Blessed are the Dead

When we are buried the proteins, lipids and liquids, the sugars and salts, the vitamins, minerals and trace elements of which the human body is composed go back to enrich the earth.

When an archive finds its institutional resting place, it enriches the inner life of -- I was going to say -- the nation. But a British writer had better be dead before he can expect to encash his archive on his native soil. The only real domestic alternative is to make a lifetime disposition of his or her 'remains' gratis.

The simple, regrettable fact is that Britain is careless of its literary heritage in terms of the archives of living writers, despite the overly brave face put on the situation by the likes of the former head of the British Library, Brian Lang, when he should have been the person spearheading assaults on the government to make it change its attitude.

Current institutional budgets provided by the Treasury in this country are not large enough to facilitate the purchase of all the manuscript collections that British libraries should and would like to acquire and nothing has changed in any real terms of late in the provision of funds for the purchase of contemporary writers' archives. Only minimal verbal tweaking has been made to the policy of the Heritage Lottery Fund not to acquire objects created in the last twenty years. The significant relaxation of the rules which was anticipated but not forthcoming in the HLF's recent review of its policy raised false hopes among British librarians about the papers of writers they were beginning brightly to call L[iving] L[iterary] L[egend]s, if not others. A consideration that the twenty-year rule does not take into account is that libraries rightly want complete archives thereby preserving all the chains of evidence, not just the portion that happens to be more than twenty years old. Buying bits is not really an option, for, unlike their American counterparts, British institutions do not seem to favour agreements for buying future work at the market prices obtaining when they come to be offered them - it is too open-ended a commitment for them, and doubtless responsibly so, since they depend entirely on their masters for money and cannot presume on any uncharted largesse.

Writers and their dealers and agents are, therefore, in reality obliged to turn to America to make sales. British scholars might argue that they are thereby denied the concentrated and repeated examination of writers' papers necessary for the excavation of their full cultural value. At the same time the position of British writers has been severely prejudiced.

Such funds as British institutions are granted, either on an annual basis or ad hoc, tend to be allocated towards the purchase of more ancient collections. The British Library has had to eke out its meagre and progressively threatened budget on such recent acquisitions (each for sums I believe in seven figures) as the major seventeenth- and eighteenth-century archives of William Trumbull, John Evelyn and William Petty, and also of the later-day Laurence Olivier, to name only four of the most significant. And it could only do this, it should be said, with substantial additional contributions from the Heritage Memorial Fund, whose budget, I am informed, has been slashed by more than four-fifths in recent years. As noted above, Lottery funding is also available for papers created more than twenty years ago. At the same time, our export regulations, which (rightly, or everyone, even tourists and businessmen would need licences for working papers) do not demand licences for papers under fifty years old, have encouraged some of the most active American institutions to concentrate their funds largely on modern collections.

In many kinds of purchases, like the Trumbull, Evelyn and Petty archives, British institutions have three advantages over their rivals abroad: the export regulations; the calls they can make on the Heritage Memorial and Lottery Funds; and the douceur, whereby owners can get tax concessions of normally 25% against any capital gain or inheritance taxes on sales to accredited British institutions.

But none of these advantages obtain in the case of living British authors: (i) export regulations, as has been said, do not apply to manuscripts less than fifty years old; (ii) it is the current position that no Lottery or Heritage funding is in real terms available for the purchase of the papers of living writers; (iii) the douceur can no longer be invoked for such sales as a result of the outcome of the case about John Wain's papers, vigorously fought, though ultimately unsuccessfully, with support from the Society of Authors during his lifetime.

The result of the Inland Revenue decision about John Wain’s archive was that the literary papers (though not non-business letters) of living writers must be judged as products of their professional work and consequently proceeds from selling them have since been treated as income, subject to the highest rate of income tax applicable in any particular writer's circumstances. The douceur, a tax kickback usually of 25% on sales to accredited institutions, is a concession on C[apital] G[ains] T[ax] and Inheritance Tax; it is not available on income tax.

As if this were not enough, the Wain judgment carries a further two-fold sting in its tail, one damaging to the interests of living writers, the other even further limiting the ability of British institutions to compete with the Americans. Firstly, the treatment of proceeds of sales as income means that writers cannot now group their manuscripts, as was often legitimately possible before when they were deemed ‘chattels’, so that the values of as many of the discrete groups as possible would be below CGT minimums and therefore not qualify as taxable events - namely £6,000 plus costs on any number of individual items sold irrespective of the cumulative value. Thus, a former largely untaxed 'pension' has been snatched from British writers. Secondly, as the disposal of a business asset, any sale of a living author's papers to a British institution will, if the writer is registered for VAT (or has to become so because the sale exceeds the minimum for VAT registration), be subject to VAT at 17.5% (except - officialdom's most arcane ratiocination - those manuscripts which are bound and presented in the form of a book). American institutions do not have to pay VAT on any manuscripts. British institutions pay it on all unbound manuscripts and although some major institutions here can now recover VAT as an input, many still cannot. Ergo, a number of British institutions remain at a further disadvantage vis a vis their American counterparts to the extent of 17.5%.

The consequence of all this is, to go back to where we started, that death needs to precede any real chance of enrichment from the sale of such papers to a British institution. Once the writer is dead, however, the surviving spouse, if there is one, has the advantages of the deferral of inheritance tax, the 'uplifting' of CGT to the date of death of the writer, the douceur, Heritage and Lottery funding, and the treatment of sales as chattels below CGT minimums. Only the last three of these benefits are open to heirs who are not the deceaseds’ spouses. It is perhaps understandable, however, that writers prefer lifetime sales abroad to such posthumous benefits at home.

So, given that this is how the matter stands and that it is to American institutions that we must look for sales, what can be said for them? Our export regulations favour the concentration by some of the libraries on modern archives – there is no need then to wrestle with the not always judicious decisions of the Committee on the Export of Works of Art. American libraries tend to have budgets, the disposition of which are largely at the discretion of the directors, and they can often call on funds, including private donations, that are in the gift of the universities of which they are part. In the background, the University of Texas at Austin has access to oil revenues and Emory University has a large holding of Coca Cola shares, though the Ransom Center at Texas is fortunate to depend most directly on a group of private donors, who like the officers of the library, are committed to collecting modern British literature and are keen to maintain its dominant position in this field. Decisions can be taken pretty quickly and, though libraries may need to spread payments over a period of two to four years without interest, the first payment is usually made fairly swiftly, especially the nearer the time is to the beginning of their financial year. Arranging and cataloguing collections tends to be a high priority and visiting professorships and accommodation are sometimes on offer to scholars and students from abroad. Most of the libraries I have dealt with want continuing relationships with their authors, welcoming (and financing) visits and are keen to make arrangements to have first refusal on any other items offered for sale. They want archives to be as complete, comprehensive and capacious as possible, representing all aspects of the writer's life and work, both in terms of what has already been achieved and what has yet to be endured and produced. Any requirements for the restriction or embargo of selected material, including parts of correspondence, are best addressed before the sale is agreed and confirmed in an exchange of letters or a contract. I have found that American institutions are generally very mindful about the conservation and proper housing of manuscripts and about giving access to them and frequently have continuous programmes of investment in their facilities and resources. Fortunately, the exclusive access to Graham Greene’s archive afforded by Georgetown University to his official biographer appears to be a lonely aberration.

American librarians also generally show enormous commitment to and enthusiasm for acquiring the archives of living writers and are keen to mount exhibitions of their prizes. The British are much more concerned about being seen not to back the wrong horses and British librarians, I am sorry to say, appear demoralised by the difficulties with which they are faced. But if the current flood of papers abroad is thought to have any disadvantages someone will really have to pursue the Chancellor with the dogged determination that Robert Woof of the Wordsworth Centre here does in finding the money to buy manuscripts of his, albeit already dead, authors.

Published in the The Author, the magazine of the Society of Authors, Summer 2002