The Last of the Big-Time Spenders
So you thought libraries were dull? The University of Texas has spent millions stalking the globe, buying everything from the first photograph to Houdini’s magic gear, all to get one of the world’s most impressive collections—and itself in trouble.
(Page 2 of 5)
Also in the possession of the HRC are countless pages of letters to and from just about every English, American, and French literary figure of the past hundred years, among them more than a thousand each to and from such figures as Eliot, Forster, Lawrence, and Pound. Most are as yet unpublished. Some, for the protection of the privacy of persons yet living or their relatives and friends (including 2600 letters in a collection revolving around Eliot and a woman friend), may not even be read until specified dates in the future. So extensively has the HRC collected that, to my considerable astonishment and chagrin, a librarian directed me to a generous selection of my own and my wife’s letters to a minor novelist of long-term and intimate acquaintance who had somehow persuaded the library to buy his papers. The two or three demented souls in Austin who might have wondered what vile things I may have written about them privately will find that, like Eliot’s, my letters are under cover until I am long dead.
More significant, the Carlton Lake Collection of modern French literature, donated to the HRC by its owner, contains manuscripts, proof sheets, first editions, unpublished letters, and other memorabilia from Céline, Gide, Sartre, Toulouse-Lautrec, Ionesco, Genet, Beckett, Colette, Valéry, Verlaine, Debussy, Rimbaud, and Cézanne. The manuscript of T. H. White’s The Book of Merlyn, the fifth and previously unpublished and unknown volume of The Once and Future King, was discovered in the HRC. Published by UT Press, it is now a national best-seller. One may expect similar discoveries to come out of the HRC in future years, since whole crate-loads of material have been acquired by the library much faster than they can be indexed, a difficult and time-consuming process.
Nothing short of a dictionary-sized catalog could do justice to the wealth and, as my letters show, the occasional promiscuity of the HRC’s holdings. The Gernsheim Photography Collection, bought in 1964 for $338,000, to considerable negative comment, has made the HRC perhaps the finest museum of photography outside of the Eastman in Rochester. The library has raised $366,000 in the last few years by selling off the duplicates, which represented only 2 per cent of the total collection. A conservative estimate of the auctionable value of the Gernsheim Collection is $3,500,000. The HRC owns the first photograph ever taken; it is on a metal shelf in the sixth-floor stacks, protected from decay in an air-tight glass case filled with helium. They also own Gertrude Stein’s cape and fan, the professional and personal effects of Harry Houdini, countless theater costumes and circus memorabilia, the presidential campaign papers of Barry Goldwater, 3000 World War I propaganda and recruiting posters, and a large collection of bubble-gum baseball cards, autographed balls, bats, and uniforms. Negotiations are in progress to purchase the archives of a rock critic, including 45 rpm records, posters, and concert programs. It is just possible that Texas taxpayers may end up owning a lock of Elvis Presley’s hair or Mick Jagger’s mascara brush.
What Harry Ransom wanted was a collection that, as it was phrased at the time, would “put Texas on the map.” A former English professor who had risen through the academic ranks and a passionate bibliophile himself, Ransom was the kind of administrator who is far better at generating ideas than at seeing them through in detail. The words most often quoted to describe Ransom by persons who admire the way he did things are those of former UT Dean of Arts and Sciences John Silber: “He could not tell the difference between the actual, the possible, and the totally inconceivable. He was, therefore, a man who could imagine new possibilities.” According to HRC Librarian Bill Holman, whom Ransom lured back to the Southwest (he is an Oklahoma native) from the directorship of the San Francisco Public Library, “Ransom had dreams far beyond his capacity to execute them. He collected people the way he did books. People arrived here ready to go to work and already salaried to find they had no desk or office, no parking space, and no real job or assignment. He expected you to be able to create your own.” Holman, himself a talented book designer and printer, is that rarest of species, a passionate bureaucrat. What he sees in the HRC is what he believes Ransom saw: “One of the most unique endeavors in the history of the Southwest. A librarian has to think of the future more than about himself. The system is bigger than the man. Can you imagine what this collection is going to mean fifty, a hundred, or two hundred years from now when you and I are dead and forgotten?”
By ordinary standards Texas already had quite a good rare books library in 1957 when Ransom first began talking about his idea for a research center. It centered around the John H. Wrenn Collection, given to the university in 1918 by Major George W. Littlefield of Austin. The strengths of the Wrenn Library, criticized in its day in some of the same ways the HRC has been criticized, are mainly in English literature from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. But Ransom realized, says Warren Roberts, a onetime English professor who assisted the chancellor from the start and who is now the HRC’s director, that the great collections at venerable institutions like Harvard and Yale could never be duplicated at any price, and scarcely imitated for anything less than a very large fortune. It made far more sense for Texas, a relatively new university, to specialize in a field where competition was less intense and real uniqueness possible—the twentieth century in England and America. By 1960 Texas was well on its way to its present distinction in the field. “We simply stole a march on time and did it,” Warren Roberts says today. “Before anybody realized what we were doing we built a library which cannot be matched anywhere.”
Although Ransom’s earliest acquisitions came from private gifts (he had been scouting for funds as early as his tenure as dean of Arts and Sciences from 1954 to 1957), what gave the HRC its real start, were direct grants bestowed upon the project from the Board of Regents. By going to the Regents, Ransom did not have to justify his project to the Legislature, no doubt by that tactic cheating posterity of what might otherwise have been a debate of genuinely comic-heroic proportions, but also making sure his dream had some chance of coming to pass. In fiscal 1958—1959, he persuaded the Regents to part with $2 million for the center—$500,000 from regular regental appropriation and $1.5 million designated from “other funds.” With most of that money, $1 million to be exact, Ransom bought the collection of T. E. Hanley, a brick manufacturer of Bradford, Pennsylvania, who had what turned out to be an uncanny knack for collecting books. Now the heart of the HRC’s modern holdings, the Hanley Collection was especially rich in D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and Shaw. Hanley, a somewhat eccentric gentleman of little formal education who was married to a former Egyptian belly dancer, had books and manuscripts under every bed, filling most closets, and spilling over into his barn. When his insurance company grew edgy and suggested he take either the books or the paintings (he also collected modern art) to a safer place, Hanley, who had little contact with other collectors, was introduced to Ransom by a New York dealer.
Ransom, whose charm was legendary, had a gift for talking to people of all kinds in whatever language made most sense to them. Without the time to make a detailed appraisal of the collection’s contents, Ransom somehow made Hanley believe that Texas was where it belonged. Before Harvard, Yale, and other interested bidders were able to prepare their offers, one of the great literary sales of the century had been made and the goods transported to Austin in a guarded truck caravan. Warren Roberts, a radarman on a destroyer in the Atlantic during World War II, remembers the days of unpacking the crates as among the most exciting in his life. “Nobody,” he says, “not even Harry, really knew what we had. We had made a calculated gamble, based largely on the dealer’s word and Harry’s quick appraisal. But when we started taking it out of those boxes—it was in no particular order really—we were astonished. None of us dreamed of all the things that were in it.”
My Library
