I wrote a short, stiltedly polite note to Hamilton, explaining my research project, conveying my long interest in his work, and saying that I was planning on a trip to New Hampshire during the summer and wondered if he might be willing to talk to me. I included my address, phone number, and e-mail address. I mailed the note to the post office box and waited.
A week later, I received a response written elegantly in black ink on a small sheet of heavy, cream-colored stationery: “Dear Mr. Dalaria: Thank you for your kind letter. I will, indeed, be at home this summer. Please send me your essay, as I would like to have a sense of your work before I commit myself to meeting. Sincerely, Wendell Hamilton.”
I read the note over again and again, my feelings a lightning storm of surprise, elation, terror. I had made contact with someone whose ideas had been important to me for many years, and he seemed willing to meet, but he wanted to read my own work—work I had little confidence in. I regretted even mentioning it to him. I spent the next few days revising my essay on Casca and DeLillo, trying to make it not quite so insipid, trying to show that I had thoughts of my own and wasn’t merely repeating the insights in Hamilton’s own essay. I wondered if he would respect me more if I was critical of some element of his work. There was nothing I particularly disagreed with in what he had written, though. I decided not to force it. Better to have him think of me as a naive sycophant than as an arrogant kid. Finally, I printed the paper out, stuck it in a large envelope, and mailed it to him.
A week and a half later, I received another letter: “Dear Mr. Dalaria: Thank you for sending your very interesting essay. I am generally at home and would be happy to meet you. If July 16 at 1:00 p.m. would be convenient, that would work well for me, and you do not need to reply, but simply show up. If it is not convenient, please reply with another date and time and I will make myself available. I have enclosed a map. Sincerely, Wendell Hamilton.”
The map was hand drawn, simple and graceful, with clear indications of where highways turned into small roads, where pavement gave way to dirt, and where moose, deer, cows, chickens, geese, ducks, and dogs were most likely to walk in the road. I found an inexpensive hotel a few miles away from Hanover and booked a room, then spent the long days until our meeting rereading not only all of Hamilton’s writings, but the various books and writers he wrote about. I was trying to shape my own knowledge to be similar to his.
And then I was driving through the back roads of New Hampshire, through forests and valleys so heavily wooded that I feared claustrophobia would overtake me. I got to the hotel, tried to read, couldn’t concentrate, ordered a chicken sandwich from room service, could hardly eat it, tried to sleep, couldn’t, took a bath, then spent much of the night lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and running scenarios through my mind: Hamilton likes me and answers all my questions jovially, Hamilton hates me and doesn’t answer any questions, Hamilton is demented and answers my questions in bizarre riddles, Hamilton is not home, Hamilton is a serial killer and slits my throat with a rusty kitchen knife …
In the morning, I drove to Pike. Being nervous and excited, I was early. I think I allowed four hours to drive the forty miles from my hotel to Hamilton’s house. I used the spare time to drive around the area until I understood how each road connected with the roads around it. It was a lovely day, sunny and not too hot or humid, so I parked my car and wandered through woods, stopped to look at rivers and ponds, letting myself take in the shape and smell of the landscape that Wendell Hamilton had made his own for more than a decade now. Places, I thought, could tell us about the people who chose them. What was this place—quiet, remote, somehow outside history—telling me about Wendell Hamilton?
I pulled into his driveway a few minutes before 1:00 p.m. He lived on a dirt road off a dirt road, and his driveway was another sort of dirt road, though one with a bit more grass covering it. The driveway led down to a little gray house sitting on a ledge overlooking a brook. Beside the house stood a garage that looked barely large enough to hold one car.
Before I could knock on the front door more than once, it opened and a short, bald man smiled at me. “Mr. Dalaria, I presume.”
“Dr. Hamilton.”
“Nobody has called me ‘Dr. Hamilton’ in a long time. It sounds like an accusation. Call me Wendell, please, for the sake of my sanity. Come in.”
I followed him into a closet-sized mudroom and took off my shoes. “And call me Ted. ‘Mr. Dalaria’ is not something I’m used to.” He chuckled and led me to a living room where two whole walls were nothing but bookcases. Hundreds more books stood in stalagmite piles across the floor. The furniture (couch, two chairs, a coffee table) was old (but not antique); it made my own furniture, relics of yard sales past, seem fresh, modern, affluent. I noticed cobwebs in corners.
“I’m afraid I’m a bit of a Miss Havisham,” Wendell said. “I used to be self-conscious about my indifference to housekeeping, but now I’m indifferent to my indifference. Entropy always wins.”
He offered me a cup of coffee or a glass of lemonade, and I gladly accepted the latter, which it turned out he had squeezed himself that morning. It was sharp and sugary.
I scanned his bookshelves, stepping carefully between the piles.
“There’s no real order to it all,” he said. “There was once, but I found it oppressive and unhelpful. It is frustrating, I admit, to have to search when you are seeking one specific book, but I find the opportunities for serendipitous thinking far outweigh that occasional inconvenience.”
Countless paperback mystery novels, many looking like they’d survived floods and beatings, mingled with pristine old hardcovers of Greek plays and French Enlightenment philosophy. New copies of recent novels sat beside old self-help books from the sixties and earlier. I took Norman Vincent Peale’s Stay Alive All Your Life from a shelf. “I can’t say I expected to find something like this in your collection,” I said.
“Oh, Peale is one of my favorites. A blithering idiot and a snake-oil salesman, no doubt, but I can’t help suspect he actually believed what he wrote, and I find something compelling in that, something even, perhaps, noble. A feeling that turns the laughter and scorn that fills me when I start reading to shame and then awe by the time I am finished.”
I put the book back on the shelf, tucked between what looked to be a lovely illustrated volume of Rabelais and a home-repair manual from before I was born. “What do you read these days?” I said.
“Theoretical physics.”
I laughed. He smiled. “Really,” he said. “Not especially detailed theoretical physics, but introductory sorts of texts, popularizations, books for people who don’t really ever have a hope of truly understanding physics but nonetheless possess a certain curiosity. And its words are sometimes beautiful—a tachyonic field of imaginary mass—who couldn’t love such a phrase? I find it all strangely comforting, the more far-out ideas of quantum theory and such. It’s like religion, but without all the rigmarole and obeisance to a god. Or perhaps more like poetry, though really not, because it’s something somehow outside language, but nonetheless elegant, and of course constricted by language, since how else can we communicate about it? But it gestures, at least, toward whatever lies beyond Logos, beyond our ability even to reason, though perhaps not to comprehend. At my age, and having spent a life devoted to language, there is comfort and excitement—even perhaps some inchoate feeling of hope—in glimpses beyond the realm of words. There is, I have come to believe, very much outside the text. What is it, though? Call it God, call it Nature, call it the Universe, call it what it seems to me now to be—having read and I’m sure misunderstood my theoretical physics—call it: an asymptote.”
I had not yet asked Wendell if I could record him, so the above is a reconstruction, but I feel I remember it almost perfectly, because I’d never heard anyone speak like him before. At first, I believed he must have prepared what he hoped to say to me in advance, or had said it to many other people over the years, turning it into a performan
ce, a shtick. Maybe this was the case, but I prefer to think not. He enunciated carefully, his voice a bit high and almost, I thought, English in its accent, and he spoke without haste and without resort to the umms and uhhs and like, you know, likes that the rest of us so often succumb to in conversation. We talked for a while longer about nothing of any real import (certainly nothing I remember as having any import), and then I asked if he might be willing for me to record him.
“Why?” he said, suddenly suspicious. I said it was faster for me than taking notes, and that way I could forget about whether I was getting it all down and instead devote myself to listening, to conversation. He stared at me for a moment, then shrugged and said though he thought it a tad discomforting, he was sure it would be just fine. And so I began the recording. (My transcription here has cleaned up some of what I said, but I’ve hardly had to edit his responses at all. I have indicated where he took an especially long pause between words, as these silences seem to me as meaningful as what he spoke.)
Q: I’m most curious I guess why you switched, or changed—why you made the change from the sorts of essays you were writing in the eighties—right up through the William S. Burroughs piece—that essay—why after that—there’s a break—a break in chronology as well as in subject matter—and that’s probably the biggest thing that has stuck out to me over the years about your work, the question of why that shift.
A: Yes. There is a shift, certainly, obviously. I’ve thought about it a lot. [Pause.] At the time, I thought what had happened was that I had simply become bored. I had been doing the same sort of work, the same sort of writing, for a decade or so. I had been ambitious as a young man. I had seen academia as an escape from a fate—from a, though it will sound hyperbolic, a doom. It is the right word. I had felt doomed. I also felt that I was a fraud. Given the circumstances of my childhood, it is remarkable that I was ever able to imagine a life for myself different from the lives of the sorts of people with whom I attended public school, the sorts of people, in fact, that I now, once again, live among, and quite happily. But at the time of my childhood it was not happy. I was not happy. I dreamed of escape. School was the only thing I showed any talent for, and so school became my escape. Boarding school, then college, then graduate school. From each of which, of course, I also wanted to escape, because only new things offered the escape I sought, or at least that I thought I sought. It remained so even as I was hired by Cornell. The essays I wrote throughout the 1980s, the essays, we might say, of the Reagan years, those essays are written by a man who wants nothing more than to escape from a fate he cannot even quite articulate (if you’ll pardon that unintentional rhyme), a fate that is, though unarticulated, though imprecise and vague and even perhaps mystical, a fate that is, as I said, a doom. The escape that man sought was an escape through literature, or, more accurately, an escape through the interpretation of literature. It was an attempt to get the stories right, to find, somehow, the right words, and, thus, salvation.
Q: But? What changed? What was the shift?
A: Not one thing, not one large crisis or such. A series of … it’s hard to find the word. A series of insights. A series of catastrophes. Insights taken for catastrophes, catastrophes taken for insights. It was a long time ago. [Pause.] I will tell you this: people were dying. People I knew, acquaintances, and a couple of people I cared about very deeply. They died, slowly, horribly. They wasted away, sometimes neglected, all of them cast out by a society that declared them to be abject. Sinners, lepers. But not deserving of compassion, not even seen as human, at least not fully human. Untouchables. It is easy to forget now, seemingly so far away from it, what it was like for … us … to live then, to die then.
Q: AIDS?
A: Yes.
Q: But you weren’t—
A: No. I used to get tested every six months, then every year, then … well, it’s been a while. But there’s no need. That part of life is over for me, and I will not pretend I’m not happy to be done with it. A friend once called me a Buddhist atheist, and I suppose the label is accurate for me, as I have spent many years now attempting to escape desire, though even as I say it I’m somewhat embarrassed as I know so little about Buddhism that my perception of its precepts, its antipathy to desire—even war against desire—may be a flight of my imagination. It doesn’t matter, though. “Atheist” is accurate. Anything else is … noise.
Q: Why—OK, this is an impertinent question. I’m sorry. I—why do you think—why—I mean, your health, I assume—
A: Why did I not get sick?
Q: Yes.
A: Because most of my practices were not the ones that correlate with the highest transmission of the disease. I wouldn’t want to give you the impression that I was safe, because I wasn’t. I am, I expect, quite lucky, and perhaps even somehow immune. Or it may just be that since I’ve never really enjoyed anal sex, and haven’t sought it out, and have rarely indulged in it, that I wasn’t at as much risk as others. Oral sex, yes, some, certainly, but fundamentally I was interested more in touch than in penetration or the exchange of bodily fluids. I expect the reason, or a reason among a constellation of reasons, that I have been able to settle quite comfortably into celibacy is that I have always been somewhat, and sometimes quite strongly, disgusted by bodily fluids. You’ve seen Dr. Strangelove, I assume—“precious bodily fluids,” yes? (Is that the phrase?) Well, I’m quite the opposite. Nothing precious to me about bodily fluids. I all but faint at the sight of blood, for instance. But that’s not quite disgust, not quite what I’m referring to. (I am, as always, circling my subject.) By disgust, I mean what has been inside the body and is expelled, secreted. Semen, saliva, sweat: they’re all equally unappealing to me. To hold a hand, though, to touch a face, to kiss a cheek, to run hands through hair—to wake in the morning and look into someone else’s eyes, or to watch them as they sleep peacefully, to listen to them breathe—that, for a while at least, was an exquisite pleasure, a privilege even.
Q: For a while?
A: Yes. Feelings change. Emotions fade. Desires fade, I’m sorry to say. I expect it was because certain people died.
Q: AIDS?
A: Mostly. Not entirely.
Q: Randall Curry?
(I had not planned how I would bring Curry up. In my memory, his name just pops out of my mouth, but I expect I was thinking that the time was right, or that there would, at least, not be a better time, given how honest and personal Wendell had become in our conversation.)
A: [After a long pause.] Yes. But. No. Not in the same way. Randall and I were not lovers, I should say that. We were friends, best friends for a time. When we were young. Our ideals were similar, if you can believe it. We wanted to be intellectuals, and we wanted to change the world, to make it a more just, more equitable place. We became embittered and disillusioned, but in different ways, toward different ends.
Q: Were you surprised by what he did?
A: What he did was a shock, and ghastly, and unforgivable. It was, in addition to being ghastly, and in addition to being unforgivable—it was, for me, personally—it was a … a disappointment. Randall was a brilliant man. My sense of escape was entwined with my sense of his escape. We were, I had thought, similar. I was wrong. Or perhaps not wrong. I have thought about it a lot over the years, of course. How could I not? I never wanted to talk about it at the time because I only wanted to reject him, to cast him out, to make him, as it were, my own abject. To keep him, and his beliefs, and his acts, to keep them outside, untouchable and, most importantly, untouching me. A foolish, if natural and understandable, emotion. In a narcissistic way, I saw Randall as a failed version of myself. There but for fortune go I. Our given names, after all, are so similar. Wendell. Randall. The same but for a few small letters. Surely, that must mean something? And yet it does not. Chaos torments the pattern-seeking mechanisms in our minds. Catastrophe brings out the fool in the best of us. And I am not the best of us.
Q: Did he have anything to do, for instance, with your
interest in the Casca novels?
A: Yes, of course. He was one of the contributors to the shift in my thinking, my desires, my life. His was one of the later deaths, and an entirely different type than that of my friends who got sick. But his decline—I know no other word for it, though the word itself saddens me and, in fact, implicates me—his decline was clear for years, and viewed in retrospect it seems, to me at least, that only a moral monster could have seen it as anything less than a severe crisis. But that is in retrospect. Still, much was visible, even at the time. How could it not be? My inclination, though, was simply to create distance. To separate myself from him. To avoid contact. Do not touch. And yet I was fascinated. The fascination of the abomination.
Q: Did you think he would kill people?
A: No. Of that I am certain. (Or I tell myself I am certain.) I had no conscious idea it would take the final form that it did. Does that exonerate me? If anything, I think it shows how unperceptive I was. All the clues were there. I did not see them. I thought I was reading him with great insight, but I was terribly wrong. It’s not that I was oblivious. I was afraid for him. But only for him, because in the darker moments of night when I thought about his fate, his doom, I thought only that he might kill himself. And he did. In the worst possible way, by bringing other people into his own despair.
—But you asked about the books. Indeed, the Casca novels were ones he loved, as was First Blood, though in his case the movie and not the novel, which I don’t think he’d ever read. I tried to understand him by writing about them. I tried to write my way out of his doom. It was arrogant and stupid and the only thing I could, at that moment in my life, see to do. [Pause.] What I, in my self-absorption, could not see is that my writing those essays, my engaging with those thoughts, those patterns, would do nothing. And did nothing.
Q: The First Blood essay came out right around the time when he died.
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