The Thanatos Syndrome

over meals, fistfights. In prison, ideas are worth fighting for. One also gets paranoid. There is a tendency to suspect that So-and-so has it in for you, to read hostile meanings into the most casual glance.
    I witnessed such a fight between an anti-Communist Italian Republican dentist from Birmingham who had patented a new anesthetic and more or less inadvertently killed half a dozen patients and an anti-anti-Communist Jewish lawyer from New York, my cellmate Ben Solomon, recently removed to New Orleans, where he had been convicted of laundering Mafia-teamster money for a black mayoral candidate.
    This pair and I were sitting in the prison library one afternoon, the Birmingham dentist reading Stars and Bars , a new New Right magazine published at Fort Sumter, South Carolina; the New York lawyer reading The New York Review of Books. I was reading a new history of the Battle of the Somme, a battle which, with the concurrent Battle of Verdun, seemed to me to be events marking the beginning of a new age, an age not yet named. In the course of these two battles, two million young men were killed toward no discernible end. As Dr. Freud might have said, the age of thanatos had begun.
    These two fellows had argued violently at table about racism in the South and the crypto-communism of Northern liberals. Now in the library I looked up from the Battle of the Somme and began to watch them. Both were gazing down at their magazines but neither was reading. Not a page was turned for twenty minutes. It was clear from his expression that Ben Solomon, the lawyer, was festering, nurturing some real or fancied slight, which was being rapidly magnified in his head to a mortal insult. I knew the signs. Perhaps he had lost the last argument and was thinking of what he might have said, a killing remark. But it was too late for talk. His fists clenched and unclenched on the table. The dentist, I perceived, was aware of the lawyer’s mounting rage. Then why didn’t they steer clear of each other? Why didn’t one just get up and leave? But no. They were bound, wedded, by hatred. They were like lovers. Finally the lawyer rose slowly and stood over the dentist, looking down at him, fists clenched at his sides. In a trembling voice he said, “Did you or did you not imply that as a supporter of Israel I was a secondclass and unpatriotic American?”
    The dentist, surprised or not, did not look up from his Stars and Bars. “Only after that crack, addressed to others but intended for me, about rednecks, crackers, yahoos, and gritspitters. I only replied in kind.”
    â€œYou mentioned something about Yankee kikes.”
    â€œOnly after you used the expression ‘Southron fascist rednecks.’”
    â€œTake it back,” said the lawyer, clenching and unclenching. Take it back! I am marveling. Like my five-year-old Tommy: Take it back. Well then, why not?
    â€œLook, Doctor,” I said mildly, “if the word offends him—”
    Both ignore me.
    â€œYou take it back,” said the dentist, rising.
    â€œLook, Ben,” I say, rising, “why not take—”
    â€œWho in the fuck asked you?” says Ben, not taking his eyes from the dentist.
    Neither would take anything back. I am rising from the Battle of the Somme to say something like “Hold it, fellows.” Actually I’m fond of both of them.
    â€œTell him to take back ‘redneck,’” says the Italian (redneck!) dentist to me, without taking his eyes from the lawyer.
    â€œTake back ‘redneck,’” I tell Ben. “Then he’ll—”
    â€œTell him to take back ‘Yankee kike.’”
    â€œOkay. Take back—” I begin, relaying messages two feet. But before I can utter another word, they have actually hurled themselves at each other, and now they are actually rolling on the floor, grappling and punching, two middle-aged gents grunting and straining, their bald scalps turning scarlet. Neither can hurt the other, but they’re apt to have a stroke.
    I am straddling them, trying to wedge them apart. Good God: a New York-New Orleans Democrat Jew fighting it out with a Birmingham Italian Confederate Republican.
    â€œCut it out, goddamn it!” I yell at them, straddling both. “You’re going to have a stroke!”
    I did get in between and did stop the fight, easily, because both wanted an excuse to quit with their Jewish and Confederate honor intact. For my