Kingsley Amis, Saul Bellow, Franz Kafka

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Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts: Kingsley Amis, Saul Bellow, Franz Kafka

Zachary Leader

In September 1960, with the encouragement of the Standing Confer- ence of National and University Librarians (SCONUL), Philip Larkin sent a questionnaire to ‘twenty “leading writers”’, among them T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Graham Greene, asking about the disposition of their literary manuscripts.1 The results were to be reported back to SCONUL at its annual conference. The writers were asked three questions: (1) ‘Have you ever been asked for a gift of your manuscripts by a British library, an American library, or any other library?’; (2) ‘Have you ever been asked to sell your manuscripts to a British library, an American library, or any other library?’; (3) ‘Would you care to express any general opinion on this question to the conference?’2 The idea of the questionnaire was inspired by a letter Larkin received from an American library asking him if he would donate his own papers.3 The letter arrived sometime before 10 October 1958, when Larkin wrote to the Times Literary Supplement about ‘the growing practice of American libraries of soliciting the gift of manuscripts or worksheets from living authors for study and preservation.’ In the letter, Larkin declares that ‘the time has come for British librarians to consider adopting a more positive policy.’ Larkin’s election to the Poetry Panel of

1. Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (London, 1993), p. 339; hereafter abbreviated PL. 2. Kingsley Amis, completed questionnaire, The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader (London, 2000), pp. 580–81. See also Amis, letter to Philip Larkin, 24 Sept. 1960, The Letters of Kingsley Amis, pp. 578–80. 3. See Larkin, ‘A Neglected Responsibility: Contemporary Literary Manuscripts’ (1979), Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (London, 1983), p. 103; hereafter abbreviated ‘NR’.

160 This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 161 the Arts Council in January 1961 led to just such a policy, a collaboration between the Arts Council and the British Museum in creating in 1963 the National Manuscripts Collection of Contemporary Poets (NMCCP), which made its ﬁrst purchase in 1964.4 Larkin’s friend Kingsley Amis was among the twenty writers surveyed, and he answered questions 1 and 2 by saying that no British library had ever approached him either for a gift of his manuscripts or to sell them, but that he had been approached by American libraries, had given a dozen or so items (corrected drafts of poems) to one of them, and might well sell other manuscripts ‘in the future’ to another. The ‘general opinion’ he wished to express to the conference was this: I will sell any of my manuscripts to the highest bidder, assuming such bidder to be of reputable standing, and I have no feeling one way or the other about such bidder’s country of origin. It seems to me no more incongruous that the Tate Gallery should have a large collection of Monets (say) than that Buffalo University should have a collection of Robert Graves manuscripts (say). I view with unconcern the drift

4. In 1969 the NMCCP became the NMCCW (National Manuscripts Collection of Contemporary Writers) and began purchasing prose as well as verse manuscripts, beginning with the only two surviving folios of Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932). For a variety of reasons, the Arts Council withdrew its support for the NMCCW in 1979, thus ending its existence; see Jamie Andrews, ‘What Will Survive of Us Are Manuscripts: Collecting the Papers of Living British Writers’, Journal of the History of Collections 20, no. 2 (2008): 259–71; hereafter abbreviated ‘WWS’. In its twenty-plus years of operation, signiﬁcant manuscript material of writers, magazines, and small presses was purchased for British institutions, dispelling the idea that British libraries were not interested in contemporary manuscripts. In 2005 the campaign for preserving contemporary British literary manuscripts was reinvigorated by the creation of two lobbying bodies: the Group for Literary Archives and Manuscripts (GLAM), made up mostly of archivists, curators, and librarians of literary collections, and the United Kingdom Literary Heritage Working Group (UKLH), spearheaded by writers such as Motion and Michael Holroyd, as well as prominent curators, academics, and publishers. These organizations campaign in the public press and with the government for the retention of modern literary manuscripts in Britain and for tightened export regulations and tax incentives to beneﬁt living authors and British collections. They also provide advice to authors wishing to sell their archives or seeking guidance on the care of electronic archives.

Z ACHARY L EADER, professor of English literature at the University of Roehampton, is at work on a biography of Saul Bellow. He is the author, among other books, of Reading Blake’s Songs: Revision and Romantic Authorship and The Life of Kingsley Amis (a ﬁnalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in biography) and the editor, among other books, of Shelley’s The Major Works, On Modern British Fiction, and The Letters of Kingsley Amis. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 162 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts of British manuscripts to America, where our language is spoken and our literature studied.5 In an accompanying letter to Larkin he explains: ‘I’d have said “my work belongs not to England, but to the world” if I were a different type of chap. (I use this last phrase so often these days that I’m beginning to wonder whether I may not actually be a different type of chap.)’6 Nine years later, in 1969, Amis sold one and a half boxes worth of manuscript material to the Harry Ransom Humanities Center in Texas, including two unpublished works (an essay assignment book, written at age eleven, and a copy of his failed Oxford BLitt thesis), typescript and holograph manuscripts of five novels, plus extensive notebook material for three other works. The most important of these items is the partial typescript of the first version of Lucky Jim, originally titled Dixon and Christine. The differences between Dixon and Christine and Lucky Jim are striking, beginning with the fact that Jim, disconcertingly, is called Julian, quite the wrong name. In the Ransom Center catalogue, the manuscript is described as containing numerous pencilled annotations ‘by Amis and others.’ But when I was able to examine a photocopy of the manuscript (easily ordered and quickly posted), I immediately recognised that almost all the annotations were in Larkin’s hand. Larkin’s crucial role in revising Lucky Jim has long been recognised, but its extent has been a matter of controversy. What the Dixon and Christine typescript makes clear is how Larkin improved the novel not just in large ways but in numerous small ways, with many warn- ings ‘against overwritten or artificial dialogue, as in “terribly unnatural” or “This speech might come from a stage play TOO BAD to be produced” or simply “Horrible smell of arse” (subsequently “HS of A”) or “GRUESOME AROMA OF B” (presumably “BUM”).’ Other suggestions concern pacing, as in ‘“not going quickly enough” or ‘“too detailed for their purpose.”’ The best of these annotations reads: ‘“This speech makes me twist about with boredom.”’7 Fifteen or so years after Amis sold the Dixon and Christine manuscript to the Ransom Center, he turned to America again, selling the remainder of his papers (483 catalogued items) and rights to all future papers (plus all books in his library, many annotated) to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The Amis archive had been put up for sale, through his agent, Jonathan Clowes, by the London book dealer Bernard Quaritch, and the purchase was arranged by George Robert Minkoff, a dealer in the

5. Quoted in Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis (London, 2006), p. 448. 6. Amis, letter to Larkin, 24 Sept. 1960, The Letters of Kingsley Amis, pp. 578–80. 7. Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis, pp. 268–69.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 163 United States. A dozen American libraries expressed interest, but only the Huntington bid, offering $90,000, rather a low figure for the time. Accord- ing to Minkoff, the figure was low chiefly because the archive lacked the material in the Ransom Center, the Lucky Jim or Dixon and Christine manuscript in particular. The Ransom Center was the logical American buyer, but the Ransom Center had just purchased the Pforzheimer Library of Early English Literature (1,100 first editions of works by the most influential and representative English writers from the years 1475 to 1700). It claimed not to have the money for a second big purchase.8 There was also the question of Amis’s reputation. The archive was offered at the lowest point in Amis’s life, after the publication of the weakest of his novels and a string of pot-boiling nonfiction works (anthologies, jokey books about drink). The period 1980–85 was for Amis one of great personal unhappi- ness and consequent aggression towards academics, women, lefties, and all manner of fools and phonies; his opinions were as likely to alienate Amer- ican literary scholars as English ones. Unsurprisingly, several of the Huntington’s academic advisors and overseers voiced reservations about the purchase, partly on grounds of quality, partly because Amis was funny, so not serious, partly on political grounds, and partly because he was alive, had not yet stood the test of time (an objection British librarians made to collecting modern literary manuscripts in general). The Huntington’s prime literature collections are from earlier periods. It possesses half the titles printed in England before 1641 and 95 per cent of all English plays and masques in one or more early editions. Its eighteenth-century holdings number over thirty thousand items. It has a Gutenberg Bible, the Ellesmere Chaucer, one of the finest collections of early editions of Shakespeare’s works in the world, and important holograph manuscripts by many eighteenth- and nineteenth- century British authors. It also has significant modernist holdings (James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens—none of whom Amis had much time for).9 Did Amis really belong in such company? Amis quickly accepted the Huntington offer, unwilling to wait for a better price, or for the Ransom to replenish its coffers. The house in Kent- ish Town where he lived (with his ex-wife, Hilly, her third husband, Lord

8. Details of Minkoff’s negotiations with the Huntington and the Ransom Center come from George Robert Minkoff, letter to Bernard Quaritch, 5 Apr. 1984, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. Although a dozen institutions were interested in purchasing Amis’s papers, only the Huntington was prepared to make an offer. It did not quibble about the papers already held by the Ransom: ‘all they want is to buy the letters [that is, to Amis, from Betjeman, Conquest, et al.] and the manuscripts at the same time’ (ibid.). 9. Details of the Huntington’s holdings come from ‘About the Huntington’, www.huntington.org/Information/about.html

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 164 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts Kilmarnock, and their son, James) was too small and the neighbourhood too scruffy: ‘there isn’t any hall or dining room,’ he complained to Larkin, ‘and it’s getting a bit common round here.’10 The $90,000 from the Hun- tington would be used to purchase a larger house, in Primrose Hill, not as trendy as it is today, but more salubrious than Kentish Town.

So one must fly to Los Angeles to examine the working papers, annotated volumes, pocket diaries, engagement books, holograph manuscripts, correspondence, and ephemera of a writer often thought of as quintessen- tially English, a ‘little Englander’, like Larkin himself. Here are located Amis’s several unpublished and unfinished novels, including a fair number of unpublished poems. One of these poems, written between 1980–85, makes clear the extent of Amis’s despair or depression at the time. I came across it in my capacity as Amis’s authorized biographer and the editor of his letters, in the course of working through his archive, and thought it strong enough to publish—thought Amis had suppressed it because it was too personal rather than for aesthetic reasons. The Amis estate agreed, as did the Times Literary Supplement, which published ‘Things Tell Less and Less’ (the title is from the first line), on 14 May 2004 to widespread and approving notice.11 One comes to a literary archive dreaming of discoveries like this, but also, if one is the editor of a writer’s correspondence or a biographer, to read the letters, or many of them, the author received: in Amis’s case, several hundred from Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, Larkin, and others. These letters help to supply the answers to niggling editorial puzzles: for example, the meaning of the frequently encountered abbreviations P-W-R or I-W-I-C-S-L-M-S-K or B-H-Q (respectively, Pee Wee Russell, I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate and Bastard’s Headquarters, meaning God’s Heaven or, more generally, where things go wrong, said in one letter to be located in France).12 Once the Huntington purchased Amis’s collection it set about obtaining ancillary collections,

10. Amis to Larkin, 18 June 1984,inThe Letters of Kingsley Amis,p.975. 11. See, for example, John Ezard, ‘Newly Discovered Poem Reveals Unguarded Amis’, Guardian, 15 May 2004,p.40; Henry Hardy, ‘Kingsley Amis and Depression’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 May 2004,p.15; and Christopher Hitchens, ‘Kingsley Amis and Depression’, Times Literary Supplement, 28 May 2004,p.17. 12. The abbreviations were jokey tests, as well as friendship assertions. See Larkin to Amis, 28 Dec. 1945, Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull. On jazz pianist Joe Sullivan: ‘Sullivan’s solo is very good and second only to I F ANBandIGSMHL(“Work that one out”—“Work it yourself”).’ ‘I F A N B’ is ‘I Found a New Baby’ and ‘I GSMHL’is‘I’m Gonna Stomp Mr. Henry Lee’, both with piano solos by Sullivan.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 165 notably the archive of the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis’s second wife, and of Eric Jacobs, his friend and first biographer. The Huntington was established as a research and educational institution in 1919 by Henry E. Huntington, a key figure in the development of southern California, and his wife, Arabella. Like other great collectors of his era, Huntington bought in bulk, bought whole collections, and was never much interested in the archives of living writers. Today, according to Sara S. Hodson, the Huntington’s curator of literary manuscripts, the library seems to have established a pattern of purchasing the archive of one major modern writer per decade. In the 1970s, it purchased Stevens’s papers; in the 1980s, Kingsley Amis’s; in the 1990s, Christopher Isherwood’s; in the 2000s, Hilary Mantel’s.13 The present decade has only just begun, and the Huntington probably has its eye on Thom Gunn’s papers (Gunn having been grouped with Amis and Larkin as a Movement poet, also having lived for most of his adult life in California). I’m sure the library also covets the papers of Conquest, close friend of Amis and Larkin, and another long-time resident in California. Hodson, like every other archivist or curator I’ve met, is horribly over- worked and claims to have little time for what she calls ‘acquisitional out- reach’ (so busy is she fielding queries, providing reference assistance on site, overseeing processing, mounting exhibitions, giving talks). ‘A lot of archivists have a file of collectors they regularly write to. I seldom have time to do this, nor have I much time to cultivate potential donors.’ She has ‘every sympathy’ with the efforts of the UKLH to keep British authors’ papers in Britain. But if a British writer of stature approaches her she won’t turn him or her away. In 2000 the Huntington hosted a conference on the modern British novel, addressed by Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Man- tel, as well as a handful of distinguished critics and scholars. The Hunting- ton had nothing to do with the choice of speakers (except nervously to suggest that Salman Rushdie, who attended, should not be listed on the programme). The conference was well attended, the weather was beauti- ful, there were lavish dinners and receptions, and when Hodson asked Mantel if the Huntington could purchase her papers, she said yes. Presum- ably Hodson also approached McEwan and Martin Amis. The Huntington did not pursue or cultivate Mantel, but when she appeared on its doorstep it made her an offer.14

13. These and other details about the Huntington’s acquisition policies come from Sara S. Hodson, interview by the author, 7 Aug. 2008. 14. Mantel’s willingness to see her papers housed outside Britain is partly explained by the article she produced for an expanded version of the Huntington conference proceedings, in which she writes, ‘When I speak or read abroad I am sometimes described as a British writer,

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 166 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts Though Hodson thinks nationality an important consideration in the disposition of literary manuscripts, she lays greater stress on providing what she calls a ‘proper home’, by which she means not just one in which archives are properly conserved and processed but which contains related collections. ‘No collection should be orphaned’, is her view, nor, in an ideal world, should archives be split up. Were Martin Amis to take his father’s line and offer his archive to the highest bidder and were the Huntington to make the highest bid, it would qualify as a ‘proper home’ in Hodson’s eyes, given the presence of the papers of Amis Senior and Elizabeth Jane How- ard. Were Gunn’s papers to be obtained by the library they would nestle comfortably next to those of Isherwood and Amis. A more difficult case is presented by the papers of Robert Conquest, a robust and still-publishing nonagenarian. Conquest is the son of a well-born Virginian father and an English mother, was brought up in England and France, and educated at Winchester, the University of Grenoble, and Magdalen College, Oxford. In addition to being one of the world’s foremost historians of the Soviet Union, author of The Great Terror (1968) and many other studies of Rus- sian history and politics, he is a considerable poet, notably of light verse, and was a key Movement polemicist, as editor of the influential anthology New Lines (1956) and as literary editor of the Spectator in the early 1960s. Conquest’s letters to Amis and Larkin, close friends from the 1950s onwards, number in the hundreds and are often, among other things, hilar- ious, especially when they contain limericks. Conquest’s papers could find a ‘proper home’ in several places: the Huntington, the Bodleian (which houses a number of his and Amis’s letters to Larkin), the Hoover Institution at Stanford, where Conquest has been a fellow for forty years (home now also of Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice). The Hoover has a matchless collection of Soviet books and documents, and the political and historical component of the Conquest archive (including, for example, correspondence with Alexander Solzheni- tsyn, Andrey Sakharov, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Margaret Thatcher, for whom Conquest wrote the speech that earned her the soubriquet Iron Lady) would be right at home there. But the literary component would be ‘orphaned’. And the reverse would be true if the archive went to the Hun- tington. Conquest will probably take an Amisian line, keeping the papers

sometimes as an English writer. To me, the ﬁrst description is meaningless. “Britain” can be used as a geographical term, but it has no deﬁnable cultural meaning. As for calling me “an English writer”—it is simply what I am not’ (Hilary Mantel, ‘No Passes or Documents Needed: The Writer at Home in Europe’, in On Modern British Fiction, ed. Leader [Oxford, 2002], p. 94).

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 167 together as an archive, but offering them to the highest reputable bidder, either in America or Britain. From a scholar’s or user’s perspective, it is hard to know which place would be best. The Huntington has many Anglophile readers, as well as a number of actual British ones. Its current director of research is English, his prede- cessor was born in Scotland. The recently retired director of the art collections is English and previously ran the Courtauld Institute. But no one would mistake the Huntington for Britain. Sitting in the richly appointed Ahmanson Rare Book Library, readers of the correspondence of Kingsley Amis encounter descriptions of poverty and gloom in 1950s Swansea or of titanic drinking sessions in smoky London pubs. Outside, except in dry, hot summers, the temperature is in the mid-70s, with a sky as blue as a Hockney swimming pool, the scent of orange blossom in the air (the Hun- tington has its own orange grove), and a view of the snow-capped San Gabriel mountains in the distance. At noon, the rare book room closes for an hour and its readers stroll across the gardens, past the North Vista, edged with azaleas, palms, and seventeenth-century Italian sculpture, to a shaded outdoor restaurant. Amis would barely recognise as lunch the meal most readers eat there; nobody drinks, nobody takes more than an hour, scholars leap up suddenly for strenuous walks through the gardens. He might also find certain of the medievalists, the Shakespeareans, the massed historians (of colonial America, the English Bible, early modern comedy, the commercialisation of contraception, and so forth) a trifle narrow— though narrowness, his letters attest, can be found everywhere. The oddness or incongruity of Amis’s archive being in southern Cali- fornia is reinforced by a common public perception of him as anti- American. The evidence for this anti-Americanism is easily harvested and funny, even to an American. Here is Jake Richardson in Jake’s Thing (1978): ‘everything horrible or foolish was worse if it was also American. Modern architect—modern American architect. Woman who never stops talking— American ditto. Zany comedian. Convert to Buddhism....’15 Or take Patrick Standish, from Difficulties with Girls (1988), after seducing his deeply sincere and emotive neighbour, Wendy Porter-King (‘“You do feel...something?”’ she asks Patrick, ‘“It would be so bleak if you felt nothing. That’s what scares women, you know”’). As Patrick and Wendy lie in bed, the sun shines down on them through half-drawn curtains. Wendy clasps her arms round her drawn-up knees and says: ‘“The sky is blue and I feel gay.”’ The next paragraph reads: ‘She never knew how close she came from losing her front teeth for that. Taken off guard again, Patrick again spoke too quickly.

15. Kingsley Amis, Jake’s Thing (London, 1978), p. 153.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 168 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts “Are you an American?” “What a strange question, darling.” “I know. I’m sorry. Anyway. Are you?”’ This was a favourite insult of Patrick’s, we are then told, though ‘he always said he had nothing against real Americans, most of them anyway.’16 The impression given by such passages—the common public perception— ismisleading. Like Patrick, Amis had nothing against most real Americans, was no more negative about them than about most Englishmen. Amis visited America twice, in 1958–59 and 1967–68, teaching for a year at Princeton University and a term at Vanderbilt University. At one point he even considered moving his family to America permanently. In his Mem- oirs (1991), he says that he knew instantly upon arrival in New York that ‘this was my second country and always would be.’ America was the land of jazz, science ﬁction, the movies, of pleasure and plenty. Deprivation may have been to Larkin what daffodils were to William Wordsworth, but Amis wanted no part of it.17 Of New York he has written: ‘anyone who makes a business of hating it or being superior to it...isacreep, and...anyone who walks up Fifth Avenue (say) on a sunny morning without feeling his spirits lift is an asshole.’ ‘Asshole’, here (as opposed to the English ‘arse- hole’), is itself a tribute.18

There is nothing like this in the work of Larkin, who was a much more consistent cultural nationalist than Amis and whose twenty-ﬁve year campaign for the preservation of British literary manuscripts in Britain raises interesting questions about the relative weighting of nationalist and scholarly concerns. What Larkin says about the campaign, in his 1979 essay ‘A Neglected Responsibility’ is perfectly reasonable and on the surface re- spectful towards American scholars and libraries. ‘I certainly don’t mean to imply that American libraries are not responsible custodians of manuscripts, or that they are not better off in them than in private hands.’ He quotes Geoffrey Gorer writing to The Times in protest ‘against the use of the word “saved” when what was meant was “retained in England.”’ In Gorer’s words: ‘it is inaccurate as well as discourteous to suggest that these papers and paintings would have been in any peril if they went to their American purchasers’ (‘NR’, p. 101). Larkin wants English literary manuscripts in England because ‘I think they are more likely to be studied there, and studied with greater understanding. I think they are more likely to grow there by the addition of further related collections from his family

16. Kingsley Amis, Difﬁculties with Girls (London, 1988), pp. 119, 120, 158. 17. See Larkin, ‘A Interview with the Observer’(1979), interview by Miriam Gross, Required Writing,p.47. 18. Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (Harmondsworth, 1992), pp. 194, 197.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 169 and friends; I think above all that a country’s writers are one of its most precious assets, and that if British librarians resign the collection and care of their manuscripts to the librarians of other countries they are letting one of their most rewarding responsibilities slide irretrievably away’ (‘NR’, p. 101). Larkin thus calls on his fellow librarians to counter ‘that irresistible gravitational westward pull, to end up deep in the heart of one of those institutions for which Mr. Gorer has so much respect, as indeed we all have’ (‘NR’, p. 106). A suspicion that there might be a hint of irony here is aroused by jokey comments in the correspondence: ‘I am glad that you are prepared to accept the printing copy of Jill on behalf of the Bodleian Library’, Larkin writes to Bodley’s librarian in 1964: ‘It is, I am afraid, not a very exciting document, but it may do some visiting American out of a research project’.19 Or, ten years later, to the literary editor of the Sunday Times: ‘I don’t think I can manage a Hardy article: for one thing, I have just moved house, which will strike me dumb for about five years, and for another the Hardy industry is so productive nowadays that probably anything I said would simply be repeating the lucubrations of some logorrhoeic Middle- Westerner.’20 Then there’s Larkin’s poem ‘Posterity’ (1968), the draft of which decorated the programme of the UKLH’s 2006 conference, ‘Manu- scripts Matter.’ In the poem, Larkin imagines his posthumous reputation in the hands of ‘Jake Balokowsky, my biographer.’ His papers, including the manuscript of the poem we are reading, reside in Jake’s ‘air- conditioned cell at Kennedy’ (‘cell’ means office, possibly carrel or cubicle, as in a library). Jake is bored and fed up with both ‘“the research line”’ and ‘“this old fart”’, ‘“one of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.”’ On a break, he and a colleague ‘make for the Coke dispenser’, where Jake confesses that he wants to work on protest theatre (‘“something happening”’), perhaps in Tel Aviv, though his wife’s parents—‘he makes the money sign’—think he should get tenure first.21 When Larkin’s collection High Windows was offered to the American publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Robert Giroux wrote back saying he was keen to publish but wondered if Larkin would think again about including ‘Posterity’. To quote from Andrew Motion’s biography of Larkin:

19. Quoted in Judith Priestman, ‘Philip Larkin and the Bodleian Library’, Bodleian Library Record 14 (Oct. 1991): 39. 20. Larkin to J. W. Lambert, 24 July 1974, MS Eng. C. 2308, fol. 52, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 21. Larkin, ‘Posterity’, High Windows (London, 1974), p. 27. See Larkin, letter to Monica Jones, 30 June 1968, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica, ed. Thwaite (London, 2000), p. 387, on the poem: ‘It gets in Yanks, yids, wives, kids, Coca Cola, Protest and the Theatre—pretty good lists of hates, eh?’

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 170 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts ‘The American accent used in the poem struck [Giroux] as awkward, and the references to “Tel Aviv”, “Myra’s folks” and making “the money sign” seemed anti-Semitic.’ Larkin’s general view of American publishers was that they were all ‘“Neanderthal blockheads”’; he refused to budge and Giroux eventually gave way (PL, p. 436).22 Giroux was not the only reader made uneasy by the poem. To the Irish poet Richard Murphy, Larkin wrote: ‘I’m sorry if Jake Balokowsky seemed an unfair portrait. As you see, the idea of the poem was imagining the ironical situation in which one’s posthumous reputation was entrusted to somebody as utterly unlike oneself as could be. It was only after the poem had been published that I saw that Jake, wanting to do one thing but having to do something else, was really not so unlike me, and indeed had probably unconsciously been drawn to my work for this reason, which explains his bitter resentment of it.’23 That Larkin was, indeed, ‘one of those old-type natural fouled-up guys’, there is no reason to doubt, at least from the poem (it is wilful to think Jake’s subject is not Larkin);24 though in many ways ‘utterly unlike’ Larkin, Jake got his subject dead to rights; whether ‘Poster- ity’ extends Jake any sympathy, however, as Larkin does in the letter to Murphy, is doubtful. After Giroux capitulated, Larkin wrote to his English publisher, Charles Monteith, saying he felt like ‘George III or Lord North’ (PL, p. 436).25 There is comic resignation here, defeat even, implying the futility of resistance to America and American inﬂuence; but the comparison is also serious. Larkin’s nationalism extended to Britain’s imperial past. In ‘Homage to a Government’, written at the end of the 1960s, when Harold Wilson was in power, he deplores the withdrawal of British soldiers from abroad merely because ‘we want the money for ourselves at home / Instead of working.’26

22. The exchange with Giroux was mediated by Charles Monteith, Larkin’s editor at Faber and Faber. 23. Quoted in John Osborne, Larkin, Ideology, and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction (Houndmills, UK, 2008), p. 211. 24. Note the ﬁrst-person singular pronoun: ‘I suppose what Jake is trying to say is that I am one of those old-type natural fouled-up guys you read about in Freshman’s Psych.’ (Larkin to Charles Monteith, 16 Apr. 1974, Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985, ed. Anthony Thwaite [London, 1992], p. 503). 25. See also Larkin to Monteith, 8 Jan. 1974, Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985, p. 497. 26. Larkin, ‘Homage to a Government’ (1969), High Windows,p.29. Archie Burnett quotes Larkin to Monica Jones, 30 June 1968: ‘I long to write a political poem—the withdrawal of troops east of Suez started me, now I see someone boasting that in a few years’ time we shall be spending “more on Education than ‘Defence’”—this shocks me to the core, & I seriously feel that within our lifetime we shall see England under the heel of the conquerer—or what used to be England’ (Archie Burnett, editorial note in Larkin, The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, ed. Burnett [London, 2012], p. 461).

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 171 Larkin has written poems of great power and subtlety, but that’s no reason to approve his prejudices, just as the power and subtlety of Harold Pinter’s plays hardly excuses the crudity of his poems and pronounce- ments about America and Americans, even for opponents of the Iraq War.27 Pinter’s archive was purchased by the British Library for £1.1 million, with the aid of a grant of £216,000 from the National Heritage Me- morial Fund. As the fund’s director, Carole Souter, put it in a press release: ‘This National Heritage Memorial grant is particularly special as it is the ﬁrst time we have helped save works and papers of a living artist. This unique collection is now safe for future generations to enjoy and learn from.’ Presumably by ‘safe’ she means ‘safe in Britain’ or ‘saved for the nation’, as the headline to the British Library press release puts it.28 This seems a less important reason to applaud the purchase than the fact that it brings together Pinter’s entire archive in a single location, uniting play- scripts already on loan to the library with 150 boxes of new materials. In this case, it also matters that the location is London, where Pinter was born and has lived all his life, as actor, director, and playwright. London is not only a subject in his plays, but its stage or theatrical world is the ground out of which the plays grew, even when conceived in resistance to its conven- tions or commercial constraints. More problematic, from a user’s or scholar’s perspective, is the British Library’s 2008 purchase of a large collection of Ted Hughes papers, com- prising two hundred ﬁles and boxes of manuscripts, letters, journals, personal diaries, and ephemera. This collection was purchased for £500,000, with a £200,000 grant from the Shaw Fund. It effectively splits the Hughes archive between London and Atlanta, where Emory University houses 186 boxes and 103 oversized folders of Hughes papers, plus the 6,000 volumes of Hughes’s library, many of them annotated. The Emory collection covers what its website describes as ‘the entire spectrum of Hughes’ personal life

27. See Harold Pinter, ‘American Football’ and ‘God Bless America’, War (London, 2003), p. [11], [93]. At a launch for the book at the National Theatre, Pinter declared: ‘The US is really beyond reason now. It is beyond our imagining to know what they are going to do next and what they are prepared to do. There is only one comparison: Nazi Germany.’ He added that he hadn’t ‘heard anything about the US population saying: “We can’t do this, we are Americans.” Nobody gives a damn’ (Angelique Chrisaﬁs and Imogen Tilden, ‘Pinter Blasts “Nazi America” and “deluded idiot” Blair’, Guardian, 11 June 2003, www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/jun/11/books.arts). 28. Andrews, curator of modern literary manuscripts at the British Library, implicitly distances himself from the British Library’s Press Release when he deplores ‘national chest- beating at the “loss” of literary papers to American libraries, and increasingly hysterical speculation as to the disposition of literary manuscripts and archives not already incorporated in collections’ (‘WWS’, p. 259).

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 172 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts and career.’29 In addition to manuscripts, journals, photographs, scrapbooks, sound recordings, and collected printed materials, it contains extensive correspondence with Seamus Heaney, Al Alvarez, Stephen Spender, and others. Among related collections at Emory are those of Heaney, Olwyn Hughes, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Edna O’Brien, and the poet and critic Daniel Weissbrot, who cofounded with Hughes the journal Modern Poetry in Translation. The Hughes papers are hardly ‘orphaned’ in Atlanta. In the press release for the British Library purchase, entitled ‘Saved for the Nation: British Library Acquires Major Ted Hughes Archive’, the poet’s widow, Carol Hughes, pronounces the library ‘an ideal home for such an important archive, a place where it can be properly conserved and made available for scholars in a way that will prove an invaluable aid to the understanding of his work. Ted was a man of these islands—their landscapes, rivers, and wild places—and it is ﬁtting that papers covering such an important part of his creative life should be deposited with such a prestigious institution here in Britain.’30 That Hughes was very much ‘a man of these islands—their landscapes, rivers, and wild places’, is perfectly true; but London isn’t much like Devon or Yorkshire. If location is important, why not sell the papers to the University of Exeter, which in 2007 acquired the archive of the Arvon Foundation? Hughes was closely asso- ciated with the Arvon Foundation, and the University of Exeter also possesses some Hughes and Sylvia Plath papers.31 Whether Emory was able to bid on the papers or had a bid rejected, it will not say. When asked this question, the interim director of Emory’s Manuscript, Archive, and Rare Book Library, Naomi L. Nelson, replied: ‘I’d rather not comment too much on any negotiations Emory may have participated in, but I can conﬁrm that Emory was contacted when the recent group of Hughes papers were on offer. You may be pleased to hear that the institutions that hold the bulk of the Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath papers are applying for a collaborative grant to provide better access to the collections for scholars.

29. ‘Ted Hughes Papers and Related Collections’, marbl.library.emory.edu/collection -overview/featured-collections/ted-hughes-papers-and-related-collections 30. ‘Saved for the Nation: British Library Acquires Major Ted Hughes Archive’, 14 Oct. 2008, pressandpolicy.bl.uk/Press-Releases/Saved-for-the-nation-British-Library-acquires -major-Ted-Hughes-archive-364.aspx. It describes the purchase as ‘saved for the nation with generous support from the Friends of the National Libraries and the Friends of the British Library, and a £200,000 grant from the Shaw Fund towards the purchase price of £500,000. The acquisition includes funding to catalogue and preserve the collection, which is expected to be fully accessible by the end of 2009’ (ibid.). 31. Thanks in part to the NMCCW, which in 1975 saw off strong interest from the New York Public Library, purchasing two collections of drafts of Hughes’s Cave Birds, which were subsequently sold on to the Exeter University Library at 50 per cent of the purchase price.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 173 These partners include Emory, the British Library, Smith College, the Uni- versity of Exeter, Indiana University. It is unfortunate when collections are divided, but technology offers us some opportunities to bring materials together again.’32 The British Library ought not to be criticised for landing the Hughes papers—just as the Huntington ought not to be criticised for landing Mantel’s. But is what is best ‘for the nation’ best for scholarship, and, more generally, does the current campaign to preserve modern British literary manuscripts pay sufficient attention to historical realities? Larkin himself acknowledges these realities in the opening pages of ‘A Neglected Respon- sibility’. What he calls ‘the modern literary manuscript situation’ is that during the last forty or fifty years, and more particularly during the last twenty years, the papers of the major British writers have been intensively collected not by British but by American libraries. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in so far as future studies of these writers, and definitive editions of their works, depend on direct access to their papers, these studies and these editions are most likely to be undertaken by American scholars in American universities....A meeting of British national and university librarians to discuss modern literary manuscripts resembles an annual convention of stable- door lockers. [‘NR’, p. 100] The policy of not acquiring modern literary manuscripts was mostly ac- knowledged by British librarians in the breach. In 1911, when the British Museum accepted Thomas Hardy’s donation of autograph manuscripts of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Dynasts, its acquisitions committee em- phasized that ‘manuscripts of living authors are not as a whole accepted by the Museum’ (quoted in ‘WWS’, p. 261). Larkin’s concerns in ‘A Neglected Responsibility’ were taken up in 1967 by T. C. Skeat, keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum: ‘hitherto the collection of such [modern literary] manuscripts has lacked direction and purpose, and has relied overmuch on the charity of donors....Such a haphazard approach is no longer feasible’ (quoted in ‘WWS’, p. 261). More recently, in an editorial ‘Leader’ in News from the Royal Society of Literature (2004), Motion, at the time poet laureate, took up the cause: ‘Season by season, we open our newspa- pers to discover that yet another archive has been shipped overseas, usually across the Atlantic’. This ‘monotonous and depressing’ pattern needs to be stopped; it is ‘high time that all interested parties—which means most of us—cried NO MORE’ (quoted in ‘WWS’, p. 260). In 2005, the House of

32. Naomi L. Nelson, email to the author, 26 Nov. 2008.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 174 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts Lords debated a motion asking the government to ‘stem the brain drain to American universities of the literary papers of living British authors’ (quoted in ‘WWS’, p. 260).

How did Emory come to purchase its Hughes papers, the bulk of the archive? Larkin’s Jake would make the money sign. And where did the money come from? From Jake’s Coke dispenser in the Kennedy. The library at Emory University is named after Robert W. Woodruff, president of Coca Cola from 1923 to 1954, who in 1979 gave the university $105 million. In 1980, Emory was able to lure the Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, the biographer Richard Ellmann, to At- lanta to become the ﬁrst Robert W. Woodruff professor. Money was not the only factor; it mattered that Ellmann was sixty-ﬁve but wanted to keep working, which he could do in an American university but not in a British one; that he had an invalided wife and could not afford to live in Oxford and care for her on his pension; and that his son Stephen was working in Atlanta, clerking for a judge on the Court of Appeals. It was Ellmann who persuaded the university president to begin collecting manuscripts and archives in earnest, as a way of attracting researchers from around the world to Emory.33 Ellmann was Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature for fourteen years. An American, the son of Jewish-Romanian immigrants, he grew up in the Midwest and taught for many years at Northwestern University, where Saul Bellow was an undergraduate in the 1930s. For much of the time Ellmann taught at Northwestern, Bellow taught at the University of Chi- cago. The two men were friends and admired each other’s writing. Ell- mann is an American scholar who lived and taught happily for many years in Britain, retained his American identity (never taking British or dual citizenship), yet enriched our understanding of the works and the lives of writers—Yeats, Joyce, Oscar Wilde—whom Larkin and others would describe as ‘utterly unlike’ him.

Ellmann’s refusal to accept differences in nationality or background as insuperable barriers to understanding made him unlike Larkin. Whether it made him like Bellow is less clear. In his last year at Northwestern, Bellow asked the chair of the English department, William Frank Bryan, whether

33. These and succeeding details about Ellmann come from Eric Betts, ‘Schuchard’s Living Legacy’, The Emory Wheel, 10 Nov. 2008 (this is the Emory University student newspaper); John Kelly, ‘Ellmann, Richard (1918–1987)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39805; and Maud Ellmann, interview by author, 20 Nov. 2008.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 175 he should do a PhD in English. ‘You’ve got a very good record’, Bryan told him, ‘but I wouldn’t recommend that you study English. You weren’t born to it.’ No Jew could really grasp the tradition of English literature, Bryan explained. ‘No Jew would ever have the right feeling for it.’34 Bellow went off to study anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and to nurse a lifelong grudge—a mild one, like Larkin’s anti-Americanism—against both the English and English professors, including Jewish ones. Hence his disparaging remarks about Lionel Trilling and Harry Levin, the first Jews to receive tenure from Ivy League English departments. Bellow called Levin ‘a Harvard kike’ and all but accused the Anglophile Trilling of trying to pass.35 According to Alfred Kazin, in his memoir, New York Jew (1978), a typically abrasive title, ‘the barrier’ between himself and Trilling was the latter’s ‘fondness for the words “scarcely,” “modulation,” “our educated classes.”’ ‘Bellow’s success in these pages’, begins Trilling’s positive review of The Adventures of Augie March (1953), quoted by Kazin, ‘may be judged from the familiarity of the matter upon which he exercises his talents.’ Bellow could never get over what Kazin characterises as Trilling’s ‘nerveless compromised accents.’36 These accents owed much to Trilling’s reverence for Henry James, a reverence shared by other Jewish literary intellectuals and professors of English in the 1950s, including Philip Rahv, editor of Partisan Review, which printed Bellow’s first stories and championed him as ‘the redeeming novelist of his period’; Clifton Fadiman, a radio and television personality, as well as an influential editor and critic; and Leon Edel, biographer and editor of Henry James and eventual holder of the Henry James Professor- ship at New York University.37 Bellow’s feelings about James were woven

34. This quotation comes from the ﬁrst tape of an eight-hour interview Bellow gave in 1987 to Sigmund Koch, a University Professor (as Bellow himself would become) at Boston University. Koch, a psychologist, had been funded by the Ford Foundation to conduct a series of videotaped interviews with artists and authors. Between 1983 and 1988, as part of the Boston University Aesthetics Research Project, he conducted seventeen eight- to ten-hour interviews with, among other authors, Toni Morrison, Arthur Miller, and Richard Wilbur, as well as Bellow; see buprimo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com:1701/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?ct ϭfacet&fctNϭfacet_genre&fctVϭVideorecording&rfnGrpϭ1&rfnGrpCounterϭ1&dscntϭ1& scp.scpsϭscope%3A%28ALMA_BOSU1%29%2Cscope%3A%28BU_OAI%29%2Cprimo _central_multiple_fe&frbgϭ&tabϭdefault_tab&dstmpϭ1369755643293&srtϭrank&ctϭsearch& modeϭBasic&dumϭtrue&indxϭ1&tbϭt&vl%28freeText0%29ϭKoch%2C%20Sigmund&vid ϭBU&fnϭsearch 35. See James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (London, 2000), p. 342n (on Harry Levin) and p. 228 (on Trilling). 36. Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York, 1978), p. 47. 37. See Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (Oxford, 2000), p. 186, and, more generally, chapter 5, ‘Henry James among the Jews’ (pp. 155–209); for Leon Edel, in particular, see Michael Anesko, Monopolizing

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 176 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts into his feelings about the American literary establishment, which he thought of as WASP, resistant both to his fiction and to the entry of Jews and other aliens into English department posts. These feelings were established early and never quite relinquished, for all his celebrity and acclaim. Bellow was the most decorated writer in American history, winner, among other awards, of the Nobel Prize for Literature, three National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for the Novel, and the title Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, awarded by the French Republic. He did not, however, achieve national recognition until his third novel, The Adventures of Augie March. Prior to Augie he laboured under the anxiety-inducing burden of what he called ‘letter-perfect’ writing, a ‘Flaubertian standard.’ ‘Not a bad standard, to be sure’, he later admitted, but restricting: ‘because of the circumstances of my life and because of my upbringing in Chicago as a son of immigrants. I could not, with such an instrument as I developed in the first two books, express a variety of things I knew intimately.’38 Augie March was written in defiance not only of a ‘Flaubertian standard’ but of Jamesian indirection and self-consciousness, as is clear from its opening sentence: ‘I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that som- ber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.’39 This proud patriotic declaration—about James’s great subject, ‘the whole American question’40—is itself anti-Jamesian in its directness. Also anti-Jamesian is

the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship (Stanford, Calif., 2012), pp. 158–91. In addition to writing favourably about James in Partisan Review, Rahv edited The Great Short Novels of Henry James (New York, 1944); the next year, Fadiman edited the Modern Library Selected Stories of Henry James. After a long period failing to find a university post, Edel was appointed visiting professor of English at NYU in 1950; three years later, in 1953,hewas made associate professor, a permanent post. Bellow was living and teaching on the East Coast from 1950 to 1953, first at Princeton University, then at Bard College. The praise of Bellow as ‘the redeeming novelist of his period’ comes from Elizabeth Hardwick, review of The Victim by Bellow, Partisan Review 15 (Jan. 1948): 114. 38. Bellow ‘The Art of Fiction: Saul Bellow’, interview with Gordon Lloyd Harper, Conversations with Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel (Jackson, Miss., 1994), p. 63. In later life Bellow would refer to his first two novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, as ‘formal requirements’, like an MA and PhD (Bellow, ‘A Talk with Saul Bellow: On His Work and Himself’, interview with Michiko Kakutani, Conversations with Saul Bellow, p. 184). 39. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), in Saul Bellow: Novels 1944–1953, ed. James Wood (New York, 2003), p. 383. 40. Percy Lubbock, ‘Henry James, O. M.: The Man and the Artist’, The Times, 29 Feb. 1916, p. 9: ‘Through all his long residence in Europe, his relations with America were closer and more constant than may perhaps have been generally understood; and the whole American question, in whatever aspect, was one in which he was always eager to keep himself instructed.’ Lubbock was James’s friend and editor. Or see Philip Rahv, ‘Henry James’s America’, review of The

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 177 the sentence’s mixture of registers: vernacular (‘free-style’, ‘go at’), biblical (‘Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you’ [Matthew 7.7]). At the end of the opening paragraph, after a reference to Heraclitus, Augie tells us that ‘there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.’41 The knock is a knock: crude, hard, loud. The knock as novel, this novel, is, in addition, jangling, jumbled. The opening recalls a moment in James’s The American Scene (1905), one several times alluded to by Bellow. Returning to New York, after long absence in Europe, James is taken by Jewish friends to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a setting marked by ‘the whole hard glitter of Israel.’ The Cafe Royal, with its many Yiddish-speaking authors and performers, is described by James as one of the ‘torture-rooms of the living idiom.’ ‘Who can ever tell’, he asks, ‘in any conditions,...what the genius of Israel may, or may not, really be “up to?”’ The scare quotes around ‘up to’ suggest two unequally offensive meanings: ‘good enough for’ or ‘equal to’, which is merely patronizing, and ‘conniv- ing’.42 Edel’s discussion of this passage is couched in (Kazin would say compromised by) the ‘nerveless accents’ of Trilling or James: ‘His view of the Jews in the mass had always been distant; he had repeated the cliche´sby which their national distinctness was marked in the English novel’.43 The Adventures of Augie March won the National Book Award for the best novel of 1954. Among the judges was Edel, the first volume of whose five-volume biography of James had also come out in 1953. The other judges were Mary McCarthy, Arthur Mizener, Gerald Sykes, and David Dempsey. Unusually, the judges declared publicly that their decision had

American Novels and Tales of Henry James by F. O. Matthiessen, New York Times Book Review, 2 Mar. 1947,p.4: ‘for a writer who, as the legend goes, was enamored of old-world privilege and by no means aglow with belligerent fervor in dealing with the national ideals, the work collected in this volume is astonishing in that it shows us to what an extent James was able to express creatively the meaning and quality of American life.’ 41. Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, p. 383. 42. Henry James, The American Scene (1905; London, 1907), pp. 132, 139, 135. To James, the Lower East Side was marked by ‘a sense...ofgreat swarming....There is no swarming like that of Israel when once Israel has got a start...multiplication of everything, was the dominant note, at the bottom of some vast sallow aquarium in which innumerable ﬁsh, of overdeveloped probiscus, were to bump together’ (p. 131). In discussing The American Scene, Jonathan Freedman argues that ‘for all [James’s] worrying about the threat posed by Jews to the English language, there is a countervailing and envious sense of the vitality of Yiddish culture’ (Freedman, The Temple of Culture, p. 121). For Bellow’s references to The American Scene, see, for example, Bellow, ‘The Jefferson Lectures’ (1977) and ‘My Paris’(1983), It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future (Harmondsworth, 1994), pp. 151–52, 234. 43. Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1977), 2:599. This two- volume edition is described in the publisher’s blurb as ‘a “deﬁnitive” edition’ (1:i).

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 178 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts been unanimous, a measure undertaken to counter rumours, spread by McCarthy, at the time the theatre critic of Partisan Review, that Edel had argued against Bellow. Edel denied these rumours, explaining that at a first meeting of the judges McCarthy had been so convinced that the prize should go to Bellow that she declared there was no reason for them to meet again. The other judges disagreed and, as Edel puts it, ‘“Mary construed our procedural discussion as hostility to Saul’s book”’. Bellow believed McCarthy’s account. When next he met Edel, he snubbed him.44 Months later, he published a short story, ‘The Gonzaga Manuscripts’ (1954), with a premise much like James’s ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888), drawn from material originally intended for The Adventures of Augie March. ‘The Gonzaga Manuscripts’ concerns the attempts of an ardent young Midwesterner, Clarence Feiler, to recover the lost poems of Manuel Gon- zaga, ‘“one of the most original of modern Spanish poets, and in the class of Juan Ramoń Jimeńez, Lorca, and Machado.”’45 The poems, he has been told by a Spanish Republican refugee, are reputed to be somewhere in Madrid, perhaps mislaid, perhaps hidden or suppressed for fear of political repercussions. Feiler’s motives in searching for the manuscripts are presented as wholly admirable, unlike those of the nameless narrator of ‘The Aspern Papers’. What he desires is ‘to do a decent and necessary thing, namely, bring the testimony of a great man before the world’ (‘GM’, p. 114). The approach Feiler takes to his mission is also admirable, again quite unlike that of James’s narrator. ‘Once more Clarence told himself that there was a wrong way to go about obtaining the poems, a way contrary to their spirit’ (‘GM’, p. 128). The right way is the direct way. ‘“You know what I’ve come for?”’ says Clarence. ‘“Yes, I do know. But let’s not start talking about business right away. You’ve never been in Segovia before, I assume”’, answers his host, whom he thinks may have the manuscripts (‘GM’, p. 137). In The Aspern Papers, the narrator confesses: ‘“I can arrive at the papers only by putting her off her guard, and I can put her off her guard only by ingratiating diplomatic practices. Hypocrisy, duplicity are my only chance.”’46 In A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990), in part an updat- ing of the James story, the unscrupulous American manuscript hunter Professor Martin Cropper, of Robert Dale University in New Mexico, is prepared to steal and to desecrate graves in order to acquire documents

44. Atlas, Bellow,p.210. 45. Saul Bellow, ‘The Gonzaga Manuscripts’, ‘Mosby’s Memoirs’ and Other Stories (1968; Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 122; hereafter abbreviated ‘GM’. Bellow chose not to include ‘The Gonzaga Manuscripts’ in Bellow, Collected Stories (New York, 2001). 46. Henry James, The Aspern Papers (1888), ‘The Aspern Papers’ and Other Stories, ed. S. Gorley Putt (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 17.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 179 related to the fictional English poet Henry Randolph Ash. His opposite number, James Blackadder, honest and British, believes that ‘British writings should stay in Britain and be studied by the British’, a view shared by his creator. ‘I don’t want to be too nationalist’, Byatt told the Guardian, ‘but it is better if writers’ papers stay in Britain.’47 In Bellow’s story, in contrast, dishonesty and duplicity are qualities that mark the well-born Spanish executors and informants Feiler approaches. What also marks them are ignorance and prejudice, of and about both literature and America. Feiler travels to Madrid and takes a room in a pension overlooking the Retiro, the city’s largest park. ‘“Have you come to study something?”’ asks his landlady. ‘“There’s a great deal here to interest people from a country as new as yours”’ (‘GM’, p. 115). ‘“I hope you won’t mind if I tell a story about Americans and the size of things in Spain”’, begins Gonzaga’s literary executor, a suave member of the Cortes, ‘with his irony and his fine Spanish manners’ (‘GM’, pp. 126, 125). At dinner with the executor, Feiler sits next to ‘an Italian Monsignore’ and ‘a German gentleman’ (all Europe is impli- cated in Bellow’s scorn). When asked ‘was American really a sort of Eng- lish’, Feiler replies, ‘I’ve seen people cry in it and so forth, just as elsewhere’ (‘GM’, p. 127). The executor makes it perfectly clear that he thinks Feiler incapable of comprehending Gonzaga’s poem and, in response, Feiler feels ‘an ugly hatred’ grow and knot in his breast: ‘He wanted to hit him, to strangle him, to trample him, to pick him up and hurl him at the wall’ (‘GM’, pp. 127–28). When asked, yet again, why Gonzaga interests him so much, he replies: ‘“Why shouldn’t I be interested in him? You may some- day be interested in an American poet”’ (‘GM’, p. 134). This exchange is with the nephew of the woman, an equivalent to James’s Juliana Bordereau (lover of the famous American poet Jeffrey As- pern, now deceased), to whom the poems are addressed. The nephew, Feiler has been told, works for the Banco Espanol but is nonetheless a ‘“cultivated person”’ (‘GM’, p. 133). His startled, laughing reply to Feiler’s remark about being interested in American poets is, ‘“I? No!”’ (‘GM’, p. 134). He has no interest in poets of any kind. Nor has the well-mannered executor or anyone else Feiler meets in Spain. What the Spanish are interested in is money, the material prosperity they mock and envy in Ameri- cans. ‘“There’s plenty of poetry already, for everyone”’, the executor tells Feiler. ‘“Homer, Dante, Calderoń, Shakespeare. Have you noticed how

47. Quoted in Tanya Gold, ‘Shortcuts: How Much for Your Notes?’ Guardian, 24 Oct. 2005, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/0ct/24/andrewmotion.ﬁction/print. See A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (London, 1990), p. 10.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 180 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts much difference it makes?”’ The cultivated banker did not even know Gonzaga was a poet. ‘“Manuel? The soldier? The little fellow? The one that was her lover in nineteen twenty-eight?”’ (‘GM’, p. 140). After Bellow’s ﬁrst visit to Spain, in the summer of 1947, he returned furious at the condescen- sion of Spanish intellectuals. ‘Who do they think they are? They haven’t done anything worthwhile in the arts since the sixteenth century.’48 Also infuriating was having to listen to talk about ‘“American emptiness”’, ‘“unhistorical Americans who live only in the future”’, the atom bomb.49 Some of this talk found its way into ‘The Gonzaga Manuscripts’. In Feiler’s pension in Madrid, he meets an Englishwoman depressed by the weather. It has been raining continuously: ‘You people may be to blame for that.’ ‘Who people? Which people?’ ‘It could be because of the atom bomb,’ she said. ‘The weather has never been normal since the atom thing started.’ Later on the woman complains that ‘“you Americans are ﬁlling the air with Carbon Fourteen, which is very dangerous.”’ To which Feiler replies: ‘“I don’t know about it. I am not all Americans. You are not all the English. You didn’t lick the Armada, I didn’t open the West. You are not Winston Churchill and I am not the Pentagon’ (‘GM’, pp. 117–18).

From 1960 onwards, in a series of gifts and deposits, Bellow sent his papers (including letters, notes, galley proofs, unpublished speeches and essays, hand-corrected manuscripts, and typewritten drafts) to the Uni- versity of Chicago’s Special Collections, located in the Joseph Regenstein Library. Before 1968, Bellow was eligible to receive a tax deduction for such gifts; when the laws involving cultural property changed, in reaction to enormous deductions obtained by visual artists, gifts became deposits, held but not owned by the library, an arrangement agreed to in the hope that the new law would be reversed and deposits could then become donations. When lobbying efforts failed, American authors began to sell rather than donate their papers, transforming the marketplace for Amer- ican literary manuscripts and resulting in the division of many collections. Bellow, like Augie, was a Chicagoan. Though born in Lachine, Quebec,

48. This remark was recalled by Bellow’s friend H. J. Kaplan, the American writer and diplomat, in an interview of 6 May 2008 with the author. 49. Bellow, ‘Spanish Letter’, Partisan Review 15 (Feb. 1948): 229. ‘Spanish Letter’ opens with an account of a train trip to Madrid, in which Bellow and his party are accosted by a Spanish gentleman, an undercover policeman, who talks in minute detail about hydroelectric power, on the grounds that ‘we were American and therefore interested in mechanical subjects’ (p. 217).

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 181 just outside of Montreal (now part of it), he was raised in Humboldt Park, in the northwest of the city, to which his family moved in 1924, when he was nine. He was an undergraduate for a year and a bit at the University of Chicago. When he became a faculty member, it was not in the English department; for over thirty years, from 1962 to 1993, he taught in the Com- mittee on Social Thought, a small interdisciplinary faculty drawing together writers and scholars of literature, philosophy, history, art history, religion, politics, and society. After his death in 2005, at the age of eighty- nine, the executors of Bellow’s literary estate decided that his papers should be kept together at the University of Chicago Library.50 After about a year of negotiation, the estate and the university reached an agreement, formalized on 23 May 2006, covering the sale of the materials already on deposit in Chicago and others not yet deposited. ‘There’s a wonderful symmetry to having all the Bellow papers housed at the University of Chi- cago’, declared Walter Pozen, one of the executors; selling to the Regen- stein was ‘an idea which I am sure would give Saul great pleasure.’ Alice Schreyer, then director of the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago, declared completion of the archive ‘a tremendous gain for scholarship.’51 During the discussions with the University of Chicago, I received a phone call from Bellow’s widow, Janis. She was calling at the suggestion of Martin Amis to ask my advice as to the disposition of the papers. I agreed that Chicago was the right place for the papers but advised that the estate was likely to be offered more money elsewhere. The Ransom Center was richer than the University of Chicago, and the Ransom Center had Bellow materials (a holograph manuscript of Seize the Day [1956], four typewritten drafts, and numerous Bellow letters: to agents, publishers, and literary friends whose archives it housed). It was clear that the decision to sell to the University of Chicago would be taken at some ﬁnancial cost (although the Regenstein’s already substantial holdings would have discouraged other institutions from extravagant bids); what was less clear was that the decision would have challenging consequences for users of the collection. These consequences can be attributed partly to money, partly to the nature of the holdings in Special Collections. The reading room of Special Col- lections at the Regenstein is comfortably appointed. Its staff are efﬁcient,

50. As a result of this decision, roughly 150 boxes of materials joined the 200 boxes already housed in Special Collections. These boxes are of different types, which is partly why Special Collections counts the Bellow Papers by linear feet, the standard archival metric, rather than boxes. 51. Quoted in Lydialyle Gibson, ‘Something to Remember Him By’, University of Chicago Magazine 99 (Oct. 2006): 24.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 182 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts good humoured, and professional, helpful before, during, and after visits. I am in their debt. But the library has not found the money to process (the American term for catalogue) the Bellow papers. In the case of correspondence, letters from long-time friends and associates are scattered in dozens of deposits or gifts with separate inventories. Bellow was a demon reviser, he rarely dated manuscripts, and the inventories make only a few shrewd attempts at ordering draft material. Properly to process the Bellow papers, Alice Schreyer estimates, would cost something like $150,000 and take at least two years to complete.52 The University of Chicago Library does not have this money and will ﬁnd it difﬁcult to raise it through gifts or grants. Funding institutions are reluctant to provide money for the sort of processing literary scholars need (item level processing, indexing); they prefer collaborative proposals to process the archives of groups of related individuals and organizations (such as the library’s Chicago Jazz Archive).53 The emphasis now is on streamlined processing, a priority, it is claimed, given the high percentage (roughly 25 percent) of manuscripts in the United States not processed or catalogued at all.54 Then there’s the matter of the Bellow archive’s piece- meal arrival. The University of Chicago was proud to hold Bellow’s papers but understandably reluctant to process deposits, which, unlike donations, are owned by the author or the author’s estate.

Finally, there is the matter of the other holdings in Special Collections

52. These details from an interview with Alice Schreyer, interview with the author, 28 Aug. 2008. 53. See, for example, guidelines for the grant scheme ‘Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives: About the Program’, clir.org/hiddencollections/index.html, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Council on Library and Information Resources. Under ‘What Are the Criteria for Awards’, the guidelines state: Scholars increasingly work in a digital environment and are interested in ﬁnding related collections across many institutions. Consequently, collaborative proposals that aggregate disparately located but similarly themed collections may be more favorably weighed than those that do not feature such collaboration. Alternately, the review panel might aggregate several candidate collections as a single product. In general, the panel grants preference to applications from institutions or consortia that agree to employ graduate students, parapro- fessionals, and other staff that will contribute to a cost-effective and swift generation of re- cords. [www.clir.org/hiddencollections/applicants] 54. For trends in processing among American libraries and research institutions, see Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, ‘More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing’, American Archivist 68 (Fall–Winter 2005): 208–63. After providing statistics about processing backlogs and donor anger at the inaccessibility of collections, the authors list four guidelines for breaking ‘the chains of unhelpful practice.’ The fourth of these guidelines ‘describe[s] materials sufﬁcient to promote use. In other words, it is time to focus on what we absolutely need to do, instead of on all the things we might do in a world of unbounded resources’ (pp. 212–13).

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 183 and of the needs of its users. The main holdings in Special Collections, those most in demand, are in nonliterary fields, principally the social sci- ences. It rarely seeks out modern literary manuscripts, except in the area of modern or contemporary poetry. The University of Chicago houses the first fifty years of Poetry, founded by Harriet Monroe, a Chicago-based publication and pioneer of modernism. Poetry’s papers were donated to Chicago until the 1970s when the magazine, in need of funds, began to sell them to the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana. When J. M. Coetzee, like Bellow a Nobel laureate, taught in the Committee on Social Thought, Schreyer made no attempt to approach him about his papers. She did, however, enquire about purchasing what were likely to be the less costly papers of Mark Strand, also in the committee for some years, because Special Collections focuses on acquiring modern or contemporary poetry archives. Since the acquisition of the Bellow papers, the University of Chi- cago Library has continued to acquire Bellow materials by gift and purchase in order to ensure, to the extent that funding and circumstances permit, that the archive is as complete as possible. Formally processing the archive is an objective of the library, but it is not a top priority. Having almost all of Bellow’s papers together in a single location, in Chicago, a city memorably portrayed and pondered in his writing and having also the papers of longtime friends and associates of Bellow at the university is a great boon for scholars. I am not suggesting that the remain- ing papers should have gone elsewhere. Nor am I suggesting that the Bel- low papers are ‘orphaned.’ But negotiating the Bellow archive is a much more difficult business than negotiating the Amis archive at the Hunting- ton and not just because it is bigger. At some future date, according to Shreyer, the archive will be formally processed and the finding aid will be online and available freely on the web. She also, fairly, questions ‘the as- sumption that other institutions would have processed the collection right away and at the item-level.’55 But were the Bellow archive to be formally processed and indexed elsewhere—the Ransom Center, Boston Univer- sity, even the British Library—incongruities of location would matter less than ease of use. Larkin was a university librarian, a servant of scholars and students, but like Bellow, who admired Larkin’s poetry, he had his doubts about ‘the dutiful mob that signs on every September.’56 He was also a proud English- man, as Bellow was a proud American, a proud Chicagoan. Both could be

55. This quotation is from an email of 24 July 2012 to the author. I am grateful to Alice Shreyer and to Daniel Meyer, Director, Special Collections Center and University Archivist, for their comments on a draft of this paper. 56. Larkin, ‘The Pleasure Principle’, Required Writing,p.82.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 184 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts highly critical of their nations, but both were cultural nationalists (despite Bellow’s wide reading in European literatures and Larkin’s early debts to Ste´phane´ Mallarme and Robert Montherlant).57 In Larkin’s poem, ‘Natu- rally the Foundation Will Bear Your Expenses’, a forerunner of sorts to ‘Posterity’, the speaker is just the sort of jet-setting academic careerist its author detested. As he flies from England to Bombay, there to deliver a paper delivered three weeks earlier at Berkeley (rhymed with ‘darkly’, as if Larkin could not bring himself to use the American pronunciation, something the jet-setting academic would surely know), he recalls the ‘colour- less and careworn’ crowd that made his taxi late to the airport. This crowd, he suddenly realizes, had been gathering to celebrate the memorial service at the Cenotaph, on what used to be called Armistice Day, which he sneers at as ‘solemn-sinister / Wreath rubbish’, ‘mawkish nursery games.’58 ‘Nat- urally the Foundation Will Bear Your Expenses’ has been newly edited by Archie Burnett for the Faber Complete Poems of Philip Larkin (2012), the latest and most scholarly edition of Larkin’s poems. Burnett, an English- man, is a professor at Boston University and codirector, with Christopher Ricks, another Englishman, of BU’s Editorial Institute. He must have spent a lot of time on airplanes, but he is lucky to be where he is. In Britain he might well have found it more difficult to undertake and fund a large-scale editorial project like the Complete Poems, given the exigencies and pres- sures of the Research Excellence Framework and the collaborative or col- lectivist biases of funding agencies and departments. One of the reasons I was eager to accept an invitation to write Saul Bellow’s authorized biography was that after editing and writing about Amis I wanted to take on an American subject. As Amis’s biographer I had to overcome suspicions about my qualifications, being an American. When I got to Chicago in 2008, Bellow’s friends, colleagues and relatives were relieved to discover that I wasn’t English. There had been much gossip in Chicago and Manhattan about the 2005 memorial service for Bellow at the 92nd Street Y in New York at which English speakers (McEwan, Martin Amis, James Wood) outnumbered Americans, or so it seemed to the Americans.59 When faced with such cultural nationalism—an

57. For Larkin’s debt to French symbolist poetry, see Barbara Everett, ‘Philip Larkin: After Symbolism’, Poets in Their Time: Essays on English Poetry from Donne to Larkin (London, 1986), pp. 230–44. 58. Larkin, ‘Naturally the Foundation Will Bear Your Expenses’, The Whitsun Weddings (London, 1964), p. 13. 59. Only two American writers spoke, Jeffrey Eugenides and William Kennedy. ‘Had it not been for an especially vapid speech by some forgettable rabbi, the platform would have been exclusively composed of non-Jews, many of them non-American’ (Hitchens, ‘The Great Assimilator’, review of Novels 1944–1954: ‘The Dangling Man’, ‘The Victim’, ‘The Adventures of

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 185 international phenomenon—it is good to remember Ellmann’s example. It is also good to remember Ellmann when considering the disposition of modern literary manuscripts. In our digital age, it has been argued, the direct scrutiny of archival materials on paper serves a mostly magical or talismanic rather than a scholarly function. The problems discussed here will soon be academic in more than one sense. John Sutherland, for example, has claimed that ‘within the forseeable future, the British Library (successor to the old British Museum, with its elephant folio catalogue) will have all its con- tents digitised and text searchable.’60 But mass digitalisation of paper archives is a long way off and likely to stay so given the increasing size and number of collections and the fact that possession of manuscripts rarely implies ownership of copyright, without which reproduction is impossible. Presumably, Sutherland is talking of printed rather than manuscript material, which has to be reproduced in facsimile. Jamie Andrews is less sanguine than Sutherland about mass digitalization, which he calls ‘still a costly exercise.’ He emphasizes the sheer size of collections (‘no longer the iconic item, but hundreds of boxes containing hundreds of thousands of individual folios’) and problems of copyright: ‘so the geographical location of [a manuscript’s] resting place stubbornly lingers’ (as does the importance of determining that resting place) (‘WWS’, p. 268).61 As long as manuscripts continue to matter for scholarly reasons rather than magical ones, scholarly concerns ought to outweigh nationalist ones, in America as in Britain.

Augie March’ and Novels 1956–1964: ‘Seize the Day’, ‘Henderson the Rain King’, ‘Herzog’, by Bellow, Atlantic [Nov. 2007]: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/the-great -assimilator/306331/). For the prominence of English authors eulogizing Bellow in the immediate aftermath of his death, see James Kaplan, ‘Mr. Bellow’s Planet: Amis, McEwan Snatch Saul’s Herring Soul’, New York Observer, 18 Apr. 2005. 60. John Sutherland, ‘Raiders of the Lost Archives’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 28 June 2012,p.42. 61. As for electronic archives, though most libraries holding modern literary manuscript collections now include some ‘born digital’ materials, they, too, pose problems. Salman Rushdie’s papers, now at Emory University, arrived in part on obsolete hard drives, and Emory is collaborating with the Ransom Center and other collectors of modern literary manuscripts on ways to process, preserve, and make available the digital ﬁles they receive; see ‘Salman Rushdie Archive to Open Feb. 26’, Emory University News Release, 11 Jan. 2010, shared.web.emory.edu/emory/news/releases/2010/01/salman-rushdie-archive-to-open-at -emory.html#.UAv-JKBdATA. The Bodleian has a website devoted to their electronic and digital collections (mostly of political rather than literary archives, though including the papers of Isaiah Berlin); see www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/beam

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 186 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts Coda: Kafka What, though, of cases in which scholarly concerns are met or balanced by rival institutions or in which the supposedly magical or talismanic properties of manuscripts become matters of international dispute? Con- sider in this regard recent debate over Franz Kafka’s papers, as discussed in lengthy articles by Elif Batuman in the New York Times Magazine, Judith Butler in the London Review of Books and Jens Hanssen in Critical Inquiry.62 The background to the debate is well known. Kafka instructed his friend and executor Max Brod to burn unread ‘everything I leave behind me... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others), sketches and so on.’63 Brod promptly informed Kafka that he would do no such thing and, after Kafka’s death in 1924, arranged for the publication of The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927). Brod was a passionate Zionist and in 1939, only minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border, fled Prague for Palestine, carrying with him a suitcase filled with Kafka manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts he eventually deposited in vaults in Israel and Switzerland, others he kept in his house in Tel Aviv. Much later, in 1956, he sent a number of manuscripts to Switzerland. The ownership of these manuscripts was shared among Kafka’s nieces. At the same time, Salman Schocken, Kafka’s publisher since 1933, first in Palestine, then in New York, moved his operations to Zurich. Among the unpublished Kafka materials Schocken brought with him to Switzerland were diaries and correspondence as well as autograph manuscripts. In 1961 the papers in Schocken’s possession and those owned by Kafka’s nieces were acquired by the Bodleian Library in Oxford in a deal brokered by Malcolm Pasley, a tutor of German at Magdalen College, Oxford. Kaf- ka’s great nephew, Michael Steiner, read law at Magdalen, and after meeting Pasley introduced him to his mother, Marianna Steiner, the daughter of Kafka’s sister Valli. It was Marianna Steiner who agreed, on behalf of all the nieces, to deposit the papers in the Bodleian. In subsequent years the Bodleian acquired further papers from another Kafka niece, Gertrude Kauffman, the daughter of Kafka’s sister Elli, and from Miriam Schocken,

62. See Elif Batuman, ‘Kafka’s Last Trial’, New York Times Magazine, 22 Sept. 2012. www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/magazine/26kafka-t.html, hereafter abbreviated ‘KLT’; Judith Butler, ‘Who Owns Kafka?’ London Review of Books, 3 Mar. 2011, lrb.co.uk/v33/no5/Judith -butler/who-owns-kafka, hereafter abbreviated ‘WOK’; and Jens Hanssen, ‘Kafka and Arabs’, Critical Inquiry 39 (Autumn 2012): 167–97, hereafter abbreviated ‘KA.’ For details from the trial, see Jodi Rudoren and Myra Noveck, ‘Woman Must Relinquish Kafka Papers, Judge Says’, New York Times, 14 Oct. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/world/middleeast/woman-must -relinquish-kafka-papers-judge-says.html?_rϭ0 63. According to ‘KLT’, Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his writing. After his death at forty-one, the letter quoted was found in his desk in Prague addressed to Brod.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 187 representing the Schocken family. The Bodleian now holds the majority of Kafka manuscripts, in addition to journals, travel diaries, letters, apho- risms, German-Hebrew vocabularies, Hebrew exercises, and a small number of photographs, sketches, and doodles. When Brod died in 1968, the Kafka papers that remained in his possession, along with his own archive, passed to Esther Hoffe, his secretary. Hoffe’s right to the papers was attested to in a letter of 1952, the so-called gift letter, in which Brod appeared to will the papers to her outright. She kept them, as had Brod himself, in ten safe-deposit boxes in Zurich and Tel Aviv and in her home, a ground-floor apartment on Spinoza Street in central Tel Aviv. In 1988 she sold the original manuscript of The Trial at auction at Sotheby’s for $2 million. The purchaser was the German Liter- ature Archive (Deutsches Literaturarchiv) in Marbach, near Stuttgart, which already possessed some Kafka papers.64 Batuman calls the 1952 decision to bequeath the papers to Hoffe ‘the central mystery in this case’, given Brod’s stated intention, attested to in letters and his will of 1961, for the papers to end up in an archive (‘KLT’). Hoffe sought eventually to honour this intention, negotiating to place the papers, both Brod’s and Kafka’s, with the German Literature Archive. The transaction was never completed, and when Hoffe died in 2007, at the age of 101, control of the papers was entrusted to her two septuagenarian daughters, Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler. At this point, the National Library of Israel, previously the Library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, challenged the legality of Hoffe’s will and the authenticity of the gift letter, claiming a right to both sets of papers and arguing that Hoffe had been entrusted with them as an executor, not a beneficiary, meaning that at her death they should revert to the Brod estate, which would deposit them, in accordance with Brod’s 1961 will, ‘with the Library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Municipal Library of Tel Aviv or another public archive in Israel or abroad’ (quoted in ‘KLT’). When the Municipal Library of Tel Aviv renounced its claim to the papers, the National Library of Israel was able to declare itself ‘the only claimant specifically named by Brod.’ The Hoffe daughters, motivated in part by financial gain (or need, one of many details hotly debated in court and the popular press), resisted the National Library’s claim, arguing that they were abiding by the terms of Brod’s will by negotiating to sell some or all the papers to the German Literature Archive, as much a public archive as the National Library of Israel. The case then went to court in Israel, where

64. For the content of the Kafka archive in Marbach, see the catalogue at ‘Franz Kafka’, Deutches Literaturarchiv Marbach, www.dla-marbach.de/?idϭ51891

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 188 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts for almost ﬁve years it was argued by more than a dozen lawyers.65 Last fall, Judge Talia Kopelman Pardo of Tel Aviv Family Court ruled in favour of the National Library, in a judgement of ﬁfty-nine pages. The judge accepted the library’s argument that Brod had bequeathed the papers to Esther Hoffe not as a gift but as a trust, citing documents in which Brod seemed to indicate a preference for the National Library. Ruth Wiesler died before the ruling, but Eva Hoffe has vowed to appeal.

Where do the disputed Kafka papers belong? If one thinks only of the interests of scholars, by which is meant, by extension, of Kafka’s readers and writings, it is hard to say. There are significant Kafka holdings in the Bodleian and the German Literary Archive. The papers would not be ‘orphaned’ in either of these locations. The National Library of Israel in Jerusalem has no comparable Kafka holdings but is strong in ancillary German-language collections (stronger, certainly, than the Bodleian), containing the papers of many German-Jewish intellectuals, including those of Albert Einstein, Stefan Zweig, Gershon Scholem, Walter Benja- min, and Martin Buber, as well as several close friends from Kafka’s Prague circle, including Hugo Bergmann, first director of the National Library and Rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The German Literary Archive is also strong in ancillary collections, as well as holding Kafka manuscripts, and, as it frequently reminds disputants, Kafka wrote in Ger- man. The strength of the Bodleian’s claim lies not only in its holding the majority of Kafka manuscripts, the basis of the critical editions of Kafka, published by S. Fischer Verlag, but in the activities of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre, which aims to forward research not only on Kafka’s life and work but more generally on German-Jewish literature of the modernist period. The Bodleian also has close relations with Marbach. In April 2011, the two institutions jointly purchased over a hundred letters and postcards written by Kafka to his favourite sister Ottilie, known in the family as Ottla. The Bodleian website heralds this purchase as ‘the first time a literary archive has been purchased jointly by two different institutions in different countries with the intention to share access and scholarly activities.’66 When Eva Hoffe and the Kafka biographer Reiner Stach, among others, claimed that no archive in Israel had the resources to keep the papers as

65. One lawyer acting for the Israeli government ofﬁce responsible for estate hearings, two for the National Library of Israel, ﬁve court-appointed ‘executors’ (three representing Esther Hoffe’s will and two representing Brod’s will), four for the sisters, and two for the German Literary Archive. 66. ‘The Bodleian Libraries and Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach, Jointly to Purchase Franz Kafka “Letters to Ottla” Archive’, www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/news/2011-april-04

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 189 well as Marbach, supporters of the National Library vigorously objected, calling such claims ‘outrageous and hypocritical’ (Otto Dov Kulka, Emer- itus Professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, quoted in ‘KLT’). In any of the three locations, it is fair to say, the papers would be properly cared for, processed, and made accessible to the public. The Bodleian, though, lacks the resources of Marbach or the National Library, both of which can count on substantial state assistance (it was the German government that funded Marbach’s purchase of the manuscript of The Trial). That the Bodleian has been involved only peripherally in the current debate over stewardship of the disputed papers is partly a matter of money. Though a Bodleian spokesperson assured me that the institution is capable of significant fundraising on a case-by-case basis, on this occasion it did not feel in a position to bid against Marbach in negotiation with the Hoffes. For Butler the presence of the papers in Israel poses problems not of care or processing but of access because ‘anyone who seeks to see and study that work must cross Israel’s border and engage with its cultural institutions’, something not all scholars, herself included, are willing or able to do (‘WOK’).67 Butler accepts ‘that the legal management of [Kafka’s] papers requires a decision regarding their stewardship, and that the problem of legal ownership has to be solved so the papers can be inventoried and made accessible’ (‘WOK’). But she offers no solution to the ownership problem and leaves open the question of stewardship. What she offers instead is a detailed account of the impossibility of ‘belonging’ and ‘arrival’ in Kafka’s life and writing: ‘if we turn to his writing to help us sort through this mess, we may well find that his writing is instead most pertinent in helping us to think through the limits of cultural belonging, as well as the traps of certain nationalist trajectories’ (‘WOK’). These limits and traps mostly concern claims about Jewish identity and Kafka’s German. Butler makes a strong case against the National Library’s presumption ‘that it is the state of Israel that represents the Jewish people.’ What, she asks, about ‘Jews in the diaspora for whom the homeland is not a place of inevitable return or a final destination’ (‘WOK’)? Kafka was just such a Jew, she argues. For all his interest in Zionism and talk of emigrating, he never went, and his plans to

67. ‘Citizens from several countries and non-citizens within the Occupied Territories are not allowed to cross [the Israeli] border....Also . . . many artists, performers and intellectuals are currently honouring the cultural and academic boycott, refusing to appear in Israel unless their host institutions voice a strong and sustained opposition to the occupation. The Kafka trial not only takes place against this political backdrop, but actively intervenes in its reconﬁguration’ (‘WOK’). Butler supports the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) Movement against Israel ‘until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights’ (‘Introducing the BDS Movement’, www.bdsmovement.net).

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 190 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts do so late in life were mostly pipe dreams, entertained only after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which, he knew, was likely to have prohibited entry into Palestine.68 In Butler’s striking phrase, Kafka ‘had a stopping ambivalence’ about the whole Zionist project, of a piece with the ‘poetics of non-arrival’ that pervades ‘his love letters, his parables about journeys, and his explicit reflections on both Zionism and on the German language.’ Butler marshals these latter reflections, together with Kafka’s multilingual- ism (Czech, Yiddish, German), against those who support Marbach on the grounds of the ‘purity’ of Kafka’s German, ‘how perfectly German his language is’ (‘WOK’). One thinks of the letter Amis wrote to Larkin accompanying the SCONUL questionnaire: ‘I’d have said “my work belongs not to England, but to the world” if I were a different type of chap.’ Kafka’s work is much easier to see as belonging to the world than Amis’s, even for those who value Amis’s work. Partly this is because Amis, like Larkin, set his face against modernism, the most international of literary and artistic move- ments; Kafka, in contrast, was a pioneer of modernism. Partly it is because Amis’s poems and novels are rich in particulars—social, historical, national— while Kafka’s fiction, in the words of the American-Israeli critic, Mark H. Gelber, ‘removes the particularist markers, erases the particularist traces’ (quoted in ‘KLT’).69 This removal or erasure widens Kafka’s appeal, helping to draw readers throughout Europe and beyond, including readers from Arab countries, as Jens Hanssen has shown (see ‘KA’, pp. 175–79). Amis makes a single reference to Kafka in the thousand-plus pages of his collected letters: ‘I have also looked at The great wall of China and other pieces, by you know who else [he has been discussing The Bosto- nians ‘by you know who’]. Now there’s another man who can’t tell a story, who’s incapable of illustrating the slightest thing, or the most

68. ‘Kafka studied Hebrew and periodically flirted with the idea of going to Palestine—as a waiter, artisan, or bookbinder. However, immigration criteria would have disqualified him from entering the promised land after his case of tuberculosis in the summer of 1917, as Arthur Ruppin, who directed the Palestine Office for Jewish immigration, proposed strict health, occupation, and racial criteria for the selection of the fittest and the most desirable’ (‘KA’, p. 193). Hanssen cites Arthur Ruppin, ‘Die Auslese des Menschenmaterials fur Palestina’, Der Jude 3, nos. 8–9 (1918): 373–83. Der Jude, the Zionist periodical launched by Martin Buber in Berlin and Vienna in 1916, was well known to Kafka and his circle. At one point in 1922, ‘incongruously’, as Hanssen puts it (‘KA’, p. 193), Kafka was even considered as a possible replacement for Buber, despite his scepticism about Zionist claims on and about Palestine; Hanssen cites Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison, Wis., 2007), pp. 170–72. 69. Gelber is director of the Research Center for Austrian and German Studies at Ben Gurion University in the Negev. He is also a consultant to the National Library of Israel, supporter of its claim to the Brod and Kafka papers, and has written widely on Kafka’s relation to Zionism.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 191 important thing, by action. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many abstract nouns in a SUPPOSEDLY narrative writer before.’70 Bellow had similar reservations about Kafka, a key figure in his early years, as unpublished manuscripts and Dangling Man (1944), his first novel, make clear.71 In discussing these years, however, in interviews and written reminiscences, Bellow rarely mentions Kafka and when he does it is with misgivings. For example, in describing his childhood faith in ob- servation (‘the abstraction came later. Actual life was always first’), he mentions having read Kafka on Honore´ de Balzac. Kafka could not bear Balzac’s novels because they ‘contained too many characters. He’s asked, Aren’t you interested in characters? And he says, No, I’m only interested in symbols. And I could see that as a source of dramatic power. Especially when I was growing up, I found that a “personality” could also be con- structed of something artificial. On the other hand, the number of types and roles were really limited: they soon became tiresome because they were derivative.’72 Elsewhere Bellow associates Kafka with Joyce, whom he greatly admired, and Gertrude Stein, as key figures who ‘took the novel into an impossible blind alley.’73 Though fascinated by theories and con- cepts, Bellow, like Amis, drew strength and meaning as a novelist from particulars. He, too, would say his work belonged to the world, while also admitting that it does so by virtue of its immersion in specifics of place and time. Kafka’s placelessness makes placing his papers difficult. Butler is right to object to the National Library’s claim that the papers belong in Israel because Kafka was primarily a Jewish writer and Israel is the home of the Jewish people, assertions open to question on several grounds. She is also right to worry over the nationalist purposes she suspects the papers will serve. ‘The library does not intend to give up on cultural assets belonging

70. Kingsley Amis, letter to Larkin, 12 June 1950, The Letters of Kingsley Amis,p.232. 71. Bellow’s first published story, written while an undergraduate, appeared in The Daily Northwestern on 19 February 1936. It takes its title, ‘The Hell It Can’t’, from the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here (1935) and is Kafkaesque in several respects: in its unspecified setting, the utter helplessness of its protagonist in the face of state-sanctioned lawlessness, and the sparseness of its style, with little verbal flourish. Bellow’s first completed novel, entitled The Very Dark Trees, was accepted for publication in 1942 but never appeared. Bellow eventually destroyed the manuscript and all that is known of it comes from a childhood friend who remembers it as ‘Kafkaesque’, a fable about ‘an enlightened southerner’, a teacher at a Midwestern university, who suddenly, on the way home from class, turns black. His first published novel, Dangling Man, has an alienated protagonist known only as Joseph, powerless in the face of an inscrutable bureaucracy. 72. Bellow, ‘A Half Life’ (1990), interview with Keith Botsford, It All Adds Up, pp. 298–99. 73. Bellow, ‘Successor to Faulkner?’ (1964), interview with Nina Steers, Conversations with Saul Bellow, p. 35.

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 192 Zachary Leader / Cultural Nationalism and Modern Manuscripts to the Jewish people’, declares the chairman of its board of directors, David Blumberg, whom she quotes (‘WOK’).74 In this context, Butler comments, ‘an asset is something that enhances Israel’s world reputation, which many would allow is in need of repair: the wager is that the world reputation of Kafka will become the world reputation of Israel’ (‘WOK’). Another way of looking at the papers, however, is to see their presence in Israel as a cor- rective, opening out or calling into question restricted notions of Jewish- ness, the sort that valorize aliyah (the return of Jews to Israel, from the Hebrew for ascent, a telling derivation), stigmatizing galut (exile, the Jew- ish diaspora). (The title of Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back [1976] is partly a dig at such notions, in particular at the suggestion that only in Israel can a Jew be properly a Jew.) Three days after Judge Pardo ruled in favour of the National Library, the New York Times ran an article on the case, quot- ing Nurit Pagi, a PhD student at the University of Haifa. Pagi is writing a dissertation on Max Brod and has published several articles about the controversy over Kafka’s papers. She supports the National Library and Judge Pardo’s verdict which she hopes will ‘mark a change, a beginning, in adopting this whole culture which belongs to the heritage of the Jewish people and ﬁnally the state of Israel will fully adopt it and maybe even implement it.’75 By ‘whole culture’ Pagi means a culture that includes the emancipatory, presettler Zionism of Brod’s and Kafka’s Prague circle, a Zionism she believes the papers will illuminate, to the ultimate beneﬁt of Israelis and Palestinians alike.76 What connects this hope to Butler’s suspi-

74. Nurit Pagi, ‘Kafka: To Whom Does This Legacy Belong?’ Eretz Acheret, 21 Oct. 2010, www.acheret.co.il/en/?cmdϭarticles.436&actϭread&idϭ2414, quotes Gelber as saying that ‘Kafka’s works and manuscripts are the Jewish people’s eternal assets.’ 75. Quoted in Rudoren and Noveck, ‘Woman Must Relinquish Kafka Papers, Judge Says.’ 76. In ‘Kafka’, Pagi argues that the Brod and Kafka papers belong in Israel in part because they make a case for the broader, precolonial Zionism discussed by Hanssen and others. As Hanssen puts it, the original ‘project’ of this Zionism was ‘Jewish emancipation in Europe.... Jewish settlement in Palestine remained a side project for many Prague Zionists until the Balfour Declaration and the establishment of the British Mandate for Palestine in 1920’ (‘KA’, p. 169). Pagi seems to be making a similar point in defending Brod’s Zionism. She quotes Dmitry Shumsky of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, who calls Brod one of the most original thinkers that the modern Jewish national movement produced. Utilizing insights from his personal experience as a Jew living in Prague’s multinational setting, Brod made a major contribution to the development of an unconventional perception of the idea of Jewish nationalism. According to that perception, the unique quality of the Jews as a national group is their ability to build bridges linking neighboring nations and cultures without denying their Jewish identity. Furthermore, Brod made an even more unique contribution to the basic concept of nationalism in general when he came up with the idea of national humanism. He believed that, only from a reasonable distance and from the depths of your own national identity, can you ‘translate’ and understand what members of other nations feel toward their own national culture. Only then can there be fruitful mu-

This content downloaded from 128.252.067.066 on July 25, 2016 23:07:05 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2013 193 cion is a shared belief in the vital power, the political import, of manuscripts as ‘cultural assets’, a power more than merely talismanic. To what end would such power be put in Marbach, chief rival to the National Library? Is there not, moreover, something offensive, hurtful even, in the argument that the papers ‘belong’ in Germany, which even Reiner Stach, Marbach’s champion, calls ‘the country of the perpetrators’? When Marbach bought the manuscript of The Trial in 1988, Philip Roth characterized the sale as ‘yet another lurid Kafkaesque irony.’ Kafka was not German. His three sisters had perished in the Holocaust. Batuman quotes Otto Dov Kulka: ‘They say the papers will be safer in Germany, the Germans will take very good care of them. Well, the Germans don’t have a very good history of taking care of Kafka’s things. They didn’t take good care of his sisters’ (quoted in ‘KLT’). Placing the papers in Marbach, however, could be thought of as a way of keeping them unplaced, of facing rather than effacing Kafka’s history, including the fate of his family and of European Jewry in general. It could also be thought of as respecting Kafka’s experience, his inability or unwillingness to be at home, perpetuating it even. What is clear is that for supporters and opponents alike, the incongruities of studying Kafka manuscripts in Germany are different in kind from those of studying Amis’s manuscripts in California. In the former case, the incongruities matter.

tual relations with that other culture and only then is it possible to “love” it—but from a distance. What we have here is a great theoretician of humanistic Zionist nationalism, which is today a forgotten concept. Today, when Zionism is being given various dubious labels and unworthy actions are being undertaken, the idea of introducing Israelis to Brod’s Zionist national thinking would have unprecedented signiﬁcance. [Pagi, ‘Kafka’]

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