Saving writers' manuscripts for the nation

 

MANUSCRIPTS MATTER
 
I came to writing comparatively late – in my mid-teens – but once I’d started, there was no holding me. Most Saturdays at school, if I could get off games, I took the bus from the front gate into Oxford, and bought whatever poetry took my fancy, and which I could afford, from Blackwells in the Broad. The day I travelled back with the Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Cecil Day Lewis (the flyleaf says it was November 25, 1967) was a highlight. Not just because I already loved Owen’s poems, but because at the back of that book there were illustrations of the first and second drafts of his great sonnet “Anthem for Doomed Youth” – the first with Siegfried Sassoon’s amendments, added when the two soldier-poets were writing shoulder to shoulder in Craiglockhart Hospital. I learned more about writing by looking at those two pages than in whole terms of study and instruction. To realize at a glance that first thoughts were not inevitably best thoughts; to see in the most practical way imaginable how what we used to call inspiration needed to be combined with ingenuity and sheer hard work; to understand how valuable the interventions of a second and sympathetic mind might be: all these things made my discovery of those pages feel like a revelation. And when I later saw the pages themselves, in the British Library, the revelation deepened and the pages became almost sacred. I still glimpse them in my mind’s eye now, almost forty years later, whenever I write a poem. Think harder, they say to me. Stretch your imagination. Write better.

During the last part of my school life, and in the comparatively careless rapture of my first year as an undergraduate, I fed my manuscript addiction whenever I could – by staring at the first draft of Shelley’s “Ode: to the West Wind”, for instance, under its glass in the Bodleian; by trawling through the collection of my friend Geoffrey Keynes (who, though best known as a bibliophile, also possessed some remarkable manuscripts). My feelings about the value and fascination of manuscripts received another big lift four years after I’d bought my copy of Owen’s poems, when Valerie Eliot published her edition of the drafts of The Waste Land. Here again – but over many more pages, and in exceptional detail – were proofs of the same truth I’d seen in the draft of the “Anthem”. The extraordinarily bold eruption of Eliot’s genius, checked and shaped by Pound’s suggestions; the evidence that Pound always got it right (and not just because he’d helped to produce the poem I already knew). I felt I had been lowered into the enormous, gleaming engine room of the poem, and for the first time could begin to understand how it worked.

Five years later, and after an exceptionally happy time writing my thesis on the poetry of Edward Thomas (whose manuscripts floated in my hands like holy writ, even though they were writ without many corrections, because he produced his poems so quickly), I went to teach English at the University of Hull – drawn more by the possibility that I might meet Philip Larkin than anything else. We got to know each other pretty well, and although we spent a good deal of time doing what friends do when they are employed by the same organization – moaning about colleagues – we also managed to raise the tone from time to time; especially when we talked about poems, and when we talked about manuscripts, about which Larkin had feelings that were just as strong as my own – but better formed.

It was, in fact, during this time (the late 1970s) that Larkin produced his essay “A Neglected Responsibility”: still one of the best things that has ever been written about manuscripts. It provides a condensed history of British collecting – and the lack of it – and although this is elegantly done, it often makes for melancholy reading. Why? Because so much has changed so little. Larkin discusses the lack of information about “the going price”, the lack of centralized information about who holds what, the leakage of British manuscripts to American libraries, the demoralized state of British libraries. Then, brightening, he talks about the initiatives led by himself and Eric Walter White of the Arts Council, which were really the first significant – and in many respects successful – attempt to create a properly systematic approach to the whole business of acquiring modern papers.

But the essay is also a call to arms. “We should do all we can to collect the papers of living writers”, Larkin says, “because increasingly we are at a great disadvantage when it comes to acquiring the archives of the recently dead.” Furthermore, and just as significantly, it is a hymn to the importance of archives in themselves. “I think above all that a country’s writers are one of its most precious assets, and that if British librarians resign the collection and care of their manuscripts to the librarians of other countries they are letting one of their most rewarding responsibilities slide irretrievably away.” And again, even more plangently:

“All literary manuscripts have two kinds of value: what might be called the magical value and the meaningful value. The magical value is the older and more universal: this is the paper [the writer] wrote on, these are the words as he wrote them, emerging for the first time in this particular magical combination. We may feel inclined to be patronising about this Shelley-plain, Thomas-coloured factor, but it is a potent element in all collecting, and I doubt if any librarian can be a successful manuscript collector unless he responds to it to some extent. The meaningful value is of much more recent origin, and is the degree to which a manuscript helps to enlarge our knowledge and understanding of a writer’s life and work. A manuscript can show the cancellations, the substitutions, the shifting towards the ultimate form and the final meaning. A notebook, simply by being a fixed sequence of pages, can supply evidence of chronology. Unpublished work, unfinished work, even notes towards unwritten work all contribute to our knowledge of a writer’s intentions; his letters and diaries add to what we know of his life and the circumstances in which he wrote.”

This crystallizes the thoughts I fumbled towards when I was young and poring over my copies of Owen and Eliot. I love Larkin’s distinction between the magical and the meaningful, but I especially like the fact that these things combine. Yes, there is a primitive, visceral thrill in thinking “My god, Keats’s hand rested on this piece of paper”. But manuscripts matter equally because as we share in the creation of the text at a profound level, and feel we understand it in a way that is frankly very difficult to put in words, we are actually putting some things into words. We are articulating thoughts about planning and plotting and scheming and timing; we are thinking about ingenuities of one kind or another. To put this another way: good writing is usually the result of two parts of the human mind working together: a part which is manipulative and artful, and a part which is given, fundamental and murky as the primeval swamp. We can appreciate that double-mindedness when we read a printed page – of course we can – but we never feel it so vividly as we do when we read a manuscript. Manuscripts take us right to the heart of the matter, into the engine room.

This is why one of the arguments used against the importance of keeping manuscripts in their native place doesn’t work. I mean the argument that photocopies and other modern methods of transmitting material have made it unnecessary to be unduly concerned about where manuscripts reside; their availability is what matters. The fact is, photocopies etc are very valuable, but they can never be the place where magic and meaningfulness most forcefully combine. That only happens in the manuscript itself. And if we add the awareness that access to manuscripts overseas is often made difficult by funding and other issues (such as the permissions problems surrounding some digitized material), we must accept that there are powerful practical reasons, as well as all those others, for thinking that not only do manuscripts matter, but where they are kept matters as well.

What I’m recommending here might seem like a solitary pleasure – the blissful, appreciative trance of someone whose whole identity depends to a great extent on writing, as mine does. But of course these articulate responses to a manuscript are only solitary in the sense that they happen to us as individuals. That’s to say, the importance of manuscripts does not depend exclusively on their power to move and inspire one particular writer or another, but on their value to whole communities – to a whole nation, I would say. Writers need them because they are exemplary. Scholars need them because they are the essential element of their research. Students need them because they are instructive as well as delightful. Creative Writing students need them for all the reasons I have given in my own case. Nations need them because they are an essential storehouse of past achievements, precisely as valuable in their way as the other elements we consider essential to our notions of heritage.

When I was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999 I decided that the post needed updating in a respectful way, and I found myself dividing it into two parts in my mind’s eye: into a writing part and a doing part. Under this heading of “doing”, I decided – along with the school visits, the nagging of government about education policy, the creation of the web-based Poetry Archive, which was launched last November – to pick up the manuscript baton where Larkin and others had left it, and see what could be done about a situation that was, by general consent, regrettable. I gave a few interviews lamenting the tendency of British papers to end up overseas, I wrote to the Treasury and asked whether they were interested in creating tax initiatives which might make home sales more attractive (they weren’t), and I spoke to friends and colleagues whom I knew to be interested in the cause. Then, in the spring of last year, I wrote a piece about the whole business which was published in the journal of the Royal Society of Literature and also by the Guardian. This led very swiftly to my receiving a letter from the Chief Executive of the British Library, expressing her support, and soon after that the UK Literary Heritage Group was set up under the chairmanship of Chris Smith, and the auspices of the British Library.

Everyone concerned about manuscripts owes the Library a big debt of thanks. While our concerns are to a great extent motivated by the leakage of British manuscripts to American libraries, I have no wish to criticize those libraries for their aims and methods. Au contraire: I commend American libraries for their purchases, the way they celebrate their holdings and nurture their relationships with the writers involved. We should learn from them, and we should be grateful for their generosity towards interested scholars. More than that, we would do well to consider the possibility that the American enthusiasm for British papers might have kindled our own interest in them to a degree that might not otherwise have occurred. They have woken us up.

Or rather, they have made us more fully awake than we were. As Larkin reminded us in his essay, more than twenty-five years ago, British libraries have run an under-funded but effective buying policy for the last two or three generations, to which the British Library itself bears witness – they are quite rightly proud to have laid their hands on papers by Laurie Lee, James Stern, Kathleen Raine, Peter Nichols, Ian Hamilton, Anthony Powell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Laurence Olivier, Dirk Bogarde and Harold Pinter, among others. Furthermore, other interested parties have done what they could under existing arrangements – the Friends of the National Libraries, for instance, the National Art Collections Fund, and the National Heritage Memorial Fund. In addition, we have seen important collecting programmes developed by the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester, by the National Library of Scotland, by the Universities of Edinburgh, Sheffield, York and Hull to name but a few, and by the Seven Stories centre for children’s literature in Newcastle. We have seen vital work initiated by the Group for Literary Archives and Manuscripts.

I could add more detail to this picture of collecting by British institutions, and no doubt others could add even more, because it would be wrong to give the impression that nothing whatsoever has been happening on behalf of British manuscripts in the recent past. Something has been happening – but as Larkin also said, it’s not systematic enough, and it’s often done with backs pressed firmly against the wall. The fact is, the list of British writers who have sold their papers to American libraries in the recent past is a long and depressing one. Here are some of the names, in no particular order: Tom Stoppard, David Hare, John Osborne, Ted Hughes, Malcolm Bradbury, Alan Sillitoe, Anthony Burgess, Angus Wilson, John Fowles, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Julian Barnes.

So what can we do to change and improve things? In a nutshell, this: we must create a situation in which British writers feel their manuscripts are as valued and welcome in their native institutions as they are abroad, and we must put those institutions in a position where they are able to demonstrate that value and prove that welcome. At the moment, British institutions and their American counterparts are playing the same game, but on a very unlevel field. In spite of the best efforts of many UK institutions, it is generally perceived to be the case, and often actually is the case, that it is more attractive for British writers to sell their papers overseas than at home.

I have already touched on some of the possible remedies. We need to make a much more dynamic case for the intrinsic importance of manuscripts, and emphasize the ways in which they nourish not only the obvious interested parties (writers and students and scholars), but the wider community as well. We need to spread the word about what British libraries have already achieved. We need to re-moralize librarians who have understandably become demoralized, and encourage them to develop even more coherent strategies for collecting modern papers and for cultivating their relationships with writers at the regional level as well as in the big centres. We need to accelerate the procedures of funding bodies. We need to continue to develop a “culture of giving” (which is something else America has to teach us). We need to think again about the Heritage Lottery Fund’s recent decision to lower the age at which manuscripts become eligible for purchase grants from twenty years to ten (this was a step in the right direction, but it still allows for the break-up of archives, which is a shame in itself, and a disincentive to writers thinking of selling their papers). We need a more coherent and better-funded national strategy for collecting.

There it is: we need more money, more core funding. To take the case of the British Library: of the £15 million spent on new acquisitions each year, only 10 per cent is available for heritage items from all periods and in all formats. That is not enough, for items which – although still on the cheap side when compared with paintings – are slowly but surely becoming more expensive. In addition, and as the Literary Heritage Group knows very well (because we talk about it every time we meet), we need the Government to think about three things, as a way of encouraging British writers to sell at home and not overseas. They are: the possibility of making all manuscripts (and not just bound ones) VAT exempt; the benefits of the “douceur” arrangement with regard to inheritance tax and capital gains tax being extended to income tax for living authors who agree to sell their papers to designated British institutions through private treaty; and the extension of Acceptance in Lieu of tax to living authors. (At present, no approaches under AiL can be made until after the death of the author and therefore writers can only anticipate, without guarantee, that AiL will be applied after their death, thereby hampering financial planning for their estate.)

I’ll end as I began, on a personal note. When the British Library bought the first instalment of my own papers, which I’d like to emphasize was just before I was appointed Laureate, I felt a mixture of things which I’m sure are shared by all writers who have found themselves in a similarly fortunate position, and would gladly be shared by others if circumstances permitted. I was pleased to have more room in my attic. I was very pleased to have some money in the bank (money is always important, whether we like saying so or not).

More than anything, though, I was proud to have my work gathered in a place which connected it at the most fundamental level with the culture and country in which I’d produced it. If manuscripts are the engine rooms of writing, then archives are the engine rooms of history – that is where their magic and their meaning are most potent.
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Andrew Motion will give the opening address at “Manuscripts Matter: Collecting modern literary archives”, a conference organized by the British Library and the University of London’s Institute of English Studies, at the British Library on October 19–20. For further information call 44 (0)20 7412 7222 or fax 44 (0)20 7412 7168.