The Archivist (2 page)

Judith used to say I became an archivist to spite my parents. I suppose that’s partly true. I knew my father wanted me to go into a more lucrative line of work, and my mother was eager for me to become a teacher or (better yet) a pastor — neither of which I had any intention of doing. But the truth of my choice ran deeper. Having so few emotional resources to spare after wasting them on a soured marriage, my parents could make no hard claims on my future. That it should include higher education was perhaps the only point on which we three were in unspoken agreement. Even on this issue, though, there was friction. My father was proud of my academic competence but uneasy about my lack of interest in business, and my mother was concerned about my spiritual life, unsupported as it was by any church. Neurotic and awkward and ailing, she still managed to convince herself of the necessity of a spiritual community, and she went to church each week until she became bedridden. She could never accept my solitariness, though I’d learned it from her.

On the day I entered college, I realized in a bitter flash that I owed my parents nothing. I believed, however, that I owed something to books, which had kept me going throughout my least happy stretches, and this belief eventually outweighed all other considerations. After a half-dozen years of work in bookstores, I enrolled in graduate school and began the study of library science.

I saw myself then, and still do, as inheritor of a rich tradition, one that straddles the line between mind and spirit. The great librarians have all been religious men — monks, priests, rabbis — and the stewardship of books is an act of homage and faith. Even Thomas Jefferson, that most rational and ingenious of librarians, revered what he called the Infinite Power. It’s impossible to be a keeper of books and not feel a gratitude that extends to something beyond the intellects that created them — to a greater Mind, beneficent and lively and inconceivably large, which urges reading and writing. Judith used to complain that libraries are full of too many false, banal books — and she was right, of course, though it’s never bothered me. A library is meant to be orderly, not pure.

In 1939, when I was twenty-one, my father and I made our first and only trip together. We took the train down to Washington. My mother was quite ill, and my father (normally no traveler) wanted to get away from the apartment. He proposed that my college graduation present be a visit to the capital. I had been there on a school trip and had no interest in the sights, but I accepted the invitation eagerly. I wanted to explore the Library of Congress.

As I’d anticipated, my father quickly tired of sight-seeing. By the time we reached Capitol Hill he was bored, and he left to seek out a bar on Pennsylvania Avenue. Alone and happy, I entered the library’s cool foyer. At college I’d read many descriptions of the vast collection, but I was unprepared for the beauty of the building itself — its vaulted ceilings and marble floors, its magnificent circular reading room fitted with mahogany benches, rows of soft reading lamps, and heavy brass-trimmed doors that kept out all noise. I walked around the upper gallery, reading the inscriptions that ring the second-story walls just below the ceiling, and I knew then that eventually I would claim such a place as my home.

My mother died that year, my father four years later, in 1943. A few months after his death, I went back to Washington to see the library again. This time I took color photographs, explored the stacks, and talked at length with the librarians. I also wrote each of the wall inscriptions on note cards. When I returned to New York, I bought a leather binder and made myself a scrap-book of the photos and cards.

Judith knew as no one else did what libraries meant to me. The scrapbook was among the first of my possessions I showed her, not long after we met. My memory holds an indelible image of Judith turning that book’s pages, reading the inscriptions aloud. Literate as she was, she identified most of the authors. Then she read her favorite inscription:
The True Shekinah Is Man
. It came, she said, from the Kabbalah — the writings of Jewish mystics.

I asked her to explain the concept of
shekinah
. As she spoke about the Trees of Life and Death, I watched her full, mobile mouth, her long-fingered hands and slender arms, the shadows at her collarbones. Her entire body was suddenly an astonishing surprise to me. I can clearly remember how she looked up from the book’s pages, her gaze locking with mine. I knew unconsciously, as one senses a cry before hearing it, that my life was going to be changed.

Crossing the room, I circled her shoulders with my arms. Her hands tightened at my back as we held each other for the first time, swaying back and forth, our lips skimming each other’s cheeks and then meeting, lightly at first, my teeth on her tongue gently pulling and being pulled. I had experienced nothing so urgent and terrifying as the sound of my pulse at that instant, the blood-driven beat of my heart.

J
UDITH WAS TALL
— nearly as tall as I am: six feet — and slender, with elegant hands, short dark hair, a long waist and narrow hips, a beautifully shaped backside, prominent collarbones and kneecaps, broad feet. Her face was slightly olive in tone, its skin supple and shiny. Her eyes were grey-green, almond-shaped, and widely set beneath thin dark brows. She moved with a fluid, graceful ease that attracted notice.

We used to read T. S. Eliot aloud. For utterly different reasons, we were among his admirers.
Time the destroyer is time the preserver
— we loved those impressive contradictions of Eliot’s, that authoritative way he had of stating a paradox. Perhaps too tidy, too controlled? Yet he did know something about destroying and preserving; and about time.

Judith said she read Eliot because he understood how the sacred resides in time,
is
time. For me, reading his work is like trying to intercept a butterfly. It comes so close you can see its markings, the luminous wings, and then as you extend a hand it’s gone — hidden among other flickering objects of consciousness. There’s a pleasure in this approximation, I suppose, and even in the failure to apprehend. I don’t mind the obscurity of Eliot’s verse. (What good, after all, is an insect pinned on velvet, gorgeous but dead?)

In the thirties and forties, living in London, Eliot wrote about a thousand letters to a woman named Emily Hale, an American he had known since adolescence. But after his wife Vivienne died in 1947 and he was freed from the nightmare of his failed marriage, he repudiated Emily Hale. He felt, he wrote her, as if something in him had frozen and couldn’t be revived.

Vivienne Eliot had spent the final decade of her life locked up in a sanitorium in London — a high-walled institution from which she made several desperate but unsuccessful attempts to flee. Eliot chose never to visit her there. Perhaps she wrote to him, pleading, though that is doubtful. She must have suspected his role in having her committed, but she didn’t cease loving him, directing toward him the same intense, narcissistic heat that had driven him away. She was unbalanced but extremely perceptive, as people on the borders of sanity tend to be, and she knew things about Eliot — things he could communicate to no one, things transmitted obliquely in his poems, the objects of guesswork for his readers. Not acts but rather emotional capacities — dark, angry, punishing tendencies that the rising star of modernist verse couldn’t afford to expose.

Beneath the mask of the penitent, Eliot was a hugely ambitious man. He knew that with her madness, his wife could decimate all his possibilities. Although he figured out how to protect himself from her, the stain of their relationship lingered, ineradicable. He and she were too intimately bound up in each other’s terrors to disengage, even with the help of forced separation. (“As to Tom’s
mind
,” Vivienne wrote to a friend shortly before her lockup, “I am his mind.”)

From such possession he sought exorcism — and achieved it. But it had to be paid for, and Emily Hale was sacrificed along the way. After Vivienne’s death, Eliot pulled back. He visited Emily only a few more times, and his letters were infrequent and perfunctory. She never understood, never got over the shock of repudiation. Like Eliot she was a master concealer; she didn’t reveal the extent of the damage she had sustained. There was a brief hospitalization, in the fifties, for “nervous exhaustion,” but no other visible evidence. She resigned herself to the unfathomable. In the place within her where rage might have been, there was a desolation she could not share even with old friends. (In one letter to a woman she’d known for years, she referred to a “miscarriage” — and not a physical one — which was as close as she could come to the truth of her aborted relations with Eliot.)

Vivienne the hysteric had tried, even at the end, to break out. Emily, more stable and less imaginative, chose convention: the silence of the spinster, the relief of her acting and teaching careers, the solace of memory. But Emily was not without her own implacable sense of what must be done. In 1957, she took it upon herself to amass all her letters from him and deposit them — with strict instructions that they were to be sequestered until 2020 — in the library of a major American university. Eliot, furious, cut off all communication. In 1963, she wrote him a short, impressively honest letter pointing out the necessity of her action and reminding him of the future — not theirs but that of his work. Scholars would want to read her letters to him as well as his to her, she said; their twenty-year correspondence chronicled important events, ideas, feelings. Wouldn’t it make sense for him to give her letters to the same institution that had received her bequest?

Eliot did not approve, would not respond. But Emily had already made her move. His side of the correspondence had arrived at the library, I later learned, in five identical grey cardboard boxes tightly bound with white string. My predecessor — by all accounts a highly disorganized man — evidently failed to decide what to do with this gift from Miss Hale. He simply dumped the lot into one large carton, where they lay jumbled for eight years. When I arrived on the scene, I made it my business to provide order where there was none.

J
UDITH AND I WERE MARRIED
in Manhattan on V-E Day. We were giddy with excitement, convinced that the confetti on the sidewalks had been strewn around as much for us as for the war’s end. We were each twenty-seven years old and had known one another for twelve weeks. I’d escaped military service because of a lower-back condition; Judith had spent the war years in a West Side walk-up, writing poetry and working as a secretary. We’d met in a bar.

Twelve weeks. It now seems such a short stretch of time — dangerously short, really. Yet in my memory those weeks are like a honeycomb in a jar: the clustered days, suspended in an amber sweetness, drenched and happy …

What did I notice about her? Judith resembled no one else I knew. My first impression was of quickness. She had a wonderfully agile, skeptical intelligence, and a certain aggressiveness — that of someone eager to engage new ideas and willing to be unsettled. Judith was less interested in Truth than in truths, and she trusted a good argument to flush them out. Right away I felt, in her company, the relief that comes when caution is unnecessary: when it is not merely possible but desirable to expose what one thinks.

She was my only genuine partner in amusement. My father had a dry, vinegary laugh; my mother’s was a nervous trill, unpleasant and sad. In college my acquaintances were amusing in the wry, detached manner of our generation. Judith was the only person who could make me laugh hard at literally nothing. She had a way of becoming suddenly, ferociously funny, and sometimes giddy and out of control, like a small child.

She loved Manhattan, and she knew it well. Among my strongest memories are our long walks, hand in hand, up and down and across the city. She liked to eat while walking — ice cream in summer, hot chestnuts in winter, apples in autumn and spring. The scent of apple on her fingertips …

Our long strides were evenly matched. Judith walked with purpose, deftly circumnavigating stragglers, maneuvering us through Fifth Avenue crowds, jaywalking across busy intersections. Sometimes she put her arm around my waist as we walked, and this gesture felt protective as well as affectionate, as if she were assuming responsibility for my well-being.

I doubt she knew then how much I needed to feel safe, or how deeply this need disturbed me.

Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession, of belonging to another …
Eliot wrote of the terrors of old men, but they were mine also.

In her lovemaking Judith was candid and unpredictable. With other women I’d revealed only a self I could risk showing, polite and restrained; Judith elicited from me other selves, more demanding but also more giving. She loved me hard, without any false promising; wordlessly she urged me to learn how to please not only her but myself. Though I couldn’t admit it, the force of our intimacy frightened me. I struggled to stay open, waiting for something in me to give way, to allow me to love my wife unhesitatingly.

There were hints of trouble. Now and then, while we were talking, Judith would grow quiet and still. She wasn’t daydreaming; she would sit for a minute in a state of tense vigilance, as if awaiting news that might be disturbing. Then, just as suddenly, she’d become animated again. I remember once coming home in mid-afternoon to find her curled up in my bed. Her eyes were red-rimmed; she’d obviously been crying. When I asked her what was wrong, she shrugged at first. Then she picked up a magazine that lay on my bedside table — one of those small-circulation literary journals that feature the work of young poets. She opened it to a poem by LeRoi Jones, a Beat writer.

I sat next to her on the bed and asked if she’d mind reading some of the poem aloud. Judith stared at the page, and I assumed she was trying to decide which lines to share with me.

No light under my fingers
, she read, so softly I could barely hear her. Then she stopped.

I picked up the journal and read the poem to myself. It was called “The Death of Nick Charles,” and it was long. I can’t remember all of it, but a few lines return to me: