This spring, I fell in love with John Gower, who died in 1408. For months I’d been reading his poems in their modern print editions with a scholarly disinterest. Then at the Huntington Library one morning, my stomach fluttered when I opened the cover of a fourteenth-century manuscript of his most famous work, Confessio Amantis, to a blurry illumination of a dreaming Gower, asleep. Since that day in Pasadena I’ve been talking about him breathlessly, chasing him through centuries of scholarship, tracking his records across continents in archives from California to Kent.

What is it about the archive that makes us fall in love? Why is it, as Saidiya Hartman puts it, that book supports and acid-free boxes make us dream of “a romance that exceed[s] the fictions of history—the rumors, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies that constitute the archive”? No doubt, archival research is occasionally extremely tedious—transcribing difficult handwriting can be a more effective sleep aid than melatonin—but most of the time it’s a unique thrill. Turning over folios or examining the wax seal of a medieval charter is a sensual encounter; Arlette Farge calls it a “physical pleasure [in] finding a trace of the past.” Parchment, the predominant material for medieval writing, is made of animal hide, so studying Gower’s manuscripts and life records means I’m often encountering him, literally, through the touch of skin on skin.

I’m far from the first person to swoon at the masses of papers, documents, and manuscripts that populate historical and cultural institutions across the globe. A smattering of novels has emerged in the past quarter century that stage a quest for knowledge in the low lighting and tense intimacy of a quiet study room, “unbashedly interpret[ing] the past through its material traces” and constituting a literary genre that Suzanne Keen calls the “romance of the archive.” In these books—A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, Isaac Fellman’s Dead Collections, to name a few—the narration of history often intertwines with personal love stories until the two threads become virtually indistinguishable. Lately, I’ve been reading as many as I can get my hands on.

While the researchers (or archivists, depending) almost always fall in love with each other, on some fundamental level, these love stories are always unrequited: a research object can entrance a scholar, but it can never really belong to her. Any encounter with a document in the archives—whether a nineteenth-century letter or a medieval court document—is an attempt to reconstruct the past from fragments that are only touchable and holdable in the reading room for an hour or two. Byatt plays on this paradox in her 1990 classic Possession, when one of the main characters, Roland, finds himself “seized by a strange and uncharacteristic impulse” to pilfer the previously undiscovered letters of a nineteenth-century poet out of a special collections library, catalyzing the adventure that will lead him to become equally possessed by his fellow scholar, the cold and beautiful Maud. Neither knowledge nor love should be mistaken for ownership, Byatt seems to suggest, though Maud ends up with the letters at the end of the day. Scholarship and romance can operate according to similar logics of jealousy and compulsion.

A quixotic longing underlies these books. Characters may have special access to collections and libraries, but the pursuit of history is nonetheless ingrained with a gnawing sense of loss. Archival romance novels often center on a search for someone or something that is missing; to quote Sol, the trans archivist at the center of Fellman’s fan-fiction-steeped 2022 novel, “in general what you find in archives is the absence of a body, the chalk outline of a life… You can almost taste the closeness of the body sometimes, almost feel the glossy heat of it, but never quite.” Historical research is always a kind of heartbreak; the more I learn about Gower’s works and life, the more I nurse a yearning for all I’ll never understand. And the past can be tremendously brittle; much of what we can know rests in records and account books and literary manuscripts that exist in fragile, finite copies. Perhaps it makes sense then that both Sol, whose love story with Else, a grieving donor to the archive, will lead him to uncover the source of a preservation issue, and the blood-sucking antagonist of Kostova’s book are vampires. Every time we use archival material, the ink fades a little from light exposure, the internal structure of the book weakens a little, no matter how gently we handle the spine. Like parasites, those of us who work with archives slowly leech life out of our materials, loving our subjects to death.

Given that the personal and romantic is always also historical, these novels are often intensely political. For Keen, who focuses on contemporary British literature, the romance of the archive necessarily constructs itself in relation—whether affectionate or antagonistic—to England’s imperial legacy. The multigenerational The Historian (2005), to give another example, centers on the story of two young researchers, Paul and Helen, who fall in love during a sprawling, trans-European quest to uncover the identity of a mysterious stranger who murders Paul’s academic mentor. Along the way, sedimented history, from the vestiges of the Ottoman Empire to the conflicts of the Cold War, constantly shape their lofty pursuit of knowledge and justice. The past and the present mutually construct each other, Kostova reminds us, inseparable from the passions that incite both love affairs and geopolitical strife.

Yet the archive’s sparkle can also leave us misty-eyed, occluding a political vision. I’ve been guilty of this myself. Gower was (it would seem from the texts he left behind) a morally stuffy money-grubber, with a vicious attitude toward peasants, who may have married a woman half his age. If I knew him when he was living, I probably wouldn’t have liked him at all. But from a distance of six hundred years or so, I find myself constructing enemies-to-lovers plotlines. Perhaps it’s just impossible to pay this much attention to someone and not catch an “archive fever,” as Jacques Derrida calls that fierce and consuming nostalgia for the past. Or maybe in a profession as solitary and quiet as academia, it’s all too easy to forget the present and become enamored of an intellectual figment or a ghost.

Last week, at the Lambeth Palace Library in London, I read Gower’s last will and testament, recorded prior to his death, then walked along the bank of the Thames to visit his final resting place. Pushing through the crowds at Borough Market sampling fruits, paella, and jams, I ducked into Southwark Cathedral. The tomb, to the left of the nave, is a wooden effigy of Gower’s supine body, painted in green, red, and gold. His eyes are open, and his head rests not on a pillow, but on books of his poems. I thought of a line from the Confessio, when Gower imagines his books will endure when he is “dede and elleswhere” for future readers to find in some “tyme comende after this” (time coming after this). I felt shy then, implicated in his transhistorical glance.

Eventually, my boyfriend came to collect me on his way home from the British Library. On our way out of the cathedral, I turned and blew Gower a kiss. My boyfriend laughed at me, then reached out and brushed a piece of hair behind my ear. I was alive, the year was 2023. His skin was warm and soft; it felt nothing like parchment at all.

It’s 1965. Truman Capote was a known figure on the literary scene and a member of the global social jet set. His bestselling books Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s had made him a literary favorite. And after five years of painstaking research, and gut-wrenching personal investment, part I of In Cold Blood debuted in The New Yorker. As people across the country opened their magazines and read the first lines of the story, they were riveted. Overnight, Capote catapulted from a mere darling of the literary world to a full-fledged global celebrity on a par with the likes of rockstars and film legends.

The success was all encompassing, but the cost would prove greater than even Capote had realized. Having read an article in the New York Times about the brutal slaying of a family at their farmhouse in Kansas, Capote embarked on a journey to the small rural farming town. Holcomb, located in Southwest Kansas, was a town of just under three hundred people and quintessential 1950s America. A small tight knit community that felt and acted more like one large family than a municipality.

Needless to say, the murders of prominent farmer Herbert Clutter, his wife Bonnie, their youngest daughter Nancy and their son Kenyon, sent shockwaves through the town. Not only was this kind of crime unheard of in Holcomb, it also cast a cloud of suspicion over the entire town. Who would have had reason to kill the Clutters? And even if there had been cause to kill Mr. Clutter, how could anyone justify killing young Nancy and sweet Kenyon? Neighbors locked their doors and kept their children home from school, firearms were placed next to bedside tables, and all were on high alert for fear that they were next on an unknown killers hit list.

It is amidst this air of fear and dread that Truman Capote arrived in Holcomb in 1959. The town had never seen anything like Capote. A man of diminutive stature, great flamboyance of style and a uniquely high-pitched vocal quality, he was a character that the townspeople could never have dreamed up. But there he was, with his notebook in hand, getting the story. It took time for the community to warm to Truman. Their inherent unease with outsiders was immediately on display, not to mention their added skepticism around a New York City reporter’s arrival in town. But Capote did what he was consistently able to do throughout his life—he charmed them into being on his side.

Capote’s charm offensive was especially targeted toward Alvin “Al” Dewey and his wife Marie. Dewey was the special agent from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, assigned as the Chief Investigator of the Clutter murders. Known as an honest, dedicated and earnest public servant, Dewey was a member of the Holcomb community and knew the Clutters socially from church.

Capote, being both a journalist and sharp social observer, knew that Dewey was the key that could unlock all the access that he needed. His charm offensive on the couple ranged from dinner at their home, where he regaled them with stories of his celebrity friends in New York and Los Angeles, to invitations for them to come and visit him around the world. Before long a bond had been forged (one which would last the rest of Capote’s life) and Truman had the access he needed to begin investigating and writing his story.

Truman now had entrée not only to the details of the investigation, but also to the townspeople who felt he was safe to speak with, given that he had the confidence of Chief Investigator Dewey. Soon Truman was interviewing everyone, from the late Nancy Clutters boyfriend to members of the investigative team. He was given access to files and tips that had pointed the investigators in divergent directions. He had the inside track on how the investigation was progressing.

By December 1959, the search for the killers had run hot, cold and hot again. The investigators had a tip from a prison inmate that seemed credible. Chief Dewey and the investigators followed the lead and headed to Las Vegas where it was believed the perpetrators were. On December 30th, 1959, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock were arrested in Las Vegas and charged with the murders of Herbert, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter. They were promptly transferred from Las Vegas to Kansas where the trial would soon begin. Chief Investigator Alvin Dewey’s arrival back in Holcomb with Smith and Hickock was a triumphant return, as he had successfully tracked down the two men, but it was the end of innocence for the small town.

Would the townspeople come together in solemn remembrance of their slain brethren, or would they jeer at and riot around those who had killed them? The sentiments of the town and the people were all on display and Capote was there to witness and transcribe each and every breath of contradiction.

Capote’s sketches of River Valley Farm, the Clutter family home in which the crime was committed. ©Truman Capote Estate. The New York Public Library; Manuscripts and Archives Division (Truman Capote Papers, MssCol 469. Box 7-8).

Perry Smith and John Hickock were now the objects of Capote’s investigative desire. His story was their story, and he had to once again turn on his charm offensive. While he spoke and communicated extensively with both men, it was Perry Smith who Capote developed a particularly close relationship with. Capote’s obsession seemingly straddled from the physical to the psychological. In Perry he saw the person he might have become had his life taken a different path.

Both men were from homes torn apart and both were eventually orphaned. Truman, ever the intellectual and the aesthete, found in Perry a gentle soul with an artistic nature and intellectual curiosity. They traded books and stories and letters. Their connection became one in which Capote could not fully separate himself from his subject, so as the months turned into years, the relationship became increasingly interdependent.

The years between 1959 and 1965 were filled with Capote communicating with the community at large, the investigators and of course the inmates. Trials came and went, and despite confessions from both men, the wheels of justice turned slowly. By 1965, Truman had finished his manuscript except for the ending. And the ending he needed, the ending he felt his story deserved was a complete resolution for the crimes committed, and that meant death to Smith and Hickock.

As they went through additional motions and hearings, Capote became agitated. His book was ready and after five years, he needed his ending to arrive. Court antics and filings could only continue to delay what he needed, and his fear was always rising that they might receive a stay of execution, in essence leaving him with no ending at all. Yet throughout this entire process, Capote had not fully realized the relationship that had developed between him and the killers, particularly Perry Smith. So, as he waited anxiously for their death, he had not fully assessed what the loss would be for him personally.

Eventually there were no more legal motions filed, no stays of execution from the governor. The future for Hickock and Smith was the gallows. And Capote had his ending. He knew he had to see the story through to its most final conclusion, which meant being there as the executioner placed the sacks over the heads of the two young men, as they were dropped from the gallows, and as the last moments of life twitched out of their bodies. Capote watched in tears and was inconsolable on the plane ride back to Manhattan. His friends rallied around him, but each acknowledged that something in Truman had died with Perry. A small, unidentifiable element of himself had been ripped away.

The success of In Cold Blood was instant and it bestowed upon Truman all the riches he had dreamed. His five years of work had created a new genre of literature, the nonfiction novel, as he declared it. Soon after publication he gave his storied Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York. He was the toast of jet set society, and the guests who came to fête him were world leaders, royalty, film stars and of course Alvin and Marie Dewey and a few friends from Holcomb Kansas. 1965 was to be the best year for Capote as he ascended to the global stage as the “It” author and personality of his generation; but something eerie lurked just below the surface.

When I began work on my documentary The Capote Tapes, I was initially drawn to Truman’s years following the publication of In Cold Blood; but I quickly realized that I could never tell Truman’s story without telling the story of In Cold Blood. His story is intrinsically wrapped in Perry’s story. And the sorrow he felt at the loss of Perry’s life and yet the realization that his success was dependent on that life coming to an end, always lingered for Truman. As glamorous as his life was, the years following 1965 and Perry’s death became a slow and long decline into alcohol and drug addiction.

As a young boy in the American South, I grew up reading Capote, from the short stories to the novels. He was an aspirational figure. Someone who lived a grand far away life, he was both indulgent and intellectual. He stood out as an openly gay man when the laws of the land deemed it criminal, but he chafed at the idea of being defined by his sexuality. He was a media personality who emitted wit and charm, but he could also be cruel and inhumane. He was a ball of contradictions. But perhaps most important of all, was his writing. It remains for me so close to home, so near the smells and sounds of the South, so rich in tone and elegant in prose. As Norman Mailer said, “He wrote the best sentences.”

My exploration into Capote’s life was through the lens of never heard interviews that Capote’s friends had given the author George Plimpton. Plimpton had turned those interviews into his oral history on Capote. The tapes are a rich history not simply of Truman, but of the era in which he lived and the range of people he charmed and alienated along the way. Additionally, I spent hours poring over Capote’s notebooks and correspondence. Immersing myself in his detailed penmanship, concise and often witty observations, and the pure genius that is his writing.

Having access to these incredible notes and drafts, was essential in allowing me to further dive into Capote the man, as well as the author. Capote’s literature remains ever more relevant today. From Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the stories of young people running from their past to make a new life in New York, to the True Crime genre which he is undoubtedly the godfather of following his writing of In Cold Blood. Capote’s talent—his unyielding talent—is what continues to make him a captivating personality and author. He wrote it best himself in Music for Chameleons, “But I’m not a saint yet. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius.”

_____________________

From the introduction by Ebs Burnough to In Cold Blood, the manuscript by Truman Capote, copyright ©2023 by Ebs Burnough and SP Books. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, SP Books. All rights reserved.

In the beginning was the permit, and the permit was not with me. Only with it in hand could one map and inhabit the space of the archive. The process of gaining permission to enter and use the archive immediately threw one into the teeth of Egyptian National Security (Amn al-Dawla or another of the security agencies, which one was never clear). After the staff of the archive vetted an application for research, it moved up to be assessed by an office of the national security apparatus.

The same logic that erected barricades and put guns in the hands of police on Cairo’s streets seeped into the construction of Egypt’s history. For the historian, security, access, and permission stood as the requisite first steps into the craft. If one could not see documents, one could not write history. So much of the historical enterprise revolves around who can see what. The permit bluntly structured the potentials of the histories that could be written. Who had permission to narrate Egypt’s past?

Nowhere was there a clear articulation of who would gain access to the archive and who would not. Vagueness functioned as a deliberate and effective strategy across Egypt. The ambiguous notion of an Islamist terrorist threat or an imminent attack by Israel, for example, justified the maintenance of emergency rule for the whole of Hosni Mubarak’s reign. A generalized sense of Egyptian amity meant that no one purchased car insurance because, in a nondescript way, Egyptians always did the right thing.

In the archive, with no clear guidelines in place, the state could do what it liked, no questions asked, leaving one only to guess as to why a particular person received a permit and someone else not. Certain research areas were clearly off limits: topics related to foreign policy or Egypt’s wars and most anything from the 1940s on—the period after the establishment of the state of Israel, the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, and the expansion of the state’s machinery of security.

The best strategy for a researcher applying to work in the archive was to meet vagueness with vagueness. The more general a topic, the more innocuous it sounded. In this way, even from the moment of applying to access the archive, security concerns entered into the calculus of a historian’s research. At the time I applied for my permit, I wanted to work on the history of medicine in eighteenth-century Egypt and so was instructed to write as my research topic “eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social history.”

Not only would this fuzziness seem ignorable but it would, in theory at least, not limit the kinds of sources I would be able to see in the archive, if I was allowed in at all. From California, I sent to a professor I knew in Cairo my application for a permit along with two passport-size photos, an official letter in Arabic and English from my thesis adviser (the more official-looking, the better) stating the purpose and title of my research project, and a copy of my Egyptian ID card. My professor friend wrote to tell me that all had been delivered and that we should inquire in six weeks or so.

When I arrived in Cairo six months later, my research permit was not yet ready. I landed in early summer, keen to begin my forays in the archive after years of preparation. I felt like a bucking bronco in the chute before the gate is flung open. I was ready to leap and smash my way through the archive. Beyond taking years of courses, reading everything I could about Egyptian history and the Egyptian National Archives, and preparing the documents I needed for my application, I had built my life around spending years in Cairo.

I had left my university and department, moved out of my apartment, and said goodbye to my social network. My plan to be gone for at least two years precipitated a breakup with my girlfriend. I had come to graduate school to become a historian. Historians went to archives. However high the price of admission to the guild, I was, for better or worse, committed and ready to pay.

Having expected delay, bureaucracy’s norm everywhere, I remained unperturbed that first summer. I concentrated on doing other things to prepare for my research. I reconnected with colleagues in Egypt, bought books, readjusted to life in the city, saw friends and family, and generally got my bearings. It was all thoroughly enjoyable. The archive loomed; I waited. In mid-July, nearly seven months after I had sent the application materials to my friend in Cairo, I learned my permit was ready.

Elated by this news and relieved that the national security authorities found me unremarkable, I was facing a moment of truth. I found myself growing apprehensive. Retrieving the permit would mark the first time I entered the archive. I knew—well, at that point, hoped—I would be spending a lot of time in that building over the coming years. But what if I hated it? What if the people there hated me? Added to this general anxiety was the realization that I now had no excuse not to be in the archive. It was the reason I had come to Cairo, and it stood open. Being in Cairo for research but not being in the archive would eat at me.

Dutifully, I went to the archive to retrieve my permit without delay. I was scolded for entering the wrong way, through the workers’ entrance—long before my bad joke—and then directed to the door at the top of the black stone steps. At the front desk, Ahmed (this was our first meeting) looked me up and down—though it was the peak of summer, I was wearing a sport coat and dress shoes to try to make a good first impression—and asked me what I wanted. With pride, I said I had a permit waiting for me. Ahmed made a phone call and then told me to go upstairs to the reading room. All extremely promising, I thought. I thanked him profusely and, pretending to know where to go, headed confidently for the stairs I saw beyond his desk. At the top, I scanned the scene in front of me, hoping for some direction.

To my surprise, I saw a set of double doors on the far side of the café with a plaque next to them saying “reading room” (qā‘at al-bahth). There it was. Having crossed North America, the Atlantic,˙and the Mediterranean, I had arrived at this corner of Africa. After years of fetishization, preparation, mythology, anticipation, hope, and anxiety, I finally stood on the cusp of entering that place—the archive. I wanted to speed through this ominous portal to the other side as quickly as possible.

I pushed through the double doors for the first of what would become hundreds of times. I veered left, past the sagging computer tables, taking in the new terrain, and glimpsed the head bureaucrat sitting at her desk. Even at this first glance, it was obvious that she was the person who held my research permit, and hence my professional future, in her hands. I would come to know her very well over the years.

I walked over, mulling the most appropriate way to greet her, asking myself how I could possibly not have thought about what I was going to say at this critical moment. Having reached her with no strategy, I smiled and greeted her very normally. I wanted nothing more than for her to like me. Intimidated, my pulse racing, I tried to engage her warmly, but she barely looked up, waving me to a broken metal chair with black upholstery. She shuffled through some papers underneath her desk, found my permit, and handed it to me, saying nothing. I am not sure what I imagined for this moment, but certainly something more than this. An anointing of historian’s oil, perhaps? A ceremonial oath? A handshake? Finally being let in on the secrets all the other historians seemed to know? I looked at the permit for a few moments. Next to my picture, it listed my name, address, citizenship, and research topic. The topic read “the history of society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” This pleased me with its broadness and encouraged my hope that I would be able to see the documents I wanted.

After a few moments perusing my new research permit, I looked up expectantly at my god incarnate. I smiled again nervously; she stared back at me blankly. As part of the ceremony, admittedly still unformed in my mind, of retrieving my permit and entering the archive for the first time, I imagined a welcome, a tour of the space, an explanation of research tools, or an official primer to the reading room. The eyes looking back at me seemed to say merely, “You are free to go.” I gathered that if I wanted an introduction to the archive I would have to instigate it myself, and so, overly eager and against my better judgment, I asked her if there were catalogs I might consult or if she had any suggestions as to where I should begin.

She looked at my permit again, to see what my topic was. She hesitated and then said that I probably would not find much in the archive. My heart sank. This remark did not bode well for my future in the reading room, as she alone determined what materials qualified as relevant to “my” topic. She suggested I go to the Egyptian National Library, which housed manuscripts and printed books. I would find much more there, she said. But in my still-forming historian’s mind, archives—not manuscripts or books—represented the sine qua non of the stuff of history.

Although I did not know it at the time, my questions on that first day were sorely misplaced. The archive and, by extension, the government employees who worked there did not think in terms of research topics. The overriding logic of the archive was a bureaucratic and organizational one, laced through with security concerns. On that first day, I did not grasp how the institution of the archive worked and, more significantly, what this meant for the writing of history in Egypt.

Instead of beginning with certain topics, problematics, people, or events, history in Egypt was most often written about archival units. The archive shaped history in direct ways. Historians wrote about the court records of a certain city or the administration of a government department. Theses and dissertations have titles like “The Court of Mansura” or “The Department of Housing.” Given that the archive itself has no index to most of its collection, these works organizing and summarizing the records in an archival unit proved extremely useful as the sorts of research guides I had naïvely expected to exist.

The question of where to look for sources on eighteenth-century medicine, or even eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social history, was therefore the wrong question to ask. As soon as I asked it, the head of the reading room likely began riffling through all of the archive’s various collections and units in her head. Given that no archival heading was an obvious match for my stated interest, she told me I would find nothing on the topic. (Perhaps an additional factor was that fewer historians meant less work.) Most researchers in the Egyptian National Archives grabbed onto one archival unit like a vein of gold and mined it until it tapped out.

To think in terms of topics rather than archival units ran counter to this logic, and I, therefore, had to learn how to translate my interests into an Egyptian archival language that would get me the documents I wanted. Only after working in the archive for a few months and after many conversations did I realize that I had to think in terms of local courts and governmental departments—to work with the bureaucratic designations of the archive itself.

What I did learn on my first day were some of the many rules. No pens, only pencils. No cell phone usage in the reading room. No notebooks, only loose sheets of paper. No food. No cameras. Research permits had to be renewed every year. I would also quickly grasp that the archive’s rules about everything applied to nothing. Such exacting detail acted as a corollary to vagueness in Egypt.

Both were mechanisms of state power. Rules existed for every detail of life (perhaps even put down in writing somewhere) and governed nearly every institution, business, restaurant, agency, household, and school. Egyptians like to joke that their bureaucracy is the world’s oldest, at five thousand years. Yet ubiquitous as they were, most of Egypt’s rules lay dormant, unknown, unenforced. The threat of enforcement, though, loomed at every moment. After years of smoking on the bus, one might suddenly be informed that smoking on the bus is illegal. But what about the previous five years when I smoked on the bus and no one seemed to care? Irrelevant.

Many of the codified-though-never-enforced rules aimed at quite reasonable and important matters. One should indeed refrain from using a pen in an archive. Yet when you see most people using pens, you acclimate to the culture of pen usage (why them and not me?), only to be chastised later for using a pen in the archive. Egyptians overcame the crushing avalanche of rules primarily by ignoring them. The rules slowed society and one’s life. Bypassing them was one of the most efficient and productive means of greasing the wheels of social and economic relationships.

One day, a policeman stopped me for talking on my cell phone while driving—technically a violation, though rarely enforced. Why uphold this rule on this day on this road? The officer asked to see both of my licenses—my individual driver’s license and the car’s operating license (equivalent to its registration). I handed them to him and he put them in his pocket, informing me that I would have to go to a police station the following morning to pay a fine of one hundred pounds before I could retrieve them. I grew agitated and annoyed and told him that I was very busy the next day—I wasn’t—and would not be able to go to the station.

Despite knowing the futility of the question, I asked why he had stopped me out of all the other millions of drivers talking on their phones. Why selectively enforce the rules with me, I asked in my head. Pick someone else! His blank stare clearly signaled what I already knew I was to do in this situation. I gave him twenty pounds, took back my licenses, and drove away.

Egyptian law clearly states that talking on the phone while driving is a violation, and, for the good of society, it should be. The penalty for this infraction is one hundred pounds and the seizure of one’s licenses until the fine is paid. The officer who took my licenses and I both knew why he had stopped me. Such policemen made six hundred pounds a month, about one hundred US dollars—not enough to support a single person, let alone a family. Quite reasonably, they supplemented their government income by collecting money from motorists as they could.

Some might call it a bribe, but it functioned more as a means of economic redistribution in a corrupt system that stole from the citizenry. From my perspective, the choice was obvious. I was happy to give this poor man who stood in traffic all day twenty pounds rather than giving the Egyptian government one hundred pounds (and spending a few hours at a police station in the bargain). Bypassing the law benefited us both, though it did little to prevent people from using their phones while driving.

The same principle held in the archive. The nonenforcement of rules benefited both parties—worker and researcher. Renewing a permit every year proved a hassle for the researcher and a great deal of work for the archive’s staff. What really was the big deal about using pens? Easier to let this go. Rules produced delay, hardship, and tedium. No one wants any of that. Moreover, the power to choose when rules apply, and to whom, represented a means of control for the authorities. Uncertainty about the timing and context of the application of existing laws kept everyone off balance, especially, of course, the weakest in society, who are always the most common targets of state power.

The ethos of Egyptian security embodied by endless selective rules, applications, permits, guards, locked doors, and security procedures manifested as well in the ways many Egyptians thought about history and its place in society. A conversation in the archive’s small café years into my research made this very clear. A group of Egyptian researchers and another American graduate student and I were enjoying coffee around one of the glass-topped tables.

At a certain point, one of the Egyptians turned to my American colleague and asked her why she worked on the history of Egypt. I could see that the question took her aback. Our Egyptian colleague meant nothing challenging or malicious by the question; she was genuinely curious: Why not study the history of America? After all, our Egyptian friend said, she was an American and America was her country. Was she not interested in writing the history of her own country? Why would she be drawn to a place so far away and different from America, a nation of which she was not even a part? Why care about the history of a country that was not your own?

The sentiments expressed in these questions reveal some of the ways Egyptians conceive of history and their responsibilities toward the past—their past. For most, Egypt had to be protected and cast in a positive light. The vagueness of the threats against Egypt demanded its defense. As in all national historiographies, some Egyptians wrote as crude nationalists; however, most did not. Nearly all, though, held on to some notion of Egyptian distinction, the idea that the specialness of Egypt required care and protection. With an air of suspicion, the Egyptian historian of Egypt wondered whether an American historian of Egypt could be trusted to understand and contribute to the project of the Egyptian nation. Did she subscribe to the same notion of history that most Egyptians did? Would she make Egypt look good or bad? At base, this was the question for most Egyptian historians.

And until it was answered, the non-Egyptian historian had to be treated with caution. If she ultimately proved to be a friend of the nation, she would be lauded and admired, as Egyptian historians greatly prized those non-Egyptian historians who expressed intellectual sentiments supportive of a nationalist conception of Egypt’s past. Non-Egyptians offering proof of Egypt’s greatness strengthened the nation’s case, allowing Egyptian historians to claim exoneration from the accusation of blind nationalism, which they understood some took as negative. The recognition of Egypt’s glory by non-Egyptians, who had been born without any obligation toward Egypt, strengthened its standing as truth.

As an Egyptian American, I posed a challenge for the assessing of loyalties. In the archive, I was clearly a foreigner. I myself felt more American in Egypt than I ever did in the United States. I had been born, educated, and inculcated in the United States, yet I felt culturally very Egyptian, was legally an Egyptian citizen, had family in Egypt, and knew the country well. Where did this place me in the eyes of my fellow researchers? Did my heritage mean I recognized the grandeur of Egypt more than other Americans did? Did I love Egypt? Was I writing Egyptian history as “my own” or not? Did the “Egyptian” blood coursing through my veins reveal to me things non-Egyptians could never understand? Or did the facts of my dual citizenship, American upbringing, and accent disqualify me from Egyptianness? What made one an Egyptian, anyway? To be accepted as a legitimate historian in Egypt, one had to prove one’s allegiance. Being identifiably Egyptian, whatever that meant, helped. Evidencing fealty and love sealed it.

Partly in and partly out, I proved suspect. I viscerally reacted, and acted, against the game of nationalist history, no matter the nation. As best I could, I rejected the imposition on me of any unearned privileges that came from being whatever amount of Egyptian I was. I did not believe that one needed to be Egyptian—let alone an Egyptian nationalist—to be a historian of Egypt, any more than one needed to be American to be a historian of America or Thai to be a historian of Thailand. I fancied I could, in my naïve and small way, change how Egyptians, and others, viewed history.

But who was I? Even as I felt myself the impostor Egyptian—never mind the impostor historian—oscillating between trying to be more Egyptian than American, more Egyptian than Egyptians, I strove to move beyond the frame of national history. This more than anything else made me a non-Egyptian historian in and of Egypt.

On my first day in the archive, I did not spend much time fretting about any of this. That would come later. For now, I had received my permit. I held it tight. I marked and celebrated this victory. As I left the archive for the first time, I profusely and deferentially thanked the reading room staff and all the bureaucrats I encountered as I collected my belongings and exited the building.

On my way down the steps, I impatiently called my aunts to tell them I had secured my permit. I also called to thank the professor who had helped me get it. Excited and daunted, I began to think about how I would organize my research time. As archival researchers query themselves daily, I asked myself for the first time that day, “Will I go back tomorrow?”

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Excerpted from My Egypt Archive by Alan Mikhail. Copyright © 2023. Available from Yale University Press.

Feature image, Malcolm with a camera, date unknown, courtesy of FSG.

Stepping into Janet Malcolm’s home overlooking Gramercy Park was like entering an alternate version of New York City, the kind one might have read about in a childhood chapter book. The ceilings were double height, the lighting was warm and soft. The art adorning the walls was attractive, but the pièce de rèsistance was Malcolm’s library.

Books covered the walls of her soaring living room, with a wooden ladder tucked in the corner to offer easy access. The collection was organized by genre: photography, biography, criticism. Books by friends got their own shelf by the door, perhaps to ensure that good company was never far beyond reach.

This was where Malcolm and I met for the first time when, in the waning days of the summer of 2019, she invited me over for tea. I had just completed my own research project on her life and work. Surrounded by  Malcolm’s home library, we discussed my time in her papers.

At one point, Malcolm got up to grab a photograph of her elementary school class at the top of the Empire State Building. She had been telling me about a series of essays she was starting to tinker with, short reflections on old pictures. She was not sure what she wanted to do with them but her editor thought they would make a good collection. In this photograph, the children of P.S. 82 were smiley and windswept, no older than nine or ten. She asked me if I could pick her out of the lineup. Of course I could: small frame, unmistakable grin, third from the left in the front. This is the kind of intimacy built by time spent in an archive.

Malcolm (front row, third from the left) with her classmates from P.S. 82 at the Empire State Building. (Courtesy of FSG)

This photograph is one of a few dozen that provide the source material for Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory, Malcolm’s final book-length work, which was published posthumously in January 2023. On the surface, these essays are a radical departure from everything else Malcolm wrote over the course of her career: they concern people, places, and items that populated her younger life, rather than subjects from which she could purport to maintain some degree of journalistic remove.

But the choice to root her recollections in printed images was a calculated one. By starting with her own archive, Malcolm created the opportunity to write from a vantage point more akin to that of her earlier work, to keep her readers ever at arm’s length.

Prior to her death at 86 in 2021, Malcolm had long been a towering figure in American journalism. She had earned a reputation for penning biting criticism and novelistic reporting. Whole issues of the New Yorker were devoted to her deep dives. But despite her robust literary credentials, she was wary of becoming a celebrity in her own right. For much of her storied career, Malcolm seemed to shun any work that might resemble autobiography, or really expose her true self to her audience at all.

After Jeffrey Masson, Sanskrit scholar, psychoanalyst, and the subject of In the Freud Archives, sued Malcolm for libel in 1984, tarnishing her image even though she won the suit, she retreated almost entirely from the public eye. She did not pose for photos. She hardly ever made appearances: for a rare public event in the spring of 2012, she insisted on reading aloud from a pre-written and edited script rather than speak off-the-cuff. She postured in her writing as someone terrifyingly and unapproachably sharp, never missing an opportunity to remind her readers of “the fiction—on which all autobiographical writing is poised—that the person writing and the person being written about are a single seamless entity.”

Her work over the final decade of her life, though, tells a different story. In 2010, she published her first piece hinting at a change of heart, a short essay for the New York Review of Books titled “Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography.” At the time, any intimation of a memoir in the works would have taken devoted readers by surprise. There, she’d remarked, “I cannot write about myself as I write about the people I have written about as a journalist. [These people] have posed for me and I have drawn their portraits. No one is dictating to me or posing for me now.” But in the years following the publication of this essay she did find a way to write about herself more directly. The people smiling at the camera in her personal photographs became the ones sitting for her last set of portraits.

It’s hardly coincidental that Malcolm was organizing her own archive around the same time that she began to explore writing about her life. In 2013, she sent her first shipment—59 boxes of assorted detritus—up to New Haven, where they would live at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. To say that Malcolm organized her papers would be a stretch. In some cases, she simply emptied the contents of her filing cabinets into cardboard boxes. But elsewhere, she annotated letters and folders, leaving easter eggs and reminders for any future researcher that she was thinking carefully about what to include in her archive and, more importantly, what to leave out.

In 2020, she sent a second installment of materials, bringing the total number of boxes in her archive to around a hundred. This project punctuated the final decade of her career. As she built this collection during these years, her aversion to writing about herself, or engaging with her own legacy at all, slowly gave way to something closer to ambivalence.

Malcolm published the first of what would become the Still Pictures essays, “Six Glimpses of the Past,” in the New Yorker in the fall of 2018. A sequence of short reflections on family photos, the piece began with a snapshot of the writer as a little girl wearing t-strap sandals and a polka-dotted bucket hat and beaming at someone beyond the frame. But Malcolm was careful to remind her readers that just because she was sharing this photograph didn’t mean she was getting personal.

Regarding the picture, Malcolm wrote, “I say ‘my’ age, but I don’t think of the child as me. No feeling of identification stirs as I look at her round face and thin arms and her incongruously assertive pose.” The little girl posing in the picture and the woman writing about her were hardly the same person at all. This was the same perspective she employed to write about a family therapy session from the other side of a one-way mirror, or Sylvia Plath through five other biographies of her, only this time there was no denying that she was much closer to the content. The material was brand new, and the perspective was quintessentially Malcolm.

Still, Malcolm had long been aware of the limitations of her approach. As she once jotted down in a set of notes, “We are all in our work… What I write here will probably have a lot more to do with me than it does with [other] people.” Malcolm’s device of using her own archive to access her memories was a brilliant act of self-deception. She had always made clear to her readers that she was showing them events, or books, or people as she perceived them, and not in any absolute or purportedly objective terms. The Still Pictures essays are autobiographical less because she was showing readers her family photographs, and more because she was letting us in on how she looked at them.

Prior to attempting an autobiography in 2010 or penning the Still Pictures essays later that decade, there was one other occasion when Malcolm chose to write explicitly about her youth and her homeland. In 1990, she traveled back to Prague on assignment on the eve of Václav Havel’s inauguration. But, she wrote in that piece, “another agenda also claimed my attention, and sometimes threatened to subvert the journalistic one. This was my quest for the Proustian sensations that would reconnect me to my early childhood in Prague, and illuminate—and possibly settle—the question of what coming to this place meant to me.”

Though Malcolm resisted writing about herself, essays like this one are an unmistakable illustration of how she used her journalistic work to explore her own mind, especially some of its more submerged corners. She was open about her fraught relationship with many of the fixtures of her youth: Judaism, Prague. After this story came out, she received a torrent of notes from readers, many of whom had similar ties to Eastern Europe or similarly complicated feelings about the places they were from. She was good about responding to them. In one reply, to a Mr. White, she wrote, “The thoughts stimulated by your letter make me want to return to Prague and learn more about the feelings of unease and alienation my ‘homeland’ evokes.”

Decades later, as she wrote Still Pictures, Malcolm’s relationship with her memories remained fraught. Shame and ruefulness crackle beneath many of her recollections. The years she spent facing unrelenting criticism are no doubt partly to blame. She saved every profile of her or review of her work, many of them unflattering, with headlines like “Oedipussy-whipped” and “The back-stabber’s art.” This kind of coverage—often sexist and snide—compounded her anxieties about the divide between the written account and real life, or the lack thereof. Her writing in the final phase of her career is consistent with so many of her earlier anxieties, about how writers posture within their work, and what the implications of that work are for people alive in the world.

When Malcolm decided to write these essays for publication, she was still in relatively good health, though illness kept her from finishing what was meant to be the final piece in the collection. While writing about herself through her personal archive seems like an attempt to maintain a safe distance from her readers, she knew the photographs could only provide a protective barrier for so long. Why did she want to bare herself? Perhaps she was aware, having recently sent a batch of papers to Yale, that she would likely become someone else’s subject sooner rather than later. She knew better than most that the only thing scarier than writing about oneself is letting someone else wrest control of the narrative.

This may well be what motivated her to write, and publish, some of the most exposed writing of her career. Revealing herself did not come naturally. Her mother Hanna was a particular hair trigger for this aversion. In one of the collection’s opening essays, Malcolm remarked, “I’m not sure that I’m ready to write about my mother yet.” But eventually she did, repeatedly, and the result is arresting. Her recollections are alternately sweet and caustic. Hanna doted on her daughters, even making them profiteroles when they were sick. But, Malcolm added, she could also be volatile. Their relationship was loving, but complicated.

Ultimately, once Malcolm was able to overcome her ambivalence, her writing about Hanna became some of her most open writing about herself. “Did I become a journalist because of knowing how to imitate my mother?” she mused at one point. “When I ask someone a question—either in life or in work—I often don’t listen to the answer. I am not really interested. I don’t think my mother was interested in what people told her, either. She asked her questions. But her mind was elsewhere. This is what I can’t get hold of. What was she interested in?”

What was Malcolm interested in here, when she wrote this line and these essays, appraising her personal papers and family photographs? She was hardly naive about the effect that a piece of nonfiction writing can have once it takes on a life of its own. She knew that publishing a memoir would change how her readers—past, present, and future—related to her. And she was well aware that when you send your papers off to live in a university library you lose control of who uses them, and how.

Case in point: in the spring of 2019, I curated an exhibit of selected materials from Malcolm’s archive, which was displayed in glass cases front and center in Yale’s main library. Malcolm had declined to speak with me for the project early on, and I chose not to think too much about the prospect of her coming to see this display.  After all, the show was an unmistakable manifestation of her idea that the biographer is really a burglar. Her personal notes and letters, teenage photographs and newspaper clippings, spend six months prominently displayed before students, researchers, and ambling passers-by.

But she knew better than anyone that the voyeurism was part of the appeal. New Haven is less than three hours by train from Gramercy Park, an easy day trip. Unbeknownst to me, in early summer she paid the display a visit. We hadn’t spoken yet. She didn’t want to be the subject of someone else’s show. Or did she? Shortly after going to see it Malcolm wrote two emails. One to the Beinecke, to let them know that she was preparing more papers for her archive. The other to me, asking if I would like to come over for tea.

When you’re an archivist, people ask you what your favorite thing in the archives is. I often respond with “I can’t pick one of my children,” not because I think that’s true (the archives aren’t my children; they are my aging parents who say confusing things about the 70s), but because the answer is “the pube jars,” and I’m trying to think of another answer. Sometimes I do feel comfortable saying “the pube jars.” Sometimes I look into the person’s eyes and all I can think is, “You seem nice; maybe you are nice; do we have to do this intrusive thought right now?” And then I say, “the pube jars.”

The jars come from the collection of Robert Chesley (accession number #1993-06). I work at a queer historical society, and Chesley was a gay playwright. He was not, however, the collector of the shaven masses of pubic hair, which are kept in spice jars, each one labeled with a man’s first name. I know they’re not his jars because some Chesley stans came by the archives one day and did a deep dive on the topic, prompted by their awareness of Chesley’s kinks, which didn’t include this one. Their conclusion: Chesley had inherited the jars from a friend who died unexpectedly.

He kept them—why? As a memorial, I assume, and because you can’t throw such a thing away. What do you do with mementoes of someone’s sex life, mementoes that grew from the human body? It wouldn’t be right to throw them out, and it wouldn’t be right to burn or bury them. The garbage insults the dignity of a body. Burial insults the ephemerality of pleasure. All you can do is keep them, and so Chesley did, and when he died in turn, so did we.

The narrator of my novel Dead Collections, who is an archivist and also a vampire, observes that “in general what you find in archives is the absence of a body, the chalk outline of a life, crowded all around with papers and artifacts and ephemera, but with a terribly small hollowness within.” The archives are where the body is not. This is the reason the most ardent nonbeliever can feel that the archives are haunted: if a zombie is the horror of a body without a soul, a ghost is the horror of a soul without a body.

In the archives, we hold papers smeared by inky fists, and books from which small hairs drop, and photographs of people who felt sexy that day and wanted their sexiness commemorated, and we are very aware of the flesh that’s absent. Even if the donors and subjects are alive, they’ve left pieces of themselves behind in a way that reminds us that the moment is gone.

Recently, I catalogued some midcentury letters from a person I thought was a campy gay man, who described working as a screenwriter, serving in the Air Force reserves, and enacting a daring plan to send flowers to Joan Crawford. He signed himself “Mother,” a common joke for gay men of this era. It was late in the process when I realized that this was, in fact, the donor’s actual mother. Her name was Margo, and her letters hold a wealth of information, valuable for researchers. They provide an example of an out gay man’s parent supporting and loving him in the 1950s. They show how women in the Air Force (presumably veterans of the Second World War) felt about ongoing careers in the service. They even speak to the queer connections a worldly woman in Hollywood might have. Margo pinged my gaydar for a reason. No doubt she was picking up her speech patterns from people around her, as writers do.

But her letters are surrounded by absences. Her son Ron kept them with him, in the Victorian house he lovingly decorated with his boyfriend Stan (their collection contains enormous bills for antique furniture, and the living room featured a pipe organ built into the wall). But Ron died in the 80s, and Stan grew old alone and couldn’t maintain the house. By the time he died, almost nothing inside could be saved from the mold. What was left was one box of letters and ephemera, and the house itself, which has been flipped, gutted, and painted a uniform white. No trace of the pipe organ remains. Where did Margo, Stan, and Ron go? I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I do believe in archives; insofar as they went anywhere, they came here. Only they came here incomplete, and what’s left of them is like a sentence with the vowels missing.

Archival emotions are big. There’s curiosity, delight, humor, desolation. People mostly come to the archives to do intellectual work—to find out how people lived in the past, how they described their days and how they spent them—but they often end up doing emotional work as well. People cry in the archives. You need to leave room for tears. You need to leave room for boredom, too; for every Ron and Margo, there’s a collection that’s composed entirely of financial records, or clippings on something arcane. Sometimes those collections fulfill a researcher’s wildest fantasies. They’re still dull to explore, and that dullness is an archival experience as well.

The strongest archival emotion, though, is awareness of paradox. Of all the collections I’ve worked with recently, the one with the most striking paradoxes was that of Felicia “Flames” Elizondo. Elizondo was a trans woman, a professional drag queen, and a fixture of San Francisco’s queer activist community for decades. In the late sixties, she used to hang out at Compton’s Cafeteria, site of the riot that ignited local trans resistance against police brutality. When she died last May after many years living with HIV, Elizondo’s family donated her collection to the archives—but when it arrived, we found that she was missing.

Her clothes and costumes were there. We found her trans flag cape, her bedazzled denim jacket, her home-sewn cloak with its dozens of polyester ruffles. But when it came to written evidence of her life, all we found was papers from Elizondo’s friend, Vicki Marlane, which Elizondo had kept safe since Marlane’s death in 2011. The two were close friends, and Elizondo had even helped to name a local street, Vicki Mar Lane, after her. In caring for the memory of another iconic trans woman and drag performer, Elizondo had ignored her own.

Once again, we had the clothes, but not the person; the outline, but not the interior. It’s not quite accurate to say that the clothes don’t teach us about the person, or else the archives wouldn’t collect them, but clothes can’t capture our thoughts the way that papers can. The paradox of Elizondo’s papers, though, was that by her absence, she did teach us about herself. Her devotion to Marlane’s memory tells a story of solidarity and friendship, of humility and care. It tells the kind of story papers can’t tell, because it is an action and not a word.

Archives are repositories of memory, of course, but what that platitude overlooks is that they have all the failings of memory: gaps, self-serving myths, and a tendency to arrive at their own speed, not the speed we want. These failings only make the archives more human, more in need of our care. I want people to approach the past, not only with intellectual curiosity and with passionate critical thought, but also with an openness to feeling. The work of denying our feelings is hard, and it’s alienating, and it’s not worth it. I want the work of history to be the opposite of that; I want the work of history to use our whole minds.

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Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman is available via Penguin Books.

When I open the scrapbooks, tiny flakes of brittle, brown paper fall away from their edges, warning me that my compulsion to read could hasten the demise of these strange old volumes. Stored in my workplace in the archives of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, they are filled with thousands of newspaper clippings that report the deaths of painters, sculptors, and photographers of the early 20th century. I first surveyed them four years ago, while hunting through old books and files for historical images to illustrate Making the Met, an exhibition and catalogue that celebrated the museum’s 150th anniversary in 2020.

The Archives is a treasure trove of unique documents and artifacts of the Met’s founding and early years, and I am fortunate to have spent much of my career preserving and sharing the history of one of the world’s foremost cultural institutions. But I quickly discerned that artist obituaries were irrelevant for Making the Met and was about to reshelve the scrapbooks, when my attention fixed on a headline glued to the page to which I’d randomly turned: FAMOUS ARTIST DIES PENNILESS AND ALL ALONE. Curious, I carefully leafed through the tome and found myself spellbound by a panoply of heartbreaking tales.

Artist obituary scrapbook, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. All photographs by the author unless otherwise noted.

Some are formal obituaries of art world luminaries whose names remain familiar today, such as Auguste Rodin. Others describe the passing away of artists revered in their own time, but whose work has since fallen from fashion and is today little known. Hundreds more of the clippings, though, recount more gruesome stories: the demise of artists obscure at the time and now utterly forgotten, many of them suicides, or victims of bizarre accidents, murders, or disease. These grim fragments retrieved from the past reveal disturbing themes and motifs once prevalent in mass media portrayals of creative people.

The most jarring stories are titled and told in a sensationalized style that emphasizes personal idiosyncrasies of the victims and the graphic details of their deaths. Typical of the era’s crass tabloid journalism, they were crafted to wring maximum drama out of misfortune, and to excite and fix the attention of readers susceptible to raw emotional appeal and voyeurism. Their authors drew upon and reinforced stereotypes of artists as indigent, debauched, obsessed with greatness, eccentric, or suffering from mental illness.

Many news reports observed that artists routinely suffered poverty, and even those of great renown were liable to die of hunger or in squalor while fanatically pursuing their vocation. Dire material circumstances and failure to sell work or secure patronage drove some to depression and suicide, and reporters graphically described methods by which artists ended their own lives.

Numerous stories recounted deaths in the studio, while toiling at the easel, or amidst remnants of an oeuvre. A few artists were said to have passed while putting the finishing touches to masterworks that might have won them recognition at last. Another theme presented artists as murder victims, often stemming from love quarrels or unorthodox romantic entanglements associated with a bohemian lifestyle.

Many stories reflected on the whims of fate by describing, in harsh detail, bizarre accidents like conflagrations that consumed artists alongside their creations. Others describe creative lives ended in momentous global tragedies, including sinking of the Titanic, the First World War, and the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic.

Who compiled this macabre archive, and why? I noticed that many clippings are marked in blue crayon with the name “D’Hervilly” or an abbreviated “D’H”. I searched through century-old museum employee rolls in the archives, and found a match for the unusual surname: Arturo B. de St. M. D’Hervilly, hired in 1894 as an office clerk. Details of his early life are scant, but online research turned up a reference to a painting by D’Hervilly titled “Chasseur” in the digitized catalogue of an 1887 exhibition at the National Academy of Design. No more evidence of his artistic production has yet surfaced, though this tantalizing clue helps explain his professional orientation to the museum.

At age 44, D’Hervilly sent to the Met’s director a beautifully handwritten application letter, followed up with an epistolary poem illustrated with a watercolor image of a medallion. The overwrought style attested to D’Hervilly’s creative ambition, though he confessed willingness to accept any position offered as he was “unable to follow my profession, the Fine-Arts, owing to inadequate means.” His odd pitch was perfectly aimed at the Met’s colorful chief executive Luigi Palm di Cesnola, an Italian-American veteran of the US Civil War who micromanaged staff, craved their respect, and prized loyalty. Cesnola assigned D’Hervilly to calligraphy invitations for Met special events, sort business correspondence, and tend to other administrative matters.

Clipping marked with the name “D’Hervilly”

After laboring for a decade at clerical tasks, D’Hervilly was in 1906 promoted to Assistant Curator of Paintings. In this new role he compiled a checklist of American paintings at the Met, and updated its catalogue of European pictures, leaving behind in the Archives his extensive and detailed research notes. D’Hervilly guided access to galleries by tour groups, and recorded statistics about school classes, trade organizations, and others who visited the museum for learning and inspiration. He took special interest in art students who honed their talent copying old master paintings and closely monitored a locker room where they stored supplies and hung their overcoats.

He coordinated press previews for special exhibitions and hosted reporters for private showings of new acquisitions. Believing that newspapers served the museum as both a publicity tool and resource for self-documentation, D’Hervilly oversaw the assembly of scrapbooks that preserved thousands of newspaper stories about a wide array of Met happenings. The construction of new museum wings, milestone art purchases, deaths and legacies of benefactors, and the launch of educational programs were extensively documented in this press archive.

National Press Intelligence Co. label marked with the name “D’Hervilly”

D’Hervilly’s preferred news source was the National Press Intelligence Co., one of many “clippings bureaus” that thrived a century ago. Richard K. Popp, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, has researched these businesses extensively, finding that the earliest were established in Europe around 1880 to cater to actors, artists, and authors eager to collect reviews of their productions and document celebrity. Soon, the value of absorbing deep wells of press intelligence from around the globe was clear to business leaders, politicians, and cultural institutions like the Met.

The first American clippings bureaus were established in the mid-1880s, and dozens operated nationwide by the turn of the century. Clippings bureau employees—mostly women—read hundreds of daily papers each day, bearing in mind a plethora of personal names, terms, and concepts requested by customers. When readers encountered a target phrase they underlined it with a bold stroke of blue pencil and often scrawled the name of a client, like the distinctive “D’H” in the Met scrapbooks. Marked-up sheets were clipped apart, then isolated stories were glued to header slips with a citation of the name and date of the publication in which they were found. These were bundled and delivered to subscribers at a price of $.04 cents each.

Words and phrases in Met batches included mentions of the institution by name and references to its trustees and staff, search parameters which harvested thousands of clippings, which were then, in turn, pasted by museum clerks into scrapbooks from the late 19th century until the 1960s.

In 1906, the same year he was promoted to Assistant Curator of Paintings, D’Hervilly apparently ordered National Press Intelligence to collect and send him stories about deaths of artists, the only theme in the press archive not Met-specific. Over the next few decades, these obits accumulated to fill nearly 500 densely-packed pages bound into the two overstuffed volumes that I stumbled on in the Archives 112 years later. Jules Breton, a renowned painter of French rural scenes, is the first artist memorialized on their opening pages, in lengthy dispatches flagged with a blue “D’H” and dated July 6-8, 1906.

It is poignant to discover that only a few newspapers printed brief accounts of D’Hervilly’s own passing on April 7, 1919, though his colleagues were sure to paste these clippings in the scrapbook. He died of heart failure at home in Harlem while preparing for his commute to work; a headline declared him A SLAVE OF DUTY AT ART MUSEUM who never took vacation and always ate lunch at his desk.

*

As an archivist at the Met, I safeguard the scrapbooks that D’Hervilly made so that people of the future may consider their mysteries. As a personal project, I photograph some of the most astonishing headlines, research artists they describe, and present my findings in publications like this one. This exhumation can feel eerie and invasive, like the opening by archaeologists of an ancient tomb. I sometimes question my impulse to expose old obituaries to the light of the present day, and I crop many images to omit the names of the deceased, conferring on them an anonymity that I hope protects the dignity of their final repose. During especially bleak phases of the pandemic, absorbing too many reports of artist deaths by Covid, I have set this work aside entirely. But the impulse to explore this mournful theme revived again and again, and I have come to recognize that the scrapbooks are compelling not only because they document artist deaths, but because they stimulate ideas about artist lives. I choose to share these stories to inspire wonder at the unique challenges artists face, the exceptional risks they take, and the strange turns of fate that often thwart their efforts.

Arturo B. de St. M. D’Hervilly, undated photograph, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives

Viewed in retrospect, Arturo B. de St. M. D’Hervilly’s massive, collage-like chronicle of the deaths of artists of his time seems a crowning professional achievement,, and the timing of his decision to launch the effort feels charged with meaning. Newly promoted to curate masterpiece paintings, had he given up for good his own artistic ambition? Was the composition of these morbid tomes a veiled acknowledgement of the passing away of his creative aspiration? Did he identify with the hundreds of uncelebrated artists whose fates the news clippings recorded in grim detail? Perhaps, instead, his intent was more mundane, and compiling them was an expedient for collecting useful biographical data as he catalogued pictures in the Met collection that were made by recently deceased artists.

Whatever their purpose to D’Hervilly and his colleagues, viewers today can study, interpret, and respond emotionally to these scrapbooks on multiple levels. They offer clear, factual accounts of how the lives of a few hundred artists ended. They exhibit some of the crass, sensationalist techniques deployed by the press in the heyday of yellow journalism to influence how millions of readers thought about artistic types. But in addition to their evidentiary value for historical knowledge, they have an intrinsic, aesthetic worth. Composed of dense, decaying layers of folded browned paper, dried glue, faded black ink, and bold strokes of blue crayon, they are fragile memento mori, deeply redolent of time’s passage. Their literary style is by turns brutal, satiric, and laudatory, but never dull. Curators like D’Hervilly and archivists like me are devoted to the solemn work of gathering, protecting, and sometimes even creating such powerful artifacts so that our contemporaries and future generations can feel their impact with all the force of great art.

On a hot September night in 1964 a bomb exploded under the bedroom of five-year-old Anthony Quin, youngest child of Mrs. Aylene Quin. Aylene was a single mother of four, restaurant owner, and voting rights activist in the small town of McComb, in southern Mississippi, deep in Klan country. It was her daughter Jacqueline’s ninth birthday, and after the bomb collapsed the front of the house where she and her brother were sleeping, you could see party streamers and birthday cake through the gaping hole.

This story—that 14 sticks of TNT were thrown at the house of “Mama” Quin, as she was known to local activists—is the reason her name is mentioned—if it is mentioned—in histories of Freedom Summer. I was drawn to her story because clearly she was considered a threat by the KKK, who were bombing local civil rights leaders with impunity. So why were there so few details about the work she had been doing around the county and beyond for a decade? I knew there was more to the story—of Mama Quin’s unique leadership, of the power of owning a restaurant and feeding activists during this hot and bloody summer—than was written about in popular histories of this time.

So on a cool and gray January day in early 2020 I steered my rental car down Summit Street in McComb, Mississippi. I had just begun research for my book Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panthers and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement, and I wanted to have a sense of where Mama Quin had lived. From the screen of my laptop or the thick paper of library-bound books people remembered her as amazing. Hardworking. A force to be reckoned with. But I knew that by laying eyes on the house the KKK had bombed, and speaking with Aylene’s daughter or friends in the integrated library constructed with funds Aylene helped raise, would help me better understand and amplify her story.

Summit Street was, during Aylene Quin’s time in the 1950s and ‘60s, one of the central streets for Black commerce and social life. But other than a historical plaque, one would have only thought it another sleepy street in a quiet town. I had the address for her restaurant and tavern South of the Border, but only a few buildings had numbers. So I drove up and then back down the mile or so strip of low apartment buildings and single-story concrete block storefronts. The most activity was at the car repair shop, where three men, middle aged and older, were out front, inspecting a vehicle that had just pulled in. They had all watched me each time I passed their garage. And now, as I pulled in and stepped out, they regarded me with curiosity.

“Hello,” I smiled. “I’m in town researching Mrs. Aylene Quin. She owned a restaurant around here in the 1960s. Do you know where it was?” I pronounced her name A-leen, long A.

“Hey, LD,” the first man in coveralls, called to a gentleman who was about to get into his low pickup. “She here is looking for info on Mama Quin.”

LD walked over. “Mrs. Aylene Quin, huh.” He pronounced her name with a short a, like apple. “South of the Border was right there.”

He pointed across the street to a two-story apartment building set in the middle of an empty lot with scrubby grass and a gravel parking area. Then he smiled. “You know who you should talk to—my mother. She worked with Mrs. Quin when she was president of the NAACP back in the ’60s. My mama was the secretary. She’d tell you stories all day.”

*

Within minutes I was sitting in the living room of 90-year-old Mrs. Patsy Ruth Butler, surrounded by framed certificates of appreciation for her civil rights work and graduation portraits of her grandchildren. She told me stories about the men who kept watch for KKK bombings during the summer of 1964—of which law enforcement’s inaction allowed so many that McComb was called “the bombing capital of the world.” They would lay all night on the roofs of houses and churches, signaling to each other with flashlights and bird calls when a suspicious car drove by. She told me about visiting house after house with Mrs. Quin, canvassing for voting rights, most people too afraid of violent retribution to register. By the time I got up to leave she had invited me back to stay with her next time I was in town. Little did either of us know that the events of the year would not allow another trip.

I consider myself so lucky to have had the opportunity to visit McComb just weeks before the pandemic halted travel, made personal interviews nearly obsolete, and would have all but precluded the happenstance of meeting an activist like Mrs. Patsy Ruth. That same month I had traveled to Memphis to meet Cleo Silvers, the Black Panther Party member who lived in New York in the 1960s and early 1970s and worked the Free Breakfast for Children Program, whose story is the other narrative thread in Power Hungry. She and I went out to hear live jazz, cooked a small feast for a dinner party, and talked.

Our few days together took on a rhythm. I would bring coffee and pastries and Cleo would answer my questions and tell stories. By late morning we had a snack paused to listen to her favorite jazz show. She looked around her apartment—overstuffed sofa, stacks of books and magazines and CDs—and reflected that all of her apartments had always been set up similarly: a semi-circle of seating for people to gather and talk, art and music and ideas all within reach. The afternoon of the dinner party I drove us to three different stores for ingredients and we swapped recipes and ideas. Back at her apartment, one of us chopped while the other stirred the soup and roasted the vegetables, conversation moving between memories of childhood and meals she cooked for fellow Black Panthers.

Cleo, too, was first a name I had read in passing as one of the few named female leaders of the Black Panther’s survival programs, despite that the Party’s membership was around two-thirds female. Aside from a few renown women, why were so few stories told of female leadership making breakfast for children, leading door-to-door health care, and organizing tenants to take over buildings from derelict landlords? It was over the shared meals that memories bubbled to the surface; the time sitting around the table with other activists that ideas were debated and history recalled.

*

I’ll never know what my book might have looked like if I had not been able to take those two, important trips before the world all but shut down. But I can compare the kinds of research I was able to do in person versus what I was forced to do solely from my apartment more than a thousand miles away. While I had more long talks with Cleo (who continued her activism virtually, perhaps becoming even more busy as the internet extended her reach), and interviewed many other people who were perhaps even more amenable to Zoom in the current climate, I was also starting to better understand how some of the research I had done on the ground that seemed incidental, had an outsized effect on my understanding of Aylene and Cleo’s lives. Researching outside of more formal institutions was essential to getting closer to the knowing, especially of people and time and place where I am not endemic.

The term “archival silences,” which I heard first a few months into the pandemic, gave form to what I was already understanding: that there are stories left untold and undocumented—intentionally or not—that skew what we know and understand about history. Considering these silences includes asking: what or whose perspectives are not included in archives and historical collections of a time period, event, or place? It is unsurprising that the experiences of people of color, of women, the impoverished, and lesser educated have often been long neglected by resourced archives, even as many strive to bring voice to these silences.

While I understood that by giving voice to the women and those they worked with was working to rectify some of this, only in the inability to travel did I better understand the importance of researching in person—and the power of more informal and local archives and collections that are not the places many researchers tend to look, and certainly not readily available virtually. These collections are often languishing without resources, despite that their archival perspective can help write, and right, historical accounts—if they are preserved.

One such collection is owned by Jan Hilgas, who has rented a storage space full of documents related to Freedom Summer, and who told me in January 2020 that she was months behind in rent. Despite pleas to pertinent libraries, she has yet to find an institution who has the resources and desire to take this on. I also heard that a trove of documents belonging to C.C. Bryant, longtime McComb NAACP officer and friend to activists Medgar Evers and Robert Parris Moses, was lost in a fire before he could find them a safer home.

But the Black History Gallery is a success story, demonstrating what can be done to preserve these imperiled archives. A small museum in a house on a residential street not far from Mrs. Patsy Ruth’s house, the Black History Gallery was collected and run solely by ninety-something Hilda Casin, a retired local high school teacher. Inside, ornate side tables held photos of local activists, framed documents, and typed accounts of events of significance to the local Black community—perhaps honoring business leaders and praising the election of local officials. In one room there was a movie viewing area, with a library of documentaries and movies on Black leaders and history.

In another room, that, fittingly, was once the dining room, there was a section dedicated to Aylene Quin. Collected were images from the local paper, personal photos and business promotion, and ephemera from her funeral. A photo on a promotional fan for her newly opened hotel has the image that, in my mind, best represents the version of the woman from the stories her loved ones told me: dressed fashionably in a long cocktail gown, laughing with two friends, a morsel of food in her hand. From that display I learned more about her family, her businesses, her community-minded work, than I could find in hours of online research over the months afterward. One poster honoring local civil rights workers led me to Curtis Muhammad, living in New Orleans, who had known Mama Quin well, and who I would meet over coffee a few days later, hearing stories not even Aylene’s daughter had known.

I’ve thought about the fate of this museum often during my research and was heartened to discover that it had a new online presence in June 2021. There’s now a board of directors, with names I recognized from my research and a website boasting of the “most comprehensive black history collection in the region.” Through local leadership, this precious archive has been saved.

*

My goal with Power Hungry was always to give voice to the almost-silenced activism of two women who had been long reduced to historical footnotes. Despite the challenges, I feel confident I succeeded. Perhaps I interviewed some people over Zoom who might not have been as comfortable with technology previously; perhaps spending less time traveling meant that I dug deeper into other available resources and came across the names of people I might not have otherwise spoken with. One kind of silence opened the space for another voice to speak.

And I have come to understand, more than ever, the importance of documents like the ones Jan Hilgas is hopefully still housing for thousands of dollars a year in her storage space; those include documents like the affidavit signed by Aylene about one of the many instances of harassment by law enforcement. There are many dozens more like that, all representing the experiences of someone whose story is being silenced.

Writers must consider the collectors who are keeping these voices alive. They make it possible to see the objects that Aylene touched and photos only shared among her family and close community; to hear stories from her daughter, about what it was like to be in a home that was bombed by white supremacists that hot September night; to understand the many ways that Mama Quin put her life on the line to fight for voting rights and equality, and why her work to feed activists and connect a community felt so threatening to the KKK. Aylene Quin is worth writing about because of what she did— not because of the violence committed against her.

__________________________________

Power Hungry by Suzanne Cope is available via Chicago Review Press.

We thought we had heard his stories. My father is 92 and lives in a retirement home in a pleasant part of Ottawa. Originally English, Clyde spent his working life as a journalist in Britain, Africa, the US and Canada. Four years ago, when he and my mother began moving out of the big old house they’d lived in for close to 50 years, my three brothers and I helped clear things out. Paper in all its many forms was the house’s main ingredient: glossy government reports, dog-eared typescripts, ring-bound notebooks, fading blue aerogrammes, press releases from defunct NGOs and, of course, books of all kinds, hardbacks, paperbacks, novels, biographies, histories, atlases, dictionaries…

As the Manchester Guardian’s first-ever Africa and then UN correspondent in 1960s and later the Guardian and the Economist’s Canada correspondent, Clyde accumulated a lot of material; as an inveterate clipper and filer of stories, he had filing cabinets filled with articles on topics ranging from the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa to Saskatchewan’s potash industry. As a journalist herself, ardent Canadian and devourer of novels, my mother had certainly done her bit to fill the shelves—and then, at 86, had had the good sense to depart before we had to empty them.

In this morass of print, perhaps the most intriguing items were a group of 50 or so small red notebooks filled with odd, runic squiggles occasionally interrupted by an English proper noun or a number. Looking at them, I could briefly imagine my father as a spy or cryptographer. In the early 1960s, well before cassette tape recorders, he had used these little Kenyan-made notebooks to record his notes in Pitman shorthand as he travelled through south, central and eastern Africa to report on the growing independence movements and interview nationalist leaders, colonial administrators, recalcitrant white settlers, tribal chiefs and such like.

Africa was where my parents had met and spent the first five years of their married life, the place they would hearken back to and remain involved with for the rest of their lives. There were often African students, journalists and politicians passing through our house and, as children, we were taught early about the injustices of apartheid and colonial rule. I remember vividly one of those African students at a Toronto party of my parents sneaking my seven- or eight-year-old brother and me out of the house in our pajamas to give us a ride in the dark on the motorcycle he had just bought—and then my mother appearing on the front steps to watch us return, with an expression—feigned or not—of mild concern.

When it came to finding a home for all this printed material, we quickly learnt our lesson: no one wants books these days. Not even the most obscure fugitive African-published progressive magazines from the 1960s that my father had saved were of interest to university libraries—let alone the actual works of Nyerere, Ngugi, Achebe, Lessing and others. And forget about the Encyclopaedia Britannica my father was given in partial payment for contributing the article on Zimbabwe. It turned out that a former colleague of Clyde’s had sold her Africa collection to Stanford University a few years previously and they had catalogued all those obscure magazines and publications from the 1960s. In contrast, there was a lot of interest in any original documents we might have from both Stanford and the Guardian Foundation’s new Guardian News and Media archive—and that meant those red notebooks full of Pitman shorthand. We chose the Guardian and duly shipped off five big boxes of notebooks and typescripts and letters to London.

People at the Guardian seemed genuinely excited about all those files and notebooks that had sat in my parents’ basement for close to five decades. In fact, when interviewed in the paper’s online edition about her job, the head archivist Philippa Mole had singled out Clyde’s papers as the kind of thing she found fascinating. They also ran a story about the donation—and seemed to think that the Pitman notebooks might include real surprises. I wasn’t so sure. Intriguing as it looked, it seemed to me you could just as easily use Pitman to record banalities as secrets. My guess was that there were probably quite a few interviews with obscure party officials in newly independent nations about their upcoming five-year agricultural plans. I obviously thought I knew his stories.

Then, last summer, two years after sending off the boxes, we got an email from Philippa saying that with some funding from the UK National Archives and the help of Britain’s University of the Third Age, the Guardian had found a group of some 40 Pitman-proficient volunteers who were going to transcribe the notebooks. They were all required to sign confidentiality agreements because it was thought the notebooks could contain sensitive material about living people. The four month project got underway just as the prospect of a Covid winter became reality and, partly because of my father’s idiosyncratic Pitman skills, served to bring an eclectic group of Englishwomen of a certain vintage together on line.

All women, yes: Pitman shorthand was widely taught in secretarial schools up until the 1970s (though the Moravian missionaries who developed the first written forms of Cree and Inuktitut in the 1860s also based their syllabic scripts on Pitman). Clyde, whose handwriting is distinctive and neat, writes a version of Pitman that looks like the marks an acrobatic worm might leave in the sand if attempting a straight A-to-B dash by a series of end-over-end leaps—one unpredictable squiggle after another. As one volunteer noted, he also tended to leave out vowels and periods and would often jump from one place and topic and date to another without any indication… All lapses that make sense if you realize he was only writing for one reader—himself.

The volunteers set up an online forum where they would post and discuss difficult passages—and by and by seemed to bond with each other. A number had connections to Africa and so were especially interested in the material. One was an active Wikipedia contributor and so wrote up an entry for Clyde. Then a very thoughtful volunteer arranged for the group to write to Clyde and tell him of their experiences transcribing his notebooks. Many said they had enjoyed reviving their Pitman skills and that the challenge had helped them get through the enforced isolation of Covid. One volunteer who had lived in Uganda told of her delight in discovering that some of the words Clyde had written down in Pitman were Swahili. And another wrote how excited she was when she finally decoded the word “twiddling” as in what an interviewee was doing with a pencil.

But the biggest surprise came from Ann Brookfield who wrote “I enjoyed transcribing your conversations with the Beatles after their successful concert in the US.” What? We couldn’t believe it. Clyde had met the Beatles and never told us?! How often had we listened to the Beatles with him and he’d never said a word! How often had we heard about Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Joshua Nkomo and Ndabaningi Sithole… And not a peep about John, Paul, George and Ringo? My parents had had and played all the Beatles albums—there is no music I associate more with my early childhood. Think of how we could have impressed our classmates.

It took some probing from all four sons to get the full story. When my brother Matt asked why he had never told us, he said he just didn’t find them that interesting. When I asked, he said, with the inscrutable logic of a 92-year-old, well, it wasn’t a “very smart” place they had played in. We eventually learnt that, in August 1966, Clyde, the Guardian’s UN correspondent, was asked to sub for the paper’s holidaying Washington correspondent. My mother, now caring for four boys aged three to six without the help of our Kenyan nanny, was back in Canada with us. And then the Beatles came through town on their final tour ever.

Clyde went to the concert—in those days, they only played one 30 minute set—and then was apparently locked up with them and other journalists for a good deal longer afterwards until the police decided it was safe for them to leave the stadium. During this time, as Anne wrote, the Fab Four “resorted to entertaining you the journalists with their views on life, fame etc.” It’s not hard to conclude that Clyde, then 37, had been overexposed to these young musicians, all in still their early twenties but used to having the press find profundity in their every word.

In the notebook entitled “Aug 66,” there are five pages of squiggles recording the encounter that begin simply with the initials “R P J G” and “P” (Paul) saying he would like to be reincarnated as a tree. The following pages do touch on some serious issues—the Vietnam war, the prospect of the band breaking up—but in each case the Beatles seem more interested in defusing controversy than creating it. In 1966, summer riots in Black neighborhoods were a regular feature of American life and the fact that this British band was now causing white youth to riot had driven conservatives and the Ku Klux Klan to hold rallies and make threats in response. In Memphis, someone threw a firecracker on stage. The young Liverpudlians were probably just hoping to get out of the US alive. Perhaps out of boredom with what they were saying, Clyde at one point reverts to his interest in his interviewee’s physical tics, noting that an unidentified Beatle “shreds a Kleenex like a fly whisk.”

But if the Beatles’ utterances seem pretty anodyne, Clyde’s Guardian story, published August 16, 1966, and unearthed online by my nephew Adam, sets the concert deftly in the context of American racial politics and answers all the difficult questions one might ask today. He notes that the Beatles’ audience was almost entirely white, but focuses on a riot that took place that same night in a Black neighborhood in Washington—and the fact that though “Negros” comprised the great majority of the city’s population, they had no say in its government. In short, there are riots and there are riots. Having come from Africa, where he’d watched a generation of young Black nationalists fight for and finally achieve independence, he clearly saw the continued oppression of African-Americans for what it was—and found Beatlemania pretty faddish and ephemeral by comparison. Though those Pitman notebooks did hide a surprise, it was one that in turn contained its own banalities.

Libraries, as Hannah Arendt well knew, can be dangerous places. In 1933 she was arrested by the Gestapo one afternoon leaving the Prussian State Library on her way to meet her mother for lunch. Her friend, Kurt Blumenfeld, had asked her to collect anti-Semitic statements from newspapers, journals, and speeches for the German Zionist Organization. At the time, this was an illegal activity the Nazis called “horror propaganda.”

The collection of materials was to be sent to foreign press offices and world leaders, to show how dire the situation in Germany had grown, and used at the 18th Zionist Congress that summer in Prague. For several weeks, Arendt sat in the library sifting through newspaper articles and statements from all kinds of professional clubs and organizations. And then, one afternoon, as she was leaving, she was arrested. A librarian had reported her unusual reading activity to the Gestapo: What use does an academic have with so many newspapers?

Arendt was detained for eight days before being released by pure luck, as she would later say, knowing full well what was happening to other people who had been arrested, disappeared in cellars, murdered, and transported to camps. The night of her release, she gathered her friends and drank until the early hours of the morning. As the sun began to rise, she and her mother Martha fled, taking little with them.

Among her belongings was a folder that contained her birth certificate, her diploma from the University of Heidelberg, a self-portrait titled The Shadows, a copy of Love and Saint Augustine, the manuscript for Rahel Varnhagen, which was to be her habilitation (second book for a teaching position in Germany), marriage documents, and 21 poems she wrote between 1923 and 1926. She held on to these private artifacts of her experience and inner life during nearly eight years of exile in Paris before escaping to the United States, which are now neatly tucked away in Container 79, Folder “Miscellany: Poems and Stories, 1925-1942 and Undated” in the United States Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Etymologically, an archive “houses.” It is a kind of dwelling space. When I first entered Hannah Arendt’s archive at the Library of Congress in 2010, I felt like I was trespassing into somebody’s home. I kept waiting for somebody to come and take the folders away from me. There was a sense of transgression in touching those private things, which spend their time away from public sight. It is no wonder that our modern conception of pornography was born in archives, in those windowless backrooms where the illicit treasures of Pompeii were held.

Historically, the archive has negotiated the line between public and private life, deciding which materials should be available for public access. And for a long time, they were reserved for the few who could afford such pleasures. (Many still are.)

In The Human Condition, Arendt talks about the need to separate the private life of the home from the public realm of human affairs. One needs a space for appearance in the world, and one needs a space to retreat from the glare of public light to be alone with themselves. The archive complicates Arendt’s distinction. As a dwelling, it is a private space that can be accessed by the public, sometimes.

As institutions archives become part of a national mythology, helping to make the narratives we live by. Archives keep the records. For Foucault, archives transformed a collection of texts into a set of relations. Tracing the root of archive to the Greek arkheion, Derrida shows how archive refers to the arkhē of the commandment. Archons were the lawgivers, citizens who possessed the public authority to make laws, and they kept their official documents at home. Archives were established by the powerful to guard their social and political positions in society. One need look no further than the librarian who reported Hannah Arendt for reading too many newspapers to begin to think about the relationship between archives, libraries, and the state.

While there is much to lament about the ways in which digital technology has transformed our daily lives, one benefit has been the opening of previously privately held collections: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, Walter Benjamin’s Papers, The Nietzsche Project. And now, for the first time, Hannah Arendt’s archive is fully available for public use by anybody who has a computer.

Since 2001, Hannah Arendt’s papers have only been partially available digitally, and fully available in three locations worldwide: The Library of Congress in Washington, DC (where most of the physical papers and documents are held), the New School for Social Research in New York City, and the Hannah Arendt Center at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. The papers include over 25,000 items, about 75,000 digital images, and contain correspondence, articles, lectures, speeches, book manuscripts, transcripts of the Adolf Eichmann trial proceedings, notes, notecards, teaching material, syllabuses, and family papers. You can even look at an echocardiogram of Arendt’s heart.

When I first visited Arendt’s archive, I worked my way through her papers alphabetically, following the finding guide the aide at the desk handed me when I walked in. In “Correspondence Folder A-B” I read her letters with W.H. Auden about friendship and forgiveness, her fight with Theodor Adorno about the publication of Walter Benjamin’s papers, which Arendt had carried across the Atlantic when she escaped Nazi Europe, and I read Walter’s Benjamin final letters to Hannah Arendt, which included a hand drawn map of Lourdes, and Benjamin’s last work, written on a stack of colorful newspaper bands, titled, Theses on the Philosophy of History.  

There are fights with publishers, letters of recommendation for graduate students, stacks of notecards for lectures, legal documents from lawsuits, day planners with shopping lists, and birthday cards. In Hannah Arendt’s papers, you will find two essays she wrote in German for Walter Benjamin. The drafts of her response to Gershom Scholem after he told her she had no love of Israel, which judging by her hand edits she struggled to write.

You can read a card from Thomas Mann, previously unpublished. There are four drafts of The Life of the Mind, course lectures on Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, Hegel, Marx. You can look at her drafts of “Truth and Politics” and “Lying in Politics.” You can see her mother Martha Cohn’s papers from Nazi Germany and a Kinderbuch (a record of Arendt’s childhood). Among these files you will also find a record of friendships, stories untold. Arendt’s correspondence with Randall Jarrell, Roger Gilbert, Uwe Johnson, Robert Lowell, Ralph Mannheim, Dwight Macdonald, Norman Mailer, and Paul Tillich. With the opening of Arendt’s archive there is no shortage of new stories than can be told. “Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive,” Derrida wrote.

Before Arendt began doing political work for the World Zionist Organization in the Prussian State Library, she was researching her book, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess—a work that was interrupted by the Second World War, arrest, and internment. Editing the book after the war, Arendt said that in Rahel she had found her “closest friend, though she had been dead for some hundred years.” I’ve often thought that when Hannah Arendt bequeathed her papers to the Library of Congress she imagined somebody might find a best friend in her someday.

*

The newly digitized Hannah Arendt papers can be found here.

The New York Public Library is getting its Christmas gifts early this year—all 692 of them.

Thanks largely to Arthur Miller’s family, a massive collection of the dramatist’s plays, books, translations, anthologies, and more spanning the years 1928 to 2012 will become part of the NYPL’s holdings. This will include not only English editions of Miller’s work, but translations as well, not to mention some of Miller’s theater criticism, essays, and audio tapes.

Miller, a native New Yorker and one of the most revered American playwrights, came to fame with dramas like All My Sons, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge and Death of a Salesman.

Miller’s books join the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, which contains the work of more than 400 authors, including Vladimir Nabokov and Jack Kerouac.

Fine Books Magazine highlighted a few notable items in the collection, including personalized copies of his play books (like a 1951 edition of An Enemy of the People, his adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play, inscribed to his then-wife Marilyn Monroe).

Miller wrote a number of books as well, like Focus (1945), a novel about antisemitism and Jewish assimilation in the US at the end of WWII; In Russia (1969), which documented Miller’s observations of Russian society; a memoir entitled Timebends: A Life (1987), and more.