The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [40]
“God, and I was also governor of Illinois.”
—You were both?—
“Yes, I have to earn my living, you know.”
On other occasions, he claimed to have been in the French Foreign Legion, a soldier of fortune in Central and South America, a general in the U.S. Army Air Force, a G-man, President Eisenhower’s adviser, a naval officer.
At the same time Joseph, like Leon, was a weak God. He had an enormous feeling of inferiority and a low self-esteem which became manifest in many ways: “God doesn’t want to be kissed or worshipped. God just wants the respect that is due.” “I was over six feet tall in those days.” “Faust is a symbol of one who studies too much, who wants to know too much, and the price is insanity. A man who is capable doesn’t have to sell his soul to the Devil for anything.” “Where is all the power that I had before? That’s what I’m trying to do, deport myself to England. I can’t do it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m the God that took a psychiatric. Later on I’ll be a different God when I get my power back.”
Joseph saw himself as a great writer; this was a central theme both in his delusional system and in his everyday behavior. He told us that he liked to read good literary criticism, history and biography, and essays on art and architecture. Once, in a discussion of Madame Bovary, I asked Joseph who wrote it. “Flaubert,” he said. And when? “Around 1874.” And in answer to the question: “What is it about?” he was able to give a quite accurate account of the story. The discussion lasted about ten minutes and proceeded on an entirely realistic level. Then Joseph said: “You know, I really wrote Madame Bovary.”
—You did? I thought you just got through saying that Flaubert wrote it.—
“No, I did. Flaubert stole it from me. He took it to France.”
Yet with all his delusions, Joseph impressed us with his knowledge of literature and his developed literary tastes. Once during a meeting he pulled three books from his pocket, walked over to the window, and tossed them out, saying: “There isn’t a good line in the whole bunch.” Then, pulling Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea out of another pocket, he exclaimed: “This is a good book!”
A partial list of the books Joseph brought with him to the meetings, and which he had apparently read in whole or in part, included Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan, Durant’s Story of Philosophy, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico. When asked whether Prescott’s work was about the conquest of the Aztecs, Joseph replied: “Yes, but actually the Aztecs supplanted the Toltecs.” He was able, too, to discuss the history of Napoleon I and Napoleon III in quite realistic terms. But as soon as he had finished, he said: “In the War of 1870, I told the French to quit fighting or the Germans would ruin France completely.”
“Tell me about your mother,” I asked the three Christs during one of their early meetings.
Joseph was the first to answer, and his answer was bland and uninformative. “My mother,” Joseph said about his long-dead mother, “is about sixty-three years old. She has rheumatism and can hardly walk.”
Clyde was next. He had a good mother, he said, but she wasn’t living now. She had been quite religious, a good cook, and had helped people. “We had a wonderful home.”
Leon claimed he had no mother. “She’s not my mother. I sincerely know from experience that she’s an old witch, a devil, a duper. She is in with the arsenic and old lace gang. You know what they are, don’t you? She likes to get people blue under the gills and put them underground for no other reason than to be mean because of prejudice and jealousy.
“A woman bore me; she consented to having me killed electronically while she was bearing me, which is in itself a disowning of a child. And I disowned her after I put the picture together. And she also stated when I was eight and a half years of age that I’m nothing to her, and that was like a brick between the eyes. And after I died the death I told her she’s nothing to me, and it’s true what people say about her,