265. Punch the keys

“Punch the keys or your words mean nothing! Punch them, dammit!”

He pressed the laptop keyboard with force.

“No good! Get her a proper typewriter!”

The assistants scurried off immediately. When you had a Nobel Prize winner in your midst, you obeyed. Especially when it was the first time – and last, it would later transpire –he had agreed on a public lecture on the art of writing.

The student he’d handpicked from the audience was stranded in limbo on the podium with him now, in front of a 2,000 strong audience. She sat in fear and the writer did nothing to comfort her.

He had won his Nobel Prize for sensitive poetry, but none of this was apparent in his lecture so far. He had been rude, cantankerous, ill at ease. His view on the state of modern writing had been scarcely less malicious, as he seemed hell-bent on settling feuds with his contemporaries. It had made the audience restless: where you could hear a pin drop at the start of the lecture, now whispers filled the room.

There the assistant finally arrived with a typewriter from the fifties.

“Punch!” the writer ordered.

Forty-two clicks later the student stopped. The writer pulled the paper from the typewriter. He did not look at the ink, but turned the page and felt the indents the hammers had made on the back.

“You must show the blank paper you’re not afraid of it,” the writer said. “This … is great writing.”

He held the paper up, for all to see, shook the student’s hand and in the same movement stepped off the podium, never to return.

The student did return, many years later, a published, award-winning author.

Fearless, the critics called her writing.

It was the biggest compliment they could have given her.

 

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161. Drink more. Eat more. Fuck more.

“Drink more. Eat more. Fuck more.”

It was 7 in the morning on the first of January.

“Fun resolutions,” the girl who brought the hung-over writer his breakfast said.

He concurred, knocking back his first of many whiskies that day.

“Though rather gluttonous,” the girl continued.

“My favourite sin,” the writer answered, digging into his eggs Benedict.

“Is there anything you’re planning on doing less of, perchance?”

He shook his head, then seemed to change his mind.

“Perhaps writing.”

As someone who had read both of his rambling novels, that was one New Year’s resolution the girl would root for.

 

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96. You crave the numbness the alcohol provides

You crave the numbness the alcohol provides. How it washes away the bitter taste of failure you’ve grown so accustomed to. The way it fogs your already erratic judgement.

You desire the sense of slow-motion that gives you time to take a breath.

 

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78. How about Mykonos?

“How about Mykonos?”

He pretended to be interested in the place on the map his wife’s finger was pointing at but he wasn’t. Each year, at the end of their holiday they repeated the same ritual. His wife would get out a map of the Mediterranean and they’d settle on where they’d vacation the following year. And by settle he meant that his wife would choose and he’d go along with it.

Truth was, he didn’t much care for the Mediterranean. He instead longed for more adventurous summers. To circumnavigate the Earth. Cross the Americas by train and scoop fresh Himalayas snow from a hot air balloon. As his eyes wandered from the map he imagined diving to the bottom of the ocean with a megalomaniac Indian and exploring strange new worlds at the centre of the Earth.

Of course that would never happen. Not with two stepchildren in tow and a kid of his own on the way. Not with a flourishing law firm that at most allowed three weeks of vacation a year. It pained him that his world would never expand beyond the Paris arrondissement he resided in and his yearly Mediterranean sightseeing tour.

“I’ve finished your story,” his wife said, awakening him from his daydream. “It is quite good, you know. Silly, yes, but fun. You should find a publisher.”

Jules kissed her on the lips, beaming.

“So, whereto, my love?” his wife asked.

“To the future,” he replied. “To the future.”

 

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60. Squiggly letters

Squiggly letters were the writer’s trademark. At first glance you’d have trouble reading anything at all, so lush and loopy they danced across the page. But once you encoded her elegant calligraphy, an unexpected new world opened up.

The first to discover this was Vanya, who’d stumbled upon the lone copy of the writer’s novella in a Glaswegian cul-de-sac bookshop. The year was 1940 and Vanya had fled his native Poland a year earlier. A librarian back in Danzig he now scoured Glasgow for unique books he could discuss in the Sunday edition of the local newspaper.

This particular cover didn’t hold much promise. Boring brown felt clumsily clung to the edges of the novella, barely holding it together. The only thing that kept Vanya from discarding it immediately was the puzzling fact that neither a title nor an author was mentioned.

Initially confused by the typography – the letters seemed neither handwritten nor printed but a curious hybrid – he gradually fell madly in love with it. The story, though passable, wasn’t what gripped him. It was the assuredness of the writing, the sense of purpose that each letter, every squiggle seemed to possess. A ‘the’ wasn’t just a ‘the’ as each of the many times the word occurred it had a different appearance, suggesting nuances a regular font could never produce.

With his fingers poised over the typewriter he realized it would be impossible to do the genius of the novel justice in his column. The hammers would just batter the page with standardized, meaningless ink.

Vanya had never before contemplated that the invention of the printing press could in centuries past have smothered countless writers’ unique voices. It saddened him deeply that the world might never know their art.

 

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