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 more than that, I think of my visits to the respective offices of two scholars. The first, Carlton Lake, is a New Englander by birth, but for over twenty years he lived in Paris as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, writing as a freelancer for several other magazines, mostly about art, and putting together the matchless collection of French literature that bears his name. He began his collection in 1935 by paying $210 for a presentation copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, inscribed to the poet’s photographer friend Nadar and containing a rare set of proof sheets, which Lake believes is “the most important book of poetry published in the nineteenth century … in any language.” When he lent it to the Bibliothèque Nationale for a centennial exhibition in 1957, a Paris dealer offered him $15,000 for it, a price which by now has been multiplied four or five times at least. He has given it and the rest of his collection to the HRC and moved here to work with it. “I think there is more going on here that is of real interest,” he says in a burst of hyperbole, “than there is going on on all the campuses in Boston combined. They are dead from the neck up. Harvard is sclerotic. People here are excited, don’t you think?” He says he brought his collection here because Ransom convinced him it was the best place in the country to bring it, and that he hasn’t for a moment regretted the decision.
Across the campus in the classics department, G. Karl Galinsky, a passionately bookish man and well-known scholar and teacher, says he is no longer bitter about the HRC and that the major deficiencies of the Main Library have been largely corrected. He is still troubled, though, by the bombastic rhetoric of what he calls “the imperial university” and irritated by what he regards as the attitude on the part of the Regents and the administration that “we built this for you, and you had better be grateful.” There is no other campus that he knows in America where special collections are not considered a part of the general library system and administered as such. “They are hard pressed over there to show that the research and scholarship they talk about are getting done. There is almost no tie-in between the HRC and the teaching mission of the university. We don’t get any reinvigorization of our humanistic commitment from the HRC. In the end they will pin their hopes at the HRC on the Regents, on the imperial policies … perpetuating the elitist, ascetic approach to the humanities. If you foster the impression that this is what humanistic research is all about…” His voice trails off and he shrugs.
There is only one way such impasses may be resolved, and that is through time. Every society that has the means erects monuments to itself, and, like the HRC, they usually reveal its contradictions as much as its glories. Whether in the long run the HRC accomplishes what its supporters have hoped depends as much or more upon what happens in the culture outside its walls as within. If it does become an important center of humanistic thought and research nobody will remember the cost (which, after all, is small compared to that of a few miles of interstate highway), and it will be seen that rather than hurting the UT Main Library, the establishment of the HRC may well have helped shame the Regents and administration into seeing after its needs. Maybe that was part of Harry Ransom’s intention to begin with. Twenty years is a very short time in the history of a great collection.
Carlton Lake aside, however, very few unbiased observers would claim that the HRC is at present what it ought to be. With one or two exceptions, perhaps best known among them William Stott’s book Documentary Expression and Thirties America, the scholarly work that has emerged from the library has not been of the imaginative and synthesizing kind. The HRC’s most characteristic role so far has been as a provider of letters and other materials, either for reprinting in collected editions or for biographies. As often as not, due to the HRC’s generous policy on photocopying and sending materials by mail to interested scholars (adopted partly to deflect criticism), those wishing to use its unique collections have not had to come to Austin to do so. Evelyn Waugh’s biographer Christopher Sykes did his work without leaving England; when Graham Greene decided to return to his biography of Lord Rochester, abandoned in 1938 and later bought from him by the HRC, he stayed at his home in France. It would be difficult to claim that the collections have attracted scholars of great eminence to locate in any of the relevant academic departments of the university, although the program of instruction has benefited from the occasional visitor.
Scholarly editions of letters and variorum texts of literary classics have their uses, although those uses are usually exaggerated by the persons who prepare them. However imaginatively an edition of letters is edited, doing the job is essentially clerical work. Some scholarly editors are great thinkers and teachers; most are not. As literary documents, incidentally, the letters of many authors are more interesting for what they are not than for what they are. Even with the smutty ones now restored, for example, Joyce’s letters make quite pedestrian reading; the artist who went into exile to create what he hoped would be the conscience of the Irish race found his poverty galling. Poor artists write about money almost as often as stockbrokers do.
But whatever their intrinsic worth, once letters and manuscripts have been made available in print, their value to a library shrinks from precious resource to that of curio. To remain great, therefore, a library must continue to grow. When Bill Holman talks about it, he employs terms like “intensity” and “momentum” that make him sound very much like a football coach. Outsiders have criticized the HRC for promiscuous acquisitions, sometimes justifiably. It often seems the HRC has flung its net so wide, in fact, that it would buy and put a wall around the entire city of Austin as an example of an American city in mid-twentieth century if somebody would provide the money. Holman, however, sees it another way: “You can’t build a collection like this without making mistakes. But how can we know today what will be important to future generations? They criticize us because we don’t know how to say no. The only way to avoid making mistakes is not to make any decisions at all. I know some librarians, you could offer a $50,000 collection for $2000 and they would turn it down.”
Even so, collecting coups of the kind Ransom and the HRC were able to make in the past grow more unlikely, indeed almost impossible, every year. Other universities as different as Stanford, Virginia, Southern Illinois, Tulsa, and Utah are also in the competition, for rare books and manuscripts, as well as the big libraries that usually come to mind. With so many institutional buyers now in the field, particularly since many have public money at their disposal, prices continue to go up and up.
Quite obviously the HRC will need firm and enlightened guidance if it is to avoid bureaucratic entropy: the slow leakage of energy that ends in self-satisfied mediocrity. Priorities need to be maintained that will give shape and coherence to the library’s future acquisitions. There is reason to fear that such goals are not at present being articulated, and it is certain that if the growth of the HRC and the development of the UT instructional program are related at all, it is purely by accident. To some degree this state of affairs is an almost inevitable result of Harry Ransom’s passing, and the fact that Warren Roberts, who administered his visions, plans to retire in three years.
For his part Roberts regards the library as having been built, and, with a common sense one wishes were more generally shared in the UT community, thinks that the academic tone of the campus would be enhanced by a slackening of both anxiety and zeal: “UT is so big now,” he says, “that nobody can destroy it—or change it very much from year to year. It doesn’t really matter very much which individual professors stay or leave. Some departments will improve and some will decline in quality, then come back. It’s like some big thing out of the sea that keeps restoring itself. You can hurt it in individual parts, but the whole organism survives.”
But if UT is an organism, the HRC is its appendix—an inessential part. The next edition of its journal, in theory a quarterly, is a year and a half late. Private libraries print theirs on time and list financial statements and books acquired. The HRC does not. Others seek “friends of the library” groups that are not exclusively academic. Roberts sees the need but says he lacks the energy.
The person who inherits Warren Roberts’ job will have the task of guiding the library into full maturity, bringing it out of hiding, as it were, and ending its isolation from the rest of the university and the private booklovers of the state, the nation, and even the world. Actually it will be the local part of the endeavor that will be the most difficult, since the HRC is already better known to bibliophiles in London, where UT’s inner squabbles are unknown, than it is in Texas. No doubt factions are already forming on the Board of Regents and in interested circles of the faculty, administration, and the HRC to maneuver their own choices into the job. The results of such tribalized infighting are well known at UT; what is less understood is how to avoid it. Perhaps enough has been learned in recent years by most of the concerned parties that they can manage somehow to put aside their mutual suspicions. Then perhaps the HRC will become the magnetic center of intellectual and communal endeavor that a great library should be. Hope for it. Do not, however, make the mistake of betting on it.
My Library
