Present Imperfect

Payment: The new pillaging? | June 30, 2007

With one minute left in June, allow me to call your attention to this article in The New Yorker about Tom Staley and The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Seems many Englishfolk are up in arms about literary manuscripts leaving Ye Olde Country and coming to rest in Hill Country. Which reminded me of A.S. Byatt’s Possession (mentioned in the article), and of the hypocrisy inherent in the very idea of “owning” a work that one has not written. The idea that literary masterworks could be auctioned off to the highest bidder may be a tad unsettling, but so is the notion that a nation can lay claim to an individual’s work, simply by dint of geography. And, love him or loathe him, Staley says the same:

There is not much that other institutions can do when Texas is interested. After Osborne, Stoppard, Penelope Lively, and others sold their papers to Texas, the mass departure aroused alarm in Britain — a 2005 headline in the London Times proclaimed, “WRITERS UNITE TO FIGHT FLIGHT OF LITERARY PAPERS TO U.S.” To counter the Ransom Center, Britain’s national-heritage fund changed a rule prohibiting public money from being spent on material less than twenty years old; the exclusion was reduced to ten years. The change barely diminished the flow of work across the ocean, however. Staley does not have much sympathy for the aggrieved. Last year, at a conference at the British Library, Staley was asked about an essay in which the British poet laureate Andrew Motion argued that national treasures belonged in the nations that created them. He retorted, “Like the Elgin Marbles?”

Booyah! Or rather, Yeehaw!