A SCHOLAR'S SUMMER:While researching his book on 1916 within the famous walls of the New York Public Library, NICHOLAS ALLENhappens across a letter, which appears to have been written by the hand of one Nora Connolly, after the death of her father during the rising
THE New York Public Library sits on 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, in the heart of Manhattan. Its movie-famous facade is shrouded for the moment in builders’ netting. Around the back is Bryant Park, a small, green calm between three streets of honking hustle. In here the city is lost in the miniature dramas of ping-pong and children’s books, the green space dressed with the providence of games tables and library carts. And all around the beeping.
Any time in New York induces an auto-tinnitus, which is only relieved when you ride a cab that barks back. Beeps to slow down, beeps to hurry up, beeps to turn left, right, to stop, move over or just goddamn get out of the way. The library has a similar bustle. Before opening, a queue forms outside. I try to spot the Irish with their outsize sunglasses, but am successful only once as I am taken for a moment to the intricacy of something that happened last week in Roscommon. He did not behave well. After the shuffle in, a tall, marble foyer offers separate ways into the American past.
On the left is a small room that holds Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten Declaration of Independence. This beautifully neat manuscript glows in an intermittent light, the soft glow of illumination triggered by movement so no direct light shines on it for too long. Outside, a corridor leads to the library’s main reading room on the upper floor. This space is civic secular, the high ceilings painted with scenes that evoke the religious sense of awe without inviting God to enter the house. In the American ideal of republic, conscience takes place before obedience, which is where the special place of the book, and the life world that attends it, connects to the public institution of the library.
MY REASON TOvisit here was to work in the Berg Collection. Established in 1940 by two physician brothers, Henry and Albert Berg, the archive holds many treasures. There are letters from Jack Kerouac to his mother, a lock of Walt Whitman's hair, and the manuscript of TS Eliot's The Waste Land, marked up by Vivienne Eliot and Ezra Pound. Pound, the great modernist chameleon, whose interests ranged from classical Japan to fascist Italy, is a thread to William Butler Yeats, having served as Yeats's secretary at Stone Cottage in Sussex during the early years of the first World War. These filaments wind around Lady Augusta Gregory, whose archive ropes a repertory of characters together. John Millington Synge sent years of harried letters to her, complaining of the precarious business of a national theatre and charting the onset of an illness that too soon took his life. Jack Yeats emerges as an early lover of Coole Park, Lady Gregory's home, and the Berg holds several sketchbooks of his travels through Co Mayo. Through it all the American lawyer and literary patron John Quinn sends swooning letters, drafts of Lady Gregory's plays exchanged and commented upon with all the sublimated passion of a long-distance correspondence.
For a literary scholar the Berg is one of the most famous archives to visit, not only for its holdings but for its reputation. Stories still cling to its name after the long stewardship of Lola Szladits, a Hungarian émigréwho ruled access to the Berg with capricious intelligence. Under the curatorship of Isaac Gewirtz, today's reader is met with an efficiently cheerful ritual that begins with a sharp buzz at a closed door. Having established credentials, the following days are spent with the quiet watchfulness of a new pupil. Temperatures are kept low to protect fragile paper from humidity and the chill sinks into bones as readers sneeze through dusty letters.
BEING INNew York, the Berg attracts many kinds of readers. One woman tutted her way through several misfortunate sessions in which she tried to photograph laminate papers. I glared. Two Finns giggled their way through a correspondence. I gave up. Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad were summoned from the depths and sent back at day's end. One librarian spent an hour each day covering his colleague's lunch break and recording Vladimir Nabokov's handwritten annotations to a copy of Joyce's Ulysses. Not that he had much peace to do so. The Berg's reading room is a kind of outsized living room that comprises the librarian's desk, a card catalogue, two desks for four readers each, a collection of busts to commemorate generous donors, and various glass-cased oddments. It is only after a few days' orientation that you realise you have become part of the exhibit.
The Berg is one stop on the New York Public Library’s tours, which seem to go from dawn to dusk on a regular schedule. The city’s pulse beats through the corridors as surges of people appear, look in, take a photograph and leave. I was a cheap show in the Manhattan palace of varieties. I smirked when the foolhardy pressed the buzzer, to be dismissed by the librarians. And I wondered what the guy from Idaho, or the lady from Osaka, would make of me, frowning over crusty papers into a laptop, when they got home.
My research was towards a book that I am writing on 1916. I trawled through thousands of pages in order to add to my sense of people and events that year. For example, while one enthusiastic revolutionist spent his first night in the GPO shooting at the statue of Lord Nelson, Gilbert and Sullivan advertised their Dublin performances with a poster of the admiral aboard the Trafalgar.
As always, one small treasure turns up and, as usual, it surfaced thanks to the diligence of a librarian, Anne Garner, who was familiar with the scraps of correspondence that survive between Padraic and Mary Colum. Hard up in New York, Padraic promised that the money he made from lectures in Chicago would save his wife from taking in washing for the next weeks. Mary Colum later wrote a careful memoir, Life and the Dream, which hides the difficulty of this transitory life in partnership with a middling writer of uncertain means. Mary Colum has attracted in turn the attention of Madeleine Humphreys, the biographer of Edward Martyn. Humphreys is writing Mary Colum's life and happened upon a file of letters that were attributed to an unknown family member, possibly by the name of a "Miss N Harvey". There is a series of letters in the file, one of which stands out. Dated June 16th, it gives a return address of 79 Grosvenor Road, Belfast. On reading the letter, Miss Harvey appears to be Miss Connolly. The correspondence seems to be from James Connolly's daughter Nora. It details her plans to leave for America after her father's execution and records, among his last words, his plea to his family to leave Ireland and live abroad among friends. The letter is written in memory of the glorious rebellion and asks that Mary Colum contact their mutual friends in America to inform them of the family's decision. It is ripped in half through the middle and lay silent until Madeleine Humphreys found its possible voice. This fragile link to Connolly and the generation of activists, writers and thinkers who made a viable Ireland from their constructive imagination made me think of our current civic crisis, whereby the ruinous state of our finances has resulted in the public intimidation of certain groups. Words wait to be read, and it may be that the beginning of a new dialogue will grow from the dead end of our current rhetoric. If so, we should all be grateful for the persistence of libraries as still spaces in which the future rests.
Nicholas Allen is Moore Institute Professor at NUI Galway. His Modernism, Ireland and Civil Warhas just been published by Cambridge University Press