LOML and I went to the Tennessee Williams exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center on Saturday with our good friends Aaron and Adrian. The Center is a wonderful archive with a mind-boggling wealth of material on display - I can only imagine how much they have behind the scenes! After reading through Williams' scripts, personal and business letters and clippings, we moved over to a display of ephemera from American novelists. It was fantastic to see scribbled-on notebooks, heavily edited pages criss-crossed with red pen and complicated (and sometimes indecipherable) outlines and notes. It really inspired me to come home and keep working, knowing that my chaotic confetti of papers is something I share with every other writer. I particularly loved seeing Norman Mailer's odds and ends.
Norman Mailer's character timeline for his 1991 novel, Harlot's Ghost.
One of Denis Johnson's plot outlines.
From Norman Mailer's first draft of The Naked and the Dead.
"Discarded pages mark the physical dimensions of a writer's labour - you know, how many shots it took to get a certain paragraph right. Or the awesome accumulation, the gross tonnage, of first draft pages. The first draft of Libra sits in ten manuscript boxes. I like knowing it's in the house. I feel connected to it. It's the complete book, the full experience containable on paper." - Don deLillo
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