Product Description

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #468508 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-08
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.com
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

From Publishers Weekly
The reserved voice of 65-year-old Matthias Lane, archivist at a prestigious Eastern university, opens this remarkably assured first novel, a complex and beautifully written tale of loss, crises of faith and resolution. Then we read the anguished journal of his wife, Judith, a poet who committed suicide in a mental institution in 1965, the same year as T.S. Eliot died. This is just one of the many parallels between the life of the poet and those of Matt and Judith (Eliot, of course, committed his own wife, Vivienne, to an asylum). Grad student and poet Roberta Spire requests Matt's permission to look at the sealed correspondence between Eliot and a Boston woman named Emily Hale, to whom he may have bared his emotions. Roberta has more than an academic interest in this correspondence. She is immensely disturbed by her parents' belated revelation that they were Jews who fled Germany and converted to Christianity in the U.S., and she feels that Eliot's conversion to Catholicism may hold insights for her. She is unaware that Judith's mental breakdown was related to the Holocaust, but Matt is quick to see the relationship and to recognize the parallels between Eliot's reclusive personality and his own emotional detachment. As several wrenching surprises about the past are revealed, Matt is finally opened to his pain and guilt and to an affirmative act of connectedness and trust. With its sinewy interplay of moral, spiritual and philosophical issues, its graceful interjection of lines of poetry and references to jazz, the novel first engages the reader's intellect. Soon, however, the emotions are also engaged, and the narrative acquires unflagging suspense as it peels back layers of secrets. This is an auspicious debut from a writer who already has mastered the craft.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Matthias Lane quietly inhabits his work as the keeper of an unnamed university library's special collection, which includes the letters T.S. Eliot wrote to Emily Hale. When a young poet requests access to the sequestered papers, Matt must confront a personal history he's been avoiding?a mystery that, ironically, recalls the terrible pain between Eliot and his wife, Vivienne. Cooley builds upon a parallel between Vivienne and Matt's dead wife, Judith, to reveal a staid conformity that cannot withstand the failure of love. Told through Matt's recollections and Judith's journals, this excellent first effort chips away at issues of religious faith, madness, and the troubling intersection between life and art.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Tormented characters. But should we care?
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.

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.

[SPOILER POTENTIAL FROM HERE ON]





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 gradually goes insane, 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's 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. The story of Matthias and Judith is the emotional core of the book; by layering on Roberta's extraneous and unconvincing 'crisis' Cooley actually diminishes, rather than augments, the power of her narrative.

In the end, it all seems just a bit too overwrought. The emotional reactions of the characters, Roberta in particular, 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 not so much. So that, despite the book's welter of swirling emotions, by the end this reader was left surprisingly unmoved.

Lose yourself
"I've only read your excerpts and I'm already trembling," wrote back a friend when I sent out 'HELP!' emails during my first reading of _The Archivist_. I needed to share the extreme emotional experience of this novel, and as I am well met in my friends, the spreading of the experience did help me process Cooley's first work. Don't try to go this one alone, and don't hold back from it, either. Cooley isn't holding back.

I identify strongly -- to a point that sometimes frightens me -- with Judith, the narrator of the book's middle section. She frightens me, enchants me, and has taught me much. Whenever I want to introduce _The Archivist_ to a new reader, I simply show them pages 112+113, an early (May 5?) "journal" entry of Judith's that touches on all(!) the major themes of the novel: marriage, depression, alienation, poetry, religion, music, &c.

Cooley responded to at least one of my fan letters, acknowledging that Judith's world was difficult to inhabit even in imagination. She hopes that the (even if only incrementally) greater understanding gained of mental illness in the last few decades makes life easier for a younger woman with some of Judith's gifts and trials.

A number of people see _The Archivist_ as an obviously *young* and still unpolished work. My relationship with the book goes far too deep for such criticism to mean anything to me, but I try at least to acknowledge the opinions. I am among those who believes the ending doesn't necessarily make sense: at the very least, that Matt made a wrong decision, and perhaps that Cooley incorrectly divined what the character would indeed have done. But as Orson Scott Card once said, the real story is not what's on the page, nor even what's in the author's mind. The real story is what author and reader create together in the reader's mind. Give yourself over to Cooley's work and you will be surprised at the story you create.

A great theme...
From my perspective, Judith was insane because her life was a lie from infancy. I saw it coming, a slight weakness in this book. Also, though I'm a T.S. Eliot fan and love jazz, I found references to these subjects a bit pretentious. They just seemed "off," perhaps because I sensed they were inserted to give the book literary "credibility." However, the book carries an important theme. A person can be driven to madness if lied to by those who are supposed to protect and care for them since childhood. To discover this is like having a rug pulled out from under you. On a couple of occasions I have been lied to by people I thought I could trust, and it is crazy-making. Judith's obsession with the Holocaust is completely understandable. It was a symbol of lies and denial that mirrored the lies and denial of her stepparents. She didn't know the secrets, but she sensed they were there, and her intense reactions to political intrigue made her seem insane to everyone around her, even herself. Sad story.