We continue with our excerpts from Erik Mortenson’s Allen Ginsberg in Context.
Yesterday was Steven Taylor on Allen and music. Today’s focus, Bill Morgan,
Allen’s biographer and bibliographer, on Allen’s archives (Bill, it should be pointed out,
was extensively engaged both in the preparation and in the sale of the archives)
Allen’s extensive archives were acquired by Stanford University in the Fall of 1994
Morgan’s contribution to the Mortenson essay collection begins, as follows:
“Dictionaries define an archive as an accumulation of historical records and materials which are preserved owing to their continuing value. Ideally an individual author’s archive should preserve documents which cover their life from birth to death. This is rarely achieved for a wide variety of reasons. Frequently writers haven’t considered their early lives important enough to document, or they didn’t begin to save materials until they had become successful writers, or they didn’t realize the value of germinative materials. There are many reasons not to put things aside. For example, many Beat Generation writers have lived on the edge of poverty, often moving from place to place and traveling widely. It would have been impossible for them to carry wide range of material with them around the globe. Another important factor that impended the assembling of complete archives was the immediate financial needs of Beat writers. As their fame grew but not their wealth, some of these writers had to look at their papers as a source of money and therefore chose to sell them piece by piece to libraries and collectors. Lack of storage space was also a major factor, although some writers were lucky enough to have family or friends who were able to keep materials for them. In some cases, souvenirs were saved by parents and returned later in life. It is rare indeed when authors are able to document their own career from the very beginning. Of the most famous Beat writers, only Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were able to hold on to their papers. Both saw their personal archives as important primary sources for their creative work. Kerouac continually mined his archive for ideas and stories that he used ins books. Ginsberg saw his archive as a unique creation equal to some of his other notable achievements. He considered it a work of art in and of itself. He spent a good deal of his time building, safeguarding, and preserving his archive, and treated it much more than a pile of keepsakes.
Even as a schoolboy, Ginsberg had decided to save material that was important to him.Maybe it’s not unusual for a child to dream that one day he will be famous, but in Allen’s case, the dream became a reality. For his eleventh birthday he was given a small diary in which he began to record his daily experiences, activities, personal thoughts, and opinions. While he was still a teenager, he wrote one passage with infinite self-confidence – “I am writing to satisfy my egotism. If some future historian or biographer wants to know what the genius did and thought in his tender years, here it is. I’ll be a genius of some kind or other, probably in literature. I really believe it”….No matter what his living conditions were, Allen continued to write every day in his journal, a habit he continued without interruption until his death. By that time his journals totaled nearly 500 separate volumes . While he was still young he began to save letters and cards from his family and friends and started to clip articles from newspapers and magazines that were of interest to him…He wrote letters to the local newspaper…With the rise of fascism and the looming war in Europe he expanded his interests and enlarged his clipping collection to include articles about the international situation. This became another life-long habit, and he kept bits and pieces from publications that influenced his thinking for future reference. As he moved from interest to interest, entire file-cabinets were filled with his independent research, specific items he could look back on to support his views. Often items were so ephemeral that his are the only copies of unique items that survive. In the late 1940s. Ginsberg began to take pictures of himself and his friends, and these, along with the negatives, were also saved religiously along with their correspondence and examples of their writing…”
“Allen”, Morgan notes, “saw his papers as the record of the life and times of him and his friends, with tentacles that reached out in dozens of different directions. If he was interested in something it was saved; that was the only criteria for preserving anything. He faithfully put everything into the archive no matter how ephemeral. That is the remarkable thing about his archive, unexpected discoveries are constantly being made. It contains surprising things, such as a Thelonious Monk score, a copy of a poster announcing Bob Dylan‘s early New York performance, a catalog issued by Ed Sanders‘ Peace Eye Bookstore for a benefit auction which included a selection of poets’ pubic hairs, and a postcard sent out friends inviting them to the seminal 6 Gallery reading in 1955. The only item that Allen voluntarily removed was his manuscript of “Kaddish”, which he donated in true Ginsberg fashion to the Living Theatre to sell as a fund raiser when fifteen members of the troupe were imprisoned. Luckily, Ted Wilentz, the owner of the legendary Eighth Street Bookshop, bought the manuscript and donated it to the Fales Library at New York University, where it is readily available to scholars.”
“As mentioned so frequently, the Ginsberg archive is vast, and in order to make good use of it, a researcher should review the organization of the files before going to Stanford. They have painstakingly itemized most of the archive and their finding guide is available on their library’s web site. Allen’s personal library contained well over 10,000 books and periodicals which have been added to the university library’s holdings. Some of those contain notes and annotations in Ginsberg’s own hand.”
Morgan’s essay concludes:
“Through the course of all his collecting and saving, Ginsberg and his staff developed their pwn vocabulary that no librarian would ever have approved of. His clippings file came to be called “FYPC” which stood for “faded yellow press clippings”. His correspondence with crazy hero-worshipers who sometimes wrote him twenty-page letters were saved and kept in seperate folders which were identified as “Mad Letters”. And finally his important papers such as his will and his medical records were kept in a file drawer labelled truthfully as “Death and Asshole”. He was a true poet, even when it came to creating file headings. Through it all his archive stands as one of his most notable achievements and should be considered one of his most remarkable creations.”
More on Allen as archivist on the Allen Ginsberg Project – see our earlier posting – here
and currently on show at Stanford (in the Peterson Gallery and Munger Rotunda of the Cecil & Ida Green Library) through till September 5, Ginsberg at 100: Selections from the Allen Ginsberg Papers at Stanford – see here
Michael A. Keller, the Ida M. Green University Librarian:
“The Allen Ginsberg Papers, a transformative acquisition for our Special Collections in 1995, hold immense importance for the San Francisco Bay Area and serve as a destination collection for researchers seeking primary sources in the humanities'”
J. Christian Greer, lecturer at Stanford:
“Thanks to Ginsberg’s uncanny premonition to save almost everything (including the trimmings he clipped from his beard!), the archive is the central database for the 20th-century American underground and beyond,”
Deardra Fuzzell, exhibit producer and designer concurs:
“Ginsberg’s archives contain visually striking, historically meaningful, and culturally recognizable artifacts”
The curated selection on display is accompanied, on this occasion, by historic audio recordings (another important and invaluable component of the archive)