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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 and his part of the 20th century in an unblemished account that would bring him fame.
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 the 1,000 or so characters Inman debriefed, so to speak (the more lurid the accounts, the better, Inman felt), "disclose aspects of American life only sporadically touched upon in contemporary fiction." In a way, the diary can be seen as a nonfiction novel. The nut wrought something important.
By the 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."
Inman, whom Aaron calls Arthur as affectionately as you would an old uncle just stepped away for tea, seems to have won his editor's respect with his lifelong refusal to pretty himself up, much less anyone else. The diarist would look at scribblings 20 years old, realize what a creep he had been when he had written that, yet reject his right to excise a word. His own wife was "a pathetic little wren," though at another time she was his "treasure girl with a heart of gold," but then again she was "homely as a stump fence built in the dark."
Let the diary fall open of itself to any passage, and most likely something reprehensible lives upon the page. Yet, Aaron says, read as a whole, one finds the self-deception. Arthur contradicts himself. He is a blowhard. He knows it. Then something happens. Blam! He blows harder.