BJ. William Plomer

28. †Unpublished materials.

a. William Plomer Papers, Durham University Library. The largest Plomer archive includes diaries, manuscripts, drawings, notebooks, drafts of the ‘church operas’ (18, 19, and 21), material relating to the composition and publication of Notes for Poems (2), Paper Houses (3), The Family Tree (4), Sado (5), and other works, approximately six hundred books from Plomer’s library, many with marginal annotations, and letters to and from many correspondents, including copies of the letters to Leonard Woolf from the Hogarth Press Archives (see 27). According to Alexander a diary note for 28 June 1965 in notebook B10 includes remarks about Waley (see D26).

b. Other materials. Alexander (40) notes that Plomer was an inveterate letter writer, that ‘many thousands survive’, and that for many years after his stay in Japan he maintained correspondence with Japanese friends, and Morris (36a) reports that Plomer’s correspondence with Mori Katsue (see 7 and 10a) spanned ‘fifty years or so’. Nothing in the published record, however, identifies the location of Plomer’s letters to Japanese acquaintances, and the major libraries of Tokyo have no record of them. The likelihood is that many were lost during the war and that others remain in private hands. See also 26 and 27d.