Typewriters knew things. Long before the word-processor actually stored information, many writers felt that their Remingtons, or Smith-Coronas, or Adlers contained the sum of their knowledge of eastern Europe, or the plot of their novel. A typewriter was a friend and collaborator whose sickness was catastrophe.

It’s surprising to recall that in college, in the late 1980s, I still owned a typewriter, along with my standard-issue Mac Classic. I must have lugged it with me from dorm room to dorm room each year–and to and from different apartments each summer–but I can only remember using it in one context, a poetry writing course my junior year. Typing my poems made me feel more like part of an ongoing tradition (itself relatively recent, of course), and it called for a precision and a decisiveness in the act of composition that were bracing. It pleased my senses, and bolstered my sense of making something real and substantial, to see and hear the keys strike the page with a physical, really a violent impact. My longest poem ran only a page and a half, so I wasn’t exactly suffering for my art. Anything longer I wrote on the Mac, but it felt like a more evanescent affair.
Maybe I hang out with too many writer types, but it seems to me the memory of typewriters sends lots of us into giddy, almost moon-eyed reverie. This lovely obituary of typewriter whisperer Martin Tytell, in the Economist, is no exception. I love how it finds room amidst the extraordinary facts of Mr. Tytell’s life to wear its heart on its sleeve about the magnificent machine:

Anyone who had dealings with manual typewriters–the past tense, sadly, is necessary–knew that they were not mere machines. Eased heavily from the box, they would sit on the desk with an air of expectancy, like a concert grand once the lid is raised. On older models the keys, metal-rimmed with white inlay, invited the user to play forceful concertos on them, while the silvery type-bars rose and fell chittering and whispering from their beds. Such sounds once filled the offices of the world, and Martin Tytell’s life.
Everything about a manual was sensual and tactile, from the careful placing of paper round the platen (which might be plump and soft or hard and dry, and was, Mr Tytell said, a typewriter’s heart) to the clicking whirr of the winding knob, the slight high conferred by a new, wet, Mylar ribbon and the feeding of it, with inkier and inkier fingers, through the twin black guides by the spool. Typewriters asked for effort and energy. They repaid it, on a good day, with the triumphant repeated ping! of the carriage return and the blithe sweep of the lever that inched the paper upwards.

Adding to Carrie’s thoughts about David Foster Wallace’s shocking suicide is my friend Erin Hogan, author of the land-art travelogue Spiral Jetta and the most impassioned Wallace reader I know.

It seems only fair to start a few words about David Foster Wallace by talking about myself. No other writer was as deeply invested in individual consciousness–and its ridiculously messy, digressive, splintering course–as DFW. The individual consciousness that is me received so many condolence calls about Wallace’s suicide on Saturday and Sunday that I began to feel I had some sort of friendship with him, though I never met him.
I was an early proponent of Infinite Jest, probably gifting it over the years to at least 20 people. As a former coworker wrote to remind me, I made familiarity with IJ a condition of employment in my department. I believed–and still believe–that no other novel comes close to engaging with the welter of sights, sounds, fears, smells, absurdities, and beauty of our time. It’s a sprawling, sickening, hilarious mess, and many people have taken it to be DFW’s definite work. And why wouldn’t they? At nearly 1100 pages, the last leg of them footnotes, it is a magnum opus. Others have pointed to his essays–on tennis, cruise ships, television, language, state fairs–where DFW seemingly harnessed his impulses to overwhelm and emerged with biting, incisive, and yet sympathetic views of contemporary life. They were essays in the truest sense, essais, attempts, tries to explain, to elucidate arcane sports skills or how vacation alienation points to a fundamental human pathos.
But I always found DFW most in his short stories. I should say immediately that I am not a natural fan of the genre. Even the best short stories seem to me too short. They don’t allow a reader an immersive experience, which is the kind of experience I am always looking for. DFW’s story collections–particularly Brief Interviews with Hideous Men–remain for me the epitome of the genre. They push the story form to its limits, though with mixed results. There are stories that are two sentences or two paragraphs long, stories that are answers to unvoiced questions, stories that include their own scaffolding of craft, stories in the second and third person, stories that are pure dialogue. They are stories of nearly unspeakable tragedy and horror, and stories of unbearable beauty. Sentences I first read in these stories–“Metal flowers bloom on your tongue” (“Forever Overhead”), “All this according to Dirk of Fresno” (which always makes me laugh, from “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko”), “His own forehead snaps clear” (“Think”)–are still with me.
I could say that I think Wallace loved language and detail and work, prolific work, all of which are clear in everything he did. But it is in his stories that his ethical agenda is clear. He’s not racking up these gruesome details to disgust us; he is empathetically portraying the worst that humans can offer to each other. He’s not using footnotes because it’s clever; he’s using footnotes because it they are the closest approximations in a literary form to the mass of nonlinear parenthetical thoughts that is the monkey brain of all of us doing its job. He’s not using that vocabulary of his to show off; he’s using it because the world is bursting to be described fully. I think I once heard him say that literature teaches us how to be human. By this I think he meant that the role of literature is to stretch our understanding of the hideous and the glorious; embrace the ambivalence, the mess; be attentive even when the stimuli are too much to bear; and understand that beneath all of this–these words, these betrayals and misdeeds, this ugliness and absurdity–lies the essentially human.
Maybe I didn’t hear him say this, but he probably wouldn’t care. I’m a reader, not a writer, so many more people will have a lot more intelligent things to say about him. But I cried when I heard the news. It was only then that I realized I was looking forward to growing old with him, hearing what he had to say about aging, Obama, the millennium, California, Rafael Nadal, cookies, anxiety, reality television, love, hybrid cars–everything under his sun. I am so grateful that he shared what he had, that he suffered through his struggles long enough to gift us with what he did.

Terry wrote about Spiral Jetta for Commentary’s blog here. This New York Times review found the book pretty great, too. Thanks to Erin for sharing her thoughts.

Patrick Kurp, whose blog I recommended yesterday, posted the other day about the necessity of gratitude and about W. H. Auden: “Auden’s instinct was to offer thanks for the gifts he, like all of us, had done nothing to deserve.” The post resonated with an almost throwaway sentence I read recently in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. This is very much how it is, reading Jones: peripheral details about peripheral characters, mentioned in passing, have the weight and pull of miniature stories in their own right. These stories might, in a half-sentence, be told, or they might be only gestured at. Through them a sense of the whole vast, connected world slips in, of its enormity and of the numberless threads of human plots therein. The effect, over pages and chapters, is not only of richness and plenitude but of a great humaneness–Jones’s and, the more you read of him, your own.
Jones’s novel is about slaves and slave owners in pre-Civil War America. In the passage I was reminded of, the young Virginian John Skiffington, who on principle owns no slaves, has just married a Northern woman. To the profound discomfort of half the wedding party, a cousin of the groom has made a wedding gift of a nine-year-old slave girl, Minerva. The next morning, her first in the house, Minerva rises early and tiptoes around her new surroundings.

The child now took more steps, passing her own room, and came to a partly opened door. She could see John Skiffington’s father on his knees praying in a corner of his room. Fully dressed with his hat on, the old man, who would find another wife in Philadelphia, had been on his knees for nearly two hours: God gave so much and yet asked for so little in return.

This fleeting narrative detour is lovely and painful at once: lovely for the humble and surprising act of gratitude it records, painful for being observed by someone not so fortunate. We don’t hear a lot more about the elder Mr. Skiffington, at least not as far as I’ve read, and that only makes this impromptu glimpse the more poignant.
Nobody else I’ve read is like Jones. He’s an unmatched teller of stories big and small–he’ll hook you on the stuff. His short stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children had me over the moon when I read and reviewed them two years ago. The stories and the novel deal with some of the darker aspects of human experience; they look at this material hard and straight on. But there are always points of grace amidst the pain that are the most indelible moments, and the whole enterprise is characterized by a generosity toward humanity that isn’t ever blindered or phony. Definitely a writer to be grateful for.

After ages and ages away, I’m going to ease back into this blogging business with a few good links.
• Are you reading Patrick Kurp’s literary blog Anecdotal Evidence every day? Patrick is a widely traveled and discerning reader whose posts I’ve begun to regard as almost a fourth daily meal: I leave them feeling not only delighted but somehow substantially fed. Here he is on the evolution of literary taste with age, on Chekhov and oysters, and on our newest poet laureate. Essential.
• An editor friend sends along Brian Doyle’s Kenyon Review essay on the art of saying no–and yes–to writers. Doyle is the editor of one of the most distinctive university magazines in the country, Portland Magazine from the University of Portland. Here’s a bit from Doyle’s essay:

Many magazines lean on a form letter, a printed note, a card, and I study them happily. The New Yorker, under the gentle and peculiar William Shawn, sent a gentle yellow slip of paper with the magazine’s logo and a couple of gentle sentences saying, gently, no. Under the brisker Robert Gottlieb, the magazine sent a similar note, this one courteously mentioning the “evident quality” of your submission even as the submission is declined. Harper’s and the Atlantic lean on the traditional Thank You But; Grand Street, among other sniffy literary quarterlies, icily declines to read your submission if it has not been solicited; the Sun responds some months later with a long friendly note from the editor in which he mentions that he is not accepting your piece even as he vigorously commends the writing of it; the Nation thanks you for thinking of the Nation; and the Virginia Quarterly Review sends, or used to send, a lovely engraved card, which is worth the price of rejection. The only rejection notice I keep in plain view is that one, for the clean lines of its limbs and the grace with which it delivers its blow to the groin.

In addition to its tales of rejection and acceptance–experienced from both sides of the editor’s desk–the essay is notable for containing this account of the author’s proposal to his wife:

She did say yeah, or I thought she said yeah, the wind was really blowing, and then she slapped her forehead and went off on a long monologue about how she couldn’t believe she said yeah when she wanted to say yes, her mom had always warned her that if she kept saying yeah instead of yes there would come a day when she would say yeah instead of yes and really regret it, and indeed this very day had come to pass, one of those rare moments when your mom was exactly right and prescient, which I often think my mom was when she said to me darkly many years ago I hope you have kids exactly like you, the ancient Irish curse.

“If my discoveries are other people’s commonplaces I cannot help it–for me they retain a momentous freshness.”
Elizabeth Bowen

I feel rather sorry for this guy, unable to derive a shred of pleasure from A Dance to the Music of Time and its minute observations from within of the English upper classes, even after shedding his Marxist convictions. I don’t imagine he’d care much for my current book A Legacy either: Sybille Bedford grew up and lived among the European aristocracy and cast a similarly cultivated eye on their wayss. Again he’d be missing the boat.
Powell and Bedford both look on their privileged bees and hives from a clear insider’s perspective, with all the understanding that implies and some of the sympathy. But they both also have plenty of ironic distance on these scenes and their absurdities. And they wouldn’t be successful satirists of the social scene if they didn’t also take seriously, and observe perceptively, the moral and emotional lives playing out within the teeming hive.
Bedford, a twentieth-century writer attending to a nineteenth-century scene, employs more ironic distance. She sends up her characters’ milieu and all their attendant mannerisms deliciously. One character is a bachelor living on the French Riviera who keeps pet monkeys that everyone speaks of as though they were badly behaved children, making the term “monkey” for a few pages ambiguous. His engagement to a young woman and visit to her starchy family in Berlin brings about the following passage that made me, a painfully self-conscious type, laugh out loud on the train to work yesterday about five separate times and again on the way out of the terminal.

Grandmama Merz eventually put two and two together.
“Is Melanie going to live in a house with monkeys?”
Fraulein von Tschernin, who had had a glimpse also of Julius, confirmed that this was part of her daughter’s radiant prospects.
“We’re not going to allow it,” said Grandmama.
“Herr Gehaimrat is fond of them too.”
“Monkeys are all right for bachelors,” said Grandpapa.
“I asked him whether he was going to have those brutes around for the rest of his life,” said Markwald; “and you know what he told me? Alas, very likely not, although they did live longer than dogs.”
“Dogs too?” said Grandmama.
“Flora’s Max brought one,” said Friedrich.
“Not in the house,” said Grandmama. “Flora told me.”
“What does one do with unwanted monkeys?” said Emil.
Grandmama pondered this. “He must give them away,” she said. “Hasn’t he any poor relations?”

An arrangement is eventually made with “a new kind of cageless zoo,” though Julius is “only just prevented from accepting the return present of a seal.”
The comedy is high when her view is long, but Bedford is just as canny when she gets up close to individual emotional life. The social, political, and historical forces that shape such life don’t care a fig for their victims–the novelist most adeptly makes this clear. But she cares herself.
The character we get closest to through the first three parts is Sarah, sister-in-law of the affianced Melanie, displacer of the monkeys. The following, roughly in regard to Sarah, is the sobering (or just numbing) perspective of having seen too much go by.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow… Life, in the neat sad dry little French phrase that bundles it all into its place, Life is never as bad nor as good as one thinks. La vie, voyez-vous, ca n’est jamais si bon ni si mauvais qu’on croit. Never as bad, never as good… When? At the instant of calamity, at the edge of fear? when the bad news is brought, and the trap felt sprung, or the loss strikes home? At low ebb, in tedium, in accidie? In the moments of renewal? the transfiguration of love, the flush of work, the grace of a new vision, the long-held now? Or later, when the doors shut, one after another, and regret moves in the heart like a steel coil? Never as good, never as bad, but a drab, bearable, half-sleep banked by a little store of this and that, subsiding after visitations and alarms, a drowsing, often not uneasy, down the years, an even-paced irreversible passage–life, the run of lives, the sum of life? Is it consoling? Is it the whole truth? Is it inevitable?

A few pages later, this character is in love.

Funny that while the fortunes of the sentence flicker, I am immersed in a second consecutive book whose grammatical units–sentences and paragraphs alike–are, one after the other, superlatively made. First it was Netherland, covered in my post yesterday. Now it’s Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy. Fifty pages in, I’m really quite awed. Here’s a sentence about the narrator’s well-to-do German grandparents:

While members of what might have been their world were dining to the sounds of Schubert and of Haydn, endowing research and adding Corot landscapes to their Bouchers and the Delacroix, and some of them were buying their first Picasso, the Merz’s were adding bell-pulls and thickening the upholstery.

And a paragraph that shortly follows:

They took no exercise and practised no sport; they kept no animals–except carriage horses–and none were allowed in the house. The caretaker couple kept a canary in their basement by the furnace, but no truffled nose had ever snuffed the still hot air upstairs, no padded paw had trod the Turkey pile, no tooth had gnawed, no claw ripped the mahogany and the plush, and there was a discreet mouse-trap set in every room. The Merz’s had no friends, a word they seldom used; they saw no-one besides the family, the doctor and an occasional, usually slightly seedy, guest asked to occupy the fourteenth place at the table. They were never alone; when it wasn’t the barber, it would be the manicure. Grandmama Merz had never taken a bath without the presence and assistance of her maid. They did not go to shops. Things were sent to them on approval, and people came to them for fittings. They never read. There was a smoking-room, and a billiard-room nobody used, but there was not so much as a courtesy library, and I cannot ever remember seeing a book about.

Dorothy Parker, a woman not easily scared, called A Legacy “almost terrifyingly brilliant.” I can only account for the terror in her reaction by imagining the encounter with a writer at least her equal for wit and incisiveness posed a threat. The encounter certainly brought out her own incisiveness; her critical comment on the novel (part of an Esquire group review of the best fiction of 1957) begins and ends with these three words. The book’s brilliance is evident from the first page, but, at least so far, it has me feeling merely appreciative.