Words of Wavell Wisdom on Typewriters

The first nine paragraphs of a comment piece called "The Day the Music Died", written by British journalist Stuart Wavell and published last week, are too good to be overlooked by typewriter aficionados. Wavell was arts and media editor of The Guardian and is now a senior feature writer for the London Sunday Times. Here they are:

IN THE attic of your memory, can you recall the music of a typewriter? That sweet cacophony of clattering, clunking and tinkling, produced solely by a blurring of fingers. Imagine an orchestra of such machines in a newspaper office, the players twitching like marionettes, driven by deadlines and their personal demons, until the protesting screech of a ratchet proclaims a last sheet snatched triumphantly from a roller. Welcome to The Guardian in its late sane period, circa 1987.

At odd moments a hush falls on this tintinnabulation of typists, like the sudden silence of cicadas, and then you might discern the muffled thump of a Lamson pneumatic tube spitting out one of the capsules that convey stories and information to the newspaper’s digestive organs. Here the words produced by journalists are masticated and regurgitated, cast in metal and finally bolted to revolving drums. The whole caboodle might easily be mistaken for a factory from an earlier industrial age. It’s magnificent, but . . .

On the day the music died, they removed the typewriters and installed word processors. It marked the start of an almost imperceptible decline that would become progressively steeper. For most production departments, the final ding of a typewriter bell sounded their death knell. Generations of acquired skills became surplus to requirements.

The alien word processors were to trigger a dynamic which led eventually to a press that sees and hears no evil. Lazy journalism. Wilfully misleading journalism. Corrupt journalism. And the ills of newspapers were to become the ills of British institutions and government. An exaggeration? A little, perhaps. Other newspapers managed things differently, but the pathway was broadly the same.

It happened like this. In the beginning was the word, and the word was typed on to three carbon-copy sheets – one for the [news] desk, one for the readers’ department and one for the composing room. Careful thought went into the intro, for if you experienced a change of heart you had to crank another sheaf of paper through the roller [platen] and mark it with the catchline, byline, date and page destination. Clean copy often merited a more prominent position in the paper.

Computers completely dispensed with this hassle. Wonderful. Now you could dash off a whole story in the knowledge that it could be recast with a few strokes of the keys. Except that the screen imparted a flattering lustre to your hastily contrived sentences. That looks rather good, you’d think. Gradually you took less care; after all, you were under the cosh.

Most journalists had come up through reporters’ rooms, where any hint of literary aspiration was quickly drummed out of them. Clichés were greatly preferable to phrases that might confuse the reader. But those who defied such pressures found themselves succumbing to the computers’ soporific allure. They, too, were being de-skilled at a time when ‘quality’ newspapers were consciously dumbing down in a vain attempt to attract new readers.

A premonition that this step of ‘progress’ could eventually backfire led me and my Diary co-writer to retain the only two remaining typewriters in captivity. I recalled a throw-away remark by Len Deighton, one of the first authors to use a word processor, discussing his update of the anti-hero Harry Palmer books. He no longer felt any ‘mental warmth’ for what he had written on the screen, he told me. It puzzled me at the time, but I began to realise what he meant.

A typewritten story is the tangible product of a writer’s endeavours: you can hold it in your hand and annotate it in the margin. It’s real, whereas sentences on a screen seem cold and impersonal. You have surrendered something to the computer – a sense of ownership. Now someone further up the food chain can read your article as you write it.