Great Writer, Great Machine

[Dave Monroe]

December 9, 2009
Great Writer, Great Machine
Posted by Thessaly La Force


Last Friday, Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter sold at Christie’s for a
staggering $254,500 to an anonymous American collector. “I have typed
on this typewriter every book I have written including three not yet
published,” McCarthy wrote in his authentication letter. Of the
machine—an Olivetti Lettera 32—Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer who
handled the auction for McCarthy, told the New York Times:

When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly
fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional,
frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to
Cormac’s typewriter. It’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss
Army knife.

Otherworldly fiction, okay, fine. Talismanic, sure. But is it me, or
does Horowitz sound genuinely unimpressed with the Olivetti Lettera
32? Because he really shouldn’t be. “He has all his metaphors right,
but he doesn’t understand design,” Paola Antonelli, the Senior Curator
of Architecture and Design at MoMA, told me this week. “Olivetti was a
great company. And actually—the Swiss Army knife is another
masterpiece!”

Designed by Marcello Nizzoli, the Lettera 22 (and its later
incarnation, the 32), was a lightweight and luxurious machine. Simple,
as Horowitz said, but purposely so. “Before the Olivetti, typewriters
had an old-fashioned look,” said Antonelli, “You could see the keys.
It was more decorated. Nizzoli basically changed the shape of
typewriters by taking a technological innovation—bending steel—and
applying it to typewriters. All of a sudden, they had a monochrome
look, a real smooth line.” Nizzoli’s first typewriter, created in
1948, was called the Lexicon. Encased in enameled aluminum, a light,
malleable metal, the machine has a glorious curve, like an inverted
Nike Swoosh. The Lettera 22, made two years later, is encased in
steel, and, though boxier, is more portable. Everything, from the keys
to the corners, feels as though it’s been smoothed down and rounded
over. The Lettera 32 (McCarthy's version) which was introduced in
1963, retains the same essential shape, but has square keys. Both the
Lexicon and the Lettera 22 are in MoMA’s permanent collection.

Horowitz also describes the Lettera as “frail-looking.” It may look
frail, but McCarthy used his machine for forty-six years and, in his
letter, added: “It has never been serviced or cleaned other than
blowing out the dust with a service station hose.” Most Olivettis have
a longer lifespan than today’s computers.

Olivettis were cherished by many other talented writers, too. Sylvia
Plath owned one; so did the playwright James Purdy; John Updike
favored a nineteen-forties variety; Ann Landers typed her famous
column for the Chicago Sun-Times on one; T. C. Boyle used one his
mother gave him until switching to a computer; and Thomas Pynchon
likes his so much he even mentions it on page fifteen of “Inherent
Vice.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/12/great-writer-great-machine.html