[Personal_archives] Random remarks on Garbo's foot

[Fisher Robert]

Hello Maryanne & SISPA,

 

I am following this discussion with interest - and perhaps a small bit of trepidation - but have been too busy to actively participate before now.  The trepidation comes from the intensity of use of literary archives and perhaps, in the case of Garbo, celebrity archives.  This intensity is jarring to someone who acquires and preserves personal archives in fields where there is very little public "reading between the lines".  The search for inner meanings in the words of ordinary letters, the poring over of texts to find sub-texts, and such detailed analysis is absent from much of the use of personal archives.  Literary scholars invest much more time in the meaning of the letters and diaries that archivists acquire and preserve than we do in understanding and describing them, or perhaps than the creators did in writing them.  But I enjoyed reading Maryanne's work and sense that she accepts an inherent absurdity in this, even while knowing it leads to creative insight.

 

I found perceptive her rebuttal of other scholars who "appear persuaded that sexual passion necessarily generates a particular textual outpouring".  I wish it were so.  But alas, the letters in my acquiring areas seem largely devoid of sexual passion.  Not to say, non-existent but certainly love letters are a tiny minority of the whole correspondence.  I suspect that creators in my areas are as passionate as any other group of people but are careful (or their heirs are careful) to ensure their most explicit textual declarations of passion stay clear of the archives or the archivist.  Maryanne's ideas of absence and the contradictory elements of intimacy and distance are also insightful.  We find letters between husbands and wives only when they are apart - an atypical state of affairs.  For long relationships we may only find correspondence for a few brief absences, separated by many years.  We know the gaps are there but seldom meditate upon them or mention them in our descriptions.  We describe what we have, not what we don't have or what never existed, or what existed only in spoken form.  I also enjoyed her appreciation that in the Garbo letters "the play of desire here is not necessarily to be read off any one individual letter but is threaded across them".   It is a wonderful expression of the kind of insight that comes from immersion in the documents, but one very difficult to express to those who have not read through them too.

 

Cheers,

Rob

 

 

PS- in case you're curious, my acquisition area is intellectual life, scholarship, education, religion, journalism.

 

 

The opinions expressed above are mine alone and not those of my institution.

 

 

________________________________________________ 
Robert C. Fisher 
Archivist, Social Archives 
Library and Archives Canada 
550 Boulevard de la Cité 
Gatineau, Quebec, K1A 0N4 
(819) 934-7392 

________________________________

From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Rodney Carter
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 11:10 AM
To: Maryanne Dever
Cc: Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] Singular moments and some destruction

 

Hello Maryanne & group,

Thank you so much for your thought-provoking discussion so far. There are a number of threads that could be picked up and followed

On Plath's writing on the back of Hughes' manuscripts, I am reminded of David Greetham's "poetics of exclusion" where he states that actions which try to suppress a group can inadvertently - and ironically - allow material traces to survive and be found. Through her attempts to efface and overwrite Hughes, Plath, ultimately, allows his work to be saved along with hers. Geetham talks about how it is often rubbish (such as pottery shards thrown in garbage piles) that are found centuries later by archaeologists and it also brings to mind the Archimedes Palimpsest, where two previously unknown treatises - which were scrapped off the parchment and written over with prayers and then later was illuminated "medieval" paintings by a 20th century forger - were discovered through high-tech scanning. Leaving the historical record up to fate is certainly not something I would encourage, but it is definitely wonderful to see that some things do survive because of a happy accident.
[see David Greetham, "'Who's In, Who's Out': The Cultural Poetics of Archival Exclusion," Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 32, no. 1 (Spring 1999)].

The mention of Plath/Hughes, your discussion of Barnard's anxiety regarding the knowledge that her correspondents were keeping her letters (even, if as you state, this wasn't actually the case), and reading the articles shared with the group, brings me to something I've been thinking about for a while without finding any clear guide or ever coming to any hard and fast conclusions about (if such a thing is even possible) and that is the ethics of archival acquisition. Certainly the need to respect personal privacy is mentioned in professional codes of conduct but it is the application which is tricky.

Maryanne, you've written in "Reading Other People's Mail", that we live in an "age of disclosure" but that other generations, and not everyone now, shares the feeling that their personal records be open to all - de Costa's exclusion of the 'vulgar people', for example. I guess, what I've been struggling with is the balance between respecting the real - or, in the case of executors, often perceived - wishes of creators and the 'greater good' of preservation. It is easy to say that Max Brod did the right thing by disregarding Kafka's wish to destroy his writings or that the Public Archives of Canada was in the right to keep King's diaries (after all, he passed away before he got around to stating which parts he wanted saved and which he wanted destroyed) - and we might easily say that Hughes did the world a great disservice by destroying Plath's diary - but generally the considerations are much more subtle. What of the papers of those who are not literary giants, politicians, or otherwise among 'the great and the good.' The ethics of dealing with the "ordinary" people - when archives are lucky enough to get them - seem much less clear cut (which is not to say that the decision to keep or destroy in the above instances were made easily).

Dealing with personal and private correspondence, diaries, and other material is complicated by accruals that contain correspondence received by a donor who has little concern them self about the personal information contained in their papers but 3rd party author of the correspondence might not feel the same way. You quote Barnard stating that the information she conveyed in a letter was "not a thing to remember" but it was ultimately saved and remembered.

The committing to paper and sharing of memories is an act of trust. Confidence is placed in the recipient to be discrete, to maintain the author's privacy, and they may even include instructs to destroy the letters. Once the letter leaves the author's hands, though, they lose control over the content and its fate. If the letters are entrusted to a confidant is the author giving over the control of the information? Have they effectively assigned the rights to the letter to the recipient to keep safe, destroy, or deposit in the archives as they see fit? What about those recipients who had every intention of destroying their records but whose untimely death prevented them from getting around to it (and who, like artist Isabel McLaughlin, didn't have a housekeeper who was up to the task of destroying their private papers following their death)?.

As an archivist or scholar, does the right to privacy trump the 'right to know' (or vice versa)?. If so, does it do so in all cases, or just in some. Where do we draw the line, assuming the material is in our hands? Certainly, I believe and hope that we desire to preserve and provide access for some greater good, to aid in the understanding of the individuals and the world in which they live; that are interests are not salacious or vulgar, but we cannot guarantee it. 

Is there, or does there need to be, an archival ethics - both for archivists and those who use archives - and how do we go about developing it?

In case anyone gets the wrong idea, I naturally have a very real concern and do respect personal information in my professional capacity as archivist. I deal with orphanage records and medical information and treat these documents with the utmost sensitivity. Some cases seem clear cut but it is the grey areas that interest me and how the idea of what is sensitive information changes over time and across different territories and how this might impact our decisions to keep, destroy, or limit access. 

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this, Maryanne, as a scholar who has used and though about the use of personal records and any thoughts or experiences the group might like to share.

All the best,
Rodney Carter


Archivist
St. Joseph Region Archives
Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Maryanne Dever <Maryanne.Dever at arts.monash.edu.au> wrote:

I think Sylvia's point is a really important one and it comes up
frequently in literary studies - but maybe isn't commented on very
much. I'm thinking here of the way a particular sentiment expressed in
a single archived letter will be quoted as though it represented a
enduring life philosophy rather than, as you say, something expressed
in the moment! The example that has troubled me is another Barnard
one. Barnard maintained a correspondence for decades with critic
Nettie Palmer and when in 1935 she learned from Nettie that she was
keeping her letters, Barnard responded thus: "By the way what
possessed you to tell me that you kept my letters? It was enough to
scuttle me as a correspondent". This line is quoted frequently to
suggest that Barnard had a "life long" anxiety about her letters being
preserved which simply isn't so. She learned in the 1940s that Palmer
was quoting from them in a published selection of her journals and was
evidently quite chuffed. She was also cons
ulted about the transfer of her letters to the National Library as
part of the Palmers' papers and she not only appears to have agreed
but later drew people's attention to them.

On the conditions under which letters are sometimes written (and how
this affects handwriting, choice of stationery etc) I always like this
description Barnard gives of her letter-writing habits:

At one o'clock in the morning I'm liable to say anything. I'm writing
in bed, the lamp carefully draped with a dark blue slip so that my
family shall not see it and come to reproach me for getting a little
more out of the day than they think proper. A devious creature but I
must milk the night if I'm to get any time to myself.
Marjorie Barnard to Nettie Palmer, 30 March 1939.

Barnard was 41 years old at this point! Her worst handwriting is when
she is writing on the morning ferry.


On the question of destruction/survival and material literacy, there
is a very interesting essay by Lynda K. Bundtzen, 'Poetic Arson and
Sylvia Plath's "Burning the Letters"' which I've just found. She talks
about how 'acts of textual violence or abuse [destruction of each
other's work/papers] ...were...habitual in the Plath-Hughes marriage.' She
then talks about how when Smith College rare books collction purchased
some of Plath's papers they also received parts of Hughes' papers
because Plath had written her work on discarded of Hughes'. Bundtzen
writes: "Many of her final poems are written on his backside, so to
speak: Plath recycles old manuscripts and typescripts by Hughes, and
often she seems to be back talking, having the last word in an
argument. The friction between these two bodies is palpable at times,
as text clashes with text, and one intuits Plath's purposeful coercion
and filleting of Hughes's poems and plays as she composes ... If
Plath's "rare" body is skillfully
re-membered for public viewing and scholarly dissection, Hughes' seems
at times hopelessly dismembered, scattered and disordered. Her words
are on top and one peeks at the other side, often finding her ink has
bled through, indelibly splotching and staining Hughes' work'.

(That essay is in Anita Helle, ed. "The Unravelling Archive: Essays on
Sylvia Plath". Ann Arbor: Uni of Michigan Press, 2007, pp.236-53.)


Cheers,
Maryanne

--
Assoc. Prof. Maryanne Dever
Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, Monash University,
Melbourne
President, Australian Women's and Gender Studies Association (AWGSA)

Visiting Scholar, McGill Center for Research and Teaching on Women
(MCRTW), Apr-Jun 2008

Bank of Montreal Visiting Scholar in Women's Studies
University of Ottawa, Jan-Mar 2008

Mailing Address:
Centre for Women's Studies & Gender Research
School of Political & Social Inquiry
Faculty of Arts
Monash University
Victoria 3800 A

 

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