The right attitude to archives
I love Alexander McCall Smith’s stories; simple, thoughtful, entertaining and easy to read. He even demonstrates a fine understanding of the value of correspondence and stamps! But does he have the right attitude to archives?
In the most recent installment in his Sunday Philosophy Club series, The Careful Use of Compliments (Little, Brown, 2007), the value of archives and the issue of appraisal is deftly and comically described… and initially disturbing at that!
Isabel Dalhousie, the main character, edits an academic journal on ethics and has done so for years. Recently informed that in spite of her success in turning the journal around she is to be replaced by Professor Dove, who requests the editorial archive be handed over to him, she warns him in writing that ‘I do not consider these archives to be anybody’s property but my own.’ The narrative continues:
What she had said about the ownership of the archive was probably wrong. Some of it belonged to her – the personal letters written to her as editor and the copies of letters which she had written, on paper which she had provided; those, she thought, were surely hers. (p.92)
Professor Dove duly arrives at Isabel’s place for the handover and Isabel explains:
‘When I took over the editorship,’ she said, ‘I threw out a lot of old files. There were boxes and boxes of papers which my predecessor had done nothing about sorting out. There were all sorts of things which would have been of no interest to anybody. Letters from the printers, and so on. I cleared it all out. There was even an ancient letter from Bertrand Russell about a claim for a train fare to a symposium that the Review had organised.’
Dove, who had been facing the window while Isabel spoke, now spun around. ‘Russell? But what about his biographers? What if they had wanted it?’
Dove’s tone was one of subdued outrage, and Isabel bristled defensively. ‘Would his biographers be interested in a claim for a train fare? Surely not, unless Russell questioned the reality of the train journey, or something like that. I think that I boarded a train at Paddington, but can I be sure?’ She laughed, but Dove did not; he was concerned with posterity, and could not laugh at such things. Isabel wondered what conclusion biographers might draw from such a letter: that Russell was always one to claim expenses? Or that his finances were not in a good state and that he needed to watch even very minor outlays? (pp.135-6)
Isabel is given to these flights of philosophy, but more than anything she is annoyed at the manner in which her downfall has been plotted: her attitude to the archive is tied up in this. But I felt a pang that a favourite character (and the author no doubt) could apparently trivialise the idea of the archive. She knows her idea about the ownership is probably wrong, and her dilemma about the division of personal/professional in the archive is interesting.
As a researcher first however, I blenched at her cavalier statement of appraisal and disposal (‘I threw out a lot of old files’) and like Dove (described in the blurb as machiavellian) find myself slightly more concerned with posterity.
Delightfully however, McCall Smith brings this to the point some forty pages later, when Isabel is trying to track down the identity of a man who stayed at a guesthouse and asks the proprietor to check his register for an address (let’s not consider the ethics of that):
Rob looked through the papers again. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘We would have known at the time, but we weed out the old letters. We don’t keep them.’
‘A pity,’ muttered Isabel. She thought of her conversation with Christopher Dove: it was exactly what she had done with the old correspondence of the Review of Applied Ethics. She was one to talk. (p.177)
So, has Alexander McCall Smith the right attitude to archives? I’m sure if asked to elaborate on this point, he’d make an interesting keynote speaker at an archival conference!
Well spotted! I am struck most by the absence of any notion of the archivist. There are archives, but there is no archivist. The process of keeping such and such a record and then made known to and available to “the biographers” does not comprehend the role of the archivist. A pretty common attitude.
But actually I wonder if AMS is really having a go at the biography industry, with its obsession with blockbuster biographies and its romantic notion of the biographer dedicating his or her life to the scrutiny of every possible piece of paper - bills, travel claims, laundry lists …
Juliet Barker’s biography of the Bronte family is a typical example and the sad thing is that by the end, when poor Charlotte dies, the biographer seems so exhausted that she cannot bring herself to grieve for the death of her subject, or allow her reader the space to do so either. She just toils lamely along until she can kill off old Pagtrick Bronte and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. There has to be a reason why Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte remains a classic, for all fo its flaws!
Even Michael Holroyd (Lytton Strachey) made some remark to the effect that when one has read a thousand letters by or about one’s subject, it is hard to get excited about reaching for the 1001st.
Strachey himself thought that the wise biographer would “row out over that great ocean of material, and lower into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.”
Good point Anne-Marie and great examples. He probably is!
I know though that when I was in the throes of researching Thea Proctor for my masters thesis I’d have given anything to access more than what was left behind. And for the reasons that you’ve given I would probably have made a poor biographer, at that time anyway. (I think and hope that I’ve learnt something since.)
Isn’t archiving just for old people and librarians? :)
Feel free to cast nasturtiums on archivists Russ, (I am apt to myself), but you leave those librarians alone!