The rest of us, according to C., couldn’t decide whether the man was ill or transcendently healthy. We were attracted to him quite as much as we were repelled. And that, according to C., made the question of his potential danger a real one. He went on briefly to cite a few famous cases that he thought were historical parallels — Juan Perón, Howard Hughes, Mary Baker Eddy, and several others I’ve forgotten. In all these cases, C. insisted, the very thing one person used as evidence of the hero’s madness, his illness, another person cited as evidence of his genius, his transcendent good health. Usually, this produces a stand-off, a static situation, which no responsible person should abide. (I thought C. did sound a bit self-righteous there, but basically I agreed with him.) At which point, according to C., the person recognizes that he or she is faced with the choice of either becoming one who follows the hero or one who flees from him, and because of the nature of genius on the one hand and this particular type of illness on the other, one is forced to forgo one’s reason, one’s reliance on objectively considered evidence, and rely instead soley on one’s intuition, which, C. said, was precisely what all of us — Rochelle, her mother, Annie, Dora, and I — had attempted to do.
Apparently it was easier for people like Rochelle’s mother and Annie and, eventually, Dora to trust their intuition. Though they never actually were able to conclude, in a syllogistically sound way, that the man they had married was insane, they nevertheless had ended up acting as if they had so concluded. Though they had all three decided, after the fact, to regard certain bits of his behavior and certain physiological manifestations as evidence of his madness, it was wholly on an intuitive basis that they had reached their conclusion. After all, C. pointed out, the very same bits of behavior and physiological manifestations these three people used to prove their ex-husband’s madness, Rochelle and I had cited as evidence of his genius — the cryptic, self-denying, aphoristic utterances (which, C. reminded me, I had once regarded as “double positives” and a higher form of wisdom); the absurd ritualization of petty tasks and minor events (to me, the absurdity was admirable and was in fact the whole point); his inability to demonstrate “normal” feelings toward others (a willed characteristic, which, I had claimed, functioned mainly to make us more conscious of our “normal” feelings); his growling out loud, the “dead eyes” cited by Dora (to me, evidence of a yogic state of meditation employed by Hamilton to help him cope with deep frustration without having to resort to simple repression); and numerous other minor acts and behavior patterns. The point C. wanted to make, apparently, was that none of this was evidence that could justify our feeling one way or the other about the man. For on that level Hamilton resisted penetration or analysis. One could not confidently project oneself onto him, which, said C., is indeed as much characteristic of genius as it is of madness, for we are, none of us, one or the other. Rochelle and I, C. believed, had taken longer than the others to decide one way or the other, had continued to entertain the question, letting one ambiguous, open-ended image of him fold into another just as the first image seemed about to close, because we were probably slightly more intelligent than they, or at least were more worldly-wise in the way of paradoxes.
Up to this point I had not found it especially difficult to agree with my old friend, and actually, as the conversation progressed (it was more a monologue than a conversation), I had felt grateful to him for taking the time and thought to put the matter in this particular perspective. In my quest for an understanding of Hamilton Stark, C.’s point of view was still of value to me. The bedroom had gradually filled with a milky light, and because of the peculiar stillness, I knew that it would soon be snowing. I lay back down and propped the receiver against the pillow next to my ear and continued to listen.
But, unfortunately, this was where C. started to assert a point of view that, to my mind, not only revealed an intolerable intellectual arrogance but actually undermined his carefully stated previous position as well. Essentially, what he started to do was cite what, to him, was clear-cut evidence for the madness of Hamilton Stark, what he, C., called “a particularly virulent form of madness.” I listened with dismay as he described Hamilton’s absurd overritualization of petty tasks and acts as a compensatory device for his failure to participate any longer in his society’s “normal” social rites. Then C. went on to recall for me Hamilton’s youthful belief, “on rather suspiciously flimsy evidence,” that he had killed his own father in a quarrel. That, plus his unseemly rush to supplant his father later, after the old man’s first stroke, by taking over legal title to the property, indicated to C. the presence of a “deep and unresolved oedipal conflict.” As further evidence of this unresolved oedipal conflict, he also pointed to what he described as Hamilton’s strong need to keep his mother at a safe distance, even going so far as to “toss the old woman out into the cold” and to withhold all expressions of feeling for her, even at her death.
By now, quite frankly, I was too appalled to stop him. And thus C. went on uninterruptedly, dragging out one bit of so-called evidence after another, each time reasserting his diagnosis of “unresolved oedipal conflict,” sounding more and more like a college psych major. I could barely believe what I was hearing! There was the pattern of Hamilton’s passively aggressive stance toward the women who became his wives — why there were so many of them, C. insisted. There was his inability to declare his love for any one of them, which, conjoined with his inability to say that he did not love any one of them and his apparent belief that the only alternative to loving someone, in particular a woman, was to hate him, or, in particular, her. And then there was “that gravestone business,” as C. called it, which indicated to him that the man was by now dealing with only barely repressed desires to remove the object of his obsession, the object of his “unresolved oedipal conflict,” by wishing her dead. And so “naturally,” C. had felt a rush of concern for Dora’s welfare, for with Hamilton’s mother finally dead and buried, his dark obsession would turn to the next closest substitute, his wife, and even if she were his most recent ex-wife, she would still be the next closest substitute for his dead mother. “Murder, my friend, is always the madman’s way out of an overpowering love-hate relationship.” Hamilton was giving evidence, to C., at least, of an increasing inability to sustain any relationship at all with a woman, as shown by the increased pace of his marriages and divorces. “How can I not be deeply concerned with the welfare, even for the very life, of any woman who falls prey to the charm of his enigmatic ways and his manipulative passivity, especially now, when he seems so close to losing what little ability he has had in the past of repressing his murderous impulses?”
How, indeed? I thought sarcastically. Yes, how? Oh bitter disappointment! Oh solitude! Oh inevitable betrayal! Oh silence, exile and cunning!
“You there?”
Oh lost and by the wind grieved point of view!
“Are you still there?”
Oh deep-wounding reason! Oh overreaching Apollonian perspective!
“Hello? Operator? Anyone there? I think I’ve been cut off. Operator? I think I’ve been cut off. I think the connections broken. Operator? Is anyone there?”
Chapter 11. An End
“‘A fine setting for a fit of despair,’ it occurred to him, “‘if I were only standing here by accident instead of design.’”