THE ARCHIVIST
By Martha Cooley
Little, Brown, 328 pages, $22.95
The words of the dead have a strange power, and no one knows that better than the protagonist of Martha Cooley’s arresting, accomplished first novel, “The Archivist.”
Matthias Lane is the curator of special collections in a university library that houses among its treasures a cache of letters from T.S. Eliot to an American woman named Emily Hale. Hale, a friend of the poet’s since adolescence, was the nearest thing to a confidante Eliot had during the years of his wife Vivienne’s increasing madness and his own conversion to Catholicism, when he was writing such works as “Ash Wednesday” and the poems in “Four Quartets.” Repudiated after Vivienne’s death, Hale left the letters to the university on the condition that they not be opened until the year 2020. But embargo or no, the bequest infuriated Eliot, who had begged her to destroy his correspondence, and he cut off all further communication with her.
Thus is the conflict at the heart of “The Archivist” set up: Whom does Matthias serve? The poet, whose wishes that the letters be destroyed he disregards? Hale, whose property the letters were? Or posterity, in whose name Hale has made her bequest? In a larger sense, to whom does any of us owe our loyalty? At first, there seems to be no reason for Matthias to choose between Eliot’s wishes and Hale’s. They are safely dead, and the letters won’t be opened for 20 years, by which time Matthias will be as dead as they are. But then a determined young poet named Roberta Spire asks to see the letters–not for a class or a thesis, but because, as she explains, ” `I just want to know, for myself, what really went on between Eliot and Hale.’ ” To shock Matthias, she tells him she believes that Vivienne went crazy because Eliot hated having sex with her, and that Hale knew this; further, she says Matthias must know all about it, ” `Because you’ve read the letters’ “–something he is forbidden, under the terms of the bequest, to do, and something he has in fact done.
Such confrontational tactics stir up old ghosts for Matthias, as do Roberta’s stories of her upbringing as the daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors who assumed Christian identities during the war and only confessed the truth when she found them out. ” `My parents’ conversion . . . it has me paralyzed, in a way,’ ” she says–not because of their new beliefs, but because of theiyr repudiation of and deception about their former ones. Matthias finds himself reminded of his dead wife, Judith, also a poet and an admirer of Eliot’s. Like Roberta, she felt impaled on the horns of religious dilemma; and, also like Roberta, deception was in her heritage. Although she had been brought up to believe her parents were killed in a car accident, in reality they were Jewish-American socialists who had gone to Russia to make the revolution and died in a pogrom.
By the time she learned this, however, Judith was mad. Obsessed by the horror of the Holocaust and the injustice of racism, she had retreated from daily life and become what Matthias later called “an archivist of evil,” poring over clippings about concentration camps and reading the cabala. She picked religious quarrels with Matthias (a believing but non-observant Christian)–quarrels that ended in thrown crockery and desertion. Desperate to have her regain her equilibrium, Matthias persuaded her to enter a mental hospital. And there, after six years of confinement, she slits her wrists.
Thus Matthias (named for the disciple who replaced the betrayer Judas) is carrying a heavy load of repressed guilt when he meets Roberta. And his conversations with her, about her background and about Eliot’s treatment of Vivienne, inevitably lead him to unearth this burden and come to terms with it. This conservator (and secret reader) of Eliot’s papers has, it turns out, destroyed the files Judith methodically kept of concentration camp statistics and Holocaust stories. “I couldn’t bear having those files in the apartment anymore,” he tells her while she’s incarcerated; on the other hand, after her suicide, he keeps her journals, which she had asked her doctor to read and destroy. A series of encounters with the persistent Roberta makes him understand that his carefully ordered life is in fact a thorn-bed of conflicting interests, and at the novel’s end he rectifies his errors against Judith, and Eliot, with an act unthinkable for a man in his position.
This denouement aside, “The Archivist” is a novel that hinges less on action than on conversation, and much of the heavy emotional lifting in its pages is provided by the connotative power of quotation–either from Eliot’s poetry, the most frequent source, or from other modern poets or jazz lyricists (Judith is also passionate about jazz, particularly the on-the-edge music of the doomed Bud Powell). As a result, the book seems strangely airless, rather like the archives Matthias works in; and while this quality theoretically suits the subject matter, it can make for somewhat heavy going from time to time.
In addition, the two carefully drawn central characters, Matthias and Judith, are oddly short on allure. Matthias’ idea of fun appears to be taking photographs of the Library of Congress and copying the inscriptions on its walls onto index cards, and Judith too quickly falls under the spell of her illness to be really likable. Her journals, which form the long central section of the book, seem intended to provide a vital counterbalance to Matthias’ account of his marriage–to speak for the dead when the dead can no longer speak for herself. But unfortunately, the woman they evoke seems so obsessional, so solipsistic and so self-righteous that Matthias becomes a hero by contrast.
If this miscalculation robs the book’s conclusion of some of its emotional force, “The Archivist” nonetheless has a kind of dry, Eliotesque grandeur. Full of irony and elegant prose, its pages are a rebuke to the overheated, undercooked writing being churned out by too many young novelists. The exhortation to “write what you know,” the cornerstone of so many writing courses, has been stretched to an absurd degree in the proliferation of contemporary first-person fiction and memoir; but in “The Archivist,” Martha Cooley has spurned that advice. She has instead imagined characters–and a situation, and a world–seemingly far removed from her own experience. For that achievement alone, which Eliot the critic would have admired, she deserves high praise.
