Field/Notes: negotiating with friends

More from field notebook:

How to represent conflict in the archive? How to engage with the conflicts in the narrative between biographies, memoirs, and public records. How to not get trapped by document guardians ²see pp. 6 in Derrida J and Prenowitz E (1996) Archive fever: a Freudian impression. Diacritics 25(2). Chicago: The Johns Hopkins University Press: 9–63. or stalling on post-truths? When I go through the biographies, there is a pile of citations to papers, memoirs, letters, and early biographies written by close contacts – some digitised, some scattered across two continents. One might still be in the private possession of an octogenarian that may or may not still be alive or in London. The mundane ‘facts’ of public records carry more weight because they were collected from a benevolent third party. In whose interest is it to produce an entry in a street directory or catalogue the residents of one building or another on the night of April 1st, 1911 (the night of the English census) and why do these ‘facts’ offer more to the map than the insinuations of others? I’m trying to make a map, to geolocate who was where and when to present the narratives that matter in an interactive and nonlinear way. But the facts don’t line up with the narratives. And the facts beg the question of property and ownership, routes, countryside lifestyles and domestic arrangements that this particular inquiry about Radclyffe Hall and Malvern hinges on. If Radclyffe Hall didn’t own the property if she spent so little time at the cottage that it never made it to public record, how did she have an idyllic life with Mabel Batten there? A kind of life that acts like a blueprint for wealthy lesbian domestic partnerships that resemble any other Heteronormative ways of being in the world. Even if it was simply a weekend country home, I’ve only got others’ perceptions of this to work off of. It might be just as real as a narrative, but knowing that the biographies are not inclusive of the public records raises a lot of questions of how we know what we know and how we come to know it.