TERRIFYING MACHINES and times gone by

My fellow writers might enjoy this description of a once-alarming writing tool, which appears in the title piece of Cynthia Ozick’s collection Dictation. The novella opens with a scene in which Joseph Conrad, at the time an author with only one book to his credit, visits Henry James in the older author’s London flat. There he sees—or at least truly notices—a typewriter for the first time.

It was said that the Queen had requested the new thing for her secretary, who had refused it in terror. On a broad surface reserved for it in a far corner of the room….stood the Machine. It stood headless and armless and legless—brute shoulders merely: it might have been the torso of a broken god. Even at a distance it struck Conrad as strange and repulsive, the totem of a foreign civilization to which, it now appeared, James had uncannily acclimated. The thing was black and glossy, and in height it ascended in tiers, like a stadium. Each round key was shielded by glass and rimmed by a ring of metal….Their glassy surfaces were catching the overhead light. Shifting his head, Conrad saw blinking semaphores.*

I love Ozick’s evocation of the typewriter’s alien, oddly malevolent presence. And also the reminder that even in the halcyon days of the early twentieth century, writers could feel threatened—even terrified—by the new technologies that kept arising around them.

*From "Dictation," collected in Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008. Copyright Cynthia Ozick 2008.