The Archivist
Copyright © 1998 by Martha Cooley
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
First eBook Edition
This story is a work of fiction. The characters are all fictitious except for the poet T. S. Eliot, his first wife, and his friend Emily Hale. In real life, Hale and Eliot wrote one another many letters, and Hale bequeathed Eliot’s side of their correspondence to Princeton University, where it is currently sequestered. Any resemblance by any other characters in this story to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The other characters, locations, events, and dialogue are all the product of the author’s imagination.
The author is indebted to Lyndall Gordon for her masterful two-volume biography of T. S. Eliot.
Acknowledgments of permission to reprint previously copyrighted material appear on page 328.
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Contents
In memory of my grandmother
,
ELEANOR STROTHER COOLEY
(1886–1986
),
who read me poems
I keep my countenance,
I remain self-possessed
Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired
Reiterates some worn-out common song
With the smell of hyacinths across the garden
Recalling things that other people have desired.
Are these ideas right or wrong?
T. S. ELIOT
“Portrait of a Lady”
W
ITH A LITTLE EFFORT
, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced. And everything has more than one definition. A cat is a mammal, a narcissist, a companion, a riddle.
I’ve been reading T. S. Eliot again, the nice hardback edition of his poems that Roberta gave me before she left. I’d almost forgotten how heady Eliot is, how much thinking he crowds into “Four Quartets”:
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
I cannot imagine what Vivienne Eliot must’ve thought when she read those lines. Locked away in Northumberland House, listening to German bombs dropping on London, waiting in vain for her husband to take her home.
Hearing his poems in her head. Alone, listening, forced to reconsider everything.
What is that sound high in the air
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Roberta, too, will reconsider. She’ll be stunned, of course, when she hears the news about the Hale bequest. But after she mulls it over, the whole thing won’t seem so astonishing. I think she’ll appreciate my motives even if she can’t condone them.
I picture her in her kitchen, the new poems spread out on her table. By now she’s probably learned them all by heart — or the best parts, anyway. I wonder what they’ll prompt. More of her own, I trust; else why read Eliot — or anyone else?
We shall see.
A
LTHOUGH I’VE ALWAYS BEEN CALLED MATT
, my first name isn’t Matthew but Matthias: after the disciple who replaced Judas Iscariot. By the time I was four, I knew a great deal about my namesake. More than once my mother read to me, from the New Testament, the story of how Matthias had been chosen by lot to take the place of dreadful Judas. Listening, I felt a large and frightened sympathy for my predecessor. No doubt a dark aura hung over Judas’s chair — something like the pervasive, bitter odor of Pall Malls in my father’s corner of the sofa.
As far as my mother was concerned, the lot of Matthias was the unquestionable outcome of an activity that seemed capricious to me: a stone-toss by the disciples. I tried with difficulty to picture a dozen men dressed in dust-colored robes and sandals, playing a child’s game. One of the Twelve had to carry on, my mother explained, after Judas had perpetrated his evil. The seat couldn’t be left empty. Hence Matthias: the Lord’s servants had pitched their stones, and his had traveled the farthest.
So much for names. To the first-year students at the university where I work, I am merely Mr. Lane, the grey-mustached warden of the obscure Mason Room. But to graduate students I am something like a god, indispensable and unavoidable, keeper of countless objects of desire. And in reality? — in reality I’m the archivist at one of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, where I oversee a collection of rare books and manuscripts, the notes and letters of dead writers and other
prominenti
, and boxes of miscellany donated by eccentric graduates. This archive, housed in a quiet wing of the main library, is among the finest anywhere; and I am its guardian.
I assumed my post in 1965, the year T. S. Eliot and my wife Judith died, and since then I’ve inhabited a secure realm. Of course, there have been the predictable encroachments of micro-fiche, computers, fax machines … I make use of these things, in fact I find them entertaining; but they have nothing to do with the life of the mind. The genuine scholars, those for whom books are nearly everything, pay little attention to the junior librarians with their keyboard fixations. The real scholars come to me. In this part of the library, I alone know where everything is. I have memorized the stacks and shelves and drawers, I could find books in the dark: by their broken spines, their covers’ textures, their heft in my hand.
My work has always satisfied me. When scholars ask me about an unusual book that I haven’t seen before, I experience an almost physical pleasure. It’s as if I’m a boy again, scavenger-hunting. When I’m on the trail alone, sure of my ability to find what I’m looking for, I experience my rewards.
Naturally there are frustrations, when things are misplaced or my time is wasted. I’m rough on pseudo-scholars, but I like assisting anyone who’s serious — even novices who can barely use the card catalogue. I look for the sign of real intention, that hunger which comes over a person’s face when he really needs to find something in print. Except for a few of the oldest and most fragile manuscripts, I allow the collection to be read and used by anyone who passes my inspection. I don’t hoard the treasure.
Materials not open to the public, however, are another story. Now and then some unscrupulous researcher will ask for a “quick look” at items that remain under lock and key until a specified date. This pushiness instantly annoys me, though it no longer surprises me. With such researchers I assume a weary, antagonized look as I explain that certain bequests arrive with clear restrictions on accessibility. Violating those limits is a form of grave-robbing. Yes: the images that come to me are those of exhumation, the unearthing of something meant to lie fallow — something that will appear waxy and lifeless if brought to light too soon.
Of course I don’t put it in just those terms. But the message gets across to anyone who thinks I’ll pick up the shovel and dig for him.
I was set on edge, then, when last spring a young woman approached me about some letters of T. S. Eliot.
I want, said this woman in a tone neither loud nor soft but direct, to read the Emily Hale letters.
Had I not looked straight at her, I’m sure nothing would’ve ensued. But I stared at this woman, and in her eyes, which were large and curiously colored — a moss-grey shade, lustrous — I could see the genuine intention I’ve never been able to ignore.
There was something else. Her eyes summoned for me that strangely evocative line from Eliot’s poem “Usk”:
Where the grey light meets the green air.
And Judith, whom I’d buried two decades earlier. Since my wife’s death I had encountered no one who reminded me of her in any way.
Glance aside
— I heard the poem now as if it were being read to me —
do not spell old enchantments. Let them sleep.
The young woman stood very still, waiting, her face a question.
The answer, I said aloud to her, is no.
M
Y WORK IS WHATEVER I WANT IT TO BE
, and I report to no one regularly. The head librarian — the man in charge of the University’s entire collection — is a figurehead, well-to-do and poorly read, with whom I have only perfunctory contact. His deputy is Edith Bearden, who supervises several junior librarians. Once a week, over lunch, Edith and I trade news or solicit one another’s advice on technical matters. We’ve always gotten along, and after all these years we know each other reasonably well. When I’m withdrawn, which I suppose I often am, she doesn’t pull at me. But when she needs my help or wants my company (for libraries can be lonely), she’s not afraid to break into one of my unresponsive moods. Hers is the only lasting friendship I’ve known, and I’m grateful for it.
Each month I supply the library’s Board with a brief summary of the activities in my wing. I prepare these reports in my office, which adjoins the Mason Room. Normally I leave the connecting door open so I can see who comes in and out. On busy days the receptionist admits around twenty people; on quiet days we have only a handful of visitors, and peace reigns.
During those calm days I become a literal bookkeeper. First I return calls and answer correspondence from other archivists, and then I catalogue new acquisitions. After that, I check the drawers containing oversized materials and generally see that everything is as it should be. I need those hours of silent physical labor, when I am alone with the collection and can experience it in its entirety. It’s become almost a living thing for me. The bound books and loose-leaf manuscripts and files of letters and photos are a many-voiced convocation I attend as a kind of permanent host. Whenever I can, I read. Familiarity with the collection is my first obligation.
When I was a child, I had dozens of books. My father built me a bookcase for my tenth birthday. It ran the length of one of my bedroom walls, and I prized it almost as much as the books I arranged neatly on its three shelves. I employed a very simple cataloguing method — alphabetization of titles, which meant that my Bible sat between
Babar
and
Boats Under Bridges
, a story about the difficult life of a New York harbor tugboat operator. I remember my mother expressing dismay at this arrangement. As a devout Presbyterian, she felt that the sacred Book should not be tossed in with profane paperbacks, and she urged me to keep my Bible next to my bed. It was her desire that I read it nightly and attend church each week with her, duties I fought then and have never undertaken since.
My mother was an unhappy woman, and unhealthy too — terribly overweight and easily agitated by small things. She entered marriage with few established friendships, and as my father discouraged the formation of new ones, she became something of a recluse. Gradually, as I was growing up, she isolated herself from the people in our neighborhood in Washington Heights who might have helped her. Eunice Carey, who had an antique toy train set I coveted, and Betty Keep, a cheery widow I used to accompany on long rambles through the Cloisters — these were women who wished my mother well and who felt sorry for me; I was, after all, the only child of an irascible accountant and a housewife who quoted the Bible a little too frequently. By the time I was twelve, my mother had ceased even the pretext of a social life for the family. And as both sets of grandparents were long dead and neither of my parents had siblings, I was effectively cut off from a community of adults.
Each Friday night my father satisfied his own needs for company by going to a bar around the corner from his office near Herald Square. There he would drink for a few hours with other dissatisfied husbands, finally wending his way home at around eight o’clock, smelling of smoke and scotch. My mother and I would watch him descend from the heights of his drink-induced good humor to the foul mood that typically enshrouded him. He would bark orders at my mother, who lumbered anxiously from table to kitchen to fetch him extra water or more salt, and in my direction he would level a barrage of questions about my performance at school that week.
Fortunately I was a good student. Books were my refuge; I made friends, but often they interested me less than books. And at home, in the face of my mother’s perpetual anxiety and my father’s cantankerousness, I retreated into my small bedroom, where my books awaited me, reliably patient and tolerant. Now and then my father would engage me in conversation about a story I was reading, or my mother would read aloud a poem by Wordsworth or Blake. Those interludes I remember with intense clarity. Everything else from that time feels like a bruise feels when pressed: painful in a dull, unmemorable way.