The Archivist By Martha Cooley
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
I first read The Archivist when it was released in paperback in 1999. I was drawn in by the cover and the concept: an archivist, a woman, old letters and the connection of lives in history. There are many plot summaries so I will keep mine brief: the archivist, advanced in years, is a man named Matthias, the younger woman is Roberta, a poet who seeks some letters written by T.S. Eliot. Matthias's deceased wife does have about a third of the book in diary entry form - entries made while she is committed in an asylum - but the main purpose of Matthias's wife is to draw an analog between him and Eliot, whose wife was also committed.
After my first reading, I hated the book. I hated it so much, in fact, that I kept it on my shelves thinking that I would try to let time and personal context really change themselves so I could see if that earlier version of myself lacked some form of depth or experience that was blinding me to what might lie deeper within the novel.
More than 10 years have past, my urban life has given way to a rural one, I'm now married, not single, and birth and death have marked me in ways that, while not making me an entirely different person, have etched things in my understanding of life that make it more comprehensive.
Although I do not hate the book, I go away from it with the same misgivings - that the book's central theme on religious conversion is a failure because Cooley doesn't understand religion or a religious identity. The result dilutes her characters and the other themes of the book.
If anything, my experiment in time and rereading validates that the current version of myself retains that younger core; that some of the intuitions I would have had difficulty expressing are now more concrete because of experience and maturity. 0316158461 This has become, unintentionally I assure you, the third book in a row I've read about repression, silence, isolation, and lies, and how they destroy you bit by bit. When I began reading this, I expected something of a love story, something along the lines of Possession, by the description on the back cover.
I could not have beenn more wrong. It is instead, a very introspective, harsh self examination by a man who happens to work at an archivist at a prominent university, in a place that is unnamed but is likely Harvard or Yale or something of that ilk. The present day story centers around his interactions with a grad student by the name of Roberta who wants to see letters donated by a woman who corresponded with TS Eliot, letters that aren't supposed to be opened up until 2020. But what it is actually about is a man who is coming to terms with his relationship with his late wife, (the entire central section is written by her) his family, his own fear of and need for solitude that ruined his marriage, and the nature of faith.
The poems of TS Eliot are woven through the text. I found them moving even without knowing anything about Eliot (and trust me, I really do not know anything about him), though I imagine that this book would be all the more moving if you are an Eliot fan. The book uses Eliot's familial struggles with his wife as a mirror for the cental character's pain as we float in and out of his head. The central debate on Christianity vs. Judaism that affects much of the interactions of the text (there's also quite a bit Jewish Holocaust and war guilt to be dealt with here) is also interwoven into Eliot's own conversion and repudiation of his wife Vivienne.
The only problem I did have with the text is that I sometimes felt that the various chunks of it were jarringly seperated. The central section dominates too much of the book, in my opinion. It is fascinating, but I lost track of what was happening with the actual characters in the present day. I also felt that it could hit you over the head with it's dry morals a bit too much. Though one could argue that the weighty subject matter deserves that.
All in all, a great read, though, like my last few, quite oppressive and depressing. 0316158461 You know that email chain letter, Bad Analogies from High School English Papers, the one that went He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree? That's the feeling this book gave me a lot of the time. It's about a librarian in charge of, and obsessed with, a collection of letters T.S. Eliot wrote while separated from his wife, who was in a mental hospital. As it turns out (surprise!), the librarian himself was also separated from his wife, who was in a mental hospital. Now, echoes like that are a perfectly valid formal device, but they shouldn't be so loud. (Quiet, please, this is a library.)
My three stars are for the middle section, the one from the wife's perspective, lighter-handed and with some affecting insights into mental health care as it was in the 1950s. 0316158461 It would appear that I purchased a copy of Martha Cooley's novel at least a decade ago & never read it or perhaps began it while traveling in the U.K., with BritRail ticket stubs parked with the book. I was most likely captivated by the novel's suggested attempt to pair the poetry of T.S. Eliot & his relationship with his wife, who was eventually placed in an asylum, with an American man & his wife, who also was sent to a psychiatric hospital. Alas, my own appraisal after finally reading The Archivist is that the author was ill-equipped to deal with a rather complicated structure. What occurs is a potentially interesting story with many dangling possibilities but with a definite lack of cohesion.
At the outset, we encounter Matthias Lane, age 65, an archivist whose duties include presiding over a wealth of letters from Emily Hale, an American who was a longtime friend & confidant of T.S. Eliot, whose English wife has been incarcerated due to mental instability. We learn that Mr. Eliot seems to have suddenly parted company with Ms. Hale when the Nobel laureate's wife Vivienne dies, though most of the interaction between Eliot & Hale was via posted mail.
There he is a hugely successful poet--a man released from an awful marriage, with a woman friend who would marry him instantly. And what does he do? He rejects her completely, isolates himself for a decade, lives like a hermit and at the end of a decade suddenly marries his secretary--a woman almost 40 years his junior.Meanwhile, we learn that Matthias, once happily married to a woman named Judith, also a poet, has likewise dealt with his wife's increasingly bizarre behavior, causing her to be taken to an institution for help in regaining the ability to cope with daily life. Matthias visits her on a regular schedule, as do Judith's adoptive parents Len & Carol but she never regains an ability to cope, drifting deeper into a nether sphere of her own consciousness, though the prescribed drugs are perhaps thought to have been detrimental.
Matthias Lane's wife Judith & another woman, Roberta Spire, also a poet as well as a graduate student, someone who who is very intensely in search of the secrets of Eliot's relationship with Emily Hale that may be conveyed within the letters, to be kept under lock & key, unrevealed to the general public until 2020 as it turns out, are both Jewish women raised as Christians. Thus, Judith & Roberta are each exceedingly perplexed by issues of identity & in the case of Matthias's wife Judith, very preoccupied with the issue of the Holocaust, so much so that it seems to affect her sense of well-being, interfering with what had seemed a happy marriage.
The poetry of T.S. Eliot, rather than being used to meaningfully encapsulate the lives of these key characters, is employed as a kind of intermittent decoration within The Archivist. The excerpts do not seem to act in support of the characters or their situations, though Eliot's poetry does have some limited peripheral value for those who find that it represents an important voice. We never learn about the relationship between Eliot & Emily Hale, though Matthias appears aware of content of the letters. It is indicated that Judith had become an archivist of evil, a nice phrasing perhaps but not really substantiated, even though her behavior is increasingly erratic.
In my view, Eliot's poetry is as profound it is varied. We have The Wasteland, something I feel stands a a kind of intellectual Rosetta Stone for the 20th Century, or at least the first half of it. But we also have poetry that involves an almost perpetual quest for meaning via various formal religious vestiges, a search that culminates in his declaring himself an Anglo-Catholic, something I'd forgotten about until rereading much of Eliot's poetry. And, let's not forget that Great Tom (as Mr. Eliot was sometimes called) also authored those wonderful little poems dealing with practical cats. Thus, T.S. Eliot takes us on a path that leads from complex symbol dissection to considerable feline whimsy.
Eliot stated in Little Gidding, The Four Quartets that...Every poem is an epitaph. I feel that Martha Cooley should have employed some form of invented poetry for both Judith Lane & Roberta Spire to relate their individual life stories & their inner complexity. The author should also have allowed Matthias Lane to at least insinuate how the letters entrusted to the university for which Matthias serves as archivist to point to some similarity between the madness of both Judith & Eliot's wife Vivienne, or even to eventually infer that there was little or no point of similarity. In the end, we have a narrative that displays for the reader little connective fabric, though it seemed to have been forecast. Matthias does tell the reader:
Words, phrases, then a few lines came to me, pieces of different poems Judith had recited. I was hearing her voice, reedy & dense, profoundly erotic & powerful: an instrument of connection & release. I put my head down, cupped my face in my hands & wept for Judith and for myself. I wept for my terror & my silence, for Judith's courage & her madness; for all our shared loss.This is expressed within a small church in Manhattan where the couple had lived early on in their marriage. In fact, New York City & Jazz might be said to be major characters, or at least primary influences in Martha Cooley's The Archivist. The actions of Matthias & his personal responsibility for decisions made in dealing with his wife's illness & ultimately as archivist are also at the heart of the novel.
What we encounter is not without interest but I felt that ultimately the framework for the novel exceeded the author's ability to properly navigate it. Because it isn't clear from my review comments, the period detailed in the novel would seem to be from the late 1940s to approximately the early 1970s. And with all of the characters seeming to cast backward glances in search of identity, I would like to offer some more hopeful words from Mr. Eliot:
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning
The end is where we start from
*Author's photo image included within my review, followed by one of T.S. Eliot with Emily Hale + an inset of one of his letters to her, and finally the image of a young T.S. Eliot. **My own inserted Eliot quote is from Little Giddings, the Four Quartets. 0316158461 Prisoners live in full awareness of the existence of an external reality, but the cell is of greater significance. My mother was the gatekeeper.
ספר חזק הכולל עלילה מתוחכמת ואפלה שנעה בשלושה מישורים:
במישור הראשון משולש היחסים בין ט. ס. אליוט, אישתו ויויאן ואמילי הייל. מערכת היחסים בין ט. ס. אליוט ואישתו ויויאן היתה רעועה. חלק תולים את התפוררות הנישואים במצבה הבריאותי והנפשי של ויויאן שאושפזה לבסוף במוסד המטפל במחלות נפש ונפטרה שם. בכל תקופת אישפוזה, במשך 10 שנים אליוט לא ביקר את אישתו אף לא פעם אחת. שנים לאחר פטירתה הוא נישא למזכירתו הצעירה ממנו ב 30 שנים.
במקביל לנשואיו, היתה לאליוט מערכת יחסים עם אמילי הייל. היא חייה בארהב והוא באנגליה ולכן קיימת תכתובת ענפה בינהם הכוללת מעל ל 1,000 מכתבים. הייל היתה המוזה שלו כנראה הוא גם אהב אותה ולא ברור אם היה להם רומן אבל אין ספק שהם נפגשו לאורך השנים.
לאחר מותה של ויויאן, הייל היתה בטוחה שאליוט ינשא לה אולם הוא לא. כשהוא נישא למזכירתו הצעירה ממנו ב 30 שנים אמילי הייל סבלה מהתמוטטות עצבים כל כך קשה שהיה צורך לאשפז אותה.
אליוט שרף את מכתביה של הייל אך היא העבירה את המורשת של המכתבים לפרינסטון למשמרת עד 2020 אז יהיו פתוחים לציבור הרחב.
המכתבים הללו הם הציר סביבו חגה העלילה במישור השני:
מאט הוא ספרן בשנות ה 60 שלו. הוא מנהל את אוסף הייל בפרינסטון. במהלך אחד מהימים פוגש מאט את מרתה שפייר המתעניינת באוסף המכתבים בתקווה שהם ילמדו אותה על אליוט ויסייעו לה להעשיר את כתיבת השירים שבה היא עוסקת.
מרתה בת ה 35 היא בת לניצולי שואה שלאחר המלחמה היגרו מהולנד. הוריה מעולם לא שיתפו אותה בקורותיהם בזמן המלחמה ובאופן שבו ניצלו.
השואה, הרוע של השואה, השתיקה של הסביבה מהווים את ציר העלילה השלישי בספר. הציר הזה מספר את סיפור אשמת הניצולים באמצעות סיפורה של ג'ודית, אישתו של מאט.
הספר כולל 4 פרקים. החלק השני הוא יומן שניהלה ג'ודית. אחד הפרקים החזקים שקראתי בספרות והוא מראה כיצד הרוע מחלחל לחיי הפרט גם במרחק השנים. ג'ודית אוספת קטעי עיתונות שקשורים לשואה ולניצולים. היא נשאבת לתוך הצער וחווה את הרוע במלוא עוצמתו מה שמעורר אצלה שאלות על אמונה ��אלוהים ודת. הסיחרור של ג'ודית מוביל אותה ואת מאט למחוזות אפלים בהם מאט ניצב משותק וחסר יכולת תגובה מול עוצמת הרגש והחוויה של ג'ודית.
מאט מנסה לסייע לג'ודית, אבל אהבתו אינה מספיקה להחזיק את נפשה המתרסקת של ג'ודית שמתחילה לחוות אפיזודות פסיכוטיות.
החלקים השלישי והרביעי הם סגירת מעגל של מאט באמצעות מרתה שפייר. מרתה חווה את הכאב שבהסתרה בדיוק כפי שג'ודית חווה אותו. מאט סוגר את המעגל הפרטי שלו באמצעות מרתה.
כפי שכתבתי ספר מתוחכם עם עלילה אפלה. הורדתי לספר כוכב כי אני מרגישה שלא הבנתי את הפרק האחרון של הספר ואת סגירת המעגל הסופית של מאט. 0316158461
This book created a dark sense. Not noir, but a sense of foreboding and of something evil lurking. I'm a sucker for that. Witness my liking Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which many of my Facebook friends turn up their noses at. Apparently that makes me want to find out *what is going on.*
The story is of a young couple who marries in 1945. She's a poet. He's a librarian (the archivist of the title). He's a Christian, she a Jew. He can't accept what she's going through as everybody learns what happened during the Holocaust, and he can't tolerate looking too closely at it himself. So he tries to block her preoccupation and stifle her creativity on the subject. Although he believes he's protecting her, he's defending himself. Already he subtly looks down on her religion. She gradually falls apart and gets institutionalized for good (which is like nothing that happens today). This parallels what happened in T.S. Eliot's relationship with his wife, so snippets of his and other poetry are part of the narrative.
The book is about how the husband failed the wife in his ability to relate to her.
The book is also about the impact of their faith traditions on what happens. Not only is the husband the male, but also he's part of the dominant religious tradition of their locale.
The book has some flaws. As I put in some of my comments there was some confusion of dates and ages. That's important because it's a little bit of a challenge to keep the people straight. The young couple is of the greatest generation, i.e., those who were of age to fight in WWII. That makes them the age of my parents, but for many readers, it would be the age of their grandparents. Different events happen along the line that relate to where they are in history. For example, the wife goes into the hospital in 1959, in her 40s. Meanwhile the present (in the novel) is the 1980s, when the husband is in his mid-60s. One of the mistakes would have added another five years onto his age, but being in his 70s during the present day action would have been even less plausible. I say that because he seems a little too young for his 60s -- except that since I'm in mine, of course I'm young at heart - ha!
The male protagonist's character is a little off, as though the author couldn't do men just right. Both my husband and I arrived at that conclusion independently.
The religious attributions are a little odd. Since both the male and female are utterly without community, then it could mean each had arrived at idiosyncratic beliefs. I think you'd have to say that to make sense of it. Also, I think the author leaves the impact from the male's religious attitudes not just subtle but underdeveloped.
The author perhaps couldn't make up her mind or didn't know whether the woman's mental illness was something that would have happened anyway or whether it was in response to relationship issues, religious factors, and the times. The author didn't make a clear case for either one of those, so that took away from her point.
And I wish a little more had been done with Eliot's poetry. I'm not much of a poetry aficionado, so I could have used that. I have heard that Eliot had antisemitic tendencies, but whether they impacted what he wrote I don't know, and it didn't seem to have anything to do with the story.
All that being said, the book did lend itself to discussion of the issues at hand, even though the author's portrayal of them was through a glass darkly.
It didn't bother me that their lives paralleled those of Eliot and his wife. Some Goodreads reviewers thought that seemed contrived, but they are probably very young and don't know how strange life is!
I will say that this book was recommended by a clergyman-scholar involved in an interfaith foundation who thought it would be a good book for interfaith couples to read. In that respect, I just wish it hadn't had the woman going down the tubes!
I would have probably given this book three stars, except that my husband and I read it together. What we put into it raised it to a 4. 0316158461 Martha Cooley obviously went to a lot of trouble setting up the various patterns and parallels in this very tightly constructed book. I wish I had enjoyed it more. But really, she might have done better if she hadn’t been trying quite so hard.
Let me explain. There are three main characters in the book – Matthias, the archivist of the title (who is custodian of a cache of T.S. Eliot’s letters, sealed for the next 60 years, and a potential treasure trove for scholars), his wife Judith, and Roberta an English scholar, whose curiosity about the Eliot letters serves as the book’s McGuffin. The emotional palette that Cooley draws on ranges from sombre to bleak.
There��s a lot of torment in this book. Matthias agonizes because Judith is tormented by guilt about the fate of European Jews during World War II. So much so that she goes nuts, has to be put in a mental institution, where she eventually commits suicide. The middle - and strongest - section of the book is an account of her descent into madness, reminiscent of ‘The Bell Jar’. But it’s not the parallel with Plath that is on Cooley's mind, rather it's the parallel between Matthias and T.S. Eliot, who also had a tormented wife who ended up in a mental institution, where she ultimately died.
This is already a bit heavyhanded, but for some reason Cooley finds it necessary to layer on yet another set of parallels. This time an unconvincing crisis of identity suffered by Roberta, upon learning that her parents, far from being the devout life-long Lutherans she was always led to believe, were actually Jews who barely escaped the Holocaust by being sheltered by devout Dutch Protestants. Roberta's crisis is supposed to parallel Judith's breakdown, which was also triggered by learning the real past of her Jewish parents. The problem is, Roberta's crisis in no way rings true; in fact, her role in the book seems little more than a device used by the author to precipitate Matthias's revisiting of his own particular Calvary.
In the end, it's all just a bit too overwrought. The emotional reactions of the characters seem completely off the deep end, and are unconvincing in the final analysis. The novel's intricate structure, and laboriously crafted parallels, seem like much ado about very little. So that, despite the book's welter of swirling emotions, at the end the reader is left surprisingly unmoved.
0316158461 A novel that initially enthralled me through the beautiful clarity of its writing and then through the patterns of parallels in its network of a plot; even so, I was hardly prepared for the emotional devastation of its finale.
Matt, in his mid-60s, is a senior archivist in the library of an unnamed university. Among the sealed (not to be opened until . . .) archives he supervises, the pearl must be the collection of letters between poet T.S. Eliot and the love of his life, Emily Hale. One day a graduate student, Roberta, comes to ask Matt if she might view the Hale correspondence; naturally he refuses her, because the cache isn't due to be opened for decades yet, but he's nevertheless fascinated by her, even though she's half his age, and the two begin a quirky friendship.
The root of his fascination is that Roberta strongly reminds him of his long-dead wife Judith, who spent the last years of her life in a mental asylum receiving futile treatment for her neuroses. As Matt, a T.S. Eliot aficionado, is all too well aware, there's a strong parallel here with the situation of Eliot and his wife Vivienne, who likewise died in an institution. The parallel goes further. The two wives never stopped loving their husbands but, as they languished in confinement for their own good, they were treated by those husbands with shameful neglect.
Matt (named for Matthias, the replacement for Judas among the apostles) was a librarian and lukewarm Christian, Judith a poet who'd discovered her Jewishness relatively late in life. They married around the end of World War II, when America allowed itself to learn of the atrocities committed in Europe during the Nazi nightmare. Obsessed by those atrocities, Judith began making a collection of the tales of those who'd somehow survived them -- in other words, the novel's title, which seems to refer to Matt, could equally well be taken to refer to Judith.
It was the devastating confrontation with the evil enshrined in the horrific accounts collected in her archive that led to Judith's breakdown; also, I think, the realization that the evil didn't somehow magically end with the Armistice.
Matt is now by choice what we might call a solitudinarian. He's rejected any depths he might once have had, content to live in shallowness, rarely allowing himself to become excited by the manuscripts in his care. And then the arrival of the earthy, argumentative, frank Roberta throws his orderly life into disarray.
The narrative's divided into three almost exactly equal parts. The first and third are told to us by the present-day (1990s) Matt; the central section comprises entries from the journal Judith kept while in the sanitarium. Cooley does well in differentiating the two voices; even so, I had some little difficulty adapting back to Matt's narration after a hundred pages in the presence of the far more volatile, far more impassioned Judith. That's my only complaint about this novel, and it's not so much a minor as a minuscule one.
As I said, the finale devastated me. I think perhaps the quietness -- repression, almost -- of Matt's narration hid from me how very deeply involved I'd become in the characters and in what I might superficially call Judith's dilemma: the powerlessness of the innocent to confront past mass evil. It was in the finale, even more than while reading her own extended account, that it came crashing down on me just how great was the horror she was having to deal with. Although their suffering was indisputably the greatest -- we can hardly imagine how great -- those who experienced the Holocaust directly were not its only victims.
Cooley, I see, hasn't been prolific, which, to judge by this novel, is a pity. On the other hand, I'm not sure how often I could take body-blows like the one The Archivist delivered to me! 0316158461 Set mostly in the 1960s, this is a story of three people: Matthias Lane, an archivist at a prominent northeastern US university, Judith Lane, wife of Matthias, confined to a mental institution, and Roberta Spire, a graduate student working temporarily at the archives. The archive contains a collection of letters written by TS Eliot to his paramour, Emily Hale, while his wife, Vivienne, resided in a sanitarium. Hale has donated the letters to the archive. Roberta asks to see the letters, but they are to be kept private until the year 2020 (which was well into the future when the book was published, in 1998).
This is a character driven novel focused on relationships between detached men and depressed women. Matthias forms the focal point for the convergence of three storylines, all with interrelated pieces and parts, leading up to a personal revelation. The poetry of TS Eliot is used sporadically throughout the novel to illustrate key points. Each of the main characters has unresolved personal conflicts related to identity, accountability, guilt, relationships, and religion. I had one issue with an action that seems out of character for an archivist. I appreciated the delicate hand of the author and found it easy to become immersed in the story.
0316158461 The Archivist is based on the real-life sealed trove of letters between T.S. Eliot and his friend Emily Hale (held at Princeton, though that exact location is never given in the novel). Matthias Lane is the archivist of the Mason Room’s rare books and literary papers. He’s still haunted by memories of his late wife, Judith, who was a poet incarcerated in a mental hospital for more than five years. She was an orphan, raised by her aunt and uncle in a jazz-loving household, but her religious angst, augmented by obsessions with the Kabbalah and the Holocaust, caused tension in her marriage with Matt, a Christian.
Matt narrates the first and third sections, while Judith’s diaries fill the second. A reckoning comes for Matt when he is approached by Roberta Spire, a graduate student and library assistant who’s determined to view the Eliot–Hale letters even though they’re legally sealed until 2020. Roberta, too, is a poet preoccupied by her Jewish heritage – her parents converted to Christianity to make it out of Europe alive. The more time Matt spends with Roberta, the more similarities start to arise between her and Judith, and between his situation and Eliot’s when he put his wife away in a mental hospital (and I suspect those familiar with Eliot’s life and work would discover even more parallels).
I like the way the title takes on different meanings, with Judith considering herself an “archivist of evil.” The novel continually asks what we owe the dead and whether we conform to their wishes or make our own decisions. There are also some great lines about what books and poetry do for us. But I think something about the structure – the way Judith’s diaries, which total a third of the book, interrupt Matt’s narrative – weakens the reader’s connection with the protagonist and makes the story drift off into an anticlimax. Ultimately the Eliot letters matter very little. Still, I liked Cooley’s writing and will try her memoir (Guesswork – in a neat little connection, Roberta says to Matt, “I figured you’re an archivist, you probably enjoy a little guesswork.”).
Favorite lines:
Roberta: “You like films?” / “‘Not particularly,’ I said. ‘I prefer books.’”
Judith: “Poetry: where I encounter what is not in memory but arises through a kind of instinct, deep-running, inventive. Recognition of something I don’t know I knew; something I know only as I write and a poem begins to deliver itself, to assert a reality, startling but oddly familiar.”
Matt: “A good archivist serves the reader best by maintaining, throughout the search, a balance between empathy and distance.” 0316158461