For Whom the Margin Bell Tolls
During a recent episode of autumn cleaning, while rummaging through the old footlocker and vintage suitcases that had collected thick layers of dust on the unfinished concrete of my basement floor, I opined to an audience of no one about the suspect organizational principles that led to my storing a decade of writing—from high school through graduate school—under a workbench strewn with home-maintenance paraphernalia. I had saved reams of reports, journalism assignments, workshop poems, and personal essays, a cache of productivity that captures something of the striving young person I used to be. But why? To what end? Two sentences into my sophomoric typewritten report “A Forest of Symbolism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,” I had to slide it back into the manila envelope marked 1991, firmly reclasp, and pretend it was authored by one of my two kids. Scant paper evidence of their education exists beyond the precious construction-paper crafts that my wife and I excavated from their backpacks seemingly every week of elementary school. They were plugged into online learning and required to use a laptop by the time their writing assignments got interesting.
Inside every writer surely there is an archivist, more or less methodical, careful to preserve history but, in my case anyway, hesitant to study it. I find I’m more interested in the artifacts themselves, especially the older ones, created when I used my grandma’s gray and forest-green 1953 Smith Corona, immaculately maintained, to bang out my masterpieces, the depth of the indentations the type slugs made on the paper commensurate with the conviction of my words. That typewriter started my small collection, which now consists of nine machines, including a 1929 Royal Model P in “lizard skin” brown that I found in a farmhouse antique store tucked alongside an Iowa cornfield and a tan 1964 Smith Corona Galaxie II given to me by a former longtime colleague. They hold many memories.
These are the machines that I heard in my mind as I pored over “Write Against the Machine,” our special section on technology and the author. The click of the rolling platen, the snap of the carriage return, the margin bell, distant sounds on a continuum that continues today. The typewriter of my youth forced me to be deliberate, if nothing else. How is the tech of today shaping our writing? “What hath God wrought,” as Samuel Morse tapped out using a new feat of electrical engineering in 1844. In the end it is you, not the machine, who writes the words. May it always be so.
