Local author John Craig’s papers are preserved at the Harry Ransom Centre in Austin
Local author John Craig’s papers are preserved at the Harry Ransom Centre for Research in the Humanities in Austin
AUSTIN, TEXAS — I am visiting Austin, Texas, this month in pursuit of Peterborough writer John Craig (1921-82). Why you might ask? The answer is twofold. First was Craig’s need for money for his writing in the late 1970s. Secondly, there was the welcome news that the University of Texas at Austin was offering payments to writers for their papers. Craig had given up his day job back in 1970 in order to pursue his plan to become a full-time writer. While he wrote with great determination throughout that decade, he had a large family to look after; in fact, all four of the Craig offspring were headed to university by then. He had offered his papers to Trent University, but he learned, to his disappointment, that all his home university could offer in return was a tax receipt based on their estimated value. This was not enough. At the same time, two of John’s sons were attending the University of Texas on track scholarships. A connection was forged from the track to the library and the Harry Ransom Center for Research in the Humanities purchased his papers in the late 1970s. I don’t know the date or the price, but what I do know is that the HRC has nine boxes of Craig material. They are only partially catalogued and, until I arrived, they likely hadn’t been opened. But they sit before me now in the capacious and attractive Reading Room of the Ransom Center as I go through their contents box by box. I do so with the greatest care in the manner required by major research libraries. Two stories have converged for me in Austin. On the one hand, I have before me the nuts and bolts of the ways that John Craig made his life as a full-time writer. On the other, I have the pleasure of working in one of the greatest research centres in the western world. I feel privileged to be here. In that spirit, I’ll devote the rest of this column to the Harry Ransom Center. Not enough Canadians know that, in this difficult time for the United States, the city of Austin and the Harry Ransom Research Center represent a progressive and heartening meeting place of southern America’s cultural and intellectual life. The Ransom Center is really the story of a young man from Galveston who loved books and literature from his boyhood. In 1938, while John Craig was still a high school student at PCVS in Peterborough, Harry Huntt Ransom (1908-1976) became an assistant professor at the University of Texas. Concerned that the university’s library was very thin in its holdings, and aware that a flourishing academic community needed books and archival material to support its intellectual and scholarly life, he began to drum up local sources of money for the purchasing of such material. The amount of money available was small at the outset, but Ransom persisted. After wartime service in the Air Force, he returned to U Texas and, in a matter of years, qualified as a full professor in the English department. When I first saw the name Harry Ransom, I assumed I was dealing with a wealthy oil or cattleman who gave such a large donation to the University of Texas that his philanthropy merited a major naming opportunity. Such, however, was not the case. Ransom was an academic visionary who made his way upward within the ranks; from an instructor he progressed to full professor and then assistant dean; then to dean and president and finally chancellor. At each stage along the way, he commandeered more money for books and recruited more interested donors. Good-humouredly, he apologized to his fellow Texans in saying, “I know that more books are not likely to excite alumni as much as football.” But gather books and manuscripts and archival material he did, undaunted by a culture that often looked askance at his passion. In a now-famous letter in 1956, he framed his vision: “Let there be established somewhere in Texas — let’s say in the capital city — a centre of our cultural compass — a research centre to be the Bibliotheque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation.” (Today, by the way, is Texas Independence Day). Though he died in 1976, Harry Ransom lived to see the University complete the building I have been working in — it is a spacious and impressive monument to his extraordinary cultural dream. There is a long story of moneyraising, acquisitions and planning that has led to the present state of the Harry Ransom Center. It has its own Guggenheim Bible on display and a first edition of Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales.” It has great photographic, music, theatre, television and film collections. It has some, if not all, the papers of so many modern writers that I couldn’t begin to list them all. Here are but a few — Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, Evelyn Waugh, Don DeLillo, Carson McCullers, Marianne Moore, Graham Greene and Tom Stoppard. Recently, the HRC accessed the entire collection of playwright Arthur Miller and all the material from the television show Mad Men. Scholars come from around the globe to study the papers and editions by writers like these, some more famous than others. And what about Canada? Canadian writers have been garnering plenty of attention since the 1970s, and the collection of writers’ papers from Canada is now a priority for the Ransom Center. In the late 1970s John Craig’s collection was likely an anomaly. Since then, the HRC has processed the papers of editor, anthologist and author John Metcalf and very recently those of Michael Ondaatje. Add, too, Brian Moore, Norman Levine, Peterborough’s Hugh Kenner and A.M. Klein Indeed, the new Ransom Center Magazine (Fall, 2017) features an Ondaatje interview conducted by the Center’s Director, Stephen Enniss. The piece is entitled A Nomad’s Writing Finds a Home. Focusing on the great success of Ondaatje’s “The English Patient,” it celebrates both the novel and the feature film it spawned. “The archive documents in great detail Ondaatje’s working methods and demonstrates his centrality to the literary and cultural communities of Canada and the broader world over more than 50 years,” writes Enniss. Asked about his ‘notebooks,’ which often include scrapbook images of different kinds, Michael Ondaatje replied, “I usually write about four drafts of a book by hand before it moves to a typewriter or computer. After that, I keep reworking it, printing it out, rewriting it by hand. So during these early stages of handwriting the novels, I sometimes need visual breaks along the way; I might stick in someone’s poetic fragment … or perhaps a stray visual image …” Whoever said that writing fiction is easy? I am finding in John Craig’s manuscripts a similar attention to the careful building stage by stage of his books. The Harry Ransom Center for Research in the Humanities now houses the papers of both John Craig and Michael Ondaatje. They may be a long way from home, but both authors have found a new and storied home for their papers.