Word: inmanned
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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...
Arthur Crew Inman was born in Atlanta in 1895, the son of old money (cotton). Midway through Haverford College, in 1916, he collapsed, mentally and physically. "Slipping joints" was prominent among his litany of miseries, and his search for osteopathic relief led him to Boston. Eventually he settled into Garrison Hall , a seven-story residential hotel in St. Botolph Street. Back then it was the sort of place where you could hire a room and a woman instead of having lunch...
...Inman took an apartment, then another, then another. At one time he had five. He needed the flats above and below to shield himself from noise (once he tried swapping urban sonic torture for the sounds of nature and wound up shooting songbirds). Bright light he considered poison, so he restricted himself to a heavily draped bedroom. To this room he beckoned "talkers," people he advertised for in the newspapers, saying he would pay them to tell him of their lives. And he wrote. A failed poet, for good reason, he aimed at capturing his life, the lives of others...
...Inman fondled the women talkers who allowed him to and had sex with the women who allowed it. His wife Evelyn allowed him to do so. His document was not simply a wenching man's laundry list; it became in part a repository of American sexual habits from World War I 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...
...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...