Curmudgeons, especially literary ones, make lively interview subjects. Remember Ray Bradbury’s declaration, on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday last month, that “we’ve got too many Internets”? If everyone could be depended upon to spout such succinct, ornery—and, often, bizarre—opinions, the task of the time-pressed reporter would be a bit easier.
Cora Lewis, writing for the Yale Daily News last week, happened upon just such an obligingly crotchety interviewee: ninety-four-year-old Manson H. Whitlock, “the oldest typewriter repairman in New Haven.” When asked why he prefers typewriters to computers, Whitlock offered this ominous reply:
“A computer owns you”: a great, pithy line, but what does it mean? Much of the interview reads like a zippy vaudeville routine, with the interviewer doling out reasonable questions and Whitlock firing back jovial zingers:
Being allowed to affect this style of polite impertinence is, in my estimation, one of the great privileges of advanced age, and Whitlock seems to relish his role as the tweedy emissary from a kinder, simpler time. He worries, predictably, that the Internet has ruined our young minds: “You don't have to have a brain anymore. You can just push a button.” But buried within Whitlock’s bewilderment over twenty-first-century life is the puzzling hypothesis that the popularity of typewriters is actually on the rise. “Youngsters,” the repairman says, have been buying junked typewriters and asking him to help fix them up.
Indeed, nostalgia for typewriters, even—or perhaps especially—among those of us who never used them in the first place, seems to become stronger with the release of each new fancy gadget. For around five hundred dollars, you can buy a typewriter that connects to your iPad via USB port. (The creator of the device wryly describes it as “groundbreaking innovation in the field of obsolescence.”) At Etsy.com, there are thousands of listings for pieces of jewelry made out of antique typewriter keys. And isn’t our tortured fascination with the steamy, boozy, workplace drama of “Mad Men” fueled, at least partly, by the clackety-clack of secretaries typing away? Our more-or-less silent offices are eerily tomb-like, by comparison.
I’m certainly not the first to note that the ability to delete, copy, paste, and re-arrange has changed the writing process. If I’d drafted this post on a typewriter, the result would likely be different, but I’m not entirely sure how. Would I have made quicker progress, without trying out so many different variations of the first line? Would having to re-type from the beginning, rather than replacing a single word or phrase, change how I thought about revision? It would be an interesting experiment. At the very least, it would be a relief to use a machine dedicated to writing alone—one that cannot also receive e-mail, news alerts, and Facebook messages. But when I ask my parents about their experiences with typewriters, all I get are horror stories about Wite-Out.
I wonder if the typewriter will become the record player of the literary world: a dusty old contraption that becomes fashionable among a generation of people who have always had access to newer, sleeker versions of the same thing. The very coolest music lovers insist that we should all switch back to vinyl, even after almost everyone else has moved from CDs to MP3s. Listening to a record is thought to be better than listening any other way, even if no one can quite articulate the reason for why this is so. Have the very coolest young writers similarly decided that writing on a typewriter is better, in some deep, indescribable way, than using a computer?
It’s an unanswerable question, perhaps, but the quiet resurgence of interest in typewriters has ensured that, oddly enough, Manson Whitlock isn't the only typewriter repairman in the news lately. Just days after the Yale Daily News published the piece about him, the Buffalo News profiled Bob Will, who collects and repairs old Smith-Coronas from his basement in Dunkirk, New York. The very next day, the Louisville Courier-Journal ran a story about David Stacey, a typewriter repairman and co-owner of the Kentucky-based ACS Computer Company. And who, exactly, are the loyal customers keeping these men in business? Stacey says that most of his company’s profits come from computer repair, and that the rare typewriter job comes as a welcome “mini-vacation” from fighting computer viruses and other invisible electronic ills. Will admitted that twenty percent of his customers are prison inmates who are not allowed access to computers. Imagine the sound of clattering keys echoing off of jail-cell walls!
Actually, in at least one case, a typewriter played a vital role in landing someone in prison: A woman was arrested in Nyack, New York, Saturday after breaking into her ex-boyfriend’s home and then attempting to clobber someone with a metal typewriter she found inside. It’s a strange story that raises a lot of questions. Why does the ex have a typewriter? Is he a writer? Yet another repairman? A government worker tasked with filling out endless stacks of forms? We’ll probably never know, but perhaps all you typewriter devotees should take extra precautions against burglary.
(Photograph: “Pretty Typewriter and Friends”.)
