ANOTHER MAN 123hoping to throw suspicion on Riderhood for his own assault on Wrayburn.
In another of the novel’s great scenes, Riderhood figures out his game and
enters his classroom, where he plays elegantly with Headstone’s two identities
as murderer and schoolmaster in front of his pupils. When he sees that Rider-
hood has fished up the clothes in which Headstone meant to impersonate
him, the schoolmaster turns and slowly wipes his “respectable” name off the
blackboard. His only remaining job is to kill the murderous part of himself
in another intimate embrace, this time with Riderhood. Their face-to-face
double drowning, Riderhood “girdled still with Bradley’s iron ring” (OMF
4.15), renders Headstone’s death a permanent return to the willed self-
mastery of the life he had intended to lead.
In the John Harmon—Julius Handford—John Rokesmith story, the themes
I have been sounding are gathered together within the boundaries of a single
body. In this character, otherness becomes the explicit condition of identity.
On his return to England, Harmon takes up with his sailor double George
Radfoot, in a plot to spy on Bella Wilfer and defer his father’s injunction
to marry her. Like Wrayburn and Headstone, Harmon evades the predict-
able marriage plot by mediating his desires through another man. As he
reconstructs his story, he recalls himself drugged and placed in a room full of
men. “I saw a figure like myself lying dressed in my clothes on a bed. What
might have been, for anything I knew, a silence of days, weeks, months, years,
was broken by a violent wrestling of men all over the room. The figure like
myself was assailed, and my valise was in its hand.” It is unclear whether he or
George Radfoot is the figure on the bed; we learn only later that Radfoot has
secretly plotted to steal Harmon’s fortune and destroy him, but that others
have intervened to attack them both. As Harmon tells it, his sense of identity
was destroyed: “There was no such thing as I, within my knowledge.” When
both he and Radfoot are dumped into the Thames, Harmon’s return to his
own name is figured as the falling away of a “heavy horrid unintelligible
something”: the part of himself that falls away as Radfoot dies and he comes
back to self and survival (OMF 2.13). When he tells his retrospective story,
however, Harmon speaks as if he were another man, interrogating himself.
He is not yet finished with self-division.
When he decides to “kill” his identity as John Harmon and appear in the
world as John Rokesmith, he splits himself between the desiring Harmon and
the bland Secretary Rokesmith. Rokesmith is identified with self-sacrifice
and duty: he must stay away from Bella, clear Gaffer Hexam’s name, and clean
up the other moral messes his deceit has created. John Harmon is identified
with the man whose life force resisted drowning, the aggressive and sexual
desire that has to be crushed under piles and mounds of figurative earth.