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.
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But regional styles grate on ears unused to Texas plain talk. Big Money at Yale may whisper quietly its transformations to perform; at UT it sounds like former Regents Chairman Frank Erwin—who drives an orange Cadillac instead of a tasteful black one, or a Mercedes-Benz such as a Yale trustee might favor. So nobody really knows what Harry Ransom said to the Board to convince them to build the best by god collection of modern literary manuscripts in the English-speaking world, but devotees of the Ronnie Dugger school of academic demonology, a school generally sympathetic to faculty complaints, suspected the worst. Rumors circulated that money was being passed under the table, that this or that member of the Board had a special understanding with the booksellers who acted as Ransom’s agents, allegations that were never supported by so much as a shred of evidence. Bill Holman, who in his career in San Francisco exposed a crooked bookbinding arrangement that was costing the city as much as $50,000 a year, enduring payoff offers, lawsuits, and even a death threat in the process, says the idea is nonsense that Ransom or anybody else profited improperly from the HRC, and offers to show the financial records to anybody who thinks he can prove otherwise. “Ransom just wasn’t motivated that way,” he insists, “and anybody who thinks he was just didn’t know him at all.” An Austin book dealer who has not done much business with the HRC personally, but who is familiar with some of the sales that have been made, says, “I’d be astonished if anybody ever made an illegitimate nickel off the HRC.” The book dealing fraternity is a small one; the market value of rare books and manuscripts is well known and sharply watched.
But the spectacle of millions of dollars being committed on trust to what appeared to many to be Harry Ransom’s vainglorious hobby, while the General Libraries languished and faculty salaries did not grow as rapidly as most would have liked, was bound to cause trouble. Probably Ransom’s biggest mistake, from a public relations standpoint, was failing to respond to criticism from beneath him in the hierarchy or from outside the university. Partly he is said to have been fearful of too-close scrutiny from the Legislature. No rare book library comparable in scope has ever been built by public money at a state university; almost all of the HRC’s equals, Harvard, Yale, the Huntington, even the special collections at the New York Public Library, are funded from private sources. “That’s why they still lie low,” according to the same book dealer who denies chicanery. “What they fear is they will have to try to convince some of the idiots that are in the Texas Legislature that these things are worth the money.”
The result was that while the HRC, with the backing of Ransom and the Regents, won most of its battles, it remained rather isolated from the rest of the campus. Faculty who might have been won over by Ransom’s famous salesmanship and contributed to the HRC’s growth or made use of its resources stayed away. Certainly it did not help when Warren Roberts, contrary to Holman’s current offer to open the books, responded to Ronnie Dugger’s request to look at the purchase records by saying they were nobody’s business. That, as Dugger points out, was a peculiar position for a public employee to take, and one that did nothing to allay critics’ suspicions.
The result of all this secrecy was that when Stephen Spurr became president at UT-Austin in 1971 he acted as if he had a mandate from the faculty to bring the HRC under control by placing its budget under the aegis of the General Libraries. Ransom, by then in partial retirement but still serving as director of special collections, had no difficulty in continuing to see that the HRC monies came directly from regental appropriations, which in effect gave him and the library a much freer hand than the elaborate budgetary processes of the administration would have allowed. But on September 1, 1974, Ransom resigned from that position to concentrate his efforts on the history of the university, which occupied him until his death twenty months later.
Apparently, while trying to conceal exactly what he was doing from the Board, which had specifically instructed him otherwise, Spurr began taking steps to move the HRC budget to a position subordinate to that of the Main Library. On September 24, he was fired by Chancellor LeMaistre, some thought at the urging of Regents Frank Erwin and Jenkins Garrett, both of whom had a proprietary interest in the HRC and its collections. (Garrett himself is a bibliophile and has made generous gifts both to the HRC and the library at UT-Dallas. It bears mentioning that Regent and ex-Governor Allan Shivers is also a collector of books, and of Texana particularly.) No one believes that the HRC affair was the sole cause of Spurr’s firing and the subsequent follies over who would succeed him. The conflict was engendered over a period of more than two years, but there is no question it was a significant factor. (The whole story, as well as it was known at the time, was told by Bo Byers in the December 1974 issue of Texas Monthly. No wonder Lorene Rogers makes a point of her pride.
But now that the dust has apparently settled, what has all this hoarding and institutional self-aggrandizement got to do with education? Can one not, afterall, purchase a perfectly serviceable copy of Passage to India for less than $5 at any decent bookstore? One can. The question of the HRC’s intrinsic worth, however, is more difficult. A visible symbol of UT’s large ambitions, the HRC is also, both historically and in its present uncertainties, a case study of why the university’s visions of unquestioned eminence seem never quite realized. In a larger frame the library also presents the perennial problem of Texas culture beyond Willie Nelson, and, by extension, of the rest of the country’s cultural aspirations as well. Is the growing, tax-supported cultural bureaucracy in the United States a testimonial to our sophistication or just another form of government pomp?
Actually using the HRC’s manuscript materials at first adds to that uneasy feeling of dislocation and contradiction summoned by the thought of all those artistic passions entombed. I made the proper requests to examine some of the library’s Graham Greene papers, entering that forbidding building—almost no one who works there has anything good to say about it—and walking by the armed guard and the bank of television monitors at the entrance to the elevator, which is the only way to get to the collections. After passing those barriers and surrendering anything in which a book or manuscript could be hidden, and having filled out the proper forms and exchanged pens for light pencils, I was handed two manuscripts I had asked to see. The Power and the Glory was written with a fountain pen on bound, legal-sized sheets in a hand that, while minuscule, is still quite readable. Either Greene had a remarkably clear idea of where he was going from the first page, or, like me, he has habit of tearing up the sheet and beginning again when a passage has not gone just right. The Comedians exists in the HRC in several drafts, and also in notebook form, dating from the trip Greene took to Haiti that gave him the idea. Some of the notes are preserved on scraps of newspaper, personal stationery, even a stolen menu. In form they are fragmentary, incomplete, and at times incoherent. Even the man many regard as the greatest living novelist in English has his moments of leaden scribbling, just like those of us who rarely have anything else.
Even so, looking through such literary artifacts can be rather humdrum: most imaginative people lack the patience for scholarship, while many scholars have little imagination. As a writer who sometimes wonders whether he has enough of either capacity, I was considering whether I could stick it out for more than an hour when I turned over the jacket to volume 14 of The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman upon which Greene, obsessive like all novelists, had jotted some notes while reading. There he had scribbled, almost illegibly, a few lines of dialogue that illuminated the man for me like a silent flash of summer lightning. They were the words, evidently, of his drunken and adulterous English hotelkeeper, desperate to ignore the Haitian tonton macoute:
“I’m not interested. I want to run a hotel. I want to make money.”
“What else do you want?”
“God knows.”
Fifty or a hundred years from now, a person reading that scrap of dialogue who values Greene’s work as I do will experience a chill, as if the man himself (Greene is now in his mid-seventies) had come quietly into the room and touched his shoulder. Such experiences are what make scholarship exciting. They are, to scholars, both thrilling and sustaining, and in fact are better than having met the writer, because a great artist’s legend, and the self-protective masks notoriety and circumstance compel him to wear, impose a screen between him and his admirers. Writers are what they are on paper. If that scholar/reader has the patience and the imagination, he or she may be moved to create something novel and worthwhile out of the moment, or of a series of such discoveries, and to that degree the purpose of the HRC will have been fulfilled.
In trying to think my way further through the contradictions raised by the HRC, I think of the lift that comes into the voices, even over the telephone, of former Regents Garrett and Erwin, the latter so often cast as the villain in UT’s recurring melodramas, when they speak of Harry Ransom and of what they think of the library he built. The Regents, Erwin says, have precious little to do with whether the university and the HRC live up to their potential. All they can really do is to provide the wherewithal and hope. To readers accustomed to viewing Erwin as the very devil, as Dugger characterizes him in Our Invaded Universities, it is no doubt blasphemy to imagine that he is probably sincere, even worse to speculate, as Bill Holman does, that in a hundred years the HRC will be seen as his monument as well as Ransom’s.
My Library
