The case is a good example of what Van Vogt came to call ‘the violent man’ or the ‘Right Man’. He is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem – to feel he is a ‘somebody’. He is obsessed by the question of ‘losing face’, so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong. This man’s attempt to convince his wife that she was insane is typical.
Equally interesting is the wild, insane jealousy. Most of us are subject to jealousy, since the notion that someone we care about prefers someone else is an assault on our amour propre. But the Right Man, whose self-esteem is like a constantly festering sore spot, flies into a frenzy at the thought, and becomes capable of murder.
Van Vogt points out that the Right Man is an ‘idealist’ – that is, he lives in his own mental world and does his best to ignore aspects of reality that conflict with it. Like the Communists’ rewriting of history, reality can always be ‘adjusted’ later to fit his glorified picture of himself. In his mental world, women are delightful, adoring, faithful creatures who wait patiently for the right man – in both senses of the word – before they surrender their virginity. He is living in a world of adolescent fantasy. No doubt there was something gentle and submissive about the nurse that made her seem the ideal person to bolster his self-esteem, the permanent wife and mother who is waiting in a clean apron when he gets back from a weekend with a mistress…
Perhaps Van Vogt’s most intriguing insight into the Right Man was his discovery that he can be destroyed if ‘the worm turns’ – that is, if his wife or some dependant leaves him. Under such circumstances, he may beg and plead, promising to behave better in the future. If that fails, there may be alcoholism, drug addiction, even suicide. She has kicked away the foundations of his sandcastle. For when a Right Man finds a woman who seems submissive and admiring, it deepens his self-confidence, fills him with a sense of his own worth. (We can see the mechanism in operation with Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.) No matter how badly he treats her, he has to keep on believing that, in the last analysis, she recognises him as the most remarkable man she will ever meet. She is the guarantee of his ‘primacy’, his uniqueness; now it doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks. He may desert her and his children; that only proves how ‘strong’ he is, how indifferent to the usual sentimentality. But if she deserts him, he has been pushed back to square one: the helpless child in a hostile universe. ‘Most violent men are failures’, says Van Vogt; so to desert them is to hand them over to their own worst suspicions about themselves. It is this recognition that leads Van Vogt to write: ‘Realise that most Right Men deserve some sympathy, for they are struggling with an almost unbelievable inner horror; however, if they give way to the impulse to hit or choke, they are losing the battle, and are on the way to the ultimate disaster… of their subjective universe of self-justification.’
And what happens when the Right Man is not a failure, when his ‘uniqueness’ is acknowledged by the world? Oddly enough, it makes little or no difference. His problem is lack of emotional control and a deep-seated sense of inferiority; so success cannot reach the parts of the mind that are the root of the problem. A recent (1981) biography of the actor Peter Sellers (P.S. I Love You by his son Michael) reveals that he was a typical Right Man. Totally spoiled by his mother as a child, he grew into a man who flew into tantrums if he could not have his own way. He had endless affairs with actresses, yet remained morbidly jealous of his wife, ringing her several times a day to check on her movements, and interrogating her if she left the house. She had been an actress; he forced her to give it up to devote herself to being a ‘good wife and mother’. As his destructive fits of rage and affairs with actresses broke up the marriage, he convinced himself that he wanted to be rid of her, and persuaded her to go out with another man. But when she told him she wanted a divorce, he burst into tears and threatened to jump from the penthouse balcony. (‘This was not the first time he had spoken of suicide. This was always his crutch in a crisis.’)
The morbid sense of inferiority emerged in the company of anyone who had been to public school or university. When, at dinner with Princess Margaret, the conversation turned to Greek mythology, he excused himself as if to go to the bathroom but phoned his secretary and made her look in reference books and quickly brief him on the subject. Then he went back to the dinner table and casually dropped references to mythology into his conversation. His son adds: ‘I saw him engage in this ploy on many occasions.’
Another typical anecdote shows the borderline between normal and ‘Right Man’ behaviour. The children’s nanny was a strong-minded woman of definite opinions; one evening, Sellers had a violent disagreement with her and stormed out of the house; he went and booked himself into the RAC Club for the night. From there he rang his wife and said: ‘What the bloody hell am I doing here? If anybody’s going to leave, it’s that bloody nanny.’ He rushed back home, seized a carving knife and drove it into the panel of her bedroom door, shouting I’ll kill you, you cow.’ The nanny jumped out of the window and vanished from their lives.
Sellers’s behaviour in storming out of the house could be regarded as normal; in leaving her on the battlefield he was acknowledging that she might be right. In the club, his emotions boil over as he broods on it; by the time he has reached home, he has convinced himself that he is right and she is wrong, and explodes into paranoid rage. Whether the threat to kill her was serious should be regarded as an open question. The Right Man hates losing face; if he suspects that his threats are not being taken seriously, he is capable of carrying them out, purely for the sake of appearances.
Van Vogt makes the basic observation that the central characteristic of the Right Man is the ‘decision to be out of control, in some particular area’. We all have to learn self-control to deal with the real world and other people. But with some particular person – a mother, a wife, a child – we may decide that this effort is not necessary and allow ourselves to explode. But – and here we come to the very heart of the matter – this decision creates, so to speak, a permanent weak-point in the boiler, the point at which it always bursts. The Family Chronicle by Sergei Aksakov provides an apt illustration: Aksakov is talking about his grandfather, an old Russian landowner.
And this noble, magnanimous, often-self-restrained man – whose character presented an image of the loftiest human nature – was subject to fits of rage in which he was capable of the most barbarous cruelty. I recollect having seen him in one of those mad fits in my earliest childhood. I see him now. He was angry with one of his daughters, who had lied to him and persisted in the lie. There he stood, supported by two servants (for his legs refused their office); I could hardly recognise him as my grandfather; he trembled in every limb, his features were distorted, and the frenzy of rage glared from his infuriated eyes. ‘Give her to me,’ he howled in a strangled voice… My grandmother threw herself at his feet, beseeching him to have pity and forbearance, but in the next instant, off flew her kerchief and cap, and Stephan Mikhailovich seized on his corpulent and already aged better half by the hair of her head. Meanwhile, the culprit as well as all her sisters – and even her brother with his young wife and little son [Aksakov himself] had fled into the woods behind the house; and there they remained all night; only the young daughter-in-law crept home with the child, fearing he might take cold, and slept with him in the servants’ quarters. My grandfather raved and stormed about the empty house to his heart’s content. At last he grew too tired to drag his poor old Arina Vasilievna about by her plaits, and fell exhausted upon his bed, where a deep sleep overpowered him, which lasted until the following morning. He awoke calm and in a good humour, and called to his Arishka in a cheery tone. My grandmother immediately ran in to him from an adjoining room, just as if nothing had happened the day before. ‘Give me some tea! Where are the children? Where are Alexei and his wife? Bring little Sergei to me!’ said the erstwhile lunatic, now that he had slept off his rage.