This Book Is Overdue!

by Marilyn Johnson

  The RSVPs came rolling in via e-mail, from J. Crew and Ann Taylor and all sorts of independent design shops and blogs, artists and students—so many that the Trustees Room, the party’s scheduled venue, was deemed too small. Instead, the display cases, the bar, the round table full of donated cupcakes (official snack of young librarians), and an information table stocked with brochures about the collections were all moved to the grand Celeste Bartos Forum. On a frigid night, they came, four hundred strong, to celebrate the debut of art inspired by the library.

  David Ferriero and I were the oldest people in the room. “Do you believe this?” he said with obvious delight, as someone wheeled a stroller in, and arty young people in hand-knitted scarves clustered around the displays. Josh Greenberg beamed over the crowd. Jessica Pigza introduced me to the artist Julia Rothman, who had grabbed the book on navy uniforms and turned it into vintage-looking wallpaper, Sergeant Pepper–esque rows of uniformed men linked by loops of rope; she would give the whole venture a motto when she said: “I didn’t know there was so much in there, waiting for us.”

  The art was displayed in the center of the room and the artists circulated through the party, but the video, the moving picture of the experience, was the point of the evening, the flickering happening that would capture the narrative of discovery and the spark of creation—simply because it was a video, an enveloping experience you could have in a group, in the dark, an event.

  What was my problem? Though I loved the wired world, the new-wave librarians, the avatars and activists, I turned into a dinosaur in that library. I couldn’t help it; I was an old-fashioned writer who loved the ancient books summoned via pneumatic tubes, the archives, the quiet. I had found something rare there: an inexhaustible wonder. The digital library hovering over it made the whole place only more wonderful and rich. But my heart had sunk the first time I went in the space that used to hold the yizkor memorial books and saw a phalanx of cheerful librarians welcome a toddler, the first or second child-patron through the door. Maybe this was just a New York story after all: I had laid claim to a little piece of the island, and I didn’t want to give it up.

  But I couldn’t deny that there was something happening in the room of artists that thrilled me. I turned with the others toward the screen. A creative collaboration between librarians and patrons—isn’t that a wonder, too? As the lights went down, those closest to the screen sank to the floor, and then the whole crowd behind them sank, too, a wave of hundreds of young people dropping to the floor and tilting their faces to the light. They might have been a tribe of ancient people, falling to the ground at the mention of their gods—or were they large children, gathered around a virtual rocking chair for story time?

  David Ferriero grinned over their heads from the sidelines. A fresh crowd for the old library, new, alive, and up-to-date, playing with new media. That’s the future of this library.

  11.

  WHAT’S WORTH SAVING?

  “Just by the grace of God, really, did this collection survive.”

  Who Do You Love?

  When Toni Morrison’s home in Grand View-on-Hudson, New York, burned down in 1993, a breathless New York Times article barely mentioned her adult son, who was there when a flying ember burst into flames and who tried in vain to extinguish it. The headline did not read TONI MORRISON’S SON SPARED IN CHRISTMAS FIRE. It read TONI MORRISON’S MANUSCRIPTS SPARED IN CHRISTMAS FIRE.

  The fire was both alarming and ironic, the Times declared. Two weeks after she collected the Nobel Prize, “a writer’s greatest honor, Ms. Morrison was subjected to what might have been a writer’s greatest nightmare: the possible destruction of a large portion of her irreplaceable original manuscripts.”

  That’s literary license, I assume; surely a worse nightmare would be the death by fire of her only child. But in diminishing the human in this story, the newspaper kept a tight focus on the manuscripts, only a few of which were in the house. You could boil this story down to a line: a little bit of water damage from fire hoses was sustained by a small number of manuscripts stored in a Nobel Prize winner’s second home, which, by the way, was gutted. The whole piece was an excuse to read about Toni Morrison’s papers, one of the great archival prizes still floating around out there. Never mind the son, the old house, even the fire. The real story was: Where will Toni send her papers? Where will Toni send her papers? Toni! Her papers! Where will she send them?!

  Howard Dodson, chief of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a friend of Morrison’s, admitted to the Times that he and the author had had informal talks about her donating some of those precious manuscripts of Beloved and Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye to the Schomburg, but she hadn’t committed. Not yet, maybe not ever. “The whole world wants her papers,” Dodson acknowledged.

  She has been judged in the company of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, and Sinclair Lewis.

  She won the prize that went to Beckett, Shaw, Sartre, Camus, Solzhenitsyn.

  She’s on the same immortal international list as Gabriel García Márquez, Thomas Mann, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Wole Soyinka, Seamus Heaney, Günter Grass, Czesław Miłosz, and so on, and so on…you get the idea.

  Her archives are gold. Her grocery list is gold. Some cheesy detective novel (she reads such novels for relaxation while she’s writing her own books), complete with her thumbprints and dog-ears, is hot property. The sentence she was composing long ago when her son, then a toddler, threw up on the paper and she scrawled right through his vomit—well, maybe you’d toss it out with the coffee grounds and junk mail, but I promise you, that nasty scrap is worth a mint, and every archivist knows it.

  The whole world wanted Norman Mailer’s papers, too, but they went to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, all twenty thousand pounds of them, from the forty thousand letters to every version of each of his books, with one little exception (a draft of his first book, The Naked and the Dead ). Mailer wrote more than forty books, many of them critically acclaimed best-sellers, in multiple genres over more than six decades, won everything but the Nobel Prize, and considered himself the peer of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Maybe he wasn’t as big as Tolstoy, but he was big.

  The thing about archives is they need to go somewhere where they’ll be preserved and remain accessible to scholars; and they really ought to end up somewhere that makes sense geographically. You don’t expect the papers of the Harlem Renaissance to go to Indiana. The only connection to Texas that Mailer seemed to have, though, according to his New York Times obituary, was that during his stoned and drunken years in the fifties, he used to affect a variety of accents: British, Irish, gangster, and, yes, Texan.

  Mailer had a long-winded answer for why he disappointed the libraries of Harvard, where he went to school; Brooklyn, where he grew up and lived for most of his eighty-four years; and New York City, a place where he’d left his mark not only culturally but politically as well, when he ran for mayor on a platform promising to declare it the fifty-first state. “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,” he wrote. “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.”

  So faking a Texas accent really was part of it. His excuse was a stretch—or should we call this rationalizing on a preposterous scale? Not that there was anything wrong with the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. On the contrary, it is a golden mountain, with a collection built ambitiously by Harry Huntt Ra
nsom, and ambitiously supplemented by archivist Tom Staley, a man who rustles up sponsors when he finds a worthy prize, and delivers, time and again. So far, the Center holds papers by Jorge Luis Borges (a great writer and a great librarian), James Joyce, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Graham Greene, and Woodward and Bernstein, to mention a few. So many British authors were selling their papers to the Ransom Center that the archivists of Britain and Ireland organized the Group for Literary Archives and Manuscripts (GLAM) to counter the “wealthy overseas institutions with their hunger for archives and manuscripts of literatures other than their own, above all in English.” They meant Texas, mainly. As an anonymous British archivist muttered in the Guardian: “Two things are inevitable, death and Texas.”

  Norman Mailer’s papers went to the Ransom Center because the Texans offered him $2.5 million for his stash.

  So what? They were his to give or sell. But this might explain why everyone got so excited about the fire licking at Toni Morrison’s scraps.

  The differences between the kings and the beggars in the writing world are vast: Toni Morrison’s and Norman Mailer’s letters are worth something and, published or not, donated or sold for vast sums, will be collected and treasured by highly trained archivists, cataloged, kept in climate-controlled rooms in expensive, acid-free boxes, scrutinized by scholars who will in turn be scrutinized by archivists watching them with squinty, suspicious eyes to make sure they don’t deface, alter, or steal these precious written remnants of literary originality.

  As a young editor, I used to comb Esquire magazine’s slush pile for publishable stories by the unknown, or relatively unknown—or at any rate, unpursued—writers. Once I opened one that had a cigarette taped to it. “Have a smoke on me,” the letter said, in a lunatic scrawl. My desperate, rejected correspondent had his letter, tobacco drifting from its taped cigarette, tossed in the trash.

  There was another brown manila envelope that clawed its way out of the Esquire mailbag: my name and address were written in dark marker, and plastered across the top, the sides, and the back, were multiple bold notices, all proclaiming FRIEND OF BILL SCHULZ!!!! in scary handwriting. Schulz, a poet I’d known in graduate school, had alerted me to a writer living in his town’s dump who seemed to have real talent. He told her I was expecting her manuscripts, but that’s how impenetrable the glossy magazine must have seemed to her. The envelope and the letter inside were as disturbed and disturbing as those from Have a Smoke on Me. Her stories, however, were terrific, though not, perhaps, for a men’s magazine like Esquire. I sent her on to a literary magazine, which published her, and they sent her on to a book editor, and who knows how many more people passed her along, but soon enough, four of her novels, most famously, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, were ushered into print. I wish I hadn’t thrown away Carolyn Chute’s letter (like the envelope, emblazoned FRIEND OF BILL SCHULZ!!!!)—not because of its financial worth, which in spite of her success, might not amount to much, though who knows?—but because she is a singular voice in our culture, a woman who does indeed live in a garbage dump with her illiterate husband, fires AK-47 rifles, and organizes protests for the disaffected poor. It’s as if one of Faulkner’s Snopes leapt off the pages of literature and spoke, eloquently, for herself and her people. The letter was a piece of evidence from her extraordinary life. Someone could study it, use it to trace her path out of obscurity or shed light on her body of work. It could illuminate rural poverty in the late twentieth century. At the least, it would be another glimpse behind the library shelf of the effort and serendipity and wild stories involved in the process of amplifying the literary voice.

  I came across the science-fiction writer Joseph V. Hamburger’s papers in a one-day workshop for archivists in “Managing Literary Manuscripts.” The archivists in attendance worked in the collections of research and university libraries, or for corporations; one worked for a prominent architect, processing his papers as he generated them. Another offered this tongue-in-cheek job description: “I read other people’s mail.”

  Near the end of the workshop, the two instructors divided the class into teams and distributed files of raw literary material for us to identify, arrange, and describe. I was with the team that got some letters and draft manuscripts of the work of Tennessee Williams. This was exciting, even though we were working with color facsimiles and even though our job didn’t involve reading what was actually written on these pages (if you were doing archival work, you were supposed to skim them just enough to be able to write the finding aids, the breadcrumbs that could lead someone to it). I was impressed by how challenging it was to lay a path to an item for others to follow, to try to anticipate the researchers’ questions. The difficulties were structural—how were these letters to be organized in the context of the collection? Where should it fit so the most people could find it? Where did it intellectually and organically make sense? These letters had been stuck between the pages of a draft of The Night of the Iguana, so maybe it made sense to group them with the manuscript, instead of in a file with Williams’s miscellaneous correspondence.

  There were three letters, from three dates early in 1961. Here’s how the University of Delaware’s Special Collections described them: “Three TLSs [typed letters, signed] from Tennessee Williams to the actress Katharine Hepburn in which he attempts to persuade her to play the role of Hannah Jelkes. The three letters are similar in content, and it appears Williams never sent the first two letters but only the final one for which he retained the photocopy which is present here.”

  There was a feeling in our group that we were getting privileged glimpses into a famous writer’s backstage life, as evidenced by typos, coffee stains, and gossip. Of course these letters were worth saving. Tennessee Williams had been a searing writer who had animated generations of actors with words that grabbed his audience by the throat. He had imagined Katharine Hepburn as the prim, unmarried, impoverished Jelkes. Instead, Margaret Leighton got the role and won a Tony for it. A bit of theatrical history turned on these documents.

  Other teams in the workshop got a folder of Gregory Corso’s letters and poems, and a stack of Ishmael Reed’s papers to process. The last team got a file (a song, a short story, a news clipping of a letter to the editor, and several poems, including one scrawled on a manila folder) from the writer Joseph V. Hamburger. The Williams, Corso, and Reed papers had come from the holdings of the University of Delaware, where L. Rebecca Johnson Melvin, one of our instructors, worked as an archivist. Her copresenter came from Penn State, but the Joseph V. Hamburger papers weren’t from those archives, which boast early papers of Ernest Hemingway’s, a play of John Updike’s, and the John O’Hara collection. Susan Hamburger brought Joseph V. Hamburger’s papers from her and Joe’s house.

  Not many people have heard of Joe Hamburger, even science-fiction fans. That’s because Hamburger never actually published any of his sci-fi stories. He wasn’t unpublished as a writer—articles, essays, poems, even a couple of encyclopedia entries found their way into print—but like most of us who call ourselves writers, he mainly collected rejection slips. Or, rather, he moved on to the next idea, the next piece, the next file, and his wife collected the rejection slips (and everything else besides).

  I thought it was intriguing of Sue Hamburger to use a regular writer to demonstrate archival practices, but I was just as happy to be working on one of the celebrities’ papers. Somewhere along the line, though, in our subsequent correspondence, I came to value her approach. I realized that it wasn’t just convenience or pride on her part to bring along the literary archives of her husband, obscure as he might have been. It had been a deliberate strategy to show us that the tools of archiving were not only for Nobel and Pulitzer winners and MacArthur fellows. They were for anybody any of us thought worth saving.

  And who is worth saving? Ah, that’s the question. Certainly we are worth saving ourselves, whoever we are, if only for our family’s sake. If we are helping build or create something, save a town landmark, fight for freedom,
launch a field of study; if we survive a disaster or witness a miracle—if we do anything with our life besides watch television—we might want to document it somehow and save the evidence. Then again, forget that qualifier; someone who did nothing but watch TV might be able to tell us a great deal about the history of television in the twenty-first century. We are all living history, and it’s hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing’s certain, though: if we throw it away, it’s gone.

  Sue Hamburger gave me good advice when I wrote to her about saving my work and my friends’. We should use open-source software anytime we have a choice. She warned us against saving text files in Word, for instance, and urged us to use instead the generic (and free) rich text format (rtf). Proprietary programs like Word go out of date quickly, she pointed out, and there’s no guarantee a company will stay in business or feel an obligation to keep information readable into the future. However we organized our files, we should keep notes about the reasons behind our decisions. Oh—and if we were to be signing any books, we shouldn’t use gel pens; their ink deteriorates. We should invest in a good archival-quality pen.

  My e-mails were short and fractured, Sue Hamburger’s long, carefully composed, and jammed with news of her activities. She had a high-maintenance home: five cats, gardens, a pool. She was working on a book about literary archiving with her copresenter Melvin. She read voraciously, and after reading my book about obituaries, lamented that she didn’t have time to keep up with obits around the world. She might have tried, too, except her husband, the writer, was in a hospital in Hershey, Pennsylvania, two hours from home, recovering from multiple surgeries related to bladder cancer. “The poor guy is like an old car—fix one thing and something else goes wrong.” Twice a week, she left her job at the Penn State University Libraries and took a two-hour bus ride from State College to sit by his hospital bed. On weekends, she drove there, and on the way back, swung by the Salvation Army in Camp Hill to buy used clothing that she then sold to vintage stores, a little business she and Joe ran on the side. They had another business, as well—had she mentioned this?—as spies for a music licensing company, visiting restaurants, dance clubs, stadiums, and other public places to document the music that was broadcast, the first step in policing music copyrights. I pictured her, energetically gathering the world’s loose ends, old clothes, old papers, dispersed music, and putting them in their rightful place. Salvaging.