The Last Page in the Typewriter

By Roger Rosenblatt

Thanks to the clamor over the forged Hitler diaries, one almost overlooked entirely the news from Rumania. There, on April 28, a government decree took effect requiring all citizens to register their typewriters with the police. The stated purpose of this decision was to prohibit Rumanian troublemakers from typing anti-Communist leaflets, but anyone concerned with the fate of the typewriter will recognize a trend. It is going, this wonderful machine. It is on its way out of the world. Whether at the urgings of the Communists or the word processors, the device that has come to be called the old-fashioned manual will soon lie dusty in fraudulent antique shops between the duck decoys and the miniature spoons. "What's that funny-looking box, Daddy?" "Why, that's an Underwood, darling [gulping imperceptibly]."

But who cares, really, if the manual typewriter goes the way of the manual orange-juice squeezer or the crank phone? Progress is progress. It isn't as if the invention itself is dropping from existence; there are new electronic microchip jobs that automatically produce a thousand individually addressed love letters while the author snorkels in Cancun. Nor is there a great heaving nostalgia attached to the old machine. The history of its growth reads as excitingly as politics in Ottawa. Besides, people these days show far too much reflex yearning for the snows of yesteryear. Let the thing go. Indeed, one can briefly sum up the reasons for looking back with moderate affection on the manual typewriter and still not feel that the world is about to lose a piece of its heart.

Famous Literary Typewriters. Hitler evidently did not use a typewriter, being a dictator, but other writers have found it indispensable. J.M. Synge and Henry James, to name two. Mark Twain, who typed the manuscript of either Tom Sawyer or Life on the Mississippi (the matter is murky), became the first author to hand in a typewritten book to his publisher. Of his Remington, Twain wrote: "It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around." Twain also began the practice of double-spacing manuscripts, thus providing room for editors ever since to fill the margins with the words "awkward" and "Don't get this."

Famous Criminal Typewriters. In America, the most notorious was the Woodstock No. N230099, which was used as evidence in the Alger Hiss trials, although no one seems to have been able to prove whether or not the Woodstock No. N230099 was in fact involved, and if so, or not, what it did, or did not do. In "A Case of Identity," Sherlock Holmes exposed the culprit by examining the faulty letters on typewritten notes. Holmes explained: "A typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man's handwriting." The word processor's criminal potential is probably infinite.

Memorable Sentences Associated with the Typewriter, a) Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party; b) qwerty yuiop; c) Miss Hunkle, please come in, shut the door and take a letter.

Noteworthy Typewriter Stunts and Tricks. In the late 1920s, the Royal Typewriter Co. dropped 11,000 parachuted typewriters out of a plane over Hartford, Conn. This was intended to increase sales. Tricks with typewriters were also popular in the early days, such as making palm trees out of capital I's and asterisks. Placing such things in a composition must have offered problems, but they are said to have given much fun.

Typewriters in Art. Claes Oldenburg's Soft Typewriter. Also, Leroy Anderson's musical number The Typewriter, remembered for its effective use of the bell. Marshall McLuhan surmised that the typewriter has contributed to the writing of free-verse poetry, because the righthand margins are uneven. This is fascinating, but unlikely. Yet e.e. cummings' poems could have been composed on nothing but a typewriter, and many novelists have used the lower case and run-on words to convey streams of consciousness. Don Marquis' archys life of mehitabel made a poet of a cockroach who was unable to press the shift key.

The Typewriter and the Lady. Men constituted the first "typewriters," as the operators were originally called, but women soon took over the task, which was supposed to give them entry to the American workplace. As it turned out, typewriters ultimately tied women down to uninteresting mechanical jobs, proving once again that men are smarter than machines. The typist in modern folklore is often given a melancholy identity, like the typist in T.S. Eliot's Waste Land, who takes her lover as wearily as she lights her stove. On a happier side, Rose Fritz, the national speed-typing champion from 1906 to 1909, never lost to a man, and Stella Willins, the 1926 world's amateur champion, once typed 264 words in one minute, repeating a memorized sentence. The report that the sentence was "How I loathe this work" is apocryphal.

The Typewriter Goes to the Movies.

Movies about the press inevitably display lots of typewriters on which reporters furiously bang out their stories as if they were using artillery. Such scenes illustrate the idea that the typewriter can be a weapon, which recalls the original patent that the inventor, Christopher Latham Sholes, sold to E. Remington & Sons, a manufacturer of firearms. There is always something heroically decisive about a character's plunking himself down before a typewriter in a movie. The machine itself becomes an instrument of integrity, which may be one of the things we miss when it finally disappears.

Pleasant as all this may be to record, it does not add up to much. Mainly one will miss the manual machine simply because it has been around so long. We take unexpressed comfort from the sight of familiar objects, superannuated or not, tending to regret their absence even when we no longer require their presence. Then, too, we will miss the sound, the clackbop from the house next door that signaled the Great American Novel in progress, or the Great American Last-Minute Term Paper. Writers will miss their old machines greatly, even as they now flirt pantingly with Apple IIs. They will even miss the mistakes they used to make. This sort of msitake. The new machines correct so perfectly that they do not show error, and sometimes error was nice to see, a useful memento of human sloppiness.

Still, what may be missed most is the companionship of the manual machine that was attached not to the wall by electric cord, but solely to oneself. There it sat, that Smith-Corona, waiting patiently for you to get hold of yourself, seize an idea, find a right word. Then you went at it together, two stained, tired antiques of the future, giving and taking, the way friends are supposed to. The times you stayed up all night, the sweat on the keys, the sigh of accomplishment at something furnished famished finished. --By Roger Rosenblatt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.