Major English, Irish, and American Writers Revealed in Exhibition Opening April 26

Manuscripts and Personal Items of James Joyce, Henry James, E. M. Forster, W. H. Auden, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, and Others

Selections from Jack Kerouac Archive Receive Their First Public Display

New York, NY, April 12, 2002 -- Documents that provide insight on the development of works by major British, Irish, and American writers will be on view in Victorians, Moderns, and Beats: New in the Berg Collection, 1994—2001, an exhibition at The New York Public Library from April 26 to July 27, 2002. Visitors to the exhibition will see original handwritten drafts of poetry and fiction by W. H. Auden, Walt Whitman, Saul Bellow, and Sylvia Plath, including fragments of unused portions of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. There are also letters from Henry James, James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, and Allen Ginsberg and volumes inscribed or annotated by James Merrill, Herman Melville, E. B. White and other writers.

Detail of Jack Kerouac's journal from September, 1939, just after he arrived in New York to start classes at the Horace Mann School. Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.

The exhibition also features the first public display of materials from the Library's recently acquired Jack Kerouac Archive, including drafts of novels, journals, personal items, and materials related to the author's passionate involvement in the playing of a fantasy baseball game of his own creation. Victorians, Moderns, and Beats is on view in The New York Public Library's D. Samuel and Jeane H. Gottesman Exhibition Hall at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Admission is free.

The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature is one of America's most celebrated collections of literary first editions, rare books, autograph letters, and manuscripts. Victorians, Moderns, and Beats continues the series of New in the Berg exhibitions that began in 1945, five years after the collection was established. The exhibition is divided into two parts, the British Isles and America, to reflect the distinctive, though related, evolution of literary sensibilities on either side of the Atlantic. Within these divisions there are separate sections on Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, The Beats, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, the Black Mountain poets, and the confessional poets.

The Victorian era encompassed a wide variety of approaches to literary expression created mostly during the mid- to-late nineteenth century. However, according to Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the Berg Collection and Curator of Victorians, Moderns, and Beats, "Victorian literature was characterized by one common feature — the assumption that the omniscient narrator's imagined world was, in essence, the same world inhabited by the reader." In Britain this was supported by a system of religious and social beliefs that were held widely throughout the culture.

In the early part of the twentieth century, the sense of a common social order began to disintegrate, and literature evolved toward expression of the individual psyche in conflict with itself and the world. This Modernist perspective was reflected in the works of such authors as Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, who remarked that "All genuine poetry is in a sense the formation of private spheres out of a public chaos."

The British Isles
The Victorian sensibility is represented in the Library's exhibition chiefly through an exchange of correspondence between George Moore, an Irish-born critic, playwright, and writer of fiction; and England's Arnold Bennett, who gained immense popularity with a series of "Five Towns" novels. After an initial admiring letter from Moore, Bennett responded that it was Moore's novel A Mummer's Wife that inspired him to recognize the "romantic nature" of the pottery district in which his stories were situated. "You are indeed the father of all my Five Towns books," Bennett wrote in December 1920, adding, self-deprecatingly, "May God help you!"

Among those who reacted against the literature of this earlier era were the members of the Bloomsbury group, including Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and Woolf's sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. Victorians, Moderns, and Beats features a series of letters Bell wrote as a teenager to her brother Thoby Stephen, who was at Cambridge. Bell reported on various aspects of family life, including a bicycle collision witnessed by Virginia (called Goat by the family), who thought her sister had been involved in the crash. "The poor old Goat was in a dreadful state as you may think and now she wants me to give up riding altogether, which of course I shan't do. It's very unlucky that it should always be the Goat who sees accidents."

Staying in the British Isles, the exhibition has separate sections on W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas. Auden, in the view of many critics and poets, formed with W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot the past century's great triumvirate of English-language poets. This past year, the Berg, which already contained the world's largest collection of original Auden materials, purchased two Auden archives belonging, respectively, to his Italian translator and to his brother John. In letters drawn from these collections, Auden touches on a wide range of literary and personal identity issues, including thoughts about his sexual identity, a topic that has received considerable scholarly attention. Although he addresses the subject in letters to his brother as early as the 1920s, in 1968 he wrote to his Italian translator, Aurora Ciliberto, "Though reason tells me that homosexuality is a derangement of nature, and, as a Christian, I must acknowledge that to be homosexual is to be in sin, I must honestly say that I have never had any feelings of guilt about the matter, nor felt in any way 'alienated' from normal people. But then I am in the fortunate position of having a vocation in life which is more important to me than personal relations." Also on display are two emended typescripts of "Sonnets from China" and an unusual representation of "Make This Night Loveable," which Auden etched on a pane of glass in the home of Edmund Wilson.

In addition to the section on Dylan Thomas, which features love letters and a poem inspired by his wife, Caitlin, other authors featured in the British Isles section include W. B. Yeats, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, V. S. Pritchett, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender.

America
In America the break from the traditions of Britain and Europe came in large measure from Walt Whitman, who created a poetic language rooted in American speech and sensibilities. Whitman forged the future of American poetry in his awe-inspiring book Leaves of Grass, which was first published in 1855 and which he revised in successive editions throughout the rest of his life. On display in Victorians, Moderns, and Beats are five literary fragments in Whitman's own hand that explore ideas that appeared in Leaves of Grass. The documents were selected from a much larger group compiled by Dr. Richard Bucke, a friend of Whitman's and one of his literary executors. For example, in one, Whitman writes of the "butcher boy," a figure who appeared in a different form in the "Song of Myself" section of Leaves of Grass: "Why should I subscribe money to build some hero's statue?/That butcher boy is just as great a hero/He does not know what fear is."

Other important items in the American portion of the exhibition include letters from Henry James, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and John Cheever. Also on view are manuscripts and typescripts (frequently with emendations) by Ezra Pound, Thomas Wolfe, Elizabeth Bishop, Saul Bellow, and many others. In a section on the Black Mountain Poets, the exhibition delves into the influential work of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and others who broke from the traditional forms of line breaks and stanzas, allowing each poem to take its own shape. Another part of the exhibition is devoted to the confessional poets, such writers as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and John Berryman, who drew on their personal lives and conflicted psychological responses to them.

Jack Kerouac and the Beats
A major collecting focus of the Berg over at least the last decade has been the Beats, the generation of writers who picked up the mantle of Whitman but developed an even more direct, immediate approach to their literary work. The Beat movement began to evolve in the 1940s when Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac met in the Columbia University neighborhood of Morningside Heights in New York. As Berg curator Isaac Gewirtz explains, "They recognized in each other a rare integrity that was rooted in the need to remain true to one's own experience in life and art." The exhibition features a healthy selection of letters, manuscripts, and other items relating to such major Beat figures as Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder.

The most significant acquisition of the Berg Collection during the period covered by Victorians, Moderns, and Beats was the Jack Kerouac Archive, which came to the Library in July of 2001. It was Kerouac who coined the term "Beat Generation" and can be considered its central figure. The archive contains more than 1,050 manuscripts and typescripts, including novels, short stories, prose pieces, poems, notebooks, journals, correspondence, and personal items, as well as papers relating to Kerouac's intense passion for sports.

The Kerouac items on view include a Valentine's Day card he created for his mother in 1933 at age 11; a journal he kept in 1939 soon after he arrived in New York to attend the Horace Mann School; and two revisions of his landmark work, On the Road, that succeeded the original scroll version of 1951. There is also a draft of a novel called Gone on the Road, which bears only a peripheral relationship to On the Road, but became the core of Visions of Cody, only excerpts of which were published during Kerouac's lifetime.

Also shown is an array of fascinating materials he created in relation to his passionate interest in baseball. As a youngster Kerouac devised an intricate fantasy baseball game which required the use of hundreds of cards that allowed for very specific descriptions of each play. These card sets, along with related team rosters, and newsletters he wrote to report on the results of his fantasy games, are displayed in the exhibition and give a sense of the vivid imagination he had as a youth and which later found expression in his literary work.

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature was assembled and presented to The New York Public Library by Dr. Albert A. Berg, famous New York surgeon and trustee of the Library, in memory of his brother, Dr. Henry W. Berg. Both men found relaxation from their medical careers in collecting the works and memorabilia of English and American writers. The original collection, which numbered 3,500 items, has grown through acquisitions and gifts to include some 35,000 printed items and 115,000 manuscripts, covering the entire range of English and American literature.

Victorians, Moderns, and Beats: New in the Berg Collection, 1994--2001 is on view from April 26 through July 27, 2002 in the D. Samuel and Jeane H. Gottesman Exhibition Hall at The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Exhibition hours are Monday and Thursday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesday and Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; closed Sundays and national holidays. Admission is free. For more information about exhibitions at The New York Public Library, the public may call 212.869.8089 or visit the Library's website at www.nypl.org.

 

Funding for this exhibition has been provided in part by the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.

Support for The New York Public Library's Exhibitions Program has been provided by Pinewood Foundation and by Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III.

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Contact: Herb Scher, Sabina Potaczek 212.221.7676

 

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