Word: aarons
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...soft spot for brutes, his diary would reveal--all 17 million words, all 155 volumes. It took the late Evelyn Inman (she died last June) and two other trustees of his estate until 1977 to secure a publisher. Harvard University Press accepted the diarist's tonnage, then engaged Daniel Aaron, professor of English and American literature, to make sense of it. Aaron's distillation is just out; it runs to 850,000 words, costs $39.95 and weighs 5lbs...
What is not mentioned enough, however, is Professor Aaron, who spent these past seven years inside the tortured mind of the megalomaniacal bigot misogynist Peeping Tom hypochondriac called Arthur Inman. In his fulminations, Inman addresses the editor who would not come along until twelve years after his death; he bullies, wheedles, whines, pleads. Then along comes Aaron, who responds to the dead diarist--and in so doing becomes a flesh-and-blood character. Inman says at one point that "a diary expurgated and deleted is a eunuch of a diary." Aaron says at another, "Oh, for God's sake, Arthur...
...Aaron, 73, a bike in his office, pipe in his mouth, tweeds on his back, speaks in perfect paragraphs: "I took it on at first for the money. Then I became stuck, absorbed, caught up in it. I got to know him and his world in a way I know of nothing else, no other society. And while I disliked him intensely--I couldn't be further away from his political, economic, nearly all his attitudes--I became fascinated by his unique opportunity to indulge himself in a way no one else could. He was a voyeur, yes, a sadist...
...into the 1960s. On another level, a man who hated Jews, Italians and Roosevelt while admiring Hitler managed, according to his critics, to capture just about every significant thing that happened in this country--culturally, socially, politically and economically--during the time frame of his obsession. Professor Aaron says the 1,000 or so characters Inman debriefed, so to speak (the more lurid the accounts, the better, Inman felt), "disclose aspects of American life only sporadically touched upon in contemporary fiction." In a way, the diary can be seen as a nonfiction novel. The nut wrought something important...
...time Aaron came on the case, the survivors of that old gang of Inman's had long since scattered. But the professor soon came to find interviews unnecessary. "Nobody can tell me anything I don't know about him," he says. "I just know him. I can predict his response to anything. Anything. I don't think many people have had such an experience. I certainly know him better than any member of my family...