TypeTown #38: “I can't write without a reader.”
💋 John Cheever, Philip Wylie, Olivia de Havilland, and more...
Pucker up, sweetie.
Next week, novelist and short story writer John Cheever would have turned a grand old 101.
“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss: you can’t do it alone.”
Fuelled by more than the occasional Dry Martini (it apparently made him feel “brilliant, chatty, and urbane”), Cheever’s career scaled literary heights.
He won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Medal for Literature.
And he was a committed clacker, using at least five different typewriters: an Underwood Champion, a black Remington portable, an Olivetti Lettera 32, a Hermes 3000, and an Olympia Deluxe.
According to his daughter, Susan, he wrote in every room in their Ossining home — and even, memorably, in a tent on the lawn.
His son, Benjamin, remembers his technique. “He’d sit at that machine and smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and make the most ferocious sound, not like a typewriter at all, more like a machine gun,” he says.
But Cheever’s taste for booze caused problems.
He wrote some of his stories in his underwear.
A near-fatal pulmonary edema in 1973 left him staring at the inside of hospital walls for more than a month.
The following year, at Boston University, Cheever would down vodka before his classes; fail to dress before leaving his apartment; and cry on the shoulder of his favourite student in seedy hotel bars.
It took an intervention by his brother, Fred, and a spell in a New York rehab clinic, to finally kick away the bottle.
He was dry for the last seven years of his life, until cancer in his lung quickly spread further and, in 1982, eventually proved too much.
“Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.”
READ» John Cheever Goes Under - Vice
READ» Excerpts from a diary: from the seventies and early eighties - New Yorker
READ» John Cheever… - Routine Matters
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Wyling away the hours…
Clacking away at his portable, a box of papers by his side and a parasol offering protection from above, author and screenwriter Philip Wylie (1902-1971) looks utterly absorbed in his work.
Perhaps the world should have been, too.
As far back as 1971, he was writing TV episodes highlighting a nightmarish future grappling with the consequences of pollution and climate change.
“Ignorance is not bliss. It is oblivion.”
Wylie was generally known for his science fiction, particularly his work published before World War II.
His 1930 novel Gladiator is widely believed to have inspired the character Superman.
Today, though, he is a largely forgotten figure.
“If liberty has any meaning, it means freedom to improve.”
READ» Philip Wylie: The Unsung Hero of Super-Heroes - The Saturday Evening Post
WATCH» Interview with Philip Wylie - Harry Ransom Center
A true screen Queen
This 1948 image shows Olivia de Havilland (left) in a scene from The Snake Pit. It was a powerful role for which she received an Academy Award nomination.
And while the typewriter here is a prop helping her in the portrayal of a patient in a mental health institution, we feel confident she’d have been a TypeTown reader today.
“I’m all for typewriters, with instant carbon copies, and seeing films in cinemas.”
This week, fans wanting a piece of cinematic history can bid for the Olivetti Lettera 35 used by the Gone with the Wind actress to communicate with her family, friends, and worldwide fans.
de Havilland died in Paris in 2020 at the marvellous age of 104.
“I would prefer to live forever in perfect health, but if I must at some time leave this life, I would like to do so ensconced on a chaise longue, perfumed, wearing a velvet robe and pearl earrings, with a flute of champagne beside me and having just discovered the answer to the last problem in a British cryptic crossword.”
Finally, upset hen and ted find a conclusion (3,3).
Worth pausing the platen
📬 Typewriter artist creates Burj Khalifa, Dubai skyline with letters, numbers - Zawya
📬 A Lifetime of Stories, and Still More to Tell - The New York Times
📬 COAS Bookstore hosts Typewriter revival May 13 - The Las Cruces Bulletin
📬 Typewriters in the 21st Century - Poets & Writers
And finally… typewriters in the wild
In the first second of the first act of last week’s Eurovision Song Contest…
In this statue of World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle…
And in this 1963 image from the offices of British satirical magazine Private Eye…
Until next time
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I just found your stack and I’m super excited! I didn’t know that Cheever used a Olympia Deluxe (or SM9). The first typewriter I bought in 2014 was a ‘66 Olympia Deluxe. Great typewriter and still one that is affordable. My current go to is a Torpedo 1960 18B. Thank you for writing this newsletter, Neil!
Carbon copies got me thinking of carbon paper which got me thinking of erasable onion skin typing paper which got me thinking of little bottles of white-out and...