The Handwriting on the Wall

I used to think that writing on walls was something that people did only in the United States. But my years of travel around the world have been enough to disabuse some of this, and to show me that the act of writing on the wall is not in the least an eccentricity peculiar to us of this country, or even us of this century, but a shared experience of all peoples, of all times. Indeed, I've had to conclude that an inner compulsion to write on other people's walls is just as basic as the urge to make love or complain about taxes, and I've found that the study of these writings can throw light on an enigmatic corner of the human soul, and is a hell of a lot of fun besides.

Governor don Francisco Manuel De Silva Nieto Whose Indubitable Prowess and valor have already conquered the impossible in New Mexico, Bishop Ethelred in the Catacombs, EG?ITEOS in ancient Mycenae--all of them had given in to this wall-scribbling compulsion, one, it seems, that neither the supplications of men nor the fulminations of law can stint. It says on the walls of the Taj Mahal that National Monuments are your Heritage--Please do not disfigure the monuments by scribbling or scratching, but that, and the fine of $4.20, didn't stop babu firozapad. It said in ancient Rome do not scribble ("scariphare") on the wall, and it says in New York, on East 80th Street, that any person marking or defacing this wall will be prosecuted by the law, but that didn't stop c. emeleus afer in the first case or joey, kevin, ken, barry, Betty, Annie Clarino and Abei Van stinklyhymer in the second. Something else to think about is that all of these importunations to lay off writing on walls are themselves written on walls. It is granted that fools' names, like fools' faces, are often seen in public places; but so is this very poem, and so too was a similar poem of ancient times--

Wall, I wonder you don't fall down, Scribbled on by everyone in town

--which, scribbled on a wall, is still to be seen in Pompeii and Rome.

Pompeii is a giant hornbook ready to teach us that wall-writing isn't a sometime thing. I learned it there myself, walking all day by the marble walls of circus and gladiator times and stopping to look at words, words, words which, except for their being in Latin, are exactly like those of movie and television times: Like Paris was here. I found that love life, as it does in our own times, predominated, running from the coldly factual (PS and CE together in a heart) to the tenderly valentinian (Nonia to her Pagurus: Greetings) and the Comic-Valentinian (To Victoria: Greetings, and may you sneeze sweetly wherever you are) to the apostrophically imploratory (My Dear Sava: Love me, I pray thee) all the way to the emprisingly poetical (Ah! If I should ever wish to be/ a God without thee, May I die!) and down again to the poetastrical (Whoever has a mind/ to hinder lovers' way/ let him the zephyrs bind/or running waters stay), the ungallantly braggadocian (Staphylus was here with quieta), and the unspeakably obscene (Miccionis statum considerate; go look it up yourself). For most of these lovers, love had been requited--anyhow they said so (Happy, Happy Atamas)--and had been requited too easily for some of them, I learned (Restitutus has deceived many girls many times), or I deduced (Staphylus, who was here with quieta, was also around the corner with romula). Next to love, the dominant theme that I found on the walls of Pompeii was hate, and this too was told by the same calumniatory devices popular today: Communications (Virgula to her tertius: You are ugly), predications (Oppius is a crook and suavis is a sot), and clearly unreasonable imperatives (Samius to Cornelius: Go hang yourself). Also in this category were the quasi-patriotic exhortations of the Yankee-go-home type (Down with the nucerians!). Usually, however, I found it hard to fathom what, if any, practical result the wall-writer hoped to see gotten by expressing himself publicly (Pyrrhus to his pal chius: I'm sorry to hear that you are dead).

I'm trying to keep this essay as tony and serious-minded as any, but in all honesty, standing at all those walls and looking at all those scribbles of dirty words, smutty sentences, and--I didn't yet say--phalli, and taking notes, I felt like a perfect idiot. It argued, I felt, a case of sophomoricism at best and satyriasis at worst to everybody passing by, and usually, when anybody did, I tried to make as if engaged in some more elevating pursuit; writing poetry, or watching my fingernails grow. However, I was found out at last by one of the official guides; and try to imagine how I felt when he said to me: "Che face, signore? Ah; to study on the walls the Graffiti, yes? But already it is done, signore. Already a hundred years. By the Jesuit." The Jesuit, he went on, was one Raffaele Garrucci, and what he'd done was to copy down each and every scrawl and scribble on Pompeii's walls and to publish them, and what he'd called an "atlas" of them, in 1856. Well--flabbergasted, that's how I felt. And my flabbergastation nothing but grew when, at the Pompeii museum, I got a look at Garrucci's book itself, Graffiti de Pompei: Inscriptions et Gravures Tracees au Stylet Recueillies et Interprété, and saw that he and his fellow workers had not only transcribed and translated all of 6000 scribbles but had solemnly analyzed their meters, usually the elegiac distich, and ascertained their literary antecedents, usually Propertius and Ovid. In fact, they had even come to a few scholarly, if not especially world-shaking, conclusions: that the plaster on the Small Theatre was already dry in 37 B.C., and that the lower classes in Pompeii had talked a little like a Chinaman talking English, saying "1" instead of "r."

Shortly after this incident, I discovered that, far from being of interest only to people like Garrucci and me, wall-writings long had had the devotion of some of the most learned scholars in Western history, who had so abandoned themselves to taking the things seriously that they wouldn't ever call a scribble a scribble but, modulating to the higher key of Italian, always a Graffito, Plural Graffiti. The scholars had written of these Graffiti in all the learned journals, and it still amazes me to come across them. In the fall 1953 issue of Hesperia, Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, there are 10 pages, three diagrams and two photographic plates devoted to nothing more edifying than Anthyle is a Fairy, a graffito of the 6th Century B.C. that was found scratched into--not a wall, but the side of a Greek vase. The cause of Hesperia's unseemly curiosity in the tidings Anthyle is a fairy isn't that It's a rarity; It isn't, and Hesperia itself is at infinite pains to point out that other vases have been turned up saying that aristomenes is a fairy, Alkaios is a Fairy, Sosias is a Fairy, Sosias is a fairy ("We are tempted to assume that it refers to the same Sosias and was written by the same person as our number 3. The grave from which it comes, however . . . ."), Eukles is a Fairy, and Sikela is a Fairy; Also a Lamp saying I am the biggest fairy in Pausania. Nor was Its curiosity due to the fact that Anthyle wasn't a man but a woman; So was Sikela, and "The Imputation, as every reader of the classics knows, was one from which women were not exempt in antiquity." Cf. Cratinus, Sophron and Aristophanes. No, the cause of Hesperia's inquisitiveness was nothing more, nothing less than that the word fairy in Anthyle is a fairy had a feminine, instead of the usual masculine, ending.

This is not an isolated example. In the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, six pages are used to deduce, from the fact that somebody name of [symbol] had written this at the Wadi el-'Allaki, at Umbarekab, at Tonkalah, and between Kalabshah and Dendui, that " [symbol] seems to be a much-traveled person," and another two pages to deduce that [symbol] was the Count of Elephantine; "It is to be hoped," says the Journal, "that no one will be tempted to interpret [symbol] as keeper of elephants!"

You'll be pleased to know that I successfully resisted this temptation. But I'm not the one to cavil. If, like me, the scholars are happy in this work--and I gathered that they are--then that is all that matters; they are keeping busy, they are keeping off the streets, and so more power to them. Except that I do wonder at times how the prime movers of all this erudition--how the actual scribblers of ages past--would, if they could, feel about it, about their unanticipated immortalization. I see in my mind's eye at times a Roman, name unknown, wearing a tunic as mucky as yesterday's football uniform and skulking around in the peristyle of somebody's house and then, in a fit of pique, of cheek, or of simple foul-mindedness, writing the words Irumo te--sorry, you've got to look that up too--on a piece of this somebody's chinaware. And then I see this fellow again in Elysium, Limbo, or wherever the hell it is Romans are, and I wonder if at that outlying address he has managed to get a copy of the American Journal of Archaeology for spring 1948 and has seen in it his literary effort subjected to a most scholarly analysis: his chirography characterized as "a good legible hand, which included the cursive e," his spelling (Irumo instead of irrumo) criticized as being "short of academic purity . . . though not illiterate," and his use of the present tense--which is "clearly not the progressive but rather the equivalent of the minatory-monitory future"--compared to the 35th and the 63rd poems of the Priapeia and also to Catullus' Paedicabo ego vos et irrumabo ("I shall impale you yet/ on something you'll not soon forgetl"). And I wonder if this fellow has congratulated himself on his till then undetected talents or has, perhaps, sighed at the gay capriciousness with which immortality, like lightning, strikes us.

I wonder at times about another thing, apropos scholars, and that's this: seeing they are so determinedly snoopy about the Graffiti of long ago, why are they so incurious about the scribblings of here and now? The truth is, I haven't seen a single scholarly paper about a graffito postdating the 28th of September 1737, when the Bishop of Durango and some other people's monikers were put on what's now the El Morro National Monument in New Mexico. To me this is really odd: as if a graffito was thought of as a kind of coprolite, uninteresting and even unspeakable until it had been around two or three hundred years and gotten hard. And this point of view is not just a scholars' idiosyncrasy, it is the Government's official policy: witness the fact the Government doesn't allow you to scribble on a National Monument, and yet that it made the El Morro National Monument a National Monument because it was scribbled on--prior, though, to 1737. The Government also wouldn't permit Dr. Kinsey to bring into this country a collection of 20th Century wall inscriptions he had collected abroad, even though Irumo Te (Circa 10 A.D.) is safely stowed at Columbia University and Anthyle is a fairy (circa 530 B.C.) is eyed by hundreds of genteel people every day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Myself, I couldn't go for a statute of limitations covering Graffiti, and if, I said to myself, other people are out to study the ones of yesteryear, then I'm setting out to survey the ones of now. After all, as Lanciani says in his immortal Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries, we "have gained more knowledge of the life . . . of the Pompeians from this source than from any other written or engraved documents," and, since it isn't out of the question that our own cities will be buried under some sort of radioactive ashes, to be rediscovered a few millenia hence, it behooves us to look at our own Graffiti, to see what archaeologists of the (continued on page 50)Handwriting (continued from page 40) next era will think of us, whether we will make a good impression.

Accordingly, I took it upon myself to step into their shoes, or whatever it is they'll wear on their feet. I walked along the more Graffiti-infested walls of New York City and mustered everything on them in an awful stack of three-by-five index cards (I'll grab a few; they say Diana, Vote for Dewey, Sence I left you baby I allmost lost my mind, 123456789, SS, Leo the hawk, and V.F. is a stuped dope in big letters in big letters) and I put them under no little scholarly scrutiny. First off, I saw that love--I Love Victor Very Very Much--was far and away the overriding passion of the 20th Century: so much so, that it could be abbreviated to things as enigmatical to the glance of the non-lover as Jrlpw (East 81st Street), the l standing for "loves" and the Jr and pw standing for a boy and girl who are, otherwise, still enigmatical. We are tempted to assume that Jr refers to the same Jr on the door jamb of the Hotel Embassy; but that's on the West Side, and he would have to have spread himself rather thin. Tallying up, there were 10 protestations of love for each of antipathy, like Gorman is a Jerk (East Houston Street), and 10 of these for each obscenity --but love, unlike in Pompeii, was not necessarily requited; witness I love you, do you love me? no on West 93rd Street. Two other conclusions of mine--the first of them from Kilroy was here on the plaster wall of Hamburg Heaven and the second from Killroy was here, Kilry was here, and Kirloy was here on the lower East Side are: the plaster on Hamburg Heaven was already dry in 1945, and the lower classes of New York City had talked like idiots. The word Dewey may have become obsolete between 1948 and 1953. The prevalence of all these Kilroy was heres seems to suggest that Kilroy was a much-traveled person. Kilroy's choice of choriambic monometer to tell of his travels is a fine one to express unequivocacy, but the consequent use of the preterit "was" instead of the present perfect "has been" is short of academic purity, albeit colloquially common to the ill-educated classes.

So far so good--and yet, where the deuce was I getting? I still had to come to grips with the real enigmas: such as who is Kilroy? So laying aside all other pleasures, I started in on these matters, and the first result of my scholarly application over the course of many weeks was to get in my hands a signed affidavit of--cross my heart and hope to die-- Kilroy himself, telling how it all began. I got it from the files of the American Transit Association, of Everett, Massachusetts, whither the spoor of Kilroy was here had led me and which, in 1946, had had a little contest to find out who Kilroy was. Mr. Kilroy, winning it, was given a streetcar as a prize. Here is his affidavit verbatim:

On December 5, 1941, I started to work for Bethlehem Steel Company, Fore River Ship Yard, Quincy, Mass. . . I started my new job with enthusiasm, carefully surveying every innerbottom and tank before issuing a contract. I was thoroughly upset to find that practically every test leader I met wanted me to go down again and look over his job with him, and when I explained to him that I had seen the job and could not spare the time to crawl through one of those tanks again with him, he would accuse me of not having looked the job over.

I was getting sick of being accused of not looking the job over and one day, as I came through the manhole of a tank I had just surveyed, I angrily marked with yellow crayon on the tank top, where the testers could see it, "Kilroy was here."

James J. Kilroy

Halifax, Mass.

And thus he was off and running-- Kilroy, first on the tank tops, first on the beachheads, first in the hearts of his countrymen.

Flushed with success, I looked for other worlds to conquer. The expression There is nothing better than is to be found painted everywhere in Spain; it is even painted on mud walls, where washing it away would also wash away the walls. The inevitable question--than what?--that such an inscription as There is nothing better than (Mejores no hay) gives rise to, has never been answered for me satisfactorily. I'm not even sure there is an answer. Driving one day to the Costa Brava, I asked the question of an officer in the Spanish Civil Guard, and while his reply, "I am an officer in the Spanish Civil Guard," is more than likely a sign of my incompetence in the Spanish idiom, it may well have been the officer's way of telling me that what cannot be answered should not be asked.

My third, and final, attempt at unraveling enigmas was better fated. Some half-dozen years ago in the city of New York, sedulously written in chalk in an estimated 15,000 places, East Side, West Side, all around the town, was the legend An onion and you. This obscure message had, understandably, caused a good deal of public and private speculation, but, as far as I could discover, its meaning and its author had never been revealed. My scholarly task was to track the phrase down, and the chase exhausted the better part of a month. I spent a lot of time backing and filling in libraries and newspaper morgues and radio monitoring services. At first, the documents uncovered in this fashion were only bewildered, or querulous, or angry and of no help to me. I persevered, however, and at last on the unlikely pages of the Songwriters Review a breakthrough came--such is scholarship! The offhand remark of one of the Review's columnists--that he'd seen An onion and you written on the sidewalks and "said to myself: here is one writer drawing attention to his song" --sent me scurrying, heart-a-flutter, to the Copyright Office of the U.S. Government and eureka! there was indeed An Onion and You, published in 1949 by a Mr. Martin Kalmanoff. I made a telephone call to Mr. Kalmanoff, and he obligingly told me that the author of the song-- a grocery clerk by the name of Alexander J. Anagnos--had written An onion and you up and down the city for several years to try to help out An Onion and You sales.

As soon as I had all these onions in the right mental baskets, I paid a call on Mr. Anagnos himself at his sunless, onionless apartment practically around the, wouldn't you know it, corner. It was a historic confrontation, I felt: after heaven knows how many weeks of looking at and analyzing Graffiti in the abstract, to run at last into somebody who had written the damn things. For there he was at last--A. J. Anagnos, the living reincarnation of Paris and of Staphylus and of untold thousands of faceless, but not at all nameless, others who had scribbled themselves a place on the walls of history. When I met him, the reincarnation, a quiet and (to look at) level-headed young man, readily admitted authorship of the song.

"And why not?" he said. "There's been a big hit song about bananas, about peanuts, a bowl of cherries, coffee --why not about onions, asparagus, or other good things to eat?"

An Onion and You, it turned out, had not only been published, but recorded as well with Betty (the kid sister of Rosemary) Clooney belting the melody out. The only terrible thing was, the record refused to sell.

"So," the author went on, "you know what I did about it. I got me a hundred dollars' worth of chalk and I started in. Around the fire hydrants and on the risers of the subway station stairs: the best place to write on, nobody walks there. You saw what The New York Times said about it? 'A good job . . . bold, even and plain . . . a steady hand on the chalk.' I used to take, see, calligraphy at the Art Students League. If anyone on the subway stopped me and said to me, 'How come you do this?' (I remember an old lady said to me, (continued on page 83) Handwriting (continued from page 50) 'How dare you do this!' and kicked me in the BMT), I would tell them, and ninety-five percent of them'd be full of delight, and congratulations, and say it took a lot of guts; but some of them were indignant. As if it was obscene. As if--somebody said this--it was Communist. I even got taken to court one morning: two dollars," said Mr. Anagnos, and he concluded, "so now you know what it's all about, An Onion And You."

"Yes," I said, "but you didn't tell me: after all the favorable publicity you gave yourself, how many copies of the record did you sell?"

Mr. Anagnos sighed. "Two," he said. "Two copies."

I would have ended my investigations right there, except for one other problem that gnawed at me. If it is such an enigma what people write on walls, surely it is an enigma wrapped in a mystery why people write on walls. I had a few theories about this, though, and I told them to a psychologist by the name of Rudolf Arnheim, and Dr. Arnheim replied, "Exactly--exactly. These people who write on walls: they do not want to communicate anything, they only want to express it. They want to externalize their emotions, in other words to give reality to what's inside of them by turning it to something outside of them. To make an idea more real, even to pretend to act it out: this is what an artist does, a person dreaming does, an angry person tearing up a letter does; a person writing on a wall does. To take an example . . ."

To take an example, a Stephen X is in love with a Susan Y. "Or am I?" he says to himself unconsciously. "There's nothing to see, nothing to put my finger on, and still no change in my leucocyte count. I do hear music and there's no one there, but this could be simply ringing in the ears. If only there was a way, to know this love is real. Hmm . . . maybe I could get it in Cholly Knickerbocker ... or maybe go to Paris, and Maurice Chevalier will come by and see me and say to everybody, 'Ehh! He is in love!' Or maybe even . . . yes! Of course! I'll go and write it on the delicatessen!" And 10 minutes later Stevie Loves Sue is scribbled there--Q.E.D.

"Ah! But Stevie who?" Dr. Arnheim said. "And Sue whom? It isn't for us to know. Stevie knows, and he's the only one in creation it's written for--the only one it's not an enigma to. However, as for that other theory of yours," Dr. Arnheim went on, "isn't it maybe, well, a bit far-fetched?" It may well be, but I think it is worth a few words in closing. It owes to my having observed that the walls that are scribbled on most often are generally the most pretentious, or the most forbidding. To me, the sorriest artifacts that are made by man are those things that only diminish him as a man, only tie him in fetters of his own forging: artifacts that start in the golden calf and end, at last report, in subliminal advertising, and also include en route all other advertising, girdles, hand grenades, bayonets, pride, astrology, slums, laws, triskaidekaphobia, high-heeled shoes, nations, hate, the Marine Corps, monasteries, guillotines, alcohol, table manners, tennis rules, marriage, and notices to keep off grass.

All of these things that are built by man and belittle man, a wall is the epitome of, and I'd like to think there is something (something that doesn't love a wall) in each of us that makes us want to beat our hands, or heads, against the damn things, to scratch our names in them, to make them understand that human beings, after all, are what the world's for. If this theory is right, the moral to be gained from my definitive and ecumenical study of the things that people scribble on walls is this: Down with the walls! Up with the people! Viva i Graffiti!