Contact Highs, Literature Style

Gone to see Flannery O’Connor’s notebooks and got to see Seamus Heaney’s desk as a bonus.

Yes, that’s the woolly Nobel laureate’s coffee- and ink-stained writing surface above: two oak planks, long part of the site-specific furniture at the Belfast school where he once taught, that he repurposed as a desk in the Eighties and then stuck with all through the stormwinds of fame and eminence out of “a superstitious fear of making a designer study, a film set rather than a bolt-hole” and finding that his poetry had “absconded.”

The desk is part of an extraordinary exhibit of Heaney’s books, papers, fine-press editions, and ephemera, all drawn from Emory’s special collections, which include huge caches of manuscripts by Heaney, Ted Hughes, Paul Muldoon, Salman Rushdie, and others.

A few floors upstairs is the university’s newly acquired deposit of Flannery O’Connor materials: letters, manuscripts, cartoons, photographs, notebooks, report cards, birthday cards, even a luggage tag from her 1958 pilgrimage to Lourdes. It was a privilege to see them; more soon.

Emory’s director of special collections, Rosemary Magee, is an O’Connor scholar, and when I asked if it would be possible for her to arrange a loan of materials to Georgetown – where O’Connor spoke powerfully and memorably fifty years ago, and where a chapel now under renovation will showcase religious art – she was intrigued. We are discussing.

With that prospect in mind, I concluded a long and absorbing day in the O’Connor archive by reading a typescript or two about mystery and manners. And then went downstairs for some field work.

• 24 October 2014
• 3