To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material—books, pamphlets, periodicals, etc.—and the archive of unpublished papers and documents. In the first category, one of the greatest is happily in my home town: the New York Public Library. In resources (not to mention problems) the NYPL has everything: every published work you need to consult on virtually any subject, besides a lot more you do not know you need because you do not know they exist until you come across them by serendipity. In the course of research extending over twenty years on subjects stretching from the Phoenicians of the Bronze Age to the music of Richard Strauss to Americans in China, there were, as I remember, only two books I asked for that the Library lacked. One was in their catalogue but could not be located, and both they were able to borrow for me.
Since most of the work on Stilwell was done in unpublished papers and interviews, I did not spend as much time at the NYPL on this book as on my others; nevertheless, at 42nd Street I made an unexpected strike of the kind that brings the occasional rare thrill in research. In this case it was a full run on microfilm of the Sentinel, the weekly journal of the 15th Infantry stationed in Tientsin, to which Stilwell was attached in 1926–9. These were the crucial years when the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek made its bid for control of China, but up to then I had found almost nothing on the views and attitudes of the American military on what was happening all around them. To my intense disappointment, after winding laboriously through the first reel, scanning every page, I found nothing of interest; the Sentinel might have been published at some regimental post in the heart of Kansas for all its notice of China. I was ready to send the box back, but decided as a matter of conscience to look at the second reel. There on the first page of the first issue was an article by Major Stilwell, the regiment’s recognized expert on Chinese affairs, inaugurating a series, no less, on the personalities and issues of the civil war! His articles continued to appear each week in the Sentinel for more than a year, providing me with my protagonist’s own judgment of events at a climactic time in which he shared.
The frightening thing was how close I had come to missing them altogether. No one among his family or former colleagues of the 15th Infantry had mentioned to me the existence of the articles; the originals had not been among his papers; and the Sentinel was not, of course, indexed in the Periodical Guide. With no clue to their existence, I might never have found them, which would have been a serious omission for Stilwell’s biographer. This is the kind of thing that makes one shiver to think of what else one may be missing.
How came the 15th Infantry’s journal from Tientsin to 42nd Street? It appears that a Library staff member had made a hobby of regimental histories and had acquired a file of the Sentinel, which the NYPL, with an admirable sense of time, place, and history, had preserved. Researchers in every field must owe the staff many debts similar to mine.
Unlike the British Museum (BM) and Bibliothèque Nationale (BN), where you cannot penetrate the mysteries of the catalogue (which is written in books and changes system whimsically, say at letter H from 1792–1920 or suddenly at Q in 1898) without the assistance of the staff, at the NYPL you can plunge ahead independently by virtue of its single over-all card catalogue.* The card catalogue, to my mind, is the supreme advantage of being an American; if there are others, they are secondary. One may acknowledge, however, certain drawbacks at 42 nd Street: It does not have the marvelously mellow, protected surroundings of the circular Reading Room at the BM or of its replica under the dome of the Congressional, nor the pleasant sense of being one among a community of scholars. Although access is open at the Congressional, the drifters do not come there, no doubt because of its location on the Hill rather than in a midtown commercial area like that of the NYPL. In Europe access to the great libraries is controlled by the requirement of written application with a statement of purpose. This is hardly more than a formality in London, but in Paris you should prepare for a week’s struggle with French bureaucracy, which regards every applicant as a natural object of suspicion. Supply yourself with passport, birth certificate, university diploma, your mother’s marriage license, and a letter from your ambassador. If you can show your return ticket home, that will have a soothing effect.
Apart from the rather heterogeneous types who join you in the NYPL Reading Room—some to come in out of the cold, others to pursue often strange devices (once a lady sat across from me with a large cloth bag from which she extracted a variety of embossed paper napkins, colored pencils with which she decorated the napkins, envelopes into which she stuffed them, an address book which she fiercely leafed for names to write on the envelopes, stamps and a sponge to finish the process)—apart from these distractions, the chief disadvantage of the NYPL is that one cannot enter the stacks, as one can, with authorization, at the Congressional, or at Widener at Harvard (which, suffering from the universal budget squeeze, now sensibly charges outsiders for this privilege). To roam the stacks is of course the most delightful, if not the most disciplined, form of research, and the most productive of discoveries. Collected before you is all the gathered wealth on your subject. You can examine, compare, explore, and choose.
Archives are a resource whose usefulness depends on the knowledge and enthusiasm of their custodians. The searcher is helpless without them. Fortunately, archivists are a genus who seem actually to get their satisfaction from locating for you what you want. At the prototype of them all, the Public Record Office in London, which houses the documents of ten centuries, I once asked for the papers of the English delegation to the Hague Conference of 1899 and received the originals within fifteen minutes. That was another example of serendipity because they were bound in with all the letters from the public to members of the government on the subject of the Peace Conference, and the letters gave an extraordinary glimpse of public opinion at the time; they were something I would never have known to ask for.
The chief disadvantage of the PRO is gastronomical: There is no place to eat a quick lunch in Chancery Lane (or there wasn’t when I was there last), and when absorbed in a pile of original papers one hates to waste time by going far afield for food. In these circumstances my solution is a small package of raisins and nuts which can be carried in one’s purse and eaten surreptitiously while working. Our National Archives in Washington, the American counterpart of the PRO, surfers from the same disadvantage, except for a cafeteria in the basement; and concerning all cafeterias in American government basements the only polite comment is silence. Maybe libraries and gastronomy do not mix, except, naturally, in Paris, where one can buy a sandwich in a superlative French roll and eat it with mirabelles on a stone bench under a tree in the lovely little park of the Place Louvois outside the BN; that is, if one has arranged to do one’s research in summer.
The National Archives and the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress are our major archival collections, both of them places so seductive that, notwithstanding the nutritional handicaps, historians have been known to enter and never emerge, or at least never publish because they cannot bear to bring their research to an end.
Authors Guild Bulletin, March 1972.
* As of the year I wrote, 1972, this was to become a bygone condition. Acquisitions since 1972 are now catalogued in printed books, and in time the entire card catalogue will be photographically reproduced in bound volumes.