The New Yorker, April 9, 2007
THE TYPING LIFE
How writers used to write.
APRIL 9, 2007
KEYWORDS
ÒThe Iron Whim: A Fragmented History
of the TypewriterÓ (Cornell);Wershler-Henry,
Darren; Typewriters;Writers;Sholes,
Christopher Latham; QWERTY;Inventors,
Inventions
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 ÒThe Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of
TypewritingÓ (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 ÒEureka!Ó 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 didnÕt make its
appearance until 1841; in most earlier machines the keys were inked by rollers
or carbon paper.
As with all inventions,
however, people want to know who the ÒfatherÓ was, and that title is usually
awarded to Christopher Latham Sholes, from Milwaukee. It is strange and
pleasing that a machine famed for its cold efficiency issued from the hands of
this modest and distracted man. (ÒHe wore battered hats,Ó one historian says.
ÒHis trousers were inches too short.Ó) Sholes was apparently trying to invent a
mechanical paginator—a device that would number the pages of a document
sequentially—when he read an article on the typewriter in Scientific
American
and switched to that instead. The design he came up with was in many ways no
better than previous ones, and he had little part in the typewriterÕs later
history. He soon disowned the machine—refused to use one or even to
recommend its use. Nevertheless, his model was the first to be successfully
marketed. In the eighteen-seventies, the arms manufacturer E. Remington &
Sons was looking for a new product line; the Civil War was over, and rifles
were less in demand. SholesÕs typewriter seemed a good bet. In 1873, Remington
put it on the market, attached to a sewing-machine table, and made a bundle.
Sholes was also the
author of the so-called QWERTY keyboard, which, with a few modifications, is
still in use on our personal computers. (Look at the top row of your letter
keys.) A problem with early typewriters was that the key arms kept getting
stuck together. As the arm of the letter that had just been typed was falling
back into place, it would jam against the arm rising to type the next letter,
and the typist would have to stop and pry them apart. Reportedly, SholesÕs
partner delegated his son-in-law, the superintendent of schools for western
Pennsylvania, to draw up a list of the most common two-letter sequences in the
English language. Sholes then designed the keyboard so that these pairs were
separated, thus introducing a tiny delay between the activation of one letter
and the next. Wershler-Henry quotes an early history of the typewriter, Bruce
BlivenÕs ÒThe Wonderful Writing Machine,Ó to the effect that the QWERTY
keyboard was in fact Òconsiderably less efficient than if the arrangement had
been left to chance.Ó Nevertheless, people got used to it, and it was never
replaced.
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 ÒtypewriterÓ 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.) RemingtonÕs 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 familyÕs hold on women.
As for unsexing them, the effect was the opposite. Wershler-Henry documents the
entry of the Òtypewriter girlÓ 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 secretaryÕs thigh, says, ÒMiss Higby, are you ready
for—ahem!—er—dictation?Ó Such a situation did not lead
swiftly to Miss HigbyÕs empowerment, but for a woman to have a job, any job,
outside the home was part of the humble beginnings of twentieth-century
feminism.
Wershler-Henry covers
these matters in the first half of his book. But he is a scholar of the
postmodern persuasion, and, as he soon tells us, his interest is not in the
typewriterÕs history but in its Òdiscourse.Ó In the postmodern vocabulary, this
means the web of assumptions that collect around a cultural fact, with heavy
emphasis on notions that have been unmasked as na•ve and ridiculous by French
theorists. The names of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard
come up frequently in the book, and Wershler-Henry has a couple of
propositions, consistent with those menÕs theories, that he wants us to agree
with. First, he says, in the age of the typewriter—the twentieth century,
more or less—there was a mythology that what was typewritten was true, that the machine
somehow caused writers to bare their souls. This is a central idea of ÒThe Iron
Whim,Ó and it calls forth some of Wershler-HenryÕs most atmospheric prose: ÒThe
typewriter has become the symbol of a non-existent sepia-toned era when people
typed passionately late into the night under the flickering light of a single
naked bulb, sleeves rolled up, suspenders hanging down, lighting each new
cigarette off the smouldering butt of the last, occasionally taking a pull from
the bottle of bourbon in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.Ó
Wershler-HenryÕs second big point is that people believed that what was
typewritten was dictated, by a voice separate from the person typing; even
people composing at the typewriter thought they were receiving dictation from
elsewhere. Both these ideas are surprising—furthermore, they seem to
contradict each other—but Wershler-Henry never really tries to prove them
or reconcile them. He just asserts them, repeatedly. Never mind. They make him
think of good stories to tell us about the typewriter.
ILLUSTRATION: THIERRY GUITARD
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, ÒLife on
the Mississippi,Ó 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 JamesÕs late-period style. (But why
would oral composition make a writerÕs 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 machineÕs 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 ÒOn the RoadÓ on a roll of paper so that the job of changing the paper
would not interrupt him and thrust him back into the worldÕs inauthenticity.
Kerouac was a fast typist—a hundred words a minute. Two weeks after
starting ÒOn the Road,Ó 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 architectÕs paper Scotch-taped
together. As with Burroughs, KerouacÕs 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. DonÕt run to the drugstore. TheyÕve changed the formula.
Wershler-Henry does not
confine himself to human users of the typewriter. He also tells us about monkeys,
as in the hypothetical question ÒIf you put a bunch of monkeys in front of
typewriters, how long would it take them to compose the works of Shakespeare?Ó
This question originated as part of the theory of probability, and it has been
tested. According to Wershler-Henry, the world record for
Shakespeare-reinvention belongs to the virtual monkeys supervised by Dan
Oliver, of Scottsdale, Arizona. On August 4, 2004, after the group had worked
for 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey years, one of OliverÕs monkeys typed,
ÒVALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-Ô;8.t . . .,Ó the first nineteen
characters of which can be found in ÒThe Two Gentlemen of Verona.Ó Runner-up
teams have produced eighteen characters from ÒTimon of Athens,Ó seventeen from
ÒTroilus and Cressida,Ó and sixteen from ÒRichard II.Ó Did these monkeys get
federal funding?
Wershler-Henry discusses
canine typists as well. In the nineteen-sixties, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, a
daughter of Thomas Mann, trained her English setter, Arlecchino, to type with
his nose on a specially constructed electric typewriter. After about a year,
and many dispensations of raw hamburger, Arli could type twenty simple words.
He made a lot of typos, though, and when Borgese tried to induce him to record
his own thoughts, without dictation, he got discouraged and started smacking
the machine with his paw. Borgese sent some sheets of ArliÕs typing to a poetry
critic, who wrote back that the dog had Òa definite affinity with the
ÔconcretistÕ groups in Brazil, Scotland, and Germany.Ó
It is a shame that Wershler-Henry, so
willing to generalize about our experience with the typewriter, does not spend
much time on the difference between that and our relationship to the personal
computer. Consider, for example, our physical involvement with the
typewriter, which stands in relation to our connection with the P.C. as a
fistfight does to a handshake. On the P.C., we use the same typing skills that
we used on the typewriter, but the contact is not the same. We run our fingers
lightly over the keys, making a gentle, pitter-patter sound. On the typewriter,
by contrast, we had to stab, and the machine recorded our action with a great
big clack. We liked that. (As Wershler-Henry tells us, a silent typewriter was
put on the market in the nineteen-forties, and nobody wanted it.) The noise
told us that we had achieved something. So, in larger measure, did the carriage
return—another line done!—and the job of changing the
paper—another page done!
Which brings us to the
white page. MallarmŽ spoke of the uncertainty with which we face a clean sheet
of paper and try, in vain, to record our thoughts on it with some precision. As
long as we were feeding paper into a typewriter, this anxiety was still present
to our minds, and was revealed in the pointillism of Wite-Out, or even in the
dapple of letters that were darker, pressed in confidence, as opposed to the
lighter ones, pressed more hesitantly. A page produced on a manual typewriter
was like a record of the torture of thought. With the P.C., the situation is
altogether different. The screen, a kind of indeterminate space, does not seem
violable in the same way as the page. And, because what we write on it is so
effortlessly and undetectably erasable, the final text buries the evidence of
our struggle, asserting that what we said was what we thought all along.
Wershler-Henry suggests that the P.C.—with some help from Derrida and
Baudrillard—ushered us into a world in which the difference between true
and false is no longer cause for doubt or grief; falsity is taken for granted.
I donÕt know if he was thinking about the spurious perfection of the
computer-generated page, but it would be a useful example.
Something else to think
about is the effect that the computer, with its astonishing capabilities, has
had on us as writers. Take just one example: the ease of moving a block of
text. Highlight, hit control X, move cursor, hit control V, and, presto, that
paragraph is in a new place. Of course, we were able to move things in
typewritten text, too, but all that business with the scissors and the tape
made us think twice, and maybe it was wise for us to hesitate before changing
the order in which our brains produced our thoughts. In recent years, I have
read a lot of writings that seemed to say, ÒThis paragraph is here because it
seemed an O.K. place to shove it in.Ó Furthermore, by allowing us to move text
easily, computers influence us to write in movable units. In the novel that won
BritainÕs Booker Prize last year, Kiran DesaiÕs ÒThe Inheritance of Loss,Ó
there is a line space, indicating a break of thought, every three pages or so.
In ÒThe Iron Whim,Ó the average chapter length is eight pages, and much of the
book is simply a miscellany, a collection of anecdotes. (The subtitle, ÒA
Fragmented History of Typewriting,Ó is accurate.) This gives it a light,
less-holy-than-thou tone, in the manner of much postmodern scholarship. ÒI
donÕt trust any idea of truth,Ó Wershler-Henry seems to say, Òand IÕm not going
to pretend to.Ó
But in the cool climes
of the book there is one burning ember, and that is the notion that typewriters
made writers feel they were being dictated to. Wershler-Henry returns to this
idea again and again. He says that not only Burroughs but also Paul Auster and
others felt haunted, controlled, by their typewriters. This makes sense, if
only as a modern version of an ancient poetic theory. (The muse spoke to
Virgil; the nightingale spoke to Keats; the typewriter spoke to us.) It may
also be a species of wish-fulfillment. Most writers donÕt know where their
ideas come from, or whether they are any good, really. How nice, then, to
imagine that they were produced by some independent agency, which, if rather
spooky, seemed to know what it was doing. In all this, however, I think that an
important factor is the sheer sound of the typewriter, that reiterative
click-clack. In his catalogue of typewriter-haunted authors, Wershler-Henry
leaves out one interesting example, the heroine of Muriel SparkÕs first novel,
ÒThe ComfortersÓ (1957). This woman, Caroline, a literary critic, has recently
converted to Catholicism (as did Spark), and she is undergoing a sort of
religious crisis. One night, she is wondering whether something she did will
offend her friend Helena:
On the whole she did not think there
would be any difficulty with Helena.
Just then she heard the sound of a
typewriter. It seemed to come through the wall on her left. It stopped, and was
immediately followed by a voice remarking her own thoughts. It said: On the
whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena.
Soon, this is happening
all the time. Spark writes a sentence, then Caroline hears a voice saying the
same sentence, together with the sound of a typewriter. This, of course, is an
excellent way of casting the narrative into modernist Òreflexivity,Ó
spotlighting the inventor behind the illusion. But, as CarolineÕs experience is
repeated, it doesnÕt so much de-realize the novel as make it more real—a
transcript of spiritual experience. CarolineÕs sense that her story is being
written as she lives it becomes an analogue of the old problem of
predestination versus free will, and the click-clack of the typewriter becomes
the pulse of fate, like the ticking of a clock or the pounding of PoeÕs
tell-tale heart. How we wish it would stop! And if it stops weÕre dead. The
typewriter fed into that story. Now that itÕs gone, what will writers think up
to make their lives exciting? ♦
May
4, 2007
Book Review: The Iron
Whim
The Iron Whim A
Fragmented History of Typewriting. By Darren Wershler-Henry. Illustrated. 331
pages. $29.95. Cornell University Press.
While incarcerated in a
madhouse in mid-18th-century England, Christopher Smart scribbled a poem
suggesting that God was "punching" words onto the blank page of his
imagination. Two centuries later, William S. Burroughs imagined the Soft
Type-writer, a demi-urge that writes each of us into being and controls our
behavior. In "The Iron Whim," Darren Wershler-Henry insists that,
until quite recently, the act of typewriting exercised a sinister influence
over our lives. Just because Smart and Burroughs were paranoid, he suggests, it
doesn't mean their typewriters weren't out to get them.
The typewriter, of course,
didn't exist in Smart's time. But its precursors - movable-type presses, windup
text-producing automata, prosthetic writing devices for the disabled, document
duplicators like the "polygraph" used by Thomas Jefferson —
were as much a product of the Enlightenment as the notion that society should
become an administered utopia, with individuals adjusting themselves to its
immutable norms. Even before the typewriter was invented, Wershler-Henry claims,
its "logic" enforced a disciplinary regime, modifying "our
behavior, our social structures and our very sense of ourselves." Until
I.B.M. introduced a proportionally spaced typewriter in 1941, each character on
a type-written page - whether typed using the 1843 Patent Printer (considered
the first American typewriter) or the 1870 "writing ball" invented by
Pastor Rasmus Hans Johann Malling Hansen, head of an institute for the deaf in
Copenhagen - occupied precisely the same amount of space.
Herein lies the crux of
Wershler-Henry's argument: the monospaced typewriter implicitly divides each
blank sheet of paper up into a series of cells on a grid, which is "the
essence of the disciplinary structure that typewriting applies not only to
typewritten texts but also to... larger society, adapting the world to its exigencies."
Come again? Here the influence of Foucault, in particular his book
"Discipline and Punish," is apparent. According to Foucault,
discipline — a mode of social power that seeks to modify our attitudes
and behavior in ways that make us more productive - worked subtly through
social institutions. In factories and prisons, the "technologies" of
discipline (now known as time-and-motion studies, ergonomics and so on) broke
all human tasks down into the smallest divisions of time and movement; once
internalized by workers and prisoners, such discipline supposedly made them
more manipulable.
Thanks to these
technologies, Foucault lamented, the Enlightenment dream of an administered
utopia had come to pass. Likewise, although the first usable typewriter wasn't
manufactured until 1873, by the firearms producer E. Remington & Sons, the
logic of typewriting, Wershler-Henry writes, has shaped "not only written
documents but also bodies, workplaces and practices, institutions and
politics." Thanks in part to typewriting, society itself became an
invisible prison, each of us contentedly occupying one of the cells in its
grid.
Wershler-Henry, a professor
of communication studies in Canada, seems particularly exercised by
touch-typing, which requires that practitioners not only memorize every aspect
of the illogical qwerty keyboard but also position their bodies vis-ˆ-vis the
desk and typewriter just so. (In high school, he notes rather smugly, "I
wasn't in the typing class, and still can't touch type," though he's happy
to pass along a tip about how to turn a sharpened pencil and the H slug of an
electric typewriter into "a small but dangerous missile launching
device.") But this is where the type bars, if you will, of
Wershler-Henry's thesis begin to collide and jam up. After all, the most famous
operator of one of Malling Hansen's machines was perhaps Foucault's greatest
influence: Friedrich Nie-tzsche, who once typed that "the writing ball is
a thing like me: made of iron/yet easily twisted on journeys."
Wershler-Henry attempts to read this plaintive bit of doggerel as evidence that
Nietzsche recognized that "typewriting blurred and complicated the lines
that Enlightenment thinking had drawn between body and machine," but this
exegesis is unconvincing at best.
The malign
influence of typewriting upon our behavior and our social structures remains
doubtful. When it comes to our sense of ourselves, however, Wershler-Henry may
be on to something. Among the book's many fascinating topics — America's
early-20th-century erotic fixation on the Type-Writer Girl; the link between
Remington's efforts to develop faster typists and the origins of domestic
engineering, via the real-life protagonist of "Cheaper by the Dozen";
the mathematical formula proving that no number of monkeys could randomly peck
out "Hamlet"; the 2004 flap over the special characters used on a
typewritten memo purporting to show that President Bush received preferential
treatment in the Texas Air National Guard - the most persuasive is the
persistence of the eerie feeling that we're not alone when we sit at the
typewriter. From a turn-of-the-century short story in which an author's
typewriter picks up signals from a ghost, to Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James's
Type-Writer Girl, who supposedly took dictation from James after his death, to
Paul Auster's illustrated book about his own haunted typewriter, the examples
pile up. As Burroughs discovered, when you compose at a typewriter, it's easy
to become one's own amanuensis, merely taking dictation.
So are we freer, more
ourselves, than we once were, thanks to the rise of the computer?
Wershler-Henry seems to think so. Unlike type-writing, a discourse whose rules
are determined "by mechanical devices and hierarchies," he writes
reassuringly, "computing is a discourse whose rules are determined by the
functioning of software and networks." But for anyone who has ever run
afoul of software and networks, this is cold comfort indeed.
Joshua
Glenn is co-editor of "Taking Things Seriously," a book of photos and
essays about everyday objects, to be published this fall. He is a regular
contributor to The Boston Globe's "Brainiac" blog.
This Magazine, Nov-Dec 2005
THE ANTIQUES WORDSHOW
BY
SUZANNE ALYSSA ANDREW
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MOLLY CREALOCK
ÒTypewriters may have been consigned to
the dustbin of history,Ó writes Darren Wershler-Henry in the introduction to
his new book from McClelland & Stewart The Iron Whim, Òbut their ghosts are
everywhere.Ó Tracing not only the historical, but also the spiritual,
socio-cultural, gendered and writerly significance of the old clickety-clack,
Wershler-Henry offers insights into what he calls our Òbizarre nostalgiaÓ for
the typewriter.
He describes typewriters as a Òsymbol for
a non-existent historical moment when it Ômeant somethingÕ to be a writer.Ó
Even though computers and laptops occupy the real estate of writersÕ desks, the
typewriter icon still finds its way onto innumerable sepia-toned book covers
and grainy writing workshop advertisements. Wershler-Henry calls it Òone of the
biggest visual clichŽs of our age.Ó
Wershler-Henry is a poet, editor,
cultural critic and university instructor, and his book is keyed with
references to star scholars such as Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson and Jean
Baudrillard, vestiges of the fact that The Iron Whim began life as a Ph.D.
thesis. Self-described as both a historical archeologist and a CSI buff,
Wershler-Henry was eager to expand his bookÕs scope. He gathered plenty of
research from beyond the dusty library stacks, including an extensive eBay
survey, comics, typing manuals and an analysis of typewriters in pop culture,
TV, art and literature. ÒI wanted to write something that would be accessible
to people interested in cultural history,Ó he explains over a lattŽ in TorontoÕs
Annex district.
Indeed, the book gives equal space to
postmodernist academic theories on typewriting-as-discourse and contemporary
commentary by writers such as Paul Auster, David Sedaris, Henry James and
Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps the most culturally revealing section, however,
involves Wershler-Henry linking the trajectory of women in the workforce and
the rise and fall of the typing pool. ÒWomen typists came to be seen as
mechanical entities where the typewriter meant both the person typing and the
machine itself,Ó he says. According to Wershler-Henry, typewriters not only
were sexualized as a result—proof of which can be seen in the crude illustrations
of some Tijuana Bibles he uncovered—but it also became impossible to
disentangle the roles of dictation, typist and machine.
In the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, when mysticism and science captured the cultural imagination, this
particular confluence of roles resulted in the widespread belief that the
typewriter was a spiritual medium. ÒThere are dozens of stories of haunted
typewriters,Ó Wershler-Henry explains, pointing to the fact that Henry JamesÕs
typist took dictation from the Modernist writer for many years after his death,
first through a psychic and later on her own.
While Wershler-Henry observes that sci-fi
writer William Gibson uses eBay as a Òshamanic induction device,Ó the
ghost-in-the-machine mysticism of the typewriter era has been replaced with a
powerful nostalgia. Wershler-Henry documents the collection and sale of
valuable antique typewriters available online, with sample listings for myriad
rare vintage Smiths, Remingtons and Underwoods. Each ÒVintage 1913 Oliver
Typewriter #9 UnusualÓ or ÒLot of 5 IBM Typewriter Font BallsÓ are relics whose
only function is to Òserve as signs for the passing of time.Ó
As for the answer to the inevitable question:
no, Wershler-Henry did not pound out The Iron Whim on an IBM Selectric,
accumulating the ubiquitous pile of crumpled papers in the process. ÒIt would
have been hell,Ó he explains. ÒThe way that I write is profoundly influenced by
not just writing on a computer, but on a networked computer.Ó Wershler-HenryÕs
PowerBook has a wireless internet port providing ready access to information
via the latest invisible medium, which for now is haunted only by spam.
http://www.bookbuffet.com/wphim
After each
holiday season my mother-in-lawÕs birthday comes up rather quickly, and I seem
to find myself scrambling to find something to give her. What a joy it was to
discover The Iron Whim by Darren Wershler-Henry.
My
mother-in-law is in her 80Õs now, but for years during the war she served as the
executive assistant to high ranking military personal. Back then she was called
a secretary, and she took short-hand using the Pitman shorthand method. She
typed all the documents and correspondence in 6 copies with carbon paper in
between each sheet on a black Underwood typewriter. Typos of course were a
nightmare!
She laughs
now when she describes how as a young, eager employee she would cringe at the
fact that her boss had a tendancy to mumble and face away from her while he
dictated, preferring to look out the window into the military courtyard. I
guess she developed the intuitive ÒradarÓ of Corporal OÕReilly in M.A.S.H., but
unlike the movie/television character, she would be terrified to ask her gruff
boss to repeat anything. So if she made a mistake typing the shorthand dication
into letters or memos, the work involved making necessary revisions using the
old fashioned typewriters was horrendous — a far cry from our editing
techniques today on computers with word processing software!
The
Iron Whim goes into the amazingly rich history of the humble iron
work-horse. It is loaded with fascinating tidbits. Did you know that Henry
James became so accustomed to the sound of a typist when he composed that he
could not even begin the creative process without someone hammering away on a
machine to create the familiar background noise! [Picasso transported a cage of
pigeons whereever he lived in order to work amidst their gentle cooing, and
W.C. Fields required that a garden sprinkler splash his bedroom window so that
he could sleep — so there must be a connection between the repetitive
rhythms in sounds that feed the creative process.]
It is
fascinating now to realize how the typewriter actually shaped the creative
writing process for two centuries, when typewriting was writing
and effected its usersÕ behavior and thought process.
One of the
prolific journalists in the early days at The New Yorker was A.K.
Liebling, who was famously able to come in, sit down to his desk and type out
perfect copy for his daily deadlines, requiring no re-writes, no revisions.
Colleagues claimed there was a direct connection between his mental processes
and the keys.
And what
else could we imagine Grahme Greene using to compose his correspondance letters
from international locations back to London, which was also the instrument used
to compose all his novels? He dragged the same typewriter in his suitcase
everywhere.
Interestingly
enough, Darren Wershler-Henry is Assistant Professor of Communications Studies
at Wilfred Laurier University. He is an authority on communications and
technology-related issues. This book would interest people in the technology
sector, or communications sector.
And my mother-in-law? Well, she
still types all of her letters, finding it easier than holding a pen with her
arthritic fingers, and her Smith-Corona sits proudly at the foot of her dining
room table with a pink towel on it, (that the cat often sits on top.) I tried
for some while to get her to use an old laptop, but she didnÕt like the feel of
the keyboard. Somehow I canÕt imagine her using anything else.
Canadian Literature,
Winter 2007 - #195
Iron Keys
Darren Wershler-Henry (Author)
The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History
of Typewriting. McClelland
& Stewart
Reviewed by Karl E. Jirgens
Darren Wershler-Henry
offers astute perspectives on the history of the typewriter and its role in
shaping communications and literature. He covers the invention of the
typewriter and its influence on diverse authors including Henry James, Charles
Olson, and Paul Auster. For example, Wershler-HenryÕs examination of Tristan
Tzara, Brion Gysin, and William BurroughsÕ application of the cut-up method,
along with CronenbergÕs film adaptation of Naked Lunch readily reveals the
profound cultural influence of the typewriter. Wershler-HenryÕs interest is in
typewriting, discourse, and our perceptions of ourselves. The Iron Whim is a bricolage on the nostalgia that
inhabits typewriting, creativity, and social constructions of truth.
Marshall McLuhanÕs maxim
that Òthe medium is the messageÓ informs perceptions presented here.
Wershler-Henry comments on the title to this book by acknowledging McLuhanÕs
chapter ÒInto the Age of the Iron WhimÓ in Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man. Aware
of McLuhanÕs delight in puns, Wershler-Henry discovered that ÒwhimÓ refers to a
capricious notion, a play on words, and any machine with a drum and connecting
radiating arms, including the typewriter. The Iron Whim includes insightful
references to prominent theorists including Foucault, and feminist thinkers
Gilbert and Gubar. Providing a history of the mechanical development of
typewriters, the book moves to human interaction including questions of
secretarial functions and dictation in business environments. Relationships of
authors such as Henry James with their amanuenses, arguably gave rise to
literary styles suddenly freed from restrictions of long-hand. The book illuminates
political economies involving female typists, but primarily discusses male
authors. In balance, perhaps more could have been offered on women writers who
have also worked with typewriters.
I found one of
the most rewarding chapters to be ÒThe PoetÕs Stave and Bar,Ó in which
Objectism and the poetics of Charles Olson are discussed with reference to
McLuhanÕs notion of technology not only as a prosthetic extension of the human
body, but as a vehicle for returning us to a Òpost-literate acoustic space.Ó
This key point resonates throughout the study in discussions of numerous
typewriting authors. Included are discussions of automatic writing, stylistics,
temporal efficiencies and emerging social truths with reference to Northrop
Frye, Mark Twain, and Jack Kerouac with his 120-foot typewritten scroll
featuring a single-spaced paragraph from On the Road. Wershler-Henry
analyses legal, military, and counter-cultural applications such as Samizdatpublishing
during the Cold War. The Iron Whim concludes with observations on the mechanics of
typewriters and the interface of the QWERTY keyboard with computer software,
while returning to questions of perceived social truths in reference to
contemporary electronic communications, including blogging. This book gestures
to but does not enter into typewritten concrete and visual poetry, but in his
acknowledgements Wershler-Henry promises to pursue such remarkable forms in his
next book. The Iron Whim offers incisive perceptions on the cultural impact of the
typewriter and is elegantly informed by the authorÕs own significant literary
accomplishments.
The Danforth Review
Canadian - twenty-first
century literature since 1999
January 2006
Type cast: Darren Wershler-Henry
explores
typewriting throughout history
Interview by Derek Beaulieu
Reading
Darren Wershler-HenryÕs The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of the Typewriter,
I looked up from the page, and saw, on the end table beside my couch, an old
Underwood No. 5 typewriter. When I originally spotted the machine at a garage
sale, I knew I had to own it, even though I didn't understand why. It just had
something to do with what a writer was supposed to be.
In
The Iron Whim, Wershler-Henry argues that the typewriter defines not only how
we write, but also what we write, who does the writing, and how we look upon
writing itself.
Despite
the fact that typewriters have become an antiquated form of communication, replaced
by personal computers, they are still icons of the writing life, part of the
romantic sepia-toned image of the struggling author ensconced at his desk,
surrounded by gray smoke, discarded drafts and frustration. The typewriter
however, is just as clearly associated with typing pools, secretarial positions
and even speed-typing competitions. It
is these images, and what
Wershler-Henry describes as the "haunted" relationship between
machine, dictator and "amanuensis" (the person who receives the dictation
and does the actual typing, receiving transcription from the dictator), that is
the focus of The Iron Whim (McClelland & Stewart, 331 pages, $29.99).
As
the Winnipeg-born writer, critic, editor and poet explains in the book,
inventors tried to create a writing machine for more than 200 years. Those
efforts eventually culminated in Christopher Latham Sholes's invention of what
we today recognize as the typewriter in 1866. Since that date, for the past 140
years, the typewriter has had a striking effect on how authors approach
writing. This is where The Iron Whim comes in. Wershler-Henry has focused not
so much on the history of the typewriter itself, but on the history of typewriting.
Wershler-Henry,
who teaches communication studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, is the author
or co-author of nine books, which include the tapeworm foundry, a book of
poetry nominated for the Trillium Award in 2000, and five books on Internet
technology and culture. With fellow poet Christian Bok, he co-authored the
infamous Virus 23 Meme (a meme is an idea, behaviour, style or usage that
passes from person to person in a culture
like a virus), which they
posted on Andy Hawks' Future culture mailing list in 1993.
Clearly,
Wershler-Henry is a computer man. He was drawn to write about the
history
of the typewriter and typewriting because of what he feels is a
"disconnection" between us and the typewriter. While we feel an
"incredible nostalgia for the typewriter," very few people
"recognize typewriting when they see it and, in fact, very few people even
own a typewriter." The typewriter as a tool has been completely replaced
by the personal computer, and its very form is antiquated. Instead, he argues,
we have an "intellectual and emotional investment in it as the symbol of
writing."
Collectors
have brought their hunt for old typewriters - like the one I have on my end
table - online. Strangely enough though, Wershler-Henry says, "a
typewriter is only valuable if it doesn't look like a typewriter. The late-19th
century, strange things are what collectors go nuts for."
"It's
always struck me as odd and improbable that people are invested in this.
Writers that still use typewriters are deliberately contrarian. It's a world of
computers."
Writing
The Iron Whim, which is based on his doctoral dissertation at York University,
enabled Wershler-Henry to understand how nostalgia "looks back on the way
that we no longer write and says that it was the correct way." As an
example, he said, "we are blinded to the media technology that is organizing
how we are writing now, we only recognize that influence after the technology
is gone."
Not
only is the typewriter indicative of our dependence on and blindness to technology,
it also reflected and defined gender roles in the workplace for decades. Wershler-Henry
explains that "the Industrial Revolution brought a massive amount of
paperwork memos, bills of lading, invoices for the goods that are circulating.
No longer were rows of clerks on stools sufficient. Women started to enter to
workforce in a very complex way."
"Typewriting
is associated with the suffragette movement and the independent woman, but on
the other hand, this figure is either alien and cold or a new sex-toy for the
male office workers of the world. Originally, the typewriter sales companies
sold the typist with the typewriter: she was part of the package." This
contradictory packaging of the typewriter with the typist in the case of the
suffragette, caused G.K. Chesterton to quip that "women refused to be
dictated to and went out and became stenographers."
It
is also ironic that the 1930's romantic image of a journalist sitting long into
the night, with his suspenders down and a bottle of bourbon in the desk drawer,
has come to represent unalienated, direct, honest writing. Only a few decades
earlier, the typewriter was not seen as the symbol of writing; the pen was the
direct mode of communication. Typing was seen as an inferior mechanical
process. Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood, once infamously dismissed the
work of Beat generation author Jack Kerouac's On The Road saying "that
isn't writing, it's typing."
As
Wershler-Henry and I spoke over the telephone, we recreated the
dictator-transcriber role. I frantically attempted to speed up my typing to
make sure my transcribing of our conversation on my computer keyboard kept up
with his admission that "I can't type - I've never been able, I've
never taken a typing class. I've tried to teach myself ever since the third
grade, and now I'm an insanely fast hunt-and-peck two-finger typist."
Like
so many writers today, however, Wershler-Henry is hunting and pecking on
digital technology that not only records but links him to information from
anywhere in the world. "My own writing is structured around the computer.
Not only do I write on a computer, it's a network computer and can access the
Internet and the hundreds of feeds that come into my path at any given moment.
These are the terms under which I write now - it would be difficult to consider
it any other way."
derek beaulieu is the
author of several books of poetry (with wax Coach House, 2003; Frogments from
the Frag Pool Mercury, 2005; fractal economies Talonbooks, 2006). His poetry
and artwork has appeared extensively in magazines and galleries across Canada.
He recently co-edited Shift & Switch: new canadian poetry (Mercury, 2006).
He lives, with his young daughter, in Calgary where he is Administrative
Director at The New Gallery, an artist-run centre.
Times
Higher Education, 10 August 2007 History
Monkey about
with a hunt-and-peck history
10 August
2007
John Sutherland
The Iron Whim
This book is a meditation
on the cultural significance of the typewriter. The machine, a vital component
of 20th-century history, has become, with alarming abruptness, "an object
of nostalgia" in the 21st. As Darren Wershler-Henry observes, its Homeric
epithet is no longer "office", "portable" or
"electric" but (on eBay, notably) "vintage". Old
technology.
The machine was variously
named over the century and a half of its supremacy: polygraph, pantograph, plume
kryptographique , mechanical typographer, Schreibkugel (the
philosopher Nietzsche's preferred term), writing automaton and a dozen other
things. All are unsatisfactory. The eventual name "typewriter" is
similarly so. Nor, mysteriously - and inconveniently - has it ever (by analogy
with that other ubiquitous, and still triumphant, machine) been abbreviated to
"TW".
As Wershler-Henry points
out, for much of its history, the word "typewriter" irritatingly
confused machine and operator. "Typist", "secretary" and
"stenographer" are, in various ways, also unsatisfactory.
Wershler-Henry's book is
what Dr Johnson would call "a loose sally of the mind" - elegantly incoherent.
It offers a disconnected series of epigrams and Shandean digression. The
titular "whim" is borrowed from Marshall McLuhan. One of the word's
remotely obsolete meanings, the media guru gleefully discovered, is
"wheel". McLuhan also (as Wershler-Henry seems not to have picked up)
alludes to the jokey locution "whim of iron".
Among impressive erudition
(on the transformation the typewriter brought about in the White House of
Theodore Roosevelt, for example) there are small pockets of ignorance in The
Iron Whim . Wershler-Henry seems, surprisingly, not to have read Walter
Benjamin's seminal essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction". There is a yawning gap in the index between "Benedict,
H. H." and "Bennett, William R. Jr".
The author is an assistant
professor in the communications studies department at Wilfrid Laurier University.
His courses must be fun but, one suspects, immethodical - whether to a fault or
a virtue only his students can say. He is principally interested in the mystique
of typewriting (not, he insists, "typewriters"), and lets his mind
run freely, not to say wildly. The book's epigraph is J. G. Ballard's
apophthegm "It types us, encoding its own linear bias across the free
space of the imagination". It sounds awesome in a familiarly sinister
Ballardian way. But is it true?
Apropos of Paul Auster's
fantasia, The Story of My Typewriter , Wershler-Henry asserts
that "it's common for writers not only to attribute souls to their
machines but to attribute someone or something else's soul to their
machine". This may, conceivably happen in literary flights of the imagination,
but is it really "common"? "No one," Wershler-Henry
asserts, "is ever alone at a typewriter". The
Iron Whim is replete with this kind of whimsical nonsense. Perhaps it's
ironic.
Among the less
counter-commonsensical things in the book are the author's revisionary comments
on Christopher Latham Sholes, generally credited as the Henry Ford of the
modern typewriter. Wershler-Henry is deeply sceptical about the Sholesian
doctrine that the typewriter was a principal agent of liberation for women in
the late 19th century. He backs up his revisionism with a discreet dip into
"typewriter girl pornography". Milton's daughters were as exploited
by Qwerty as by the quill pen. More objectionably, they were invisibly
exploited, uncredited. Who can recall the Henry James novels that Theodora
Bosanquet typed for the "Master"? Or thinks about her nimble fingers
when reading them?
The typewriter, as
Wershler-Henry conceives it, was a necessary component in the 20th-century
tyrannies of Time and Motion and Taylorism - a conveyor belt that chained its
operators to the factory system as efficiently, and soullessly, as Charlie
Chaplin in Modern Times . Foucault is invoked to identify
the typewriter as a prime instrument of "discipline".
Wershler-Henry's book is a
glorious vindication of indiscipline. Particularly engaging is his digression
on, for example, how long it would take how many monkeys to reproduce the works
of Shakespeare. "Sooner or later," he blandly observes, "anyone
writing about typewriting has to deal with the monkeys." He himself does
the monkey business amusingly.
The Iron Whim is as
enjoyable to read as, manifestly, it was to write. One does, however, rather
wonder what kind of writing machine the author used - a detail that, unless
I've missed it, he never discloses.
John
Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe professor emeritus, University College London.
The Iron Whim: A
Fragmented History of Typewriting
Author -
Darren Wershler-Henry
Publisher - Cornell University Press
Pages -
344
Price - £14.95
ISBN - 9780801445866
BookLust
Some of you might know that I've got a weakness for black and white cards that are somehow related
to the subject of books or writing. Naturally I could not resist
this little beauty!
(Of course as cute as this photo
is, personally I'd go postal if I caught any little kids playing with my
precious Underwood...)
May 06, 2008
The Love of
the Iron Whim
Right now I'm reading and
enjoying The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting
by Darren Wershler-Henry. It's not a typical history of the typewriter –
more of a social and psychological study of this still very fascinating and
beautiful machine. Here's a link to a little article about the author,
in This
Magazine, and a link to the author's web site.
And why call it The Iron
Whim? Well, the author discovered that Marshall McLuhan in his In
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, called his chapter on the
typewriter "Into the Age of the Iron Whim." Apparently whim doesn't
just mean "a fanciful or fantastic creation; a whimsical object; a
capricious notion of fancy"; it also means "a
machine...consisting of a vertical shaft containing a large drum with one or
more radiating arms or beams." I think that the word whim is very
fitting for an old typewriter, don't you? An old typewriter is strong, sturdy
and mechanical, as well as being rather silly-looking clunker, don't ya think?
All the more reason to start a new category about the subject of typewriters
(which is beginning to become a bit of an obsession with me) called The Iron
Whim.
And speaking of said Iron Whim, did you know
that there's a fabulous little display going on right now at the Royal
Ontario Museum of early typewriters? We're not talking about the
run-of-the-mill clunky Underwoods (which I think are divine, by the way) we're
talking about heavy, clunky, very whim-sical machines
that look nothing like what we would imagine a typewriter to be. The display is
on until June 29th, so do pop in if you're even remotely intrigued. And even if
you don't go, do check out this video podcast of Martin Howard, the collector
of said bizarre typewriters.
And guess what?
I even took a few piccies of those Iron Whim beasties while
I was there...enjoy!
A Qwerty Kind of Love
It's true what they say –
love will strike you when you least expect it. Yes, I've been thinking of him
off and on for years, hoping that one day I'd find the right one, but deep down
inside I was doubtful of my chances. Then today, I saw him. All alone, off to
one corner, looking a little sad and tattered, but still self-assured and very
solid. I smiled. He did not respond. So I walked up to him, and caressed him
lightly with my fingertips, and that's when I knew it was all over for me.
Throwing caution to the wind, I called a cab and took him home.
