Literary Archives are Like Monkfish

So says the Guardian.

From an article...

However, though I spend a lot of my time with archives, this does not mean that I take unalloyed pleasure in them. Let's start at the beginning. An archive consists of the mass of personal papers that fill a writer's study, and attic, and (if you ask their partner) most of the rest of the house: the terminal moraine of an author's life. What is to be found there? Well, in ideal state – with, as Gertrude Stein put it, "no pieces of paper thrown away" – you might find: the author's manuscripts and drafts of work both published and unpublished; diaries or journals; incoming correspondence, and (if you are very lucky) copies of the author's outgoing letters as well; historical material that documents the author's life, like photographs and family memorabilia; objects of significance: the writer's desk, or typewriter, or (even) best Sunday suit. This material will have spread like an infestation through the house, and found its nesting places in boxes and cartons, filing cabinets, bookshelves, and drawers both open and secret. ("No one is looking into my drawers!" William Golding once told me, a little ambiguously).

When first encountered, an archive, I remarked at the conference, reminds me of a monkfish. When it is eventually served up to you in bite-sized morsels, accompanied by rice and a salad, it is enticing, but when you see it in an unfilleted state it is ugly, cumbersome and unappealing. I have spent a lot of time in attics, studies, and cellars, sifting through myriad unsorted boxes and cartons of a writer's manuscripts, letters, diaries and miscellanea – dust! damp! – and there is something lowering about the process, something dirty and invasive that makes you both literally and figuratively need a wash. My audience was not amused by my fish metaphor, and glared at me disapprovingly – "A monkfish!" muttered Tom Staley, the legendary director of the Ransom Centre – and I made myself an inward promise to stop trying to be funny, and to shut up. (I didn't keep it.)