Bad Archive, Flora Feltham. Wellington: Te Herenga Waka University Press 2024.
In the last of this series of intriguing essays, the narrator attends a conference for writers of romance fiction. One of the speakers, a prolific novelist, defines her practice thus: “I’m mainly Paranormal, Historic Scotland, Urban Contemporary and Veterinarian … usually with an Enemies to Lovers slant, but lately I’ve been really excited by exploring Soul Mates” (212). Personally, I had no idea there were so many categories of romance fiction, but if you’re in the business, then you need a strong grasp of the options. As an aspiring novelist, however, the narrator knows as well that romance fiction works when it taps into human feelings and needs. Thus even experience that is ostensibly remote from her own – in one instance, a relationship between two men – can be a source of awareness.
Flora Feltham’s essays themselves are harder to categorize – and I do not intend that as a criticism. They may seem disconnected, but the whole collection is artfully put together, and without the links coming across as artificial. The narrator is implicitly the same person in all the essays – a married woman in her mid-30s who works as an archivist at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, and who is increasingly engaged in weaving as well as in writing. What emerged most strongly to me was their accretive exploration of personal relationships, between spouses, as well as between parents and children, including parents and adult children.
Thus an essay about a holiday that the narrator, her husband Pat and some friends spend mostly getting wasted in Croatia, takes on further resonance in a later account that is centred on a crisis in her marriage. Here the couple have to confront the emotional (more than physical) damage caused by Pat’s condition as a functioning alcoholic and drug-taker, and aggravated by her own self-righteous and self-dramatizing response to it. The marriage is also revisited in other essays where it is not the obvious focus, so that in the final story about the romance writers convention, the title ‘HEA’ (the abbreviation for the romance trope ‘Happy Ever After’), gains an extra meaning. Does the inevitable dénouement of genre fiction apply to real life?
Recalling the stages of her relationship with her husband naturally involves drawing on the narrator’s memory – but memory, it becomes evident, is not always easily accessible. There was a period in her earlier family life that she finds impossible to recall clearly, because the breaking-up of the household and long periods spent without parents at home was very hard to deal with. What the essays track, nonetheless, is the narrator’s gradual understanding of the past, especially as she engages with both parents in her own adulthood. The writing conveys this understanding implicitly as much as explicitly.
To go into detail about the mother’s life would give too much away about the narrator’s experience as well. But after her father has been an intermittent presence in the text, the narrator recounts a visit to him, many years after the marriage breakdown with the mother. A retired radiologist, his hobby is now making Meccano machines, and she comes to see him at a gathering of Meccano enthusiasts.
The gathering is attended overwhelmingly by men, a fact that the writing foreshadows by describing the venue as “like a cinderblock high-school gym, camouflaged with forty trestle tables and manly bunting” (187). Yet what is emphasized is the ingenuity of the inventions the men come up with: the narrator’s father constructs a mechanical Spirograph, and other men produce a funicular railway, a mouse-sized theme park, and a machine that solves Rubik’s Cube. This sort of creativity, too, echoes other kinds evoked in the essays, notably the practice of weaving. Weaving is now very much associated, both culturally and in the text, with women. But the narrator’s creative bent as a weaver, it is hinted, links her to her father.
So why the title, Bad Archive? The first essay describes the narrator’s work as an archivist, outlining the different kinds of memorabilia the Turnbull Library collects, as well as the various things that now count as archival records in the digital age. What she highlights, however, is the paradox that, in ensuring the survival of records of the past, the archivist risks sanitizing the material not only literally but emotionally – cutting it off from ordinary life and from the library’s regular visitors. She is, she says, “professionally responsible for pampering time’s debris” (11).
To counter this effect, the writer delves into a diary from the collection which was written in England in the 1890s by a 19-year-old girl, Ella Mary Marriott Watson. The teenager had been sent back from Christchurch with her mother and sisters by her father, in an effort to separate her from a love-interest, bricklayer Harry Marshall, whom the father considered an unsuitable prospective husband. The narrator is gripped by the diary – and so is the reader of the essay – as Ella encounters several alternative suitors, but also England’s grim weather. Neither kind of encounter is much leavened, except by moments like recognizing in kittens at a cat-show “bright violet and heliotrope eyes” that remind her of (Canterbury?) sheep (12).
Do Ella Mary Marriott Watson and Harry Marshall have a HEA? The grand-daughter who inherited the diary filled in the rest of the story. But much is left up to the reader’s imagination – and that is the point. The imagination revitalizes a long-dead woman’s experience, even if the absence of some facts makes the archive incomplete. Just as the imagination comes into play in weaving, or in constructing Meccano machines, or in understanding the emotional experience of a spouse or parent.
As far as my own experience of archives is concerned, Flora Feltham’s essay reminded me of reading in Liverpool Public Library many years ago the letters of a little-known 19th-century writer, Hannah Mary Rathbone. Her main claim to fame is actually linked to diaries, in that her Diary of Lady Willoughby (1844) is a fictionalized version of the life of a real woman caught up in the English Civil War of the 1640s. In her family letters, Hannah Mary Rathbone wrote to a son working in Alexandria about his younger brother, Basil: Basil Rathbone had sunk into alcoholism. If only he had taken his parents’ advice, Hannah lamented, and had joined a voyage to New Plymouth! That letter got my imagination engaged with ‘Basil Rathbone’, and the wartime Sherlock Holmes movies I’d seen that starred an actor of that name. So I checked out whether the actor was a relative of the Liverpool Rathbones, and thus a more successful scion thereof than his namesake. Yes indeed, he was from the same family, from a branch which had emigrated from rainy England to South Africa. Was this discovery directly relevant to the project I’d been commissioned to do in the library? Well no, actually – so I may be a ‘bad’ user of archives as well….
