Recalling the sound of my father’s writing

They thundered, those percussive strokes of my father’s fingers on his manual typewriter. This is my earliest and most enduring emblem of written language, and of dad’s verbal gifts. His Royal typewriter was a word engine: a gleaming black industrial mechanism, a factory of printing, hammering letters directly onto paper winding down below its shiny hood where the levers, rods, connecting pulleys and metal type lurked. It had a hood like a ’55 Buick and the innards of a knitting machine.

As dad wrote newspaper stories or worked on his books at night, the soft light from his gooseneck lamp seemed to pool around his concentration. I recall the poise of his hands above the home keys, attending the next flurry of prose. As I listened from my bed, the sound of those keys striking paper wafted upstairs to my room. The cadence of his certain thoughts punctuated summer twilights. It melded with the sprinklers and cicadas outside, every 10 or 15 words the typewriter’s little bell sending its carriage zippering back to drag a new line of words across the page from the opposing margin.

Four-bar rest: the nonsounds of pondering, then a few phrases murmured under his breath as he tested the next passage. More thunder, then another pause to backspace and X out a clinker. This was typing, not word processing; and typing was music. Keys hit paper, telegraphing letters down into the very floorboards through the metal legs of the typewriter table. The Royal had sharps and flats, bass and treble: a staccato space bar; the timpani capital letter shift; the triangle of the pinky finger making a question mark. It had sixteenth notes of familiar patterns and convenient phrasing: “the,” “is,” “without,” words which alternated hands allowing greater speed or swinging rhythm to accompany a jaunty thought. Boom, clatter-clatter-clatter, ta-ta-ta-ta-Boom. Ting.

Typewriting broke the silence of the house at bedtime. Stopping and starting, back and forth, the song of text proceeding out of silence – writing, dad was telegraphing to me, was something you worked at, tried and retried. It charged my fourth grade storytelling with the effort to be correct, clear, even stylish. And I wanted to type – fast. Stories written on a typewriter had more authority because they looked real.

His 40-year newspaper career bridged the evolution from lead type to computer layout, and downsizing from broad sheet to tabloid. Efficiency. If I was lucky, a visit to dad’s desk in the newsroom might include a walk down the hall to pick up lead type banner headlines left over from the prior day?s edition, awaiting smelting and a return to the Linotype machine as fresh ingots. This was alchemy: base metal turned to stories on paper by men who typed for a living. I filled my pockets with lead words.

My father introduced me to men in the newspaper’s composing room, typists with eye shades, fingers flashing above a keyboard appended to a machine the size of our furnace and just as hot. I watched in amazement as lead slugs were pounded out and sluiced into place, letters aligning themselves in reverse order line by line, paragraph by paragraph until a whole broad sheet of typeface had been assembled and positioned in the press. On a good day, visiting after deadline, I might be awarded a slug with my own name in 14-point letters and return to school with an artifact of publishing.

My own children have never used a standard typewriter, much less the classic Royal. As they peck their way through book reports, watching their words flicker on the computer monitor, writing is television. No heft. My laptop replaces a whole newsroom and composing room as it lays the illusion of publishing at my fingertips without weighing more than a few paragraphs of the old lead type. Hundreds of fonts; any size type; bold, italic, underlined and shadow; even color; justified margins reside in its circuitry.

It is the apotheosis of Gutenberg’s revolution. But it has changed the rhetoric of invention: this paragraph has no living history, no record of its clinkers, deletions or verbal heritage, only a current avatar. Every text file is a palimpsest; writing and editing is sleight of hand staging magical disappearing acts, as letters and words simply evanesce.

Without music. This is a synthesizer to the Royal’s piano, a sterile clicking that transmits words, phrases and sentences in identical timbre. The reverberant aural power of words, mechanically hammered onto the page with emphatic variations in speed and pressure, is missing. The laptop has no apparent moving parts – all circuitry, all plastic. No inky ribbon; no fingerprints. No Buick hood. No diesel. No percussion. No thunder. To my children,this is writing. And I can’t explain to them what they are missing.

But I will always remember the sound of real writing: the engine of my father’s words.

Todd R. Nelson is assistant editor of Hope Magazine in Brooklin.