Russell Banks - Hamilton Stark

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.