Writers are notoriously superstitious creatures. Writing is a mechanical process; but those mechanics are almost invariably surrounded by no small sense of ritual. In particular, writers get awfully attached to whatever method enables them to get words on paper — so what will happen to Cormac McCarthy (whose novel The Road was recently chosen as our best book of the past decade) now that he has decided to auction his typewriter?
The machine is a portable Olivetti manual, bought around 1963 in a Knoxville, Tennessee, pawnshop for $50. Nearly all of his dozen novels and several screenplays have been written on it; but now it’s going on the block at Christie’s — with proceeds to benefit the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research association with which McCarthy is affiliated.
But the typewriter is ancient technology, isn’t it? Surely flint axes and typewriters will soon be mentioned in the same breath. Glen Horowitz, the rare-book dealer who is handling the auction, seems to think so. He told The New York Times: “When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac’s typewriter. It’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife.”
Using a typewriter requires power. You have to be strong to be a typist, you have to have real writers’ blood flowing through your wrists and knuckles and fingertips. Watching Helena Bonham Carter portray Enid Blyton on television the other week, what I found most amazing was not that Blyton only pretended to like jelly, was horrible to her children and had affairs — but that she was able to type 6,000 words a day on a manual typewriter. I may hate her books, but I have to tip my hat to her genius for that.
Perhaps it’s surprising, given the quality of her work, that her machine allowed her to continue; it must have been as pliable as her men. Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote for more than four decades on an Underwood portable. For him, his machine was a kind of first editor. “If this typewriter doesn’t like a story, it refuses to work,” he said. “I don’t get a man to correct it since I know if I get a good idea the machine will make peace with me again. I don’t believe my own words saying this, but I’ve had the experience so many times that I’m really astonished. But the typewriter is 42 years old. It should have some literary experience, it should have a mind of its own.”
Advertisement
There is still a sense of urgency about the writing that scrolls off the platen of a typewriter. At The Times we occasionally use a typeface called Typeka: a slightly broken-up old typewriter face that looks like the letters might have come off Cormac McCarthy’s battered machine. And yet those letterforms somehow convey an immediacy — in pullout quotes or strips of bulletin text. Born only in the late-19th century, the typewriter has entered our literary cellular memory.
As for Mr McCarthy, I wish him luck. A friend has offered to replace his old machine with a new one — let’s hope it proves as fortunate as the first.