Burying Vital Details: Tanya Berry's 1956 Royal Standard Manual Typewriter

“I can only conclude that I have scratched the skin of a technological fundamentalism that, like other fundamentalisms, wishes to monopolize a whole society and, therefore, cannot tolerate the smallest difference of opinion.” 

- Wendell Berry responding in 1987 to letters about his essay

 “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer”.

Wendell Erdman Berry will be 88 next August 5. He lives less than a mile outside Port Royal in north-eastern Henry County, Kentucky. He refuses to use a computer. Yet he is, among other things, a novelist, poet and essayist. In other words, among other things, he writes. A lot. He has written 52 books. He writes with a pencil.

Soon-to-be-married Tanya in May 1957

Wendell Berry’s wife is Tanya Jewell Berry (née Amyx), who turns 86 on April 30. Tanya types her husband’s fiction, poety and essays. She uses a  Royal standard manual typewriter. The couple bought it new in 1956, the year before their marriage in Lexington, Kentucky.

There! I’ve put it all down in black-and-white. Now, young journalist out there, you try it, too. It’s not so hard, is it?

So why in the name of goodness can’t even executive editors of The New Yorker bring themselves to spell it out? It’s a very simple way of meeting the demand of every story ever written about Wendell Berry: that is, to answer the very obvious question every reader will ask. If he “renounced modernity 60 years ago”, how does he write? The editors don’t even have to leave the top line of letters of their keyboards. T Y P E W R I T E R. And if they forget the brand name, just think Port Royal – ah, that’s right, a Royal! What’s their problem?

How do I know Tanya Berry uses a 1956 Royal standard manual? Because I continue to constantly indulge myself in that quaint old exercise called research – it’s a now strange habit born of being a Baby Boomer reporter, I guess. In this case, I went to the horse’s mouth, as it were – Wendell Berry’s 1987 essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer”. There, writ clearly at the opening of the second paragraph, are the words, “My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then.” 

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution reported the fact on page M-4 on Sunday, April 22, 1990, in a special “Dixie Living” feature from Tom Chaffin. A blog post by Gabriel Popkin in 2013 added the observation, “I think today’s writer has far more to be wary about than Berry did, back when computers were little more than glorified typewriters.” The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry mentioned the Royal in 2014, and Richard Polt covered “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” on page 28 of The Typewrier Revolution in 2015, saying, “ ... by most of the Berry Rules, a typewriter makes a great replacement for a computer.” Vox reaffirmed the use of a Royal in an article by Hope Reese on October 9, 2019. Yes! (“The Woman Beside Wendell Berry: The Most Important Fiction Editor Almost No One Has Heard Of”) had a dab at it in December 2017, illustrating an article by Robert Jensen with Tanya at some sort of a typewriter (it looks very much like an Olivetti-Underwood 21). Jensen’s piece, which also mentioned the Royal and “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer”, was reproduced in 2018 by the ABC here in Australia.

Tanya Berry attends the Look And See: A Portrait Of Wendell Berry premiere during the 2017 Sundance Film Festival at Egyptian Theatre in Park City, Utah.

It is just me who finds the Berrys' use of a typewriter not just worthy of mention but vital to a Berry story? That ignoring the fact is unforgiveable? Can typewriter lovers reassure me on this? One of the great things about being a part of the Typosphere, I often think, is that one can always feel guaranteed that one is not alone in the world. But, short of putting a call out into the ’sphere, I asked my wife: “If you read an article about a writer who ‘renounced modernity 60 years ago’, would you wonder what he used to write with?”

“I’d assume a pencil,” she said. And, unable to resist a touch of deftness: “Or maybe a quill?”

“And if his publishers won’t accept copy hand written with a pencil?”

“He gets someone to type it for him.”

I should be thankful for some small mercies. In the latest Berry article, in the February 28 New Yorker, “Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age”, by the magazine’s executive editor Dorothy Wickenden, we are told that Tanya was “in mechanical terms, his typist, a fact that outraged feminists when Berry mentioned it in his [May 1987] Harper’s essay. (Tanya looks back on the controversy with amusement: ‘Did I tell you several women have greeted me with “Oh, you’re the one who types!’”).” But if, as Wickenden asserts, Tanya was Berry’s typist, it begs two obvious questions: Who does it now? and Has he found some other method? Neither, of course, answered by The New Yorker. (Wickenden, 68, is the daughter of Dan Wickenden, 1913-1989, who was Wendell Berry’s first editor at Harcourt Brace in Manhattan in 1964.)

Wickenden tells us that “Berry’s critics see him as a utopian or a crank, a Luddite who never met a technological innovation he admired. In ‘Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer’, an infamous ... essay that ran in Harper’s, he announced, ‘I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.’ When indignant readers sent a blizzard of letters to the editor, Berry noted in reply that one man, who called him ‘a fool’ and ‘doubly a fool’, had ‘fortunately misspelled my name, leaving me a speck of hope that I am not the “Wendell Barry” he was talking about.’”

In fact, as Richard Polt points out in The Typewriter Revolution, ‘Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer’ was first published in the New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly before being reprinted in Harper’s. It came out in book form by Penguin four years ago and this was republished last year. In an item called WYSIWYG (as in What You See Is What You Get) Computerworld magazine in its September 2, 1991 issue printed the following: