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Oregon Humanities is a journal of ideas and perspectives published three times a year by the Oregon Council for the Humanities. Each issue includes essays and articles that explore a particular theme from a variety of perspectives, broadening the ways in which readers think about a subject and providing a basis for further thoughtful discussion.

Oregon Humanities Spring 2009

Literary Legacies

Boxes of authors' papers may be a state's treasure

By Ellen Santasiero

Among Ken Kesey's papers at the University of Oregon live the pitted and splattered pages of notes the author made for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. There, in his archive, Chief Bromden, McMurphy, and Nurse Ratched still breathe their first breaths on the smudged carbons that make up the novel's first draft. Letters, in stacks, still provoke: a message from Allen Ginsberg, a tribute from Jack Kerouac, and a lament to Ken Babbs stamped in red ink by Kesey's dog's paw. Some archivists would suggest that a writer's soul resides in the papers he leaves behind, which may explain why one gets the sense, while perusing the Kesey collection, that if the old prankster's spirit lives anywhere, it is here, among the archive's leaves--laughing, inventing words, exhorting us, and wagging a finger at the world.

Ask an archivist why creased and yellowing papers--letters, scrawls, drafts, official documents, and photographs--are important, and the answers range from the spiritual to the political to the practical. Archives are sometimes perceived as pure, as "the temple of fact, objectivity, and omniscience," writes historian Randolph Starn, but James Fox, head of special collections and university archives for the University of Oregon Libraries, is more interested in the archive's link to democracy.

"Here's the thing," says Fox. "Our libraries and archives are our collective memory." Fox cites the 1992 burning of the national library in Sarajevo, where 1.5 million volumes and some 150,000 rare books and manuscripts were lost. "Literally, Bosnia's written record was burned. The Bosnian-Serb forces knew if they wanted to destroy this multiethnic society they would have to destroy the library." Fox says theorists and cultural observers have noted that whoever controls the archive controls our memories and our identities, and thus our political landscape. "Why do you think some political regimes struggle and fight so hard to control access to their records? We can measure a democracy or free society by the amount of access there is to the archives. I don't want to inflate my position, but believe me, a day doesn't go by when I don't think about the tremendously important cultural role that I have. I take it seriously." So much so that Fox recently secured a grant from the Oregon State Library in part to help shore up other, less well-endowed Oregon repositories.

Finally, paper archives contain the raw data that scholars use to produce new, useful knowledge about human experience. Called "the hard core within a soft core of interpretation" by Starn, the marks upon the pages are equivalent to the fragments of bone, clay, and metal that anthropologists use to construct theories about humanity. When we see in an archive references to past events, evidence of old technology (typewritten carbons, envelopes with seven-cent stamps), and relatively uncensored and unvarnished facts, it's easy to understand why some people believe that not much preserves the past as well as the primary source documents in our public institutions.

But for all their supposed importance, we almost never think about archives.

"It certainly made the papers when the most ancient Hebrew text written on a shard of pottery recently showed up," says Charles Seluzicki, an antiquarian bookseller in Portland. "But when was the last time you heard about manuscripts in the news?"

Many archivists agree that literary papers are the most revealing, because, well, no one is more apt to leave behind a written record than a writer. Paul Merchant, the William Stafford archivist at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, says Stafford kept unusually complete records, including the manuscript drafts and typescripts of all his poems, twenty thousand pages of daily writings, and one hundred thousand pages of correspondence. "Present and future readers will gain inspiration from these papers," he says. "They are the supporting evidence for a successful and extremely hardworking life in three separate but related fields: pacifism, poetry, and teaching. They will be read far into the future for their insights."

Merchant adds that researchers also will read Stafford's papers to track the development of particular poems. Most archivists agree that this endeavor--to learn more about the creative process--is the literary archive's raison d'etre. Fox notes, "We are not just interested in the finished product. We want all the drafts and the correspondence so a researcher can see the particular choices the artist made along the way, and how their thought developed in the writing of a novel or a poem."

For instance, because we can see that Ken Kesey changed the last phrase in the second-to-last sentence in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, we may draw conclusions about his craft or his editor or both. Is his scrawl in blue magic marker, "I miss Keneddy [sic]," a clue about the man or the artist? Perhaps the rest of the archive will hold the answer. Then the scholar moves on to the next gray box of papers.

Writer Barry Lopez, whose considerable collection of papers once required a separate building on his property, says he didn't think of leaving physical evidence of his creative process to future researchers; rather, he attributes his diligent archiving to an "occupational neurosis." "There is that congenital, neurotic feeling about being forgotten, so I think we save material because throwing it away means losing part of ourselves." But Lopez also had an inkling that his compulsion to save certain things was more than just a personal tic.

"I thought somebody should hold onto my correspondence to see the social changes that took place in the U.S. from roughly the middle '60s to the present," says Lopez, referring to his letters to and from Annie Dillard, Tobias Wolff, and Richard Brautigan, among others. "I sensed something happening in my generation, that we were part of something way bigger than whatever we were. Whether [the letters were addressed] to Barry or not--that is almost incidental."

There is, however, lots of evidence of Lopez's creative process in his archive, and no one is more delighted about that than scholar Jim Warren, who started examining the contents of Lopez's eighty boxes at Texas Tech University in Lubbock last November. Warren discovered that although Lopez published his book Field Notes more than fifteen years after he published Desert Notes and River Notes, the writer considered the books a trilogy. That discovery prompted Warren, an English professor at Washington and Lee University who is writing a book about Lopez's literary and intellectual gifts, to search for connections between the three volumes. He found, among other things, that the three books contain identical tables of contents. Hmm. If such a revelation doesn't quite inspire, remember this: when it comes to literary archives, God is in the details. Such details may just be the lowly bricks of a soaring cathedral. "I am learning how his imagination works and how he weaves things together," says Warren, who is also studying the structure and images in Arctic Dreams. "I've got a much better sense of his work now than I had [before]. It is going to enrich my teaching of him greatly."

So it would seem that archives are at once godhead, cultural ur-texts, and piles of raw data. But there are other reasons the archive cannot be ignored. Fox and his colleagues are well aware of what theorists call the "romance" of the archives. For the researcher, he says, "It's intoxicating. It's as if you are a detective and no one has gone there before you. You have this kind of direct communion with this past. Every once in a while from all these disparate pieces of information, a beautiful picture emerges. It's fabulous."

Paul Erickson, director of academic programs at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, is less enamored. "Researchers do have a sense of excitement because they don't know what the next thing they turn over is going to be, but they also have a feeling of frustration about the limitations of archives," he says. "Archives are always fragmentary to a certain extent. You always have the feeling of wanting to find the perfect smoking gun, but you never really do. There is never that one thing that says everything you want it to say."

And how much are we driven by nostalgia in our desire to keep archives? Theorist Jacques Derrida, in his book Archive Fever, opines: "[Archive fever] is ... an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement." But most archivists respond to the question the same way Erickson does: "I think nostalgia is part of it, but any motivation that encourages us to preserve the past is okay."

Merchant adds, "Some inferior work may be preserved out of sentiment. But we can't anticipate the judgments of posterity, and masterpieces sometimes lie hidden. Emily Dickinson is the perfect example. She was not very well known when she died, and it is a miracle that we have her work. It is in little bound volumes that she left behind. It's wonderful, just wonderful. But someone might easily have thrown those away. She is a great national treasure, obviously."

What's the difference between an archive and a dump?" Doug Erickson, special collections librarian at Lewis & Clark College, joked at a meeting of professionals and volunteers from repositories in Central Oregon last November. The group had gathered at the invitation of Fox, who was using some of his grant funds to hold town hall meetings around the state. His objectives were to hear about others' collections challenges and to introduce a project called Envisioning Oregon. The proposed project may enable Oregon repositories to work together to weave a safety net that will catch cultural treasures before they fall into oblivion.

"A dump has seagulls," says Erickson, whose punch line got the group discussing the diplomatic issues around unwanted donations. One librarian mused on how many offers of National Geographic she routinely turns down; another told of a woman who called his institution wanting the sewing machine back that she had donated forty years prior. (The institution didn't have it anymore.)

Fox's idea is simple: if we work together, we'll do a better job of saving our cultural heritage and making it available to people. Envisioning Oregon grew directly out of Fox's realization that many, many items are perishing or languishing in substandard conditions because Oregon repositories are strapped for cash.

Yes, money is a factor in the collections equation. Not just in the ongoing care of materials, either--more and more, large institutions with finely tuned collections policies are paying top dollar for boxes of papers that used to be given as gifts to an alma mater. At the center of this market hums the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which in the 1950s started paying Texas-size prices for some of the most valuable and sought-after literary archives in the world, including those of British modernists Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, and Malcolm Lowry. It appeared to many dismayed Britons as if the Ransom Center had tipped the Isles on their sides and many of their most important papers had slid out.

"Ransom's vision has had nation-rattling implications," says Seluzicki. "When a place like the Ransom has more materials by certain French authors who are iconic than exist in France, then you had better believe that someone is saying, 'This is what we want and here's the money to go and get it.'"

It's a funny market. A few blockbuster names--Cormac McCarthy, Norman Mailer, and others--go for over $2 million, and most everyone else falls within the $30,000 to $300,000 range, says Ken Lopez, a rare books dealer in Hadley, Massachusetts. "It's also a buyer's market," Lopez says, "so prices can be much lower than what you would expect for items of significant cultural worth." Lopez explains that there has been an upward trend at the market's high end and a weakening in the middle and lower levels over the past twenty years. "It's actually harder to sell a $30,000 or $50,000 archive, or even a $100,000 archive, these days."

Writer Ursula Le Guin, who is slowly feeding her papers to the University of Oregon, says that for many years she didn't even know it was an option to sell one's papers. "When I discovered bidding wars were going on, I felt disgusted envy," she says. "But I wouldn't sell anything to a nonprofit unless I was starving, and even then I would feel ashamed and humiliated." Not everyone agrees with her.

"For many writers," Fox says, "the only time they make any money is when they sell their archives. Particularly poets. Poets don't make a lot of money, but their literary archive can contain a lot of valuable correspondence. I usually find that poets start advertising their collections for sale when they are thinking of retiring or when they have to put kids through college. Who can begrudge them that? They've never made any money most of their careers."

Its power notwithstanding, the market is not always, or even usually, the determining factor in where a given writer's papers end up. Dealers, archivists, and writers concur that a writer's relationships with specific regions, places, or institutions are usually the first consideration and often trump relationships initially forged by monetary promises alone. Writers also consider an institution's prestige and reputation for stewardship.

Another force propelling the development of literary archives are institutions' collections-development policies. Clearly stated messages about an institution's thematic interests, such as pacifism or children's authors or screenwriting, may draw certain writers and institutions together. Many writers and their heirs are attracted by the notion of their legacy being understood within a larger cultural context and being read alongside complementary authors' papers and other related collections. Such was the case for Barry Lopez, who sold his papers to Texas Tech in 2001 for an undisclosed amount.

When Texas Tech approached Lopez, they relayed the message that a former regent wanted to establish an archive devoted to authors who were deeply engaged with the connections between nature and culture. They proposed making Lopez's work one of the cornerstones of the archive. If he said yes, the university was confident that major writers William Kittredge, Pattiann Rogers, and David Quamman would place building blocks in the archive's foundation as well. It worked. Today, Texas Tech's Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community, and the Natural World is not only home to the papers of Lopez, Kittredge, Rogers, and Quamman, but to those of Rick Bass, Max Crawford, Bill McKibben, Annick Smith, Walter McDonald, Doug Peacock, and David James Duncan, among others.

"I would have preferred to keep my papers in Oregon," Lopez says, "but when I went to Texas and saw the endowment and the connective tissue and the commitment that we would all be brought together, I decided to have my papers there." With its financial resources, the Sowell Collection is able to make its papers widely available to the public. It funds fellowships for scholars like Jim Warren and traveling exhibits to local schools, where children may get inspired about the writing life by seeing Lopez's arctic gear and tattered expedition flags. And someday, portions of Lopez's and Kittredge's papers may be available on the Web to long-distance researchers.

Other institutions are already using digital technology to make materials widely accessible. Scanning, as well as other software and hardware, has allowed the University of Nebraska to create the Walt Whitman Archive, a website that is one of the most highly respected resources for Whitman scholars, despite the fact that the university owns nary a scrap of Whitman's actual papers.

"There's no doubt the digital age is allowing us to do things with papers and manuscripts we could never do before," says Fox. "Now an eighth grader in Topeka or someone in Berlin can see our photos of Native Americans around the Pendleton area. Before long, we are going to have scans of various manuscripts and seminal letters from one author to another there for everyone to see. Digital technology means the archive is no longer a privileged place."

But digital technology is not just changing how and where we access archives--it's transforming the literary archive in every other conceivable way. If an archive can be thought of as having a life cycle, from production and storage to access and use, digital technology affects it at every stage. Whether those effects are for better or worse remains to be seen.

First, archivists say, because digital technology shapes the way writers write and save their work, it may determine whether we even have paper archives in the future. Doug Erickson says the wonderful correspondence between writers in Lewis & Clark's archive is a thing of the past. "We communicate in very short and spontaneous ways now, rather than being methodical and contemplative about what we are writing." He adds that we tend to not print out e-mail correspondence. Nor are writers printing out other potentially important documents, says Merchant. "Word-processing programs that overwrite previous drafts will result in fewer early versions being preserved," he says. "There may be poets and novelists who end up keeping only their final version. This will be very impoverishing for literary scholars."

As far as storage goes, Erickson calls digital technology horrific. "Paper is not perfect, but we know its limitations. We know how to de-acidify. We know how to extend the life of paper by regulating temperature and humidity. But there is no such thing as an 'archival' CD because no CD has been around for a hundred years yet." Erickson says it is expensive to keep transferring digital archival information to the latest forms of technology, but if institutions don't do it, they risk losing information. "How many five-inch floppies do we have that we don't have any more floppy readers for?" he asks.

Even when it comes to access, archivists agree that the digital can go only so far.

"It's of interest if writer X's papers between 1930 and 1936 are all stained with rum," says Seluzicki. "That's not going to come through on the digital screen. As a matter of fact, it may erase any trace of it. I am not being facetious here. There are a lot of material evidences that are important to any future scholarly process."

But scholarly processes may be changing, too, says Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. "It's common to hear people ask, 'What will happen to the biographies of the future now that everything is just e-mail and nobody saves anything?' But I think there is a strange fallacy in asking that question because it presumes that everything else stays more or less the same." The digitization of the literary archive, he points out, is not an isolated phenomenon. "It's part of an enormous relativistic shift that is happening [with] information, especially information on paper." Birkerts speculates that the whole idea of the authoritative book on a subject may morph into something else, perhaps a kind of an open-file archive, presided over by an institution. "I think all systems, including library systems, are changing." However, says Doug Erickson, that doesn't mean that we won't still want and need the strands of raw data.

Lopez biographer Warren, a self-avowed paper lover, says he doesn't know what the future will bring, but he does feel fairly certain about one thing. "Texts will remain texts, no matter what they are written upon, and reading and writing will remain two of the most important ways of knowing our place in the world. The technologies of reading and writing may change somewhat, but they won't change to the point that [they] will utterly disappear from our cultures. At least, I surely hope they won't."

Ellen Santasiero is a freelance writer in Bend. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Northwest Review, Marlboro Review, High Desert Journal, and Oregon Home. She also teaches literature at Oregon State University, Cascades.

Where to find the archives of Oregon authors

Regional identities are sometimes tied up with certain authors and their work, says James Fox, head of special collections at the University of Oregon Libraries, and to remove those authors' papers from that region could have a damaging effect on the region's understanding of its own past. "There are some collections, like Ken Kesey's, that should never leave their home state. Ken's identity is so closely bound up with this place, and it is around Ken's papers that we bond as a state. It is more difficult when you have a writer who needs to sell their archives, but if all things are equal, it would be much better to keep the collections in the areas they are closely associated with."

But Fox allows that a collection from England could be understood well in Texas.

Writer Ursula Le Guin says it seems like a regional writer "belongs" near home, where he or she might receive more understanding treatment by regional archivists, but that with other writers it seems less important. Still, she says, "It seems grotesque to have to go to Texas to study Keats, but that's how we do things."

Many of Oregon's most prominent writers' collections reside in Oregon. Besides Ken Kesey's collection, the University of Oregon, or UO, is steward to the complete or near-complete collections of Le Guin, Don Berry, Glenn Coffield, Alvin Josephy, Ernest Haycock, Kate Swift, Kate Wilhelm, Molly Gloss, and children's authors Virginia Lee Burton and Elizabeth Wharton Jones. The UO possesses some 250 literary collections, which include authors and illustrators of children's books and journals. In addition to the William Stafford archive, Lewis & Clark College is home to more than twenty-five literary archives--one thousand banker's boxes in all--including those of Vern Rutsala and Charles Erskine Scott Wood. Reed College has the papers of Mary Barnard, among others.

Barry Lopez's and William Kittredge's papers are part of the James Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community, and the Natural World at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Raymond Carver's papers are at Ohio State University, Gary Snyder's at the University of California at Davis, and John Reed's at Harvard University.

Portland antiquarian bookseller Charles Seluzicki observed that there are some writers who do not have as strong a sense of place as others. "We forget that, because the Pacific Northwest does, in a great number of writers, inspire a particularly strong sense of place, but I don't think we can assume that that is always operating on the levels we think it is. There is nothing automatic about any of this."

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