PHILIP LARKIN, WHO was one of the most important poets of the twentieth century, was also a librarian, active on various committees alongside his role as chief librarian at the University of Hull (from his appointment in 1954 to his death in 1985). He understood as an insider the different aspects of literary archives from both sides – a rare combination, although there have been others such as Jorge Luis Borges, who was both a great writer and the director of the National Library of Argentina. (Casanova, too, spent his last years working as a librarian.)
During the 1960s and 1970s many archives of British writers were being acquired by university libraries in North America: Evelyn Waugh’s papers were sold to the University of Texas at Austin (in 1967) and Sir John Betjeman’s to the University of Victoria, British Columbia (1971). Larkin became involved with an effort to raise awareness of the value of literary archives in Britain, as part of a national scheme to improve funding. He gave the notebook containing his earliest poems to the British Library in 1964 to start it off, even though he wrote self-deprecatingly to his lover Monica Jones that the manuscript was ‘jammed with unpublished poems etc. I must say they are fearfully dull, stodgy humourless thin Yeats-and-catpiss’. But, he added, ‘Still.’ He knew the value of his own material.1
In his essay ‘A Neglected Responsibility’, written in 1979, Larkin wrote eloquently to encourage universities and writers to value literary collections:
All literary manuscripts have two kinds of value: what might be called the magical value and the meaningful value. The magical value is the older and more universal: this is the paper he wrote on, these are the words as he wrote them, emerging for the first time in this particular combination … The meaningful value is of much more recent origin, and is the degree to which a manuscript helps to enlarge our knowledge and understanding of a writer’s life and work.2
These two values are why such collections are now so prized by university libraries, provoking competition between institutions and high prices demanded by dealers. They provide raw materials for students to work on, encourage academic productivity and enrich teaching opportunities. The ‘magical’ aspect of the documents emerges in seminars where students studying a text are allowed to get close to the original manuscript, or in exhibitions where a wider public can see the drafts of works they may be familiar with in other cultural contexts (such as films or TV productions).
Some writers have a real sense of the research value of their archives, having perhaps had interactions with scholars and sensing that people will wish to study them long into the future. There are of course writers with a purposeful sense of the archive ensuring their posthumous reputation, and they use their own papers as a way to ‘curate’ how they will be studied long after they have died. Other writers see their archives as a way of gaining extra income. Often it is a mixture of motivations. What is omitted from an archive can be just as meaningful as what is included.
Andrew Motion – one of Larkin’s literary executors – described the librarianly order in which Larkin kept his own poetic archive, neatly storing it in boxes, alphabetising the correspondence and making it relatively easy for his executors to make sense of his papers.3 His archive was placed, some time after his death, in the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull where he had spent most of his working life, and a smaller but still significant part in the Bodleian in Oxford, where he had been an undergraduate and where he did research for his edition of the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, published in 1973. In order to complete this research, he was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College and given a precious key by the Bodleian: a key to the stacks of this great copyright library, access to which was only granted to readers on rare occasions. Naturally, Larkin enjoyed the privilege immensely.
Yet on his deathbed, Larkin urged his long-term lover Monica Jones to burn his diaries as he lacked the strength to do so himself. Not surprisingly, she felt unable to perform such a task alone – who would want to be responsible for destroying the writings of one of the country’s most famous poets? The destruction of Larkin’s diaries was instead delegated after his death to Betty Mackereth, Larkin’s devoted secretary of twenty-seven years (latterly another of his lovers, as was his assistant librarian Maeve Brennan). Mackereth took more than thirty volumes of his diaries into his office in the Brynmor Jones Library a few days after his death on 2 December 1985, removed their covers, and shredded their contents. Just to make sure that nothing could survive, the shredded pages were then sent to the university boiler house and incinerated. The covers are still to be found among the Larkin papers at Hull covered in press cuttings stuck on them by the poet.4
There had been more volumes of diaries at an earlier stage in his life but some of these had been destroyed by Larkin himself. A publisher in 1976 had suggested bringing out a selection of them, and this had encouraged Larkin to go back through the diaries, a reflective act that had prompted him to destroy the earlier volumes. Presumably the idea that they should all be given the same fate was lodged at the same time. Mackereth herself was in no doubt that she did the right thing. Andrew Motion, in his biography of Larkin, quoted her:
I’m not sure I was right to keep the covers, but they’re interesting aren’t they? About the diaries themselves I’m in no doubt. I must have done the right thing because it was what Philip wanted. He was quite clear about it; he wanted them destroyed. I didn’t read them as I put them into the machine, but I couldn’t help seeing little bits and pieces. They were very unhappy. Desperate really.5
Larkin made an interesting choice in destroying them completely, given his profession of librarian and championing the cause of literary manuscript acquisition and preservation. Jones and Mackereth were very clear in their view of Larkin’s wishes. He had begun to think about his literary legacy as early as 11 March 1961 after a spell in hospital. He wrote to Jones that:
One thing that makes me ashamed is my refusal to let you use my flat. This has been a worry all through, & springs from the fact that I had left a few private papers & diaries lying around. Such things, which I suppose I keep partly for the record in the event of wanting to write an autobiography, & partly to relieve my feelings, will have to be burned unread in the event of my death, & I couldn’t face anyone I thought had seen them, let alone being willing to expose you or anyone else to the embarrassment & no doubt even pain of reading what I had written.6
As a librarian and one interested in literary manuscripts, Larkin knew that there were alternatives to this shocking fate. In 1979 he wrote to his friend Judy Egerton after he had been to Devon to look at the papers of their old undergraduate friend Bruce Montgomery who had recently died: ‘Was alarmed to find he had kept all my letters since 1943! Since Ann [Bruce’s widow] is short of money … I feel she shd be free to sell them, & yet … She has quite cheerfully offered them back again, but I don’t think I should take them. Problems!’ The Bodleian eventually acquired the Montgomery letters but with the agreement that some of the papers could not be opened to the public until 2035: Larkin would have known very well that a long closure period (perhaps even an extremely long one) could have been applied to his own papers.7
However, an alternative to Larkin’s diary does survive and was almost destroyed by accident. Throughout their relationship Larkin and Monica Jones exchanged thousands of letters and postcards. Her letters to him were bequeathed to the Bodleian by Larkin, but his letters to her were so frequently sent and so expansive in their personal revelation that they cumulatively bring us as close to a diary as can be recovered from his literary remains.
Larkin was a great writer of letters. He corresponded extensively with a number of friends and family including James Sutton, Bruce Montgomery, Kingsley Amis, Monica Jones, Judy Egerton, Robert Conquest, Anthony Thwaite, Maeve Brennan and Barbara Pym. The largest series of letters are the ones he sent home to his parents over the period 1936–77: over 4,000 letters and cards in all (a similar number sent back to him from his parents also survives).8 Even so, perhaps the most personal and important of these major correspondences was that between Larkin and Monica Jones, with whom he had the longest romantic relationship of his life. He sent Jones more than 1,421 letters and 521 postcards, amounting in total to more than 7,500 surviving pages. Many of the letters were lengthy, regularly in excess of six pages, sometimes as long as fourteen pages, and they were often sent every three or four days. After her death the collection remained in her home in Leicester, where she had been an academic. Burglars broke into her flat, stealing cheap electrical goods, but trampling over the papers which they strewed around her home, not realising that the value of the archive was many times more than the TV they had stolen.
The letters were purchased from her estate by the Bodleian Library in 2004. They offer deep insight into Larkin’s character; his motivations, his thoughts on all kinds of topics, from his colleagues to politics, are revealed in these letters, more so than in the other correspondences in the public domain owing to the closeness of their relationship.
Why was Larkin so unhappy at the thought of others reading his diaries? He was a shy person, sometimes known as the ‘Hermit of Hull’, and wrote of his own difficulty in revealing his personal thoughts in his own writing. His poetry is infused with melancholy and the reflections are mostly not direct. Occasionally the reverse is true and he searingly confronts his own feelings, opens up his inner thoughts in a shocking way, most famously in ‘This Be the Verse’.
When he asked Motion to join Monica Jones and Anthony Thwaite as one of his literary executors, Larkin said that: ‘There won’t be anything difficult to do. When I see the Grim Reaper coming up the path to my front door I’m going to the bottom of the garden, like Thomas Hardy, and I’ll have a bonfire of all the things I don’t want anyone to see.’ Motion sets this instruction against the fact that at his death the main group of diaries, together with his other papers, were intact. Monica Jones, he records, felt that Larkin was trying to deny his impending death and to have destroyed them would have been an admission of his own mortality. More convincing is the inherent dichotomy of Larkin’s position. He simply couldn’t make his mind up. On the one hand he was passionate about preserving literary manuscripts – even giving one of his own poetic notebooks to the British Library. On the other, he was highly uncomfortable about letting others, especially those close to him, see his innermost thoughts, as set down in the diaries. Even his will was so contradictory that the executors had to seek the advice of a Queen’s Counsel before deciding that they were entitled under law not to destroy any more of the Larkin archive but to put the bulk of it in the Brynmor Jones Library at Hull.
The example of Larkin demonstrates the impact that one individual’s self-censorship can have on their legacy. The loss of his diaries has created an enigma about the thoughts of this very private person, with efforts to reconstruct those thoughts through the letters, which may fill some of the gaps. Interest in Larkin’s life and work has grown since his death, boosted to some extent by the enigma created by his final wishes to have his diaries destroyed.
The destruction of Byron’s memoirs is one of the most notorious acts of literary damage limitation. Those who were close to him wanted to protect his posthumous reputation, an act that literary scholars have regretted ever since. A poet of similar popularity two hundred years later – Ted Hughes – would be at the centre of another act of literary destruction, of the last journals of his first wife, the equally great poet and writer Sylvia Plath. The relationship between Hughes and Plath has come under intense scrutiny, taking up many pages of discussion and criticism in print. One aspect of this relationship that remains unclear concerns the fate of some of the contents of Sylvia Plath’s personal archive following her suicide in 1963. Her suicide and the circumstances of the relationship between the two poets leading up to this tragedy have been the focus of much debate – in particular whether Hughes’s behaviour towards her was a major factor in Plath taking her own life. The precise details of Plath’s state of mind are unknowable, not least because Hughes destroyed Plath’s journals. Hughes claims the act was to protect Plath’s reputation and to save their children from reading harrowing entries in the journals written in the days leading to her suicide. Many have speculated that the destruction could rather have been motivated to protect Hughes’s own reputation.
Plath died in London and was at the time still married to Hughes although they were separated. Hughes was having an affair with Assia Wevill. He, as next of kin, and because Plath left no explicit will, became the executor of Plath’s estate and kept many of her papers as part of his own, until 1981 when he chose to sell them through Sotheby’s to Smith College, with the proceeds going to their children, Frieda and Nick Hughes.9 Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mother, decided to sell the letters she received from her daughter over the years to the Lilly Library at Indiana University in 1977. One of the complications is that Hughes, as executor to her will, also held control of the copyright in Plath’s literary estate, and controlled the way Plath’s own words could be circulated in print. Even though Plath’s archive found its way to libraries, the circulation of Plath’s thoughts as they were laid down in the letters to her mother and in her private journals could not be shared in print without Ted Hughes’s express permission.10
As literary executor Hughes was able to carefully curate Plath’s reputation as a poet. In his estimation the manuscripts he found on her desk after her death were particularly powerful and brilliant. In 1965 he published the first major posthumous collection of her poems, Ariel, and other poems were slowly released to literary magazines. Ariel became a literary sensation and has remained in print since its first publication, having reprints in hardback and paperback, and presumably earning a considerable income for Hughes. On the publication of Plath’s Collected Poems it became clear that Hughes had altered the order of poems in Ariel from that found in Plath’s manuscript, removing some and replacing them with other unpublished poems. Although Hughes explained that his motivations were to avoid causing offence to living individuals depicted in the poetry and to provide a wider perspective on Plath’s work, his intervention was viewed by some as evidence of his desire to further control her legacy. It is certainly clear from his subsequent treatment of her archive, and the very detailed and careful management of the process of publication, that Hughes was as concerned with his own reputation as he was with that of his deceased first wife, and that he considered the two inseparable.11
In 1982 Hughes published The Journals of Sylvia Plath, a heavily edited and selected version of the eight volumes of manuscript journals, and additional gatherings of papers that he had just sold to Smith College. It was not published in the UK where Hughes and their children lived but only in the United States. In the preface he recounted the process of discovering and dealing with Plath’s unpublished journals. He describes them as ‘an assortment of notebooks and bunches of loose sheets’, referring also to two ‘maroon-backed’ ledgers that were not included in the materials he sold to Smith College. These, he tells us in the preface, covered the period leading up to her death, during the most strained period of their marriage. One of these volumes he describes as having ‘disappeared’ and the other he confesses to having destroyed in order to protect his children from the intrusive and hurtful comments that would follow if the content of that journal were to become publicly known.12 Not only did Hughes destroy (at least) one notebook, he also carefully edited his publication so that the contents of two notebooks that covered 1957–9 were not included, his intention being to keep them closed to researchers and to publication until fifty years after her death. In the end he relented on this and allowed all the surviving journals to be published, a decision he made just before his own death in 1998.13 Writing in a different publication in the same year Hughes changed his story very slightly, even moving from the first to the third person to recount it: ‘the second of these two books her husband destroyed, because he did not want her children to have read it … The earlier one disappeared more recently (and may, presumably, still turn up).’14
The critic Erica Wagner has suggested that the missing journal may be in a trunk in the Hughes Archive at Emory University in Atlanta, which is not to be opened until 2022 or until the death of Ted Hughes’s second wife, Carol.15 The dealer in rare books and manuscripts who managed the sale of the archive to Emory, the late Roy Davids, felt that Hughes had a deep sense of archival integrity, and that if he had found the volume he would have presented it to Smith College to join the other journals there.16 Another interpretation, of course, is that Hughes destroyed both of the journals, although his most recent biographer, Jonathan Bate, feels that a further possibility is that the volume was destroyed in the fire at Lumb Bank, the house that Ted and Carol Hughes occupied in Heptonstall, Yorkshire, where a mysterious fire took place in 1971. At the time the local police felt that the fire may have been set deliberately.17
Hughes was not the only family member seeking to ‘manage’ the dissemination of Sylvia Plath’s personal writings after her death. The letters of Plath in the Lilly Library in Indiana University contain black marker pen redactions made by Aurelia Plath, and her edited selection of these papers, Letters Home (1975), was also strewn with cuts and omissions. These redactions had been made by Aurelia who edited the publication, although as Ted Hughes owned the copyright he also had a say in what could be published. Both Aurelia Plath and Ted Hughes made their editorial decisions to protect their own reputations, although the process uncovered problems between the two. Aurelia removed any negative representation of her by her daughter, and Hughes was similarly anxious to ensure that no negative criticism of him appeared in print. The two ended up in a dispute over his requests for material to be withdrawn from the draft of the book. He wrote to Aurelia in April 1975:
It seemed to me, after I’d cut the letters, that though the book now lacks the sensational interest of all the inside dope on me, & though it lacks those early love letters which somehow Sylvia sent to you rather than me – I mean those early letters about me – nevertheless it does still give, very brilliantly & fully, her relationship with you. And I know that was what you wanted. All I’ve done really, Aurelia, is extract my private life, in an attempt to keep it private.18
The set of interrelated decisions relating to the management of knowledge in the case of Sylvia Plath must be considered to be political. The cycle of subsequent release of the material into the public domain – the sale of the archive, the first expurgated edition of the journals and the letters, the subsequent relinquishing of the bar on publication – were acts that had Hughes, rather than Plath, at the centre. He stood to gain the most from his actions – in terms of both reputation and finances – but, to add further complexity to the moral questions at stake here, he also had his own personal privacy to contend with. He too was emotionally affected by Plath’s death and held profound concerns for their children.
But the task has been completed and it is possible now to use the surviving text of the journals to assess Plath’s life and work alongside her published writings, the text of her letters and the other literary forms in which her work survives. These texts continue to provide rich material with which to appreciate Plath’s contribution to literature. We cannot truly comprehend what has been lost, but it has become possible to understand aspects of her inner mental life when she was writing what Hughes and critics have since described as her most profound and significant work. To quote Tracy Brain: ‘We know very little about the contents of the absent journals, yet so much of what critics do – and do not do – with Plath’s writing is affected by them. Important pieces of Plath’s body of work are missing: the very pieces, so the thinking goes, that might just make sense of it.’19 The destroyed material discussed in this chapter might well have ended up in a university library or a national library if it had survived. Held in such an institution these collections would not only have been preserved but would have been made available for study and shown in exhibitions or digitised for the public to appreciate.
Writings containing the inner feelings of an author have the potential to transform our appreciation of his or her work. The Kafka material, since it came to the Bodleian, has been used by editors like Sir Malcolm Pasley to broaden the reputation of Kafka through scholarly editions; the manuscripts have been translated into many other languages and have been used for exhibitions, films and plays. It is hard to argue that the world is a poorer and less interesting place because Max Brod defied the wishes of Franz Kafka. But does this argument, which at its heart suggests that the public interest of posterity must trump the private interests of those who created the work, or who held the interests of the author close, suggest that those who destroyed Byron’s or Plath’s journals were wrong to do so?
When we look at the knowledge of the ancient world we have to piece together evidence that exists only in fragments. Sappho’s work was so important that for centuries she was referred to as simply ‘The Poetess’, just as Homer was ‘The Poet’. Homer’s two epics have survived more or less intact, whereas Sappho’s lyrics are known to us only through the works they influenced, such as those of Plato, Socrates and Catullus. Had the Library of Alexandria, which we know held a complete set of her lyrics, survived, how differently might we view the literature of the ancient world today?
None of the decisions taken in these case studies was easy or straightforward. In this particular domain of knowledge, the private and the public vie with each other for supremacy. The difficulty comes from the fact that writers make their living, and their reputations, by taking part in the public realm: their work is, after all, ‘published’, that is to say ‘made public’. The public interest in the thoughts of great writers is clear but so is their right to privacy. Ted Hughes held the privacy of his children (and of himself) at the forefront of his mind when he destroyed parts of Sylvia Plath’s journals.
Working in a library that measures time in centuries, one answer to these questions is, perhaps, to take a long view. The stacks of the Bodleian are full of manuscripts that are ‘closed’. That is to say we have made a promise to some of those who have given or deposited papers with us, for the sake of preservation, that we will not make their contents available to the public until an agreed amount of time has elapsed. This might be after the death of the writer or owner of a collection, or even longer. In the case of Bruce Montgomery, Philip Larkin’s Oxford friend, we agreed to keep the collection closed until thirty years after his death, with some of the material closed for a further twenty years. Byron’s autobiography and the journals of Plath and Larkin could have been preserved, but remained closed for as long as their executors chose, being released to scholars only after the death of all those closely affected by their contents. The preservation of knowledge is ultimately (as Max Brod knew) about having faith in the future.