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Thursday 4 December 2008

Crossing continents

Lloyd Evans on the trend among British authors to sell their archives to the United States

The problem is that our state-funded bodies can’t hope to compete with the finances of freelance American universities, many of which are funded by billionaire old boys sprawling on pots of gold. And yet there are signs that the tide is turning. In January the Treasury agreed to maintain the budget of the National Heritage Memorial Fund at £10 million per year. Hurrah. The NHMF’s boringly bureaucratic name disguises its intrepid and heroic nature. It’s a sort of literary coastguard that picks up mayday signals from archives in danger of floating off-shore and launches a lifeboat to haul them back home.

The fund has scored two notable successes recently. Last December Harold Pinter sold his papers to the British Library for £1.1 million (supplemented by £216,000 from the NHMF), and a couple of years back the NHMF contributed a similar sum to secure the Coleridge archive for the nation. It’s easy to argue that this is reckless expenditure. The notebooks of a writer, unlike the finished products of painters or musicians, are quite extraneous to an appreciation of the published work. But leaving aside questions of artistic value, the financial outlay will repay itself in time. Scholars, biographers and poetry buffs wishing to inspect Coleridge’s rough drafts will, in perpetuity, have to visit Britain (rather than, say, Texas) in order to commune with the yellowing and inky parchments.

The British Library has displayed a few highlights from the Pinter archive in an exhibition which continues until 13 April. For Pinter anoraks this is an absolute must. You can watch his mind in action as he writes. The opening scene of Betrayal seems to have come to him fully fledged. The first draft written in Biro on a cheap A4 notebook is identical to the published version. Not so the first page of The Homecoming. Max’s savagely sentimental opening speech goes on for several minutes and has been heavily cut. It isn’t just too long, it’s also far too explicit. He calls himself a ‘villain’ and openly refers to his sons as ‘bastards’. The question of the boys’ paternity is one of the play’s driving forces and in the final draft Max never alludes to it openly. Instead audiences have to make the connection for themselves. This struck me as amazing. Pinter’s famously mysterious style isn’t so mysterious after all. He just chopped out the obvious stuff and left us to fill it in.

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