Not obviously appetising ... monkfish. Photograph: Murdo Macleod I once attended, and spoke at, a conference on literary archives at the home of so many of them, the Harry Ransom Centre at The University of Texas. The conference stretched interminably to me, for I am impatient and not very good at such things over three days, and covered more topics about archives than most people would wish to know. But it was, of course, peopled by participants who did wish to know, and we (they) covered topic after topic with enthusiasm. What is the future of literary archives? How will they be affected by changes in digital technology? What new ways have been devised for information recording and retrieval?Yawn, alas. Alas, because I make part of my living dealing in literary archives. So I ought to have been interested in such questions, and intermittently I was. Did you know that a techno-wizard can retrieve every keystroke made on a keyboard and recorded on a hard disc? This means not only will you be found out having watched (and deleted) Swedish Nurses 37, but that all of the emendations, alterations, changes and corrections in an author's literary compositions can be located, recovered, and eventually made available for hyper-diligent perusal.However, though I spend a lot of my time with archives, this does not mean that I take unalloyed pleasure in them. Let's start at the beginning. An archive consists of the mass of personal papers that fill a writer's study, and attic, and (if you ask their partner) most of the rest of the house: the terminal moraine of an author's life. What is to be found there? Well, in ideal state with, as Gertrude Stein put it, "no pieces of paper thrown away" you might find: the author's manuscripts and drafts of work both published and unpublished; diaries or journals; incoming correspondence, and (if you are very lucky) copies of the author's outgoing letters! as well ; historical material that documents the author's life, like photographs and family memorabilia; objects of significance: the writer's desk, or typewriter, or (even) best Sunday suit. This material will have spread like an infestation through the house, and found its nesting places in boxes and cartons, filing cabinets, bookshelves, and drawers both open and secret. ("No one is looking into my drawers!" William Golding once told me, a little ambiguously).When first encountered, an archive, I remarked at the conference, reminds me of a monkfish. When it is eventually served up to you in bite-sized morsels, accompanied by rice and a salad, it is enticing, but when you see it in an unfilleted state it is ugly, cumbersome and unappealing. I have spent a lot of time in attics, studies, and cellars, sifting through myriad unsorted boxes and cartons of a writer's manuscripts, letters, diaries and miscellanea dust! damp! and there is something lowering about the process, something dirty and invasive that makes you both literally and figuratively need a wash. My audience was not amused by my fish metaphor, and glared at me disapprovingly "A monkfish!" muttered Tom Staley, the legendary director of the Ransom Centre and I made myself an inward promise to stop trying to be funny, and to shut up. (I didn't keep it.)When, eventually, you have carted it away and sold it to an institution that has catalogued it assiduously, and then put it on display or exhibition, an archive can be a wonderful thing. It is, after all, on the basis of such collections that we come to have accurate recordings of ourselves and others: biographies get written, journals are published, Collected Works and Letters come in to print. History is made.I rose to my feet again, to ask (yet) another question. It was a distinguished panel on the stage, consisting of Tom Staley, Steve Ennis (The Folger Shakespeare Library), Frank Turner (Yale), and Michael Ryan (Columbia): the heads of some the leading libraries of America, and though they had a! lready h eard enough from me, I was anxious to hear their response."I want to ask a longish question," I said, "and I hope you will bear with me. But the crux of it is this: do any of you ever suffer from doubts?" There was a glimmering of interested hostility as they looked at me."We are wedded, are we not, in this archival world, to documenting the development of texts: how does a literary work begin, what stages does it go through before it reaches its mature, final form? And it occurs to me that this process, of tracing things through their stages, as if they were persons growing up, may have the concomitant danger of over-emphasising the importance of process at the expense of product. I feel this strongly, sometimes, with manuscripts and working drafts of published works. Do you?"No. They did not."Don't misunderstand me, though. I am fascinated, too, by watching things grow and develop. I recently had the privilege of reading carefully through Geoffrey Hill's many working notebooks of poetry, and it was riveting to watch the poems develop, contract, wind back upon themselves, finally and difficultly finding their final form of words. That is terrific, but it is purchased at some cost, isn't it?"No."The cost is that the special status of the final form of the text is mitigated. When we do not have any indication of the writing process as we do not with, say, Shakespeare the received texts have an inevitability about them, as if they could hardly be other than they are. And that adds, to me, to their otherness, and suggests some mystery in their composition. I am glad there is no Shakespeare archive. I like him as he is. Do you see any point in this?"No."Remember that great phrase of Keats, describing how Coleridge "would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge"? By way of contrast, Keats instances Shakespeare, who, possessed of Negative Capability, was content to allow "uncertainties, mysteries and doubt! s" witho ut attempting to resolve or rationalise them. I cite this because I believe we strip something numinous from our texts, reduce and denature them, when we focus too intently on how they came to be, and too little on the fact that they are. As if the purpose of literary research was to produce Variorum Editions [which exhaustively collate all known versions and variants of the text]. So let me pose this question in its final form, and ask you: if your library was offered the archive of the Penetralium of mystery, would you buy it?"Each of the panel members took it in turn. No, they saw no problem in the processes and procedures of literary and archival research as they practised them. Yes, they would utterly adore to see the Shakespeare archive. And as for the Archive of the Penetralium of Mystery, whatever the hell that was, well it might be worth a look, at the right price.I had outstayed my welcome, and been treated courteously. Anyway, it was a stupid line of thought, misplaced, inappropriate. After all, would you ask a convention of rubber fetishists if they would prefer dressing in taffeta and lace?I was thinking on my feet, feeling my way. But, considered historically, there is something to be said here. Our fascination with an author's manuscripts, and the development of his texts, is a relatively recent phenomenon, which though it begins in the 19th century, has accelerated into orthodoxy only in the last 50 years. To a pre-20th century sensibility, or indeed, in many countries of the world to this day, an author's manuscripts are regarded as of little interest, because all that really matters is what the writer finally chooses to publish.The film Shakespeare in Love (1998) makes the point adroitly, as well it might, for the screenplay was co-authored by Tom Stoppard, himself a sophisticated book collector. In one scene Shakespeare is seen in the process of composition, and, finishing a sheet, wonders aloud whether he should keep it?"Who'd care about that?" he is asked, and he shrugs his shoulde! rs, and tosses it in the bin.
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