English and Drama blog

On literature and theatre collections from the 16th century to the present day

Introduction

Discover more about the British Library's 6 million sound recordings and the access we provide to thousands of moving images. Comments and feedback are welcomed. Read more

15 April 2020

Collecting Literature on the Web: a Q&A

A Q&A with Carlos Rarugal, Assistant Web Archivist about the UK Web Archive’s literary collections, and the challenges faced by colleagues trying to collect the web, conducted by Callum McKean, Curator of Contemporary Literary and Creative Archives. For more news and information about the work of the UK Web Archive, visit their blog or follow them on Twitter.

‘Oh, you work at the British Library? You guys have everything, right?’ My colleagues and I hear this more often than you’d think. Usually it’s in reference to the Legal Deposit Act, which states that one copy of every book (which includes pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, sheet music and maps) published in the United Kingdom must be sent to the British Library (and, that five other UK libraries have the right to request a free copy within one year of publication). But books — even if they include unusual printed formats — aren’t everything. So much knowledge, entertainment, culture and community is created and shared without ever going to print in the traditional sense. This is why Legal Deposit legislation was updated in 2013 to include regulations around ‘non-print’ works, making provision for the collection of works published online or offline in formats other than print, such as websites, blogs, e-journals and CD-ROMs. The UK Web Archive (which celebrated its 15th birthday this year!) exists to collect, make accessible and preserve web resources of scholarly and cultural importance from the UK domain in line with this legislation. But the Archive also plays an important role in selecting and curating this material. I spoke to Carlos Rarugal, Assistant Web Archivist, about some of their literary collections — the challenges they face — and how you can get involved.

Hi Carlos. Considering the UK Web Archive is relatively young, it’s often presumed that it’s focus is exclusively on contemporary material, but I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of content about contemporary reception of older literary material, like the Dickens Bicentenary and the 19th Century Literature collections — how do you decide which anniversaries to collect?

Hi Callum. The Dickens Bicentenary and 19th Century literature collections are examples of what we call Special Collections, in that they’re actively curated, either by Library staff or outside experts. Web Archiving happens in two streams, called a Domain Crawl and a Frequent Crawl. The Domain Crawl takes place once a year over several months and is a ‘shallow crawl’ of all known UK hosted web-sites. As you can imagine, this involves many millions of web-sites, so we deliberately cap the amount of data per site to 500 megabytes and refer to it as a ‘shallow capture’ because it’s unlikely to capture the whole complexity of the original website.

The Frequent crawl is different because it’s curated and deals with a relatively small subset of websites, around 100,000, each including a unique database record and metadata. Special Collections are often created to highlight frequently crawled sites because a curator or external partner outside of the UK Web Archive, with access to tools, has added the site for crawling, or the public has nominated the topic for inclusion, or curators and archivists within the UK Web Archive team itself were made aware of the occasion. Our network of internal and external experts means that we’re particularly good at capturing material relating to contemporary reception of historical events, as well as more active events as they happen. (As you can imagine, our whole team is very busy with the Pandemic Outbreaks collection right now).

Screenshot of UK Web Archive's 19th Century Literary collectionA screenshot taken from the UK Web Archive's 19th Century Literature Special Collections Page, showing the breadth of content being captured, from news and blogs to academic journals.

One of the collections which I think will be of particular interest to readers of this blog is the Poetry and Zines Special Collection.  This must be a very difficult collection to build in some ways, as this activity often happens in the nooks and crannies of the internet — can you say a little bit about how these collections are built? 

It would be fair to say that we have archived millions of websites that have yet to be discovered or accessed by the public. Websites that feature zines, poetry zines and journals have been captured, though their numbers are few. Contributions come from the curatorial team responsible for contemporary published collections, especially Debbie Cox and Jerry Jenkins (ed note: whose extensive work on Artists’ Books has appeared on this blog). We rely on them and their highly specialised knowledge and professional connections to build these obscure collections. Our work is always collaborative in this way. We try to partner with as many Curators and Archivists as possible, and also with external experts who are keen to get involved in web archiving.

One of these experts, Pete Hebden, who we were lucky enough to work with recently, just posted to the UK Web Archive Blog talking about his experience of exploring and helping to build this collection. If your readers are looking for a place to start, I’d recommend they take a look.

You spoke about contemporary events earlier, two of the largest collections which are available from home seem to be the ones relating to Black and Asian Britain and LGBT issues. This isn’t surprising given how active the online discourse around social justice has become in the past ten or fifteen years. The Library has been active in these spaces more generally, with exhibitions such as Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land and Gay UK: Love, Law and Liberty, and their corresponding web spaces, Black and Asian Britain and LGBTQ Histories. But these are highly controlled spaces, sensitively and co-operatively curated by experts and activists. Collecting web-content  — which is relatively uncontrolled, and sometimes hurtful and offensive — must present huge issues in terms of data-protection and hate-speech.

Yes, definitely. There are quite a few sensitive areas in the UK Web Archive: adult sites, for instance, aren’t promoted but are still archived. Personally, I think it’s important that we archive all sides of the story; and if certain narratives are controversial, we should pay particular attention.  All sides of the conversation will be important for the historians of the future, who will see value in a discursive and highly active medium with a rich research potential. We are limited, of course, but more-so in technical than curatorial and legal terms.

If a site is public, then we are simply operating within our obligation as outlined in the 2013 Non-Print Legal Deposit act. Whether or not we can capture this content is a more of a technical issue, as many sites that include forums for discussions are highly dynamic (PHP or Javascript heavy) and very difficult to capture using our current setup. The discussions online are also occurring more frequently on app-based platforms, which again we are unable to capture, and sites such as Facebook (to name a few) are designed to inhibit crawlers and so we are prevented from archiving.

Under these regulations, if archived content is illegal, it will be suppressed from public access. The content we collect grows daily by gigabytes and is not ‘processed’ at the point of archiving; rather there is a delay to archived content being made available (to both curators and the public). Only parts of our archived content is full-text indexed, so it would not be possible to perform deep searches on recent crawls.

There are times when content can be removed from public access for other limited reasons; for example if sensitive personal data has been mistakenly published on a live website. Our Notice and Takedown process is robust and we are quick to respond; thankfully, there have only been a handful of such requests in the past few years. Archiving under GDPR is permitted as stated in Article 89 which allows ‘archiving in the public interest’.

Screenshot of UK Web Archive's black and Asian Britain collection
The Black and Asian Britain Special Collection page is one of the largest, and contains a wide variety of literary material, from author pages to literary festivals and Twitter pages.

You mentioned social media and how difficult it is to archive. Whilst there’s clearly work going on in this area, I think the Archive does a good job of capturing some of the everyday interactions that happen online, especially on public forums. One of the most charming hubs, and I think it’s important too, is the one relating to Online Enthusiast Communities in the UK. The internet seems able to bring people with similar interests together across huge geographical distances. Most of this activity happens on specialist forums. Everything is represented here, it’s a real curiosity shop, from fans of Japanese Anime to Pylon enthusiasts. Some of the collections that might interest our readers are the Comics UK Forum and the Writers Online Forum. What are some of the issues around collecting this kind of highly social material?

People are fascinated by the spectrum of content in the Online Enthusiast Communities of the UK Collection, and although a lot has been tagged into that collection, it’s likely that more sites that have already been archived are waiting to be added to it, or have yet to be nominated and are waiting to be archived. Whilst all Collections remain active, only a few at a time have the focus of curators and archivists. When a Collection is in focus, curators, archivists, and external partners all work together to focus on adding targets en-masse, with a sustained amount of archiving within a short time frame. Collections in focus need attention so that time-sensitive content is quickly captured. For example, Twitter or news articles that should be captured, perhaps daily, require curation to add/amend the crawling schedules of those websites.

Another issue when archiving uncommon content is the lack of discovery; if we are unaware of their existence then it is unlikely that we will capture that content, even in the Domain Crawl. This issue is compounded when delving deeper into a site, that is, looking at their online forums where regular discussions occur. Without the proper intervention of users, these overlooked forums may not be crawled, and if they are, they may only be shallow crawls that occur infrequently. We do have forums that are being captured often, sometimes daily, however, it is rare that we would have a frequent crawl of a forum unless a user updated a record accordingly. The complex structure of forums, and the fact that they often sit behind a login, makes them more difficult to capture effectively.

Screenshot of UK Web Archive's Online Enthusiast Communities in the UK collection

The Online Enthusiast Communities in the UK page is a fascinating insight into how communities of shared interest, including those of a literary bent, evolve online.

Thanks Carlos

10 April 2020

Postcards for our times

Postcard from Angela Carter Archive showing Prince Charles and Princess Dianna

Postcard from the archive of Angela Carter Archive, Add MS 88899/3/4-24. © Courtesy of Susannah Clapp. Except as otherwise permitted by your national copyright laws this material may not be copied or distributed further.

When was the last time you sent a friend a postcard? Perhaps now’s the time. Yes, you could Whatsapp or videocall or email, but who doesn’t love post? Even if receiving it in this day and age does throw up multiple questions. Should I wash my hands after touching it? Did the postwoman wear gloves? My dad even took to quarantining the daily newspaper for a while until the absurdity of reading 24 hour-old ‘news’ got the better of him. Still, once you’ve got past the hurdle of welcoming an item from the outside world into your home, there is all the joy of the postcard to appreciate. A written message and a visual element to admire, and perhaps some witty interplay between the two, depending on the acuity of the sender.

As we continue our blog series on Digital Literary Collections and following on from Callum’s post on the epistolary novel, I’d like to draw attention to the humble postcard. Sometimes overlooked within the correspondence section of a literary archive, many of our contemporary literary archives contain substantial numbers of postcards and greetings cards. Unlike the heavyweight genre that is the literary letter, they may not be as painstakingly performative and endlessly quotable as their paper counterparts. But these cardboard cousins offer us a more intimate and arguably less self-conscious view of literary friendships. And the images chosen by the senders can themselves offer insights into the workings of a writer’s imagination.

In Susannah Clapp’s article Angela Carter in Postcards on our Discovering Literature: 20th Century website, she recalls her friendship with Carter as played out in postcards ‘dashed off throughout the 1980s from Australia, the States, Europe, London’:

These cards told more than one story. The cartoons, paintings and photographs Angela chose sometimes contradicted, at other times re-emphasised her words on the other side. Some of the images glance at a conversation we had been having, or at an episode in Angela’s life. Sometimes, of course, the picture hints at nothing. Soon it will be harder to uncover the hidden history here, to know what is random and what is allusive.

The images which Carter sent to Clapp reveal her preoccupation with Shakespeare in the early stages of work on Wise Children, as well as her delight in lampooning authority figures, and her aesthetic tastes (there’s something particularly Carteresque about the red splatter of Mount Etna exploding in a card sent to Clapp in 1987). For further commentary see Susannah Clapp's article Angela Carter in Postcards, or her beautiful little book, A Card From Angela Carter.

Postcard from Angela Carter Archive  showing Shakespeare portrait

Postcard from Angela Carter Archive showing erupting volcano

Postcards from the archive of Angela Carter Archive, Add MS 88899/3/4-24. © Courtesy of Susannah Clapp. Except as otherwise permitted by your national copyright laws this material may not be copied or distributed further.

As a great sender of postcards, it follows that Carter also received many in return. The large collection in her archive includes examples from other writer friends, such as one from ‘Jim’ [J G] Ballard, congratulating her on ‘your demolition job on Our Saviour’, referring to a documentary she had written and narrated irreverently deconstructing visual images of Christ. Aptly, Ballard chose a reproduction of Dalí’s surrealist painting of Mae West as a vehicle for his message, while comparing her achievement to that of other surrealist artists: ‘Breton + Ernst would have been proud of you’. Given the visual sophistication of both writers’ work it’s not surprising that they both enjoyed this means of communication. (For more on Ballard’s interest in and influence on visual art see Roger Luckhurst’s article on our site.)

And of course, sometimes the postcards we find in a writer’s possession were never sent but were kept for inspiration, such as Winston Levy’s souvenir postcard of the Empire Windrush that hung on his daughter Andrea Levy’s wall as a visual reminder of the true story that prompted her to write Small Island.

Postcard from Andrea Leavy Archive showing photograph of the Empire Windrush

Postcard of Empire Windrush purchased by Winston Levy on board ship, 1948 © By kind permission of Andrea Levy

I’m off to look through my postcard collection… Meanwhile, if anyone is feeling lonely and in need of post during lockdown, see the brilliant Shaun Usher’s offer to send a ‘letter of need’.

08 April 2020

Born-digital Literary Archives — How We’re Capturing the Future

by Callum McKean, Curator of Contemporary Literary and Creative Archives. For more information about the challenges and opportunities posed by born-digital material elsewhere in the Library, see the Digital Scholarship Blog and the extensive work of the Library's Digital Preservation Department.

I. Capturing a Moving Target

If you’re adjusting to working from home, look around your working area: maybe you have a home office or you’ve repurposed the dining table, or you're out in the garden. Did anyone in your team — when making the move — scramble to transport the filing cabinets or stacks of unsorted paper that had accumulated on their desks to their new workspace? If not, this is sufficient evidence that the way a lot of us work has radically changed; a platitude that doesn’t get less true with repetition. Your computer (and, more often than not, the network) has at least partially relegated or replaced the paper in your professional life with ‘Digital Objects’ — a useful but deceptively complex archival term — defined by the Society of American Archivists as, “a unit of information that includes properties (attributes or characteristics of the object) and may also include methods (means of performing operations on the object)”. If the word ‘object’ seems ontologically insufficient to carry such a definition, with its emphasis on process, relationship, and contingency, then this is part of the problem we’re facing. (Archivists — and traditional archival methodologies — have a clear (and often justified) tendency to fetishise permanence and fixity). 

This shift towards the ‘digital’ is no less dramatic in the personal archives of the novelists, poets and playwrights collected by the Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts department at the Library, whose historical remit (c.1950-) traces the rapidly evolving landscape of personal computing in the latter half of the twentieth century and the explosion of the internet and social media, which is by no means complete, in the twenty-first. This shifting landscape means that, more often than not, we collect ‘hybrid’ archives comprised of traditional paper material and — depending on the donor’s enthusiasm for new forms of technology — a variety of digital formats, including floppy-disks, CD-ROMs, spinning hard-drives, USB sticks, and even laptop computers. Creative writers are, much more-so than institutions, academics and scientists, given to superstition and mysticism regarding the tools of their trade. Most are methodologically conservative and eager to link their ability to produce work to their idiosyncratic habits and tools. (On this blog, Chris Beckett’s discussion of Will Self’s use of post-it notes and typewriters in one of our most significant hybrid archives is an excellent case-study of how complex these interrelationships can become).

 

Photograph of Amsaft branded Floppy Disk form the Archive of Wendy Cope

A double-sided Amsoft branded Compact floppy disk from the Archive of poet Wendy Cope, dated 1989.

What becomes apparent when attempting to capture, preserve, arrange and fix these ‘Digital Objects’ is that an undeniable materiality — often partially erased by the term ‘digital’ — is fundamental to their structure. The history of computing is a history of design miracles, both technical and aesthetic. Recovering a long-forgotten Word Perfect file from an Amstrad Floppy Disk is an archeological task, demanding attention to the structure and format of the data, its physical housing, and the software-codex able to make sense of it. Like a dig, it requires sensitive excavation equipment capable of moving the object without altering or destroying it. Similarly, capturing a hard-drive demands knowledge of how it reads, writes and stores data mechanically in order that when we act upon it we capture everything (including, interestingly, apparently empty space) and disturb as little as possible. (In a strange turn, archivists have learned to use software and hardware first developed by law-enforcement for these and other tasks).

 

Photograph of Kryoflux machine used for magnetically reading legacy floppy disks

A Kryoflux machine reads a 3.5” floppy disk using magnetic resonance technology to achieve a complete capture where possible, often helping us to recover partially-corrupted legacy data.

II. Representing exchange

Next to draft material, correspondence is another major component of the traditional literary archive. The movement from paper to digital has been just as pronounced in this area too, with e-mail becoming the dominant mode of communication for the vast majority of our donors. Unsurprisingly, the collection of e-mail archives presents its own challenges, both technical and curatorial. In much the same way that a letter might come to us within an envelope, an e-mail message is held within a machine-readable envelope — from which it is possible to glean similar kinds of data about sender, receiver, the path which the messaged travelled through on its journey from one to the other. All of this data must be preserved in order to retain the integrity of the archival collection, but much of it must also be withheld from public access for a significant period of time in order to comply with legal restrictions relating to the use of personal data.

Photograph of letter addressed to BS Johnson from Samuel Beckett

Screenshot of e-mail metadata

A side by side metadata comparison of a letter and an e-mail. The envelope sent by Samuel Beckett to B.S. Johnson contains critical metadata about dates and receiver, as well as about the French post-offices through which the letter travelled before reaching Johnson. The e-mail metadata contains much of the same information (highlighted) in a machine-readable format.

As well as these technical challenges, the preservation and access provision for e-mail archives must take into account its threaded nature  — its a conversation and so is not particularly amenable to the archival logic of ‘deliverable units' which guides our approach to paper manuscripts. Additionally, any robust archival process must consider e-mail's increased tendency to include rich media; including attachments such as word-processing files, images and sometimes even audiovisual material. The scale of the challenge for collecting institutions is huge. The largest e-mail archive held at the Library, (of the poet Wendy Cope, comprised of around 25,000 individual messages) contains everything from family correspondence, professional booking requests, draft revisions and shopping lists. Making sure that this material complies with data protection regulation in the UK before it is released is obviously a considerable task. Fortunately, software tools like ePadd, an e-mail archiving tool developed at Stanford University, exist to alleviate some of the issues; allowing us to filter and process messages more efficiently through the implementation of a tool-assisted approach.

Screenshot taken from Stanford University's ePadd E-mail Archiving Project

ePadd’s user friendly interface allows curators to filter messages by correspondent, attachment and assign user-generated labels.


III. Managing Scale

Scale is a double-edged for born-digital literary archives. The growing size of these collections undoubtedly renders some established archival cataloguing techniques inadequate. Equally, as the the kinds of media stored on consumer-level storage devices become more complex, traditional techniques for information organisation and control become either too labour intensive or impossible to adapt to this new context. Nevertheless, the scale of structured metadata available for these new kinds of collection items allows us to explore new techniques for data visualisation and ‘enhanced curation’ in ways that would be impossible for more traditional archival collections.

 

Bar chart showing file type distribution in a born digital archive Screenshot showing enhanced metadata for a born digital archive

Examples of how structured metadata can allow us to visualise and compile data in interesting ways using computing languages such as Python. The bar graph shows a time distribution for files in the Virago archive, with the 24 hour clock on the x axis and number of files on the y axis. The text describes some statistics and metrics for the same archive.

 

What next?

The processing, preservation and access provision for born digital literary archives is very much still an open field. The future is uncertain, but consequently still very exciting. Although there are many challenges ahead, if we are willing and able to leverage the technology, there are innumerable new discoveries to be made about the collections we hold, some of which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. In this way, our driving motivation for born-digital is no different than it is for paper -- to preserve, interpret and provide access to our collections for the inspiration and enjoyment of everyone. 


03 April 2020

Epistolary Novels and Social Distancing

by Callum McKean, Curator of Contemporary Literary Archives and Manuscripts. Read more about 18th century letter writing culture, and the epistolary novel, on Discovering Literature Restoration & 18th century, here.

Broad technological change is often experienced as a distortion or shift in our lived experience of communication with one another. In this way, as in so many others, the twenty-first century mirrors and repeats what was rehearsed in the eighteenth-century. As Dr. Lucy Curran writes in the article linked above — cementing the relation between technology, speed and infrastructure: “the 18th century is commonly known as the great age of letter writing: postal routes rapidly expanded, and the epistolary novel emerged as a hugely popular genre”. As communication at a distance became more viable and wide-spread, so did novel forms of self-expression and self-construction, or, as Curran writes, ‘just as social media streams today allow modern celebrities to present versions of their intimate lives for public consumption, so early modern and 18th-century figures carefully constructed themselves in their letters for particular audiences keen to read these kinds of works”.

Photograph of the frontispiece of Samuel Richardson's "Letters Written to and for Particular Friends"The frontispiece of Samuel Richardson's Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, a letter-writing manual, which inspired perhaps the most famous epistolary novel, his Pamela (1740)

This knotty relationship in the epistolary novel between the secluded self and the social self, between private relationships and their performance, and between sociality — as mediated by rapid technological change — and isolation, has much to tell us about our current moment. Like it or not, the selves we construct through social media, instant messaging and video conferencing software are collected and stored somewhere (if even just in the minds of others) and they exist -- to a large extent -- outside of us. Reflecting on how others navigated these choppy waters in the past can teach us a lot about what it means to be performing, constructing, confiding and loving in a time of enforced social distancing. If you're curious, Dr. Lucy Curran's article for Discovering Literature: Restoration & 18th century is a great place to start.

 

 

01 April 2020

Digital Literary Collections — Variety, Complexity and Curiosity under Lockdown

by Callum McKean, Curator of Contemporary Literary Archives and Manuscripts.

The April - June  2020 season of blogs on English and Drama will focus on the Library’s digital literary collections, ranging through Online Exhibitions, Learning Resources, the UK Web Archive, Personal Digital Archives and Emerging Formats.

Curators and cataloguers will post selections from our remotely available collections alongside their reflections every Friday, and an investigation of a different aspect of these digital collections every Wednesday.

The current situation is strange in countless ways. One way — relatively abstract and apparently unimportant at first glance — is how it has distorted our collective sense of physical space. By staying at home we simultaneously ground ourselves in a limited physical range whilst being drawn to new, expansionist forms of electronic communication. How many times have we heard, over the past few weeks — listening to friends and family over distorted, overburdened broadband connections — how relieved we all are that this particular crisis (if it had to happen) happened now; when we have unprecedented access to technologies which can, for those of us lucky enough to be able to access them, ameliorate the isolation or at least stave off the boredom. Perhaps it is inevitable that the ‘digital’, as a somewhat amorphous and poorly defined category, comes to the forefront of these conversations. Puritanical notions of screen-time as something to be avoided, or at least restricted, take a back-seat as the physical world grinds to a halt around us, and the fibre-optic synapses continue to fire, faster than ever.

 

Screenshot

The UK Web Archive (UKWA) attempts to collect this online activity, capturing millions of websites each year, preserving them for future generations. 

 

For curators, cataloguers and researchers who work at, use and visit cultural heritage institutions like the British Library, the physical collections remain out of reach. They’re in isolation too. In storage areas which are less like the ancient, labyrinthine temples of happenstance so often depicted in media representations — and much more like sterile hospital wards — countless boxes of archival material and shelves of printed material sit unprocessed and unread, gathering (minimal, tightly controlled, mostly metaphorical) dust. And we’ll miss them. But we’re relieved too. Because if this particular crisis had to happen, then at least it happened now, when our capacity to share our collections with our audiences remotely is growing more quickly than ever before.

 

Disco Lit Screenshot

 

Discovering Literature is an example of growing capacity to share and re-contextualise our literary collections online.  Enjoy digitised treasures from our collection, newly commissioned articles, short documentary films and teachers’ notes.

Every Wednesday a blog will go live from one of the Library’s curators or cataloguers, which will approach a different aspect of the ‘digital’ and how it relates to literature, drama and the Library.

Every Friday, a curator or cataloguer will highlight a digitised literary collection item or piece of writing from one of the Library’s many online portals, which in some way reflects upon our unprecedented situation.

None of this is to say that digital collections are easy; a fall-back option during a crisis. Archivists and other cultural heritage workers have long resisted the optimism (and hubris) of the tech-world and its zealots who claim that everything will be — or already has been — digitised. We know that the internet hasn’t superseded the Library or the Archive. We know that a future where all of our collections are available remotely, for free, online is a long, long way off. Most of us have spent too many years buried under piles of paper to confidently predict its obsolescence. We have spent too long agonising over the logistics, pragmatics and ethics of categorisation to take such systems for granted. We know that information delivery is never value-free or structure-free, and we take our roles as custodians of information seriously enough to question anything that argues otherwise. And, as the posts lined up for these coming months will prove, a significant number of Library colleagues have enough experience with these complex and various ‘digital objects’ to be all too aware that they are not post-archival in any meaningful sense, but rather present their own set of unique — and, at this point, often insurmountable — challenges for conservation, visibility and access.

Stock HDD Image

The Library's Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts Department now routinely collects born-digital archive material, including the hard-drives and e-mail of prominent writers. This material presents heretofore unprecedented opportunities and challenges for the Library in terms of preservation, visibility and access.

 

We hope that these reflections and selections will engage your curiosity and encourage both reflection and discussion in the coming months, as more of us settle into this new way of life.

20 March 2020

Three New British Library Collections Featuring Harold Pinter

By Chris Beckett

The British Library’s collections of material relating to Harold Pinter continue to grow. Just released into the Manuscripts Reading Room are two small but significant acquisitions, one from Susan Engel, who acted in the first production of The Room (15-16 May, 1957), and another from the Estate of Guy Vaesen, who was Assistant Director to Pinter for the double-bill The Lover and The Dwarfs produced by Michael Codron at the New Arts Theatre in 1963. The third and more extensive deposit also now open to researchers is the archive of Joe Brearley, Pinter’s teacher and mentor at Hackney Downs School.

Susan Engel was a drama student at the University of Bristol when she took the role of Rose Hudd in Pinter’s first play, The Room. The play was produced and directed by Henry Woolf, one of Pinter’s close circle of Hackney Downs friends, who was at the time a postgraduate student in the Drama Department. As well as directing, Woolf also played Mr. Kidd. Woolf’s passion for the theatre, like Pinter’s, was strongly inspired by Brearley’s enthusiasm for poetry and drama. Engel has provided her programme for the play, seven original photographs of the production and her typescript copy of the play. Rose’s part is underlined throughout, and Engel’s occasional annotations show something of Woolf’s direction.

    Front cover of Typescript for The New Plays by Harold Pinter

Cast list for The Room by Harold Pinter

Programme front cover and inside page showing the cast for The Room, University of Bristol, 15-16 May, 1957.

Michael Billington’s biography of Pinter tells how, one evening in July 1957, Engel was instrumental in bringing together Pinter and his future theatrical agent, Jimmy Wax. Engel’s papers include a letter and a card from Pinter that show he kept her informed. Following Harold Hobson’s influential review of The Room (when it was revived at the National Student Drama Festival, again at Bristol, in December 1957), Pinter wrote to Engel (January 1958) that The Birthday Party, ‘my 3-acter is expected to go on at the Lyric Hammersmith. Quite a thing. Thank God you were Rose’. Although the play flopped badly on its first run, Pinter remained resolute: ‘a cheer for Hobson. I ain’t finished yet!’ (postcard to Engel, 4 June 1958).

Guy Vaesen kept a fascinating theatre journal in which he recorded, over eighty-eight closely-written notebook pages, the 1963 Pinter-led rehearsals for The Lover and The Dwarfs. Pinter and Vivien Merchant, who played ‘Sarah’ in The Lover, had previously acted together in several of Vaesen’s productions in repertory. At Bournemouth, in the summer of 1956, Merchant played Jane Eyre to Pinter’s Rochester; at the end of the season, they married. Vaesen’s journal is therefore not only illuminating about Pinter’s approach to stage direction but is enriched by personal observation and it displays particular insights that only close association brings. Of the two plays, it was The Dwarfs that proved the more challenging in rehearsal. Pinter’s response to the actors’ difficulties with some of his lines was that they should simply follow the rhythm of the words: ‘In short,’ Vaesen reports Pinter as saying, ‘if you hit a line with particular emphasis (within the rhythm) the line will become clear. Listen to the sound first – and the meaning will clear through this […]. Music and rhythm. They must be your guides.’ Here, Pinter’s approach to performance exhibits a poet’s confidence in the cadence of his words.

Photograph showing manuscript excerpt from Guy Vaesen's journal

Extract from Guy Vaesen’s rehearsal journal (19 August 1963).

Vaesen’s papers include thirty-two letters and cards from Pinter, beginning in 1963 with a letter confirming that he is to work with Pinter in directing the double bill: ‘Codron is completely happy about the idea! So am I, as you know.’ In typical Pinter style, the letters tend to be brief and direct. They continue until 1995, when we find Pinter ‘off today to Chichester where I’m directing Harwood’s new play.’ Lifelong friends, Pinter kept Vaesen abreast of his writing and directing projects for stage and screen. In later life, Vaesen enjoyed considerable success as an artist. Pinter bought his cricket scenes. In 1980, he wrote to say that he has a Vaesen ‘in almost every room in both houses now’.

Pinter’s acceptance speech for the Cohen Literature Prize (1995) included a warm tribute to his ‘inspirational’ teacher at Hackney Downs, Joe Brearley, who ‘possessed a passionate enthusiasm for English poetry’, especially the dramatic poetry of Shakespeare and John Webster. Pinter said that Webster’s words made him feel ‘dizzy’. Henry Woolf has recalled the vivid impression that Webster made on ‘the Hackney gang’ when Brearley took some of his pupils to see The White Devil. In his Cohen speech, Pinter remembered long walks with Brearley when they would ‘declare into the wind, at the passing trolley-buses or indeed to the passers-by, nuggets of Webster’. Betrayal, cruelty, moral corruption, and torture – mainstays of dark Jacobean theatre – were to be repeatedly re-inscribed in Pinter’s plays. The memorial poem he wrote for Brearley, who died 19 November 1977, evokes these excited walks and talks of his youth, perambulations so indelible that it seemed to Pinter he was, in some ever-necessary way, undertaking them still: ‘You’re gone, I’m at your side, / Walking with you from Clapton Pond to Finsbury Park, / And on, and on.’ When Mr. Kidd in The Room says ‘So I thought to myself, I’d better have a look at those pipes’, one can imagine an inward chuckle as Woolf performed, reminded as he surely must have been of Webster’s visceral line, cited by Pinter in his Cohen speech: ‘There’s a plumber laying pipes in my guts’.

Joe Brearley retired from Hackney Downs School in 1971, at the age of 62. He spent the next six years of his life – all that was to remain to him – in Germany. A German speaker, and a teacher of German as well as English, Brearley had spent his summers in the 1930s in Germany as a private English tutor, where he witnessed at first hand the rise of the National Socialist Party. In 1933, he heard Hitler speak at a rally at Rüdesheim on the Rhine. After the War, he returned to teach at Hackney Downs School, where fifty per cent of the pupils, including Pinter, were from Jewish families. Although Brearley’s final years in Germany were few, they were nevertheless eventful. At the Gymnasium where he taught English (his retirement did not bring an end to the impulse to teach), Brearley met the artist and teacher Mara Loytved-Hardegg, thirty-three years his junior, with whom he was to share his last years (and who has now donated Brearley’s papers to the British Library). They lived in Nuremburg. To an out-going yet conservative former Deputy Head, Mara’s circle of young friends – avant-garde artists, teachers, film-makers, and Marxists – were a rich source of intellectual stimulation (although, as the papers show, he drew the line at Marxism and at smoking cannabis).

Photograph of Joe Brearley in 1973

Joe Brearley, 1973 (credit: Mara Loytved-Hardegg).

Brearley’s archive is weighted towards these final and personally-fulfilling years: there are extensive files of correspondence and two journals that record, in poetry, photographs and watercolours, holidays with Mara in Greece and Ireland. But the collection also includes some earlier Hackney Downs material. There are printed programmes for the school plays that Brearley produced, and school exercise books that record the staging and lighting schemes for the two plays by Shakespeare in which Pinter acted, as Macbeth and as Romeo. Brearley did not act in his production of Macbeth, but in Romeo and Juliet he played Prince Escalus.

Photograph showing drawings of stage lighting schema from Joe Brearley's notebook

A page from Joe Brearley’s lighting scheme for his school production of Macbeth (1947).

In September 1977, only weeks before his death in November, Brearley returned to England to meet up with a longstanding American friend and his wife. Much to Brearley’s frustration, they are determined to visit – whistle-stop fashion, guide-book in hand – every cathedral city in southern England. Along the way, however, Brearley manages to augment the repetitive schedule. They visit Henry Woolf, ‘an old (actor) pupil of mine’ then living in Folkestone. Two days later, they detour to Brighton where Brearley is reacquainted with Pinter’s parents (in 1948, Brearley had interceded on Pinter’s behalf when, much to the dismay of his parents, he decided to register as a conscientious objector). At the end of the exhausting itinerary, on Friday 30 September, Brearley lunches with Pinter, at ‘The Little Acropolis’ in Charlotte Street. Inevitably, much of their conversation touches upon Pinter’s changed personal circumstances, sensationally reported at the time in the newspapers: the end of his marriage to Vivien Merchant and his new life with Antonia Fraser. When Brearley and Pinter met for the last time, they were both were embarking on new futures. 

Pinter is a presence throughout the archive, which includes his correspondence with both Brearley and Loytved-Hardegg, continuing solicitously until his death in 2008. But there is a second consistent presence who must be mentioned. On the same tour of southern England, Brearley slipped away to make one further personal call. Passing through Cambridge, he called upon his old tutor, F. R. Leavis, whose health was then rapidly declining. Queenie Leavis greeted him: ‘It’s good to see his really old students from the great days … one has to be so careful now. I have to keep away people who come out of mere curiosity … and journalists out for a story.’ Brearley read for the English Tripos at Cambridge under Leavis’s supervision. In an autograph testimonial in the archive, Leavis wrote (14 March 1932): ‘[Brearley] has in particular studied critical method, especially as it bears upon the problem of teaching English. He is a cultivated man with a trained mind, & is himself well qualified to teach. I recommend him with great confidence.’ Among the many letters of condolence Mara received was one from Q. D. Leavis, who admitted to having initially hesitated in agreeing to Brearley’s visit, ‘Dr Leavis so changed and not able to converse’. She paints a poignant picture of their last meeting: ‘I shall never forget how kind and sympathetic [Joe] was to my husband, sitting by his bed & holding his hand’.

Leavis outlived Brearley by five months. His persistent presence in the archive – which extends even to a final brief entry (2 November 1977) in Brearley’s last journal, written from his hospital bed – serves as a reminder that Brearley’s enduring influence upon the young Pinter in the late 1940s, including the ‘revelation’, as Pinter described it, of Webster’s plays, had a particular critical and pedagogical setting. It also supplies a context to Pinter’s advice to the actors rehearsing The Dwarfs, that their guide should be the music and rhythm, the movement – to borrow a favoured term from Leavis – of his words. If Brearley’s teacher was not far from his thoughts in hospital, nor was his pupil. The first note in the same hospital journal (15 October) registers a dream of a dream, a dream of Pinter acting in a ‘school production’ of Midsummer Night’s Dream.

 

 

13 March 2020

Community Printing in North Kensington: The Beryl Foster Archive

by Eleanor Dickens, Curator of Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts, Politics and Public Life. The Beryl Foster Archive( Add MS 89305) now available to consult, for free, in our Reading Rooms

During the late 1960s, London was home to many revolutionary groups and radical collectives that were part of the greater wave of student and worker action that spread across Europe that decade. In West London, community activists sought to fight local issues -- such as poor housing conditions and lack of play space for children -- by forming groups such as the Notting Hill Community Workshop and the Notting Hill People’s Association.  In this environment, there was a need to spread information and updates quickly and cheaply, to promote the local community activities and share the successes and the campaigns.

To meet this need student nurses Beryl Foster and Linda Gane co-founded Notting Hill Press LTD in 1968. It was the beginning of almost three decades of radical printing in North Kensington and, although the press would change hands and identities over the next decades, its output would remain a consistent and important resource for the neighborhood until the late 1980’s.

Foster and Gane had initially wanted to produce a newspaper for local community groups to share updates but all the groups they had contact with had wanted to print their own material. So the idea of the Notting Hill Press LTD was born. The Press was designed to meet the needs of the local radical community by allowing them to design and print their own material using in-house equipment. Foster recounts: “In the 1960’s printing was a powerful medium. Organisations, groups and movements all sought to get their message across to others and to put their information in print. […] Controlling the means of production had a particular appeal to anyone wanting to make a revolution and the offset lithographic process could make these means more affordable and flexible. It could deliver long runs, colour printing, flexible graphics and even photographs.” (Foster:2017)

Through their friends, Myrtle Solomon, general secretary of the Peace Pledge Union, and the pacifist and suffragist Sybil Morrison, Foster and Gane procured a printing machine - a Rotaprint 30/90 - from a mutual friend. Another friend emptied out an old laundry room as a home for the machine and the first premises for Notting Hill Press was established. Given the precariousness of Foster and Gane’s living situation and that of the radical communities which they served, Notting Hill Press organised a careful legal arrangement that protected the expensive printing equipment. They ‘sold’ their machinery, for a peppercorn, to two neighbourhood centres and the Community Workshop, who then leased them back to them, again for a peppercorn.

Photograph of pamphlet 'Playspace in North Kensington: Report on Local Play Programmes 1967-69)

‘Playspace in North Kensington: Report on local play programmes 1967 – 69’ published by the Notting Hill Social Council Leisure and Amenities Committee, printed by Notting Hill Press, July 1970. Copyright – Beryl Foster

 

Photograph of excerpt from ‘People’s News’ published by Notting Hill People’s Association

‘People’s News’ published by Notting Hill People’s Association, printed by Notting Hill Press, January [1969] Copyright – With kind permission of the Mike Braybrook Archive Group

 

Photograph of Westway Nursery Association first Annuel showing children playing

Westway Nursery Association first Annual Report, printed by Crest Press, 1974. Copyright – Beryl Foster

 

In 1969 the press moved to premises at on Ladbroke Road, beneath an opticians. This new premises required rent so Foster and Gane, who had both had children by 1970, were beginning to struggle to put in the long hours the press required. In 1971 they trained up and handed over the press to two students, Vicky Hutchin and Carola Ker. Just as they had anticipated with the earlier financial arrangements Notting Hill Press LTD could be declared bankrupt with the machines remaining safe in the hands of local community groups.

This was the end of Notting Hill Press LTD in name but not the end of community printing in this area. In fact, the people, ideas and even machines through which it emerged continued to flourish. The press formed itself into a new company, Crest Press Ltd., which functioned in much the same manner as Notting Hill Press; printing for local community organisations and on local issues such as housing, nurseries and play spaces for children. As before, all the staff were volunteers who drew no real wage and no commercial work was taken.

Senta Kandler joined Crest Press in around 1973 and in 1975 she and Mike Braybrook took over the press and moved it to the Community Action Centre (CAC) on Kensington Park Road. CAC as an organisation was formed the same year to secure rights to the Talbot Tabernacle, known as ‘The Tab’ and used as a community center. Another new iteration of the press was born, this time known as Printshop W11.

Photograph of cover of 'Losing Out': A study on Colville and Tavistock

'Losing Out': A study on Colville and Tavistock, printed by Crest Press. Copyright – With kind permission of the Mike Braybrook Archive Group

Photograph of Cover of The Un-Supported Mothers Handbook by members of the Claimants’ Union

The Un-Supported Mothers Handbook by members of the Claimants’ Union, printed by [Crest Press]. Copyright – With kind permission of the Mike Braybrook Archive Group

In 1978, moved on again by the council, Printshop W11 moved to ‘The Point’ on Tavistock Road. By this point those that ran the press were still working for free but they were breaking even and had developed an impressive list of local customers. Before it ended, the press was to go through one final move, forming in 1982 into ‘Words Illustrated’ run by Braybrook, Conor Lynch and George Robertson. Words Illustrated ran in this format for much of the eighties before finally folding in 1988. As his next move Mike Braybrook started A-Priori Press and though this was more commercial in the sense that people earned a wage (and so commercial work was undertaken) it remained the go-to for local community printing until it was finally bought in the 1990s by Portobello Press.

Through all these changes – and the many wider political and national changes over these decades - the press and the essential community activism around it remained the constant. There had been differences: Notting Hill Press wanted to be embedded in the broad left community coalition which was active in North Kensington at the time, they wanted to serve that movement; Crest Press worked as a collective of political activists who were involved in local and national movements; later incarnations, Printshop West 11 and Words Illustrated, functioned more as worker collectives serving community groups and supporting movements for social and political change. Through it all, one thing remained the same – the Rotaprint 30/60 which was used until this final iteration in 1988. As Forster re-calls, “from 1968 to 1990’s the names of the printers and of the press change, but the machines carried on”. Beryl Foster (2017).

28 February 2020

Stirrings Still

Lucy Carolan is currently in the third year of a practice-based fine art PhD at Newcastle University, funded by Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership. In her research she is using photography, text and moving image to create work that draws on the inspiring experiences of people living with dementia, and her recent research placement at the British Library was entitled 'Art, Poetry and Memory: Contemporary UK Artists’ Books'. See more of Lucy's work here.

At the beginning of January this year I completed a short PhD placement in the British Library’s department of Contemporary British Publications, which involved researching artists’ books towards a potential future project on the theme of memory. During the three months I spent at the Library I consulted over 300 artists’ books, ranging from late nineteenth century works, like ‘Le Corbeau’ (C.70.i.1), the 1871 Stéphane Mallarmé/Édouard Manet response to Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Raven’, to contemporary works such as Jana Traboulsi’s 2013 ‘Sorry for not attending’ (ORB.30/8742), and from tiny concertina books the size of 35mm film strips, to a suite of screen-prints so large, at 93x73cm, it took a while for Reading Room staff to figure out how to manoeuvre it through the door and over the Issue Desk. Even the artists’ books which didn’t fit the research brief captured my interest, but one in particular left a very strong impression.

Stirrings Still (C.193.c.25) contains the last prose piece, of that title, written by Samuel Beckett and designed and illustrated by artist Louis le Broquey for publication in late 1988, roughly a year before Beckett’s death. As an object, Stirrings Still is not as spectacular or unusual as many of the other artists’ books in the Library’s collections, and although it is evidently beautifully crafted, its form is very familiar. Nevertheless, it continues to affect me. Initially I was struck by the subtlety of its unusual page layout; the way the text splits across pages in blocks in order to fragment the narrative and the way le Broquey’s abstract imagery punctuates Beckett’s prose. Its design drew me in, but it was the book in its entirety -- as aesthetic object and as an artistic vehicle for the literary text – that worked to unsettle what I’d thought was a comfortable familiarity with Beckett’s work. I suspect that I may not have discovered this text if I’d come across it otherwise, such as in the paperback version of his complete short prose that I bought afterwards. By comparison with the standard edition, Beckett and le Broquey’s Stirrings Still, although modestly designed in the context of other artists’ books, clearly demonstrates the power of the medium.

Photograph of hardback cover of Stirrings Still Insert from Stirrings still showing abstract image alongside text Insert from Stirrings still showing abstract image alongside text
Photographs illustrating the modest design of  le Broquey and Beckett's work and the placement
of abstract images alongside the text C.193.c.25

Timing is a factor to consider. My receptivity to the book can partly be explained by my own research project, which concerns finding ways to express -- through image and text -- aspects of the lived experience of dementia. Stirrings Still is remarkably consistent with these experiences. The narrative is centred in a lone character who seems to exist in a state of spatial and temporal confusion: he experiences hallucinations, short-term memory loss, compulsive repetition, disorientation, and a pervading sense of non-continuous identity, or having lost previously held capacities, which he meets with an unmet desire for concentration. Beckett writes:

    One night or day then as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go. First rise and stand clinging to the table. Then sit again.     Then rise again and stand clinging to the table again. Then go. Start to go. On unseen feet start to go. So slow that only change of pace to show he     went. As when he disappeared only to reappear later at another place. Then disappeared again only to reappear again later at another place     again...

The spiralling structure of this text is disorienting for the reader, too. It seemed to me to also have an aphasic quality. Further research lead to the discovery of the next and final piece of Beckett’s writing; a poem called ‘Comment Dire?’ (Shelfmark Cup.21.g.27(11), translated into English as ‘What is the Word?’), written contemporaneously with Stirrings Still and following a presumed stroke earlier that year which left him temporarily aphasic. The loss of ability to access language – to remember or recognise words -- was something that interested Beckett throughout much of his career.[1] And in an interview with Lawrence Shainberg in 1980,[2] when he was 74 years old, he was recorded as saying:

    ...with old age, the more possibilities diminish, the better chance you have. With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence what you, I suspect, would call brain damage the more chance there is for saying something closer to what one really is.

Photograph of poem from Comment Dire

Comment Dire Cup.21.g.27(11)

Beckett is one of those authors who people tend to think they ‘know’, by reputation, through reviews, or having read/seen/heard some of his works, however partially. My encounter with Stirrings Still at the British Library has led to the realisation that even the most straightforward-looking artists’ books can take things, like the text of an author with whom I thought I was familiar, and inspire a radical reassessment and refreshed appreciation of their work.

[1] Salisbury, L., Code, C. (2016), Jackson’s Parrot: Samuel Beckett, Aphasic Speech Automatisms, and Psychosomatic Language, The Journal of Medical Humanities vol. 37:2 pp.205-22 doi:10.1007/s10912-015-9375-z

[2] Shainberg, L. (2019), Four Men Shaking, Shambala Publications, Boulder CO, p.71