Martha Cooley on Emily Hale and T.S. Eliot's Letters

Cooley's 1998 novel, The Archivist, centered on Hale and Eliot's then-mysterious correspondence. At Literary Hub, Cooley remarks, "It’s finally happened: over a thousand letters written between 1930 and 1956 by T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale, and sequestered until January 2, of this year, have been made available to researchers. Princeton University has untied the copper bands around the wooden boxes and let the letters loose." More: 

Until now, the actual nature of the Eliot-Hale relationship has been a murky and alluring mystery. Eliot aficionados have long awaited the chance to see what was going on between the great Modernist poet and a woman about whom nobody knows much. They’ll know more shortly, for sure. Or think they will.

I too have been waiting for this moment—for 22 years, as it happens. My first novel, The Archivist, which Little, Brown published in 1998, puts that stash of letters at its center. The novel’s narrator is the archivist (wholly my invention) in charge of the letters’ safeguarding. An older man who keeps his own counsel, he’s thrown off track when a young woman, a poet, expresses keen interest in reading the letters, though not for the reasons he expects. Her parents—Jews who managed to flee Germany and the Holocaust—converted to Christianity without telling her about their past. Seeking to make sense of this life-altering decision, their daughter hopes to learn from the Hale letters something about another conversion, Eliot’s, from Unitarianism to Anglicanism. The young woman’s startling request dredges up memories and emotions the archivist has managed til now to tamp down.

My novel is not directly concerned with the Eliot-Hale relationship, though it does bear upon my characters’ inner lives. Regardless, it’s fascinating to see that the way things unfold in The Archivist is nothing like the way they’ve begun unfolding in the public imagination, now that Eliot’s official statement (written in 1960) about his bond with Hale has been released in tandem with the letters’ unveiling.

Learn more at Literary Hub.