The Archivist: A Novel

by Martha Cooley

Overview

A young woman's impassioned pursuit of a sealed cache of T. S. Eliot's letters lies at the heart of this emotionally charged novel — a story of marriage and madness, of faith and desire, of jazz-age New York and Europe in the shadow of the Holocaust. The Archivist was a word-of-mouth bestseller and one of the most jubilantly acclaimed first novels of recent years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316158466
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	04/08/1999
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	677,346
Product dimensions:	5.56(w) x 11.16(h) x 0.91(d)

Reading Group Guide

1. Matt seems to have found the perfect profession for himself -- an introvert with an incredible respect for books and literature should, of course, be an archivist. It was quite shocking, then, that he would betray his passion by burning the Hale letters. How does he let us know that this betrayal is what needs to be done?

2. What, exactly, do you think is at the core of Judith's paranoia? She didn't know the reality of her parents' demise until just before she took her life, but it is as if she had an inkling all along. Was it this sense that made her different from other Americans hearing of war-torn Europe? Was it perhaps this unknown connection that forced her to take it all so personally? Can we account for Judith's obsession?

3. T. S. Eliot's contradictions are cited more than once in the book ("Teach us to care and not to care"; "Time the destroyer is time the preserver") and are one of the reasons Judith and Matt admire him. How does this relate to this work as a whole? Think specifically about betrayal versus trust.

4. One vital message addresses the importance of our religious roots. Judith and Roberta both suffered as a result of religious lies. It was perhaps the most important factor in Judith's undoing, and the driving force for most of Roberta's actions. Do you think it's realistic that religion plays such a large role in the lives of the characters? What role does religion play in your own life?

5. We are all products of our experience. When Matt and Roberta speculate about T. S. Eliot's reasons for institutionalizing his wife and converting to the Anglican Church (p. 38), how do their experiences influence their speculations?

6. The character development of Lottie and Sam so late in the book is fascinating, as we already know so many of the players. With whom do your sympathies lie, Lottie and Sam, or Carol and Len?

7. Although Matt suffers from a guilty conscience, he acknowledges that even in hindsight he wouldn't have done things differently for Judith. How much do you think Matt's attraction to solitude plays a role in his actions?

8. Matt's disdain for his mother's brand of Christianity leads to what he calls his own deity -- a combination of both parents' beliefs. How does his God serve him?

9. What are the extent of Matt's feelings for Roberta? Is he in love with her?

10. The ultimate contradiction in life, betrayal versus trust, is the underlying theme of this book. We see betrayal take many forms: religion, relationships, profession, self. What we are left with at the end of the book, however, is a sense of well-being. How does the author make this happen?

Editorial Reviews

Raiders of the Lost Archives

The Morgan Library in New York recently acquired letters written by Thomas Pynchon to his agent, but the head librarian decreed that this correspondence will not be available to scholars during the author's lifetime; in other words, Pynchon has to croak before we can read them. A few miles south, in Princeton, New Jersey, there's another potentially explosive series of letters that are locked up until the year 2019 -- ones that renowned poet T. S. Eliot wrote to a woman named Emily Hale.

I know what you're thinking: Emily Hale -- who's she?

"Emily Hale was probably the only person Eliot honestly confided in," says poet Roberta Spire. "With others Eliot equivocated about his feelings for Vivien. But I figure he told Emily the truth."

The Vivien that Spire refers to was Eliot's first wife, the one the poet stuck in a mental institution after 23 years of marriage. Spire is a little crazy herself. She recently tried to convince Matthias Lane, caretaker of the special collection at Princeton, to let her read the Eliot-Hale letters before their scheduled 2019 unveiling.

Spire and Lane are fictional, of course -- characters in The Archivist, a marvelous new novel by Martha Cooley. It's her first novel, and it's good. But it's not just a good first novel -- it's a damn good novel, period. It reads like a crackerjack detective novel: Will she or won't she get to read the secret letters?

Speaking of detectives, let me intrude a moment to describe Cooley as if I were a private eye. You see, right after I meet the dame, she jokes about women writers being interviewed by fashion magazines, which spend most of the interview describing what the woman is wearing. Although I don't write for fashion mags, I have to tell you about Cooley's garb. The problem is, I don't know couture from Cocteau. I can only say that Cooley is wearing blue. A blue skirt. Blue blouse. Blue sweater thing. Little blue hat. I think of a lazy lake full of sailboats. A clear sky during the church picnic. Cooley herself is not blue. She's both relaxed and edgy. As if she'd just bumped off some blackmailer and is now ready to talk serious literature.

I ask her how she started the book. Cooley slowly sips some ice water (she was offered numerous liquids, but chose ice water). Puts the glass down. Tells me she began it in Moscow, 1988. Her ex-husband was working there. Was he a spy? She shakes her head: "Businessman." Then she tells a story: "One breakfast, I read an article about Emily Hale's bequest of a collection of T. S. Eliot letters to Princeton University. I thought, 'If I was that librarian, I'd be in the library with a flashlight reading those letters.'" She then gives a sly laugh. "Who'dah thunk that T. S. had a girl on the side!"

Up until that moment in Moscow, Cooley had only written short stories. "I was getting nowhere with them," she says with a frown. "I was feeling stupid...like I should just forget writing. But I gave myself a little exercise of writing a character study of this Princeton librarian. I pictured him as this proper guy -- or professionally correct guy -- tempted as he'd never been before to breach his ethics and read these letters. But then, almost immediately, another character showed up. Another transgressor into this trove of letters."

That transgressor turned out to be poet Roberta Spire. And before Cooley knew it, she'd started a novel about the letters. And marriages. And T. S. Eliot.

"So what's this about Eliot's crazy wife?" I ask.

Cooley gives a sad smile. "Different people have different opinions. The Eliots' marriage was tortured and torturing. They were enmeshed in this mutual need and mutual repulsion. Vivien was overdrugged. She took ether. She was also probably manic depressive. And I would think that living with her would be a nightmare. She would get hysterical and have these bouts of colitis. It would make Eliot queasy. He just didn't want to get anywhere near menstruation and fever and weird stuff. Girl aliments were not his cup of tea."

Eliot wrote Hale letters all during his marriage, but after his wife died he found himself with "this status as unredeemed sinner. And it blew up in his face. Emily Hale was part of the debris of that explosion," Cooley says.

Asked about recent charges of Eliot's anti-Semitism, Cooley frowns. "He was not someone I would have wanted to have dinner with on a Saturday night, but did he change the landscape of modern poetry? Better believe it."

What about the poetry itself? "I think 'Four Quartets' is quite something, to put it mildly," Cooley says, then quotes five or six lines from memory. "'Ash Wednesday' is quite something as well. The prayer that ends it is quite beautiful. It's gorgeous, almost liturgical."

She recites lines from that one. I pour more ice water -- for me. When Cooley finishes, I ask her abut LeRoi Jones, another poet she quotes in her book. She tells me she loves early Jones, but "fell off the log sometimes in the late '70s when Jones was in his Maoist phrase. I saw him read these ideological poems while these girls stood behind him doing these Rockette kick things, chanting, 'Mao Tse Tung! Mao Tse Tung!' I thought, This is not the man who wrote those wonderful poems, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suidide Note."

We talk more about poetry. "I love the work of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert," she says. "The Mr. Cogito poems. They're these unbelievably funny, wry, very political and personal poems all done through this persona of this man Mr. Cogito."

Cooley is a novelist, and she does read fiction, of course. She raves about The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. "I was just constantly talking to the book while I was reading it. I was also learning the whole time. 'Look at how he didn't do flashbacks the way they're usually done.' This may sound like it's all vivisection, but what was nice about that book was that Ishiguro kept what John Gardner calls the 'fictional spell.'"

Ah, that magic! Martha Cooley has mastered that very same spell. Who knows what you'll say to The Archivist as you read it. I said a lot of "Wow," and "Oh, wow"s. A "Holy cow" or two. And finally, "Great book. Great book." The Archivist has also inspired me to plot a break-in at a certain library. I won't tell you if it's the one at Princeton. Or the Morgan. But I'll surely have my flashlight handy for my nocturnal letter reading. And if I'm busted, I'll just plead insanity -- tell the cops that I'm crazy over Martha Cooley's novel, The Archivist.

—David Bowman

bn.com

Engrossing.

Entertainment Weekly

Compelling.

Boston Globe

A memorable achievement.

Washington Post Book World

The reserved voice of 65-year-old Matthias Lane, archivist at a prestigious Eastern university, opens this remarkably assured first novel, a complex and beautifully written tale of loss, crises of faith and resolution. Then we read the anguished journal of his wife, Judith, a poet who committed suicide in a mental institution in 1965, the same year as T.S. Eliot died. This is just one of the many parallels between the life of the poet and those of Matt and Judith (Eliot, of course, committed his own wife, Vivienne, to an asylum). Grad student and poet Roberta Spire requests Matt's permission to look at the sealed correspondence between Eliot and a Boston woman named Emily Hale, to whom he may have bared his emotions. Roberta has more than an academic interest in this correspondence. She is immensely disturbed by her parents' belated revelation that they were Jews who fled Germany and converted to Christianity in the U.S., and she feels that Eliot's conversion to Catholicism may hold insights for her. She is unaware that Judith's mental breakdown was related to the Holocaust, but Matt is quick to see the relationship and to recognize the parallels between Eliot's reclusive personality and his own emotional detachment. As several wrenching surprises about the past are revealed, Matt is finally opened to his pain and guilt and to an affirmative act of connectedness and trust. With its sinewy interplay of moral, spiritual and philosophical issues, its graceful interjection of lines of poetry and references to jazz, the novel first engages the reader's intellect. Soon, however, the emotions are also engaged, and the narrative acquires unflagging suspense as it peels back layers of secrets. This is an auspicious debut from a writer who already has mastered the craft.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Matthias Lane quietly inhabits his work as the keeper of an unnamed university library's special collection, which includes the letters T.S. Eliot wrote to Emily Hale. When a young poet requests access to the sequestered papers, Matt must confront a personal history he's been avoiding--a mystery that, ironically, recalls the terrible pain between Eliot and his wife, Vivienne. Cooley builds upon a parallel between Vivienne and Matt's dead wife, Judith, to reveal a staid conformity that cannot withstand the failure of love. Told through Matt's recollections and Judith's journals, this excellent first effort chips away at issues of religious faith, madness, and the troubling intersection between life and art.

Library Journal

The Archivist is a romance and a novel of ideas....A deeply symbolic story about privacy and memory.

BookPage

[A] thoughtful and well-written first novel, suffused withintellectual and moral integrity.
— The New York Times Book Review

Brian Morton

It is rare and gratifying to read a novel about people who take literature seriously, who practically live and die by books….The Archivist is a memorable achievement.
—Washington Post Book World

Steven Moore

A literary detective story…beautifully paced and gripping….An impressive debut.
—The Observer (London)

Christina Patterson

A sophisticated and compelling debut—about libraries though without a particle of dust, and with passion galore though about inability to love. Matthias Lane has been bookish all his life and may not seem like much to write about—a buttoned-up man in his 60s, chief archivist of rare books and manuscripts in a university library. But when a grad student named Roberta Spire asks to see T.S. Eliot's letters to his passionate but unrequited lover Emily Hale, a set of associations is let loose that will reveal the painful truth (and deceit) of Matt's past life and the painful truth as well of a great sweep of the 20th century. Though 30 years his junior, Roberta reminds Matt of his own dead wife, Judith—who was also beautiful, also passionate, and also a poet. There are other parallels between Roberta and Judith—both had been deceived, in one way or another, about their own past, their parents' past, and their own Jewishness. And both, in different ways, were connected with the fate of the Jews in WWII Europe. Judith, in fact, in the years after the war, grew so obsessed by the emerging details of the Holocaust—and by people's having stood by and done nothing—that she became unhinged and was committed by Matt to an institution (just as Eliot had earlier committed his own wife Vivienne), where a fate awaited her that will grip any reader and that will haunt the self-blaming Matt forever. Roberta's appearance causes him to revisit that past, revisit—and revise—his own guilt, and suffer again both the intensity of his love for the doomed Judith and the terrible, fear-based inadequacy of it. What sounds like an entirely dour tale takes wings in Cooley'shands, is enlivened by her eye for character, detail, place, period, every small human nuance—and by her perfect, apt quotations from Eliot's poems. A superlative, serious, gripping literary treasure.

Kirkus Reviews