The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (64 page)

Never mind the fellow’s thoughts of the night, Victor was trying to adjust himself to the day, shifting his frame, looking for a position that didn’t shoot pains down the back of his thigh. Since the operation, his belly was particularly tender, distended and lumpy, and the small hairs stuck him like burning darts. As if turned inward. The nerve endings along the scar were like the tip of a copper wire with the strands undone. For his part, Wrangel seemed fit—youthfully elderly, durably fragile, probably a vegetarian. As he was trying to fix Wrangel’s position, somewhere between classics of thought (Hegel) and the funny papers, there came before Victor the figures of Happy Hooligan and the Captain from
The Katzenjammer Kids
_ with the usual detached colors, streaks of Chinese vermilion and blocks of forest green. Looking regal, feeling jangled, Victor sat and listened. Wrangel’s eyes were inflamed; it must really have been a bad night for him. He had a wry, wistful, starveling expression on his face, and his silk banner made you think of the scarf that had broken Isadora’s neck. His main pitch was now beginning. He had read
The Eighteenth Brumaire,
_ and he could prove it. Why had the French Revolution been made in the Roman style? All the revolutionists had read Plutarch. Marx noted that they had been inspired by “old poetry.”

“Ancient traditions lying like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

“I see that you boned up on your Marx.”

“It’s marvelous stuff.” Wrangel refused to take offense. All of Katrina’s sympathies were with him. He was behaving well. He said, “Now let’s see if I can put it together with
your
_ conjectures. It’s still a struggle with the burden of history.
Le mort saisit le vif.
_ And you suggest that the modern avant-garde hoped to be free from this death grip of tradition. Art becoming an activity in which life brings raw material to the artists, and the artist using his imagination to bring forth a world of his own, owing nothing to the old humanism.”

“Well, okay. What of it?” said Victor.

Katrina’s impression was that Wrangel was pleased with himself. He thought he was passing his orals. “Then you said that the parody of a revolution in 1851—history as farce—might be seen as a prelude to today’s politics of deception—government by comedians who use mass-entertainment techniques. Concocted personalities, pseudoevents.”

Worried for him now, Katrina moved to the edge of her seat. She thought it might be necessary to rise soon, get going, break it up. “So you fly around the country and talk to psychiatrists,” she said.

Her intervention was not welcome, although Wrangel was polite. “Yes.”

A sound approach to popular entertainment,” said Victor. “Enlist the psychopaths.”

“Try leaving them out, at any level,” said Wrangel, only slightly stiff. He said, “In Detroit I’m seeing a party named Fox. He has published a document by a certain D’Amiens, who is sometimes also Boryshinski. The author is supposed to have disappeared without a trace. He had made the dangerous discovery that the planet is controlled by powers from other worlds. All this according to Mr. Fox’s book. These other-world powers have programmed the transformation and control of the human species through something called CORP-ORG-THINK. They work through a central data bank and they already have control of the biggest corporations, banking circles, and political elites. Some of their leading people are David Rockefeller, Whitney Stone of Stone and Webster, Robert Anderson of Arco. And the overall plan is to destroy our life-support system, and then to evacuate the planet. The human race will be moved to a more suitable location.”

“And what becomes of this earth?” said Katrina.

“It becomes hell, the hell of the unfit whom CORP plans to leave behind. When the long reign of Quantification begins, says Boryshinski, mankind will accept a purely artificial mentality, and the divine mind will be overthrown by the technocratic mind.”

“Does this sound to you like a possible film?” said Katrina.

“If they don’t ask too much for the rights, I might be interested.”

“How would you go about saving us—in the picture, I mean?” Victor said. “Maybe Marx suggests some angle that you can link up with the divine mind.”

Katrina hoped that Wrangel would stand up to Victor, and he did. Being deferential got you nowhere; you had to fight him if you wanted his good opinion. Wrangel said, “I’d forgotten how grand a writer Marx was. What marvelous images! The ghosts of Rome surrounding the cradle of the new epoch. The bourgeois revolution storming from success to success. ‘Ecstasy the everyday spirit.’

‘Men and things set in sparkling brilliants.’ But a revolution that draws its poetry from the past is condemned to end in depression and dullness. A real revolution is not imitative or histrionic. It’s a
real
_ event.”

“Oh, all right,” said Victor. “You’re dying to tell me what
you
_ think. So why don’t you tell me and get it over with.”

“My problem is with class struggle,” said Wrangel, “the destiny of social classes. You argue that class paralysis produces these effects of delusion—lying, cheating, false appearances. It all seems real, but what’s really real is the unseen convulsion under the apparitions. You’re imposing European conceptions of class on Americans.”

Katrina’s thought was: Ah, he wants to play with the big boys. She was afraid he might be hurt.

“And what’s your idea?” said Victor.

“Well,” said Wrangel, “I have a friend who says that the created souls of people, of the Americans, have been removed. The created soul has been replaced by an artificial one, so there’s nothing real that human beings can refer to when they try to judge any matter for themselves. They live mainly by
rationales.
_ They have made-up guidance systems.”

“That’s the artificial mentality of your Boryshinski,” said Victor.

“It has nothing to do with Boryshinski. Boryshinski came much later.”

“Is this friend of yours a California friend? Is he a guru?” said Victor.

“I wish we had had time for a real talk,” said Wrangel. “You always set a high value on ideas, Victor. I remember that. Well, I’ve considered this from many sides, and I am convinced that most ideas are trivial. A thought of the real is also an image of the real; if it’s a true thought, it’s a true picture and is accompanied also by a true feeling. Without this, our ideas are corpses….”

“Well, by God!” Victor took up his stick, and Katrina was afraid that he might take a swipe at Wrangel, whack him with it. But no, he planted the stick before him and began to rise. It was a complicated operation. Shifting forward, he braced himself upon his knuckles. He lifted up the bum leg; his color was hectic. Remember (Katrina remembered) that he was almost always in pain.

Katrina explained as she was picking up the duffel bag and the violin case, “We have a plane to catch.”

Wrangel answered with a sad smile. “I see. Can’t fight flight schedules, can we?”

Victor righted his cap from the back and made for the door, stepping wide in his crippled energetic gait.

Outside the lounge Katrina said, “We still have about half an hour to kill.”

“Driven out.”

“He was terribly disappointed.”

“Sure he was. He came east just to take me on. Maybe his guru told him that he was strong enough, at last. He gave himself away when he mentioned Parker Tyler and Tchelitchew. Tchelitchew, you see, attacked me. He said
he
_ had a vision of the world, whereas the abstract painting that I advocated was like a crazy lady expecting a visit from the doctor and smearing herself with excrement to make herself attractive—like a love potion. Wrangel was trying to stick me with this insult.”

Threatening weather, the wicked Canadian north wind crossing the border in white gusts, didn’t delay boarding. The first to get on the plane was Victor. His special need, an aisle seat at the back, made this legitimate. It depressed Katrina to enter the empty dark cabin. The sky looked dirty, and she was anxious. Their seats were in the tail, next to the rest rooms. She stowed the violin overhead and the zipper bag under the seat. Victor lowered himself into place, arranged his body, leaned backward, and shut his eyes. Either he was very tired or he wanted to be alone with his thoughts.

The pi ane filled up. It was some comfort that despite the mean look of the weather, practical-minded people never doubted that they would lift off from Buffalo and land in Chicago—business as usual. In the hand of God, but also routine. Katrina, who looked sensible along with the rest of the passengers, didn’t know what to do about her anxious doubts, couldn’t collect them in a single corner and turn the key on them. In one respect Dotey was dead right: Katrina jumped at any chance to rush off and be with Victor. Victor, even if he was ailing, even if no life with him was really possible—he couldn’t last long—was entirely different from other people. Other people mostly stood in a kind of bleakness. They had the marks of privation upon them. There was a lack of space and air about them, they were humanly bare, whereas Victor gave off a big light. Strange little Wrangel may have been a pretentious twerp. He wanted to exchange serious thoughts; he might be puffing himself up absurdly, a faker, as Victor suspected. But when he had talked about ecstasy as the everyday spirit or men and things set in brilliants, she had understood exactly what he was saying. She had understood even better when he said that when the current stopped, the dullness and depression were worse than ever. To spell it out further, she herself could never generate any brilliancy. If she had somebody to get her going, she could join in and perhaps make a contribution. This contribution would be feminine and sexual. It would be important, it might even be indispensable, but it would not be inventive. She could, however, be inventive in deceit. And she had made an effort to branch out with the elephant story. She had, nevertheless, had that serious setback with _M*A
S
H.__ The movie house itself had been part of her misfortune. They were surrounded by hippies, not very young ones, and in the row ahead there was a bearded guy slurping Popsicles and raising himself to one cheek, letting off loud farts. Victor said, “There’s change from the general for the caviar it’s eaten.” Katrina hadn’t yet figured out
that
_ one. Then Victor stood up and said, “I won’t sit in this stink!” When they reached the street, the disgrace and horror of being
exposed
_ by _M*A
S
H__ and associated with San Francisco degenerates made Katrina want to throw herself in front of a cable car rushing downhill from the Mark Hopkins.

Now she made a shelf of her hand on her brow and looked away from Victor, who was staring out at the field. Was there anything she could do about that goddamn elephant? Suppose a man turned up who hypnotized ball players and could do the same with an animal. They were now discovering new mental powers in the bigger mammals. Whales, for example, sang to one another; they were even thought to be capable of rhyming. Whales built walls out of air bubbles and could encircle and entrap millions of shrimp. What if an eccentric zoologist were to visit the management with a new idea? Meanwhile the management had to send for fodder while the elephant dropped whole pyramids of dung. The creature was melancholy and wept tears as big as apricots. The mahout demanded mud. If Margey didn’t have a good wallow soon, she’d go berserk and wreck the entire fifth floor. Abercrombie & Fitch (were they still in Chicago?) offered to send over a big-game hunter. For them it would be terrific publicity to shoot her. Humane people would be outraged. Suppose a pretty high school girl were to come forward with the solution? And what if she were to be a Chinese girl? In Chinese myth, elephants and not men had once been the masters of the world. And then?

Victor’s mind was also at work, although you couldn’t say that he was thinking. Something soft and heavy seemed to have been spread over his body. It resembled the lead apron laid over you by X-ray technicians. Victor was stretched under this suave deadly weight and feeling as you felt when waking from a deep sleep—unable to lift your arm. On the field, in the winter light, the standing machines were paler than the air, and the entire airport stood in a frame of snow, looking like a steel engraving. It reminded him of the Lower East Side in—oh, about 1912. The boys (ancients today, those who were alive) were reading the Pentateuch. The street, the stained pavement, was also like a page of Hebrew text, something you might translate if you knew how. Jacob lay dreaming of a ladder which rose into heaven.
V’hinei malachi elohim
_—behold the angels of God going up and down. This had caused Victor no surprise. What age was he, about six? It was not a dream to him.
Jacob
_ was dreaming, while Victor was awake, reading. There was no “long ago.” It was all now. The cellar classroom had a narrow window at sidewalk level, just enough to permit a restricted upward glance showing fire escapes under snow, the gold shop sign of the Chinese laundry hanging from the ironwork, and angels climbing up and down. This did not have to be interpreted. It came about in a trance, as if under the leaden weight of the flexible apron. Now the plane was starting its takeoff run, and soon the NO SMOKING sign would be turned off. Victor would have liked to smoke, but the weight of his hands made any movement impossible.

It wasn’t like him to cherish such recollections, although he had them, and they had lately been more frequent. He began now to remember that his mother had given him the windpipe of a goose after drying it in the Dutch oven of the coal stove, and that he had cut a notch in the windpipe with his father’s straight razor and made a whistle of it. When it was done, he disliked it. Even when dry it had kept its terrible red color, and it was very harsh to the touch and had left an unpleasant taste in his mouth. This was not exactly Marx’s nightmare of history from which mankind had to be liberated. The raw fowl taste was nasty. The angels on the fire escape, however, were very pleasing, and his consciousness of them, while it was four thousand years old, had also been exactly contemporary. Different ideas of time and space had not yet been imposed upon him. One comprehensive light contained everybody. Among the rest—parents, patriarchs, angels, God—there was yourself. Victor did not feel bound to get to the bottom of this; it was only a trance, probably an effect of fatigue and injury. He gave a side thought to Mass. General, where a tumor had been lifted out of a well of blood in his belly, and he reminded himself that he was still a convalescent—reminded himself also that Baudelaire had believed the artist to be always in a spiritually convalescent state. (This really was Baudelaire Day; just a while ago it had been the touch that brought the dead to life.) Only just returned from the shadow of death, the convalescent inhaled with delight the close human odors of the plane. Pollution didn’t matter, the state of a convalescent being the state of a child drunk with impressions. Genius
must be
_ the recovery of the powers of childhood by an act of the creative
will.
_ Victor knew all this like the palm of his hand or the nose on his face. By combining the strength of a man (analytic power) with the ecstasy of a child you could discover the New. What God’s Revelation implied was that the Jews (his children) would obstinately will (with mature intelligence) the divine adult promise. This would earn them the hatred of the whole world. They were always archaic,
and
_ they were always contemporary—we could sort that out later.