To assemble a valuable collection of literary manuscripts takes talent, brains, luck, cash--and a vision of what may become important to scholars far removed in time and place from the original works. Can one university cover almost an entire century of American literature within its collection? The University of Maryland does, thanks in large part to the papers of two very different women authors, Katherine Anne Porter (below left) and Djuna Barnes (below right).

By Carol Casey

The two represent distinct American literary strains.Porter has been called "a writer's writer," working her stories to a gem-like clarity and unity, with no detail left to chance. She delineates and colors particular human predicaments through flawless technique. Her friend Robert Penn Warren referred to Porter's work as "world class." The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, first released in England in 1964, won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award after its American debut in 1965.

Avant-garde writer and illustrator Barnes, on the other hand, opens up human agony in lyric, barely controlled language that even writer T. S. Eliot found difficult. Her friends often presented interpretations of her work that Barnes found puzzling. Scottish poet and critic Edwin Muir called her play The Antiphon "one of the greatest things ... written in our time." Eliot called it "a work of genius and utterly absurd."

Despite their differences, Barnes and Porter shared the experience of expatriates, of women making their way through the upheavals of the 20th century, of strained relations with publishers and editors. And between them, they counted as friends or acquaintances nearly every leading English-speaking literary figure of their time.

Much of that history lies within their personal papers and manuscripts, housed in the university's Hornbake Library. How they got there is a story in itself.

Pursuit of Djuna
In 1971, 79-year-old Barnes complained to her attorney, "I am worn to a thread with the rising glory of Djuna Barnes." Ill and in need of money, she was tired of negotiating with Princeton, Yale, Harvard and Syracuse universities, the New York Public Library and the University of Maryland about the placement of her papers. All had expressed interest, but Barnes had accepted no offers. She felt that time was running out. "If I should die tonight, the wind would take my world away," she wrote.

Barnes was born in 1892 into a talented, bohemian and highly unusual family. When she was 20, her father chose to marry his mistress, who with their children had been sharing the family's house for 15 years. Essentially evicted, Barnes had to quickly begin earning a living to support her devastated mother and three younger brothers.

She applied in 1913 for a job at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in New York City, "clad in a calico dress and carrying a basket, and looking rather like a milkmaid gone astray," according to Barnes's biographer, Phillip Herring. She concluded the interview with the simple statement, "You need me." She could draw and she could write, so they hired her. Barnes quickly became a celebrated journalist who illustrated her articles with her own drawings.

Her avant-garde works and her journalism were widely published from 1913 through the '30s. She lived in Paris, London and Greenwich Village, all centers of modernism at its height. In 1937, her novel Nightwood was released in North America. The novelist James Joyce befriended her; she became one of the few permitted to call him "Jim." Poet Dylan Thomas quoted and praised her work.

Yet Barnes had for all practical purposes dropped from the literary scene in 1939 when she moved to New York, settling the next year into the tiny apartment on Patchin Place in Greenwich Village where she would stay for the rest of her life. Battling alcoholism, she enveloped herself in public silence but continued to correspond and socialize with her closest friends, among them T. S. Eliot and Peggy Guggenheim. In 1954, she finished her last major work, The Antiphon.

Robert Beare, assistant director for collections at Maryland, sought her papers for several reasons. Although Barnes was relatively obscure in 1970, Beare felt her reputation would grow over time. The feminist movement was gathering steam and Barnes was a strong-voiced writer who strove to be remembered for her work, not her gender.

Beare also had a scholarly interest in T. S. Eliot, whose correspondence with Barnes was significant and revealing. They had begun writing to one another while Barnes worked with Eliot as he edited Nightwood and continued corresponding until his death in 1965.

Foremost, however, Beare knew that Barnes's papers would complement those already donated by author Katherine Anne Porter. Together the two collections embrace the entire 20th-century American literary scene, holdings unmatched by any other collection.

Porter's Prize Gift
Porter's papers comprise one of the largest intact literary archives devoted to a single author at any U.S. institution. Over her lifetime, she corresponded with more than 1,000 people, including Robert Penn Warren, W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Cleanth Brooks, Hart Crane (with whom she had a dramatic falling out in Mexico), William Faulkner, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Robert Lowell, Archibald MacLeish, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Theodore Roethke and Eudora Welty. Her papers cover the years 1880 to 1977 and are rich in information about the literary, intellectual, social and political history of the United States.

Looking over the voluminous guide to the Porter collection, Beth Alvarez, curator of literary manuscripts at the university and a Porter scholar, says, "There are thousands--probably tens of thousands--of dissertation topics in here." She should know. Researching her own dissertation, Alvarez turned over every leaf in the manuscript section of the collection. Her digging brought up an interesting anomaly in Porter's work--that the tone, style and subjects of her writing changed after she moved to Mexico in 1920. "I believe that in Mexico, Porter decided to become an artist," Alvarez says.

That Porter's papers came to Maryland was a result of good timing and more than a little luck. She had been courted by the University of Texas and had actually deposited her papers at the Library of Congress. In 1966, the University of Maryland offered Porter an honorary degree. The 76-year-old writer was too ill to attend commencement, so university president Wilson Elkins offered to bring the ceremony to her home near Silver Spring, Md. That day a caravan of a dozen cars pulled up in front of Porter's house. Twenty-five people, including university officials, faculty members and students, piled out. She served champagne and home-baked rolls after the ceremony. Then, ever a charming raconteur, Porter entertained the group with stories as they sat in her sumptuous home sipping the wine.

Porter warmed to Elkins, who like the author hailed from a small Texas town. At the end of the day, she declared the degree ceremony to be "the most charming thing that had ever happened" to her. Visiting the university several months later, she said, "Now I know what my university is. I'm going to give my papers and some of my belongings to the University of Maryland."

Porter's donation comprised manuscripts, letters and other personal papers, her library of 3,700 titles, furniture and many photographs. The university offered to house the books and furniture in a special place on campus--the Katherine Anne Porter Room, now located on the ground floor of Hornbake Library.

Beare may have chuckled that the papers of Porter and Barnes would end up almost side by side. For Porter, Barnes had represented the '20s, a decade she hated. In a draft of an unpublished piece, Porter describes Barnes at a party: "The good old style of the Twenties, getting drunk, making a scene, insulting her hostess, smashing her coffee cup ... here was a member of the original troupe giving her famous performance."

Porter was accurate in her picture of Barnes. Yet, although their styles of life were radically different, both women sought privacy. By securing their papers at the University of Maryland, they also left their lives and times open to inspection and evaluation after their deaths.

Inspiration for Porter and Barnes sprang from the same fount--their lives and experiences. Barnes said, "I can't imagine spending years writing fiction, things made up entirely, out of thin air, and without a foundation in some emotion." Porter believed that a writer lived stories three times: once in the actual events, second in memory and third in re-creation of "this chaotic stuff."

From Noon to Midnight
Porter's acclaimed short novel Noon Wine was inspired, she once said, by three remembered events--a shotgun blast followed by a scream; a proud, poor and somewhat foolish man riding by on a horse; and an overheard conversation between her grandmother and a man who made his wife attest that he wasn't a murderer. In the story, a hired hand, Olaf Helton, comes to Royal Earle Thompson's farm, which prospers from Olaf's hard work. One day Homer T. Hatch shows up at the farm saying he is to take Helton back to the "asylum," where he had been confined for the murder of his brother. Thompson accidentally kills Hatch. But, unable to convince his neighbors or his own family that the murder was not intentional, Thompson eventually kills himself. His suicide note reads, "Before Almighty God, the great judge of all before who I am about to appear, I do hereby solemnly swear that I did not take the life of Mr. Homer T. Hatch on purpose. It was done in defense of Mr. Helton. I have told all this to the judge and the jury and they let me off but nobody believes it. This is the only way I can prove I am not a cold blooded murderer like everybody seems to think."

Barnes's Nightwood, a modernist tale of lesbian love gone very wrong, chronicles Barnes's shattering relationship with her lover, Thelma Wood, and its emotionally devastating aftermath. In the book, Barnes's real-life friend Daniel Mahoney, a self-hating homosexual doctor infamous on Paris's Left Bank, becomes character Dr. Matthew O'Connor, a Tiresias-like prophet figure. Barnes lifted material from her conversations with Mahoney for O'Connor's witty but sad exegeses on human suffering. Barnes certainly suffered for that artistic license. Mahoney showed up one night at her apartment about a year after the book's publication. There he held her hostage from 1 to 5 a.m., screaming at her, demeaning her writing and knocking her down twice when she tried to escape. Barnes wrote to Eliot, "Little did I know what a book could do to one."

In the novel, the main character Nora, spurned by her lover, turns for solace and sympathy to O'Connor. Eventually even O'Connor turns on her. "Oh," he cried. "A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart! But do I scream that an eagle has me by the balls or has dropped his oyster on my head? Am I going forward screaming that it hurts, that my mind goes back, or holding my guts as if they were a coil of knives?"

Beare knew that among Barnes's papers was the original manuscript of Nightwood with Eliot's edits. "As of yesterday, I am sold to the University of Maryland," Barnes wrote to a friend in January of 1973. She had accepted Beare's offer to purchase her papers.

Today the Porter and Barnes collections are valued at more than $10 million, says Alvarez. To scholars and students of 20th-century literature, their value is incalculable. Whatever those scholars inscribe about Katherine Anne Porter, Djuna Barnes and their tumultuous times will derive in great part from the papers that now lie side by side in a quiet room on the campus of the University of Maryland. --CP

All images courtesy of Papers of Djuna Barnes and Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries

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