Liza Campbell and Henry Hudson

Two private views in a week: first there was Liza Campbell, whose Black Boxes have been a feature of my life for a while now; her "Carphology & Cryptograms" were on display at the Julian Hartnoll Gallery in St James'. My favourite was "Neurotics Checklist" (left), which lists - you can guess - all the things that a neurotic might worry about, including Alien Abduction, Putrefaction of the Genitals, Quicksand, a Tsunami and a Piranha Infested Caipirinha. If you are neurotic it's probably worth avoiding it. The works have a great deal of the customary Campbell charm and wit - go and check them out: never have Linnaean taxonomies seemed so much fun.

Read about Liza Campbell's Black Boxes here

Then today, at T J Boulting's near Oxford Circus, was Henry Hudson's "Hominidae", a series of vast portraits of his family and friends in swirling, layered plasticenes that brought to mind Lucian Freud. They're textured, striking and haunting, upright figures in all but bare surroundings, sometimes looming out of their frames (quite literally as the material rises up towards you.) To the right is a portrait of the artist Lucy McMillan-Scott (who painted both me and my mother) and her dog Piper. There's also one of the novelist Cressida Connolly and her husband Charles Hudson, both of whom were present; striking a more colourful note was Janet Street-Porter, whose hair was, I think, purple, though it was hard to tell.

More about Henry Hudson

Fountain pens, and Philip Hensher's The Missing Ink

A while ago I was asked to write a piece by a newspaper which never made it into print: it was about fountain pens. So when I was recently asked to review Philip Hensher's book about handwriting, The Missing Ink, for The Telegraph, I thought I might dig it out again. Here it is.
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I still have my first fountain pen. At my prep school everyone used them: Shaeffers were considered the top of the tree. Mine, given when I was eleven years old, was an elegant grey Parker, with a gold nib and an arrow clip. It marked a move into the exciting adult world. My headmaster at the time carried a beautiful fountain pen which used a striking shade of turquoise ink: it represented sophistication and a little of the eccentric artiness to which I aspired.

Fountain pens are talismanic. They remind you of everything you’ve written with them, taking on deep layers of significance. They are used at moments of international importance – the treaty of Versailles was signed with a gold fountain pen. Though instruments of supreme taste (Waterman fountain pens were a favourite of the Emperor of China) they are also democratic, freely available to everyone the world over.

Writing with a fountain pen when I was child was in itself inspiring. There’s something organic about it. No more the unattractive shapes made by a ballpoint; now my stories were formed with luscious curves.

A fountain pen becomes an extension of your body. It was always impressed on us that you should never lend your fountain pen to someone else, because the nib ‘learns’ your grip, reflecting your idiosyncracies and style. 

This is in stark contrast to writing on a computer. I have the sense of another, distracting presence, that little cursor blinking snarkily. I’d lend my laptop to anyone. A computer never becomes part of you. In my experience they provide more heartache than pleasure. When you’re typing, both sides of your brain are employed. Writing means you’re only using one side, leaving the other to generate those all important ideas. With a blank page and a pen there’s nothing in between you and your story: the words and ideas flow, uninterrupted, the only, natural break coming when the pen runs out of ink. I still draft my novels by pen, typing them up every so often and editing as I go.

Writer Liza Campbell, whose memoir about growing up in Cawdor Castle was recently published, uses a silver italic Lamy. ‘I went to a prep school where fountain pens were compulsory’, leading to ‘an ever-evolving Rorschach Test of splots and the telltale blue tongue from sucking ink into the nib from a recalcitrant cartridge.’ Since she was left-handed, her teachers said there was no hope for her script, but, ‘with the arrival of an italic nib,’ she ‘became determined to conquer calligraphy. It took about a decade, but fountain pens allowed me to do this.’ The fountain pen as symbol of beauty and patience is here writ large; Campbell highlights, too, the necessity of precision and reliability.

We’ve come a long way since we first scratched letters into wax. For centuries, people wrote with quill pens, which required constant dipping, giving rise to a lovely eighteenth century slang term for writers: ‘inkslingers’. Romantic and messy, yes; but not so good on control and precision. Attempts were made at producing fountain pens: as far back as the tenth century, one was apparently constructed for Ma-ad al Mu-izz, the caliph of the Maghreb; however it can’t have been very good, as the technology was soon forgotten. In the nineteenth century, slightly more successful attempts were made, but not very much more so, as Lewis Waterman found out in 1883 in New York, when he tried to sign an important business contract with one and it failed to work; he rushed back to his office to get another contract, but by the time he’d returned, someone else had pipped him to the post.

It was this that inspired him to create what would become Waterman pens. He developed a new feed for the ink that relied on a capillary process, with air entering through the nib to create a consistent pressure on the reservoir. Which means a continuous, satisyfying flow, and cheers from writers all over the world. His company was soon leading the charge, making pens that were objects of art as well as practical. Parker, too, were constructing fabulous pens. Dave Ruderman, who looks after the Parker archive quotes founder George Parker, ‘the good thing about Parker pens is that they write in any language.’

So what’s the future for the noble fountain pen? These instruments are not dying out. Their style and adaptability ensure a following even now. Even Facebook has pages dedicated to fountain pens, with over 5,000 ‘likes’. In this digital age, it's pleasing to note that ink still rules.

My First Birthday

Quick! Whilst he's (you know who I'm talking about - The Boss) looking the other way I'll try and get a word in edgeways. Hello and welcome! I'm Philip Womack's Blog - Hah! He won't like that - he hates the word blog, flits around calling it 'Web-log', as if anyone does that. He's been using / misusing / desecrating me for one whole exact year now. He's a good enough master, on the whole; still, he hasn't done anything to celebrate my first birthday... He might at least have got me a re-design. Is that too much to ask? Sometimes I dream about becoming more than a mere, simple, clod-hopping blog. Perhaps one day I could, like chrysalis to butterfly (doesn't that just sound like something HE'D write), become a website - or, dare I even think it, a multi-platform user-friendly interface... Excuse me for a second, I am sorry. I'd better be quick. I can hear him rummaging around in the drawer looking for a pen. Imagine - he still uses pens!

You might think that I'm quite articulate for a one-year-old, but we blogs grow up fast. I now have 27 'followers' - twenty-seven! - only one of whom is related to The Boss, and only twenty-six of whom were physically bullied into following. I have had over 1,500 visits a month. My visitors are unpredictable in their likings; though most of them (don't tell The Boss this) tend to be searching for Philip Womack, quite a lot of them stumble across me by accident (I won't mention exactly what words you were searching for. I'm not that kind of blog).

In the past year The Boss has written on anything from A A Milne to Zurich; I've allowed him to indulge his penchant for classical literature and to show off about everything he's been writing. He's written a book called The Liberators, which was published just before I was born, and which he has been systematically and endlessly promoting; he's continued to write for The Daily Telegraph, The Literary Review and The Financial Times and sundry other papers, and has just started being involved with Port. He's visited several schools; his book's been reviewed in papers from the School Librarian to the South China Post. It's been an exciting year - for him, at any rate; I just look on from the sidelines and think about being a server.

These, then, are the top five things you've been looking at. There appears to be no rhyme or reason in them:

1. The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming: Party

2. The Afterparty by Leo Benedictus: review

3. I'm Late, I'm Late... Christian Marclay's The Clock

4. Books of the Year: Final Day: Children's Books

5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One: Review

You've also displayed a fondness for Adam O'Riordan, Zadie Smith, Ned Beauman, and Robert Saxton (the poet).

He's found a pen - he's coming back - look, I'd better go - but hey, I for one am glad that I've had so many visitors, and maybe I can persuade some of you to follow me without The Boss sending round the heavies. See you all soon...

Love from

Philip's Blog
xx

(PS The picture is of a Black Box by Liza Campbell. It's called Fatty Had a Party and Nobody Came. Let's hope that some of you come to mine...)

The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming: Party

Last night brought hordes and hordes of people to Daunts on Holland Park for the launch of Charles Cumming's new spy thriller, The Trinity Six. I've never seen so many people in the shop: at least one wine glass was broken (not that there are always wine glasses in Daunts, of course: it is a book shop, after all; one of the wine glasses might possibly have been broken by me, but I'm not confessing...) In attendance were Damian Lewis, Belinda Stewart-Wilson (who bought The Liberators! Which has been reprinted and has a weirdly shiny plasticky new cover about which I am weirdly excited!) and Dominic West, lending a thespian gloss to the affair; also sundry writers, including Liza Campbell and Raffaella Barker, with whom I spent a happy twenty minutes chatting, wedged into a corner behind the cookery books (so many cookery books!). Charles spoke charmingly, apparently having forgotten to bring his speech with him. The book looks marvellous - it's about the Cambridge Spies, and has apparently already been reprinted. It was an enormously amusing party, and it carried on round the corner for quite some time, and I managed not to break any more glasses. Click below to buy the book: there'll also be an interview with Mr C in this Saturday's Daily Telegraph, so look out for it.

Lust and Murder in Lilliput: The Return of Liza Campbell's Dark Boxes: review

Last night I wended my way through the slate-grey streets, past the megalithic tower blocks of Royal Oak, down a road that seemed never to end. I felt like a knight on a quest (specifically, like Childe Roland): and then I came to the Dark Tower; although it wasn't actually the Dark Tower - it was Westbourne Park Studios. Brooding under the arch of the Westway, it is a strangely tranquil place of glass and space - and the perfect setting for the return of Liza Campbell's Dark Boxes. No Lilliput Lane is this: Naughty Lego, as the poster said. Here you will see tiny people in the throes of existential crises; possessed twins, unreformed bestialists, suicidal actors and gun-toting tortoises. The landscape is the mind: anything can happen in the square, dark confines of the black box. Incredibly wry, funny, and often deeply cutting, they are both salve and stimulus for the troubled. The centrepiece was a large doll's house, which on the surface appeared normal. Peer into the windows, however, and you see a devil walking out of the bathroom; a man who's hanged himself, a woman who's put her head in the oven; an orgy going on blithely upstairs, and a party of sinister nuns approaching a cradle.

The real party, of course, went swimmingly, with the guests managing to suppress their neuroses even with the application of several glasses of wine. Chief amongst the admirers was the actor Bill Nighy, who loomed in his greatcoat; perhaps he found some inspiration for his next sardonic film role.

By the end of the party, I'd never seen so many red dots. May the dark boxes invade every house.