Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Research Articles

Editor's Introduction

Editor’s Introduction Louisa Smith Anyone conducting research in children’s literature knows the value of special collections. Most of these collections bear the names of their originators—Baldwin, Kerlan, de Grummond, Rosenbach, Renier, Porter, Opie, Osborne, Cotsen. These are people who, for the most part, had the insight to acquire materials that others considered insignificant and then locate libraries and institutions that were willing to take their collections and make them available for scholars’ use. My introduction to special collections was the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota when I was encouraged by two history professors who saw the value of untapped materials in the collection. It was like walking into Aladdin’s cave. Besides the books, I found manuscripts and rough drafts, original artwork, illustrators’ dummies, letters, photographs. The inception of an addiction. The world of bibliomania opened. Over the years it has only gotten worse—or better—depending on one’s perspective. In addition to my research that has taken me to Canada, Britain, and collections in the United States, I am also driven by the thrill of seeing original work such as the Ezra Jack Keats illustrations at the de Grummond Collection in Mississippi. Printing hardly does his work justice. I offer this special issue as a tribute to those individual people whose persistence and perseverance have given us those jewels, those collections. For many it involved a lifetime’s work haunting bookstores, searching flea markets, writing to authors and illustrators, and committing resources, both financial and personal. With this issue, we only scratch the surface. One has only to examine Dolores Blythe Jones’s helpful book, Special Collections in Children’s Literature: An International Directory, published by the American Library Association in 1995, to see the proliferation of collections. As researchers know, half the battle is fought just discovering the location of materials—often an artist’s work is found in several locations. In the case of someone such as Lois Lenski, this is intentional; she wanted her materials readily available for teachers to use with their students. In this issue curators and researchers open the doors to show us the person behind the collection. George Bodmer introduces us to one of the first collectors of children’s books, A. S. W. Rosenbach, whose Early American Children’s Books, published in 1933, is still the reference used [End Page v] to cite early children’s books. Rita Smith, curator of the Baldwin Collection in Florida, gives us a personal memory of that indefatigable collector, Ruth Baldwin. Interestingly, both Baldwin and Lena de Grummond were faculty members at Louisiana State University. The de Grummond collection is presented by Anne Lundin, former assistant curator of the collection, who is now at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Karen Hoyle and Tessa Chester, whose names are practically synonymous with their respective collections, the Kerlan and the Renier, discuss Dr. Irving Kerlan and Ferdnand and Anne Renier. The Lenski Collection at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, differs from her other collections by being composed primarily of American children’s chapbooks that Lenski acquired prior to her work on historical children’s figures. Emilie Mills, retired special collection librarian, gives us insight into Lenski’s collection. Clare Bradford and Alida Allison demonstrate how a scholar could use special collections: Bradford at the Pound Collection in the State Library of Victoria, Australia, and Allison at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Finally, Martha Rasmussen, who for ten years has published Martha’s Kidlit Newsletter, a newsletter for collectors of children’s books, provides us with background on her work with collectors of today who may be the names on collections of the future. Throughout the curators’ articles, the reader will note several reoccurring themes: no collection is blessed with an overabundance of staff, so researchers will need to be patient in seeking materials. Cataloging is time-consuming and with the electronic means now available, transferring and entering materials is ongoing but will make collections more accessible. Finally, storage and maintenance take funds, so support is welcome. With the escalation of prices for first edition books and original illustration, materials are beyond the resources of...

British Theatre Collections in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin has become, since the 1950s, well-known for its holdings in twentieth century literature. I offer here a brief description of the holdings in British theatre in the Theatre Arts Collection and the Manuscripts and Archives division of the Ransom Center. My secondary purpose is to suggest: and encourage corollary research in other Ransom Center holdings, such as its Art Collection and Photography and Film Collection. A listing of selected holdings follows this overview below, together with information on fellowships for researchers.

The John Fowles Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the principal rare books and manuscripts library of The University of Texas at Austin, is noted for its collections of British, American, and French literary materials, with major Additional strengths of photography, music, film, and theater arts. The Ransom Center's acquisition of the John Fowles Papers, the majority of which were obtained from the author in 1991, serves to enhance the Center's twentieth-century British literary holdings. The Fowles collection documents the author's activities as a novelist, translator of French plays, screenplay writer, essayist, local historian, and museum curator from about 1926 to 1992, though most of the materials date between 1953 and 1991. This collection offers extensive material for critical, bibliographical, and textual study of the works of John Fowles, but as yet contains relatively little in terms of more personal information such as personal correspondence and financial or legal records. The papers, now catalogued, occupy 54 boxes (approximately 24 linear feet) and are available for use by scholars. A 52-page archival inventory (produced using Microsoft Word on a Macintosh computer) describes the collection and is available on the Internet at the UT-Austin World Wide Web Home Page or from the Office of the Research Librarian at the Ransom Center in paper or diskette form. The papers are arranged in the following five series: I. Works, 1953-1991 (35 boxes); II. Adaptations of Fowles's Works, 1968-1987 (5 boxes); III. Works about Fowles, 1963-1991 (10 boxes); IV. Personal Papers, 1926-1990 (2 boxes); V. Miscellaneous, 1965-1992 (2 boxes). The majority of the collection consists of manuscripts in the Works series, including The Magus, The Aristos, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Ebony Tower, Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A Maggott. Additional manuscripts represent poems, plans, several translations from the French (Cinderella, Don Juan, Lorenzaccio, The Lottery of Love, Martine, and Ourika) various nonfiction works (such as Shipwreck, Islands, Land, The Tree, and The Enigma of Stonehenge), contributions to books by others, and book reviews, as well as curtorial and local history writings. The collection also contains a number of unpublished essays, novels, plays, poems, short stories, and screenplays. Materials relating to the works include notes, clippings, multiple handwritten and typewritten drafts, printer's copies, galleys, and page proofs, many heavily revised. Of special note among the manuscripts of Fowles's major published works are an early urdraft of The Magos, a file of work notes for The Magus which includes clippings embodying Fowles's vision of the character Alison, and a notebook for Daniel Martin. While this collection does not contain all known manuscripts of The Collector and The French Lieutenant's Woman (The University of Tulsa holds a collection of these manuscripts), it does include an unpublished group of poems called Sequence Four (written as an exercise during the writing of The Collector), as well as the final typescript for The French Lieutenant's Woman. During the writing and publishing of his works, Fowles kept related correspondence, clippings, contracts, and other items in the folders along with his manuscripts, and this original order has been maintained. The correspondence is usually from agents, editors, co-authors, and commissioners of works among others, and serves to elucidate the evolution of Fowles's works. Major correspondents include Julian Bach, Anthony Sheil, Tom Maschler (Jonathan Cape Limited), Ray A. Roberts (Little, Brown, and Company), Fay Godwin, and Michael Bogdanov, John Russell Brown, Peter Gill, and Sir Peter Hall (all of The National Theatre). Fowles's original file folders, also preserved in the collection, frequently include title information, dates, identifications of draft progression, or other notes. Brief descriptive notes, with information Fowles apparently jotted down as he was preparing his papers for shipment to the Ransom Center, provide valuable commentary on the works. …

Nahuatl to Rayuela: The Latin American Collection at Texas. Edited by Dave Oliphant. (Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, 1992. Pp. 155. Illustrations. Index. $15.00.)

Nahuatl to Rayuela: The Latin American Collection at Texas. Edited by Dave Oliphant. (Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, 1992. Pp. 155. Illustrations. Index. $15.00.)

A TREATMENT OF A PUBLISHER'S PASTE-UP

Summary A publisher's paste-up of the first American edition of The Winding Stair by William Butler Yeats was treated by the Conservation Department of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Texas. The volume contains 44 pages and 128 inserts, mostly cut from galley proofs. All of the printed inserts were stained with a rubber cement adhesive and more than half were no longer attached to the pages of the book. The rest were stuck to each other in layers, each insert obscuring the one below. The conservation treatment required that the inserts should be made accessible to researchers. The inserts were separated and the adhesive residues were removed; the inserts were collated, lined and rehinged to the pages of the book.

Thinking of Home: William Faulkner's Letters to his Mother and Father, 1918-1925.

often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home, says Darl Bundren in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. How much Faulkner himself is speaking may be suggested by this moving collection of nearly 150 letters. Written during his twenties, these letters describe Faulkner's first encounters with the North (...I made my first subway trip yesterday. The experience showed me that we are not descended from monkeys, as some say, but from lice.); his brief World War I military service, which grew in the retelling; the productive New Orleans months with Sherwood Anderson; and his first trip to Europe, with cold autumn days in Paris (Good thing the Lord gave these folks wine--they rate a recompense of some kind for this climate.) Fascinating in themselves for their close observation of people and places, the letters also offer glimmers of The Sound and the Fury and other future works, as the young writer stores up characters, settings, and events that will re-emerge, transformed, int the great novels of his maturity. Never before published, these letters are from the Faulkner collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. These letters, for years sequestered and unavailable, are among the most informative, touching, and eloquent William Faulkner ever wrote. No Faulkner specialist can be without this book; no Faulkner admirer should be without it.-Joseph Blotner, author of Faulkner: A Biography

An Atomy of the Novel: Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds

Flann O'Brien began At Swim-Two-Birds in 1934, while finishing a master's thesis, in Irish, on Irish nature poetry, writing and publishing his own humor magazine, Blather, and, after 1 August 1935, working five and a half days a week as an Administrative officer for the Irish Civil Service. The death of O'Brien's father in 1937 placed upon him the added burden of supporting his mother and most of his eleven brothers and sisters. I offer this information not as justification for the disruptive and fragmentary quality of his first novel, but to suggest that O'Brien did not disappear into a Daedalean workshop for the four years he spent writing it. Rather than retreating from life to flesh out in calm reflection a predetermined, structured work, O'Brien made an interactive process of writing or compiling his novel, integrating it into his daily life and giving over the details of his own experiences to his narrator. The method of indeterminacy employed here has in recent years come to be seen as definitive of postmodern writing, as have many of the techniques of At Swim-Two-Birds, including its questioning of narrative authority and its critique of the hostility to mass culture that Andreas Huyssen finds central to the modernist aesthetic. O'Brien's novel is an aggressively anti-modernist work that is simultaneously modernist in the sense that it does not, in its reductio ad absurdum of modernism, advocate a return to more traditional forms of fiction, but rather calls into question the enterprise of artistic creation itself. Two typescript drafts of At Swim-Two-Birds exist, both in the collections of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. A few pages of notebook paper at the front of the first typescript, containing the title, several doodles, and a list of the novel's Personnel, point to a possible earlier notebook manuscript. It is not known what draft of the novel is represented by the first typescript. Niall Sheridan claims to have edited the draft of the book, which he says contained over eight-hundred pages of typescript: I told him it was too long. He had got such fun out of sending up the Fenian cycle that he over-indulged himself and the weight of this material seriously unbalanced the latter half of the book.... |I am sick of the sight of it,' he told me. |What about cutting it yourself.?' I took out about one-fifth of the text. (47) The first Austin typescript, however, does not contain much of the excess Finn material that Sheridan claims to have removed. It may be the draft that O'Brien had professionally typed before sending it to his literary agents, A. M. Heath & Co., in London. This typescript shows the novel much as it appears in print. Many of the smaller changes made by O'Brien in this draft are purely technical. For example, three copper coins in a white cup in the Pooka MacPhellimey's house have been changed to four in accordance with the Pooka's dictum that truth is an odd number and evil even. The most heavily worked-over passages are O'Brien's original translations from the Irish Buile Suibhne (The Madness of Sweeney). Overall, however, there seem to be remarkably few changes in word choice or sentence structure. Most of the revisions performed on this typescript, or between the early and late typescripts, are on the larger, structural level. Entire scenes have been added in longhand. Extant scenes, particularly some of the Biographical reminiscences, have been relocated in the text. A few sections have been cut, many of which duplicate stylistic devices found elsewhere in the published text. The second typescript is a carbon copy of the final draft of the text as it appears in published form.(1) O'Brien sent the final typescript to A. M. Heath on 3 October 1938 along with a letter outlining the changes he had made in response to the publisher's suggestions. …

Perspectives on Australia: essays on Australiana in the collections of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center

Perspectives on Australia: essays on Australiana in the collections of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center

The Recovery of a Fifteenth-Century Flemish Book of Hours (University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, HRC 2)

The Recovery of a Fifteenth-Century Flemish Book of Hours (University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, HRC 2)

Bloomers on the Liffey: Eisegetical Readings of Joyce's "Ulysses" , and: James Joyce's Trieste Library: A Catalogue of Materials at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center , and: James Joyce and Heraldry , and: International Perspectives on James Joyce (review)

Reviewed by: Bloomers on the Liffey: Eisegetical Readings of Joyce's "Ulysses", and: James Joyce's Trieste Library: A Catalogue of Materials at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and: James Joyce and Heraldry, and: International Perspectives on James Joyce Marvin Magalaner Paul Van Caspel . Bloomers on the Liffey: Eisegetical Readings of Joyce's "Ulysses." Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. 281 pp. $27.50. Michael Patrick Gillespie , ed. James Joyce's Trieste Library: A Catalogue of Materials at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. 276 pp. No price given. Michael J. O'Shea . James Joyce and Heraldry. Albany: State U of New York P, 1986. 196 pp. $39.50. Gottlieb Gaiser , ed. International Perspectives on James Joyce. Troy: Whitston, 1986. 260 pp. $22.50. Paul Van Caspel's Bloomers on the Liffey is far and away the most helpful of the books reviewed here for a serious reader of Ulysses. Assuming that critics over the past half-century have often misread that novel, passed on to decades of readers their own misconceptions, and thus perpetuated incorrect interpretations of important passages, the author proceeds to examine, episode by episode, disputed segments of the text to point out which exigeses were right, which wrong, and so to present his own opinion as to Joyce's meaning. In addition, because he is a European linguist, a teacher of literature, and a translator in several languages, he is able to comment on the translations of the novel into French, German, Spanish, Italian, and other tongues as they offer clues to Joyce's meaning or simply examples of the translators' inability to cope with Joycean obscurity. Van Caspel is much concerned with Joyce's technique of narration: the intricacies of his interior monologue, problems of dialogue presentation, and the [End Page 348] subtle switching in narration from person to person or from one time period to another. He deals also with the difficulty of spotting within a particular narrator's remarks interpolated quotations from literature or from other characters in the novel. The task is heavy. Fortunately the author does not try to do everything in one short volume. The treatment of each of Joyce's episodes is highly selective. Usually after a brief synopsis he jumps from one chosen passage to another, skipping what is uncontroversial to focus on what has ensnared earlier critics. The result is a series of notes on the chosen passages, with the implicit awarding of gold stars to scholars or translators who have performed well, demerits for those who have not. Suzette Henke and Marilyn French are scolded severely; the Benstocks have many stars to their credit. Wisely, the commentary is restricted almost exclusively to matters of fact: when Molly uses "he" in a passage, does the pronoun refer to Bloom or Boylan or Mulvey? Very little attempt is made to discuss the handling by critics of the symbolic levels of the novel, deliberately, for there is small chance that such an ambitious book could ever be completed. The readings are precise, careful, substantiated by internal evidence for the most part, and extremely interesting. The passages he selects are, of course, not of equal significance in Ulysses. Occasionally, therefore, he will spend a long time making a minor point, but more often the reader learns a great deal about the novel and its earlier critics. Though Van Caspel tries to establish Joyce's patterns—to demonstrate that a thought or speech or description in one episode of the book is balanced or counterpointed by a similar one elsewhere in the novel in a significant way—there are, understandably, oversights and apparent misreadings. He quotes a section of the "Aeolus" episode in which Red Murray, in the newspaper office, tells Bloom that the paper can offer Bloom's advertiser-client a bit of free publicity: — Of course, if he wants a par, Red Murray said earnestly, a pen behind his ear, we can do him one. — Right, Mr. Bloom said with a nod, I'll rub that in. We. Van Caspel surmises that the final "We" shows Bloom "ridiculing, apparently, Murray's pluralis majestatis." What the critic does not notice, or at least fails...

The Total Stranger

THE TOTAL STRANGER / Theodore Dreiser Theodore Dreiser's "The Total Stranger" survives in a single typescript housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The top right-hand corner of the first page contains a note written in a hand other than Dreiser's: "Last typescript, with corrections—copied—1945." The typescript came from the papers owned by Marguerite Tjader, who served as Dreiser's amanuensis and editor for The Buhoark in 1944-1945. In her memoir Theodore Dreiser: A New Dimension (1965), Tjader recalls Dreiser's presenting her with "several pages of pencilled manuscripts for me to type. Then he talked on about this man [in "The Total Stranger"], and I jotted down what he said" (p. 203). As was his habit at this time, he partly wrote, partly dictated to Tjader. "The Total Stranger" can be understood best as part of what may be called Dreiser's "marriage group," his writing about the difficulties and conflicts in modern marriage. While the autobiographical novel The "Genius" (1915) is the most elaborate rendition of this theme, the group includes short fiction such as "Free," "Marriage—For One," "The Old Neighborhood," and "Convention"; essays like "Marriage and Divorce" in Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub; and the many examples of marital incompatibility in the major works, from the domestic troubles of Hurstwood and Frank Cowperwood to those of Dreiser himself as he explores his marriage to Sara White in Neiospaper Days. "The Total Stranger" recalls the themes of Dreiser's early writing— the violence at the heart of conventional marriage, the male's "varietism," the ethics of divorce, the woman as potential victim in the battle of the sexes. Yet the story leads to a moralistic resolution that is not apparent in the earlier works. Those works explore the psychology of conflicting needs and aspirations that accompany marriage, which Dreiser represents as a tangle of economic, personal, and parental pressures. They are studies in psychological realism, using sophisticated techniques like internal dialogue and dealing with fairly complicated middle-class characters: writers, architects, financiers, Dreiser himself. In contrast, "The Total Stranger" takes the form of a sentimental moral fable of the type Dreiser would have read in the popular magazines of the late nineteenth century. As if to accommodate his subject to that model, he uses working-class characters of whom he The Missouri Review · 97 notes that "intelligence of a high order played no part in [their] composition." Dreiser's choice of a humble, even gritty, background for his story probably owes something to literary fashions established in the thirties, but it is also a more natural setting for the central character Walter, whose human needs are less abstract than the introspective subjects of Dreiser's earlier stories. Such a figure, moreover, lends himself more readily to the theme of spiritual redemption, a strong motif in Dreiser's late fiction. Here it is expressed in a kind of allegory in which Walter effectively overcomes his "double," and thereby conquers his old self. What connects "The Total Stranger" to the larger body of Dreiser's writing is the emotional longing of Walter, a pathetic drifter whose homelessness and desire for forgiveness and fulfillment link him to a long line of more famous Dreiserian yearners. Editorial Note: Dreiser did not type. Since the few typos and misspellings in the typescript cannot be traced back to their source, such blemishes have been silently corrected. The story is published with the permission of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas, which owns the manuscript, and the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania , who hold the copyright. Tom Riggio Speer Morgan 98 · The MISSOURI Review Theodore Dreiser HE WALKED SLOWLY and apparently speculatively, as well as dubiously eastward, along the semi-tatterdemalion street in which at one time he and Mady (Amelia) had lived—or should he say, had existed—he and she, and for reason of what? His wish? Hers? Decidedly not! Since after enduring it, and him, for all of two years and a little more—his lies, his periods of drunkenness, his pretense of being faithful to her, his pretense of being a...

James Joyce's Trieste Library: A Catalogue of Materials at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin. Michael Patrick Gillespie , Erik Bradford Stocker

<i>James Joyce's Trieste Library: A Catalogue of Materials at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin</i>. Michael Patrick Gillespie , Erik Bradford Stocker