By Elena Watts

With his torrent-like gait, Thomas Staley, an internationally acclaimed James Joyce scholar, will exit the doors of the Harry Ransom Center as director on August 31, 2011 for the last time.

Photo by Danielle Villasana

After 23 years of leadership, he plans to retire, taking with him a breathless flood of energy and ideas mingled with profound Joyce passages that poured through the building’s hallways for more than two decades. Shrewd, funny and well-connected, he built the center’s vast collection of priceless treasures in the same manner that Joyce built the complicated infrastructure of “Finnegan’s Wake.”  Nodally.

“It’s nodes. You build it nodally — in nodes, because it’s not linear,” Staley said. “It’s not checkers. It’s chess. Your moves are always different.”

Staley equates the acquisition of the numerous coveted collections during his years of service to the strategy inherent in a heated chess match.

“Literature builds out of a gestalt … So writers are collected [and] they are frequently not always in isolation,” he said. “John Donne says we’re part of the main. We’re not islands. And so knowing this collection helps you to get this [other] collection.”

The biggest difference, Staley said, between the private and institutional collector is that the private can indulge his obsessions, and the professional who works in an institution cannot. While Joyce is clearly Staley’s favorite writer, he is not at liberty to pursue Joyce’s work at the exclusion of other collections. Rather, he is deeply interested in all kinds of modern literature.

Writers from the ’50s to the present who caught Staley’s eye reside on an infamous list that he started in 1988. Although it is not cloaked in secrecy, it is not widely available either.

“The list contains nearly 600 authors and continues to grow as we identify new individuals who we think could become the great writers of their generations,” said Megan Barnard, the center’s deputy to the director for administration and acquisitions.

All first editions of their work are collected, and for a smaller number of these writers, the center collects all their published work including translations, special editions and manuscripts, Barnard continued. The list frequently changes.

Staley said literature is a test of time. “There are a lot of writers who were major players in the 17th century, and you don’t hear of them anymore,” he said. “We watch very carefully who’s doing what, where and when.”

The center is interested in the whole idea of the gestation process — in how close one can get to art in the making. “The difference between high talent and genius is often made manifest in revision,” Staley said. “That’s what that [gestation] is about.”

The latest fiction does not speak to Staley in the way modernist and even post-modernist does. This is where young staff members such as Danielle Sigler, Molly Schwartzburg and Barnard, who are trained in the humanities to read and understand culture, come in.

“The secret of administration is to find very, very good people who do very, very good work and who can do it better than you can, and these are people who do that,” Staley said.

Sigler, the center’s curator of academic affairs, who develops the calendar of events, plans symposia and lecture series and manages the fellowships and undergraduate interns, said Staley has an extraordinary capacity to see the ways in which collections can speak to and inform one another.

“Rather than setting very specific limits about what we do and do not collect, he examines the relationship a potential collection has with our existing collections,” Sigler said. “Will it illuminate a new dimension of writing about war? Will it enhance our understanding of modernist writers? Will it shed light on the interaction of images and text? By asking these broader questions, he has transformed the center’s collections and its institutional vision.”

Staley’s first coup for the center played out like a complicated sting operation. After convincing five University vice presidents that coveted acquisitions would put the center back on the map, he set out to snag the Stuart Gilbert collection of James Joyce materials inherited by a British widow living in France. To avoid any difficulties with the French authorities and the import/export figures, Staley moved the collection out of Paris in a bread truck.

“So we waited ’til Holy Thursday when things are at half mass in a Catholic country [and] got it out of Paris, got it to the airport in London, got it in Austin in three days, and here it was,” he said.

The collection turned out to be a gold mine: tissues with the missing link in “Finnegan’s Wake,” part of Joyce’s 10 thunder words (hundred-letter words), Joyce first editions that were worth the price of the acquisition and books stuffed with 5,000- and 10,000-pound Swiss franks that joined the center’s war chest when attempts to return them were spurned.

The resulting headline in the New York Times’ art section generated excitement around the University and proved to be the first of many during Staley’s tenure.

He calls his luck with three University presidents, William Cunningham, Larry Faulkner and William Powers, amazing.

“I thought it [the University] was an interesting place trying to make a great mark on the world,” he said. “And I thought, you know, this is a place that supports things. And so I haven’t been misled.”

President Powers said Staley’s vision, energy and brilliance are responsible for the center’s status as the world’s premier humanities research center. He also credits Staley with advancing the world’s understanding of culture by making the collection accessible to scholars.

“For a very long time, he [Staley] has been one of the very best leaders on our campus,” Powers said. “He leaves an unparalleled legacy, and he has been a marvelous friend. I will miss him, but I thank God I have known him.”

Barnard said one of Staley’s greatest contributions was to make the Ransom Center’s collections more accessible not just to students and scholars but also to the public.

“He has been dedicated to bringing life to the center’s collections through exhibitions and programs and by establishing long-term relationships with the writers and artists whose archives reside here,” Barnard said.

Staley said the center’s reputation attracts many collections. Robert De Niro’s came in an indirect way. The actor sent a curator to visit under the guise of a conservator looking for advice on costume preservation. The true nature of the visit was to explore the center as a potential home for De Niro’s extensive collection. Six to eight months later, Staley gladly accepted the array of film-related materials amassed over De Niro’s long, impressive acting career.

The author of 15 books and more than 60 essays and articles attributes his success to his enthusiasm. He holds two bachelor’s degrees, a master’s degree and a doctorate, but calls his entrée into the Joyce world as a young man his education. Staley is founding editor of the “James Joyce Quarterly,” a journal that he edited for 26 years.

Sigler said beyond Staley’s discrete skills such as being an internationally recognized scholar, a gifted administrator and remarkable fundraiser, he is incredibly passionate about the work he does.

“I understand what it’s all about. I enjoy my work. I am deeply, deeply, deeply attuned to the marketplace — the way it works and what goes on,” Staley said. “I have a large array of friends that I’ve been working with since I was a kid practically, and we keep our friends, we keep the people we work with, we follow things, and we understand them.”

Staley said what he enjoys most about his job is the people: the writers coming and going, the artists, the staff and the “brilliant young people.”

“That’s why I leave not worrying about this place — because I think they’re poised for the next stage,” he said.

Sigler called Staley’s energy contagious. “He encourages the staff to excel, and he inspires volunteers and donors to participate in the life of the center,” she said.

Barnard noted his fundraising skills. She said he enhanced the center’s endowments from $1 million to $25 million, which has enabled them to act quickly when important collections become available.

Staley will not take part in the center’s search for a new director but said his replacement should have a sense of humor.

“You’re dealing with writers and a great many people who were major talents, and don’t begin to think you’re one of them,” he said. “In every way, you’re with them … but it’s different. They’re writers. They’re artists. And many of them are writers of high achievement.”

A Joyce quote that Staley rattled off in the interview for this article typifies his own journey: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” He said it means: “The river is always moving, always changing and never changing.”

Staley plans to write books when he retires. One will detail his many adventures as the center’s director, and the other will explore how research in the humanities is changing and the effects it will have on institutions such as the Harry Ransom Center.