Paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all, but remark all these roughness’s, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me. Oliver Cromwell Two views of Racial that scan the man behind the monument are clearly headed for controversy. A startling anatomy of the hero Is offered In “The First Filipino” by Leon Marl Guerdon and In “Racial from Within” by Ante Radial.
The Guerdon book, In English, is a biography In the modern manner, where the details are massed not for their scholarly but their emotional value, and the delineation is by narrative, crafted,progressive and dramatic like a novel, and Just as addable, though the style is hardly Guerdon at his felicitous best.
The Radii piece, in Spanish, is a psychoanalysis of Racial, with emphasis on his formative years, and has clinical fascination, though rather prolix and turgid in the writing, its special quality evident in its sources, which range, not from Retina to Belittlement, as one would expect in a Racial study, but from Rile and Dostoevsky to Porous and Joyce! The Guerdon opus is magnum. It’s a massive tome (over 500 pages), has 24 pages of bibliographical references, was unanimously awarded the first prize in the biography notes during the Realizations.
It was published by the National Heroes Commission, has so far been received by what one editor calls “a conspiracy of silence,” but can be expected to find Its way to the top of the Racial shelf and Into every debate over the hero’s personality. The Radii study is basically an extended essay, and a tentative one; the author subtitled it “An Introduction to a Study of Racal’s Inferiority Complex. ” It’s [end of page 53] barely 70 pages long and is still in manuscript, awaiting translator and publisher. It begins with an exposition of Idler’s horses, concludes with a letter of Kafka to his father.
Radii, a Yugoslavian exile, finished his study in late 1963, Just before his tragic death. For epigraph, Guerdon uses the words of Cromwell quoted above and two lines from Othello: Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate Nor set down aught In Malice. Radar’s epigraph Is from Alfred Adler: “To be human is to feel inferior and to aspire to situations of superiority. ” Guerdon sees Racial as the first man to use the term Filipino in its present sense, and he stresses the role in the Revolution which “was, in a sense, made in Spain” of
Racal’s class: the propertied bourgeoisie and the illustrate though they, and Racial especially, might seem to condemn it. Guerdon paints a cruel picture of Racial sitting comfortably in a ship’s cabin, sailing off to Europe in September, 1896, while Boniface and his Stationeries were being driven back to the hills of Balboa and the Propagandists crowded Fort Santiago: “Racial was vexed because he had heard that he was being blamed for the disturbances In Manila. ” Racal’s trial, says Guerdon, presents us with a dilemma.
Racial passionately defended himself from the charge hat he was Involved In or even sympathized with the Revolution hardly an attitude we would honor him for. “Was he innocent or guilty? ” asks Guerdon. “If Guerdon accepts the retraction as genuine: “That is a matter for handwriting experts, and the weight of expert opinion is in favor of authenticity. It is nonsense to say that the retraction does not prove Racal’s conversion; the language of the document questionable. It is a truism that the recantation of his religious errors did not involve the repudiation of his political aims.
We may also accept that he was not too fervent a Mason. In fact Racial himself stated that he had ceased being a Mason in 1891. Why should it be so strange then for Racial to ‘abhor’ Masonry as a society when he had in fact already left it four years before? One hospitalizes are not engaged on either side must face the authenticity of the instrument of retraction, on the one hand, and, on the other, the admitted failure of the intellectual assault on Racal’s position, and can only wonder what it was that happened to the decided rationalist who had promised to kneel and pray for the grace of faith. For Radii, Racial is “a mystery still to be revealed,” a sphinx who, even in the impulsive confessions of his youth, already knew what not to tell which is why, says Radii, not everything has yet been said about Racial, including, perhaps, the most importance’s: “While gazing at pictures of that giant of small and delicate body, many Filipinos must have felt as I did when I first came to know about him, a few years ago, in Europe that behind the well-buttoned frock coat was hidden a deep and delicate human problem. Radii suspects that Racial suffered from complexes of inferiority (he terms them “complexes De Racial”) and that these arose from a belief that he was physically defective. It’s necessary, says Radii, to do for Racial what Socrates did for philosophy, bringing it down from heaven to earth, not to degrade it but to understand it better. It’s curious, but both Loon Maria Guerdon and Ante Radii, in their personal circumstances, approximate certain aspects of Racial, so that one feels, at times, that they are reading themselves into him.
When Radii, for instance, dwells on Racal’s obsession with physical deficiency, one cannot but remember that Radii, too, was obsessed with physical deformity, being crippled: he had lost a foot in an escape from a concentration camp. Guerdon, a descendant of ‘lust- [end of page 54] trades, was bred by the Atone and a home steeped in the old Filipino-Spanish traditions, and is thus perfectly at home in the mind of Racial. Hashes lived long abroad, has a cosmopolitan outlook, and is at the same time a nationalist whose moth wings got rather burned in that Asia-for-the-Asians flame.
Radii, on the other hand, fled from his homeland, which groaned under a tyranny, and became that archetype of modern man: the displaced person, the stateless individual, which, to a certain extent, Racial also was, when he rejected the Spanish air’s concept of the Philippine state as “a double allegiance to Spain and Church. ” In Madrid, at the university, from the Filipino girl who became his wife, Radii heard of Racial and immediately felt rapport with the Philippine hero. He became an ardent student of Racial, did a thesis on him (“Racial: RoomГnotice-Realists”), and came to the Philippines to marry, and to become a countryman of his hero.
He had Just finished “Racial Poor Deadener” that night in January when he climbed to the roof of the main building of Santos Thomas and Jumped off. Because Guerdon and Radii seem, at certain points, to be reading themselves into Guesser’s cosmopolitan intellect and the dark glass of Ante Radii’s tragic sense of life. Guesser’s Racial For Guerdon, Racial is “the very embodiment of the intelligentsia and the petite bourgeoisie”: “One gathers from Racal’s own account of his boyhood that he was brought up in circumstances that even in the Philippines of our day would be considered privileged.
Racal’s father became one of the town’s wealthiest men, the first to build a stone house and buy another, keep a carriage, own a library, and send his children to school in Manila. Joss himself had an ay, that is to say, a nanny or personal revert, although he had five elder sisters who, in less affluent circumstances, could have been expected to look after him. His father engaged a private tutor for him. Later, he would study in private schools, go to the university, finish his courses abroad.
It was the classic method for producing a middle-class intellectual, and it does much to explain the puzzling absence of any real social consciousness in Racal’s postulate so many years after Mar’s Manifesto or, for that matter, Leo Xi’s Rerun Nova- [end of page 55] rum. Racal’s nationalism was essentially rationalist, anti-racist, anti-clerical political rather than social or economic. ” Guerdon surmises that, even if born a peasant and in penury, Racial would still have made his mark: “His character, in a different environment, with a different experience of the world, might have made him another Boniface. But, reared in bourgeois ease, Racial became a bourgeois idealist, putting his faith in reason and telegraph dogmas of the inevitability of progress, like any proper Victorian, and preferring reform to revolution, and “revolution from above” to “revolution from below. ” What he wanted to be what he might have been if the policy of the illustrates had prevailed – as representative for the Philippines in the Spanish parliament.
Reported Governor Carnivore from Adapting in 1892: “One of Racal’s ambitions is to become Deputy for the Philippines, for, once in the Cortes, he says that he could expose whatever happens in the islands,” And Guesser’s laughing comment is: “Congressman Racial, and a congressman dedicated to making exposures, at that! ” This ambition of Racial must have been well-known among idolatresses; one of their plans to spring him from Jail in 1896 was to get him elected to the Cortes; the governor-general would then have been forced to release him so he could go to Spain and attend reliant.
As the Philippine representative in Madrid, says Guerdon, Racial would have worked for the expulsion of the friars, the sale of their estates to the new middle class, the establishment of a certain measure of self-government in the islands and more native participation in it; and this would have resulted in an alternation in power between conservatives and liberals, this political activating, however, limited to the educated and the propertied. In other words, the two political parties would have represented only one social class; the bourgeoisie. If this is really what
Racial envisioned, then his dream has come to pass, for the two political parties that alternate in power today are limited to the educated and the propertied and actually represent only the middle class. Yet there was a Boniface latent in Racial, according to the hero divided. Observes Guerdon: ‘”Assimilation’ has been rejected as a vain hope. ‘Separatism,’ or in plainer words, independence, has been advocated almost openly. Racial in the Fills no longer the loyal reformer; he is the ‘subversive’ separatist, making so little effort of concealment that he arrogantly announces his purpose in the very title of his novel, which means ‘subversion. No solution except independence! But how is it to be achieved? At this point Racial hesitates and draws back. The last chapters of the Fill are heavily corrected, and it may not have been due only to Racal’s desperate need to cut down his novel to match Ventures money. The thought of revolution in real life may have called up too many ‘bloody apparitions. ‘” So, Father Florentine is made to deny in the final apostrophe of the novel that freedom must be won at the point of the sword: “What is the use of independence if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow? What,” asks Guerdon, “are we to conclude from this? In Racal’s mind the Filipinos of his generation were not yet ready for revolution because they were not yet ready for independence, and they were not ready for independence because they were still unworthy of it. ” The Hamlet split in Racial between the will to act and the tendency to scruple preceded the flagrant schizophrenia of El Fill- [end of page 56]boisterous. In 1887 he was saying that “peaceful struggle will always turn out to be a futile dream because Spain will never learn the lesson of her former colonies in South America. That as the Boniface in Racial speaking. But Racial the man of property quickly added: “In the present circumstances, we do not desire a separation from Spain; all that we ask is more attention, beautification, a higher quality of government officials, one or two representatives in parliament, and more security for ourselves and our fortunes. ” Four months later, he turned 26, and both sides of him wrote: “l have no desire to take part in conspiracies which seem to me premature and risky in the extreme.
But if the government drives us to it, if there remains no other hope than to seek our ruin n war, then I too shall advocate violent means. ” That sounds like a final statement: it was not. The following year, 1888, while one side of him was crying, “It is too late; the Filipinos have already lost the hopes they placed in Spain! ” another side was murmuring that the happiness of the Philippines must be obtained by “noble and Just means” and that “if to make my country happy I had to act vilely, I would refuse to do so. Comments Guerdon: “We think of Racial as a mild and gentle reformer who shrank from the thought of separation from Spain, most of all a violent revolution; it would me that he appeared to historicalness, especially after the publication of the openly subversive Fill, as a wild firebrand, as demagogic as Lopez-Jean. ” The question is: Who saw Racial plain? Guerdon wickedly relates that when firebrand Lopez-Jean thought of migrating to Cuba, Racial opined that Lopez-Jean should return to the Philippines and “let himself be killed in support of his ideas. Home went Lopez-Jean, bravely declaring himself “resigned to everything, ready to fight if necessary, ready to die if need be. ” But after Marinas. ” And Racial himself, who had called Cuba “an empty shell,” would, when the Revolution broke out in the Philippines, enlist for Cuban service, laying himself open to the charge that, by offering to serve the Spanish government in Cuba, he was not only trying to flee from the struggle in his own country but was making clear on which side of the struggle he stood.
Says Guerdon: “There can be no argument that he was against Benefaction’s Revolution. Not only had he offered his ‘unconditional’ services to help suppress it but he had indicted a environmentalist the Revolution. ” He called the idea of revolution “highly absurd. ” The condemnatory manifesto was gratuitous; it was not dad to influence the court, he had been offering to make it even before he was arrested. But the court was alert; it noted that Racial condemned Benefaction’s Revolution but not Benefaction’s aim of independence for the Philippines. Racial,” says Guerdon, “believed in the gradual and natural evolution of the Filipino Nation in the course of years and foresaw the international developments that would make eventual independence an inevitable conclusion on which metropolis and colony would peaceably agree. ” In short, in the life-long duel between Racial distributives and Racial the progressive, the latter won in the end. He had flirted, in his fiction, with revolution; but when faced by the fact of it, he called it absurd and retreated to Reason, Reform,Evolution, Inevitable Progress, and all the other Victorian catchwords.
The malicious could say that his was the retreat of a man with property to lose. Guerdon says that Racial was “a nationalist who did not recognize his Nation when it suddenly reservoir him, a bloody apparition in arms. ” But it was he who, as the First Filipino, had most created the idea of that nation. “Throughout the centuries,” says Guerdon, “one tribe after another took up arms, against the missionary friars or for them, in protest against a wine tax or against forced labor, in the name of the old gods or in the name of the new Spanish Constitution.
Whether the revolt was long-lived like Dagon’s, which lasted 85 years, or as short-lived as Novella’s, who ‘was outlawed at midnight, proclaimed emperor at two o’clock in the morning, and shot at five in the evening, natives allies, converts, mercer- [end of page 57] marines fought against natives and kept the archipelago Spanish Christian. Malone proclaimed himself king of the Illusion, and Pollinate De la Cruz, king of Togas. No one proclaimed himself a Filipino. What Guerdon misses here is that the Filipino forces sent to subdue Malone the Pensiveness or AlmaГn the Oilcans or De la Cruz the Toga were fighting (whatever the Spaniards may have intended) to keep the Filipino one. They were proclaiming themselves Filipino, and not merely Pensiveness or Oilcans or Toga, as the American northerner sent to subdue the American Southerner in the Civil War proclaimed the oneness of the American.
The Filipino allies, converts, mercenaries sent against the Filipino rebel may have kept the archipelago Spanish ND Christian, but they also kept it from falling apart again into the numberless tribes it used to be, prevented the return of separate kingdoms for Painlessness,locales and Togas. The paradox is cruel, but Racial could proclaim himself a Filipino only because Adagios failed, and Novels and Malone and AlmaГn and De la Cruz.
Their success could have meant the end of the idea of the When Racial arose, the Philippines had been Spanish and Christian long enough to feel itself ready to be something else. The preliminary mold was necessary (as our present difficulties with the “cultural minorities” indicate) but now the matrix could e broken, the womb abandoned. “It was Racial,” says Guerdon, “who taught his countryman (sic) that they could be something else, Filipinos who were members of a Filipino Nation.
He was the first who sought to ‘unite the whole archipelago’ and envisioned a ‘compact and homogeneous society’ of all the old tribal communities from Battles to the Sulk Sea, bassoon common interests and ‘mutual protection’ rather than on the Spanish friar’s theory of double allegiance to Spain and Church. “He would arouse a consciousness of national unity, of a common grievance and common fate. He would work through his writings, overlapping the old barriers of sea and mountain and native dialect, from Vagina to Adapting.
Without this new middle class of which he was the exemplar, now national by grace of school, the printing press, and [end of page 58] newly discovered interests in common, the Kibitz Revolution of 1896 might not have had greater significance than that of 1872. Instead, what might have been only one unrepentant revolution, what might have been a Toga uprising to be crushed as before with levies from Pangaea or the Looks or the Biases, was transformed into the revolution of a new nation.
It was Racial who would persuade depreciates, and with them, and sometimes through them, the peasants and the artisans that they wearable equally ‘Filipinos,’ and in so doing would justify the opportunities of his privileged birth. ” Radii’s Racial A Victorian hero is one’s ultimate picture of Guesser’s “First Filipino. ” Ante Radii’s “Racial from Within” is, on the other hand, modern man – anxious, nervous, insecure, ill at ease in his world,ridden with complexes, and afflicted with feelings of inferiority and impotence.
The key image is of the child Racial, as described by his sisters Narcosis and Maria to AsuncionГ¶n Lopez Bantus: “Jose was a very tiny child. And his head grew disproportionately. When he began to walk by himself he often fell, his head being too heavy for his frail body. Because of this, he needed an ay to look after him. ” Radii believes that Racial was aggrieved by his puny physique. Whether the hero was really smaller than normal, the significant thing is that he thought he was, during the impressionable years buyouts.
In his “Memoriam De UN steadiest”, written before he was 20, references to his size recur obsessively: “The son of the teacher was a few years older than I and exceeded me in stature… After (beating him in a fight) I gained fame among my classmates, possibly because of my smallness I did not transcend into the river because it was too deep for one my size… At first (the father at the Atone) did not want to admit me, perhaps because of my feeble frame and scant height Though I was 13 going on 14, I was still very small. Other people are seen in relation to his height. His teacher in Fabian is “a tall man”; his professor in Manila is “a man of lofty stature”; and most poignantly of all, the young man presumed to bisector of Segundo Katie, Racal’s first inamorata, is “UN hombre alto. Brother Pacing decided against enrolling Joss as a border at the Atone because (this is from Mrs… Bantam’s account) he was timid and small for his age. ” And Father Pastels of the Atone wrote that Racial failed to be elected president of the college stolidity because of his “small stature. His sisters recalled that he insisted on Joining games like the popular game of “giants” for which he was too weak and small: “He grew up pathetically conscious of his short stature and fragile body, he made great effort to stretch himself out in his games, and he was continually begging his father to help him grow. His little body did not permit him to compete with boys his age but stronger than he; so he withdrew into himself. Nevertheless, the tiny lad went on craving to become big and strong. He persisted in playing the game of ‘giants. His Uncle Manuel, seeing the boy’s avidity for advice on body building and pitying his eager new of tougher boys, took him under his care. A strong man full of vitality, he sought to part the boy from his books and to satisfy his craving to develop his body. He made the boy skip, jump, run; and though this was atavist hard for the frail boy, he had so strong a will ND such anxiety to improve himself that, at last, the will won over the flesh. He became lighter and quicker of movement, and his physique more lively, more robust, more vigorous, although it didn’t grow any bigger. ” Comments Radii: “Truly, the mystery of the body is great.
It’s as if every man carried within himself an ideal or invisible image of the body, of his body; and looking in the mirror, compares what hashes there, the visible image that confronts him, with the invisible image he hopes to see mysteriously reflected there. Feelings of inferiority al- end of page 59] most always arise not from confrontation of the I with the non-l but from our confrontation with the interior image we carry of ourselves. We measure ourselves, not against anything outside the sphere of the l, but against our own selves, or, rather, the ideal of ourselves we propose to realize. Racial, as adolescent, had in his mind a clear and vexing image of his puny stature, an image not yet repressed into the subconscious; and it’s not difficult to understand the marks and imprints hostile body stamped on his spiritual character. Nature, as whimsical as retune and as rarely Just, had created this little body as hovel for the spiritual beauty of a child whose ailing soul felt itself to be an exile from a world infinitely purer. Because of an excess of spirit, Racial saw his body as inadequate, and this, in turn, influenced his complex psychological structure. Radii’s point is that Racal’s career was an effort to reduce the discrepancy between the interior image he carried of himself and the image he saw in the mirror. The discrepancy produced both inferiority complex (Racial withdrawing into himself and his books because he could not compete with tougher boys) and the determination to excel (Racial fighting the bigger boy and taking up body building and fencing). That he already carried, as a child, an image of himself as a great man, is demonstrated by a childhood incident.
One day, while the young Racial was modeling a figure of Napoleon (another dwarf boy who went forth to make himself a big man) his sisters teased him, apparently on his diminutiveness. Cried tetchily to his sisters: “You can laugh at me, make mock of me; but wait till I grow bigger. When I die, people will keep pictures and statues of me! ” extraordinary events marked his boyhood, significant. The adolescent already felt hat even the most humdrum happenings of his youth would have future historical value, and should be recorded for posterity.
But, side by side with this image of greatness, was the actual image of the boy who felt himself to be stunted, who was haunted by a sense of inadequacy. In the horrid outside world of Fabian and Manila he ached aloud for the refuge of the home in Calm, the bosom of his mother; and one can theorize that he would later turn disestablished refuges into intellectual ones: the safe home in Calm would become the untroubled paradise of the pre-Hispanic archipelago; the bosom of the other would become the sweet warmth of the Mother Country.
In the Canto De Maria Clara, in fact, mother and Mother Country are indistinguishable figures. The nostalgia of Racial, says Radii, was a fear of the world: “Well may Racial have exclaimed with Sartre: ‘l am condemned to be free. ‘ In the moments when the young Racial had to show a certain responsibility, [end of page 60] an obligatory independence; intense moments when he had perforce to face the world, the world inspired him with veritable terror, a terror we would call cosmic. ” Radii quotes the passage in the Memoriam where Racial describes his last night at the
Atone: “At the thought that I would have to leave that refuge of peace, I fell into profound melancholy. When I went to the dormitory and realized this would be the last night I would pass in my peaceful alcove because, as I was told, the world waited for me, I had a cruel foreboding. The moon that shone mournfully seemed to be telling me that, at daybreak, another life awaited me. I could not sleep until one o’clock. Morning came and I dressed; I prayed with fervor in the chapel and commended my life to the Virgin, that she might protect me while I trod this world that inspired me with such terror…
At the critical moments of my life I have always acted against my will, obeying other ends and powerful doubts. ” Alongside this and similar passages expressing terror, hesitancy, and a nostalgia that “makes me see the past as fair, the present as sad,” Radii places Miguel De Unanimous Judgment of Racial: “Racial, the bold dreamer, strikes me as weak of will and irresolute for action and life. His withdrawal, his timidity, proved a hundred times, his timorousness, are no more than facets of his Hamlet disposition.
To have been a practical revolutionary he would have needed the simple mentality of an Ands Boniface. He was, I think, a faint-heart and a tabulator. ” One remembers that the English meaning of filibuster is to delay; and El Filibusterer’s may more aptly be read, not as an act of subversion, as Guerdon says, but as an acting out of Homesteader’s. But Radii’s (and Unanimous) Judgment of Racial as fearful of the world of reality fits in with Guesser’s theory that Racial was devoid of any real social consciousness and feared to face, in the end, the fact of revolution.
His condemnation of the Revolution as “absurd” has an uncanny echo in the “theater of the absurd” with which modern existentialists condemn what they me the correlatively of contemporary life. Radii, whose study of Racial is spiked with quotations from the existentialists, from Aggregated to Kafka to Sartre, would seem to be placing Racial in that company –the modern man aghast at the world he has made. Racial, knowingly or unknowingly, created a Nation and a Revolution, but terrifying bloody apparitions.
So, modern man, confidently believing in the inevitable benefits of science and education and progress, is at a loss to explain how such beneficial things could have produced the dreadful world in which he nervously awaits an insane doom. Would Racial, who so admired the Germans and the Japanese for their dedication to science, commerce, education and progress, have recognized the Germany of Belles and Dachas, the Japan of the Death March? Yet these bloody apparitions were shaped by the very virtues he admired.
The analogous question would be: Would we have been able to predict the later multitudinous Racial who wrote the Memoriam? Radii thinks that the writing of the memoirs, in the certainty that they would be read by posterity, was “already the beginning of deformation”: “Whether instinctive or conscious, it was an effort to mask important and intimate facts. His mind was enormously impressionable and given to self-analysis and introversion. With such a mind, household appraise, hyperbolically, his weak nature and small physique, active factors in the formation of his very complex character.
His physical inferiority complex, exacerbated by psychological influences, can be detected in numberless manners of expression, both direct and indirect when he speaks of his smallness, of the tallness of others, of his yearnings and nostalgia for the past, of his insecurity and tragic doubts of the future, of his boldness and his desire to rise above himself, and [end of page 61] other protestations that seem extinct from fear. ” But what are the “intimate facts” that the young Racial would “mask”?
Radii opines that one of the most important of them is sexual inadequacy, and he takes for test case Racal’s first amorous affair:”el fenГ¶men Katie,” as Radii calls it. The usual interpretation of this affair, says Radii, is that the young lover knew how to behave with the strictest decorum and delicacy toward a girl already engaged. Radii smells a rat. He notes that it’s Racial who, when he first meets Segundo Katie, presumes that “the tall man” with her is her novo. Racial is attracted to the RL, whom he described as “smallish” (fajita). He plays chess with the man he keeps calling her novo and loses. From time to time she looked at me and I blushed. ” He vindicates himself, after losing at the chessboard, by displaying his intellect, when the talk at the gathering turns to “novels and other literary things. ” In later meetings, Segundo makes it indubitably clear that she’s interested in Racial. He feels flattered, he professes to be unworthy of any woman’s love, and he persists in taking it for granted that she is soon to be married, though she herself puts his suppositions in doubt. “But I’m not getting married! She tells him pointblank, and in tears. “l forbade,” he says, “my heart to love, because I knew she was engaged.
But I told myself: Perhaps she really loves me? Perhaps her feelings for her fiance are but the affections officialdom when her heart had not yet opened her breast to true love? ” One perhaps followed another; she waited, giving one proof after another of her feelings for him; but he told himself he would make no declaration until he had seen “greater proofs” of her affection. Just what he expected the poor girl to do to prove her love is so vague it’s indecent; in other love affairs it’s usually the other side that’s opposed to furnish the “greater proofs. There’s no question that, whether she was previous vows and given herself to him. But he persisted in his Hamlet hesitations, doubts and questions, until one suspects he was manufacturing excuses protesting that, although she had conquered his heart, his heart refused to surrender! Observes Radii: “Despite the certainty that he was loved, he went on maintaining a Hamlet disposition, which strikes us as that of a faint-heart trying to hide an incapacity to face the fleshly demands that love brings.
In his manner of love, more than in his manner of speech, each man reveals himself. But it was finally impossible formal to go on with his deceptions and doubts, and he had to admit, after seeking ever fresher proofs of affection, that Katie loved him truly. He felt no relief over this, for the intensity of love, which he considered a height unattainable by his poor energies, was to him an intolerable tyranny troubling his nights and his sleep. The more sure he was that Katie loved him, the more nervous he became. Racial saw the girl’s love for him as “a yoke” “UN Hugo queue hay VA impounded sober mi. ” Finally, the poor girl gave up. She returned to her home town, to marry her “tall man. Racial, on horseback, in Calm, watched her ride past in a carriage. She smiled at him and waved a handkerchief as she rode out of his life forever, leaving he says, “a horrible void. ” Immediately after, he says, he visited on two successive nights a girl in Calm who was white of skin and seductive of eye, but discontinued the visits at the order of his father.
This confession, says Radii, may be no more than a desire to clothe, for future readers of historians, the nakedness of the failure of his first attempt to love. His later affairs of the heart followed the same pattern of vacillation and invented impediment. He made Eleanor Riviera wait eleven years, then cried that she had betrayed him by preferring Englishman. He considered Nellie Boosted “worthy” enough to be loved by him, but feared she might think he was after her money.
Much has been made of the number of women in his life, but the very number is suspicious, hinting at emotional deficiency and the inability to sustain a relationship. “The popular myth,” says Guerdon. “is that Racial could never love woo- [end of page 62] man, he had given his whole heart to his country. In any case, no woman was worthy of throe; he had a higher fate. And noting that Racial does not come out too well from his love affairs, Guerdon reflects that “not even the appealing theory that he was ‘married to his country’ can wholly satisfy. Radii traces the generally unsatisfactory air of these love affairs to Racal’s feeling of insecurity: “In few fields of human conduct do complexes of inferiority play so great a role as in the field of love, especially in the activities called sexual. Young men unsure of themselves find sexual timidity the most difficult to overcome. There’s no complex of inferiority that does not imply a feeling of sexual deficiency, and one of the common exults of this is the ‘attitude of vacillation’ so polysaccharides by Adler. Racial, despite his efforts to overcome his complexes and free himself from the anxieties caused by his small stature – experiences as painful for him as they were beneficial to his country was to go on being a great neurotic, with all the consequences that a pathogenic memory produces. With the years, the feelings filtration would oppress him less, but he would not be able to keep from reviewing them continually, afflicted by the memory of whisperings. In the struggle he had received grievous
