In the Realm of the Archives

by

Lev Raphael

T.S. Eliot's Prufrock may have measured out his life in coffee spoons, but mine has lately been measured out in boxes. Hammermill Paper boxes, to be precise. Each one is approximately 9" x 11" x 18". Some are loosely filled, others are stuffed so full the lids barely cover them and they’re hard to lift.

Thirty boxes were sitting in my garage a few weeks ago, waiting for a van from Michigan State University to pick them up. MSU’s Libraries have acquired my literary papers, present and future. Right now, they fill ninety-one boxes and that shipment was the first installment.

The archivist who spearheaded the acquisition first contacted me over a decade ago about how I intended to dispose of my papers. I knew and liked him, but at the time I was dubious. Making any kind of arrangements for my papers seemed somehow far more serious than having a will drawn up (even though I had done that years before), too focused on death. 

But just to see what it might feel like to let them move out of my possession, I dug out the long, detailed correspondence with my first editor at St. Martin's Press about my first collection of short stories Dancing on Tisha B’Av. We had spent seven months editing and arranging the stories and I rewrote some of them many times. Reading this correspondence again for the first time in years, I was appalled at the thought of anyone else studying them: the letters were too intimate, too revealing.

Publishing many more books since then, going on book tours here and in Europe and accumulating masses of material connected to all of that put those letters in a different perspective. The long, chatty, detailed, anxious missives I wrote in 1990 about revising my first solo book don’t seem relevant to my life now. Even at an artistic level, they seem almost alien since I’ve long since stopped writing and publishing short stories and focusing my energy there. I’ve written in many different genres since then, and have more to explore. 

I’m also not the insecure author I was at the time, on the verge of a first book of my own, not yet nationally reviewed, with no prizes to my name, no recognition. But then almost all of the contents of the ninety-one boxes seems very much of the past, like snake skins shed and discarded.  There are, for instance, framed reviews and framed pages of stories that used to hang on my study walls to remind me that success was building. I needed that encouragement, having gone for five years between my first and second short story publication, needed to feel I actually had a career.  Now they seem quaint. 

There's a very practical side to letting go. When boxes fill your small attic, lurk under your desk and crowd closets throughout your house, it’s time to send them off. It will be a psychic and physical relief not to be working around them, not to be aware that they fill so many interstices, not to be burdened by so much of the past.

So what's in “The Lev Raphael Papers”? Handwritten and typed manuscripts; writing diaries; travel/book tour journals; correspondence with other authors; domestic and foreign tour memorabilia; fan mail; corrected galley proofs; drafts and clippings of the hundreds of reviews I’ve published; programs from all the conferences I’ve attended with copies of my talks and info about the panels I appeared on; advertisements for my books and readings; notes and talking points for talks and keynotes I’ve given; copies of material for workshops and classes I’ve taught; CDs from my radio show interviews with authors like Salman Rushdie and Erica Jong; research materials including books I consulted for many of my projects; interviews in print and on tape, CD and DVD; editorial correspondence; reviews of my books from around the world; articles, conference papers, and book chapters written about my work; copies of all my published works in all languages, including some rarities; unpublished manuscripts; poetry; “association copies” (books inscribed to me from other authors); awards; original cover art and posters; and “ephemera” (including gifts from fans).

These boxes chart the dreams and realities of thirty-one years of publishing and easily another five or more before that in college and graduate school learning my craft.  I sometimes think of those early years as a very long audition.

And even the years that followed my getting published for the first time in 1978 are filled with false starts as well as successes: dozens of stories that didn’t get published, aborted novels and short story collections, unproduced plays, unfilmed screenplays, notes for stories and books that never took shape. And then there are the rejections from editors and agents. But those things are outweighed quite literally by the dozens of boxes of work in every stage, from handwritten drafts to copyedited manuscript to galley proof to reviews and fan mail.

Once I had agreed in principle to a deal with Michigan State for the papers, it took me six months on and off, working with my partner, to get them ready. We inventoried for ourselves the boxes that were already filled, and emptied out all the file cabinets in the house into more boxes. Everything was carefully labeled and recorded. The full inventory I came up with reached over seventy pages.

A professor I know called the collection “remarkably complete” when I described it to him, and I would agree. Having been a graduate student, having done my share of archival work, I know that a future researcher in, say, American Jewish Literature, could follow every step of my first short story about children of Holocaust survivors, which appeared in Redbook. She could go from notes in a journal, to a tentative first paragraph, to comments from a writing professor at my MFA program, to the award it won, to the editorial correspondence, and beyond. Diaries from the time would shed light on my creative process and the emotional turmoil surrounding the story’s birth and publication.

That researcher could go even further back to my very first attempt to treat in fictional form the experience of being a Holocaust survivor. I still have a one-page prose poem from a 1974 college creative writing class touching on this subject and  had forgotten it existed until sorting through the boxes. When I discovered it, I realized that it had later found its way into a story appearing in my first collection Dancing on Tisha B’Av as the writing of one of the characters (that’s another advantage of saving old drafts and unfinished writings: you can always recycle).

I held on to all this material because it was my first story, and I saved everything else afterwards the way friends of mine have saved many hundreds of Playbills from Broadway shows: it's part of their history, it's tracing where they've been, what they've experienced, how they lived. I also held on to every phase of a work because I never knew when I’d want to go back to undo some changes and go back to a previous version.

Some of my discoveries boxing and inventorying everything have been funny, especially in the ephemera category. Like the jokey poster put up by a Jewish group in Wesleyan, one of the first colleges I spoke to in the 1990s: “The Jews are Coming! The Jews Are Coming!” Or the award that misspells the title of the book winning a prize. And then there’s the just plain unusual: like the fossil given to me by students at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln when I spoke there in the early 90s. I think it’s matched by a new addition: a table runner with a pattern of lilacs given to me by a fan of my memoir My Germany, where I mention that my mother loved lilacs.

What happens now? The boxes will be frozen to kill off any insects that might have gotten into them, and they will be gone over carefully to switch out metal paperclips for plastic ones, since the metal stains paper over time. Then the archivists will transfer everything to their own smaller storage boxes and produce their own inventory which will eventually be online. All this could take a year, given the volume of material.

At a book club discussion of My Germany, a woman recently asked me, “Won’t you be losing your identity when they take your papers away?” It was a good question, but something about boxing everything that was unboxed and inventorying the entire collection helped me further separate myself from my writing past and look toward the future. Selling my papers is an act of liberation, not a loss.

Old friends are reminding me of many things now. One who used to type my early stories back in the 1980s because I was such a slow typist, told me that we used to discuss the possibility of some university buying my papers one day. I don’t remember that, but I have no reason to doubt her. Another reminded me of a long period in my career where nothing I wrote could get published, and that in more than one fit of despair I threatened to take everything I’d written and destroy it in a bonfire—as if that could somehow purge my failures. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t?” she asked wryly. “Michigan State wouldn't have The Lev Raphael Papers, just the Lev Raphael File Cabinet.”

My eldest made the best comment. When I told him about the papers deal, I said, “This makes me part of history.” He demurred. “You’re already part of history. Now you’ll have an index.”
 
Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Even better, The Michigan State University Libraries recently purchased his present and future literary papers. Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he’s always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.