Poet Frank O'Hara and the Olivetti Lettera 22 Portable Typewriter

It's May 1954 and it's NOT an Olivetti Lettera 25.

When one spends much of the day researching and writing, it’s handy to have an in-built radar-system. It can often save a lot of time and effort. The radar sends out a signal similar to what my two-year-old grandson says when he types a wrong letter: “Uh-oh”. Unfortunately, the system didn’t kick in until I’d reached the 3760th word of a 3949-word article while catching up on a back issue of The New Yorker last night. Because of the pandemic, there was a long hold-up in delivery of our copies, and at the beginning of last month we received 13 editions of The New Yorker, stretching back to September 2021, in one week. Last night I got to the December 20 issue, and naturally thought there’d be something of interest to me in the “Dept. of Technology” article, “Focus Mode:  Can ‘Distraction-Free’ Devices Change the Way We Write?” The online go-first is even more enticing: “The digital age enabled productivity but invited procrastination. Now writers are rebelling against their word processors.” The over-long piece was written by Julian Lucas, a 2022 newcomer to The New Yorker’s staff.

What was it about the 3760th word that set off the alarm bells? Lucas wrote, “When Frank O’Hara typed his Lunch Poems on a floor-sample Lettera 25 in Olivetti’s showroom on Fifth Avenue, it was a cute stunt.” As readers of this blog will know, it was in May 1954 that Olivetti set up a Lettera 22 portable typewriter, bolted to a marble plinth on the sidewalk outside its new New York City showroom on Fifth Avenue, near 47th Street. Over the next 10 months, 50,000 people stopped to use the machine. Lunch Poems was published in 1964, 10 years later. Frank O’Hara died, aged 40, on July 25, 1966, 12 years later. The Olivetti Lettera 25 came on to the market in 1974, 20 years later.

It certainly is true that during lunchtime breaks from his curator’s job at the Museum of Modern Art, O’Hara used the Olivetti portable typewriter on the stand on Fifth Avenue, but it wasn’t a Lettera 25, it was a Lettera 22. And when one sees a glaring error like that, one’s confidence in the accuracy of the rest of the story begins to crumble. Having got to the 3760th word, my faith in Lucas’s views wasn’t all that great anyway.

Lucas might not be alone in making such a simple mistake, and at least he got the brand right. In 2018’s John Ashbery and Anglo-American Exchange: The Minor Eras, Oli Hazzard wrote that British poet Lee Harwood “deliberately imitated O’Hara several times, going so far as to write a ‘lunch poem’ on the typewriter on which O'Hara wrote his own, thereby mimicking not only the style but also the material circumstances of those poems’ composition.” From an interview Hazzard had with Harwood in October 2013, the author quoted Harwood as saying, “Remington’s, I think, a typewriter manufacturers (sic), had outside their showrooms a stand, and on it was bolted their latest model.”  Things only get more complicated and confused after that.  

Toward the end of his article Lucas says the AlphaSmart is a collectible – “typewriter mania meets millennial nostalgia for 90s homeroom homeliness”, whatever that means. Earlier, however, he says that “Perhaps the authors who first used word processors felt emancipated from the typewriter’s linearity, but I began to wonder if they hadn’t been mistaken.” And did Stephen King’s novel The Shining really “link killing sprees to typewriter drudgery?” From what I can tell, none of the “distraction-free” devices Lucas mentions has anything like the look or feel of a real manual typewriter, and not one of them would qualify as a writing machine under the terms and conditions of the Typewriter Manifesto. I suspect Lucas has missed a golden opportunity to offer a lasting solution to the rebellion against word processors.