The Manuscripts Division is very pleased to announce the recent acquisition of the Papers of Brendan Behan (C1596). He was one of Ireland’s most important 20th-century authors. Behan grew up in Dublin during the Great Depression and became an Irish Republican and rebel. In later life, he enjoyed spending time in New York, which he called “my Lourdes, where I go for spiritual refreshment.” His life was cut tragically short at age forty-one, largely because of alcoholism. Preserved by his wife Beatrice Behan, the papers include three boxes (about 1500 pages) of writing in English and Irish (Gaelic). While the papers are modest in volume relative to most modern literary archives, they still constitute the principal collection of manuscript materials available for the study of Behan’s life and work, from his formative years in a borstal (reform school for juvenile delinquents) and prisons, to his involvement with the Irish Republican Army and its junior branch (Fianna Éireann). The papers, rarely available before for research, provide insight into Behan’s literary career and working methods of writing and revision. Included are unpublished materials that complement published editions of his plays, prose works, and letters.

Michael G. Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, notes: “During his much-reported lifetime, Brendan Behan’s gifts as a writer were often obscured by stories of his misbehaviour as the eternal bad boy of Irish legend—or rather of legends about the Irish. Behan died in 1964, and time has clarified the situation considerably. One critic said The Quare Fellow (1954) was the finest play to come out of Ireland since O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars; and The Hostage (1958), written in Irish and translated by Behan himself, was in many ways an even greater dramatic success. Borstal Boy (also 1958), Behan’s memoir of his life in a borstal, remains the classic account of what it is like to find a community in a world of exclusion. The collection the Library has acquired, with its wealth of previously unavailable notebooks and other works, will allow scholars of Irish literature and language, and all those interested in the long historical moment of Anglo-Irish conflict, to explore these topics in unusual and extensive depth.”

Brendan Behan’s papers are in the form of autograph notebooks, manuscripts, and corrected typescripts, which are complemented by unrevised typescripts, selected correspondence, and ephemera. Among the major discoveries in Behan’s papers is a small orange notebook (see image below) containing autobiographical writings from 1948 at Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, possibly preparatory for Borstal Boy; his papers also include two corrected typescripts of Borstal Boy, which (though published in 1958) was banned in Ireland until 1970. The survival of these drafts was unexpected since Behan asked his editors to destroy any manuscript copies of the pre-edited version. Also in the papers are preliminary notes, drafts, or completed manuscripts of various works: Casad an tsugain eile [”The Twisting of Another Rope”], autograph manuscript draft in Irish for the first act of a play, ca. 1946, later published in English as The Quare Fellow; and his first play, An bhean cíosa (The Landlady), ca. 1943, 1946. Other notebooks contain notes in English and some Spanish relating to his writing, character development, and other wide-ranging topics; and an autograph notebook, with notes for an essay in English on the Irish people. Separate manuscript leaves contain commentary, poetry, street ballads, and autobiographical recollections, in English and Irish.

The Manuscripts Division already had Brendan Behan materials thanks to the generosity of Leonard L. Milberg, Princeton Class of 1953. The Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Collection of Manuscripts, Correspondence, and Photographs (C0962), includes an untitled typescript of a radio play, An Evening with Brendan Behan, in which the author plays himself (1962). The Milberg Collection also contains selected correspondence and manuscripts of other Irish authors, such as Maria Edgeworth, Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney. Other holdings relating to modern Irish authors include James Joyce-related materials in the papers of Sylvia Beach (C0108); selected papers and literary agency files for Irish-American author Frank Harris; correspondence of writers Sylvia and Robert Lynd, dating from 1905 to 1937 (C1554); papers of poet Theodore Holmes, Princeton Class of 1951 (C0805); and the recently acquired papers of poet John Ennis (C1563). These are complemented by the printed holdings of Rare Books for Brendan Behan and other Irish authors.

Brendan Behan, Notebook, ca. 1948. In Irish, “leabhar cleachta” means lesson book.?

On 30 August 1655, Caspar Schmalkalden of Gotha (1616-1673) penned the Dutch proverb “Aensien doet gedenken” in the Liber amicorum of Johann Günther Kirchberger (1628-1674), his brother-in-law. The meaning of the proverb was clear. Experiencing the wider world provides food for thought. Schmalkalden was a German-born soldier in service to the Dutch and had spent the previous twenty years years traveling and working in South America (chiefly Brazil and Chile) and the East Indies, Taiwan, and Japan. At age thirty-nine, after his world travels, he returned to his native Gotha (Thuringia), a small city located about 20 kilometers west of Erfurt, and on 30 January 1655 married Susanna Christina Kirchberger, the sister of Johann Günther Kirchberger. Later that year, he filled a page near the end of the latter’s Liber amicorum (C0938, no. 755), a recent addition to the Manuscripts Division. In addition to the Dutch proverb and personal sentiments in Latin, Schmalkalden added a line drawing of two Chinese scholars in academic garb and a Chinese inscription phonetically spelling out the name Caspar and the word servant, as in the old English valediction, “Your obedient servant.” See image below. Schmalkalden had probably learned how to write his name in Chinese during his years on Taiwan (1648-1650), then under Dutch control. He also illustrated his travel journals, several of which have been published, with drawings and watercolors of the places he visited and people he met or observed. (Thanks to Minjie Chen, Project Cataloger, East Asian Collections, for deciphering the inscription.)

Northern European university students, especially from Germany and the Low Countries, from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, kept small bound albums in which their classmates, friends, neighbors, and people they met in their travels contributed personal sentiments, pithy sayings, brief quotations, verses, emblematic drawings, coats of arms, and other illustrations. Each volume was called a Liber amicorum or Album amicorum, meaning “album of friends.” The recently acquired Kirchberger Liber amicorum is actually a double-album, still in a contemporary dos-à-dos binding. The first half was kept by Anton Günther Kirchberger (1588-1652?), beginning around age twenty, but adding a full-page autobiographical introduction in later years; and the second half was kept by his son Johann Günther Kirchberger, including Schmalkalden’s entry. There are more than five hundred entries from people in Augsburg, Erfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Giessen, Hamburg, Jena, Tübingen, Magdeburg, and other places, 1608-1660s, with innumerable colored coats of arms, allegorical and costume illustrations, and even a landscape.

In addition to the Kirchberger double-album, the Manuscripts Division has five other Libri amicorum: Georg Brandstetter of Vienna, chiefly kept at the University of Perugia, 1595-1598 (Princeton MS. 251); Johann Stade, 1589-1614, with references to Regensburg, Eberstein, and Hallegg (C0199, no. 603); Georg Gottlob von Dobschütz, Oberlausitz (Saxony), 1651-1667 (C0199, no. 602); and the Winter family, Dresden, 1789-1795 (C0199, no. 604). Libri amicorum provide insight into academic student life, social networks, emblem books, heraldry, costume, readership, and other subjects.

For more information, contact rbsc@princeton.edu

Caspar Schmalkalden, Drawing and inscriptions (C0938, no. 755).

As a result of an ongoing digital preservation project to assess and digitize legacy audio recordings in the Manuscripts Division, visitors to the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections can now hear the voices of many of Latin America’s most celebrated modern authors, including five Nobel laureates in Literature, Miguel Angel Asturias (1967), Pablo Neruda (1971), Octavio Paz (1990), Gabriel García Márquez (1982), and Mario Vargas Llosa (2010). Among the other authors represented in the digitized media are Jorge Amado, Reinaldo Arenas, Jorge Luis Borges, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, and others. Audio-visual media from the papers of Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and other Latin American literary collections are being surveyed for future digitization.

The recordings of interviews, literary readings, and conference presentations are found dispersed among the Manuscripts Division’s rich holdings on Latin American authors and intellectuals since the Boom. The pilot project that identified and preserved the content of approximately 230 audio cassettes and open-reel audio tapes was managed by Elvia Arroyo-Ramírez. Magnetic tape and other analog media have a limited life-span because of the natural degradation of the medium, changes in recording formats, and the obsolescence of listening and viewing equipment. These problems long prevented access to the original recordings, which had to be professionally digitized, backed up for long-term storage, and loaded onto laptops in the Reading Room for access.

Below is a list of what is currently available for listening in the Reading Room of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (in Firestone Library, C-Floor), during regular visiting hours, Monday-Friday, 9:00 am to 4:45 pm:

• Rita Guibert Collection of Latin American Authors (C1502). The Argentine-American writer Rita Guibert (1916-2007) made most of these recordings for her book Seven Voices: Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert (1973), with additional interviews on other occasions. Authors include Miguel A. Asturias, Jorge Luis Borges, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Manuel Puig, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

•Thomas Colchie ’64 Collection on Jorge Amado (C1450). Recorded interviews (1984-91) by Thomas Colchie (Class of 1964), with Jorge Amado, as well as with other people about the Brazilian author’s life and work.

• Gabriela Mora Collection on Elena Garro (C0994). Recorded interviews and readings (1974, 1979).

• Emir Rodríguez Monegal Papers (C0652). Numerous recorded interviews, lectures, and conference presentations (1956-84). Authors include Maria Bonatti (about Borges), Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, Juan Carlos Onetti, Octavio Paz, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

• Juan García Ponce Papers (C0977). Recordings (1970-2002) of conferences and readings by this Mexican author, including Tajimara.

• Dolores Koch Collection on Reinaldo Arenas (C0984). Includes a recording of two songs, with Reinaldo Arenas and Dr. Olivier Ameisen (1988).

• Juan Gelman Papers (C1511). Includes a recording, “Bonifaz.”

• François Wahl Collection on Severo Sarduy (C1470). Interviews, radio programming, interviews, and music, 1976-95, collected by Cuban author Severo Sarduy and French editor François Wahl.

• Ann Tashi Slater Collection of Cuban Writings (C0799). Interview by Ann Tashi Slater (Class of 1984), with Reinaldo Arenas (1984).

• Ricardo Piglia Papers (C1513). An interview with the author (undated).

Additional recordings of Latin American authors are available in the archives of PEN American Center, which are also in the Manuscripts Division. They are primarily available through PEN’s online media archives, offering more than 1,500 hours of audio and video. PEN digitized the analog media as part of a multi-year project, in cooperation with the Manuscript Division, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Mario Vargas Llosa, Pablo Neruda, and other Latin American authors have participated in PEN public programs as speakers or panelists at conferences, such as “Role of the Latin American Writer” (1966); “An Inquiry into the Role of Latin American Writers: The Politics of Torture” (1979/80); and “An Inquiry into the Role of Latin American Writers: Habeas Corpus and Los Desaparecidos” (1979/80).

For more information about Latin American holdings and Reading Room access, contact Public Services at rbsc@princeton.edu

Analog media from the Carlos Fuentes Papers