Vignette: Quin's dark archive

Summary

In April 2009, heavily pregnant and right at the beginning of this project, I made a visit to Carol and Alan Burns in the flat they were then living in together (although long separated) in north London. The flat was crammed with stuff and countless shelves of books and papers. There were also several cats. One of them was being sick, I remember, as Carol and I sat talking about Ann Quin at a little table in her kitchen. I’d talked with Alan first, in his separate bedsit area, as he fed me cake and remembered Ann fondly. He showed me photographs and talked of her ‘glance, her own particular vision of world’. On later visits it was mainly Carol I spoke with. She shared her collection of Quin's letters and papers with me, allowing me to copy them all and to begin my own ‘dark archive’ I know I am not alone among Quin scholars in having a partial, incomplete and unofficial archive of letters and manuscript materials in my possession, kept for a purpose not yet known.

A more recent encounter with another part of Quin's archive in 2018, in a private collection of books, letters and other papers owned by her nephew, also involved being fed cake. (No vomiting cats this time, though.) I made that trip with Chris Clarke, who has described how the items in this particular collection remind us that Quin's archive is as much an absence as a presence. In 1965, she had written to the poet Robert Creeley about keeping his letters in a ‘huge trunk in Brighton for Eternity or at least until fifty years after we are all dead!!’ Yet when Clarke located the trunk in this private collection, it was empty and revealed nothing. This is perhaps unsurprising. Quin remarks that she has an archive of materials, but she doesn't seem interested in collecting or collating this in any official way and didn't keep carbon copies of her letters to sell on to university libraries as some of her friends and contemporaries did. Instead, her collection of correspondence and papers was and is precarious, vulnerable to a scattering and loss that was, perhaps, partly wilful, and partly to do with how much Quin moved and travelled from place to place.