Hamilton Stark

by Russell Banks

  There are two versions of what happened following the moment when Hamilton confronted his brother-in-law with a 30.06 rifle. Both are widely believed. Here is Chub’s version:

  “I come in there and the bastard’s got his thirty-ought-six aimed and cocked. I can see he’s drunker’n a fiddler’s fart, so I start trying to humor him, you know, because your drunk man can pull the trigger when your sober man won’t. So I start saying things like, ‘Hey, Ham, ol’ buddy, you don’t want to shoot your ol’ buddy, get yourself in all kindsa trouble.’ You know, stuff like that, just talking to him, while all the time I’m circling around the room and closing in on him, trying to look real casual, like I’m just checking out the furniture or something, but with each step getting closer to the guy, not being obvious about it or anything, of course, until finally I’m maybe only two feet from the tip of the barrel. That’s when I make my move. I look quick off to my left, like there’s someone at the window, and he follows my look, and I grab the barrel of his gun and yank the thing out of his hands, and then I throw it on the couch behind me with one hand and reach around his neck with the other arm, yank his head back, and throw a hammer lock on him until he blacks out and goes limp. He’s a pretty big guy, bigger’n me, but he doesn’t have my training, of course, so there’s not much he can do against me, especially since he’s drunk and all. Anyhow, after a few seconds he comes to, and realizing what he’s done, the guy starts bawling like a baby, pounding his fists on the floor and everything, just like he’s a little kid. I can see he really isn’t right in the head, so I says to him that he ought to get himself to one of those psychologists or something, a head doctor, only he tells me to go to hell, starts laying me out like that, so I says the hell with him and I walk out, and I haven’t seen the bastard, not socially, since that night.”

  The second version of that confrontation was, naturally, Hamilton’s own, which he conveyed by means of a typed post card to his daughter Rochelle, when in a letter she asked him specifically what had happened at that particular point in the evening, “the night you and your family quarreled,” was how she delicately put it. Here is his post card:

  Big Chief broke into private domicile. H. S. ordered him off property with aid of 30.06 Winchester. B. C. eagerly complied. Nothing else. Later phone call from B. C. threatened H. S. with bodily harm. Promises never kept. Boring story. Tell about how your great-great-great-great-grandfather stole 700 acres from Abenookis. You need some humor in your book.

  Her father’s literary advice, offered gratuitously, was not followed, which is perhaps unfortunate, because possibly the only significant flaw in Rochelle’s novel is its lack of humor.

  At the time she received the above card from her father, she was especially unlikely to heed the kind of advice he was offering, for at that particular moment in the writing she was exploring and expounding her theory that her hero, Alvin Stock (Hamilton Stark), was actually possessed by a little-known demon named Asmodeus. Although, to be sure, Rochelle later on gave up this somewhat bizarre notion, so that in the completed manuscript there is not a single reference either to demons or possession (with one possible exception, in her Chapter Two, “Conversion,” where she describes a vision of the archangel Raphael that was experienced by the hero, Alvin, at the age of sixteen one night after a high school dance in the Pittsfield High School parking lot), nevertheless, the terms of her theory are significantly revealing, not only of how Rochelle perceived the extremity of her father’s behavior, but also of the man’s behavior itself.

  While in many ways a courageous and rigorously rational young woman, Rochelle, especially during the period when she was writing her so-called novel, was nonetheless capable of profound superstition, and further, was capable of structuring her superstitions to help her evade uncomfortable truths. Of course, she was very young at the time (still is), and besides, one can hardly blame her. Even if she had been drawing on nothing more than her own direct experiences of her father, she would at some point have been forced to confront the facts that he had mistreated her mother, that he had deserted her in her infancy, that later, as she grew into young womanhood, he had mocked her attempts to express her love for him, and that he had rejected outright her final attempts as an adult to create a friendship with him. Additionally, he had done all this as if he had intended to do it from the beginning! As if nothing could have pleased him more! His villainy was all of a piece. Thus, no matter how much one would have liked to, one could not have forgiven Hamilton Stark for his weakness, nor understood him for his stupidity, nor sympathized with him for his pathology—because he so consistently had insisted that everything he did was intentional, was deliberate, and in the long run was happiness-producing. And if all this, which was no more than her own direct experience of the man, were not sufficient to send her flying to the warm solace of superstition, at the time of her novel-writing Rochelle was interviewing and corresponding with many other people who had been involved with her father, either as wife, sister, brother-in-law, or even friend, and thus she was being literally overwhelmed with tales of selfishness, of rage, drunkenness, lust, greed, of eccentric violence and destructive manipulation, of betrayal, disloyalty and deceit. She could find people, men as well as women, who said they had loved him, who even seemed to be obsessed with him, but she could find no one who could tell her tales of sweetness, of gentleness, kindness and generosity, of affectionate big-heartedness, humility and steadfastness. And yet, oddly, the more of the man’s nature she uncovered to herself, the more she loved him and the more her obsession with her father dominated her thoughts and actions.

  How else, then, to explain to herself (or to others) such a compelling attraction to a man she knew in all ways to be morally obnoxious—unless she could believe that he was possessed? An otherwise sweet, gentle, kind and generous man, she decided, an affectionately big-hearted man, a humble and steadfast man, was tragically possessed by a demon, she believed, and he had thus been transformed into a wholly selfish man, a raging, drunken, lustful man, a greedy man, a man of eccentric, unpredictable violence and pointless manipulation, a master of betrayal, disloyalty and deceit.

  And it was not unnatural, once she had determined that her father was possessed in the first place, that Rochelle would happen on the demon Asmodeus. She had what might be called a lively religious curiosity, possibly the guilt-motivated residue of an adolescent conversion experience and the falling away that had followed. She had been raised rather casually as a Presbyterian, southern (and therefore highly emotional regardless of how casual one might be in keeping the rituals), and when she underwent what in those sects is referred to as the “conversion experience,” whereby Jesus Christ, heretofore a mere abstraction, becomes one’s “personal savior,” she brought with her the intellectual apparatus and energy that were her genetic birthright, and as a result she succeeded in making herself into something of a biblical scholar before, at the age of eighteen, she commenced to fall away from the organized forms of religion. Thus, later on, when the young woman began looking around for the proper demon, she had little difficulty remembering Asmodeus. (It might be worth noting also that in the meantime, between her falling away from her religious faith and her “discovery” that her father had been possessed by the demon Asmodeus, she had undergone almost a year of Jungian psychoanalysis, and consequently it was not especially difficult for her to credit non-Christian deities and other mythical figures with immense power in determining the behavior of individuals who in all ways were unconscious even of the mere existence of such deities.)

  Rochelle knew that Asmodeus, or Ashmedai, though imported from Persian mythology into Palestine, showed up rather frequently in Jewish literature, where his original function was to cause frustration in marriage, usually by provoking rage and violence. There was a crucial link with lust, however, a particularly non-Jewish and non-Christian (although perhaps not non-Protestant) link between rage and lust. Rochelle’s adolescent studies had shown her that the Jewish Asmodeus
had probably originally been the Persian “fiend of the wounding spear,” sometimes Aeshma Daeva, from the root aesh, meaning “to rush forward” or “to be violently self-impelled.” He was a storm spirit, a personification of rage, one who took deep pleasure from filling men’s hearts with anger and desire for revenge. In contrast to the modern world, where anger is regarded as a thing of great value, as something not to be suppressed but rather as a “feeling” to be experienced as a type of ecstasy, in the ancient world anger was regarded as something pre-eminently evil and nonhuman and, therefore, dependent upon interference from outside forces for its visible expression.

  According to Jewish stories, Asmodeus was the son of a mortal woman, Naamah, either by one of the fallen angels or possibly by Adam himself before the creation of Eve. In the testament of Solomon, written between A.D. 100 and 400, he is reported to have remarked, “I was born of angel’s seed by a daughter of man.” Described there as “furious and shouting,” he not only prevents intercourse between husband and wife, but also encourages adultery. “My business is to plot against the newly married,” he boasts, “so that they may not know one another… I transport men into fits of madness and desire when they have wives of their own, so that they leave them and go off by night and day to others that belong to other men with the result that they commit sin…” A peculiar function: to frustrate desire so that he may arouse it elsewhere. In another account, the book of Tobit, written around 250 B.C., Tobias marries Sarah, who has had seven husbands before, all of whom were strangled by Asmodeus to prevent them from lying with her. On the advice of the archangel Raphael, Tobias cooks the heart and liver of a fish, and the smoke repels the demon and drives him off.*

  For Rochelle, the peculiar sequence of the demon’s evolution—from a demon of rage to one who infected men with uncontrollable lust to one who meddled with the mainsprings of marriage—was sufficient to qualify him as the one responsible for her father’s equally peculiar combination of what she had no choice but to regard as social and moral inadequacies. Of course, to connect Asmodeus to the life of her father, Rochelle was also forced to ignore or to explain away as “corrupted sources” and “mistranslations” long chains of bizarre imagery and anachronistic, minor attributes of the demon. All she cared about was the fact that he was the only figure who combined rage with lust and loosed these emotions onto the institution of marriage. To do this, she had to overlook, for instance, the efficacy of the smoky fish liver. She also had to sidestep all ancient attempts to describe the demon physically, because his attributes, if she visualized them, would have made her suspect herself of having drifted into “imaginative zeal,” which she abhorred in others as much as in herself. How, for instance, could she have pictured her father as being possessed by a figure who was said to have the enormous feet of a cock (a bird, one might note, well known for its indiscriminate sexual vigor)? How could she have accommodated herself to those several Jewish tales that have Asmodeus as the king of the demons and residing on top of a mountain from which he regularly journeys to heaven where he takes part in the learned discussions that supposedly go on there? How to make peace with the tale that has the master magician, King Solomon, force Asmodeus and the other devils to construct the Temple at Jerusalem,* after which Asmodeus takes his nasty revenge by seizing the ring in which all Solomon’s magic power resides and, tossing the ring to the bottom of the sea, sends Solomon into exile and reigns in his place until, miraculously, Solomon recovers the ring from a fish’s belly and proceeds to imprison Asmodeus and all the other devils in a large jar? And how to honor the source called the Lemegeton, a highly respected magic textbook, which, providing a long list of demons, asserts that when Asmodeus shows himself to human eyes he rides a dragon, carries a long spear, and has three heads, that of a ram, a bull and a handsome youth, asserting further that only a bare-headed magician may summon the demon, whereupon the demon will respond by making the magician invisible and will lead him to great treasure? How indeed? And what is meant by “bare-headed”?

  Nevertheless, despite such pathetic imaginings, Rochelle successfully managed to incorporate the demon into her vision of her father and, for a single, early version of her novel, her vision of Alvin Stock as well. Happily, she saw the irrationality and the personal psychological use such a vision implied, and because she is as brave a woman as she is intelligent, she purged the novel of all references to demons and possession, and though she did not in that way simplify the character of her father, she did succeed in seeing him more clearly, more realistically, one might say.

  On the other hand, perhaps by coming to regard her father in such a critically analytical light, she lost something, too—a depth, the shuddering, vibratory quality that a proper description of his character required, especially if the reader were to understand the intensity with which Hamilton Stark (Alvin Stock) could simultaneously attract and repel people who, for whatever reason, came close to him. One is left, with regard to Hamilton Stark, with the two-dimensional vision of the chief of the Barnstead Police Department, Chub Blount, who, unable to imagine (or if he imagined them, to care about) the qualities of life associated with the Stark house simply because it had been owned and lived in by the Stark family for over two hundred years, and not mentioning those qualities to himself, thus saw the house in what may be called a “realistic” light. To continue the analogy, one would be forced to deny oneself any vision of the house that explained how a man could commit irrational acts of loyalty to a mere wooden structure. One would not be capable of understanding why a man, who from adolescence had resolutely refused to pray for anything, suddenly had found himself on his knees one night next to his bed in his modest ranch house in Concord, steadfastly praying for ownership of the same house his ancestors had owned. No, if the reader relied on the chief’s view of the relationship between Hamilton and the house his ancestors had owned, he would see a merely selfish, aggressive man using the occasion of a deed and his old and sick parents’ desperation to work out his hostilities and gratify his greedy whim to own the house outright and exclusively.

  Knowing about the patina of time and family that in Hamilton’s mind had surely been laid over the image of the house—an inescapable aura, when it’s available, for any imaginative American of our time—knowing that, however, the sensitive reader may add to the chief’s opaque view of the dispossession the vision of a man obsessed and terrified, a man determined to attach himself to the one thing in his life that seemed capable of connecting him to the thread of time that potentially runs through the fabric of every family. In most cases, especially in this country and among the members of all classes but the most privileged, this thread is broken at every turn. Given geographic relocation, eager divorce, homes for the aged, distant, private schools for the young, housing developments for the middle-aged and insistence by all generations that the adult life of one generation will not be repeated as a life again, it should be no wonder when, having endured all that discontinuity, a man who sees a possibility to attach himself to his familial past by means of a two-hundred-year-old farm and house will grow desperate and impatient beyond reason. He will conceive plans and schemes, will see potential heirs (such as his two younger sisters) as threats to his very life, will even see his own mother as a likely breaker of the thread, and will see his father’s death as a piece of great good luck. Who then is to say this is mere selfishness and aggression? For a man such as Hamilton Stark, emotionally severed from his parents and sisters since childhood (and perhaps, because of the conventions, since birth), a man unable to attach himself to the life and history of a wife or even, at the deepest level, of a friend or of his only child, a daughter he can barely remember and for whom he is unable to create any loyalty except in terms of conventional guilt, which he rejects as both inappropriate and insufficiently personal—for a man such as this, it seems natural that an old frame house and seven hundred acres of rocky, overgrown hillside would become, for all practical purposes, mystical emblems, badges which,
if his, would connect him to the rest of the universe.