Walking to get a cup of coffee before returning home, we also browsed cats. The main street of Catskill is lined with large cats made of fiberglass and decorated by local artists. They will be auctioned off in September to raise monies for local charities. We were charmed, we considered placing a bid on “Tropicat,” then we remembered — we are trying to downsize and acquiring a large ceramic cat does not qualify as downsizing.
I have, however, succeeded in deaccessioning two of my large American literature collections.
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro has accepted my collection of 19th century editions of fiction by women for its Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections. The Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College has taken my library of books by and about Mark Twain.
When I started graduate school at Indiana University in 1962, I planned on getting a Master’s degree, writing a thesis on the way black Americans were portrayed in canonical American literature, and teaching in a high school. I had just completed a year of working for the American Friends Service Committee organizing northeastern college campuses to support the Southern Non-violent Coordinating Committee’s civil rights movement. I had begun thinking seriously about race.
In rapid succession, I fell in love with research, accepted an offer to enroll in the Ph.D program, and discovered Mark Twain. In Mark Twain I found a writer I admired, a writer I identified with, and a writer whom I felt I understood. I wrote my dissertation on a pattern I saw in his five major fictions. In each of these books, he tries to tell a certain story, and in each he becomes disillusioned with the possibility of ever writing something “true.” Yet at the end of each attempt, he finds the beginning of the next one. To wit, Huckleberry Finn’s announcement at the beginning of his book: “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.”
Ultimately, the only way out of this pattern lay in leaving his final fiction, The Mysterious Stranger, unfinished.
Recently married and struggling with whether or not I would even have a career once I lost my job at the University of Pennsylvania – my chair had made it clear that no woman would ever get tenure in his English Department – I did not think about trying to get this dissertation published. Had I been a man, I suspect I would have been encouraged to do so, but I believe my dissertation chair felt it would be presumptuous of me to reach so high. “Articles,” he said, “try for an article.” There were no women on the faculty of the English Department at Indiana University at the time. I suspect he could not imagine a future for me that looked like his.
I have always regretted this lost opportunity, not so much for my own personal career where a book on Mark Twain would have helped, but for the story I told that no one ever read and that I still think rings true.
I made one request to the director of the Mark Twain Center in return for my donation of books: please order a copy of my dissertation to add to the collection. He has gladly done so. Perhaps now someone will read it.
My collection of fiction by 19th century American women writers ran to over 100 volumes. In soliciting a home for my collection, I wrote the following “advertisement.”
“The collection as a whole reflects primarily the determination of one woman to tell a different story about 19th century American literature and about the women who participated in its making. When I first began to explore the work of 19th century American women writers of fiction, I knew nothing of the field. In my entire undergraduate and graduate training to be a teacher and scholar of 19th century American literature, I read not one single prose work by a woman. Jealous of the success of his female contemporaries, Hawthorne sneered them off as “that damned mob of scribbling women.” Hawthorne, once elevated to canonical status, ruled. 19th century American women story tellers were ignored, ridiculed, and despised, all by those who had read not a word of what they had written.
So I was curious. What really was out there? Who were these women and what did they have to say? Were they really as bad as I had been told or might they, if given a chance, tell a different story from the one the men were telling?
I began to read. I read everything in prose that I could get my hands on that had been written by a woman between 1800 and 1900. I was fortunate enough to have access to the New York State Library which has a substantial collection of works by 19th century American writers; it also possesses complete runs of relevant 19th century literary journals and newspapers. I began to haunt barns and used bookstores. I became expert at picking out 19th century editions by their color, texture, feel, and shape from the mass of books the seller had labelled “fiction.” I did not know what I would find, and so I bought everything and read everything.
Given these origins, my collection is not particularly one for collectors. It contains few first editions or rare books. Rather its value lies in the way it marks a moment in history. The field of 19th century American women writers of prose did not exist when I began my work in 1980. It had to be created, and the only way to do that was to read, widely and wildly. I bought whatever I could find and whatever I thought was interesting. Then I chose what to reprint and write about in order to begin the work of creating a field.”
We now have some empty shelves. Sara asks, “What are the books I cannot live without? What are the books I must take with me if I move from this house?” I ask, “What is bone?” We both answer, “Beowulf.” But that’s another story.
