A Writer Remembers His First Loves
The Royal was an old, classic machine: Dull, jet black body; white keys. Built sturdy and dependable. I don’t know where my family acquired it -- did my grandmother buy it in the 1930s? did dad get it after WWII? did he buy it while attending college in the early 1950s? -- but I remember playing with it as a toy even before I learned to read and write. I fought my first dragons with that typewriter, took my first trips to the moon.
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Eventually, as I made more and more demands on the Royal’s time, my family bought me a Smith-Corona as either a birthday or Christmas present so the rest of the family could use the older typewriter when they needed it. The Smith-Corona was a dandy little machine in every sense of the word; a small portable with a very precise, almost fussy business-like air to it. The first published writing of mine came off that typewriter, but as precise as it was, it was too delicate. When I went into the army I left it for my brothers.
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I first met the IBM Selectric in 1965 at the New York World’s Fair. An elegant whore, the Selectric looked curvy and was designed to take a beating but despite its versatility possessed no soul. Our romance was an on again / off again affair: The Selectric taught me touch typing in high school, wrote my press releases when I was in army public affairs, secretly typed stories and scripts and cut mimeograph stencils when the brass wasn’t looking. For all that, I could never afford a Selectric on my own; after the army my employers provided typewriters for office use and the Selectric was their machine of choice.
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While in Korea I bought an Olivetti portable through the PX. My God, how I loved that machine! As dandy as a Smith-Cornona with all the elegance of the Selectric. The Olivetti moved me forward: My first sales came off that machine. But for all the beauty and joy it provided, the Olivetti proved to be too delicate; my heavy handed typing method (learned off the Selectric) wore out its workings too fast, too often.
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The company that made the Adler must have also made Panzer tanks during WWII. Of all the machines I owned, it was the best: Not the most beautiful, not the most elegant, not the one I loved the most, but the one that proved most dependable. Tough, almost brutal, it could withstand the punishment I pounded out on its keys. It was the last typewriter I owned, and of all the machines, the most faithful.
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Word processors? Computers? No love there. I met my first word processor during my last month in the army, a big machine the size of an office desk, horseshoe shaped with the operator sitting in the middle. It looked like it belonged on the cover of an old 1940s Astounding Stories, and even though I knew I would want one when they became cheaper and smaller, there was nothing to love there. It was a weapon, a tool.
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Of all the computers I’ve owned, the only one I keep fond memories of is the first one, the Frankenstein, a PC-clone the late Steve Gerber cobbled together for me out of the corpses of three other desktops. Even there the fondness is not for the machine itself but the friend who built it for me.
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Paper and pencils? Pen and ink? Funny, I do love them, but not the way one romantically loves a partner, but as one loves one’s mother. When I write by hand, legal pads (if employed) or collegiate notebooks (if working on my own) are my media of choice, with a passion for PaperMate Flair pens. I love the Flairs, but among pens they’re not my first love, my great love. There used to be a pen called the Expresso that every artist I knew fell in love with and lordie, how smoothly it flowed over paper, how easily it widened or thinned its line at the slightest application of pressure. But the Expresso is long dead and gone and while almost invisible, the Flair is still here, and the Flair is a good pen and even though it knows it’s not first in my heart, it does its job well.
© Buzz Dixon
