CHAPTER 15
Teaching with Special Collections
CHRISTOPH IRMSCHER
“Christmas . . . is a cheating holiday,” wrote Bartolomeo Vanzetti, on December 28, 1926, to Mary Donovan, the secretary of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee and one of his regular visitors in Charlestown State Prison. She had sent him a Christmas card. Vanzetti’s problem with everyone’s favorite holiday was this: once a year, right in time for those supposedly special couple of days, people would pretend to be good—an attitude that, when it was not merely a “bad illusion,” was simply “rank hypocracy.”1 The word is vintage Vanzetti: recognizable enough to make sense but, at the same time, entirely original and weird, evoking new meanings the conventional spelling won’t gesture at. I like the term “hypocracy” applied to the democratic and, in Vanzetti’s view, pseudo-Christian United States, whose courts had falsely kept imprisoned a poor Italian fishmonger for a murder many still believe he couldn’t have committed. Vanzetti found support in a quip by Mark Twain he remembered, namely that the only useful holiday we celebrate is April Fools’ Day, since it reminds us of what we really are during the rest of the year.2 “Holy macherel,” Vanzetti exclaims at the end of this brief reflection, and then interrupts himself, since he’s actually not sure about how to spell “mackerel.” “Holy” is not a problem, but the name of the fish is, even though fish used to be Vanzetti’s business. He tries out an alternative spelling (“makerel”), but then throws in the towel. “I am only sure of holy, though fish peddler,” he quipped. How ironic that, at the end of this train of thought, religion seems to be the place where Vanzetti is on firm ground.
Vanzetti’s anti-Christmas diatribe is a rich document. Written on a bifold of cheap, lined paper, in Vanzetti’s careful, slanting handwriting, neat as a schoolboy’s, it gives us a sense of the depth of the man’s mind. The letter was published in 1928, in Gardner Jackson and Marion Frankfurter’s edition of the Sacco and Vanzetti letters, the standard text quoted by everybody and still available as a Penguin paperback today. But when one checks her version of Vanzetti’s missive, one finds that the editors have simply (and without noting so) corrected his wayward spelling, thus removing, as a student of mine, Megan Jones, put it, “any humor from the joke.”3
Vanzetti’s autograph letter, along with fifty-seven others by him, is part of the Hapgood Mss. at the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington.4 Megan read Vanzetti as an assignment for a class I taught a few years ago, English L-460, Modern Manuscripts. When Megan compared the handwritten version of his Christmas letter with the one that was printed in the Jackson and Frankfurter edition, she was at first surprised at the discrepancies. Then she became annoyed. Bartolomeo Vanzetti was executed seven months after his Christmas reflection, after two trials in which exonerating evidence—including an actual confession by a career criminal—was ignored or diminished, and the judge was heard bragging outside of court about what he had done to those “anarchistic bastards.” “Rank hypocracy,” in Vanzetti’s own words. Or, as a red armband distributed by the Sacco-Vanzetti Committee (which can also be found in the Lilly’s collection) stated: “Justice Crucified.”5 The fact that the executed Boston fishmonger’s voice had been corrupted by his editors—well-meaning though they were—seemed to her as if insult had been added to injury. Megan began to spend more and more time in the Lilly’s Reading Room until she had transcribed most of Vanzetti’s letters. What had begun as a class assignment grew into Megan’s sixty-three-page Honors thesis submitted in 2014, “Vanzetti’s Voice: A Critical Look at the Letters of Bartolomeo Vanzetti.”
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The idea behind English L-460 was a simple one. And yet I don’t think a similar concept had been used for a class before, at least not by one of my colleagues at Indiana University Bloomington. The librarians at the Lilly Library do teach individual sessions for classes at the request of faculty members, and they regularly develop classes for graduate students in Indiana University’s library science program. My course, however, was intended for English majors, not library science students. For several years, I had become more and more dissatisfied with the way we teach our undergraduates in the humanities. While even freshmen in the natural sciences gain practical experience, for example, by working in a professor’s lab, most of our regular courses are either lecture- or discussion-based, divorced from any professional context in which our students might find themselves after they graduate. Defenders of the traditional role of the humanities see this as an asset rather than a liability, and with good reason. And yet, the more committed of my students had for years been asking me about the work that I do outside the classroom. Like many of my colleagues, I had kept my identity as a scholar separate from my role as a teacher, resigning myself to advocacy for the more general relevance of my subject to a student’s academic education, always mindful of the miniscule percentage of English majors that go on to pursue a graduate degree in the discipline I had chosen. But I had not been happy doing so: I found myself longing for a different way of interacting with my students, one that would connect what I taught to some of the reasons why I had devoted my life as a researcher and writer to working with texts. I am an archival scholar and editor as well as a biographer of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louis Agassiz, and, more recently, Max Eastman. The book-club model of the typical English class, in which we celebrate the privileged space opened up by the literary text as a source of superior insight, had never fully worked for me. Some of the subjects of my research—Louis Agassiz was a scientist and Max Eastman mostly a political writer and pundit—did not fit any narrow “literary” categories anyway. To make matters worse, I am at best a reluctant convert to literary theory, the classic English Department compensation for the alleged lack of professional or “scientific” rigor in our discipline.6
What I realized I wanted to create was a course that would allow my students to get a glimpse of the kind of work I do as a scholar, a course that would enable them to think of themselves not just a learners but, potentially and for the space of one semester, as my colleagues. L-460, as I imagined it, would help me to break down that wall between teaching and research. At the heart of the class I was envisioning was the close encounter with the artifact itself. For me, at the beginning of my love affair with libraries, was the way they smelled, the way books or old letters felt when I picked them up, the sound the pages made when I turned them. In my class, I would encourage my students to read, see, touch, and smell whatever they had decided to find out more about. (The Lilly, which prides itself on providing direct access to their materials, is a fantastic place in which to make such encounters happen). If this approach reminds you of the anecdote of the fish Louis Agassiz had asked his students to draw until it started reeking so badly that they couldn’t carry on—Ezra Pound famously used it in his ABC of Reading—that is not entirely inappropriate.7 Except that books and manuscripts don’t decompose, at least not that fast. I realized then, as I still do, that my method, superficially at least, appears to buck the trend towards digitization in recent thinking about the future of special collections. But in fact, I knew that I would actively encourage my students to produce digital versions of their materials, would ask them to use their cellphones and cameras to take pictures or get the Lilly’s photographer to produce professional scans for us. And I would require them to present the results of their work in electronic, publicly shareable form on websites and as web exhibits. To be sure, my model depends on students crossing the physical threshold of the library, a place many of them had never visited. But my ultimate goal was to “demystify” special collections, to establish them as a place not unlike but in fact very much like the rest of the campus or, for that matter, the world. A place that was not apart from, but a part of their community.8
When I taught the class, student engagement surpassed my expectations. So far I have offered English L-460 just once, but I have incorporated elements from it—and the principles behind it—into all the other classes I have taught at my university. I also developed a graduate form of the same course (English L-504),9 distinguished mainly by a more extended—and, yes, theoretical—section, in which I wanted students to be able to think creatively about what constitutes a manuscript, as opposed to a printed, allegedly “finished” text. The following examples are drawn mainly from the experiences I have had in my work with undergraduates, since they are the audience probably least familiar with special collections, while graduate students are more likely to have at least an inkling of the importance of materials kept there. Most of my illustrations are drawn from L-460 (in the appendix to this essay, I am including a syllabus for that class), but I will also draw from units that I have used in subsequent classes (such as L-356, Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, and L-317, the second part of the Nineteenth-Century American Literary Survey) and that I continue to use in new classes I develop. This eclectic approach will involve some switching back and forth between the past and the present tense, but I hope the main ideas will remain clear.
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I had planned L-460 as a small class, with an enrollment limited to fifteen, a classic capstone course within our major and manageable enough for me to work individually with each student (although when the time came, I had to allow additional students to enroll). The course began with a few weeks devoted to the joint study of archives I had selected, ranging from an entire author-based collection—the papers of Sarah Helen Whitman, the one-time fiancée of Edgar Allan Poe and subsequent fierce defender of his reputation—to more focused assignments, such as the various drafts of a chapter from Theodore Dreiser’s autobiography, Dawn (published in 1931), or Lewis Carroll’s correspondence with the illustrator of his novel Sylvie and Bruno, Harry Furniss (1854–1925).10 I put the items on reserve, alerted the students when they were available, and asked them to come into the Lilly’s Reading Room to work with them ahead of our next meeting. My classes typically meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the Ellison Room of Lilly Library, a wonderful space, complete with a (nonworking) fieldstone fireplace, sandblasted fir paneling, and rustic, pegged furniture, which houses the collection of Westerniana assembled by Robert Spurrier Ellison (1875–1845) of Wyoming, a former Vice President of the Midwest Refining Company. Each Friday morning and afternoon, I made myself available in the Reading Room to help students (and to ease the burden on the public service staff). In this fashion, we would look at an unpublished, handmade early volume of poems by Stephen Spender, along with letters by the septuagenarian Sir Stephen attesting to the fact that he had forgotten about this work but that he was pleased to be reminded of it; a letter from the flamboyant actress Florence Deshon to her lover Max Eastman about how, in May 1919, she hopped on a plane at the Hollywood airfield of Charlie Chaplin’s brother and went flying all over Hollywood; and a clipping of an 1879 newspaper interview with Walt Whitman, littered with autograph corrections by Whitman himself, who was angry about being censored by his interviewer and reinserted the adjective “constipated” into a sentence about the unacceptable “sweetness” of contemporary American poetry.11 In a particularly revelatory session, we deciphered Virginia Woolf’s holograph corrections and emendations in the proofs to Mrs. Dalloway (1925)—last minute alterations made when Harcourt and Brace had agreed to publish the American version of the novel. Woolf’s interventions, which included a typed rewrite of the two crucial pages in the novel describing the suicide of Septimus Warren, created a complex textual situation for the novel, which we now realized exists in at least three different versions: as a manuscript, as a set of corrected proofs and—since her corrections came too late for her own publisher to adopt in full and were often too dense to be deciphered by the American printer—in a British and American printed version.
I also invited members of the Lilly staff to talk about their work, from the Director of the Lilly and its Curator of Manuscripts to the Archivist, the Senior Cataloger, the Conservator, and the Head of Public Services, helping the students to track the journey of a manuscript from acquisition to patron use in the Lilly’s Reading Room. My goal during these first few weeks was to impress on students that while manuscripts are important sources (e.g., for the historian, the biographer, the literary critic), they are so much more than simple repositories of useful information. Manuscripts teach us to think of texts or other artifacts not as products but steps in a process that began long before a text—or, in the case of Crone’s albums—a photograph was published.
Manuscripts also are physical objects in their own right, written or typed on paper that in turn was created by someone else (even if that someone is an anonymous company), which carries the signs of use by those who wrote on it or handled it. Manuscripts allow us a behind-the-scenes look where none seemed possible; they allow us to risk a glance at stories that might and should have been told but weren’t. Lewis Carroll’s letters to Harry Furniss are a case in point. Furniss was a well-known artist for Punch, and he was able to insist on his own artistic views, even when Carroll’s criticism of his work was withering. Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno is a fiendishly complicated novel involving multiple, mysteriously linked plots and three different worlds of varying degrees of reality, loosely tied together by the characters, among them most prominently the two siblings Sylvie and Bruno, who are sprites or fairies and who are exposed to all sorts of political intrigue. Furniss had his work cut out for him, and Carroll was not an easy boss. For example, in a letter written on November 24, 1886, he complained that Furniss’s sketches, while “very graphic & suggestive,” were not on a track towards realizing a “comic result.” He disliked Furniss’s portrayal of Sylvie, who, to Carroll, looked to be more like fifteen than twelve (Carroll’s preferred age for girls). Things got so tense that, in a letter dated August 26, 1889, Carroll announced plans to write an essay on “Authors’ Difficulties with Illustrators.” He also tried to embarrass Furniss by pointing out that his previous illustrator, John Tenniel, has responded to criticism by quietly redoing the image. Furniss was, by all accounts, not an easy man to get along with, but Carroll’s letters do reveal an astonishing amount of micromanaging, especially when he drew illustrations himself to steer Furniss in the right direction. Not that Furniss complied. He pushed back when Carroll’s creatures—more uncanny and perverse than simply “naughty”—were simply too weird for a Victorian audience. In class, we considered in detail Carroll’s draft sketch for the “changed crocodile” (chapter XVI of the first part of Sylvie and Bruno), a crocodile willfully shortened by a character named “the Professor” for the benefit of Sylvie and Bruno and then lengthened again to more than “two times and half its original size,” all “just because” (figure 15.1). The flexible crocodile is a great addition to Carroll’s unsettling collection of diminishing and expanding bodies, which to many modern critics has suggested some kind of sexual meaning but is certainly also, as William Empson showed long ago, a nifty response to children’s natural obsessions with their own size and the size of the world.12
Carroll’s serpent-like reptile—which, in Carroll’s second drawing on this page, becomes a kind of bizarre Ouroboros—appears tamed in Furniss’s rendition, tidied up, nudged into humorously awkward acceptability by the addition of the accouterments of Victorian masculinity (figure 15.2). He is now a suave gentleman about town rather than the exaggerated, prehistoric-looking, vaguely phallic, naked-looking creature recently emerged from the original slime that Carroll had imagined.13
Students in the class were divided as to which one was the more effective illustration—the somewhat nightmarish one sprung from Lewis Carroll’s subversive mind or its transformation into gnarly adorability by the more audience-conscious Furniss.
Often manuscripts are ravishingly beautiful. I usually like to show my classes a note to the Reverend Everett Hale written, likely in 1856, by the poet Emily Dickinson. My students are invariably surprised by the abstract visual patterns the poet’s handwriting created on the page. Barely putting any pressure on her pen, filling every available inch of the paper, writing from margin to margin, she loops and slants her letters as if the impression it would make on the reader were what mattered as much as the content. Which was, as the class agreed, cryptic on its own terms. Dickinson had first written to the Reverend Hale, a minister in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1854, to inquire how a friend of hers, Benjamin Franklin Newton (a name that one would find only in such a waspy context!), had died and whether or not he had embraced his Savior. The Reverend had written back and somewhat churlishly—from Dickinson’s perspective—suggested that she should have rushed to her dying friend’s bedside, rather than writing letters after his demise—a suggestion the notoriously reclusive Dickinson, in her miffed response, flatly rejected, since this would have been a pleasure entirely too “costly” for her (figuratively speaking). Two years after her first letter to Hale, she was writing to him again, as if to revisit the debacle of their earlier correspondence, and promised the Reverend that she would “cull” him “buds serener” at some future point in time, namely “upon a purer morn” (figure 15.3). Imagine the poor Reverend’s confusion! Was she ironically alluding to the afterlife when they would meet (an afterlife Dickinson did not really believe in, as poems such as “Because I could not Stop for Death” show), and did she combine that facetious promise with the equally ironic—and of course completely inappropriate—prospect of sexual favors granted? The physical appearance of the letter, its pictogrammatic appeal on the page, enhanced the mystery of its promise—a reminder to the good Reverend that Emily Dickinson was not to be measured by conventional standards. What students also got from Dickinson’s message was a distinct sense that no transcription of an autograph can ever do justice to the original.14
FIGURE 15.1. Lewis Carroll, “Crocodile walking along its own back,” letter fragment dated September 1889 [?], Carroll Mss. (courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington)
FIGURE 15.2. Lewis Carroll, page 229 from Sylvie and Bruno (1889), Carroll Mss. (courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington)
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During these four or five weeks of joint study, I asked students to investigate and commit to projects that they would then go on to study on their own during the rest of the semester. I met with each member of the class individually and, after inviting them to describe their interests or post-graduation plans, proposed projects to them based on my own knowledge of the Lilly’s collections. I would also show them how to browse the Lilly’s catalogs and finding aids on their own. The fact that my students usually pick their own projects—both in L-460 and my other classes—means that they develop a sense of ownership towards them. Some students consult with me; others come to me with discoveries they have made or resources that I wasn’t aware of. Sometimes they find things by accident: Upton Sinclair’s half-hearted application for admission to graduate study in English at Harvard (he was turned down);15 scripts and notes by the creators of the series All in the Family regarding the notorious segment in which Edith nearly becomes the victim of sexual violence that show how thoughtfully they researched and discussed the controversial subject, distancing themselves from contemporary accounts that usually blame the victim;16 or a series of love letters written in the 1880s by a sailor longing for his fiancée back home as he was travelling on the USS Enterprise from Cape Henry, Virginia, to Cape Town, South Africa (figure 15.4). Lt. Mason Abercrombie Shufeldt had poured his soul into these beautifully illustrated letters, clearly out of fear that she might forget about him (she did and she married someone else).17
FIGURE 15.3. Emily Dickinson to Everett Edward Hale [1856], American Literature Mss., The Lilly Library (by permission of the Fellows of Harvard College and the Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington; © President and Fellows of Harvard College)
The wealth and comprehensiveness of the Lilly’s collections makes it easy to find a match for virtually everyone. Thus, Bernadette Patino, a student of Filipino ancestry, delved into a collection of photographic albums of the Philippines during the early years of the American occupation. Anjona Ghosh, a double major in telecommunications and a fan of James Bond movies, looked at Ian Fleming’s correspondence with his editor, William Plomer (1903–73), while Becky Ferber, an avid hiker, compared contemporary writer Scott Russell Sanders’s journal notes about a whitewater rafting trip with the description of the same trip in his published memoir Hunting for Hope.18 (Sanders, a Bloomington writer who has donated his extensive papers to the Lilly, visited the class later in the semester to talk about how it felt to be “archived.”) Elizabeth Pappas, a dyed-in-the-wool Vonnegut fan, looked at the eccentric notes kept by her idol while he was an increasingly rebellious anthropology student at the University of Chicago; she recovered two poems Vonnegut had scribbled on loose-leaf paper in which he was already contemplating one of his favorite themes: “the Grand Ideal, Oblivion/To be shared by all.”19 Erika Jenns read through many of the thirty-plus volumes of journals left by Don Belton, a recently deceased faculty member in English, whose entire estate had become the property of the Lilly after he had fallen victim to a violent crime. (Erika went on to also catalog Belton’s extensive library for the English Department.)20 Finally, Deborra Sanders, a student fascinated by the rich Bloomsbury collections of the Lilly, transcribed some of Virginia Woolf’s correspondence with her friend Molly McCarthy, paying special attention to her rich metaphorical language, which allowed Deborra to show, in the microcosm of the individual letter, what Bloomsbury as a whole had exemplified: the breaking down of the barriers between art and life.21
FIGURE 15.4. Cover for Mason Abercrombie Shufeldt, Letter to Elise Buckingham, February 7, 1883, written from Cape Verde; Shufeldt Illustrated Letters, Lilly Mss. (courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington)
The Bloomsbury magic had not worked so well for the subject of Michelle Gottschlich’s project. Karin Costelloe Stephen (1890–1953), a peripheral member of Woolf’s circle and one of the first female psychoanalysts in the United Kingdom, is now mostly remembered because of her marriage to Woolf’s brother—unjustly so, as Michelle showed in transcriptions of several key letters from Stephen’s career, including several written during her work as a psychiatric resident at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Stephen had called the hospital a “grim . . . fairyland,” where she had to assert herself against supercilious male doctors but also seems to have made a real difference in sick people’s lives. As she wrote to her mother, Mary Berenson, on October 20, 1927, in a letter transcribed by Michelle:
I am having exactly the sort of experience now that I could have hoped for in my wildest fancies. I wouldn’t have missed this for anything and it amply justifies the trouble of qualifying medically. I have my hands much too full but I could fill them 10 times over with interesting work. I wish I could see you and talk about all this, letters are hopeless to convey experiences of this kind. I feel I am getting much surer about the fundamental underlying drives in human beings and more skill in getting patients to drop their pretences and camouflages and face-savings and recognise what is really true about themselves. It is like being a strange kind of priest but the only doctrine you preach is honesty.22
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I always require students to present their work-in-progress to the entire class. I help them put on reserve, in the Lilly’s Reading Room, selections from the material to be prepared and help them post study questions to the course blog. Class members are invited to post their responses to this material either before or after our meetings. Fortunately, I usually don’t have any problem finding students willing to present early in the semester—I tell them that they get beneficial peer responses to their work sooner than others. The students also use the blogs I set up to share work-in-progress, to ask questions that come up as they begin to write about their material and, at the end of the semester, to publish the results of their work. So far I have relied on BlogSpot software, since it’s simple to navigate and allows for easy posting of diverse materials, including video clips. I am fairly open as to the format students choose for their final projects—submissions have ranged from conventional term papers to elaborate web exhibits. At the end of the semester, all students post to the course blog their finished projects or links to other sites they might have created.
Often, unexpected correspondences and synergies between projects emerge. A good example was the response generated by Bernadette Patino’s project on the Frank Crone Mss.: an archive of photographs, speeches, and clippings assembled by the American Director of Education in the Philippines from August 1913 to June 1916.23 Among the highlights of Bernadette’s archive were photographs of the portly Mr. Crone posing next to the corn plants he had taught Filipinos to grow and handing out awards to the most deserving of his corn-growing pupils. Why corn? Being a Hoosier, that’s what Crone knew. A particularly poignant example is a photograph featuring a grinning Crone next to General Emilio Aguinaldo (1869–1964), the leader of the Philippine resistance against Spain and the United States and the island’s first President until he was captured by American forces in 1901 (figure 15.5).
In her comments on the photograph, Bernadette notes that Crone’s caption has stripped Aguinaldo of his military rank. Crone had asked him to stand in front of the corn plot grown by Aguinaldo’s son, Emilio Jr., as part of a school project. The former Minister of the Interior on the Philippine Islands, Dean C. Worcester, used the same image as the frontispiece of volume 1 of his anthropological study, The Philippines: Past and Present (1914), offering the following assessment in his caption: “This chance photograph showing General Emilio Aguinaldo as he is to-day . . . typifies the peace, prosperity, and enlightenment which have been brought about in the Philippine Islands under American rule.” In a statement to Committee on the Philippines of the United States Senate delivered in Washington, DC, on December 30, 1914, Worcester used this photograph again and reiterated his justification for the American occupation, praising Aguinaldo’s new-found meekness: “I may say that he is more easy to photograph now than he once was. . . . Aguinaldo does not represent the highest class, although since his surrender he has been a good citizen.”24
FIGURE 15.5. Frank L. Crone, photographer—“Señor Emilio Aguinaldo, in front of his corn plot, Cavit [sic], Cavite, December 16, 1912. Philippine Islands”; Album #2, Crone Mss. (courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington)
In a response to Bernadette’s work posted on the course blog, Ly Nguyen, who had spent the semester reading and transcribing autograph letters by the young James Baldwin,25 drew parallels between Bernadette’s observations about the Philippine occupation and the history of slavery. She provided her own image, a well-known 1841 print by Edward William Clay showing a caring master and his family, surrounded by grateful slaves, a “sacred legacy from my ancestors,” as the master helpfully explains.26 Baldwin, in his early essays, had made a point of excoriating the noxious tradition of white benevolence, blasting even Uncle Tom’s Cabin—“Everybody’s Protest Novel” as he called it—as enmeshed in the logic of racist paternalism.27 “Like the Americans who wished to educate and civilize the Filipino people,” wrote Ly, “pro-slavery advocates also wanted to project the image that they could do good for the people they were colonizing and forcing into slavery.” And Ly expanded her argument to make a more general point about the power of images in racist domination: “If one was uninformed about the brutality and dehumanizing reality of slavery . . . the image [of the master taking care of his slaves] would not seem to be that bad. Everyone in the print looks as if they were enjoying themselves, so what would one object to? The relevance here is Bernadette’s point about how Crone and the American officials were the ones who were responsible for the image of the Philippines Americans saw.” (Crone went on to use his photographs in lectures he gave about the Philippines after he had returned to the United States.)28 Ly’s comments sharpened Bernadette’s narrative in the web exhibit she submitted as her final project, using free Omeka software. Bernadette’s exhibit was subsequently added to the Lilly’s public website, along with another exhibit developed by Mary Bowden, a student in the graduate version of my class. Mary’s “Building Jerusalem in America” re-created the story of an intentional community founded in 1834 in Mount Carmel, Indiana, by working-class emigrants from Manchester.29
Of course, I would also accept more traditional essays or written project narratives, as long as students were willing to publish them on the course blog (and as long as they also contained transcriptions of the material the student had consulted). An outstanding example from L-460 was Michelle Gottschlich’s paper on Karin Stephen. Michelle is an accomplished poet, and she used her great talent for feeling her way into the minds of other people to make Virginia Woolf’s luckless sister-in-law come alive again, at least for the duration of a few pages. It was a joy to see how Michelle immersed herself in the Stephens collection, to an extent that went far beyond the confines of a final research project.
The loving, profoundly moving portrait of Stephen (figure 15.6) that Michelle produced in her final essay will forever be etched in my mind. Instead of a research project, Michelle had written a prose poem: a recreation, in lyrical language, of the life of someone who had been on the margins of all the important intellectual movements of her time without ever being allowed to become a fully vested member of any of them. As Michelle wrote (and I have never forgotten these two sentences), “We rarely value the person who lives, and leaves us, as an outsider, and we deny that there is much to learn about history from the periphery. Yet Karin knew these spaces in a way we have lost access to.”30 Stephen was to the manor born, at least culturally and intellectually. Her parents were Frank Costelloe, an English barrister, and Mary Pearsall Smith, the daughter of the writer and suffragist Hannah Whitall. Her stepfather was the famous art historian and critic Bernard Berenson. But although she studied at Cambridge University and Bryn Mawr College and associated with the Bloomsbury group, Karin never fully fit into that tightly woven web of friends, siblings, and lovers. Isolated by her increasing deafness, she valiantly carved out a different space for herself, decades before her sister-in-law demanded that women be given a room of their own. Michelle’s re-creation of Karin Stephen (who would eventually commit suicide) drew heavily on her letters, many of which Michelle had laboriously transcribed in the Lilly’s Reading Room. She read Stephen’s letters with great sensitivity and an eye for her quiet, unsettling humor, always teetering on the abyss that would finally claim her. I have rarely seen undergraduates weep for reasons other than bad grades—but when Michelle gave her presentation on Stephen, many in the room were visibly moved.
FIGURE 15.6. Unknown photographer—Karin Stephen at Bryn Mawr, 1908/1909, H. W. Smith Papers, box 18, folder 23 (courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington)
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The level of excitement in my special collections-based courses is palpable, and I can assure you that the reason for that is not whatever skills I might possess as a teacher. My students are more than ready to embrace special collections materials, to handle them, to study them, to make them part of their lives—and, might I say, they do so with more care and love and respect than many of my more seasoned colleagues. By the time their work is done, they are the experts; they know more about the artifact or a series of special collections artifacts than I do. In these classes I am a student as well as a professor. They have proved to be a great way of involving students directly in work at a reasonably advanced level, giving them skills that might help them as they are considering careers outside the traditional paths for English majors or PhDs (be it in the field of public history, the National Park Service, or libraries). Three of the seventeen students enrolled in L-460 have gone on to study library science. But for many of my students—as I know from the letters and emails I receive, sometimes years later—the real appeal of these classes cannot be limited to skill sets. Students who have taken my courses know that manuscripts come in all sorts of forms, and they celebrate the diversity they encounter: letters (Florence Deshon, Ian Fleming, Karin Stephen, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Sarah Helen Whitman, and Virginia Woolf); journals (Belton, Shufeldt, and Woolf); as drafts of shorter or longer texts, such as poems, stories, novels (Dreiser and Belton); in the form of outlines for television shows (All in the Family); class notes (Vonnegut); annotations in books and notes on proof sheets (Woolf); and captions in albums (Frank Crone). They may be handwritten or typed or they exist virtually (as the files on Belton’s university computer, for example). Manuscripts can be by famous people and by ordinary people; they may be historically important or relevant for understanding a person’s life, or both. Or they may touch you on an entirely different, personal level, as happened to Alicia Scott, who fiercely defended the unlucky Mr. Shufeldt’s letters against objections by some classmates that they weren’t anything special. The fact that Special Collections is a place where all these voices come alive again—where Vanzetti’s voice, silenced by his execution on August 22, 1927, still resonates, and the forgotten Mr. Shufeldt is still allowed to long for his unfaithful fiancée—will help them see not only libraries very differently. My approach has worked if, in the eyes of my students, there is indeed nothing particularly special—in the sense of specialized, remote, or refined—about special collections. For my students, they become a gateway to the world.
ENG-L 460 (Spring 2013)
Modern Literary Archives
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:30 PM—3:45 PM
The Ellison Room, The Lilly Library
Christoph Irmscher
Office hours: W 3–4 and by appointment
Course description
Have you ever wondered about what it would be like to work not with someone else’s edition of a novel, a work of poetry, or a play but with the actual source, the manuscript or typescript handled by the author himself or herself? Have you ever asked yourself how your argument in a term paper might be made stronger by referring to an unpublished letter, an early draft of a poem, an annotated book once owned by your author? Or do you just enjoy spending time in libraries or museums? If any of this applies to you, then this is the course for you. Manuscripts are a literary critic’s bread-and-butter; this course will introduce you, in hands-on fashion, to the practical and ethical principles of working with modern literary archives. We will draw exclusively on original materials from the Lilly’s collections, from the papers of such outstanding writers as William Wordsworth, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, W. Somerset Maugham, Kurt Vonnegut, and others.
Some of the topics and skills to be covered might include the “archeology” of literary texts (i.e., all that comes before the “fair copy” of a manuscript, such as drafts, notebooks, reading notes, and letters); exercises in deciphering handwriting; principles and types of textual transcription; prepublication documents (annotated and fair copies) as well as publication-related documents (page proofs); the nature of the literary archive or collection; the use of finding aids in libraries; and so forth.
Course requirements
This is a practicum in which, after some weeks of introductory conversations, I will assist you in your work. Initially we will meet and do some practical exercises with material I have selected. You are expected to prepare for these meetings carefully by visiting the Lilly regularly. I will make myself available—in the Lilly Reading Room—on most mornings to be on hand to help you. Make sure that you come to class ready to share your notes and/or editions. When you discuss your own work, you are required to make copies of your findings or post the results of your work in advance of the meeting to the course blog.
I will meet with you early in the semester (always at the Lilly) to determine what project you might be interested in. I will ask you to describe your work during the semester in regular, brief updates to be posted to the course website (http://lillymodernarchives.blogspot.com). I expect about 4 in the course of the semester. There is no prescribed length or deadline. Share a problem, an editorial decision you feel you need to make, a discovery, an epiphany or a disappointment you had.
By the end of the course (05/01), I will expect you to have produced a short critical edition of an original manuscript from your field of interest (five to ten pages) using your archive of choice from the Lilly’s collections as well as a short essay commenting on the archive and your editorial practice. The essay needs to explain the principle behind your edition, comment on choices you had to make, as well as the opportunities that you see your edition offers. You may choose to present your final edition in traditional print format or as a digital document. There is no textbook for this class. Regular attendance and participation in our meetings as well as posting to the blog count for 30 percent of the grade. Presenting your project to the class will make up another 30 percent; your final project will account for the final 40 percent.
01/08 Introduction: What are manuscripts? Examples of manuscripts.
01/10 Preliminary exercises: Sylvia Plath, “Finisterre” or “The Surgeon at 2 A.M.” (Plath Mss.). I will be available Wednesday morning to help you with the material. Compare the autograph with the printed text and write down what you observe.
Week 2
01/15 An unpublished autograph: Stephen Spender, “Poems Written Abroad.” Spender Mss.
Each student should pick one poem from the collection, transcribe it, and post it to the course blog. Don’t worry if the same poem is selected by several people. Describe the entire autograph as carefully as possible.
01/17 Spender, cont.
Week 3
01/22 Lewis Carroll, Letters and Drafts for Sylvie and Bruno. Additional reading: Kelemen, “Why Study Textual Editing and Criticism?” (course blog)
01/24 Multiple Drafts: Theodore Dreiser, Dawn
Week 4
01/29 Dreiser, Dawn
01/31 From Autograph to Print: Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Additional Reading: Erick Kelemen, “Text Technologies and Textual Transmissions” (course blog)
Week 5
02/05 Cherry Williams, Curator of Manuscripts
02/07 Mrs. Dalloway, cont.
Week 6
02/12 Working with Archives: Editing the Sarah Helen Whitman Correspondence
02/14 Sarah Helen Whitman, cont.; Visit Craig Simpson, Archivist
02/19 Working with Archives: The Florence Deshon Mss.
02/21 Visit Jim Canary, Conservator at the Lilly
Week 8
02/26 Deshon Mss., cont.
02/28 Erika Jenns on the Don Belton Mss.
Week 9
03/05 Michelle Gottschlich on Karin Stephen
03/07 Anjona Ghosh on Ian Fleming; Deborra Sanders on Virginia Woolf
Week 10
03/12 and 03/14 SPRING BREAK
Week 11
03/19 Ava Dickerson on Charles Baudelaire; Bernadette Patino on Frank Crone
03/21 Megan Jones on Sacco and Vanzetti
Week 12
03/26 Ariel Hunt on William Carlos Williams
03/28 Ly Nguyen on James Baldwin
Week 13
04/02 Morgan Burris on Sylvia Plath; Alicia Scott on Mason Shufeldt
04/04 Elizabeth Pappas on Kurt Vonnegut; Steven Whyte on Sarah Helen Whitman
Week 14
04/09 Rebecca Ferber on Scott Russell Sanders
04/11 Instructor on his own project (Audubon)
Week 15
04/16 Visit Scott Russell Sanders
04/18 Audrey Snider on The Wizard of Oz; Aaron Denton on Carver
Individual Meetings with Participants. Definitely no class on Tuesday!
04/25 Wrap-up
05/01 Submission of Final Version of Project
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Joel Silver, Director of the Lilly Library, and Cherry Williams, Curator of Manuscripts at the Lilly Library, for reading this essay and for the permission to use materials from their collection. Leslie Morris, Curator of Modern Books and Manuscript at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, graciously gave me permission to use Emily Dickinson’s letter to Edward Everett Hale. Thanks also to my former students Michelle Gottschlich, Megan Jones, Ly Nguyen, and Bernadette Patino for allowing me to quote from their work. All images were taken by Zach Downey.
NOTES
1. Bartolomeo Vanzetti to Mary Donovan, December 28, 1926, Hapgood Mss., Sacco-Vanzetti Papers, The Lilly Library.
2. One of the epigraphs taken from “Puddn’head Wilson’s Calendar” in Mark Twain’s novel Puddn’head Wilson, originally published in 1894 (New York: Pocket Books, 2004), 179.
3. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, ed. Gardner Jackson and Marion Frankfurter (1928; New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 164–65; Megan Jones, “Vanzetti’s Voice: A Critical Look at the Letters of Bartolomeo Vanzetti,” Honors Thesis, English, submitted April 4, 2014, Indiana University Bloomington, English Department, 48. Megan, now at the University of Kansas, and I are collaborating on a new edition of the Vanzetti letters.
4. Mary Donovan married the labor leader and union organizer Powers Hapgood on December 28, 1927.
5. Hapgood Mss., Sacco-Vanzetti Papers, box labeled “Printed,” folder “Broadsides & Armband,” The Lilly Library.
6. See the chapter on “The Rise of English” in Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
7. See Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber, 1961) 17–18.
8. John H. Overholt, “Five Theses on the Future of Special Collections,” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 14.1 (2013): 15–20,. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10601790.
9. The blog for the graduate version of the class can be found at www.lillymanuscripts.blogspot.com (access by permission).
10. Dreiser Mss., box 1, The Lilly Library; Carroll Mss., The Lilly Library.
11. Stephen Spender, “Poems Written Abroad” (1927), English Literature Mss., The Lilly Library, and Spender to John Yarnall, August 4, 1964, Lilly Library Administrative Files; Florence Deshon to Max Eastman, March 9, 1920, Deshon Mss., The Lilly Library; “Walt Whitman in St. Louis. Literature, Politics, and the Prairie States. Two Manuscript Notes and Printed Newspaper Clipping, with Holograph Additions by Whitman,” The Lilly Library, Manuscripts PS 3222.W62 1879.
12. William Empson, “The Child as Swain,” Some Version of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1950); see especially 266–67.
13. For more on Furniss and his exceedingly difficult relationship with Carroll, see Lewis Carroll & His Illustrators: Collaborations & Correspondence, 1865–1898, ed. Morton N. Cohen and Edward Wakeling (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 100–107.
14. Emily Dickinson to Everett Hale, January 13, 1854 and 1856 [?], American Literature Mss., The Lilly Library. Dickinson’s response to Hale’s letter, dated February 14, 1854, is at the Frost Library of Amherst College and was published in Diana Wagner and Marcy Tanter, “New Dickinson Letter Clarifies Hale Correspondence,” The Emily Dickinson Journal VII.1 (1998): 110–17.
15. Sinclair Mss. V, The Lilly Library.
16. The episode in question was “Edith’s Fiftieth Birthday,” aired originally on October 16, 1977. All in the Family Mss., The Lilly Library, Box 1, 0805 Box 1. See especially the notes on the Writer’s meetings, August 23, 26, 31, 1977.
17. Mason Abercrombie Shufeldt, 1852–1892. Illustrated letters, 1882–1883, Lilly Mss., The Lilly Library. See www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/blog/sailor/.
18. William Plomer Mss. II, The Lilly Library; Scott Russell Sanders, Journal, June 9 to 13, 1995, Scott Russell Sanders Mss., box 9, The Lilly Library.
19. Kurt Vonnegut, “Matter can neither be created nor destroyed . . .” (1946), Vonnegut Mss., box 21, folder labeled “Anthropology 220.”
20. See the Don Cornelius Belton Mss., boxes 1–3. Erika Jenns’s website devoted to Belton can be found at http://belton.indiana.edu/~belton/collection/about. For more on Belton, see https://justicefordonbelton.wordpress.com.
21. Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) to Molly McCarthy, March 1912 and undated [1923], The Molly McCarthy Mss., The Lilly Library.
22. Karin Stephen to Mary Berenson, October 20, 1927, Correspondence, Stephen, 1927, May−December, box 12, H. Whitall Smith Manuscripts, The Lilly Library.
23. Bernadette Patino, “Documenting Empire: Frank L. Crone’s Photographs of the Colonial Philippines,” www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/digital/exhibitions/exhibits/show/crone. Bernadette now works as a writer for the Film Development Council of the Philippines.
24. “Statement of the Hon. Dean C. Worcester, Formerly a Member of the Philippine Commission,” Hearings before the Committee on the Philippines of the United States Senate, Sixty-Third Congress, Third Session on H.R. 18459, Part 4 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1915), 272.
25. Baldwin Mss., The Lilly Library.
26. See the image archived by the Library of Congress at www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/pga.05677/.
27. James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), in Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955: Boston: Beacon, 2012) 13–24.
28. Ly Nguyen, “Education as Rhetoric of Colonization,” March 20, 2013, http://lillymodernarchives.blogspot.com/2013/03/education-as-rhetoric-of-colonization.html (access by permission).
29. Mary Bowden, “Building Jerusalem in America: William Ashton and a Trans-Atlantic Utopia,” www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/digital/exhibitions/exhibits/show/ashton. These and other exhibits are discussed in a recent article about Omeka use in the display of Library collections, Juliet L. Hardesty, “Exhibiting Library Collections Online: Omeka in Context.” New Library World 115, no. 3/4 (2014): 75–86.
30. Michelle Gottschlich, “Recovering Karin Stephen,” unpublished essay (2013).