Considering The Adams Special Collection at St. John's College, Cambridge
Why did he keep all this 'junk'?
The new publication edited by Kevin Jon Davies, 42: The Wildly Improbably Ideas of Douglas Adams, delves into the special collection of Douglas Adams’ papers, photographs, and notebooks. As a result, it is spurring conversations among fans about the detritus of life—the stuff that is still around even after you’ve ostensibly used up its intended purpose.
In my office, detritus is a binder from an organizational development class, a black velvet notebook with a silver unicorn embossed on the cover (half-full of journaling I’ll probably never re-read), and staging photos that made my first home look better than it ever did when I lived it.
Items like these belie a sentimental? unhinged? optimistic? reality about which I have far too much experience and too many thoughts (read: guilty pleasures and equally guilty anxiety).
One of the ZZ9ers started a discussion in our FB group bemoaning the process of getting rid of stuff (hard! annoying!). She mused on the reality that if she were ever to be famous, there’d be nothing left for an archive.
She posed the question we had all avoided thinking about in our excitement at getting our hands on a bound and transcribed version of what is essentially ‘junk’ Adams’ didn’t see fit to print, but which we fans find precious: Why did Adams keep it all in the first place?
Here's one of my theories, drawn from personal experience.
If an author finds it 'difficult' to write on any axis (not enough ideas, not a fast enough typist, not enough time, not enough "good" stuff) it becomes psychologically important to hoard what you do write. And, because Adams did a lot of recycling; of his ideas, of his plots, of his words, I don't find it much of a long shot to assume that his insecurities led him to this state of keeping the old to fuel the new.
And while this strategy I ascribe to Adams (and secretly, myself) can work, the idea of mining old work for new work isn't encouraged much in the writing circles I run in, for two reasons:
If you thought it or wrote it once, you could do it better the second time and
What you wrote then, won't be in your now-voice. It will actually take you MORE work to transcribe and then edit.
I know these are arguments in favor of decluttering and clearing the space for new work. I also know I certainly can’t (yet?).
And fellow Adams fans are with me on this optimistic preserving of the possible. Nothing proves that point more than 4,945 backers pledging £271,389 for a $50. large format, coffee-table book that is full of someone else’s failure to declutter. Granted, a brilliant and beloved author’s detritus, but detritus all the same.
I will also safely say that those who suffer from this psychological fear of losing a precious thought, idea, memory, or writing, can only hope that someday they will have the reason and resources of Adams' family to box it all up and send it to an institution interested in it for some reason.
As the recipient of vast boxes of paperwork and pictures from my mother's house after her death five years ago, I readily admit that her Great Cleanout has yet to be cataloged and managed. My mother was a thoughtful woman who wrote many things down and cared deeply about how her ancestry and upbringing forged who she became. Some part of me wants to know more about that, for her and for me. Another part of me is averse and never finds the time.
And perhaps that is the true optimism of the multiple, only a quarter-full, journal-hoarder: A desire to both remember and BE remembered through the easiest possible inaction of just not destroying our own work first.