Author | Martha Cooley |
---|---|
Illustrator | Amy Goldfarb |
Language | English |
Publisher | Little, Brown and Company |
Publication date | 1998 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
Pages | 336 pp |
ISBN | 978-0316158466 |
OCLC | 37694914 |
813/.54 | |
LC Class | PS3553 .O5646 A87 1998 |
The Archivist is an American novel by Martha Cooley, first published in a hardcover format by Little, Brown and Company in 1998. [1] The story makes extensive reference to the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and it dwells on themes such as guilt, insanity, and suicide. The book was reprinted in 1999 by Back Bay Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company.
Matthias Lane is a widower in his sixties. He works as an archivist at an unnamed library and is told to preserve a set of letters that T. S. Eliot once wrote and sent to Emily Hale. Roberta Spire, a graduate student in her thirties, appeals to Matthias for a look at Eliot's letters.
Emily Hale donated T. S. Eliot's letters to the library and gave specific instructions that they were not to be shown to the public until 2020. Her decision to donate the letters at all, however, went against the wishes of T. S. Eliot himself, who wanted Hale to destroy the letters after she had read them.
Both Matthias and Roberta are highly familiar with T. S. Eliot's poetry, as well as Eliot's personal background. The novel briefly retells the story of how Eliot placed his first wife, Vivienne Eliot, in a mental institution, and how she eventually died. It is gradually revealed that Matthias, similarly, placed his wife Judith in a mental institution, and she eventually committed suicide. Judith's death occurred twenty years before Matthias first meets Roberta. Roberta reminds Matthias of Judith, because both women are of Jewish ancestry, both read and write poetry, and both have done research on the Holocaust.
When Judith was in the mental institution, Dr. Clay forbade her to read newspapers. Yet Judith's aunt and uncle, Len and Carol, smuggled newspapers into her room, so that Judith could keep up with the aftermath of the Holocaust. After Judith's suicide, Matthias assumes that the newspapers contributed to Judith's insanity. However, later, when Matthias speaks to Roberta about his wife, he admits that his attempts to cut his wife off from the real world were what really made her sick:
She kept trusting me...I was like a paralyzed man. It's clearer to me now, what she need from me. But I got it all wrong. I tried to shield her from the present, from the city...I tried to conceal the terrifying things, to keep quiet about them. That's what got to her, more than anything else. She couldn't bear it. She couldn't bear that I, too, was silent. [2]
At the end of the novel, Matthias takes the Hale Letters out of the library and burns them. He believes that respecting the last wish of T. S. Eliot - that the letters be burned and not shown to the public - is a step toward atoning for Matthias's personal mistake of sending his wife Judith to a mental institution.
The actual letters of Eliot to Hale were kept in the Firestone Library, at Princeton University from 1956 to 2020. [3] [4] The letters were released to the public in January 2020, 50 years after Hale's death, per her instructions; in a surprise announcement, the estate of Eliot simultaneously released a posthumous statement from Eliot that he wrote in 1960, specifically for the release of the letters. [5] [6]
Matthias identifies himself as an "archivist", a "gatekeeper" who controls people's access to information. [7] The term "archivist" applies not only to Matthias, but also to Judith, because she keeps extensive records of Holocaust stories. [8] Judith is emotionally affected by her records; whereas Matthias's relationship to records is merely an effort to protect them, Judith's relationship to records is like that of a fire being fueled. Her passions refuse to be controlled, and she insists on acting upon her feelings, forming a sharp contrast to Matthias's passivity. [9] Judith fascinates Matthias, and terrifies him.
Brian Morton wrote a review of the novel for The New York Times, called it "a thoughtful and well-written first novel." He noted that it brought up serious questions such as morality's relationship with art and religion, and a person's relationship with his or her own past. However, Morton also said that Judith's confinement in a psychiatric ward was limited "by providing Judith with no worthy interlocutors -- with no one who understands her well enough to argue with her in an interesting way." [10]
Arlene Schmuland considers Matthias's final act of burning the Hale letters to be a metaphor for his breaking free of his library's code:
At the end of the novel, he breaks all of the stereotypes about archivists being passive, dedicated to their collections, and devoted to duty by allowing the woman access to a portion of the closed collection and then carrying the whole collection home and burning it in his back yard. [11]
Matthias's decision to burn the library materials has been criticized from an ethical standpoint. Verne Harris, an archivist in South Africa, [12] asked, "In destroying the letters is he protecting Eliot’s rights, serving the writer’s desire, or merely playing god?" [13] Eric Ketelaar, Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam, [14] has written, "The aspect I criticized was that of the archivist as a censor who decides that the memory of Eliot should be kept through his poetry, not through these letters. I censured the archivist who was guided by changes in his personal life to take a decision he was not entitled to take, neither legally nor morally." [15]
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). As with Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside. Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist and playwright. He is considered to be one of the 20th century's greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. His use of language, writing style, and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often re-evaluated long-held cultural beliefs.
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Charles Langbridge Morgan was a British playwright and novelist of English and Welsh parentage. The main themes of his work were, as he himself put it, "Art, Love, and Death", and the relation between them. Themes of individual novels range from the paradoxes of freedom, through passionate love seen from within and without, to the conflict of good and evil and the enchanted boundary of death (Sparkenbroke). He was the husband of Welsh novelist Hilda Vaughan.
Evelyn ('Lynette') Beatrice Roberts was a Welsh poet and novelist. Her poems were about war, landscape, and life in the small Welsh village where she lived. She published two poetry collections: Poems (1944) and Gods with Stainless Ears: A Heroic Poem (1951). Roberts' work was admired by many poets, including: T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Robert Graves. In later life, Roberts had a mental breakdown and stopped publishing. Her work was largely forgotten for the remainder of her life. She died in 1995.
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Isobel Armstrong, is a British academic. She is professor emerita of English at Birkbeck, University of London and a senior research fellow of the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. She is a fellow of the British Academy. She has been a visiting scholar at many institutions, including at Princeton University in 2016-2017. She is also a published poet. Armstrong is the younger sister of writer Diana Wynne Jones.
The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important English-language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's magazine The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and "These fragments I have shored against my ruins".
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Judith Sidney Hornabrook was the Chief Archivist of New Zealand at the Archives New Zealand from 1972 until 1982.
Emily Hale was an American speech and drama teacher, who was the longtime muse and confidante of the poet T. S. Eliot. There were 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale deposited in Princeton University Library in 1956, described as one of the best-known sealed archives in the world for many years. The archive was opened to the public on January 2, 2020. Hale had specified that the letters would be embargoed for fifty years after both of their deaths, and the Princeton Library staff needed a few months to prepare them. The day the Hale letters were opened, Harvard's Houghton Library issued an unexpected statement that Eliot had prepared in 1960, to be opened when Hale's archives were released. Princeton then released Hale's summary of their relationship.
Fifty years after the death of Eliot's purported muse, Princeton has unveiled hundreds of passionate — and deeply revealing — letters the poet wrote to her.