1/2 Resolving the fight over Arthur Miller's archive - by Jennifer Schuessler Jan 15,2018 アーサー・ミラー文書
University of Texas wins after a tug of war with his estate and Yale University
Arthur Miller’s place in the pantheon of 20th-century American literature is secure. But his literary remains have been in limbo since his death in 2005.
More than 160 boxes of his manuscripts and other papers have been on deposit for decades at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, uncatalogued and all but inaccessible to scholars, pending a formal sale. Another cache – including some 8,000 pages of private journals – remained at his home in rural Connecticut, unexplored by anyone outside the intimate Miller circle.
Now, the Ransom Center has bought the entire archive for $2.7 million after a discreet tug of war with the Miller estate, which tried to place the papers at Yale University despite the playwright’s apparent wishes that they rest in Texas.
The battle pitted two of the nation’s most prestigious and deep-pocketed, archival institutions against each other, in a mini-drama mixing Milleresque high principle with more bare-knuckled completion. And it cracks a window onto the rarefied trade in writers’ papers, and the delicate calibrations of money, emotion and concern for posterity that determine where they ultimately come to rest.
The Miller archive, comprising 322 linear feet of material, is certainly a rich one. It documents the whole of his public career, including the development of classic plays like “Death of a Salesman” and “ The Crucible” and his showdown with the House Un-American Activities Committee and advocacy against censorship around the world.
There is also intensely personal material, including early family letters and drafts of an essay about the death of Marilyn Monroe, Miller’s second wife, begun the day of her funeral and revised over many years but never published. But the richest vein may be the journals, which span more than 70 years, often mixing fragments of works in progress with intimately diaristic reflections.
“Arthur wrote about everything in his journals,” said Julia Bolus, Miller’s longtime assistant and director of the Arthur Miller Trust \, who is coediting a volume of selections. “They were the place where all the elements of his life came together.”
Those journals are closed to researchers until after publication of that volume, by Viking. But when made available . Stephen Ennis, the director of Ransom Center, said, “they will really allow us to see one of our finest playwrights in a very full and human way.”
The Miller papers trace the arc of the American 20th century, both in contents and materials, which range from marble-covered drugstore notebooks to computer printouts. But their journey to Texas also unfolded over a nearly 60-year period that tracks the rise of the modern market in writers’ papers, as it evolved from a clubby business governed by gentlemen’s agreements to a highly competitive arena marked by sometimes eye-popping prices.
Miller began his relationship with the Ransom Center in the early 1960s, a moment when the center, flush with oil wealth, was emerging as the field’s most unabashedly aggressive player. Short on cash and facing a big tax bill, he donated 13 boxes of material, including multiple manuscripts and working notebooks for the plays that made his name – including “Death of a Salesman,” #All My Sons” and “The Crucible” – in exchange for a tax deduction.
In 1983, after a fire damaged Miller’s house in Roxbury, Conn., he shipped an additional 73 boxes to Texas for safe-keeping. In a letter held at the Ransom Center, he said that he would like to eventually formalize the transfer either by sale or by donation, should the tax deduction (which had been eliminated in the early 1970s) be restored.
“I am in full agreement with your suggestion that I give them absolute first refusal in whatever I make for the disposition of the archive,” he wrote to the Manhattan bookseller Andreas Brown, who was serving as his archival consultant.
In January 2005, a few weeks before his death at the age of 89, Miller shipped 89 more boxes to the Ransom Center, whose extensive American theater holdings also include the papers of the playwrights Tennessee Williams and Lillian Hellman and actress and acting teacher Stella Adler.
“He always told me the stuff would go down to Texas, which is the only logical place,” said the British scholar Christopher Bigsby, a longtime friend of Miller’s who was given access to Miller’s archive for his 2009 biography.
Mr. Enniss said he contacted the estate in September 2013, shortly after becoming director of the Ransom Center, to discuss formally acquiring the balance of the archive. A few months later, he visited the Miller home, to see the journal and other material there.
In March 2014, the Ransom Center made what it called “a good faith offer.” But it said the estate’s representative, the Wylie Agency, “never meaningfully engaged in a negotiation.”
In the summer of 2015, three staff members from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library visited the Ransom Center to inspect the Miller collection. Yale then made an offer of $2.7 million for the materials on deposit, plus some 70 boxes still held by the estate.
