Building Chapters of Literary History
By Alma Freeman

Since his arrival at Emory 15 years ago, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) Director Steve Enniss has helped to expand the library to become one of the fastest-growing literary archives in the country. Over the last decade, Enniss oversaw such major acquisitions as the Danowski Poetry Library and the archives of the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, of the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, and of the novelist Salman Rushdie. Enniss recently spoke to Emory in the World about the library’s growth, the challenges that it faces, how his career turned when he met Ted Hughes, and more.

How did you begin your career as a librarian?
I have always had a love of libraries and from a young age I was a habitual accumulator and collector of all kinds of curiosities and oddities. I received my master’s degree in library science from Emory and while I was finishing my PhD in English from the University of Georgia, Head of Special Collections Linda Mathews invited me back for what was initially going to be a part-time position as a manuscript librarian. While my colleagues in graduate school were throwing themselves on the job market with horrific results, I had this invitation to come back to Emory – to a strong institution with a lot of things happening – and to a position that combined my interest in libraries and literature.

What do you consider to be a turning point in your career?
The acquisition of the papers of the late Poet Laureate of Britain Ted Hughes (1930-1998) raised the library’s collections to a new level of international stature and visibility. Hughes was one of the major poetic voices of his generation, a poet in that long line of laureates that included William Wordsworth and Alfred Tennyson. It was that acquisition that led quite directly to the acquisition of the largest part of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s papers in 2004.

How did you meet Ted Hughes?
English Professor Ron Schuchard had been teaching Ted Hughes’ poetry for many years and Ron makes heavy use of primary materials in his classes. Through his persistence, the library had collected a few pieces over time. In 1996, I received a call from Hughes’ agent and at the time, he was offering a single manuscript of his poems and wanted an extravagant amount for it. It was at the end of the fiscal year and so I said something that at the time may have sounded flippant. I told the dealer that building an archive one manuscript at a time was a rather slow way of building a research collection and if he ever had anything more substantial to let me know. In fact, a year later he called again acting as the agent for the entire archive. I went over in 1996 and 1997 to see Hughes – he was still living at the time in the same thatched house that he and Sylvia Plath had picked out together in Devon. As he explained to me, “Devon was a hard place to get out of.”

The library earned worldwide media coverage when the acquisition of novelist Salman Rushdie’s archive was announced last fall. How do you think this has affected Emory’s perception internationally?
When Rushdie was asked “why Emory?” he replied, “because they asked.” Certainly there was more to it, but he is correct that Emory asked. There is an attitude of boldness here at Emory and a well-developed sense of possibilities. Collections like the Rushdie papers or those of Ted Hughes or those of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney have a way of leaving a mark on an institution. These collections are permanent additions to the intellectual landscape of the University and for generations to come students and scholars will travel from around the world to do research here that simply cannot be done anywhere else. It is no exaggeration to say that entire chapters of the literary history of our time will be written at Emory. As part of the Rushdie archives, we received several defunct computers that he had worked on throughout his career. We are currently exploring the hard drives and the early indications are that they will serve as an extraordinary record of Rushdie’s day-to-day work habits and communications. For example, we will have a trail of emails that convey what else Rushdie may have been doing during the day while he was writing a part of, say, The Satanic Verses or Midnight’s Children. Some people wring their hands and think that the days of archive manuscripts are over, but in fact it’s quite the opposite – the future is very bright for a rich archive of some of our best writers.

The Rushdie acquisition deviates from Emory’s pattern since 1988 of collecting poetry. In what ways does this fit into the University’s mission, and what impact will this have on future collections?
One will always be most successful building a research collection in alignment with the University’s ongoing and evolving story. The original impetus for the library’s literary collections was the appointment of Richard Ellmann, a renowned W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Oscar Wilde scholar and Emory’s very first Woodruff Professor. The teachings of Ron Schuchard and his leadership as director of the Richard Ellman Lectures in Modern Literature have served as a roadmap to the literary terrain documented by the Emory archive. Rushdie is certainly a feature of that landscape, and his papers also fit very nicely in the University’s commitment to internationalization. One of the most compelling issues of our day is this global conflict between East and West and no one has had a more privileged vantage point of that conflict than Salman Rushdie. The acquisition of the Rushdie papers could well have the same liberating function for Emory’s research collections that his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children had for modern literature.

What have been some of the biggest challenges in collecting and building the library since you arrived in 1992?
The biggest challenge over the last decade, continuing to the present, remains the space that MARBL occupies. We are growing so fast that we need a larger space to properly display Emory’s most valuable and important research collections in a state-of-the-art facility capable of leveraging this University investment for maximum impact and value.

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Alma Freeman is the communications specialist for the Office of International Affairs.