Rebecca West’s Handwriting

I have a low frustration threshold. I cried when learning to skip, to tie my shoes, to ride a bicycle. I cried on my dad’s shoulder in fourth grade after spending two desultory weeks trying to get a sound out of my flute. I cried at the age of three when I tore off the tip of my fingernail too close to the quick and the air was harsh to the exposed skin. I’ve cried in a math test every year since fourth grade, up to and including my senior year of high school.

So why I have always enjoyed working the knots out of necklaces is beyond me.

It became an occasional pastime, indulged as necessary: my mother’s jewelry box, a few stubborn knots in the chains, and I had an hour’s entertainment. I would become concentrated in my own fingernails and close-drawn eyebrows, splayed out across my parents’ bed, picking, working, massaging the knots with tiny kneads. Sometimes I employed a needle, sometimes I went it alone. Usually I kept at it until I succeeded. When I didn’t, I put the knot away to work on another time—fairly confident that it would come out eventually in my hands.

Getting on for two years ago, at my old job in a prestigious Special Collections department, a woman came to study one of Rebecca West’s manuscripts. West’s first attempt at a novel, Sentinel, was the young feminist’s homage to the Pankhursts and their persecuted efforts to get women the vote. The scholar was working on a publishable edition of the novel, to add to the growing body of scholarly work on West—of whom I had not heard before I started to work there, but who was clearly a formidable person and a great writer. A mass of contradictions, like we all are; a journalist, an “adventuress” as Irene Norton was called; an ascerbic and slightly tragic personality; beautiful even into her eighties.

Her handwriting was small, idiosyncratic, and looked highly legible. Until you started to read it.

Everyone else in the office knew the scholar from years’ worth of research, so for a while I puttered at my desk while the rest hung over her shoulder, attempting to decipher West's small words in fountain-pen ink on extremely yellowed paper; but at one point I wandered over to help. “Can you read that?” the scholar asked me. “It looks like it says, ‘to solve the crying sin of the age’—”

“Or ‘to rase’—”

“But that can’t be right—”

I read the line, read it again, and my mouth opened with the answer before my brain could think it. “Cure,” I said. “It’s ‘to cure the crying sin’.” And so it was.

I started to develop a reputation among West scholars for being able to read her writing. It seems strange to me now, that during such a time of illness and incompetence in my work there, I should have been so successful at something so fidgety as deciphering authors’ manuscripts and scribbles, but I was. It was strange that, as an undergraduate scholar myself, I hated research, hated plugging keywords into the MLA database, hated the haystack-needle dredging for scholarship on a paper topic I wanted to exegete entirely myself—and yet spent an entire semester going through book after book looking for the historical connection between William Blake and George Macdonald for my master’s thesis: the diaries of Lewis Carroll and John Ruskin, the history of Victorian fairy painting, Alexander Gilchrist’s Blake biography, Butler’s Blake Books—I read them all, looking for the key. And I found it at last in George Macdonald’s biography, written by his son Greville, a doctor, and a Blakean.

I find it strange that I should continue to be so easily frustrated by simple things, and enthralled by complex ones. It is difficult for me to write a check to pay a bill. It is not difficult for me to construct the raw bones of an essay, or a story. And yet I am afraid of complexity too, when it matters. A human relationship may be as complex as a hopelessly tangled necklace, but with the latter the stakes are lower. There is less of a price if one fails. And with humans, of course, the agency does not all lie with me.

But it does not all lie against me either.

I should like to move to the physics of intuition—a spinning nebula of emotion and reason, a dance where every step falls exactly right, both ponderous and light at once. I should like to untangle knots from necklaces that matter. I should like to beat Schrodinger at his own game.

I should like to read a difficult manuscript and alter the world.