The Archivist is an

American novel American literature is literature written or produced in the United States of America and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition thus is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature, but also inc ...

by Martha Cooley, first published in a hardcover format by

Little, Brown and Company Little, Brown and Company is an American publishing company founded in 1837 by Charles Coffin Little and James Brown in Boston. For close to two centuries it has published fiction and nonfiction by American authors. Early lists featured Emily ...

in 1998.''The Archivist,'' by Martha Cooley.
''Caboodles Book in a Bag: Author Biography.'' The story makes extensive reference to the poetry of

T. S. Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 18884 January 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor.Bush, Ronald. "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career", in John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds), ''American National Biogr ...

, and it dwells on themes such as guilt,

insanity Insanity, madness, lunacy, and craziness are behaviors performed by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns. Insanity can be manifest as violations of societal norms, including a person or persons becoming a danger to themselves or to ...

, and

suicide Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Mental disorders (including depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, personality disorders, anxiety disorders), physical disorders (such as chronic fatigue syndrome), and s ...

. The book was reprinted in 1999 by Back Bay Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company.

Plot

Matthias Lane is a

widower A widow (female) or widower (male) is a person whose spouse has died. Terminology The state of having lost one's spouse to death is termed ''widowhood''. An archaic term for a widow is "relict," literally "someone left over". This word can so ...

in his sixties. He works as an

archivist An archivist is an information professional who assesses, collects, organizes, preserves, maintains control over, and provides access to Document, records and archives determined to have long-term value. The records maintained by an archivist c ...

at an unnamed

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

and is told to preserve a set of letters that

once wrote and sent to

Emily Hale Emily Hale (27 October 1891 – 12 October 1969) was an American speech and drama teacher, who was the longtime muse and confidante of the poet T. S. Eliot. Exactly 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale were deposited in Princeton University Libra ...

. Roberta Spire, a graduate student in her thirties, appeals to Matthias for a look at Eliot's letters. Emily Hale donated T. S. Eliot's letters to the library and gave specific instructions that they were not to be shown to the public until 2020. Her decision to donate the letters at all, however, went against the wishes of T. S. Eliot himself, who wanted Hale to destroy the letters after she had read them. Both Matthias and Roberta are highly familiar with

's poetry, as well as Eliot's personal background. The novel briefly retells the story of how Eliot placed his first wife,

Vivienne Eliot Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, also spelt Vivien (28 May 1888 – 22 January 1947), was the first wife of American-British poet T. S. Eliot, whom she married in 1915, less than three months after their introduction by mutual friends, when Vivienne w ...

, in a mental institution, and how she eventually died. It is gradually revealed that Matthias, similarly, placed his wife Judith in a mental institution, and she eventually committed

. Judith's death occurred twenty years before Matthias first meets Roberta. Roberta reminds Matthias of Judith, because both women are of

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

ancestry, both read and write poetry, and both have done research on the

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

. When Judith was in the mental institution, Dr. Clay forbade her to read newspapers. Yet Judith's aunt and uncle, Len and Carol, smuggled newspapers into her room, so that Judith could keep up with the aftermath of the Holocaust. After Judith's suicide, Matthias assumes that the newspapers contributed to Judith's insanity. However, later, when Matthias speaks to Roberta about his wife, he admits that his attempts to cut his wife off from the real world were what really made her sick:

She kept trusting me...I was like a paralyzed man. It's clearer to me now, what she need from me. But I got it all wrong. I tried to shield her from the present, from the city...I tried to conceal the terrifying things, to keep quiet about them. That's what got to her, more than anything else. She couldn't bear it. She couldn't bear that I, too, was silent.

At the end of the novel, Matthias takes the Hale Letters out of the library and burns them. He believes that respecting the last wish of T. S. Eliot - that the letters be burned and not shown to the public - is a step toward atoning for Matthias's personal mistake of sending his wife Judith to a mental institution.

Historical

The actual letters of Eliot to Hale were kept in the

Firestone Library Princeton University Library is the main library system of Princeton University. With holdings of more than 7 million books, 6 million microforms, and 48,000 linear feet of manuscripts, it is among the largest libraries in the world by number of ...

, at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

from 1956 to 2020.''T. S. Eliot Letters to Emily Hale.'' Princeton University Library Finding Aides.
/ref>
'' Princeton University Library''. The letters were released to the public in January 2020, 50 years after Hale's death, per her instructions; in a surprise announcement, the estate of Eliot simultaneously released a posthumous statement from Eliot that he wrote in 1960, specifically for the release of the letters.

Themes

Matthias identifies himself as an "archivist", a "gatekeeper" who controls people's access to information.Tyacke, Sara
"Archives in a wider world: the culture and politics of archives."
''Archivaria'' 1.52 (2001). p. 3. The term "archivist" applies not only to Matthias, but also to Judith, because she keeps extensive records of Holocaust stories.Cooley, p. 231. "... om news accounts, photographs, anecdotes all the revelations she'd catalogued during those months after the camps were opened, when she became an archivist of evil." Judith is emotionally affected by her records; whereas Matthias's relationship to records is merely an effort to protect them, Judith's relationship to records is like that of a fire being fueled. Her passions refuse to be controlled, and she insists on acting upon her feelings, forming a sharp contrast to Matthias's passivity."Editorial Reviews" for ''The Archivist: A Novel.''
"Judith, in fact, in the years after the war, grew so obsessed by the emerging details of the Holocaust--and by people's having stood by and done nothing--that she became unhinged and was committed by Matt to an institution." Judith fascinates Matthias, and terrifies him. Brian Morton wrote a review of the novel for

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

, called it "a thoughtful and well-written first novel." He noted that it brought up serious questions such as

morality Morality () is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper (right) and those that are improper (wrong). Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of cond ...

's relationship with art and religion, and a person's relationship with his or her own past. However, Morton also said that Judith's confinement in a psychiatric ward was limited "by providing Judith with no worthy interlocutors -- with no one who understands her well enough to argue with her in an interesting way."Morton, Brian
"The Hollow Men: The protagonist of this first novel is haunted by the lives of T. S. Eliot and his wife"
''

'', April 26, 1998. Accessed November 22, 2013. Arlene Schmuland considers Matthias's final act of burning the Hale letters to be a

metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared wit ...

for his breaking free of his library's code:

At the end of the novel, he breaks all of the stereotypes about archivists being passive, dedicated to their collections, and devoted to duty by allowing the woman access to a portion of the closed collection and then carrying the whole collection home and burning it in his back yard.Schmuland, Arlen
"The Archival Image in Fiction: An Analysis and Annotated Bibliography."
''
The American Archivist The ''American Archivist'' is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal and the official publication of the Society of American Archivists. It covers theoretical and practical developments in archival science, particularly in North America. The j ...
'', Vol. 62 (Spring 1999) : 42.

Matthias's decision to burn the library materials has been criticized from an ethical standpoint. Verne Harris, an archivist in

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countri ...

,"Verne Harris, Head of Memory Programme, The Nelson Mandela Foundation visits Bates on Oct. 12, 2011."
''Ladd and Muskie News and Events''. 7 October 2011. asked, "In destroying the letters is he protecting Eliot’s rights, serving the writer’s desire, or merely playing god?"Harris, Verne. “Claiming Less, Delivering More: A Critique of Positivist Formulations on Archives in South Africa.” Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997). pp. 132–41. Eric Ketelaar, Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam,
/ref> has written, "The aspect I criticized was that of the archivist as a censor who decides that the memory of Eliot should be kept through his poetry, not through these letters. I censured the archivist who was guided by changes in his personal life to take a decision he was not entitled to take, neither legally nor morally."Ketelaar, Eri
"Exploring Archives: An Introduction to Archival Ideas and Practice in South Africa, 2d ed."
VERNE HARRIS. Pretoria: National Archives of South Africa (2000). p. 198.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Archivist 1998 novels Psychological novels Novels about suicide T. S. Eliot