abutting time and not
betraying it. A contract
much like a contraction,
loyalty closing around
its object, expelling time.
VIRGINIA WOOLF SAYS GOODBYE TO LYTTON STRACHEY, THEN ROGER FRY
Always one thing left behind in a series.
We were counting, and then the increments changed.
Even—no,
odd—
integers.
I might have insisted that the sheer abstraction of numbers is ridiculous.
Yet here I am, counting breaths as I would count
waves breaking on the shore.
Expecting their tempo to remain steady.
Odd numbers, always,
weren’t they?
Divided from each other, they have no natural parity.
Loss makes unnatural remainder.
COMPETITIVE MOURNING
Each of us wants to take
a little piece of what isn’t left of you.
Huff a little breath on the absence, shine
it on the sleeve, hold it up to the light.
A little opacity, yes, almost opaque, almost
opal, almost
anything one could purely imagine.
One walks away from what isn’t there having
poached a bit of it, stuffed it in the pocket.
Slowly the sense of translucence, cloudy as it was,
becomes absolutely lustrous, a pearl through which
no light obtrudes.
Closeness, in the end—after the end—
does not conduct light, but deflects it.
Each of us has this conviction,
that we leave you
as you left us.
The pocket almost empty, but not quite.
A glance back over the shoulder, our breath
a vague smudge in the cooling air.
MINA LOY WRITES TO JOSEPH CORNELL ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
My dear,
I have been thinking—health is the mundane, made of quotidian recognitions.
Magazines from which we clip pictures, the child’s discarded marble flicked
to a crack in the pavement, parchment modeled, mottled, and curved
again as a lampshade, sheltering the light beneath it.
My dear friend,
I recognize you. I mean to say that we know the same illusions.
Snow is falling with its varnish of cleanliness. A white world. But soon,
traffic will dirty this surface too. I am tempted to say that by knowing
what is beneath, we transcend. What’s underneath fails its own glow—for now.
One of my favorite words is “recognition.” Its sacred modesty.
Ami, Amico,
Whatever anyone else may believe, isn’t it the case that we know what we know,
and that creates the surfeit, the wholeness, that we call health? I am sure and
unsure. Fullness is theology that we reclaim and revise: all that discarded
surplus. Matter may be illusion, but at the same time, we know that theology at
its core is illuminated detritus. We, who are scavengers, are faith’s adepts.
Mass
Matthew Cheney
The brief obituary for Wendell Hamilton that appeared in the September 30, 2015, issue of the Coös County Democrat was not entirely inaccurate, but it was far from complete. I expect he wrote it himself years ago. (Perhaps his lawyer submitted it as a requirement of probate.) Dr. Hamilton’s life was significant enough that his obituary should have appeared at the very least in The Boston Globe, and it should have been noted by Cornell University, where he taught for nine years, and by Yale, where he earned his PhD, and by Dartmouth College, where he earned his BA. The only notice of his death that I have been able to find, however, is the one in the Democrat, the small weekly newspaper covering the northern region of New Hampshire where he was born and grew up, though not quite where he died.
When I tracked him down during the summer of 2007, Dr. Hamilton was living on a dirt road in the very small western town of Pike, New Hampshire, in a hundred-year-old house (little more than a cabin), where every spare bit of space was filled with books, journals, magazines, and newspapers. I was twenty-four, had just finished my second year as a PhD student at Boston University, and had been granted a modest research fellowship to study representations of mass murder in contemporary American fiction. Early in that research, I discovered that Randall Curry’s best friend had been a literature professor.
Curry is hardly the most famous mass shooter in the United States. Indeed, he’s been mostly forgotten, for though he shot seventeen people (killing nine) outside the Tip O’Neill Federal Building in Boston in 1994, his crimes were not extraordinary enough to last in the public memory, and he was killed by a security guard before he could be taken into custody, leaving little for the media to feast on later. My father worked for the Department of Housing and Urban Development at the time, and he had been in the O’Neill Building when the shooting occurred, so I had a particular interest in it, and my memory of that day remains vivid, though I was only ten years old at the time. (My father came home late, and afterward he never spoke about what happened or what he saw, if anything.)
Soon after meeting with Dr. Hamilton, I dropped out of my PhD program and worked odd jobs out west for a while, mostly in Montana and North Dakota. Eventually, I ended up here in New Mexico, teaching part-time at NMSU in Las Cruces, before recently feeling a need to move on again, somewhere farther away, beyond the borders of the United States, somewhere where the language is unfamiliar and I can’t read any of the books I encounter.
I will leave this memoir behind with Ruben Trevino, a research librarian at Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library, who helped with so much of the work that led me to Wendell Hamilton, and who sent me the obituary. He will file it away somewhere where a researcher with interests similar to mine might find it, if such a person ever exists. There is some information here, and possibly even something more than information, but I am currently in no frame of mind to speculate on what that might be. I have learned what I can from this material.
If you, whoever you are, need final words for all this, then let them be these: do not try to find me.
I was working on my master’s degree at Dartmouth when I first read one of Wendell Hamilton’s essays, “Style as Substance at Century’s End: The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Wings of the Dove, and Three Lives,” published in a 1984 issue of Modern Fiction Studies. I don’t remember how or why I encountered it. It had nothing to do with anything I was working on. I’ve long been interested in Wilde and Stein, so maybe that was it. (I’ve also long had an aversion to the writing of Henry James, which perhaps should have led me away from the essay, but didn’t.) I doubt that I understood much of what Hamilton wrote, and none of his arguments are what stuck with me. Instead, it was the precision of the mind behind the words, the clarity and elegance of his writing, that fascinated me and compelled me to seek out everything I could find by him.
The list of his writings is not long. As far as I can tell, he never published a book of his own (oh for the days of more lenient tenure committees!), but he did coedit Outside the (Meta)Text: Deconstruction and Twentieth-Century American Metafiction with John W. Rye, published in 1989. Simply listing his bibliography solidified my fascination with his work and my curiosity about his fate:
•“Style as Substance at Century’s End: The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Wings of the Dove, and Three Lives,” Modern Fiction Studies, 1984
•“The Making of Americans and the Making of the Twentieth-Century Novel: A Study in Discourse,” Modern Fiction Studies, 1986
•“Obscene Harlem Unseen: Ford & Tyler’s The Young and Evil,” Studies in the Novel, 1988
•“‘A Squeeze of the Hand’: Melville’s Radical Différance,” Social Text, 1989
•“Cut-up as Self-Narrating Form in Naked Lunch, The Ticket that Exploded, and Th
e Wild Boys,” Outside the (Meta)Text anthology, 1989
•“Fascist Aesthetics and the Adventure of History in Barry Sadler’s Casca Novels,” Journal of Popular Culture, 1992
•“John Rambo/John Barth: Lost in the Funhouse of First Blood,” Journal of Popular Culture, 1994
There is much that could be said about that bibliography, but what struck me immediately was the difference between the first five and last two items, the movement from the study of modernist and postmodernist texts (utilizing common theoretical lenses of the time) to the study of popular paramilitary fiction. I read each of the essays and was impressed by the sharp, unaffected writing in them, even when they relied on abstruse philosophical concepts that I’ve never been especially skilled at parsing. The 1990s essays were as beautifully structured and written as the earlier ones, but there was a difference in them too, a new sense of, for lack of a more precise word, urgency. The sentences were generally less complex than those in the earlier essays, the philosophy was less dense, and the insights led to an unsettling feeling that these items of popular culture matter in a way that everything else Hamilton had written about could not—that, in fact, some sort of life-and-death struggle was not just represented within books designed for quick and unreflective reading, but embodied by them.
And then Hamilton published nothing else that I or, later, various research librarians could find. Ruben Trevino did uncover his 1983 dissertation at Yale, Oscar Wilde after Dorian Gray, and I read it, though with disappointment. Its best passages were early drafts of ideas that would appear in some of the articles, and nothing that had not later found its way into print seemed to me especially insightful.
After my brief original interest in Hamilton, I forgot all about him until I was a student in a seminar at BU on violence in contemporary American fiction. I grew curious to know whether anyone had fictionalized Randall Curry and the shooting at the O’Neill Building, thinking I could somehow turn the subject into a seminar paper, and in my general search on literary topics related to Curry, I quickly discovered a long profile of him in The Globe, published a year and a half after the shooting, which noted: “Curry’s closest friend for much of his life until recently seems to have been the Cornell literature professor Wendell Hamilton. Dr. Hamilton declined to be interviewed for this article, and has never spoken publicly about the friendship.” Suddenly my interest in Hamilton returned, I dug up all my old photocopies of his essays, and I searched everywhere I could for mention of him in connection with Curry. His name occasionally appeared, but no one had managed to get any more information than The Globe, and anyone’s nascent interest in Hamilton (if there had been anyone with such interest) had vanished as other mass shootings grabbed headlines and, inevitably, fascination with Curry dissipated.
Now, though, knowing the connection between the two men, all of Hamilton’s 1990s publications made more sense—or not sense, exactly, since I had no idea what the nature of their friendship was, but rather the change in Hamilton’s work no longer seemed entirely, almost comically, random.
The newspaper and magazine articles about Curry said he was someone with paramilitary fantasies. He’d been raised in a basically middle-class family in Peekskill, New York (father an accountant, mother an insurance agent), though apparently there was significant tension between the parents; they divorced when Randall was young and he moved with his mother to central New Hampshire. They were, by all accounts, liberal in their politics. Randall was a stellar student, and easily earned a scholarship to a private school nearby, which is where he met Wendell Hamilton, who was one year behind him. Randall’s life doesn’t get interesting until after high school, however. He attended Harvard for a year and a half, pursuing a double major in computer science and political science. He never fit in at Harvard, kept dropping classes and failing the ones he didn’t drop, until finally he just stopped attending, returned to New Hampshire, worked various low-wage jobs (many of which he got fired from; apparently he was especially unsuited for retail jobs), and finally ended up working at a small-engine repair shop in the southeastern part of the state. Acquaintances said Curry was standoffish and often seemed to think he was superior to the people around him. He became interested in various conspiracy theories, and he developed an obsession with guns and militaria, spending the majority of his income on weapons, tools, accoutrements. He wore a camouflage cap and an olive drab coat he called his “Rambo jacket.” He occasionally had contact with his parents, mostly to ask for money, but never talked about either his mother or father to anyone except to say that they were dead or, if the person knew they were not, that they were mentally unstable, especially his mother, whom he seemed particularly to despise. He subscribed to Soldier of Fortune magazine, and told more than one person that he wished he could become a mercenary; it seemed like a good way to see the world. On a Monday in the middle of April, he didn’t go in to work, but instead drove to Boston, parked his 1989 Ford Bronco illegally outside the O’Neill Building, and started shooting at the building with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. He finished with the rifle, got out of his Bronco, walked toward the building with a Sig Sauer P226 pistol in hand, and shot three people at close range before a security guard was able to return fire, shooting him in the head, chest, and stomach, killing him.
Where had Wendell Hamilton fit into this life?
I wrote my seminar paper as a comparison between ideas in some of the Casca novels of Barry Sadler (tales of an eternal warrior) and Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Libra—a terrible paper, really, but my goal wasn’t so much to write a good paper as it was to think more about Hamilton and his ideas. It also let me put together the core of a research proposal for the summer. Though my ostensible topic was masculine, paramilitary violence in literature and society in the 1990s, my real interest was the connection between Randall Curry and Wendell Hamilton.
Mostly, I wanted to find Hamilton and talk to him. For reasons I couldn’t possibly have explained at the time, I sensed that he might somehow offer a key not only to Randall Curry, but to some inchoate feeling lurking in the shadows of my own life. But how to find him? Cornell seemed a good place to start, and so I e-mailed every member of the English Department who had been there when Hamilton had also been on the faculty. Only one responded: Maxwell Corliss, a Milton scholar whose first two years at Cornell overlapped with Hamilton’s final two. He replied to my e-mail and told me to give him a call, so I did. (With his permission, I recorded the phone call.)
“Wendell was not as odd as some people will probably make him out to be to you,” he said. I told him that nobody so far had responded to any of my inquiries. Either they had no memory of Hamilton or didn’t want to talk about him, at least to me. Corliss laughed. “Not surprising,” he said. “Wendell was not the touchy-feely type, not at all. People liked him well enough—I don’t think he had enemies, per se, at least not any more so than the rest of us—people who disliked something he said in a department meeting or something, certainly, but not more than that, and in any case, Wendell hardly ever spoke in meetings, at least that I saw.”
“Did you know he was friends with Randall Curry?”
“Who?” Corliss said.
“The man who killed nine people outside a federal building in Boston. Nineteen ninety-four.”
“Oh, right, yes,” he said in the sort of tone that made me think he didn’t remember it at all. “I can’t say I paid much attention. Tenure was calling. But no, I had no idea Wendell was involved. How strange.”
“He wasn’t involved, but he knew the shooter somehow.”
“I see.” An awkward pause and then I asked if he could tell me anything else about Hamilton. “What do you want to know?” he replied. I said I didn’t know anything about his personality, his likes or interests. “Oh,” Corliss said, “well that’s a bit difficult. A bit personal.”
“Personal?”
“He’s a very private man. There are so many things I never knew about him, things I don’t know about him, an
d yet we were—well, I’m far less interested in privacy than Wendell, so I’ll just tell you: he and I were in a casual, primarily sexual relationship for a lot of my time here. Wendell didn’t have any interest in something more than that, at least not with me, but it was very cordial, and I honestly think back on it with fondness. He wanted to know about me, and he enjoyed talking about poetry and books and scholarship, but he rarely opened up much about himself.”
“Did you keep in touch with him after he left Cornell?”
“Yes, for a year and a half, maybe two years. He returned to New Hampshire. I assume he’s still there. He inherited a house, some money. He really didn’t like academia. He liked scholarship, and in many ways I think he actually enjoyed teaching—I think he sees the sharing of knowledge to be a kind of duty, a moral duty—but he has little tolerance for bureaucracy, and even less for the corporatist weltanschauung that has so infected higher education, the, well, you know, the endless insistence on usefulness, the instrumentalizing and marginalizing of the humanities, all that. So once he was able to, he left. Even when he was here, we’d meet in Manhattan, usually. There were some bars and clubs that he liked, some friends he had down there. This was the nineties, and New York was a different sort of world, a different place from what it’s become. Now it’s just a playground of the rich. But there was some life still there in the nineties. The last hurrah of the real New York, as it were. We had a nice time, always, but Wendell had become more interested in … well, in rougher trade than I. I’m rather bourgeois in my tastes, I’m afraid. He was not, at least not usually, and less so after he left here. There wasn’t a lot remaining for us to talk about, it seemed, nor much passion in the sex, so we drifted apart, and I haven’t heard from him in a while. I thought maybe you might have.”
Corliss was willing to give me a mailing address he had for Hamilton, a post office box in Hanover, New Hampshire. “He said he checks his mail two or three times a week, and that it’s a good half hour from where he lives. He may still be there, wherever it was. It’s been almost a decade since I last heard from him, though.”
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