O for a muse of fire: the iconoclasm of Jonathan Williams and the Jargon Society

Afterimage, March-April, 1996 by Tom Patterson

In addition to its publishing work, the Jargon Society has sponsored other activities related to its mission of "finding, bringing together, and focusing upon overlooked or underrated aspects of American and English culture."(26) For example, the Society organized and administered a special fund to help pay Bunting's living expenses from the late 1970s until his death in 1985 at age 85. And in the mid- to late 1980s the Society coordinated a three-year research project to document and preserve the work of self-taught artists in its home territory, the American South. Among the varied accomplishments of this project was the negotiation of preservation arrangements for a collection of more than 3000 biblically-inspired driftwood sculptures by the late Annie Hooper, a little-known visionary artist who spent her life on North Carolina's Outer Banks.(27) Williams's research for his still-unpublished Walks to the Paradise Garden was also a component of this project, as were several exhibitions, public programs and publications.(28) At one point Williams had hoped to establish a Jargon-affiliated museum to display work by self-taught artists, but he eventually dropped the idea due to the high operating costs of such an institution. For the time being, the substantial collection of contemporary Southern "outsider art" that he began assembling a dozen years ago for the proposed museum is housed in a recently renovated, brightly painted basement studio of the house at Skywinding Farm, along with selections from his impressive photography collection and an assortment of amusing kitsch items, such as an aerosol spray can labeled "Bullshit Repellent."

As a by-product of Jargon's activities and Williams's prolific personal correspondence with writers and artists all over the world, there is now an extensive archive of manuscripts, letters and other documents that have accumulated over the years since the press began. This collection of papers has had its own rather convoluted history of being kicked around from one institution to another. Indeed, the saga of the Jargon Archives unfortunately exemplifies the academic world's (at best) ambivalent response to Williams's cultural labors - and to the legacy of Black Mountain College in general, with which he remains closely associated in the minds of most scholars who know his work.

In an interview that Williams gave last fall at his home, the day after his return from the Black Mountain College Reunion, he said that he began his efforts to sell the Jargon Archive in 1965, when he offered it to the library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - seemingly the most logical place for it. Officials at the UNC library agreed to store the archive while negotiating the possible sale with Williams, and in the meantime both parties sought independent appraisals of the material it contained. Williams engaged the services of J. M. Edelstein, the head librarian at the National Gallery of Art, who estimated the archive's total value at $405,000. The university's appraisers came up with the much lower figure of $85,000. When Williams offered to meet them halfway and let the UNC library have the archive for $250,000, three or four years of committee deliberations ensued. The library's special acquisitions committee "hemmed and hawed," in Williams's words, and in the meantime the Jargon papers were moved out of a dry, upper-floor storage space where they originally had been placed, and into "a corridor in the basement, next door to the men's room." Once it became clear that his home state's principal university wasn't going to pay what he considered a fair fee for his archive, Williams decided to approach Duke University in nearby Durham to see if that institution might be interested in it. Presented with the opportunity to acquire such a unique collection of documents for $250,000, officials at Duke's library formed a special committee to raise funds for that purpose. Williams noted that the effort had the support of the university's president (and former North Carolina Governor), Terry Sanford, as well as poet and novelist Reynolds Price, a member of Duke's faculty and of the library's special committee. But after three years, they too could not come up with the money.