In the early 1950s, when a nosy reporter asked Ernest Hemingway if he had a therapist, the author’s pithy response was: “Yes, I do, an Underwood Standard.”
Yes, that old marvel, the manual typewriter, whose clickety-click sounds most of us writers continue to miss terribly even since we opted to give in to the age of word processing. Yes, an old guileless marvel it was, that typewriter, into which we had poured our life’s work, patiently, stoically and contentedly retyping whole pages, changing ribbons, inserting carbon copies, and whitening out mistakes. And never once did a typewriter ever ask us, as a therapist would have, for $150 a session.
Mine was a charmer, a Royal Standard, but unlike Hemingway’s, it had a “grasshopper” strike action, which means that while I typed, the neighbors did not suspect that I had taken up carpentry as a hobby.
So why, you ask, was I was seduced away from that venerable contraption five years ago, and allowed myself to be dragged by friends, feet first, to Staples in order to buy a computer? Well, first, I was shamed into believing them when they said I was a dinosaur, an old geezer afraid of innovation, and a half-baked, left-over technophobe from a long-lost era.
Secondly, I was asked to imagine the wonders of word processing, how the computer would correct my spelling, grammar and punctuation as I went along. It would even, at the push of a button or two, give me the word count on any one column I wrote. And, hey, they said, there is, thrown in as a bonus, instant messaging as well, by virtue of which I could take up e-mail and leave the snail-mail behind. (Remember that one, involving an addressed envelope that you would stick a stamp on, and rush to put in the mail box around the corner from your house before the postman came for the second pickup of the day at 5:00 p.m.?)
What more do you want, these friends asked?
I want to go back to my Royal, that’s what, the very same machine that I had bought at a little Mom-and-Pop typewriter store in Cambridge. Mass., back in 1972, and that I had lived, worked and developed a breezy, loving relationship with, till I agreed, fool that I was, to drop it five years ago.
The other day, as I was spring cleaning, rummaging around in a closet in the laundry room, there is was — my Royal Standard, in all its glory. I looked at it in wonder, standing in front of it like one of the apes in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Yes, my Royal, the ancient contraption that, over a quarter century, had spoken to me, about me, from me, as if it knew — when I hit away on the keys, and gave the roller handle a soft manual push to go from one line to the next on the page — the precise rhythm of my thoughts.
We had worked together, this typewriter and I, through thick and thin, through writer’s block and through days when I was on a roll, through my first book and then my second and third, through my articles, my lecture notes and, oh yes, my letters to friends — before we parted ways.
So for the longest time, that day, I went around dusting, cleaning and polishing this neglected beauty — ever so carefully, so as not to damage any of the parts — and then inserted a blank page into the carriage, feeling a rush of delight surging through me at the machine’s mechanical and aesthetic virtues.
Forget your darn laptop for a moment and contemplate, not just the glory, but the glory days, of the typewriter, which was considered, in its time, when it was invented in the late 19th and, later as it evolved further, in the early 20th centuries, a technological breakthrough, credited with sweeping changes in the lives of people who wrote for a living. (In the United States, Mark Twain is said to have been the first author to submit a typed manuscript to his editor.)
The first typewriter, as we know it, we read in “Antique Typewriters and Office Collectibles” by Daryl Rehr, was invented in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes, from Milwaukee, a tinkerer of sorts, who was (hold on to your hats) a full-time journalist — a case attesting yet again to how necessity is the mother invention. After he took on a partner, Carlos Glidden, he formed the Sholes & Glidden Company, that by 1874 began to mass market his invention. An early Sholes prototype is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. (And if you love typewriters, I’ll tell you this: It is, and it is worth, a trip).
Most people today regard the typewriter as quaint or obsolete. And young people, who have never seen one, would probably mock typewriter lovers with the question: “This, heh, this thing here, whatever it is, really types? Bust, Gosh, I mean, like you know, where do you plug in the, like, monitor? and heck, where is the, like, enter button, anyhow?” Yes, youth is indeed wasted on young people.
So I plunk myself at my desk in front of my Royal Standard, washing my hands with non-existent soap, and then strike at the keys, which begin to move to upstroke onto the inked ribbon before hitting the blank page. To get my first letter, “Y”, I hit the shift key to go to uppercase, then take my finger off, to finish the sentence in lowercase. And that familiar, reassuring clickety-click sound begins, first tentatively, as if my Royal was clearing its throat, then smoothly and rhythmically at greater speed. I nod with delight as I finish my sentence and hit the period key.
“you are a beauty,” I had written playfully on my black page, addressing the machine in anthropomorphic terms “you and I are together again, this time for good.” And my Royal, true to type, had responded, as always, with clean, clear copy. But, wait, where do you buy ribbon these days? On the Internet, perhaps?
