The Author Who Didn’t Care to Be Remembered

The largest Ann Petry collection in the world, coming in at a mere 19 boxes, is housed in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University (BU). Yet until you make an appointment at least two business days in advance to see the material, the size of the collection will remain a mystery. As the center’s website clearly states, “The Gotlieb Center does not publish or distribute copies of finding aids.”

“In some cases,” it states, “a scope and content description is published on our website,” but it has not done so for the Petry Collection. In fact, something like a shroud of secrecy—or privacy—surrounds most things related to Ann Petry. Born in 1908 (or was it in 1912 or 1909 or 1911 or 1910?), on October 12th (or was it October 20th?)—records show that she gave “at least six birth dates”—Petry was a major postwar writer whose first book, The Street (1946), became the first novel authored by a black woman to sell more than a million copies.

Petry bristled against the limelight immediately upon finding success and sought to safeguard her privacy her entire life. This “rage of privacy,” as her daughter, Elisabeth Petry, puts it in her memoir, At Home Inside: A Daughter’s Tribute to Ann Petry, determined many of her life choices and had a direct impact on what now remains of her archive. And as scholar Farah Griffin puts it, Petry “so feared the possibility of exposure that she destroyed much of her own writing, including letters and journals.”

Leaving New York in 1947 to seek a more quiet life for her writing, Petry and her husband, George, moved back to her native town, Old Saybrook in Connecticut, and throughout her career she deflected all inquiries into her life or into her as a person back toward her oeuvre. Publicity campaigns, she wrote in one of her surviving journals from 1992, made her “feel as though I were a helpless creature impaled on a dissecting table—for public viewing.”

Appropriately enough, “Keeping Secrets” is the title of the first chapter in At Home Inside. As the multiple disclosed birth dates suggest, Petry deliberately “tailored the story of her own life by omitting information, changing details, embellishing the stories she heard as a child.” Elisabeth Petry relied on her mother’s remaining journals to write her illuminating memoir and carefully explains what materials were left at her disposal at the time of Ann Petry’s passing in 1997.

Through the memoir, we learn that aside from “the few volumes that she donated to Boston University,” 33 of Petry’s handwritten journals, usually in spiral notebooks, are still in existence. Petry regarded these journals, we are told, “as sacred space where she recorded her private thoughts” and where she would revisit events and experiences from her own life—as she did in earlier drafts of her fiction. Thus, learning that Petry deliberately “embarked on a shred-and- burn campaign” of her archive in the 1980s feels acutely tragic, a figuratively immeasurable loss we can measure quantitatively.

In the scholarly confines of 20th-century American literature, this absence via destruction is tremendous and even more so given the paucity of black women’s voices in the archive. As such, the history of the Petry archive is a particularly painful reminder of the many ways—both external and self-inflicted—in which black women writers’ archives are scarce. At the same time, Petry’s case is instructive on a number of more general points related to the state and availability of 20th-century American literary archives—notably, the crucial role played by a change in tax law in the late 1960s.

Adding yet another layer of mystery and significance to this case, the information I unearthed during my first visit to the Ann Petry Collection at BU seemed to hold the promise of a hidden, undisclosed collection of precious Petry manuscript materials housed at Yale University. But given the facts that Yale does not list any Petry manuscript collection and that the author had conducted a late-career “shred-and-burn” campaign, I had to ask: Was the Yale collection even still of this world?

*

Ann Petry presents a clear case of an author who “wanted readers to direct their attention to her writing, not to her life.” This position raises important ethical questions that archival seekers must wrestle with in their relation with the dead. Are we treating our subject as an automatic “recovery imperative,” to use Stephen Best’s phrase in None Like Us, or is there an ethics of care guiding our curious hands? Should we limit the types of documents we make use of or even consult, or is everything fair game in the name of knowledge production?

In life, of course, Ann Petry took control, in part at least, of what she wanted to leave behind as a usable resource. Putting a premium on her work, she concentrated on safeguarding some drafts of her fiction; when it came to correspondence, diaries, and other personal papers, she “thought it was better to destroy this stuff myself than rather than [sic] leave it to someone else’s tender mercies.” When requests to photocopy materials from her archives began coming in, the idea struck her as utterly “repugnant,” and she vowed to “oppose all requests made during her lifetime.”

She admitted in a journal from 1983: “It never occurred to me that in my lifetime people would be poking through that stuff I gave to Boston University, just never occurred to me. Why not? Principally because I tried to disappear. I wanted no part of the celebrity circuit.” Indeed, we know all this only because her daughter shares these quotes in her memoir, against her mother’s wishes, as she admits in her opening sentence: “My mother did not want this book to exist.”

In the same journal from 1983, Petry returned to the issue of preservation versus destruction and made her decision: “No reason to give these journals and notebooks to Boston University. Destroy them, journal by journal or else edit them. No. Destroy them.” She nevertheless exerted other forms of control upon the materials she chose to save, such as redacting passages, excising certain pages, obscuring names with black markers, altering facts, distorting chronologies, and so on.

These actions are a stark reminder, in a fashion complementary to Claude McKay’s late archival aesthetic, that what we find in archives can rarely be taken at face value. Each encountered document “must be questioned pointedly,” as Arlette Farge reminds us, for “a quotation is never proof, and any historian knows that it is almost always possible to come up with a quotation that contradicts the one she has chosen.”

Beyond Petry’s alterations and forgeries, her preserved materials were further subjected—as are all papers, those of both the living and the dead—to the mercy of the universe and the laws of thermodynamics. “Poor storage,” Elisabeth Petry explains, “resulted in the accidental destruction of other papers.” Lack of space in their Old Saybrook home led Petry to relocate multiple boxes to a small building with no insulation in the backyard, where they were exposed to water damage, rodents, and insects.

When Elisabeth tried to salvage the “moldy papers” from the building after her mother passed away, “much of it crumbled in my hands,” she writes. Only the later material—starting in 1981—had survived, and thus the bulk of materials from the heyday of her writerly career were gone forever. In contrast, it appears Petry decided to keep many of her letters—or at least she “never got around to disposing of them.”

An atypical journal entry from 1983 seems to offer a little more sympathy for the interest of future scholars regarding her correspondence: “If I were a recorder in the year 2000, I’d be curious, very much interested in what went into letters in the latter part of the 20th century, especially interested in letters written to an author.” And then, almost as if to tease these millennial recorders, “I’ve got stacks of letters.” Indeed, in 2012, Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library acquired, as a gift from Elisabeth Petry, a collection of letters between Petry and English professor Edward Clark and his wife, Leah R. Caliri-Clark, dated from 1973 to 1997.

Even earlier, in 2005, Elisabeth edited Can Anything Beat White? A Black Family’s Letters, an anthology of personal letters that document the lives of Petry’s relatives from 1891 to 1910. In browsing through the Petry Collection at BU, I also noticed that many of the letters therein are indeed “letters written to an author”; they came from, among others, her fans, up-and-coming writers, and high schoolers who had read her young-adult books and sent in questions.

Elisabeth Petry’s memoir tantalizes textual-genetics scholars with observations about Petry’s own idiosyncratic archival practices, such as the fact that she often tore “pages from earlier volumes [of her journals] and inserted them in later ones.” Although most of her journals have dated entries, many of her early journals, “especially the ones containing notes for her novels and short stories,” Elisabeth Petry notes, “contain no dates or have a single date that covered twenty or more pages.”

One particular journal from 1981, we are told, is part commonplace book, part scrapbook, and part curated anthology of Petry’s own previous journals, containing “pages dated 1974, followed by pages from 1971, 1946, 1970, 1955, and clippings from the 1970s.” In short, the journals appear to be a goldmine of converging lifecycles that would surely teach us much about Petry’s process, the invisible steps behind her novelistic craft, and the ways in which sociopolitical concerns merge or clash with her intimate-private beliefs and affect.

We already knew that Petry’s fiction was informed by the sociological data and emerging statistics she had mined during her tenure as the women’s section editor for Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s newspaper in Harlem, the People’s Voice—notably the “extraordinary rates of domestic violence, alcoholism, rape and murder,” as Lawrence P. Jackson puts it in The Indignant Generation.

Petry, he states, “bent her fiction to explain the statistics that regularly confused people and seemed to support the hoary notions of biological inferiority.” According to Farah Griffin, in her weekly column at the People’s Voice Petry consistently focused on the realities that most reflect her early fiction: “housing, segregation, equal opportunity, and the fight against white supremacy at home and abroad.” More than providing journalistic coverage about these pressing issues in her fiction and reporting, Petry also served on the boards of “as many organizations as seemed to improve the quality of life for Harlem’s most vulnerable: its women and children.”

For all these reasons, Petry’s personal notebooks and manuscript drafts would invariably uncover a fount of new knowledge not only about her novelistic practice and archival sensibility but also about African American sociopolitical history in the wake of World War II from the unique perspective of a black, female artist-activist.

Indeed, as I was to discover later, Petry often typed her novels directly on the backs of fliers and newsletters of the activist organizations in which she was a leading member, such as Negro Women, Incorporated. In other words, Petry’s literary work is literally inscribed upon her activism, a relation that the materiality of her manuscripts renders inescapable as each typescript page forms two sides of the same coin or, rather, the same sheet of paper.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature by Jean-Christophe Cloutier. Copyright (c) 2019 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.