Retyping A Novel, As Art
POUGHKEEPSIE, New York — Tim Youd got distracted. He did not notice that the paper was in wrong until he had typed “Herconfidencefledasshe.”
A writer would have put spaces between the words, but Mr. Youd is not a writer. He is a performance artist who retypes famous novels, word for word, with no spaces — lineafterlineafterline, likethis. And he does so on old typewriters like the ones the authors themselves used. Mr. Youd, 50, has retyped 55 novels so far. He is aiming for 100.
Mr. Youd has typed “A Farewell to Arms” in Piggott, Arkansas, where Ernest Hemingway wrote much of it, and “The Sound and the Fury” in William Faulkner’s hometown, Oxford, Mississippi.
His 56th novel brought him here, to the campus of Vassar College. It’s “The Group,” the 1963 best seller about eight classmates from Vassar. It made Mary McCarthy, Vassar class of 1933, famous and also rich.
Vassar is different from what it was in McCarthy’s day — for one thing, it has admitted men since 1969. But Mr. Youd decided that “The Group” was just the thing to type on the Vassar campus, and not just for its potential as a history lesson for undergraduates of the laptop-and- cellphone age who have never touched a carriage-return lever or heard the bell ring close to the end of a line.
Mr. Youd was typing a single single- spaced sheet of paper. That one page will contain the entire novel. By the time he reaches Page 487, the page will be a mess.
“I’m coming at this from the perspective of the visual artist who’s interested in how text and literature manifest themselves in a visual way,” he said.
He is a two-finger typist and said he did not know how many words per minute he could bang out. “I generally have to get 25 pages done in a day,” he said.
On good days one week, he set himself up under a London plane tree that was already a campus landmark in McCarthy’s day. His desk was a folding table that he hauled around on a hand truck.
The typewriter this day was a Remington portable that he said was just like the machine McCarthy owned when she wrote “The Group.” He bought it on eBay.
He said he made mistakes as he went along. “Yeah, probably one a line,” he said. “I just keep chugging along. I’m earnestly attempting to retype every word, but it’s an exercise in good reading, not good typing.”
The first novel he retyped was “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” by Hunter S. Thompson. “The reason why I chose him was he typed out ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and ‘The Great Gatsby’ to learn how to write fiction early in his writing career,” he said.
Undergraduates passed by. Jennifer Novak said she had seen manual typewriters in a museum, “but never out like this.”
“It’s kind of mesmerizing,” she said.