by Rick Gekoski
It would have been enough, surely, to cause Nabokov posthumously to regret not having destroyed it himself, and in this case he was less well served than Philip Larkin was by his literary executors. Or perhaps not. There is always that counter-example of Max Brod, preserving and arranging the publication of most of Kafka’s life’s work. But those are works of genius – you didn’t need to be Max Brod to see that – whereas The Original of Laura is slight, incomplete and unpromising. Its publication would have distressed the fastidious Nabokov.
It is no wonder, then, that one encounters the occasional author who tries to ensure that nothing they have written survives unless they regard it as of significant quality. Jeanette Winterson once told me that she throws away manuscript drafts, corrected work, and abandoned projects, on the grounds that ‘if I have decided they are not good enough for publication, why should I allow them to be seen?’ She makes this point forcibly in her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?: ‘I burn my work in progress and I burn my diaries, and I destroy letters. I don’t want to sell my working papers to Texas and I don’t want my personal papers becoming doctoral theses.’
To Winterson, such material is not only personal, it is no longer alive, and the impulse to keep it is as absurd as the way in which Orthodox Jews preserve hair and fingernail clippings. There is not going to be a Winterson archive, and one wonders, quite, why more authors don’t take this view. Perhaps there is something self-mutilating about throwing away material that might just, somehow or other, turn out to be useful. Or at least, valuable.
The major usefulness of a writer’s archive, both scholarly and financial, rarely resides in manuscript material, for an author’s journals and incoming correspondence often carry more scholarly potential. This can be damaging to an author’s amour propre, when what they may (wrongly) regard as their life’s work – the manuscripts – is regarded as unimportant compared with having known and corresponded with people, especially writers, more highly regarded than themselves. The archive of Al Alvarez, a central figure in the English literary scene for many decades, was of considerable value largely because he had significant relations with both Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, and had kept their letters. (When you are a dealer in such material, it is best not to make such an observation, and to gush a little about the archive ‘as a whole’, hoping that the owner will not decide, at the last minute, to retain the significant incoming letters and ask you to sell the rest.)
The impulse to do so is not uncommon. It is one thing to sell your own manuscripts and journals, quite another to sell letters written to you, most often on the reasonable assumption that they were private. Though there comes a point when an author is sufficiently well known to be aware that his or her letters may be collected one day – and hence becomes that little bit less forthcoming – in the early moments of a literary career unguarded transmission of personal material is frequent, and frequently (later) embarrassing. Letters are supposed to be private, aren’t they?
Some time in the 1980s I visited the elderly Brian Coffey, now a rather neglected Irish writer, poet and philosopher, hoping to place his papers with an appropriate institution. The National Library of Ireland, perhaps? I was not unaware that he had for some years in the 1920s been a close friend of Samuel Beckett, though I did not inquire about this until I had examined, and appreciated, Coffey’s own manuscript material.
‘You were a friend of Beckett’s, weren’t you?’ I eventually asked over a beer and a sandwich, as we took a break from searching through old filing cabinets and placing various folders on a table in the kitchen.
‘Oh yes, before Sam went to Paris I used to see him all the time. We used to play golf together.’
Golf? I had been aware that Beckett had played cricket for Trinity College Dublin – he is one of very few writers (John Fowles is another) whose records, modest though they may be, are enshrined in Wisden, whose obituary of the writer notes that he
had two first-class games for Dublin University against Northamptonshire in 1925 and 1926, scoring 35 runs in his four innings and conceding 64 runs without taking a wicket. A left-hand opening batsman, possessing what he himself called a gritty defence, and a useful left-arm medium-pace bowler, he had enjoyed a distinguished all-round sporting as well as academic record at Portora Royal School, near Enniskillen, and maintained his interest in games while at Trinity College, Dublin.
No mention of golf though.
‘Was he any good?’
‘Oh, he hit a nice ball did Sam.’
‘What was his handicap?’
Coffey paused for a moment, in what I presumed was an effort to remember, but he was simply baffled by my question.
‘I don’t know, we never kept score, we just hit our shots and walked and had a good talk.’
You can almost imagine it as a scene from a Beckett play. Vladimir and Estragon waiting impatiently at the first tee.
‘After Sam left,’ I asked, ‘did you keep in touch?’
‘Oh yes, we wrote to each other all the time, most days.’
The correspondence is unknown, and I could think of no references to it. A cache of letters from Beckett, written on first going to Paris, at the time of his first publications and initial relationship with Joyce and the expatriate cultural milieu, would be utterly fascinating. And valuable.
‘That’s interesting. How many letters would you say you had from Sam?’
‘Never counted. Thousands probably.’
Thousands! My mind went back to those filing cabinets. Nothing there. Perhaps one of the drawers in the dresser in the corner? Or might they have been put into a bank?
‘Where do you keep them?’
‘Sam’s letters? Oh, I threw them away.’
Threw them away!
‘Why did you do that?’
‘At first, I just answered a letter, then chucked it in the bin. As you do. But after a few years, and Sam got well known, then I made sure to throw them away …’
‘Because?’
‘… because they were private.’
By this Coffey did not mean intimate, or particularly revealing, just that they were addressed only to him. He seemed surprised, perhaps slightly bemused, that I should regard this – one look at my face would have revealed it – as regrettable.
‘They were just between us,’ he added.
In that period Beckett wrote proper letters of some length, full of thinking and reflecting about his new life abroad, the people he had met and the work he was contemplating. In later years, when he became famous and there were more demands on his time, he took to writing short postcards in his spidery hand, terse, exact and exacting. The sort of cards that could easily be published, which gave nothing away, if anyone were foolish enough to collect and publish them all.
But ‘thousands’ of early letters? Even if ‘thousands’ is some sort of trope here, and can be taken to mean LOADS, the gap they leave is substantial, and I have little doubt that our picture of this period in Beckett’s life would be enlarged and illuminated if they had survived. And yet I have, still, great admiration for Coffey’s position. It wasn’t so much a matter of principle for him – he took no pride in it, and felt no need to adumbrate or to defend his thinking – it was simply, for him, a matter of consideration, of discretion, of protecting something essentially private between himself and his friend. That his friend was to become not Sam the golfer but Samuel Beckett the great writer strengthened his resolve, when for many less considerate or more venal recipients the opposite might be true. But Coffey, had he even considered a potential financial windfall, would not have been moved by it: the letters were gone, deposited in the waste paper basket one by one as they were answered. That was the right place for them.
It’s a wonderful, uncompromising attitude, and when I am not bemoaning the loss to literary history, I admire it very much.
These days, however, most writers are positively anxious, at some point, to sell their archives, and the letters of thei
r friends. But there are several impediments to a happy conclusion to this process. First, and most poignantly, most writers value their own papers, and have reason to believe that others will do so too. They are wrong. It is only a tiny percentage of authors whose archives are purchased by institutions, while the (envious) others eventually either have to throw theirs out or impose them posthumously on bemused and irritated next of kin, who don’t know what to do with them either. The only thing that can be said in favour of this is that it is better than inheriting the unwieldy and unhangable contents of an unsaleable painter’s studio.
Why are so few archives saleable? The reason is that so few writers merit academic research, their manuscripts, diaries and letters of insufficient interest to spark off PhD students, biographers or anyone wishing to write a book about them. It doesn’t matter how popular the writer is: I do not believe the archive of Dan Brown or James Patterson would elicit any interest from university rare book and manuscript departments. Insufficient literary merit. But – there is always some sort of ‘but’ lurking when you talk about archives – the James Patterson archive would be of interest if he knew (and corresponded with) the right people. Suppose he had received dozens of letters, let us say, from Cormac McCarthy? Or Barack Obama?
But I suspect that this archive business is slowly drawing to an e-close. Manuscripts? Hardly anyone writes by hand any more, and those that do are over forty. Letters? Precious few, and more precious the fewer they become. Now we have emails and texts. And what library, one wonders, would wish to collect – if one knew how to do so – the tweets and texts of Salman Rushdie (who is said to fire them off in large numbers)?
This shift away from the written to the electronic word is already causing massive uncertainty in the archive world. While there is no question that the outgoing and incoming emails from an author’s computer(s) can be harvested, and perhaps printed out for cataloguing, and that these will be of substantial scholarly value, it is not clear what their monetary value should be. In general, the archival world values material – in both senses of the term – that is unique. But emails could be printed out once or a hundred times. They may offer us invaluable information about a writer’s interests, relationships and work habits, but no one in the rare book world has yet come up with a formula that sets a price on them. Perhaps the old standby – what the market will bear – is all we have to go on. But as individual transactions become public knowledge, there will eventually be a sort of case law that takes over: writer X’s emails were valued at $10,000, so (inferior, or less collected) writer Y’s emails cannot be worth as much.
But the problem is more troubling even than this because emails, with rare exception, are not as interesting as letters. Writers take time – or took time – when writing a letter, because writing was what they did, diligently and well. So the letters, say, of Lord Byron or of Philip Larkin are frequently of enormous interest in themselves: lengthy, personal, considered (or, better yet, unconsidered), they are testimony to the writer’s inner life.
Emails, by way of contrast, are quick-fire missives generally intended to initiate a question or to respond to one. They are short, pedestrian, generally unconsidered flashes in the ether. We clear the contents of our Inbox as quickly and efficiently as possible, and press Delete; the contents of our post box, on the other hand, may well be cherished, read and reread, and frequently filed away.
And as for texts? U got to b kdng. Quick-fire serial rubbish by addicted teenagers, or messages telling our partners that we will be late for supper. Not merely not literary language, hardly language at all. Curiously, though, email compression and text-speak are foreshadowed in the letters of Ezra Pound, who developed an idiosyncratic epistolary style, with truncated syntax, compressed spelling and slangy tones that would do a literate Valley girl (an oxymoron indeed) proud. Here he is, writing from Rapallo in the early 1930s:
New man on lit/ page/ section called ‘Bear Garden’ open to free (not to say prophane and viorlent diskussin … you cd. notify people of yr/ continued existence via that medium. Or the son and heir might practice on ’em. Grey, the edtr., is trying to stir up discussion and in gen. improve the level of same.
Such Pound letters often trade on the rare book market at surprisingly modest prices. (We once sold a series of 430 of them at an overall price of £60 each, though they get a lot pricier if you buy them in ones.)
Emails and texts haven’t yet found their place in the market, but electronic archives do have one advantage over paper ones: you don’t get dirty and dusty collecting them, which ironically makes me think more fondly of all those sweaty times in attics, trawling about for the real things.
10
Death by Water: The Great Omar
Here’s something of a poser: can you guess what the following object was? It was adorned with over 1,000 jewels and precious stones, including rubies, turquoises, amethysts, topazes, olivines, garnets and an emerald, each in its own gold setting, held together by almost 5,000 leather inlays, and 100 square feet of gold leaf was used in its production. Was it:
1. Cleopatra’s girdle?
2. King Midas’s tablecloth?
3. The saddle of King Arthur’s horse?
4. A bookbinding executed in 1911?
You will, naturally, have guessed number 4, as being the most preposterous. A thousand precious stones? Who would be mad enough to attempt such a thing? Aside from the question of how you could stuff all those ingredients onto its covers, what book could possibly deserve such ornate presentation, making us imagine some moustachioed Oriental potentate luxuriating as he reads in a garden of earthly delights?
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou
Beside me singing …
That’s it: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the twelfth-century Persian masterpiece, with its compelling insistence that our pleasures and rewards, if we are to have them, must be sought in this life, not the next.
Ruba’i are poems which consist of four lines, of which all but the third rhyme. These short verses are particularly well suited to the presentation of memorable images and homilies, of which Khayyam was the great master. His poems were immediately recognised as a dangerous and thrilling counsel of temptation. The work was vilified by the religious authorities as a ‘tissue of error like poisonous snakes’, and their author forced to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he prudently resolved ‘to draw in the reins of his tongue and pen’, lest both be forcibly removed.
Omar Khayyam (or to give him his full name, Ghiyath al-Din Abu’l-Fath ’Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nishapuri al-Khayyami) was the Leonardo da Vinci of the ancient Persian world, a polymath who, in a time when it was still possible, knew more or less all there was to know. He made significant contributions in the fields of philosophy and theology, mathematics, astronomy and climatology, music and, particularly, poetry. But he came to conclude, as many men of great learning have, that no amount of understanding of such abstruse matters is likely to lead to an ultimate understanding of the nature of life. We are here, for our tiny speck of time, and then gone.
‘The pride of the peacock is the glory of God’: the front panel of Sangorski’s Great Omar.
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
If oblivion may be inescapable, there is much to celebrate and to enjoy in our brief sojourn. But Omar Khayyam is often misrepresented as a mere celebrant of the pleasures of the flesh, a misconception promoted by his first translator into English, Edward Fitzgerald, but shared by many clerics in his own, and later, times. In fact, he wrote several treatises on religious matters which, though they deny divine intervention in daily human life, or the possibility of an afterlife, yet cannot be described as irreligious. He declared himself a Sufi, and though his God is distant from human affairs, that may be all to
the good, allowing us to enjoy ourselves while we can.
But it is as a poet that Omar Khayyam is remembered. His ruba’i are not intended to be read in any given order, and most are versions – many of which have entered into everyday language – of the eat, drink (a lot) and be merry school of thought. It is, ironically, a sobering message: there is no ultimate reward, nothing to look forward to but dust. Loss, all is loss. No wonder many clerics reviled him, whatever his pretensions to orthodoxy.
Yet his work has inspired readers for eight centuries, been translated into dozens of languages and, by the turn of the twentieth century, was a publishing sensation. There was hardly a poet alive who could not quote from his verses. If any book deserved an extravagant binding, this was it, and it was given its ultimate incarnation not by the fabled craftsmen of the East but by two Englishmen, Francis Sangorski and George Sutcliffe.
The two first met in 1896 as young men, taking an evening course in bookbinding at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. Their exceptional ability was soon recognised, and both were given scholarships of £20 a year for three years, to pursue their studies. Within a year they were teaching at Camberwell College of Art, and in 1901 set up premises in Bloomsbury Square as the Sangorski and Sutcliffe Bindery. During the eleven years of their ensuing partnership, the pair became the finest bookbinders in the world, moving several times to larger premises and receiving commissions of the most important kind.
It was the greatest period of English bookbinding (the rival firm of Zaehnsdorf employed 180 craftsmen), and the highly elaborate bindings that Sangorski and Sutcliffe were to produce triumphantly bridged the gap between art and craft. John Stonehouse, an employee at Henry Sotheran’s Bookshop in Piccadilly, offered frequent commissions to the Bindery, and declared that their binding of John Addington Symonds’s Wine, Women and Song (a most Omarish title), with its depictions of grapes made from amethysts set in gold, was the most superb ever executed. It sold quickly, and gave Stonehouse a remarkable idea, which was to come to fruition some years later.