Going back to the origins of research libraries, there is a long history of scholars building collections to suit personal interests, constructing around themselves an athenaeum of books that supported their individual research goals. [Read more…] about Commitment to collecting
Doris Lessing
Coleccionismo comprometido
Cuando se busca en tiempo atrás los orígenes de las bibliotecas de investigación, damos con una larga historia de académicos dedicados a recabar colecciones de acuerdo a su interés personal, construyendo en torno suyo ateneos de libros que documentaran sus muy particulares metas de investigación. Y muchas veces, cuando dicho académico proseguía su carrera –en otro trabajo o en otro contexto intelectual- la colección emprendida se marchitaba, sin la mente directriz inicial que siguiera contando su historia. [Read more…] about Coleccionismo comprometido
Fellows Find: Doris Lessing correspondence deepens insight into The Grass is Singing
“Have you had a look in the Knopf collection?” Rick Watson, the head of reference services at the Ransom Center, sounded casual, and I wasn’t sure I had time to take the detour he was suggesting.
I spent a month at the Ransom Center last year, working mainly with the extensive Doris Lessing archive. [Read more…] about Fellows Find: Doris Lessing correspondence deepens insight into The Grass is Singing
Acclaimed writer Ian McEwan’s archive acquired
The Harry Ransom Center has acquired the archive of writer Ian McEwan (b. 1948), one of the most distinguished novelists of his generation. The archive documents McEwan’s career and includes early material from his childhood and adolescence, as well as his earliest abandoned stories dating from the late-1960s and early 1970s. The archive includes drafts of all of McEwan’s later published works including his critically acclaimed novels Amsterdam and Atonement up through On Chesil Beach and Solar.
McEwan composed his novels partly in longhand, typically in uniform green, spiral-bound notebooks, and party on the computer. After an initial draft, he would transfer the entire text to a computer, printing out multiple drafts, which he would revise further by hand. McEwan’s Booker Prize-winning novel Amsterdam is represented in the archive in its earliest form as a handwritten notebook, followed by two further revised drafts. McEwan often notes details of composition in these drafts, including their completion or revision dates.
“The writer tends to forget rapidly the routes he or she discarded along the way,” McEwan said, commenting on his manuscripts. “Sometimes the path towards a finished novel takes surprising twists. It’s rarely an even development. For example, my novel Atonement started out as a science fiction story set two or three centuries into the future.”
Read a Q&A with McEwan, where he shares insights about his archive, writing process, and more.
McEwan’s archive will reside at the Ransom Center alongside the archives of many of his peers and contemporaries, including his longtime friend Julian Barnes, as well as J. M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Tom Stoppard. The McEwan materials will be accessible once processed and cataloged.
McEwan will visit Austin and speak at the university on Sept. 10. More details about this event will be posted here later this summer.
Please click on thumbnails below to view larger images.
Two Ransom Center archives illuminate Doris Lessing’s life, work, and relationships
Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing died on Sunday at the age of 94. She was born in what is now Iran, grew up on a farm in Zimbabwe, lived briefly in a boarding house in South Africa, and settled as an adult in London. She was deeply influenced by the racial and social injustices she witnessed, and her books reflect a lifetime of experience observing racism, colonialism, communism, and terrorism. She wrote frankly about relationships between women and men and is heralded as an early feminist writer, though she never embraced that distinction. She was an avid reader and was largely self-educated through books, as her formal education ended when she was just 15 years old. Yet she remained unsentimental about books. In one letter in her archive, which resides at the Ransom Center, Lessing noted, “[I] wish that people would just read books and get all the sustenance from them they can—and then throw them away and go on to the next useful sustaining book.”
Early in her career, Lessing applied this same attitude toward her manuscripts. As a young writer in England, she had little space and less money. She moved frequently and saw little value in her cumbersome stacks of manuscripts and papers, so she discarded them. As a result, manuscripts of many of her most notable books, including The Golden Notebook, have been lost.
Fortunately, Lessing later changed her ways. The drafts and working papers of more than 50 of her novels, plays, stories, and other works are available for research at the Ransom Center, where they have resided since 1999. The 45-box collection includes Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series, her two autobiographies, and novels such as The Good Terrorist and Mara and Dann. Although few of Lessing’s early works appear in the archive, another Ransom Center collection offers a rare glimpse of Doris Lessing from this period.
American author Clancy Sigal lived with Lessing in London in the late 1950s. In many ways, they were kindred spirits. The two writers were passionate about many of the same social concerns. In the photograph above, the two can be seen, according to Sigal, “in a bus, in the mud, on our way to cut through the barbed wire of a nuclear air base.” Their relationship may have been intellectually deep, but it was emotionally fraught and stormy. It also provided great fodder for literature. It’s no secret that Lessing modeled the infamous Saul Green of The Golden Notebook on Sigal. Once at a party, Lessing even boasted to the guests, “I invented Clancy.” Sigal was less than thrilled to appear in Lessing’s novel, a book that is widely hailed as a cornerstone of feminist literature. Yet he, too, looked to their relationship for inspiration, even decades after it had ended. Rose O’Malley from Sigal’s 1992 novel Secret Defector, is just one of many characters he created who bear a striking resemblance to Lessing.
The journals in Clancy Sigal’s archive detail the difficulties of their relationship, and traces of their time together appear throughout his writings. His archive includes letters from Lessing, some dated long after their relationship had ended, showing that they remained friends for decades. In one such letter, written in November 2001, not long after the September 11th attacks, Lessing harkened back to their earlier years of social activism, “Do you think the world is even madder now than [w]hen we knew it was?” she asked. “God, what a world.”
Image: Clancy Sigal and Doris Lessing, ca. late 1950s.
More than 65 research fellowships awarded
The Harry Ransom Center has awarded more than 65 research fellowships for 2013-14.
The fellowships support research projects in the humanities that require substantial on-site use of the Center’s collections of manuscripts, rare books, film, photography, art, and performing arts materials.
The fellowship recipients, half of whom will be coming from abroad, will use Ransom Center materials to support projects with such titles as “Postirony: Countercultural Fictions from Hipster to Coolhunter,” “Elliott Erwitt: Early Work,” “Obsession: The Films of Brian De Palma,” “David Foster Wallace: The Form of His Fiction,” “Matisse’s Illustrations for Ulysses,” and “Doris Lessing’s Intuitive Style.”
“Support of scholarly research is one of the primary goals of the Ransom Center,” said Director Thomas F. Staley. “With what has become one of the largest fellowship programs of its kind, we encourage scholars from around the world to make new discoveries about the writers and artists who have shaped our culture.”
The fellowships range from one to three months in duration and provide $3,000 of support per month. Travel stipends and dissertation fellowships are also awarded.
The stipends are funded by individual donors and organizations, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Hobby Family Foundation, the Dorot Foundation, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and The University of Texas at Austin Office of Graduate Studies.
