The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (67 page)

“Victor was one of those writers who took command of a lot of painters, told them what they were doing, what they should do. Society didn’t care about art anyway, it was busy with other things, and art became the plaything of intellectuals. Real painters, real painting, those are very rare. There are masses of educated people, and they’ll tell you that they’re all for poetry, philosophy, or painting, but they don’t know them, don’t do them, don’t really care about them, sacrifice nothing for them, and really can’t spare them the time of day—can’t read, can’t see, and can’t hear. Their real interests are commercial, professional, political, sexual, financial. They don’t live by art, with art, through art. But they’re willing in a way to be imposed upon, and that’s what the pundits do. They do it to the artists as well. The brush people are led by the word people. It’s like some General Booth with a big brass band leading artists to an abstract heaven.”

“You have clever ways of expressing yourself, Mr. Wrangel. Are you saying that Victor is nothing but a promoter?”

“Not for a minute. He’s a colorful, powerful, intricate man. Unlike the other critic crumb-bums, he has a soul. Really. As for being a promoter, I can’t see how he could hold the forefront if he didn’t do a certain amount of promoting and operating. Well, what’s the status of innocence, anyway, and can you get anywhere without hypocrisy? I’m not calling Victor a hypocrite; I’m saying that he has no time to waste on patsies, and he’s perfectly aware that America is one place where being a patsy won’t kill you. We can afford confusion of mind, in a safe, comfortable country. Of course, it’s been fatal to art and culture….”

“Is this your way of asking
me
_ how corrupt Victor is?” Katrina asked. Heavy distress, all the more distressing because of its mixed elements, came over her. Should she tell Wrangel off? Was it disloyal to listen to him? But she was fascinated and hungry for more. And Victor himself would have thought her a patsy for raising the question of loyalty at all. Too big for trivial kinds of morality, he waved them off. And Wrangel was taking advantage of Victor’s brief absence, crowding in as many comments as he could. He was very smart, and she now felt like a dope for bothering him with her elephant.

He was trying to impress her, strutting a little (was he trying also to make time with her?), but his passion for understanding Victor was genuinely a passion.

“Victor is a promoter. He did well by himself, solidly. But he hasn’t faked anything. He really studied the important questions of art—art and technology, art and science, art in the era of the mass life. He understands how the artistic faculties are hampered in America, which isn’t really an art land. Here art isn’t serious. Not in the way a vaccine for herpes is
serious.
_ And even for professionals, critics, curators, editors, art is just
blah!
_ And it should be like the air you breathe, the water you drink, basic, like nutrition or truth. Victor knows what the real questions are, and if you ask him what’s the matter here he would tell you that without art we can’t judge what life is, we can’t sort anything out at all. Then the ‘practical sphere’ itself, where planners,’ generals, opinion makers, and presidents operate, is no more real than the lint under your bed. But even Victor’s real interest is politics. Sometimes his politics are idiotic, too, as they were during the French student crisis, when he agreed with Sartre that we were on the verge of an inspiring and true revolution. He got carried away. His politics would have made bad art. In politics Victor is still something of a sentimentalist. Some godlike ideas he has, and a rich appreciation of human complexities. But he couldn’t be engrossed in the colors of the sky around Combray, as Proust was. He’s not big on hawthorn blossoms and church steeples, and he’ll never get killed crossing the street because he’s having visions.”

Katrina said, “In Victor’s place, I don’t know how I’d feel about such a close study.”

“Shall I tell you something? There was more than one hint of Victor Wulpy in the adventures of Buck Rogers.”

This little guy, the celebrity covered by
People
_—opinionated, sensitive, emotional—was definitely an oddball. Under the flame-shaped bulbs with their incandescent saffron threads, delicacy, obstinacy, and bliss were mingled in his face.

He began now to tell her about his son, an only child. “By my second wife,” he said. “A younger woman. My Hank is now twenty-one. A problem from the beginning. He was born to startle. Some kids are dropping acid, stealing cars—that was the least of it. If he signed checks with my name, I could handle it by keeping my checking account low. He made the house so terrible that he drove his mother out. She couldn’t take it, and she’s now living with someone else. Illegal dealings started when Hank was about fourteen. Chased on the highway by the police. He held out money on dope dealers and they tried to kill him. No communication between me and the boy—too much sea-noise in his head. He’s in a correctional prison now where I’m not allowed to visit. There the recidivists are treated like infants. Their diet is infantile—farina—and they’re forced to wear diapers. The theory must be that the problem lies in infancy, so there’s a program of compulsory regression. That’s how human life is interpreted by psychological specialists.”

“Heartbreaking,” said Katrina.

“Oh, I can’t afford to be heartbroken. He’s my crazy Absalom. His mother is finished with him. She’ll talk to me. To him, never. He resembles her physically: fair-haired and slight, the boy is. A born mechanic, and a genius with engines, only he’d take apart my Porsche and leave the parts lying on the ground.”

“Does he hate you?”

“He doesn’t use such language.”

Why, the boy may kill him in the end, Katrina thought. The one who’s loyal may be the one who pays with his life.

“Enough of that,” said Wrangel. “Getting back to Victor. It wasn’t by his opinions that he influenced my attitudes toward art, but by the way he was. I don’t really
like
_ his ideas. In the old days I would compare him mentally to Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom I personally admired although critical of his policies.”

Like Roosevelt! Of course! Both handicapped men. Katrina made some rapid comparisons. Beila was like Eleanor Roosevelt. She, Trina, was like Missy Le-Hand. Katrina remembered hearing that Missy LeHand, with whom Roosevelt had had a love affair, fell ill and crept away to die, and Roosevelt, busy with the war, had no time to think about her, didn’t ask what had become of her. FDR was as cold as he was great. Victor, too, talked about the coldness and isolation of people—the mark of the Modern. The Modern truth was severe. Making love to a middle-class woman, it was necessary to indulge her sentiments ot warmth, but to a hard judgment these had no historical reality. There was monstrousness and horror in Modern man. Useless to deny dehumanization. That was how Victor would talk, when he lay in bed like one of Picasso’s naked old satyrs. But you, spread beside him—the full woman, perhaps the fat woman, woman-smelling—you perhaps knew more about him than he knew himself.

They now saw Victor working his way back to the booth, and Wrangel signaled to the waitress to serve their lunch. The glazed orange duck looked downright dangerous. Circles of fat swam in the spiced gravy. Famished, Victor attacked his food. His whiskey glass was soon fingerprinted with grease. He tore up his rolls over the dish and spooned up the fatty sops. He was irritable. Wrangel tried to make conversation, as a host should do. Victor gave him a gloomy if not sinister look—a glare, to be more accurate—when Wrangel began to point out connections between cartoons and abstract ideas. When people spoke of ideas as “clear,” didn’t they mean reductive? Human beings, in reduction, represented as
things.
_ Acceptable enough if they were funny. But suppose the intention wasn’t funny, as shorthand representations of the human often were, then you got an abstract condensation of the Modern theme. Take Picasso and Daumier as caricaturists (much deference in this to Victor, the expert). It might be fair to say that Daumier treated a social subject: the middle class, the courtroom. Picasso didn’t. In Picasso you had the flavor of nihilism that went with increased abstraction. Wrangel in his rolls of fur and his chin supported by silk scarf and cotton bandanna was nervous, insecure of tone, twitching.

“What’s this about reason?” said Victor. “First you tell me that ideas are trivial, they’re dead, and then what do you do but discuss ideas with me?”

“There’s no contradiction, is there, if I say that abstract ideas and caricature go together?”

“I have little interest in discussing this,” said Victor. “It’ll keep until you get back to California, won’t it?”

“I suppose it will.”

“Well, then, stow it. Skip it. Stuff it.”

“It’s a pity that my success in sci-fi should be held against me. Actually I’ve had a better than average training in philosophy.”

“Well, I’m not in the mood for philosophy. And I don’t want to discuss the nihilism that goes with reason. I figure you’ve done enough to fuck up the consciousness of millions of people with this mishmash of astrophysics and divinity that has made you so famous. Your trouble is that you’d like to sneak up on real seriousness. Well, you’ve already made your contribution. Your statement is on record.”

“You yourself have written about ‘divine sickness,’ Victor. I would suppose that any creature, regardless of his worldly status, had one ticket good for a single admission if he has suffered—if he paid his price.”

But Victor wouldn’t hear him out. He made a face so satirical, violent, so killing that Katrina would have turned away from it if it hadn’t been so extraordinary—an aspect of Victor never manifested before. He drew his lips over his teeth to imitate bare gums. He gabbled in pantomime, not a sound coming out. He let out his tongue like a dog panting. He squeezed his eyes so tight that you couldn’t see anything except the millipede brows and lashes. He put his thumbs to the sides of his head and waggled his fingers. Then he slid himself out of the booth, took up the duffel, and started for the door. Katrina, too, stood up. She held Vanessa’s fiddle in her arms, saying, “I’d apologize for him if you didn’t also know him. He’s in very bad shape, Mr. Wrangel, you can see that for yourself. Last year we nearly lost him. And he’s in pain every day. Try to remember that. I’m sorry about this. Don’t let him get to you.”

“Well, this is a lesson. Of course, it makes me very sad. Yes, I see he’s in bad shape. Yes, it’s a pity.”

It had cut him up, and Katrina’s heart went out to Wrangel. “Thank you,” she said, drawing away, turning. She hoped she didn’t look too clumsy from the rear.

Victor was waiting for her in the concourse and she spoke to him angrily. “That was bad behavior. I didn’t like being a party to it.”

“When he started on me with Daumier and Picasso, I couldn’t stand it, not a minute more of it.”

“You feel rotten and you took it out on him.”

He conceded this in silence.

“You didn’t behave well with me, either. You never said a word about your conversation with Kinglake, and whether we’re getting out of here or not.”

“He’s sending a corporate plane for us. He says it can get through.”

“Now, you know I’m in trouble if I’m stuck in Detroit overnight.”

“You’re not going to be stuck. A plane is coming for us.”

Once more, thousands of people. Nothing she could think of accounted for the sorrow she was feeling in the crowd-crazed concourse. Victor stopped beside the blazing window of a costume jewelry boutique and stared down into her face. He was speaking to her. She could not hear. Her ears seemed plugged.

“You should have told me sooner. You know my anxiety about being stuck.

“Why
should
_ I put up with a guy like Wrangel?” he said. “Thousands of people zero in on me. They come to clean up their act, or make a bid to change their act altogether. They want better clichщs to live by. A man like Wrangel has to achieve another ‘self because he’s in a position he never expected to reach. When he turned up in the Village long ago, he made himself striking by re-stringing his violin or by being a comic-strip plot spinner whose
real
_ life was with Hegel and Pascal. Now he’s become a big pop symbol, so he’s completely lost. Wears arctic fox. All right, if you don’t stand up to the real conditions of life and stand up to them with strength and shrewdness, you are condemned to live by one poor fiction or another, of which you are the commonplace interpreter.

Their commonplaces sting these guys without mercy, and drive them to try to be original. See how hard Wrangel was trying. He wanted me to adopt him and be his spiritual uncle or something—too old for a father. A while back I got a letter from a guy, an artist, who works in fire extinguishers. He said he was guarding the human soul from the arsonists of evil. He would never paint anything except fire extinguishers. He demanded my blessing, /have no Secret Service to protect me. I have to fend ‘em off myself.”

“All right…. Now, what are we supposed to do until the plane arrives?”

“There’s a hotel on these premises, upstairs, out of this madhouse. Kinglake has reserved a room for us.”

“Thank God! I can’t face any more shoving and pushing up and down the corridors,” said Katrina. “What kind of plane are they sending?”

“A plane. How should I know? You’re overreacting. This is not such an awful crisis. The Negro woman wouldn’t desert the kids, and there’s your sister.”

“I’ve been trying to tell you. My sister is half bonkers.”

“I had words with Kinglake about Felsher, the man who is supposed to introduce me. I said he was an old Stalinist bum, and he’d give a low tone to the occasion. It’s too late to change the program, but I put my objection on record.”

“Can we go up to the room, Victor? You have a rest. I have to use the phone.”

They made their way to the hotel desk. They were expected. Victor signed the card and he refused a bellhop. “We don’t want help. Nothing to carry. We’re just waiting for our plane.” Why should it cost a buck to put the key in the lock?

When he came into the room, Victor pitched himself heavily on the bed and Katrina removed his shoes. They must have been size sixteen. Nevertheless, his feet were delicate in shape. A human warmth was released from these shoes when she pulled them off. She stacked pillows behind his head. As he made himself comfortable, he was aware again of the bristling of nerve ends in the belly. Surgical damage. The frayed ends of copper wires. Hair-darts ingrown.