Let’s pretend.
Tony Gilroy’s new film, Duplicity, revolves around the theme of corporate espionage. In a nutshell, Richard Garsik, played magnificently by Paul Giamatti, believes that a business rival, Howard Tully, is about to unveil a world-changing new product, so he employs a team of specialists to steal information from Tully. One of the purloined items is a sheet of paper upon which Howard has prepared a draft of a speech. It is handwritten. The script is elegant; the ink is rich. The fountain pen (a Mont Blanc?) used to produce the lines is big, silver, striking.
Garsik, however, is not impressed when he sees the sheet. ‘Who the hell writes with a fountain pen these days?’, he shrieks. ‘How freaking pretentious is that?’ (I’m quoting from memory, so the words may not be entirely accurate.)
I have, you may be surprised to learn, dear readers, spent much of my life being called pretentious. I have, it’s probably fair to say, hardly made it difficult for the mud-slingers. For instance, I once refused to take part in a sports ‘lesson’ (what’s to learn? or did they mean ‘lessen’?) in secondary school, declaring, as I have probably recalled here in an earlier post, that I was instead ‘going to the library to read Cocteau’. At roughly the same time, and for a period of around twelve months, I refused to wear clothing that was not black. (One of my colleagues who is just a few months younger than I am once said, ‘I bet you were one of those pretentious bastards who spent the 1980s wearing black, being miserable, refusing to go to parties, and listening to Joy Division albums, even though most of us were dancing to Wham!, drinking Bacardi, and having a good time.’ There are several grains of truth in this.) And then, in my final year at school, I formed, with a couple of like-minded souls, The League Against Dance Music. We wore the ‘smiley’ badges that were sported by the ravers (this was 1988 or 1989, when rave was king), but we had drawn a large black cross through the face. While our dance-crazed contemporaries listened to their repetitive beats in the corner of the sixth-form common room, we sulked self-importantly at the opposite end of the room and discussed surrealism, Camus, Wim Wenders, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, communism, French cigarettes, the Situationists, the nouvelle vague, and the quickest way out of small-town South Wales (by sedan chair, presumably). Pretentious? Moi?
Those moments are, I’m relieved to note, two decades behind me. But I have no doubt that the term 'pretentious' is still used to refer to me behind my back. (When does the teenage practice of face-to-face name-calling disappear? When did I start denouncing people only in their absence?) The moment in Duplicity described above does rather neatly put its finger on a widely held belief: users of fountain pens are oddballs, misfits, pretentious. (The same colleague who spent her teenage years living it up to the sounds of 'Club Tropicana' has regularly sighed 'Just get a bloody ballpoint!' when I have interrupted meetings by splattering ink and then having to leave the room to wash my hands.) If you take an interest in writing instruments, if you care about ink, if you refuse to use a ballpoint pen, you are inevitably seen by most people as affected, vain, pretentious. (Again, I have probably not helped myself by amassing a collection of silk pocket squares and luxury shaving creams, and by using a silver pocket watch to keep track of time while lecturing. In my defence, the latter was a thirtieth-birthday gift, and I cringe whenever I see colleagues pushing back their sleeves to glance at their wristwatches in the middle of a class. A subtle glance down at a pocket watch on the desk or the lectern is far more dignified, I feel. I could simply undo my wristwatch and place it in front of me, I suppose, and I have seen signal-conscious colleagues do precisely this, but I like the weight of my watch on my wrist, and I feel unbalanced without it.)
I suspect that most people dislike being called pretentious. But I have decided, dear readers, that it is time for us to embrace the term. And it's all the fault of Greil Marcus.
In Mystery Train's brilliant essay on the music of Sly and the Family Stone, Marcus suggests that something can only be pretentious if it's false. I can remember being struck by that statement when I read it for the first time in the early 1990s (when I was, no doubt, up to something pretentious). I was so struck by the whole essay on Sly Stone, ink fact, that I fell in love with the bleak There's a Riot Goin' On before I'd heard a note of it. Marcus describes beautifully, for instance, how the band took one of its songs from just a year earlier, 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)', and turned it from a happy, optimistic number into the bitter, lost, insular 'Thank You for Talkin' to Me Africa', which is, in short, the sound of a once-uplifting band and a musical genius imploding. Curious readers may wish to compare Riot's savage reworking alongside the original (and sit in stunned awe at the solidity of Larry Graham's bass playing on the later version):
'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)' (1970)
'Thank You For Talkin' to Me Africa' (1971)
But back to the pretension, to the crime of being false. I think that it's time to stand up for falseness in life. If it's true that the ballpoint pen rules over the world of writing instruments, and if it's true that real ink is on the verge of being forgotten by the general population, then perhaps the only alternative lies in being as false as possible. Yes, dear inkthusiasts, every time we remove a gleaming fountain pen from a pocket and find ourselves accused of being pretentious, we're actually negating the bland truth of Western culture with a flicker of falseness.
Long live falseness! Don't be tense about your pretence. Enough of the false prophets; it's time for the prophet of falseness. This is not a false alarm; it is a defiant step towards the false, a faux pas. Let our many pretences be false pretences. I am happy, with my array of false affectations, to be the enemy of truth. Through and through foe and faux.
Ink in use today: Sailor Brown.
PS (12 April): I have, in the light of a message from honorary Penquod crew member Ken, decided that a small postscript is perhaps needed. When I proposed above that lovers of fountain pens and ink embrace the label 'pretentious', I wasn't suggesting that we're all shallow, affected creatures. (I am, of course, but I wouldn't want to tar you all with the same nib.) I know that we ink-fingered inkdividuals truly believe in the inkherent superiority of a fountain pen that has been filled with well-chosen ink; we're not just trying to inflate ourselves by creating a flashy image, in other words. My aim, rather, is to reclaim something of the term 'pretentious' and to insist that, if the truth of the world is the reign of ballpoint pens, we might be better off on the side of the false. In other words, I'm suggesting that it's time to think about pretension as something positive, something of which to be proud, simply because it's the mark of being at odds with the general lack of interest in writing instruments. Think, for inkstance, of how the term 'queer' was reclaimed by certain groups fighting for gay rights; 'We're here and we're queer' therefore became a defiant, empowering chant. 'Pretentious' does not rhyme quite so easily, but I've come up with the following, which I offer as a rallying cry: We're pretentious, and it's tendentious. What was once an insult is thus now an inksult.
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