Yale University's Beinecke Library holds one of the finest collections of English-language manuscripts, catalogued and preserved in excellent and retrievable condition. I owe the Beinecke for a eureka moment. Researching the life of James Joyce's wife, Nora Barnacle, I came across a letter written by Joyce's brother Stanislaus mentioning that Nora had written a laundry list on the back of "A Painful Case", one of the Dubliners short stories. Laughing, I showed the letter to Hans Walter Gabler of Munich, editor of Ulysses: Corrected Text working at the next table.
"Let's have a look," he said. "Where's the manuscript?" I asked. "The Beinecke," was the answer. Within 20 minutes he and I were looking at the original typescript Joyce had sent to his brother. There on the reverse of page one was: "10 rags, 2 chemises, 1 blouse, 3 towels, 3 Pr. drawers, 3 vests" and more. Evidence indeed that Nora, as Joyce had said, took in washing around 1905, when the young unmarried couple, having run away from Dublin, were impoverished in Trieste, with Joyce's only income derived from teaching English to foreigners.
Would the moment have been any more "magical" - Philip Larkin's word, urging that British manuscripts be kept in their native locales - if I had read it in Trieste? Or should the letter have been in Dublin? Would the papers of Wordsworth have more meaning if read in Grasmere rather than in Texas? This was a question at last week's conference on literary archives at the British Library, "Manuscripts Matter", which brought together scholars, librarians, dealers, authors, even biographers like myself, all of whom, in their various ways, know the importance of the raw material - letters, rough drafts, even train tickets and bank statements - that show a writer's working life.
Andrew Motion took up Larkin's 1979 plea. When it was suggested that the wish for geographical association was sentimental, Motion said he preferred to call it "appropriateness". He argued that archives should go, when possible, to a place associated with the author. The mood of the conference was in no way anti-American. All appreciated the achievement of the great American collections. But the feeling was that the migration should be halted, that what is needed now is more money for acquisitions and pressure on the Treasury to grant British writers the tax benefits enjoyed by writers in other countries - Canada and Ireland, as well as the US - when they sell their archives to a public institution. It should be some solace to those who agree with the "appropriateness" philosophy that Larkin's papers do repose at the place with which he is associated: the University of Hull.
There is now a slew of organisations that are encouraging British libraries, particularly the national libraries, to spot, collect and catalogue the work of English, Welsh and Scottish authors. Newly prosperous Ireland, too, is asserting itself, as the recent Joyce acquisitions by the National Library of Ireland show. Indifference or neglect is no longer the story. "This colloquium is about money!" boomed Rick Gekoski, a dealer in 20th-century English and American manuscripts. He refused to feel a sense of loss. "These manuscripts don't die if they go abroad. They are catalogued quicker and more efficiently and conserved better in the United States." That would seem to be why the papers of Salman Rushdie and the Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon, to name two recent well-publicised examples, have gone to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Thomas Staley, director of the Humanities Research Centre at Austin, reported that the author Norman Mailer accepted less money than he might have got for his papers in exchange for a guarantee that they would be catalogued within a year. British libraries do not have sufficient funds for cataloguing. They are often forced to leave some of their acquisitions in the shoe boxes and shopping bags in which many of them arrive. There is about a quarter of a million pounds a year for some 40 institutions seeking to buy literary papers. If that is the reality, it seems that the outflow may continue.
In an electronic world, the archival problem may reduce. Digital copying and transmission means that the "virtual reunification" of scattered archives is possible. Institutions can hold complete collections of a writer's manuscripts and letters even if some of the documents are not original. Digitised pages can be enlarged and turned around to get a better look. That technical gain, everybody realises, carries a corresponding loss, as the textual alterations of the drafting process are erased as writers go along. And collected emails will never have the charm of the old stationery with its letterheads and evocatively postmarked envelopes.
For the material that still exists on paper, the conference consensus was that integrity of an archive should take precedence over its location. As someone said, "the best place for an author's material is with the rest of the author's material". A great deal of Samuel Beckett's archive is at the University of Reading, thanks to his friendship with Professor James Knowlson, later his biographer. Would anyone argue that the collection should be broken up and sent to Dublin or Paris? But the scholars who must travel to visit the manuscripts of their choice do run into obstacles. "Special collections" tend to have comparatively short hours. One participant gave a glimpse of the loneliness of the long-distance scholar when he described filling his spare time in Austin, Texas by walking over to look at the football stadium, visiting the Lyndon B Johnson Library and gazing at the Texas state capitol building. Perhaps some of the money raised to preserve British authors' collections intact should go into a travel fund to help scholars visit the papers wherever these have ended up. It might also be used to buy these itinerants temporary membership of the appropriate faculty club, where they can wait when the library is closed.
· Brenda Maddox's latest book is Freud's Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones, published by John Murray.