Harold Pinter Archive Blog

One week to go...

The Harold Pinter archive catalogue is being put on-line on Monday 2 February and should be fully visible by Tuesday 3 February. The collection number is Add MS 88880 and you should be able to search using that reference or with keywords (e.g. ‘Pinter’ and ‘Hothouse’). 
 
Once the catalogue is uploaded it will be possible to order items from the collection by emailing mss@bl.uk, specifying which particular volumes you are interested in (bearing in mind the collection is comprised of 504 volumes). A reference for a volume would consist of the collection number followed by a series number and a file number, for example, the reference for the volume containing the final draft of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ is Add MS 88880/1/3 and the reference for the volume of drafts of poems A-G is Add MS 88880/5/1.

The only section of the archive that will not be available for consultation will be the photograph albums as they are currently at the Library’s Centre for Conservation.

Anyone who holds a valid Reader Pass will be able to view items from the collection in the manuscripts reading room at The British Library, St Pancras. Details of how to obtain a pass can be found here. There is one volume in the Pinter archive that has been deemed to be ‘select’ material; this is the file that contains the personal letters of Samuel Beckett, Edward Bond and Joseph Brearley (Add MS 88880/7/2). To gain access to this material you would need to provide a ‘letter of recommendation’ in addition to your reader pass.

‘Tender the dead, as you yourself would be tendered…’

A few days after Christmas, I gave a paper at the MLA as part of a panel organised by the Harold Pinter Society. Although organised many months ago, news of Harold’s death on Christmas Eve lent the panel a reflective air, which did not stop the papers –in their variety of approaches and subjects- celebrating the life and work of a writer who meant so much to us all in so many ways.

Harold was a great friend of the British Library over many years, and we were very grateful to him for agreeing to talk here last September as part of our Theatre Archive Project conference  (an interview that has been picked up by many commentators in the recent days.

It had been a pleasure and a privilege for me to show Harold his papers in their new ‘home’, and to see the delight he got in looking back over his own past through these documents (including photograph albums). In the face of personal tragedy, consideration of manuscripts and archives seems beside the point … a poor substitute for their living, complex, and multi-facetted creators. Yet, in its own –small- way, the preservation of a writer’s papers, among those of friends and colleagues (and the occasional enemy), is one way of ‘tendering the dead’, and helping to ensure that the works and ideas live on.

I saw No Man’s Land just a few days before news of Harold’s passing, and was already carrying the lines and images around in my head when I read of the use of Hirst’s monologue as part of the funeral. As always with Pinter, there’s a certain ambiguity to Brigg’s swift response ‘They’re blank, mate, blank. The blank dead’. Personally, I’m with Hirst who, after a trademark ‘silence’, ripostes quite simply: ‘Nonsense’.