Lost, Stolen or Shredded

by Rick Gekoski

  On October 14, 2012, the case was (presumably) decided in an overcrowded Tel Aviv court, when it was ruled that the papers were – wait for it! – the rightful property of the state of Israel. Presumably this came as a surprise to no one except Esther Hoffe’s daughters, who have announced they will appeal against the judgement.

  But according to Judge Talia Kopelman-Pardo, the case was clear enough: Brod’s will of 1948 did not gift tens of thousands of pages to Esther Hoffe, but instead stipulated that they should ‘go to the library of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem or the Tel Aviv Municipal Library …’ (That this sentence concluded with the phrase ‘or any other public institution in Israel or abroad,’ would certainly have interested the archivists in Marbach or Oxford, both holders of more Kafka material than there is in Israel). But the lure of these foreign possibilities cut no ice with the judge. The papers were in Israel, and there they would stay. Unless, of course, another flurry of obscure legal activity on behalf of the sisters managed to free them.

  To its credit, the Hebrew University intends to publish all the material online, once the case is finally decided and the necessary processes can be completed. That, according to Oxford’s Professor Robertson, is an unambiguously good thing, though he doubts how much important primary material may be revealed. But the redoubtable English novelist Will Self was sniffy about the whole business: ‘Brod himself was intent on canonising Kafka as a Zionist saint (! – sceptical exclamation mark supplied) and the Israeli state holding the papers ensures that this falsification (! – ditto) will continue apace …’

  I haven’t re-read Kafka for forty years. I had a second read-through when first teaching English at the University of Warwick in the 1970s, but since then have not been tempted to return. The reason for this, I suspect, is that he is a young person’s writer, not in the sense that only the young can appreciate him, but because on first exposure he is so comprehensively and unexpectedly formative that you may never feel the need to read him again. He becomes part of you, and your mind and spirit and view of the human condition are inhabited by his stories, his views, and especially by his characters: by poor persecuted Josef K., by Gregor Samsa trapped in his rotting shell, by the hunger artist, yearning to find something, anything, that is actually good to eat, by poor K., who can’t get into that castle to visit the Authorities. Kafkaesque: a world incomprehensible, alienating and threatening, absurd. We visit it with incomprehension and at our peril, lost at all points, disorientated, inoculated against faith, searchers for meaning in a book – and universe – that either has none, or in which it lurks inaccessibly. Once you have read Kafka, you know this.

  So Kafka is like Keats? Keats died at the age of twenty-five, and as far as we know there is nothing left to be discovered. We had presumed that Kafka, dead at the age of forty, was in the same category. But Kafka, being Kafka, seems constantly likely to spring a surprise, to astound and to mystify. And however fascinating the new material – how can it not be? – there is a sense of loss attached to it, as well as an enormous excitement at something found. For we will have, in the next years, as the new material makes its way into the public domain, to revise our sense of Kafka, to reassess and reinvigorate him, to think again, and further.

  I like thinking again, that’s fine with me. But I also have my inner pantheon of writers and artists who are more or less set into place, and it unsettles me when something potentially cataclysmic happens to make me have to reassess them. This cataclysm can sometimes involve new biographical information. Who can now look at Eric Gill with the same affection and respect, after reading Fiona MacCarthy? Or Philip Larkin, with all that ugly talk of ‘Reds’ and ‘niggers’? Or Ezra Pound, after encountering his anti-Semitic tirades and defence of Fascism? Because once such material enters the mind, it cannot be swept aside, marginalised or compartmentalised: we do not read an author qua author, denuded of personality and history: we read a fully fledged person, and some of these imperfect beings are more sympathetic than others.

  But we are used to this, this uncertain mapping of the artist onto his work, and we are fully aware that great works of art can issue from decidedly uncongenial personalities. What seems to me more dangerous is the discovery, not of unsettling sexual or political information about an artist, but of previously unknown works which undermine our received image of him or her.

  New Kafka stories? It makes me nervous. I can hardly wait to read them, unlike Will Self’s next novel.

  9

  The Archive of the Penetralium of Mystery

  It is the most famous opening line, perhaps, of any modern poem, as well as the most frequently misquoted: ‘April is the cruellest month’, the words with which T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land begins. In fact, the complete opening line actually reads ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding’, but the point I wish to make here is that – correctly or incorrectly quoted – the phrase is immediately recognisable, set in our memories as it is in literary history, immutable.

  So it comes as something of a shock when we learn that Eliot never intended this as his opening line, and only settled on it after the acute editorial intervention of Ezra Pound, who recommended that Eliot abandon, entirely, the original opening section of the poem, an account of some rowdy Irishmen after a night on the town in Boston, full of drunken song and allusions to popular culture, which began: ‘First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place.’ Hardly the opening of The Waste Land, is it? But then again, it wasn’t: at that point in the composition of the manuscript – some time in 1921 – the provisional title was He Do the Police in Different Voices.

  Ezra Pound was so active and trenchant in editing the original typescript – largely in pruning and rearranging – that the final poem is occasionally referred to as a ‘collaboration’ between the two poets, though neither of them would have sanctioned the term. Eliot admitted that he ‘placed before [Pound] in Paris the manuscript of a scrawling, chaotic poem’, and certainly Pound did not hesitate to claim his role in its final incarnation:

  If you must needs enquire

  Know diligent Reader

  That on each Occasion

  Ezra performed the caesarean Operation.

  But if Pound was the midwife–surgeon, what was born was pure Eliot: it was Ezra’s role simply to help him to deliver the best that was in him.

  This fascinating information has been available since 1971, when Eliot’s widow, Valerie, published an annotated scholarly edition of the original typescript of the poem, entitled The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, which reproduced the emendations and comments not merely of Pound but also of Eliot’s first wife, Vivien. Study of this text teaches one not merely about The Waste Land and about Eliot and Pound, but also about how great poetry generally comes to be and how it works. It reminds us that a poem can undergo repeated processes of composition, consideration and revision, until the final form of the work has been decided upon, and published.

  We know all of this because the corrected and annotated typescript of The Waste Land can be found in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, which acquired it in 1968. It had originally been purchased directly from Eliot, following its publication in 1922, by the great patron of modernism the New York lawyer and collector John Quinn, and was widely assumed to have been lost, since it did not appear in the five-volume sale of Quinn’s books and manuscripts held at the Anderson Gallery in 1923–4 (at which a holograph manuscript of James Joyce’s Ulysses was sold for $5,000). But it had, in fact, been hibernating amongst Quinn’s papers since his death in 1924.

  The home of many a fine isolated verisimilitude.

  The Berg Collection is a fitting final home for the manuscript because it contains the papers and manuscripts of many great writers – Auden, Conrad, Dickens, Hardy, Woolf, Yeats – and is certainly one of the repositories of literary archives that students and scholars are most likely to visit when doing their research. A f
ew years after their acquisition of the Eliot manuscript, I went to Berg myself to study some Conrad material while doing my D.Phil. at Oxford, though the highlight of my time there was not the (terrific) Conrad material, but the hour or two that I spent with Eliot’s typescript. I did not know then that my final engagement with literary manuscripts and archives would be as a dealer rather than a scholar, but the magic of literary manuscripts, as both scholarly objects and cultural treasures, was finger-tinglingly obvious. Since that time literary archives have been central to my life, and have provided occasional sources of epiphany, but also a lot of drudgery, sorting out the occasional wheat from the manifold chaff. What one encounters in the vitrines of libraries is the result of the sifting of voluminous amounts of material.

  I once attended a conference on literary archives at the home of so many of them, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The conference stretched – interminably to me, for I am impatient and not very good at such things – over three days, and covered more topics about archives than most people would wish to know. What is the future of literary archives? How will they be affected by changes in digital technology? What new ways have been devised for information recording and retrieval?

  Yawn, alas. Alas, because I make part of my living dealing in literary archives, so I ought to have been interested in such questions, and intermittently I was. Did you know that a techno-wizard can retrieve every keystroke made on a keyboard and recorded on a hard disc? This means not only will you be found out having watched (and deleted) Swedish Nurses 37, but all of the emendations, alterations, changes and corrections of an author’s literary compositions can be located, recovered and eventually made available for hyper-diligent perusal.

  But though I spend a lot of my time with archives, this does not mean that I unalloyedly enjoy it, or them. Let’s start at the beginning. An archive consists of the mass of personal papers that fill a writer’s study, and attic, and (if you ask their partner) most of the rest of the house. The terminal moraine of an author’s life. What is to be found there? Well, in ideal state – with, as Gertrude Stein put it, ‘no pieces of paper thrown away’ – you might find: the author’s manuscripts and drafts of work both published and unpublished; diaries or journals; incoming correspondence and (if you are very lucky) copies of the author’s outgoing letters as well; historical material that documents the author’s life, photographs and family memorabilia; objects of significance: the writer’s desk, typewriter or computer, or (even) best Sunday suit. This material will have spread like an infestation through the house, and found nesting places in boxes and cartons, filing cabinets, bookshelves and drawers both open and secret (‘no one is looking into my drawers!’ William Golding once warned me, a little ambiguously).

  When first encountered, an archive reminds me of a monkfish. When it is eventually served up to you in bite-sized morsels, accompanied by rice and a salad, it is enticing enough, but when you see it in an unfilleted state it is ugly, cumbersome and presumably unpalatable. I have spent a lot of time in attics, studies and cellars, sifting through myriad unsorted boxes and cartons of a writer’s stuff – dust! damp! – and there is something lowering about the process, something dirty and invasive that makes you both literally and figuratively need a wash.

  When, eventually, you have carted it away and sold it to an institution which has catalogued it assiduously, and then put it on display or exhibition, an archive bursts into life. It is, after all, on the basis of such collections of assiduously preserved pieces of paper that we come to have accurate recordings of ourselves and others: biographies get written, journals are published, Collected Works and Letters are published, history is made.

  This will seem, on the face of it, an unambiguously good thing. We are wedded, in this archival world, to documenting the development of texts: how does a literary work begin, what stages does it go through before it reaches its final form? This produces fascinating results, like the one with which I began this chapter. Yet it occurs to me that this process, of tracing things through their stages, as if they were persons growing up, may have the concomitant danger of over-emphasising the importance of process at the expense of product.

  Of course, we are fascinated, whether as parents or gardeners, by watching things grow and develop. I recently had the privilege of reading carefully through Geoffrey Hill’s many working notebooks of poetry, and it was riveting to watch the poems develop, contract, wind back upon themselves, searching for their final form of words. That is exciting, but such knowledge is purchased at some cost, isn’t it? The special status of the final form of the text is mitigated. When we do not have any indication of the writing process – as we do not with, say, Shakespeare – the received texts have an inevitability about them, as if they could hardly be other than they are. And this apparent un-negotiability enforces their otherness and suggests some mystery in their composition, as if it were impossible that they could be other than they are. I am glad there is no Shakespeare archive. I’m delighted not to know what the other Commandments might have been, when God originally drafted them. Show me a few rejected drafts – Thou Shalt Only Eat Kosher Food – and the power and authority of the Ten will diminish. It could have been otherwise, could it? Why obey then? Maybe they will change again?

  Remember that great phrase of Keats, describing how Coleridge ‘would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge’? By way of contrast, Keats instances Shakespeare, who, possessed of ‘Negative Capability’, was content to allow ‘uncertainties, mysteries and doubts’ without attempting to resolve or rationalise them. I cite this because I believe we strip something numinous from our texts, reduce and denature them, when we focus too intently on how they came to be, and too little on the fact that they are. As if the purpose of literary research was to produce Variorum Editions, which exhaustively collate all known versions and variants of the text. I’m glad there is no archive of the Penetralium of Mystery.

  Our fascination with an author’s manuscripts, and the development of his texts, is a relatively recent phenomenon, which, though it begins in the nineteenth century, has accelerated into orthodoxy only in the last fifty years. To a pre-twentieth-century sensibility or, indeed, in many countries of the world to this day an author’s manuscripts are regarded as of little interest, because all that really matters is what the writer finally chooses to publish.

  The film Shakespeare in Love (1998) makes the point adroitly, as well it might, for the screenplay was co-authored by Tom Stoppard, himself a sophisticated book collector. In one scene Shakespeare is seen in the process of composition and, finishing a sheet, wonders aloud whether he should keep it. ‘Who’d care about that?’ he is asked, and he shrugs his shoulders, and tosses it in the bin.

  Well, a vast number of people would, that’s for sure. The Shakespeare archive! Whatever my misgivings, however much one wants to protect the inevitability of the received text, what fascination there would surely be in visiting the corrections, drafts and revisions of Hamlet.

  You’d learn enormously from such material, but the problem is that you can only learn it once, though you might then discuss it in academic journals ad nauseam. Having discovered ‘First we had a couple of feelers at Tom’s place’, you cannot rediscover it, only colonise and inhabit it, and in so doing ironically diminish it. It is one of those facts that startles at first, then fades into usage. So even with the best manuscript archives of the best writers there is only a limited range and potential scholarly value of such variant manuscript material. Thus when librarians and archivists consider the purchase of a writer’s archive, the recurring question is ‘how many books or PhDs can we get out of this?’ And with corrected manuscripts, even one as important as that of The Waste Land, the answer is: very few.

  This is even true when a manuscript is an unpublished, or perhaps incomplete work, something that never saw the light of day during a
n author’s lifetime. William Golding’s archive, for instance, contains three unpublished novels that precede Lord of The Flies (1955), which is on the record as his ‘first’ novel. Golding had tried to find a publisher for them, but after the great success of Lord of the Flies abandoned not the hope but the desire to find a publisher for Seahorse, Circle under the Sea and Short Measure, having come to regard them as apprentice work. It will be interesting to see if his literary executors allow their publication. If their author regarded them as inferior, might it not be interesting, nonetheless, to see him in the act of interrogating his early talent, seeking the voice and the kind of narrative that would most suit him?

  Before his death in 1977, Vladimir Nabokov left instructions that an incomplete manuscript on which he had been working (later entitled The Original of Laura) should be destroyed. The manuscript, written on a series of 138 index (3 × 5 in.) cards, the equivalent of perhaps thirty pages of typescript, remained in the possession of the author’s wife, Vera, and following her death was owned by their son Dmitri. In 2008, after three decades of consideration, he announced that the book was going to be published in the following year, and though there was much fanfare surrounding the publication, the reviews confirmed what Nabokov père had said in the first place: not good enough, or at least not ready for publication. Who knows what might have happened if it had been completed, revised and rewritten to Nabokov’s stringent standards? Unlike Golding’s unpublished early novels, which may help us to trace his early development, The Original of Laura allows us only an unhappy glance at a writer’s apparent decline.