IJ study archive

Ransom Center restricts part of Wallace archive

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TL;DR

A September 2011 Austin American-Statesman news report by Joe Gross recording the one notable act of censorship in the life of the Harry Ransom Center's David Foster Wallace archive: at the request of Wallace's mother and widow, the Center removed 11 books — self-help titles in which Wallace had written margin notes about living family members — from the previously public collection after Maria Bustillos published an online essay about those notations. It is the primary documentary record of that removal — the sober counter-event to the celebratory "open archive" coverage of the same summer — and it lays out the institutional tension it exposed: restrictions of already-public material are unusual, are supposed to be negotiated before acquisition, and here were not. It advances no reading of Infinite Jest or any other Wallace work; its subject is the ethics and mechanics of the archive itself.

Key claims

  • The removal: in "an unusual move," the Ransom Center "removed 11 books from the previously public materials in the archive" of Wallace, at the request of the Wallace estate. The affected volumes are "several self-help books in which Wallace made margin notes about living family members".
  • The trigger: the family made the request after freelance writer Maria Bustillos published "Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library" in the online journal The Awl — an essay that "discussed Wallace's struggles with depression" and his reading of titles including “the controversial "The Drama of the Gifted Child" by Alice Miller and "Bradshaw On: The Family, A Revolutionary Way of Self-discovery" by John Bradshaw.” Wallace "made repeated notations about his mother, who is still alive, in these works."
  • Why it is unusual: institutions do sometimes withhold material that could "adversely affect people who are still living", but "such arrangements are usually worked out in advance of an acquisition -- not after the materials have already been made public" (the double hyphen is the report's own). "In an ideal world, all of this material should have been vetted first," Associate Director Rich Orem concedes.
  • The Center's account: "The material was removed at the request of the mother and the widow. There's a certain vulnerability in this whole process," Director Thomas Staley says. "The restricted items contain annotations with sensitive, private information about members of the family, and the materials will remain restricted during the lifetimes of the specific individuals affected," public affairs director Jen Tisdale said.
  • The acquisition facts: the estate approached the HRC in early 2009; the Center purchased the archive "in December for $675,000, paid over four years, with the majority of funding coming from Ransom Center endowments." The report names no year for the December purchase — its own timeline (approach in early 2009) reads as December 2009, where the CultureMap series of the same summer calls it "the 2010 purchase"; both are quoted as written. The material included "more than 320 books, many of which contained extensive handwritten annotations" by Wallace.
  • The institutional stakes: the report notes the Center's "long-term interest in maintaining good relations with the families of authors" whose work it holds, which aids future acquisitions — while acknowledging the restriction removes the notes from public view "for the foreseeable future."
  • Precedents: in 2003 the HRC removed a previously public autobiographical typescript by Blanche Knopf at her son Pat's request, restricted until the death of his sons; the Norman Mailer agreement restricted certain personal material until after the deaths of Mailer and his wife, with material about his children restricted during their lifetimes. Conversely, the Center had recently opened restricted material from Anne Sexton, Eudora Welty, and the Woodward–Bernstein Watergate papers.
  • An outside view: Kevin Repp, curator for Modern Books and Manuscripts at Yale's Beinecke Library, says restrictions "rarely" happen and are done "reluctantly," usually "to do with protecting individuals who figure in the material."
  • The timing: the decision came as the HRC opened a fall exhibition, "Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored," on censorship in the interwar United States — the report lets the juxtaposition stand without comment.

Themes

The ethics of the literary archive — the collision between scholarly access and the privacy of living family members; the biography-versus-estate control that shadows a posthumously sold collection; and, at one remove, the same addiction-and-family material that Infinite Jest's recovery world draws on, here reaching the public only to be withdrawn.

Cross-references

Notable passages

  • "In an unusual move, the Ransom Center at the University of Texas has removed 11 books from the previously public materials in the archive of renowned author David Foster Wallace after a request from the Wallace estate."
  • Thomas Staley: "The material was removed at the request of the mother and the widow. There's a certain vulnerability in this whole process".
  • Jen Tisdale: "The restricted items contain annotations with sensitive, private information about members of the family, and the materials will remain restricted during the lifetimes of the specific individuals affected".
  • Rich Orem: "In an ideal world, all of this material should have been vetted first".
  • Kevin Repp (Beinecke): "Restrictions do arise, but it's something that we rarely do, and we do it reluctantly".