Things I Miss #5

There was always a Hermes portable typewriter in the house, about 12” square and encased in pale blue, known as a Hermes Baby. I remember reading Joan Didion’s packing list in 1979; it included bourbon and a typewriter. I knew what she meant. I used to see foreign correspondents in African airports, at Schipol, Rome, CDG, Madrid. I learned to touch type on the Hermes, and dreamed of being a foreign correspondent, filing breezy dispatches back from Havana and Kinshasa.

In 1985 at university in California I was told my turgid essays needed to be typed. I enquired at the university library and was told there were two upright Remingtons in a “private study” area in the basement, where the serial killer grad students hung out. They (the typewriters, not the serial killers or grad students) made a splendid clacking sound and looked like something on which I should be hammering out sports stuff: “Mikey Sullivan stepped up to the plate, his pug-ugly mug coulda told a million stories; then he unwound one and sizzled it over the plate and boyaboy was that heard on in at the pickle barrel.”)
I also had to write my student dissertation (“Some Aspects of Travel Writing”) on my Hermes. It was pre memory stick days so I wrote much of it in my head; which I still do, with paragraphs forming in my head.

I tried using a friend’s electric typewriter but found I sometimes typed faster than the golfball could keep up, which I found disconcerting. I sympathised with Philip Larkin writing to Anthony Powell in August 1985, saying how bold it was of Powell to buy an electric typewriter (“the only time I tried one I was scared to death, as it seemed to be running away with me.  I felt as if I’d been put at the controls of Concorde after five minutes tuition”).