The Pitt-Kethley papers: what price a poet’s archive?

Back in 1986 I had my first publication with a major publisher, Chatto and Windus. (The book was Sky Ray Lolly , a poetry collection.) My launch was at Bernard Stone’s poetry shop, and we became firm friends. Bernard was great fun and a serious lover of poetry as well. He had a lifelike waxwork of Freud near the counter and many people mistook it for an assistant. Bernard was Jewish, from Odessa. He joked about his father being a huge Russian sailor. He was rather short. He was a member of the Chelsea Arts Club, as was I for a few years. He had an interesting group of friends such as Laurence Durrell, Laurie Lee and Ralph Steadman, all of whom I met. 

At that first launch I signed 90 copies of Sky Ray Lolly . One of these was for a collector called John Kaiser who had some relation to Penn State University Library. In the following year Bernard set me up with a deal with Penn State, which was interested at the time in collecting the archives of significant women poets. I passed on many boxes of materials such as rough drafts of poems, unpublished work and a vast amount of correspondence. I received a handsome fee. At the time the librarian was William Joyce, who seemed very civilised, and we had some correspondence. A couple of years later I topped up the archive with a few more boxes of archives. Again, this was all organised through Bernard Stone. According to him, I could top up this collection from time to time throughout my professional life.

Bernard published a poetry chapbook and a novella I wrote when I was 19. I found out that he was in the habit of using Peter to pay Paul. His huge love of poetry was in part funded by pornography sales to collectors in Amsterdam. I approve of this and wish many more publishers would use mercenary publication to fund something more artistic. It’s better, really, than publishing poor work while pretending a sow’s ear is a silk purse.

Bernard was a hugely professional dealer of books and manuscripts and presented my archives better than I have ever been able to do since. When he moved to a bigger shop his health failed and he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. I visited him in hospital. His assistants tried to keep the business afloat, but without his juggling act with the discreet porn sales it was not enough. Bernard moved into a small flat in the Seven Dials area and I visited him there. It became hard to do so, though, as he stopped answering the phone because of his many creditors. We lost touch when I moved to Spain.  I was sad to learn of his death in 2005. There are few booksellers of his calibre.

I corresponded with Penn State about continuing to contribute to my archives. There was some reluctance, and I felt that just as publishers prefer dealing with agents to writers, university libraries prefer booksellers to us. Eventually a London-based bookseller was delegated to ship another load, and I included a lot of my artworks with this. I took the bookseller to lunch in Hastings, as I learned he was not being paid for all this work. It was the least I could do. Booksellers, it seems, are willing to take on this kind of job for universities, as they sometimes manage to sell them other books on the side.

At this stage I still believed it was a lifetime relationship. From Spain, without any intermediate bookseller, I sent them some more shipments, two, a few years apart. William Joyce the librarian retired, then died, and I dealt with his successor. There seemed to be less enthusiasm but still some willingness to continue to take work for a smaller fee. Some sort of fee is necessary as postage alone for a large box of books and papers to the US is usually about 50 euros. 

This new librarian retired recently, and I made a connection with the latest one, only to find that the situation has changed radically. I had to email her twice and eventually got a very unenthusiastic reply. I had offered to send quite a few books and some papers to update the collection. I had assumed this was still possible, She said she was willing to receive just two of these books as “a donation”.  I cannot see the point in doing this. If I were to donate books it would make more sense to do it to a British or Irish library which might trigger some PLR and ALCS payments for me. 

In the snakes and ladders literary world, I have recently experienced more snakes.  This was a bad one, taking me back to the days when my archives were worth nothing. What do I do now? Should I throw out rough drafts of current poems and interesting correspondence? According to this new librarian, none of this is wanted. Should I bide my time until someone else is in her job, or do I argue the case with her or others at the university?

Archives are rarely split between universities, so my chances of getting funding from another university are poor. I might perhaps offer to donate them to a British university as long as my postage is covered. Do I continue to save notes, letters and rough drafts for posterity, or is it time to bin all this? I wonder if other authors have this problem. 

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