Grushenka
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Oct 7, 2006
- Posts
- 516
This is from a long article in The New Yorker (easy to find online). Here's the opening para and more interesting excerpts. I actually felt a bit of nostalgia remembering how my old portable typewriter keys would get jammed when I went too fast. And coincidentally my main character in my contest entry is a secretary (though I don't have any typing scenes). - Gru
= = = = = = =
The Typing Life - How writers used to write - by Joan Acocella
Many of the early inventors of the typewriter thought that what they were inventing was a prosthetic device for the blind. Why would ordinary writers need a writing machine? They had pens. Eventually, it became clear that such a mechanism could benefit the seeing, too, but, as we find out in “The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting” (Cornell; $29.95), by Darren Wershler-Henry, a professor of communication studies in Ontario, almost two centuries, roughly the eighteenth and the nineteenth, passed before that hope was realized. There was no single moment of discovery, no lone inventor crying “Eureka!” in a darkened laboratory. On the contrary, historians estimate that the typewriter was invented at least fifty-two times, as one tinkerer after another groped toward a usable design. One early writing mechanism looks like a birthday cake, another like a pinball machine. One was almost eight feet tall; another, a Tyrolean entry, was whittled largely from wood. Until about the eighteen-thirties, all typewriters lacked a keyboard, and when they got one it was usually modelled on that of the piano. Nor did they have a ribbon. That didn’t make its appearance until 1841; in most earlier machines the keys were inked by rollers or carbon paper.
. . .
Wershler-Henry follows the fortunes of the typewriter into the twentieth century, with special emphasis on the role of women in the story. In the beginning, few people imagined that anyone would compose at the machine. The user of the typewriter would be an amanuensis—in other words, a secretary—taking dictation from another person. Accordingly, in the early days the word “typewriter” was used to mean not just the machine but the person plying it. That person, the Remington folks assumed, would be a woman. (The flowers printed on the casing of the early models were to make the mechanism seem friendly to the weaker sex.) Remington’s prediction was correct. It was often as typists that women poured into the professional workforce at the turn of the century. By 1910, according to the Census Bureau, eighty-one per cent of professional typists were female. Guardians of the social order warned that this development would have baleful consequences. It would unsex women; it would spell the end of the American family. They were right, in part. Together with other social changes, the availability of typing jobs no doubt did weaken the family’s hold on women. As for unsexing them, the effect was the opposite. Wershler-Henry documents the entry of the “typewriter girl” into the iconography of early-twentieth-century pornography. He also gives us illustrations, from the so-called Tijuana Bibles, dirty comic books produced in Mexico, starting in the nineteen-thirties, for the American market. In one panel, a three-piece-suited executive, staring at his secretary’s thigh, says, “Miss Higby, are you ready for—ahem!—er—dictation?” Such a situation did not lead swiftly to Miss Higby’s empowerment, but for a woman to have a job, any job, outside the home was part of the humble beginnings of twentieth-century feminism.
. . .
Nietzsche used a typewriter. This is hard to imagine, but in the effort to stem his migraines and his incipient blindness—symptoms, some scholars say, of an advanced case of syphilis—he bought one of the new contraptions. So did Mark Twain, and he was the first important writer to deliver a typewritten manuscript, “Life on the Mississippi,” to a publisher. Henry James also had a typewriter, and a secretary, to whom he dictated. That is a famous fact; it is said to have contributed to the extreme complexity of James’s late-period style. (But why would oral composition make a writer’s prose more complex, rather than more simple? Again, Wershler-Henry does not address the question.) James got used to the sound of his Remington; when it was in the repair shop and he had to use a loaner, the new machine’s different sound drove him crazy. For many years after his death, his devoted typist, Theodora Bosanquet, claimed that she was still receiving dictation from him. Indeed, through her spirit medium she was informed that Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and John Galsworthy, all as dead as James, also wanted to use her stenographic services.
Wershler-Henry tells us about William S. Burroughs, who wrote in certain of his novels—and may have believed—that a machine he called the Soft Typewriter was writing our lives, and our books, into existence. We also hear about Jack Kerouac, who typed “On the Road” on a roll of paper so that the job of changing the paper would not interrupt him and thrust him back into the world’s inauthenticity. Kerouac was a fast typist—a hundred words a minute. Two weeks after starting “On the Road,” he had a single single-spaced paragraph a hundred and twenty feet in length. Scholars disagree as to whether the scroll was shelf paper or a Thermo-fax roll or sheets of architect’s paper Scotch-taped together. As with Burroughs, Kerouac’s relationship to the typewriter was heavily mediated by drugs. He would buy nasal inhalers, pry them open, and eat the Benzedrine-soaked paper within, followed by a chaser of coffee or Coca-Cola. Don’t run to the drugstore. They’ve changed the formula.
= = = = = = =
The Typing Life - How writers used to write - by Joan Acocella
Many of the early inventors of the typewriter thought that what they were inventing was a prosthetic device for the blind. Why would ordinary writers need a writing machine? They had pens. Eventually, it became clear that such a mechanism could benefit the seeing, too, but, as we find out in “The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting” (Cornell; $29.95), by Darren Wershler-Henry, a professor of communication studies in Ontario, almost two centuries, roughly the eighteenth and the nineteenth, passed before that hope was realized. There was no single moment of discovery, no lone inventor crying “Eureka!” in a darkened laboratory. On the contrary, historians estimate that the typewriter was invented at least fifty-two times, as one tinkerer after another groped toward a usable design. One early writing mechanism looks like a birthday cake, another like a pinball machine. One was almost eight feet tall; another, a Tyrolean entry, was whittled largely from wood. Until about the eighteen-thirties, all typewriters lacked a keyboard, and when they got one it was usually modelled on that of the piano. Nor did they have a ribbon. That didn’t make its appearance until 1841; in most earlier machines the keys were inked by rollers or carbon paper.
. . .
Wershler-Henry follows the fortunes of the typewriter into the twentieth century, with special emphasis on the role of women in the story. In the beginning, few people imagined that anyone would compose at the machine. The user of the typewriter would be an amanuensis—in other words, a secretary—taking dictation from another person. Accordingly, in the early days the word “typewriter” was used to mean not just the machine but the person plying it. That person, the Remington folks assumed, would be a woman. (The flowers printed on the casing of the early models were to make the mechanism seem friendly to the weaker sex.) Remington’s prediction was correct. It was often as typists that women poured into the professional workforce at the turn of the century. By 1910, according to the Census Bureau, eighty-one per cent of professional typists were female. Guardians of the social order warned that this development would have baleful consequences. It would unsex women; it would spell the end of the American family. They were right, in part. Together with other social changes, the availability of typing jobs no doubt did weaken the family’s hold on women. As for unsexing them, the effect was the opposite. Wershler-Henry documents the entry of the “typewriter girl” into the iconography of early-twentieth-century pornography. He also gives us illustrations, from the so-called Tijuana Bibles, dirty comic books produced in Mexico, starting in the nineteen-thirties, for the American market. In one panel, a three-piece-suited executive, staring at his secretary’s thigh, says, “Miss Higby, are you ready for—ahem!—er—dictation?” Such a situation did not lead swiftly to Miss Higby’s empowerment, but for a woman to have a job, any job, outside the home was part of the humble beginnings of twentieth-century feminism.
. . .
Nietzsche used a typewriter. This is hard to imagine, but in the effort to stem his migraines and his incipient blindness—symptoms, some scholars say, of an advanced case of syphilis—he bought one of the new contraptions. So did Mark Twain, and he was the first important writer to deliver a typewritten manuscript, “Life on the Mississippi,” to a publisher. Henry James also had a typewriter, and a secretary, to whom he dictated. That is a famous fact; it is said to have contributed to the extreme complexity of James’s late-period style. (But why would oral composition make a writer’s prose more complex, rather than more simple? Again, Wershler-Henry does not address the question.) James got used to the sound of his Remington; when it was in the repair shop and he had to use a loaner, the new machine’s different sound drove him crazy. For many years after his death, his devoted typist, Theodora Bosanquet, claimed that she was still receiving dictation from him. Indeed, through her spirit medium she was informed that Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and John Galsworthy, all as dead as James, also wanted to use her stenographic services.
Wershler-Henry tells us about William S. Burroughs, who wrote in certain of his novels—and may have believed—that a machine he called the Soft Typewriter was writing our lives, and our books, into existence. We also hear about Jack Kerouac, who typed “On the Road” on a roll of paper so that the job of changing the paper would not interrupt him and thrust him back into the world’s inauthenticity. Kerouac was a fast typist—a hundred words a minute. Two weeks after starting “On the Road,” he had a single single-spaced paragraph a hundred and twenty feet in length. Scholars disagree as to whether the scroll was shelf paper or a Thermo-fax roll or sheets of architect’s paper Scotch-taped together. As with Burroughs, Kerouac’s relationship to the typewriter was heavily mediated by drugs. He would buy nasal inhalers, pry them open, and eat the Benzedrine-soaked paper within, followed by a chaser of coffee or Coca-Cola. Don’t run to the drugstore. They’ve changed the formula.
