Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page (New Directions in Book History) 1137498854, 9781137498854

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN BOOK HISTORY Series Editors: Shafquat Towheed and Jonathan Rose

PAPER, MATERIALITY AND THE ARCHIVED PAGE Maryanne Dever

New Directions in Book History Series Editors Shafquat Towheed Faculty of Arts Open University Milton Keynes, UK Jonathan Rose Department of History Drew University Madison, NJ, USA

As a vital field of scholarship, book history has now reached a stage of maturity where its early work can be reassessed and built upon. That is the goal of New Directions in Book History. This series will publish monographs in English that employ advanced methods and open up new frontiers in research, written by younger, mid-career, and senior scholars. Its scope is global, extending to the Western and non-Western worlds and to all historical periods from antiquity to the twenty-first century, including studies of script, print, and post-print cultures. New Directions in Book History, then, will be broadly inclusive but always in the vanguard. It will experiment with inventive methodologies, explore unexplored archives, debate overlooked issues, challenge prevailing theories, study neglected subjects, and demonstrate the relevance of book history to other academic fields. Every title in this series will address the evolution of the historiography of the book, and every one will point to new directions in book scholarship. New Directions in Book History will be published in three formats: single-author monographs; edited collections of essays in single or multiple volumes; and shorter works produced through Palgrave’s e-book (EPUB2) ‘Pivot’ stream. Book proposals should emphasize the innovative aspects of the work, and should be sent to either of the two series editors. Editorial Board Marcia Abreu, University of Campinas, Brazil Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University, USA Matt Cohen, University of Texas at Austin, USA Archie Dick, University of Pretoria, South Africa Martyn Lyons, University of New South Wales, Australia More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14749

Maryanne Dever

Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page

Maryanne Dever University of Technology Sydney Sydney, Australia

New Directions in Book History ISBN 978-1-137-49885-4    ISBN 978-1-137-49886-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49886-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design: Pattern adapted from an Indian cotton print produced in the 19th century This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

For Lisa

Chapter 2 has been adapted from my earlier article, ‘Greta Garbo’s Foot or Sex, Socks and Letters’, Australian Feminist Studies 25:64 (2010), 163–174.

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to a great many people who have supported this work. I am grateful for the long-standing interest my colleagues have shown, particularly Marie-Louise Ayres, Katherine Bode, Sue Breakell, Mark Byron, Catherine Hobbs, Tuula Juvonen, Jacqui Lorber-Kasunic, Linda Morra, Gill Partington, Wendy Russell, Elizabeth Shepherd, Kate Sweetapple and Wim Van Mierlo. Different institutions generously supported my research and writing, and I would especially like to acknowledge the Memornet network in Finland, whose invitations provided critical impetus for the work, as well as fellowships and research placements extended by the Gender Institute and the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, Canberra; the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tampere; and the Department of Information Studies, UCL. Research for this book was completed across a number of cultural institutions. At the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, I acknowledge the assistance of Elizabeth E. Fuller, Gregory M. Giuliano and Jobi Zink. At the Marlene Dietrich Collection Berlin, Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin, I acknowledge Silke Ronneburg. At the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, I acknowledge Anne Drayton, Rachel Franks, Meredith Lawn,  Kevin Leamon and Richard Neville. At the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, I am grateful for access to the Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland collection and acknowledge the

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

particular assistance of Morine Krissdottir, Judith Bond and Anna Butler. At the Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading, I acknowledge Caroline Benson, Nancy Fulford, Jennifer Glanville and Adam Lines. For various permissions, I thank Faye Cliné, Katherine Fox, Naomi Greenway, Thomas Imo, Michael Kelly and Tanya Stobbs.

Praise for Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page “In this book Maryanne Dever has brought together the many threads of her work. Her reflections on the materiality of literary archives, on the importance of the haptic and affective in the archive, and the ways in which she brings together archival science and literary studies, continue to be fascinating.” —Elizabeth Shepherd, Professor of Archives and Records Management, Department of Information Studies, University College London “In Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page, Maryanne Dever provides an incisive and elegantly written exploration of why the very materiality of paper should matter to our understandings of, and critical engagements with, literary archives. Through a series of theoretically astute and beautifully rendered accounts of her encounters with the literary and personal archives of Mercedes de Acosta and Greta Garbo, Eve Langley, and Valentine Ackland, Dever deftly reveals the untapped critical and aesthetic possibilities of the archived page. This is a timely and generative intervention from one of the leading international scholars in the field.” —Lorraine Sim, Senior Lecturer in Modern English Literature, Western Sydney University

Contents

1 The Matter of Archival Paperwork: An Introduction  1 2 The Weight of Paper 27 3 Archival Mess 51 4 Dark Archive 75 5 Afterword101 Bibliography109 Index119

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Typescript and manuscript sheets in a folder entitled ‘Diary of Episodes, June to October 1928’. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Collection, Dorset County Museum. (Photo by the author) 2 Fig. 1.2 Archival materials photographed at the provisional city archive in Cologne, Germany, 11 January 2018. Some 9 years after the collapse of the Cologne city archive, the restoration of the salvaged documents is still ongoing—and will be for the next 30 years. (Photo: Rolf Vennenbernd/dpa/Alamy) 7 Fig. 1.3 Restoration and cataloguing of manuscripts in Timbuktu. (Photo: Thomas Imo/Photothek) 8 Fig. 1.4 Emily Dickinson Amherst Manuscript #463: ‘There is no frigate like a book’. (Photo: Amherst College Library & Special Collections)14 Fig. 1.5 Extended page of typescript. State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS 6035/1-19. (Photo by the author) 16 Fig. 2.1 Greta Garbo stars in The Divine Woman (1928), directed by Victor Sjöström. (Photo: Everett Collection/Alamy) 33 Fig. 2.2 A cinema poster for Camille (1936), starring Greta Garbo and directed by George Cukor. (Photo: Silver Screen/Alamy) 34 Fig. 2.3 Mercedes de Acosta kept a framed photo of Garbo’s hand, a detail from a 1925 photo portrait by Arnold Genthe. (Photo: Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia) 40 Fig. 2.4 Envelope addressed to Mercedes de Acosta. (Photo: Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia) 41 Fig. 2.5 Blank card contained in the envelope addressed to Mercedes de Acosta. (Photo: Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia) 41 xv

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Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3

Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5

Fig. 3.6

Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6

Eve Langley and her sister June (‘Steve & Blue’), c. 1928. Eve & June Langley Collection, State Library of NSW, PXE 1333. (Photo: State Library of New South Wales) 53 Eve Langley, studio portrait for her novel, White Topee, c. 1954. Eve & June Langley Collection, State Library of NSW, PXE 1333. (Photo: State Library of New South Wales) 54 Eve Langley’s carefully preserved shopping lists from among her literary and personal papers. Eve Langley—Papers, 1926–1974, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS 4188. (Photo by the author)55 Stitched together government envelopes from among Eve Langley’s literary and personal papers. Eve Langley—Papers, 1926–1974, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS 4188. (Photo by the author) 56 Eve Langley’s photo of her manuscripts, titled on the reverse, ‘The Manuscript Cupboard, Sept 1970’. Eve & June Langley Collection, State Library of New South Wales, PXE 1333. (Photo: State Library of New South Wales) 60 Eve Langley’s photo of her manuscripts laid out on the lawn outside her Katoomba house. Eve & June Langley Collection, State Library of New South Wales, PXE 1333. (Photo: State Library of New South Wales) 65 Eve Langley’s photo of her manuscripts assembled on the grass. Eve & June Langley Collection, State Library of NSW, PXE 1333. (Photo: State Library of New South Wales) 66 Eve Langley’s photo of her typewriter set out on a table on the grass. Eve & June Langley Collection. State Library of NSW, PXE 1333. (Photo: State Library of New South Wales) 67 Valentine Ackland in 1936. (Photo: Dorset County Museum) 76 Pieter Claesz, Vanitas Still Life, 1630. (Photo: Mauritshuis, The Hague)78 Two paper dolls in a matchbox bed. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Collection, Dorset County Museum. (Photo by the author) 80 Valentine Ackland’s writing room at Frome Vauchurch, the house she shared with Sylvia Townsend Warner. (Photo: Dorset County Museum) 82 Headstone for Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner in Chaldon Herring churchyard. (Photo by the author) 85 Sylvia Townsend Warner annotated this envelope to record when she received it a second time following Valentine Ackland’s

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death. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Collection, Dorset County Museum. (Photo by the author) 86 Fig. 4.7 Typescript letter from Valentine Ackland to Sylvia Townsend Warner, 27 July 1949. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Collection, Dorset County Museum. (Photo by the author)89 Fig. 4.8 Typescripts of Valentine Ackland’s poems. University of Reading, Special Collections/Gerald & Joy Finzi Collection. (Photo by the author) 92 Fig. 4.9 Draft of ‘For Sylvia’. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Collection, Dorset County Museum. (Photo by the author)94 Fig. 5.1 File box. Eve Langley—Papers, 1926–1974, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS 4188. (Photo by the author) 106

CHAPTER 1

The Matter of Archival Paperwork: An Introduction

Abstract  This chapter examines current debates concerning archives, paperwork and materiality, and begins to outline the case for why paper matters in archive-based literary research. The scope of the current study is laid out and its particular focus on twentieth-century literary and personal archives clarified. The chapter explores how the dominant view of paper as a mere neutral platform or carrier for written text has meant that its presence and significance in archival research has often been underappreciated. In this way, the chapter opens out the question of what constitutes ‘evidence’ in archive-based literary research, and it poses a set of questions and provocations that set the terms for the empirical studies of individual archival collections that follow. Keywords  Paper • Materiality • Archives • Evidence • Manuscripts • Digitization This is a book about archives and paper. It seeks a new and productive mode of engagement with the archived page. Its focus is on the particular case of modern literary and personal papers that survive their creators and caretakers to form the basis of archival collections  (Fig.  1.1). The question that drives the book—namely how archived paper matters—is loosely inspired © The Author(s) 2019 M. Dever, Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49886-1_1

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Fig. 1.1  Typescript and manuscript sheets in a folder entitled ‘Diary of Episodes, June to October 1928’. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Collection, Dorset County Museum. (Photo by the author)

by novel debates emerging from what is becoming known as the field of ‘critical archival studies’. This is a field of inquiry that brings the traditional areas of archival science and records management together with insights from critical theory. In its explicit attention to the politics of archives and archiving it differs from conventional archive studies which focus on ‘the preservation, classification and interpretation of […] literary drafts and manuscripts as well as personal records’ primarily in the service of ‘the writing of biography and history’ (Van Mierlo 2018, p. 78). While critical archival studies also draws energy from new work in literary studies, queer theory, cultural studies and history, particularly colonial history, at the same time the field seeks to ‘make a much-needed intervention into the humanities, which has so often ignored the existence and legitimacy of archival studies as an area of rigorous academic inquiry’ (Caswell et  al. 2017, p. 4). The field positions itself as transformative of how we understand what archives are, what they can do, and their role in the production of knowledge. Critical archival studies treats archives not as unproblematic repositories of source material but as subjects of inquiry in their own right. In this field, archives are understood as ‘figured’, that is, enmeshed in histories

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and politics that must be interrogated or accounted for before any investigation of individual collections can proceed (Stoler 2009; Ketelaar 2012). Indeed, such histories and politics are ultimately understood as constitutive of those collections and of individual documents. As will be evident, the field is indebted to the work of Michel Foucault on relations of knowledge and power (1972) and that of Jacques Derrida on the role of archival technologies (‘archivization’) in the shaping or making of history and memory (2002, p. 17). Although in critical archival studies the archive as a concept is generally treated in a less abstract and more particularized manner than in either Foucault’s or Derrida’s accounts, insights from their work are nevertheless integral to the field’s understanding of the contingent nature of the archive and of the need to problematize the idea of archival records as simply inert sources offering transparent and unmediated access to our past. While Derrida’s Archive Fever (2002) is regularly cited in contemporary discussions of archives and archiving, of greater relevance for this study are the occasional pieces brought together in the collection Paper Machine (2005), where Derrida speculates in a far more concrete manner on documents themselves and on the challenge new technologies might pose to archives and their paper documents. Importantly, he challenges the ‘commonsense’ view of paper as a neutral support or ‘inert surface laid out beneath some markings, a substratum for sustaining them’ (p.  42). The implied question of what paper is—and what it might do—if it is more than a mere support to writing is actively taken up in this book and explored via a series of archival case studies. In this chapter, I locate my inquiry in terms of current debates concerning archives, paperwork and materiality and begin to outline the case for how and why paper matters in archive-based literary research. The focus on archived documents as paper might appear odd at first but it can be readily contextualized. Since the late 1990s we have witnessed a ‘turn’ (or return) to ‘things’ across the humanities and a new focus on relations between humans and things and the agency or potential of things (see, for example, Brown 2004; Domanska 2006). This is part of a broader ‘material turn’ that attempts to refigure nature, bodies and things for the humanities. In this context, it is not surprising to find rising interest in the thing that is paper. Indeed, scholarly attention to the general area of paper and paperwork has been developing steadily. One particularly generative work on the topic is Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper’s The Myth of the Paperless Office (2001). Their foundational study revealed how our continuing attachments to paper are entangled with its specific affordances as

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a technology. Their approach marked a turning away from a focus on what paper is, its history and its properties, towards an interrogation of what it can do or what it can make happen. The influence of these insights is evident in recent scholarly investigations of the productivity of paper in specifically bureaucratic settings, including Matthew Hull’s Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (2012) and Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (2012). Kafka, in particular, is interested in how the materiality of the bureaucracy is entangled with ‘the psychic life of paperwork’ (p. 16) or the fears and desires generated from working with paper. The field of early modern science studies, with its focus on paper and note taking in the recording and circulation of new knowledge has, together with the history of science, generated fascinating insights into the way particular tools of inscription enabled ‘the transformation of rats and chemicals into paper’ (Latour and Woolgar 1979, cited in Latour 1986, pp.  3–4; see also Jardine 2017). Indeed, as May and Wolfe observe, the increasing availability and relative affordability of paper established it as ‘the connective tissue’ of the early modern period (2010, p. 125). A similar burgeoning interest in documents, forms and files is evident in critical legal studies, where scholars have sought to interrogate the paper document’s status not only as a material object but also as an analytical category and a methodological touchstone (Riles 2006; Vismann 2008). Additional impetus has also come from recent developments in media archaeology, with notable works such as Markus Krajewski’s Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548–1929 (2011), Lisa Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014) and Anke te Heesen’s The Newspaper Clipping: A Modern Paper Object (2014). These latter three studies trace the evolution of different document forms and they explore how the various printing, systematizing, copying, cutting and pasting technologies with which they are associated have been adopted and become embedded in the everyday. Perhaps the most energy, however, has come from studies in the history of the book, a field of knowledge with a long history but one that has developed rapidly in recent decades. It is broadly dedicated to understanding ‘the book as a force in history’ (Darnton 1982, p. 65). This dynamic field of study insists upon the recognition of the book as a material object and upon the materiality of textual production, and has its origins in the new bibliography of the early twentieth century, which aspired to become ‘the science of the material transmission of literary documents’ (Greg 1914, p. 39). Book history

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and studies of the ‘material text’ (McGann 1991; Brayman et al. 2016) have together sponsored increasingly sophisticated understandings of the processes, institutions and materials that together give a text presence in the world and of precisely how the material book matters. They have also uncovered the complex historical interrelationships between publishing and paper as ‘the primary material of literature’ (Darnton 2007, p. 498). These investigations have been accompanied in recent years by an upsurge in popular histories of paper, including Ian Sansom’s Paper: An Elegy (2012), Lothar Müller’s White Magic: The Age of Paper (2014) and Mark Kurblansky’s Paper: Paging Through History (2016), all of which attest to a new-found fascination with what is assumed to be a threatened—or at least diminishing—technology. Indeed, together these histories reveal how paper and print are specific technologies belonging to a particular historical moment, one that is thrown into relief by the arrival of digital technologies. None of these works, however, tackles the specific case of archived literary and personal papers nor do they focus on the productivity of the archived page as this book will. But what each of them does achieve is the work of making visible something which so often falls from view. I am alluding here to the manner in which paper is experienced by many archival researchers as something that simply disappears before their eyes or slips from conscious apprehension. In this respect, there are striking similarities to Andrea Pellegram’s exploration of paper in the context of office work, where it was everywhere and nowhere. As she writes: The workers do not think much about paper, however. They are continually holding it, reading the words upon it, crinkling it up into tight balls and throwing it into plastic bins, putting it in piles and putting it away for safe keeping, but its importance is lost on them. It is so much a part of mundane existence, as necessary for their work as air for their lungs, that they pay it virtually no attention. It is simply there for them, the unnoticed complement to their thoughts. (Pellegram 1998, p. 105)

While archival researchers neither crinkle nor throw the documents they encounter, paper nevertheless tends to remain ‘the unnoticed complement to their thoughts’. This is ironic inasmuch as the lure or promise of paper is often what attracts us to archival research in the first place since it is physical contact with original documents that both confirms our status as privileged readers and generates that longed-for sense of intimacy with our research subjects. And yet, direct allusions to the papery possibilities

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of the materials with which we work are rather rare. It is generally only in instances of what I call ‘heightened materiality’ (Dever 2013, p. 174) that the status of these documents as paper comes to the fore. These are paradoxical moments when the actual or threatened disappearance of a paper document suddenly makes its distinctive materially embodied nature present to us. One such instance of this would be an encounter with the weighing machines deployed in certain archives and special collections as a means of both detecting and deterring acts of theft. These machines discern minute variations in weight before and after materials are issued to researchers, specifically variations resulting from the removal of leaves or parts of leaves from books or folders. The use of such security devices in the issuing of requested items necessarily focuses attention on the materiality of the documents, an aspect exemplified in Everett Wilkie’s advice on the required sensitivity for such scales: In weighing manuscript folders and most books, a scale that weighs in the hundredths of a gram (0.00) up to 4500 gm (about 10 lb) should be adequate; one less sensitive may prove inadequate because it will not be able to detect the removal of small pieces of material, such as a signature from a letter or a bookplate. (Wilkie Jr 2006, p. 149)

Indeed, Wilkie’s additional concerns regarding the substitutions that can accompany an act of theft cannot help but remind us that the contents of an individual folder or entire fonds are just so many finely calibrated leaves or sheets of paper: The most vulnerable collections to such swapping procedures appear to be modern manuscripts. If they are recent enough, it is possible to obtain paper that is nearly identical to what is to be stolen, substitute it, and not alter the weight of the folder significantly. (Wilkie Jr 2006, p. 153)

It is not only the potential for theft but also instances of destruction and deterioration that produce these moments of heightened materiality. Think of the shock that followed the 2018 fire that destroyed Brazil’s National Museum (Jones and Phillips 2018), the 2013 destruction of manuscripts in Timbuktu (Jones 2013) or the catastrophic 2009 collapse of the building housing the Historical Archives of the City of Cologne, an event which left volunteers pulling more than 9000 documents out of the rubble (Fig. 1.2). In the wake of the Cologne disaster, archivists talked

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Fig. 1.2  Archival materials photographed at the provisional city archive in Cologne, Germany, 11 January 2018. Some 9 years after the collapse of the Cologne city archive, the restoration of the salvaged documents is still ongoing— and will be for the next 30 years. (Photo: Rolf Vennenbernd/dpa/Alamy)

explicitly of ‘fragile papers […] ground to dust’ (Curry 2009). While it is estimated that 85 per cent of the Historical Archive’s materials were subsequently recovered, they survived in severely compromised states: ­ ‘[a]part from mechanic damage like deformation, shredding or tearing, damage by water and, as a result, by mould occurred—even where the damage is seemingly minor, the entire archive material is covered by a fine concrete dust that has to be removed sheet by sheet’ (Anon 2010a). Images from the Timbuktu recovery operations (Fig. 1.3) similarly show the pageby-­page care that was required. The scale of such recovery and restoration operations, with their focus on the deformation and scarring of individual documents, marks out the profound vulnerability of archived collections, something known only too well to those in the field of document conservation. Conservators dwell in the realm of the tangible, tasked as they are with assessing, remedying and preventing ‘serious and often irreversible mechanical or chemical damage’ (International Council on Archives 2000,

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Fig. 1.3  Restoration and cataloguing of manuscripts in Timbuktu. (Photo: Thomas Imo/Photothek)

p. 96) to records in their care. While the Cologne and Timbuktu episodes place conservators in the context of disaster recovery or the ‘atypical disruption of routine activities’ (Pearce-Moses 2005), the more regular aspects of their work often entail dealing with the impact of those seemingly innocent tools the rest of us deploy in our own daily rituals for managing and manipulating paper: metal clips and pins, rubber bands, ink and marker pens, adhesive tape and post-it notes, all of which have the potential to cause physical damage to valuable documents. But even with the best of care, there is no escaping the fundamental material transformations all artefacts undergo over time or ‘the agential force of matter’ that reveals ‘the fugitive nature of almost all things’ (Hennessy and Smith 2018, p. 132). Perhaps it is recognition of this fundamental vulnerability that makes conservator Jan Paris confess that she had been trained to view researchers as ‘adversaries’ or ‘destroyers’ (Paris 2000c) for their potential to overlook— and thus fail to respect—the fragile physical nature of the paper documents entrusted to them.

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Indeed, it is not uncommon for researchers to let the possibilities of the page itself fall from view while they subject the words alone to their ­interpretive gaze. Alberto Manguel alludes to this particular reading tendency when he describes how ‘[t]he page leads an underhand existence […] Its brittle being, barely corporeal in its two dimensions, is dimly perceived by our eyes as they follow the track of the words’ (2004, p. 27). That such blind spots haunt the practices of historians and literary researchers working within archival collections is due, at least in part, to the legacy of the earlier linguistic turn in those disciplines which saw researchers focus their efforts on what Arlette Farge refers to as the ‘strange and banal exercise’ of transcribing the text of documents word for word (2013, p. 16) and then leaving the page behind. This way of operating encouraged us to separate meaning from materiality, to ignore the material instantiation of the texts with which we work, and to invest in the idea of archived papers and pages as seemingly neutral containers or platforms for the transmission of words from which meaning can later be extracted. Even a field such as genetic criticism, with its focus on the process rather than the product of writing, has still largely ignored the affordances of the page and how authors ‘think on paper’ (Van Mierlo 2018, p. 83). As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht points out, the ‘absolute dominance of meaningrelated questions’ across the humanities generally ‘led to the abandonment of all other types of phenomena and questions’ (2004, p. 16). It is precisely our understanding of the ‘materialities of communication’ that, he suggests, has suffered as a consequence of this dominance. Nevertheless, even in the course of methodical transcription, the page might reassert itself. This is something Gumbrecht addresses via the question of the fragment or the torn and damaged page: What all the fragments resulting from physical causes share is a margin—we may call it, with a more dramatic emphasis, a ‘scar’—where the flow of a text randomly stops and where we can normally discover traces of the physical cause of its fragmentation. Such scars are indispensable […] for the perception of such scars changes our attitude vis-à-vis the text: they draw attention to its exteriority (to its ‘materiality’ would be a different way of saying the same). […] To thus perceive the exteriority of the text means that we suspend our automatic habit of deciphering it. Instead of constituting the meaning that an absent author wanted to convey, we then concentrate on the sensual qualities of the text as a materially present object. (Gumbrecht 1997, p. 320)

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As the above analysis reveals, far from being completely and permanently out of sight, the manuscript page has the capacity to fade away and then suddenly return to impinge rather awkwardly on our activities. This tendency to shift in and out of view is what Boris Jardine has neatly termed paper’s ‘flickering materiality’ (2017, p. 54). Tackling the topic of paper and materiality at a time when discussions around archives are pretty much dominated by the digital may seem odd but it is not as anomalous as it might first appear. Nor should it be taken to mean that I am locating my inquiries in a world prior to the advent of digital technologies or untouched by the debates that animate that space. I am not one of those ‘paper minds’ who struggle to imagine the possibilities and affordances of the digital (Klareld and Gidlund 2017). As archivist Charles Jeurgens highlights, that would scarcely be possible given the ways in which ‘digitization is fundamentally changing the relationship between the archive, the archivist and the researcher’ (2013, p. 31). On the contrary, I argue that it is only in the face of those technologies and the ontological and epistemological shudders they have caused that the questions I am now exploring concerning paper and materiality become both possible and necessary. After all, the emergence of digitization as a new option for the reproduction and circulation of archived cultural heritage has transformed the familiar experience of being-in-the-archive and delivered profound changes to our understanding of what an archive is and to the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of archival research. Critically, where archival research was once synonymous with the ‘need to see and touch objects and documents’ (Howe 2014, p. 9), that experience is now increasingly digitally mediated. We know that, as mass digitization programmes began to be rolled out, impassioned arguments were advanced for the ‘retention and preservation of textual artifacts’, with significant emphasis placed on the importance of scholars’ continuing engagements with the unique ‘physicality’ of original documents (MLA 1995, p.  28). This is perhaps not surprising given that in those early debates the process of translation into digital code was often viewed not as an alternative form of material instantiation with its own specific properties and capacities, but as a descent into what historian of art and technology Margot Lovejoy nicely labelled ‘the void of the immaterial’ (2004, p. 73). There were also fears that the creation of digital surrogates might constitute grounds for dispensing altogether with the analogue originals (see Baker 2001). Today, we operate with a well-developed understanding of ‘the materiality of informatics’ (Hayles 1993) and recognize the dependence of the

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digital upon significant physical infrastructure. Further, rather than cancelling out or superseding traditional archival formats, the introduction of digital media into the archival domain has instead generated important and novel questions about what it means to work with those originals. Not surprisingly, perhaps, those questions have tended to cluster around matter and materiality. Media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst (2005) characterizes this as the ‘archival retro-effect’, arguing that ‘[t]he more cultural data are processed in electronic, fugitive form, the more the traditional archive gains authority from the very materiality of its artefacts (parchment, paper, tapes)’. However, this sense of technology as sponsoring a productive return to the materiality of the page is perhaps best captured in Derrida’s reflections on the hitherto unacknowledged possibilities of paper and the page. ‘By carrying us beyond paper’, he writes, ‘the adventures of technology grant us a sort of future anterior; they liberate our reading for a retrospect exploration of the past resources of paper, for its previously multimedia vectors’ (2005, p. 47; original emphasis). This suggests that, in the face of the transformative potential of the digital, it may be possible to unravel as never before what is distinctive about the paper documents we possess. In short, any ‘thinking through the archive’ that digitization might facilitate should engage us equally in ‘thinking through paper’ with a renewed sensitivity to the work that paper does. So if what we are witnessing is not paper’s death in the face of the digital so much as its long afterlife, the key issue is how questions of materiality and matter might now fundamentally reshape our archival inquiries and the objects that lie at the heart of them. In How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012), Leah Price investigates the ways in which books must be understood not only in terms of their use as reading matter but also their use as furniture or decorative items, fashion accessories, trophies and tools; that is, what else they can do. She makes the case that if we are to understand and effectively historicize what a book is and what it can do, we need to ‘get physical’ with the ‘book-object’ (p. 4). But what would a parallel material account of the archived page look like? While in the digital age the original manuscript object is ‘apparently still regarded as the “gold standard” for study’ (Rimmer et al. 2008, p. 1378), reflexive accounts of locating, handling and working with original materials as physical objects remain rather scarce. Notable exceptions have been Carolyn Steedman’s influential Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001) and Arlette Farge’s The Allure of the Archives (1989/2013), each of which reflects in detail on the experience of undertaking archival

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research and grounding historical accounts in archival materiality, albeit for a predigital era. In a section entitled ‘Gathering and Handling Documents’, Farge explicitly reminds her reader that ‘contact with the archive begins with […] handling documents’ (p.  55). More recently, there is Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives (2014), which focuses on the advent of the digital and specifically its impact on the experience of working in literary archives. It is a homage to the ‘material details’ (p. 21) or ‘historical-existential traces’ (p. 24) that for her make an archive an archive. Howe writes evocatively of the spontaneous reflections that flow from researchers’ encounters with ‘thingsin-­ themselves and things-as-they-are-for-us’ (p.  18), arguing that we must never lose sight of the importance and impact of these in-person archival encounters with ‘things’. It would seem, however, that the majority of researchers take another path and follow what Alice Yaeger Kaplan identifies as the ‘conventional academic discourse [that] requires that when you write up the results of your archival work, you tell a story about what you found, but not about how you found it’ (1990, p. 103). Sara Edenheim identifies this practice as stemming from the ‘historian’s basic view that whatever happens in the archive stays in the archive’ (2014, p. 52). Whatever its origins, adherence to this particular scholarly convention means that we are generally deprived of those reflexive accounts of locating, handling and working with original documents that Howe celebrates, and thus we forego opportunities to interrogate questions of materiality and archival method or to reflect on the phenomenology of being with—and working with—archived paper. As a consequence, we tend to lose sight of the centrality of accessing papers, of lifting, unwrapping, unfolding, handling, reading and even smelling them to the research process. These tendencies are in fact reinforced by the prevailing standards of archival description. Ala Rekrut highlights this point in the course of making the case for enhanced ‘material literacy’ when she identifies how ‘existing archival descriptive structures do not explicitly support recording physical characteristics as evidence that contributes to understanding the records, their creators and custodians’ (2005, pp. 28–29). In this way, any focus on the matter of archival collections is frustrated at the outset by the categories of metadata recorded and made available. While archivists Wendy Duff and Verne Harris (2002) have argued persuasively for more ‘hospitable’ modes of archival description that might ‘resist the temptation to privilege text’ (p.  279), the question of materiality ultimately

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escapes their notice too. So those seeking to approach specific collections with these elements in mind will usually find in the catalogue or finding aid only perfunctory accounts of linear metres of shelf space, numbers of boxes or folders, numbers of pages. And because few researchers ever have the opportunity to go behind the scenes in the archival repositories in which they work, they rarely encounter first-hand the full extent of the documents, files and boxes that concern them, and thus they rarely confront what Uriel Orlow pinpoints as ‘the sheer materiality of the collections’, let alone how those ‘papers, boxes and shelves all function together’ (quoted in Birkin 2015, p. 2). A further reason for the paucity of critical engagement with the materiality of the archived page may be because, as James Elkins has observed, while it is ‘relatively easy to build theories about materiality’, it is ‘relatively difficult to talk about materiality in front of individual objects’ (2008, p. 26). Fields such as medieval and early modern manuscript studies have paid more attention of late to questions of textual materiality and material research (see Burton and Scott-Baumann 2014; Daybell 2012; Pender and Smith 2014); however, this style of work with its focus on the minute cataloguing of a manuscript’s physical features or on the material aesthetics of paper and ink choices tends to understand materiality in terms of fixed or inherent properties, and, thus, the analysis often remains at the level of ‘descriptive literalism’ (Drucker 2009, p. 8). Indeed, these authors’ concerns arguably lie more in materials than materiality. One key exception here is Bonnie Mak’s innovative study, How the Page Matters (2011). Working at the intersection of medieval studies and book history, Mak highlights the ways in which the architecture of the individual page—its size, shape, colour and texture; the layout of the text on a page; the presence of blank spaces—is far from incidental. She is centrally concerned with exploring how meaning is embodied in a page and entangled in how that page ‘transmits ideas’ (p.  5). Mak elaborates how each successive material instantiation of a page does different things. Critically, she operates from the premise that meaning and materiality are inseparable, arguing that we must attend to ‘the matter’ and ‘the mattering’ of the page. As she elaborates: [t]o matter is not only to be of importance, to signify, to mean, but also to claim a certain physical space, to have a particular presence, to be uniquely embodied. (p. 3)

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Equally suggestive is Alexandra Socarides’ work on Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts, where she focuses specifically on the poet’s material practices and upon paper as a ‘constitutive and meaningful part of the making and dissemination of her poems’ (2012, p. 6). Dickinson’s poems are widely acknowledged as demanding a qualitatively different form of engagement with the manuscript page, not least because for Dickinson—a poet whose work scarcely made it into print in her lifetime—the manuscript poem ‘was not the point of departure for poetry, but, instead, its final destination’ (Werner 2011, p. 70). What Dickinson’s draft poems make clear is that neither paper nor the page can be understood as a mere material support to the text in any familiar or straightforward way. And so it is not surprising that scholars working on the poet and her distinctive manuscript heritage (Fig.  1.4) have produced some of the most interesting scholarship focused on the materiality of the manuscript page (see Kreider 2010; Werner 1995, 2011). But too often these are the very elements that as researchers we bracket in the drive to strip the paper page of its precious words. We fail, in Mak’s analysis, to note paper’s presence, a term that Gumbrecht also uses to define the impact of the ‘tangible’ (2004, pp. xv and xiii). Something that is tangible is perceptible by touch, it is palpable, it makes its presence felt. Presence also suggests proximity and any push to engage with the materiality of the page ought also to take into consideration the productivity of proximity—that is, how papers might come to matter—and to mean—as a condition of their being together. After all, we rarely encounter just a single sheet of archived paper, so how might papers work together? Archivist Catherine Hobbs suggests that we are ‘inclined to see proximity and grouping together as indicating meaning’. That is, we are inclined to infer meaning or connection via proximity. But in so doing, we generally naturalize the very proximity through which we read

Fig. 1.4  Emily Dickinson Amherst Manuscript #463: ‘There is no frigate like a book’. (Photo: Amherst College Library & Special Collections)

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that meaning. Interestingly, Hobbs goes on to note that some of the dilemmas confronting archivists in their efforts to find relationships among authors’ digital files and folders stem from the way these same issues were never satisfactorily teased out ‘in the realm of paper’ (2012). While Hobbs is referring here to larger debates concerning ‘original order’ as an organizing principle within fonds (see MacNeil 2008; Douglas 2010), the issue of proximity or connection that is core to those debates arguably exists for researchers working at the level of individual pages or papers. For example, architectural scientist Susan Yee describes the day she came across a ‘little parchment bag full of paper squares of different colors and different sizes’ (2007, p. 33) in the Le Corbusier archive in Paris. On investigation, these shapes revealed themselves to be part of a system the celebrated architect used to design the internal floor plans of buildings: different colours represented different possible purposes for spaces (meeting rooms, public areas, etc.) and the shapes were able to be fiddled with upon the surface of the plans until a satisfactory configuration of rooms was arrived at. Yee confesses that she ‘fiddled with them too’. In learning to place the coloured shapes upon the plan in this way, Yee was engaging with the very mechanics of paper, and while there may be fewer opportunities for such tactile play in more traditional fonds, nevertheless, the question of how one piece of archived paper—judiciously positioned—may extend the expressive or documentary possibilities of another is one worth considering. This is echoed by Anke te Heesen in her studies on the newspaper clipping, where she reminds us of the need to remember that paper is a thing, ‘a three-dimensional object that we work with and that we not only read but handle, fold, glue, and cut as well’ (2008, p. 299). Heesen’s insights resonate with the example of a contemporary author whose donated papers contained ‘vast amounts of content on fluoro coloured post-it notes, which were left adhered to the multiple pages of the collection and protruded outside of the text block of the notebooks and folders’ (Anon 2010b, p. 35). This presented a dilemma in terms of conservation and presentation: the glue from the post-it notes would damage the pages underneath and for this reason they should be removed. In any case, if the post-its were simply left, the glue would eventually lose its efficacy and the notes would drift free from their assigned places. Anyone seeking to study these manuscripts would invariably want to engage with the pages in conjunction with the post-its, so the question was how in the process of resolving the conservation issue could the ­integrity of this textual arrangement—paper-on-paper—be preserved? The

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solution was found in an overlay system that saw the post-it notes repositioned inside an archival quality document sleeve that could then be placed directly on top of the pages from which they had been removed to recreate the initial layered disposition. Thus, the original supplemented mise en page remains available as a field of engagement for researchers, but interestingly, I would argue, in a way that effectively denaturalizes the relations of proximity and brings the fundamentals of the original layering operation—paper-on-paper and text-over-text—to the fore once again. At stake here is the idea of how, through recognizing what we might term ‘paper relations’, one might engage with the manuscript mise en page in terms of what it does and not simply as an intellectual composition (Fig. 1.5). After all, as Heesen reminds us, in instances such as this, it is possible that ‘pasting, not writing, is the operative process for generating meaning’ (2008, p. 300). From the above discussion it will be evident that my approach to paper and materiality is framed not in terms of paper’s basic properties or its

Fig. 1.5  Extended page of typescript. State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS 6035/1-19. (Photo by the author)

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ontology. That is to say, I am less interested in physical elements such as paper stock and ink or in questions of page layout and design, those aspects Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008) designates as the ‘forensic’ and ‘formal’ aspects, respectively, of materiality. My focus is in terms of paper’s capacities or what it can do. To think about the materiality of the archived page in this way is to think about paper as fundamentally dynamic or lively. As the archival case studies I pursue will underscore, this means that my interest lies not with paper’s particular qualities or even its history, although both can be interesting and valuable considerations. My interest lies with its productivity or, put differently, what archived paper might set in motion. As this implies, I am working with an understanding of materiality ‘not as a dimension of externally positioned objects, but rather […] as an aspect of embodied persons’ interactions with things’ (Hallam and Hockey 2001, p. 127). This is a materiality defined as an emergent rather than inherent quality of the archived page, something that is neither fixed nor given, but which manifests itself in our interactions with the page. To quote Katharine Hayles, it is a ‘materiality that cannot be specified in advance, as if it pre-existed the specificity of the work’ (2002, p. 33) or—I would add—our encounters with it. To explore archived collections in terms of matter and materiality and to focus in this way on the tangible and on paper’s presence naturally has implications for how we define or understand the very ‘stuff’ we study and, more specifically, what we may seek to measure or weigh as archival ‘evidence’. Indeed, I would suggest that it necessitates adopting an expanded view of what matters when engaging in archival research and, therefore, an expanded understanding of the empirical. Adkins and Lury (2009) note that we are witnessing profound revisions to familiar knowledge-making practices and that in recent years there have been calls across various disciplines to engage with ‘changes in what the empirical is and how it matters’ (p. 6). There are, they argue, ‘changes in the very matter of the empirical that require us to reconsider the relations between fact and value, ontology and epistemology’ (p.  6). I would propose that in this instance it also requires us to reconsider relations between the cultural and the material. Asking where questions concerning matter and materiality might push our thinking around archival evidence arguably provides the basis for producing different kinds of ‘archive stories’ (Burton 2006, p. 6) from those with which we are familiar, ones that privilege the insights that come from thinking through paper. This entails bringing materiality and methodology together in ways that accord a new status to archived paper,

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acknowledging both its presence and its potential. But it is also more than this. It means applying new critical pressure to our encounters in the archive and becoming sensitive to paper’s operations, its particular intensities, its capacity to do things and to engage and move us in ways that exceed its more familiar and taken-for-granted function as a support to text. In developing the case studies that form the basis of this book, I approached the different archival collections with an openness to experiencing them as boxes and folders of paper that had been preserved first by individuals and then by institutions. I wanted to explore how paper mattered in each instance and how that mattering might add to—or even upset—more conventional understandings of these holdings and of the individuals who were both object and subject of them. It was not always easy in the process to articulate precisely what my research entailed or what my questions were, since seeking to experience collections in this way doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the straightforward framing of requests that institutions have come to expect from researchers and around which their collections and services are generally organized. Indeed, the logics of archives are not necessarily amenable to engagements with papers that value them for more than their immediate textual content, particularly given how such engagements potentially reorganize the customary nature of our knowledge-­making practices in archives. In one instance, my access to a collection was delayed while I satisfied the institution that my explorations were legitimate or at least ones they had some chance of supporting. In another instance, staff responded to my delight that a collection hadn’t been processed and that certain papers were still housed in the original envelopes in which they had been delivered to the institution by insisting that there were plans to process the collection just as soon as I had finished my work! Certainly, in their address to questions of matter and materiality, the three case studies presented here do test in varying degrees what it is we can do in and with particular manuscript collections. Each case study concerns a set of literary manuscripts or personal papers from the twentieth century. Chapter 2, ‘The Weight of Paper’, explores archived correspondence between screen idol Greta Garbo (1905–1990) and Mercedes de Acosta (1893–1968) held in the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia. Closed to readers until the year 2000, the Garbo letters were publicly declared upon their opening to offer no concrete evidence of the nature of the relationship between the two women who were long rumoured to have been lovers. In this case study, I unpack the controversy surrounding the letters in order to make an argument

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about paper, affect and the empirical. Put differently, I ask the question, ‘what counts as evidence of intimacy?’ Starting with a blank florist’s card filed among de Acosta’s letters from Garbo, I consider what happens when our understanding of archival evidence extends beyond the written text of a personal correspondence to encompass, for example, the volume of correspondence or paper present. What do we make of the weight of paper that confronts us as researchers? What does it mean to hold on to and preserve paper, whether as individuals or as institutions? And critically, how do we account for the emotional intensities generated around such gatherings of paper? These questions are not only important in relation to the Garbo correspondence; they will continue to resonate across all the case studies offered in this book. The second case study focuses on the archived papers of Australian writer Eve Langley (1904–1974). We commonly associate archives with order and so as researchers we can be wrong-footed when a collection has elements of the chaotic, exhibits random inclusions, or shows odd signs of damage and decay. In Chap. 3, ‘Archival Mess’, I explore how a nuanced approach to a writer’s archived work as paper can potentially challenge a reputation for madness and incoherence based, at least in part, on our discomfort with physical mess in the archive. Langley is today generally better known for her gender non-conforming dress, her history of institutionalization and her obsessive identification with the writer Oscar Wilde, than for her literary achievement as a poet and novelist. Despite early success and recognition, her career was marked by a substantial and growing imbalance between what she produced and what she succeeded in publishing. The majority of Langley’s later work remains unpublished, and several thousand single-spaced typescript pages together with an array of handwritten personal papers and manuscripts are held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. The collection is noted for the challenges it poses for researchers. In this chapter, I advance a novel framing of Langley’s manuscript legacy, one in which challenges the taint of pathology that has attached to her papers as an extension of the author herself. In elaborating how paper matters in Langley’s literary archive, I highlight how Langley’s own approach to paper and to her manuscripts might provide a model for rethinking not only what it means to be creative but also how we might surface hitherto underexamined aspects of the experience of being-in-the-­ archive. In short, I use the example of Langley’s collection to underscore the importance of marking paper’s presence as a critical dimension of the archival scene.

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In Chap. 4, ‘Dark Archive’, I offer a final case study, focusing on the English poet Valentine Ackland (1906–1969) and I return to the question of what makes a piece of paper precious. Ackland was the lifelong partner of celebrated novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978), and, while also a writer, Ackland’s published output and her reputation were eclipsed in her lifetime by the more successful Warner. Ackland claimed towards the end of her life not to know what to do with the mass of papers she was leaving behind, a mass that included fair-copy typescripts of hundreds of poems, the majority of them unpublished. After her death it fell to Warner to manage the papers and, with them, Ackland’s poetic legacy. In this chapter, I ask how the posthumous presence and handling of paper becomes entangled with—and ultimately even the expression of—the privileges, delights and obligations of intimacy and friendship. How—via acts of formal or informal archiving—might a collection of such papers invoke old claims and establish new holds? How does paper become entangled with mourning and memory? Is it possible that piles of paper may be endowed with a ‘dead weight’ that is experienced by those charged with their care and arrangement as a form of affective intensity? At the same time as engaging with these questions, I am also interested in speculating on how such weight might register in terms of scholarly investments in editorial and publication projects, and I point to the relationship between literary papers—their presence, scale and accessibility—and the making and remaking of posthumous literary reputations. Finally, the chapter is concerned with how paper can incite activity, and I reflect on how elements of Ackland’s surviving papers remain ‘on the move’, calling forth all manner of archival labours and generating activity in the form of emerging editorial and custodial projects. In the ‘Afterword’, I consider what these three case studies suggest about the value of taking questions of matter and materiality into account and the value of examining archived collections via their status as preserved paper. I point to the ways in which a sensitivity to paper’s potential can reorient our inquiries and bring to the fore nuances that are simply not available to us if our interpretive gaze is focused exclusively upon the textual. I argue for a productive re-engagement with the materialities of archival research and for a more general rethinking of relations between the cultural and the material, suggesting how this might productively reorganize not only what we seek and what we accept as archival evidence, but the very terms of our inquiries into lived lives and their archived traces.

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Modern Language Association of America (MLA). (1995) Statement on the significance of primary records. Profession, 95, 27–28. Müller, L. (2014) White Magic: The Age of Paper. Cambridge, Polity Press. Paris, B. (2000c) Conservation and the politics of use and value in research libraries. The Book and Paper Group Annual, 15. Available at http://cool.conservation-us.org/coolaic/sg/bpg/annual/v19/bp19-16.html. Accessed 28 July 2018. Pearce-Moses, R. (2005) Business continuation and disaster recovery. A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology. American Society of Archivists. Available at https://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/b/business-continuationand-disaster-recovery. Accessed 28 July 2018. Pellegram, A. (1998) The message in paper. In D. Miller (ed.) Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter. London, UCL Press, 103–120. Pender, P. and Smith, R. (eds.) (2014) Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Houndmills, UK, Palgrave Macmillan. Price, L. (2012) How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton, NJ and Oxford, Princeton University Press. Rekrut, A. (2005) Material literacy: Reading records as material culture. Archivaria, 60, 11–37. Riles, A. (2006) Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge. Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press. Rimmer, J. et al. (2008) An examination of the physical and the digital qualities of humanities research. Information Processing and Management, 44 (3), 1374–1392. Sansom, I. (2012) Paper: An Elegy. London, Fourth Estate. Sellen, A. and Harper, R. (2001) The Myth of the Paperless Office. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Socarides, A. (2012) Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics. New York, Oxford University Press. Steedman, C. (2001) Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. Manchester, Manchester University Press. Stoler, A.L. (2009) Along the Archival Grain, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. te Heesen, A. (2008) News, paper, scissors: Clippings in the sciences and arts around 1920. In L. Daston (ed.) Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York, Zone Books, 297–327. te Heesen, A. (2014) The Newspaper Clipping: A Modern Paper Object. Trans. L. Lantz. Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press. Van Mierlo, W. (2018) What to do with literary manuscripts? A model for manuscript studies after 1700. Comma, International Journal on Archives, 2017 (1), 75–87.

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Vismann, C. (2008) Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press. Werner, M.L. (1995) Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing. Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press. Werner, M.L. (2011) ‘Reportless places’: Facing the modern manuscript. Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, 6 (2), 60–83. Wilkie, E.C. Jr (2006) Weighing materials in rare book and manuscript libraries as a security measure against theft and vandalism. RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Cultural Heritage, 7 (2), 146–164. Yee, S. (2007) The archive. In S. Turkle (ed.) Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 30–37.

CHAPTER 2

The Weight of Paper

Abstract  This chapter explores letters from screen idol Greta Garbo (1905–1990) to Mercedes de Acosta (1893–1968) held in the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia. Initially dismissed as revealing ‘nothing’ about their relationship when they were made public, this array of letters, telegrams and ephemeral scraps of paper is examined in light of de Acosta’s evident attachment to them. The chapter asks how questions of materiality and an awareness of the part played by paper in sustaining desire might shift understandings of archival evidence of intimacy. What does it mean to hold on to and preserve intimate correspondence, whether as individuals or as institutions? How do we account for the sensations generated around such gatherings of paper? Can paper be understood as an index of feeling? Keywords  Greta Garbo • Mercedes de Acosta • Letters • Archives • Affect • Materiality • Paper At the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, I found myself staring at item no. 80 from Box 23 of the Greta Garbo material held there. Item 80 is an envelope from the Pont Royal Hotel on the front of which is written ‘Greta’s foot Sept. 1958’. Inside the envelope are two small sheets of unlined notepaper across which a pencil tracing of Garbo’s foot © The Author(s) 2019 M. Dever, Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49886-1_2

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extends. I held the two pieces of paper up in mid-air and stared at them with what I hoped was a look of sufficient scholarly intensity to satisfy the two librarians looking on. ‘Looks about a size 8’, I have written in my notes, but in my excitement at finally seeing the fabled foot I failed to note down whether it was her left or her right foot. Elsewhere in the collection—that of Mercedes de Acosta—I encountered a yellow cotton ankle sock with a lipstick kiss still visible upon it. Further afield in the same collection there is a single silk stocking that once belonged to Marlene Dietrich. Nowhere present is the pair of second-hand socks that Garbo generously offered to de Acosta in a note from 1938. But socks and stockings aren’t really what took me to Philadelphia; no, this visit was the culmination of a long-held desire to see what ‘nothing’ looked like. It also turned into the trigger for my thinking about meaning and materiality or what unacknowledged work paper might be doing in a collection such as this. What took me on this apparent hiding to ‘nothing’? In April 2000, the world’s press reported on the opening of a long-embargoed cache of letters from screen legend Greta Garbo to Mercedes de Acosta, the Spanish heritage aristocrat turned screenwriter widely thought to have been Garbo’s lover. The letters were deposited by de Acosta in the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia in 1960 with the condition that their contents remain sealed until ten years after Garbo’s death. As the day of their opening approached, international press speculation ran rife. Would the letters, as Carrie Rickey of the Philadelphia Inquirer hoped, finally reveal the ‘smoking lipstick’ everyone expected (cited in Paris 2000b). Would these be the fatal ‘Letter Bombs’ (Paris 2000a)? Or, as the headline in the Austin American-Statesman trumpeted: ‘So what’s in those secret letters? Our sources say that Greta was one wacky, fun-loving gal’ (Kulhavy and Seaborn 2000). While the Rosenbach Museum enjoyed the sudden attention—as director Derick Dreher observed, ‘There has never been anything quite like this. It has catapulted us from relative obscurity’—they were considerably more reserved in their pronouncements. Dreher reminded the world that Garbo was ‘a notoriously brief writer. So we may have a collection of one-liners that deal with the weather’ (Anon 2000a). The great day finally came—and who would not be a little moved by descriptions in the press of the small group of curators who gathered in the museum to cut the two shiny red ribbons that encircled the box of letters? At issue was whether the letters would somehow ‘prove’ the nature of the relationship between Garbo and the woman whom she fondly addressed

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as ‘dear boy’ and ‘honeychild’. The consensus among those at the ­opening—and the view espoused in press releases by the Garbo Estate— was that while the letters ‘indicate[d] that they had a long-standing friendship, one that had its ups and downs’, it ‘could not be characterised as tumultuous or amorous […] there is no concrete evidence that any sexual relationship between these two women ever existed’ (Anon 2000b). As The Age newspaper in Melbourne solemnly concluded, ‘Garbo papers reveal nothing’ (Anon 2000c). Interestingly, this is all despite the fact that the opening was to be followed immediately by an exhibition at the Rosenbach of 25 of the letters entitled ‘Garbo Unsealed’, sponsored in part by the Philadelphia-based gay rights festival, PrideFest America 2000. What is offered to us here in this ‘archive story’ is the absence of something that is frequently represented as core to the archival experience: that seemingly revelatory moment when one stumbles upon a piece that appears to resolve the puzzle, a phenomenon often characterized as the ‘archival “pay dirt” moment’ (Burton 2006, p.  8) or ‘the archival jolt’ (Bishop 2005, p. 36). In this case, those present at the opening failed to find whatever it was they hoped (or dreaded) the letters would offer. Yet their representation of this apparent absence becomes—in the telling— evidence of another sort: evidence of the thing which does not exist. Their role in the constitution of this absence—the ‘nothing’ or ‘no evidence’ that is in itself evidence—is effaced in the telling. Stories such as this are heavily indebted to what historian Antoinette Burton refers to as ‘the lingering presumptions about, and attachments to, the claims of objectivity with which archives have historically been synonymous, at least since the extended moment of positivistic science on the German model in the nineteenth century’ (2006, p.  7). But they also embody the repressive project of ‘don’t ask; You shouldn’t know’, characterized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a series of common dismissals: It didn’t happen; it doesn’t make any difference; it didn’t mean anything; it doesn’t have interpretive consequences. Stop asking just here; stop asking just now; we know in advance the kind of difference that could be made by the invocation of this difference; it makes no difference; it doesn’t mean. (Sedgwick 1990, p. 3; original emphasis)1

Beyond the resemblance here between the archive and the closet—the Garbo Estate has from time to time been accused of attempting to ‘in’ the fabled star2—in terms of archival research, the story offered here is also

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replete with problematic assumptions about the nature of the archival artefact, about the act of reading, the visibility and legibility of archival traces of the sexual, and the status of (love) letters as a literary genre. Those confident declarations of ‘nothingness’ also lack any sustained consideration of the forces that shape archives in general—and this one in particular. But critically for my inquiries, they also lack any sensitivity to the materiality of the documents under consideration. It is this last point in particular that I am going to address in what follows. Mercedes de Acosta met Greta Garbo in Hollywood in June 1931 at the home of Austrian-born actress and screenwriter, Salka Viertel. De Acosta was 38. Garbo, then 26, was already a major star. Following silent classics such as The Temptress (1926) and Flesh and the Devil (1927), Garbo had the previous year made the successful transition from silent films to talking pictures with Anna Christie (1930). Across town, Marlene Dietrich’s fortunes were also riding high as she starred in Morocco (1930) and Dishonored (1931), the first of a series of highly successful films made with director Josef von Sternberg. De Acosta, already an established playwright,3 had come to Hollywood from New York under contract to produce a screenplay for sultry stage and film actress Pola Negri, although that deal would soon founder. De Acosta’s circle of friends and lovers included Eva le Gallienne, Hope Williams, Alla Nazimova, Isadora Duncan and Tallulah Bankhead. The usually guarded and aloof Garbo was evidently quite taken with de Acosta4 as she initiated further contact with her over the next few weeks and then in July invited her to join her on a holiday to a remote cabin on Silver Lake in the Sierra Nevadas, a summer idyll memorialized in a famous series of topless photos taken by de Acosta. The two continued to keep company and they received occasional mentions in fan magazines,5 as well as being photographed together around town (albeit reluctantly) until Garbo departed for New York the following year en route to Sweden. Tension entered the relationship when Garbo refused to permit de Acosta to accompany her to Sweden, possibly over her stifling behaviour, possibly over Garbo’s plans to reunite with the Swedish actress Mimi Pollak, with whom she had been close during their drama school days together (Duval Smith 2005). Feeling herself to be abandoned by the legendary actress, de Acosta embarked on a new affair with rival star Marlene Dietrich, whose interest in the lovelorn Mercedes had apparently been piqued by the Garbo connection.6 The affair with Dietrich, while passionate and exciting, was relatively short-lived, Dietrich tiring not only of de Acosta’s possessiveness but also of her endless monologues on the

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subject of Garbo.7 They nevertheless kept up an intimacy of sorts for the rest of the decade, despite the fact that de Acosta had resumed contact with Garbo or the ‘Swedish child’ as she and Dietrich labelled her. So what archival record of the relationship between Garbo and de Acosta survives? The papers held by the Rosenbach Museum consist of 90 items, some 55 letters and a variety of telegrams, florists’ cards and ephemera: scraps of paper, mailing labels, a feather. All are from Garbo to de Acosta; the latter’s letters to Garbo have not survived. This latter point further facilitates the dismissal of the sexuality question if we consider Teresa de Lauretis’ argument that ‘it takes two women, not one, to make a lesbian’ (1994, p. 283). Indeed, confident perhaps that she had done away with all evidence to the contrary, Garbo once declared to an astonished dinner table that ‘in all my life, I have never received a love letter’ (McLellan 2000, p. 376; original emphasis). The Rosenbach also holds a range of informal black and white photos of Garbo taken by de Acosta, including the famous shots taken on their trip to Silver Lake in 1931. The letters and cards date from 1931 or 1932—the period of their initial meeting—to 1959, shortly before Garbo broke off contact, with the publication of de Acosta’s autobiography, Here Lies the Heart, in 1960. The papers were acquired by the Rosenbach in 1960 after negotiations between de Acosta and William McCarthy, the museum’s then curator, during which de Acosta had made it clear that she would not sell the Garbo letters separately, only if the Rosenbach purchased her entire collection of papers. The sale was prompted by de Acosta’s dire financial situation and, while it was with some reluctance that she parted with the more intimate correspondence in her possession, their purchase resolved a dilemma for her. As she later wrote to McCarthy, ‘I would not have had the courage to have burned these letters. I mean, of course, Eva, Gretas and Marlenes [sic]— who were lovers. So it seemed a God-sent moment when you took them. I only hope, as the years go on, and you are no longer there that they will be respected and protected from the eyes of vulgar people.’8 When the letters were finally opened, it was reported in the press that selected items were to be on public display for a period of time, but that the full collection was to be ‘available only to scholars’ (Cameron 2000)—indicating that the latter were happily excluded from the category of ‘vulgar people’. Diana McLellan, in her study, The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood (2000), asserts with respect to the Rosenbach holdings that while there are items dating from the period ‘any [letters] documenting their affair between 1931 and 1935 have vanished’, suggesting that ‘perhaps

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Mercedes herself destroyed them in a conciliatory gesture to her old lover’ (p.  376). From McLellan’s point of view, there is in effect not enough paper in the collection. In general, it is wise to assume that the letters one finds in any archival collection are but a fraction of the whole.9 Indeed, I have elsewhere described the typical archive of personal papers as resembling ‘a fishing net: the few threads … held taut over pockets of nothingness’ (Dever 1996, p.  120). While I fully acknowledge the necessity of reading any archival collection in terms of both what it does and potentially does not contain, McLellan’s presumption of precise gaps in the Garbo letters is worth examining, not least because she is also conjuring a form of ‘nothingness’. While noting that there are items dating from 1931 through 1935, McLellan rapidly discounts those brief and somewhat mundane cards and notes, instead pursuing the notion that the affair must inevitably have sponsored another quite particular kind of correspondence—one more intimate and explicit than that which is in evidence in the extant papers—and that such letters would necessarily have conformed to a specific and recognizable generic form (the ‘love letter’) offering textual confirmation of the sexual. The same view is reflected in biographer Karen Swenson’s comment that ‘the fact that the letters didn’t say anything explicit, like “I love you or I need you”, says a lot’ (quoted in Cameron 2000). Both appear persuaded that sexual passion necessarily generates a particular textual outpouring and that the rise and retirement of that passion when captured in epistolary form offers both legibility and narrative coherence. In contrast, Ann Cvetkovich notes that ‘subject to idiosyncrasies of the psyche and the logic of the unconscious, emotional experience and the memory of it demand and produce an unusual archive, often one that resists coherence of narrative or that is fragmented and ostensibly arbitrary’ (2002, p. 110). The implied twin conditions of sexual thraldom and epistolary fever are probably indebted, at least in part, to the very industry that created the Garbo legend, namely Hollywood cinema. The majority of Garbo’s films were highly tortured romance narratives, and while she may have routinely played the ‘notorious woman’, those characters ‘invariably remained vulnerable to a single vision of love as embodied by one man … She was Superwoman; love was kryptonite’ (Lasalle 2000, p.  84). In numerous films, including The Divine Woman (1928) and The Mysterious Lady (1928), love letters or hastily scribbled notes exchanged between lovers operate as significant plot devices (Fig.  2.1). Further, the screen image of Garbo as eternally sensual, swooning and more

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Fig. 2.1  Greta Garbo stars in The Divine Woman (1928), directed by Victor Sjöström. (Photo: Everett Collection/Alamy)

accustomed to the horizontal10 (Fig.  2.2) is suggestive certainly of the burning passion that apparently makes its hapless victims prey to ‘the allure of the written text’, the correspondence that promises them ‘a symbolic intercourse’ (Carson 1986, p. 106).11 For commentators such as McLellan and Swenson, the de Acosta collection lacks some critical form of evidence imagined exclusively in terms of a clear and revealing textual record. However, as Lisa Cohen has noted, this is a collection ‘that suggests how peculiar collecting, collections, and the idea of evidence are’ (2012, p. 179). Questions of evidence and intimacy are ones that have taxed historians, not least because, as Cvetkovich observes, there is an ‘invisibility that often surrounds intimate life, especially sexuality’, not least because ‘sex and feelings are too personal or too ephemeral to leave records’ (2002, pp. 110, 112). It is apparent that de Acosta was prone to write to her lovers in passionate, voluble and, at times,

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Fig. 2.2  A cinema poster for Camille (1936), starring Greta Garbo and directed by George Cukor. (Photo: Silver Screen/Alamy)

explicit terms (her correspondence with Dietrich, for example, is replete with sexually suggestive detail12), but Garbo was not known to lean towards the explicit or the indiscreet in her own correspondence nor to encourage such practices in those who corresponded with her. According to de Acosta in Here Lies the Heart, Garbo explicitly linked the management of correspondence to the management of her privacy, as illustrated in her reported treatment of fan mail: In the days when she received thousands of fan mail letters a week she suffered from them. She never opened them and they were burned on the back lot of the studio. I know these letters caused her sleepless nights. She worried about the senders even though she would have no part of them. Once when I said to her that perhaps these poor fans had a need to write to her, she answered, ‘But what right do they have to intrude in my private life?’ (de Acosta 1960, p. 317)13

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As Dreher noted before the opening of the archive, Garbo was a notoriously brief correspondent. More than that, she was notably uncomfortable writing in English (she spoke no English at all when she arrived in America in 1925), found her own handwriting ugly, detested signing autographs and maintained a lifelong reticence and paranoia about exposure where her private life was concerned. Evidently recognizing the letter form’s ‘equal potential for secrecy or publicity’ (Klein 2001, p.  6), she rarely signed her letters with more than an initial (G or GG), was given to hiding behind pseudonyms (most famously ‘Harriet Brown’)14 and issued correspondents—casual and intimate alike—with instructions on how to avoid communicating with her in ways that either drew attention to her presence in a particular locale or that would make their correspondence identifiable if chanced upon by prying eyes. It is not surprising therefore that her letters are generally marked by strong elements of self-censorship. She wrote to de Acosta on one occasion in 1938 that she was struggling as always with some ‘personal things’, but she does not elaborate within the letter itself on what they might be.15 On a much later occasion, she gave de Acosta pedantic instructions about how she must be sure to glue the envelopes together firmly when writing to her and how such letters should not be addressed to her under her own name.16 For these reasons, Garbo was clearly far from a model correspondent. That letter writing was, for her, a less-than-privileged form of communication is evident, moreover, in her choice of stationery. While Dietrich penned de Acosta notes in green ink on her signature silver stationery and de Acosta herself allegedly arrived back from one trip to Europe with a trunk containing ‘hundreds of boxes of light blue stationery with her address engraved in silver’ worth some $1000 (Schanke 2003, p. 123),17 Garbo rarely resorted to formal notepaper. Most of her letters to de Acosta are written in pencil in rather childish capital letters on less than romantic torn-off sheets from lined exercise books or a scrap ripped from a film treatment.18 The only formal or ‘respectable’ looking notes are written on the occasional item of hotel stationery. For these reasons, while I am sympathetic to the idea underpinning McLellan’s speculation about missing letters—and the guiding principle that one should be conscious always of the partial and fragmentary nature of any archival holding—I suggest it is doubtful in this particular instance that—to de Acosta’s eternal regret—Garbo ever produced anything entirely worthy of the erotically intimate epistolary tradition McLellan invokes or the destructive impulse she imagines followed from it.

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What then can the surviving letters tell us? In many respects, they are unexceptional. Certainly, it is possible to note the playful intimacy of the pet names by which Garbo routinely addresses de Acosta: ‘Sweetie!!’, ‘little one’, ‘Honeychild’ and—most frequently—‘my boy’ or ‘Dear Boy’. The letters themselves, however, are generally brief, for the most part stylistically bereft, occasionally grammatically challenged, and taken as a whole they might be thought to offer few significant biographical insights. Garbo complains about her health, the trials of moving around, the complexities associated with travel. At first glance they could well be considered unworthy of the fuss they generated. So, how to read them? The series of hasty interpretive gestures that attended their opening not only failed to register the materiality of the correspondence but also to recognize that a letter is a text that ‘does not carry its own meaning or politics already inside of itself’ (Grossberg 1992, p. 52), and the obvious correlative that the act of reading must itself then be constitutive of meaning. One of the few commentators to invoke the possibility of the reader’s active role in interpretation did so in order to dismiss rather than recommend the practice. Biographer Karen Swenson, while putting forth the view that on her reading of them the letters did not ‘prove’ a lesbian relationship, conceded in interviews that ‘other researchers may see something different. If they feel the need to see lesbianism, they’ll see it’ (quoted in Cameron 2000). How then might I tackle the question of seeing ‘something different’ from those who stood around at the Rosenbach in April 2000? Initial readings by those present at the opening were directed towards identifying explicit expressions of passion and desire within individual letters, and they claim to have found ‘nothing’. Of course, they overlooked the potential intimacy that may in fact be present in the sharing of the mundane and the daily, those details of minor ailments, fabric dyes and aversions to certain foods. But I would argue that the play of desire here is not necessarily to be read off any one individual letter but is threaded across them. I have elsewhere made the point that reading any letters contained in an archive is a slightly unnatural act (Dever 1996, p. 121): the fact of the letters having been archived produces a very particular reading experience as the process of archiving inevitably forces an order and linearity from what were once irregular fragments of correspondence. It is for this reason that Rosemarie Bodenheimer points to the manner in which readers of archived letters may become ‘creators of plots where none were intended’ (1994, p. 19). However, this neat, sequential ordering allows

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individual letters to take on new significances, not least because unexpected patterns of response and ironies of juxtaposition emerge across the correspondence. In this way, my reading again takes me away from the usual feverish focus on interpreting the text of individual letters to reading the entire correspondence as a compelling, if discontinuous, narrative. In her celebrated role as Marguerite Gauthier in the 1936 film Camille,19 Garbo plays a scene in which Marguerite dismisses her would-be lover Armand (Robert Taylor) by telling him, ‘You should go away and not see me anymore’. But every time Armand attempts to leave the room, she hauls him back, so that we hear her verbally dismissing him at the same time as seeing her failing to let go of his hand. Watching this scene one is struck by the obvious parallels in her letters to de Acosta where over the decades Garbo replicates the ‘sending away’ and ‘reeling back’ gesture of the Freudian fort/da game,20 that symbolic play of control where pleasure attends upon the repeated staging of loss and restoration (Freud 1920/2003, pp. 52–53). And while it is doubtful whether Garbo’s letters could ever qualify as love letters in any conventional sense, it is worth noting Linda Kauffman’s observation that as a genre such letters—with their inevitable dependence upon the tension between presence and absence, mastery and powerlessness—can be considered ‘a metonym of the fort-da game’ (1992, p. 113). It has been suggested that one condition of close friendship with the prickly star was that one ‘must never put her on the spot, or try to pin her down for an appointment’ (McLellan 2000, p. 91), and while de Acosta’s letters to Garbo haven’t survived, it is evident from Garbo’s responses that certainly in her later communications with the star de Acosta regularly violated this edict by pressing for information as to her whereabouts, her travel plans and the possibility that their movements across the United States and in Europe could be synchronized so as to permit some form of meeting or contact. In response, she received from Garbo a litany of refusals: that she will not spend any time with her, that she will not telephone her, that she will not tell her of her plans, and that she will not be bothered.21 But Garbo was not always so adamant. On other occasions we see her teasing deployment of ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’— two adverbs that commonly appear in her later notes and which have the force of being not quite ‘no’, while also not quite ‘yes’. ‘Maybe’ she can see her another day, she writes; or ‘perhaps’ they can meet in the fall; she will call her in Paris, ‘maybe’.22 In one instance, Garbo even demonstrates her explicit awareness of the confusion likely to arise out of this tormenting performance of indecision by asking de Acosta directly if she can make

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any sense of the ‘maybe I will, but then again perhaps I won’t’ form of her reply.23 Letter by letter, desire here entertains a future, but time and again it is deferred or cancelled. As Cohen observes, Garbo ‘enjoyed controlling and deflating Mercedes’ hopes’ (2012, p. 158). And it is in this play of desire and denial, of almost ritualized request and refusal, that one can discern an eroticized tension between the two women that extends over decades. The most famous episode of this global yanking around involves Garbo agreeing to de Acosta coming to Stockholm from New York (‘for just one day’) in order to have dinner with her.24 The letter was actually sent to de Acosta at a Paris hotel, although in Here Lies the Heart she writes that she received the letter ‘after I returned to New York’ (1960, p. 268) and made the journey from there: ‘The trip was very rough. This was the month of October and the gales kept the portholes closed and even boarded up’ (p. 269). De Acosta continues: Less than a week later I arrived in Stockholm at one o’clock in the morning. It was bitter cold and I was frozen and desperately tired, partly because of the nervous tension and my excitement about the whole adventure. (de Acosta, p. 269)

That de Acosta could always be reliably put off and then hauled back as necessity or whimsy dictated is also evident in the notes and letters in which Garbo commissions her to run what are essentially personal errands for her: picking up her lampshades, bringing her fur coat to Paris, making hotel bookings for her, buying her a pair of slippers.25 De Acosta appears to have fulfilled these requests, however trivial or inconvenient, thus confirming her position as one of abject adoration, the loyal lover/friend/fan who will not only undertake the menial task but will relish it: the fact of her having been asked to perform the service representing at once an expression of Garbo’s ongoing need of her, a further demonstration of their continuing intimate connection and a sanctioned space from within which to negotiate the often tense and always shifting play of proximity and distance that defined her relationship to the star. But what about the paper? McLellan’s idea that more intimate and telling letters are simply missing from the record is at odds with de Acosta’s declaration that she could never have burned such letters. And I suggest that declaration is supported by the fact that the de Acosta papers in the Rosenbach demonstrate a very specific relationship to the preservation of signs of the beloved or, to use Jesse Matz’s suggestive phrasing, to ‘the

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erotics of paper’ (2006). This is in fact something that many researchers can understand. As I observed in the previous chapter, while there is comparatively little published commentary on the material properties of what we encounter in the archives, it is generally the lure of paper that calls us forth. Indeed, the fierce scholarly preference that many of us maintain for handling original letters and documents over microfilmed and digitized surrogates is evidence of the power of physical contact with such documents to generate that desirable sense of proximity to the objects of one’s research. As DeVun and McClure highlight so beautifully, ‘the material of the archive is inseparable from the uncategorized bodies with which it engages: the touch of human hands, the impulse of the scholar, an active tide of research wherein these objects, once again, move’ (2014, p. 122). While new technologies for reproducing and circulating unique archival documents in digital formats mean that the concept of the archive as a defined physical space is, in the words of Harriet Bradley, ‘loosening and exploding’ (1999, p. 117), many researchers remain reluctant to forego the particular intimacies that we associate with site visits if that means foregoing the pleasures of losing ourselves in paper. An awareness of these particular pleasures, I argue, is fundamental to interpreting de Acosta’s personal archive and her gestures of preservation. In considering the form of her archive, it is clear that de Acosta took a quite particular approach to personal ‘record-keeping’ as a way to evidence significant events and key relationships in her life. In her analysis of de Acosta’s collecting practices, Cohen highlights how by retaining the letters, paper scraps and clippings that linked her to the famous and the celebrated, she was not only laying down proof of her own significance and of her participation in that glittering world, but of the fact that she had been ‘loved and admired’ (2012, p. 181). In the case of Garbo, de Acosta not only preserved letters and telegrams, she also appears to have cut out and kept the handwritten mailing labels from parcels, as well as the traced paper outline of Garbo’s foot that was sent so that she might buy the star some new slippers. It appears that de Acosta preserved anything Garbo’s hand could be presumed to have touched and I would argue that the hand is a provocative figure or trace here. Indeed, de Acosta’s collection contains a velvet-framed photograph of Garbo’s hand (Fig.  2.3), a detail from a 1925 photo portrait of Garbo taken by the celebrated photographer Arnold Genthe when the star was newly arrived in Hollywood. As psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has observed, lovers are ‘notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of

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Fig. 2.3  Mercedes de Acosta kept a framed photo of Garbo’s hand, a detail from a 1925 photo portrait by Arnold Genthe. (Photo: Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia)

signs and wonders’ (1994, p. 31), and de Acosta here provides a stellar example of the practice. Indeed, she was clearly prey to a strong auto-­ archival impulse which manifested itself over time in the obsessive assembling, ordering and preserving of the unfolding paper trail left by Garbo. Garbo’s letters are housed in clear document sleeves with one letter per Manila folder. In the reading room they are issued in lots of five numbered folders. The envelopes are still present and the letters are folded inside. Some envelopes have limited address details and others none at all, suggesting those items may have been hand delivered rather than mailed. Among the most intriguing items in her collection is a small blank florist’s card preserved together with its equally tiny envelope (Figs. 2.4 and 2.5). The finding aid lists the florist’s card as dating from 1958 and when I inquired as to how this date had been arrived at, I was informed by library staff that all the materials had arrived at the Rosenbach arranged in a series of individually dated envelopes, each containing all the items received by de Acosta from Garbo in a particular year. The tiny envelope reads, ‘Mercedes de Acosta 315 E 68 Str’, and my notes from that day in the reading room state simply: ‘Text: Card is completely blank’,26 as if acknowledging how this item had confounded my initial efforts to engage with the correspondence via a focus on text and transcription. The card effectively says nothing and in terms of conventional practices of archival appraisal it might be considered to hold little or no value. Nevertheless, in the context of this collection it clearly resonates or ‘speaks’. As a communicative act, the card is at once enigmatic, flirta-

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Fig. 2.4  Envelope addressed to Mercedes de Acosta. (Photo: Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia)

Fig. 2.5  Blank card contained in the envelope addressed to Mercedes de Acosta. (Photo: Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia)

tious, guarded and teasing. It embodies the paranoia around privacy and exposure that we know Garbo experienced, at the same time as announcing the long-vanished gift of flowers that almost certainly expressed something of the enduring connection she and de Acosta shared. Like the paper mailing labels from parcels that sit alongside it, the card materially evidences something—a pattern of interactions, a series of gifts, a shared emotional history—which in turn endows that same ephemeral paper trace with an undeniably precious quality for its recipient. The card’s preservation, first by de Acosta and now by the Rosenbach, speaks of—and to—the circuits of emotion and feeling that sponsored the ongoing, if intermittent, correspondence between the two women and of the affective intensity attaching to its surviving paper traces. As Marika Cifor observes, recognizing the affective intensities of the archived mate-

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rials we encounter means recognizing ‘the reality that there are times, places and spaces where lives are explicitly lived through affects (love, pain, pleasure, hope)’ (2016, p. 12), and this seems particularly apt in relation to de Acosta’s intimate archive, a repository of complex feelings and desires sticking somehow to these tiny items of ephemera. In his discussions of everyday life, Walter Benjamin writes of the imprints and traces left by individuals in the everyday world, traces that others might discern and follow. He draws a very useful and—for my purposes here—telling distinction between the ‘trace’ and that to which he refers as the ‘aura’: The trace is the appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is appearance of distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us. (Benjamin 1999, p. 447)

This distinction is a particularly apt one when considering a luminous star such as the Divine Garbo.27 What Benjamin suggests here is that in the trace—the sign of indexical presence—we enter into the possession of the thing, in the aura the mystique of the thing overpowers us. He connects then the trace and our possession—through it—of the thing we seek to the condition of our own possession by it. Just as love letters themselves embody the contradictory elements of intimacy and distance—the presence of the letter marking the absence of the lover at the same time as it makes the absent one present—the accumulation of letters and other papery ephemera associated with Garbo represent indexical traces of the presence of the absent, auratic star: the letters and paper scraps that testify to her absence producing the archive of her presence. As I noted above, a significant proportion of the later letters in this collection comprises Garbo’s repeated refusals to accede to de Acosta’s entreaties to meet and continue their previous intimacy, and, in the face of this demand to maintain distance, the piles of letters become the key signs or sole evidence of the special relationship de Acosta shared with the star. Anne Carson writes of how ‘letters are the mechanism of erotic paradox, at once connective and separative, painful and sweet […] From within letters, Eros acts’ (1986, p. 92). But in this instance, where the text of the letters is so brief and banal, I would argue that the affective and erotic sensations are generated instead around these precious gatherings of paper. Viewed within this context, the blank florist’s card that

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de Acosta has preserved is not a mute document but a voluble one, one that makes legible her connection to the star. For de Acosta, the body to which she has access is not the body of the star, but the body of papers that gives their often tense and attenuated relationship a continuing material form. While she had the paper, in some sense de Acosta ‘had’ Garbo or a tangible connection with her. This was a precious body and de Acosta was heavily invested in its care and preservation, not its destruction. Indeed, given the slight and often elliptical nature of much of what Garbo writes, it is in the weight of paper preserved first by de Acosta and now by a formal collecting institution rather than in the written contents of this correspondence that the pressure of intimate desire finds its expression. It is there that the much debated (and often disputed) emotional content of this relationship with its lopsided intensity can be unravelled. But not all paper remains necessarily carry the same intense associations. Patricia White observes that de Acosta’s collection of fan magazine and newspaper clippings differed little from those any Garbo fan might have accumulated (2001, p. 257), which makes the letters, cards and telegrams the particular grounds upon which de Acosta sustained the distinction between the thraldom of the mere fan and herself as a privileged intimate of the Divine Garbo. As such, these papers represented for de Acosta the crucial means to keeping a particular narrative—that of the ‘special relationship’—going. It is this carefully curated paper trail, moreover, that preserves a trace of the relationship itself for posterity or, to use Jodie Medd’s figuration, for a ‘posthumous queer future’ (2006) that might read de Acosta’s dedicated archival impulse as one that both memorializes and anticipates, one that ensures ‘something’ rather than ‘nothing’ is left on the record (despite her fears that such a future might contain ‘vulgar people’). In this way, the preserved letters and ephemeral scraps of paper mark the transformation of personal memory into a fragment of a more public history. Those who attended the opening of the Garbo letters and pronounced them to offer ‘nothing’ evidently favoured a form of literacy that ‘objectifies and detaches us from what we read’, [such that] ‘information becomes almost rootless, floating away from the artifact in which it was anchored’ (Taylor 1995, p. 9). In their commitment to an ultimately disappointing exercise in close textual reading, they overlooked or discounted any relationship between meaning and materiality. And yet, in my discussion of the part played by paper in evidencing intimacy, I have shown how it is in the materiality rather than the text of the preserved letters that the relationship between

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Garbo and de Acosta becomes both legible and intelligible. Indeed, these paper traces help to remind us that ‘objects such as photographs, letters, and tokens are not merely valued for their content’, but as ‘sensory interfaces’ that ‘gain affective value’ through intimate exchange (Cram 2016, p. 214, original emphasis). De Acosta’s papers remind us that archives exist in dynamic relationship not just to the past, but to the present and the future, and that a crucial element in that dynamism is a struggle over meaning and the never-­innocent reading practices we bring to bear on a collection in its totality, on the individual items found therein and on the relationship between the two. In putting forward the case for paper’s potential, I am inevitably questioning how we determine what order of thing matters in such struggles. The Garbo letters provide a suggestive fillip for considering where questions concerning matter and materiality might push our thinking around reading practices and archival evidence. Thomas Keenan highlights that evidence ‘does not close the case. Evidence—whether it’s a written document, a testimony, or an object—opens the case. Something is presented for consideration, debate, dispute, interpretation—and other interpretations’ (Keenan and Steyerl 2014, p. 58). Or, in Vikki Bell’s succinct paraphrasing of Keenan, evidence ‘asks to be told what it is’ (2016), something that became all too clear to me as I sat before the blank florist’s card. That card forced me to engage first with the archived page as a material object and then to consider the productivity of piled-up paper and what it might add to our thinking. In particular, I was prompted to confront how a renewed sensitivity to the materiality and expressive potential of paper might offer alternative ways to approach archival artefacts and, in turn, to consider a different approach to the vexed question of ‘evidence’ when researching intimate histories and archival traces of desire. What might it mean to read materially? What difference might it make? To sift these celebrated letters and ephemera is to confront these questions and to think about the conditions under which particular accumulations of paper come into being, about the affective value of what we encounter there, and about how attention to paper might productively unsettle conventional archival logics. As the Garbo letters show, when we engage thoroughly with these questions, something remarkable happens: the erotic possibilities of something rather than ‘nothing’ start to unfold.

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Notes 1. See also the essay ‘Privilege of Unknowing’ (Sedgwick 1993, pp. 23–51) in which Sedgwick makes the case ‘against the killing pretense that a culture does not know what it knows’ (p. 51). Elizabeth Meese (1996, p. 91) makes a related point when she argues that ‘it matters when a critic avoids (a form of suppression) the word lesbian; as long as the word matters, makes a social, political or artistic difference, it matters when lesbian is not spoken’. 2. Garbo biographer Barry Paris refers to the ‘relief of the Garbo estate’ that the Rosenbach letters were able to be dismissed as containing ‘no concrete evidence that any sexual relationship between these two women ever existed’ (Paris 2000b). 3. For a short biographical account of de Acosta’s life, see Smith (2002). More detailed accounts can be found in Schanke (2003) and Cohen (2012). 4. De Acosta reported that Salka Viertel said to her as she left that day, ‘Greta liked you and she likes few people’ (de Acosta 1960, p. 214). 5. Gever notes that while it was initially reticent, some of this coverage hinted at the nature of their relationship and she cites a 1931 ‘Film Gossip of the Month’ column which trumpeted: ‘Garbo has a new friend! And when Garbo becomes interested enough to have even a rumored friendship … it is news in Hollywood’ (2003, p. 129). 6. Garbo and Dietrich, rival European stars in Hollywood, each claimed never to have been introduced to the other. However, Diana McLellan demonstrates that the two did meet in Germany in 1925 on the set of G.W.  Pabst’s film Die Freudlose Gasse or The Joyless Street, and that they even shared a crucial scene in which Dietrich catches the fainting Garbo. Dietrich is not listed in the credits but she is clearly recognizable in stills from the original film. The film was made immediately prior to Garbo’s departure for Hollywood, and McLellan speculates that Dietrich seduced Garbo during the filming and then earned her eternal ire by making intimate details of the affair public. See McLellan (2000, pp. 57–66). Dietrich’s presence in the film is also noted in Conway, McGregor and Ricci (1963, p. 41). 7. In an undated letter from the period, de Acosta wrote to Dietrich concerning her obsession with Garbo: ‘I now realize that I have been an utter and damned bore and I think you have been an angel to have put up with me.’ It is worth noting that despite confessing to remorse for her ‘boring’ behaviour, de Acosta continues on for 20 pages in this same letter ostensibly explaining her obsession with Garbo for Dietrich’s benefit. The letter is a fascinating performance. Letter from Mercedes de Acosta to Marlene

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Dietrich, ‘Monday’ [c. late 1932]. Marlene Dietrich Collection Berlin (MDCB), Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin. 8. Mercedes de Acosta to William McCarthy, 31 October 1964, folder 07:01. Mercedes de Acosta Papers, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA. 9. In Possession, A.S. Byatt’s satire on letters, romance and literary biography, the feminist literary scholar, Maud Bailey, sums up the problem quite well when she says: ‘You know, if you read the collected letters of any writer—if you read her biography—you will always get a sense that there’s something missing, something the biographers don’t have access to, the real thing, the crucial thing… There are always letters that were destroyed. The letters, usually’ (1990, p. 89). 10. On Garbo’s screen presence, Barry Paris comments: ‘The metabolism that photographed as listless sensuality was really closer to fatigue. What looked like a migraine on Joan Crawford was, on Garbo, “an intense form of sexual yearning.”’ Cited in Maslin (1995). 11. Gillian Rose makes the qualifying point that ‘however satisfying writing is … it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and the agony of loving’ (1995, p. 54) 12. In one letter dating from around 1932, de Acosta writes to Dietrich: ‘On the 16th of this month it will be eight small weeks since that holy and flaming night that you gave yourself to me.’ In another letter from the same period she writes, ‘I have missed the closeness I had with you and the nights, when in the dark, I have been able to hold you in my arms.’ Marlene Dietrich Collection Berlin (MCDB), Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin. 13. Naturally, Garbo’s public utterances on the subject of her fans differed considerably. An article entitled, ‘What the Public Wants’, and published under her name in the Saturday Review in 1931, included the following sentiment: ‘The popular artiste who is loved and admired by a large section of the public must in his or her turn have a boundless kindliness and affection for the public’ (1931, p. 857). Gever makes the point that ‘Garbo’s famous antipathy to fans’ desire to know more about her … has been interpreted in a variety of ways: cynics have wondered if her avoidance of publicity was a cunning public relations ploy intended to create an aura of mystery that elevated her above other glamorous but more accessible stars, while more recent commentators explain it as a frightened effort to keep her lesbian sexuality secret’ (2003, p.  129). Interestingly, McLellan, in contrast, quotes Garbo telling reporter Dorothy Calhoun, ‘The thing I like best about Hollywood is that here is the only place in the world where you can live as you live and nobody will say anything about it, no matter what you do!’ (2000, p. 74). 14. For further discussion of these practices, see Swenson (1997, pp.  431, 461–462, 487–489).

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15. Greta Garbo to Mercedes de Acosta, 13 September 1938, Box 23, Folder 15. Garbo material 1197/8,  Mercedes de Acosta Papers, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA. 16. Greta Garbo to Mercedes de Acosta, 29 April 1950, Box 23, Folder 30. Garbo material 1197/8, Mercedes de Acosta Papers, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA. 17. Schanke notes that Abram Poole, Mercedes’ husband, was less than impressed with this extravagant use of his money and stormed off the dock, leaving de Acosta and her trunk of stationery behind. However, Nigel Hall makes the point that some letter writers are alive to the materiality of the process and invest heavily in it: ‘Such people do choose letter writing equipment carefully. As much as any other items that people own and use in their lives, it can represent who one is, what one believes one is, where one belongs, and how one wants to be perceived by others’ (1999, p. 87). 18. Greg Guiliano of the Rosenbach Museum observed in relation to the scrappy nature of much of what constitutes the Garbo correspondence that ‘You get the feeling that’s what she thought Mercedes was worth.’ 19. Camille. Dir. George Cukor. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1937. 20. The fort/da game (from the German for ‘Gone!’ and ‘There!’) is a psychoanalytic concept originally outlined by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920/2003) to account for the pleasures (and pain) generated by certain repetitive gestures, particularly the staged loss and reappearance of a favoured object within the child’s reach, a game which might be understood as the symbolic dramatization of the loss and return of the mother. 21. See, for example, telegram from Garbo to de Acosta, 7 March 1948 (Box 23, Folder 20); letter from Garbo to de Acosta, 26 February 1946 (Box 23, Folder 25); letter from Garbo to de Acosta, 17 Sept 1958 (Box 23, Folder 79). Garbo material 1197/8,  Mercedes de Acosta Papers, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA. 22. See, for example, note from Garbo to de Acosta, 24 December [1948?] (Box 23, Folder 23); letter from Garbo to de Acosta, 18 May 1950 (Box 23, Folder 32); letter from Garbo to de Acosta, 29 July 1951 (Box 23, Folder 38); letter from Garbo to de Acosta, 25 August 1952 (Box 23, Folder 48).  Garbo material 1197/8, Mercedes de Acosta Papers, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA. 23. Letter from Garbo to de Acosta, 8 February 1951 (Box 23, Folder 36).  Garbo material 1197/8, Mercedes de Acosta Papers, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA. 24. Letter from Garbo to de Acosta, 19 September 1935 (Box 23, Folder 15).  Garbo material 1197/8, Mercedes de Acosta Papers, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA. 25. See: note from Garbo to de Acosta, March or April [1938?] (Box 23, Folder 14); letter from Garbo to de Acosta, 29 April 1950 (Box 23, Folder

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30); letter from Garbo to de Acosta, [19?] December 1951 (Box 23, Folder 39); letter from Garbo to de Acosta, 17 September 1958 (Box 23, Folder 79).  Garbo material 1197/8, Mercedes de Acosta Papers, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA. 26. Box 23, Folder 84, Garbo material 1197/8, Mercedes de Acosta Papers, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA. 27. As Roland Barthes notes, ‘The name given to her, the Divine, probably aimed to convey less a superlative state of beauty than the essence of her corporeal person, descended from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light’ (1972, pp. 56–57).

Bibliography Anon. (2000a) Garbo letters unsealed. Newsmakers. Houston Chronicle, 16 April, 2. Anon. (2000b) Lesbian letters leave Garbo mystique alone. The Age (Melbourne), 19 April. Anon. (2000c) Garbo papers reveal nothing. The Age (Melbourne), 19 April. Barthes, R. (1972) The Face of Garbo. In Mythologies. Trans. A. Lavers. London, Jonathon Cape, 56–57. Bell, V. (2016) Re-emerging pasts: Forums for telling in contemporary Argentina and Chile. Paper presented at the Third ISA Forum of Sociology, Vienna, 10–14 July. Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project. Trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA and London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bishop, T. (2005) Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books. New York and London, W.W. Norton. Bodenheimer, R. (1994) The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction. Ithaca, NY and London, Cornell University Press. Bradley, H. (1999) The seductions of the archive: Voices lost and found. History of the Human Sciences, 12 (2), 107–122. Burton, A. (ed.) (2006) Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History. Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Byatt, A.S. (1990) Possession. London, Vintage. Cameron, M. (2000) Garbo keeps her mystery. Herald-Sun (Melbourne), 19 April. Carson, A. (1986) Eros the Bittersweet. Princeton, NJ, Dalkey Archive Press. Cifor, M. (2016) Affecting relations: Introducing affect theory to archival discourse. Archival Science, 16 (1), 7–31. Cohen, L. (2012) All We Know: Three Lives. New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux. Conway, M., McGregor, D. and Ricci, M. (1963) The Films of Greta Garbo. New York, Cadillac Publishing.

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Cram, E. (2016) Archival ambience and sensory memory: Generating queer intimacies in the settler colonial archive. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 13 (2), 109–129. Cvetkovich, A. (2002) In the archives of lesbian feeling: Documentary and popular culture. Camera Obscura, 17 (1), 107–147. de Acosta, M. (1960) Here Lies the Heart. New York, William Morrow & Co. de Lauretis, T. (1994) The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press. Dever, M. (1996) Reading other people’s mail. Archives and Manuscripts, 24 (1), 116–129. DeVun, L. and McClure, M.J. (2014) Archives behaving badly. Radical History Review, 120, 121–130. Duval Smith, A. (2005) Lonely Garbo’s love secret is exposed. The Guardian, 11 September. Freud, S. (1920/2003) Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings. Trans. John Reddick. London and New York, Penguin Books. Garbo, G. (1931) What the public wants. Saturday Review (London), 13 June, 857. Gever, M. (2003) Entertaining Lesbians: Celebrity, Sexuality, and Self-Invention. New York and London, Routledge. Grossberg, L. (1992) The affective sensibility of fandom. In L.A. Lewis (ed.) The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. London and New York, Routledge, 50–68. Hall, N. (1999) The materiality of letter writing: A nineteenth century perspective. In D.  Barton and N.  Hall (eds.) Letter Writing as Social Practice. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 83–108. Kauffman, L. (1992) Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Keenan, T. and Steyerl, H. (2014) What is a document? An exchange between Thomas Keenan and Hito Steyerl. Aperture, 214, 58–64. Klein, S. (2001) ‘Me, you, the wide world’: Letters and women’s activism in nineteenth century America. In K. Wells (ed.) Women Writers: A Zine, an online journal (16 May), 31. Kulhavy, J.B. and Seaborn, J. (2000) Garbo writes! So what’s in those secret letters? Our sources say Greta was one wacky, fun-loving gal. Austin American-­ Statesman, 7 April. Lasalle, M. (2000) Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood. New York, St. Martin’s Press. Maslin, J. (1995) Greta Garbo’s pedestrian side—Everything not on film’. The New  York Times, 14 March. Available at http://www.greta-garbo.de/com/ PedestrianSide.html. Accessed 1 October 2018.

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Matz, J. (2006) Out in the archive: Roundtable on experience and theory in queer archival work. Paper presented at Out of the Archive, Modernist Studies Association 8, Tulsa, OK, 19–22 October. McLellan, D. (2000) The Girls: Sappho goes to Hollywood. New  York, LA Weekly Books. Medd, J. (2006) Posthumous Queer Modernism. Paper presented at the ‘Posthumous Publication’ seminar, Out of the Archive, Modernist Studies Association 8, Tulsa, OK, 19–22 October. Meese, E. (1996) When Virginia looked at Vita, what did she see; or, lesbian: Feminist: Woman—what’s the differ(e/a)nce? In M.  Vicinus (ed.) Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, Indiana University Press, 85–101. Paris, B. (2000a) Letter bombs? Museum will open Garbo’s correspondence to alleged socialite lover. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 13 April. Paris, B. (2000b) Mercedes and Garbo: Read between the lines. Pittsburgh Post-­ Gazette, 24 April. Phillips, A. (1994) On Flirtation: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Uncommitted Life. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Rose, G. (1995) Love’s Work. London, Chatto & Windus. Schanke, R. (2003) ‘That Furious Lesbian’: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta. Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press. Sedgwick, E.K. (1990) Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press. Sedgwick, E.K. (1993) Tendencies. Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Smith, P.J. (2002) Mercedes de Acosta. GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Culture. Available at http://www.glbtqarchive.com/arts/acosta_m_A.pdf. Accessed 7 October 2018. Swenson, K. (1997) Greta Garbo: A Life Apart. New  York, A Lisa Drew Book/Scribner. Taylor, H. (1995) ‘Heritage’ revisited: Documents as artifacts in the context of museums and material culture. Archivaria, 40, 8–20. White, P. (2001) Black and white: Mercedes de Acosta’s glorious enthusiasms. Camera Obscura, 15 (3), 227–265.

CHAPTER 3

Archival Mess

Abstract  This chapter focuses on the archived papers of Australian writer Eve Langley (1904–1974). Langley is generally better known today for her gender non-conforming dress, her history of institutionalization and her obsessive identification with the writer Oscar Wilde than for her achievements as a poet and novelist. Her initial literary success was followed by a growing imbalance between what she produced and what she published. Her literary papers are voluminous and their celebrated disorder has contributed to the pathologizing of their creator. I explore how embracing the messy materiality of Langley’s papers can provide alternative understandings of the shape of a literary career, ones that recognize continuing innovation and creativity over chaos and decline. Keywords  Eve Langley • Paper • Archives • Manuscripts • Materiality • Mess If, on the face of it, the issue for the Garbo–de Acosta correspondence explored in Chap. 2 was one of not-enough paper—the claims of apparently destroyed or otherwise absent letters making it possible to miss or dismiss the evidentiary potential of the paper that was there—in the case of Australian writer Eve Langley (1904–1974) the issue presents itself as one of too much paper. Interestingly, while worlds apart in almost every © The Author(s) 2019 M. Dever, Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49886-1_3

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respect, Garbo and Langley share oddly symmetrical histories of ­semi-­scandalous trouser-wearing in their younger days and reclusive later years. In all other respects, their profiles and legacies could not be more different. Langley benefited from the flurry of scholarly interest in Australia’s interwar women writers across the 1980s and 1990s and the publication of Joy Thwaite’s biography, The Importance of Being Eve Langley (1989), but since then she has largely dropped from sight. While various scholars have drawn attention to the quality of her early poetry, to the richly innovative nature of her prose, and to significant personal and professional links with Australian and New Zealand writers such as Douglas Stewart, Ruth Park, Hal Porter, and Robyn Hyde, her contribution to the literary culture of both countries in the interwar and immediate post-war years continues to be underappreciated (see Segerberg 1992; Winning 2002). Where Langley is remembered at all these days, it is likely to be as much for the less conventional aspects of her later years as it is for her early success as a poet and novelist.1 Critics acknowledge that it has been ‘almost impossible to side-step the biographical data that often obscures discussion of her work’ (Ellis 2001, para 9). Born Ethel Jane Langley in the Australian country town of Forbes in 1904, Langley called herself ‘Eve’. As a young woman in her twenties she and her younger sister ‘June’ (Lillian May) famously dressed in men’s clothing and went to work as itinerant farm hands, picking peas and hops in the Gippsland countryside in Australia’s southern state of Victoria (Fig. 3.1). It is this period of her life that is repeatedly—some would argue obsessively— fictionalized in writing across her career. By the time of the publication of her prize-winning2 semi-autobiographical first novel The Pea Pickers in 1942, Langley had left Australia for New Zealand, married a young artist, Hilary Clark, and was the mother of three young children. The Pea Pickers was widely praised for its vivid and poetic rendering of the Australian landscape, its flamboyant picaresque narrative with its cross-­dressed heroines and its unexpectedly comic insights. That the novel remains in print is a clear indication of the quality and inventiveness of the work. However, as noted above, this early literary success is generally overshadowed by the troubled decades that followed. This included a lengthy period of institutionalization in Auckland Mental Hospital (1942–1949), the changing of her name by deed poll to Oscar Wilde, and a tendency to adopt gender non-conforming dress (Fig. 3.2) and to refer to herself not as Eve but as ‘Steve’ after the youthful female central character of The Pea Pickers. She spent the final

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Fig. 3.1  Eve Langley and her sister June (‘Steve & Blue’), c. 1928. Eve & June Langley Collection, State Library of NSW, PXE 1333. (Photo: State Library of New South Wales)

years of her life living in an isolated and makeshift dwelling on the edges of Katoomba, a town in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. While Langley published a second novel White Topee in 1954, the vast majority of her later writing remains unpublished. Indeed, it is recorded that she sent over 4000 pages of ‘single-spaced typescript on rose-coloured paper’ (Thwaite 2000, para 5) to her publisher Angus & Robertson in Sydney, ultimately encouraging them to see themselves more as archivists than publishers. As she wrote to the distinguished editor Beatrice Davis: ‘I feel so amused to think of you and Nan [MacDonald] wondering what to do with all those books. Now, my dear, I told you to store them for me, at least, so don’t worry about publishing them.’3 One reader’s report prepared for her publisher covered a total of seven submitted manuscripts, and referred to ‘still more to come’.4 These thousands of pages now rest in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, alongside diverse personal papers, correspondence, notebooks, drawings, photos and eccentric and random inclusions such as her shopping lists (Fig. 3.3). Some of the manuscripts and correspondence came to the Library as part of the extensive Angus & Robertson publishing collection,5 and these were joined by a range of papers that were in Langley’s possession at the time of her death and

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Fig. 3.2  Eve Langley, studio portrait for her novel, White Topee, c. 1954. Eve & June Langley Collection, State Library of NSW, PXE 1333. (Photo: State Library of New South Wales)

which were simply handed in to the Library for safekeeping. Meg Stewart, daughter of the poet and literary editor Douglas Stewart, a long-time friend and supporter of Langley, delivered the majority of these around May 1975. She had been planning a film on Langley and it was she who reportedly discovered Langley’s body. According to the Library, the papers ‘were in the bush hut where Eve Langley died the year before. Conditions

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Fig. 3.3  Eve Langley’s carefully preserved shopping lists from among her literary and personal papers. Eve Langley—Papers, 1926–1974, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS 4188. (Photo by the author)

in the hut were very bad. [Stewart] dried out the water-damaged papers. Some other papers were so badly decayed they had to be left behind.’ In November 1975 a ‘further package of papers [was] handed in to custody of the Library which had been “found among discarded material”’.6 This account suggests that some of the more eccentric (and suggestive) items in the collection are likely to have been included by accident rather than design, haphazardly gathered together in the effort to protect everything that may have constituted Langley’s ‘paperwork’ from the elements. Those items include a series of used government envelopes stitched together at the corner (Fig. 3.4). Langley’s was without doubt a prodigious paper output and one marked by a growing imbalance across her career between what she produced and what she succeeded in publishing. She frequently reports in correspondence that she is endeavouring to make progress on multiple

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Fig. 3.4  Stitched together government envelopes from among Eve Langley’s literary and personal papers. Eve Langley—Papers, 1926–1974, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS 4188. (Photo by the author)

manuscripts simultaneously. In 1954, for example, she informs her editor, Nan McDonald, that she is ‘writing five books at once, at present, and putting good work into all of them’.7 Already it should be apparent that in tackling Langley one has no choice but to tackle paper. However, the sensationalism that has attached to key episodes in her life and more particularly to her macabre death—her body lying undiscovered and surrounded by odd, elaborately wrapped (empty) paper parcels while rats gnawed her face away—has only heightened the existing suspicion of her vast and unwieldy manuscript body as little more than the troubling extension of her own apparently abject and unruly form. Consider the way her publisher’s editors were unsettled by what they termed the ‘shapeless’ manuscript of White Topee: they responded with the suggestion that ‘superfluous matter’ be ‘pruned’ or ‘sheared away’.8 Their espoused desire was to produce from such edits ‘as solid a body of good stuff’ as they had previously

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achieved with her first novel, The Pea Pickers. In responding to the ­manuscript of Wild Australia, a work which followed on from White Topee, the editorial staff make clear, moreover, that their editing task is bound up with managing those elements of the text that threaten a sense of coherence around questions of gender, sexuality and the self: the author’s idea of having been Oscar Wilde, mixed up with some peculiar ideas about changing sexes, is so much in evidence in the later part of the book that it becomes almost the main theme, & it would be extremely difficult to remove it. But I don’t think it could be left.9

In recent years, critics and editors have routinely recognized the travesty in those editorial judgements, even as they afford the editors some recognition for the challenge of presenting such radically disruptive works to reading audiences of the 1950s and 1960s (Colwill 1994, p. 10). Some critics, such as Joanne Winning, make nuanced readings of Langley’s oeuvre, highlighting how across the extended body of mostly unpublished works that unfold the story of ‘Steve’, the cross-dressed itinerant field worker, Langley not only narrativizes aspects of the early twentieth-­century rural Australian experience but also offers up ‘complex dysphoric versions of sexual and gender identities’ (2002, p. 301). Yet others have nevertheless felt obliged or entitled to straighten out what they find in Langley’s manuscripts. Lucy Frost in her essay ‘Body in the Vault’ offers an insightful reappraisal of Langley, arguing that the ‘material Eve’ with her sensational biographical baggage of gender non-conformity, institutionalization and lonely death should not be allowed to ‘kill off’ textual Eve lying ‘shut away, immured’ in the archive (1993, p.  50). Oddly, this impassioned defence of the integrity and originality of Langley’s manuscripts in the face of precisely that ‘infecting’ slippage between the corpse and the manuscript body was not mirrored in Frost’s subsequent editing of the volume Wilde Eve: Eve Langley’s Story (1999). In her introduction to the work, Frost describes her aim as ‘simply to open these closed manuscripts’ (ibid., p.  5). The volume, however, presents some seven separate manuscripts (2500 pages) edited down and spliced into a single work of just 304 pages. Admittedly Wilde Eve is directed towards a general rather than a scholarly audience but it nevertheless raises the question, as Aorewa McLeod argues, not only of ‘what an editor can do with a text’ but also of ‘what an editor should do with a text’ (McLeod 1999, p. 166). Frost’s editorial interventions involve not only an extremely radical cutting away of pages and pages

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of the original manuscript but also a systematic tidying and flattening out of the very ‘rich’ and ‘sprawling’ qualities she elsewhere argues define Langley’s very distinctive prose (Frost 1999, p. 5). This is even more concerning given, as Winning has demonstrated, what to the untutored might at first appear opaque, awkward and verbose in Langley’s writing, is often in fact richly allusive and the product of ‘meticulous research’ (2002, p. 313). Wilde Eve highlights the manner in which Langley’s manuscript legacy continues to conjure the problematic, excessive and incoherent— much like the figure of the writer herself—and to generate a particular kind of regulatory impulse, one Catherine Bates has in a different context described as turning ‘exciting chaos into coherent stories, stifling the excess of the archive’ (2008, p. 8). There is no question that Langley’s surviving manuscripts present challenges, and their capacity to repel researchers is widely acknowledged. Indeed, it is tempting in the face of mounting series of typed and sometimes illegibly scribbled pages, torn, bundled and tied papers, mouldy or water-damaged notebooks, and recycled breakfast cereal packets to write this collection off as evidence of a mental illness that manifested itself in bouts of compulsive writing or graphomania (followed by uncritical hoarding of the results). But to do so would mean remaining insensitive to the productive possibilities of disruption that such a collection offers: disruption of order and with it the disruption of a familiar kind of archival aesthetics founded on neatness. Our pronounced cultural preference for orderly paperwork—‘filing’ over ‘piling—betrays ingrained assumptions about the former’s inherently superior approach to paper management (Whittaker and Hirschberg 2001, p. 164) when the latter may in fact be more attuned both to paper’s particular affordances and to its role in terms of creative practice (Becker and Nogues 2012, p. 482). With this in mind, I would argue that researchers have generally failed to recognize how their responses to Langley’s papers emerge from entirely unexamined preferences for orderly paper over mess, a preference that inevitably means we sidestep the plangent possibilities of what Amelie Hastie terms ‘materials in disarray’: those elements of the historical record that come to us in disorderly states and that force us—as we pick through less than pristine pages—to confront what she calls ‘the wear and tear of history’ (2006, p. 224). The negative responses to excess and to the unwieldy or flawed material states of Langley’s collection reveal the generally unspoken regulatory norms that govern ‘material nonconformity’ (Herring 2011). They also reveal a reluctance to acknowledge the fragile border that invariably

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separates all archives—not just this one—from the rubbish heap, existing as they do as the awkwardly twinned destinations for the consigning of used paper.10 The singular irony of this is underscored by Anna McNally’s observation that while we like to think that the items we encounter in archives ‘have been carefully selected […] actually it’s just that they weren’t thrown away’ (2013, p. 99). Yet working in Langley’s archive is not simply a matter of tolerating chaos or of patiently sorting through mess and decay; and nor is it simply a question of establishing what archivists call ‘orders of personal meaning’11 within the papers. After all, it is clear that any sense of the latter has almost certainly been lost given the precarious path critical sections of this collection took to reach the library12 and, further, these papers sit uncomfortably with what Gillian Murdoch terms ‘the clinically come-too late tidying interests that sort and label and cover their subjects in clean Mitchell-Library-white tissue paper’ (2000, p. 14). What I am suggesting is that ignoring or, indeed, refusing the potentially messy materiality of this unique collection means failing to recognize how Langley was fundamentally ‘at home’ in and with paper—at times quite literally. This means rethinking the question of archival aesthetics. On this point I want to invoke archivist Anna Chen’s work, where she highlights how the accumulated clutter of the artist might be considered ‘profoundly artful’ (2014, p.  123) if we could only acknowledge hoarding, with its messy, excessive and seemingly disorganized and overflowing states, as having its own distinct aesthetic. In confronting the weight of paper in Langley’s archive, could we begin to think about its messy materiality and seemingly haphazard accumulation as a mode of creative or artistic practice? Could Langley’s papers operate not as a simple and transparent index of abjection, chaos and instability, but as a highly suggestive material measure of her creativity? In posing these questions, I also seek to use Langley’s archived papers to extend my consideration of what a focus on materiality might offer researchers that more conventional approaches to archived literary papers cannot, particularly in terms of speculating on how such an approach might help us to consider alternative relations not only between writing, creativity and publication but also between archives, literary creativity and scholarly research. Of critical importance to the case I make in this chapter are several significant series of personal photographs held in Langley’s papers.13 When I first called up the box listed on the New South Wales State Library’s catalogue as PXE 1333, I was unsure how useful or revealing its contents

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might be. The box contained a number of the better-known and f­ requently reproduced studio portraits undertaken for the release of White Topee: those eccentric images that have generally fostered more interest in Langley’s habits of dress, her history of institutionalization, and her obsessive identification with the writer Oscar Wilde than in her achievements as a poet and novelist (see Fig. 3.2). What caught my attention, however, was not a photo of Langley but one presumably taken by her.14 It was a serendipitous find. After all, given that I had been thinking through how to engage with this voluminous archive in terms of its materiality—that is, as an accumulated body of paper—here was a photo of paper or, to be more precise, of Langley’s manuscripts (Fig. 3.5). The photo in question is a small black-and-white snapshot. It is an orphan image resembling none of the others filed alongside it, and in this respect it reminds us of how even seemingly carefully preserved photos have histories as itinerant objects (see Nouzeilles 2013, p. 42). The photo is a slightly off-centre close-up of the interior of a domestic cupboard and

Fig. 3.5  Eve Langley’s photo of her manuscripts, titled on the reverse, ‘The Manuscript Cupboard, Sept 1970’. Eve & June Langley Collection, State Library of New South Wales, PXE 1333. (Photo: State Library of New South Wales)

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it has a 1:1 square format which lends a certain concentration or focused intensity to the image.15 In it we see two evenly spaced shelves filled with exercise books, folders and paper-wrapped parcels. The upper shelf is slightly bowed with the weight of packed-in notebooks; the next one, with its downward angled contents, hints at the faint possibility that the papers might spill outward. A third similarly stuffed shelf is just visible at the lower edge of the tightly cropped image. On the reverse side of the photo is Langley’s handwritten descriptive note, which reads, ‘The Manuscript Cupboard, 1970’. As an archival ‘find’, the photo had for me a kind of intensity, although I recognize that ‘photographs are very difficult objects to talk about, let alone classify, describe, and essentially “own” as archival evidence’ (Schlak 2008, p.  85). Indeed, it is important to acknowledge how ‘the archive constitutes photographs in particular ways’ (Rose 2000, p. 558). I had been pursuing Langley’s attachment to the materiality of paper and writing and here was Langley apparently documenting the precious piled up ‘stuff’ of writing. If ‘evidence’ is too problematic a term to apply to this photo, it might still be thought of as a suggestive trace—of an arrangement of paper that was once before the camera—and as a provocation to explore how pages and papers matter not only in the context of Langley’s literary archive but also within debates concerning researchers’ enduring preferences for working with original documents. Interestingly, the neatness and order of Langley’s ‘manuscript cupboard’ has the potential to displace a particularly entrenched narrative of excess and incoherence that inevitably structures most critical and biographical accounts of her life and death. Winning argues that ‘part of Langley’s lack of favour, to be sure, is a result of this perceived “taint” of auto/biographical “excess”’ (2002, p. 301), and that taint extends to her manuscript legacy. This is despite the fact that a brief analysis of the provenance of the collection suggests many of the features (disorder, water damage, mould, eccentric inclusions) responsible for the abject or pathological taint that has attached itself to her papers may have little to do with the state or arrangement of them during the author’s lifetime and result instead from their neglect following her death. The photo of Langley’s ‘manuscript cupboard’ tells a different story and suggests an alternative framing of her manuscript legacy. After all, as one works through her collection, what becomes apparent is that Langley had a quite particular relationship to paper: that it was personally meaningful for her and supported an alternative aesthetic vision that embraced abundance and repetition. This attachment to paper may have been a

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l­egacy deriving in part from time spent as a printer’s devil in her youth and later as a book repairer for a public library following her release from Auckland Mental Hospital.16 She did indeed demonstrate a fondness for pink typing paper, selecting it especially for the typing of her manuscripts. She described the experience of working with it thus: ‘I was carried away with the fury of it. Each pink page was like a beautiful fire or jewel, a tapestry that I could embroider rapidly’ (de Berg 1964). Her enthusiasm, however, was not shared by one of her editors at Angus & Robertson, who appealed against this preference since ‘that single spacing on pink paper is really so trying that only your most devoted admirers (such as myself) would persevere in reading it’.17 Langley also had a fascination for the appearance of words on the page. Looking over the original manuscript of a poem written decades before, she notices particularly how the text ‘lies on an old rounded palette like page of lined paper’.18 And this is the striking quality of her as a writer: the way the physical page is always present to her. More than a mere neutral support to words and markings, the paper is alive in its history and in its potential. She writes similarly of how a new bundle of paper she has been promised will soon be on its way to England with her words ‘weighing it down’.19 There was, she recorded, a ‘peculiar power’ to be found in words: ‘What splendid visions and colored [sic] pictures lay behind them’, she wrote, marvelling at ‘[h]ow they colored a plain page of paper and made me feel the power of god’.20 More than a sensitivity to the arrangement of words and white paper, however, this latter statement suggests that Langley may have experienced a form of synaesthesia such that words arrayed across a page evoked for her the sensation of colours. Certainly she describes herself elsewhere as ‘full of stories like a caravan. I amble and wander across all the plains of fantasy. They’re apricot coloured and my red caravan totters across it with painted wheels full of stories and poems’ (de Berg 1964). Her tendency to illustrate various of her manuscripts with sketches and watercolours further suggests that the act of writing and of engaging with the page offered Langley sensations and aesthetic pleasures unrelated to any plans for publication. For Langley, to write was quite simply to inhabit paper. She was fundamentally ‘at home’ in and with paper—at times quite literally. Her sister June characterizes a 1952 visit to Langley’s lodgings thus: ‘bed, book, typewriter, dishes, manuscript’.21 In the same vein, Langley herself sent a warning to an impending visitor: ‘I am but MSS and talk of it and volumes of poetry.’22 Langley framed the experience of writing as one of immersion, not just in ideas and words, but literally in paper. Hers was a dynamic

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compositional process. For example, when attempting to start over on a partly completed manuscript, she writes of lifting down ‘the bag of rags that constituted the unwritten book’.23 She describes writing in terms of how she would ‘sit down, with the manuscript around me, and begin’.24 She offered oral historian Hazel de Berg a similar description: ‘When I wrote The Pea-Pickers […] I had an enormous amount of material around me, mostly old letters and jottings when I was working’ (1964). If this attachment to volumes of paper is suggestive of hoarding, then it might be as well to note Chen’s observation that ‘hoarders approach the world from a more aesthetic point of view than do most people’ (2014, p. 121) and to think more deeply about the role of accumulation and the resulting piled up paper in Langley’s efforts to craft a sense of herself and of her creative purpose. Interestingly, Langley’s practice of laying out the already-written manuscript pages around her in order to engage with them holds distinct parallels with the activities of those researchers who opt for handling manuscripts in a reading room over the ‘less immersed’ experience of viewing digital surrogates from the comfort of their homes or offices (Rimmer et  al. 2008, p.  1381). While Langley describes a process in which ‘about [her] are hundreds of papers, old writings’,25 a similar experience is documented for researchers who appreciate the manner in which lifting, holding and browsing paper documents within an archive fundamentally aids their work (see Farge 1989/2013, pp.  55, 62–63; and Latham 2011, p.  10). In both instances, the basic mechanics of paper allow for ordering and reordering, layering and the serendipitous discovery of new relations of association and proximity. As Helen Wood notes, ‘the user in a searchroom can order documents in whatever order s/he chooses; it does not have to be chronological’ (2000, p.  38; see also Moravec 2016). Langley’s writing practice and that of the archival researcher appear even more explicitly aligned if we consider Arlette Farge’s account of working through swathes of archived documents and of ‘how slow work in the archives is, and how this slowness of hands and thought can be the source of creativity’ (1989/2013, p. 55). Is it possible that Langley’s accounts of lifting and leafing through her papers— much in the manner that we now employ in their archived state—can return us to a sense of the significance of paper to the experience of ‘being-in-the-archive’ and to a more explicit awareness of what Kiersten Latham identifies as ‘the tacit, assumed and taken-­for-­granted aspects of using original archival material’? (2011, p. 1)

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Langley’s manuscripts were present to her in complex ways. They were clearly understood by her to be vulnerable physical documents deserving of considerable care. Ahead of her committal to Auckland Mental Hospital in August 1942, when Langley knew herself to be ill, she entrusted them all (‘a large cushion cover jammed with tightly rolled manuscript’) to her sister June with instructions to guard them ‘with your life’.26 In the years following her release, Langley wrote to editor Nan McDonald of her fears of ‘a fire out here in the ranges getting on to [her] draft’ and her desire that Angus & Robertson instead store her manuscript securely.27 Interestingly, Langley also showed an awareness of their pecuniary value and status, as demonstrated in her 1954–1956 correspondence with noted bibliophile and collector, Harry F. Chaplin, who was keen to secure her manuscripts for his collection.28 On several occasions, Langley forwarded him pink typescripts of recently published work, primarily poems.29 In the same correspondence, Chaplin cited Langley’s account of having ‘50 volumes of assorted manuscripts being bound up’,30 further indicating her substantial investment (both financial and psychic) in these papers. But more than this, Langley’s manuscripts evidently held a very particular status for her as a body of papers with the capacity to do things. Rather than a mere stage in a writing process leading to formal publication, they appear to her as vital or vibrant things in themselves. They are ‘live presences’, in Jane Bennett’s sense of vital materiality, of things ‘not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them’ (2010, p. 5). Another set of photos is relevant on this point: a series of slightly ethereal colour snapshots dating from the early 1970s which were located in the same box as the photo discussed above. In these latter photos (Fig. 3.6), Langley appears to have laid out different manuscripts in a variety of tableaux on the untended lawn outside her home in Katoomba. Amateurish and just barely in focus, they are strange and haunting photographs. They have the dreamy look of Polaroids, although this is due mainly to the fading effects of time. Variously labelled ‘books’, ‘MSS books’ or ‘Books of Manuscripts 1972’ on their reverse sides, their subjects—the manuscripts—are oddly and ambiguously placed to one side in each shot, making these images in some ways difficult to read or to classify. Significantly, these are images created at a point when Langley’s writing has largely ceased to circulate within the print economy and yet what they capture is an act of making or creativity in which the manuscripts feature centrally. In this respect, they recall an earlier episode involving Langley’s deployment of the papery weight of the unpublished manuscript of Wild

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Fig. 3.6  Eve Langley’s photo of her manuscripts laid out on the lawn outside her Katoomba house. Eve & June Langley Collection, State Library of New South Wales, PXE 1333. (Photo: State Library of New South Wales)

Australia. In 1954, Angus & Robertson had sent a delicately worded rejection of the book, leaving Langley quite devastated.31 The following year, Langley enthusiastically agreed to the manuscript being displayed as part of the Literary Show for Auckland’s Arts Festival. She described a dramatic assemblage that reorganized an otherwise failed or unwanted pile of paper into a sign or site of accomplishment: The manuscript of “WILD AUSTRALIA” is to be prominently placed and a copy of White Topee beside it […] Those of the library staff who have read Wild Australia think it is remarkable. It will be examined and read by thousands during the Arts Festival Week, and if that isn’t a good test for a book, I don’t know what is.32

The manuscripts on the lawn presumably do not have ‘thousands’ of viewers (or indeed any readers), but nevertheless they are suggestive of a form of display as Langley assembled (by their shape) a literal body of

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Fig. 3.7  Eve Langley’s photo of her manuscripts assembled on the grass. Eve & June Langley Collection, State Library of NSW, PXE 1333. (Photo: State Library of New South Wales)

papers (Fig.  3.7). Indeed, the carefully laid-out manuscripts might be thought of as a series of installations: an immersive yet ephemeral form of art destined for dismantling, but capable of suggesting how things go together in that moment (see Bishop 2005, pp. 6, 10).33 These installations beg the question of what a manuscript is or what a body of literary papers can do. Across the series of photographs, we see different combinations and recombinations of manuscripts, with the specific items included in a particular assemblage sometimes detailed on the reverse side, for example, ‘25. Black Exercise books & Diary book’, ‘26. Black Exercise book and Dandenong book’. The patterns of repetition and variation suggest an experimental approach to image composition as Langley worked carefully with these precious papers to forge an entirely new aesthetic. There is a further series which shows her old manual typewriter sitting atop a rickety table set out on the grass, a chair drawn up as though one might sit down to work in the sun (Fig. 3.8). Taken together, the photos not only suggest new ways of thinking about Langley’s literary

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Fig. 3.8  Eve Langley’s photo of her typewriter set out on a table on the grass. Eve & June Langley Collection. State Library of NSW, PXE 1333. (Photo: State Library of New South Wales)

papers, but critically they also open out the possibility of thinking differently about the creative dimensions of her later career. It is a period usually understood in terms of failure, madness and withdrawal, but which might instead be viewed as a time of creative renewal in a new media. These photos and other series filed alongside them are suggestive of renewed creative agency and of a highly focused creative vision, one still very much anchored in the materiality of paper and of writing but freed from the conventional ends of print and publication. Their hitherto unremarked-upon presence in Langley’s archive ruptures the familiar script of mental and physical failing accompanied by creative fading (see Gullette 1993). Instead, they point to a late in life flourishing of creative vision that recycles the paper manuscript drafts as subjects in a new aesthetic enterprise. In approaching Langley’s literary archive in this way, with due attention to paper’s hitherto underexplored capacity to do things, I have sought to engage with Langley in ways that conventional approaches to writers’ ­literary papers—approaches structured by words and the tex-

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tual—arguably have not. Equally, I have sought to challenge a reading of Langley’s papers as a repellent mess that is little more than the embodiment of its subject’s own pathological state, a mess that necessarily demands intervention in the form of tidying up, stripping back and straightening out. With its embrace of paper and materiality, my approach challenges traditional forms of archival research conditioned by the practices of transcription and traditional forms of literary history structured around an individual author’s assumed desire for publication and their success or otherwise in achieving it. My analysis also enables some limited recasting of the decline narrative that has dominated discussion of Langley’s work and to consider her creative life as extending into the decades beyond her final published work, and her creativity as exceeding mere textual production. While Langley’s literary papers offer an especially rich site for theorizing the significance of the material in the context of archival research, I nevertheless want to suggest the wider significance and application of these insights. Specifically, using the example of Langley’s own practices with paper, I want us to think about how—as researchers—we too ‘think through paper’ and how paper’s various affordances, movements, histories, associations and assemblages condition our experience of being-in-the-archive. Thus, I am arguing not only that we need to refocus our attention on Latham’s notion of ‘the archive-as-experience’ (2011, p.  1), but that we must understand that experience to be mediated ultimately by the open and unsettled matter of paper.

Notes 1. For a brief biography, see Thwaite (2000). 2. The 1940 S.H. Prior Memorial Prize for an unpublished manuscript which was administered by the Bulletin magazine was awarded jointly to The Pea Pickers and to Kylie Tennant for her novel, The Battlers (1941). 3. Eve Langley to Beatrice Davis, 13 January 1960. Item 461. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, ML MSS3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 4. Reader’s report on multiple manuscripts by Eve Langley written by N[an] McD[onald]. [c. 1965]. Item 573. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, ML MSS3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 5. See Angus & Robertson Ltd—Business Records, 1881–1973, ML MSS 3269, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

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6. Meredith Lawn (Archivist, Original Materials Branch, State Library of New South Wales), email to the author, 11 September 2013. In 1975, Stewart completed her experimental documentary film on Langley entitled She’s My Sister (Director: Meg Stewart; Cinematographer: David Sanderson; Distributor: Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative). Stewart later made an ABC radio documentary entitled ‘The shadows are different’. See Meg Stewart Further Papers, MLMSS 5147 Add-on 2077 / Box 19 and MLOH 249/3–4. She’s My Sister is available through the National Film and Sound Archive (Canberra). 7. Eve Langley to Nan McDonald, 6 February 1954. Item 273. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, ML MSS3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 8. Reader’s report for White Topee by N[an] McD[onald]. [c.1952]. Item 137. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, ML MSS3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 9. Handwritten second reader’s report for Wild Australia [by Nan McDonald], 30 September 1953. Item 191. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, ML MSS3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 10. As Liam Buckley highlights with respect to the practice of archival appraisal ‘the real wisdom of archiving is not a question of knowing what to keep but of what to send to the incinerator’ (2005, p. 262). 11. See, for example, Hobbs (2001). 12. The archivist who catalogued the Langley papers reportedly left a file note referring to the collection as ‘very messy and disorganised’. Meredith Lawn (Archivist, Original Materials Branch, State Library of NSW) suggested that, as a consequence, the collection would not have been ‘left it in its original order (or lack of order) but arranged it into series according to our usual archival practices for arrangement and description’. Meredith Lawn, email to the author, 11 September 2013. 13. Eve and June Langley pictorial material, ca.1860–ca.1979. This material is catalogued under: PXA 1612, PXD 1268, PXE 1333, MIN 492, and ON 492. There are approximately 684 photographs. 14. The catalogue contains the following note: ‘Most photographs are apparently taken by Eve Langley, but were received from June Langley together with June’s papers in February 1981 (MLMSS 3898)’. 15. The square aspect ratio was popular in the 1960s and 1970s. In square format images, the eye tends to travel around the image in a circular fashion rather than ‘follow the longer edge of the rectangle from side to side (or up and down in the portrait format)’ (Gibson 2011). 16. June Langley writes to Beatrice Davis that in her work at the Auckland Library Langley was ‘putting into practise an art learned in her first work

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at Walker and May’s [the printers] in Melbourne’. June Langley to Beatrice Davis, 14 March 1952. Item 183–85, Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Reader’s Reports, ML MSS3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 17. Nan McDonald to Eve Langley, 29 July 1955. Eve Langley Papers 1920s– 1974, ML MSS4188 (6), Item 12, Correspondence 20 April 1954 to 8 November 1972. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 18. ‘The Letters of Steve and Blue from 1925 to 1931 Gippsland. Mt Buffalo. Wandin Yallock’. Angus & Robertson Papers, Box 146: Eve Langley typescript literary works, MLMSS 3269, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 19. Eve Langley to Father Colgan (?), undated [c.1941]. Eve Langley letters, 1937–1942. Uncatalogued MS.  Presented by D.  Beirne, Archivist of Catholic Diocese of Hamilton, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 20. ‘The Letters of Steve and Blue from 1925 to 1931 Gippsland. Mt Buffalo. Wandin Yallock’. Angus & Robertson Papers, Box 146: Eve Langley typescript literary works, MLMSS 3269, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 21. June Langley to Beatrice Davis, 14 March 1952. Item 183–85. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, ML MSS3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 22. Eve Langley to Mary Dobbie, 9 July 1955. Letters from Eve Langley to Mary Dobbie, MLMSS 7487. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. Copies of originals held in MS Papers 8070–1, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. 23. Eve Langley to Ruth Park, 11 October 1941. Ruth Park Papers 1938– 1976, MLMSS3128/Item 1/21, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 24. Eve Langley to Mary Dobbie, 10 October [1941]. Copies of letters from Eve Langley to Mary Dobbie. MLMSS7487. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. Originals held in MS Papers 8070–1, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. 25. Eve Langley to Ruth Park, 11 October 1941. Ruth Park Papers 1938– 1976, MLMSS 3128/Item1/21. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 26. June Langley to Beatrice Davis, 7 November 1950. Item 133. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, ML MSS3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. This letter and its reply from Davis cover the matter of what is to become of the manuscripts and who should rightly act as custodian.

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27. Eve Langley to Nan McDonald, 24 May 1954. Item 311. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Reader’s Reports, ML MSS3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. Judging by the correspondence between Langley and Angus & Robertson, the publishers continued the practice of storing her manuscripts for safekeeping in what is variously referred to as their ‘strong room’ or ‘archive’ through until the 1970s. 28. Harry F.  Chaplin—Album of papers concerning Eve Langley, 1938– ca.1955, MLMSS 7154, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. The correspondence indicates that Langley sent Chaplin a series of her manuscripts and typescripts across the period 1954–1956. 29. These appear in the bound volume that comprises MLMSS 7154, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 30. Harry Chaplin to Eve Langley, 22 June 1954, Harry F. Chaplin—Album of papers concerning Eve Langley, 1938–ca.1955, MLMSS 7154, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. As Langley was working as a book repairer at Auckland Public Library across the period 1950–1955, it is possible that she was either binding the manuscripts herself or having them bound in the library workshop. 31. This episode led to Langley’s fabled declaration, ‘I AM OSCAR WILDE. AND YOU’RE KILLING ME.’ Oscar Wilde [Eve Langley] to Nan McDonald, 12 April 1954. Item 269. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, ML MSS3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. Original emphasis. 32. Eve Langley to Nan McDonald, 24 May 1955. Item 311. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, ML MSS3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 33. I am grateful to Amanda Lawson for suggesting this way of thinking about the photos.

Bibliography Bates, C. (2008) Messing with the archive: Back doors, rubbish and traces in Robert Kroetsch’s The Hornbooks of Rita K. Substance, 37 (2), 8–24. Becker, D. and Nogues, C. (2012) Saving-over, over-saving, and the future mess of writers’ digital archives: A survey report on the personal digital archiving practices of emerging writers. The American Archivist, 75 (2), 482–513. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Bishop, T. (2005) Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books. New York and London, W.W. Norton. Buckley, L. (2005) Objects of love and decay: Colonial photographs in a postcolonial archive. Cultural Anthropology, 20 (2), 249–270.

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Chen, A. (2014) Disorder: Vocabularies of hoarding in personal digital archiving practices. Archivaria, 78, 115–134. Colwill, R. (1994) Eve plays her Wilde card and makes the straight flush. Hecate, 20 (1), 10–27. de Berg, H. (1964) Eve Langley interviewed by Hazel de Berg, 9 May. Hazel de Berg Collection, National Library of Australia. Available at http://nla.gov.au/ nla.oh-vn201494. Accessed 14 May 2014. Ellis, C. (2001) Review: The Pea-Pickers (1942) by Eve Langley. API Review of Books, Australian Public Intellectual Network, October, para 9. Farge, A. (1989/2013) The Allure of the Archives. Trans. T. Scott-Railton. New Haven, CT and London, Yale University Press. Frost, L. (1993) Body in the vault: The unpublished novels of Eve Langley. Australian Literary Studies, 16 (1), 50–56. Frost, L. (1999) Wilde Eve: Eve Langley’s Story. Sydney, Random House. Gibson, A. (2011) Shooting in the square format. Ephotozine, 7 December. Available at http://www.ephotozine.com/article/understanding-square-format-18005. Accessed 30 November 2018. Gullette, M.M. (1993) Creativity, aging, gender: A study of their intersections, 1910–1935. In A.M. Wyatt-Brown and J. Rossen (eds.) Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity. Charlottesville, VA, University Press of Virginia, 19–48. Hastie, A. (2006) The miscellany of film history. Film History, 18 (2), 222–230. Herring, S. (2011) Material deviance: Theorizing queer objecthood. Postmodern Culture, 21 (12). https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2011.0009 Hobbs, C. (2001) The character of personal archives: Reflections on the value of records of individuals. Archivaria, 52, 126–135. Latham, K.F. (2011) Medium rare: Exploring archives and their conversion from original to digital part two—The holistic knowledge arsenal of paper-based archives. LIBRES: Library & Information Science Research Electronic Journal, 21 (1), 1–21. McLeod, A. (1999) Alternative Eves. Hecate, 25 (2), 164–179. McNally, A. (2013) ‘All that stuff’: Organising records of creative processes. In J. Vaknin, K. Stuckey and V. Lane (eds.) All This Stuff: Archiving the Artist. Faringdon, UK, Libri, 97–107. Moravec, M. (2016) How digitized∗ changed historical research. On Archivy: Occasional writings about the archive, 24 August. Available at https://medium. com/on-archivy/how-digitized-changed-historical-research-d77c78540878. Accessed 6 December 2018. Murdoch, G. (2000) Her Katoomba. Overland, 160, 13–15. Nouzeilles, G. (2013) The archival paradox. In E.  Cadava (ed.) The Itinerant Languages of Photography. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Art Museum, 38–53.

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Rimmer, J. et al. (2008) An examination of the physical and the digital qualities of humanities research. Information Processing and Management, 44 (3), 1374–1392. Rose, G. (2000) Practising photography: An archive, a study, some photographs and a researcher. Journal of Historical Geography, 26 (4), 555–571. Schlak, T. (2008) Framing photographs, denying archives: The difficulty of focusing on archival photographs. Archival Science, 8 (2), 85–101. Segerberg, A. (1992) ‘Strangled by a bad tradition’? The work of Eve Langley Journal of New Zealand Literature, 10, 55–73. Thwaite, J. (1989) The Importance of Being Eve Langley. Sydney, Angus & Robertson. Thwaite, J. (2000) Langley, Eve (1904–1974). Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Available at http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/langley-eve-10784/ text19125. Accessed 6 December 2018. Whittaker, S. and Hirschberg, J. (2001) The character, value and management of personal paper archives. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 8 (2), 150–170. Winning, J. (2002) Wilde identifications: Queering the sexual and the national in the work of Eve Langley. Australian Literary Studies, 20 (4), 301–315. Wood, H. (2000) The fetish and the document: An exploration of attitudes towards archives. In M.  Procter and C.P.  Lewis (eds.) New Directions in Archival Research. Liverpool, LUCAS, 20–48.

CHAPTER 4

Dark Archive

Abstract  This chapter explores the archival legacy of Valentine Ackland (1906–1969) and offers a critique of the idea of archived papers as ‘inert’ sources by asking how individual documents or collections of papers take hold of us and register as significant and precious in ways that demand we act to save, arrange and promote them. Ackland was the lifelong partner of English novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978), who was ultimately left to manage Ackland’s manuscript legacy, including fair-copy typescripts of more than 700 poems. I explore how the posthumous presence and handling of literary papers become entangled with the privileges, delights and obligations of intimacy and friendship and also point to the relationship between literary papers—their presence, scale and accessibility—and the making and remaking of posthumous literary reputations. Keywords  Paper • Archives • Valentine Ackland • Sylvia Townsend Warner • Mourning • Manuscript • Letters • Materiality In a typescript draft of her autobiography, English writer Valentine Ackland (1906–1969) reflected on the likelihood that the pages she was producing at that moment would ‘all vanish with the rest when I am dead’.1 But I am concerned in this chapter with what happens when papers don’t vanish and instead survive, as occurred in Ackland’s case. Indeed, her papers not only survived but are now preserved—alongside those of her partner, © The Author(s) 2019 M. Dever, Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49886-1_4

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Fig. 4.1  Valentine Ackland in 1936. (Photo: Dorset County Museum)

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978)—in a dedicated archive within the Dorset County Museum, the part of England where they spent the majority of their lives together.2 My particular interest in Ackland is as another writer whose archived writing, like Langley’s, substantially outweighs her published work. Indeed, while Ackland (Fig. 4.1) achieved some success as a writer, her published output and her reputation were eclipsed in her lifetime by the more successful Warner. Ackland published in book form a collaborative volume of poems with Warner, Whether a Dove or a Seagull (1934), a non-fiction study of the privations of rural life, Country Conditions (1936), and a tantalizingly brief volume, Twenty-eight Poems (1957), which was privately published by Warner for circulation among

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their friends. Ackland also published articles, letters and poems in a variety of English magazines, especially those associated with the left intelligentsia. However, as Frances Bingham observes in her introduction to a more recent edition of Ackland’s poetry, her ‘pace of publication never kept up with the speed of composition’ (2008, p. 5). Her literary papers offer an especially rich site for examining the significance of the material in the context of archive-based literary research in that they are both extensive and varied. They include the materials on which Ackland both wrote and typed her poems, her bound notebooks, diaries, loose and sewn sheets of stationery, loose leaves and scraps, formal and informal stationery, and household notes. That her papers did not vanish is hardly surprising for, as Melanie Micir records, in the decade before Ackland’s death, she and Warner ‘kept themselves busy remaking wills, appointing literary executors, leaving instructions for themselves and others about how to order their posthumous lives and works, ordering correspondence, compiling personal archives, and, in general, preparing ways in which to leave a mark on the world once departed from it’ (2012, p. 122). In this chapter, I pursue a number of questions regarding the connections between death, paper and posterity as a way of further extending my arguments about the productivity and potential of archived paper. I am interested in what might be thought of as the afterlife of paper. I ask, for example, whether the leaving of a large body of literary or personal papers incites activity and how it is that individual documents or collections of papers take hold of us and register as significant and precious in ways that demand we act to save, arrange and promote them. In the specific case of Ackland and Warner, I am also interested in how the posthumous presence and handling of literary papers becomes entangled with—and ultimately even the expression of—the privileges, delights and obligations of intimacy and friendship. It is generally acknowledged that death and the archive are deeply entangled. Derrida writes of the archive’s very structure as ‘spectral’ (2002, p. 84) and Helen Freshwater of the ‘ghostly’ nature of those we encounter there (2003, p. 738). It is recognized, further, that field archivists routinely operate in a ‘sensitive zone of life and death’ as they undertake the work of appraising collections from donors ‘at the end of their careers and the end of their lives—whether or not [those donors] are able to acknowledge these realities’ (Wexler and Long 2009, pp. 478, 480). And as researchers working with archived documents we too are frequently located in a kind of ‘dead zone’—and this is arguably precisely where we

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want to be. After all, as Louise Bernard reminds us, ‘the beauty of archival work […] lies not only in the serendipitous nature of discovery and recovery but in the tactile experience of engagement—to touch, literally to commune, with the dead’ (2011, p. 97). The idea of paper’s persistence beyond the grave is not novel, however: it exists as a standard conceit present in a variety of literary and artistic traditions. It is evidenced, for example, in the Dutch tradition of the ‘vanitas’ painting which takes its title from a line in the Book of Ecclesiastes 1:2: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’. Works such as Vanitas Still Life (1630) by the painter Pieter Claesz (Fig. 4.2) are designed to remind the viewer of the ephemeral nature of human life and the folly or vanity of earthly pleasures and distractions. Claesz presents us with a human skull resting rather grimly on sheets of paper and, while those brittle pages are also destined eventually to crumble, at least for the present they endure. The role of paper in the granting of a life beyond the grave is also highlighted by Philippe Lejeune, who writes of how ‘paper has its own biological rhythm’ and a capacity to ‘outlive’ those whose work appears on it and who might choose to store it up (2001, p. 110). Paper thus offers a form of immortality hinged on an ironic plasticity that guarantees life in the face of death. As Lejeune continues: ‘I will be incinerated, my body reduced from one to zero. I will be preserved, my diary will stay on a shelf in the archives’ (ibid.). All of these considerations suggest that it may be useful to look rather more carefully at the idea of writers’ archived papers as their ‘literary remains’, a phrase Sylvia Townsend

Fig. 4.2  Pieter Claesz, Vanitas Still Life, 1630. (Photo: Mauritshuis, The Hague)

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Warner herself termed ‘absurd’ even as she embarked on the work of assembling the ‘notable correspondence’ between herself and Valentine Ackland for posterity.3 As I elaborate in this chapter, Warner’s gestures in preserving and editing the couple’s correspondence and in preserving and promoting Ackland’s poetry constitute profound labours of love enacted after Ackland’s death. As Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey observe, the act of ‘cultural preservation, of persons or objects, requires investments’ (2001, p. 7), and I want to consider the nature of those investments and especially the part played by paper itself in the structuring and intensifying of them. From the initial stages of their courtship and throughout their decades together as a couple, Ackland and Warner’s relationship was mediated by paper and they recognized and celebrated paper’s capacity to materialize their shared intimacies. The Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Archive contains various tiny handwritten billet-doux originally left on pillows, as well as a small number of delicately cut-out and hand-painted paper cards made to mark various celebrations. There are also two miniscule paper dolls in hand-inked nightdresses sleeping in a tiny bed sewn into a matchbox (Fig. 4.3). As an instance of archived paper, this box and its tiny paper doll inhabitants is unconventional, eccentric even.4 It is technically archived paper, but not a document as such. To look at it is to be drawn to the fine work of manipulating the paper: the delicate inking, cutting, positioning and gluing required to produce a work of that scale. So evidently an object of intimate exchange—the paper dolls referencing as they do a set of feelings so private as to make the observation and handling of them seem intrusive if not prurient—the tiny box and its equally tiny inhabitants point to the ways in which some paper records—in their intimate materiality—operate as powerful ‘repositories of affect’ (Cifor and Gilliland 2016, p. 3). While the impulse towards crafting such objects was stronger in Warner (see Pinney 2018, pp.  3–5)—the Finzi collection at the University of Reading contains a large framed paper collage of a beach scene that she made for Ackland—Ackland nevertheless participated in similar gestures. It is recorded that many of the unpublished poems that publisher Julius Lipton considered for the posthumous collection, Further Poems of Valentine Ackland (1978), came to him ‘in little booklets which had been personally presented to Sylvia by Valentine’.5 It is also evident that the briefest of separations prompted the exchange of notes and letters between the two. It was such an habitual reflex that even three years after Ackland’s

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Fig. 4.3  Two paper dolls in a matchbox bed. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Collection, Dorset County Museum. (Photo by the author)

death Warner could still ‘never back up the lane to the little pillar-box without recapturing that sense of hurrying to meet her with a letter’.6 Ackland too was a keen correspondent (‘I do love writing letters’)7 and, sensitively attuned to the material aesthetics of letter writing, she secured a selection of embossed and printed letterhead notepaper for herself and personalized her papers and folders with customized stamps bearing her name and address. Her letters contain references to particular types of writing paper and also inquiries such as the following to her friend, Joy Finzi: ‘P.S.  Where do you get your Japanese envelopes?’8 The London studio room Ackland occupied when she and Warner first met was ­‘covered in drafts of poems, books, expensive accessories and beautifully tailored

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clothes’ (Harman 1989, p. 108) and so her interest in stationery might be construed as a simple extension of her lifelong appreciation for the wellmade and the luxurious were it not for her evident attachment to something more than its mere aesthetics. ‘Do you remember this paper?’9 is how Ackland opens a brief note on a striking blue page sent to her ‘lovely Love’ in 1945, a query which points directly to an understanding of paper as something more: the material trace of a bond and a reliable ‘proxy for memory’ (Stabile 2004, p. 98). For Ackland, writing—its successes and disappointments—was often characterized in terms of the resulting output of paper. Early in her writing career, the desire to create and to communicate resulted in ‘feverish’ activity. This was a time, she later recalled, when ‘into the night I wrote, and wrote all day; I wrote in buses and in the lavatory; I wrote in the cloakrooms of restaurants, of hotels where I had gone out to dance’.10 Bingham observes too how Ackland ‘lived and dreamt poems, she wrote them in notebooks, on the flyleaves of other books, in her diary, on shopping lists, cards, old envelopes, telephone pads or whatever else came to hand’ (2008, p.  5). This hectic pace of poetic composition is captured in the briefest of diary annotations on her fishing and writing activities for a day in August 1937: ‘Trout—1lb. 3 poems’.11 Her efforts, especially in those early years, frequently fell short, with Ackland judging the results to be discouragingly ‘unlike the thing I had in my head’.12 Later in life she was still burdened with a sense of disappointment and failure. Reflecting at the age of 45 on how the redecorating of her study (Fig. 4.4) had prompted the clearing out of ‘a sackful of manuscript’, Ackland estimated that the remaining balance of her accumulated writing would have ‘filled at least four sacks more’.13 But rather than generating any sense of achievement, this revelation was instead deemed part of ‘a very dreadful experience—to have to look at the untidy waste-paper which is all I have to show for my most fortunate, most various, most happy, most unhappy life’.14 This rather melodramatic moment of self-reflection concludes with the consoling insight that the sack’s contents could be sent for pulping and recycling into government forms. The rest, she predicted, would vanish upon her death. While dissatisfaction and frustration were commonly the hallmarks of Ackland’s creative life, it is also clear that she possessed a profound conviction that poetry was her vocation and consequently the key both to her happiness and to her grief. As she writes in a poem entitled ‘Poet’, it is the poet’s particular lot to find grief ‘where all others have found their grief’ (Bingham 2008, p. 114). She might have struggled to produce work with

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Fig. 4.4  Valentine Ackland’s writing room at Frome Vauchurch, the house she shared with Sylvia Townsend Warner. (Photo: Dorset County Museum)

which she was satisfied (‘I have never had a reliable talent’),15 but Ackland also recognized writing’s central place in her life and that she was ‘very unhappy without being able to write’.16 And write she did. While Ackland states in one version of her ‘Notes for Autobiography’ that ‘I have scarcely ever finished any piece of work in my life’,17 this was not a serious admission of indolence. Certainly she upbraids herself on occasion for a lack of discipline in her approach to writing, for the way her ‘magpie-mind’ tended to ‘litter pick’18 and for her apparent laziness, particularly with respect to the drafting of her

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autobiography (‘no one in the world is as persistently lazy as I am’)19; however, the religiously inspired confessional nature of the latter text— and Ackland’s desire to perform herself throughout as a suitably selfflagellating penitent—need to be recognized. The reality is that she was highly productive, as evidenced by the fact that her papers include around 2000 poems—albeit in different states of drafting—with more than 1000 of these in typescript and a smaller number in published form (Bingham 2008, p. 6). Interestingly, across the drafts of her autobiography a particular refrain emerges, namely that of ‘putting things away’, usually in desk drawers. For example, of an early attempt at her autobiography she notes how ‘the impulse faltered and failed and the manuscript went into the drawer’.20 On the one hand, this practice gave her the opportunity for revisiting and potentially revising work at a later time (‘there was a long pause’),21 but on the other it was an expression of a particular relationship to an imagined audience for her writing, one remote from the present moment and far from the maudlin vision of her work as failed and vanishing following her death. This gesture of deferral is registered quite explicitly when Ackland writes of how her only hope ‘to “get anything down” is to write it when and as I want to’ and then to ‘put all the little sheets of paper together in an envelope and leave them in a drawer to be discovered by whoever clears out the drawers of my desk when I am dead’.22 It is even more clearly expressed in a letter she wrote to Warner in 1944 actively speculating on how readers in 20, 50 or 75 years’ time might respond to her writing. She imagines as time passes that some of her poems may still hold if not ‘genuine pleasure’ for readers then certainly ‘interest’. She concludes, ‘We can’t tell what someone may think in 2044. If he likes one poem it is better than I expect now, but it is what I still hope. For I have always hoped. And have always been in a confused despair.’23 Certainly Ackland was wary of the reception her poetry garnered during her lifetime, and particularly following the experience of the jointly authored collection, Whether a Dove or a Seagull (1936). Warner’s helpful suggestion that the two of them publish their work side by side in the volume but without authorial attribution for individual poems only stimulated the comparisons it sought to avoid and prompted readers and critics to credit the more established Warner with most of the best poems. ‘I don’t think she held me to blame’, Warner reflected, ‘she blamed herself for having consented to a joint book’.24 Ackland’s descriptions, moreover, of the general diffidence of publishers’ readers (‘extremely hard to interest at all’)25 was doubtless

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based on rather bitter experience. In Warner’s estimation, ‘the fashion had changed’, and therefore ‘she went unheard’.26 Warner later records Ackland’s desire to have her poems ‘cold-stored’27 in the interests perhaps of finding that appreciative future audience. It is a rather prosaic and unromantic image and I suggest that a better way to think about these literary remains might be as Ackland’s ‘dark archive’, the technical term for a collection compiled not for immediate access and viewing but as a material guarantee against destruction, loss, indifference and forgetting. In a practical sense, a ‘dark archive’ is a failsafe against the possibility of disaster and ultimately the means of recovery. In Ackland’s case, it was the guarantee of long-term artistic survival and, while it can be said that all archives are unquestionably bound up with futurity, hers was evidently a studied rather than haphazard or accidental investment in literary posterity. Undated pencilled exhortations on various sheets confirm that some form of preservation was definitely desired: ‘Early poems—only copies—please keep. VA.’28 Interestingly, unlike Townsend Warner, who made clear and detailed arrangements in her will for the disposition of her literary papers and the ongoing organization of her literary estate, Ackland’s final will, made in June 1969, makes no separate mention of her wishes for the posthumous management of her mass of literary papers.29 This doubtless resulted from the fact that she was well aware that she would predecease her devoted partner,30 who was presumably already entrusted with the task (a new meaning perhaps for the term ‘death duties’). But it is an odd gesture all the same from a woman who arranged for her headstone to carry an inscription from the Roman poet Horace, non omnis moriar, or ‘I shall not wholly die’ (Ode III. 30) (Fig. 4.5). The choice of quotation was both poignant and pointed: it comes from a noted tribute to the enduring power of the written word (‘I have achieved a monument more permanent than bronze’) and celebrates its potential to ensure that ‘through future praise I will grow ever fresh’.31 In short, it encapsulated her aspirations for her work and her confidence that the future might deliver what the past had not. That future, however, was always to be secured through paper. In thinking through the afterlife of Ackland’s literary and personal papers, I am particularly interested in Warner’s continuing engagements with Ackland’s papers in the home they once shared together and how those papers remain ‘on the move’. Warner’s letters, written in the months and years following Ackland’s death, contain numerous cameos of caches of letters or manuscripts tumbling out of unexpected places around the

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Fig. 4.5  Headstone for Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner in Chaldon Herring churchyard. (Photo by the author)

house. ‘These two letters have just fallen out of a folio’,32 she writes on one occasion and on another of how ‘at least a hundred more letters have turned up—in a tin marked biscotini [sic] di Novara’.33 The emotive nature of these encounters is witnessed in the pencil annotation Warner left on a tiny envelope containing a note from Ackland dating from 1955. Perhaps unsettled by its sudden and bewildering reappearance, Warner has written: ‘received 20.x.1970—when I had said there could be nothing left’34 (Fig.  4.6). Indeed, while Ackland had assured Warner that her promise of devotion from beyond the grave would not extend to ‘the embarrassment of receiving letters’,35 it appears that was—ironically—precisely what was happening. This odd, posthumous flow of correspondence continued when her friend, Joy Finzi, took the opportunity around the same time to return two packets of letters Ackland had written to her.36 What is of interest as these papers stir is how they make things happen, and especially their capacity to generate both affects and activity. Working with—or immersion in—another’s literary papers and manuscripts was not an entirely novel experience for Warner. When in 1964 she accepted a commission to write a biography of the late T.H. White, it was arranged for all of White’s manuscripts and notebooks to be delivered to Warner for the duration of her research and writing. While Ackland had generously cleared space for the papers in her shed in the garden, they rapidly spread

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Fig. 4.6  Sylvia Townsend Warner annotated this envelope to record when she received it a second time following Valentine Ackland’s death. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Collection, Dorset County Museum. (Photo by the author)

‘all over it, and flowed into the house’ (Harman 1989, p. 283). Warner had not known White personally, yet, in the course of working with his manuscripts, notebooks and letters, she became increasingly attached to them as a point of felt connection with him (‘he handled them, knew the look of them’). Such was the intensity of this experience that she wrote in her diary how she would ‘die when they are withdrawn’ (Harman 1994, p.  303). Warner refused to use the terms ‘friendship’ or ‘intimacy’ to describe her connection with White as these required, she felt, ‘some foothold on living memory’ (ibid., p. 308). Nevertheless, the papers generated a palpable pull on her. The growing sense of understanding and familiarity she experienced through handling them, ultimately created a proprietorial sense that the papers were now in some way ‘hers’. As she confided to her diary in June 1966, ‘they are mine, he bequeathed them to me’ (ibid., p. 303; original emphasis). This strong sense of the associative power of paper reconstitutes it as something akin to a relic object, a token capable of conjuring the physical proximity of a loved or sacred being even after death (Hallam and Hockey 2001, p. 164). And certainly this is how Warner initially responded to the enduring paper traces Ackland left. Consider how a surviving note on the ‘magic’ blue paper they shared becomes the very embodiment of Ackland,

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with Warner describing how she has ‘my Love on blue paper before me’ (Harman 1994, p. 343). In a diary entry in May 1970, she records a further cache of letters turning up unexpectedly: ‘I wandered into V’s workshop, in pursuit of flat candlesticks, began, sans savoir comment, to unpick the further corner […] at the back a damp cardboard box. And in it, her letters to me 1932–39.’ In the wake of this discovery she declares that ‘the house is full of her’ (ibid., p. 344). At one point Warner declares herself to be simply ‘a part of [Ackland] she left behind’, a ‘Relict’ (ibid., p. 347, original emphasis), raising the question of how to characterize that which remains behind. While ‘relict’ is an arcane term for widow, it also carries the sense of an object venerated by association with a saint or martyr, the precious material trace of that figure. Literary remains are not usually classified within, or discussed in terms of, the material cultures of death or the materials of mourning, but it is all but impossible to confront Warner’s initial posthumous encounters with Ackland’s papers and not think in terms of mourning rituals and the part these papers played in structuring relations between the living and the dead. The role of objects in grieving is well documented, particularly the manner in which a loved one’s intimate possessions often take on a heightened significance for those left behind (Ash 1996; Gibson 2004). For this reason, the letter Warner sent to Joy Finzi on the day of Ackland’s cremation offering sundry ‘handbags, wallets, headscarves’ and suggesting that ‘[s]ome of Valentine’s shirts or pullovers’37 might fit other mutual friends reads at first glance as rather shocking, even a little cold. This is especially so considering Warner associated Ackland’s fine shirts and their beautiful colours and fabrics (‘the scarlet silk, the grey & silver brocade, the cobalt blue canvas-cloth, the willow green silk’) with her lover’s ‘triumphal gleam and beauty’ (Harman 1994, p. 348). But evidently these items were not freighted with quite the same emotional and symbolic weight that attached to Ackland’s papers, and especially to elements of their personal correspondence.38 Warner’s diary for this period intersperses accounts of attending Ackland’s cremation and later the burial of her ashes in East Chaldon churchyard with descriptions of how she had begun to ‘read & order our letters of 1930’ and how she ‘[c]ame home, to sort papers’ or ‘to go on sorting’ (ibid., p. 331). In the weeks and months that followed, Warner immersed herself in this work of assembling from the paper traces around the house what was in effect an archive of mourning. The process marked her loss, and, while it did not necessarily make her grief any more bear-

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able, it nevertheless provided a concentrated focus for the anxiety of absence that characterized her days during the period: ‘the loss of that company weighed on me all through this weeping day’ (ibid., p.  334). Handling the papers became a comfort to her, a way of both holding onto and letting go of Ackland. At the same time, it provided a means of reinhabiting the shared space of their house as the work of searching, sifting and sorting enabled her to settle in what might otherwise have been potentially distressing places: ‘after dinner I sorted her letters of the 50s, and was soothed. Sorted in her room a little’ (ibid., p.  340). Indeed, according to Warner’s diary notes for the period, the organizing of this paperwork was entangled quite explicitly with the process of ridding Ackland’s room ‘of death’. She records how this had ‘involved clearing files, reading part of a diary, reading her letters to me during Aug–Sep. 1949. To unriddle my heart I did a last tidying of the 1930 letters’ (ibid., p. 338). The 1949 letters Warner mentions cover the period of Ackland’s renewed affair with Elizabeth Wade White, an extended episode that, unlike Ackland’s other passing infidelities, had genuinely threatened their relationship.39 In one very long letter to Warner dated 27 July 1949, Ackland attempts to explain her vision of how she can love two women, although she acknowledges her actions and desires leave Warner still ‘buried in darkness and dust’ and surrounded by ‘unidentifiable rubble and corpses’.40 To observe the overlaid strips of paper that extend the formal limits of the page and to unfold or gently lift the layered inserts is to witness Ackland’s tense search for adequate expressions of feeling and connection with Warner (Fig.  4.7). Indeed, it appears to take the full affordances of paper, tape, clips and glue to answer the challenge of being suitably articulate in the face of complex and competing emotions. Little wonder Warner turned away from the tense cut-and-paste work of these particular pages to handle once again the richly spontaneous letters from their first days as lovers. It is across this period in early 1970—and through these gestures of reading, sorting and organizing—that the correspondence between the two of them evolved into a project in itself and, interestingly, it is precisely the terminology of archiving that Warner used to characterize her endeavour. Five months after Ackland’s death she writes a striking letter to William Maxwell, fiction editor at The New  Yorker and later one of her literary executors, in which she informs him that at last ‘she has begun to write again’. She continues:

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Fig. 4.7  Typescript letter from Valentine Ackland to Sylvia Townsend Warner, 27 July 1949. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Collection, Dorset County Museum. (Photo by the author) No, not a story, not a novel, and nothing for now. An archive. I found that Valentine had kept quantities of my letters, as I had kept quantities of hers. Reading through them, and putting them into sequence, I realised that it is a notable correspondence and the sort of thing that should be put away in a tin box for posterity. So now I am entirely absorbed in writing the narrative links and explanations. (Steinman 2001, p. 211, emphasis added)

She announces in the same letter that Maxwell himself ‘must be the tin box’ (ibid.), a command that constitutes him as both archivist and repository as she makes plans to forward him their correspondence with her annotations and linking narratives in successive batches. While Warner referred consistently to her ‘delight’ in annotation, working on the letters was simultaneously ‘an engrossing agony’ (ibid.). Elements of the correspondence needed to be copied, in part because they were ‘almost illegible with having been carried around, slept with, loved’

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(Harman 1989, p. 303). These were not letters that had been opened and then casually set aside or misplaced, a fact that is more than apparent in the cameos of surprise and pleasure Warner offers as successive bundles of carefully sequestered letters reveal themselves. ‘Preserved, not hoarded’, is how Warner came to describe them (Maxwell 1982, p. 256). Their faded state is an index of their status as significant objects, objects that had been ‘carried in pockets, kept under pillow, read and re-read’ (ibid.), and their creases and worn surfaces are clues to how such objects trigger and sustain circuits of desire. And just as letters traditionally mediate their writer’s absence, Warner’s methodical gathering up of their mutual correspondence revives the letters’ ‘conjuring power of reverie and mediation with the lost, absent person’ (Gibson 2004, p. 286). Her joy in them speaks to the enduring power or pull of these familiar once-lost-and-now-found sheets of precious paper, and her processing of them becomes integrated into the processing of her pain and loss. Ironically, the capacity of these letters to restore Warner to a sense of both wholeness and intimacy finds echoes in a surviving typescript of a short story by Ackland entitled ‘Widow of the Late—’: But as she read the letters, she felt herself solidify, as it were, into the very shape and form of the woman he was addressing. They seemed to bring all the scattered parts of her together, momentarily, so that she was integrated again, and could believe that the person who was so much loved was really there, was true, and was herself.41

Warner’s project of ‘archiving’ the letters lent them a new and mobile life. Determining that the letters should be retyped, she entrusted this work to Susanna Pinney, the young daughter of friends, who for the most part removed the letters to London, which proved inconvenient ‘for consultation about calligraphic doubts’.42 This was a monumental task (roughly 400,000 words) and, at one point, Warner observed how her typist ‘grinds exceedingly slow’.43 A consequence of this level of industry, however, was that substantial new piles of paper were being generated as fresh typescripts joined the originals. Having first tumbled out and been gathered in, the papers were now on the move again, and spreading. Warner writes to Joy Finzi of how ‘[t]he drawer of the bureau in the sitting room became too full; so one set of typed letters is now in the small Davenport desk in the dining room: 3rd drawer down’.44

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Interestingly, while the letters in question had been absolutely critical to the generation and sustaining of intimacy between Warner and Ackland (Jolly 2006), in their posthumous handling, retyping and (limited) circulation among a closed circle of readers, they were now productive of new networks and new relations of intimacy. Warner observed as the project progressed how she was ‘growing very much attached’ to her typist, at the same time as acknowledging that Pinney must find her task ‘very strange’, inasmuch as it forced her ‘to be tumbled into intimacy with two people she scarcely knew’.45 As the retyping of letters from each decade was completed, Warner noted down in her diary the succession of ‘porridge coloured envelopes’ heading off to William Maxwell at The New Yorker (Maxwell 1982, p.  251). Indeed, quite remarkable itineraries began to develop for these highly personal and revealing letters as they travelled to the United States to be shared further—first with Maxwell and thereafter with two American writers, the sisters Joy and Marchette Chute.46 In October 1970, Warner wrote to Maxwell that it ‘makes me very happy to think of you reading our letters, sharing them with me’, as though in the face of Ackland’s loss she required some new sustaining intimacy to validate and revive what she and Ackland once shared. She hopes that in reading the letters Ackland will become ‘more real […] more living’ for Maxwell (Steinman 2001, pp. 213–214). In a similar vein, she writes to Joy and Marchette Chute of her pleasure in their having read the letters which Maxwell had conveyed to them in March 1972, ‘for now you know us’ (Maxwell 1982, p. 257). In particular, Warner stressed that in receiving and reading the letters they have forestalled the process of Warner and Ackland ‘being whirled away from each other’, and, instead, Warner is now ‘reassembled’ as ‘we still exist to you, in our exact truth, in our reality’ (ibid.). More than a mere paper shrine to Ackland and their relationship, as the precious bundles of letters circulate and are lodged in new places, they clearly do new work: they take hold of people, cement new claims and obligations, and redraw the boundaries of earlier intimacies to encompass a new and trusted circle. As papers, then, they move both in the sense of being mobile or itinerant and in the sense of generating profound affective resonances. Warner’s posthumous handling and editing of Ackland’s poetry provides a further site for considering how these papers propelled her into major editorial and custodial projects. Even as the letters were still under preparation, Warner was engaged with Ackland’s poetry, first compiling a compact, privately printed volume Later Poems (1970) for distribution

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among friends, and then working with Chatto & Windus towards the more substantial volume, The Nature of the Moment (1973). Of this latter project Warner wrote: ‘Valentine’s poems are accumulating in new folders, in order of year’s dates; the tattered sheets are being retyped by [Susanna Pinney]. 1950–1969 are almost ready; and those of the [19]30’s. I have still to attack the decade in between.’47 Such descriptions in letters and in her diary of the work of sorting, preparing and checking Ackland’s poems generally fail to capture the scale of work on which she had embarked: this only becomes apparent when viewing the results in the form of the neatly ordered folders of 700 chronologically arranged typescripts of poems in the University of Reading Library Special Collections (Fig. 4.8). That the wealth of manuscript material Ackland left behind claimed such intense labour from Warner is evident in her account of herself as ‘tied to’ the papers and through them ‘to her’.48 In this characterization, she again evokes the idea of the papers as part of the very ‘materialities of death’, those objects that ‘stand as (problematic) extensions of embodied persons now deceased’ (Hallam and Hockey 2001, p. 127). She qualified her situation, however, by noting that she was ‘not so much haunted as possessed’.49 These implicit demands echo the force of personality Ackland

Fig. 4.8  Typescripts of Valentine Ackland’s poems. University of Reading, Special Collections/Gerald & Joy Finzi Collection. (Photo by the author)

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was known to exert in real life as characterized by Warner in a letter to their mutual friend Llewelyn Powys, which she signed off in the following manner: Valentine is rattling in the hall. The rattles are increasing in volume and imperativeness, in a moment I shall have to depose the cat and obey that summons. (Maxwell 1982, p. 27)

In leaving behind the volume of manuscript poetry that she did, there is a sense in which Ackland may have understood not only the patience of paper,50 but also its capacity to sustain and even intensify the complex emotional states that existed between the two women. While Warner wrote to Joy Finzi as early as April 1970 reflecting on Finzi’s idea of producing a new joint volume of her own poems and Ackland’s, drawing on the ‘quantities of [Ackland’s] working mss’,51 this option was never realized. Moreover, Ailsa Granne’s analysis of the fallout from their first and only such joint poetic endeavour suggests that this was not something Warner would seriously have contemplated. Granne argues that Ackland’s autobiographical work For Sylvia (1985)—which provides an account of her life as ‘a failed human being’—does not altogether preclude the possibility of blame for her failure, ‘particularly as a poet’, lying ‘in her association with Warner’ (Granne 2014, p.  779). After all, the principal audience for the account was Warner, and while Ackland struggled over the manuscript, ‘For Sylvia was not only completed but also handed over to Warner’ (ibid.) (Fig. 4.9). Warner’s refusal to provide an introductory essay for inclusion in The Nature of the Moment or to allow her connection to Ackland to feature prominently in the promotion of the book lend weight to Granne’s interpretation, as does her willingness to subsidize the costs of publication.52 Ackland’s legacy in the form of hundreds of manuscript poems provided for a posthumous reversal of energies, with Warner now taking on responsibility for realizing her lover’s strong desire for publication and recognition. In other words, the weight of surviving paper and the work it imposed tipped some delicate balance back in Ackland’s favour. It is clear too that, in working to organize the surviving manuscript poetry and establish the contents of a posthumous volume, Warner was once again forced to stand witness to Ackland’s acute disappointments as a writer. In a letter to Joy Finzi in May 1972, she describes the work thus:

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Fig. 4.9  Draft of ‘For Sylvia’. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Collection, Dorset County Museum. (Photo by the author) Chatto & Windus are doing a volume of Valentine’s poetry. I am doing the selecting & the order […] There is a quantity of her poetry; and a quantity of variants—endless searching, checking, comparing. I am torn between the mechanical strain of checking, and grief for her frustration. Have never been so tired in all my life, nor so torn in half, pulled into pieces.53

As this extract suggests, in the work of sorting through—and poring over—the manuscripts, the mechanics of paper are endlessly entangled with the affective triggers that operate at the interface of the body and the page. The same exercise which on the one hand made Warner whole again also reduced her to pieces via a paper-like metaphor of being ‘torn in half’.

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In making the selection for The Nature of the Moment, Warner struggled with her own preferences and partiality, fearing herself to be ‘affected by side-issues: remembrances of when, of how’.54 In the end, she resolved ‘to discard [her] own judgement and prepare a corpus for that future reader [Ackland] fixed her hope on’.55 All of Warner’s efforts give the poems order, collective substance and weight, and this in turn provides the basis for a more substantial posthumous reputation. The term ‘dead weight’ might be applied here to Ackland’s literary remains, but not in the familiar sense of an unrelieved weight of an inert mass—after all, these papers have shown themselves to be far from inert—but rather in how the term is used in shipping to refer to the total weight of a vessel when all cargo and passengers are aboard. ‘Dead weight’ thus conveys the sense of the freight or weight these papers ultimately carried into their afterlife in Warner’s keeping. If Warner understood her role in relation to Ackland’s literary remains as one of ‘anxious stewardship’,56 this extended to finding suitable permanent homes for different elements of her papers, mindful that their preservation—and the conditions of future access to them—would be critical to securing the future readership upon which Ackland had built such hope. Of their letters, she initially advised Maxwell to ‘[k]eep them for the present where they will be warm’ and later to find a home for them in ‘some humane place of learning … perhaps some woman’s University’ (Steinman 2001, p.  227). Around the same time in 1973, she was writing to Joy Finzi that ‘a complete corpus of [Ackland’s] poems should go to Reading [University]’,57 with Finzi enlisted in the project of securing this arrangement. This followed a failed attempt the previous year to persuade the Arts Council to take them when they acquired Ackland’s collection of poetry books.58 As Warner negotiated around the possible movement of her own and Ackland’s papers into the care of a formal collecting institution, she was doubtless sensitive to the absolutely pivotal role such papers would play in the making and maintaining of both their posthumous literary reputations. The careful sorting, arranging and annotating, moreover, ensured that the papers had the desired impact, that in their very materiality they produced suitable feelings and responses. In this respect, despite the depth of her mourning, Warner’s prolonged preoccupation with Ackland’s letters and manuscripts cannot be understood simply as a melancholy reluctance to give up the dead. It is more than this; it instances a profound sensitivity to paper’s capacities and to a materiality that emerged in—and was structured by—her interactions with those piles of paper. Warner’s gestures of preservation were tied, therefore, not entirely to

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memory and the past—although Ackland’s papers clearly retained potent ties to both—but also with a view to future possibilities, to potential opportunities for these papers to incite further activity. It is as though she recognized that in their weight and in their arrangement lay the conditions for exerting what Domhnall Mitchell calls their ‘gravitational pull upon us’ (2000, p. 177). In this regard, Warner’s actions both mimicked and anticipated the future scholarly investments that both require and follow from her efforts and which are ultimately needed to guarantee the live-ness or liveliness of this archive. As DeVun and McClure highlight so beautifully, ‘the material of the archive is inseparable from the uncategorized bodies with which it engages: the touch of human hands, the impulse of the scholar, an active tide of research wherein these objects, once again, move’ (2014, p. 122). It is a sad irony, therefore, that the Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Archive, so carefully preserved in its dedicated room atop the Dorset County Museum, is awkward to access and rests underutilized, the reputations of both writers compromised despite Warner’s skilled work with paper.

Notes 1. Valentine Ackland, ‘Notes for Autobiography. 1951’. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Archive, Dorset County Museum (hereafter abbreviated to ‘STW Archive’) R(FR)10/1/2. 2. Their papers are stored using an idiosyncratic filing system in a bespoke series of low-set cupboards created for that purpose by Auberon Waugh. While the collection is extensive, there are holdings elsewhere. Tolhurst (2017) provides a guide to the location of additional correspondence. 3. Letter from STW to William Maxwell, 13 April 1970. STW Archive S(UR)/84/307. 4. T Cupboard, Artefacts, STW Archive, Dorset County Museum. 5. Letter from Julius Lipton to Norah Smallwood, 7 June 1978. Chatto & Windus Fonds, Archive of British Publishing and Printing, University of Reading Special Collections and MERL (hereafter abbreviated to ‘Chatto’), CW577/1. 6. Letter from STW to Joy Finzi, 27 October 1972. STW Archive G(Left)/4/163. 7. Letter from VA to Helen Thomas, n.d. Gerald and Joy Finzi Collection, University of Reading Special Collections and MERL (hereafter abbreviated to ‘Finzi’), MS1399/3/7. 8. Letter from VA to Joy Finzi, 1 June 1960. Finzi MS1399/3/4.

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9. Letter from VA to STW, 22 February 1945. STW Archive N(Lower left)/46a. Ackland was referring to blue sheets they had used since the early 1930s for billet-doux to accompany bouquets. Warner responds, ‘Of course I remember the blue squared paper. What d’you take me for? Wot, I mean. I thought it was magic then […] Now I know it is. How else can you still have it?’ (Pinney 1998, p. 200) 10. Typescript notes. Warner is quoting in this document from drafts of Ackland’s autobiography. STW Archive R(FR)/22a. 11. VA diary for 1937. STW Archive T(LL)/13. 12. STW typescript notes on VA’s poetry. STW Archive R(FR)/22a. 13. VA, ‘Notes for Autobiography. 1951’ (typescript), p.  3. STW Archive R(FR)10/1/2. 14. ibid. 15. VA, ‘Notes for Autobiography. 1951’ (typescript), p.  53. STW Archive R(FR)10/1/2. 16. ibid. 17. VA, ‘Notes for Autobiography. 1951’ (typescript), p. 2. STW Archive R (FR)10/1/2. 18. VA, ‘Loose Pages of an Autobiography’ (typescript), p.  2. STW R(FR)10/1/2. 19. ibid. 20. VA, ‘Notes—April 1952’ (typescript), no pagination. STW Archive R(FR)10/1/2. 21. ibid. 22. VA, ‘Notes for Autobiography: written in April 1952’ (typescript), p. 3. STW Archive R(FR)10/1/2. 23. Quoted in a letter from STW to Joy Finzi, 9 July 1973. STW Archive G(left)/4/174. 24. STW typescript notes on VA’s poetry. STW Archive R(FR)/22a. 25. VA, ‘Notes—April 1952’ (typescript), p. 2. STW Archive R(FR)10/1/2. 26. Letter from STW to Kate Maxwell (daughter of William Maxwell of the New Yorker and one of Warner’s literary executors), 16 January 1971. STW Archive N(LR)/15/4. 27. Letter from STW to Norah Smallwood, 19 January 1972. Chatto CW 576/10. 28. STW Archive R(FR)/18/3. 29. A copy of Ackland’s will (dated 26 June 1969) and her estate account are held in the STW Archive, together with Warner’s will. 30. Ackland had been diagnosed with cancer in 1968. 31. This translation of the ode is from Kaimowitz and Ancona (2008, p. 142). 32. Letter from STW to William Maxwell, 23 February 1973. STW Archive S(UR)/49.

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33. Letter from STW to William Maxwell, no date. STW Archive S(UR)/83/15. 34. Note from VA to STW, 30 January 1955. STW Archive N(lower left)/16 a,b,c. In fact, as late as 1973 Warner was still reporting random letters turning up. 35. Letter from VA to STW, 26 March 1968. STW Archive N(lower left)/8/3b. 36. Letter from STW to Joy Finzi, 9 February 1970, STW Archive G(left) 4/119. 37. Letter from STW to Joy Finzi, 15 November 1969. STW Archive G(left)/4/73. 38. Minter (2015) recalls how Warner also attached significance to the many small objects that had once been part of her shared life with Ackland. 39. This period caused immeasurable pain to Warner, who by mutual agreement temporarily removed herself from the house at Frome Vauchurch. Hence, the need afterwards to reread letters from an early stage in their relationship in order to ‘unriddle’ her heart. Judd (2012) provides a detailed account of relations between the three women. See also Harman (1994, pp. 222–239) and Pinney (1998, pp. 226–283). 40. Letter from VA to STW, 27 July 1949. STW Archive S(LF)/5/206. The location of the physical letter is given here as those are the features I am highlighting. The text appears in Pinney (1998, pp. 231–235). 41. Valentine Ackland, ‘Widow of the Late—’, typescript story, 16 pp. STW Archive R(BR)/2/7. Also see ‘Relict of …’ held at R(BR)/3/6. 42. Letter from STW to Joy Finzi, 6 May 1970. STW Archive G(left)/4/124. For Pinney’s account of this period see Pinney (2018). 43. Letter from STW to Joy Finzi, 12 June 1970. STW Archive G(left)/4/126. 44. Letter from STW to Joy Finzi, 12 August 1970. STW Archive G(left)/4/128. 45. Letter from STW to Joy Finzi, 7 July 1970, STW Archive G(left)/4/127. 46. Joy Chute (1913–1987) was a novelist and short story writer; Marchette Chute (1909–1994) was a children’s writer and biographer. The sisters were ‘intimates at a distance’ who only rarely met Warner and Ackland in person, such that their friendship was maintained via correspondence. The Warner–Ackland letters remained with the Chute sisters before ultimately being returned to the Dorset County Museum following Warner’s death. 47. Letter from STW to Joy Finzi, 30 October 1973. STW Archives G(left)/4/174. 48. Letter from STW to William Maxwell, 28 November 1971. STW Archive S(UR)/84/331. 49. ibid. 50. A reference to the German proverb ‘paper is patient’ famously quoted by Anne Frank when invoking paper’s capacity to endure.

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51. Letter from STW to Joy Finzi, 15 April 1970. STW Archive G(left) 4/121. 52. Correspondence from Norah Smallwood of Chatto & Windus makes it clear that Warner wanted Ackland’s poems to appear without any reference to herself (‘no trimmings’), although she did relent and provide an endorsement that appeared discreetly on the inside back flap of the dust jacket. Warner also informed Smallwood that she would underwrite the project: ‘Money no object, I would be glad to pay for the printing’. Letter from STW to Norah Smallwood, 19 January 1972. Chatto, CW 576/10. 53. Letter from STW to Joy Finzi, 8 May 1972. STW Archive G(left)/4/158. 54. Letter from STW to Joy Finzi, 9 July 1973. STW Archive G(left)/4/171. 55. ibid. 56. Letter from STW to Joy Finzi, 14 October 1974. STW Archive G(left)/4/184. 57. Letter from STW to Joy Finzi, 9 July 1973. STW Archive G(left)/4/171. 58. Letter from STW to Norah Smallwood, 19 January 1972. Chatto, CW 576/10.

Bibliography Ash, J. (1996) Memory and objects. In P.  Kirkham (ed.) The Gendered Object. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 219–224. Bernard, L. (2011) Unpacking the archive. The Yale Review, 99 (4), 93–107. Bingham, F. (2008) Valentine Ackland: Journey from Winter: Selected Poems. Manchester, Carcenet Press. Cifor, M. and Gilliland, A.J. (2016) Affect and the archive, archives and their affects: An introduction to the special issue. Archival Science, 16 (1), 1–6. Derrida, J. (2002) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. E.  Prenowitz. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. DeVun, L. and McClure, M.J. (2014) Archives behaving badly. Radical History Review, 120, 121–130. Freshwater, H. (2003) The allure of the archive. Poetics Today, 34 (4), 729–758. Gibson, M. (2004) Melancholy objects. Mortality, 9 (4), 285–299. Granne, A. (2014) Fantasy, writing and relationship in the texts of Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Literature Compass, 11 (12), 776–785. Hallam, E. and Hockey, J. (2001) Death, Memory and Material Culture. Oxford and New York, Berg. Harman, C. (1989) Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography. London, Chatto & Windus. Harman, C. (ed.) (1994) The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner. London, Chatto & Windus.

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Jolly, M. (2006) A word is a bridge: Death and epistolary form in the correspondence of Sylvia Townsend Warner and David Garnett. In G. Davies et al. (eds.) Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner, English Novelist 1893–1978. Lampeter, UK, The Edwin Mellen Press, 11–28. Judd, P.H. (2012) The Akeing Heart: Passionate Attachments and Their Aftermath, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, Elizabeth Wade White. New York, Peter Haring Judd. Kaimowitz, J.H. and Ancona, R. (2008) The Odes of Horace. Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press. Lejeune, P. (2001) How do diaries end? Biography, 24 (1), 99–112. Maxwell, W. (ed.) (1982) Sylvia Townsend Warner Letters. London, Chatto & Windus. Micir, M. (2012) Living in two tenses: The intimate archives of Sylvia Townsend Warner. Journal of Modern Literature, 36 (1), 119–131. Minter, T. (2015) Sylvia’s gifts: Meetings with Sylvia Townsend Warner in the 1970s. The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 1, 43–52. Mitchell, D. (2000) ‘A foreign country’: Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts and their meanings. Legacy, 17 (2), 174–186. Pinney, S. (ed.) (1998) I’ll Stand By You: The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner & Valentine Ackland. London, Pimlico. Pinney, S.  (2018) Sylvia, a memoir. The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 1, 1–9. Stabile, S. (2004) Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth Century America. Ithaca, NY and London, Cornell University Press. Steinman, M. (2001) The Elements of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner & William Maxwell 1938–1978. New York, Counterpoint. Tolhurst, P. (2017) Sylvia Townsend Warner’s letters: Where are they now? Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 1, 65–76. Wexler, G. and Long, L. (2009) Lifetimes and legacies: Mortality, immortality, and the needs of aging and dying donors. The American Archivist, 72 (2), 478–495.

CHAPTER 5

Afterword

Abstract  This afterword takes up the ideas explored through the case studies and advances an argument for an expanded understanding of what literary papers are and can do. It suggests that the insights generated in the case studies via attention to the materiality of the page can be extended to form the basis of productive and novel ways of engaging with archived literary papers more generally. The afterword thus highlights the importance of developing an orientation to ‘thinking through paper’. Keywords  Paper • Archives • Evidence • Manuscripts • Materiality • Methodology

What I have sought to do in this book is to re-engage with the materialities of archival research via a focus on paper and what it can do. If the project carries with it a certain unapologetic nostalgia for the embodied experience of the reading room and the idea of researchers ‘seated at wide worktables bent in devotion over some particular material object’ (Howe 2014, p. 43), it is also much more than that. As I have already outlined, we should not imagine that the rise of digital technologies in the context of archives and archiving has closed down conversations around matter and materiality. On the contrary, the emergence of such technologies has only enlivened our understandings of archival materialities and lent a new © The Author(s) 2019 M. Dever, Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49886-1_5

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urgency or intensity to our engagements with the archived page by prompting us to consider the potential of paper and the page in ways that we have hitherto largely ignored. Put differently, that which was initially thought to diminish the page in its materiality has ironically only enlarged it for us. So while I remain genuinely attached to the pleasures of the reading room, I am also deeply interested in how the arrival of digital technologies inflects those familiar experiences. And if, as Derrida observes, the ‘end of paper isn’t going to happen in a hurry’ (2005, p. 65), there is some potential value in these speculations. In the three case studies that make up this book, I have endeavoured to explore what happens when one embraces archival collections in terms of their status as preserved paper. This has entailed, in the first instance, rejecting methodologies that effectively fail to ‘see’ paper and that participate by default in what Johanna Drucker calls ‘the celebration of transparency, in which physicality and materiality are wished away’ (2009, pp. 7–8). This is, as Drucker maintains, ‘a pernicious practice rooted in the worst sort of denial or denigration of our embodied condition’ (p. 8). It has also entailed confronting the privileging of words and text—often to the exclusion of all other phenomena—that has characterized humanities inquiry in the wake the linguistic turn. In each case study, I have set about investigating what happens when the material instantiation of a text is acknowledged rather than ignored, when the page itself is brought to the fore as a critical element in how a document comes to mean, and when the capacities of paper are freely and openly acknowledged as critical dimensions of the research scene. Taking the archived page as the subject of my inquiry in this way has meant actively displacing the traditional objectives of archive-based research in order to make space for more productive and experimental modes of engagement with literary and personal papers. This transformative manoeuvre opens out the question of what researchers might legitimately do in the face of such materials and what new modes of intelligibility might emerge from surfacing the page in this way. ‘Surfacing’ is used here not in a literal sense of the flat surfaces of a page, but in the sense in which this terminology is employed by those interested in rethinking the nature of the empirical. In this sense, ‘surfacing the page’ refers to the page as a productively redefined space of inquiry where, in the words of Adkins and Lury, ‘the space of the surface [can] open up possibilities for the development of differently co-ordinated— multidimensional, multi-situated, processual and open-endedly engaged— knowledge claims’ (2009, p.  5). How paper matters thus becomes an

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epistemological question and one that suggests our engagements with the archived page should be thought about less in terms of encounters with fixed objects already known and knowable than in terms of productive and transformative events. That is, an element of openness is introduced as we are now concerned with a materiality that is present when we turn up. Such an approach not only troubles more conventional understandings of archival evidence by pointing to its emergent rather than residual nature, but it also poses interesting questions about archival value by establishing materiality as having potential meaning and value in its own right rather than functioning as a loose proxy for another kind of value. My stated goal across the different case studies has been to develop the fundamentals of an approach or an orientation to ‘thinking through paper’, something that enables us to tease out what work the archived page does if it is indeed more than an invisible or transparent support to text. In effect, I have been asking what kinds of knowledge archival work can produce if we move beyond seeing such work as operating solely in the service of hermeneutic criticism or of making texts mean, and extend consideration to what we might think of as post-hermeneutic engagements with affects, sensations and a range of embodied experiences. Following this way of thinking, I have set forth—and experimented with—an expanded view of what matters in archival research and have remained open to the results. I discovered in the process that thinking through paper entails experiencing collections differently and asking different questions of them. In this work I was ultimately aided by the very subjects whose collections I chose to explore and who had preceded me in experiencing and handling the respective piles of papers. Indeed, it is fair to say that they provided models that informed the approach I have developed. As will be apparent from my analysis, the figures discussed here—de Acosta, Langley, Ackland and Warner—each demonstrated very particular relationships to the papers in their possession. It is clear that those papers were present to them in complex ways that shifted over time. They each touched, arranged, preserved and organized their papers, and, whether or not we deem those gestures in every instance to be consciously auto-­ archival, the level of their attachment to the papers is clear, as is their investment in the idea of some form of future or posterity for them. These are papers or pages with the potential to become. What is more, in their potentiality they are revealed to be far from inert: each case study offers instances of papers that not only move, but are also moving. They move in the sense that we see them travel from place to place, sometimes from

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person to person, and ultimately from private possession to public ­custodianship. But as each case study reveals, they are also moving in the sense of generating feelings and sponsoring actions. As Marika Cifor reminds us, ‘affect is a force that creates a relation between a body and the world’ (2016, p.  8), and my analyses reveal the diverse ways in which paper functions as a powerful interface for feelings, mediating between desire and distance, intimacy and creativity, bodies and memories. This inevitably raises too the question of what we are doing as researchers when we in turn take up these ‘felt objects in which sensation and feeling collide’ (Cram 2016, p.  111). Whether it is an individual sheet or a substantial accumulation of pages, I have shown how paper acts first as a trigger for— and later as a trace of—those feeling states we associate with desire, passion, affection, tenderness, trauma, loss, grief and mourning and how this impacts on the pathways such papers travel. Indeed, to suggest that paper acts is also to highlight how it moves in the sense of making things happen or in its capacity to call forth certain actions and to take possession of someone or take over some place. In other words, the case studies have each opened out the possibility of thinking about the archived page in terms of its liveliness and its capacities. Working with this set of insights, I have stressed how a sensitivity to those capacities of paper can reorient our inquiries and bring to the fore nuances that are simply not available to us if our interpretive gaze is focused exclusively upon the textual. In the case of Greta Garbo’s letters to Mercedes de Acosta, attention to the conditions of paper’s careful preservation allowed for the links between intimacy and materiality to emerge and the presence of a sustained (if unevenly experienced) passionate connection to be felt. Rather than in explicit expressions of affection, the bonds between the two women are evident in the affective weight of paper—some of it entirely scrappy and ephemeral—that has been accumulated, organized and archived. In the case of Eve Langley, by looking beyond critical and archival imperatives that privilege order and coherence and by embracing the messiness of paper as a material aesthetic and guiding principle, I was able to begin the work of separating Langley’s archive from the enduring taint of pathology and to embrace an alternative archival aesthetic. This enabled me to see the ways in which Langley’s creative life extended beyond conventional accounts of a stalled career as a published writer to a phase in which her paper manuscripts supported a new vision for her in a new medium. Following the paper enabled me to understand her collection as something other than an archive of failure. In the case of

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Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, a focus on the materiality of their shared archives made visible the part played by paper both in sustaining intimacies among the living and later in structuring relations between the living and the dead. Further, it revealed to me how paper might constitute the basis for new claims and obligations placed upon the living by the dead and how critical volumes of paper can then become to shaping and ensuring posthumous literary reputations. In each of these instances, I have sought to highlight how paper matters and how attention to questions of materiality can shift the very terms of scholarly engagement with archival collections. I have used these different case studies to argue for the necessity and value of moving away from our ingrained habit of ignoring the material instantiation of the archival artefacts with which we work and, instead, to take seriously the potential of the thing that is paper. In proposing that we understand our archival encounters to be encounters with paper and thus mediated by materiality, I am necessarily arguing against research practices which endlessly enact problematic splits between matter and meaning and which, through their insistent focus on the textual, linguistic and the cultural, fail to mark paper’s presence as a critical dimension of the archival scene and fail to account for how paper’s various affordances, movements, histories, associations and assemblages condition our experience of being-in-the-archive. This is not, however, a wholesale departure from all considerations of the textual and linguistic and neither is it a simple injunction to reckon matter more centrally in our methods. I am arguing that we need to refocus our attention on ‘the archive-as-experience’ (Latham 2011, p. 1) and understand that experience as mediated by more than words and the textual. In so doing, we allow for new and different questions and research pathways to emerge. Such questions and inquiries would operate with an expanded hermeneutics that acknowledges the distinctive materiality of paper documents and can more readily account for what then happens in our encounters with them. This would entail not only a productive re-engagement with the material realities of archival research, but it would also necessarily involve us in a more general rethinking of how relations between the cultural and the material have conditioned not only what we seek and what we accept as archival evidence, but how we organize our very inquiries. Finally, an expanded understanding of archival materiality must surely have implications for how we operate in the digital realm. It suggests that for critical digitization projects which work at the level of individual documents and ‘develop project-specific practices and tools’

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Fig. 5.1  File box. Eve Langley—Papers, 1926–1974, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS 4188. (Photo by the author)

(Dahlström et al. 2012, p. 463), we must imagine a digital archival environment sensitive to the emergent capacities of the paper page, one that registers the manuscript page as open and dynamic rather than inert and accounts for our interactions with it. What would that be like? (Fig. 5.1).

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Latham, K.F. (2011) Medium rare: Exploring archives and their conversion from original to digital part two—The holistic knowledge arsenal of paper-based archives. LIBRES: Library & Information Science Research Electronic Journal, 21 (1), 1–21.

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Index1

A Ackland, Valentine, 20, 75–77, 79–93, 95, 96, 98n46, 99n52, 103, 105 Affect, 19, 42, 85, 103, 104 Angus & Robertson, 53, 62, 64, 65, 71n27 Archival description, 12 Archival evidence, 17, 19, 20, 44, 61, 103, 105 Archival Mess, 19, 51–68 Archive stories, 17, 29 B Bennett, Jane, 64 Book history, 4, 13 Burton, Antoinette, 17, 29 C Conservation, 7, 15 Correspondence, 18, 19, 31–37, 40, 41, 43, 47n18, 51, 53, 55, 64,

71n27, 71n28, 77, 79, 85, 87–90, 96n2, 98n46, 99n52 Critical archival studies, 2, 3 Cvetkovich, Ann, 32, 33 D Dark archive, 20, 75–96 De Acosta, Mercedes, 18, 19, 28, 30, 31, 33–44, 45n4, 45n7, 46n12, 47n17, 51, 103, 104 Death, 11, 20, 28, 53, 56, 57, 61, 77–81, 83, 86–88, 98n46 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 11, 77, 102 Dickinson, Emily, 14 Dietrich, Marlene, 28, 30, 31, 34, 35, 45n6, 45–46n7, 46n12 Digitization, 10, 11, 105 Dorset County Museum, 2, 76, 80, 82, 86, 89, 94, 96, 98n46 Drucker, Johanna, 13, 102

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Dever, Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49886-1

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INDEX

E Epistemology, 17 Ernst, Wolfgang, 11 F Farge, Arlette, 9, 11, 12, 63 G Garbo, Greta, 18, 19, 27, 28, 30–44, 45n2, 45n5, 45n6, 45n7, 46n10, 46n13, 47n18, 51, 52, 104 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 9, 14 H Hayles, N. Katherine, 10, 17 Heesen, Anke te, 4, 15, 16 Historical Archives of the City of Cologne, 6 Howe, Susan, 10, 12, 101 Humanities, 2, 3, 9, 102 L Langley, Eve, 19, 51–68, 69n6, 69n12, 71n27, 71n28, 71n30, 76, 103, 104, 106 Letters, 6, 18, 19, 28–32, 34–40, 42–44, 45n2, 45n7, 46n9, 46n12, 47n17, 51, 63, 70n26, 79, 80, 83–93, 95, 98n39, 98n46, 104 M Mak, Bonnie, 13, 14 Manuscript, 2, 6, 10, 11, 13–16, 18, 19, 53, 56–58, 60–67, 68n2, 70n26, 71n27, 71n28, 71n30, 83–86, 92–95, 104, 106

Materiality, 3, 4, 6, 9–14, 16–18, 20, 28, 30, 36, 43, 44, 47n17, 59–61, 64, 67, 68, 79, 95, 101–103, 105 intimacy and, 104 Material literacy, 12 Material turn, 3 Media archaeology, 4 Methodology, 17, 102 Mitchell Library (State Library of New South Wales), 16, 19, 53–56, 60, 65–67, 106 Mourning, 20, 87, 95, 104 N Notepaper, 27, 35 P Page damaged, 9, 15, 55 layout, 13, 17 Paper cutting, 57, 79 handling, 20, 77, 88, 103 history of, 5 invisibility of, 103 ‘mind,’ 10 piles of, 20, 65, 90, 95, 103 presence of, 20, 77 productivity of, 4, 17, 44, 77 relations, 16 Photographs, 39, 44, 59, 61, 64, 66 Price, Leah, 11 R Rosenbach Museum and Library, 18, 27, 40, 41

 INDEX 

S Stationery, 35, 47n17, 77, 81 Steedman, Carolyn, 11 T Timbuktu manuscripts, 6, 8 Transcription, 9, 40, 68

121

W Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 2, 20, 76–80, 82–96, 98n39, 98n46, 99n52, 103, 105