Collected Prose

roller twice, perhaps three times. I have taken it into the shop for cleaning no more than I have voted in Presidential elections. I have never had to replace any parts. The only serious trauma it has suffered occurred in 1979 when my two-year-old son snapped off the carriage return arm. But that wasn’t the typewriter’s fault. I was in despair for the rest of the day, but the next morning I carried it to a shop on Court Street and had the arm soldered back in place. There is a small scar on that spot now, but the operation was a success, and the arm has held ever since.
    *

    There is no point in talking about computers and word processors. Early on, I was tempted to buy one of those marvels for myself, but too many friends told me horror stories about pushing the wrong button and wiping out a day’s work—or a month’s work—and I heard one too many warnings about sudden power failures that could erase an entire manuscript in less than half a second. I have never been good with machines, and I knew that if there was a wrong button to be pushed, I would eventually push it.
    So I held on to my old typewriter, and the 1980s became the 1990s. One by one, all my friends switched over to Macs and IBMs. I began to look like an enemy of progress, the last pagan holdout in a world of digital converts. My friends made fun of me for resisting the new ways. When they weren’t calling me a curmudgeon, they called me a reactionary and a stubborn old goat. I didn’t care. What was good for them wasn’t necessarily good for me, I said. Why should I change when I was perfectly happy as I was?
    Until then, I hadn’t felt particularily attached to my typewriter. It was simply a tool that allowed me to do my work, but now that it had become an endangered species, one of the last surviving artifacts of twentieth-century homo scriptorus , I began to develop a certain affection for it. Like it or not, I realized, we had the same past. As time went on, I came to understand that we also had the same future.
    Two or three years ago, sensing that the end was near, I went to Leon, my local stationer in Brooklyn, and asked him to order fifty typewriter ribbons for me. He had to call around for several days to scare up an order of that size. Some of them, he later told me, were shipped in from as far away as Kansas City.
    I use these ribbons as cautiously as I can, typing on them until the ink is all but invisible on the page. When the supply is gone, I have little hope that there will be any ribbons left.
    *

    It was never my intention to turn my typewriter into a heroic figure. That is the work of Sam Messer, a man who stepped into my house one day and fell in love with a machine. There is no accounting for the passions of artists. The affair has lasted for several years now, and right from the beginning, I suspect that the feelings have been mutual.

     Messer seldom goes anywhere without a sketchbook. He draws constantly, stabbing at the page with furious, rapid strokes, looking up from his pad every other second to squint at the person or object before him, and whenever you sit down to a meal with him, you do so with the understanding that you are also posing for your portrait. We have been through this routine so many times in the past seven or eight years that I no longer think about it.
    I remember pointing out the typewriter to him the first time he visited, but I can’t remember what he said. A day or two after that, he came back to the house. I wasn’t around that afternoon, but he asked my wife if he could go downstairs to my work room and have another look at the typewriter. God knows what he did down there, but I have never doubted that the typewriter spoke to him. In due course, I believe he even managed to persuade it to bare its soul.
    *

    He has been back several times since, and each visit has produced a fresh wave of paintings, drawings, and photographs. Sam has taken possession of my typewriter, and little by little he has turned an inanimate object into a being with a personality and a presence in the world. The typewriter has moods and desires now, it expresses dark angers and exuberant joys, and trapped within its gray, metallic body, you would almost swear that you could hear the beating of a heart.
    I have to admit that I find all this unsettling. The paintings are brilliantly done, and I am proud of my typewriter for proving itself to be such a worthy subject, but at the same time Messer has forced me to