Score one for the Empire. The British Library announced yesterday it had acquired a sizable chunk of former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes’s archive. Coming on the tenth anniversary of the poet’s death on October 28, and coinciding with the release of a pair of CD recordings of Hughes reading from his work, the acquisition of more than 220 boxes of Hughes’s manuscripts, files, and ephemera, at a cost of roughly $880,000, represents a coup for the UK literary community.
Beyond the question of the scholarly worth of the archived material — which is substantial, given that much of the material involves the publication history of Hughes’s Birthday Letters, the highly personal collection that appeared just after the poet’s death and that relates most intimately to his relationship with Sylvia Plath — the acquisition represents a victory for those in the UK have long argued that the country’s literary patrimony is being bled away to cash-rich archives in the United States.
In fact, if there is any single figure who helped spur the efforts in the UK to alter government taxation policies regarding the sale of archives and, more broadly, to instill a sense of duty among writers and their estates to resist final expatriation, it is probably Hughes. The sale of the bulk of his archive to Emory University the year before his death was a blow to those who fretted over the flight abroad of the papers of the UK’s most eminent writers, leading to the formation of a group to reform policies that they saw as providing American archives an unfair economic advantage in bidding. In a memorable New Yorker profile last year of Tom Staley, the director of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas who has trained his sights particularly on the collections of postwar English men and women of letters, D.T. Max wrote, “There is not much other institutions can do when Texas is interested.”
Except perhaps to appeal to the English rightfulness of bequests. “Saved for the nation” read the British Library’s press release — a phrase recycled from the press release announcing last year’s acquisition of the papers of Harold Pinter. (The Pinter purchase was lubricated by a sizable grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund , a British government organization funded by the lottery and a lending source of “last resort” for projects that protect the nation’s cultural landmarks.) Journalists too chimed in: writing in the Times, Erica Wagner argued that “there are some artists whose connection to their country, their land, can’t be disputed: Ted Hughes was one of those.” Hughes’s widow Carol stated, “Ted was a man of these islands — their landscapes, rivers and wild places — and it is fitting that papers covering such an important part of his creative life should be deposited with such a prestigious institution here in Britain.”
That is no doubt true — but would it have been a bit more compelling if Hughes himself hadn’t sold so much of his archive, while alive, to the Atlanta university?
