In past blog posts, I've remarked that both Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea both did a less-than-ideal job of preserving their literary papers. I haven't been able to find, for example, their lengthy correspondence. There's no collection of "Robert Anton Wilson papers" at an academic library.
In yesterday's blog post, I mentioned that Michael Johnson's latest Substack included an unpublished letter from RAW to Kurt Smith, and when I asked about it in a comment, Michael explained in a comment that there are more where that came from:
"Here’s the story:
"Kurt liked some writing I did about RAW online. I still lived in Berkeley. This must have been around 2008, I’m guessing. He told me he had a fantastic correspondence with RAW saved - actual letters you send through the mails - and would I like to read that? Of course I said yes. So he drove over to my house and we hung out for a couple hours. He left a shoebox crammed with his RAW correspondence, most of which was from Dublin to San Francisco. But some letters were from RAW in Los Angeles.
"I spent a couple hours at a Xerox place on Solano in Berkeley, makeing copies of the letters. RAW also sent a lot of fliers for talks he’d give, newspaper clipping, and other ephemera that had a Discordian tinge to it.
"My RAW book never materialized, but Gabriel [Kennedy] found out I had this trove and asked for it for his work-in-progress, and I had my wife scan most of the pertinent stuff - if anything seemed even moderately apropos to what I imagined his aims were, I had it scanned and sent.
"I don’t remember giving the shoebox back to Kurt, but I must have.
"The stuff is really great. Gabriel made excellent use of it for Chapel Perilous, I think. I have shared bits of the stuff when it was totally warranted, like in my long essay in Straight Outta Dublin.
"There’s a letter that I think was in Beyond Chaos and Beyond in which RAW writes to Greg Hill and says he’s been writing letters all day, since early in the morning, and he was writing to Hill late at night. He was a FANTASTIC letter writer. I have a few short things RAW wrote to me via email, but I suspect typewriting mail and sending it out via snails was his metier.
"I hope Hilaritas publishes as many letters as they can find in a book. I hope to get a chance to edit or write a Foreword or something for that dream-book.
"The unseen RAW/Shea correspondence - I fear it’s missing or it would have turned up by now. What a drag if it’s lost! I have found a number of other RAW letters that haven’t been published."
If you are a RAW fan, probably a good idea to subscribe to Michael's Overweening Generalist Substack.
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