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Did Ralph Ellison’s Osborne 1 hurt his literary career?
August 20, 2007 | 9:08 am
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By David Rothman
Ralph Waldo Ellison, author of The Invisible Man, didn’t just leave behind handwritten and typed manuscripts, but also dozens of computer disks.
Ellison was a tinkerer, it turns out, like many of the readers of the TeleBlog, and rather surrealistically yesterday I read how he fell in love with the Osborne 1, perhaps the first portable computer for serious business use, or literary use. Oh, the incongruity of it all: a great American legend from the 1950s boning up on at least the basics of CP/M! To think of Ellison typing away on a computer, even a 1981 model that looked like a suitcase! I can barely imagine somebody so venerable at the keyboard of a Selectric.
Old literary debate
I myself began computing with a Kaypro II, an Osborne rival, so I can imagine the excitement Ellison must have felt at being able to slide words around on that tiny black-and-white screen. But were the Osborne and Ellison’s several other machines good for his career? Are they a major reason why his second novel, just parts of which were published, took decades to reach print?
Such issues are grist for an old literary debate about technology’s pros and cons for writers, and it’s of special interest from a TeleBlog perspective, since I haven’t exactly heard of many e-book-oriented writers creating manuscripts by pen or typewriter first, then feeding them into the maws of their word processors.
Details vs. the whole
In an engrossing feature story on Ellison published over the weekend, a look at the circumstances under which a pair of literary scholars have patched together his material for a fuller edition of the master’s fiction published as Juneteenth, Washington Post reporter Wil Haygood mentions an interesting theory.
The academics, Adam Bradley and John Callahan, believes that the gadgetry may actually have set back Ellison by encouraging him to fixate on the details of his work at the expense of the whole. Here are three versions of the same sentence, the first two without a computer and the second with one:
–1960: “Three days before the shooting a chartered planeload of Southern Negroes swooped down upon the District of Columbia and attempted to see the Senator.”
–1972: “Two days before the shooting a chartered planeload of Southern Negroes swooped down upon the District of Columbia and attempted to see the Senator.”
–1993: “Two days before the bewildering incident a chartered plane-load of those who at that time were politely identified as Southern ‘Negroes’ swooped down upon Washington’s National Airport and disembarked in a confusion of paper bags, suitcases, and picnic baskets.” This one came out a year before Ellison’s death.
Take your pick
So which version of the sentence would you vote for? I actually would have gone for the computer-expanded one, except that I’d have just put the words ‘Southern Negroes’ in quotes and have dispensed with “those who at the time were….” I prefer the telling imagery of the third version.
Could the skeptics be wrong about the effect of technology on Ellison? Might the Osborne and brethren helped him make his prose significantly richer, even if they stretched out the writing time? I can’t say, not having read all his drafts of the second novel. Still, it’s fun to speculate, isn’t it?
Another lesson
On a related matter, I see another lesson in the gestation period for the second novel. You cannot cast aside issues of quality and say the world is better because such-and-such writer produced X number of novels. Even without the Osborne to distract him, Ellison went about his craft slowly, and that’s something to ponder in the current debate over copyright terms. Shouldn’t “Progress of Science and useful Arts” be judged by quality, too, not merely quantity? If the final version of Ellison’s second novel can come even slightly close to The Invisible Man, then the wait will have been worth it.
While I continue to dislike the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and, even more, the talk of eternal copyright, I don’t think that 14-year copyright terms would be blissful, either, as a promoter of literature. Some of the best works need to marinate, and beyond that, an artist of Ellison’s stature has only one life from which to draw. Go ahead. Disagree, as I suspect most TeleBlog readers will.
And yet another thought, in another area
If nothing else, the Ellison case shows the need for word-processing standards that do not depend on the survival of one company. Who knows what the world would have lost without scholars’ ability to his old Osborne disks? Technically it wasn’t much of a challenge. But unlike computer people, literary archivists think in terms of decades and even centuries.
The same concept, of course, would apply to e-book formats, one reason we need comprehensive standards that can gracefully evolve.
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Comments:
Back in the early 1980s, there was a debate on whether computers and word processing would ever become popular with writers. Many authors opined that they would never leave their beloved typewriters behind. I’m sure there are still authors (other than JK Rowling) who still write by hand or by typewriter (in my years in business, I’ve gotten one submission from an author who had to have someone transpose to type for her). But there aren’t many.
As someone smart (or maybe it was Michael Crichton) once said, novels aren’t written, they’re rewritten. And word processors are rewriting machines.
The same people who once said they’d never abandon their typewriters now claim they’ll never abandon their paper books. Time has a way of making people forget.
I also think the third version adds the kind of emotional detail that connects the reader.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
It’s hard to say what was in the mind of an author when he wrote a certain passage, but having used a very early Osborne I can say that after the first week of getting used to using what was then something straight out of science fiction, I soon felt it was just another tool to make life easier. I even mastered Visicalc in a few days. Don’t forget, computers had been around for quite a few years so most people in offices and colleges would have been familiar with the concept, but having one on your desk – now that was a luxury! (And also bypassed those dragons who used to guard the typing pool!)
Re: a) Ellison’s output problem and b) the preservation issue — remember that Ellison was widely described as being devestated by the 1967 fire at his home that destroyed, among other things, 200 pages of a draft to the follow-up to the Invisible Man. Not all data loss is DRM-related.
OTOH, this was still 14 years after Invisible Man. There is hardly any shortage of artists who score an initial work putting them on the map as geniuses only to then suffer from performance anxiety that prevents them from moving forward.
Presumably if he had live in a different era, Ellison would be on the dev team for Duke Nukem Forever.
I can’t speck to Ellison, but a place I worked at in the mid-80′s had long used secretaries and Wang word processor’s. The other employees (engineers and scientists) had access to some HP workstations that were used for analysing data. These HP workstations also had a propietary word processing program on them.
The idea was that instead of wrting a draft paper longhand, the software on the HP’s could be used, thus saving the engineer/scientist lots of time. It didn’t happen that way. Most of them would sit in front of the HP for hours or days, trying to get their “draft” into final form, before printing it out for the secretary to type into the Wang.
“Most of them would sit in front of the HP for hours or days, trying to get their ‘draft’ into final form, before printing it out for the secretary to type into the Wang.”
Wow, what a story, Joseph! Perhaps someday someone will come up with a program to help office workers be more efficient in their writing and be better at seeing the whole picture–rather than fixating on the details. But can you really do that to help a genius like Ellison with his work?
Of course, as we know, his computer wasn’t the only reason why we ran so late.
By the way, the Washington Post has just done a chat session on Ellison, and it’s well worth reading—complete with computer-related references, including this one from Adam Bradley: “As for the computer material, I would say that what it sometimes lacks in polish, it makes up for in the richness of the characters’ voices-particularly that of the jazzman turned preacher, Alonzo Hickman, who emerges as the governing voice of the novel.”
At the same time, Bradley says that “I believe that the computer has fundamentally transformed the way writers write and readers read. The implications are stylistic (shorter paragraphs, more disjointed narratives) but also practical (we can play games, surf the web, even participate in online chats!). Ellison might not have done all of those things on his computer–he couldn’t have–but it nonetheless was a radically different tool than the typewriter.”
Does anyone agree with the above? I’m not sure we can blame shorter paragraphs on computers; the culprit instead is the shortened attention span of modern readers, and in the case of the Web and e-books, then shorter could be better. As for disjointed narratives—well, that depends on how well you use computers. With easier revision, a conscientious writer could make the narrative flow better.
I speak first-hand, not from theory. I’ve been revising some old fiction from my Selectric days, and both the prose and the narrative are far, far better in the new version, not just because I know more about writing but also because I can revise more easily. I doubt I’ll be returning to a Selectric very soon.
What’s more, you can bet I prefer a 19-inch monitor to the midget screen on the Ellison’s Osborn, which perhaps made it harder to keep track of the book as a whole. This wouldn’t be so much a problem today. I can wander around a book-length manuscript just about as rapidly–in fact, probably more so due to the powers of search—as I could around a typewritten manuscript.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Ellison lacked a hard drive on the Osborn, which meant he had to swap disks in and out, and had more problems finding material than writer do when using a hard drive. My manuscript is one big Word file.
Thanks,
David
An aside to Carol: Thanks for your Osborne memories!
I think that part of the problem of using computers for writing has to do with the novelty. Part of it also depends on the personality of the user. And part of it has to do with learning how to best use the tool. Some people may never get past the novelty stage to really use the tool to their advantage.
For myself, I learned to touch type in high school, before anyone had personal computers (I’m dating myself, aren’t I?). I first got my hands on a computer in 1980 and have owned and used many of them ever since. Although there was a lot of time spent on just “playing” with the computer, even in the early days, I realized that a word processing program was the most useful software to have.
With all this exposure to computers, I very quickly got to the point that if I needed to write anything more than a few lines, I would use the computer. I found it much easier to compose on the computer, without ever writing anything on paper first. The thoughts just flowed more freely than with paper. Today, if I have to write anything of length on paper, it is a real chore.
I am reminded of Isaac Asimov, who for most of his career composed his stories at the typewriter, without a paper draft. In fact, usually his typewritten first draft was also the final draft. In his later life, he did switch to using a computer, but still wrote the same way he did on the typewriter. Considering the number of articles and books that he created, it obviously worked for him.
re: copyright terms and Ellison’s sort of writer. I rather doubt that the greats who labor for years over their prose are working, like pulp-fiction hacks, for the money. So 14 years of protection or 180 would make little difference to them. They will take their time and get the prose “right” before they submit to their publishers.
On the other hand the royalties of “Invisible Man” had they run out after 14 years might have “encouraged” Ellison to produce his next work post-haste…which argues in favor of shorter terms of monopoly protection even for the fine artists of the literary world.
Back 30 years or so ago, Lester del Rey (no fan of computers in writers’ lives) told me that there are some writers who get computers to write, and some who get computers to play with the computers. This is a distinction that makes sense to me.
And there are theories advanced that postulate that writing with the hand, physically shaping each glyph as if you were drawing it, involves parts of the brain that play no part in pressing a key. And therefore there is a differenct quality of writing that emerges from longhand MSS vs. typescripts whether from typewriters or word processors.
But I would not wish to give up my Scrivener for the Mac!