We win it in the last of the twelfth, on the best day—when we lose I am disconsolate for ninety seconds; baseball woe fades fast—as I undress and put on my nightshirt. When I go to bed I read twenty pages of Working before my eyes refuse to remain open.

The best day depends partly on other people. Jane’s presence, working in her study on her poems, enables me to concentrate on my own. But also, “I dash down to Lois’s house and bring back the afternoon’s typing.” Until 1960 or so, I typed my own manuscripts. Often I worked directly onto the typewriter but I came to think that it was bad for my work. I typed rapidly—one finger and many errors—and tended to run on, to be glib and glibber, never to pause and x-out or reconsider. For me, the typewriter was mania; when I wrote longhand I slowed down; I paused to cross something out and to try again. But then, in order to read and revise, I needed to type from my handwriting; then I would mess the page up with my handwriting again, then type it again … The mechanics took time—my impatience was with mechanics not with revision—and when I typed my back hurt.

Someone told me about a good typist in town, and tentatively I began to take her my work. Dorothy Foster became my friend as well as my keyboard-helper and typed for me off and on for thirty years (I mailed manuscripts from New Hampshire). Dorothy loved to type, loved her own speed, accuracy, and shrewdness in solving problems of wretched penmanship; she took the same list-making, crossing-out pleasure in work as I did. And when I hired Dorothy to type manuscript, I found that I did more work; I had withheld myself from the desk because typing was painful and boring. As businessmen say, “You have to spend money to make money.” By selling one more essay or book review a year, I paid for Dorothy’s hours.

Then I discovered dictation. The Department of English at the University of Michigan possessed a spare Grundig Stenorette, available to teachers for dictating letters of reference. I tried, and at first my sentences sounded like a witless parody of Winston Churchill, pompous and wandering. (Ford Madox Ford said that Theodore Watts-Dunton “addressed me as if I were a public meeting.”) I used the dictated originals as drafts and tried again; in a mere two weeks of reference-writing season, I learned to dictate letters that sounded as natural as anything I pecked on my typewriter or scrawled in my illegible longhand—although I needed to supply “comma” and even “exclamation point!” as well as to spell proper names. I have dictated ever since. Living in the country, preferring solitude, we entertain few visitors and never go to dinner parties; but gregariousness withered in the flesh blooms in the post: thus my five thousand annual pieces of mail.