Harold Pinter Archive Blog

East London united

  I’m just back from collecting the archive of the writer and critic John Berger. John generously donated his archive to the British Library’s collections, but on the (entirely reasonable, and enjoyable) condition that we come out to pick it up from his Alpine home…and help out on the farming while there. In the end the weather conspired against haymaking, but I spent a very pleasant few days sorting through the archive in preparation for its transport back to the UK, and recording my impressions on audioboo. Although John has lived in the Haute-Savoie for many years now, he hails, like Harold Pinter, from East London, and was born in Stoke Newington, not far from Pinter’s Hackney. I haven’t as yet found any Pinter letters in John’s archive, but John was delighted to know that his papers would rest alongside Harold’s archive: just one of a number of examples of the ways in which real-life relationships extend to posterity in our climate-controlled storage area. 

‘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’.

Preserving Pinter

This week I have been continuing the repacking of Harold Pinter’s correspondence files. This has involved removing all the letters from their current homes in lever arch files, taking each letter out of its individual plastic wallet and putting them into acid free archive folders and boxes. I’m not going to lie; this is almost as tedious as it sounds. However, it is absolutely necessary to ensure the long-term preservation of the documents - the metal in the lever arch files would eventually rust and the plastic wallets would degrade, taking the paper inside with them. Harold Pinter’s literary papers have been given the same treatment, whilst the photographs are currently at The British Library conservation suite, being re-housed into specially made albums.

I was allowed a bit of light relief from repacking last week when I attended the ‘The Golden Generation?’ New Light on British Theatre between 1945 and 1968 conference. One particularly interesting section of the conference involved a talk between Harold Pinter and the actor and director Harry Burton, where Pinter shared his memories of post-war British theatre. A podcast of the complete interview can be heard here.

Conservation concerns

The cataloguing of Harold Pinter’s scrapbooks has continued this week. Whilst cataloguing, in addition to noting dates and languages, I have been listing any conservation needs of the volumes. The scrapbooks pose a particular problem in terms of conservation. Many of the earlier volumes are literally bursting at the seams with material. Much of the material is made up of newspaper cuttings, which by their nature are only meant to survive for a day or two. There is also the issue of modern paper types - faxes, photocopies, ink-jet printouts - which are a relatively unknown quantity, but are fairly low quality paper and are not expected to survive longterm. Some items are stuck to the scrapbook pages with adhesive tape or glue, which has already started to degrade and stain. Despite these problems, it is not an option to remove the items from the scrapbooks and re-house them in archival standard folders or boxes as the integrity of the item as a whole would be lost. As was mentioned in last week's post, Harold Pinter himself had a hand in compiling the scrapbooks and the way they are put together is as much of interest as the information they contain. The conservation solution is likely to involve the deacidification of the newspaper cuttings and the creation of boxes to house each scrapbook and protect it from dirt, dust and further damage to the bindings. The climate controlled environment in the stores at The British Library will also prevent further deterioration of some of the more unstable paper types.

I am on holiday next week so cataloguing and blogging will recommence the following week.

Meeting Mr Pinter

Last week I finally met Mr Harold Pinter over a very entertaining lunch. I’ll admit I was slightly nervous to meet the man whose letters I had been rifling through for the last month, despite the fact I had permission. Amongst many things, we discussed how the archive was to be arranged and some of the conservation needs of a relatively modern collection. Luckily for me, Pinter is what I would term an ‘archivist’s friend’ and most of his papers are well ordered into files, with dividers and labels and dates and titles, so devising a scheme of arrangement and maintaining the ‘original order’ has not been too difficult. The conservation of the collection does pose a few more problems, with the horrors of fax paper, newspaper cuttings and early photocopies to contend with.

After lunch we visited the small Pinter exhibition in the Treasures Gallery at the British Library. It must be strange to see your personal scribblings on display, but Pinter seemed very interested and expressed the desire to have a closer look at some of the items. I think it’s a natural reaction to want to hold documents in your hands and take a closer look. Unfortunately, on this occasion we weren’t able to oblige due to the need to keep the documents in a nice, constant environment.

Sadly, cataloguing can’t always be about lovely lunches and by the afternoon I was back to the slightly less glamorous (but more typical) task of removing rusty paperclips from drafts of ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’.