Welcome to Issue Eleven of Related Materials
surprisingly actually about actual archives this month
Hi, I'm Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher. Welcome to issue eleven of Related Materials, a newsletter about archives.
Slightly different this month as, rather than talking about three things that vaguely relate to archives, I have four for you! And some of them even directly relate to archives! A bumper August issue no less.
Reading: House as Archive: James Baldwin’s Provençal Home by Magdalena J. Zaborowska
Listening: The Lost Archives of James Baldwin - BBC Radio 4
We start this issue with a double bill: I had already lined up the article about James Baldwin’s house to write about in this month’s newsletter when the radio programme was also broadcast on the BBC. I wanted to include both as they tell two slightly different stories, 5 years apart, with no clear resolution.
James Baldwin’s archive - as defined by his Estate and archivists - sits in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a department of the New York Public Library. However in the south of France there is another ‘archive’ - his typewriter, his records, his books, his table - remnants of Baldwin’s daily life. The house where Baldwin lived is gone, or in the process of going - lost to developers, of course. These items were retrieved by Jill Hutchinson, the partner of Baldwin’s brother David and now sit in limbo. The BBC radio documentary focuses mostly on Jill’s sense of responsibility in caring for these items. Before David died, she promised him that she would look after them but has so far been unable to arrange for any institution to take them. And so they sit, quietly decaying, in her house.
Zaborowska’s article on the other hand, written in 2019 after the publication of her book about Baldwin’s french home, titled Me and My House, is a direct demand for the value of these items. Zaborowska first visited Baldwin’s house in 2000 and documented the items in situ. She argues that they convey a significant aspect of Baldwin’s life, a queer domesticity which informed his later writings. Baldwin himself had wanted to turn the house into a retreat for writers from the African Diaspora, a wish that was never fulfilled as the purchase of the property wasn’t complete at the time of his death. She challenges the archivists at the Beinecke, who carefully preserved Walt Whitman’s reading glasses and “Jonathan Lethem’s entire archive” [italics, Zaborowska’s own], that professionals should show the same regard for Baldwin’s personal possessions; they respond that the items are not unique.
The word ‘archive’ has come to have a very fuzzy meaning in contemporary society but in archival literature has a strict definition: evidence of a transaction. It can be tricky to apply this to personal papers - a diary is, maybe, a transaction with your future self? - but it gets to the core of what I’m looking for when I decide what to keep and what to not keep in a collection. To belong in an archive, an item must convey information, not just have a a talismanic quality. In my freelance practice, I’m currently working with a performance archive that includes wigs, silk ties and shoes. However these aren’t just personal mementos, they convey important information about the on-stage acts. As the majority weren’t filmed, it can be an important way of understanding how someone might move on stage. Objects can be archival.
Yet listening to the description of Baldwin’s clothes and table, I was reminded more of the Freddie Mercury exhibition at Sotheby’s last year. The exhibition saw the contents of Mercury’s house - furniture, books, costumes, handwritten lyrics and a large collection of porcelain cats on display as a once in a lifetime opportunity, before they were sold to collectors around the world. I queued for three hours to get in and I have absolutely zero regrets. In some galleries, the furniture and objects were arranged in room-like sets, as though Freddie was about to waft in wearing a kimono and sit down to eat. As I work in a private house turned museum for three days each week, it was slightly disconcerting. Sothebys had understood that in order to imbue these - often fairly ordinary - objects with value, they had to construct an archival context for them. Out of Freddie’s house, and looked at separately, they risked losing their aura and thus their (financial) value.
As an archivist, I see Zaborowska’s article as a provocation and a challenge, not necessarily to do things differently, but for archivists to better explain what it is that we’re doing. If we’re to be trusted with preserving heritage, we need to be able to justify the boundaries we put in place, and also demonstrate that they’re being applied fairly across collections and across communities. This means good documentation of our policies and decisions, and as much of a focus on communicating archival principles as on sharing digitised images. As a profession we also need to be open to discussing different modes of preservation and how museum-ification isn’t always the best route. The seller of Freddie Mercury’s collection, his friend Mary Austin, said that she wanted his piano to go to “a home where it will be loved, cherished and enjoyed to the full”. In the BBC radio documentary, presenter Tony Phillips talks about how meaningful it is to him to touch Baldwin’s ‘welcoming table’ - but how possible will it be to do this if it goes to an institution? Objects can be worth preserving without needing to be described as an archive; and an archive is just one way of preserving them.
Reading: ‘It could disappear for ever’: Anger over sale of George Orwell archive The Observer, 17 August 2024 [free access]
Reading: They by Kay Dick (Faber Editions, 2022)
The second of this issue’s double bills starts with a piece in The Observer newspaper about the sale of George Orwell’s ‘archive’. If it feels like I’m writing the word ‘archive’ in inverted commas a lot this month, this is basically what I do in my head every time someone who isn’t an archivist say that word, because usually they don’t mean archive in the way that I do. The reason you can hear my eyes rolling so hard on this occasion, is because it’s not Orwell’s archive, it’s the archive of his publisher, Victor Gollancz. A person’s archive usually doesn’t include the letters they sent, only the letters they received (until e-mail, which complete changes the game, but let’s stick with Orwell for now). These are letters which Orwell sent to Gollancz, discussing concerns about his books.
The parents company which owns the publisher, and therefore the archive, has decided to close the warehouse that stores it and sell the collection. They attempted to sell the entire archive for £1 million; it will surprise absolutely no-one working in the heritage sector that they didn’t find any takers. Archives cost a lot of money to catalogue and package and keep in an environmentally controlled environment. If the system made any sense at all, people would pay us to take them off their hands rather than vice versa. But anyway, not receiving any offers for the whole collection, instead they’ve split it up ‘between dozens of dealers, private collectors and libraries: “All the board asked us to do was to get rid of as much material as possible… and the rest… had to be thrown away.”’.
Let’s hold that thought for a minute and move on to They, which I happened to pick off the shelf in the local library a few hours after reading that article. They was originally published in 1977; it won the South-East Arts Literature Prize but was out of print two years later. A few years ago a literary editor chanced upon a copy in a second-hand shop and it was reissued as a dystopian horror prescient of today’s culture wars. They tells the story of an England in the grip of a moral cultural panic, where a shadowy group are destroying artworks and forcing artists to ‘forget’. It’s a short book of sparse prose that never really explains what’s happened or what is happening, but conveys the fear, indignation, anger and resignation of those attempting to continue to ‘make work’ in the new climate. I read it in an afternoon but I’m still quietly haunted by some of its imagery.
I wanted to discuss this alongside the sale of George Orwell’s ‘archive’ (eyeroll) because I feel like it neatly sums up the problem. There is little genuine danger that Orwell’s ‘archive’ could “disappear for ever” as the article bombastically suggests - in a likelihood, if it goes into the hands of a collector, it will be back on the market again in 30 or 40 years when they die. Instead my concern is for the ‘…and the rest…’ which was thrown away and not distributed to dealers for sale. This kind of cherry-picking just reinforces the canon. Orwell is studied because we know about his books so we keep his letters, so he’s studied more and so on, ad infinitum. Kay Dick’s works were forgotten, even though she also wrote dystopian fiction (although this was apparently an outlier in her work), because her work wasn’t simple enough to be understood by GCSE students, and also possibly because she was a lesbian who fell out with basically pretty much everybody in the literary scene to what seems like an almost heroic extent. Frankly, I know whose letters I’d rather read.
As discussed above in relation to Baldwin, we can’t keep everything. But when we select only the names we already know from archives - when we let the market decide - we genuinely risk that other names will disappear forever.
Bonus track: All Dead, All Dead from Queen Songs by Makoto Yano feat Akiko Yano [YouTube Music link]
The original ‘All Dead, All Dead’ was sung by Brian May about his childhood cat, and if you can listen to the original version without crying then you’re a stronger person than me. The version I’ve linked to is an instrumental from a 1979 album of Queen cover versions by Makoto Yano, featuring the incredible Akiko Yano on piano. This is a very tenuous excuse to alert you all to the fact that Akiko Yano’s back catalogue is finally available on streaming platforms. I’m trying not to think about how much money I spent on her CDs in Tower records in Tokyo this January only to have them now available as part of my spotify subscription but anyway! Enjoy! If you don’t know where to start you basically can judge an album by its cover in this case, although that won’t necessarily help you because the covers are all equally wonderful.
Thanks for reading!
Anna