One for Libraries
Interview for the New York Public Library
My current trip to India is coming to an end. Have spent a lot of time in Bengal and it has been good. Tonight I’ll conduct a writing workshop at The Bookshop in Jor Bagh, and then get on a plane. In this post I want to share something different. In mid-July, while I was leading a workshop at the Cullman Center for school teachers and also doing research, I was interviewed by Julie Carlsen, a curator at the New York Public Library, for the library’s “Researcher Spotlight” series. (Thanks to Julie for asking about my guilty pleasures, a question that made me produce the placard above!) I hope you read the interview for what it says about writing and research but mostly for the debt of gratitude it expresses for librarians and curators, in my case most notably, apart from Julie, the most excellent Carolyn Vega at the Berg Collection in NYPL.
This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling the experiences of researchers who use The New York Public Library's collections for the development of their work.
Amitava Kumar is the author of several works of nonfiction and four novels. The books of nonfiction include Husband of a Fanatic, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, and A Matter of Rats. His novel Immigrant, Montana was on the best of the year lists at The New Yorker, The New York Times, and President Obama’s list of favorite books of 2018. His next novel A Time Outside This Time was described by the New Yorker as “a shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist.” Kumar’s latest, My Beloved Life, was praised by James Wood as “beautiful, truthful fiction.” Three volumes of his diaries and drawings were published by HarperCollins India. His work has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, BRICK, Guernica, and The Nation. Kumar’s awards include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Cullman Center Fellowship at The New York Public Library, and residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Lannan Foundation, and the Hawthornden Foundation.
When did you first get the idea for your research project?
This was in September, 2023. At the Berg Collection, I saw the butterfly drawings of Vladimir Nabokov and the landscape watercolors of Annie Proulx. Gorgeous. I had already done some work by that time in London, at the British Library, with notebooks of writers I admired: Virginia Woolf, Penelope Fitzgerald, John Berger. But these drawings at the Berg were a different thing. I thought I could do more with notebooks and drawings. I also found in NYPL a book of photographs by another writer I admired, Janet Malcolm. At some point, I used oil paint on a panel to copy one of her photographs of a burdock leaf.
What brought you to the Library?
I was a Cullman Center Fellow, preparing for publication of my novel My Beloved Life. We were brought to the Berg Collection as a part of our orientation. And that is when I was exposed to all kinds of notebooks: in addition to the ones I just mentioned, there have been other drawings by Nabokov, also Jack Kerouac in the diaries he kept as a park ranger, Emily Brontë, William Blake, several others.
What's your favorite spot in the Library?
I have a fondness for the Cullman Center, of course, not least because now my own name is up there on the brass plate outside office number 9. But I love the Berg Collection too. Of late, I have also started work in the Map Division at NYPL. What a beautiful ceiling! I can be looking at a map from a small corner of the world and then when I lift my head there seems to be a whole cosmos of color above me.
Describe your research routine.
Routine? That’s too grand a word for what I do. I stumble on to something and proceed almost entirely by accident. I rely, like Blanche, on the kindness of strangers. Mostly, librarians! Thank you, librarians and curators for all the work that you do.
What research tools could you not live without?
As a lot of my writing, both fiction and nonfiction, relies on newspapers, I often start by doing some searches on LexisNexis (also called Nexis Uni). Currently, I’m using the NYPL research catalog several times daily.
What’s the most unexpected item you encountered in your research?
Let me mention a recent discovery. I was looking at the William Maxwell papers in the Berg Collection. Maxwell was a writer and also an editor at the New Yorker. The letters sent to him by the authors he was editing—John Cheever, John O’Hara, also Nabokov—were amazing. They revealed the fears and hopes that these writers had but what was also remarkable was the sheer brilliance of the writing: these notes banged out on the typewriter shimmered with life!
What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
From a book? I was just reading a history of Indian railway. I found out that toward the end of the 19th century, Mark Twain had taken a train across India. He reported that he made a stop at “a little wooden coop of a station” in a jungle inhabited by tigers. From that lonely station, according to Twain, a message had once gone out: “Tiger eating station master on front porch; telegraph instructions.”
Describe a moment when your research took an unexpected turn.
You know, when I had started looking at writers’ notebooks, I was trying to find out more about the writing process. What did journals reveal about how books got written and revised? But then, coming across these journals in the Berg that also showed drawings, my research became an exploration of work between or across genres. I also found encouragement to do more drawings to accompany my reportage.
How do you maintain your research momentum?
I always tell my students that you have to write every day and walk every day. Modest goals: 150 words daily and 10 minutes of mindful walking. Research is a part of that practice. And all this work gets recorded in my notebooks too. Keeping track of one’s work is a way of sustaining the creative practice.
After a day of working/researching, what do you do to unwind?
I’m the family cook. I find cooking relaxing, particularly if I have my earphones on and listening to a book on tape.
What's your guilty pleasure distraction?
I can honestly say that while I feel guilty about many things, I don’t feel guilty about my pleasures.
What tabs do you currently have open on your computer?
I have been requesting books at the Cullman Center this week and also looking at maps. Those are the tabs on my computer. But I also have one linked to a site called cricinfo so that I can follow the fortunes of the Indian cricket team battling it out on the pitches in England.
Is there anything you'd like to tell someone looking to get started?
It can be daunting when you start because you often know so little; and, on the other hand, it can be overwhelming when you discover that there is so much that you can learn. Start small, remain open to possibilities, and trust the process…
What's your favorite spot in midtown for taking a break?
What break? Don’t have time for breaks. That said, I’ve had some fine cocktails with my Cullman colleagues during happy hour at the Heritage Grand Restaurant across from the Library on West 40th St.
Have we left anything out that you’d like to tell other researchers?
Can I just say that I’m utterly amazed that we have these resources that are there for the public for free? A huge resource! Sometimes I can’t wrap my head around this richness. Yesterday I was looking at maps showing the ratio of the differing populations of men and women in rural India. Today, in the Berg Collection, I was shown pages of the first diary of Virginia Woolf’s that survives today. She maintained this journal when she was a teenager. “Saturday, January 1st 1898” is how the entry on that page started. That entry ends with the words: “Here is a volume of fairly acute life (the first really lived year of my life) ended locked & put away. And another & another & another yet to come.”