The Sound of My Father’s Writing

By Todd NelsoncloseAuthor: Todd Nelson Name: Todd Nelson
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About: Todd R. Nelson has been a public and private school English teacher and administrator for 29 years, in schools in Cambridge, San Francisco, Chicago and Maine. Head of School at The School in Rose Valley (Pennsylvania).See Authors Posts (31)
 

By Todd Nelson

It sounded like thunder, the percussive strokes my father’s fingers made on his Royal manual typewriter. It is my earliest emblem of written language and a persistent mnemonic for dad’s verbal gifts. His typewriter was a word engine: a gleaming black mechanism, an industrial 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 or diesel power plant.

As Dad wrote newspaper stories or worked on his books at night, the gooseneck lamp arching over the keyboard, soft light 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 ten or fifteen words the typewriter’s little bell sending the carriage zippering back to drag a new line across the page from the margin.

Four bar rest: the nonsound of pondering, then a few phrases murmured under his breath as he tested the sound of the next passage. More thunder, then another pause to backspace and X out the phrase that didn’t work. It was typing, not word processing; and typing was music. Keys hit paper, telegraphing letters down into the floor boards through the metal legs of the typewriter table. The Royal had sharps and flats, bass and treble: the staccato space bar; the timpani shift to capital letters; the triangle of the pinky finger making a question mark. It had sixteenth notes of familiar patterns and convenient phrasing: ‘the’, ‘is’, ‘without,’ the letters of 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.

Writing 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 explaining through his typing, was something you worked at, tried and retried. It charged my fourth grade storytelling with the effort to be correct, clear, stylish. And I wanted to type — fast. Stories written on a typewriter had authority because they looked real .

His forty year newspaper career bridged the evolution from lead type to digital layout on the computer, 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 headlines left over from the prior day’s press run, 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 leaden words.

My father introduced me to his pals in the 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 sent to be 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 a primal artifact of publishing.

My own children have never used a standard typewriter. As they peck their way through book reports, watching their words flicker on the computer monitor, writing is television. No heft. This laptop of mine 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 reside in its circuitry; any size type; bold, italic, underlined and shadow; even color; justified margins. 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 deletions or verbal heritage, only a current avatar. Every text file is a palimpsest; writing and editing sleight of hand, 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 finger prints. No Buick hood. No diesel. No percussion. No thunder. To my children, this is typing; this is writing. But I remember the sound of real writing: the engine of my father’s words.

By Todd Nelson

Originally published in The Christian Science Monitor.