Starting to sift the fragments
I spent the last two weeks processing archival documents, and I thought it might be helpful to me to try and think out loud about what I’m doing.
First of all, I’m noticing how wild it is that ordinary academics at mid-century had secretaries who typed their correspondence. The carbon copies on the onionskin paper with the initials of the secretaries below the signature; the “dictated but not signed” notice; the few handwritten notes when someone was writing from vacation are all remarkable windows into the lifeworld of the period. It’s an occupation whose history I feel I should know more about. It makes me want to identify these people if possible through the books whose typing they surely did. Or perhaps the typists of books were different administrative support staff.
The second thing I notice is how the densest correspondence is the most professional and business-like. The thickest folders are the ones with many letters produced by secretaries, meaning things the people whose archives I’m now sifting through did not feel it worth their time to write themselves. For letters they wrote themselves did not produce carbon copies. Or at least, I’m assuming this to be the case. In this way, the archive is rather less revealing than I want it to be. Or, rather, it is less personally revealing. It still reveals directions of thought, especially amid the ferment of an ongoing project. Letters show colleagues reaching out to one another to share ideas. But the letters typed by secretaries rarely give a glimpse behind the professional mask.
A better way to say it, however, is that what is revealed is always interpretive and inferential. In the two archives I have recently visited, folders tell a story that the principal wants posterity to hear. Thomas Szasz wants people like me to know that he was a friend to the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Harold Lasswell wants people like me to know that he proposed forming an agency that would centralize intelligence functions at the same time that “Wild Bill” Donovan was. People want to be remembered in a certain way and for specific actions, arguments made, or positions taken relative to the history that they (at some point) realized they were living through.
What I wonder is whether and how to use this as evidence, and, if so, what kinds of questions it can help to answer. When Thomas Szasz and his mentor Therese Benedek share a letter about a paper he gave at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago about his use of “game” language to describe the psychoanalytic situation between patient and therapist, what is that evidence of? How should that be weighed against his published bibliography? And when the two sources (published and unpublished) diverge, how do I make sense of that divergence?
And what about the substance of some of the letters? Szasz is remembered today, if he is remembered at all, as a crackpot libertarian, a bit of a provocateur who lent his name, likeness, and reputation to a number of dubious causes in search of fame. Yet, the archives are full of letters from individuals seeking his help in securing their release from involuntary psychiatric commitment, or restitution after their hard-won release. Some are women whose husbands or fathers had them committed involuntarily after some slight, fight, or rebellion. Some are civil rights protestors who are sent to psychiatric hospitals after their arrest at marches. Some are former military men who are held for reasons they don’t understand, but suspect an effort to prevent them from sharing their involvement in legally suspect activities.1 And some letters are from people who did have an acute experience of (what we would call) mental illness who are now finding it impossible to secure their own release. The letters are tender, and Szasz’s response is cordial, graceful, and often sorrowful. He simply can’t do very much for most of these people unless they secure some legal representation. And yet, he’s also the same person who serves as an expert witness for the prosecution in cases whose lurid details suggest the acts of someone who could not possibly know right from wrong, whose explanations of their deeds are so detached from any consensus reality that ascribing criminal responsibility seems absurd at best, and cruel at worst. And here is Szasz, flying to California and collecting a handsome fee for helping to prevent an insanity defense.
The last thing I’ll say is that I’m noticing how hard it is to make sense of anything. A life seen so close is always complicated. It makes me feel tempered in my judgments. After all, were my life subjected to such scrutiny, who knows what interpretations others would develop. Moreover, I have photographed so many letters and pieces of correspondence. Then, I write up my summary of what each letter says, trying to make sense of a conversation that I am usually tuning in to midstream. In most cases, I’m having to trust that something of use will emerge because its immediate relevance is not clear. In some cases, it’s one or two sentences for every dozen letters. For others, it’s one or two letters for every dozen folders. Either way, the hit rate is small. I’m finding that it’s best not to think too hard about the low efficiency of the work and just be so thankful that I have the time and space to be doing it. The suspension of judgment is good practice, and so is resisting the feeling that every bit of my attention needs to have its value maximized.
Footnotes
These letters are interesting because of their soft-pedaled paranoia.↩︎