The Keeper of Letters: Martha Cooley’s The Archivist
While visiting my parents over Christmas, I reached into a hidden bookcase I kept in my childhood room (yeah, I was am that kind of book nerd), and drew out Martha Cooley’s The Archivist.
I had just finished reading Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats to Chloe. To tell you the truth, I was far more delighted than she was. Also… I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t realize that CATS the Musical was based from Eliot’s poems. The more you know, eh?
The Archivist follows Matthias, a university (Princeton) archivist who is in charge of the school’s most prized and rare letters and manuscripts. Specifically, he is the keeper of the Emily Hale letters, a correspondence between a former actress-turned-professor and the famous poet, T.S. Eliot. Though this is an entirely fictionalized account, the real drama is in these letters. In the real world, Emily Hale donated her correspondence with Eliot to Princeton (he burned the letters she sent him) with the explicit requirement that they not be opened until January 1, 2020. The Rumpus gives a great little history lesson on their significance.
So, in the book, Matthias meets Roberta, a graduate student and poet that has a fixation with the Hale letters. The body of the text weaves together their histories and friendship, laying out naked the complex relationship Matthias had with his late wife, Judy, as well as Roberta’s own tangled family history. Central to these stories, however, is the idea of Eliot and Hale; friends who should have been lovers, a mutual admiration whose fever seemed to subside quite suddenly.
Though I have a few qualms with the narrative structure of the book (specifically, lumping Judy’s story in one middle part as opposed to combing it throughout the book), in the same light, I found Cooley’s emotional and sensory-laden text to invigorate a deep curiosity I have with the profession. What seems to some as stodgy and boring, to me, is a truly remarkable position in society. To be the keeper of letters. To be responsible for the preservation of the personal lives of some of the world’s greatest minds. To catalog the first drafts of some of the world’s greatest masterpieces. What is more profound than that?! I swooned.
Cooley weaves lines of Eliot’s poems throughout the book, dissecting text and pulling a part stanzas to emphasize poignant aspects in the characters’ (and Eliot’s) lives. This disembodied Eliot does things to me. I’m not sure if I enjoy it. But it plays into literary passion: I feel quite confident that for anyone that loves modernist literature, The Archivist become a satisfying contemporary novel to pour over on these cold winter months.
As I need some way of “rating” books (and given the name of this blog), I’m giving The Archivist 3½ sips:
