Typewriter
FIELD NOTES (APR '23)
"The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!”
— Allen Ginsberg, "Footnote to Howl"
Mark Twain was the first American author to submit a typewritten manuscript ("Life on the Mississippi") but that did not mean he loved his typewriter. In 1874, Twain purchased one of the earliest Remington models and wrote to his brother "the machine has several virtues i believe it will print faster than i can write." However, he eventually ended up giving the typewriter away to fellow writer William Dean Howells. Later, in his autobiography, Twain wrote: "That early machine was full of caprices, full of defects—devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells," then adding, in typical Twain style, "my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered."
THE FIRST COMMERCIAL TYPEWRITER
Model 1 Remington, Shop No. 1
C.S. Lewis refused to use a typewriter but had no problem letting his brother Warren "drive" one, as he put it, for typing all his books and correspondence. When asked by a young schoolgirl for advice on writing, Lewis said "Don't use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm."
C.S. Lewis at home at The Kilns, Oxford, in 1960 (courtesy of Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College).
Bob Dylan, on the other hand, composed many of his songs by typewriter. He could stay anywhere as long as the room "contained three fundamentals: a bed, a table and a typewriter." Dylan would set up the typewriter in the corner of the room "with either an ashtray or a bottle of Coke sitting next to it. In the evenings, he’d drink red wine, smoke and type for hours.... in the middle of the night, it was common to see him wake up, grunt, light a cigarette and stumble over to the typewriter again." (NSF Music Magazine)
Jack Kerouac loved typing but hated having to reload new sheets of paper. Instead, he would manually tape pages together to form giant scrolls. "On the Road" was typed on a continuous 120-foot long scroll during a three-week period in 1951.
There's other stories too -- about how Ray Bradbury wrote "Fahrenheit 451" on a rental typewriter in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library (10 cents for every half-hour); how Kurt Vonnegut's daughter knew he was in the of process of "wrestling big thoughts onto small pieces of paper" by the "rat-a-tat-tat-tat" of his typewriter; how Hunter Thompson copied pages of “The Great Gatsby” and “A Farewell to Arms” on his typewriter just to feel the rhythm of Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s writing; and how Ernest Hemingway himself once said "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." It was definitely a time and place in literary history -- a generation of writers and the instruments they used and, in some cases, loved.
Ray Bradbury, at his home in Los Angeles, 1963. Screen capture from the 1963 David L. Wolper documentary Ray Bradbury: Story of a Writer,
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. at his New York City home, 1972. (Photo by Santi Visalli/Getty Images.)
Hunter S. Thompson at his ranch near Aspen, Colorado, circa 1976. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.)
Ernest Hemingway while serving as a war correspondent in Europe,1944. (Photo by Kurt Hutton/Getty Images)
E.B. White, at his summer home in Brooklin, Maine, once said "I fell in love with the sound of an early typewriter and have been stuck with it ever since." (Photo by Jill Krementz)
When I was sick with COVID a few months ago, I had a late-night fever dream about typewriters and I could still hear the sound of clacking keys and carriage return bells the next day. I think it is then that I began this fascination with the connection between authors and their typewriters. Coincidentally, this was also the same time I began reading the haiku of Richard Wright. [Continued]