Arthur Inman was a very strange man. Part of this strangeness has to do with his massive, engrossed, graphic legacy-a sprawling diary of well over sixteen million words, filling one hundred fifty-five manuscript volumes, omnivorously chronicling the wreck of the Hindenberg and the only known 'Petrified Ham,' the rise of Hider and the crash of the stock market, the depression and Mr. Farnsworth's Flea Circus, the sexual life of his domestics, the Lindberg baby-snatching, the Coconut Grove fire, Joe Louis' heavyweight tide defeat of Max Baer, the tribulations of stockpiling rations during the war, the perils of a small-time dancer in Hollywood, the deaths of Joe McCarthy and Franklin Roosevelt, the menu of the Jackson Day benefit dinner for the Democrats, the escapades of an oily little picaro, and, always, his own distorted, phobic, neurotic life, his rantings, ragings, and assaults, his aches, pains, compulsions, his enemas, stomach pumpings, and bromide ingestions, his delusions, desires, and hatreds, his pettiness, his machinations, his racism, his vicious nightmares, his consuming failures at poetry, at business, and at suicide, and what he considered his two crowning successes, his diary and, finally, his death. Why? Why would Arthur Inman devote his life to this monstrous fungoid growth (Gross, 1985)? The long answer is an involved psychological study, one that might be too short of external evidence to reach a satisfactory conclusion. For all his incessant self-probing, strapping his childhood and his nightmares to the examining table and poking them until they twitch, Inman provides neither and adequate account of his condition nor a solid grounding on which to base one. He places tremendous emphasis on a speech his father delivered on the dangers of masturbation (a human life, in those few minutes ... was-and I do not exaggerate-as much as ruined [90]).1 He was tortured for most of his life by dreams of the taunts and tensions he endured at an all-male private school. He resented his mother's moral injunctions. But surely others suffered these Victorian vestiges in turn of the century childhoods and lived normal, less obsessed, less self-absorbed lives. There is no trauma, no single event that explains Inman's peculiarities-at least none that he records-and the complex of all that he reports does not seem