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Author | Martha Cooley |
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Illustrator | Amy Goldfarb |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Publisher | Little, Brown and Company |
Publication date | 1998 |
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 (1862–63), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–72) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like 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.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. Considered one of the 20th century's major poets, he is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. Through his trials in language, writing style, and verse structure, he reinvigorated English poetry. He also dismantled outdated beliefs and established new ones through a collection of critical essays.
Richard Aldington was an English writer and poet. He was an early associate of the Imagist movement. He was married to the poet Hilda Doolittle from 1911 to 1938. His 50-year writing career covered poetry, novels, criticism and biography. He edited The Egoist, a literary journal, and wrote for The Times Literary Supplement, Vogue, The Criterion and Poetry. His biography of Wellington (1946) won him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His contacts included writers T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Lawrence Durrell, C. P. Snow, and others. He championed Hilda Doolittle as the major poetic voice of the Imagist movement and helped her work gain international notice.
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Harold Hart Crane was an American poet. Provoked and inspired by T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane sought to write an epic poem, in the vein of The Waste Land, that expressed a more optimistic view of modern, urban culture than the one that he found in Eliot's work. In the years following his suicide at the age of 32, Crane has been hailed by playwrights, poets, and literary critics alike, as being one of the most influential poets of his generation.
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.
May Sarton was the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton, a Belgian-American novelist, poet, and memoirist. Although her best work is strongly personalised with erotic female imagery, she resisted the label of ‘lesbian writer’, preferring to convey the universality of human love.
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Shelley Sweeney is a Canadian archivist. She was university archivist at the University of Regina from 1983 to 1998, and the Head of the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections from 1998 to 2020. She helped found two regional archival organizations, the Saskatchewan Council of Archives and the Saskatchewan Archivists Society, and the University and Research Institutions section of the International Council on Archives. Sweeney is a charter member of the Academy of Certified Archivists and, with colleagues, wrote the first code of ethics for the Canadian archival profession.
Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot was the first wife of American-British poet T. S. Eliot, whom she married in 1915, less than three months after their introduction by mutual friends, when Vivienne was a governess in Cambridge and Eliot was studying at Oxford.
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Hugh Alexander Taylor was an English-born Canadian archivist, archival theorist and educator.
Barbara L. Craig is an archivist, archival educator and scholar. She has contributed to the scholarly literature of archival theory and professional practice in the areas of appraisal, the ethnographic study of practicing archivists and users of archives, and the history of archives in her study of the impact of technology on the record-keeping practices of the British Civil Service before 1960. She has an MA in history from McMaster University, a certificate in Principles and Administration of Archives from Library and Archives Canada, and a Certificate in Records Management from the Government of Ontario. In 1989 she completed a PhD in Archival Studies from the University of London. Her dissertation was titled "Hospital Records in London, England and the Province of Ontario, Canada, 1880 to 1950."
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. Exactly 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale were deposited in Princeton University Library in 1956 and were described as one of the best-known sealed archives in the world for many years. Per Hale's instructions, the letters were opened on January 2, 2020. Hale had specified that the letters would be embargoed for fifty years after the latter of their deaths; the Princeton Library gave its staff a few more months to get them ready for the public to read. 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.
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Judith Schiff was an American archivist. She was chief research archivist at Yale University and historian for the city of New Haven, Connecticut.
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.