The Archivist

from Richard Ostrofsky

of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed)
www.secthoughts.com
quill@travel-net.com

September, 2010

I've just finished reading, and would like to recommend The Archivist, by
Martha Cooley. In structure, it is the story of a relationship comprised of
little more than conversation. The first interlocutor, the archivist of the
novel's title, is an elderly librarian responsible for his university's
collection of letters by T.S. Eliot to an American drama teacher and
director named Emily Hale, who for 26 years had been a very close, but
trans-Atlantic, friend. The second is a female, thirty-something graduate
student and aspiring poet who wants to read those letters, not for any
academic purpose, but for their relevance to identity issues in her own life.
The problem is that under the terms of Hale's bequest, the letters are in an
archive under lock and key, not available for access until 2020.
In fact, Emily Hale was a real person, and Eliot's letters to her really
exist – in a closed archive at Princeton, just as in the novel. But the intense
verbal struggle between Mattias, the archivist responsible for keeping the
letters sealed, and Roberta, the graduate student, is fiction. Their dialogue
and relationship is haunted by the history of T.S. Eliot's religious
conversion, his very great poetry, his anti-semitism and his atrocious
dealings with women. Behind all that, it is haunted by the real history of
the Second World War and the Holocaust. Also in play are the life
histories of the novel's two protagonists: that of Mattias' failed marriage
which parallels Eliot's own tragic and destructive marriage; and that of
Roberta, a woman brought up Christian who has discovered that her
parents are actually converted Jews who had evaded Hitler's camps, but
then remained Christian and kept their Jewish heritage a secret from their
daughter.
You can find reviews of Ms. Cooly's book, both hostile and favorable,
on the Internet; but this is not another. Personally, I think it is a fine piece
of work, very well conceived, well written and well worth reading. Rather,
I want to record some thoughts about just one of its central issues: how the
world looks through Christian, Jewish and secular eyes, based on my own
grasp of this book's interpretations.
In Cooley's account, both Judaism and Christianity offer similar
theories of evil, but very different responses to it. Her book's Christian
characters criticize the seriously Jewish ones for their morbid
preoccupation with the past, and their compulsion to redeem or repair it.
The Jewish concept of 'tikkun' – the repair of a morally shattered world –
is meaningless for them, as Christ has already accomplished the needed
restoration of grace and moral unity. What is needed is not Man's witness
and personal atonement for past sin and evil, but faith in the efficacy of
Christ's sacrifice and adherence to the moral order instituted thereby.
The Jewish characters, of course, do not recognize Jesus as the
sacrificial goat of the ancient Yom Kippur service, abrogated in any case
by the destruction of the Temple, and irrelevant to modern Jewry. For
them, the task is not faith and adherence, but witness and personal
righteousness – to be worthy of a Messiah who may someday come, and
will in any case be a political and cultural leader, not an efficacious
sacrifice. The serious Jews and Christians of the novel agree, however, in
seeing its secularists as moral light-weights, who fail to face and grapple
with a problem of evil that seems so real for them. For them – as for T.S.
Eliot himself – the moral frivolity of the modern world is its central failing
and problem.
There is no serious spokesperson in Cooley's novel to defend the
secularist position from such an accusation, but I don't see this as a
shortcoming as the inclusion of such a character would have distracted
from the drama and fraught context of the book's central dialogue. But it
surely begs a response from a secularist like myself, who is concerned
with the spiritual implications of unbelief, not just with its reasoned
grounds. For me, the God of Jews and Christians alike is as intellectually
dead as Nietzsche clearly saw; and I have written elsewhere why I think
this is so. But, as Nietzsche also saw, that death leaves a spiritual vacuum
that is not easily filled; and it is entirely understandable that so many
people are clinging desperately to moribund belief systems rather than
face the void they find around them once the old faiths are swept away.
It should be faced squarely that the spiritual world of modern Man is
essentially a comic one – not in the sense of being humorous, but in the
technically accurate sense of focusing on the lives of ordinary, unheroic
people – though perhaps forced, sometimes, to become a little heroic – just
trying to survive and thrive as best they can. By contrast, the world of
Cooley's main characters, whether Jewish or Christian, like that of T.S.
Eliot himself, is a world of individuals living up to some image of heroism
– often more concerned with their heroic stature than with living sanely, or
wisely or even decently.
The comic stance deserves more respect than it often receives. For one
thing, it can recognize ironies. It is full of gray tones and shifting,
ambiguous tones – not absolutes of black and white. It remains mindful of
human limitations. It avoids and can ridicule a great deal of cruelty and
folly, precisely because it thinks and lives on a merely human level.
To my mind, this is not a weakness, but a moral strength. There is,
admittedly, a risk and even a tendency toward frivolity: It is tempting to
refuse seriousness in the face of cruelty and destruction that stop short of
one's own skin. But I see no necessity for frivolity and solipsism in a
secular world. If anything, moral commitment must carry greater weight
and likelihood of fundamental sanity when it is stems from one's own life
history and sensibilities alone, without delusions of "doing God's work."
'God' can be no more than a convenient three-letter word for the over-
all context of nature, history and society in which one's life is lived. Thus,
the secularist's world is not a struggle between cosmic Good and Evil, but
a fertile chaos of competing forces, impulses and ideas, from which order
painfully emerges. The meaning of life in such a world cannot be
purchased off the rack, as it were, but must be conceived and crafted
always de novo by the one who lives it. Adherence to a group, even a
religious community, can be one way to do this – but it is always the
individual who gives moral stature and seriousness to the group, and not
the other way round.