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More on the topic of typewriters :

The Guardian blog responds to the news of McCarty's auction with a piece about other authors and their typewriters. Julian Barnes says :

I think you need the technology that suits the way your brain works. Sometimes you need your thoughts to go down your arm in what feels like a direct feed via pencil or felt-tip to paper, sometimes you require a more formal "sit up and address a machine".

When I tried writing on a computer, it felt an inert business. I had no relationship with the machine; whereas my IBM 196c makes a nice hum, as if it's saying quietly: "Come on, get on with it" or "Surely you can improve on that."

I also found that, while the myth of the computer was that it made everyone write at greater length, and under-correct, because on the screen and in neat print-out it looks more finished than it is, I found that I was constantly over-correcting, ending up with something too tight and unflowing for a first draft.

Another piece on the blog lists Will Self, Don DeLillo and Frederick Forsyth as more authors who use a typewriter.

Says Self :

Writing on a manual makes you slower in a good way, I think. You don't revise as much, you just think more, because you know you're going to have to retype the entire fucking thing. Which is a big stop on just slapping anything down and playing with it.

And Fredrick Forsyth definitely has a point when he says :

I have never had an accident where I have pressed a button and accidentally sent seven chapters into cyberspace, never to be seen again.

Worth browsing is the site myTypewriter.com :

Authors A-Z is an ongoing project featuring the lives, works, and typewriters of the most outstanding authors around the world. Created in 2004 by Kevin McGowin and Charles Gu for myTypewriter.com, the project is both a celebration and an exploration of writers and their writing machines. Consisting of more than 80 contemporary authors from Mark Twin to Ayn Rand, Authors A-Z is a growing project documenting the important role of classic typewriters played in the formation of literature master pieces.

May i just add the note, I used typewriters for many years ... and was Typex's best customer!

BTW, the image at the top is a sculture using old typewriters by Jeremy Mayer. More can be found here.

Postscript :

Worth reading also is George Tannebaum's post Tools vs Toys [via] :

Today, of course our tools are more sophisticated than typewriters. We can do sophisticated motion graphics and editing at our desks or on a plane. We can make type dance like Isadora Duncan on LSD. We can compose and record music. We can buy a $49 video camera and shoot stuff.

These are all things Mr. McCarthy can't do on his Olivetti. But they don't make us better than McCarthy. Because Mr. McCarthy's trade involves ideas.

So far no one has built a desktop app that produces those.

The Saddest Story Ever Told

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard." What could be more simple and declaratory, a statement of such high plangency and enormous claim that the reader assumes it must be not just an impression, or even a powerful opinion, but a "fact"? Yet it is one of the most misleading first sentences in all fiction. ... And if the second verb of the first sentence cannot be trusted, we must be prepared to treat every sentence with the same care and suspicion. We must prowl soft-footed through this text, alive for every board's moan and plaint.

Julian Barnes in The Guardian reminds me that it's high time to revisit Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, surely one of the best ... and most underrated novels in the English language and very much ahead of its time.

I couldn't remember the details of plot till I read Barnes' article, but I can remember all too well the sensation of the ground shifting beneath my feet. Unreliable narration? No author has done it better (though more recent authors Kazuo Ishiguro in Remains of the Day or Zoe Heller in Notes from a Scandal do it very well indeed).

Barnes points out that it is a novel which has strongly influenced other British authors. He mentions :

... fellow-writers who have been vocal in his cause, from Graham Greene to William Carlos Williams to Anthony Burgess.

And among the living? Well, here are two examples. About 10 years ago, while writing about Ford, I ran into one of our better-known literary novelists, whose use of indirection and the bumbling narrator seemed to me to derive absolutely from Ford. I mentioned this (a little more tactfully than I have stated it here), and asked if he had read Ford. Yes, indeed he had. Would he mind if I mentioned this fact in my piece? There was a pause (actually of a couple of days) before the reply: "Please pretend I haven't read The Good Soldier. I'd prefer it that way."

More recently, I was talking to Ian McEwan, who told me that a few years ago he'd been staying in a house with a well-stocked library. There he found a copy of The Good Soldier, which he read and admired greatly. A while later, he wrote On Chesil Beach, that brilliant novella in which passion, and Englishness, and misunderstanding, lead to emotional catastrophe. Only after publishing the book did he realise that he had unconsciously given his two main characters the names Edward (as in Ashburnham) and Florence (as in Dowell). He is quite happy for me to pass this on.

My money is on the unnamed author being Ishiguro! (If I'd been lucky enough to interview him, I'd have asked him just that question! Honest I would.)

The Good Soldier isn't at all an easy read, so I hesitate to tell you to rush out and buy a copy. I struggled to get into the book and tried several times before I managed it (a friend I lent it to said the same thing) but once the first few pages had passed, I found it one of the most satisfying novels I've ever read.

Barnes says Ford is not so much of a writer's writer (which he is often called) as :

... a proper reader's writer. The Good Soldier needs The Good Reader.

Am I recommending this book to you? No. Not unless you are a fan of the other British authors listed above and ready for the challenge. But I reckon it's essential reading for the novelist - established or budding!

Update :

How did the novel get its title when it isn't about soldiers or war at all? It was as the result of a joke, Gary Dexter reveals in the Telegraph.