I wrote a longer version of this post last night, only to lose it by inadvertently clicking the ‘back’ button on the wrong internet tab. It keeps happening to me a lot these days – I don’t seem to be able to bring anything to its close without some sort of technological mishap. I spent much of the lost post enthusing about a conference I went to earlier this week on Literary Archives, organised by the British Records Association and held at the British Library. It was exhaustingly long, arriving at the BL for 9am, and not leaving until 6pm, but well worth the effort of travelling to and from York for it. The day started with a slick presentation from Nat Taylor of the National Library of Scotland about their acquisition of the John Murray publishing archive, which contains papers relating to (and by) all the leading lights of late 18th and 19th century fiction, poetry and non-fiction. The list of authors covered seemed to go on forever: Austen, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, the Brontes, Gaskell, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Eliot, Ruskin, Carlyle, Darwin, Livingstone (the image above is from one of his manuscripts)... There are a staggering 10, 000 piece of correspondence by and about Byron alone, as well as 4 original manuscripts of his poems. Can you imagine working, day in day out, surrounded by such a glut of collective literary genius, with the single aim of making it accessible to the public? I found myself day-dreaming of a future surrounded by literary manuscripts. Inevitably I spent the rest of the day in a faint haze of jealousy: jealous of the next presenter, who worked at Seven Stories, the archive for children’s literature and illustration, in Newcastle; jealous of the young woman whose job it is to conduct long, intense interviews with British authors as part of the BL’s Author’s Lives project; jealous of the recently qualified archivist who just finished cataloguing the Harold Pinter archive; and jealous of the Assistant Keeper of Contemporary Literary Manuscripts at the John Rylands Library in Manchester.
Another highlight of the day was the debate about the ‘flight’ of literary heritage across national borders, mostly focused on the ‘loss’ of British author’s papers to American libraries and institutions. There was much lamenting and hair tearing on the one side, followed by a quiet, calm and entirely convincing rebuttal on the other. Zachary Leader, Kingsley Amis’ biographer, was the American doing the rebutting and made a fine argument for the global sharing of author’s archives. In addition to archival points of argument, he highlighted the incredible hypocrisy inherent in a nation that has bought, borrowed or stolen much of the content of its ‘national collections’ from other countries, now bemoaning the emigration of literary manuscripts across the Atlantic. He also objected to the rhetoric surrounding the issue in the mainstream media: he dislikes reading that archives have been ‘saved’ from deportation, as though they face immediate destruction at the hands of greedy, grasping foreigners. The opposite, he made clear, is true – American institutions and archivists are just as capable of caring for literary heritage as Britons are, and in many cases have more resources to throw at preservation, conservation and interpretation of the material. And now that archives can be routinely digitised and made available via the internet, does it really matter where they are physically held? Not everyone was convinced – you can imagine the knee-jerk patriotism from some audience members – but I think that, overall, we saw a wider picture than is usually presented.
The day would not have been complete without a reference to my now ubiquitous literary companion, Doris Lessing. She seems to be everywhere I go! Zachary Leader used her as an example of a writer with muddled nationality, whose literary archive has found its way to the United States (and the University of Texas, to be precise): Born to English parents in Iran, growing up and living her young adult life in Southern Rhodesia, and now settled in London, who is to say where her papers would be best cared for or understood? America seems as good a place as any to me. In the first instance I think: What a shame that her papers aren’t more accessible to us, meaning ‘us Brits’. But that is the worst and meanest kind of selfish thinking – share and share alike. And I did overhear a conversation about the deposit of 113 of her personal letters at The University of East Anglia, so all is not lost.
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There are several other things I’ve wanted to blog about this week but haven’t, because of Archives course work - I’m currently preparing an essay on the impact of Web 2.0 on records management. First, is a thoroughly infuriating book I’ve been reading for the assignment: The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the rest of today’s user-generated media are killing our culture and economy by Andrew Keen. The title says it all really. Keen’s polemic against the ‘million monkeys’ sharing their thoughts and opinions online is downright insulting; a vision of the majority of human beings as dangerous mediocrities who should sit quietly and be ministered to by expensive, highly train professionals instead. He is outraged at the thought of so many people having powers of free expression and, like all members of a threatened establishment, retreats into his ivory tower to lament the ignorance of the masses. The arguments he uses are weak and contradictory; his examples faintly ridiculous. He paints a picture of the traditional media as a bevy of objective saints, dedicating their lives to the pursuit of truth, justice and the balanced view. Meanwhile he laments that bloggers and ‘internet hacks’ lie, pedal trivialities and easily become the puppets of companies and governments. (He seems to have conveniently forgotten that he is a blogger himself.) Has he picked up a newspaper recently? Or watched the news on television? This week, while thousands of people in Zimbabwe have been dying of cholera, the BBC news has dedicated a fifth of its nightly evening bulletin to the closure of a ‘Lapland theme park’ in Dorset. Clearly Keen hasn’t noticed that sometimes the internet is the only place to go to find out what is happening in parts of the world frozen out by the mainstream. In one moment of blistering insult he references a cartoon of a dog sat at a computer, typing, and declaring that ‘Nobody knows you are a dog on the internet.’ The connotation is clear: the hounds have broken free and Andrew Keen is running scared.
Second, the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing, which I’ve been meaning to mention for weeks now. I haven’t seen too much coverage around the literary blogs, but the long-list was announced on 13th November and is just about as exciting a roll-call of titles as I have ever seen. Unlike the usual run of prizes, the Warwick has no bar on nationality (as long as the book has been translated into English, it is eligible), and crosses all disciplines so that poetry, fiction and non-fiction, both popular and academic, is admitted. The only criteria is that it fit in to a particular ‘theme’, changed each year (if you ask me, this is the only dodgy idea in a prize run on good principles). This time the list includes 12 pieces of non-fiction, 7 fiction books and a collection of poetry. It is going to be awarded biannually, with a long two-year eligibility period, and the initial ‘submissions’ will be made by University of Warwick staff, honorary graduates and professors rather than by the publishers. The prize money will be a whopping £50,000. I had heard of about half this year’s nominees, and read two of them (Netherland and Mad, Sad and Bad); the rest are all promising new finds. Could it be? A literary prize that sets trends rather than follows them? We can only hope.
Finally, just a quick word on The Grass is Singing. Wonderful. That is all, for now.
~~Victoria~~