The Princeton University Library has recently acquired 19 boxes of manuscripts, correspondence, audiovisual materials, and ephemera of Sir Frank Kermode (1919–2010), one of the most distinguished literary critics of the 20th century. These materials constitute Kermode’s remaining papers and have been added to the Sir Frank Kermode Papers, which the Library began acquiring in 2007 with support from the Friends of the Princeton University Library. For a summary of and highlights from the original acquisition in 2007, click here.

Kermode is well known for his seminal book of literary criticism, Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967), as well as his writings on William Shakespeare and D. H. Lawrence. Extensive drafts of these works, with autograph corrections, are represented in this latest addition, which includes early drafts of Sense of an Ending, a typed manuscript draft of D. H. Lawrence (1973), and correspondence, handwritten notes, sheet music, and galley proofs for his Arden Shakespeare edition of The Tempest (1954). The addition also contains a bound carbon typescript of Aaron Hill and his Plays (1940), which Kermode called his first book, as well as several boxes of unpublished lectures and research notes and over two dozen unpublished notebooks.

The acquisition enhances the Library’s holdings of literary critics’ papers and publishers’ archives. Several dozen letters from Kermode appear in the papers of poet and literary critic Allen Tate (1899–1979), who also corresponded at length with Cleanth Brooks (1906–1994), Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989), and Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989). The Library has the papers of (and copyright to) R. P. Blackmur (1904-1965), another prominent literary critic who was a professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton from 1940 to 1965. His papers include drafts of his creative work and critical essays, lecture notes, correspondence with other American literary figures, notebooks, and photographs.

The archives of The Hudson Review, a literary magazine that has published some the most eminent writers and critics of the twentieth century, contains correspondence with Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), Harold Bloom, Northrop Frye (1912–1991), Frederic Jameson, Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), Edward Said (1935–2003), and others, while the archives of the literary magazine Quarterly Review of Literature includes correspondence with critics such as Kenneth Burke (1897–1993), Lionel Trilling (1905–1975), and W. K. Wimsatt (1907–1975), as well as an unpublished essay by Paul de Man (1919–1983) on the Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843).

The Library also holds papers of 19th- and 20th-century British literary and art critics, including Raymond Mortimer (1895–1980), William Michael Rossetti (1829–1919), John Ruskin (1819–1900), and Arthur Symons (1865–1945).

Sir Frank Kermode, undated photograph (detail). Man­u­scripts Divi­sion, Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the Princeton University Library.

The Walter Houk Collection of Ernest Hemingway is now open and available to researchers.

The Manuscripts Division recently received a gift of five boxes of manuscripts, correspondence, stenographer’s notebooks, photographs, and nautical charts from Walter Houk. The papers document the friendship between Walter and his wife Juanita Jensen Houk and the Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) in Havana, Cuba, where Hemingway was writing his last major works, Across the River and into the Trees (1950) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952).

Juanita Jensen Houk, an employee of the American Embassy in Havana, received government clearance to work as Ernest Hemingway’s secretary from 1949 to 1952. In 1952, she married Walter Houk, a diplomatic officer at the Embassy. Their wedding reception was held at Finca Vigía, the Hemingways’ house near Havana. The couple were frequent visitors at the finca, where they used the library, swam in the pool, went fishing on Hemingway’s boat Pilar, and drank daiquiris with him at the Floridita bar.

The collection offers a multifaceted view of the author during a particularly prolific and creative period. Juanita Jensen Houk’s stenographer’s notebooks, with typed transcriptions, of over a hundred of Hemingway’s dictated letters include letters not only to his friends and family but also to publishers and agents. He reported on his book’s progress to Charles Scribner and wrote to A. E. Hotchner about serializing Across the River and into the Trees in the magazine Cosmopolitan. In letters to Malcolm Cowley, he discussed fellow authors such as Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, Gertrude Stein, and Eudora Welty. In addition, the collection contains the Houks’ own correspondence with the Hemingways, including nine letters by Ernest Hemingway and fourteen by his wife Mary, photographs of the Hemingways and Houks on the Pilar, and Walter Houk’s manuscript memoirs about Hemingway and Havana.

Walter Houk’s reminiscences of his friendship with Hemingway during the Havana years form key parts of Paul Hendrickson’s new biography, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 (Knopf, 2011). The book reassesses Hemingway’s creative life and personal relationships through his attachment to his cherished boat Pilar. According to Hendrickson, “The archive where I have spent the most time in these last seven or so years of research and writing is Firestone Library at Princeton. The university is an hour and ten minutes from my front door; the car knows the way.” He calls the Princeton University Library’s Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, which con­tains some 2,000 pieces of cor­re­spon­dence between Hem­ing­way and his edi­tors, and the Car­los Baker Col­lec­tion of Ernest Hem­ing­way “my centripetal research force. Nearly all the letters I quote from or make reference to in this book I have sat and held and read in the chapel-like Dulles Reading Room at Firestone.”

The Walter Houk Collection is a robust addition to the Library’s Hemingway materials. Other related collections include the Ernest Hemingway Collection, Hemingway/Lanham Correspondence, Patrick Hemingway Papers, Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., Files of Hemingway and Pound, Ernest Hemingway Documents and Tax-related Papers, and Ernest Hemingway and Milford J. Baker Correspondence.

Walter Houk, Ernest Hemingway on the flying bridge of the Pilar, 1951. Man­u­scripts Divi­sion, Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library. Not to be repro­duced with­out the per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

One of the highlights of the summer of 2011 was a visit to the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections on June 28 by Australian movie director Baz Luhrmann and members of his production team. Their visit to Princeton was in connection with production of a new movie version of The Great Gatsby. Don Skemer, curator of manuscripts, showed Luhrmann and the others F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heavily corrected galleys of Trimalchio, an early version of The Great Gatsby. In the photograph below, Luhrmann is in the foreground. The galleys are part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, which the author’s daughter Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan donated to the Princeton University Library in 1950. Skemer explained how Fitzgerald’s creative process can be traced in his own papers and related materials preserved in the Manuscripts Division. Particularly revealing is the author’s extensive correspondence with the legendary literary editor Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner’s Sons, Fitzgerald’s publisher. After the visit, Luhrmann wrote to Skemer to say, “Having returned from our trip to Princeton, I just wanted to reach out and thank you once again. Seeing those materials and hearing you articulate Fitzgerald’s processes really gave us a second burst of energy.” The British actress Carey Mulligan, who will play Daisy Buchanan in the movie, also visited to view portions of the Fitzgerald Papers and in particular to discuss the author’s relationship with Ginevra King, who served as a model for Daisy, Jay Gatsby’s lost love. Ginevra King’s letters to Fitzgerald and diary are also preserved in the Manuscripts Division. Mulligan, who earned an Oscar nomination for best actress in 2010, told the Huffington Post: “I went to Princeton where they keep all [Fitzgerald’s] papers and I got to look at Zelda Fitzgerald’s medical records and . . . the most amazing stuff.” Filming has begun in Sydney, Australia, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Jay Gatsby and Tobey Maguire as Nick Caraway. Luhrmann’s new movie of The Great Gatsby is scheduled for a New York premiere in December 2012.

Baz Luhrmann, right, examines F. Scott Fitzgerald's papers. Not to be reproduced without permission of the Princeton University Library.

Cataloging is now available online for most of the nearly 10,000 Islamic manuscripts in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. These extraordinary holdings of Islamic manuscripts constitute the premier collection of Islamic manuscripts in the Western Hemisphere and among the finest in the world. About two-thirds of these were the gift of Robert Garrett, Class of 1897. The online records have been created as part of the Islamic Manuscripts Cataloging and Digitization Project, to improve access to these rich collections and share them worldwide through digital technology. Generous support from the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project has funded this ongoing effort. Researchers can now locate manuscripts by searching the Library’s online catalog. The Library has digitized 200 manuscripts in the Princeton Digital Library of Islamic Manuscripts.

Over the past two years, the Princeton University Library has created online biblio­graphic records covering its collections of Arabic manuscripts in the Garrett and New Series. These had previously been only described in three printed catalogs: Descriptive Catalog of the Garrett Collection of Arabic Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library (P. K. Hitti, N. A. Faris, and B. `Abd al-Malik), Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts (Yahuda Section) in the Garrett Collection (R. Mach), and Handlist of Arabic Manuscripts (New Series) in the Princeton University Library (R. Mach and E. Ormsby). Over two-thirds of the Library’s some 10,000 volumes of Islamic manuscripts are described in these catalogs. The catalogs were converted to XML format, and the resulting files were then edited for accuracy and consistency—they now have authorized names, properly romanized titles, and appropriate subject headings. The files were then imported into the Library’s online catalog. Still underway is an effort to link records that describe multi-text volumes.

The Third Series, comprising over 750 volumes in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, and Jawi, has been completely cataloged, and a finding aid has been created for the William McElwee Miller Collection of Bābī Writings and Other Iranian Texts, 1846-1923, comprised of 47 volumes of writings of the Bāb, Subḥ-i Azal, and Bahá’u’lláh, and their respective followers. The collection also includes Sufi texts and an anti-Islamic polemic writings. The Miller collection has been digitized, largely from microfilm, and is being made available online by the Library as a service to scholarship. File sizes are large (30-590 MB) and may take some time to download.

For more information about the cataloging, contact Denise L. Soufi, Islamic Manuscripts Cataloger, at delsoufi@princeton.edu; for information about the overall project, contact Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, at dcskemer@princeton.edu.

Botanical treatise in Arabic. Islamic Manuscripts, Garrett no. 583H. Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the Princeton University Library.

A group of recently rediscovered watercolors by British painter Gwen John (1876–1939) are on exhibit in the Eighteenth-Century Window of Firestone Library from November 21 through December 31. Thanks to new research by Professor Anna Gruetzner Robins, University of Reading (UK), two albums containing 23 unsigned watercolors have been identified as the work of  Gwen John. The albums are in the extensive papers of the British poet and critic Arthur Symons (1865–1945), preserved in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Gwen John was the sister of British artist Augustus John (1878–1961) and the one-time lover and model of French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). She is now recognized as one of the most important painters of her generation. Made during the artist’s productive years, beginning in 1917, many of the watercolors depict nuns, women parishioners, and orphaned girls in the Catholic church at Meudon, the Paris suburb where Gwen John lived for nearly 30 years. Almost all of these subjects are viewed from the back. Other watercolors in the album portray a woman in a train carriage, a woman wearing a striking boa, and a black cat in a window. A few of the watercolors have pencil sketches on the reverse. Gwen John gave the albums to Symons in June 1920. Both were natives of Pembrokeshire, in South Wales.

In an article just published in the Princeton University Library Chronicle, Professor Robins shows the relationship of the Princeton albums to two albums once belonging to the New York attorney and art collector John Quinn (1870–1924) and to works in British institutions. Robins notes, “Symons and John belonged to interconnecting networks that brought artists, writers, actors, gallery owners, and collectors together in the increasingly international world of Paris, London, and New York….Gwen John’s oil painting has undergone a major reassessment in recent years. The discovery of the two Symons albums makes a considerable contribution to an understanding of her greatness.” The American painter and art collector A. E. Gallatin (1881–1952) acquired the papers and albums from the widow of Arthur Symons and donated them to the Princeton University Library in 1951.

For more information, please contact Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, at dcskemer@princeton.edu.

Gwen John, untitled watercolor. Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the Princeton University Library.