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Introductory wall text

The Mystique of the Archive

Archives are the material record of a culture that provide a vital source for insight into the imaginations of individuals and societies. Archives promise mystery, adventure, and discovery for those who explore them. The interest in archives has never been stronger, garnering international headlines and capturing the attention of writers such as Tom Stoppard, Doris Lessing, and Julian Barnes who have incorporated them into their work. Archives provide scholars with a remarkable opportunity to see behind the scenes of the creative endeavor, providing what one American novelist described as an “understanding from somewhere beyond earth.”

Drawing on the Center’s extensive holdings of the imaginative works of writers and artists, the exhibition demonstrates the rich and complex nature of archives and the many uses made of them. It is organized into thematic sections that:

• describe what constitutes an archive

• document how an idea evolves into a fully-developed work

• map an archive’s journey from a writer’s home to the scholar’s desk

• examine the monetary, cultural, research, and evocative values of archives

• illustrate how an archive leads to a deeper understanding of the art and

culture of which it is a part Everybody, in some form or another, creates an archive. As you view the exhibition, we hope you will think about what is in your own archive and how you will preserve it. Section 1

The Aura of the Archive

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In an April 21, 2006 interview at the Ransom Center, the Irish playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry responded to the question “What is an archive?”:

It’s a memory trail, like those old Victorian photos—is that a ghost? But here, it’s a ghost of your work, a ghost of yourself. . . When I was looking at it today, rising around me were the walls and people I was surrounded by when I wrote it. It’s a haunted river, a long river.

There is a magical quality about archives. In the era of the virtual, archives stand out as the original, the real. They carry what German philosopher Walter Benjamin called the aura of the authentic: an essence born from their utter uniqueness, their authority as genuine original artifacts, and their accumulated history.

The archive is the map that traces the trajectory of the imagination. A writer’s archive, for example, may include the journals, notes, outlines, and false starts, the drafts that illustrate innumerable changes, cross-outs, and marginal notes. These items tell the story of how a work of literature was composed, how it came to be. For a scholar, opening an archive is akin to entering an unfamiliar world, for one can know neither what to expect nor what discoveries will follow. Part of the wonder of an archive is the unlikely fact that it exists at all. Harry Ransom, a pioneer in the field of institutional collecting, wrote:

We are reminded among these written and printed things, these verbal artifacts, how tentative, how uncertain the whole process has been. Many words have been lost altogether. . . Many have been used up, worn out, discarded. Yet amid all this accident and transience, man’s record stands amazingly clear.

The aura of the archive has captivated the imagination of many artists and writers. Attracted by their promise of adventure and the lure of discovery, Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, and many other writers have used archives and archival work as the basis for works of fiction. Case 1 1

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A corrected typescript page from a draft of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot In his novel Flaubert’s Parrot, about an amateur scholar in search of information about Gustave Flaubert’s life, Julian Barnes illustrates the importance of the papers and relics an author leaves behind, while questioning what it is about archival materials that gives them such allure. In this corrected typescript page, he writes of Flaubert, “He died little more than a hundred years ago, but all that remains of him is paper. Paper, ideas, phrases, metaphors, structures, prose…” In the second paragraph, he continues in his handwritten additions, “What makes us randy for relics? Don’t we believe the words enough? Do we think the leavings of a life contain some ancillary truth?” 2-4 Manuscript notebook and corrected typescript pages from a draft of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot

In this notebook entry, Barnes records his earliest ideas for Flaubert’s Parrot, which highlight the delicate and perishable nature of archival materials. He writes:

American Froglit scholar finds Flaubert/Julia Herbert letters, proving liaison. He destroys them. Why? a) he’s fed up with the way the life detracts from the work. b) he finds some hint that F would have wished them destroyed—e.g. he tells JH to do so at the end of several. c) He likes the idea of being the only person ever to have read them apart from F & JH.

Barnes ends the entry, “What do you think is right[?] I haven’t been able to make up my mind.”

The corrected typescript pages from the novel detail the exchange between Barnes’s protagonist Geoffrey Braithwaite, who is desperate to see the Flaubert/Julia Herbert letters, and their destroyer, American scholar Ed Winterton. 11, 5-6

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First English edition of Flaubert’s Parrot (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984) Draft letter from Julian Barnes to Liz [Calder], his publisher, ca. 1983

In this draft letter to his publisher, Barnes explains the subject of the novel, his narrative approach, and what he hopes the book will accomplish. The letter exemplifies how materials in a writer’s archive can provide unique insight into the creative process.

The completion scheme Barnes prepared, displayed on the wall nearby, provides further information about his method of work. 15, 12 Corrected typescript page from Penelope Lively’s According to Mark First edition of Penelope Lively’s According to Mark (London: Heinemann, 1984) The British writer Penelope Lively’s (b. 1933) novel, According to Mark (1984), is about a biographer, Mark Lamming, who stumbles upon a treasure trove of manuscripts and letters when he visits the former home of his subject. This typescript page describes the scene of Mark’s discovery and the sense of wonder and shock it inspires. Describing the materials found in two dusty trunks up in the attic, Lively writes: “Within was a soup of documents, all jumbled together: wads of manuscript, exercise books, batches of letters bound with tape. . . Mark stared at the trunks. Thoughts and emotions hurtled through him in confusing succession: excitement and horror and curiosity and an awful weariness and a whole series of realizations that begat other realizations.” 16 Josephine Herbst’s letter to “Helen,” September 29, 1947 Josephine Herbst (1897-1969) was a novelist, journalist, historian, and critic who was active in the American literary scene from the 1920s through the 1960s. In this letter, she describes the experience of rummaging through her

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old papers, manuscripts, and letters. It is not only a magical one for her, but also revealing:

I had a strange feeling reading these things; very beautiful as one gets rarely in a love affair, a kind of other-world feeling as if understanding from somewhere beyond earth had suddenly fallen upon one’s shoulders. . . I had the feeling that I suddenly saw myself, as if I were someone else and it was quite wonderful.

7 [wall item] Julian Barnes’s completion scheme for Flaubert’s Parrot, ca. 1983 8-9 [wall item] Julian Barnes’s “The Follies of Writer Worship,” The New York Times Book Review February 17, 1985, with digital reproduction of interior page Barnes wrote this essay for The New York Times Book Review a month before the American publication of Flaubert’s Parrot. It offers a different perspective on the allure of archival materials. Barnes focuses on the personal materials and memorabilia sometimes found in archives, materials that reveal little about the writer’s work but have a powerful aura that makes one feel closer to the writer nonetheless: a lock of hair, a cigar butt, a stuffed parrot (or two, in the case of Gustave Flaubert), and other bits of a writer’s life. Though Barnes himself has been drawn to such relics throughout his life, he argues that they do nothing to further our understanding of the work. He writes:

You may feel “close” to a writer when you walk round his house and examine a lock of his hair, but the only time you are truly close is when you are reading words on the page. . . Only the work can really explain the work. So perhaps we want to approach and touch the writer’s life for a more basic, a more magical reason. . . And just as the saint’s relics were kept in a gold casket beneath the altar, so now we preserve the writer’s relics, although we expect no miracles from them.

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[text panel, wall display]

Julian Barnes on his Archive In 2001, when the Ransom Center was negotiating the acquisition of the British novelist Julian Barnes’s archive, Barnes prepared this statement, dated February 22, about his working methods and the archival materials that result from them.

I don’t do a series of neatly completed drafts, each replacing the preceding one; in fact I don’t think in terms of drafts, rather of a continuing process of rereading, correction, and adjustment. I often start a day’s work by correcting the previous day’s output; might correct again at the end of a chapter, a section, and so on; but equally I might work over a whole section by itself half a dozen or more times before moving on. I correct in pencil or biro [ball-point] or felt pen over the typed script; so any typed page might contain half a dozen or more correcting levels. When the page becomes too messy to work with, I retype it. This “secondish” “draft” would also suffer much correction in the same way; there might then be a complete clean retype for the printer. I would correct again at copy-editing stage, and again, sometimes heavily, on proof. All pages that have been superseded I put in a folder, though in no particular order and with no attempt to show where they came from. By the time I deliver the novel every typed page would have been read and corrected probably between 15 and 30 times. There might be an occasion when the germ—or rather, the pre-germ—of a novel makes an earlier appearance in a travel diary or a personal journal: a piece of gossip, say, or an account of a visit to Flaubert’s birthplace. But everything I do from the moment I am faced by what I recognize as the possibility—or pre-possibility—of a novel is contained within the Archive. I have never thrown away more than the occasional (more or less duplicate) page of typescript. My Archive therefore contains 98 or 99% of all the marks I make on paper as a novelist.

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The completeness of Barnes’s archive is part of what makes it so revealing, and such an important resource for scholarship. 10 [wall item] Unidentified photographer Julian Barnes at work in his office, not dated Gelatin silver print 13 [wall item] Mark Gerson, photographer Penelope Lively, 1984 Gelatin silver print 14 [wall item] Penelope Lively letter to Tom Staley, Director of the Ransom Center, June 11, 1999 The Ransom Center acquired Penelope Lively’s archive in 1996. In the displayed letter, Lively thanks Director Tom Staley for sending her the preliminary inventory of the collection after it had been processed and described at the Center. Lively writes, “Fascinating! I relish the thought of all that past endeavor resting in tranquility at the Humanities Research Center.” Case 2 case label

Archives in Fiction Several contemporary writers have featured archival materials as major components of their fiction. Archives or archival materials have appeared in works by such popular writers as Michael Crichton (Disclosure and Sphere) and John le Carré (A Small Town in Germany). Several writers whose archives are housed at the Ransom Center have written about archival

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materials, including Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot), Doris Lessing (Canopus in Argos: Archives series), Penelope Lively (According to Mark), and Tom Stoppard (Arcadia). On display is a sampling of novels and plays that capture and reveal the great allure of the archive and its promise of adventure. 141 Excerpt from the dust jacket text of the first American edition of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. But his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths that take place in seven days and nights of apocalyptic terror. Brother William turns detective, and a uniquely deft one at that. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon—all sharpened to a glistening edge by his wry humor and ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols, and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey. 142 Excerpt from the dust jacket text of the first edition of A. S. Byatt’s Possession (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990) Two young academics are researching into the lives of—respectively—the Browningesque mid-Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash and his contemporary, Christabel LaMotte; and as they delve deeper into the turbulent and hitherto unrelated lives of the two poets through their letters, journals, and poems, and trace their movements from London to the north Yorkshire coast, from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany, a bizarre and haunting counterpointing and correspondence of passions and ideas begins to emerge. 143

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Excerpt from the dust jacket text of the first American edition of Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (New York: Grove Press, 1988) In today’s London, a young poet and an elderly female novelist engage the mystery of [Thomas] Chatterton by trying to decode the clues found in an old manuscript, only to discover that their investigation discloses other riddles for which there are no solutions. 144 Excerpt from the dust jacket text of the first edition of Martha Cooley’s The Archivist (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998) Matthias is a man of orderly ways, a librarian whose life rarely strays from its narrow channels. At the library where he works is an archive of letters from the poet T. S. Eliot to an American woman, written during the years Eliot was undertaking Four Quartets and wrestling with problems of marriage and of faith. When a young poet, Roberta, comes to the library wanting to see the letters—sealed from public view until the year 2020—she unsettles Matthais’s composure and brings back long-buried memories of a disastrous relationship years earlier. 145 Excerpt from the dust jacket text of the first edition of David Lodge’s The British Museum is Falling Down (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965) ‘Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way round.’ This is the conclusion of Adam Appleby, postgraduate student and father of three young children, as he pursues his studies in the British Museum Reading Room. 146 Brian Friel’s Give Me Your Answer, Do! (Old Castle, Ireland: Gallery Books 1997)

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This play is set on a sunny August afternoon in the old manse in Ballybeg in County Donegal, now home of the novelist, Tom Connolly, and his wife, Daisy. They are visited by an American agent who may, or may not, purchase Tom’s papers for an American College library. Joining them is their novelist friend Garrett Fitzmaurice and his wife, Grainne, whose marriage may, or may not, outlive the year. Absent from the occasion but overshadowing it by her tragedy is Bridget, the mentally-ill daughter of Tom and Daisy, who has been institutionalized since she was a child. Section 2 text panel

Defining Archives

What is an archive and how is one created? Each archive is unique, so there are no simple answers to these questions. Archives created by authors or artists include the materials they have saved related to their work, such as notes and research materials, journals, outlines, a succession of manuscript and typescript drafts that show the evolution of a text, proof copies, and correspondence. Many also include personal materials, such as family correspondence and photographs, financial papers, diaries, and even baby books. The most comprehensive archives are composed of materials related to both a writer’s life and his or her work. These are the archives that institutions like the Ransom Center find most compelling, for they have the greatest potential to be of interest to students and scholars. Sometimes writers and artists do not save their papers, or their archives are split into small batches of materials that find their way to friends or collectors and are eventually offered to institutions. Although these collections do not provide as comprehensive a view of the artist, they can still be of great research value, especially if they are reunited with other, similar collections. Many archives at the Ransom Center and other institutions are composed of smaller, individual collections that were acquired from various sources. In this section of the exhibition, materials are displayed from two very different archives. Tom Stoppard’s archive was acquired directly from the artist and contains materials related to nearly his entire body of work. It exemplifies the vast range and depth that can be found in many archives created by artists themselves. The much smaller J. D. Salinger collection was acquired by the Center from various rare book and manuscript dealers over several decades. This collection tells only part of the story of how

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Salinger created his works of fiction and offers just a small glimpse into his personal life. Case 3 case label

The Anatomy of an Archive The archive of British playwright Tom Stoppard (b. 1937), author of such acclaimed works as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Travesties, and The Coast of Utopia, was acquired by the Ransom Center in 1991. Since then Stoppard has made a number of subsequent additions to the collection. It includes a wide array of materials related to his work and his life. Nearly all of Stoppard’s major plays, screenplays, teleplays, and radio plays are represented in some form, along with many of his lesser-known works and some that were never produced. It is a diverse conglomeration of revealing materials.

The items displayed here offer a small example of the variety of materials that can be found in a writer’s archive. Each of these items relates to Stoppard’s play Arcadia, in which two contemporary scholars search through the 180-year-old archive of the fictional Croom family at Sidley Park, the Crooms’ large country home in Derbyshire. The play opened at the Lyttelton Theatre, Royal National Theatre in London on April 13, 1993. 57 Hand-corrected typescript of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, not dated

In the play, scholars Bernard and Hannah are studying the Croom family papers for very different research projects. Hannah, who is writing a history of the garden at Sidley Park and who knows the archive far better than Bernard, tries to dissuade him from his far-fetched theory that Lord Byron murdered a little known poet while visiting the home in 1809. Bernard is convinced that he will find something in the archive to support his theory. In the displayed page, he states, “Somewhere in the Croom papers there will be something.” Hannah responds, “There isn’t, I’ve looked.”

Note Hannah’s description of the archive (crossed out by Stoppard), which does not appear in the final version of the play: “The archive is a

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magpie’s nest of diaries, bills, scrap-books, school books, dance cards, even placements for important dinners. They kept everything.” The same could be said of Stoppard. 58 Letter from Robert May to Tom Stoppard, 31 January 1992 Stoppard incorporated ideas related to chaos theory and statistical studies of grouse (birds the Croom family regularly hunted on their grounds) into the intricately structured plot of Arcadia. While writing the play, Stoppard often consulted with his son, a physics graduate student at Oxford University, and with his son’s colleagues. In this letter, Oxford scientist Robert May provides Stoppard with information about both grouse and chaos theory. Stoppard met and corresponded with May regularly while drafting the play to discuss the scientific accuracy of information he included in the text. 59 “Arcadia Production Schedule” for the week before the first preview production of the play, dated 12 March 1993 60 Unidentified photographer Tom Stoppard with Trevor Nunn, director of the premiere of Arcadia at the Lyttleton Theatre, Royal National Theatre, 1993 66 Tom Stoppard’s ticket to the 1995 Antoinette Perry “Tony” Awards. Arcadia was nominated for “Best Play,” “Best Scenic Design,” and “Best Lighting Design.” 65

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Hand-corrected page from proofs of Arcadia, not dated This page from the proofs of the book edition of Arcadia includes Stoppard’s hand-written corrections and a cigarette burn. Many of the pages in Stoppard’s archive have similar burns or smell strongly of cigarette smoke. 64 Postcard from playwright Harold Pinter to Tom Stoppard, 11 May [1993]

In this postcard from Stoppard’s friend and fellow playwright Harold Pinter, Pinter writes, “Delighted to have ‘Arcadia.’ We had a great evening on all fronts.” 62 The program of Arcadia from the premiere production at the Lyttleton Theatre, Royal National Theatre, 1993 61, 63 A ticket from the first preview performance of Arcadia, 5 April 1993 An invitation for the cast and crew to attend dinner with Stoppard after one of the performances 67 [wall display] Jennifer Dundas Portrait of Tom Stoppard, 30 March 1995 Oil pastel on paper This portrait of Tom Stoppard as Septimus Hodge, one of the characters in Arcadia, was created by “Dundasina,” Jennifer Dundas, who starred as

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Thomasina Coverly in the American premiere of the play at the Lincoln Center Theater. 68 [wall display] Advertisement for the Lincoln Center Theater production of Arcadia, printed in The New York Times, 9 April 1995 69 [wall display] Poster from the Brussels, Belgium, production of Arcadia at the Rideau de Bruxelles, 1993–1994 17 [wall display] Letter from Penelope Fitzgerald to David Bryce, a former employee of the Ransom Center, not dated

In this letter, the British author Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) uses a quote from Stoppard’s play Arcadia to describe her own archive. She writes: “The quotation from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia—‘islands of order emerging in oceans of disorder’ made me sigh, as ‘oceans of disorder’ exactly describes my notes and papers here. It’s a great comfort to think of material being so well looked after at Austin, Texas.”

The Ransom Center acquired Fitzgerald’s archive in 1989. 112 Mats Gustafson (Swedish, b. 1951) Portrait of Penelope Fitzgerald, not dated Watercolor 15” x 11” Case 4 case label

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J. D. Salinger Collection

Unlike the Tom Stoppard archive, the Ransom Center’s J. D. Salinger collection was not compiled by the writer himself. In fact, if the notoriously reclusive Salinger (b. 1919) was to have his way, none of this material would have found its way into the Ransom Center at all. But once a letter or manuscript is sent out or given away by its creator, it becomes the property of the recipient who may then subsequently sell or donate it.

The Ransom Center built its Salinger collection by acquiring such letters and manuscripts from sources other than Salinger. The bulk of the collection was acquired in 1968 from the New York City bookseller Lew David Feldman, and separate, smaller acquisitions were made in 1973, 1990, and 1991 from other dealers of rare books and manuscripts. Ransom Center catalogers grouped these acquisitions together into one collection that consists of manuscripts (including some that are unpublished), page proofs, and galleys of works by Salinger, along with some of his correspondence. 71a-b Hand-corrected typescript pages from J. D. Salinger’s short story “I’m Crazy,” ca. 1945 On December 22, 1945, Collier’s magazine published “I’m Crazy,” the first story to feature Salinger’s most famous character, Holden Caulfield. These typescript pages, corrected by hand by Salinger, provide an abbreviated, subtly different version of the opening to Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye. 72 Uncorrected advance page proofs of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, 17 May 1951 74-75 Hand-corrected page from a typescript fragment of one of J. D. Salinger’s unpublished, untitled stories

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Letter from J. D. Salinger to Elizabeth Murray, 31 October 1941 This hand-corrected typescript fragment is from Salinger’s unpublished short story about a woman named Paula Hincher who convinces herself, and her husband and friends, that she is pregnant, but her pregnancy is only a figment of her imagination. Salinger sold the story to Stag magazine in 1941 or 1942, but the magazine chose not to print it, and it remains unpublished. In this letter from Salinger to Elizabeth Murray, he mentions the story: “Finishing a horror story (my first and last) called ‘Mrs. Hincher.’” In a later letter to Murray, Salinger refers to the story as “Paula.” Its actual title is unknown. Note that Salinger signed his letter “Teddy.” He playfully signed many of his letters with the names of characters from his stories. 73 Letter from J. D. Salinger to Elizabeth Murray, postmarked 2 October 1941 The Ransom Center’s collection includes extensive correspondence from Salinger to his longtime friend Elizabeth Murray. Spanning from 1940 to 1963, the letters address such topics as Salinger’s writing and the publication of his works, his literary tastes, and his romantic relationships. This letter covers all three topics. Salinger writes, “Finishing a new piece called ‘The Madison Avenue Rebel.’ For Esquire, I think.” The story was actually published in The New Yorker as “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” in 1946, beginning a long relationship between the writer and the magazine. Of literature Salinger writes, “Re-read a lot of Scott Fitzgerald’s work this week. God, I love that man. Damn fool critics are forever calling writers geniuses for their idiosyncrasies—Hemingway for his reticent dialogue, Wolfe for his gargantuan energy, and so on. Fitzgerald’s only idiosyncrasy was his pure brilliance.” Finally, Salinger mentions his approaching date with Oona O’Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill and the future wife of Charlie Chaplin. 76-77 Letter from Andreas Brown, of Gotham Book Mart, to J. D. Salinger, 7 August 1974

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Letter from J. D. Salinger to Andreas Brown, 13 August 1974 The attention Salinger received for his hugely popular works quickly became unwanted and overwhelming to the author, and although he continued to write, he stopped publishing in 1965. In this exchange between Salinger and Andreas Brown, owner of the renowned Gotham Book Mart in New York City, Brown alerts Salinger to the fact that someone has printed and is offering for sale an unauthorized, two-volume edition of Salinger’s short stories. In Salinger’s response to Brown, he writes, “I know, of course, about those editions and am doing my damndest, with the help of lawyers, to put a stop to it.” 78 The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger, volume 1 of 2, ca. 1974 This pirated edition of Salinger’s short stories was published in two volumes without the permission of the author. 79 Ian Hamilton’s In Search of J. D. Salinger (New York: Random House, 1988) When the British poet and writer Ian Hamilton attempted to research a biography of Salinger, Salinger refused to cooperate and denied Hamilton the right to quote from his work, including letters that Hamilton examined at the Ransom Center. When Hamilton changed tactics and paraphrased the content of the letters rather than quoting directly from them, Salinger took legal action to prevent the book from being published. Although he was unsuccessful, he was able to prevent Hamilton from publishing even close paraphrases of original manuscript content. Hamilton, undeterred, incorporated an account of these scholarly frustrations into the book’s narrative.

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Section 3 text panel

Finding a Home

The road an archive travels from author’s study or artist’s workroom

to a research library like the Ransom Center can be circuitous or direct, short or lengthy, and no two archives take the same path.

The motivations for giving up the records of one’s work vary. They can be fiduciary. Before U.S. tax laws changed in 1969, writers could donate papers and deduct the fair-market value from their federal income taxes. The British playwright Arnold Wesker hoped to leverage the sale of his papers into a lifetime annuity arrangement. The reasons can be practical. The barn is not a safe long-term storage site. The basement is damp. Alan Furst was prompted to call the Ransom Center after he tripped over a box of drafts of a novel and nearly fell down the stairs. The American novelist Diane Johnson saw the sale of her papers as “a great chance to clear up some clutter” and was persuaded that her “manuscripts would be in a place where people cared about such things. . . in a spirit of preserving literary materials in general.” The appeal of having one’s work preserved for posterity can be a powerful motivating factor.

In finding a home for a collection of personal papers, a writer or artist may negotiate directly with a library, archive, or museum; use a middleman such as a literary agent, manuscript dealer, or auction house; or leave the matter of the disposition of the archive entirely in the hands of heirs and executors.

An archive may be kept intact or divided between several repositories. The American playwright Tennessee Williams’s papers, for example, are housed in as many as six libraries and archives, including the Ransom Center, and additional manuscripts still appear on the open market. Michael Holroyd, the biographer of the British playwright George Bernard Shaw, concluded after years of research that “there is no Shaw collection; there is only a Shaw distribution.”

A writer or artist’s decision to donate or sell an archive outside her or his own country of birth often sparks debate about cultural property and national patrimony. The Center and other U.S. collecting institutions have often been the subject of such British newspaper headlines as “The scandal of Britain’s lost literary archives” (1996), “Poet fights sale of authors’ archives” (2001), and “Writers unite to fight flight of literary papers to US” (2005).

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This section of the exhibition travels the often rocky road of an archive’s journey from individual to institution. 138, 139, 140 [wall mounted] Unidentified photographer Photographs of Arnold Wesker packing his papers for transport to the Ransom Center, 1999 On December 8, 1999, Wesker sent an email communication to the Center’s director, Tom Staley, reporting on packing day:

They’ve gone! . . . The driver, a huge fellow, brought his mother with for the ride. It was really quite an amusing scene. The mother sat in the kitchen doing her crosswords. . . Neil, her son, looked as though he could carry three boxes at a time. “He could lift that fridge” said his proud mum. . . And there was Jan, hauling boxes from the barn to the van while I just ticked off each box as it left. . . All over so much quicker than I’d imagined. . . I hope you don’t consider a lot of what I’ve sent to be useless. There’s no knowing what a researcher can make use of, so I threw in the lot! I now don’t exist. Take my archives you take me. The hand-written manuscripts were the evidence that I was here. Now I must make do with the rows of printed books. Not quite the same.

148 Unidentified photographer Photographs of the packing and loading of John Fowles’s papers for transport from Lyme Regis, UK, to the Ransom Center, ca. 1991

When the Ransom Center purchased the archive of the British novelist John Fowles (1926-2005) in 1991, it allowed him to retain his journals and two early manuscripts for his ongoing use, although they were considered part of the purchase. The diaries were shipped to the Ransom Center in 1999 and additional purchases of Fowles manuscripts from private owners were made in 2003, 2004, and 2006.

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Following Fowles’ death, his widow and a co-literary executor contacted the Center about adding to the existing archive manuscripts generated by Fowles after the 1991 purchase. The Center arranged for a London-based bookseller to examine this additional material. He reported, “the description you have been sent does very little justice to the scope, depth and quantity of the material. It’s tempting to draw the conclusion that if a writer’s archive exists essentially in two parts—the ‘life’ and the ‘work’—then what we have here is the former, in all its diversity.”

An agreement was reached and the remainder of the John Fowles archive, including his writing desk, arrived at the Center in March of 2008. 147 Anthony Burgess’s musical sketch for “Blooms of Dublin,” not dated

The British novelist Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) sold several important manuscripts to McMaster University in Canada between 1967 and 1983. The University purchased additional Burgess material through a bookseller, at auction, and from an individual.

Following Burgess’s death in 1993, the Ransom Center approached Burgess’s widow, Liana Burgess, and acquired the larger portion of his archive in 1997, only to learn that gathering it up involved collecting material from three homes in as many countries—Italy, Switzerland, and London. Burgess compartmentalized his work and wrote in different venues for each genre. He wrote fiction and journalism in an apartment in Italy, composed music in Switzerland, and accumulated additional materials in a flat in London. The fact that Burgess’s widow could not always remember the location of their several homes made the task of locating the component pieces of the archive all the more challenging. 216 [getting this from Pete] Image of the truck that delivered the Norman Mailer archive to the Ransom Center in 2005 When asked about his connection to Texas and why he placed his archive at the Harry Ransom Center, Mailer said:

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“A man who went to a famous prep school in the early ’20s said afterward, ‘It was the worst experience of my life and the most valuable.’

“I can say the same about my time in the U.S. Army. In 1944, I came out of Fort Bragg an artillery replacement and was sent to the 112th Regimental Combat Team, originally from San Antonio but now in the Philippines. There I was converted into an infantry rifleman. So I got to know a fair amount about Texas over the next year. And Texans. Most of them were dirt-poor and damn tough. (For years afterward in New York, when trouble was brewing on the street, I would do my best to talk in a Texas accent.)

“To this, I can add a splendid few days I spent in Austin as a lecturer back in the very early ’60s, and I do remember the university as one of the most exciting and open campuses I ever visited.

“Those are ties, but, of course, one acquires many others over 82 years. I’d say the major part of my decision (and pleasure) to have this archive go to the Ransom Center is that you have one of the best, if not, indeed, the greatest collection of literary archives to be found in America. What the hell. Since it’s going to Texas, let’s say one of the best in the world.” The Mailer archive is the Center’s single largest author archive, totaling more than 957 document cases. 160 Unidentified photographer David Mamet on the set of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), 1980 Gelatin silver print Text panel, wall display

“For the Harry Ransom Center” by David Mamet, 2007

I started keeping a journal over forty years ago, and, so, established the habit of writing longhand.

Virtually everything I’ve written since: plays, screenplays, non-fiction, and novels, existed, first in hardbound, lined notebooks full of black or blue ink.

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Subsequent drafts of my work, for forty years, were (and are) typed either on an old manual, or on an IBM Selectric typewriter. All of this material had been gathering in a famous storage facility in Cambridge, Mass.

Why was the facility famous? On one side, two stories tall, was written, sometime in the forties, the advertisement “Fire-Proof Storage.”

Seen from a certain angle to the East, however, set backs in the building’s construction caused the sign to read “Ire-Proof Rage.”

To generations of MIT, Harvard, and BU students, and to other clients of the facility, this anomaly seemed to suggest some deeper meaning.

Like much other modern poetry, however, the meaning remained inarticulable. Nonetheless, the presence of the sight led me to meditate on the transitoriness of all things.

Why, I wondered, had I collected this mass of junk, none of which I ever wanted to see again? (I never wanted to see it again as the process from first inspiration to putatively finished product was a reminder, if not of pain, then of effort I’d much rather forget.)

Aha, however, I thought, perhaps some imaginary future soul, possessed of a surfeit of time, and an interest in the arcane, might find diversion, if not benefit, in the perusal of the growth of this or that project, or, indeed, of my career. This is every parent’s fantasy: that those who come after one would actually “care.”

I dunno. During the length of my career, various scholars, interviewers, fans, and members-of-the-audience have, most flatteringly, asked questions about my work. I could vouchsafe no cogent answers; for, neither I nor any other artist knows where he “got his ideas,” or “what he meant by that.” That’s why the product is art, which may connect the unconscious of the artist to that of the audience.

So, to conclude, having an archive in the care of the Ransom Center, in the care, if I may, of intelligent, and dedicated enthusiasts, fulfilled both the fantasy of the parent, and that of the artist, who now, though absent, might envision a cost-free colloquy with a perfect interlocutor. . .

I don’t know how students and scholars will make use of my archive in later years, but it’s all there. Good luck, and thank you for the compliment.

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Section 4

The Value of an Archive

An archive can embody many different types of value: monetary, historical, evidentiary, research, aesthetic, evocative, or “magical.” The writer James Gleick, in a 2008 article about the sale of an original manuscript copy of the Magna Carta, speaks to the sustained magnetism of the authentic:

A physical object becomes desirable, precious, almost holy, by common consensus, on account of a history—a story—that is attached to it. . . A story gains power from its attachment. . . to a physical object. The object gains power from the story. The abstract version may flash by on a screen, but the worn parchment and the fading ink make us pause.

The stories contained in archives are what collecting institutions are dedicated to preserving. Yet the process of collecting archives necessarily begins at a more prosaic level: what will it cost? What an archive is worth to the person who generated it may not be the same as what an institution is willing to pay for it. How are such values determined? By the maker, by the market, or by, as James Gleick puts it, “common consensus?” To the British playwright Arnold Wesker, “The selling of archives is the writer’s final reckoning—in this life at least. You sell archives when you need money and space, and the moment you offer is the moment you ask the world to judge you, tell you what it thinks you’re worth.”

This section of the exhibition explores how a market value for a writer’s papers is established and the variety of values that can be attached to records of the past. Case 5 115 a-b Letter from Selzer & Selzer to Arnold Wesker, 15 May 1992

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In 1992, an American manuscript and rare book dealer approached the British playwright Arnold Wesker (b. 1932) about representing him in the sale of his archive. This letter sets out the dealer’s view of how the manuscript market works. Value is both intrinsic, based on the content in the archive, and comparative, based on prospective institutional buyers’ perceptions of the writer and prices they may have paid in the past for comparable collections. 116 Fax communication from Arnold Wesker to Selzer & Selzer, 18 December 1992

Wesker rejected Selzer’s offer of $60,000 (less 25% commission) because he was looking for a price and payment schedule that would guarantee him a lifetime annuity. After speculating that he could make as much money in a year doing private readings, Wesker tells the Selzer firm, “it would seem that the gap between what my archives are worth and what I want is too wide to pursue the idea of a sale any further.” 117 Letter from Arnold Wesker to Thomas F. Staley, 22 January 1999 This letter marks the start of the negotiations that resulted in the Wesker papers coming to the Ransom Center. It gives some indication of the challenges faced in physically gathering it together and packing it for shipment to Texas. 118 Arnold Wesker’s “There’s a Price on my Head” in the Sunday Times (London), 5 November 2000 (printed from the LexisNexis database) In this article, Wesker offers the writer’s perspective on archival value:

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The selling of archives is the writer’s final reckoning—in this life at least. You sell archives when you need money and space, and the moment you offer is the moment you ask the world to judge you, tell you what it thinks you’re worth. . . I don’t know what to think about what I’ve done. Emotions are mixed—relief, regret, loss. I feel secure, bereft, demeaned, flattered. . . Of course every writer believes their manuscripts are worth more than they receive but there is no way sensibly and with dignity to argue why.

51 [example of monetary and research value] A corrected typescript fragment, pp. 2-28, of the opening chapter of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, 16 December 1926

In 1988 the Ransom Center acquired the papers of Stuart Gilbert, a friend and research assistant to James Joyce. The process of getting the papers to Austin from his widow’s home in Paris was complicated and, at one point, required the service of a bread truck. The risks the bookseller took on the Center’s behalf, however, were rewarded with the eventual discovery among the papers of a 24-page fragment of James Joyce’s final novel Finnegans Wake. Had the bookseller come across this critical missing piece of the manuscript record, or stemma, of the novel’s composition before completing the sale, the cost of the archive would have undoubtedly been much higher. This manuscript alone might have realized as much as $100,000 on the open market at the time. The amazing recovery of this fragment, bearing significant manuscript corrections in Joyce’s hand, was, of course, of even greater value to the field of Joyce scholarship. Along with other supporting materials in the Gilbert archive, the manuscript provides important clues as to how Joyce invented language, evident in this work “at its most inside out and upside-down,” as one commentator put it. 113, 114

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Autograph manuscript of Uys Krige’s short story “Death of the Zulu,” ca. 1941-1943, in notebook Letter from Joseph Jones to William B. Todd, 29 November 1960

This short story by the South African writer Uys Krige (1910-1987) was written during World War II while he was interned in an Italian prisoner of war camp. Krige clearly valued this notebook highly, as he wrote on the inside cover “If this book ever gets lost please return to: Uys Krige, c/o J.L. van Schaik, Church Street, Pretoria, South Africa. It represents a year & a half’s work of a prisoner of war & it is of inestimable personal value to him. Grazie tante!” The letter from Joe Jones to Bill Todd (both emeritus professors at The University of Texas) indicates that by 1960 Krige had attached a different kind of value to the notebook and was willing to sell it to the growing research collections at the Ransom Center (then known as the Humanities Research Center). Here Jones values the notebook at $50, a suggested purchase price he arrived at in comparison with earlier purchases and the reputation of the writers. In current dollars, the Krige notebook would now be worth about $350. 163, 164 Fair copy autograph manuscript of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, signed by the author, 1960 Contemporary paperback edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems (NY: Signet Classic, 1998, 12th printing)

In 1922, T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) showed his fellow poet, Ezra Pound, a long poem he had been working on for almost a year, The Waste Land, and wrote that it “left his hands, reduced to about half its size, in the form in which it appears in print.” In 1960, Eliot made a fair copy of The Waste Land that was purchased by the Ransom Center at a benefit auction.

As Eliot wrote out the poem again, he remembered a line from the original manuscript, underlined below, that was inexplicably left out of the first edition:

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The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, The ivory men make company between us Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

In his 1922 edits, Pound did not recommend cutting the line. In fact,

he emphatically approved of this stanza. Although Eliot wrote the line back into this manuscript in 1960, contemporary editions of The Waste Land still omit the line, even though it clearly changes the stanza’s meaning: the “lidless eyes” belong not to the chess players, but to the chessmen. Although this fair copy manuscript does not have the monetary value of the original manuscript corrected by Pound, it is of great research value in that it revises our understanding of how Eliot intended his work to be read. 165, 166 Washington Post police reporter Al Kaman’s June 17, 1972 notes on Watergate burglars Woodward’s notes of June 17, 1972 arraignment hearings of Watergate burglars

On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington D.C., setting off an investigation by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post that eventually exposed a ring of conspirators embroiled in numerous questionable and criminal activities in support of the President of the United States.

The two documents on display represent the very start of the journalistic investigation that eventually forced President Richard M. Nixon from office. Without context, these pieces of paper might appear to be insignificant. It is their relationship to a pivotal event in American history that determines their value and importance. Text panel = 400

Evaluating Archives

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In an article titled “On the Selling of Literary Archives,” published in the Spring 1993 issue of The Author, Tom Staley, Director of the Ransom Center, described some ways in which institutions evaluate prospective acquisitions. The most important of these are summarized below:

Writer’s stature Judgment of a contemporary writer’s stature is somewhat speculative.

Literary reputations ebb and flow, yet the purchase by a research library of a living writer’s archive represents a contemporary ratification of the writer’s place in the literary canon. The investment by the library confirms, too, its belief that the writer will be studied in the future.

Artificial categories that critics place on writers, such as “major” and “minor,” can be misleading when it comes to contemporary writers, for many of the so-called minor writers better reflect the period in which they wrote. Research libraries are attentive to this factor and are aware that many writers are seriously undervalued by contemporary judgment.

Completeness The more complete an archive is, the more value it has to researchers and institutions. If a large portion of an archive is already at another institution, it is appropriate that the collection be offered there first. Furthermore, the selling off of highlights from an archive can reduce the value of the remaining material considerably, dispersing a collection that, from an institutional and scholarly perspective, is best kept together.

Building to existing strength Libraries pay close attention to the relationship a prospective

acquisition will have with their other collections. Does the writer work in a form or genre well-represented in the institution’s holdings? Does the archive contribute to a fuller understanding of writing associated with a particular period? Was the writer influenced by or associated with other writers represented in the collections?

Research Value The most attractive archives are those that offer a wealth of new information about a writer or a work. If a collection has already been used extensively for a published biography or an edition of letters, it won’t attract the interest of scholars, and its future research value is diminished.

Price Institutions work within generally static budgets, and there are always

more archives available than there are funds to acquire them. Institutions often set prices based on the resources they have and, if necessary, work out purchase agreements where payments for collections are made over multiple fiscal years.

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Section 5 text panel = 328 words

The Evolution of the Text

A literary archive documents how a novel, poem, play, or other work evolves into its final form, and the archive itself is shaped by the nature of the work it documents. The accumulation of manuscript drafts of a novel, for example, will be far greater than that of a poem. The archive of a play will document not only the evolution of the script but also how the playwright’s vision is realized in stage production. In consequence, the archive will reflect the influence of the director, stage manager, set and lighting designers, and cast. A film, as anyone who has sat through closing credits will know, marshals an even larger cast of contributors. This section of the exhibition illustrates the trajectory of the imagination, how texts evolve from idea to completed work and how the nature of the work itself dictates the composition of the archive. Tools and technologies used to make the imaginary tangible are constantly evolving, and the shape of archives changes with them. The presence of computer technology in literary archives—from word processing files to born-digital literary works—increasingly challenges the traditional concept of archives as paper-based and promises new opportunities for both scholarship and archival practice.

The appeal of seeing the record of a creative work is enduring. Years ago, after seeing his and other archives at the Ransom Center, the British writer Cyril Connolly wrote that he was “one of the few writers who have seen their dream implemented by reality, who have rubbed a magic lamp and beheld a huge djinn turn the contents of an imaginary bookcase into the living word, the word made flesh through photographs, letters, manuscripts, association copies, so that every error of judgment is magnified as well as every correct guess, making clearer every secret influence or unsuspected affinity.” Wall display 18 (20 pages), 19 The first draft of the prologue to Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld, ca. 1995

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A first American edition of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997) In a 1993 Paris Review interview Don DeLillo (b. 1936) said, “discarded pages mark the physical dimensions of a writer’s labor—you know, how many shots it took to get a certain paragraph right.”

As one reads these 20 pages of draft beginnings of DeLillo’s multi-themed novel about life in late twentieth-century America, a kind of lyric cadence builds as one “listens” in on DeLillo testing multiple variations on the central theme of “it was a school day, sure,” before he settles on the final, published version.

The Ransom Center acquired the papers of the American novelist Don DeLillo in 2004. Case 6 label

The Evolution of a Novel

Paul Scott (1920–1978) was a Booker Prize–winning British novelist whose fiction is chiefly about Anglo-India in the final years of British rule, during and after World War II. Scott served in the British and Indian armies between 1940 and 1946. In 1950 he became director of David Higham Associates, a London literary agency, for whom he worked until 1960 when he decided to devote his full attention to writing.

Between 1963 and 1978, the Ransom Center acquired the manuscripts for all but two of Scott’s 13 novels, including those for his best-known works, The Raj Quartet, made up of The Jewel in the Crown (1966), The Day of the Scorpion (1968), The Towers of Silence (1971), and A Division of the Spoils (1974).

Granada Television made The Raj Quartet into a major 14-part television series known as The Jewel in the Crown, which was first broadcast in the U. K. in early 1984. In 2001 the British Film Institute voted the series in the top 25 best British television programs. 23 Letter from Paul Scott to Kay Dick, 13 October 1959.

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In this letter to the English novelist Kay Dick, Scott announces his plans to retire from the Higham literary agency and devote his time to writing. 21, 22 Notebook 2 of the original manuscript, in 5 notebooks, of Paul Scott’s novel The Jewel in the Crown, ca. 1969. Paul Scott’s first note about the novel written on the back of a postcard for L’epicure Restaurant, ca. 1969

Paul Scott’s normal working method was to write out a first draft by hand, writing on the right-side pages of a foolscap notebook, then turning it over and upside down, before writing back again to the beginning. A sparse note taker, Scott incorporated his false starts, general notes, and random thoughts into the draft of the novel itself. Scott would type out additional drafts before submitting a final version to a professional copyist, discarding rejected pages of typescript and inserting revised ones. Thus, as a “clean” typescript was built up, a corresponding pile of “dirty” sheets accumulated.

Scott mistakenly stapled the very first notes he made for his quartet of novels, shown here, into the second instead of the first notebook of his original, handwritten manuscript. On a September 9, 1975 visit to the Ransom Center, Scott wrote an explanatory note about the misplaced postcard. 24 A 925-page further-corrected typescript of Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown The first revised typescript numbered 825 pages. 25 Discarded pages (there are a total of 264) from Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown

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26 An uncorrected proof copy of Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1966) with “author’s corrections marked in red.” 27 Helen Craig Photograph of Paul Scott, not dated Gelatin silver print 20 A first American edition of Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown (New York: William Morrow, 1966) Norman Mailer case Text panel to go on wall near vitrine In The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America (New York: Nation Books, 2006), a record of a conversation between Norman Mailer and his son, John Buffalo Mailer, Mailer confesses:

I can’t even turn on a PC. Indeed, as a good Luddite, I make it a point of honor not to use one. At the same time, I have all the advantages of computers because I have an excellent assistant, Judith McNally, and she’s been working with me for many years and she loves them. So I receive the agreeable aspects without having to dive into the moil. To me, there is a kind of neurasthenia built into working with the computer. To look at a screen all day is to take one down below the spiritual punishment of those who had to bang away at typewriters all their lives. It’s hard to explain how agreeable it is to do one’s writing in longhand. You feel that all of your body and some of your spirit has come down to your fingertips. Even if you have bad handwriting, as I do, there’s something perversely elegant about it. Then, after you’ve

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written in longhand, to see it typed up by someone else (if you are fortunate enough to afford that sort of work) means that you are able to read your stuff as if someone else wrote it. I can move forward as the originator of the text, yet now I am also its editor. I can employ, thereby, both sides of my working self. Whereas when authors work directly off the computer, they are typing and editing as they go, conflating two essentially opposed processes that call upon different skills. That, to me, is one small part of the psychic toll visited on your generation.

39 [vitrine] Judith McNally for Norman Mailer Toshiba Satellite Pro 430CDT, ca. 1989–1990 Operating system: Windows 95 The Mailer papers, acquired by the Center in 2005, include three laptops and close to 400 computer disks, some of which contain drafts of Harlot’s Ghost. This particular computer was used by Judith McNally, Norman Mailer’s long-time assistant, to research, transcribe, and edit a variety of Mailer’s manuscripts and correspondence. Ironically, even though Mailer was a self-proclaimed Luddite, his computers and disks comprise one of the largest bodies of digital material in any manuscript collection at the Ransom Center. Case 7 label #1

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) was an American novelist, playwright, non-fiction writer, journalist, and poet. His first book, The Naked and the Dead (1948), was based on his army experiences in the Philippines during World War II. Mailer won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Armies of the Night (1968), his “non-fiction novel” of the 1967 March on the Pentagon, the anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington, D. C. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song (1979), his fictionalized account of Gary Gilmore’s life and execution in Utah. Harlot’s Ghost, published in 1991, chronicles the life of Harry Hubbard and his experiences as a CIA agent. Although the final words of the novel appear to promise another installment of the story, Mailer never published a second volume.

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Case 7 label #2 The material in this case traces Mailer’s creative process for the Bay of Pigs section in Harlot’s Ghost, beginning with his preliminary notes and ending with the published version of the story. Mailer’s writing process hinged on close collaboration with Judith McNally, his assistant. He would often dictate an early version of a manuscript and mail McNally the cassette tape, which she would transcribe into a word processing document. After she mailed or faxed Mailer back a printed hard copy version of his dictation, he would mark up that text and mail or fax it back to her for revisions. This process would continue until the manuscript was ready to be sent to the publisher.

Mailer’s initial research for Bay of Pigs, represented by his multi-colored organizational chart (on the wall nearby) and index cards of notes for the book, had developed into a prose summary, or overview, by the time he dictated it onto an audio tape in September 1989. The Ransom Center has five tapes of dictation for Harlot’s Ghost, all recorded in 1989. 38 [wall item] Norman Mailer’s organizational chart for Harlot’s Ghost The Bay of Pigs section in the published version of the book spans May 1960 to April 1961. 40 Metal index card box that originally contained notes for the Bay of Pigs section of Harlot’s Ghost 41 Research notes on index cards for Harlot’s Ghost, not dated

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The dates and text on the tabs correspond to the historical scope of the novel. The items originally in the Bay of Pigs index card box have been clearly labeled by an archivist. 42 Audio cassette containing Norman Mailer’s dictation of the Bay of Pigs section of Harlot’s Ghost, 16 September 1989 43, 44, 45 Corrected typescript draft of Mailer’s dictation of September 18, 1989 First three pages of McNally’s transcript of the Bay of Pigs dictation with Mailer’s handwritten corrections and notes These three pages correspond to the first 5 minutes and 30 seconds of Mailer’s September 16 Bay of Pigs dictation and represent the next step of his writing process. Judith McNally transcribed the dictation from this tape, printed out a hard copy, and mailed these pages to Mailer to be edited. 46, 47, 48, 49 Successive corrected typescript drafts of Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, 5 December 1989, 12 February 1990, 13 February 1990, and 14 February 1990 This series documents the development of the first two paragraphs of the Bay of Pigs section over the course of several drafts. The red marker on the printer’s copy (dated February 14, 1990) is Mailer’s handwriting; the other marks have been made by the copyeditor and show specific details about how the section title and subtitles should be positioned, as well as some other last minute changes. 50

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A first edition of Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost (New York: Random House, 1991) Table case 8 [Evolution of the poetic text case]

The Evolution of a Poem

The Wisconsin-born poet Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970) described her chosen craft in her characteristically concise fashion in the poem “Poet’s Work”:

Grandfather advised me: Learn a trade

I learned to sit at desk and condense

No layoff from this condensery

Even though poets generally work at the spare end of the creative

spectrum, the accumulated archive of their “condensing” efforts can be expansive. Seven years-worth of the American poet Robert Lowell’s later work fills 14 document cases. Anne Sexton published just eight books in her lifetime and yet managed to leave behind an archive of drafts that fills 16 document cases. The British poet Charles Tomlinson taped and tucked into old accounting ledgers (to the point of bursting) successive drafts of his poems written between 1966 and 1986, a sort of archive within an archive. Dylan Thomas sometimes filled pages with nothing more than rhyming word pairs. 29 A first edition of Robert Lowell’s Notebook 1967–68 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969) from the library of Anne Sexton

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The manuscripts for Robert Lowell’s Notebook (1970) and for the

three variations of it published in 1973 (The Dolphin, For Lizzie and Harriet, and History) document the complexities of Lowell’s changing poetic style during this period and his perceptions of his poetry.

Notebook (1970) included revisions of about 100 poems from Notebook 1967–1968, along with 97 new poems. Lowell himself sheepishly admitted in a note to the publication, “I am loath to display a litter of variants. . . I couldn't stop writing and have handled my published book as if it were manuscript.” His continuing dissatisfaction with the work resulted in yet further revision, breaking Notebook (1970) into two new volumes, For Lizzie and Harriet (67 poems) and History (which incorporated 283 Notebook poems among its 368 poems).

Careful analysis of the manuscripts of For Lizzie and Harriet and History illuminate the evolution of these works, including which sequences of Notebook poems appeared in each draft as compared to the final published versions. 30 A first edition of the revised and expanded edition of Robert Lowell’s Notebook (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970) This is the third edition of the work. A second edition of Notebook 1967–68, with two additional poems, was published in 1969. In his notes to this volume, Lowell explains:

This text differs from the first edition in May 1969 and the second [edition] in July [to which two new poems were added]. About a hundred of the old poems have been changed, some noticeably. More than ninety new poems have been added. These have not been placed as a single section or epilogue. They were scattered where they caught, intended to fulflesh my poem, not sprawl into chronicle. I am loath to display a litter of variants, and hold up a still target for the critic who knows that most second thoughts, when visible, are worse thoughts. I am sorry to ask anyone to buy this poem twice.

31

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A first edition of Robert Lowell’s For Lizzie and Harriet (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1973), review copy from the library of Harvey Curtis Webster; publication date June 20, 1973 Lowell notes about the work: “In another order, in other versions, all the poems in this book appeared in my last published poem, Notebook.” 32 A first edition of Robert Lowell’s History (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1973) In this final iteration of the original Notebook poems, Lowell writes: “About 80 of the poems in History are new, the rest are taken from my last published poem, Notebook, begun six years ago. All the poems have been changed, some heavily. I have plotted. My old title, Notebook, was more accurate than I wished, i.e. the composition was jumbled. I hope this jumble or jungle is cleared—that I have cut the waste marble from the figure.” 33 Robert Lowell’s poem, “Norman Mailer,” in paste-up draft 5 of History Lowell would often attach two, three or four versions of a passage one over another with paper clips. Textual additions flow from one emendation to the next, often continuing over four or five sheets of paper. The resulting physical record of his process of revision presented considerable housing challenges. 34 Dylan Thomas’s “Note” about the composition of his poem, “In the White Giant’s Thigh,” not dated The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) composed this note for the first collector and owner of this manuscript, T. E. Hanley, whose library the

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Ransom Center purchased in 1958. Thomas writes tellingly about the creative process:

The following sixty lines compose the first part of a poem, “In the White Giant’s Thigh”, which is intended to be a part of a long poem, “In Country Heaven”, which is in preparation. I mean, by ‘in preparation’, that some of the long poem is written down on paper, some of it is in a rough draft in the head, and the rest of it is radiantly unworded in ambitious conjecture.

35 An undated draft of Dylan Thomas’s “In the White Giant’s Thigh” that trails off into trial phrases 107 This much less productive and undated effort at continuing the poem “In the White Giant’s Thigh” features numerous cross-outs, word lists, and doodles. The Center houses 140 such manuscript leaves that illustrate Dylan Thomas’s compositional tricks and tics. 28 + scan of inside page Charles Tomlinson’s drafts of poems written on scraps of paper taped into an old accounts ledger, August 1981–February 22, 1986

The English poet and translator Charles Tomlinson (b. 1927) archived his draft poems in chronological order in a series of old ledgers, this one first used by a dress-maker ca. 1943–1953. The resulting conglomeration presents significant preservation and cataloging challenges. Until these concerns are resolved satisfactorily, staff have decided not to make the work available to researchers. The Ransom Center acquired Tomlinson’s papers in 1993 and 1994. 93 [Wall display]

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Unidentified photographer Image of Anne Sexton working at her typewriter, not dated Copyprint Sexton’s biographer, Diane Wood Middlebrook, writes of Sexton once spontaneously pulling together for a friend and confidant a “‘poetry kit’: a pile of the bright yellow-orange ‘lucky paper’ that she used in drafting poems, a pile of three-by-five cards for scribbling notes at odd moments, and a yellow legal pad.” Then Sexton tutored her friend on how to use the poetry kit. “On the front page of the yellow pad. . . write CHERISH. . . Now write three or four things you cherish. . . Turn the page. Write LIES. Then write three lies that hurt you most. . . That ought to give you something to start on.” 108, 109, 110, 111 Drafts of Anne Sexton’s poem “Her Kind,” published in To Bedlam and Part Way Back (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960)

In this sequence of drafts, the Pultizer Prize–winning American poet Anne Sexton (1928–1974) works two very different false starts into a third, final version of the poem “Her Kind.” In the third draft Sexton, like Dylan Thomas, works through a list of rhyming word pairs as part of the compositional process. The Ransom Center acquired Sexton’s papers in 1980. Table case 9 [evolution of a film text case]

The Evolution of a Motion Picture The King Vidor collection consists of photographs, scripts, props, publicity materials, production reports, studio memos, and other production materials that relate primarily to the production of the 1941 film H. M. Pulham, Esq. Vidor donated the Pulham materials to The University of Texas Drama Department in conjunction with his December 3, 1941 guest lecture on movie making. The materials were intended to form the nucleus of a

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program for the study of the production and direction of motion pictures, an ambition that has now been fully realized with the creation of The University’s Burnt Orange Productions. 128 “H. M. Pulham, Esquire by John P. Marquand” Book-of-the-Month Club News, February 1942 King Vidor first got the idea of making a film of Pulitzer Prize-winner John P. Marquand’s novel by reading the review published in the Book-of-the-Month Club’s newsletter to subscribers. The archive contains Vidor’s working copy of the book with numerous handwritten notations and a transcription of a letter from Marquand to Vidor about the screenplay. Besides directing the film, Vidor also acted as producer. He and his third wife, Elizabeth Hill, adapted the screenplay with Marquand’s assistance. 129 King Vidor’s original outline for H. M. Pulham, Esq., ca. 1941 130 This first adaptation, breakdown, and selection of the material to be used from the novel constitutes the first script, dated March 25, 1941. Explanatory notes were used to enable the writers to assemble a completed first adaptation before working out the script in finished detail. 131 Four to six rewrites, covering a period of two months, were made between the first and final scripts. The final, approved script, dated June 25, 1941, is indicated by a change in the color of the binding.

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132 This retake script, dated October 16, 1942, contains changes, additions, and retakes of scenes to be made after the first preview of the picture. 133 This undated Assistant Director’s research book for the film contains reference images of such things as clothing of the 1920s, Boston streets, and period railroad worker attire. 134 King Vidor’s private list of casting possibilities for the film, not dated. 135 Promotional material for H. M. Pulham, Esq., ca. 1941 136 Publicity image of Robert Young reading the prop magazine, “True Love Story,” which really contains a June 1941 copy of Hunting and Fishing magazine Photographs in the Vidor collection include costume, makeup, set, production, and film stills. The film’s stars, Hedy Lamarr, Robert Young, Ruth Hussey, Charles Coburn, Van Heflin, Fay Holden, and Bonita Granville, appear in many of the photos. Publicity photos of actors and actresses considered for casting but not selected are also present. 137 Coza Flakes All Purpose Soap prop

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The tools of early 1940s film-making are represented in the archive by various props, a production board with shooting schedules, a scene slate, and a small brass periscope. Various daily reports and production, footage, and wardrobe breakdowns reveal the financial and business aspects of the film. Table case 10 [evolution from paper to digital case]

The Archive Goes Digital

Michael Joyce is Professor of English and Media Studies at Vassar College and has published both print and hypertext works. His first print novel, War Outside Ireland: A Novel (1982), won the Great Lakes New Writers Award. His other publications include Twelve Blue (hyperfiction, 1996), Othermindedness: the emergence of network culture (print, 2000), and, most recently, Was: Annales Nomadique, a novel of internet (print, 2007).

Joyce created afternoon, a story, his most well-known hypertext fiction, in 1987 using Storyspace, a software environment he designed with Jay David Bolter and John B. Smith. In his June 21, 1992 article in the New York Times on “The End of Books,” Robert Coover christened afternoon the “granddaddy of full-length hypertext fictions.” In addition to the power of its narrative, the story is remarkable as an embodiment of Joyce’s creative journey from tool to process to product: he created Storyspace, the tool, because he wanted to write a “novel that changes each time you read it;” afternoon encourages interaction and conflates the process of writing and reading by allowing readers to make choices about the narrative paths they follow.

The Ransom Center acquired Joyce’s papers, computer disks, and hard drives in 2005 and 2006. [A second, Joyce-case label] Just as Joyce’s hypertexts do not follow linear narrative structures, the story of the creation of afternoon engages multiple, simultaneous levels of Joyce’s experience. This case and the related interactive computer display draw from personal diaries, letters, and other textual representations spanning 1978 to 1994 to recreate the intellectual and emotional environment surrounding the development of Storyspace and afternoon. These hard-copy artifacts (which

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themselves embody an evolution in writing technology) viewed alongside the digital afternoon illustrate the challenge of representing a neat trajectory of any work—print, digital, or a combination of the two. 80 Unidentified photographer Michael Joyce, not dated Gelatin silver print Joyce (b. 1945) spent 1984–1985 at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, as a visiting fellow in the Department of Computer Science. It was at Yale that he and Jay David Bolter began to develop Storyspace. 81 Eastgate Systems, Inc. Installation disk for Windows version of afternoon, 1993 3 ½” floppy disk

Storyspace was written using a Macintosh and created for a Mac platform, as was afternoon. In the early 1990s Eastgate also released a Windows version of the story, which was created using Storyspace for Windows.

The faint “1.5” written in pencil on the top left corner reflects the Ransom Center’s internal method for cataloging and storing disks. This particular item arrived as part of a bundle of disks labeled “MEDIAMATE.” The bundle was assigned the number “1,” and this disk, because it was fifth in the bundle, was assigned the number “1.5” in the Joyce collection. As a preservation measure, the archivist copied files from the disk before housing it in a special, climate-controlled stack area. 152 Promotional card from Eastgate Systems, 1994

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This card advertises the 1994 Macintosh and Windows versions of afternoon, as well as other seminal hypertext works. Jane Yellowlees Douglas, whose I Have Said Nothing is featured on the inner right panel of the card, was the first to draw Joyce’s attention to the hidden “Jung” node in afternoon. A hidden node, or one not reachable by explicit links, is now sometimes referred to as a “Jane space” after Douglas. 82 Michael Joyce’s handwritten notes mapping out some of the nodes for afternoon, a story, not dated

This is one of only three manuscript pages that exist for afternoon; Joyce did the majority of his composition and editing on the computer. The phrases in the center column are all names of nodes, the points at which readers may branch off into new “points of embarkation and discovery,” as one commentator expressed it. In the published version of afternoon, the node “I want to say” links to the node “I want 1.,” which, in turn, links to “I want 2.” Each node appears as a different interactive window on the screen.

Storyspace allows readers to chase narrative paths through the text of afternoon; literally thousands of different readings are possible. Readers advance the narrative by choosing which links to follow and in which order. To facilitate this process, Joyce linked nodes to each other by word associations, “yes” and “no” responses, and simple carriage returns.

You can experiment with this and other narrative paths in afternoon using the nearby computer station. 83 Michael Joyce’s typescript notes about how to use and conceptualize Storyspace elements, not dated

On this page, Joyce works through some of the conceptual mechanisms and terminology behind Storyspace, abbreviated as “SS” in the manuscript. 84

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A printout of an email from Joy David Bolter to Michael Joyce, not dated The development of Storyspace took place across a variety of textual, digital, and geographical spaces. This printout of an email, Bolter offers a window into the logistical process of building, testing, retesting, and using the software. [Separate label to accompanying the individual labels for items 85-88] The following four diary entries represent significant threads in Joyce’s personal life during and shortly after the time he was developing Storyspace and writing afternoon. In many ways, the multiple layers of memory, consciousness, and anxiety Joyce narrates in his diaries can be read as analogous to the links, nodes, and guard fields that form the structure of afternoon and coalesce to produce an ever-changing story. The Michael Joyce collection includes five boxes of hard copy diaries, dating from 1974 to 2002, as well as digital versions of some entries. These diaries arrived stuffed with loose pages—notes, drawings, printouts—which were removed from the volume to protect them. In order to preserve the physical order of the loose pages, an archivist numbered all of the pages in sequential order and then removed the loose pages and stored them together in a sleeve in the same folder as the diary from which they were taken. 85 Michael Joyce’s diary entries from May 25, 1988 and June 4, 1988 In this May 25 entry, Joyce describes saving the life of his older son, Eamon, when he choked on a hot dog: “I turned him, hugged, once, again. Thought: And if this doesn’t work?” Joyce’s children figure prominently his diaries during the years he was developing Storyspace and afternoon and the latter actually “begins” with the sentence, “I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning.” On the facing page, Joyce writes about a conference he attended a little over a week after Eamon’s choking scare, and concludes the entry with the following: “What is not recorded here but exists in a series of papers,

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letters and what-have-you is the experience of succeeding at what I set out to do before Jay and I first contacted each other. ‘To write a novel that changes each time you read it’ came to be the story, ‘Afternoon’.” 86 Michael Joyce’s diary entry, dated November 19, 1984, about his dream of his father’s death In this entry, Joyce records a prescient dream he had about his father’s death:

Last night the first dream I can remember since Mom’s death with her there, palpable. Dad in the dream had a heart attack, meanwhile someone was being married. I went to her to tell her, a sense of son’s duty, she wore a characteristic dress, a picture book hat, but it was her face I noticed most. The texture and vividness of how she was in life. “It’s Dad,” I told her, then added “Even though you’re dead it’s him.”

Joyce’s father died of a heart attack a month later. 87 Michael Joyce’s printout diary entry for November 9, 1985, in which he comments on his diary of the previous year Joyce begins this diary entry on the preceding page by remarking that he is “surprised to see that the Yale year journal is so filled with pain and grief. . . ” Joyce’s self-reflexive commentary on his own diary of the previous year conveys a sense of telling and re-telling, or of reading and re-reading, similar to the multiple stories made possible by the structure and software environment of afternoon. [Label for Michael Joyce interactive component] In 1991, Eastgate Systems released its second edition of afternoon for a Macintosh. This edition can be read using Storyspace 1.5 on the computer.

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The items surrounding the computer illustrate the inspiration for three corresponding nodes in afternoon: “brown,” “Jung,” and “winter.” 88 (on wall) A newspaper clipping from the Jackson Citizen Patriot showing a group of people watching a burning snowmobile, Saturday, 28 January 1978.

In the “winter” node of afternoon Joyce describes seeing a group of snowmobilers:

They stood, as if posed, all begoggled, all in helmets, nylon jumpsuits and foam injected boots, watching helplessly as a snowmobile burned in the snow before them. It looked like nothing other than a black chrysalis, or perhaps a milkweed husk, the emergent wings -- the seed spawn-- yellow fire flapping like a banner.

To see this node, begin reading afternoon and click on the word “winter” in the first screen of the story, or look at a screen shot of this node by selecting the “winter” tab. 89 (on wall) A letter from Michael Joyce to Terry about the “Jung” node in afternoon, a story, 2 February 1994

In the late 1980s, Jane Yellowlees Douglas discovered an unlinked and empty node, called “Jung,” in afternoon. After she told Michael Joyce about it, he added a line of text to the node in homage to her discovery: “Man. . . never perceives anything and only Jane Yellowlees Douglas has read this screen.”

The version of afternoon installed on the nearby computer station contains this text, as well as a line added later by a mystery reader: “That's not true. so have others.”

Click on the “Jung” tab to see a screenshot of the node. Or, better yet, find this hidden node in the story itself.

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90 (on wall) Handwritten draft by Michael Joyce, no date

Regarding the genesis of afternoon, Joyce writes: “I wanted to create text which gave way before the touch, which could be caressed into motion or repose without end. It began visually: a compact brown lunch (apple juice, corned beef on rye, Dijon, a Heath bar) brought to me by a slim hipped taupe woman I know only as a mystery or texture.” This vision finds expression in the “brown” node of afternoon.

Click on the “brown” tab to see a screenshot of the node. Wall label text

The Evolution of a Photograph The creation of a photographic image can be documented in much the same way as that of a novel, poem, play, or movie. In conventional black and white photography (now largely displaced by digital technology), the photographer uses the camera to capture his vision of a real-world moment, prints the negatives into contact sheets to serve as a visual guide; prints a negative either full framed or cropped to achieve more dramatic effect, and, in consequence, creates an emotional impact in the mind of the viewer. The example here is drawn from the archive of the American photojournalist David Douglas Duncan (b. 1916) whose archive the Ransom Center began to acquire in 1996. Among the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, Duncan is best known for his dramatic combat photographs documenting World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. 153 David Douglas Duncan (American, b. 1916) Images of Con Thien, Vietnam, ca. 1967 Contact sheet This contact sheet shows Duncan’s crop marks (4th strip from left, 4th image from top) for the cover image used on the October 27, 1967 issue of

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Life magazine featuring Duncan’s photographs of Marines serving in Vietnam, “Inside the Cone of Fire at Con Thien.” The power of the image that Duncan and Life selected for the cover is apparent even on the contact sheet. The published version, cropped as marked on the contact sheet, distills the emotion and impact of the war into one focal point—the Marine’s eyes. Duncan used only six frames for this Marine, yet he was able to create, without sentiment, one of the most iconic images of the Vietnam War era. 154 David Douglas Duncan (American, b. 1916) Untitled photograph of U.S. Marine at Con Thien, 1967 Gelatin silver print This is Duncan’s full-size print of the cropped image on the contact sheet. The color difference can be attributed to hasty photochemical processing of the contact sheet. Processing of the full-size print was more carefully controlled. 155 Tear sheets for the October 27, 1967 issue of Life magazine showing how the image appeared in print 156 David Douglas Duncan’s Leica camera (with a Canon Lens) Section 6 text panel = 193 words

Organizing the Archive

Because modern archives often run to hundreds or even thousands of boxes, cataloging them demands the ability to see the forest rather than the trees. Archivists are often confronted with disorganized archives, unidentified and hard-to-decipher information, sensitive privacy issues, and

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materials in need of special housing or treatment before they can be safely handled or stored. Each archive is as unique as the person who created it and archivists approach their work with an eye toward maintaining as much of the archive’s original order and character as possible.

This section of the exhibition offers an inside look at how archivists go about their work. Before rearranging any material, the archivist learns about the creator and how the archive was put together and used. The archivist then surveys the collection much as an investigator would approach a crime scene, observing carefully without disturbing any clues. Archivists inspect collections on arrival for potential contaminants, maintain records of all acquisitions, sort, organize, and house materials in archival-quality containers, prepare descriptions of the archives, and maintain the archives’ storage areas. The eventual product is a well-organized and safely-housed archive described in a finding aid. Table case 12 case label A Collection Inspection and Accessioning

Conservation staff instituted a collection inspection process to identify and treat insect or mold-infested materials when they arrive at the Ransom Center. All newly acquired archives are “quarantined” in the Center’s basement until curatorial and conservation staff can complete a preliminary examination.

For many materials, freezing is an appropriate method of eradicating an insect infestation or stabilizing collections damaged by water. Until 2003, when EJS Systems donated a 1,000-cubic-foot freezer to the Center, conservators borrowed freezer space from facilities on campus and as far away as San Antonio. Mold requires more labor-intensive methods for remediation. In 2005 a special room was built in the basement of the Center to treat mold-infested materials.

The primary function of accessioning is to provide staff and users with ready access to information about newly arrived material and to document the details of its procurement.

Following the conservation inspection, the accessioner takes physical custody of the materials, processes paperwork related to each acquisition, and begins the initial steps of establishing physical and intellectual control by entering brief information about the materials into an accessions database. The materials are removed from their original housings, placed in

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archival-quality folders and boxes, and shelved. Care is taken to preserve original order until formal cataloging is undertaken. Larger acquisitions that are expected to be in high demand are frequently arranged and described in a preliminary inventory that is placed online on the Center’s website for immediate use by the public. 165 Jacob Sutton (British) John Fowles in his study, July 1976 Gelatin silver print The writing desk, typewriter, and other objects shown in this photograph were acquired from Fowles’s widow along with an additional sixty-eight cartons of papers that arrived at the Ransom Center in March 2008. 166 These are a few unprocessed items selected from a single carton of the recently arrived John Fowles accession: Fowles’s British passport, circa 1947-1953; a birthday card from Fowles to his first wife, Elizabeth (addressed to “The Lady Owneress, Underwear Farm”), 1965; a telegram from Ned re the Magus Literary Guild selection, 5 August 1965; Fowles’s Lyme Regis Library ticket, with a December 1994 expiration date; a typescript printout of “John’s Alphabet,” 2003; Fowles’s eyeglasses with a handwritten note by his second wife Sarah dated 13 June 2004; a photocopy of an undated typescript with handwritten corrections re “the” novel; and an undated portrait of Fowles signed B. Steel. 167 Harry Ransom Center delivery receipt form for John Fowles purchase, 2008 This form is completed when a collection first arrives at the Ransom Center. The material is placed in a quarantine area in the basement where it awaits a collection inspection. After the inspection, any observations are noted on the

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form and the volume of the acquisition in cubic feet is calculated for statistical reports. 168, 169, 170, 171 Anthony Maddaloni, photographer Images of the John Fowles collection inspection at the Center, 19 March 2008 During the inspection, staff open and look through boxes and folders searching for evidence of any problems, such as living insects or active mold. 172 Harry Ransom Center manuscripts accessions database record for the John Fowles acquisition, 2008 After the collection inspection, the accessioner brings the materials to the fourth floor of the Center to begin the accessioning process. A database record is created for each new accession and updated at each stage of work until the material is housed and placed into the stacks. The accessioner prepares monthly and annual reports of new accessions that are distributed to administrative, curatorial, and public services staff. Copies are also available to the public in the Center’s Reading and Viewing Room on the second floor. 173 A letter from John Fowles to his parents, 3 December 1939 The Ransom Center acquired the bulk of its John Fowles Papers in 1991. The new acquisition is the first received since Fowles’s death in 2005. It includes a wealth of personal correspondence, including a large cache of letters that Fowles wrote home to his parents from Bedford School, beginning in 1939 when he was thirteen years old. In this particular letter, Fowles tries to identify a butterfly from his parents’ description (interesting since his first novel, The Collector (1963), had a protagonist who collected

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butterflies) and also notes other activities and interests, including bird-watching, movies, and cricket matches. 174 Harry Ransom Center, 2007–2008 accessions list Since 1990, when automated accessions recordkeeping was instituted, the Ransom Center has received an average of 400 linear feet of manuscripts annually, which is approximately 1,000 document boxes worth of material a year. Besides providing readily searchable information for staff, this database is used to prepare monthly and annual reports of new accessions. This list includes the names of collections for which we have accessioned materials during the fiscal year just past, from September 1, 2007 through August 31, 2008. Table case 13 (Processing)

Archival Processing Archival processing is the arrangement, description, and housing of archival materials for storage and use by patrons. Archival arrangement takes into account how an archive was created, maintained, and used by the creator. Preserving the original order of an archive is a fundamental archival principle. Maintaining original order preserves evidential value and context for researchers and speeds processing. If original order has been disturbed or if anything is clearly misfiled, archivists re-file materials into their proper location. However, when collections arrive in no meaningful order, archivists impose one to facilitate use. During arrangement, the archivist provides basic conservation for the collection by housing it in acid-free folders and document boxes, removing most fasteners, and placing photographs or other fragile items in protective sleeves. Archivists also consult with conservation staff for advice about and treatment of damaged or delicate materials as well as any special housings that may be needed.

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Archivists describe collections in a finding aid. This document contains at minimum a biographical sketch of the creator, a scope and content note, and a container list of the contents of the collection. The materials in this case represent two extremes of the archival processing experience at the Ransom Center: the Isaac Bashevis Singer Papers (extreme disorder) and the Arnold Wesker Papers (extreme order). 175 Thomas Victor Image of Isaac Bashevis Singer, not dated Gelatin silver print In Zamir Singer’s 1995 memoir, Journey to My Father, Isaac Bashevis Singer, he described a room in Singer’s New York City apartment where “the papers were all stacked up almost three feet off the floor.” When Zamir asked his father what he was going to do with those mounds of papers Singer replied “Who knows how long anybody is going to live? You have to keep everything.” 176 “Yiddish Has Not Yet Said Its Last Word;” The I. B. Singer Archive (Austin: Harry Ransom Center, 1996) The Ransom Center manuscripts accessioner who received the Singer Papers described their original state in this exhibition keepsake:

The Isaac Bashevis Singer archive arrived at the Ransom Center in December 1993, tightly packed in 58 cartons, each 4 x 4 x 2 feet in size. The piles of papers had been lifted directly from the floor of his apartment into the cartons, along with books, magazines, crumbling newspaper clippings, academic regalia, award plaques, hundreds of bank deposit and withdrawal slips, video tapes, records—and a few surprises. As the collection was unpacked, things forgotten in heaps of papers came to light. A pair of green socks. Double-edged razor blades. Allergy pills. A woman’s nylon stocking. A chunk of sheet rock which had fallen onto one of the heaps during a remodeling job

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and then was buried, unnoticed, by more papers. The collection seemed as much a geological sample as a writer’s papers.

177 Women’s stockings, men’s socks, razor blades, and medications that arrived with the Isaac Bashevis Singer archive 178 Harry Ransom Center finding aid for the Isaac Bashevis Singer papers The Singer papers presented a substantial organizational and conservation challenge and also contained a high percentage of manuscripts and correspondence in both Yiddish and Hebrew. To further complicate arrangement, an additional seven accessions of materials were received between 1997 and 2000 and added to the archive during processing. Two successive archivists, aided by a visiting Singer scholar and several volunteer translators, completed the arduous task of identifying, organizing, arranging and describing the papers in 2004, making this an almost 11-year undertaking. The completed archive occupies 180 boxes (77 linear feet) and the resulting finding aid is 280 pages long. 179 John Downing (British, b. Wales) Image of Arnold Wesker, 1997 Gelatin silver print In his memoir, As Much as I Dare (1994), British playwright Arnold Wesker described the lasting impact of having his own room as a child:

With a room of my own came the habit of hoarding and order. I filed my poems, laid out sheets of paper and carbons in drawers, lined my books in alphabetical order on shelves and windowsills. Hoarded and hung. A room of my own encouraged a mania for hanging things—an animal instinct for claiming a space. . . The hoarding of my fifty years

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lives in boxes numbered one to sixty-eight, noted on computer sheets, up in the attics of Ashley Road and Blaendigeddi. . . And all because from the age of ten I was given a room of my own which invited me to keep order.

180 A photocopy of Arnold Wesker’s own description of his archive, with handwritten notes added by the Ransom Center accessioner By January 2000, when the Wesker archive arrived at the Ransom Center, it had grown to ninety-six cartons of papers. The papers were accompanied by a lengthy and amazingly detailed listing created by Wesker, complete with commentary and footnotes, such as this entry for The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel (1997): “Includes photo-copy of actor’s suggest[ed] cuts. John Dexter, director of the play, invited the actors to suggest lines of their own which could be cut to make the play [The Merchant] run shorter.” 181 Arnold Wesker’s handwritten diary entry on two cocktail napkins, 11 November 1977 This entry represents page 207 of an extensive diary that Wesker kept during New York rehearsals for his play, The Merchant, starring Zero Mostel as Shylock. Wesker’s play resulted from his dissatisfaction with anti-Semitism and unrealistic character portrayal in the Shakespearean original. The Merchant received mixed reviews.. Zero Mostel played the part only once at a preview performance on September 2, 1977 and died less than a week later. He was replaced by Joseph Leon and the show opened on November 16 , but closed after only six performances. Wesker’s description of his papers for this work makes reference to the director, John Dexter, who asked the actors to suggest lines that could be cut to make the play run shorter. In the cocktail napkin entry, written at a bar called Charlie’s days before the play opened, Wesker describes Dexter snapping at actors about cutting lines, “telling them ‘I won’t have any lines cut unless I say so!!’ That was said for my benefit, I’m sure. I notice more

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and more lines cut… I talk vehemently about the moral responsibility to do a play as the author wants first time but in practice one becomes more and more helpless as the first night approaches.” 182 Harry Ransom Center preliminary inventory of Wesker papers Although the Wesker archive is about one hundred boxes larger than the Singer archive, its existing original order and careful identification of materials by Wesker meant that the archivist was able to arrange, house, and describe the collection quite rapidly, completing work in May 2001, only a little over a year from its arrival. The papers are housed in 287 boxes (134 linear feet) and are described in an 84-page preliminary inventory. Table case 14 Case label A

Original Order and Description The archivist endeavors to preserve the original order of an archive, both in its overall arrangement scheme as well as the placement of materials within individual folders in order to preserve the record of the creator’s working methods and the original context of materials for researchers. The urge to over-tidy and consequently remove context as well as the original “look and feel” of materials is sometimes difficult to resist. Whenever possible, the creator’s own identifications and descriptions of his or her materials are used, such as original file folder titles or identifications of drafts of manuscripts. These provide not only authenticity, but also help capture some flavor of the creator’s language or even her or his emotions about an item. A good example of the latter is found in the Robert De Niro Papers, a Richard Price screenplay for Clockers labeled (exaggeratedly, one presumes) as the “one millionth draft.” 183 John Fowles’s Magos worknotes folder

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Among the manuscripts for Fowles’s second published novel, The Magus (1966), was a folder titled “Magos worknotes.” The archivist retained the original folder, which reflects an earlier title for the work and also has numerous notes that Fowles wrote on the inside of the folder. The folder contained a miscellany of items gathered by Fowles relating to his inspirations and ideas for the novel as well as the publishing process. Among the items are an image from his own teaching days in Greece, clippings that envisioned characters or inspired plot points, correspondence with his publisher, and an early book jacket design. 184 Unidentified photographer Photographic postcard image of John Fowles, 1953 Hand-colored gelatin silver print On the verso, Fowles has written “On Spetsai, 1953. L: John Fowles. R: Porchianus, whom I nicknamed the Hippo, and whom I turned into Demetriades in the book.” Fowles taught English at the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School of Spetses between 1951 and 1952. 185, 186 Character “Alison” newspaper clippings Fowles wrote on the clipping a note dated August 21, 1990, “I cut this out when writing The Magus; as it seemed to JF ‘hint’ at Alison.” Another clipping annotated on the same date concerns “Alison’s ‘suicide’” and was apparently taken from the Ham & High [Hampstead & Highgate Express]. 187, 188, 189 Memorandum of 23 August 1965 from Graham C. Greene of Jonathan Cape Limited enclosing a libel report on The Magus and Fowles’s handwritten list of libel emendations

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Publishers check manuscripts before publication for recognizable characters and institutions in order to avoid lawsuits claiming defamation and damages. The changes requested for The Magus involved the school where Fowles taught in Greece and other teachers at the school. 190 Sketch for dust jacket for “An Island and Greece” This dust jacket reflects another early, variant title for The Magus. 191, 192, 193 “The Magos” urdraft folder and hand-corrected typescript drafts as originally divided into “part one” and “part 2” Two folders contained Fowles’ first draft for The Magus, originally entitled “The Magos.” Fowles’s own designation of it as the “urdraft” was used in describing the manuscript in the Ransom Center finding aid. 194 Inscribed copy of the first edition of The Magus (1966) Table case 15

Identification Challenges and Privacy Issues During physical processing, archivists frequently encounter items that are difficult to decipher or identify and thus hard to correctly file or describe. Bad handwriting and archaic letter-writing practices, shorthand systems and codes, missing surnames, pseudonyms, and nicknames can all be roadblocks to correctly identifying, organizing, and describing materials. A knack for research, an excellent memory, determination, and a bit of luck often aid the archivist in sleuthing such mysteries.

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Some information often found in archives, such as Social Security numbers, academic grades, or medical and legal records of living persons, are protected by various laws. Archivists must be watchful of such content and secure the information, either by restricting the material entirely or redacting access to the protected content. Barring any restrictions already imposed by the creator or donor of materials, such protected information is typically redacted (hidden from view). In this way, most of the content of the material is still available to the user, with only the truly sensitive information hidden from sight. 195 Jim Buhr Image of Gloria Swanson and Indra Devi in yoga pose, ca. 1953 Gelatin silver print 196 Letter from “Me” [Indra Devi] to Gloria Swanson, 25 February 1956 During processing of the Swanson Papers, a number of unsorted letters signed from “me” were found. Fortunately, additional letters in the same hand, but with a return name and address on the envelopes, eventually turned up in the collection. “Me” was finally identified as Indra Devi, born Eugenie Peterson and a renowned yoga teacher. 197 Letter from Sara Coleridge to Arabella Brooke, 8 November 1836 This letter by Sara Coleridge, daughter of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, exhibits the fairly common nineteenth century practice of cross-writing in letters. Presumably to save paper and also to keep mailed letters to a single sheet, the writer first filled all four “pages” of a folded single sheet of paper with horizontal text and then started over at the beginning, this time on a vertical axis, writing over the horizontal text. Often entire letters are filled in

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both directions, making them difficult for modern users to read and for archivists to properly identify and sort during processing. 198, 199, 200, 201 J. W. Debenham (British) George Bernard Shaw at a rehearsal of Pygmalion at the Malvern Festival, 1936 Photography Collection, Harry Ransom Center Page of Shaw’s shorthand manuscript draft for a preface to Pygmalion Corrected proof sheets for the Pygmalion preface Isaac Pitman’s Shorthand Instructor (NY: Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1917) Some writers, such as George Bernard Shaw, utilized a shorthand system to speed their writing. Shaw created this shorthand page, the beginning of his preface to a published version of his play Pygmalion, using the Pitman shorthand system. As the proof sheets explain, a shorthand practitioner named Henry Sweet even appeared as a character in the fictional world that Shaw created for Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. Such use of shorthand, and sometimes even self-devised codes, can be a barrier to correct identification and description. 202, 203 Access photocopy of Julia Roberts’ résumé (with redacted Social Security Number) and photocopy of head shot Robert De Niro Papers, Harry Ransom Center Julia Roberts submitted a photocopied head shot/resume in order to be considered for the role of Molly in the film We’re No Angels (1989). Included along with her credits (Mystic Pizza and Steel Magnolias), training, skills, and physical description was her Social Security number. This archival-quality photocopy was made from the original, the Social Security

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number was redacted, and the photocopy substituted for the original item, which is now sequestered. 204 (on wall) We’re No Angels program, 1989, with stars Robert De Niro and Sean Penn on cover 205, 206 Ulrike Welsch Image of Anne Sexton seated at desk with typewriter, not dated Photography Collection, Harry Ransom Center Reel-to-reel audio tapes, including recordings of Anne Sexton psychotherapy sessions, circa 1961-1964 Diane Wood Middlebrook, Anne Sexton’s biographer, was given access to audio recordings of over three hundred sessions made by Sexton’s psychotherapist Dr. Martin T. Orne. These four tapes were found among Sexton’s own papers at the Ransom Center and were sealed “until [husband] Alfred Muller Sexton’s death or until explicit permission for use is given by the Sexton family” and remain restricted. In the preface to the biography, Middlebrook explains “Dr. Oren began taping their sessions in January 1961, with Sexton’s cooperation, as a way to address her inability to remember. Between sessions, Sexton would play back the tapes and make notes on them. Both the poet and her doctor regarded this practice as very productive.” Restrictions apply to a relatively small group of materials at the Ransom Center. 207, 208, 209 Edgar Lee Masters document box, with sealing tape and notes on restrictions imposed by his second wife Ellen Coyne Masters Alice Davis letter to Edgar Lee Masters, Christmas Eve, 1938

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Unidentified photographer Image of Alice Davis and Edgar Lee Masters, undated Alice Davis and Edgar Lee Masters met at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City in 1936 and she acted as his secretary, companion, and romantic partner until 1944. In 2006, Edgar Lee Master’s son, the author Hilary Masters, lifted the restrictions imposed by his mother, Ellen Coyne Masters, on a segment of the Masters archive. The formerly restricted papers now comprise twenty-two document boxes of materials, chiefly correspondence from Edgar to Ellen, other family correspondence, manuscripts labeled “Obscenia and Foolishness,” and correspondence with other women involved in extra-marital affairs with Edgar. Table case 16

Archives Oddities and Housing Challenges In addition to the usual manuscripts, correspondence, and varied personal papers that are received in collections, archives quite frequently contain unique and unusual items, some of which call for creative and ingenious housing solutions before they can be safely stored and used. 36 A carbon typescript of Peter Matthiessen’s novel Far Tortuga with the bullet fragment that damaged it Neither Matthiessen nor any scholar of his work has been able to reconstruct the story behind this damaged manuscript. 210 Leicester Hemingway’s New Atlantis currency

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Leicester Hemingway is perhaps best known for his well-regarded biography, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway (1961). He was also the founder of a new island republic off the coast of Jamaica, declared New Atlantis, on July 4, 1964. His collection is made up of papers and artifacts from New Atlantis, including pieces of its official currency, the “scruple,” made up of fish hooks, carob beans, shark teeth and similarly themed items. This custom housing safely holds the currency in a standard archival folder, allowing it to be housed in the single document box that contains all of the items in this collection. 211, 212 Letter from David Spier to Dorothy and Bill Humphrey, 25 November 1986 Unidentified photographer Image of William Humphrey with fish catch, undated Many of the Texas novelist William Humphrey’s works reflect his love and knowledge of the outdoors, especially fishing. This handwritten letter relates a fish story and encloses the contents of a fish’s stomach. Apparently the fish were biting the enclosed tiny black bugs on the surface of the mill pond behind Spiers’ house, but were not at all interested in his “no. 40 black gnat” fly. 213 Two portrait leaves of Gloria Swanson, undated Gloria Swanson Papers, Harry Ransom Center During processing, these two delicate leaves with etched portraits of Gloria Swanson were discovered, miraculously intact, within a folder inside a bulky manila envelope crammed full of her United Artists film contracts. Their accessibility and preservation is now ensured in this housing created by conservation staff, an oversize archival box with a custom sink mat utilizing a slightly “roughed up” surface to anchor the leaves in place. 214

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Film still from Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female, 1919 The portrait leaf on the right depicts Gloria Swanson as she appeared in the film Male and Female. The source for the image on the left is as yet undetermined. 215 (on wall) Two black-and-white gelatin silver photographic prints in a single mounting of Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, with handwritten captions “Wishing You a Speedy Termination of Existence” and “Stronza.” One photograph has thirteen metal objects (pins, safety pins, screws, nails, etc.) pushed through Swanson's image, the other has two metal objects pushed through Swanson's feet. In 1977, Swanson demanded a retraction of statements falsely attributed to her in Kenneth Anger’s book, Hollywood Babylon, and eventually filed a libel suit in October of that year. In November, she began receiving a bizarre series of notes, letters, and objects, including this one, from Anger, most of them signed from “Uncle Sugar.” His vituperative mailings reached a zenith with a lime-green, doll-sized coffin filled with refined sugar, emblazoned with the phrase “Hic Jacet Gloria Swanson.” Sugar was considered a “poison” by food purist Swanson and her husband William Dufty, who had recently published Sugar Blues, an expose on the addictive dangers of sugar. Swanson stopped legal proceedings against Anger when she received the coffin. While metal objects are usually removed from archival materials to ensure safe handling and long-term preservation, these represent an integral part of a communication and have been left in place. 94 [wall display]

Obsolete technologies Unidentified photographer Image of Erle Stanley Gardner with Dictaphone, not dated

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Gelatin silver print Many of the Perry Mason detective novels were composed on one of several Dictaphones that Gardner owned. By the late 1930s electric microphones generally replaced the strictly acoustical recording methods of earlier Dictaphones. In 1947, Dictaphone replaced wax cylinders with their DictaBelt technology, which cut a mechanical groove into a plastic belt instead of into a wax cylinder. This process was later replaced by magnetic tape recording. Section 7text panel

Conserving Archives and Meaning The Ransom Center’s conservation department is responsible for the physical care of the Center’s collections. It monitors the building climate, surveys and evaluates the condition of collections, designs appropriate housing and storage systems for the collections, and undertakes individual conservation treatments. Treatment of the Center’s diverse holdings requires an in-depth understanding of many types of materials, a broad range of technical skills, and the development of procedures and structures to address the needs of unique items. Although each conservator and technician is skilled in a particular specialty, such as book, paper, or photograph conservation, all are equally engaged with preserving and providing access to the full range of objects in the collections. Before undertaking a conservation treatment, conservators and collection curators engage in a dialog, asking and answering questions about a given item’s provenance, importance, value, and intrinsic and scholarly significance. A conservator’s professional mandate is similar to that of a physician: first, do no harm. As much as possible, any treatment should be reversible. Above all, a conservator will not remove or alter, without precise before and after documentation, any physical feature that might prove of value to contemporary and future scholars.

This section of the exhibition demonstrates ways in which conservators preserve and even restore meaning through their skilled interventions.

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96

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts Certificate of Nomination awarded to David Mamet and Hilary Henkin for outstanding achievement in the category Best Adapted Screenplay for Wag the Dog, 1998, with attached note reading “For Archives Ripped by David 3/23/99”

Some of the questions a conservator might ask a collection curator before recommending a treatment on this artifact include:

Did Mamet rip the certificate by accident or on purpose? Who wrote the text on the note? Mamet or an assistant? What is the historical importance of the document? Did Mamet win the award? Is the fact that the document is torn of significance for future scholars?

The answers to these questions help to determine whether to remove the note (which can leave an adhesive residue) and repair the tear. 119 Corrected page proofs of James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1922

Treatment of the Ulysses page proofs was a team effort. In planning the treatment, staff were most concerned about maintaining the subtle variations of color in the handwritten notations and corrections found in this text. The annotations of James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, the editor and publisher, and Maurice Darantiere, the printer, continue to be the object of scholarly research. These annotations were made to the individually issued page proofs before they were bound. The adhesive used for the binding and the type of binding structure obscured some of the annotations.

Even though the original binding was intact, Ulysses was disbound to reveal the annotations hidden in the gutter margin. The brittleness of the low-quality paper used for the proofs, with tears at the edges of every page, also justified this treatment.

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Following extensive testing of the media and paper colors, each leaf was deacidified with a non-aqueous solution of magnesium carbonate and mended using Japanese paper. Conservators constructed a custom housing and the original make-up of the gatherings of pages was carefully documented. 120 William Faulkner poetry fragments, ca. 1916–1926

In 1959 the Ransom Center acquired over 400 sheets of poetry written by William Faulkner that had been rescued from an incinerator. Because of their fragile condition, they could not be used by scholars. In the mid 1980s, the conservation department began to reinforce the badly charred and fragmented sheets. Conservators confronted a variety of challenges during the two-year project. They lined all the sheets with a thin reinforcing paper, neutralized the acids in the paper, and removed the oily exudations produced by the burning. Finally, storage in polyester sleeves has made these papers fully accessible to scholars. 121 Publisher’s paste-up of William Butler Yeats’s The Winding Stair, 1927

The publisher’s paste-up of the first American edition of The Winding Stair by William Butler Yeats contains 128 inserts, most of them cut from galley proofs. The inserts were adhered to 44 pages with rubber cement adhesive, layered correction over correction. The adhesive stained all of the inserts, and more than half were no longer attached to the pages of the book.

Conservators collated, separated, and removed the adhesive residues from each of the inserts. The fragile insert paper was lined and reattached to the pages of the book with customized hinges.

122 Corrected thermoset resin photocopy of Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, ca. late 1970s

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This 700-page manuscript, a corrected thermoset resin photocopy, was

previously stored in a garage or basement where an unidentified viscous oily fluid spilled on it. The fluid penetrated the paper surface leaving the manuscript difficult to handle and read, with an acrid odor. A well-meaning caretaker sprinkled a powdery substance on the surface and inserted sheets of typing paper to absorb the spillage, creating secondary problems.

As part of the ongoing treatment, the talcum powder is being removed and most of the infused oily material has been reduced, returning opacity, and thus, readability to the paper. The treatment has also eliminated the rancid smell of the paper. 123 Josephine Herbst’s photograph album and memory book, 1926–1935

This memoir of the American novelist Josephine Herbst’s life with John Herrmann includes stories of her travels and documents her friendships with fellow authors Katherine Anne Porter and Ernest Hemingway. The brittle black paper to which snapshots and typewritten sheets of text are adhered was falling out of the small volume.

A velo-binding that resembles the original book, but uses polyester film to encapsulate individual leaves, was made so that the photo album format could be preserved. The original binding is stored with the new velo-binding. 124 Sylvia Ary Portrait of [Isaac Bashevis] Singer, ca. 1935 Watercolor, pastel, and crayon on paper

This unusual watercolor, pastel, and crayon portrait of the Nobel–Prize winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer was done by the Canadian artist Sylvia Ary. It was executed on poor-quality wood pulp paper. Breaks occurred after the drawing was rolled up and crushed. Pressure-sensitive “sticky” tape was applied to hold the broken sections together. By the time the drawing entered the paper lab for treatment, only the adhesive residue

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from the tape remained, and the drawing was sooty. Large areas on the edges of the drawing had been lost.

Treatment of the drawing included reducing the adhesive residue, reducing the dirt, backing the drawing with a lightweight paper for support, and providing paper fills for the areas where paper was lost. The portrait now appears whole. 125 E. O. Goldbeck (American, 1892–1986) 45th Division, Ft. Benning, Ga., May 24, 1941 Gelatin silver photograph The San Antonio-based photographer E. O. Goldbeck was best known for using the panorama format, measuring approximately 10 x 31.5 inches.

The back of this photographic print was used to diagram the layout of the shot and, as such, functions as a manuscript record of the event. The photograph was later torn and crumpled, and then taped back together on the verso, although a significant portion remains missing.

Surface grime on the front and back was removed or reduced without affecting the image or graphite markings and notations. The photograph was humidified and flattened, tape and adhesive residues were removed, and adhesive staining was reduced. Tears and creases were mended using lens tissue and methyl cellulose adhesive. Cracks in the emulsion on the front were consolidated using dilute methyl cellulose.

The large areas of loss were compensated using fills made of two pieces of Silversafe Photostore® paper that were toned with watercolors and coated with gelatin to achieve a similar weight, tone, and surface gloss to those of the photograph. Small areas of loss were filled using cellulose powder mixed with methyl cellulose. 126 Unsalvageable cellulose nitrate film burn, 1983

Some things simply self-destruct. In 1983, severely deteriorated, unsalvageable cellulose nitrate motion picture film was deaccessioned from the Ransom Center’s David O. Selznick Archive and was disposed of by

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burning in an empty 50-gallon drum. The Health and Safety Office–supervised event provided a good example of the extreme flammability of cellulose nitrate motion picture film.

These three images are from a series of photographs taken at intervals of six seconds, showing just how rapidly the nitrate-base motion picture film ignited and burned. The contents of one 10”-diameter film canister were consumed in two minutes. The fire was extinguished with water. Even when immersed, the remnants of the film continued to smolder.

The Center now houses its cellulose nitrate-based film materials in a separate cold-storage facility.

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Section 8 text panel = 356

Archives and Industry

Without researchers, archives would be no more than cold storage. Scholars bring life to research libraries, making connections between known facts and the raw material of archives, bringing to light new discoveries and new ways of thinking that provoke and inspire more research.

In the academic world, the evolution of new theories can stimulate interest and research in material that had previously lain fallow. A nearly forgotten poet like Sara Coleridge was buoyed out of obscurity on a rising tide of feminist studies, and find new readers 150 years after her death. On the other hand, the reputation of the once-popular novelist Fannie Hurst dimmed and interest in her work faded over time. Even so, researchers still prize Hurst’s archive as a rich source of information about her now more highly-regarded friends and associates.

New movements in scholarship can also lead to new ways of looking at archives. Literary archives were once considered chiefly of interest to biographers, but researchers have discovered that the archive illuminates the text itself. At one time the text of a work was considered inert, finalized and committed to the pages of a book; now scholars see a text as something with a life history—something that grows or shrinks, goes through stages and metamorphoses—and the published version is only the final stage of this living process. New kinds of studies have been invented to approach the evolving text. Genetic criticism, for example, is currently being applied to the works of Samuel Beckett to afford a fresh, multi-dimensional view of the different stages of his texts.

Even though the primary work of a researcher is patient study and steady accumulation of data, the archive always offers the tantalizing possibility of sudden discovery: the crucial word that was mistranscribed by an earlier editor, the biographical anecdote that turns up unexpectedly in a letter, the solution to a mystery that lies in the inscription of a book. In this section, some of the Center’s patrons share the thrill of discovery they have experienced in their work on archives. [A separate label]

Recent Publications based on Ransom Center Collections

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These scans of book jackets from recent publications based substantially or in part on research conducted with Ransom Center collections represent a fraction of the approximately 100 titles that appear each year. Case 17 56, 97, 102 William Finn for the New York Journal-American newspaper Fannie Hurst at the opening of the Rivoli Theatre in New York City, 29 July 1949 Gelatin silver print A letter from Zora Neale Hurston to Fannie Hurst, 10 January 1936 A first edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1937)

Fannie Hurst (1889–1968), author of Back Street and Imitation of Life, was one of the most popular and successful American authors of the period 1910–1940. Yet, as her biographer Brooke Kroeger noted, “Fannie’s fame didn’t just recede after her funeral and the tributes occasioned by her death; it evaporated.” Even though her work is today largely forgotten, her archive remains a valuable resource for researchers interested in Hurst’s friends and acquaintances as well as her own work.

Hurst was generous to younger writers. In 1925 she judged a literary prize competition for Opportunity magazine and personally presented the second-place award to a young, unknown writer named Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960). The two women became close friends, and Hurston often credited Hurst with being a major influence on her career. Today, the Hurst papers, which contain a large correspondence between Hurst and Hurston, are most often consulted by researchers interested in the career of Hurston. 101, ?? Sara Coleridge’s poetry notebook, 1823–1851

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Peter Swaab’s edition of Sara Coleridge: Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2007)

Sara Coleridge (1802–1852), the daughter of the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was known in her lifetime for her children’s verses, her translations of the Greek and Latin classics, and her scrupulous editions of her father’s works, but her reputation as a significant poet in her own right did not emerge until literary scholars in the late twentieth century began to reappraise the contributions of women to English and American literature. Like Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), another neglected British writer whose papers are housed at the Ransom Center, Coleridge’s work has been rediscovered by critics influenced by women’s studies.

The editor of her collected poems, Peter Swaab, writes, “she is a considerable poet, passionate, versatile, and brainy. . . She makes a notable link between the Romantic and Victorian periods, and not just thanks to her name.” 105, 104, 106 The notebook of Samuel Beckett’s original handwritten manuscript for Comment c’est, 1958 Edouard Magessa O’Reilly’s genetic critical edition of Beckett’s Comment c’est (New York: Routledge, 2001) A page from Samuel Beckett’s first typescript for Comment c’est, undated

The purpose of genetic criticism is to understand the process of creating a work of literature by analyzing all versions, variants, emendations, and corrections made by the author at every stage, from first notes to final printed form. The genetic critic hopes to enhance our understanding of a text by building up a picture of the way it evolves over time.

The Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) carefully preserved the manuscripts of his works, many of which are held at the Ransom Center. For his novel Comment c’est (How It Is), Beckett worked painstakingly through many versions of the text to arrive at the result first published in 1961, making him an apt subject for a genetic critical study.

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In the apparatus that forms the bulk of the printed genetic critical edition of Comment c’est by the scholar Edouard Magessa O’Reilly, the Ransom Center’s copy of the earliest handwritten manuscript is identified as source “ms,” and the first of the three typescripts preserved among the collections is designated “Tx1.” A student of Beckett’s work can thus use this edition to study the development of Beckett’s novel. [Interactive] [Becket Electronic Manuscript Project—label to come] Case 17 ??, 53 A first-edition copy of Leon Uris’s first novel, Battle Cry (New York: Putnam, 1953) A page from Leon Uris’s Battle Cry scrapbook, 1953 For a forthcoming biography of the American novelist Leon Uris (1924-2003), Ira Nadel, professor of English at the University of British Columbia, made extensive use of the Ransom Center’s Leon Uris Papers. Here he describes his experience using the collection:

Of particular use in my research for a biography on the American popular writer Leon Uris were his scrapbooks. The large, over-sized volumes contain riches—from press clippings to photographs, letters, and even menus. Plane tickets, luggage receipts, fan letters, and even drafts of pages are all visually displayed for the scholar. The discovery of an early fan letter for his first book, Battle Cry, highlighted for me the impact of the novel on a special group of readers: the Marines. One of the most important features of the scrapbooks is the sense of discovery. Items are not in any chronological order but form a hodgepodge of shapes and sizes with very little systematically organized. Surprise is the principle of organization, since the researcher has very little sense of what the next page will bring. But turning the pages leads to the unexpected. Locating the signed menu

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from a Miss Universe contest Uris judged, plus pictures of every contestant, for example, was as unexpected as the photo of Uris in his formal and frilly tux. But it was clear that he took his role as a critic of beauty seriously. The challenge in using the material was, frankly, lifting it and finding an unused table in the Reading Room large enough to place the oversized items. Reading the contents was equally daunting, since the researcher could survey the pages only by standing. But the eye found wonders on every page.

100, 52 A letter from Carol Brandt to A. D. Peters, 18 March 1947 Selina Hastings’s Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994) The Ransom Center holds the largest single collection of Evelyn Waugh’s papers. In the adjacent label, Selina Hastings describes her experience using the Center’s holdings for her biography of the English novelist. [Second label for items 100, 52] When in 1929 the literary agent, A. D. Peters, took on Evelyn Waugh as a client he had no idea what a difficult time lay ahead. The young man was immensely talented—there was no question about that—but as Peters was soon to discover Waugh was also contentious, obstreperous, and delighted in flaunting an unfathomable contempt for the United States of America.

In 1947 Waugh was invited by MGM to Hollywood to discuss the filming of his novel, Brideshead Revisited. Peters’s heart sank. He tried his best to dissuade him from accepting, certain that mayhem would ensue, but the more he argued against it the more determined Waugh became to make the trip. Bowing to the inevitable, Peters, himself in New York at the time, wrote Evelyn a warning letter. “You have the reputation here,” he told him, “of being a difficult, tetchy, irritating and rude customer. I hope you will surprise and confound them all by behaving like an 18th century ambassador from the court of St James’s.”

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This letter, now in the Ransom Center’s collection, provides a curtain-raiser to the glorious black comedy of Waugh in California. True to form, Evelyn refused to adapt his behaviour one iota, insisting while in Bel Air on appearing in dark suit, stiff white collar, bowler hat and with rolled umbrella; he complained about everything, from the deplorable habit of chewing gum to the ridiculous practice of installing showers in bathrooms; and he mortally insulted the actor David Niven by referring to his black housekeeper as “your native bearer.” Predictably, the talks with MGM broke down, but for Evelyn the highlight of his stay was a visit to the Forest Lawn Memorial Park, providing inspiration for that superb comic novel, The Loved One.

It was not long after Waugh returned home that Peters received the report he had been dreading. It was from Carol Brandt, his associate in New York, her letter also held at the HRC. “I truly think that people here have tried to be friendly and gracious,” she began, “but Evelyn has been so constantly arrogant and rude apparently as to have left a trail of bloody but unbowed heads behind him.”

—Selina Hastings 98, 103 A letter from Oscar Wilde to Leonard Smithers, 19 October 1897 Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis’s The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate, 2000) Archives have a place not only in research that is aimed at publication but also in the classroom. In the adjacent label Janine Barchas, professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, describes one way she uses the Center’s collections to teach students new ways of thinking about texts. [Second label to go with items 98, 103] In a graduate course on the history of the book called “Graphic Design and the Literary Text,” my students and I use the Harry Ransom Center in the same way that scientists use a laboratory, testing the features of its specimens against our assumptions about how readers read and writers

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write—from the look of medieval manuscripts to the layout of modern books. One assignment in that class asks the students to examine closely some letters written by Oscar Wilde in the 1890s. Penned on a range of pale hotel stationery from different spots on the Continent, the originals conjure up nineteenth-century life and culture as well as testify to an anxious Wilde who is in need of money and eager for news from home. Wilde was then between legal trials and avoiding returning to England for fear of prosecution.

Students are asked to transcribe one of Wilde’s letters from this period and then compare their resulting text to that in the relatively recent scholarly edition of The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, published in 2000. The published edition of the letters modernizes and regularizes Wilde's punctuation throughout, in keeping with the editorial practice of standardizing so-called “accidentals” of a manuscript. This means that the features that animate the original letters as physical objects, namely Wilde's bedashed prose style, the historical flavor of his hotel stationary, the feelings of anxiety conveyed by the rushed and slanted nature of the author’s hand, are all absent from the published edition. The comparison of a unique original object and its published version invariably leads to animated discussions of editorial loss.

The point of the exercise is to illustrate that the transferring of an archival object to the world of the printed text is necessarily one of metamorphosis. This is, of course, a necessary change. Not every reader interested in Wilde could visit his letters in archives around the world and might also find it off-putting and time-consuming to read a collection of photographed facsimiles, even if a publisher could be found to finance such a Quixotic project. Yet the change to a published version also brings about possible (and sometimes unintended) changes in meaning. Modern editors of correspondence try to limit such disruption as much as possible. Yet, the mere regularizing of an old manuscript's punctuation to modern standards can diminish the unique qualities of that object and change meaning by changing grammar, or, in Wilde's case, remove or silence the nervous hesitations testified to by his haphazard dashes and rushed expression. —Janine Barchas 127, 99 David Oshinsky’s “No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov,” New York Times Book Review, 9 September 2007

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Mrs. Ernest Wiener’s reader’s report for Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., rejecting The Diary of Anne Frank, 6 July 1950 In the adjacent label, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Oshinsky, professor at The University of Texas at Austin, describes mining the Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., publishing records for his article. [second label for 127, 99] Several years ago, a colleague told me about an extraordinary resource he’d come across at the Harry Ransom Center. I had recently done some work there, using the newly acquired Woodward-Bernstein Papers as the centerpiece for a course I was teaching on Watergate, so I returned to the reading room to browse through the collection my friend had recommended: the papers of publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, a massive archive of 1500-plus boxes, containing one of the most detailed and user-friendly indexes I had ever seen. What interested me most were the publisher’s rejection letters, a subject of perverse curiosity to authors, published and unpublished, who have endured this dreaded moment of rebuff. There were thousands of such rejections in the Knopf files, most delivering the bad news in neatly typed form letters, but some containing reader’s reports guaranteed to cause humiliation and pain. Since Knopf represented the gold standard in the book trade, with dozens of Nobel Prize- and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors on its list, I was most interested in the judgments that had missed the mark, especially where new talent was concerned. And I didn’t have to look far. Rejection files are akin to an intellectual burial ground, where whopping editorial blunders are mercifully entombed. With the aid of that trusty index and the cheerful HRC staff, I discovered that Knopf had turned down Nabokov’s “Lolita,” Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and “The Diary of Ann Frank.” Indeed, I soon found myself found myself pondering this bizarre question: Do I really need to use the nasty Salmon Rushdie letter when I’m already including even harsher rejections addressed to James Baldwin and Sylvia Plath? As it turned out, however, this was not the full story. In truth, such blunders turned up less frequently than I’d expected. “The great bulk of the reader’s reports seemed fair-minded and persuasive,” I admitted in my essay. “Put simply, a rejected manuscript usually appeared to deserve its fate.”

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I received more feedback on this 1,500 word piece than for any other I’ve done for The New York Times. Bloggers had a field day, authors emailed me their horror stories, a few even sent me their rejected manuscripts. From what I can tell, most were pleased to learn that publishers routinely make mistakes—big ones—in judging talent. As one author’s workshop put it: “Rejection is tough on a writer—but you’re not alone.” —David Oshinsky 92 [wall item]

Archived and Forgotten? Helen K. Taylor Christopher Morley sorting through papers in trunk, not dated Gelatin silver print

The American novelist and writer Christopher Morley (1890–1957), whose archive the Ransom Center acquired in the 1960s, was one of the most prominent literary figures in the U. S. in the first half of the twentieth century. Many of his novels, including the well-known Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop, are still in print. Yet he is, according to Jack Matthews who wrote about Morley in the March 22, 2007 issue of The Antioch Review, “sadly neglected by the Literary Establishment.” This is born out by the fact that no scholarly monograph about Morley has been published since the 1970s and little research is conducted in the Morley papers by contemporary scholars. Matthews lists the qualities in Morley’s work that he believes have led to this neglect—modesty, an inclination for nostalgia and sentimentality, a self-conscious cleverness, a propensity for puns, and cheerfulness. Add Morley’s interest in topics now dismissed as trivial and superficial and his prolific output and, Matthews argues, you have a formula for obscurity. Yet, Matthews insists, Morley’s immunity to “the existential angst so fashionable in twentieth-century literature” and his “rejoicing in the plenitude of everyday life” gives us writing that “glows with the excitement of discovery.” That, and the brilliance of Morley’s sentences, “each one a text worthy of explication,” Matthews asserts, are why Morley should still continue to be read.

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Case 19

Archives in the News Stories about or originating out of archives frequently make headline news. For the duration of The Mystique of the Archive exhibition, we will feature a changing display of these articles, shown alongside related archival materials from the Ransom Center’s collections. 217, 218 “A Little of the Top for History” by Jerry Guo in The New York Times, 13 July 2008 A Collection of Hair formed by J. H. Leigh Hunt Miriam Lutcher Stark Collection, Harry Ransom Center The English poet and essayist, Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), assembled a collection of locks of hair of notable writers, including strands from the heads of John Keats, Mary and Percy Shelley, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, and William Wordsworth, as well as these locks Robert E. Lee and George Washington. A common nineteenth-century practice, collecting locks of hair is now considered a curious tradition of remembrance. 223, 219, 220, 221, 222 Review clipping from the New York Times A first edition of James Agee’s A Death in the Family (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1957) Pulitzer Prize Collection, Harry Ransom Center James Agee’s manuscript notes and composite first draft of A Death in the Family, ca. 1948 James Agee Collection, Harry Ransom Center

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James Agee’s A Death in the Family; A Restoration of the Author’s Text edited by Michael Lofaro (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2007) James Agee’s nearly completed memoir, A Death in the Family, was pieced together after his death in 1955 and originally published by his literary executor David McDowell. It went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and helped secure Agee’s literary reputation. Fifty years later Michale Lofaro has taken a second look at the primary manuscript materials of the novel, housed at the Ransom Center and with David McDowell’s papers at the University of Tennessee (what Lofaro calls “the other UT”), and put together a new version, re-tooling the structure of the narrative by making it chronological. Lofaro writes about his “detective odyssey” in reconstructing the text:

For fifty years, although suspicions were raised, no one could dispute the editors’ claim that the work published two years after Agee’s death was essentially “presented here exactly as he [Agee] wrote it.” The bulk of Agee’s original manuscripts at the Ransom Center, McDowell’s original typescript of these materials, and a series of Agee’s plans, outlines, and notes, however, all corroborated significant alterations to what was indeed a nearly finished manuscript, one that was longer and structured differently than the published version of 1957.

Lofaro spent nearly two decades “unraveling Agee’s intent” by deciphering “his tiny, crabbed, always seemingly unsharpened pencil strokes that often inscribed 800 words onto unnumbered sheets of cheap, five-and-dime-store paper.” Readers now have a restored edition that they can read against the original edition to arrive at their own conclusions about what Agee originally intended.