“Many scholars would argue that John Updike is one of, if not the, novelist of the late 20^th century,” Morris said. “No one can really write about the American novel without taking Updike into consideration.”

Although portions of the Archive were given to the library during Updike’s lifetime, and have been available for research at Houghton since 1970, they represented only a small fraction of the full collection. For decades, Updike had been depositing his papers, including manuscripts, correspondence, research files, and even golf score cards, in the library, but the material was available only with the author’s permission, and was not integrated with the material the library owned.

Cataloging the newly acquired material so it can be used by scholars is now one of the library’s “highest priorities,” since the Archive will not be available for research until that process is completed, Morris said. However, scholars will still be able to access materials given to the library by Updike before 1970, including early short story manuscripts written for the New Yorker; Telephone Poles, Updike’s early poetry collection; and nearly complete documentation on the creation of the novel that brought him his first taste of fame, Rabbit, Run (1960).

When the cataloging of the Archive is completed, the Updike Archive will offer students and scholars unparalleled insight into the working life of the man hailed as America’s last true man of letters.

Read the full press release here.

Above:  Updike at home.  Image  © Martha Updike, John Updike Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Right: Modern Books and Manuscripts student assistant Taylor Ferracane (left) and Assistant Curator Heather Cole unpack boxes of books from Updike’s collection.

Under the pseudonym “Mrs. Willett,” Coombe Tennant was welcomed into the Society for Psychic Research, and there are many accounts of her spirit communications, and of her writings, in the Society’s Journal.  Her work as a medium remained unknown outside a small circle of close friends, many also members of the Society.   This group included Gerald Balfour,  brother of the Prime Minister and a member of the Society, with whom Coombe Tennant had a lengthy affair.

*2008M-11.  Images appear with permission of the Estate of Winifred Coombe Tennant.  Images may not be reproduced without permission.

In 1950, perhaps because of Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James’s well-known interest in psychic phenomena, Coombe Tennant placed with her lawyer four locked boxes of her papers, directing that the boxes remain sealed for fifty years after her death and then offered to Harvard University. Houghton accepted this gift, and recently received this collection, which includes over thirty years of Coombe Tennant’s correspondence with Balfour, along with numerous scripts, or automatic writings, from their work with the Society for Psychical Research.  In death as well as in life, Winifred Coombe Tennant maintained a distinction between her public work as a Welsh nationalist, and her private life as a m edium.

At the request of the family, several of Winifred Coombe Tennants diaries, included in the bequest, were given to them to complete the series of diaries they hold.  A transcription of the diaries is in preparation, and after its publication it is the family’s intention to present the diaries to the National Library of Wales to join the Coombe Tennant archive there.

*2008M-11.  Images appear with permission of the Estate of Winifred Coombe Tennant.  Images may not be reproduced without permission.

*2008M-11.  Images © The estate of Winifred Coombe-Tennant.  Images may not be reproduced without permission.

In Blanchot’s criticism (writing, for example, about Beckett, Holderlin, Kafka, Mallarmé, Proust, Rilke, Sade), he asked the question: what is literature? In philosophical dialogue with Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, he analyzed ontological and ethical questions.  He developed a theory of writing and the book that moved away from metaphysical truth toward a sense of absence and an ethics of the Other (‘community’) that was irreducibly plural.

Having disengaged from his right-wing political nationalist writings during the 1930s, he re-engaged on the left in 1958 with the Algerian War and the events of May 1968 in France.  He is the author of Awaiting Oblivion, The Book to Come, Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, The Space of Literature, The Step Not Beyond, Thomas the Obscure, The Unavowable Community, The Writing of the Disaster, and The Infinite Conversation, among other works.

Houghton Library recently acquired page proofs of Blanchot’s 1969 major work, L’Entretien Infini (The Infinite Conversation).  Blanchot seemingly did not preserve the records of his literary work; these were (according to the dealer from whom they were purchased) salvaged from a rubbish bin by the husband of Blanchot’s long-time housekeeper.  The proofs contain numerous handwritten annotations by Blanchot, along with typewritten sheets inserted into the proofs (of which some are small slips taped over pages, and some are multiple pages in length).  Four pages are pictured below (click on each one to enlarge it).

An article providing an overview of the new material uncovered in the proofs, by Smith Professor of French Language and Literature Christie McDonald, along with a brief history of their journey to the Library by Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts Leslie Morris, will appear in the the new online journal of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, The Romance Sphere.

MS Fr 497.  Purchased with the Class of 1952 Manuscript Fund, the Amy Lowell Trust, and the Patrick Grant Second Memorial Fund 1928.  Houghton Library, Harvard University.

The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University has recently given Houghton a Masonic initiation certificate signed by Hall (above).  Dated June 23, 1799, the certificate initiates abolitionist Richard P.G. Wright, and is signed by George Medallion (SW), Jube Hill (JW) and William Smith (as secretary), and by Hall.  A detail of the document, showing Hall’s signature, is below.

This important document is the latest in a series of gifts from the Du Bois Institute to Houghton Library designed to strengthen Harvard’s increasingly significant research resources for African and African-American history and literature.  Past gifts to Houghton Library have included the papers of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (*2005M-10); a beautifully illuminated 17th-century Ethiopian manuscript prayerbook; the unique first issue of Fortune’s Freeman; and numerous other rare books and recordings.  Joint purchases have included the papers of Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka; novelists Chinua Achebe and John Edgar Wideman (*1999M-1(b)); writer Albert Murray (*1998M-1), including his correspondence with Ralph Ellison; and several smaller collections (at Houghton), and the June Jordan papers and the Shirley Graham Du Bois papers (at Schlesinger Library) (Links are provided to the finding aids of processed collections).

f MS Am 2642.  Houghton Library, Harvard University.  Images may not be used or reproduced without permission.

The album contains twelve paintings of spring and summer flowers.

Pictured below are Lobelia Cardinalis, or Cardinal Flower, for August:

Impatiens Noli Tangere, or Touch-me-not, for August:

And Orchis Fibriata, or Fimbriated Orchis, for July:

Dwight is perhaps best remembered today as a chronicler of daily life at Brook Farm, through  correspondence with her friend Anna Parsons.  Dwight, along with her parents and siblings, lived at the Farm from 1844-1847, where she taught art and Latin.  In 1845, Dwight wrote, “I have now a plan, which I will begin to execute tomorrow, of making some little books for sale…They are to be picture books – wild flowers, birds, and I know not yet what variety…I intend to have the cover of colored Bristol-board, prettily stamped like our fans and shades.”  This album seems to be one such book, of which there are very few surviving examples.

pf MS Am 2625.  Dwight, Marianne.  Wild Flowers, 1846. Purchased with the Edward and Bertha C. Rose Acquisition Fund, the Stanley Marcus Endowment for Rare Books, and the Amy Lowell Trust.  Images may not be reproduced without permission.

We are pleased to announce a new online exhibition, “Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200,” based on the 2007 exhibition curated by Christoph Irmscher.

This exhibition seeks to represent Longfellow as he really was: not as the bogeyman of modernists wanting to exorcize the ghosts of their Victorian past, but as a consummate literary professional who became the most popular poet America has ever had. By foregrounding the “private” Longfellow (the drawings made by and for his children, his journals, and letters written by and to him) alongside the international, multilingual and widely-traveled Longfellow, the exhibition demonstrates how Longfellow re-invented poetry as a public forum for everyone’s private feelings and how he consistently challenged the nationalistic distinction between what is typically and purely “American” and all that is not.

More information on the original exhibition, along with a slideshow of images, may be found here.

The records of the Reading Society indicate that writers such as Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Coleridge, and Maria Edgeworth were popular among these readers.  (Unsurprisingly, there is no Shelley, Keats, or Austen…at least, listed as such).  Aside from fiction, many works on travel were collected, along with works of history, biography, science, and even some nonconformist theology.  Many of the books were purchased from B. Crompton, as on the receipt pictured below (click on the images to enlarge them):

The book itself is a ledger-sized volume, with receipts and lists of books purchased affixed to the pages with straight pins. In this page from 1815, such varied works as Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, The Oxford Sausage, and the three-volume Lewis and Clark’s Travels share company.

The Dundas family library lists several thousand books, pamphlets, maps and atlases, from a library now dispersed (Melville Castle is now a hotel).  While the list includes items dating to the 16th century, the majority of the library included 18th-century works printed in London.  The family seems to have preferred collecting works on history, politics, finance, and travels over literature, science, or religion, which appear infrequently in the collection.  Many of the books pertain to America or India, as befitted the 3rd viscount, who spent his military career in both places.  Pictured below is an index to the work:

A selection of items from the Dundas family library, showing works on the East India Company, Edinburgh, and a book by Mrs. Edgeworth:

Books are listed alphabetically, by author and sometimes by subject, but also by their location within the castle. Pictured below is a page from the catalogue listing books found in the”Small Drawing Room,” which include Shakespeare, Addison, and “The Adventures of Ali Baba,” among others:

Catalogue of the Library at Melville Castle:  *2008M-2.  Purchased with the Harrison D. Horblit Book Fund and the Amy Lowell Fund.

Accounts of the Reading Society, Benevolent Society, and Sunday School of Bury:           f *2007M-86.  Purchased with the Amy Lowell Fund.

Images may not be reproduced without permission.

McCaffrey, a Radcliffe alum originally from Cambridge, has authored over 90 works.  This collection follows the creation of the novel, originally titled “The Harper of Pern,” to its publication, and includes multiple typescript drafts with McCaffrey’s handwritten corrections, the final draft of the novel, and correspondence with McCaffrey’s editor and agent relating to the publication of the novel.  The collection also includes a first edition of the book (*2008-47).

b *2008M-6.  Purchased with the Amy Lowell Fund. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

Our new acquisition, MS Syriac 192, is a sixth manuscript from Audo’s hand, and the only one recorded in a western library. It was written out by him in 1848, after he had become patriarch. The manuscript is surprising in several respects. It contains a collection of hymns for the feast of Corpus Christi, a western Catholic feast that must have been quite new among the Chaldeans – a liturgical innovation, indeed, that someone with Audo’s reputation might have been expected to resist. The text of the hymns is in Arabic in Syriac letters (known as Karshuni). We know about a set of hymns for Corpus Christi by the 18th-century Syrian Catholic patriarch Mīkhāʾīl Jarwah, and probably that is what Audo has copied. But if so, he took it from a manuscript in the West Syriac script, and copied it into his own East Syriac script. Karshuni in the East Syriac script is very rare and must have looked strange to local readers, if there were any.

Pictured above is the last page of the manuscript, showing the end of the Arabic text and the colophon in Syriac naming the scribe as Yosip Audo Patriarch of Babel, and giving the date Mosul 21 May 1848. (Click on the image to see it in more detail.)

f MS Syriac 192. Purchased with the Daniel D. Chabris Book Fund and the Stanley Marcus Fund. Image may not be used without permission. This post was kindly contributed by Houghton manuscript cataloger Chip Coakley.

This new four-page manuscript, most likely written ca. 1873, was probably sent to her friend and future editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose wife, Mary Thacher Higginson, transcribed it (the transcription is now at the Boston Public Library in the Higginson Papers). Ralph Franklin believed that the original had been sent to Higginson along with a note and three other poems (see Fr 796); but the new autograph is on different paper (watermarked “A. Pirie and Sons 1871″) than the three still in the Higginson Papers (BPL MS Am 1093 (48), (40), and (50)). Higginson also refers to this poem in a letter to his co-editor Mabel Loomis Todd (1891 May 13); this, in combination with the transcript, makes it seem probable that the present manuscript was at one time in his possession.

But how did it leave his possession? The details of the manuscript’s provenance are not yet fully established, but it seems likely that Higginson gave it to Gretchen Osgood (Mrs. Fiske) Warren (1868-1961), whom he would have known through the Museum of Fine Arts. The present manuscript, reputedly from Mrs. Fiske Warren’s estate, appeared for sale at Skinner’s in Boston on 10 November 2001.

Houghton Library holds a variant of this poem, sent by Dickinson to her sister-in-law Susan (Houghton MS Am 1118.3 (356)), which begins “The Wind begun to knead the Grass.” Now possible to view the two side by side, the manuscripts bring home to students and experienced textual scholars alike the physicality of Dickinson’s continual reworking of her poems, and her distribution of them to her friends.

The poem was written on one piece of paper folded in half. The first image below shows pages 4 and 1, and the second image shows pages 2 and 3. (Click on the images twice to see more detail.)

This version of the poem reads:

The Wind begun to rock the Grass
With threatening Tunes and low –
He flung a Menace at the Earth –
A Menace at the Sky –

The Leaves unhooked themselves from Trees
And started all abroad –
The Dust did scoop itself like Hands
And throw away the Road -

The Wagons quickened on the streets -
The Thunder hurried slow –
The Lightning showed a yellow Beak -
And then a livid Claw –

The Birds put up the Bars to Nests –
The Cattle fled to Barns –
There came one drop of Giant Rain
And then as if the Hands

That held the Dams – had parted hold
The Waters Wrecked the Sky -
But overlooked My Father’s House –
Just quartering a Tree –

*2007M-74. © The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Purchased with the Dickinson Collection Fund. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

At the bottom of the page, the poet wrote, “Can’t the printers manage to put this song altogether. [sic] It looks very awkward thus divided – or at least to put the 1st stanza altogether before the eye?” He was referring to the last stanza on the page, a song that begins “What does the little birdie say,” and concluded with two lines on the next page. The printer must have paid attention, as the published version of the poem appears exactly as Tennyson requested (image from Google Books):

*2007M-64. Purchased with the Amy Lowell Fund. Houghton images may not be reproduced without permission.

Two recent acquisitions give Mailer a continuing presence at Harvard, and testify to his concern with literary technique, and his efforts to continually improve his own writing and that of others: the papers of Richard G. Hannum, and those of Carole Mallory.

Richard Hannum collaborated with Mailer on the 1986 off-Broadway play Strawhead, about Marilyn Monroe, based on Mailer’s Of Women and Their Elegance (1980). Mailer had had a huge success with his 1973 biography of Monroe, Marilyn: A Novel Biography, in which he stated that she was murdered by agents of the FBI and CIA who resented her supposed affair with Robert F. Kennedy. Hannum’s papers include his correspondence with Mailer, and drafts and final script for Strawhead. Pictured below is a page from Hannum and Mailer’s script for Strawhead, with Mailer’s handwritten notes (click on the image to enlarge it):

(Image © Richard G. Hannum and The Norman Mailer Estate.)

Carole Mallory began her career as a model, then turned actress, playing a Stepford wife along with Paula Prentiss, Katherine Ross, and Tina Louise in 1975. She met Norman Mailer in 1982, and he helped her to begin a career as a writer and journalist. She published a novel, Flash (1987) described by Gloria Steinem as “fast, smart, irresistible to read.” Her interviews—of Gore Vidal and Mailer; Mikhail Baryshnikov; and Warren Beatty, among others, appeared in Esquire, Elle, G.Q., Cosmopolitan, and others. The collection consists primarily of material relating to Norman Mailer, including correspondence, Mallory’s unpublished novel, heavily edited by Mailer, along with his edits to her interviews of him; transcripts and printed interviews of other notables; publishing contracts; and printed material. Pictured below is a page from an interview of Mailer conducted by Mallory in mid-1980s, with Mailer’s handwritten corrections (click to enlarge):

Both collections add to the wealth of material available for research and teaching about the writer’s craft: how writers develop their style and substance, often, as in these cases, through layers of revision. Mailer, in particular, thought of his writing as “a job. . .you have to work at it every day” and both of these collections testify that it was a job he took seriously, as evidenced in this selection, also from the Carole Mallory papers:

*b 2007M-59 and *2007M-63. © Carole Mallory, Richard Hannum, and the Norman Mailer Estate. Images may not be reproduced or quoted from without permission.

The telegram reads: “The secretary of war requests that you come immediately to Washington for the purpose of making a medical examination of Payne the man who attempted to assassinate Sec. Seward please answer how soon you can start & reach this city. J A Hardie, Inspec. Genl. U.S.A.”

Dr. Gray was called in to examine Lewis Paine, who had been arrested for his involvement in the plot to assassinate President Lincoln. Paine (an alias of Lewis Powell, (1844-1865)) was in league with John Wilkes Booth and a group of other individuals, and had attempted to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward on April 14, 1865 (the same night Lincoln was shot). Powell was captured and imprisoned several days later.

John Purdue Gray (1825-1886) was one of the foremost forensic psychiatrists in the second half of the nineteenth century, and was involved in several notable murder trials where the mental stability of a defendant was in question. Gray was one of at least six physicians called to examine Powell when Powell’s attorney wished to use an insanity defense. The doctors could not find proof of any mental instability, and Powell was ultimately hanged for his part in the conspiracy.

This telegram is one item in a large collection of Lincolniana held at Houghton. Other items may be found by perusing Hollis, Harvard’s online library catalog.

*2007M-42. Purchased with the Bayard Livingston and Kate Gray Kilgour Fund. Image may not be reproduced without permission.

In 1950, in Key West, playwright Tennessee Williams finished a second draft of “The Rose Tattoo,” a play he had begun the year before in Rome. Williams called this draft the “kitchen sink” draft, reasoning that “I have thrown into it every dramatic element I could think of. Perhaps all of them will work. Perhaps none of them will work. Probably a few of them will work.”

A few of Williams’ annotations in pencil can be seen on this draft:

Williams showed this draft to director Elia Kazan, who felt it still needed work. Williams went through several more drafts before the play opened on Broadway on February 3, 1951. The play subsequently won Williams a Tony award for Best Play in 1951.

Williams stated in his note to the draft that he wanted “the male part to be offered to Marlon Brando.” Eli Wallach was cast instead, opposite Maureen Stapleton, who both went on to win Tony awards for their performances in the play.

MS Am 2660. Purchased with the Douglass Roby Fund for the Harvard College Library and with funds from the Amy Lowell Trust. Images may not be reproduced without permission.