LANGSTON HUGHES A SCATHING NEW ESSAY ...

L A N G S T O N H U G H E S | M O D E R N I S T N E T W O R K S | M A G I C P O S T E R S

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L ANGSTON HUGHES A S C A T H I N G N E W E S S A Y D I S C O V E R E D

Ransom Center Magazine is published biannually for members and friends of the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin.Phone: 512-471-8944 | hrc.utexas.edu © 2019 Harry Ransom Center. All rights reserved.

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The publishers have made every effort to contact all copyright holders for permissions. Those we have been unable to reach are invited to contact us so that a full acknowledg-ment may be given.

EDITOR

Elizabeth Page ART DIRECTOR

Leslie Ernst

PHOTOGRAPHY

(Unless otherwise noted) by Pete Smith and Derek Rankins

VOLUME 3 | ISSUE 2

STEPHEN ENNISS

Betty Brumbalow Director, Harry Ransom Center

FOR MORE THAN 60 YEARS, the Harry Ransom Center has supported new scholarship on the lives and work of some of our culture’s most significant figures. Often that scholarship takes the form of a monograph, a journal article, or a lesson plan, but, in this issue of the magazine, two members of the university’s faculty share their latest research in different and highly accessible ways.

The University of Texas’s Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in English Literature Janine Barchas has a fascinating story to tell about how Jane Austen’s work was first read and how it was ordinary readers who secured her place in the literary canon. A fuller account of this story has just been published in The Lost Books of Jane Austin (Johns Hopkins, 2019), and it is also retold in a current Ransom Center exhibition, titled appropriately Austen in Austin, which will be on view through January 5, 2020.

Also in this issue, Ransom Center Faculty Curator Steven Hoelscher, chair of UT’s American Studies Department, shares his discovery of a previously unpublished essay by Langston Hughes on race in America. That essay has received wide-spread media attention, and it too is a reminder of the broad relevance of the Center’s collections to our contemporary moment and to continuing conversations about our country’s still-unfulfilled promise.

A NOTE FROM THE DIRECTOR

The Center’s collections are an endless source of new dis-covery for students, for researchers, and for all of us who are curious about the past and its relevance in our contemporary lives. I hope you will enjoy all of the pieces in this issue of the Ransom Center Magazine and that you will visit our galleries to learn more.

Cover Photo: Carl Van Vechten, [Hughes, Langston, at 4th Street, Manhattan, New York City] , 1939. Carl Van Vechten Papers Relating to African American Arts and Let-ters in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Reprinted with permission of the Carl Van Vechten Trust.

CONTENTS / FALL 2019

12

16

08

02

20

24

26

28

04

NEWS

CONSERVATION

EDUCATION

ACQUISITION

EXHIBITION

BEYOND MARKET VALUE

A collector reflects on her love

of Modernist literature

by Annette Campbell-White

THE GOLDEN AGE OF

MAGIC POSTERS Stunning posters of magicians

were as magical as their tricks

by Eric Colleary

A LOST WORK BY

LANGSTON HUGHES

The discovery of an unknown

essay by one of America’s

greatest writers

by Steven Hoelscher

AUSTEN IN AUSTIN

Inexpensive editions of Jane

Austen’s novels clinched her

popularity

by Janine Barchas

THE INVISIBLE INSCRIPTION

REVEALING AN ENGLISH

SCHOOLMASTER’S

PIERS PLOWMAN

Careful detective work reveals

the meaning of a mysterious

inscription

by Aaron T. Pratt

ATROCITIES

Poem by Sigfried Sassoon

S E C T I O N S

F E A T U R E S

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2 | Ransom Center magazine

This 1948 pastel portrait of Peggy Muray is one of two portraits created by the Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo to be added to the Center’s Mexican art collections.

THOUSANDS OF PEN RECORDS DIGITIZED

M O R E T H A N 4 , 0 0 0 D I G I T I Z E D I M A G E S of the records of the international PEN writers’ organization are available online through a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Writers Without Borders: Creating Global Access to the PEN International and English PEN Records brought together multiple departments at the Ransom Center to arrange, describe, preserve, and selectively digitize the records of PEN International and English PEN.

Originally known as P.E.N, an acronym for Poets, Essayists, and Novelists, PEN is an international writers’ organization with member centers in over 100 countries. Started in 1921 by Catherine Amy Dawson Scott, PEN has had over 7,200 members, including Margaret Atwood, Joseph Conrad, and Arthur Miller.

Acquired by the Center between 1968 and 2015, the PEN records occupy 362 boxes (153 linear feet) and span from 1912 to 2008. These records document the history and activities—from social gatherings to organized protests and campaigns to literary awards—of the English PEN Center, PEN International, and other PEN centers around the globe.

In an effort to improve research accessibility of collection materials, a total of 4,400 images were digitized and made available online beginning November 1, 2019. The PEN Digital Collections contains 3,500 images of newsletters, minutes, reports, scrap-books, and ephemera selected from the PEN records.

An additional 900 images are part of an online teaching guide that provides resources to instructors and gives students an opportunity to engage with archival resources. These guides highlight PEN’s interactions with major political and historical trends, the organization’s negotiation surrounding free speech and human rights, and with global conflicts like World War II and the Cold War. Learn more online at ransom.center/PEN.

RUFINO TAMAYO

PORTRAITS ACQUIRED

T W O P O R T R A I T S C R E AT E D by noted Mexican muralist and surrealist painter Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991) have been acquired by the Ransom Center. A 1948 pastel-on-paper portrait of Peggy Muray, wife of photographer Nickolas Muray, and a 1952 pencil-on-paper portrait of their son, Chris Muray, join a collection of other works by Tamayo, including a portrait of Nickolas Muray created in 1954. The artworks complement the significant Nickolas Muray Collection of Mexican Art. In addition, the portraits offer further insight into Tamayo’s artis-tic practice and demonstrate the broad network of intellectual exchange that included Muray and Tamayo.

The Ransom Center’s art holdings include 65,000+ items, from 15th-century prints to contemporary artworks. Learn more online at ransom.center/art.

A C Q U I S I T I O NS C H O L A R S H I P & R E S E A R C H

N E W S

hrc.utexas.edu | 3

I N T H E A R C H I V E S

ransom.center/digitalcollections

Search thousandsof images in theRansom Center’sdigitized collectionmaterials online

Archivists Amy Armstrong (left) and Katherine Mosley worked in tandem to catalog more than 200 boxes of papers contained in the latest acquisition of Arthur Miller’s papers. After a two-year cataloging process, the archive is open for research.

Join the Harry Ransom Center today

Memberships start at $59.hrc.utexas.edu/join512-232-3669

ARCHIVE OF ARTHUR MILLER NOW OPEN FOR RESEARCH

T H E A R C H I V E O F O N E O F A M E R I C A’ S M O S T A C C L A I M E D P L AY W R I G H T S is available to researchers after a two-year cataloging process. Award-winning writer Arthur Miller (1915–2005) donated a collection of his early manuscripts to the Center in the 1960s, including drafts and notebooks for All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and other notable plays, but the archive was expanded significantly with an acquisition of his remaining papers in 2017. These new materials help tell the full story of Miller’s life and work.

The scope and scale of Miller’s archive offer researchers an opportunity to gain new insights into his creative process. They include more than 50 journals compiled from the 1940s through the 2000s, family correspondence, and substantial correspondence with notable colleagues in theatrical and literary realms—such as Edward Albee, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Cynthia Ozick, John Steinbeck, and others.

Miller earned numerous honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for Death of a Salesman, Kennedy Center Honors, three Tony Awards, and a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is a key figure connecting dozens of the Center’s collections. Scholars researching his work may access the newly cataloged papers in the Reading and Viewing Room.

A detailed finding aid is available online at ransom.center/arthurmiller.

M E M B E R S H I P


I T ’ S N O T E V E R Y D AY T H AT Y O U C O M E A C R O S S A N E X T R A O R D I N A R Y

unknown work by one of the nation’s greatest writers. But buried in an unrelated archive, I recently discovered a searing essay condemning racism in America by Langston Hughes—the moving account, published in its original form here for the first time, of an escaped prisoner he met while traveling with Zora Neale Hurston.

In the summer of 1927, Hughes lit out for the American South to learn more about the region that loomed large in his literary imagination. After giving a poetry reading at Fisk University in Nashville, Hughes journeyed by train through Louisiana and Mississippi before disembarking in Mobile, Alabama. There, to his surprise, he ran into Hurston, his friend and fellow author. Described by Yuval Taylor in his new book Zora and Langston as “one of the more fortuitous meetings in American literary history,” the encounter brought together two leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. On the spot, the pair decided to drive back to New York City together in Hurston’s small Nash coupe.

The terrain along the back roads of the rural South was new to Hughes, who grew up in the Midwest; by contrast, Hurston’s Southern roots and training as a folklorist made her a knowledgeable guide. In his journal Hughes described the black people they met in their travels: educators, share-cropping families, blues singers and conjurers. Hughes also

mentioned the chain gang prisoners forced to build the roads they traveled on.

Three years later, Hughes gave the poor, young and mostly black men of the chain gangs a voice in his satirical poem “Road Workers”—but we now know that the images of these men in gray-and-black-striped uniforms continued to linger in the mind of the writer. In this newly discovered manuscript, Hughes revisited the route he traveled with Hurston, telling the story of their encounter with one young man picked up for fighting and sentenced to hard labor on the chain gang.

I first stumbled upon this Hughes essay in the papers of John L. Spivak, a white investigative journalist in the 1920s and 1930s, at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Not even Hughes’s authoritative biographer Arnold Rampersad could identify the manuscript. Eventually, I learned that Hughes had written it as an introduction to a novel Spivak published in 1932, Georgia Nigger. The book was a blistering exposé of the atrocious conditions that African Americans suffered on chain gangs, and Spivak gave it a deliberately provocative title to reflect the brutality he saw. Scholars today consider the forced labor system a form of slavery by another name. On the final page of the manuscript (not reproduced here), Hughes wrote that by “blazing the way to truth,” Spivak had written a volume “of great importance to the Negro peoples.” Ro

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IN 1933, THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE STAR

WROTE A POWERFUL ESSAY ABOUT RACE,

UNPUBLISHED IN ENGLISH UNTIL

THIS YEAR.

© 2019 Smithsonian Institution. Reprinted with permission from Smithsonian Enterprises. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any medium is strictly prohibited without permission from Smithsonian Institution.

hrc.utexas.edu | 5

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Americans to participate in a film about American racism. The film had been a bust (no one could agree on the script), but escaping white supremacy in the United States—at least tem-porarily—was immensely appealing. The Soviet Union, at that time, promoted an ideal of racial equality that Hughes longed for. He also found that he could earn a living entirely from his writing.

For this Russian audience, Hughes reflected on a topic as rel-evant today as it was in 1933: the injustice of black incarceration. And he captured the story of a man that—like the stories of so many other young black men—would otherwise be lost. We may even know his name: Hughes’s journal mentions one Ed Pinkney, a young escapee whom Hughes and Hurston met near Savannah. We don’t know what happened to him after their interaction. But by telling his story, Hughes forces us to wonder.

had once a short but memo-rable experience with a fugitive from a chain gang in this very same Georgia of which [John L.] Spivak writes. I had been lectur-ing on my poetry at some of the Negro universities of the South

and, with a friend, I was driving North again in a small automobile. All day since sunrise we had been bumping over the hard red clay roads characteristic of the backward sections of the South. We had passed two chain gangs that day,¹ one in the morning grading a country road, and the other about noon, a group of Negroes in gray and black stripped [sic] suits, bending and rising under the hot sun, digging a drainage ditch at the side of the highway.² We wanted to stop and talk to the men, but we were afraid. The white guards on horseback glared at us as we slowed down our machine, so we went on. On our automobile there was a New York license, and we knew it was dangerous for Northern Negroes to appear too interested in the affairs of the rural South. Even peaceable Negro salesmen had been beaten and mobbed by whites who objected to seeing a neatly dressed colored person speaking decent

English and driving his own automobile.³ So we did not stop to talk to the chain gangs as we went by.

But that night a strange thing hap-pened. After sundown, in the evening dusk, as we were nearing the city of Savannah, we noticed a dark f igure waving at us frantically from the swamps at the side of the road. We saw that it was a black boy.

“Can I go with you to town?” the boy stuttered. His words were hurried, as though he were frightened, and his eyes glanced nervously up and down the road.

“Get in,” I said. He sat between us on the single seat.

“Do you live in Savannah?” we asked.“No, sir,” the boy said. “I l ive in

Atlanta.” We noticed that he put his head down nervously when other automobiles passed ours, and seemed afraid.

“And where have you been?” we asked apprehensively.

“On the chain gang,” he said simply.We were startled. “They let you go

today?”“No, sir. I ran away.4 That’s why I was

afraid to walk in the town. I saw you-all was colored and I waved to you. I thought maybe you would help me.”

FOREWORD FROM LIFE

Hughes titled these three typewritten pages “Foreword From Life.” And in them he also laid bare his fears of driving through Jim Crow America. “We knew that it was dangerous for Northern Negroes to appear too interested in the affairs of the rural South,” he wrote. (Hurston packed a chrome-plated pistol for protection during their road trip.)

But a question remained: Why wasn’t Hughes’s essay included in any copy of Spivak’s book I had ever seen? Buried in Spivak’s papers, I found the answer. Hughes’s essay was written a year after the book was published, commissioned to serve as the foreword of the 1933 Soviet edition and published only in Russian.

In early 1933, Hughes was living in Moscow, where he was heralded as a “revolutionary writer.” He had originally trav-eled there a year earlier along with 21 other influential African


IBY LANGSTON HUGHES

The NAACP collected reports of violence

against blacks in this era, including a similar incident in Mississippi

in 1925. Dr. Charles Smith and Myrtle

Wilson were dragged from a car, beaten and

shot. The only cause recorded: “jealousy

among local whites of the doctor’s new car

and new home.”

For publication in Russia, the title of Spivak’s book was translated as “Negr iz Dzhordzhii.” Russian doesn’t have an equivalent of the n-word used in the English title. “Negr” is a standard, neutral term that describes someone of African descent.

This sight was common. By 1930 in Georgia

alone, more than 8,000 prisoners, mostly black

men, toiled on chain gangs in 116 counties. The punishment was used in Georgia from

the 1860s through the 1940s.

Adopting the voice of a chain gang laborer

in the poem “Road Workers,” published in

the New York Herald Tribune in 1930, Hughes

wrote, “Sure, / A road helps all of us! / White folks ride — /And I get

to see ’em ride.”

In his journal, Hughes wrote about meeting an escaped convict named Ed Pinkney near Savannah. Hughes noted that Pinkney was 15 years old when he was sentenced to the chain gang for striking his wife.

hrc.utexas.edu | 7

Gradually, before the lights of Savannah came in sight, in answer to our many questions, he told us his story. Picked up for fighting, prison, the chain gang. But not a bad chain gang, he said. They didn’t beat you much in this one.5 Only once the guard had knocked two teeth out. That was all. But he couldn’t stand it any longer. He wanted to see his wife in Atlanta. He had been married only two weeks when they sent him away, and she needed him. He needed her. So he had made it to the swamp. A colored preacher gave him clothes. Now, for two days, he hadn’t eaten, only running. He had to get to Atlanta.

“But aren’t you afraid,” [w]e asked, “they might arrest you in Atlanta, and send you back to the same gang for run-ning away? Atlanta is still in the state of Georgia. Come up North with us,” we pleaded, “to New York where there are

no chain gangs, and Negroes are not treated so badly. Then you’ll be safe.”

He thought a while. When we assured him that he could travel with us, that we would hide him in the back of the car where the baggage was, and that he could work in the North and send for his wife, he agreed slowly to come.

“But ain’t it cold up there?” he said.“Yes,” we answered.In Savannah, we found a place for him

to sleep and gave him half a dollar for food. “We will come for you at dawn,” we said. But when, in the morning we passed the house where he had stayed, we were told that he had already gone before daybreak. We did not see him again. Perhaps the desire to go home had been greater than the wish to go North to freedom. Or perhaps he had been afraid to travel with us by daylight. Or suspicious of our offer. Or maybe [...]6RI

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(Above) Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston (right) visited Tuskegee University and were photographed with writer Jessie Fauset in front of a statue of Booker T. Washington. (Right) John L. Spivak photographed the torture some inmates endured in Georgia in 1930 and 1931, such as this boy who was immobilized because he ‘sassed’ a guard.

A Literary Roadtrip Hughes traveled by train (and a small freighter to Cuba) until he reached Mobile, where Hurston was conducting her first interviews with Cudjo Lewis, a formerly en-slaved man whose life she would detail in Barracoon. From Alabama, Hurston drove them through the South. (Map by Eritrea Dorcely)

In the English manuscript, the end of Hughes’s story about the convict trails off with an incomplete thought—“Or maybe”—but the Russian translation continues: “Or maybe he got scared of the cold? But most importantly, his wife was nearby!”

Hughes and Hurston visited Savannah August 23, 1927

Guard-on-convict violence was pervasive on Jim Crow-era chain

gangs. Inmates begged for transfers to less

violent camps but requests were rarely

granted. “I remem-bered the many, many such letters of abuse

and torture from ‘those who owed Georgia a debt,’” Spivak wrote.

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NORMALLY, I FELT A FRISSON OF ANTICIPATION when I walked through the heavy front door of Sotheby’s, but on this day I could scarcely summon anything other than a nod to the doorman as I entered the building. The previous evening I had been to a cocktail party at the auction house, and there, viewing the exhibition of the books on display, it had sunk in for me with a thud that the following afternoon, my treasured collection of Cyril Connolly’s titles, a selection of Modernist works discussed in his book The Modern Movement: One Hundred Key Books from England, France, and America, 1880–1950, was about to go under the auction hammer. What had I done? What madness had possessed me to offer this collection for sale? It was the end result of years of assiduously chas-ing down titles, trading lesser copies for better copies, meeting dealers, writ-ers, and other people who had become part of my world, and learning, all the time, more and more about the books and poetry and manuscripts that I had bought. These books and manuscripts

had a soul. They were my family, and I was now set to abandon them that very afternoon.

As I entered, I noted without really focusing on it that the screen in the foyer displayed a succession of carefully curated images of the fine and rare books that were to be sold. The sale was billed as Modern Movement books. The screen images dwelt lovingly on pictures of first editions of works written by important authors of the Modernist movement in literature, such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Guillaume Apollinaire, and many of their contemporaries. High-definition pictures of the fine bindings and the inscriptions contained in various of these books flicked by, and automati-cally, that inscrutable desire possessed me, that same desire which seems to kick in whenever I see beautiful books in fine bindings and first editions, or letters and manuscripts written by or corrected by or annotated by writers whom I revere, which manifests as a longing to Ph

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hrc.utexas.edu | 9

E X C E R P T F R O M B E Y O N D M A R K E T V A L U E : A M E M O I R O F B O O K C O L L E C T I N G A N D T H E W O R L D O F V E N T U R E C A P I T A L ( U T P R E S S , 2 0 1 9 )

Campbell-White’s memoir (above) offers a compelling backstory to the selections from her collection featured in the Center’s Modernist Networks exhibition. (Opposite page) She considers this proof copy of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, 1897, with illustrations by Odilon Redon, to be the anchor of her collection of works of French modernism.

NEW MEMOIR MIXES BUSINESS WITH PLEASURE

BY A N N E T T E C A M P B E L L - W H I T E

B EYOND MARKET VALUE


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touch the items, to handle them, per-haps to own them. The items looked strangely familiar, and now I started to pay attention. Wait a minute—these were my books, this was my collection. The monitors were showing works from my collection. Again that awful truth, revealed the previous evening, became evident. Yes, it was my collection. I took no pride in the fact that it had been deemed important enough to have a bespoke sale devoted to its dispersion, but I shook myself out of my stupor. Concentrate, I told myself. This was the reason that I was at the Sotheby’s prem-ises that day. To watch my beloved books and manuscripts be sold.

I looked at the items sliding by in succession on the monitor display, expe-riencing both regret and longing. I must have been mad to do this, I thought, feeling vaguely ill, because it was too late to go back. The contracts had been signed, the buyers were gathering, the catalog had been widely dispersed, and the items in the collection had been shown in a series of public viewings. The knot in the pit of my stomach tensed into

a leaden ball of anxiety; I felt almost as if I were about to put my children up for sale.

That collection of Modern Movement books was deeply personal. The separate items in the collection were a paral-lel record of the course of my life and career up until the day when I sold it. Over the course of more than thirty years leading up to that day in June 2007, I had devoted myself to collecting rare examples of books that appealed to me. After a first rash purchase of a rare book in the early 1970s, I began to buy books seriously, starting with the earnings from my first job in London. Over those thirty-plus years, I used any spare money to buy books, not just books for reading, but rare books and first editions. Initially, I bought works of English poetry from the World War I era, but within ten years, the collect-ing passion had turned into a focused search for first editions, inscribed edi-tions, and association copies of works by leading authors of a broader period spanning the years before and after that war, and even literary letters, portraits,

and related items. What had attracted me was the Modernist movement, the movement that changed the course of literature in the twentieth century just as decisively as the revolution in the visual arts changed how artists drew, painted, and sculpted. The roadmap for my collection had been that selection of Modernist authors whose key works were discussed in my personal collecting guidebook, the influential catalog from an exhibition on the works discussed in Connolly’s 1965 book, The Modern Movement, which Connolly curated, and which was held for some months in 1971 at the Humanities Research Center, now the Harry Ransom Center. Connolly’s book was not meant to be a work of scholarship, but since Connolly was one of the most influential and well-connected literary critics of his day, the book and the related exhibition catalog were the best guides one could find on the subject, and I followed Connolly’s choices in assembling my collection. Over a twenty-year period, I had suc-ceeded in creating my version of his list by assembling what I could find of

WHAT HAD ATTRACTED ME WAS

THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT, THE

MOVEMENT THAT CHANGED THE COURSE OF LITERATURE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

hrc.utexas.edu | 11

beautiful examples of all the items he had included.

There had been objective reasons for making the decision to sell, practical reasons—at least I had convinced myself that this was true. The collection was complete, and my collecting was now no longer a treasure hunt, but more of a duty. The caretaking of the collection was becoming onerous. The increased value of some of the items meant that handling them was a matter of concern, and some of the items were in need of conservation, owing to the fragility of the paper or the backing. And it had to be said that not all of the items in the collection were precious to me. There were items on the Connolly list that I had acquired only owing to their pres-ence on the list, not because they held special meaning for me. There were items whose significance I questioned as arbiters of Modernist thought. Against that, there were authors who had been left off the Connolly list whose exclusion from the list I also questioned.

Still, it ’s one thing to be objective. Subjectively, I had a completely different

and altogether unanticipated reaction. I’d had absolutely no idea how much that collection meant to me, personally, until I sent it to Sotheby’s to be sold. I had never considered how, over the many years in which I had assembled the collection, I’d almost begun to con-sider the authors of many of the works to be family. And, in addition, I felt a deep connection to Connolly himself, particularly on those occasions when I disagreed with some of his choices, not only of authors on his list but also of exclusions from it. I could even imagine myself in debate with Connolly, argu-ing for or against inclusion of particular works and particular authors as key examples of Modernism. But by the time that realization bore in on me, it was already too late for subjective analysis.

In hindsight, I am sure that, even without considering the practical rea-sons I used to convince myself, such a sale had to happen. Perhaps I already knew this intuitively the day I called Sotheby’s to discuss a sale. The sale was a sort of catharsis, a trial by fire, to force a change in my collecting direction,

since collecting in such a narrow range had clearly become stale. My collecting activities had become confined by the Connolly list, and I no longer wanted my interests to be defined by Connolly’s choices. It was time to move ahead on my own, to throw away the roadmap. In other words, objectivity aside, it was a response to the urging of that small, intuitive voice, a voice which lives inside the head of every collector, telling me that the collection was complete, that it was time to move on. That’s the real reason. But against that logic, I often, even today, hear a different voice sug-gesting that it might have been possible to keep the collection in safe custody and add to it according to my own growing and changing interests. But it’s too late for this sort of retrospection, just as it was already too late on that June morning in 2007. The sale was about to happen.

Annette Campbell-White, founder of MedVenture Associates, was the first biotech analyst on Wall Street and a found-ing member of the Wikipedia Endowment Advisory Board.

Visitors to the Ransom Center can see letters, books, and manuscripts by Modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot, Stéphane Mallarmé, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Joseph Conrad, and others from the private collection of Annette Campbell-White (opposite page), a pioneering venture capitalist and rare book collector.


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hrc.utexas.edu | 13

layers of printing with different colors of ink, and eventually translucent inks that would blend to create different color tones.

Numerous examples of these lithographs are on view in the Ransom Center galleries through February 2, 2020, as part of the exhibition, Stories to Tell: Selections From The Harry Ransom Center.

These highlights represent only a fraction of the extensive collection of stage magic advertisements largely collected by Harry Houdini and gifted to The University of Texas at Austin by the Hoblitzelle Foundation in 1958.

Dr. Eric Colleary is the Cline Curator of Theatre and Performing Arts at the Ransom Center.

T HE T U R N OF T HE T W EN T IE T H CEN T U RY WAS A PER IOD OF

innovation, when advances in printing and color lithography coincided with a new golden age in the performance of magic and illusion. This convergence resulted in the most stunning, color-saturated advertisements in the history of magic.

In the early 1900s, lithographs were popular in advertising, especially for stage magicians who used posters such as these to convey a sense of mystery and exoticism in their acts.

Lithography is a complex printing process, which, at the time, used smooth stone plates. An artist drew the image on the stone with grease or wax. An acid wash created an etching where the stone was not protected by the grease. Water could be absorbed into the etched stone, but oil-based inks stuck to the grease image. When pressed on paper, the ink transferred, reproduc-ing the original drawing. Color lithography involves multiple

THE GOLDEN AGE OF MAGIC POSTERSBY E R I C C O L L E A RY

MORE T H A N 3,000 M AGICI A NS A RE REPRESEN T ED IN T H E

R A NSOM CEN T ER’S M AGIC COLLEC T IONS.


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hrc.utexas.edu | 15

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DB O O K A N D A U S T E N I N A U S T I N E X H I B I T I O N S H E D L I G H T O N A U T H O R ’ S A P P E A L

uring the latter half of the nine-teenth century, cheap and shoddy reprints of Jane Austen’s novels brought her work to the genera l p u b l i c . T h e s e inexpensive vol-umes were sold

at Victorian railway stations for one or two shillings and targeted to Britain’s working classes. Few of these hard-lived books survive, yet these versions of Austen’s novels substantially increased her early readership. These books were bought and read widely, but due to their low status and low production values they remain largely uncollected by academic libraries and unremarked by scholars.

In The Lost Books of Jane Austen, I show how the tatty and common Austen volumes produced in heaps by nineteenth-century publishers have dis-appeared, leaving only the authoritative

and elegant editions granted a scholarly seal of approval.

In Britain, the waste paper drives of both World Wars ensured that many cheap edit ions deemed unimport-ant were simply pulped. In America, ill-placed concerns about acidic paper resulted in nineteenth-century books being tossed by librarians favoring stor-age on microfilm.

My research challenges traditional opinions about what constitutes an “important” version of a book. I want to democratize the history of Jane Austen’s reception and show how cheap versions read by working class readers, non scholars, and schoolchildren affect literary reputation. Cheap books tell a story about Austen’s fame that differs from the record of precious first editions painstakingly safeguarded by collectors.

Original, authoritative, and hand-somely i l lustrated edit ions in the nineteenth century helped Austen’s early visibility, to be sure, but so did the numerous unsung reprints at the bottom end of the book market—and in messy

and startling ways. By literally cheapen-ing Austen, these versions showed an everyday writer whose public appeal dif-fered radically from the official canonical author proffered and supported by those fine editions. Jane Austen may have been popular long before she was con-sidered great!

The Ransom Center has its own unique history of collecting. Its hold-ings of Jane Austen offer a single-author window onto the evolution of modern collecting practices during the past half century. The Ransom Center, learning of my research, gave me the opportunity to curate their Jane Austen materials to tell the story of modern collecting in a special exhibition titled Austen in Austin. In 1957, when the Harry Ransom Center was founded, first editions of major writers were an acquisition priority for a library with world-class aspirations. Soon, the Ransom Center owned an enviable number of Jane Austen’s novels as rare firsts. Then, and as great writers are great readers, all manner of Austen copies began to arrive among the books

BY JA N I N E B A R C H A S

Why are some books collected and others merely read?

hrc.utexas.edu | 17

and papers of other authors. Elsewhere, such unexpected “duplicates” of titles already owned in loftier editions might have been culled, but the Ransom Center held on to these books. Lucky for us, because these incidental catches of Austen now track her influence on other writers and artists.

The Austen in Austin section of the Stories to Tell exhibition irreverently mixes high-value and low-value items from the Ransom Center collections. There are plenty of jaw-dropping first editions as well as a surprisingly large number of Austen family books. But there are also ordinary reprints made extraordinary by former owners plus rare commonplace versions of Austen’s novels, not the tradi-tional stuff of collecting, that entered the Ransom Center as part of other scholarly archives or projects.

Dr. Janine Barchas is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in English Literature at The University of Texas at Austin.

B O O K A N D A U S T E N I N A U S T I N E X H I B I T I O N S H E D L I G H T O N A U T H O R ’ S A P P E A L

Shown here are examples of the cheap, mass produced editions that cemented Jane Austen’s popularity. Inex-pensive production and advertisements like the one below kept prices low.


ost of the books that came to The University of Texas at Austin as part of the John Henry Wrenn Library didn’t look like old books when they arrived in 1918 and still don’t look old now—not as old, at least, as the publication dates of

the printed pages inside would suggest. The earliest volumes date from the 1500s, and their bindings feature dyed goatskin leather of the highest quality, with shiny gold lettering, decoration, and page edges. Open their covers and you’ll see marbled endpapers, too, and even more gold dec-oration. Most of this high-end work was done around the turn of the twentieth century by the London bindery of Rivière and Son, which served elite book collec-tors on both sides of the Atlantic. And old books handled by the firm often have secrets to tell.

The artisans at Rivière and Son were not only skilled binders but also experts at repairing paper. They could take dam-aged leaves from early printed books

and fill losses with other paper without creating a visible seam. They were even able to match the chain and wireline pat-terns present in early mold-made paper. They were also able to remove the dirt and stains that had accumulated over the centuries by washing leaves and then flattening and compressing them in a press. In the case of many books in the Wrenn Library, a combination of repair, washing, and pressing made it possible to make leaves originally from different copies appear uniform when brought together between a single pair of covers. I discussed these books—some of which include leaves stolen from the British Museum by a man named Thomas J. Wise—as part of a recent Stories to Tell exhibition at the Center and in its accom-panying publication, Collated & Perfect. Other Wrenn books in Rivière and Son bindings aren’t “Frankenstein” copies, but they have usually been washed and pressed and include some paper repairs.

A couple of months ago, a reference question from a UT faculty member took me into the stacks to retrieve Wrenn’s 1561 edition of Piers Plowman, a poem written by William Langland toward the end of the fourteenth century. From

the texture of the paper alone I could tell that it had been treated. As part of the book’s original binding process in the sixteenth century, the paper would have been beaten and pressed, but the pages of books that remain in early bindings retain some of the original texture of their handmade paper; it is often pos-sible, too, to see and feel impressions where the metal type was in contact with the paper during printing. Not so in this book, where page surfaces are so smooth that they feel almost like cigarette paper. Such clear signs of modern washing and pressing always put me on alert.

With washing and pressing comes increased risk of a copy’s leaves being from multiple sources, and washing and pressing doesn’t only remove dirt, it can—and often was intended to—wash away inscriptions by early readers. In the Plowman copy, the title-page is a beige or tan color, with some irregularities here and there, especially near the edges. This is fairly typical, but because the smooth texture made me more attentive, I noticed orange marks in a blank area just above the imprint. Upon examination, it was clear that these were traces of early hand-writing, but it was difficult to make out

The Invisible

Inscription BY A A R O N T. P R AT T

Revealing an English Schoolmaster’s Piers Plowman

M

hrc.utexas.edu | 19

Will

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even have considered Piers Plowman an edifying enough poem to teach it to schoolchildren.

Originally written in Middle English in alliterative verse during the fourteenth century, Piers Plowman is long and com-plex. At the most basic level, it tells of a man named Will who has a series of dream visions that track his spiritual jour-ney as a Christian while offering what is often biting religious and social critique. The title character, Piers Plowman, appears throughout the visions as both a literal plowman and a Christ figure. In its time, Piers Plowman was well known: a substantial number of manuscripts of the poem still survive, and leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 referred to the poem and its characters in a speech and in writing. Almost 200 years later, in the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers adopted Piers Plowman as an ally, too. Indeed, by the time Ranulph Kent owned his copy, Piers Plowman would have been understood by many readers as a proto-Protestant poem.

Dr. Aaron T. Pratt is the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Ransom Center.

the words. Fortunately, a high-resolution camera and Photoshop made it possible to increase the contrast selectively, giving me a clear view of a couple of words: “divina,” “nihil,” and a word starting with “v” and ending with “emus.” I could also see the initials “R. K.” underneath. I posted some photos on Twitter with a call for help deciphering the inscription, and scholar Mari-Liisa Varila offered an answer: “Sine ope divina nihil valemus,” which means “Without God’s power we can accomplish nothing.”

Incredibly, a Google search for the Latin returned a link to a digitized copy of Book-Prices Current, which included a description from Sotheby’s of the very same copy that is now in the Wrenn Library—but before Rivière and Son had scrubbed and rebound it. In 1897, when Sotheby’s auctioned the book in London as part of the famous Ashburnham Library, it was still in a binding of “old calf.” In addition to confirming Dr. Varila’s reading, the description provided exciting new information: there is—or was—another inscription at the top of the page: “Ranulphi Kent et Amicorum Liber,” “Ranulph Kent and [his] friends’ book.” When Wrenn bought this Piers Plowman

at a New York auction in 1900, the cata-log description made no mention of any inscriptions but noted that the book was bound in “full crushed levant morocco extra, [with] gilt edges, by Rivière.”

The Ranulph (or Ralph or Randle) Kent who inscribed the volume was in all like-lihood the headmaster of the grammar school in Nantwich from its founding in 1572 until shortly before his death in January 1624. Conveniently, images of his will are available from the Cheshire Archives for a small fee. Atypically, the probate inventory of Kent’s personal property is preserved with it. In total, his belongings were assessed at a little under £47.50. He had kept 27 books, along with a few others, “In the studie,” and the inventory specifies these were “geven to the Schoole.” Together, Kent’s books were valued at £20, or more than 40% of the inventory’s total. It is unclear whether his Piers Plowman was among these books when assessed or if it, perhaps, had already made its way into the hands of a friend. What is clear is that Ranulph Kent was a man committed to books. He read, and he wanted his friends and students to benefit from reading, too. Especially pro-vocative is the possibility that he might

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20 | Ransom Center magazine20 | Ransom Center magazine

J . E . J O H N S O N A N D

K A R E N M A N E S S

hrc.utexas.edu | 21

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BECAUSE OF ITS HAUNTING VISUAL POWER IN speaking to the history of slavery and lynching in America, Mid Passage has served as a significant teaching tool in a number of art history and American studies classes held at the Ransom Center. The sketch was discovered as the draw-ing was being prepared to be loaned to the Blanton Museum of Art’s exhibition, Charles White: Celebrating the Gordon Gift.

John Biggers (1924–2001) was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, and studied art with Viktor Lowenfeld, Charles White, and Elizabeth Catlett at the Hampton Institute before earning a doctorate in art education from Pennsylvania State University. In 1949, Biggers was hired by what is today known as Texas Southern University to establish the art department there; he went on to serve as chairman of that department until 1983.

Biggers, who had been influenced by Harlem Renaissance artists and writers as well as by the works of Mexican mural-ists José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera, traveled to Ghana and Nigeria in 1957 thanks to a grant

awarded by UNESCO. The experience precipitated a profound shift in his art practice.

The majority of the Ransom Center’s collection of Biggers’s works document the artist’s earlier practice: in addition to Mid Passage the Center holds his 1955–1956 series of 16 original illustrations for Mason Brewer’s Aunt Dicy Tales. One of these drawings, “Aunt Dicy and Family Migrating to Lee County,” is on view at the Blanton. A suite of Biggers’s lithographic prints created to accompany the Limited Editions Club’s 1994 pub-lication of Maya Angelou’s Our Grandmothers demonstrates some of the ways in which the artist’s practice evolved after the pivotal 1957 trip.

Although he made a large number of works on paper, John Biggers is primarily known for his murals—a number of which can be viewed in Houston and elsewhere in Texas—and it is possible that the sketches on the back of Mid Passage were part of a larger study for an unfinished mural. The incomplete study was then cut apart and a portion of the corrugated board repurposed for the completion of Mid Passage.

R E V E A L I N G S K E T C HIn mid-April, Ransom Center conservators made an exciting discovery. A previously unknown sketch by the American artist John Biggers was found on the back of his celebrated 1947 drawing, Mid Passage.

FIGURES EMERGE WITH EXAMINATION OF JOHN BIGGERS’S MID PASSAGEBY T R ACY B O N F I T T O

C O N S E R V A T I O N

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Executed in graphite and black crayon, the verso sketches depict the partial, bowed heads of two male figures; the head of a third man, his mouth slightly open, appears to be striding forward or gazing ahead. In addition to these figures, there are a number of unfinished outlines for heads and faces. The style—with its emotional intensity and the cross-hatching strokes to manipulate volume and light—is typical of Biggers’s early works.

Mid Passage was acquired by the Ransom Center in 2004, and it had remained in its original frame until the work needed to be prepared for loan to the Blanton Museum. During the spring, Kress Conservation Fellow Emily Farek removed the work from its frame to examine and perform routine stabiliza-tion treatments. Upon detaching the work from its supports and turning it over to complete her assessment, she was sur-prised to uncover the unfinished Biggers sketch. The sketch was partially obscured by mulberry paper strips, which had been applied before the work’s arrival at the Center to cover areas of old adhesive residue that was still tacky.

Farek first lightly cleaned selected portions of the work before detaching the hinges previously used in mounting it within its frame. She removed the mulberry paper strips that had been acting as a stopgap solution, and worked to remove and reduce the effect of the adhesive residue on the drawing’s verso. Once the strips were removed, the sketch was fully revealed. Finally, Farek repaired minor delaminations and tears before working with exhibition preparators to mount the artwork in a new frame.

In its current presentation, newly mounted and framed for display, the verso sketches are not visible. The Conservation team carefully photographed and documented the sketches, however, so that they will never again be lost. These images


C O N S E R V A T I O N

hrc.utexas.edu | 23

are now part of the Center’s larger record of the work.John Biggers’s Mid Passage is on display until December 1 at

the Blanton Museum of Art as part of the exhibition, Charles White: Celebrating the Gordon Gift, which features works by White and a number of artists in his circle. A related exhibition, Charles White and the Legacy of the Figure: Celebrating the Gordon Gift, focuses on White’s legacy and influence on contemporary artists and is on view at the Christian-Green Gallery, located in Jester Hall, through November 30.

Visitors to the Ransom Center’s Reading and Viewing Room can request to view other works by John Biggers not currently on display from our John Thomas Biggers and Limited Editions Club collections. Dr. Tracy Bonfitto is the Curator of Art at the Ransom Center.

hrc.utexas.edu | 23

The previously unknown sketch was partially obscured by mulberry paper strips applied to the verso before the artwork arrived at the Center. During treatment, the paper strips were removed and the sketch was documented before it was mounted in a new frame.

THE STYLE—WITH ITS EMOTIONAL INTEN-

SITY AND THE CROSS-HATCHING STROKES TO MANIPULATE VOLUME

AND LIGHT—IS TYPICAL OF BIGGERS’S EARLY

WORKS.

24 | Ransom Center magazine24 | Ransom Center magazine

V I O L E N C E A N D V I S U A L C U LT U R E : R E S E A R C H I N T H E A R C H I V E is a new class I teach in The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of History that exposes undergraduates to the Ransom Center’s photography collections, providing an “eyes on” learning expe-rience. It asks students to consider the impact of visual culture on political violence in the modern era, when the mass pro-liferation of images changed the way people understood and related to violence.

This course is part of the Global Classrooms initiative of UT’s International Office, and I co-teach with professor Daniel Foliard and his students at the Université de Paris Nanterre. In this way, students collaborate in research and learning across the Atlantic.

The students follow lectures and discussions through a live video-conferenced classroom, and they organize ambitious research projects using the Center’s collections and photo-graphs held by the French archive La Contemporaine, which specializes in the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century.

The two archives hold some of the modern era’s most impor-tant images of violence. These include the war photographs at the Ransom Center taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War (1853–1856) and La Contemporaine’s holdings of Elie Kagan’s stunning documentation of the long-denied massacre of Algerian demonstrators in Paris on October 17, 1961. Between these two archives is an unparalleled research opportunity.

The Ransom Center’s Andrea Gustavson worked with me to organize the structure of the course and how students could use the collection in her role as the head of instructional services. Research Associate Linda Briscoe Myers taught a seminar introducing students to the photographs, including Robert Capa’s iconic “The Falling Soldier” and David Douglas Duncan’s Korean War photographs. In the reading room, Michael Gilmore helped train students in proper handling of the fragile resource materials.

GLOBALCLASSROOMS

E D U C A T I O N

BY B E N JA M I N C L AU D E B R O W E R

hrc.utexas.edu | 25

The Ransom Center experience has been an eye-opener for students in the Digital Age. Students have the opportunity to work with physical copies of well-known images, analyzing them in ways not possible in digital form.

The course ends in a final multimedia project, in which students learn to contextualize their sources and frame meaningful questions of the imagery. Students learn to use photographic theorists like Susan Sontag to analyze photo-graphs such as John Spivak’s images of Georgia chain gangs in the 1930s. By doing so, they develop their own visual literacy and better understand how violent imagery functions in our present cultural moment.

The course trains students to engage intellectually with what are often challenging materials. This requires cultivat-ing an intellectual attention and critical equilibrium while maintaining a capacity for empathy and ethical judgment. These are necessary skills, not only for the researcher, but for any global citizen in our current age dominated by visual culture. The fact that students develop these skills within the cross-cultural perspectives offered in the Global Classrooms initiative is a bonus.

Dr. Benjamin Claude Brower is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin.

(Opposite page) A student looks at reproductions of war photographs through a classroom stereo viewer at the Ransom Center. Research Associate Linda Briscoe Myers (above) shows collection materials to students as part of a UT Global Classroom initiative that links the Center with another archive in France.

THE RANSOM CENTER EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN AN EYE-OPENER FOR STUDENTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE.


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A M E R I C A N P O E T F R E D E R I C K S E I D E L has been captivating and pro-voking readers for more than 50 years, since Louise Bogan, Stanley Kunitz and Robert Lowell selected his Final Solutions for a poetry prize administered by the 92nd Street Y. The judges’ decision was overturned when Seidel refused to make changes to the manuscript, which was deemed too controver-sial for publication. The book was later published by Random House in 1963.

He did not publish another book for 17 years, but since the relaunch of his career with Sunrise in 1979, he has published 14 collections and two selections of his work. Sunrise won the Lamont Poetry Prize, and Going Fast was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. His Collected Poems, 1959-2009 was pub-lished by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2009.

Seidel’s archive, which has just been acquired by the Ransom Center, contains working drafts of 12 of Seidel’s major collec-tions, handwritten poems and notes, as well as unfinished and unpublished poems. The circle of acquaintance represented

in the archive is wide, and present is correspondence with Leonard Bernstein, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Hardwick, Anthony Hecht, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and others. The archive contains pocket diaries, photographs, reviews and other documentation of this singular poetic life.

“The Frederick Seidel Papers will shed light on this most elusive and private of poets,” Harry Ransom Center Director Stephen Enniss said. “The archive will allow researchers to probe the boundaries between the writer Frederick Seidel and the observing figure that inhabits this distinguished body of work. His very iconoclasm casts a bright light on the beautiful and the ugly in contemporary life, and he has left us a body of work that future readers will turn to to better understand our time.”

Poet Calvin Bedient once called Seidel “the poet the 20th century deserved,” an acknowledgment of the way a Seidel poem gives expression to elements of our contemporary expe-rience we might prefer be left unsaid. Seidel often explores


Archive of poet

Frederick Seidel

acquired

A C Q U I S I T I O N

hrc.utexas.edu | 27

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themes of wealth, privilege, race and sex, putting his work in the crosshairs of contemporary cultural debates. Of his own work, Seidel has said simply, “Everything in the poems is true.”

Jonathan Galassi, Seidel’s publisher at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, commenting on the provocative nature of his work, said “he has made a private myth that is one of the great aes-thetic constructions of our era, joyfully doffing his cap as he vrooms toward oblivion on one of the fiery motorcycles he extols but no longer rides.” He adds, “He is the last flâneur, a consummate artist whose work affords great joy.”

The Seidel papers join the Ransom Center’s deep collections of English and American poetry including the papers of Billy Collins, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, James Tate, and Dara Wier, among others.

hrc.utexas.edu | 27

The recently acquired archive of poet Frederick Seidel contains early notebooks and journals (above) from throughout his career related to his published poetry. Seidel (opposite page) was photographed by San Francisco-based photographer Mark Mahaney in 2012.

HE HAS MADE A PRIVATE MYTH THAT IS ONE OF THE GREAT AESTHETIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF OUR ERA, JOYFULLY DOFFING HIS CAP AS HE VROOMS TOWARD OBLIVION ON ONE OF THE FIERY MOTORCY-CLES HE EXTOLS BUT NO LONGER RIDES.

JONATHAN GALASSI


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argon to establish the desired “passive” environment for the heliograph’s pres-ervation for years to come.

O N E O F T H E M O S T C E L E B R AT E D O B J E C T S I N

the history of photography is featured in a permanent exhibition just inside the main entrance to the Harry Ransom Center. The untitled photograph—the earl iest know n sur v iv ing photo-graph made with the aid of the camera obscura—was produced in 1827 by the

French scientist and inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce using a process he called héliographie. Permanent exhibi-tions are never really “permanent,” however; objects may remain in place, but their meanings are always evolving, and exhibitions are periodically revised to reflect those advances.

Over the summer the exhibition for-merly known as The First Photograph was refreshed and reintroduced with a new title, The Niépce Heliograph, and with an updated introductory text that aims to inspire curiosity and invite new questions.

In conjunction with the reinterpreta-tion, the Center partnered with imaging specialists and conservation scientists across the country to undertake a project to ensure the long-term preservation of the heliograph. The project had two pri-mary goals: update the environmental monitoring system for the special case in which the heliograph is enclosed, and evaluate the current condition of the photograph.

The Center ’s conser vat ion sta f f replaced and updated all monitoring system components in collaboration with scientists, engineers, and techni-cians, including colleagues from the Getty Conservation Institute. The proj-ect team readied the case’s environment in preparation for reinstallation of the heliograph in the public display on the first f loor. This involved calibrating the sensors and purging the case with

One of the Center’s most celebrated objects was rein-stalled over the summer. Its new name—The Niépce Heliograph —is descriptive rather than supportive of a particular historical claim. The reinstallation of The Niépce Heliograph provided curatorial and conserva-tion staff a rare opportunity to image and analyze the heliograph created by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1827.

Preserving The Niépce Heliograph

E X H I B I T I O N

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hrc.utexas.edu | 29hrc.utexas.edu | 29

PUBL ISHED 19 19

You told me, in your drunken-boasting mood,

How once you butchered prisoners. That was good!

I’m sure you felt no pity while they stood

Patient and cowed and scared, as prisoners should.

How did you do them in? Come, don’t be shy:

You know I love to hear how Germans die,

Downstairs in dug-outs. ‘Camerad!’ they cry;

Then squeal like stoats when bombs begin to fly.

And you? I know your record. You went sick

When orders looked unwholesome: then, with trick

And lie, you wangled home. And here you are,

Still talking big and boozing in a bar.

ORIGIN A L

You bragged how once your men in savage mood

Butchered some Saxon prisoners. That was good!

I trust you felt no pity when they stood

Patient and cowed and scared, as prisoners should.

How did you kill them? Speak, and don’t be shy.

You know I love to hear how Germans die,

Downstairs in dug-outs. ‘Camerad,’ they cry

And squeal like stoats when bombs begin to fly.

I’m proud of you. Perhaps you’ll feel as brave

Alone in no man’s land, when none can save

Or shield you from the horror of the night.

I hope those Huns will haunt you with their screams

And make you gulp their blood in ghoulish dreams.

You’re great at murder. Tell me, can you fight?

A T R O C I T I E S I S O N E O F S I E G F R I E D S A S S O O N ’ S most famous anti-war poems. The Annette Campbell-White Collection currently on view at the Ransom Center contains Sassoon’s original, handwritten version of the poem. It is considerably different from the version published in 1919. Sassoon’s pub-lisher was nervous about the portrayal of British soldiers in the original version, so Sassoon revised the poem. The handwrit-ten poem is on view in the galleries through January 5, 2019.

A T R O C I T I E S BY SIEGFRIED SASSOON PUBL ISHED 19 19

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