What was your feeling about Tamkin? Wilhelm had a soft spot for him even as he saw his own doom in his strange face. Tamkin had a way with words. The narrator notes, "He spoke of things that mattered, and as very few people did this he could take you by surprise, excite you, move you."
I thought that was a great description of him, a perfect summary of his appeal. Wilhelm's in a world where no one talks about anything that matters. It's all business and small-talk from sunup to sundown, and here's this guy who talks about suffering ("don't marry suffering," he wisely tells Wilhelm) and seizing the day and living in the here and now and not thinking too much about what others think of you ("I want you to see how some people free themselves from morbid guilt feelings and follow their instincts"). All good advice, more or less. And then he rips him off. And Wilhelm sees it coming, but he's too enmeshed to stand clear. Why?
What's the significance of having a financial adviser be a "psychologist"?
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I couldn't get through Tamkin's poem. It was jeopardizing my plan to finish the story the same evening. I need to read it again.
ReplyDeleteI think Wilhelm was drawn to Tamkin as a financial adviser because the latter was on a parallel crash course with disaster, also full of sloppy feelings and evasive mental efforts but better disguised with smooth talk and occasional, accidental flashes of genius. Wilhelm is all these things without the script but struggling to see whether he can maintain a presence on the same stage.
Tamkin was slipping, too, I thought, even if he made off with the $700. His prattling toward the end was getting more and more self-contradictory, like he was slipping. Like the poem. (He'd been developing that line of thought for years. Yet he was thinking of Wilhelm when he wrote it.)
That poem is something else. It made me wonder if part of Tamkin's strategy was to make Wilhelm feel so laid back and self-satisfied and above-the-fray that he wouldn't get too worked up even when he discovered Tamkin's rip-off. It's almost like he was saying, "If you become the type of person I advise you, as a psychologist, to become, then you'll be able to cope really well when I, the 'financial adviser,' scam you."
ReplyDeleteI think you're right that Tamkin was slipping. I had the impression that he was perpetually on a slide, that he had to keep moving, that his life was periods of prosperity interspersed with periods of desperation.
Ha, like a pep talk to ruin. Now that's slick.
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