In Places of Mind, Timothy Brennan’s biography of the famed literary critic and public intellectual Edward Said, Brennan makes a sticking point of Said’s “taste for Mont Blanc pens and blue bonded stationery.” He repeats some permutation of Said’s apparent infatuation with fountain pens — “[his] expensive fountain pens,” or “in fountain pen on expensive blue paper” — no fewer than five times. In fact, to Brennan Said’s legacy can only be considered in terms of his fountain pen, as some sort of sordid disclaimer to future reception studies academics:

But how long can an aura last? For an author who wrote with a fountain pen …

Maybe Brennan is making a broader point about aura in the Benjaminian sense — how long can any twentieth-century writer last, really, given that they all wrote with fountain pens? Of that detail, a long time apparently: The New York Times somehow illuminates that Said’s favorite Mont Blanc model was the Diplomat (better known as the “Meisterstück 149”) in a middling review, despite the fact the only “diplomat” that Brennan mentions in his book is Le Monde Diplomatique. The International Socialist Review mentions in their eulogy Said’s “fountain pen that reminded one that Edward was very much an intellectual in the 19th century tradition of a Zola or of a Victor Hugo” — a frog eater. The Nation luxuriates in theirs over the sensuous motion of how Said would “unscrew the cap of his fountain pen” in the same stroke as describing his charm over the literati ladies of New York.

To be clear, there is undeniable affection and true warmth in these tributes for the great man, but the overall effect is not altogether flattering. The memorials remind me of a professor’s words for a well-admired Black Harvard minister, spoken in reminiscence under a looming gilt portrait: “He was a bit of an Anglophile. He liked his Victorian silver quite a lot.”

For a critic of Said’s stature to focus not on their writing, but the object of their practice is abject heresy: the so-called great spokesman, to write dicta with such bourgeois sentimentality! In an interesting turn, Fitzcarraldo Editions recently started reissuing Said’s oeuvre, the dicta in question. Perhaps they had read through the same biographic prodding, or they were just following their house code, but the book came with a tastefully textured royal-blue French flap cover: now the reader can appreciate Said’s expensive tastes in addition to his intellect, not that Fitzcarraldo readers have ever really needed the extra push, of course.

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Denounced in passing, snorted in derision: the fountain pen occupies a troubling space in our imagination of the intellectual. Invented in 1883 by Lewis Waterman (of the now defunct Waterman Company) as the first pen not to require constant dipping into a cumbersome ink bottle, the fountain pen radically changed what writing — and the writer — looked like. The writer was longer a creature chained to an inkwell, but became anyone, anywhere. By the twenties, models like the Duofold or the P.F.M. (the “Pen For Men”) became some of the most manufactured objects in history, saturating the pages of mass advertisement. The pinnacle moment was when General Eisenhower ended the Second World War with a gold-filled Parker 51, inspired by the sleek P-51 “Mustang” bomber jet, signing the fountain pen into the annals of the free world.

Waterman’s big break was in refining the ink-delivery feed mechanism to deliver a steady flow of ink from a reservoir only when the nib was touching paper via capillary action, so that ink was pulled down onto the page at the same rate of air entering the reservoir chamber to balance out pressure. The proliferation of the ballpoint in postwar America changed the fortunes of the fountain pen, and here it started to morph into its second life as a maligned hobby. The epithet of fountain thus perfectly encapsulates the American attitude towards the pen as a stepwise innovation. Towards the usage of “fountain” as a liquid reservoir, the OED announces: “Now archaic or poetic.”

Curiously the typewriter has not undergone the same cultural turn. The typewriter collector falls into the same category of mundane niceties as collectors of postage stamps and Legos, while the fountain pen hobbyist is seen to approach the more conventional fetishisms of implicated intellectuals (liquor, Royalism, underage partners, etc.).

Neither has the pen in other languages; our aversion to the symbol of the fountain pen may be a uniquely English-speaking one. In French the pen is a stylo-plume [“pointed feather instrument”] despite the inaccuracy of description, bringing up images of the hands of French school children stained by the government-mandated violet ink and pen. In Chinese gāngbǐ [“steel pen”] names the pen by its steel nib rather than ink reservoir, distinguishing the fountain pen not as a technological turn but a cultural one: steel is strong, modern, and modest. The Japanese mannenhitsu [“10,000-year pen”] and Polish pióro wieczne [“eternal pen”] make an entirely antagonistic claim: that, a fountain pen is forever.

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Archaic or poetic, to note that an intellectual is really into fountain pens in our era is to commit character assassination of the gravest order. It is to hurl all the worst insults of the academic seminar --- indulgent, bourgeois, reactionary, ahistorical.

The pen brings into focus the act of writing that is usually concealed as a matter of respectability. Text transmitted as a copy-sheet or string of Unicode glyphs is brought before equal eyes at the site of the printing-press: a complete book gives no hint of the writing that has occurred. The printed text can be infinitely contextless and reproducible, with the name of the author as just another line. The relation between the writer as the producer of a text and the writer as an ideological marker is that of the signifier and the signified. The resulting myth of the intellectual is a strong one that is impervious to attempts ad nauseam --- Milton and his scribes, Dickinson and her scraps, Mao and his calligraphy --- at revelation. Instead, these tales only reinforce the border-space linkages of the sign, because their scope is not the moment of writing itself.

To name the fountain pen, thus, is to break the myth of the intellectual. It is to reveal the link between writing and text, and in the process open their material world.

Said’s favorite fountain pen brand, the Hamburg-based Mont Blanc, releases limited-edition pens in various series: Writer’s Edition, Patron of the Arts, Muses, etc. In 2009 the inaugural pen of the new Great Characters collection was released in honor of Mahatma Gandhi. In lieu of visuals, alongside a pamphlet of quotations, a revealing semiotic reading is supplied:

The 18k 750 solid white gold barrel and cap, brushed in a horizontal linen pattern, reflects the exquisite texture of Indian shot silk … a gold wire, entwined by hand around the middle of each limited edition, evokes the roughly-wound yarn on the spindle with which Gandhi spun every day for half an hour, regardless of where he was or whom he was talking to. The clip is set with a fever opal representing the orange colour that is part of the Indian flag, whose cut is reminiscent of a spinning wheel, an object of great symbolic value to Gandhi … [the] 18K two-tone gold nib [is] engraved with a portrait of Gandhi walking with a stick, during his salt march.

One can almost rework the marketing copy of a €17,000 fountain pen into a lurid modern political condemnation: he spins yarn with an opal spindle and silver thread … he says women must be subservient and chaste … his fountain pen is made of pure gold! While no Paul de Man, Gandhi is reified in the pen as a pastiche of comical intellectual villainy --- class traitor, champagne socialist, for me but not for thee. 

One cannot write with a fountain pen unless one has the means to purchase the pen and ink, but to do so is to consider one’s relationality to the fountain pen trade, which is to consider the circulation of the world: to write with a fountain pen in America is to consign its industrial might, while doing so in India is to buy into the colonizer’s tools. To note the brands of Edward Said’s pens --- Mont Blanc, Dunhill, Cartier --- is to invoke not just their semiotic meanings but the vulgarest and most indicting sign of all: price. It is not heresy to note that the intellectual likes nice things, but to say that the nice thing is the moment of writing itself shatters myth. There is no image there at all.

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Yet, must we construct these myths? The Mont Blanc pamphleteers evidently had enough aphorisms to fill a booklet, because they left out Gandhi’s own writing on the fountain pen. In a March 20, 1932, letter to Parasram Mehrotra, Gandhi writes:

There is not the slightest need for the girls to use a fountain pen. Really speaking, nobody in the Ashram should need a fountain pen. Why should anybody be in such a hurry? For students at any rate, it is certainly a harmful thing to use. The reed pen is best for writing Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, and other Indian scripts.

Gandhi’s opposition to the fountain pen does not come from an autocratic view of righteousness sprung above, no condemnations of reification, ahistoricism, indulgency. His view is instead a simple extension of his ideology of swadeshi, Indian self-sufficiency: fountain pens and ink could only be bought from British traders at a high price because Indian factories did not have the authorization nor technology to develop them; the reed pen was the homegrown alternative, and should thus be used. Yet he did not categorically refuse the fountain pen: he often received them as gifts, encouraged all donations to his movement (often a fountain pen was the most valuable thing his student donors owned), and at times, committed the great sin of writing with one himself. In a January 1939 letter to Maurice Frydman, he writes:

Again, I dislike fountain-pens, but just now I am making use of one though I carry a reed pen about in my box. Every time I use the fountain-pen it hurts me and I think of the neglected reed pen in my box. Compromise comes in at every step, but one must realize that it is a compromise and keep the final goal constantly in front of the mind’s eye.

His great intellectual contradiction revealed, his world torn open, the great Gandhiji, father of modern India, makes a mild confession: the pen was barely in his mind at all.

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After publishing his 1999 memoir Out Of Place, Said became less receptive to granting interviews. He occasionally made exceptions, most famously for his Final Interview; but he also permitted an opening for a little-known publication of the Pen Collectors of America, The PENnant. The collectors’ guide, which usually graced its readership with articles like “Prototype or Parker 61?” and “More Lady Sheaffer: Uncatalogued,” published in Summer 2002 a profile of Said. Here, he is not the famed literary critic Out of Place, but home in “The Place of Pens.”

Said came to know in his early age of the fountain pen as middle-class sensibility. His father started the Cairo Standard Stationery Company, which in time became the regional representative for the pen brand Sheaffer.

I remember shipments coming in time for Christmas-time shopping; I got to know quite a lot of them. There was always a sense of competition in our house between Sheaffer and Parker. When [the business] expanded into Lebanon, I went to Fort Madison [where the Sheaffer headquarters were] to try to persuade them to take the dealership away from the dealer who held it and give it to my father, so I met and talked with Craig Sheaffer.

To name the fountain pen is a naturalistic admission to Said: yes, he did grow up with the comforts his father could provide. The pen draws Said’s first map of the Middle East; it obliquely glances by way to his future home in New York. The gift he treasures most is his first Sheaffer, which he can still write with it, sixty years on. Trace particles of ink from his Egyptian childhood — “I only like black inks, and the blacker the better” — linger in every page Said writes, inevitable and intractable.

Said jokes about the counterfeit Japanese pens that filled Cairo street markets and eventually his elementary school classrooms: the cheap “P.arkers” and “Shaeffers” that were all but identical to the real thing, until one had to write with them. My fountain pen education began not too differently in the stacked wholesale boxes and counter displays of Shenzhen, still chock full of the same mid-century American designs that Said encountered seventy years prior. Yet the Parker 51 (or should I say P.arker 5l) clones I faced were “WingSun 601” or “Hero 100,” replicated in socialist self-sufficiency movements instead of capitalistic integrationist ones, and these actually wrote quite well. 

What would General Eisenhower think — of an Egyptian and a Chinese, of a Third World, still writing with the bomber-shaped pen that America had long left behind? Progress becomes our false humility: consider the humble ballpoint pen from the post-war Biro to the ubiquitous Bic. Perhaps it would be more appropriate in the eyes of Western sympathizers for the poor Third World intellectual to use a plastic Bic. Only if they could get access to them — Said distinctly remembers the distribution of these new ballpoints at the English school in Cairo, secluded from the city by high walls: “[Biros] were very messy pens, and they leaked badly, especially in high temperatures. I still can’t take them seriously.”

Not to mention, the tipping of the ballpoint can still only be produced in three countries, while Gandhi’s swadeshi-based objections to the fountain pen have long been blotted away by home-grown industrial capacity. The sweltering intellect of the writer born in the heat of Cairo is too hot, has too much to say: any other pen would sputter and crack away. To use a fountain pen is no longer a matter of taste, but a means of survival, neither archaic, nor poetic.

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By the time of his death Said had amassed a collection of over a hundred pens, from all of the major brands — the Germans, the French, the Italians, and the Japanese — including a Mont Blanc Writers’ Edition: the 1992 Ernest Hemingway. He even returned to the Americans in his later years, albeit in their diminished capacity: Parker, Scheaffer, Waterman, Esterbrook, had all been relegated to the back shelves in the intervening fifty years, sold off to various global conglomerates from countries that still cared. He even became a regular patron of Menash and Joon, pen shops in New York City, although both have now shuttered their doors. Yet, what makes these pens profound are the words that flowed from them. In the same profile, Said reveals that he writes the first drafts of every book by fountain pen:

I find the slower pace of writing with a fountain pen helps me compose. There’s a type of deliberateness and physical engagement with the words and sentences that’s hard to find with a keyboard.

The pen as a physical presence — reactionary, bourgeois, however you want to label it — is the link between the mortal writer and their immortal words, and the world; it is the moment of writing. Neither the writer nor the text is complete without the tool that brings them into existence; it thus hangs in a double balance. Instead of fomenting intellectual myth that denies or fantasizes the text as sprouting from the skull of the writer, sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, or maybe their pockets, to engage with a work is to engage with its production seriously, no joke, reservation, or compromise.

I recently viewed a 1986 sculptural piece by the Catalan poet-artist Joan Brossa entitled Racó — “corner.” Indeed it was in the corner of a large room, on a white pedestal: a sheet of paper, bent to sit upright, whose two faces were connected by a thin string, suspending a fountain pen by its clip. Or perhaps more aptly, it was a fountain pen, suspended on a string, hanging between two points, attached to a bent page. The pen itself was unremarkable, most likely yet another counterfeit Parker — the arrow clip is the give — a reminder of Catalonia’s position, and perhaps Brossa’s own pen. The string is thin and black — I only like black inks, and the blacker the better — and one cannot help but notice its textural similarity to Brossa’s signature in the corner: the weight of the pen lifts it out of the page and imbues tension. The tension of the string is what holds the whole work together: the paper stands up to embrace its physical form in the world, the gravitas of the pen finds levity in its suspending act.

The paper had a gloss to it: light from the gallery became focused on the pen in its suspended state, and it looked ethereal — maybe fountain pen sellers had something to learn from Brossa. I could see the fineness of the brushed gold cap, putting the polished arrow clip into stark relief. The pen itself was made of emerald-green celluloid, variegated and semi-translucent as the Italians also preferred. In use, the ink-level of the reservoir, or fountain — archaic or poetic — would be apparent as emerald light pierces more and more of the barrel; here the light shone all the way through. Performative, ambiguous, linguistic, yes; but what all of my friends agreed on was that it was simply beautiful.