Robert Kowal

The text below was writ­ten on a Wood­stock man­ual type­writer on April 4th, 2011 and tran­scribed the same after­noon. Aside from spelling cor­rec­tions it is unedited. Notes which appeared in brack­ets in the orig­i­nal type­writ­ten pages have been placed at the end of the post as footnotes.

A recent NY Times arti­cle described the resur­gent inter­est in type­writes among a gen­er­a­tion too young to feel any nos­tal­gia for rib­bons, car­riage returns or the quaint mechan­i­cally actu­ated line end warn­ing bell. But per­haps there is cul­tural nos­tal­gia rather than a bio­log­i­cal one at work here; a long­ing for an era when words had weight, when the process of writ­ing a let­ter, a resume, or novel was a phys­i­cal act. An irrev­o­ca­ble (com­par­a­tively) act of com­mit­ting ink to paper, whether via pen and pad or levers, paper and platen.

My wife and I col­lect type­writ­ers. We both find them aes­thet­i­cally appeal­ing; my wife has a pen­chant for portable mod­els, espe­cially those with fold­ing fea­tures whereas I favor the more sub­stan­tial desk­top mod­els. We both find the com­bi­na­tion of durable engi­neer­ing with design ele­gance endear­ing. ^[1] More­over, we both enjoy actu­ally writ­ing on these machines. Mary even wrote a series of short sto­ries about type­writ­ers on sev­eral of our type­writ­ers explor­ing the medi­a­tory impact of the tool upon her text.

Per­son­ally, I have recently begun to do cre­ative writ­ing on a type­writer. I find that the process of actu­at­ing keys (I use man­u­als) imposes a pace upon my writ­ing which bet­ter matches my com­po­si­tional rhythm. I must com­pose the sen­tence before I embark upon it lest I end up with dan­gling ideas or prepo­si­tions. Yet the type­writer is implaca­bly patient; my com­puter blinks its prompt­ing cur­sor at me. It hums with the draw of elec­tric­ity. It glows with the ani­mat­ing light of poten­tial­ity and tempts one with online dis­trac­tions and other enter­prises (so many aps to while away the day). With the type­writer there is a his­tory, the past, embed­ded as pits in the platen, as wear on the most com­monly used faces ^[2], in the touch of keys, etc. With the type­writer there are only words.

Fur­ther­more, the type­writer car­ries its his­tory not only in the wear to its parts but in the legacy of the mate­r­ial that has passed through its mechan­i­cal bow­els to end up as prose or poetry. The machine has a mem­ory. It is seen as an exten­sion of the writer’s mind, chan­neled through the fin­gers. Like a sculptor’s chisel the type­writer we believe con­di­tions the work which flows through it. Con­sider Cor­mac McCarthy’s reli­able Olivetti which recently sold at auc­tion for $254,500. ^[3] One finds it dif­fi­cult to imag­ine any­one pay­ing for Stephen King’s Apple on which he com­posed The Shining.

In reflect­ing upon my own rela­tion­ship with the type­writer I exam­ined the habits I have when writ­ing. I still find it most sat­is­fy­ing and appro­pri­ate to write in my jour­nal long hand with a foun­tain pen. There is some­thing very sooth­ing, even ther­a­peu­tic about the flow of cur­sive let­ters across the page and I find com­fort in the scratch of the point upon the tex­ture of the pulp. I grant that there is a cer­tain fetishi­sa­tion of the object but only inci­den­tally. I think there­fore write, dif­fer­ently when a pen is in my hand just as the type­writer con­di­tions my work in its own way when I feed a fresh sheet into it (Today I write on one of our two Wood­stocks). I think an apt anal­ogy is to be found in modes of trans­port. Walk, bike or drive: dri­ving and auto is the most expe­di­ent means of run­ning and errand, say to the gro­cery store. The mas­sive and com­plex machine (to many of us entirely beyond our com­pre­hen­sion) is fired up and we oper­ate it to reach our des­ti­na­tion aware of the resources it con­sumes and the cost of its con­struc­tion, pro­cure­ment, and its oper­a­tion. Like the com­puter, it is for most of us the most con­ve­nient option but it also car­ries the largest iner­tial impli­ca­tions. The bicy­cle is anal­o­gous to the type­writer. It is an ele­gant yet robust tool but with a sin­gle pur­pose. It requires phys­i­cal acti­va­tion. Finally, with basic main­te­nance (clean­ing and oil) it will likely out­last its owner. While we may not indulge in main­tain­ing our own bike or type­writer, it is a mech­a­nism we can eas­ily comprehend.

Cycling to the gro­cery store is a more sub­stan­tial act; it takes longer and requires a greater phys­i­cal out­put. How­ever, it also trans­forms the expe­ri­ence of the task. The chore is still to pick up milk and cereal but because of the the reduced speed of travel, the indi­vid­ual may glance at the cherry blos­soms (smell the cherry blos­soms), over­hear the domes­tic argu­ment at the bus stop on the cor­ner. One feels the pull of grav­ity climb­ing the grade and the exhil­a­ra­tion of the wind on the descent. They bicy­cle becomes part of the trip just as the type­writer becomes part of the writ­ing process.

Writ­ing by hand I think the rough equiv­a­lent of walk­ing in this admit­tedly con­trived anal­ogy. Both are decid­edly activ­i­ties of leisure, almost idyl­li­cally so. A foun­tain pen is the tool of idle mus­ings, notes never to be reviewed, stray mem­o­ries. It also allows one to doo­dle giv­ing the writer a visual out­let. ^[4] The pen is per­sonal for one’s pri­vate thoughts or per­haps for inti­mate friends when writ­ing a pri­vate thank you or per­sonal invi­ta­tion. The type­writer is pub­lic, pro­fes­sional. The com­puter is insti­tu­tional and anony­mous; the e-mail I write from home is indis­tin­guish­able from the one I write from the library’s pub­lic ter­mi­nal. Walk­ing to the store for gro­ceries requires a com­mit­ment of time beyond dri­ving or cycling. It may even neces­si­tate a check of the fore­cast to see if an umbrella is advis­able since the round trip may take hours, long enough for the wind to shift, the sun to set, the rains to arrive. It grounds us in the irre­ducible tem­po­ral frame of our own biol­ogy. The speed of thought becomes the ambu­la­tory veloc­ity with two bags of gro­ceries. Even at Man­hat­tan­ites’ brisk pace, walk­ing com­pels us to inter­act with the world and its inhab­i­tants per­son­ally. The garbage in the gut­ter, unseen from the driver’s seat at 35 MPH, an annoy­ance on the bike to be evaded, becomes a social symp­tom when walk­ing. We can step over it or pick it up and deposit it in the cor­ner recep­ta­cle. Lit­ter is a per­sonal act when one is a pedes­trian — a human like me did this. From the side­walk cars appear absurd: 3,000 pounds of machine spew­ing tox­ins from the tailpipe to carry 200 pounds of human flesh dis­tances each year our grand­par­ents wouldn’t tra­verse in a life­time of walk­ing. Idle thoughts and stray mus­ings arrive when walk­ing, just as when writ­ing long hand.

NY Times arti­cle on typewriters

Epi­logue — April 5th
I thought I would awake today, reread my type­writ­ten pages and offer an appraisal of my exper­i­ment. To my eye the prose is stilted, the flow of logic dis­jointed. There are some inter­est­ing points but it needs edit­ing. How­ever, many have found this post more enjoy­able and “read­able” than some of my pre­vi­ous offer­ings. Per­haps spon­tane­ity and can­dor mean more than rhetor­i­cal wit and pol­ish. In any case, the response to the piece has been sur­pris­ing as well as gratifying.

I must point out one fac­tual error brought to my atten­tion: Mr. King did write The Shin­ing on a type­writer (fool­ish of me to have for­got­ten the age of the book — and my own).

1. ^[1] some­thing which it took com­puter man­u­fac­tur­ers two decades to under­stand and still only Apple seems to rec­og­nize that every tool is an aes­thetic object wher­ever one bal­ances the form/function equa­tion ↩
2. ^[2] the per­son­al­ity of every type­writer is unique. I love those old crime dra­mas in which the ran­som note was matched to the machine on which the vil­lain com­posed his threats by tiny imper­fec­tions and idio­syn­crasies on the machine ↩
3. ^[3] McCarthy’s Let­tera 32 Olivetti man­ual machine that Mr. McCarthy said he bought in 1963 for $50 and used to type all his nov­els, includ­ing a cou­ple that won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, sold in Decem­ber, 2009 at Christie’s to an uniden­ti­fied Amer­i­can col­lec­tor for $254,500, more than 10 times its high esti­mate of $20,000 ↩
4. ^[4] One won­ders how Neil Gaiman’s work would be affected were he to give up his pen and note­book for a lap­top ↩