A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

by Nicholas Basbanes

  One librarian distressed to hear that Miss Swanson’s material was going to Austin was Howard B. Gotlieb at Boston University. Gotlieb is widely respected for having built a major twentieth-century archive with little more than charm, eloquent letters, and gentle persuasion. “I tried absolutely everything I knew,” Gotlieb recalled with a wry smile. “I sent her flowers, I wrote her beautiful letters, I visited her, I ate macrobiotic food until it was coming out of my ears. But in the end I couldn’t give her the kind of space she was demanding, and most of all I couldn’t give her any money.”

  In 1971, James A. Michener and his wife were considering where they wanted to deposit their collection of 375 paintings, including works by Thomas Hart Benton, Helen Frankenthaler, Marsden Hartley, Hans Hofmann, Larry Rivers, and Max Weber. “We always intended to give it to a twentieth-century teaching institution where it would be used,” the novelist recalled in an interview. “By a process of elimination, it had come down to Syracuse, Michigan, Nebraska, and Texas.” Getting a large room and having it named for him was not what he wanted, but keeping the paintings together as a collection was.

  “I spend my life trying to keep from having things named for me, but I do like to see good things done. So the work Harry Ransom had already accomplished was crucial, and the presentation he made was decisive. My wife was absolutely enchanted by the man.” Though Michener did not give his papers, only his art, Ransom committed himself to setting aside the ground floor and part of the second floor at the HRC for the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, then housed elsewhere on campus. (Archer M. Huntington, the son of Collis Huntington and later the stepson of Henry E. Huntington, gave money to the University of Texas in 1927 to establish an art gallery.) The Mari and James A. Michener Collection of Twentieth-Century American Art was installed in the building, a circumstance that caused some unusually graceless remarks by Decherd Turner during his tenure as director of the research center from 1981 to 1988.

  “My feeling has always been that if the paintings are an imposition on the Harry Ransom Center, they shouldn’t be there,” Michener told me. “Now, the situation is such that anytime I go in there I feel apologetic. It’s a lovely place, and I agree it ought to be for books, not paintings. So there has been a basic conflict, a contradiction, and I recognize that, and I’ve advised them to get the collection out of there. I never made a point of keeping the paintings where they are.” The problem is that if the paintings are removed from the HRC, they have to go to someplace else, and no other building on the Austin campus is equipped to display and care for them properly. As 1994 drew to a close, a move to other quarters was being discussed, though no definite plans had been made. “Our hope is alive to get a new building built on campus as quickly as possible, and to move all our staff and all our paintings there,” Patricia D. Hendricks, curator of the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, said.

  In his conversation with me, Michener made clear that he was never angered by the suggestion that his paintings might be taking up so much space, but by the crude manner in which it had been expressed. Bruised feelings and misunderstandings were a continuing problem during the eight-year tenure of Decherd Turner, an ordained Methodist minister whose retirement in 1988 was met with glee and relief by many people, including a number of unnamed “insiders” who were reported by the freelance writer Clifford Endres in a May 1988 article in Texas Monthly to have “sniped” that the “eccentric” director’s departure was coming “none too soon.”

  Though Turner brought a number of important collections to Texas, he had a “feisty” and “confrontational” disposition that alienated colleagues and created enemies. In an effort to fill what he called “incredible gaps” in the Texas collection, he significantly underrated the importance of twentieth-century archival material and pursued instead such items as fine French bindings and livres d’artiste, books illustrated by prominent artists such as Matisse, Picasso, Chagall, and Rouault. For $2.6 million, he bought former Harvard professor Robert Lee Wolff’s collection of 17,000 Victorian best-sellers, and in 1986 he arranged the acquisition of the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Library of English literature with a $15 million loan from H. Ross Perot.

  Turner’s most grievous offense, however, was that he criticized Harry Ransom, and he did it openly, flippantly sometimes, in a newsletter called HRC Notes. One issue, written in 1981 on Bloomsday—June 16, the day in which all the action of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses takes place— is a parody of Joyce’s style: “the trade took his name Ransom seriously for the most insignificant manuscript scrap is priced on a ransom level how grotesque it is that anything coming before the finished product commands so much more money than the published book I just cannot believe that a pre-publication uncased review copy is worth $500 more than a copy of the first published.…” and so on, without sentence breaks or punctuation, for three full, single-space, typewritten pages. In another newsletter, he warned against returning to the days of the “Ransom syndrome.”

  Six months before his retirement, Endres quoted Turner in the Texas Monthly article as saying he could “hardly wait” to leave. “In the forty-two years that I’ve been a director of libraries—at Vanderbilt, SMU, and here—for forty-one years and six months, I have lived in the presence of my immediate, disapproving predecessors. Now, I’ll go down the street waving my hands and shouting, ‘Free at last.’”

  Turner was succeeded by Dr. Thomas F. Staley, the former provost at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, and a noted James Joyce scholar and collector. One of his immediate aims was to restore morale and steady the course, and by all accounts he has succeeded. “Finally, we have our first true leader in over a decade,” one senior staff member said in 1992. “We have a vision once again. He is creative, innovative, and willing to work with people. He does not have a hostile relationship with anyone.”

  Any reservations Staley might have about keeping the Michener Collection in the HRC have not been shared with anyone outside the building. For his part, Michener was sanguine about the situation in his conversation with me. “My experience in quite a few of these things has always been that promises are made but never kept. All arrangements are made with the institution as it is then, and it’s not going to continue that way for very long. You deal with the people who are in control at a particular time, and they do not have the power to commit other people in the future. The minute Harry Ransom died, he was dead. It’s as simple as that.”

  Carlton Lake was appointed executive curator of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in 1980, a position that brought with it considerable stature in the academic world. Originally, though, when he moved to Austin from Massachusetts in 1969, he was working on a pro bono basis. “Actually, I got paid a dollar a year back then,” Lake said one February morning in his office, a cozy cubicle dominated by a bronze head of Picasso.

  Though he pursued a number of promising careers—he had written for several magazines, including the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly and from 1950 to 1965 was the Paris art critic for the Christian Science Monitor—Lake’s primary interest in life was always his collecting. “You enter that world, and once you’re in it, you can’t get out,” he said. “The truth is that you don’t want to get out. I am convinced that it gets into your bloodstream.”

  Born into a family of New England merchants, Lake graduated from Boston University in 1936 with the idea of teaching Romance languages and literature at some small but respectable college. With the help of an “indulgent grandmother,” Lake began collecting nineteenth-century French writers, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé among them. His first major purchase came in 1934 when he was nineteen and browsing through the catalogue of a forthcoming auction in New York of the library of Harry B. Smith, the American composer of popular musical comedies. Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (specifically a presentation copy from the poet to his friend Nadar) caught his eye. “I had to have that book,” he said. It also included several letters wr
itten by Baudelaire, and the original proof sheet of one of the poems in the book, “Les Litanies de Satan,” with corrections in the author’s hand. He paid $210 to get it; in 1957, when he lent the item to the Bibliothèque Nationale for an exhibition, a Paris dealer offered him $15,000, which he summarily declined. “My first great book,” he recalled with pleasure. “It is the one book I always carried with me wherever I went. I could never bear to leave it behind.”

  Lake wrote a memoir of his collecting titled Confessions of a Literary Archaeologist in which he frequently discussed the ecstatic moment of discovery. He recalled the time he examined 4,200 folio pages of manuscript by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, comprising two complete versions of his novel Guignol’s Band, and three of its sequel, Le Pont de Londres, in the shop of a Paris bookseller.

  I sat down and began to look through the piles of paper. How long that process went on, I don’t know. One thing I do know is that by the time you have spent thirty-five or forty years digging out rare books and manuscripts in half the civilized countries of the world, when you pick up a book or a manuscript and you turn the pages and you palpate them and you fondle them, at some point there are vibrations that begin to pass out of the book or the manuscript into your fingers and your hands and up your arms and into your brain, and then, suddenly and very clearly, you get the message: right or not right, good or not good, and if good—how good.

  After more than thirty years of collecting, Lake finally found himself in a quandary. “I gradually came to the idea that because so much of my material was unique—the volume of correspondence and manuscripts was just tremendous—that it should be kept together somewhere as a resource for scholars,” he wrote. At the same time, “the sheer quantity of the whole thing was becoming impossible to deal with. Not only was my apartment in Paris full, I had a large safe at the Place Vendôme where I kept some of the more precious pieces. And it was no different back in Massachusetts. My house in Chestnut Hill had every room overflowing, and I had a walk-in vault in Boston. A few things, like the Baudelaire, I kept with me and wouldn’t let out of my sight. It was pretty obvious that something had to be done.”

  Stories about the Humanities Research Center continued to be the talk of book circles, and even though Lake was a Massachusetts native, Boston University graduate, and self-confessed “Eastern snob,” he looked toward Austin as a possible home for his collection of a quarter million pieces. “Texas was very strong in modern British and American material, but their French holdings for the same period were nothing to shout about,” he said. “It seemed like a natural place for my collection to go.” A friend then teaching at Texas put Lake in touch with Harry Ransom, and an agreement was quickly reached in 1969. Money was involved, but Lake said he agreed to sell the collection for a fraction of its market value because he was happy to see it get a permanent home.

  Once Lake agreed to the deal, Ransom wrote with another offer. “I hope you will not consider my further suggestion as either an impertinence or an imposition. I should like to nominate you as lifetime Curator of these collections. The University would benefit by your advice; and both Dr. Roberts and I would be heartened by your personal association with the new Center. More important, perhaps, is the fact that visibility of a wise and agile collector is educative among both young students and mature scholars who use the Center.”

  From 1969 to 1975 Lake worked as a “dollar-a-year” consultant, and in 1975 he assumed the position of “lifetime executive curator” at the HRC. “The job was not part of the agreement,” he said. “I had made no stipulations. I was trusting. I did not even demand that it be called the Carlton Lake Collection. I just wanted it to be kept together. At the same time, I must say in all candor that Harry Ransom was like nobody else. He could charm a bird right off the branch. He made people feel wonderful. If you want the truth, he made people feel greater than they really were.”

  Beyond securing the inestimable services of the person who knew the collection best, Ransom also ensured that there would be continued growth. “I have been accused of acting as if the collection is still mine,” Lake said, partly because he continued adding to it at his own expense long after turning it over to the University of Texas.

  How important is the Carlton Lake Collection? Florence de Lussy, conservateur en chef de manuscrits at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, had a straightforward answer to that question one chilly April day in 1990. “Remarkable,” she said in heavily accented English. “Monsieur Lake is what we call ‘un homme de goût’—a man of taste. In certain areas, for example Paul Valéry, the most important writer in twentieth-century France, you must go to Texas if you wish to study the man thoroughly. There are sheafs of manuscript there dealing with Valéry’s last love that are unknown in France. I personally did not know this text existed. Consequently, the Carlton Lake Collection is essential and very well known here in France. I wish it were here and not there.”

  Madame de Lussy paused for a moment, seeking a precise word. “He is not our enemy,” she said. “But he is our rival. He looks for the same things we do, and there are times when he fights us at the auctions. Together, let me say, we are friends. Of course we are interested here in all of French history—letters, literature, and science. He is a specialist in the twentieth century. He is very clever; he has exceptional instinct.”

  Lake was unqualified in his admiration for Harry Ransom in his conversation with me. “I would never say anything negative about him, nothing, because what he did was create the HRC, and if that is how he goes down in history, that is quite an achievement. It really doesn’t matter what people went through to bring things here, or what it all cost, even though the cost was considerable, because I truly believe that what we have here is the Alexandria of the twentieth century.”

  Just how much Texas spent for books and manuscripts during the first fifteen years is uncertain. Some observers say as much as $50 million, others suggest even more. Nobody can say for sure because the money came not only from the state but also from private benefactors whom Ransom wooed, and the purchasing procedures he used were decidedly unorthodox. “I would be very surprised, to tell you the truth, if it’s as much as twenty million,” Warren Roberts said when pressed for a figure. “But whatever it is, my theory has always been that money is only money, and you can’t believe the way people spend money for other things. You know how much money they spend over there for scientific research without even thinking about it? They’ll spend five million for a machine that is obsolete before they even get it operating. What has gone into the humanities is practically nothing by comparison— nothing. And everything we bought will increase in value.”

  Decherd Turner’s successor as director, Thomas Staley, said he believes that a myth has grown around Harry Ransom. “The reason it’s a myth is because you can get thirty people to talk about Ransom, and what they thought was Ransom’s real mission and purpose, and it’s amazing how various the stories can be.” Staley explained how difficult it is to “demythologize” Harry Ransom in a speech at Cambridge University in 1989:

  Like many brilliant leaders of institutions, Ransom was given to both candor and secrecy, depending upon how he judged the situation. Ransom created an aura of optimism that was compelling, even though this feeling could lead to expectations beyond those that he could deliver. Many book dealers felt the same way, I am sure, especially when they waited for final commitments, and waited, too, for payment. Like many collectors, his eyes were larger than his purse. Given the length of his purse you can imagine the size of his eyes. Furthermore, even if other institutional buyers had as large a purse, they would not have had the same freedom to open it.

  Colin Franklin, considering the changes at Texas several thousand miles away at his book barn in England, called Staley “the right person to be at the HRC” during a time of stabilization. “He’s a decent person, he’s probably diplomatic, and he’s not going to continue the procedures of the past. He’s interested in modern writers, and women
writers, and in filling the essential deficiencies. He’s the man they need for now, I think, because they’ve had their adventures. What they need is to settle down a bit and live with it.”

  10

  Obsessed Amateurs

  On June 1, 1983, the New York Times reported the discovery of an obscure but significant narrative, “Father Abraham,” written around 1925 by William Faulkner, a fragment of fiction that is believed to have shaped themes and characters later embodied in the Snopes family trilogy. Described as “the brilliant beginning” of an unfinished novel, the twenty-four pages of handwritten manuscript had been overlooked by literary scholars for years, largely because they were not in any of the primary Faulkner repositories maintained at several American universities, nor were they owned by any of the leading private collectors who specialize in the life and works of the great Mississippi writer.

  Instead, “Father Abraham” turned up in the Arents Collection at the New York Public Library. The reason for this is a reference to tobacco: early in the manuscript, Faulkner describes Uncle Flem as a man who “chews tobacco constantly and steadily and slowly, and no one ever saw his eyelids closed.” The only known etching ever made by Vincent Van Gogh is in the Arents Collection for the same reason: because the subject, Dr. Gachet, is pictured smoking a pipe. Oscar Wilde’s manuscript for The Importance of Being Earnest was acquired because a key turn in the plot revolves around a cigarette case. Another item in the collection, a late sixteenth-century poem in manuscript by Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, includes the line, “It was not tobacco stupefied my braine.”

  George Arents Jr. (1885–1960) was a prominent New Yorker whose personal fortune derived from his family’s substantial interest in the American Tobacco Company. In 1900, Arents obtained a patent for a machine that manufactured cigars, an invention that led to the formation of the American Machine and Foundry Company, now called AMF, and a subsidiary known as International Cigar Machinery Company. As a collector, Arents sought to document every conceivable aspect of his lucrative livelihood, including the history, folklore, and literature of the tobacco plant. He gathered material that detailed cultivation of the crop and the marketing of its products, and he included every published argument he could find that favored or opposed its use. In addition to books, manuscripts, periodicals, pamphlets, drawings, prints, and sketches, Arents also acquired more than 125,000 cigarette cards; he turned over all this material to the New York Public Library in 1943, along with a generous endowment that provided for special rooms, a permanent staff, preparation of bibliographies, and continued additions to the holdings. In fact, the “Father Abraham” manuscript was purchased by the fund from the New York bookseller Philip C. Duschenes in 1953, ten years after Arents deposited the collection.