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The Carlton Lake Collection contains approximately 350,000 items relating to French
art, literature, and music, spanning 1377-2000 (bulk 1895-1940). The majority of the
collection consists of papers of numerous French writers, musicians, and artists of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and includes manuscripts, correspondence,
photographs, artwork, music scores, and other materials. The collection is strongest
for the period known as the Belle Époque, (roughly
1895-1914) and for the years during and after World War I (especially the 1920s and
1930s). Among the earlier materials are Napoleonic-era letters. While the majority
of the materials were written in the French language, English, German, Russian, and
Spanish language materials are also present. |
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The Lake Collection is arranged in a single alphabetical sequence by creator name;
for each creator, materials are subdivided into manuscript works, outgoing and
incoming letters, and other materials. The materials present in the other category
include a wide variety of items, such address books, announcements, broadsides,
calendars, catalogs, certificates, clippings, contracts, collages, diaries,
dossiers, drawings, ephemera, financial records, funeral notices, insurance
policies, invitations, journals, legal papers, lists, menus, order forms, passports,
photographs, postcards, posters, production files, programs, proofs, quotations,
receipts, record books, research notes, scrapbooks, signs, telegrams, tickets, and
visiting cards. |
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A large portion of this collection was previously accessible only through a card
catalog, but has now been re-cataloged as part of a retrospective conversion
project. At the same time, a number of uncataloged accessions were also cataloged
and integrated into the existing collection. Two groups of previously restricted
papers concerning Pablo Picasso and Paul Valéry are now open and
available. |
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Among the numerous important literary and cultural figures and organizations
represented in the collection are Pierre Albert-Birot, Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis
Aragon, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett,
André Breton, Albert Camus, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, René Char,
Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Maurice Darantière, Marcel Duchamp, Editions
J.O. Fourcade, Paul Eluard, Léon-Paul Fargue, Paul Fort, Jean Genet,
André Gide, Georges Hugnet, Valentine Hugo, Alfred Jarry, Georges Jean-Aubry,
James Joyce, Librairie Dorbon-aîné, Pierre Louÿs, Stéphane
Mallarmé, André Malraux, Henry Miller, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Proust,
Maurice Raynal, Arthur Rimbaud, Henri-Pierre Roché, Maurice Saillet,
Saint-John Perse, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gertrude Stein,
Alice B. Toklas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Valéry, Paul Verlaine, Emile
Vuillermoz, and Emile Zola. |
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A number of significant musical scores, letters, conductor's notes, and other
manuscripts created by approximately one hundred composers are also found in the
Lake Collection. Among these composers are Georges Auric, Hector Berlioz, Ernest
Chasson, Claude Debussy, Paul Dukas, Gabriel Fauré, Franz Liszt, Maurice
Ravel, Albert Roussel, Camille Saint-Saëns, Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, and
Giuseppe Verdi. |
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Some of the highlights of the Lake Collection include: |
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Pierre Albert-Birot (1876-1967): the complete archive for the avant-garde review SIC
(1916-1919); contains maquettes, page proofs, tear sheets, manuscripts,
correspondence, and other original materials relating to Albert-Birot's founding and
editorship of the magazine. |
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Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918): manuscript of the prologue of Les Mamelles de Tirésias; letters, handwritten
notes, and other documents relating to the play and its production; manuscripts of
works written for his column "La Vie
anecdotique." |
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Louis Aragon (1897-1982): letters, manuscripts of poems and prose pieces, including
a
typescript of Le Cahier noir, a long and searching
"reflection on love" related to his novel, La Défense
de l'infini. |
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Antonin Artaud (1895-1948): significant correspondences with his publisher and other
friends reflecting his disintegration into mental illness. |
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Georges Bataille (1897-1962): manuscripts of two of his major works, L'Orestie and Dianus [Histoire de
rats. (Journal de Dianus)]. |
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Baudelaire, Charles (1821-1867): the proof sheet of "Les
Litanies de Satan" from Les Fleurs du mal
(1857), with extensive corrections in Baudelaire's hand; handwritten manuscript of
"La Charogne." |
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Samuel Beckett (1906-1989): multiple drafts of "Ceiling" and "The Way" ("8") as well as manuscripts of some of Beckett's other
later works; letters to Georges Belmont and Rick Cluchey, and information on the
1992 and 1993 publications of his Dream of Fair to Middling
Women. |
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André Breton (1896-1966): manuscripts relating to the Surrealist movement,
including "13 études,"
"La Béauté sera convulsive ou ne sera
pas,"
"Automatisme de la variante," and "Lumière Noire." |
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Albert Camus (1913-1960): manuscripts and letters, including manuscript of Le Malentendu and corrected page proofs of Les Justes; and manuscript of Discours de Suède, Camus's acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize. |
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961): the complete manuscript of Guignol's Band and its sequel, Le
Pont de Londres, in combinations of handwritten manuscript, typescript,
and corrected typescript with handwritten additions, totaling 4,022 pages;
handwritten manuscript of Scandale aux abysses; also a
moving correspondence with his friend Mourlet covering the war years and
Céline’s exile in Denmark. |
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René Char (1907-1988): letters, including a large correspondence with
Valentine Hugo, intimate friend of most of the surrealists; manuscripts of many of
his major poems, including "Crésus" and "La Récolte injuriée." |
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Paul Claudel (1868-1955): manuscript of one of Claudel's essential works, Cinq grandes odes, which is eighty-eight pages. (Except
for the first ode, the original manuscript of which has never been found, this
manuscript is complete.) |
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Jean Cocteau (1889-1963): Cocteau's own archive covering approximately the period
from the early 1900s to the mid 1930s and containing multiple drafts and publishing
states of many of his major works (Vocabulaire, Le Coq et
l'arlequin, Le Potomak, Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance, La Noce
massacrée, Les Enfants terribles), notebooks with poems and plans
for future works, and numerous correspondences with the leading figures of the era,
including a large and witty exchange with Max Jacob. |
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Colette (1873-1954): manuscripts and letters of Sidonie Gabrielle Colette and her
husband Willy (Henri Gauthier-Villars) include the manuscript of her novel Chéri, as well as other manuscripts and
correspondence. |
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Paul Eluard (1895-1952): manuscripts of numerous poems; a handwritten manuscript of
definitions prepared by Eluard and Breton for the Dictionnaire
abrégé du surréalisme; letters, including a large,
important correspondence with his lifelong friend from childhood, the binder A. J.
Gonon. |
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Jean Genet (1910-1986): four heavily corrected draft versions of the play Haute Surveillance; complete manuscript of Genet's
masterpiece, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. |
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André Gide (1869-1951): manuscript and corrected typescript of Isabelle; handwritten manuscript in two notebooks of
Le Journal des Faux-monnayeurs; manuscript of L'École des femmes; an important correspondence with
Eugène Rouart of over 300 letters and accompanying documents. |
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Georges Hugnet (1906-1974): handwritten and typed manuscripts, correspondence,
printed material, photographs, collages, and artwork document the surrealist artist
and poet Georges Hugnet's life and work. Included is a handwritten manuscript for
Non vouloir (1940), one of the earliest French
Resistance publications, as well as handwritten manuscripts, page proofs, and a
published copy of Tout beau mon coeur that together
illustrate the process of book production in the mid-1940s. |
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Valentine Hugo (1887-1968): a major portion of the archive of one of the most active
figures of the French art and literary world. Correspondence, manuscripts, notes,
journals, diaries, artwork, legal, financial and personal documents, photographs,
printed material, and photocopies document her life. A large portion the materials
relate to Jean Hugo, Valentine's husband. |
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Alfred Jarry (1873-1907): manuscripts for Léda, Le
Mousse, Par la taille, Le Moutardier du pape, and La Papesse Jeanne; letters and documents relating to Ubu Roi, including a correspondence with Lugné-Poe
in which Jarry proposes that Lugné-Poe produce the play. |
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Georges Jean-Aubry (1882-1950): a sizable portion of the papers of the versatile
critic of art, music, and literature. |
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Librairie Dorbon-aîné: letters received by this firm, a Paris publisher
and bookseller, and also Editions J.O. Fourcade, another Paris publisher, illustrate
the business of selling books. This collection is dominated by received
correspondence, but also includes financial and legal records, manuscripts,
promotional materials, and publicity art work. |
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Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925): manuscripts, correspondence, and assorted personal and
third-party papers of the French poet and novelist shed considerable light on his
professional and private life. |
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Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898): handwritten letters to Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam, Huysmans, Coppée, Charles Morice, Edmund Gosse, John Payne, York
Powell, Edouard Dujardin, Félix Fénéon, Courteline, Henri
Cazalis, and Henry Roujon, among others, plus draft of a letter to Rimbaud's mother
Marie Catharine Rimbaud. |
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André Malraux (1901-1976): complete set of galley proofs for La Condition humaine, heavily corrected by Malraux and
with handwritten additions in his hand; complete handwritten manuscript of L'Espoir. |
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Marcel Proust (1871-1922): handwritten manuscript and proof fragments of À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, plus another proof
fragment, heavily revised; letters, in particular an interesting collection of
seventy-eight notes from Proust to his housekeeper Céleste Albaret. |
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Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891): collection of numerous documents relating to Rimbaud's
life and poetry, including manuscripts, letters, drawings, corrected proofs and
similar materials by Rimbaud's sister, Isabelle; his brother-in-law, Paterne
Berrichon, poet and artist; his teacher Georges Izambard, and other poets such as
Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Claudel. |
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Henri-Pierre Roché (1879-1959): complete archive of the author of the novels
Jules et Jim and Deux
Anglaises et le continent, both of which were made into films by
François Truffaut, including manuscripts of all of Roché's works,
handwritten diaries and notebooks kept by Roché over his lifetime, as well as
transcriptions for most typed by Truffaut's secretaries, documents relating to
Roché's interests in the art world, and voluminous correspondences with such
contemporaries as Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Auric, Constantin Brancusi, Georges
Braque, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Marie Laurencin, Pablo Picasso, John Quinn,
Albert Roussel, Gertrude Stein, Erik Satie, and Wols. |
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Maurice Saillet (1914-1990) Collection: an important group of materials documenting
Sylvia Beach's personal life, her Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, and her
activities as the first publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses. |
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Saint-John Perse (Alexis Saint-Léger Léger, 1887-1975): corrected page
proofs of Éloges, the book that established
Saint-John Perse as a major poet; typescript, with handwritten emendations, of his
Nobel Prize acceptance speech. |
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Jean-Paul Sarte (1905-1980): manuscripts for over a dozen of his works, most of them
political in nature, including Joseph Lebon (synopsis
for a play based on the French Revolution), Liberté -
Egalité (philosophical and historical study of the French
Revolution); Questions de méthode, and L'Enfant et les
groupes. |
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Gertrude Stein (1874-1946): her manuscripts, correspondence, financial and legal
documents, address books, and personal papers were collected by Alice B. Toklas
after Stein's death in 1946. Included are manuscripts or proofs of three works by
Stein, Composition as Explanation, "From Dark to Day," and Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded. The bulk of
the collection comprises Toklas's incoming correspondence from approximately 250
correspondents. |
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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901): papers from the family archive, consisting
of
nearly 400 handwritten letters by the artist, his mother, his grandmother, and other
members of the immediate family, depicting the daily environment of a large and
eccentric household constantly on the move from one family château to another, as
well as the artistic development of the young Lautrec. |
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Paul Valéry (1871-1945): manuscripts for numerous poems and prose pieces,
including a handwritten and typed manuscript for a discourse on history; a large
number of letters and correspondences, notably a group of personal letters to John
Middleton Murry in which Valéry discusses his feelings about poetry in
general, about his own work, and about other writers--among them Baudelaire, Poe,
and Gide--who interested him in particular; and another significant group of letters
to Georges Jean-Aubry |
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In addition to this finding aid, several of the larger components of this collection have been described in additional individual finding aids: Samuel Beckett (3 boxes), Jean Cocteau (11 boxes), Françoise Gilot (9 boxes), Georges Hugnet (18.5 boxes), Valentine Hugo (21 boxes), Librairie Dorbon-aîné (13 boxes), Pierre Louÿs (9 boxes), Music (264 items), Henri-Pierre Roché (47 boxes), Maurice Saillet (4 boxes), and
Gertrude Stein (9 boxes). |
