In 1870, shortly after Charles Dickens, working on his final novel, ”The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” slumped to the floor of his London study and died, his wife, Catherine, whom Dickens privately described as ”a whiny woman,”
picked up all of the papers and journals that she could find and hurled them into a roaring fireplace. She had her reasons. Plagued with ”domestic unhappiness” and ”an unsettled feeling,” Dickens had been carrying on for about 12 years with an actress of ”pretty face and well-developed figure.”
If Howard Gotlieb, the director of special collections at Boston University`s Mugar Memorial Library, had been around, he would have done his duty. He would have wrestled the angry widow to the floor. He would have thrown his ample body over the flames. He would have told her what to save
(”everything!”) and what to throw out (”nothing!”). The incident still upsets him. ”If only someone had been at Dickens` side during his lifetime,” he once told an interviewer. ”There is so much lacking.”
To Gotlieb, such manuscripts, documents, journals, diaries and letters are the raw rivers of history. They flow into books and other scholarly ventures. They are essential research, detailing grand events and everyday life. They are a civilization`s collective biography. But useful collections do not come into being by themselves. They need, in a sense, a Mr. Save-It. That is why, realizing early on that B.U. did not have funds to chase increasingly expensive collections from the past, Howard Gotlieb`s mission for 23 years has been to pull together the Twentieth Century Archives.
Now they sit, in more than 100,000 acid-free blue boxes, surrounded by eerie hush because looming rows of cardboard sop up sound, filling three large vault areas–several million letters, photographs, journals, report cards, books, scrapbooks, diaries, comic strips, account books, theater programs and childhood memorabilia. They come from the fields of journalism, theater, poetry, civil rights, music, film, dance, politics and literature.
”Why do you keep all this stuff?” Gotlieb is asked.
”Do not call it stuff,” he says.
The nation`s 5,000 archivists, it could be said, are people who dream of an ultimate attic, a place where every record is kept. If, say, you were writing a book about your great-aunt who emigrated from Ireland, you could pore over old steamship records, find what cabin she had, whom she shared it with, how much the passage cost, what the crossing weather was like, how she was entertained and what was the catch of the day.
It`s no easy task to document modern society with all its complexities. Indeed, in this less-than-best of all possible worlds, archival perfection is not possible. (”Good,” some might say. ”If it were, the Earth would be covered with paper to a depth of six feet.”) But it`s important. ”Archives are the memory of the future,” notes Don Neal, executive director of the Chicago-based Society of American Archivists. What Howard Gotlieb has done is to collect materials from 1,402 people to give scholars, in his words, ”a picture of what was being read, what was being said, what was influencing public opinion during this period.”
It is an amazing trove. There are tapes and notes from journalist Oriana Fallaci of her interviews including those with Henry Kissinger and Fidel Castro. Four million documents recount the long career of former Speaker of the House of Representatives John W. McCormack, a tenure that extended from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon. There are 2,000 Christmas cards received by actor Roddy McDowell between 1959 and 1970, writer David Halberstam`s 8th-grade graduation program, George Bernard Shaw`s scribbled instructions to John Barrymore on how to play ”Hamlet,” eyewitness notes by Alistair Cooke written as he knelt beside the wounded Bobby Kennedy, the diaries of humorist Robert Benchley, the handwritten manuscript for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.`s sermon, ”Shattered Dreams”–and the papers of Dan Rather.
To Gotlieb, that acquisition made perfect sense, offering ”a day-to-day account of a newsman`s life and work,” a view, as it were, from an anchor desk of history. As for Rather, he had initial doubts. As he put it, in a telephone interview from CBS News in New York: ”Life is filled with surprises,” he noted. This was another one.”
How did it come about?
”Howard Gotlieb came to visit me in Washington in the `60s–before I was Dan Rather,” Rather explained. ”He told me what he was doing, what he wanted. I thought it was a joke. I asked him who put him up to this? But he`s very persuasive.” Rather had some notebooks going back to high school days in Texas. In addition, he adds, ”I gave him notebooks from Vietnam, scripts, notepads, letters, canteens, my notes from covering civil rights marches through the South with Dr. King. I keep a daily journal, what happened, what I thought. I keep preparatory material in notebook form. I gave him all that.” Now, once a month, from Rather`s office, Gotlieb receives a box of notes, journals, annotated scripts, letters, engagement calendars and inter-office memos. Some are sealed with a note, such as entries dealing with matters discussed or observed at White House dinners. Says Rather: ”I try, in a shot- from-horseback way, to ask myself if any historian would have any interest in what passes across my desk. If I think they might, I say, `Send this to Boston.` I suspect, though I don`t know, that it`s a source of office humor around here.”
Rather is quick to point out that he gets no tax breaks for his donations. Nor does anyone else, but that hasn`t slowed the incoming tide of materials donated to the Twentieth Century Archives, now valued, for insurance purposes, at upwards of $35 million.
In recent years, Gotlieb has stashed away the journals, diaries, sketchbooks and childhood papers (”but no wild asparagus”) of naturalist Euell Gibbons. He has annotated scores from Cab Callaway, the personal scrapbooks of actor Basil Rathbone and the diaries of Robert Redford (which are sealed until 20 years after his death). Chicago chef Louis Szathmary donated a collection of Franz Lizst manuscripts, books, engravings, etchings and letters. Michael Butler gave his files on the many productions of
”Hair.” He has shoes worn by dancers Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. Harold Gray, creator of Little Orphan Annie, burst into tears when Gotlieb took away 44 years of his work. ”You`re driving off with my life,” said Gray.
Gotlieb agrees. ”One`s papers are more personal than clothing, furniture,” Gotlieb says. ”They reflect the most important parts of one`s being, existence, psyche.” Getting people to donate accumulations takes psychology. Wooing Bette Davis, for example, took 10 years of ”avid adoration” before she allowed trucks to cart away 50 years of memorabilia.
”Miss Davis was very suspicious of me and of the institution,” Gotlieb once said. ”She would send people over to check up. And why not? It is, after all, her life story.”
These days, about 5,000 people a year draw on the collections, from students to journalists, playwrights, novelists, choreographers, critics and musicians. Applicants must state the purpose of their research, name a publisher interested in their work, give the title of their doctoral dissertations and name their faculty adviser. Browsers are not welcomed.
”We are the official repository for the Boston Symphony Orchestra,”
notes Gotlieb. ”Conductor Sarah Caldwell comes in to study before doing an opera. She`s been in looking at the original score of Rossini`s `Barber of Seville,` which we have. One writer now using our Bette Davis archives is interested in her years at the Dennis Playhouse. There are always two or three for the Dr. King collection. Edith Sitwell, H. G. Wells–somebody is always into them. That young man who found (Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef) Mengele,
(Gerald) Posner, came to use our Ladislas Farago collection. Farago sought Mengele at one time. His papers told how far he had gone in the search.”
It`s a process that involves more than mere storage. Though archivists respect the order in which papers are kept, feeling that such order reveals the mind behind the collection, they try to help by dating items where necessary, linking scattered pieces of manuscripts and putting letters in chronological order.
”Archivists are a misunderstood breed,” notes Gregory Hunter, manager of corporate records at ITT Corp.`s world headquarters in New York. ”The general public often sees them as bespectacled antiquarians huddled over old dusty records.” But the work–identifying, preserving and making available records of enduring value–can be intense. ”Young archivists on our staff can spend a year or two working on the papers of one individual,” says Gotlieb.
”They sometimes wind up knowing more about that person than the person does.”
To Gotlieb, collecting, in a way, is life.
”Collecting is one of the first forms of thought. Collecting offers the best possible education,” he says. ”People save report cards, letters from home, passports, drivers` licenses, postcards, baseball cards, bottle caps. I don`t care what it is. If you collect something, you`ve defined your thinking. You`ve acquired parameters, a theme. You become the world`s greatest living expert–on that. This is intellectual discipline.
”If you are a collector, it will help you no matter what you do.”
Gotlieb, who came to Boston University after eight years at Yale as historical manuscripts curator and university archivist, began collecting stamps as a child. He moved to menus and theater programs ”until I was able to get some money and graduate to books, manuscripts and paintings, which I now collect.” (His current treasure, which he won`t say how he acquired, is the Bible that England`s Queen Elizabeth I held as she lay dying, given to her by her father, Henry VIII, who said, ”If I ever try to kill you, send this to me and it will save you.”)
A bon vivant, opera lover, tennis player and frequent flyer to gatherings of his ”clients” in Beverly Hills, Palm Springs, New York, London and Zurich, he begins an average day at 5 a.m., listening to news, attending to correspondence and reading obituaries (”who has gone, what they left, where they left it.”)
He keeps careful tabs on reviews of his authors and actors–almost all of whom he talks to constantly–and says he is ”a combination of lawyer, doctor, shrink, agent and critic. There has to be a special rapport between curator and curatee, or it will not work the way it should work.” He adds: ”I`m a catalyst. Of scholars to write more books. To create from materials I have gathered. I lead scholars to materials. They must interpret and use it as they choose.”
Can ordinary persons who feel they might be potentially prominent help archivists? My, yes.
Gotlieb`s suggestions:
— Every time a single word is jotted down, save the paper.
— File thoughts on separate subjects in separate folders.
— Do not discard love notes, letters detailing bad business deals, requests for assignations or things you should not have written. They are interesting.
