The papers of the Canadian-born novelist Rachel Cusk have been acquired by a library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin. The cache, however, contains none of her draft manuscripts, which she admitted had been used to light fires, drawn on by her children, or lost.
Cusk’s archive, comprising items dating from the 1980s to the present day, include more than a dozen notebooks, teaching notes and diary entries, as well as drawings by her children, records of everyday life and a MacBook Pro laptop. They have been acquired for an undisclosed sum by the Harry Ransom Center, a library and museum at the university that is also home to the archives of Ian McEwan and Arthur Miller.
Cusk, the author of 10 novels, such as the Outline Trilogy, and memoirs including her confessional about motherhood, A Life’s Work, has handed over early notebooks written while travelling in Turkey and Italy as a student, which reveal what the centre called “early efforts at developing her style”, along with correspondence from the 1980s and 1990s and drafts and notes from Cusk’s version of Euripedes’ play Medea, which premiered in London in 2015.
Draft manuscripts, however, failed to make it to the Texas archive: in The Weather of Domestic Life, a short essay about how she writes, to accompany the sale of the papers, Cusk admits that she only tends to keep them “for a while … but if they didn’t get used to light the fire or for the children to draw on, they were abandoned in the next house move”.
“Against the force of emergency – of enactment, of ‘live’ action – that runs so strongly through family life, I could never exert myself to defend the dead testimonials to my past work,” she writes. “I did, however, keep hold of my notebooks, in which the ‘photographs’ of my conceptions were taken. Most of them show evidence of daily life trampling through them; they were far from sacrosanct, far from being the ‘writer’s room’ of my fantasy. But being small and lightweight and easy to carry, they survived.”
Cusk said she tends to conceive a piece of work “suddenly and entire, in a single glimpse”, upon which she will “immediately make a set of notes that are like a photograph of it: they record, in one frame as it were, what it looked like to me.” She then spends months – sometimes years – working out what she has seen in her “glimpse”.
A notebook in which she has set down the bare bones of her memoir about the breakdown of her marriage, Aftermath, reveal this process: “Those evenings with the children, the feeling that I see the bottom of the barrel, that my strength or willingness are almost depleted as the evening concludes: a kind of terminus … the story of the break up comes last … the numbness of summer becomes the breaking up, the breaking down, of autumn”.
In her essay, Cusk muses that the lack of privacy in her life, from childhood in a large family to when she became a mother, may have shaped her methods.
“Most of my work has been written while bringing up children: I have had very little time alone and have had to hold a great deal in my head,” she writes. “When my children were small I used to fantasise about the writer’s life, the life I believed other writers were living: one in which you were what you appeared to be, in which the holding it in one’s head wasn’t necessary, in which the physical world exactly reflected the mental environment. My physical world was fragmented, scattered everywhere by the weather of domestic life and its cycles of servitude and change and destruction and renewal.”
Stephen Enniss, director of the Harry Ransom Center, said that Cusk’s novels explored “the way identity is shaped by language and reveal as well the way the novel may serve as a site of struggle over the self. In placing her papers at the centre, Cusk has given us an intimate record of that struggle with life and with art.”
