TypeTown #32: "This typewriter became a fetish object for me..."

🇨🇦 Margaret Atwood, Tom Sharpe, Konrad Klapheck and more...

Feb 10, 2023

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Hello, hello.

We’ve been wondering all week how to get today’s TypeTown off to a great start. Then Margaret Atwood came along and put a rocket up our backside.

"If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.”

So here we are, crashing headfirst into a figure who has emerged as one of the most prominent authors of our time.

S J Watson @SJ_Watson

I love this photo of @MargaretAtwood writing, I think, The Handmaid's Tale

And it all began, in the mid-1950s, with a 1930s Remington portable her mom had originally used to type her dad’s PhD thesis.

“This typewriter became a fetish object for me soon after I decided - at age 16 - that I would become a writer.”

By the 1960s, Atwood was publishing her first book of poetry and ending the decade with The Edible Woman, the first of her 17 novels.

In the 1970s, she combined her fiction with roles at two different Toronto universities. And her fame in Canadian literary circles soon began to grow.

"A word after a word after a word is power."

Along the way, she switched from a manual portable to an electric portable and finally to a Selectric.

But because that machine was too heavy to transport, she rented typewriters while travelling overseas.

And thus it was in West Berlin in 1984 that she tapped out the first few pages of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Today, she is a global figure, propelled to megastardom by the TV adaptation of that work.

But one thing still nags away.

“I’ve been eyeing my old electric typewriters. Can they possibly still work? Shall I try?”

We all know the answer to that.

READ» Margaret Atwood’s Writing Routine: “All writers feel struck by the limitations of language.” - Famous Writing Routines

READ» How Margaret Atwood Learned to Type - The Walrus

Sharply put

Meet British satirical novelist Tom Sharpe, hunched over his typewriter here in 1997 as he lights a cigar and prepares to poke fun at another unwitting subject.

Educated at Cambridge and a former Royal Marine, Sharpe was at home where many weren’t.

He was born in London. He moved to South Africa to teach in his twenties. And he spent his last two decades living under the Spanish sun in the Catalonian coastal town Llafranc.

But wherever he went, his sense of mischief always followed.

"All is fair in love, war and tax evasion."

Described by one critic as “very funny - but exceptionally vulgar, crude and offensive”, Sharpe left his mark with Portherhouse Blue, Blott on the Landscape, and Wilt - all of which were adapted for TV in the 1980s.

READ» Tom Sharpe obituary - The Guardian

READ» Tom Sharpe - The London Column

READ» Comic writer Tom Sharpe inspired by WWI trench humour - Reuters