The Archivist - Softcover

COOLEY, Martha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349110964 ISBN 13: 9780349110967

Publisher: Little Brown and Company, 1998

Synopsis

Archivist Matthias' work has given him access to letters between T.S. Eliot and lifelong friend Emily Hale, bequeathed by Hale, but not to be read until 2019. Read in order to catalogue, they continue to haunt him as he falls for a student whom he knows he could save spiritually with the letters.

About this title

Review:

Matthias Lane is the proud gatekeeper to countless objects of desire, the greatest among them being T.S. Eliot's letters to Emily Hale. Now in his late 60s and archivist at an unnamed East Coast university, Matthias is--as one of his colleagues tells him--"exceptionally well defended." He's intent on keeping the Hale collection equally remote, and when a young poet first seeks access, Matthias rebuffs her with little difficulty. Still, Roberta Spire does remind him of his wife, Judith, who had also written poetry but had committed suicide 20 years earlier. And he is much taken with the student's self-possession: "Pleading never works with me," he concedes, "but authentic and angry self-interest does."

Betrayal figures heavily in The Archivist. For starters, Roberta feels betrayed by her parents, German Jews who had spent World War II in hiding and emigrated to the U.S. soon afterward, re-creating themselves as Christians. She has only recently discovered her Jewish background. The irony is that Matthias's wife had also been an Eliot adept and had felt violated by a false version of her own past and destroyed when confronted with the realities of the Holocaust. No wonder Roberta sees the Hale letters as a Holy Grail, the key to her questions about religious conversion and identity.

What holds this exceptionally ambitious and layered first novel together is the love all three main characters have for the pleasures of the text and the knowledge they share that time is, as Eliot writes, both preserver and destroyer. Eliot, after all, had wanted Emily Hale to destroy his letters (and in reality they are sealed until 2020, safe at Princeton University). Martha Cooley is deeply concerned, as are her characters, with questions of conscience, privacy, action and inaction, and security--personal and scholarly. If there is one parallel too many in this impressive work, perhaps that is more like life than some of us care to admit. --Kerry Fried

About the Author:

Martha Cooley contributes to various American Literary Magazines. This is her first novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0349110964
• ISBN 13: 9780349110967
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328