A British visitor to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, feels much like a Greek tourist in the British Museum, staring at the Elgin Marbles and wondering, a little peevishly, what they are doing so far from home.
Here in a colossal white stone building lie the papers and manuscripts of most of the greatest British writers of the last century. Gathered up from sheds and garages in damp English towns, often under the noses of a horrified British literary establishment, they have been shipped to this white fortress that turns pink each evening in the desert sun.
In not quite six decades, thanks to its hard-charging directors and vast reserves of cash, the Harry Ransom Center has become the most successful acquisitions library in the world. Such has been its success in the rare book trade that dealers and despairing managers of British libraries refer to the flow of literary treasures to Austin by the initials GTT: Gone To Texas.
The most recent literary manuscripts to suffer that fate are those of Ian McEwan: the men from Harry Ransom made him an offer he could not refuse. His papers are being sorted when I arrive at the library and descend into a cavernous, softly lit cellar. Here in white cardboard boxes, on rows of moveable shelves, lie the papers of Keats, Byron and Shelley. Here lies George Bernard Shaw, DH Lawrence and Graham Greene, beside their still-living counterparts, Tom Stoppard, Penelope Lively and Julian Barnes.
A librarian shows me neat handwritten drafts of Sherlock Holmes stories and later in an upstairs room I see the yellowing sooty shirt that Arthur Conan Doyle was wearing the day his house caught fire and he dashed about in the smoke to salvage books and papers (his wife, a believer in spiritualism, saved the garment for posterity).
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I open Evelyn Waugh’s bronze inkwell, made in the shape of Queen Victoria; Her Majesty’s head retracts to reveal the pot. The marbled, silver-nibbed pens Waugh used are in the archive too, along with his library and manuscripts of all but two of his novels.
Why is it all here? What is it doing in this city of hippies, alt-rock and excellent pork rib barbecue? And the director of the Harry Ransom Center answers in the time-honoured manner of so many officials at the British Museum. “What’s most important is that materials end up where they can be properly appreciated and cared for and that is a very expensive undertaking,” says Stephen Enniss, sitting in his book-lined office on the third floor.
“What grieves me is when I visit the local historical society of some kind just down the road from the birthplace (of an author) and the manuscripts are sitting in a case near a window totally faded out because the light is streaming in and there are no staff to conserve that material.” In other words, we bought them and you weren’t taking very good care of them anyway.
Enniss also speaks of the grants and travel bursaries the centre pays visiting scholars; last year these came to Austin from 24 countries. “They are extremely generous and helpful in the way they let scholars see what’s in their archive,” says Andrew Motion, the former poet laureate, who has been one of the loudest opponents of sales to American libraries, “but I have a sort of primitive feeling about the appropriateness of things belonging where they are made. I think it adds to their interest.” He thinks it helpful, for instance, that Philip Larkin’s papers are kept in Hull. “We are not talking vast sums,” he says. “I think this is our stuff and why can’t we care enough?”
Enniss thinks that some of the disquiet over manuscripts that have Gone To Texas is because “people imagine Texas as a kind of empty space. In fact, there’s a very rich context for these collections here.” The last time he looked, the entire collection, which encompasses literature, photography, visual art and cinema, was insured for $9.7 billion. Nearly all of it is in this building. Yikes, I say, what if there’s a fire? “Yeah,” he says, musing. “What do you grab first? Joyce’s Ulysses, I guess, and run for the door.”
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They don’t only acquire British and Irish writers. They have the great American writers and big names from South America. They recently bought the papers of Gabriel García Márquez; then it was the Colombians who got upset. The collection “wasn’t in Colombia”, says Enniss, offering an apparently well-rehearsed argument. “It was in Mexico and had been for a long, long, time.”
The reason the British section of the archive is so large has much to do with the circumstances in which the library was founded in 1957. Harry Ransom was a professor of English who proposed that Texas needed its own bibliothèque nationale. Politicians and businessmen stumped up cash and the university, which owns oil-rich estates, allowed oil revenues to be channelled into manuscripts.
“Harry Ransom knew that the University of Texas was never going to establish a rare book collection that would rival that of Harvard, for example,” says Enniss. So he looked to living poets and novelists. Many of the prominent writers whose papers were becoming available then were British and they were naturally delighted to discover an American willing to offer mountains of green dollars for their piles of yellowing notebooks. In a postcard to his brother in 1965, Evelyn Waugh declared that most British authors now “hope to support their declining years by sales to Texas”.
There were occasional howls of protest. Philip Larkin wrote a bellicose essay, AS Byatt dramatised the flight of cultural assets to American universities in her 1990 novel Possession. It contains an unscrupulous grave-robbing library director named Mortimer Cropper, who roams the English countryside with a fat chequebook, shipping manuscripts back to his archive, “a white temple shining in the desert sun”. Cropper appears to be loosely based on Tom Staley, the maverick collector who ran the Harry Ransom Center from 1988 until 2011.
When I call Staley and ask if Byatt captured him, he says: “I think she’s a great writer, but I don’t think she got that right.” Then he adds: “I mean, I didn’t see it as a roman à clef.” Staley does have a good deal of Cropper’s craftiness. One of his early coups was to acquire some crucial James Joyce manuscripts from the Parisian widow of Joyce’s long-time friend. Fearful of French cultural patrimony laws, Staley had the papers loaded into a rented bread delivery van and driven out through Calais on Ascension Day, guessing correctly that there would be fewer customs officials on duty.
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Like Ransom before him, he loved the ephemera that came with good collections — DH Lawrence’s moccasins, the shopping lists found in Norman Mailer’s papers and the dog tag for the writer’s deceased poodle. I ask what he would say if someone offered him a writer’s embalmed body, perhaps to lay out in a glass case beside the reading room and he suggests I am being silly, but does think that objects offer “a very, very human aspect to the whole project.”
Staley wanted everything from literary correspondence to billets doux. His successors want even more: ideally, they would like computer hard drives and passwords for email, Twitter and Facebook accounts to ensure access after a writer’s death. “Some writers are nervous, as well they might be,” says Staley. A writer’s secret lover once begged him to return her love letters. “I said: ‘They belong to the people of Texas,’ ” he says, although he agreed to put a restriction on that file so that it could be opened only in 25 years.
Often, he says, writers seemed unaware of the potential value of their detritus. While collecting the archives of Stoppard from the playwright’s home in Buckinghamshire, “a lady came running out saying: ‘Tom, give that man the other stuff,’ and pointing to an outbuilding”, he says. “We found a whole bloody thing of letters from Pinter.”
Under Staley’s stewardship, the library gained momentum. He recalls negotiating with John Fowles and says the writer told him: “ ‘Tom, you are going to get this collection but give me three reasons why.’ I said: ‘Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, James Joyce.’ ”
The Joyce papers helped to solve a scholarly question about the composition of Finnegans Wake. Greene’s offer an extraordinary record of the author’s dreams, jotted down in a crabbed hand each morning in the last decades of his life. He dreams of meeting popes and poets and sees Evelyn Waugh, leading a band of guerillas, shoot dead WH Auden.
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I find a less glamorous nocturnal vision, recorded on December 9, 1965, in which the great writer is in a car park and someone offers him their ticket. On the morning of January 29, 1984, he writes of being in an airport in Brussels, seeking an English newspaper and finding “nothing but scraps of paper, a Times with the printed front page headline only”. A nightmare indeed.
To Greene’s diaries and the rest will now be added McEwan. Staley had pursued him; Enniss, his successor, sealed the deal last summer after months of negotiations. “I think he recognised the appropriateness of his papers being here, the Julian Barnes collection being just one obvious complimentary collection,” says Enniss. Andrew Motion was disappointed. He fears that it will send the wrong message to other writers, “that British libraries have given up”.
The McEwan papers arrived late last year on two pallets delivered to the loading bay in the basement, where they were checked for mould and insects. Most of it was in good order (archivists still remember, with horror, the muddled, coffee-stained papers of Anthony Burgess).
Up on the fourth floor, Amy Armstrong, head of archives cataloging, pulls out an A4 ring-bound notepad in which McEwan plotted his 1997 novel Enduring Love. He has drawn a picture of the opening scene: several stick figures, holding the mooring ropes of a balloon. “Needs 5? Let go. One lets go late and breaks both legs,” he writes. There is a telephone number for someone called Nicholson, then: “Endless Love: as a blissful state (the innocence) in which we all long to live, blissfully and as a righteous condition.”
We find an invitation to McEwan’s 60th birthday and a funny poem that Zadie Smith composed for that occasion, recalling the halcyon days when the literary agent Ed Victor “was fatter,/ And book clubs didn’t matter/ And all the literary chatter/ Found no blogs and so was mute.” In a footnote at the bottom of the page, Smith writes: “Can’t find better scansion. Weep!”
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There are letters from John Updike. In April 2005 Updike notes that since they first met, McEwan has become acknowledged as “the best novelist of your generation whereas I have fallen to the status of an elderly duffer whose tales of suburban American sex are hopelessly yawnworthy period pieces”.
McEwan kept both Updike’s letters and his own replies. You sense an author carefully cultivating his legacy, well aware that all this would one day be bought by the Texans and perused by grubby hacks such as me. Describing a stay in a hotel in Boston in 2005, he writes: “I read A Tale of Two Cities and one evening ate alone in a restaurant, book propped on the salt cellar next to half a bottle of wine, completely unenvious of the noisy tables around me (it’s a great indulgence if you don’t do it too often).”
The earlier letters seem less self-conscious. “Dear Mum and Dad,” he writes in 1977. “I have repainted the hall, had a carpet laid and have also carpeted the bathroom.” If you think it odd that these missives are being carefully preserved in custom-made card files, you should have seen what was going on downstairs in a cabin that is known as “the mould room”.
“I’m just cleaning up McEwan,” says Olivia Primanis, chief book conservator. Behind her on a shelf, beside Mailer’s old boxing gloves (another new acquisition), is a stack of boxes containing McEwan’s school reports and papers from primary school. These, along with his undergraduate essays, composed at Sussex University, had shown signs of fungi.
Primanis, in overalls and a mask, is stationed beside a ventilated glass tank. Inside I can just make out a torn piece of A4 paper. It is the top page of an essay titled: “Analyse a few of Yeats’ poems so as to illustrate either his development as a poet or his characteristic strengths.”
Her gloved hands hold a brush and a specially adapted vacuum. She reaches through a slot in the base of the tank and scrubs at the paper, handling it carefully, as if it were a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls.