All would-be literary lions should learn a lesson from the $2.5 million Norman Mailer received for selling his archive.
Throw nothing away.
The Pulitzer Prize winning author’s treasure of literary delights and personal scraps will be housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. Mailer’s archive includes letters, manuscripts, notebooks, canceled checks, books, contracts, video recordings and screenplays, and numerous odds and ends that chronicle a prodigious author’s life and times. It reportedly weighs in at more than 20,000 pounds. A treat, no doubt, for fans of the author of “Armies of the Night” and “The Naked and the Dead.”
Here’s a question, though. What will today’s up-and-coming writers save in their archives? Text messages? E-mails? Transcripts of cell phone conversations?
Instant communication and quick keystrokes have robbed many a writer of a valuable commodity–the printed word. Much of modern life is handled over the phone or the Internet.
Mailer began his career in a different era, where pen was put to paper and sentences were whipped into shape, with scribbles, scrawls and corrections right on the page. In Mailer’s prime, letters were mailed and slips of paper, even carbon copies, were placed in files.
Mailer did change with the times, storing letters on computer disks. But imagine the loss if Mailer cut his literary teeth today. Would he save all his e-mail? He corresponded with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Lillian Hellman, Truman Capote and John Lennon. As a soldier during World War II he wrote letters home and then returned to write “The Naked and the Dead.” Would he today leave behind a trail of revisions? The collection includes virtually all his manuscripts and a lot of his research materials. It takes a writer with Mailer’s genius to create an archive with value. But it also takes a passionate collector.
Keep everything. That’s what attics are for.
