No aspect of this country is more admired than its literary tradition. An institution an ocean away is devoted to preserving it. Its efforts should be recognised and applauded rather than regretted.
“I view with unconcern the drift of British manuscripts to America, where our language is spoken and our literature studied,” wrote Kingsley Amis in the 1960s. He was as good as his word, and a beneficiary, for he later sold a quantity of his own manuscripts, including an early draft of his great comic novel Lucky Jim, to the Harry Ransom Center for humanities in Austin, Texas.
Since then, the centre has become the most successful acquisitions library in the world. Ransom, an English professor, founded it in 1957, determined to build a Texan institution that would specialise in the manuscripts of modern writers.
The venture has succeeded mightily, not least in amassing a huge collection of modern English literary manuscripts. Cultural nationalists may express unease but there is no cause for it: the centre is a marvel of scholarship, discriminating collection and careful preservation of manuscripts.
Philip Larkin, the poet, argued a contrary view. He was concerned at the migration of contemporary British literary manuscripts across the Atlantic, and lambasted British libraries for their “neglected responsibility” to preserve these for the nation. Yet if the Ransom Center had not had the acuity to acquire works of such notables as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and many others, these might have been lost. It took good judgment and financial risk to perceive Amis’s importance, for example, early in his career.
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Wordsworth warned prophetically that “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers”. In fact, getting and spending can also be philanthropic. The demonstration of this will be evident to any literary researchers who journey to Texas.