A Strangely Elegant, Convex-shaped Writing Machine

By Wyatt Mason

In its name is the essay’s difference: where other literary modes–novel, poem, play–succeed or fail, the essay, by definition, tries. Too short to be definitive on any topic, the essay can’t manage the comprehensive. It aspires to adequacy, fluency. An essay can argue well, to be sure, but usually argues best for itself and for it’s writer’s best self. “I am myself the matter of my own book,” the namer of the essay said at the beginning of his book of 107 attempts, better and worse, at defining the form.

If the essay is an essentially uncertain thing and historically a form that would reckon with uncertainty, it is interesting how, in our modern acquaintance with it, the form has become a font of certainty. For in the small percentage of the population that reads an essay at all, our tendency is to gravitate toward those of which we can be certain. In the mood for indignation? Krugman. Do you like your outrage with a bit more spice? Dowd. Feeling, rather, like a laugh? Sedaris. Care to be reminded, once again, that hope of governmental decency is in vain? Hersh.

The utility of such certainty is not to be misjudged: whether they are editorialists, humorists, or journalists, such dependable essayistic voices have enormous use to readers, who, by finding bylines upon which they can depend, obtain useful information, continuing education, or simply confirmation of their worldview. And yet, this modern incarnation of the essay, for all its utility–buoy in a sinking world–is not the limit of the form, only its most practical and practicable manifestation. “Human kind/cannot bear very much reality,” is the going phrase, and as reality is unstinting in its ability to flummox us with vacillations between a beautiful world and a miserable one, who needs of an essay similar indecision? A funny world, or an indignant world, or an indecent one may not be reality, but such fleeting certainty is tonic: when certain, we’re freed from having to think at all.

Whereas, in its purer state, the essay bears the reality that we cannot bear. It wavers, states, reformulates, contradicts itself: the essay is–at its best–a flip-flopper.

Of contemporary practitioners of this art of fruitful vacillation, Arthur Krystal is an essayist of unfashionable and excellent undependability. Reading Krystal on beauty, sin, typewriters, laziness, death, duelling or reading, one has no sense of what one is getting into–beyond something one feels impelled to get more deeply into. This, say, is how Krystal’s essay, “Against Type,” begins:

In 1882, for the sum of 375 marks (plus shipping), Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche bought himself a typewriter. He didn’t call it a typewriter; he called it a schreibkugel—literally, a “writing ball.” The schreibkugel had been developed (”invented” is a tricky word when it comes to typewriters) seventeen years earlier by a Danish pastor and teacher of the deaf and dumb, Hans Rasmus Johann Malling Hansen. Impressed by the speed with which his students signed, Hansen figured that they could also write faster if all their fingers were engaged; and inside of two years he produced a strangely elegant, convex-shaped writing machine that worked from top to bottom. The keys bore only capital letters and were arranged on rods in a semicircle at the-top; when tapped, they thrust obliquely downward toward a common point on the platen, partially obscuring the paper that lay curved on a wheel rising from the machine’s base. In effect, the typist could not see what was being typed. Nietzsche, whose own eyesight was famously weak, and getting worse, was thrilled with his new possession: “THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF /IRON / YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS,” he pecked out. Unfortunately for the novice maschinenschreiber, the writing ball soon went kaput, and Nietzsche, uncomplainingly, went back to his pens. Still, six weeks of use was all he needed to form the conclusion (dutifully typed): “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.”

Krystal’s tools, too, work on our thoughts. His style is what we might call “conversational,” albeit of a polyclausal and uncommonly polished kind. Alliteration cinches syntax (”tricky…typewriters”; “figured…faster…fingers”; “point on the platen, partially…paper”; “weak…worse”), but not in the showboating manner of the self-important sensualist. Krystal’s stylistic choices are always put in the service of making better sense: from his description of Hansen’s writing machine, a police sketch artist could draw a mock-up (from which the thing could be built). Freighted though it is with history, foreign vocabulary and technical description, the prose is lightfooted and lighthearted, so swift and sure, in fact, we scarcely notice that we are already being moved through history towards the idea that ends the paragraph and which is the theme of what will follow–a wondering over the wonders of literary style, through time.

To read one Krystal essay is to become a Krystal reader, and to want more than his two fine books, Agitations (Yale 2002) and The Half-Life of an American Essayist (Godine 2007) as company. This week on Sentences, therefore, will be devoted to things Krystal–such as Krystal himself, to whom I’ll pose a few questions, Wednesday.