Ham on Rye

“Dimes? Jesus Christ, what kind of ambition is that?”

Henry Senior does not criticize Ben for counterfeiting money but for lacking ambition to the extent that he only counterfeits dimes. For men like Ben, however, the world is one of shrunken ambition. He cannot see himself as someone worthy of making a quarter or a dollar because poverty has forever lowered his ambitions. He cannot counterfeit actual wealth; he can only badly copy more poverty.

“I began eating. It was terrible. I felt as if I were eating them, what they believed in, what they were.”

When Henry is ordered to eat by his parents, the act of eating becomes an act of subjection. He is forced to subject himself to their will, meaning that he understands the symbolism of the meal even at his young age. He is consuming his parents beliefs with each bite, allowing them to be proven right by doing as he is told. Henry gets no nourishment from the meal, only another example of the trauma that will remain unaddressed throughout his life.

“They came from a wealthy district, they didn’t know what it meant to fight back.”

To young, poor boys like Henry, the notion that poverty breeds toughness and resilience is essential. If this were not true, then the rich boys would have taken everything from the poor boys. The poor boys have nothing other than their ability to endure, so they turn this economic hardship into a virtue. In doing so, they can claim back some dignity, which helps them deal with the suffering and pain of their circumstances.

“Then the beating and the screaming stopped and all I could hear was my mother sobbing.”

Henry’s formative trauma involves the domestic violence and abuse in his own home. He is locked in the bathroom and forced to listen to his father beat his mother. He cannot escape the sound, either of the beating or the sobbing, just as he can never forget what he has heard. All he can do is listen, unable to intervene or prevent the violence. This abuse imprints on Henry’s mind and makes him feel just as broken and helpless as an adult as he did when he was locked inside the bathroom.

“One day they were gone. Just like that. Red never said anything in advance to me.”

Red vanishes from Henry’s life but leaves an important impression. He is Henry’s first real friend, teaching Henry the value of friendship. At the same time, however, the suddenness and unpreventability of his departure is a warning to Henry not to invest himself too much in any relationship. He never overinvests himself in anyone out of fear that they, like Red, might simply leave without warning. His social withdrawal is a defense mechanism against being hurt again.

“I didn’t know if I was unhappy. I felt too miserable to be unhappy.”

When he is forced to mow the lawn rather than make friends on the football field, Henry’s unhappiness deepens into something new. He comes to resent his father in a new and miserable way, unlike before. This resentment grows in Henry, who will live much of his adult life under the umbrella of this new-found miserableness. Henry’s great creativity is to find new and innovative ways in which to make his sadness more profound and more severe.

“The dog lost interest and walked off down the sidewalk.”

The baptized dog has no knowledge of its salvation. Henry is chased out of the church for trying to help the dog get to heaven. The baptized dog is a foreshadowing of Henry’s future self, a time in which he is indifferent to the possibility of salvation because he was chased out of too many churches in his youth. When Henry has tried to help, when he has tried to form an emotional bond with the world, he has been punished. This punishment will eventually cause his deep alienation from society.

“I wish I had thought of that.”

Henry’s first instinct is to lie in class. When he sees another child tell the truth with no consequences, he is jealous. He is not only jealous of the lack of consequences, but he is also jealous that the child would not immediately think to lie. He is beginning to conceive of himself as different or immoral in some way, and these instincts only provide him with further evidence.

“The knowledge that I didn’t have the courage to do what was necessary made me feel terrible.”

Henry is not able to save the cat from being killed by the dog. He blames himself for lacking the courage to intervene, rather than the other boys for actually orchestrating the scene. He feels terrible, not only because of his sense of powerlessness but also because he feels despondent for humanity. He empathizes with the cat, realizing how many people would be keen to see him hurt for their entertainment. He fears that no one would step in to help him. Instead, they would gather to watch his suffering as a form of fleeting entertainment. Henry is powerless to intervene, but he blames himself for lacking the courage to criticize the world around him, even when he believes the world to be wrong.

“Richard Waite. He lived somewhere and he came to school every day.”

Richard Waite has a name and an address, but, to the students, he becomes just another part of the school’s folklore. The location of his house and the details of his background are irrelevant. To the students, he is remembered only as the boy who began masturbating in class. His entire personality and history are reduced to a name and an anecdote, reducing the complexity of human identity to one embarrassing incident.

“Although most of the neighbors were unemployed he didn’t want them to think he was jobless.”

Although most of the neighbors are suffering due to the Great Depression, they are keenly watching each other. This causes Henry Senior to enter into an elaborate pantomime, in which he pretends to have a job so that other people will not look down on him. This performance is indicative of his own insecurity. He knows that he would judge people for losing their jobs, so he puts on an elaborate display to convince other people (and himself) that he is better than he really is. The theatrical nature of this routine illustrates Henry Senior’s insecurity.

“The principal gave his speech about opportunity and success in America. Then it was all over.”

Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the principal’s speech about “opportunity and success in America” seems nonsensical (124). The room is filled with young people who will emerge into a devastated labor market and many adults who have lost their jobs. Everyone is struggling, as though the dream of American life is already “all over” (124). Yet the exhausted principal delivers his familiar speech all over again because there is nothing else to say. The American people are performing an optimistic version of American society because they are scared to confront the terrible reality of economic collapse.

“They experimented on the poor and if that worked they used the treatment on the rich. And if it didn’t work, there would still be more poor left over to experiment upon.”

Henry’s acne and his experiences in the hospital allow him to refine his understanding of his status in the social hierarchy. As a child, Henry did not conceive of himself as a poor person. When he sees how other people live their lives and when he endures disinterested doctors and their painful treatments, he resents his lack of wealth and status. Other people are not forced to endure suffering like them, nor can he point to any reason why he is made to suffer other than his family’s impoverishment. Henry’s understanding of social class is fueled by his resentment toward those who mistreat him and a self-loathing for his own bad luck.

“Nothing could be seen but my eyes, my mouth and my ears, and some tufts of hair sticking up at the top of my head. I was hidden. It was wonderful.”

The bandages around Henry’s head allow him to hide from the world. For the first time in his life, he is able to be anonymous. The bandages function as an extension of his desire to remove himself from society, turning him into an anonymous observer rather than an active participant in society. The treatment for the acne, which makes him immediately unrecognizable, now grants him his long-desired inconspicuousness.

“To me, these men who had come into my life from nowhere were my only chance. They were the only voices that spoke to me.”

Henry finds solace in literature. Though he was never an academic student, his self-driven discovery of books seems separate from his disdain for school. Since he discovered the authors by himself, he does not feel compelled to resent them as though they were impressed upon him by institutions or authorities. Instead, the solace of literature is not only in the alienation and suffering with which he can now empathize, but also the act of discovery and impetus that makes him feel proud of his own agency.

“But for me, it had finally been a successful day, and I hadn’t had too many of those.”

Henry credits his half-fight with Harry Gibson as a “successful day” (159). He did not win the fight, but success derives from standing up against a bigger, stronger opponent and holding his own. Though Henry is trembling and bleeding, he is proud of himself. The victory, for Henry, is accepting the fight rather than winning it, showing that he is not afraid even though the odds are weighed against him. The opportunity to show his particular version of courage is, for Henry, a true success.

“He was worried about losing what little he had but at the same time he was very proud of a son who could break somebody’s arm.”

Henry breaks Abe’s arm during a game of baseball. His parents are scared of being sued, but Henry recognizes his father’s secret pride. The family does not have much, but physical triumph on the sporting field such as this is an intangible victory that they cannot lose in any lawsuit. In his strange way, Henry has given his father a gift, which will endure throughout their poverty.

“I don’t have any friends. Drink up!”

Henry’s antisocial tendencies are reiterated even in social interactions. Jimmy invites Henry to drink beer with him, but Henry cannot thank Jimmy or even pretend to be friendly. Instead, he replaces affirmations of social interaction with alcohol. His priority is to get drunk and to get others drunk, rather than to waste time making friends. Even as a teenager, he is laying the foundation for his future as a “loner” with an alcohol addiction.

“Wealth meant victory and victory was the only reality.”

Henry’s bleak nihilism is rooted in his material situation. He may not have much of an understanding of society or economics, but he has determined that the social structure of his world is constructed in such a way that he will never be able to truly succeed. The only key to victory, he believes, is wealth, as wealthy people can dedicate their time to succeeding rather than simply surviving.

“They were soft, they had never faced any fire. They were beautiful nothings.”

Henry feels ostracized by his wealthy, handsome classmates so he necessarily turns his adversity into a virtue. The other boys may be handsome, he reasons, but their lack of suffering has not hardened them to the world as he has been hardened. Their softness appalls him as it is the one way in which he can view himself as somehow better than them. The way in which Henry venerates toughness and endurance more than anything else is a product of his meager wealth, as it is just about the only thing he can afford that separates him from those who have grown up with everything. It validates his hatred for the rich boys.

“It was also true that some companies put ads in the papers every day when there were no jobs available. It gave the employment department in those companies something to do.”

Henry rages against the social institutions and their bureaucracy. When he cannot find a job, he invents a conspiracy in which the job adverts in the newspapers are actually fake. Rather than blame himself or come to terms with the reality of the unemployment market at a difficult time, Henry consoles himself with the assurance that his joblessness is not his fault. Delighting in blaming bureaucracy and institutions is one of the few pleasures afforded to him as an unemployed man.

“Out of sheer alienation and a natural contrariness I decided to align myself against their point of view.”

Henry sides with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in conversation. He does so because of his natural inclination to be a contrarian rather than any ideological investment. Henry is so alienated and resentful of society that he would happily condone fascism just to provoke an argument. He has no love for Hitler, who is just another dictator to him, but he resents all norms and naturally sides against anyone in his immediate vicinity. His only true politics are alienated spite.

“I wonder which guy is the sadist?”

After Henry uses subtle, illegal tricks to hurt Kong the football player, his friends ask the rhetorical question about which one is really the sadist. Henry projects his insecurities onto other people, accusing them of “stupidity” or immorality or delusion. Henry called Kong a “sadist” and then immediately subjected himself to the chance to hurt Kong, putting himself in danger to test himself against a bigger opponent. Henry revels in his toughness as a form of sadism, subjecting himself to physical challenges as a form of punishing himself for the failings he projects onto others.