PUTTING IT ON PAPER

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD....

          

 Mandy Patinkin with sketchbook as George Seurat in Sunday in the Park with George. “Look! I made a hat!”

Phillip Adams, doyen of Australian cultural commentators, recently devoted a column to his reminiscence of a childhood job peddling newspapers from a billy-cart around his native Melbourne. Being raised in a country town deprived me of a chance to share this experience but his subsequent lament at the decline and near-disappearance of a paper-and-ink press directed my memory down a different path.

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           A writer colleague in Australia recently described how he rose each morning at 4am and cycled to a local newsagent, there to spend a few hours sorting and wrapping papers and periodicals for delivery to various sub-agents. It earned him, he said, a little extra money for the small pleasures of life.

           His admission took me aback, since I too rise at 4am and spend one or two mornings a week wrapping printed items for the post. At one time they were books, magazines and photographs traded on eBay or through such book-collecting sites as Abebooks. These days, with both those markets in decline, the same items are generally  research for a book in progress.  

           Odd, wasn’t it, that two men of the same age, in the same business, at the same time of day, on opposite sides of the world, devoted themselves to performing the same actions, but for very different reasons? Might we, I wondered, be drawn to do so for motives other than the superficially practical? Did working with paper, glue, string, Scotch tape and corrugated cardboard, addressing envelopes, stamping and sealing them, commiting them to the post satisfy a fundamental need?

           Phil Adams hints at something like this in his essay. "I actually like paper papers," he writes. "I like their heft, even their smell. It’s much the same with books. Give me a real one any day, limp or stiff as naughty Dame Edna calls them, rather than something digitised on a Kindle, whatever that is."

Among writers, this affinity for paper is nothing new. John Updike evoked it in one of his early stories, Archangel, citing his delight at "the sliced edges of a fresh ream of laid paper, cream, stiff, rag-rich" and "the microscopic glitter in the ink of the letters of words that are your own."

The same paper trail leads to eroticist and scholar of the limerick Gershon Legman, who helped popularise the Japanese paper-folding art of origami. The teenaged W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender printed their own poetry on a hand press, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet/proprietor of the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco, produced broadsheets of his work.

On a less exalted level, adolescent science fiction fans, myself included, published amateur magazines - fanzines - typing the text on wax stencils (with liberal use of correcting fluid), laboriously churning out copies on a Gestetner duplicator, then collating, stapling, addressing, mailing. Their circulation was minuscule. We could have reached just as many people by letter or at club meetings and conventions, but giving our thoughts a physical existence on paper conveyed a special pleasure.

I'm sure that's why I'm so moved by Stephen Sondheim’s song Finishing the Hat from Sunday in the Park with George.  It imagines the satisfaction felt by painter George Seurat in marrying paper to charcoal as he creates sketches for a larger canvas.  That his companion, bored, wanders off while he does so is a small price to pay. There are always other women. But "Look!", he says in delight. "I made a hat!  Where there never was a hat!"

 There’s a short story - I forget by whom - in which a future culture adopts carpentry as a religion. The devout congregate not to pray but to plane wood and cut dovetails. (Why not? After all, carpentry was Jesus’s day job. Being Messiah was just his hobby.)  I’d happily embrace woodwork as a creed, except for an inability to hammer a nail without hitting my thumb first. In its place, I propose a faith whose adherents gather to write and draw, fold and wrap, stamp and staple, collect and collate, each act an affirmation of a higher order of existence signified not by prayer but paper. So long as I could commune with this most seductive of all materials, let Armageddon come.