Why Are They Here?: Describing the Circumstances of Archival Acquisition in Literary Archives

Christopher Long

Abstract

One aspect of custodial history which has not been explored in the literature is the decision-making process leading up to material arriving at a particular archival institution. I propose that the choice of institution, made by the creator or her heirs, has an effect on how the material is interpreted by future researchers. I will discuss the archives of two Canadian authors, Mordecai Richler and Sheila Watson, which illustrate how the author’s choice of archival institution for depositing their papers had meaning. I conclude by suggesting that, in certain cases, the decision-making process which led to the donor choosing a particular archives to house her materials should be captured in the archival description.

Keywords: Archives, Literary Archives, Canadian Authors, Archival Description

In this essay I will discuss the ability of current description standards to capture contextual information for personal archives, focusing particularly on authors’ archives. I am expanding on an element of Jennifer Douglas’s (2016) call for “a more honest descriptive practice,” which entails documenting the circumstances of material entering archival custody (p. 28). One aspect of custodial history which has not been explored in the literature is the decision-making process leading up to material arriving at a particular archival institution. I propose that the choice of institution, made by the creator or her heirs, has an effect on how the material is interpreted by future researchers. Thus, the decision-making process should be documented in the archival description. I will briefly summarize the debate among archival theorists over the nature of personal records and situate my own argument within the history of that debate. Expanding on Douglas’s arguments about the ‘constructedness’ of authors’ archives, I will discuss two Canadian authors’ archives which LONG DESCRIBING THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF ARCHIVAL ACQUISITION

illustrate how the author’s choice of archival institution for depositing their papers had meaning. First, Mordecai Richler’s personal papers were purchased by the University of Calgary in 1974, for reasons unrelated to Richler’s own cultural legacy. Second, Sheila Watson chose to deposit her archive at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College, and not at the University of Alberta alongside her husband’s. Using these archive stories, I will demonstrate that the decision regarding where records are archived can have significant consequences for the future interpretation of personal records. Although it is impossible to capture all contextual information about a record in its description, archivists must carefully asses which elements of a record’s history have had an impact on its structure and meaning and do their best to document them.1 If archivists are aware of the decision-making process which led to the material’s acquisition, there should be an area in standardized descriptions which allows that information to be recorded. This discussion centres on literary archives because of the unique nature of the archival output engendered by writers. According to Jennifer Douglas (2013), creative people typically produce more documentary traces than other professions (p. 4). Catherine Hobbs (2006) argues that novelists, poets, and other writers have a mastery over the written word and, as a result, their unpublished works are likely to be more intentional than the notes of other famous people, such as musicians or community leaders (p. 111). Literary archives are also an ideal subject because they are typically donated by the living author, her heirs, or executors to the institution of the author’s choice. This differentiates their acquisition from that of organizational records, which usually arrive at archival institutions for reasons related to legal accountability or institutional mandate. 2

Part 1: Debates in Archival theory, from Jenkinson to today Personal archives are generally considered a “poor cousin” to government archives in archival theory (Fisher, 2009, p. 2). The giants of classical archival theory, Hilary Jenkinson and T.R. Schellenberg, agreed that personal records typically did not fulfill the criteria required for determining ‘archival quality.’ Jenkinson questioned the authenticity of most personal records because they could not be proven to have an ‘unblemished’ line of responsible custodians and donors were not legally bound to refrain from editing or dividing documents before archival acquisition (cited in Fisher, p. 9). Schellenberg questioned the lack of purposiveness in private records, arguing that to be considered archival, records must have been created or accumulated for some purpose and preserved for reasons other than those for which they were created or accumulated (cited in Fisher, p. 12).

1Wendy Duff and Verne Harris have discussed the political power involved in selecting what data should be captured in description (Duff and Harris, 2002, p. 275). 2This is not to suggest that organizational records do not often have multiple custodians and long, confusing journeys before reaching the archives. Tracing the provenance of organizational records can be very difficult in the cases of older records, passed between successive agencies.

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While most archivists today agree that personal papers are considered archival, the debate has continued over whether personal archives are the same as organizational records and can be understood using the same archival theory. The debate reignited with the article “Personal Papers and Treatment of Archival Principles” by Chris Hurley, which was written in response to Graeme Powell’s article, “Archival Principles and the Treatment of Personal Papers.” Powell (1976) argued that archival principles could not be applied to personal records because such records are innately disordered and idiosyncratic (p. 263). Hurley (1977) disagreed, arguing that the same principles which applied to organizational records, primarily the principle of original order, remained the best practice for personal papers. Other arrangements destroy the record’s evidential value, provide a standard form of presentation, and allow depositors to consult the records after archival accession (p. 354). In his defence of original order for personal records, Hurley raised the issue of ‘evidential value’ which later inspired debate among archivists Sue McKemmish, Richard J. Cox, Catherine Hobbs, and Verne Harris. McKemmish (1996) and Cox (2008) argued that personal records are no different from organizational records because they both are created to capture transactions and provide evidence of activity, or, as McKemmish describes it, “evidence of me” (p. 176). Conversely, Catherine Hobbs (2010) and Verne Harris (as cited in Hobbs) criticize how McKemmish and Cox narrowly define records as being primarily evidential. Hobbs argues that emphasizing personal records’ evidential qualities places too much value on an individual’s public life and not on her personal and introspective life. Hobbs writes, “Personal archives are formed because of the needs, desires, and predilections of their creators to create and keep documents (not for an administrative purpose or because of a legal requirement)” (p. 213). As a result, she argues, personal archives can be valued for what they can reveal about the ‘psychology’ and ‘character’ of the creator. Jennifer Douglas has responded to the assertion that archives can reveal a creator’s psychology by drawing from the literature on life-writing. According to Douglas (2013), scholars of autobiographical writing tend to be suspicious of the assumption that this writing reveals “the true self,” and accordingly, archivists also ought to be suspicious when considering personal documents (p. 42). Douglas (2015) draws attention to how archival material cannot be considered revealing of a creator’s ‘true character’ because writers who are self-conscious of the fact that they will be archived are likely to conceal their private selves from the public (p. 55). Additionally, the intentions of the creator may be obscured by the presence of what Douglas calls ‘coaxers and coercers,’ which refers to people who influence a body of records by editing, manipulating, or rearranging it before archival acquisition (2013, p. 114). My argument expands on Douglas’s criticisms of the ‘psychological trend’ in personal archive theory by taking her notion of ‘constructed archives’ a step further to consider how the choice of archival institution may be a part of the archive’s construction. Douglas herself suggests that the decision regarding ‘where to archive’ is an aspect of the archive’s ‘constructedness’ when she discusses how Aurelia Plath and Ted Hughes shaped Sylvia Plath’s archive. One of the many interventions which Aurelia and Ted Hughes inflicted on Plath’s papers was their decision to each deposit their share of the

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records into two different institutions, Smith College and Lilly Library (Douglas, 2013, p. 202). Making explicit the reasons why a particular institution has possession of certain records demonstrates what Douglas referred to as “focusing on the archival aggregation itself as referent, rather than interpreting the archive primarily as a referent to something else” (p. 254). Douglas’s call to focus on archives themselves, as their own constructed entities, draws from a debate among archival scholars regarding the notion of expanded provenance. During what has been referred to as the “rediscovery of the fonds” among Canadian archivists in the late 1980s, Debra Barr argued for an expanded understanding of provenance in order to consider the entire history of a body of records, including not only the circumstances of its creation, but also its use and custody (cited in Douglas, 2010, p. 30). Millar argued that the expanded conception of provenance should be reflected in descriptive standards such as the Rules for Archival Description (RAD). In her 2002 essay, “The Death of the Fonds,” Millar argues that creator history, records history, and custodial history should be “[elevated] from mere optional descriptive entries to core tenets of archival practice” because custodial history is “crucial to our understanding of the records” (p. 12). In her doctoral thesis (2013), Douglas expands on this issue and identifies the various layers of archival creation which are at play in the expanded notion of provenance. As Douglas explains, archives are created by a wide range of actors, not simply the creator. Other influences on the creation of archives include: the community to which the creator belongs, the custodians of the material prior to accession, the archivists who appraise, arrange, describe, and make the records available, subsequent researchers, and finally, society itself, broadly interpreted (p. 176). Douglas calls for archivists to use descriptive standards to make explicit the constructed nature of the archive by taking into account every action which had an impact on the content and structure of the body of records (p. 246). I propose that the decisions to archive and where to archive are actions which have an impact upon a body of records’ content, context, and structure. Adhering to the concept of expanded provenance would mean documenting information about the details of archival acquisition. Documenting the decisions of creators or their heirs to donate or sell material to one archival repository over another is, in part, an answer to Laura Millar’s (2002) call for archival practice to reorient itself from the question “how did records come to be?” to “how did these records come to be here?” (p. 12). This question has significant bearing on the history of Mordecai Richler’s and Sheila Watson’s fonds.

Part 2: Acquiring Materials from Mordecai Richler and Sheila Watson The decision regarding where to archive the personal papers of Canadian writers Mordecai Richler and Sheila Watson had a significant impact upon the construction of those writers’ archives. In both cases, the decision-making processes which led to the creation of the archives are not made explicitly clear in the archival description. The Mordecai Richler fonds and the Sheila Watson fonds were deposited into university archives with specific intentions which were not documented (and could not be, under the current descriptive standards).

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Mordecai Richler (1931-2001) is one of Canada’s most well-known authors. A repeated motif in his novels and short stories is his experience growing up in the Jewish neighbourhood of Montreal, Quebec on St. Urbain Street. The street is a prominent setting in most of his fiction, including his best- selling novels, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and St. Urbain’s Horseman. As a writer and public figure, Richler’s legacy is inextricably tied to Montreal, despite his own declared ambivalence about its Anglophone-Francophone and Christian-Jewish divisions. As for the rest of Canada, he typically wrote about other Canadian cities with a dismissiveness which was characteristic of his acerbic writing:

On first glance, and even on third, [Edmonton] seems not so much a city as a jumble of a used-building lot, where the spare office towers and box-shaped apartment buildings and cinder-block motels discarded in the construction of real cities have been abandoned to waste away in the cruel prairie winter. (Cited in Morash, 2001)

It is interesting, then, that Richler chose to deposit the entirety of his archival material at the University of Calgary’s Archives and Special Collections, beginning in 1974. Calgary, Alberta is far removed both culturally and geographically from Richler’s own Montreal. There is little indication that Richler ever spent time in Calgary, much less to suggest that he had a strong personal connection to Western Canada. Richler never taught or studied at the University of Calgary, which had been founded only eight years earlier. Why was the material donated to the University of Calgary and not to a university in Quebec or Eastern Canada? Incidentally, Concordia University has recently dedicated a ‘Mordecai Richler Reading Room’ on its campus, which allows English Literature students to study in a replica of Richler’s office, complete with his original typewriter, desk, and collection of books (Bradshaw, 2013). Why was Concordia University chosen for a replica reading room but not to house the late author’s archive? The answer was not in the fonds-level description available at the University of Calgary’s Archives and Special Collections website. Through correspondence with a University of Calgary archivist, I learned that Richler sold his materials by auction. The University of Calgary, motivated by an interest in making a name for itself as a centre for Canadian literature, was the highest bidder (A. Wagner, personal communication, March 21, 2017). A newspaper report from 1974 stated that Richler may have received $100,000 for his materials (Vickers, 1974). An example of what Douglas might call a ‘coaxer and coercer,’ was the university’s chief librarian Dr. Kenneth Glazier, who personally sought out Richler’s materials, in order to build the University of Calgary’s literary reputation. Richler’s interest in selling his papers for financial gain was expressed when he convinced his fellow writers Brian Moore and Alice Munro to also sell to the University of Calgary. To Moore, he wrote, “Calgary is neck deep in oil monies” (Foran, 2011, p. 439). He also wrote to Munro in 1974, advising her to take advantage of the market for, what he referred to as, her ‘detritus’ (Douglas, 2015, p. 87). As a result, Richler had an impact on the construction of other writers’ archives at the University of

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Calgary. The construction of Richler’s archive was financially motivated and fuelled by the university’s interest in gaining credibility and respect; both motivations were not documented in the fonds’ archival description. Similarly, the Sheila Watson fonds at St Michael’s College Archives and Manuscripts at the University of Toronto was constructed at that particular archive for a reason not documented in the archival description. As historian Linda M. Morra (2014) has uncovered, Sheila Watson (1909-1998) was adamant in the last years of her life that her archival papers could not be deposited at the same university which housed her husband’s archives. Her husband, Wilfred Watson, was a successful novelist and Canadian literary figure whose work was acquired by the University of Alberta after his death. Sheila Watson was determined to assert her independence as a Canadian literary voice distinct from Wilfred’s, with whom she had a fraught relationship. In the words of her biographer, Watson felt “a reluctance to be archivally proximate to him” (Morra, p. 92). Watson’s choice to have her executor, Fred T. Flahiff, archive her materials at the University of Toronto was likely related to her doctoral work there, supervised by Marshall MacLuhan, however, she lived and worked for most of her life in British Columbia and Alberta. For Watson, her wish to be separate from her husband had an impact on the construction of her archive.

Part 3: A New Entity in Descriptions? None of the elements in the current descriptive standards allow for a discussion of the decision- making process which precipitated the archival acquisition of either Richler’s or Watson’s materials. In RAD, embedded in the ‘archival description area’ is the ‘custodial history element’ (1.7.C), where archivists describe information about the chain of agencies or people—in addition to the creator—who had possession or control of the material prior to archival accession (RAD, Rule, 1.7A1). This prompt does not suggest including the contextual information of why the creator or donor chose the archive to house the material. ISAD(G), General International Standard Archival Description, more explicitly asks for documentation about the detailed history of the record by including a rule for archival history (3.2.3). The archival history element in the context area implores archivists to “record the successive transfers of ownership, responsibility and/or custody of the unit of description and indicate those actions … that have contributed to its present structure and arrangement” (p. 20). While the archival history element is a useful starting point for interrogating the archive as referent, it does not encourage the archivist to make reference to the creator’s intentions when deciding where and how to archive.3 Neither descriptive standard encourages an acknowledgement of the full role of the creator in

3MacNeil (2009) has argued that the archival history element of ISAD(G), which is currently a subsection of the context area, should be reformed as a separate area and one that requires documentation even if the records are transferred directly from the creator to the archival institution (p. 95). The new archival history area would include an element which explained the ways that the records have been structured and restructured over time by creators, collectors, and custodians (p.100).

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the construction of the archives, which Douglas has also pointed out in her work (2013, p. 215). Considering the intentions of Richler and Watson in the construction of their archives, an ‘honest descriptive practice’ might include reference to these motivations (Douglas, 2016, p. 28). Otherwise, future researchers could be misled to believe that the archive was created organically, as a natural outcome of the writer’s usual business or activities. Jennifer Meehan (2009) discusses the analytic and creative process of arrangement and description, which involves initially gathering contextual information about the records (p. 85). According to the archivist at the University of Calgary, the archivists were aware of the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of the Mordecai Richler fonds. This information should have been included in the description because it was contextual information about the archives which was known to the archivist. In the article, “Stories and Names,” Duff and Harris (2002) wish for a permeable, liberatory descriptive standard which could better capture contextual information about records, not limited to the perspective and biases of the describer (p. 279). Tom Nesmith (2005) suggests using overlaying explanatory essays, which give a history of the archives itself and describe the societal and institutional contexts that shaped the archives and its formal mandate (p. 271-272). Nesmith’s essays would be the ideal form for describing the motivations of the University of Calgary’s purchase of the Richler material and the other contextual information related to the circumstances of acquisition. Another possible solution is the ‘colophon,’ proposed by Michelle Light and Tom Hyry (2002). The colophon is a statement appended to a body of records which describes the archivist’s impact on the creation of the archives (analogous to a ‘publisher’s note’ in a book) (p. 223). However, the colophon proposal was intended to document the archivists’ impact on the body of records, while the issue here is related to creators and donors.

Conclusion Although I selected only two examples of Canadian literary fonds which have interesting circumstances surrounding their acquisition, I suspect that there are many more similar archive stories which have yet to be uncovered. The essential question which should inspire future debates about archival description is whether or not important contextual information is being neglected. To quote Millar, “the archives left in front of us… are only fragments of a larger story, part of a journey. Our job is to tell as much of that story as possible” (p. 12). I have identified only one aspect of records history which has not been fully explored in the literature or considered in description standards. The circumstance of archival acquisition is only a part of the larger story that records tell and it may not be significant in many cases. Nevertheless, the next step towards achieving honest description involves examining the histories of archival institutions and recognizing them as self-conscious products born from the intentions of creators, archivists, and society itself.

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References

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