Summary
Chapter 3
After Perls leaves, Wilhelm eats while his father silently critiques him for being slovenly. Wilhelm advises himself often not to discuss his problems with his father and remains quiet for the time being.
Dr. Adler suggest Wilhelm visit the Gloriana’s very fine pool, and mentions massages at the Russian and Turkish baths. Wilhelm says he might see what it is like, then complains he cannot take city life anymore and misses the country. Dr. Adler suggests that if he cannot take it, he ought to get out. He adds that Wilhelm ought to cut down on the drugs.
Wilhelm sees his father’s reluctance to engage with him, but presses on about Margaret and the boys’ educational policies. Dr. Adler admonishes him that he told him to stop giving Margaret so much money. Wilhelm replies that he loves his children and does not want them to lack for anything.
Dr. Adler mentions that Catherine called asking for money to rent a gallery for her canvases. He scoffs that she is not making real art and is too old to be encouraged in her delusions. Wilhelm initially supports his sister, but then wonders what is the issue with women–her and Margaret. Dr. Adler says Margaret is trying to show him he cannot make it without her and that she will bring him back by financial force. Wilhelm protests that he has a sense of honor and will not let her do this, and Dr. Adler asks why he will not settle with her. Upset, Wilhelm says he tried to. Four years ago, they split and he gave her everything she asked for, and she even got his beloved dog. She keeps asking and asking and won’t stop.
Dr. Adler wishes his son would not indulge himself so much in his emotions. He tells Wilhelm to get a lawyer. Wilhelm says they both have one and all they do is send him bills. Dr. Adler sighs that he always thought she was strange. All Wilhelm can do is clutch his throat dramatically and say this is what she is doing to him. Embarrassed for his son, Dr. Adler tells him to stop. Wilhelm cries that she is suffocating him, that she is making him a slave.
Dr. Adler finally says he does not understand Wilhelm’s problems and that he himself never had any like them. Wilhelm is frustrated that his father is comparing Mother and Margaret, and says his father should not compare himself to his son, as Wilhelm was not a success and Adler was.
The anger reveals itself in Dr. Adler’s face. He says he worked hard and was not self-indulgent; his own father worked in dry goods and they had nothing. Wilhelm replies that he was not lazy and maybe worked too hard. He made mistakes, yes, but he worked hard. Dr. Adler adds that he did not run around with women.
Wilhelm’s head spins. He responds to this insinuation, saying he loves his kids and he had to leave Margaret. Dr. Adler does not understand, and states that if it was “bed-troubles” (47) then Wilhelm should just get used to it since everyone does.
Wilhelm thinks about it, and concedes maybe that was it, but he says simply that she was one way and he was another, and he was feeling sick about it all. He wishes she had told him to go, but he was the one that left because he had to.
His father asks him point-blank why he lost his job and Wilhelm says he did not. His father does not believe him and asks if there was a scandal. Wilhelm hotly protests this and says there was no scandal. His father is unconvinced and chastises him for ruining his reputation.
His father goes on about women and Wilhelm admits there is a woman he loves and wants to marry but Margaret will not grant him a divorce; plus, the woman is Catholic so he had to go talk to a priest about all of this. Unsympathetic, his father chides him for letting Margaret treat him that way.
Wilhelm bursts out that his father always starts off being sympathetic and he gets his hopes up, but by the end of their conversations he is always depressed. He says Dr. Adler only thinks about his death and Wilhelm wishes they could be fair to each other. He asks why his father wants to know about his problems if he is not going to help him. He wonders if it is so he can lay the whole responsibility on Wilhelm, to have Wilhelm comfort him for having such a son.
Disgusted, Dr. Adler asks why he is so unreasonable and what he expects. Wilhelm cries that he expects help. He looks frantic and Dr. Adler is embarrassed. Wilhelm protests that he cannot go back and change things; his life is half over so what is he supposed to do now? Dr. Adler criticizes him for having become a GI and the fact that he, Dr. Adler, sent a check to Margaret every month. Wilhelm complains that he sees other elderly people helping their kids.
Suddenly Wilhelm bursts out that he thinks his father hates him but that if he had money, his father wouldn’t hate him. He sighs that he is too old, too unlucky. Dr. Adler replies that if he started to give his son money, it would never end. He is alive, not dead, and he wants Wilhelm off his back. Wilhelm tells him sadly to keep his money.
Chapter 4
Wilhelm berates himself as he leaves the dining room, but also wonders if he was meant to shoulder his burdens honorably. He rages in his mind against his father, and knows that if his father were poor, he’d help the old man.
Dr. Tamkin sees Wilhelm in the lobby and addresses him. Wilhelm asks about the lard, but Dr. Tamkin asks why he is bothered. Wilhelm wonders if it is possible Dr. Tamkin is who he purports to be, but then decides he can’t doubt the man to whom he has trusted his money.
Five days ago, Tamkin and Wilhelm had walked to the brokerage office. Tamkin broke the news that he did not have all his money yet, but Wilhelm had to be okay with it. Tamkin provided a check for three hundred only, and the check looked weird to Wilhelm, but he went ahead with his seven hundred. He signed over his power of attorney, letting Tamkin speculate with his money.
Wilhelm went back to the manager of the brokerage firm and asked the manager if Tamkin had control over any of his other assets. The manager, a correct and precise personage, said no. This was comforting, but it did not even matter, as he had no assets.
Dr. Tamkin took the attitude that they were two gentlemen having fun speculating, with no real consequences if they lost the money. He told Wilhelm, “You have to take a specimen risk so that you feel the process, the money-flow, the whole complex” (17).
Tamkin asks Wilhelm about the family situation. Wilhelm says he had words with his dad, complaining his father does not like his feelings, finding them “sordid” (58). Tamkin says he has a client who has problems with his dad. He takes off his hat and Wilhelm marvels at what a creature he is with his many “complexities of his bald skull,” “deceiver’s eyes,” (58) and stocky figure; he is pigeon-toed, and has big brown eyes with strange lines within them. Wilhelm feels like the man “tried to make his eyes deliberately conspicuous, with studied art, and that he brought forth his hypnotic effect by an exertion” (59).
Dr. Tamkin keeps talking about his client but Wilhelm wants to know about the lard. He is tired of Tamkin’s idea that everyone has a neurosis, but does have to agree that the businessmen he knows are “crazier than anyone” (60).
Wilhelm anxiously suggests they go to the market and Tamkin waves him off. He laughs that you can’t “march in a straight line to the victory” (60). He is confident, gives Wilhelm a shrewd, calm, “wizardlike” (60) smile.
Tamkin suggests coffee but Wilhelm does not want to meet his dad again. He sees his father leave, though, so they sit down. He listens to Tamkin’s story of the father and son, and laughs and forgets his troubles. Tamkin says that facts are always sensational.
Tamkin talks more about his profession, waxing poetic about how he likes the “spiritual compensation” (62) of his work. Wilhelm finds Tamkin fascinating, especially when he adds more details about himself, like his knowing Greek, perhaps being in the underworld, being the head of a mental clinic in Toledo, and working with a Polish inventor.
Wilhelm keeps hearing these strange and shocking stories from and about Tamkin, such as the doctor treating an Egyptian princess and then her friends and relatives in the old country. He talks about his investing for the Egyptians, telling more and more over-the-top stories. Wilhelm wonders why he sits there and listens to these impossible stories. He decides he must be a sucker.
Tamkin speaks of how the money he was involved with made him guilty, made him feel aggressive. He knows why people say they “made a killing” in the market; he has seen it all in his speculation. He explains these murderous people by saying that “You can’t understand without first spending years on the study of the ultimates of human and animal behavior, the deep chemical, organismic, and spiritual secrets of life. I am a psychological poet” (65).
Wilhelm questions why Tamkin is in the market. Tamkin gives a convoluted answer about how people have many souls within them, but the main ones are the real soul and the pretender soul. The pretender soul makes the real soul obey him, he explains, and the true soul eventually has to kill the pretender. Wilhelm is perplexed that this means that there are murderers everywhere, and Tamkin nods seriously and says that he can hear them, the poor beings. Wilhelm finds the doctor untrustworthy and responds that there are a lot of kind and normal people out there.
Wilhelm knows the market is about to open, so he is distracted. He wonders what his true soul looks like and how it gets strength. He speaks up and says he understands Tamkin. Tamkin replies that he knows Wilhelm is not dumb, and that he has been treating him for some time now. Wilhelm is secretly pleased but also worried.
Tamkin looks at him and says it appears there is a lot of guilt in him. Wilhelm has to agree but says it is other people who make him feel bad; besides, he adds, he is ready to go to the market.
On the way out of the hotel, Wilhelm leaves an envelope for his father at the front desk; it has his hotel bill and a note asking his father to carry him this month. Tamkin asks about his dad and what is wrong between them. Wilhelm replies that his father told him there was a reason why he was let go, but Wilhelm says his father is wrong.
Tamkin assures him the market will make him feel better. On the way over, Tamkin urges Wilhelm to read a poem he wrote. Wilhelm has a strong reaction, finding it “mishmash” and “claptrap” (71). He knows Tamkin is literate and wonders how he could have written such a thing. Wilhelm says it is nice, but is confused when Tamkin says the “Thou” in the poem is about him, and talks in circles about humanity being constructive or destructive.
Wilhelm is thinking about his money and what will happen if he loses it. He thinks Tamkin might be in trouble too.
Analysis
Critic Daniel Weiss notes, “On this day of days [Wilhelm’s] whole personality has been given over to an exhibition of his neurotic symptoms. And the external world obliges by offering him a realistic basis for such an exhibition.” First, Wilhelm and Dr. Adler’s relationship continues to deteriorate over the course of the morning; Dr. Adler wishes his son would take care of his appearance more and stop taking pills; Wilhelm suspects he wants a “young, smart, successful son” (42). He thinks Wilhelm “[makes] too much of [his] problems” (42) and is “indulging himself too much in his emotions” (44), disapproves of how much money his son is giving Margaret but also suggests he was wrong to leave Margaret, tells him becoming a GI was a mistake, blames him for being let go of Rojax and suggests that Wilhelm “[did] something to spoil [his] reputation” (48), and muses with disapprobation that “I don’t understand your problems… I never had any like them” (46). Dr. Adler cannot tolerate the fact that his father worked hard to make a life for his family and that he then worked hard, while his own son seems to be wasting chances. He flat-out says he does not like the way Wilhelm behaves, and categorically refuses to give Wilhelm any money when his son broaches the subject.
Wilhelm protests against these assertions, sometimes heatedly but mostly feebly. He tries to shift the blame for everything to Margaret, complaining that she will not grant him a divorce, takes his money, and berates him. He can make no headway with the lawyers, claiming both his and Margaret’s lawyers “talk and send me bills, and I eat my heart out” (45). It is like, he whines, “she’s strangling me… One of these days I’ll be struck down by suffocation or apoplexy because of her. I just can’t catch my breath” (45). He even goes as far to equate himself to a slave, saying “A husband like me is a slave, with an iron collar” (45). This grotesque metaphor is indicative of the degree to which Wilhelm has adopted a woe-is-me attitude and refuses to take any responsibility for his actions—after all, he left Margaret and not the other way around. Certainly it is understandable that a married person could be unhappy, and we are not privy to exactly what happened between the two of them, but Wilhelm’s attempts to paint Margaret as a soul-sucking harridan seem to be convenient excuses to ignore his own culpability in the marriage’s demise.
He interprets his failure to make it in Hollywood by saying “If anything, I tried too hard” (47) but that while he admits he made mistakes, they are like this: “Like I thought I shouldn’t do things you had done already. Study chemistry. It was in the family” (47). This is clearly a half-hearted attempt to placate his father as well as shift the blame off of himself by attributing a nobler motivation to his action of quitting school and trying to make it as an actor. This extends into his wondering if he is meant to suffer: “Maybe the making of mistakes expressed the very purpose of his life and the essence of his being here. Maybe he was supposed to make them and suffer from them on this earth.” He adopts the stance of a martyr in order to ameliorate his suffering, and, for the moment, it works. Weiss writes, “The broadest psychoanalytic category within which Tommy Wilhelm operates is that of the moral masochist, the victim, for whom suffering is a modus vivendi, a means of self justification.”
When Wilhelm encounters Tamkin a few moments later, he hopes to move beyond his conflict with his father, thinking he “found himself into another channel” (54). He asks about the lard, hoping to hear that he is going to make money. Tamkin, though, works best when he is “analyzing” someone, so he immediately directs the attention back to Wilhelm and why the younger man is “obsessional” (53) and “hot under the collar” (54). He wants to know about the “family situation” (57), and Wilhelm privately criticizes his trying to be the “keen mental scientist” (57).
For all of Wilhelm’s denseness about himself, it does seem that he has perspicacious observations about Tamkin. He recognizes that the man has a “hypnotic power in his eyes” (59) and that with those eyes that he is trying to make “deliberately conspicuous,” he attempts to bring “forth his hypnotic effect by an exertion” (59). Annoyingly to Wilhelm, Tamkin wants “Every public figure to [have] a character neurosis” (59), everybody in the Gloriana to have “a mental disorder, a secret history, a concealed disease” (59). As Tamkin speaks on and on about his fantastical endeavors and gives him a poem he wrote, Wilhelm wonders, “I must be a real jerk to sit and listen to such impossible stories. I guess I am a sucker for people who talk about the deeper things of life, even the way he does” (65). He sees how Tamkin “looks at me on the sky, to see if I’m being taken in!” (66). He is “worried… and even somewhat indignant” (69) about Tamkin’s interest in his affairs. Yet while he knows what Tamkin is saying is wild and maybe untrue and definitely fashioned to elicit a reaction in him, he cannot help but realize “that the doctor cared about him pleased him” (69). In the next section, we will look more thoroughly at Tamkin as a character, but for now it is sufficient to note that Wilhelm’s insights into Tamkin’s character are actually quite useful (though it means that we are more easily annoyed with him for still trusting Tamkin with his last $700).
