The Archivist (34 page)

In 1965, I acted once again in defiance of Judith’s wishes. She had wanted her journal to be read by one person — a man she deeply mistrusted but also needed — and then destroyed. Instead I saved it, hiding it as if it were my own secret life.

But it wasn’t; it was Judith’s. And I’ve only just begun understanding what it meant for her to record that life.

B
EFORE THE WAR
, strange, sad stories circulated about T. S. Eliot and his wife. Their marriage had fallen apart, and Vivienne was acting oddly. After Eliot moved out of their apartment, Vivienne had searched for him everywhere; she had gone to his office at Faber, called all their friends, even tried to place an ad in a London paper:
Mr TS Eliot: Would you please contact your wife at home as soon as possible.
One evening in the winter of 1935, having found out that he would be addressing a public audience, she showed up at a large hall packed with Eliot supporters. Her arrival coincided with the end of his speech. She was dressed dramatically, in a dark velvet cape, dark hat, dark dress; her face was powdered white. With her was their dog, who even after two years’ separation immediately recognized his master and bounded to the podium.

Vivienne clambered up onto the stage, calling her husband’s name repeatedly, her arms extended toward him. Eliot was embarrassed and flustered, and deeply ashamed. This was precisely the sort of spectacle he loathed. He thrust the dog at her.
Why hello, Vivienne
, he said. Somehow he managed to direct his wife and dog off the stage. Quickly, other admirers thronged around him, edging Vivienne further away, out of the picture.

In one of his letters to Emily Hale, Eliot described that scene — the torment of it, his inability to act.
Will it always be like this?
he wrote in anguish. Yet he refused to visit Vivienne while she was in Northumberland House. To Emily, who must’ve asked why he hadn’t done so, he wrote that seeing Vivienne there would be excruciating and unavailing for both of them.

He may well have been right. Who can tell another person what to endure — how much, and for how long? During the last year of Judith’s life, I went to Hayden less frequently; I could no longer make my weekly forays there. My own powerlessness overwhelmed me. But I cannot imagine not having gone at all.

I
’
VE CONTRACTED PNEUMONIA AGAIN
— a somewhat more virulent case this time. It appears that my lungs will be my undoing. Each of us has a weak spot, an organ or system within the body where death gains access. For my father, it was the liver; for my mother, the heart; for Judith, the nervous system and its intricate, treacherous circuitry. This isn’t mordant romanticism, it’s merely fact.

Kafka said of Milena’s tuberculosis, when he learned about it, that it wasn’t his lover’s illness that scared him so much as the thought of what preceded its onset. I think I understand him. We resist ourselves — who we’ve been, who we’ve become; and the tension of this resistance enters our bodies and is incorporated within us. No wonder we finally tire.

As a child I would sometimes hold my breath, to prove I could control it. But always, against my will, the old air would force its way out and new air would flood in as my temples throbbed, my chest heaved; and I’d say to myself
it’s here then, no matter what
.

I trust death will be no different.

I
T HAS ALWAYS SEEMED
miraculous to me that words actually do communicate meanings. That’s not to say, of course, that they’re reliable. T. S. Eliot knew precisely how language fails us.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies
…

But I have always trusted words.

The creation of something new, said Eliot, alters everything that has gone before it. Each time he wrote to Emily Hale, Eliot wrought a small but real transformation in the whole of their relationship. What had begun in lightheartedness deepened into the most mature intimacy he’d ever experienced.

But the correspondence also led him inexorably to the past. After writing Emily over a thousand letters, he was forced to confront not her but Vivienne — still his wife, his incarcerated nightmare — and to reckon with an overwhelming guilt. Her death in 1947 turned everything upside down. Eliot’s dramatic repudiation of Emily was a failed gesture, a capitulation to his own cowardice. He could — and did — refuse to see her again. But words had let him out, and there was no going back in.

In the late 1950s, Emily sent Eliot a note about her planned bequest to the university. Eliot wrote back, asking her to destroy all his letters to her. He was utterly explicit about this.
They’re for you only
, he wrote —
no one else must see them
.
Emily
, he pleaded,
do this for me. Destroy them.

He was silent, however, on the subject of the poems he had sent her. The fate of those drafts was left in Emily’s hands. In this regard, it seems, he had always trusted her implicitly.

Emily Hale followed the dictates of her conscience. To my predecessor in the Mason Room she said simply,
I’m doing what must be done
. I can picture the scene: a handsome, conservatively dressed woman in her seventies arrives at the library one warm spring afternoon. She asks to speak with the archivist about several cardboard boxes of letters piled in the trunk of her car: a lifetime’s treasure. By training, this woman is an actress. Her face shows nothing of her pain, only her determination.

As she hands over the boxes, she recalls the closing passage of “The Waste Land.”
These
, she thinks,
my own fragments
…

A
N ARCHIVIST SERVES
the reader’s desire. Yet what of the writer’s — is it of no consequence?

After reading T. S. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale, I found myself reflecting long and hard on this question. My own training, of course, had taught me to privilege the reader’s curiosity over all other considerations. Wasn’t the writer’s hunger for privacy always less compelling than the reader’s appetite — voracious, insatiable — for more words? Eliot is already dead, I reminded myself. And by the time the bequest is opened, everyone who’d ever been close to him will also be dead. So whom could the letters possibly hurt?

It was the thought of my wife’s journal, lying in the bottom drawer of my desk, that tipped the scales for me.

Judith had wanted her files saved, but I discarded them. She’d asked that her journal be destroyed; I kept it. Afraid and uncertain, I had sought her departure, insisting on our separation as necessary for her sake; and eventually, she was unable to return — to me, or to herself.

I that was near your heart was removed therefrom

To lose beauty in terror

On the evening Roberta entered the Mason Room, I realized it was time (late, perhaps, yet not too late) to cease living a life governed by fear; to make a different choice. Eliot’s letters to Emily were not, I knew, his bequest. We were never meant to read them: only she was, and she relinquished them.

Poetry was what he left us. It was all that mattered.
The rest is not our business.

Very late that night, I served Eliot’s wish. It took several hours. I unlocked the cabinet and, after some hunting, located the letter in which Eliot had begged Emily to destroy the correspondence. I put this letter and all the cat sketches in an envelope and affixed it to the inside door of the cabinet.

Then I loaded every letter and card — everything but the poems, which I placed, safe in their protective wrappers of acid-free paper, on the top shelf of the cabinet — into two large plastic bags. I packed them tightly so I could carry them both at once. When I finished up, at around one in the morning, I hauled the bags to the trunk of my car; they were very heavy, but I managed in one go. After locking the archive’s doors and setting the alarm, I drove home and parked my car in the little lot behind my building.

The lid of the large trash bin at the rear of the lot was completely closed, which signaled that it was already full. A different container would be required. From my apartment I retrieved a sturdy metal trash can, a small footstool, a book of matches, and some bottled water. Then I installed myself behind the bin.

No lights were on in any of the rear apartments, nor in the parking lot; the night sky was overcast and free of stars. I was alone. I sat on the footstool, put the trash can between my knees and the plastic bags at my side, lit a match, and began burning paper. I did this in very small batches — just a few letters at a time, to minimize visibility and to avoid fueling a fire I wouldn’t be able to put out. Partway through, as I watched the flaring, ebbing flames, I remembered Judith’s description, in her journal, of that dusk when she burned the Christmas tree at Hayden. She too had been alone, in some remote, invisible corner of the property. The little tree, its branches dry, had gone up easily, and the flames’ rhythms had reminded her of Thelonius Monk’s music — how had she put it? —
those lovely staccato jabs at the notes …

After the last letter and postcard were gone — sometime around four o’clock — I emptied the ashes into the bin and sprinkled water on them, to be safe. Then I went inside and drafted a memo to Edith Bearden, in which I suggested that the Mason Room could use some upgrading of its physical security. Our sequestered collections had lately been subjected to rather more wear and tear than was warranted. After the student internships were over, wouldn’t it perhaps be a good idea to change the locks on all the cabinets containing sequestered materials, and to prohibit access to them — even by librarians — until they became available to the public? We had all gotten perhaps a little careless, probably because we were short on storage space. Even I, for example, had taken to storing open materials in the same cabinet as the Mencken papers. This was sheer sloppiness. Dust, light, and moisture were being introduced via repeated openings and closings of the cabinet doors.

My proposal was straightforward. The Mason Room could order some new cabinets for the public-domain material (there was, I reminded Edith, plenty of money in the budget for this), and we would then change the locks on the sequestered cabinets. The keys — and, for good measure, copies of all the bequests and their dates of release — would go to the university bursar for proper safekeeping in the administration’s main vault.

I would be happy, I concluded, to spare Edith the implementation of this plan. There was no need for her to muck around with the literal nuts and bolts. The university locksmith could be retained; he’d do a fine job. Then all of us would rest easier — including Eliot, Mencken, and the rest of the dead! — knowing that things were as they should be.

And so it was done.

When the great unveiling takes place, it’ll naturally come as a shock to everyone to find that the Hale bequest consists not of letters but of poems. I am confident that no false accusations will be leveled at Edith Bearden or at my successor, whoever he or she may be. No one but Edith will have any reason to recall a graduate student named Roberta Spire, let alone accuse her of anything. And Roberta is in any case amply capable of defending herself, should the need arise, though I cannot imagine it will. Innocent individuals will not have to pay for what I did; eventually, it will become apparent that I’m the only one who could’ve done it.

Roberta, though, will figure it out before anyone else does. I can only hope she’ll condone an act of destruction that will appall everybody else. And I believe (a little desperately, I’ll admit: have I not gone out on a very long limb?) that she will. After all, she and I did more than talk about other people’s poetry. We entrusted one another with our own discoveries: what might have been, and why it was not. When I’m no longer around for questioning, I hope she’ll remember our mutual unburdening of sorrow and shame; and of love.

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

As for those unseen poems, sequestered in the Mason Room — they await their readers! And I suspect they’ll change how people think about everything else Eliot wrote.

It is my large misfortune not to be able to count myself among those who will be the initial viewers, in the year 2020, of a half-dozen newly released poems composed by one of the twentieth century’s foremost writers.

I’d place a great deal, however, on a bet that Roberta Spire will be first in line. Even knowing what she already knows. She’ll want to see for herself. She’s bold — a desirable quality in a reader. It’s one of the things I liked about her. One of many.

Excerpt from “Canzone” from W. H. Auden:
Collected Poems by W. H. Auden
, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright © 1943, renewed 1971 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd.

Excerpt from “In Memory of Ernst Toller” from W. H. Auden:
Collected Poems by W. H. Auden
, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright © 1940, renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd.

Excerpt from “The Lesson” from W. H. Auden:
Collected Poems by W. H. Auden
, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright © 1945 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd.

Excerpts from “An Agony, As Now” and “The Liar” from
The Dead Lecturer
by Amiri Baraka. Copyright © 1964 by Amiri Baraka. Reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

Excerpts from
The Complete Poems and Plays
and
The Idea of a Christian Society
by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company and Faber and Faber Ltd.

Excerpt from
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note …
by LeRoi Jones. Copyright © by LeRoi Jones. Reprinted by permission of Carol Publishing Group.

Excerpt from “Man and Wife,” from
Life Studies
by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 1956, 1959 by Robert Lowell; © renewed 1987 by Harriet Lowell, Sheridan Lowell, and Caroline Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd.