There are two reasons that obtaining Permissions has taken so long, in my case at least (see 17 April and 20 April). First, although I rapidly earmarked the sixteen ‘major’ sources of quoted unpublished material in my biography, e.g. William Rothenstein, Grant Richards and Laurence Binyon, and secured the permission of their current copyright holders pretty quickly (plus approval from the relevant archival institutions), I soon realised I had forgotten lots of shorter quotations and lesser folk, as it were. So the first thing I had to do was re-read the typescript meticulously. I stress ‘meticulously’, because it was thanks to reading my typescript too fast the previous time that I had missed these people. There is an almost unstoppable urge, when you are reading your own work for the umpteenth time, to get carried away by it and miss things. So this second time I read at the rate of 100 pages a day and it took me four days.
It produced twenty more sources of quotations for which, according to our risible copyright law, I have to obtain permission to publish from a ‘current copyright holder’ (I am beginning to doubt whether that expression really means anything at all). Admittedly some of these quotations are only fifteen or so words long, but some of their authors turn out to be significant, e.g. Charles Villiers Stanford, Rupert Brooke, Mary Cholmondeley… Some, however, e.g. clubland friends of Archie Ripley’s, are not.
At this point, the second decelerating factor kicks in: you have got to find out who is the institution or descendant who officially owns the ‘rights’ to this unpublished material, even though it was usually written over a hundred years ago. Obviously, in the case of Stanford or Brooke, this is not difficult. In the case of semi-famous correspondents of George or Kittie, it is more difficult and time-consuming. For instance, William English Harrison, the eminent barrister in whose chambers George ‘read’ after graduating, has a clear single female line of descent to a great-great-granddaughter, a Mrs Annette Gough, born 1939, but where does one even start to look for her (or her nearest descendants)? I have half a dozen cases like this. Even archives that possess the papers of Harold Dowdall, say, or Dr Albert Tebb, don’t know who their current copyright holders are.
Fortunately, I have a fantastic genealogical research assistant in Michael Welch, who performs miracles. But it all takes us both time. I should think between us we have so far spent three weeks on Permissions, and we still have thirteen cases to crack. All the feelers are out for these, and in eight of them approaches have been made to the people we believe ‘own’ the copyright. However, it would surprise me if it took us less than another ten days to mop up all thirteen (the original sixteen have been resolved).
This could be regarded as the nadir of the whole business. Five unpaid weeks work on something cooked up by the British Government and an EU Directive! In the name of a Gogolian and Kafkian irrationality! And the prospect of it going on forever as one chases the descendants of Edwin Lankaster in Java…the collateral descendants of Kittie’s gardener…George’s batman… It’s enough to make you lose the will to live.
But life begins the other side of despair!
This whole exercise has produced something that, if I had thought about it more, I might have suspected, but which I find incredibly heartening. Indeed I would go so far as to say that my recent discovery has made this ghastly business all worth while.
When I first blogged about the idiocy and Dullness of a copyright law that insists we trace the descendants of King Alfred or Dr Albert Tebb if we are to be ‘allowed’ to quote from their unpublished works, I suggested that it had all the hallmarks of totalitarianism: a po-minded Utopian belief that it should forbid everything that wasn’t explicitly permitted, a determination to control the past, and a formula for exponentially expanding bureaucracy. But a ray of light has appeared!
I intimated that I believe the way to oppose this law is to assert one’s libertarian belief against its totalitarianism. (As Berdiaev said, ‘love is attained by loving, freedom is attained by acting freely’.) In other words, to ignore it and pursue Permissions only for, say, unpublished material whose author died less than seventy years ago, as I and numerous of my literary correspondents believe is sensible. But I decided not to assert my freedom this way for two reasons: 1) six years work on George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is too much to put at stake, 2) as a feeble Englishman I of course believe in observing the law, be it never so stupid howmsoever, as Lord Denning might have said. I have therefore plodded on into the desert created by this UK/EU legislation known as the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, faithfully pursuing mirage after mirage…
But I find that many of the institutions and persons I approach, like oases of hope, about specific persons’ copyright, do not deign to reply. They are prepared to let me expire in the Act’s Taklamakan Desert; and they are our salvation from the Act’s totalitarianism. They have said to themselves, to me, and to the Act: ‘Get lost!’ They are not prepared to perpetuate this madness. And thank you to them wherever they may be! They have called an end to it, they have given me an excuse for claiming I have made ‘all reasonable efforts’ with this lunacy! They have unwittingly brought me peace.
It is people like these who bring empires to a close. They decide to ignore, or fudge, the dictates of empire, and those empires start to die from the edges. It is what happened to the Russian and Soviet empires. As an Englishman I feel an obligation to obey Parliament/EU Directives, but I think many EU member-states have never felt that…
Ah Patrick… Do I recognise that nugget of advice – that you should make ‘all reasonable efforts’ to identify the owners of obscure unpublished letters and then, by implication, just give up – from an email of mine? I am shocked that despite these protestations about your strict adherence to the Law of Copyright, you quote my words of wisdom with neither acknowledgement nor permission! But perhaps you thought I would get into some kind of trouble with the Archive Police for suggesting something so legally dubious… And doubtless dozens of your other correspondents have taken an equally common-sensical view.
Of course you have my permission, if needed. And my deepest sympathy. Your final push to the publication line sounds utterly exhausting. But I do feel a bit of sympathy too for the staff in those institutions that have as yet failed to reply to your enquiries. Rather than striking a blow against the tyranny of the Copyright Act, more than likely they are simply failing to meet their speed-of-response targets as they struggle against budget cuts, redundancies, crumbling buildings, conservation emergencies, inadequate IT systems, and the unrealistic expectations and demands of readers – to name but a few of the problems that beset many twenty-first century archives. And I also feel rather sorry for those well-meaning legislators who sought to give small, insignificant individuals the same protection as the famous and the important – only to be blamed for the resultant morass of impossible requirements.
I idly wondered whether the difficulty of hunting down the ‘collateral descendants of Kittie’s gardener’ counts as a First World Problem. See, for example
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/10262207/First-world-problems-revealed-in-study.html
But no. The annoyances on this list are much, much worse!
Thank you, Clare, as ever. Si non è vero, è molto ben trovato!