99. He knew that if he had been a small man, people would have behaved differently toward him. But he also knew that if he had been a small man, he would have behaved differently toward them. “Different solutions create different problems,” he concluded.
100. One night, shortly after his mother had moved out, he discovered a photograph album that she had accidentally left in an upstairs closet in a dark corner of the overhead shelf. Most of the pictures in the album were snapshots of him as a child taken in the summertime at the river, by the sea, in the sun-dappled meadow. He studied each picture for a long time, and when he had finished, he took the album downstairs and walked outside, coatless in the cold night air, and heaved the album over the fence, sending it in a long, fluttering arc into the darkness.
Chapter 9. The Uroboros: Being a Further Declension of the Central Image
“Sometimes there is such a thing as too much integrity.”
IT HAD OCCURRED TO ME, on my own, that in my apparent need to justify, to myself if not to anyone else who cared to listen, the peculiar nature of my relation to Hamilton Stark, I may very well have been guilty of misrepresenting Hamilton’s peculiar relations to others, in particular to his mother. This would not be an unusual error or failing on the part of an author in my position. In fact it’s almost normal for those who come after a great man to distort that man’s relations to others, his parents, friends, other disciples, and so on, in order to cast one’s own role in the great man’s life in as interesting and favorable a light as possible. One wishes not only to spread the word, as it were, but to establish one’s version of that word as the authoritative one as well.
Thus, one evening when my friend and neighbor C. told me flatly that I had so far slighted Hamilton (A.) by my failure to address the question of his treatment of his mother, I had to agree.
On this particular evening C. had come over carrying a paper bag containing his bath soap, shampoo and towel. Every late August and September he visits me once every three days to bathe and later to drink a little wine and chat. His well, a dug well, goes dry every year at this time, whereas mine, a drilled well several hundred feet deep, continues to provide water, and naturally, it pleases us both to turn this neighborly service into a social occasion. While C. splashes about in the tub like a walrus, I often pull a kitchen chair up to the closed bathroom door and converse with him. I think at times like this, if someone could see us, he would believe that we were lonely men, and he could be right, except that we are not lonely at all. One way in which Hamilton has helped me in my well-known solitude, incidentally, is his insistence on maintaining the distinction between solitude and loneliness. And I believe that I, in my turn, have taught it to C. A solitary man is not necessarily a lonely man, unless he permits himself to fuzzy the distinction between his particular solitude and loneliness in general. That fuzziness inevitably results in self-pity, and self-pity necessarily drags along loneliness for its escort. It insists on its oppressive company, because self-pity, as if compulsively, always slaps at the presence of anyone who might offer pity and understanding instead. We are always alone, but we need not ever be lonely. What Hamilton demonstrated is that our recognition of the former, which is true whether we believe it or not, makes possible the reality of the latter, which is true if and only if we believe it so. Far be it for me to presume, but it made sense of some of his otherwise inexplicable enthusiasms, homeopathy, for instance, whose main maxim is, “Like cures like.” If you are lonely, he would say to me, don’t run out and fill your life with friends and acquaintances. Instead, direct all your attention to the inescapability of your solitude, your absolute oneness. The only way to cure a glutton of gluttony is to force-feed him. Starving him will only increase his appetite.
Most of us can understand and respect the logic of such a position, but few of us are strong enough to enact it. Hamilton, of course, by his example, shows us simultaneously both the price of exacting it and also the rewards. What more can one ask of his teacher? I ask you. And what less?
These thoughts, however, were not part of my conversation with C. He was sloshing about in the tub and shouting through the closed door about Hamilton’s (and A.’s) mother, Alma Stark (M.), and how, by my having neglected to present in any detail or believable complexity the nature of her relationship with her son, I had not merely been remiss as an author of a novel, but I had also invited the reader to deal superficially with my characters. “An otherwise excellent and amusing novel,” he warned me through the door, “can be robbed of its significance if you make it easy for your readers to deal superficially with your characters.”
I’m afraid that at first I found his theory specious, but I knew he was right about my having slighted poor, long-suffering Alma Stark. It kept her two-dimensional, robbed her of the true human complexity that I had granted, say, to Hamilton’s wives (so far). And I also knew C. was right in that by my slighting Alma, describing her as merely victim, I had also slighted my hero, Hamilton. I had made him appear as merely victimizer, insofar as I had described his relationship with his mother at all.
No, C. had me all right. I was going to have to stop in my accelerating rush toward the climax of this novel and go back, not to the beginning, but at least to Chapter Five, “Back and Fill,” and bring to bear a more scrupulously observant point of view than the one offered there, the town’s librarian’s, as I recall.
Let me try my own point of view. I don’t really know the woman very well, have not met the woman she’s modeled after, A.’s mother M., more than twice, and casually at that, and of course I was not there the night Hamilton threw his mother out of what everyone thought was her own home. But I do know Hamilton (or rather, A., the man he’s modeled after) quite well, as well as anyone, with the possible exception of his daughter, knows him. And I’ve had numerous opportunities to discuss that evening with him, to draw out of him as much of his own point of view as he’s willing to share with anyone else. I think, therefore, I can give a fairly reliable account of what led up to and what followed from that evening, thus creating a somewhat different account of what actually transpired during that evening, the particulars of which, because they’ve been included in an earlier account, the librarian’s, and referred to several times, by Police Chief Blount, for instance, the reader is already doubtless quite familiar with.
Hamilton’s mother Alma had a habit of wringing her hands and, when they seemed to have been wrung out, of tweaking with her thumb and forefinger the loose skin under her chin. Wring and tweak, wring and tweak. I don’t know when she developed this habit, but Hamilton told me that he never recalled her to his mind’s eye without seeing her first wringing her hands and then pulling at her throat. He never recalled her with her hands in the air, palms out, in glee or happy surprise, or down at her sides, empty and disappointed. He could not remember her clapping her hands in excitement. Always they were wringing and tweaking, wringing and tweaking.