King's Ransom

Here's one thing that's already great about UT: At the Humanities Research Center, you can see some of the most extraordinary cultural artifacts of all time. All you have to do is ask.

by John Spong

October 2003

WHEN I WAS A STUDENT at the University of Texas at Austin in the early nineties, a story got around about the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. It didn't qualify as campus legend; too few people had heard it. It was more like a rumor, and it went like this: If you rode up to the fifth floor of the HRC—that is, if you could find the HRC, which was a chore before $14.5 million in renovations were completed this spring—you could fill out a request form and then be allowed to look at the journal Jack Kerouac kept while he was writing On the Road. That's right: the very journal, written in Kerouac's own hand in a small, spiral-bound notebook that was no doubt kept in the back pocket of his dirty blue jeans while he was, literally, on the road.

But there was one thing you had to keep in mind. To see the journal, you had to have a valid reason. And if you weren't writing a biography of Kerouac or making a documentary on the Beats and you didn't feel comfortable lying, you could still get in if you remembered the magic word. Write "inspiration" in the space marked "purpose of research," and the keys to the kingdom were yours.

I didn't give the story much thought at the time. But a few years later, when I was between careers and in possession of plenty of free time, I went by the HRC to suss things out. It happened that the rumor was true. A particularly helpful librarian pointed me not just to Kerouac's journal but to other items in the Kerouac collection. In papers obtained from the widow of Neal Cassady, Kerouac's friend and role model, were dozens of letters Kerouac wrote while he was struggling to find his voice. The stream-of-consciousness flow was there in his prose but none of the confidence. That changed, though, with the letters he wrote after On the Road was published. Suddenly his signature was taking up half a page.

An afternoon at the HRC turned into a week. I'd arrive in the morning, think of an artist, and ask for the moon. Half an hour later, I'd be holding a handwritten draft of Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night or a letter from jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker written during his court-ordered dry-out at a California mental hospital. (Parker's handwriting was immaculate; each g looked like it had taken five minutes to write. But the message was less deliberate: "Man—please come right down here and get me out of this joint. I'm about to blow my top!")

I've since learned just how much HRC there is. It owns one of the surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed with movable type. It owns the first photograph ever taken. As an American cultural archive, it is ranked not far behind the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library; the only university libraries consistently mentioned in the same breath are the Beinecke at Yale and the Houghton at Harvard. The HRC has the personal papers—manuscripts, journals, letters, and the like—of a long list of true literary lions, including Joyce, Twain, Faulkner, Beckett, Hemingway, Ginsberg, Singer, Wilde, Waugh, and Pynchon. Its photography collection is one of the finest in the world, with thousands of images from the Farm Security Administration's famous photo project and more than a million taken by San Antonio panoramic photographer E. O. Goldbeck. Then there are the oddities that show the artist behind the art. Gertrude Stein's pens. Carson McCullers' cigarette lighter. Edgar Allan Poe's desk. Marlon Brando's address book.

If you took the time to find the HRC, the allure was simple, and it wasn't a desire to be nearer to celebrity. It was something more. The HRC humanizes the superhuman. When you pick up a page of Joyce's final revisions to Ulysses, you're not looking at the most important novel of the twentieth century. Rather, you're glimpsing a moment in time, an instant when Joyce was just a man and Ulysses just an idea.

"RANSOM BELIEVED THAT THE BOOK represented the end of the process," HRC director Tom Staley told me in his office one morning in August. "You get the story down, you print it, and then other people read it. But where did that story come from? What you really ought to study is this trajectory, as I call it, of the imagination. What are the false notes? What was thrown out; what was kept? So in the end, what the student studies is the creative process."

That was Harry Ransom's vision when, as vice president and provost of UT, he founded the Humanities Research Center in 1957, and it still guides Staley as he presides over almost everything that happens at the HRC: fundraising, acquisitions, conservation, exhibits. Staley has the refined charm of a Pennsylvania-born Fulbright scholar turned university administrator. Yet he's a passionate storyteller, particularly when the conversation gets around to the right topic, like James Joyce—nearly every inch of shelf and wall in Staley's office is occupied by books about or pictures of Joyce—or the HRC.

"When Ransom decided in the fifties to make a special collection and create the center," Staley said, "he believed Harvard and Yale had the great collections of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, Cambridge and Oxford had the great early collections, and Texas was just a young university. So he decided to collect what wasn't already gathered up, as it were, and he went after the late-nineteenth and twentieth. He bought a great deal from a man named Hanley, who was very wealthy and who lived in Bradford, Pennsylvania, which is, as you know, where the oil industry really started—they still have that famous Pennsylvania crude, which they use in motor oil. Hanley married a belly dancer named Tallulah, and her twin sister lived in the house with them. But anyhow, Hanley had this great big house that he filled full of books. His accountant would say, 'Look, you don't have the money for this, and it is so dangerous to keep these in this wooden house. You could burn them all.' So Ransom would send a truck up there and buy them. And Hanley would always tell him, 'That's it! I'm getting out of this collecting business forever!' And two years later Ransom would have the truck at his door again."

Part of Ransom's success owed to a small market for twentieth-century writers and a nearly nonexistent one for manuscripts. But it was due also to his ability as an administrator; four years after founding the HRC, he became the UT System chancellor. "There was always this myth," said Staley, "that Ransom had made a pact with the devil, meaning [Board of Regents chair Frank C.] Erwin. 'Let me have money for the libraries, and the football teams can do this or do that.' Now, I don't know if that's true. But there is one extremely important thing in all this that people lose sight of: Ransom was able to convince the regents that the part of the Permanent University Fund that went to capital expenditures, meaning the money from the university's oil leases that was originally used only for buildings and roads and not academic programs, could be used on books. That's the crucial point."

Although Ransom served as director of the HRC only from 1958 to 1961, he was a presence there throughout his chancellorship, from 1961 to 1971, and until he died, in 1976. Two years later the HRC purchased the Gutenberg Bible in his honor for $2.4 million. The next ten years saw continued growth and, more significantly, the development of a world-class conservation department, beginning in the early eighties.

Staley became the human face of the HRC in 1988. Until recently, his biggest gets were works by Pynchon, Burgess, and Singer and by contemporary British playwrights like Tom Stoppard. Although he has opted not to pursue Texas writers—they have, for the most part, deposited their papers in the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University, in San Marcos—he has pushed the HRC to take a chance on first editions of contemporary authors like Jonathan Franzen and the McSweeney's magazine crowd. "Maybe we'll make a mistake on a writer and lose eighty bucks," he said. "It will be historically interesting, and it's cheaper than the alternative."

This spring, however, Staley raised eyebrows when the HRC acquired Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate archive for $5 million. Announced at a time when higher-education funding was being slashed, the purchase caused a small ruckus even though it was made entirely with private funds. Staley said the controversy should have been over how little he had to pay. "The trick was finding the funds outside the university," said Staley. Containing more than 250 reporter's notepads, memos, photographs, drafts of stories, and All the President's Men, both the book and the screenplay, the collection realizes Ransom's vision in all ways but one: It is not complete. Documents relating to confidential sources, including Deep Throat, have been kept in Washington. Only after the sources die will their names be revealed and the documents sent to the HRC.

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