Orton in the Archives

In 1989 literary critic Simon Shepherd prefaced Because We're Queers – his book on Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell – with the following acknowledgment:

Thanks to the staff of Islington Central Library for their helpfulness and in particular to Eric Willats, now retired, who had the foresight to establish and mainstream an Orton archive before Orton became an industry. . . .No such gratitude is due, unfortunately, to Orton's theatrical agent whose manner did a disservice to her late client and whose obstructiveness did a disservice to researchers.¹

Peggy Ramsay, Orton's agent and literary executor, had called a halt to their short correspondence four years earlier. 'Please do not write to me any more about Joe Orton,' she wrote, 'you can get the full list of the material he has written on the back of the publications of any of his plays. Anything else has been fully researched by John Lahr in his book. I gave John every piece of information and there is nothing more to be said.'² Lahr himself had yet to deposit his research materials on Orton at Boston University.

In the period Shepherd was working on Because We're Queers it was Islington Central Library alone that was allowing access to primary material relating to Orton and Halliwell. This was basically limited to the library-book covers the couple had defaced and material on the resulting prosecution of 1962. Writing and researching in the context of the growing AIDS crisis and a vicious homophobic backlash in the UK, Shepherd interpreted Ramsay and Lahr as heterosexist gatekeepers of the Orton legacy, monopolizing the playwright in the interests of an 'Orton industry'. 'People who try to work on Orton and Halliwell come up against this power over the papers', wrote Shepherd.³ Letters in the Ramsay archive – now available at the British Library – indeed show her routinely discouraging or turning away those wanting to work on the playwright. It was, she repeatedly claimed, well-worn ground, and, in any case it was Lahr who now had the materials.⁴

When leading Orton critic Francesca Coppa began her research in 1994 the situation had changed; Peggy Ramsay had died in 1991; Lahr had given his papers relating to Orton to Boston University in the same year; and Coppa found Lahr, the Orton family and various archivists happy to help.⁵ Access to material relating to Orton was better still after 1997,

Fig. 1.

Joe Orton at home in Noel Road in October 1966. Daily Sketch 30 Nov. 1966.

when the University of Leicester purchased the fragmented holdings of the Orton estate and the British Library acquired the Ramsay archive.

If access is now straightforward, however, what it reveals is not. Romantically and/or naively I was looking forward to some sort of encounter with Orton in these archives. They tended, however, to re-emphasize the distance the playwright adeptly maintained between himself and his various audiences. There is precious little in Orton's own hand or typescript; most of the original diary is missing; and folder after folder contains letters (often duplicated, with copies held in Leicester, Boston and London) documenting disputes over the Orton legacy.⁶ Orton often slips from view amidst the controversies and competing stories – a posthumous reprise of his own notoriously shifting account of himself and his life.⁷ The questions I took to the archives remain pretty much unanswered (though when have archives ever answered our questions directly?). New questions emerged, however – questions about the agendas in play for those who felt they had a stake in this legacy and who in different ways controlled the archive material. Such questions have often haunted the histories and legacies of literary and theatrical figures – John Addington Symonds, Bertholt Brecht and Garcí a Lorca are disparate examples amongst many. What I want to do here, though, is to open out these questions in specific relation to Orton, focusing on the infamous diary and reflecting on what the archives can tell us about how it was shaped for the consumption of others first by Orton himself, and...