The Keys to Conan: Blood and Thunder on the Underwood No. 5
Posted by David Alastair Hayden on Aug 19, 2011 in News | 9 commentsYou might think the new Conan movie inspired this article, especially since the last article I did here was a review of the THOR movie. Alas, you would be wrong. I had intended to write this article months ago. Its source: my immense appreciation of Robert E. Howard’s work and my love affair with vintage manual typewriters.
Yeah, I said it. Yeah, you read it.
To understand the blood and thunder style of REH, indeed all our classics of swords, sorceries and heroics, I think you need an appreciation of the manual typewriter’s effect on the craft of fiction.
There’s this great scene in The Whole Wide World where Robert E. Howard pounds away on his typewriter, dictating to himself with the passion of the possessed. That machine, which Howard purchased in 1928 and used till the very end, was the classic Underwood No. 5.
For decades, when most people thought “typewriter” this 30 lb. desktop machine was what they had in mind. Millions were produced between 1901 and 1932, so even today the Underwood No. 5 isn’t a rare find, nor particularly valuable unless in mint condition. When Howard bought one of these machines, he knew he was getting a reliable companion for his career. Think about the investment value. Many of these machines still work now. Think your Dell Inspiron or Macbook will be workable in 80 years? Me neither.
Replica Underwood No. 5 in the Robert E. Howard Museum.
You can get a No. 5 on eBay for $50 or less, non-restored. (For restoration you’d need a typewriter repair place, which is becoming increasingly rare.) You’ll pay almost as much for the machine as for shipping. Sadly, I don’t have one myself. Yet. I own ten typewriters already and my wife scowls when I mention a new one… I do have an L.C. Smith from the mid-30’s and a Royal Portable from 1929 (mint condition and ever so precise), so I can well attest to the action and experience of these old machines.
Many of you have likely never used a manual typewriter before. Perhaps an electric, perhaps none at all. (I touched my first computer in 1983, resented the electric typewriters we learned to type on in school, and didn’t experience the true pleasure of the manual typewriter until early 2010.) If your experience is limited to electric machines, then you only know half the story. It’s just not the same.
There’s an almost primal experience to using a manual, like a sculptor chiseling or a carpenter hammering. The striking of the keys, the smell of oil and metal, the gunfire staccato of striking keys (the sharp feedback as they rebound), the bell ring warning the end of the line approaches, the scraping return of the carriage, the scroll of paper. It is a thing of art and beauty.
As for the effect on writing… Take a look at some books from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. Notice something? They got bigger with each decade, huh? There was a marketing dynamic, sure. But computers allowed writers to match the dynamic. Allowed us all to easily become messy and long-winded.
REH Bedroom with Desk and Typewriter
You don’t often see writing with the fast-paced, blazing action you find in old pulps. Some of that is style, but when you type on a manual machine the very writing of the story has an immediate physicality to it, not unlike the fast-paced action in REH’s work. There is sound and action.
I notice the sounds more in older books. The brevity of the words. The rush of the action. Computers, gods know I love them, simply don’t have this kind of soul. And writing with them, I think, becomes more cerebral and less a physical act of creation. And it shows. Our books today tend toward lengthy description and introspection far more than the thundering heroic fantasy pounded out on the old manuals.
When you write something on a typewriter, you have to mean it. Remember, if you mess up or change your mind, that’s the whole page to retype. There’s no time for rambling and dithering along through a story. You get to the point. You say what you mean. And you say it right the first time. And, I think the nature of the machine itself changes how you write. For bold pulp action, I think it changes it for the better.
Note: I have thus far written one novel on a manual typewriter, a 1955 Hermes Rocket. I plan on heroically composing all my future works on various typewriters. Naturally they will get scanned in and edited on the computer, published as ebooks and so forth. There are advantages to our modern world.
And, considering the power needed to work one of these, it’ll help keep the strength up in your arms and hands! I have one of these old Underwoods. A prized possession, but I don’t use it for writing. Just mostly for looking at.
The phrase “pounding out a story” is not mere hyperbole. Hammering away at the keyboard isn’t much of a stretch either.
For the record, I’m a touch typist on my Macbook but a two-finger typer on the manuals. I just don’t have the pinkie finger strength to work the keys effectively on most machines.
We still had a manual typewriter in our house. My sisters (older than I) received electric typewriters for college and eventually one stayed at the house just in time for me to use it for some high school & college papers.
I had some very basic typing program on some old PC, but it was my first job, post-college, where I was introduced to WordPerfect and learned you could play with fonts and bolds.
Wow. What an eye-opener that was.
It’s true what you say, maybe computers make it too easy sometimes. Fred Saberhagen had a very funny quote from the early days of word processors – something about word processors doing the same thing to words that food processors do to food.
Eventually, though, he too embraced the advantages of the modern age.
Type writers were just being phased out when I started out as a reporter. We typed with triplicate carbon copies, kept one copy in the office and sent the others through a vacuum tube to the production department for printing. To meet deadlines you had to be fast and accurate. You didn’t have time to redo a story if you made a mistake in the middle of it. I learned to think ahead about what I was writing. I had the headline, the lede graf in my head before I even started. It was invaluable training. I write short stories the same way. When computers came in the quality of writing and reporting in newspaper started to deteriorate. Mainly because of the lack of discipline that computers allow. I saw younger reporters sit struggling with their stories, writing and rewriting grafs, moving them around so it looked better, and turning out drivel. The computer and electronic publishing have have had far more damaging effects, completely destroyed the newspaper industry and helping create the attention deficit generation now running the media. But you know what, I wouldn’t go back to working on a typewriter on a bet. I wouldn’t use one now, I can work twice as fast as I did on a typewriter. But I’m glad that I had the benefit of having had to learn to write on a typewriter.
I think those authors who started on typewriters and moved to computers have it best. They learned discipline in writing what they meant the first time, which helps with speed and getting that first draft completed without endless fiddling, and now they get the benefit of computer revisions.
I’m a chronic fiddle as I go type, which seems typical of my generation and those younger (I had an earlier computer start than most my age). So originally I tried a typewriter to train that out of me. To say what I wanted as I went. To think about what I was writing and not slap words on a page and then fiddle with the mess before I moved on.
I really do think that computers have changed writing, and in those who’ve only used them, I think it’s changed how they think when writing. The whole process and thought of it.
I have a favorite author, and I can tell you the first book he wrote on computer in the late 80′s. It is instantly different. I find it fascinating.
Also, I’m glad I don’t have to use carbons. I like inhabiting the best of both worlds.
Interesting. I have to agree that the construction process changes when you go from typewriter to computer. For an old dyslexic, like me, I could never really keep things together without the spell-checker on a computer, much less cut-and-paste.
However, writers like Tolstoy and Dickens were writing huge books long before computers made things simple.
(The only thing that was worse than those d@%$#& carbons were the old, blue mimeograph sheets!)
Great article, David! As I mentioned on Facebook, Howard’s typewriter is almost identical to the one my Dad gave me back in the early 60s, on which I taught myself to type. It did not have any lower case letters, though. I held onto it until the late 80s, having no idea it might be worth something someday. I wrote my first stories on a portable Smith-Corona, and then a Royal. I loved my 1992 brother Word processor because it was as close to using a typewriter as you could get, considering that it had a memory, a 12″ monitor, and used the old square floppies, like they used on Star Trek. A friend recently gave me one of his Mom’s many typewriters: a powder blue, Royal Parade portable, with a carrying case and in excellent condition. It came in handy when I had to print out some job applications and fill them out by hand. My penmanship is horrible — so I type them up. The ribbon is still in good shop. Rumor has it that Harlan Ellison still uses a typewriter. Don’t know about that. But I do know that I love and miss typewriters — even though I’d rather use my computer and Microsoft Word. I am the world’s worst typist!
Other than pen and paper, my first writing tool was a bright red Olivetti portable manual typewriter. As typewriters go, it was junk, but I loved it anyway and carried it with me to libraries throughout my junior high and early high school years. Then mom got me one of those fancy Smith Corona electrics with the white-out key. For some reason, I hardly ever used the Smith Corona and soon switched to writing with pen and paper until about 1995, when I got my own personal computer (a used Mac SE, old even then). I love manual typewriters to this day, but I think I’ll stick to my computers when it comes to writing.