  I told you, Nina, how Billie Holiday’s singing affected me when I first heard it on your hi-fi system, little altered from the original recordings; and I think the hiss and crackle of old wax cylinders or shellac discs is even more atmospheric, for the dust which surrounds the music, as it drifts into the grooves, provides a more faithful molecular record of the sound in the air than is possible in a modern, hermetically sealed studio. So, when I hear Caruso’s singing – his ‘Ave Maria’ of 1914, for example, a favourite recording of my father’s – it is like dust-motes drifting through a shaft of sunlight in an empty room. The door has closed. The person has gone but the voice remains. I dreamed about my father that night, singing ‘Ave Maria’, as he used to do on Sunday evenings, sitting in the gloom of the parlour at Ophir Gardens.

  A few pages later I came across a detail that once again fleetingly reminded me of my father, who happened to be born precisely one year after the death of Ludwig Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto. In October 1916 Crawford asked the ‘operators’ if any languages besides English were spoken in the other world they inhabited. By now it had been established that the operators were indeed entities who had once lived on this planet, but had passed on to a higher plane, this information being relayed by a system of coded raps, somewhat like Morse. After some hesitation the operators rapped out, E … S … P. Crawford c
ould make no sense of this, beyond the speculation that the letters might stand for English, Spanish and Portuguese; the term ESP, meaning extrasensory perception, had not yet been coined. I was disappointed that Crawford had not entertained the possibility that it might be the beginning of the word Espagnol, or Esperanto; but I thought no more about it, until, several months later, I came across an article, in the journal Esperanto Studies, that made an explicit connection between Esperanto and the Brazilian version of spiritualism known as Spiritism, or Kardecism. Allan Kardec is the pseudonym of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (1804–1869), who was born a Catholic in Lyon, but was educated in Protestant Switzerland under the famous pedagogue Pestalozzi. After completing training as a teacher, Rivail returned to France, where he taught French, mathematics and sciences at various schools. Around the years 1854–55 the ‘talking-table’ fad had swept through the salons of Europe, and Kardec, initially sceptical, began to examine the extraordinary claims made by its practitioners. He found to his satisfaction that many of the phenomena were genuine, and summarised his findings in Le Livre des Esprits (1857). He concluded that the spirit world was made of souls in various stages of enlightenment, as the living on earth are in various stages of ignorance.