Manuscripts - an endangered species? (Published in Manuscripts, the journal of the Manuscript Society, vol. LIV - number 2 Spring 2002)

Up to the beginning of the twentieth century and even for the greater part of it, civilisation largely depended on the hand-written word. Without that means of record and communication we should have little past, not much history, and less literature.

After consciousness itself, words and speech will continue this side of the millennium as the most evident distinguishing features of our species and the main forms of documentation and intercourse, but, no doubt, they will be increasingly recorded electronically and by other mechanical methods. So what is the future for handwriting and for manuscripts?

It really is not inconceivable that future generations will no longer learn how to write. They may not even have to type. Of all writers, it is perhaps poets who will hold out the longest: for them, pen play, contact between the ink, nib and paper and the flow down the writing arm seem to be part of the process of composition, of the act of engagement. Already, however, many novelists and non-fiction writers are well versed in those parts of the PC that they need, especially revision and correction, despite the downsides of making books at once fatter and thinner (thinner in the quality of writing). We must encourage these authors to preserve their hand-corrected print-outs (as also to annotate their books). It seems even more likely that letters will soon no longer be the normal means of communication or even much of a part of it. As mailing systems get at once more expensive and more unreliable [there appears to be some sort of astral correlation between the two] and electronic mail becomes more widespread and even cheaper, and we can deliver messages, get replies and delete the lot in a trice, who will want snail mail any more? This, despite the sense that e-mails seem almost to come from another part of the brain.

For the first time, then, in virtually the whole span of civilised history, manuscripts could cease to be part of the way in which ordinary people do things - part of their general way of writing, recording and communicating. As hand-written materials pass out of normal currency, cease to have the parallels in ordinary life that they do at present, why should anyone even bother with them, let alone collect them in the future? Especially once they are published.

It is my belief that the more manuscripts cease to be the normal means for the preservation of ideas and information and for the transmission of texts, the more they will acquire a richer fascination. There will be a stronger sense of their particular identity. They will be increasingly treasured for themselves, sui generis. They will be seen, much more, not merely as means to an end or final repositories of the truth, but simply as artefacts of bygone ages. They will, at last, become antiques and their appeal will be wider.

This will be true because, while for most academics the text is everything, established collectors, more or less depending on the richness of their imaginations and the acuity of their sensibilities, already collect for reasons other than the textual content alone. Nonetheless, it perhaps needs to be emphasised that, whether published or not, the subject matter is an essential part of the mix in stimulating the fancy; indeed the more interesting the content, the greater the rewards - intellectual, aesthetic, emotional and financial - a manuscript is likely to provide.

In my view, they unnecessarily demean collecting who find it merely in their fundament - it is not just an involuntary act of anal retention. Nor is collecting just a matter of adult 'transitional objects' ('comforters') or merely a reaction to having had less than 'good-enough' parents. Though these, and perhaps the need for relationships that are at once both inspiring and unchallenging (the dead can't answer back), as well as all sorts of possible projections, reassurances, controls, compensations, substitutes, displacements and dependencies, are all too real enough and undoubtedly are among the primary forces that drive collectors. But why must an exposure of such causes belittle all their effects? A capacity for solitude, so essential to creativity, is also a desideratum in collectors. 'A tale with a lamentable close yet has its stages and times of honour' (Thomas Mann, The Tales of Jacob).

'What are days for? / Days are where we live. / They come, they wake us / Time and time over. / They are to be happy in: / Where can we live but in days?...' Fortunately for Philip Larkin, who here reminds us that we should look for happiness in the present, but who was himself somewhat of a morose disposition (as the end of the poem shows), happiness does not consist only of its most exuberant expressions - joy and elation. Across its whole gamut, both the cognitive and emotional, happiness also takes in contentment, satisfaction, peace of mind, fulfilment (including self- improvement), enjoyment, excitement and fun. In some prioritised indices of happiness, relationships with like-minded companions (and the worlds of rewards that they bring) and satisfying work and active leisure are accounted among the most important sources of well-being. Collecting undoubtedly serves many people beneficially during their lives in these respects.

However there is also a higher scheme of things in terms of collecting, involving considerations of the past, the present and the future which have significance for as well as beyond the individual involved. An interest in his past is an inbuilt response in Man. 'How else do we know it's us, without our past?', John Steinbeck asked. How else can we make sense of our lives unless we discover ourselves to be part of the continuum? For those interested in psychological parallels (if, indeed, they are not in some ways part of the same process) aspects of the Jungian concepts of the collective unconscious and the self-regulating psyche seem to suggest themselves. We need to have some relationship with the past and one of the easiest and most effective ways is through contact with our human predecessors. Collecting can be one of the royal roads.

Perhaps more than any other form of study, history gives us a purchase on the past and upon the continuum by allowing Man, uncertain of his own destiny as an individual, to stand over something finite, something more or less defined - the lives of his predecessors whose deaths afford them a unity ('closure') as yet denied to the living. Without manuscripts, our knowledge of the past and the understanding, perhaps even the wisdom, that come with it would not be possible. In terms of human history so far, we should not have the evidence or bases for learning or imaginative engagement. And the ones who get most out of the past are those who put most into it, who relive it imaginatively; who place themselves in the driving, or at least the passenger, seat of history. It happens that collectors are more or less propelled by the need to possess, some maniacally so.

One ingredient of happiness not mentioned above is absorption. Reflective commitments outside the ego are for individuals the means, as it were, of halting the passage of time, of stepping out of the stream of consciousness, discovering 'the still point of the turning world' (T.S. Eliot), finding something finite in our lives that lack the certainty of definition until, all too soon, too late, they are done. Giving ourselves time 'to stand and stare' (W.H. Davies), we can experience, when at our most attentive, Eliot's 'unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time'. And open- ended fields of study can give us open-ended opportunities for what Gerard Manley Hopkins called 'inscape'; what others, through a dimmer glass, term 'insight-fulness'. By studying the lives of others we may make some sense of our own. Along the way, partly through 'losing ourselves' ['music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts' (Eliot)], not always distinguishing the dancer from the dance (Yeats), we may learn or perceive, or receive, something for or about ourselves. We can be defined, and refined, perhaps even civilised and distinguished by our collections. They can have their noble, and ennobling, sides. They can make a contribution to our coming to terms with ourselves and comprehending something of the human condition.

One way or another, more or less unconsciously, many, if not, in truth all of us (even Existentialists) seek meaning for our lives in some form of immortality. The hopes of some reside in the future; others seek perpetuity in the present and the past. Belief in the afterlife and the continuity of genes in offspring (whose lives we can influence by environment and affection) offer solace for time to come. But a more measurable, and perhaps more human, immortality is in the present and the past - in achievement, celebrity, in the ways thinkers, writers, artists and musicians have an impact beyond the grave. As Balzac said, 'Fame is the sun of the dead.' We all survive only so long as we are remembered or can stir emotions or reflection in generations to come. Our collections can lend us a certain dignity, respectability. They can afford us a worthy place in a worthy tradition. They can be our monument. They can thereby provide us with our own defiant gesture at the Grim Reaper. Even Freud thought his collection of antiquities an essential part of what raised his life above that of the mediocre bourgeois professional.

Nor should it be forgotten or under-esteemed that collectors serve as custodians in preserving the past. Indeed, they can be ahead of the herd, can create a subject, start a trend, save what might otherwise be despised, ignored, not seen or discovered by others, or just be beyond their grasp. They pass on something for their successors to absorb, and to be absorbed by, and to build upon. And with their own reflections, research and catalogues, they can make important contributions to knowledge and civilised life. Collectors invest their personalities, as well as their pockets, in what they do, both in the selection of material and the work they do on it. Librarians and scholars (which is not to deny or denigrate what they do) cannot make the same sorts of contributions that come from the compulsive obsessions and commitments of collectors or the opportunities, and freedoms open to them. A good collection, properly described, is almost by definition, greater than the sum of its parts. In some degree, it is a creative process.

Art and engagements of the mind are man's highest activities and achievements. For some people it is old houses, for others furniture, or pictures and portraits, or objects, books, literature, music, science or history that are their contacts with these lofty transactions, and with our forebears. We can be manifold, not exclusive, in these things, but I believe that manuscripts are among and in many ways are themselves the most direct means that we can get to dynamic combinations of the events, ideas, emotions and personalities of the past and this is why they will survive as items to be collected, especially when their 'usefulness' is over. The fact is that, like people, they speak to us in many ways other than merely telling us what they have to say.

Manuscripts are how much of history happened; or how we know it happened. They are among the main artefacts and arteries of history. They do carry the cargo of men's lives. They are important conduits for their achievements. Moreover, they seem, even without entering the portals of graphology, to carry something of the personality of the person who wrote them. They appeal emotionally and often in a stirring way. They are the closest we can get to the great men and women and the geniuses who have moved us. They can carry the whiff of battle. They can bear the wisdom of the ages. They can preserve the lover's lament. They can convey the thrill of discovery. They can reveal how life transmutes into art. Letters are the first alternatives to human speech. We can be part of the conversation. Imaginatively, we can become the recipient. The contact between individuals that letters preserve makes them the most human and most accessible form of history; on a human level and on a human scale. They are living handshakes across time. You can hold history in your hand. Every manuscript is like a small key to a whole branch of knowledge. Each one is an opportunity to learn. Americans particularly (and this is said to praise not patronise) seem generally to have preserved a sense of wonder more than the British, and have a palpable, even palpitant, response to a piece of paper that they know George Washington leaned over, touched and signed. An account of the Battle of Trafalgar by a seaman on the Victory; Nolan's note leading to the Charge of the Light Brigade; a letter by Dickens giving the background to the death of Little Nell; a draft of the Declaration of Independence, bring us face to face with the events, emotions, ideas and personalities of the past. They are relics, 'holy' in their way. Powerful, some would say magical, evocations. To own a manuscript by Keats is really the closest you can get to him both physically and mentally. To own a corrected draft of one of his poems - in effect a record of part of the creative process - is to have a window into his soul. It is a numinous experience. In some degree, it is an act of worship.

More and more these qualities (almost inevitably in the manuscripts of novelists, but perhaps, as indicated above, only gradually in those of poets) will be unavailable to lovers and scholars of literature, music, science and history. The loss of drafts, swallowed up in hard drives, will mean that the evolution of a work, one of the unclaimed wonders of the world (perhaps, on reflection, the greatest of them all) will no longer be accessible - unless audit trailing and the like is possible [and there have been press reports of such a software development], though even that would not be the same. We shall be the poorer for it - but it will surely make us more respectful of what we have and give manuscripts a new lease of life.

In the best essay ever written on poetical drafts - 'Sylvia Plath: The Evolution of "Sheep in Fog"', Winter Pollen, edited by William Scammell, 1994, Ted Hughes extrapolated the remarkable qualities of drafts: 'What these drafts reveal...is more than the working out of a famous poem. They reveal what is essentially a parallel body of poetry. They are a transparent exposure of the poetic operations to which the finished work is -- well what is it? In one sense, that final version conceals all these operations. It exploits them, plunders them, appropriates only what it can use, and then, finally, for the most part, hides them. But having seen these drafts, we do not respect the poem less. We understand it far better, because we have learned the peculiar meanings of its hieroglyphs. These drafts are not an accidental adjunct to the poem, they are a complementary revelation, a log-book of its real meanings.'

They also have tremendous, and often undervalued, visual qualities.

Like books, manuscripts offer a wider range to the collector than most other media; their scope is virtually the whole of human endeavour: literature, art, music, exploration, science, medicine, finance, magic, cricket, hunting, cooking, yachting, religion, economics, space, architecture, aviation - the choice is almost limitless. But more than books, manuscripts connect us to the man. Arnold Bennett once remarked that 'Charles Lamb is a man not a book'. It is this that distinguishes the collector of manuscripts from the collector of printed books, although, of course the two species are not necessarily exclusive and their interest in the subject matter of their collection springs from the same sensibilities and emotional responses, albeit with their shadows differently positioned. It is, moreover, most often the work that rouses our interest in the man. This sense of contact experienced by collectors of manuscripts perhaps found its most exuberant and misplaced expression in 1795, when Boswell fell on his knees and kissed the then undetected forgeries of Shakespeare's papers manufactured by William Henry Ireland.

John Donne made the point thus:

'What Printing presses yield we think good store.
But what is writ by hand we reverence more:
A book that with this printing-blood is dyed
On shelves for dust and moth is set aside,
But if't be penned it wins a sacred grace
And with the ancient Fathers takes its place...'

Handwriting is, as it were, a pictograph of the man, in some ways perhaps as individual as his fingerprint, as his iris, as (some claim) the shape of his ear, perhaps even as his DNA. Its physical presence on the page represents him. It seems to bear as well as to be his mark. It usually presents him sallying forth, putting his best foot forward, but drafts, like preliminary drawings, wonderfully transfix the process of creation, and its freshness. In a very real sense a man's handwriting is his abstract portrait. We recognise him from it. We have an emotional contact with him through it. The paper, the age, the shape, the size, the colour, the ink, the bloom, the stains, the wear, the folds, the tears, the creases, the seals, the smell, the postal markings, the endorsements, the dockets, the spelling, the corrections, the revisions, the writer, the recipient, the provenance, the writing, the style, the thoughts expressed: all contribute to our senses of reality and contact. We respond emotionally, psychologically and intellectually. Manuscripts bring history home to us. They place us in the continuum. They broaden, and deepen, our sense of our own identity. They help to populate our inner lives.

Roy Davids

It is not in the purpose of this article to address two other important manuscript issues, but they are so related as requiring mention here: the consequences of the not uncommon fault of ignoring what is not understood and those special cases like marks of emphasis in music manuscripts or the punctuation dashes of Emily Dickinson which cannot be adequately reproduced in print, but are so telling to those who, wonderfully, are sensitive to them.

A substantially shorter version of this article appeared in Antiquarian Book monthly in April 2001.