Fountain Pens, Hemingway, His Typewriter and Me
© Jeffrey Robinson 2024
A preface to this story:
There was a time when I regularly wrote for magazines. For a dozen years in France and 25 more in London, before books and even after books, there were hundreds and hundreds of articles in dozens and dozens of major magazines around the world. I earned my living telling stories, from bouillabaisse in Marseilles to a boomerang champion in Sydney. From walls in Berlin to spies in Mallorca. From Churchill's cigars in London to secret bank accounts in Lugano. From Her Majesty the Queen in Copenhagen to a woman who once posed for Modigliani in France. From sex shows in Rotterdam to the underground duty-free world of Kansas City. From vagabonding around the south Pacific to secret meetings with Basque separatists in Spain. From hidden wine cellars in Monte Carlo to opera in south Texas. From a lonely baseball icon in San Francisco to a cop's murder in Cleveland. From smoked meat in Montreal to Christmas in Dachau. And short stories, too. Fiction for men's magazines and women's magazines, of first kisses, chance meetings, and lost loves, of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings.
These days it's rare. But when I do write for a magazine, because it's so rare, it's all the more special for me. It takes me back to a gentler time, when I wrote late at night and always had a candle burning near by. Like when I pounded green keys straight down, one by one, with two fast fingers, on my trusty old 1944 Royal - made in some WW2 aircraft factory out of indestructible steel - and then edited each draft, eight or ten or twelve drafts in blue ink, with my grandfather's 1920s Parker Big Red.
Hence the story below that I published in PEN WORLD Magazine... one of the most beautiful and best edited magazines on the market today.
"A Fountain Pen Scribe’s Ode to a Typewriter."
Yes, it's about fountain pens, Hemingway, his typewriter... which I own... and me. But it's also about how combining a typewriter with a fountain pen reminds me of those early years of learning to write, of struggling to make a living at it, and cherishing that particular thrill in the story telling process that young writers today, on laptops and iPads, will never know.
Here it is:
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I stood there, just 15, clutching a $30 check from a magazine for something I’d written, the first ever for my writing, growing dizzy with images in my head of where I needed to be. Paris. In the rain. Ducking into a warm café to claim an empty wooden table at the back. Nursing my grand crème while scribbling flowing exposition and biting dialog into my leather Moleskine notebook with my Montegrappa pen. Just like Ernest Hemingway all those years ago.
His love letter to Paris, “A Moveable Feast,” had awakened my $30 fortune with yearning. In that memoir, Hemingway wrote: “It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write...”
Wait. What? Stop. A pencil? What happened to his Montegrappa?
Everyone knows that Hemingway discovered Montegrappas long before he discovered Paris. It was in Italy, during World War I when he was an ambulance driver stationed near the company’s factory. He wrote with Montegrappas.
Hemingway was Montegrappa.
Hemingway was not a pencil!
Now what? Without access to that factory 4,200 miles away in Italy or to a Montegrappa anywhere in New York that didn’t require a bank loan, all that was left was to commandeer my late-grandfather’s vintage 1920s Parker Big Red. My mother was fine with that, but she put her foot down when it came to the Parisian café. “You are not moving to France. Go do your homework.”
That didn’t happen until 10 years later. France, that is. Thinking back, the homework probably didn’t get done at all.
But a pencil? They’re fine for crossword puzzles. And for the counter guy at the diner who takes your order and chews on it. And for Miss Something-or-Other, the white haired, flat-shoe wearing spinster librarian in elementary school who had a yellow No.2 with a metal ring attached on the eraser end that held a rubber date stamp.
Pencils are not fine for serious writers.
Except... John Steinbeck wrote with a Blackwing Palomino. And Truman Capote used a Blackwing 602. So did Vladimir Nabokov. So did F. Scott Fitzgerald. Apparently he’d start his writing day by sharpening two dozen Blackwings, each worthy of producing half a dozen lines on paper until it required sharpening again.
But the thought that George and Lennie, and Holly Golightly, and Lolita, and Jay Gatsby were all born out of graphite? No. Sorry.
In my mind, at some point in the process, serious writing needs to be layered seriously onto paper by hand with a fountain pen. Sure, we all write today on a screen. But I print out every draft and edit everything with fountain pens — Grandpa’s Big Red, a Montblanc, a Montegrappa, vintage Parker 45s and 51s — because fountain pens are about that “brain is connected to the hand” precision.
You know, like the way Stradivari made violins.
The way Winston Churchill wrote “We shall fight on the beaches...” with an Onoto. The way Agatha Christie wrote “Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend,” with a Montblanc. The way Steven King gave us nightmares with his Waterman Hemisphere. The way Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes to a dog that didn’t bark with a Parker Duofold. The way John F. Kennedy supposedly wrote his most famous “Ask not...” inaugural address with a Montblanc Meisterstück No. 149.
Or didn’t. When he wasn’t being photographed with his Montblanc, he’d sneak out a Parker 45. Truth be told, it was his speech writer, the brilliant Ted Sorensen, who came up with, “Ask not...” and “Ich bin ein Berliner...” and “We choose to go to the moon...” all of which he wrote with a White House Esterbrook dip pen.
It was the way Mark Twain wrote, “Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well,” with his Conklin Crescent Filler. The way Albert Einstein equaled E by squaring MC with a Pelikan 100N and/or a Waterman Taper-Cap — no one is sure which — although his Waterman is the one on display in the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden, Holland.
The way Grace Kelly answered every letter from little girls writing to ask, “What’s it like to be a real-life princess?” with her Montblanc. That’s what she told me. I was her biographer. The Montblanc company believed it, too, reportedly paying the Princess Grace Foundation $1 million for the right to produce a special edition Grace Kelly Montblanc. It’s gorgeous, which is fitting. So was she.
And it was the way I wanted to believe “Papa” Hemingway did it. I mean, sort of the way I found out he sometimes did it.
Or didn’t.
After his morning writing stint in a café, he’d return home to climb three flights of narrow stairs at 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, where he and his first wife Hadley had taken a couple of rooms. In the heart of the Latin Quarter, the place was sparse and without running water. The bathroom was supposedly nothing more than a bucket.
There are people who warn, never meet your heroes. I’m not sure about that. Baseball Hall of Famer Duke Snider turned out to be a terrific guy. So maybe the advice should be, it’s okay to meet your heroes, just don’t peek into their bathroom habits.
Once upstairs, Hemingway would type his notes, standing up, using a Corona-3 machine that Hadley had given him for his 22nd birthday. Today, there’s a Corona-3 sitting in plain view at La Finca, the museum that was Hemingway’s home in Cuba. The suggestion being, here is the Hadley gift. It is not. Hadley’s Corona-3 was destroyed by a Parisian cab driver in July 1923.
Hemingway was on his way to Pamplona in northeast Spain to run with the bulls for the first time. Arriving at the Gare de Lyons, he got into a heated discussion with his cab driver about the fare. In those days, luggage sat in an open space up front next to the driver, not in the back with the passenger. As the two argued, the driver got so angry that he tossed Hemingway's luggage onto the street. The box with the Corona-3 inside got smashed.
As soon as Papa returned to Paris, needing another typewriter and not able to afford a new one, he bought a used Erika — a small German machine made by A.G. Vorm. Seidel & Neumann in Dresden, numbered 73057 — and that’s the typewriter on which he wrote “The Sun Also Rises.”
When he left Paris, he gave the Erika to his friend Sylvia Beach, owner of the legendary bookshop Shakespeare and Company. In turn, she gave it to an antique dealer friend whose daughter was married to the French art critic Pierre Restany. He was friends with the French born, American New Realist artist Arman who, among other things, was famous for slicing objects like violins and cellos, then remounting the slices into a new shape.
Restany gave Hemingway’s Erika to Arman, suggesting he slice it, but Arman didn't have an emotional relationship with the typewriter the way he did with musical instruments, and it sat on a shelf in his Riviera studio for many years. I first saw it there in the early 1970s. Eventually, as Arman and his wife Corice became two of my closest friends, he gifted it to me. He said he knew that I’d appreciate it and would take good care of it.
I do and I have.
Hemingway biographer, Professor Carlos Baker at Princeton, confirmed that he knew about the Erika and told me the tale of the angry cab driver.
Today it sits in my office, under glass, on a shelf not far from a Hemingway-era Corona-3 and my trusty old, ever-faithful 1940s Royal, with which I earned my living when I was writing in France.
Sometimes — not often, but occasionally — I feel slightly sorry for young writers who will never know the music of words typewritingly clicking directly onto paper. Or, be able to tell young children terrifying stories about one’s struggles with carbon paper.
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