Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

First Draft Longhand? -- No Way!

Maybe there is something more to longhand penning than computer composing. Not as a literary piece or as the first draft of anything fantastic, but as any writing sweetened by time like any wine standing in the cellar for a hundred years. Come to think of it, even hieroglyphs should amount to some good cash these days, whether we can read them or not.

For instance, Sotheby’s London is (will be?) offering Beckett's Murphy for a hefty amount of green. The draft is handwritten in six ordinary note-books, between August 1935 and June 1936, in Dublin and London, while Beckett was undergoing psychoanalysis. This original draft is titled Sasha Murphy. It is said that Becket doodled inside the note-books here and there and wrote and rewrote the opening sentence at least eight times. Still this draft of the book is a far cry from its printed version.

The-Beckett-Auction  

So my question is: why did my son’s math teacher, way back when, called my husband and me for a conference, i.e. complaint, showing us his notebooks inside which the kid doodled animal pictures on the margins? My kid was acting like a genius and no one knew! But then he must have taken after his mother who also drew flower pictures on the margins even in an earlier era, during dinosaur times. With one exception, the mother was a very good student and she didn’t draw complaints from her teachers; the son was not. On the other hand, Einstein wasn’t a good student either. But I digress.

Anyhow, whenever I try to write longhand nowadays, my first draft is useless. For the simple fact that I can’t read it myself afterwards. The text looks like a modern abstract drawing with lines, words, and scratched black blobs everywhere. If you add to it the gridlike doodling in the margins, executed while I force my brain, the text becomes a goner. I might as well bury it and put a headstone on it that says, “Here lies what Joy meant to say!”

Oh well, my offspring will have to deal with it. No first drafts of anything on auction at Sotheby’s. Their mother is in love with the computer.