I wandered the time-warp of the Garment District with you, engrossed by the window displays of haberdashery shops, with their cards of loom elastic, buttons, needles, pins and hair-clips, and the reels of cotton threads arrayed like colour charts, past run-down diners, delis, anonymous shops with windows of opaque glass, and high gables bearing the names of defunct businesses in letters of peeling paint, Mutual Storage Company, Kozma Bakery, Moyel Bros Fine Menswear, Arcadian Soup Company, Dubal Loans, Kitzler Cheap Novelties and Fancy Goods.
In Greenwich Village you brought me to a dark little ink emporium, a cornucopia of inks in hues of violet and pale green and bright orange and sepia, red inks and black inks, gold and silver inks, and you told me that every colour smelled differently. Try this, you said, and unscrewed a bottle, and another, and held them to my nose like perfumes. From the red there came an almost vinous odour, and the violet seemed imbued with tar. Like perfumes? I said, and you said, Yes, and I said, holding a bottle of black, If this was a perfume, what would you call it? and you said, Oh, I don’t know, why don’t we call it Styx? Then we went off the beaten track and in Alphabet City in a street between Avenues B and C we saw an elaborate BELFAST in graffito of green and gold on a gable wall, the cross-stroke of the T elongated into an arrow that doubled back on itself to emerge from the belly of the B, and I knew it must signify something different to the name of the city I came from.
New York was beautiful to me because of its difference, and in memory of that difference I am writing this with an American Esterbrook pen, American as Chevrolet, a 1939 model in iridescent red feathered lines with steel trim. It gleams as brightly as it must have done back then, like a red car parked on the lit forecourt of a filling (gas) station. The Esterbrook, like the Wearever I began with, was advertised as the Dollar Pen, but its selling point was a system of interchangeable nibs which could be unscrewed and screwed in at will, not gold but hard steel, sometimes tipped with iridium but more generally with just the steel rolled into an equally durable ball, and by the 1950s there were more than thirty different points, Firm Medium, Flexible Stub, The Right Point For the Way You Write, Extra Fine, Bold Signatures, For Easier More Comfortable Writing, Falcon Stub For Backhand Writing, Manifold For Carbon Copies, The World’s Most Personal Fountain Pen, Bookkeeping, Firm Fine Clerical, Affordable Writing Pleasure, slogans I gleaned from a run of National Geographic magazines from 1955 that I got from Beringer many years ago and unearthed for this purpose, because when I began writing with the Esterbrook I remembered the name from the pages of the National Geographic, interleaved with ads for Mosler Safe and Western Union, Zenith Radio, Kodak, Zeiss, Hartford Insurance, not to mention the sleek low-slung chrome-trimmed automobiles, Pontiac and Buick and Thunderbird and Cadillac and Chrysler, Put New Fun Under Your Foot, Spectacular from Takeoff to Top Performance, Long Sweeping Lines with Purposeful Meaning, in vivid reds and bright yellows and pastel blues and greens, occupied by proud smiling new owners who signed the ‘check’ with an Esterbrook, Every Inch Your Personal Pen — All Ways and Always. The nibs were numbered. I’m writing this with a Firm Medium, 2668, and the Esterbrook glides across the page as smoothly as a pen costing many times as much, epitomising Affordable Writing Pleasure. And before I flew to meet you in New York I perused the National Geographics for their bright promise of an America in which everything could be bought.
I bought the Esterbrook on eBay. You might have wondered where I get all my pens. There are not that many outlets in Belfast for my passion. Beringer usually has a nice piece or two that he picks up at estate auctions, dead men’s pens, he calls them, and I still browse the antique stalls of Smithfield and Donegall Pass, though with diminishing frequency. Most of my stylophiliac transactions are now conducted on eBay. Before I ventured into that virtual market-place, my computer literacy had been confined mainly to the word-processing I used for my Esperanto book. I supposed the Internet to be a realm of dubious informational value, full of snares and pitfalls for the unwary, and I was nervous at first of entering a realm where the usual physical delineators of a transaction — speech, body language, facial expression — are absent, and where one cannot handle or examine in detail the item one is bidding on. But then I considered that those qualities of verbal and non-verbal language were precisely those used by any con man in the course of his profession, and that people can lie as readily as they tell the truth.
So I entered eBay cautiously, and over the next few weeks I bought a 1930s Conway Stewart Scribe in Green and Black Candle-Flame, a 1920s Gold Medal ladies’ ring-top in Lapis Lazuli, and a 1940s Burnham in beautifully patterned Celluloid with lighter and darker shades of rose pink pearl outlined with black veins; as my confidence with these transactions increased, I became more and more drawn into the invisible international web.
Now that I have bought some two hundred pens on eBay my opinion of humanity has been revised upwardly: some people might lie as readily as they tell the truth; but the vast majority of them are honest, and are anxious to be seen as such. The pens come packaged with loving care, taped up in layers of kitchen roll inserted into plastic tubing which is then enclosed in a Jiffy bag, or enclosed in a pen-sized box surrounded by a cushion of polystyrene beans within a much larger box secured by layers of parcel tape that make access sometimes endearingly difficult, accompanied by handwritten notes, Hi, Gabriel, hope you enjoy the pen, have left you good feedback, hope you do the same for me, warm regards, and here the seller would sign themselves by their given name, Paul, Mary, George, whatever, to show that there was a human being behind their adopted eBay user IDs, semi-humorous tags like wadatz9, pentopl, bjaune, livia4, leftyy, mcgrrkk, xklepper, mrknipl, dizmusch, from which one could form some mental picture of the person — bjaune I saw as a yellow-haired Frenchman, or Francophile, maybe he was called Bernard, livia4 had to be a buxom Irishwoman, Anna Livia, and mrknipl was a New York Jewish marriage broker, Mr Knipl — while others called themselves by impenetrable strings of letters and numerals, 56mxot99f, xh17mq555, pp97304, and from these I deduced either that they were nervous individuals, overly security-conscious, or were so secure in themselves that they did not feel the need to present an almost recognisable face to the virtual world.
At any rate, the whole eBay system is based on mutual trust. You bid, you buy, you sell, and every one of these transactions receives Feedback, so that a cumulative profile of your honesty is built up which can be consulted by any other eBay member at any time. In this manner I have bought pens from people all over the world, from Kansas, Minnesota, Taiwan, Paris, Augsburg, York, Swanage, Brighton, Hamburg, Greece, New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Balearic Islands. You could say that eBay is a kind of Esperanto, or free-market communism, except its members are invisible.
My own eBay ID is goligher. In the course of my Esperanto researches I had been following a tenuous link between Esperanto and spiritualism, and I’d taken the name from a spiritualist group known as the Goligher Circle, of Belfast, who between 1915 and 1920 were the subject of investigation by W.J. Crawford, a lecturer in Engineering at Queen’s University. The Circle was essentially a family affair. Mr Morrison, in the attic of whose home the Circle met, was a hard-working committee member of the Spiritualist Society. Mrs Morrison was a sister of the principal medium, Kathleen Goligher. The other participants were Mr Goligher, Kathleen’s father; Kathleen’s older sisters, Lily and Anna; and her younger brother Samuel, who was thought to have some mediumistic gifts. There is no mention of a Mrs Goligher. I first came across the case when I picked up Crawford’s book, The Reality of Psychic Phenomena (1916), in the Excelsior Book Store in Skipper Street. Over the next few months I managed to get my hands on the rest of Crawford’s oeuvre: Hints and Observations for Those Investigating the Phenomena of Spiritualism (1918), Experiments in Psychical Science (1919) and The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle, published posthumously in 1920. Crawford, after many painstaking experiments, concluded that Kathleen in particular was a medium of extraordinary power, and that the phenomena were genuine.