Trunk Archaeology

Sometime back I was digging around in one box or another in the shed and happened across something remarkable: two fat folders full of typewritten manuscripts I wrote while I was still in high school; that is, 1966-1970. It was a lot of paper: stacked up, the pile was over two inches thick. A handful were things I wrote in college from the very early ‘70s. Nearly all were high school stuff.

That box (and another box of more recent material) are what authors call their “trunk,” a sort of dead letter office for old manuscripts. I thought all that really old stuff was gone forever. I was sharp enough to write dates on the back pages of a few, which helped. Another clue lay in the nature of the typescript. I’ve owned three typewriters in my life:

1. My grandmother Sade Duntemann’s 1920-vintage Underwood Standard #5, which she gave me in 1962, when I was ten.
2. My Smith Corona electric, which my godmother Aunt Kathleen gave me for my birthday in mid-1968.
3. My IBM Selectric, which I bought in 1972 and kept until laser printers made it unnecessary. I sold it in 2003.

The clues lay in the characters impressed by the type bars. The Underwood had seen a lot of use in its life, and its characters were not all crisply aligned. The type bars had clearly been jammed together now and then (I’d seen it happen, heh) and the characters were not in perfect alignment. The lowercase “a” in particular was a smidge higher than all the other letters. The Smith Corona’s type looked a great deal like the Underwood’s, except that I’d received it brand-new and all the type bars were perfectly aligned. The Selectric produced typescript obviously different from that of both earlier typewriters.

Another clue is that I wrote first drafts of all my high school stuff single-spaced.

The biggest clue of all was a stapled set of two sheets containing the titles of 46 short stories and one poem. As best I could tell, the titles were in chronological order. The list itself was typed on the Smith Corona, which dates it somewhere between mid-1968 and early 1972. The first draft of my story “Whale Meat” had the date February 8, 1971 written on the last sheet but was not on the list, so that means the list was drawn up earlier than that date.

Scanning the list of titles was profoundly weird. Although most of the titles were at least vaguely familiar (hey, how could I ever forget a title like “The Man Who Drove a Bulldozer Into Hell”?) about a third had slipped my memory utterly. Of the stories themselves I remembered almost nothing, save for a couple of my favorites. In reading manuscripts from that box, I didn’t even know what would happen next. It was like reading someone else’s stories entirely.

The list was not exhaustive. In digging through the paper-clipped sheet sets, I found two stories that had been written on the Underwood but were not on the list at all.

So here I am, reading through two inches of my fiction juvenalia. If you thought that finding the stories and the list of their titles was peculiar, stay tuned. I learned a lot about my progress as a writer from those stories. I’ll cite a few examples in my next entry here.