What About the Envelopes?

By KENNETH HOPKINS

F recent years, as everybody knows, a splen- did new industry has grown up—the buying and selling in bulk of papers, documents, manu- scripts, letters, diaries and the rest—what we on the inside of the industry call 'research material.' The principal buyers of this material are the cniversities of the United States; the principal Providers, the writers (especially the lesser writers) of England and America. If you have sixty letters of T. S. Eliot, you can practically retire from active authorship yourself, and live at ease: so long as you are prepared to sell them A very natural development of this sudden interest in the papers of living authors is the deliberate creation of material to meet the de- nand. Suppose one knows Sir Cxxxxxx Sxxx well enough (say) to exchange Christmas cards ‘','iln him, and maybe to send him one from Margate in midsummer—one of those 'wish you 11.'ere here' affairs. What is to prevent one de- licately stepping the correspondence up, so as il 'n send him first four, and subsequently eight communications a year, perhaps even one a tnnnth? Over a period of five years it would thus be Possible to accumulate no fewer. than forty criainal documents from the Master, a really for- n'iclable body of material. Stay! what if one Pursues an. identical course with ten famous ..%1 riters, or twenty (if there are twenty, I forget). Y 1%7, or at latest 1968, which allows time fil. c'r some of them being a bit longwinded in Plying, something like 500 pieces of research and will be at the lucky recipient's disposal, the at long last he will be within sight of having .o

we funds to pay for the publication of his own poems.

T

it his course, however, is a little obvious; and also exposes the operator to the risk of his receipts from above becoming briefer and triefer—almost curt. Its also a bad sign if after six years of intimate intercourse your corre- spondent is still addressing you as `Mr. Hopkins' and signing himself 'yours sincerely.' Some of them have the thing typed, and just write in the heading in ink, which makes it appear even more formal. 'Thank you for yOur letter. I am so glad you had a happy Whitsun,' even if written out entirely by hand and with a little blot or a word crossed out and over-written, makes a piece of research material which yields up its last secrets almost at a glance, and the best univer- sities at least are now looking for something stronger than: that. Something positive, like `Leavis is finished.' makes a much better propo-

sition, especially if underlined. •

But because the deliberate creation of a correspondence with some famous person is apt to be thus arid when scrutinised by a third party having the researcher's eye, many truly subtle operators are now salting down material against the day when its originator enjoys a fame so far denied him. Thus—for example, and to take a case ready to hand—I am in receipt of a flattering series of letters from a young admirer who encourages me to tell him all my hopes and yearnings, especially of the literary sort, and often asks me leading cfnestions, like Don't you agree that xxx xx is ap ass?'

In this way he is building up a huge mass of material which is bound to be the subject of extensive research, and may even, be the quarry from which some luckless would-be PhD will hack out a thesis on `Internecine Jealousies Among the Slighter Mid-Twentieth-Century English Poets, with Special Reference to the Hopkins Papers.' Thus, merely oy keeping up my end of this correspondence or, as they say, `playing along,' I am assuring myself of an im- mortality my own works might never bring me,

and ensuring that something of mine will be read in fifty or a hundred years, even if not the things I set most store by—and I won't even say here what those are, which shows how proud and arrogant some chaps can be.

But now arises a problem: What about the envelopes? Most people, especially when they receive an expected communication from a cele- brated man of letters, at once eagerly thumb it open and throw the envelope away. Others, especially that older and still ageing genera- tion that remembers the last war, employ old envelopes again: so that one addressed to Snoggs, Esq., in the sacred hand of Sir xxx or even of Dr. xxx may end up in the Accounts De- partment of the Southern Gas Board covering an overdue cheque.

But—do you know?—you can get as much as another dollar apiece for letters in the en- velopes. And if on the back flap it says in a spidery 'hand, 'See you Tuesday,' there's no knowing what the thing may command (but pencil in very lightly, 'July 17, 1962,' because not every student in a hundred years will be able to work it out on his fingers).

Also—a small point, but one must never miss a trick—what is now a dull enough threepenny stamp over the years becomes something well worth steaming off: and then you can get yet another dollar on the price if steaming off has rot been practised. You have only to think what 'in the original envelopes, with stamps' would mean if the stuff was a bunch of letters from Dickens to Forster in 1840.

The next natural development is, of course, for the writer to make a modest charge. This is only fair, as anyone can see. I may say that I can accommodate another two or three corre- spondenfs either at a fixed charge per letter or on the basis of an annual subscription. The 'A' subscription carries entirely original material; the 'Et' brings only carbon copies, but with genuine signatures and occasional corrections in the author's hand.

Finally : who will give me how much for the following:

Carbon copy of this article as composed straight on to the typewriter this morning; Copy of letter offering it to the editor; Original letter from the editor graciously ac- cepting; Galley proofs of same with author's correc- tions; Copy of the issue in which the published work appears; And four envelopes.•

'They are streaming through at the rate of five or six an hour. . .