2/2 Resolving the fight over Arthur Miller's archive - by Jennifer Schuessler Jan 15,2018 アーサー・ミラー文書
The Ransom Center matched the price, which Mr. Enniss called “aggressive,” but refused to go higher, citing Miller’s 1983 letter.
“We made it quite clear we believed a legal commitment had been made, and that we had a right of refusal,” he said.
Sarah Chalfant of the Wylie Agency said that the estate had engaged with the Ransom Center “exclusively for more than a year in good faith negotiations.” She declined to comment on Miller’s 1983 letter, but said the Miller family had “reviewed carefully Arthur’s stated wishes on the matter over the course of his lifetime.” (Miller’s literary executor is his daughter Rebecca Miller, the writer and director.)
The estate said that it had “taken a number of factors into consideration” in approaching Yale, including the facts that Miller had lived much of his life in Connecticut and that the Beinecke had acquired the archive of the photographer Inge Morath, Miller’s third wife, in 2014.
“Ultimately, we decided to keep the archive whole at the Harry Ransom Center, one of the foremost facilities for preservation and research, where we are certain it will be cared for in the best possible way,” the estate said.
Given that the Ransom Center owned the early play manuscripts donated by Miller outright, any sale of the remaining papers to another institution would have run against the old-school principle that archives should not be devided.
“It makes things difficult for researchers,” said David Zeidberg, who retired in December after 21 years as director of the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., home to archives of Octavia Butler, Hilary Mantel and Paul Theroux, among other contemporary authors. If someone offered them material from a writer whose substantial holdings were elsewhere, he said “we would really try to talk them out of it.”
Whatever Miller’s desires for the ultimate disposition of his archive, Ms. Bolus said that Miller, an avid carpenter, created it with the same meticulous sense of structure he applied to everything, whether his plays or the writing studio he built for himself.
“When he asked me to file something, he would say, ‘This might be worth 12 cents someday,’” she recalled. “He knew he was building an archive. He saw that the smaller pieces of his day-to-day life helped to make up this larger record of his work.”
That larger record includes what Mr. Bigsby, the biographer, called “an Aladdin’s cave” of unpublished writing: novels, stories, poems, eassys and even speeches.
It also includes personal letters that illuminate his work, like a 1935 letter from his brother, Kermit, announcing his initiation into “that most honored fraternity, the travelling salesman’s”
An inventory of the archive notes journal entries relating to Monroe. But it does not list any personal correspondence between her and Miller, the survival of which has been the subject of speculation over the years.
In a 2002 article in Talk Magazine, Mr. Brown, the dealer who arranged the earlier deposits to the Ransom Center, described coming across an odd bundle, which Miller told him held nearly 100 letters from Monroe. “It was all sealed and tied-up,” Mr. Brown, who is now retired, recalled in a recent interview.
Miller’s memoir, “Timebends,” refers to correspondence with Monroe, and one of his passionate love letters to her fetched $43,750 at auction in Beverly Hills in 2014. “It was a really over-the-top Tom Cruse, jump-on-the-couch-kind of letter,# Mr. Bigsby said.
But Mr. Bigsby is skeptical that a secret motherlode survives. “When I asked, he said he had no more than four or five of her letters,” he said of Miller.
Mr. Enniss said that the Ransome Center would continue to seek out Miller-related material from whatever source.
“The acquiaition of an archive,” he said “isn’t just a one-time event.”
