Hamilton Stark by Russell Banks

Author:Russell Banks [Banks, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Psychological
ISBN: 9780062123244
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1978-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Ausable Chasm

THIS IS THE STORY OF HOW Hamilton Stark almost went to college. Unavoidably, it will be the story of numerous other events as well—other people, other missions, other conflicts resolved and unresolved—but mainly, it will be the story of how Hamilton Stark almost went to college.

Not many people know it, know that he even wanted to go to college in the first place or that he actually came close to doing so in the second. Naturally, you’d never have heard it from the man himself—he carried a number of odd, perhaps even (now that we know what we know) defensive prejudices against people who had gone to college.

“You take your college-educated man,” he frequently proposed, “and I’ll show you a capitalist dupe. Not that I mind your capitalists. Shit, no. I admire capitalists,” he said. “It’s your dupes I can’t stand. I’ll stomp a capitalist dupe before I’ll stomp a communist true believer, and you know what I think of your communist true believers,” he reminded me.

Needlessly, it turned out, for I did indeed know what he thought of people he chose to designate “communist true believers.” I knew that he despised them. Possibly despised them to the point of violently attacking them, for, though I personally have never actually seen him physically assault a so-called communist, nevertheless I have heard stories that, frankly, I’d rather not relate here. Let it suffice to say that Hamilton Stark, in the barrooms of central New Hampshire, was a well-known, militantly forceful anticommunist. Every morning he read the Manchester Union-Leader, a newspaper widely regarded as the nation’s most rabidly right wing, a newspaper with red-ink headlines such as MUSKIE WEEPS WHEN SHOWN HIS OWN WORDS and HALDEMAN AND EHRLICH-MAN QUIT UNDER LEFT-WING PRESSURE. That sort of garbage, which Hamilton, oh, my Hamilton, seemed to choose to believe.

There was a brief period when he and I were still willing to argue politics. I am a moderate Christian Socialist and at the time of this writing have cast my presidential ballot for the following individuals: Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Rogers Morton (write-in), and Morris Udall (write-in). Hamilton, though he has voted in every presidential election since 1948, has voted for only one man—Ezra Taft Benson. At least that is what he tells me. And I have no reason to doubt that if Hamilton votes in 1976, he will vote yet again for Mr. Benson, even though by then Benson may well be dead and out of the running altogether. And who knows, Hamilton may write in Benson’s name anyway. He used to quote Benson to me until, my ears burning, I begged him to stop. “You want to hear what a wise man said? ‘It’s just too bad, it’s really sad, but there has to be a loser.’ Now that’s my idea of presidential wisdom!” Hamilton would exclaim. “I love that … ‘it’s really sad,’ heh heh heh. You talk about your Kennedy wit. What about the Benson wit?”

I suppose in a

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