Cormac McCarthy’s Typewriter
Over at the Book Bench blog at The New Yorker, there is a posting about Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter, an Olivetti Lettera 32, being sold at auction for $254,500. Apparently, McCarthy typed every book he has written on this typewriter. I hope the fact that he sold the typewriter doesn’t mean that he plans to stop writing. But it wouldn’t surprise me. I was never attached to a typewriter in this way, but I wouldn’t give up my fountain pens for love or money. Alas, I don’t use my pens as much as I would like, but I always pull one out if I am suffering writer’s block. I also think my best writing has always been done with a fountain pen. My current favorite is a relatively inexpensive Aurora that I bought in Rome a few years ago. But if anyone is wondering what to get me for Christmas, an old Parker 51 would be lovely.
Do you have a favorite pen or typewriter? Has a particular pen changed your life? I would love to hear your writing stories.
I don’t know what became of it, but my family had a very old Underwood typewriter that looked a lot like this one. I can only assume it belonged to one of my parents from before they married each other, since I can’t think of any reason why my parents would have bought a typewriter.
I used to play with the typewriter as a kid — as I recall, even before I knew how to read and write. I remember believing that if I could only figure out how to relabel the keys, I could type in English according to the labels but what would appear on the paper would be in French. That is how I thought foreign languages worked.
When I was in fifth to eighth grade, we had moved to a neighborhood with a great many kids around my age, and we occasionally used the typewriter to create “newspapers.” They were about the neighborhood or about school, but I don’t remember a single story. I do remember the font page story of a “rival” newspaper put out by a girl who lived up the street. She was the only girl out of six (or was it seven?) children, and she was always left out of everything. Her older brother, my best friend at the time, was laughing so hard he was almost not able to tell me this, but she had published her own newspaper one time, and it’s front-page story, which was about the school we all went to, had a screaming headline that read — LAVATORY DOOR BROKEN!
I had a book and taught myself touch typing on the old Underwood, which was fortunate, since in high school, the college-bound students took mechanical drawing instead of typing and Latin instead of Spanish. This has never made sense to me, since in college I was expected to type all of my papers but never required to do any mechanical drawing. Also, it became even more ironic when I moved to New York, where so much information is provided in both English and Spanish. (La via del tren es peligrosa. No salga afuera.)
I kept a diary of sorts for awhile, typing the entries on the Underwood typewriter. I occasionally tried to write a short story. I was no good at detail, and one story I do remember writing went something like, “When the aliens landed, all the people of earth were amazed.” It may have been a little longer than that, but not much.
I don’t remember ever being required to type anything for high school, and my parents gave me a portable typewriter to use in college. I destroyed many of my personal documents and attempts at literature before I went away to Ohio State, and what little remained I destroyed before I “ran away” to New York after graduation. So nothing exists of what was typed on the old Underwood, and I assume the typewriter itself was disposed of when my parents sold the house and moved to an apartment. The only other item I remember almost as fondly as the old Underwood was a grandmother clock my mother inherited from one of her relatives It struck once for the fifteen-minute mark, twice for the half hour, three times for the forty-five minute mark, and then struck the hour (e.g, 11 times at 11 o’clock). Consequently, at night it woke everybody in the house every 15 minutes, and the ticking was so loud it was audible everywhere in the house as well, so as I recall, the first night it was wound and left to run was also the last night. I don’t know what every became of that, either.
Great story, David. And the Underwood is beautiful.