I give here some of the facts from my and my team’s experience that lie behind statements I made in the preceding post, whilst preserving the anonymity of most of the offending institutions because I think to name them would be a distraction.
‘Be prepared for nobody to answer your emails.’ See below under ‘Archive tourists don’t work in archives’ and ‘Attempts to communicate with an archival manager’.
‘Be prepared for…promises to be broken.’ The most common promise made by archivists when an item is donated to holdings is that they will contact you when the material has been curated, and invite you to view it. In our experience this never happens. I sold a collection of rare books, some inscribed and annotated by Russian Chekhov scholars, to a university library who told me that the provenance and nature of the books would be indicated by a bookplate and note in the catalogue. Neither ever happened.
‘…binned as a duplicate.’ This is V. Pokrovskii’s Anton Chekhov’s Life and Works: A Collection of Literary-Historical Articles. At 1062 pages, it was by far the most important source of contemporary Russian writing about Chekhov’s work. As you can see from the image below, George owned a copy. He annotated it, and his annotations are particularly significant for his views on The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard. George’s copy was found in a provincial bookshop by the first Professor of Slavonic Studies at Cambridge, Elizabeth Hill, and donated to the Slavonic Library there at some point between 1936 and 1955. In 1983 I persuaded the then professor, Lucjan Lewitter, that it was historically too valuable to be left on the open shelves, should be replaced by a reprint that was just coming out, and transferred to Special Collections at the University Library. Professor Lewitter, who was a very efficient administrator, arranged for this to be done. After a decent interval, I decided I should check where it was, but no record of its location at the University Library could be found. The late and greatly lamented Russian Librarian there, Ray Scrivens, then frantically searched for it and discovered it buried in a wicker basket labelled ‘Duplicates’ about to be trundled out of the Library… To be honest, I suspect the same happened to many of the collection of inscribed and annotated books I referred to in my first paragraph, viz. the fact that they were inscribed and annotated was completely forgotten by the receiving library, catalogue checks were made to see if they ‘had’ these books already, and if they had that title, the annotated copy was binned.
Photocopy of the half-title of George’s copy of Pokrovskii, 1907
‘Be prepared for… cataloguing never to happen’ and ‘they disappeared without trace.’ In my experience, smallish military archives are particularly bad in these regards. Regimental museums, for instance, seem to be managed mainly by volunteers, who are good at dealing with inquiries from the public, enjoy that and the razzmatazz around family donations, but get irretrievably behind with their cataloguing. When an item has been acquired, ‘accessioned’, but not then catalogued (whether on paper or online) and a researcher needs to see it, it often cannot be found. The euphemism is that it has been ‘mislaid’. Doubtless archivists justify this to themselves by thinking ‘I know it’s here somewhere’, but that is delusional: it’s lost.
In 1987 I was presented with the massive bronze Chekhov Centenary Medal by the head of the Soviet delegation to the colloquium ‘Chekhov on the British Stage’, Aleksandr Anikst. It was not awarded to me personally, but to the British hosts of the event, which I organised and which was a significant development in the early stages of perestroika. Indeed, Anikst explained to me afterwards that he had been directed to award the medal by Gorbachev himself; Oleg Efremov, the Artistic Director of the Moscow Arts, also told me that Gorbachev had been in touch with him about the importance of attending the event and another in Oxford at the same time. The Cambridge host of the colloquium was the University’s Department of Slavonic Studies, so the medal was passed for safe keeping to the Slavonic Library and thence to the ‘reserved’ section of the Faculty Library. Ten years later it could not be found. Ray Scrivens informed me that valuable donated and framed manuscript letters held in that library had disappeared around the same time whilst being ‘transferred’ to the University Library.
Of course, it is a great mistake to try to control something once you have given it away, but it’s still disappointing when people whose job is to conserve it, lose it.
Whilst researching my biography, I regularly trawled the Web for new references to George Calderon. In 2009 an excellent brief description of the archive of George’s composer friend Martin Shaw (1875-1958) popped up on the website of Bernard Quaritch Ltd, who were selling it. The archive included ‘a rare manuscript by the young playwright George Calderon’. Actually, this is the only known manuscript of a play by George, so the news was sensational. In February 2011 the Martin Shaw Papers were bought by the British Library. I am glad to say that, following labryrinthine email correspondence, a curator was able to find the uncatalogued George manuscript and let me see it (in an obviously uncurated state). It turned out to be the 134-page autograph of the ‘musical play’ The Brave Little Tailor, which George wrote with William Caine. So it wasn’t lost in the sense that it could not be found by the people who now owned it. But there was no trace of it on the Web between 2011 and 2018, when it was catalogued. Can no-one at the British Library see that in effect all the Martin Shaw papers were lost to researchers for the whole of that period? It is, whatever the cause, indefensible that it takes seven years to catalogue an acquisition, but failing that the Library could at least have put out to the world a short announcement of the fact that they had acquired it and what it contained. It is good practice, followed by some archives, to produce a skeleton list of a collection as soon as it is received (something that takes at most a morning, I should think), put it straight online, and even make clear that materials can be ordered and consulted on the basis of this list, but that they will not be fully catalogued until date x.
‘Customer care…was surreal.’ I had come across the letters in the invaluable University of Reading Library Location Register of 20th Century English Literary Manuscripts, a publication known, surely, to British archivists. I corresponded by email with a very efficient Historic Collections Administrator at the given library, and she informed me that the items would be transferred for me to the Manuscript Reading Room two days before I was coming from Cambridge to look at them.
The person at the Reading Room desk cast a cursory glance over her shelves and told me the ordered file was not there. She offered no further action. I explained how and when I had ordered the letters. She denied it was possible, and asked how I knew that the library possessed them. I referred to the Register, but she said she had no knowledge of it. She would engage in no further dialogue. I pleaded that I had come all the way from Cambridge to see the items and she intimated I should go all the way back. Fortunately, I insisted on calling out the Administrator I had dealt with by email. The young woman came and seemed to understand the situation immediately. The lady at the desk had, I gathered, spent a part of her life cataloguing the large collection which contained George’s letters, and was determined to control who had access to it. She had concealed my file in another one that a reader was working on at that moment. It occurred to me that as well as misguided possessiveness, her motive might be misandry.
Of course, this is a very sad story. One can well understand that archivists may, over a long period, develop extreme tunnel-vision and paranoia. However, it is up to their managers to intervene long before that. The case of this lady archivist is really one of appalling line management. The buck should never have been passed to me, the user.
‘An archivist’s mission is to collect…’ I am aware that archivists will disagree with me. The modern criterion for acquiring archives, possibly foisted on traditional archivists by uninformed consultants, is ‘research value’. As far as I can tell, this is ‘measured’ by the ‘public impact’ that the acquisition has, the number of requests to view it, etc, and may be entirely dictated by fashion (a recent top priority has been ‘gender studies’). However, ‘research value’ must mean ‘value to researchers’, if it means anything, and no-one can predict what that will be. Any experienced researcher could give examples of acquisitions that nobody looked at for decades but whose significance was suddenly realised. I will give only one. Eleonora Duse’s archives were thought to have been lost. In fact her papers and her richly annotated library, which she described as her ‘artistic wardrobe’, had been given to New Hall (now Murray Edwards College), Cambridge, by her daughter in 1962, mainly, I suspect, because she lived across the road from the college. There, in effect, the collection mouldered for fifty years. But it is enormously to the credit of New Hall’s librarians that they did not throw it out on account of its ‘proven low research value’. It was eventually ‘discovered’ by theatre historian Anna Sica from Palermo University, who realised that it showed Duse’s intellectual evolution, her erudition, her meticulous preparation of her roles, indeed exactly why she made such a profound impression on contemporaries like Chekhov, Stanislavsky and James Joyce. The impact of Sica’s subsequent book cannot be measured. Had New Hall not had such an eclectic, comprehensive and inclusive acquisitions policy — had it not collected, I would say — none of this would have happened. Similarly, some libraries have the inspired policy of collecting ‘ephemera’, such as posters, menus, or product packaging, whose research value cannot be predicted.
‘Archive tourists don’t work in archives…’ Obviously archives should be open to the general public and display their holdings. There is a world of difference, however, between visitors and the professional researchers for whom archives principally exist and always have. One or two archivists have complained to me that having to set up ‘back-to-back exhibitions’ is a distraction from their ‘real’ work. Worst, though, in my experience, is the effect that archive tourism can have on archivists’ communication. We had an enthusiastic approach from a major library about buying the Calderon Family Papers. The archival manager wanted to view the Papers as soon as possible, but was ‘heavily committed to an exhibition we have opening in the Library’ and therefore had to postpone his inspection for a month. Indeed, I visited the exhibition incognito and saw him hugely enjoying performing to a large group from the Townswomen’s Guild. Despite two emails and a letter, I could never catch his attention again. It occurred to me that perhaps he was really unhappy as an archivist and should have been an actor. But the idea, seemingly beloved of PR consultants and accountants, that archives and libraries exist to provide public entertainment, is grotesque. If it is entertainment, why not charge for it?
‘Attempts to communicate with an archival manager.’ Everyone I know who has wished to donate or sell papers to a major archive has complained about the difficulty of communicating with the right person and about the latter’s complete inability to manage their emails. There is usually no obvious portal to a process for making such offers to the archive. I would have thought the process should be a top-down-and-back-up line of management. But if, faute de mieux, you tackle the top person about donation/sale, you tend to get referred to a middle archival manager who wields power of life and death over whether your inquiry goes any further. Most people will find it is not answered. The top person will not hear about it again unless they ask. One colleague found that her emails to an archival manager about her donation of a serious collection of papers were simply blocked. The reason email communications about donation/sale prove tenuous may not just be that archivists don’t know how to manage their in-boxes, it may be that the archival manager has his/her own agenda and is simply playing politics. Internal archive-politics seem to be vicious because the stakes are relatively small.
‘A 68-page manuscript of Jane Austen’s.’ This is the fragment of The Watsons bought by the Bodleian Library in 2011 at Sotheby’s for £993,250. The Bodleian’s deputy librarian told the press: ‘We will make the manuscript available to the general public, who can come and see it as early as this autumn, when The Watsons will be a star item in our forthcoming exhibition.’ Good entertainment, then, but surely low research value, as the manuscript was first published in 1871 and has been available digitally for some time.
‘But perhaps you want to sell the papers you have inherited?’ This subject is the core of my experience and quarrel with British archives. The whole of my next post, on Monday 13 July, will be devoted to it.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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‘Spectator’
SAVE IT FOR THE (AMERICAN) NATION!
How British archives fail us
Patrick Miles
It was a biographer’s dream. For decades Russianists had searched in vain for the archive of George Calderon, top Edwardian Slavist and the man who brought Chekhov’s plays to Britain. Then The Spectator published a letter from me appealing for leads, a reader wrote to me next day, and a year later I was examining the ‘Calderon Papers’ in a Scottish attic. Eight hundred letters from Calderon, Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Bell, Rupert Brooke…seven hundred photographs and watercolours…detailed memoirs of George by his contemporaries… My biography took seven years to write, came out in 2018, and was kindly received.
But running beneath it all has been the nightmare of dealing with British archival institutions as the Papers’ owner and I sought a permanent home for them. It’s an experience that Spectator readers may one day find useful.
We agreed that such a rich archive should never be split up; it must be exemplarily curated; and it must be sold because it was part of the owner’s patrimony. But as a British Library archivist put it to me, money was ‘a rather awkward subject’. We had not realised that archival politics are vicious because the stakes are so small. The first archive we approached proudly announced that they had recently raised £1m and would be interested in buying. Then their money was collared by the Library ‘over’ them, which changed its priority to gender studies. Talks were going well with another major library, until its archivist identified us as a threat to his personal plans for the bequest most likely to be drawn on. Four years were wasted on these shenanigans.
The common belief that British archives have ‘no money’ needs qualifying. George Calderon was an Oxford man and the Bodleian Library responded well to us. However, it had no funds available as it had just spent £993,250 on sixty-eight manuscript pages of Jane Austen’s The Watsons long familiar to scholars. Was this necessary in an age of digitisation?
Our archives are addicted to celebrity. The British Library paid £1.1m for Harold Pinter’s papers and £32,000 for Wendy Cope’s emails, yet who can say that posterity will rate these writers as highly as today’s cultural establishment does? There is a sense that archivists are being taken in – or cosying up to that establishment themselves. Obviously, if they want to buy more (small) archives they must set their own price bands that will leave them with enough money.
But I am not convinced that these institutions want to collect archives at all. I could give examples of holdings whose significance was not discovered by scholars for decades; fortunately, these papers were ‘collected’ by old-fashioned archives and conserved until that day. Awe of celebrity means that the archive of someone whose name is not instantly recognised will not be wanted. This fatally affected our attempt to sell the Calderon Papers to the British Library, even though Calderon had been one of their own Slavonic Librarians at the British Museum and they themselves had looked for his papers in the 1970s! If the people on the committees don’t know ‘who’ the subject of the archive ‘is’, they won’t be interested, although this may be dressed up as the archive having ‘low research value’ (something no-one can predict).
Whether British archives are impoverished or not, they will try to bounce you into donating. In retrospect, we were wrong to say that we were determined to keep the Papers in Britain, because that removed the competition. The owner was expected to extend her patriotism to giving the papers away. Worse, in our deliberations with British archivists we sometimes felt that these salaried, process-driven folk believe it is ‘wrong to make money’ out of inherited papers. Such people literally cannot imagine being self-employed or realising your assets.
British archival managers are also deeply suspicious of private sales and independent scholars. Their default is to involve ‘established’ dealers as brokers. These take at least 20% commission from the owner and drive up prices. The owner of the Calderon Papers was perfectly capable of conducting her own negotiations and I provided a detailed description of the archive gratis. These archivists had bought manuscripts through Quaritch and Rota, say, therefore they always must. And they did not trust me, because I wasn’t a tenured academic but some maverick probably after his cut. The alternative, in their view, was to get an ‘independent valuation’ from an auction house. But an auction house can only value ‘lots’, e.g. a letter by Conrad or Brooke. It cannot put a value to the whole for research purposes. Auction valuations of the Calderon Papers were less than a quarter of my own valuation of it as a study archive – the price for which it was eventually sold. To have settled for auction valuations would in any case have been to accept its being split up, which was not on.
We began trying to engage with British archives in 2009 and by 2016 were on our fourth major one. Problems other than money emerged. Many archivists do not have a long attention span. It is often difficult to contact the right person in the first place and he/she may suddenly stop replying, which is known to the rest of us as rudeness. Friends told me of their gifts to archives being ‘lost’. The British Library bought an archive in 2011 that contained a sensational Calderon manuscript, but no mention of it occurred on the Web for the next seven years. Was it being catalogued? Had it disappeared? Even some pages of The Watsons were ‘lost’ by a London library. Calderon’s annotated copy of a Russian book about Chekhov was to be transferred from the open shelves of a Cambridge department library to Special Collections at the University Library, but when it arrived there it was binned as a ‘duplicate’. The emerging picture of British archival incompetence was alarming. I told the owner that the ‘emphasis on PR and media image at the British Library’ made me ‘wonder’ whether core activities such as cataloguing and conservation were being neglected.
Meanwhile, various vultures began to circle. Two of these had ‘no money’, but fancied owning the archive because of an association with George Calderon. The third might find money but my personal experience of its curation did not inspire confidence. Since by this time I was writing a daily blog, ‘Calderonia’, and frantically trying to complete my biography, I found these unwanted attentions from archivists extremely stressful.
Nearly nine years after first approaching a major British library, the owner and I decided we must change tack. There was no point in saving the Calderon Papers for our nation if our nation’s archives did not want them enough. We would save them for the American nation. And there were excellent reasons for doing so: I knew from my own research that American curation is good, you could view in digitised form anything of theirs that you needed to see, and to cap it all George Calderon was an Americanophile, so he would have approved. On 19 June 2018 we approached the Houghton Library at Harvard University about buying the Calderon Papers, on 9 April 2019 they arrived there, and by 9 July 2019 they had been superbly catalogued online.
Given my experience, I cannot recommend tangling with British archives if you have a literary archive that you want to sell. It would be like trying to waltz with treacle. Frankly, I cannot recommend donating anything to a British archive either, as it is likely to be ‘lost’. In the first case, I would approach an American archive direct. In the second, you should conserve family papers yourself and if they are of public interest catalogue them on a home made website. You may be surprised to find how keen a younger generation is to do this.
Of course, we have archivists whose professionalism and vision are to die for. In nine years, however, I had to deal with too many who were dilettantes. They were not focussed on their work as a profession comparable, say, to the Law. Often they ploughed a modest research furrow and projected themselves as academics, complete with the jacket and bow tie. They had manifestly stayed too long in one job. A leading American curator said to me that the problem with British archivists was not that they have ‘no money’, but that they don’t know how to manage large amounts of money. Judging by the inflated prices they have rushed to pay for celebrity archives in recent years, that statement is correct. British archivists’ perennial excuse that they have ‘no money’ for anything from buying small archives to processing collections in real time, is a function of their dilettantism. As a profession, they have reduced themselves to a state of learned helplessness.
Patrick Miles is a freelance writer and Russianist. His biography George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is available from samandsam.co.uk.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.