Three Beginnings

Published
Reading time
6 minutes

Tomorrow, my typewriter turns fifty-eight. As birthdays go, I’m expecting it to be one of the more amenable ones. It doesn’t expect a card, presents or an evening spent looking at television and watching life slip by.

That might be because my calculations are wrong.

The typewriter, an Olivetti Lettera 32, was made in Ivrea, in Italy, where, as I understand, they celebrate Christmas. And Easter. And weekends. None of which I factored into my calculations. I reckoned the date from the serial code and the Typewriter Database, and little else. Because of that, the year is accurate, but the date itself is well off. But despite such embarrassing schoolboy errors, I am in no rush to correct it.

Because tomorrow, fifty-eight years to the day that my typewriter rolled off the production line, my studies with the Open University will officially begin.

At the end of April of last year, I turned 21. A hasty addendum to my birthday list was Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I had seen in the month by reading The Road, a freak selection from the library, and I was utterly blown away by it. At once I had to read more of his work, and so I saw out the month reading Blood Meridian.

I doubt there is anything I could yet say about the book that hasn’t already been said. In a word, it is masterful, and astonishing. And appropriately enough, reading it was something of a revelation. The prose is so powerful and incredibly wrought that the act of writing became abject anathema until a fortnight hence.

When I emerged from the wreckage of the nuclear bomb it dropped on my imagination, one thing was clear enough. I wanted to write like McCarthy, and I became a mild fanatic. Not since David Bowie has a figure so enraptured me, and no author before or since has so stunned me with their ability to use words as McCarthy did.

In my fervour I learned more about McCarthy: how he rode across the Southwestern United States, observing everything he – and the Glanton Gang before him – saw, pissing gunpowder and teaching himself Spanish. How he’d juggle four projects at any one time with only a walk between them. And how he doggedly dedicated his life to writing. It all made me more impressed with the man and his work, and like Bowie before him, I knew he was someone to emulate. And amongst all that reading, I learned that he made use of a typewriter.

And within two weeks of finishing Blood Meridian, so did I.

As a late birthday present, I had also been made redundant that April from my job with a flailing web development agency. Not quite a year later, I had my typewriter, but I still was in the doldrums. My job hunt had yielded but one overdressed and undersuccessful interview. I couldn’t even be that upset about it, because it was starting to dawn on me that I didn’t actually like web development.

Buoyed by assurances I had time enough to change careers, I moved to do just that at the start of the year. First by looking into apprenticeships as a library assistant. No results. Around this time I received some casual appraisals of my prospects from the people around me. They involved supermarkets. No encouraging notion, but what if theirs were the more sober conclusions compared to my own? I figured I would do something with my life, something of some notability. But what reason had anyone offering a ‘notable’ job to consider me, exactly? Didn’t have a degree, didn’t even do A-levels.

Between that and the dogged lack of progress in baiting the toad, I slipped into some despair. And then I decided to take matters into my own hands, and rectify an old mistake. So I went after the university education I had neglected to pursue in my more foolish years, and signed up for an English Literature and Creative Writing degree from the Open University. If my prospects were indeed so dire, it seemed the obvious path out.

As anyone whose eyes have ever been graced by McCarthy’s prose – and scored by mine – can tell you, I am no Cormac McCarthy.

This is not in itself a bad thing. It’d be foolish to try and ape the voice of another writer at the expense of one’s own. But it also speaks to the effort I made to actually emulate what Cormac McCarthy did.

I bought a typewriter and I made good use of it, yes, but so what? It wasn’t a typewriter that made Cormac McCarthy great. The typewriter is but a means to an end, a way to project oneself onto the page. Typewriters, being so fantastic, can easily become the focal point, when in fact they are just the vehicle for one’s creativity. In becoming a typewriter enthusiast, I lost sight of all the other qualities of Cormac McCarthy that would have been a better – if more difficult – use of my time to emulate.

The degree poses the risk of inspiring a similar lassitude. Alone it will not make me into a good writer any more than a typewriter will. It’s a ready enough bit of advice that one doesn’t even need a degree to be a writer at all, and this is true. Like the typewriter, the degree is a means to an end, and signing up for it was the easy step. Any fool can sign up for a university course and a tuition loan, or thread a bit of paper into a typewriter. But if those things are not met halfway by efforts of one’s own, then they are just a bit of paper and something to weigh it down with.

My initial hope for the degree was that it might make me more palatable to the beast of the job market, but in the months since I signed up, I’ve found myself feeling more and more empowered to seek something beyond that: a future that isn’t in thrall to someone else. A living of my own making, rather than treading water for a coffin to keep me afloat in life. This will take some doing, that I don’t deny, and I cannot claim to be beyond doubts that it will actually happen. But before this year I never really had the confidence to think that I could do such a thing, and now I do. And it is my hope that tomorrow will be another step towards such an outcome.

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