The Archivist: A Novel (1998)

Recommended by Loel.

Matthias Lane, a reclusive widower in his 60's, is an archivist at a university library. The jewel of his collection is a set of letters that T. S. Eliot wrote to his friend Emily Hale over a 20-year period -- letters that Hale bequeathed to the library, provided that they be kept sealed until the year 2020. This is his story and that of his wife and family. Although The Archivist takes place on an intimate stage -- no more than two or three characters are typically present in a scene -- the narrative poses large questions. Should art and religion seek to console us for the world's evils or to sharpen our awareness of them? Where do we draw the line between our obligation to remember a terrible past and our desire to rid ourselves of its burdens? Once one has become aware of the existence of radical evil, how should one conduct one's life?
Most of the novel is narrated by Matthias, and with utter persuasiveness Cooley captures his cautious, scrupulous, restrained and intelligent voice. This is a brilliantly imagined tale of an archivist whose interest in T. S. Eliot and her family's history dovetail into a sad but fascinating story. Some of the best writing about mental issues that I have ever read. ( )

Spoilers, if it can be -- I was pretty disappointed in this book. It was hard to care. The characters didn't feel alive, and the dialogue wasn't well constructed when it was used for explication.

Wow ... the prose is gorgeous. The story is a little dense, a little intellectual, but simultaneously compelling. There are many excerpts of TS Eliot's poems, and I have only recently become slightly familiar with The Four Quartets, and I found the characters' intense devotion to Eliot's work illuminating. In the back of my mind, even though this story slightly pre-dates the life and struggles of Sylvia Plath, I see many parallels in the solace of poetry for those who wrestle with the truths of the world. ( )

"Who can tell another person what to endure - how much, and for how long?"

I read with no preconceptions about the book or its author but almost immediately it swept me up, took me in, began to resonate and haunt. The main character, who narrates much of the novel, is Matthias, named by his mother "after the disciple who replaced Judas Iscariot". He works as an academic archivist, and one of the plots revolves around Matt's relationship with Roberta, a poet and student who wants to see the library's collection of letters written by TS Eliot to a woman correspondent, Emily Hale, even though she knows the letters have been sequestered until 2020.

"I saw myself then, and still do, as inheritor of a rich tradition, one that straddles the line between mind and spirit. The great librarians have all been religious men - monks, priests, rabbis - and the stewardship of books is an act of homage and faith."

Throughout the novel runs a set of parallels. Between Matt's dead wife, Judith, and Roberta - both Jewish, both poets. Between Matt and Judith's marriage and the troubled relationship of TS Eliot and his wife Vivienne (both wives spending periods of time in mental institutions). This is a book in which the past is always present, unhelpfully so. Matt broods on his relationship with his wife, who committed suicide in a mental hospital. Roberta, too, broods - on the problematic (for her) fact that her parents raised her without telling her that they'd converted from Judaism to Christianity when they escaped from Germany. Roberta feels betrayed, choosing to identify as Jewish when she finds out about her past and that her grandparents had died in a camp. Judith feels many betrayals, and it is perhaps the weight of them that results in her taking her life: she feels betrayed many times over by Matt; she blames him for her incarceration in the mental hospital; blames him for destroying her own 'archive', a file of newspaper cuttings that Matt considers 'morbid', and which contained material about Jews who survived the War. She also feels betrayed by her parents, who died when she was a baby. She feels doubly betrayed when she later learns from her aunt and uncle who brought her up that her parents died not in a car accident, as she'd always been told, but had been shot by anti-Communists in southern Russia. Judith is simply unable to move on from her own past and from the past generally - the weight of history, the fact that so many people looked the other way as so many of the Jewish people were systematically disposed of. "The war wasn't somewhere else, at some other time. It was irrevocably present for her. The terrible things that had been done, not randomly but under unimaginably well-organized circumstances - these were realities her psyche couldn't encompass or deflect. Europe's crisis set her adrift. It became impossible for her to distinguish between the world's darkness and her own."

There are so many layers to this novel, so many connections that weave in and out, that it's almost impossible to review it without doing more than skimming the surface. The major themes are betrayal, of course, and also the concept of truths and lies. It also deals with the question of faith and religion. Matt's mother was a Presbyterian with strong religious beliefs (she was also deeply unhappy). "My mother lived with a barely suppressed anxiety about her status with respect to the life to come. The good acts she might perform would never, she believed, fully counterbalance her various sins. The roots of my mother's faith somehow managed not to encounter sustaining soil, the come-what-may of forgiveness."

Matt realises, finally, that Judith "never wanted me to save her, only to love her as she was." He tries to help Roberta towards a sense of perspective regarding her parents before it's too late and her mother is dead - '"While they fled, saving themselves, their parents stayed and were doomed. And how could they tell you that? How?" I gestured toward Eliot's poems. 'After such knowledge, what forgiveness?'' He tells Roberta about Judith: "I did what her family had done, what most people did - what most people always do - I tried to conceal the terrifying things, to keep quiet about them...She'd always believed I'd resist silence - that I was capable of resistance. And I wasn't."

In a final act of trust, Matt allows Roberta to see not the Emily Hale letters but the draft poems contained amongst the letters. Finally, he burns the Emily Hale letters, which he believes Eliot had never wanted other eyes to see - "Poetry was what he left us. It was all that mattered. The rest is not our business." [August 2004] ( )