Alexander Gideon’s loneliness and despair

Alexander Gideon’s loneliness and despair are presented less as a private diagnosis than as a condition formed and refracted through estranged correspondence. In Ilana Sommo’s letters, he is at once unreachable and intensely imagined: a man she suspects of having turned away from her, yet whose silence remains the focus of her attention. In his own account, years of isolation have made hatred and money seem like the last things left to him. Their letters expose the cost of that distance while showing how uncertain each writer remains about the other’s inner life.

Despair as an image in Ilana’s letters

Ilana addresses Alexander as someone uniquely qualified to recognize despair, invoking his book, The Desperate Violence: A Study in Comparative Fanaticism, before distinguishing its subject from what she calls the frozen despair of his soul. The image makes his condition seem settled and enduring, less a passing crisis than a climate in which he has lived. Yet this portrait comes from a correspondent who acknowledges that she does not know how much he knows about her life. She can imagine that he receives regular reports through his lawyer, Manfred M. Zakheim, but is just as prepared to believe that he has deliberately cut her and her family out of his new life.

That uncertainty gives her account its emotional tension. Ilana wonders whether Alexander has found even a small measure of gentleness during his travels, and says she is sorry for him. At the same time, she connects his silence and contempt to her own culpability, acknowledging that she did wrong while Alexander and his son bear the penalty. Her compassion does not erase the history of accusation between them; it emerges within it, as an attempt to address suffering that she cannot verify or repair from a distance.

Ilana also imagines what Alexander does with her letters. She pictures him crumpling one and throwing it onto the fire, convinced that he will dismiss her as someone trying to manipulate him. This is not confirmation of his actions but a revealing feature of her perspective: even in the absence of a reply, she supplies a scene of rejection. The imagined letter-burning makes his silence feel active and final, while also showing how much of the relationship now exists in each writer’s reconstruction of the other.

Silence, time, and the correspondence

The letters make silence a prolonged condition rather than a brief pause in communication. Ilana says she tried for seven years to withstand Alexander’s silence by filling her new home with noise, then gave in during the eighth year. She describes its effects as slow and cumulative, not as a single decisive injury. Her first and second letters, she insists, gave accurate details about Boaz, though she admits that she was using those facts to set a trap for Alexander. She had believed from the outset that Michel-Henri Sommo, rather than Alexander, would rescue Boaz from his troubles, and that Michel would act rightly even without Alexander’s money.

Her account therefore separates factual information from the purpose for which she sent it. The letters about Boaz were not, in her telling, straightforward requests for help: she expected Michel to manage the situation and wanted to draw Alexander into responding. That strategy coexists with her fear of his continued silence. She asks him either to destroy the letters or to use them without further delay, because each passing day feels to her like time taken away from two lives that are fading. The urgency of that appeal stands against the years of separation she describes; correspondence has become both a means of contact and a measure of how late contact may come.

The epistolary form keeps the reader inside that uncertainty. Ilana’s descriptions of Alexander often take the form of imagined scenes, while Alexander’s later letter turns his own experience into a written reply to her question about their divorce. Neither account provides an unmediated view of the other. Ilana’s certainty that Michel would help Boaz, her admitted attempt to draw Alexander in, and her guesses about what he knows all qualify the portrait she gives. Alexander, in turn, writes from within the very isolation he describes, addressing Ilana across the distance rather than resolving it through an encounter.

The solitary figure imagined at a distance

In a letter dated 19 April 1976, Ilana writes to Alexander’s Illinois address without knowing where he is. She pictures him moving from continent to continent in a capsule-like solitude, surrounded in her thoughts by a black-and-white room, an empty desk, an empty bottle, and an empty glass. The image turns geographical travel into a form of enclosure: although she imagines him constantly moving, she also imagines his surroundings as unchanging and deserted. The repeated quality of the portrait suggests that this is the Alexander she carries with her, wherever she supposes him to be.

Ilana claims to have no request in this letter and says that she is writing simply to talk to him. Nevertheless, she anticipates his response in detail. She imagines him burning the paper, pouring whisky, and treating her letter as proof that she has returned to plead for mercy. She describes him as someone who has known malicious pleasure rather than ordinary joy. These are Ilana’s accusations and projections, not independently established facts about Alexander; their importance lies in how fully the relationship has shifted into imagined exchange, with each side preparing an answer to a reply that may never arrive.

The same letter places this private correspondence within Ilana’s household. She writes behind Michel-Henri Sommo’s back after he has finished the evening’s routine and gone to sleep, and says that writing to Alexander feels like a betrayal of Michel and their child. Her secrecy underscores that Alexander is not simply an absent former partner: he remains a presence to whom she feels compelled to speak, even when she recognizes the cost of doing so in her present life. In that letter, she also reports that Michel’s judgment and Alexander’s money helped get Boaz out of trouble, while Michel gradually found a way to bring Boaz back to visit the family. The news complicates Alexander’s presumed exclusion, but it does not end the emotional distance between the former spouses.

Alexander’s account of decline

When Alexander addresses Ilana’s question about why she divorced him seven and a half years earlier, he initially responds through self-reproach and hostility. He says his hatred is beginning to thin and fade, and that, apart from hatred, he has little left but money, which is being drained into Sommo’s affairs. He asks Ilana not to interfere with his death and describes himself as having sunk slowly into fog for seven years. The language makes his despair inseparable from the long interval of estrangement: her renewed contact arrives, in his account, not as simple comfort but as an intrusion into a withdrawal he had come to treat as his own ending.

His letter places him at a twenty-seventh-floor office window in Chicago, searching for an answer to Ilana’s question about their separation. The extended pause at the window does not produce the clear explanation he seeks. Instead, he reaches questions about what made him end their relationship and why he betrayed it, then admits that he has no answer. He describes his hatred as dying and his wisdom as expiring with it. The shift matters: the hostility that had structured his account is weakening, but it does not reveal a settled understanding of the past. Despair here includes the failure of the explanations and strategies through which Alexander once made sense of himself.

Alexander’s image of himself as a monster mourning his own monstrosity gives that failure a painful form. The description makes him both the source and the sufferer of a condition he cannot master; he is angry at what he has become, yet unable to supply the answer Ilana requests. The letter does not establish that he has reached reconciliation with her. It records a moment when hatred no longer sustains him as securely as before, leaving grief and uncertainty exposed in its place.

A weakening hatred and an unresolved generosity

Alexander’s later reflections bring his isolation into relation with Ilana’s. He sees the remaining joy between them as pleasure in each other’s misfortunes, reduced to embers that neither can revive for long. He calls this a waste and offers to capitulate. The change is not a clean release from antagonism: even as he says he is ready to yield, he imagines being made to finance a religious union between Ilana and Michel-Henri Sommo. His surrender is still narrated through rivalry, money, and the old struggle over who has power in the relationship.

At the same time, Alexander recognizes an impulse that he associates with his father’s generosity. He offers to buy what Ilana and Michel-Henri Sommo want and recalls his father’s intention to use his fortune to build homes for consumptive poets on Mount Tabor and Mount Gilboa. The remembered intention gives his offer a larger precedent than the immediate quarrel, but Alexander also imagines using his money to arm both sides in a future conflict between Boaz and Sommo. Generosity and antagonism remain entangled: money can express giving, but it can also preserve Alexander’s role in a struggle from which he has otherwise been excluded.

The evidence therefore presents no completed recovery from loneliness or despair. Alexander’s hatred fades, and he makes an offer that sounds like surrender, but his words still move between care, rivalry, and the power of the checkbook. Ilana’s letters continue to approach him through fear, accusation, and imagined scenes, while his reply cannot turn their history into a clear explanation. Their correspondence makes change possible without confirming reconciliation: the silence has been breached, but the emotional distance it formed remains unresolved.