I place my hand on the handle of the giant steel door — it feels like it’s twenty feet tall and five feet thick. As I hear the mechanism unlock to let me in, I gingerly creak the door open. The lights are off, so, unblinking, I feel my hand to the side of the wall for the light switch. Flipping it on, the basement lights up, rows upon rows of tall, cold, metal shelves wait on either side of me. As I step inside and shut the massive door behind me, I’ve never felt so cold. Each shelf holds boxes and boxes, and each box holds folder upon folder. Hundreds of thousands of pages sit carefully catalogued in pencil-labelled folders. People’s lives are in these boxes, and I swear I can feel them.
As an intern in the Performing Arts department of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, TX, one of my long term tasks is to update the research guide for the Oscar Wilde collection. Since the last research guide was created in the seventies, much of the information is outdated and non-comprehensive. My job is to go through the list of related collections to discover: first, whether we still have the collection, second, what materials in the collection actually pertain to Oscar Wilde, and last, how do they relate to Wilde.
In my first two weeks, I’ve been training in the ins and outs of the Ransom Center, learning how to find things in the card catalogue, where to find the preliminary inventories of uncatalogued boxes, and how to read materials’ coordinates within the stacks. On my first day really working on my own, I headed down to the basement to look through the boxes from the Rupert Croft-Cooke collection. Rupert Croft-Cooke wrote Bosie, a biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, which includes chapters on his relationship with Oscar Wilde. Croft-Cooke also collected letters related to Lord Alfred Douglas’ correspondence.
I was maybe a little too overzealous in my inventorying, because I spent my entire five hour shift going through Croft-Cooke’s entire catalogued collection. I skimmed through his manuscripts of Bosie, looking at the handwritten changes he wanted to make. I read letters upon letters, discovering intimate information about how Croft-Cooke balanced modesty and professionalism in his correspondence. I found controversial letters in which Croft-Cooke (or should I call him Rupert now? I feel like I know him so well) writes to a relative of Robert Ross, Wilde’s first male lover, to see if she could give him information for the biography he was writing about Wilde’s other lover who was constantly in competition with Ross. Shonda Rhimes could do some research at the Ransom Center for her next television show!
Utterly fascinated and completely engrossed, I spent way too much time looking at Croft-Cooke’s materials. The notes I took rivaled Gargantuan compared to the information that would actually be useful in a research guide. I’m slowly learning where my background as a researcher can assist me in my internship rather than guide me. Much of the work I did was research that scholars coming to the Ransom Center would conduct for their projects. My role, I’m understanding better now, is to help researchers to know where to start.
Lives in Boxes 