97. When other men told stories from their experiences in the military, he never contributed any stories from his experiences in the Army Engineers Corps, although, if questioned directly, he would not deny that he had had such experiences. In that way he usually gave the impression that he had been involved with “security matters” that simply could not be discussed without clearance from above. He did nothing to correct that impression, naturally. The same was true when the men he worked with told stories from their childhood or adolescence; he merely would not deny that he, like other people, had gone through a childhood and adolescence. The impression given was that either his childhood and adolescence had been totally uneventful and bored him to think or talk about now, or else he had suffered so profoundly that it was extremely painful to him to think or talk about now. Again, he did nothing to correct either of these impressions.
98. One rarely spent an evening or afternoon with him without his at some point asking this riddle: “If you can hold six eggs in your right hand, how many can you hold in your left?” Most people, whether they knew the “right” answer or no, said, “Six,” whereupon he placed six eggs one by one into the person’s right hand. Then he placed six more eggs in a group on a tabletop and instructed the person to go ahead and hold them in his left hand — without, of course, first emptying the right. His riddle answered (i.e., three or four, depending on how many eggs the person could pluck and hold with the fingertips of his left hand), there followed a demonstration of the denial of that very answer. He deposited the dozen eggs onto the tabletop, and then, as if plunging both his hands into a vat, he placed them simultaneously over all the eggs, covering them completely, and when he lifted his hands and turned them over, he was holding six eggs in his right hand and six in his left. On his face was a broad smile of triumph, as if he had proved, not to his audience but to himself, something that couldn’t be believed.
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.