by Bellow, Saul
Katrina saw nothing funny in this. She was stabbed with anger. “Were you approached? That way?”
“By Beila? Everybody would have to go mad altogether.”
No, not Beila. You had only to think about it to see how impossible it would be. Beila carried herself with the pride of the presiding woman, the wife. Her rights were maintained with Native American dignity. She was a gloomy person. (Victor had made her gloomy—one could understand that.) She was like the wife of a Cherokee chieftain, or again Catherine of Aragon. There was something of each type of woman in the gaudy-gloomy costumes she designed for herself. Tremendous, her silent air of self-respect. For such a proud person to experiment along lines suggested by a gay handbook was out of the question, totally. Still, Katrina felt the hurt of it. Disrespect. Ill will. It was disrespectful also of Beila. Beila was long-suffering. At heart, Beila was a generous woman. Katrina really did know the score.
“So there’s the new generation,” said Victor. “When you consider the facts, they seem sometimes to add up to an argument for abortion. My youngest child! The wildest of all three. Now she’s abandoned her plan to be a rabbi and she looks more Jewish than ever, with those twists of hair beside her ears.”
Curious how impersonal Victor could be. Categories like wife, parent, child never could affect his judgment. He could discuss a daughter like any other subject submitted to his concentrated, radiant consideration—with the same generalizing detachment. It wasn’t unkindness. It wasn’t ordinary egotism. Katrina didn’t have the word for it.
Anyway, they were together in the lounge, and to have him to herself was one of her best pleasures. He was always being identified on New York streets, buttonholed by readers, bugged by painters (and there were millions of people who painted), but here in this sequestered corner Katrina did not expect to be molested. She was wrong. A man appeared; he entered obviously looking for someone. That someone could only be Victor. She gave a warning signal—lift of the head—and Victor cautiously turned and then said in a low voice, somewhat morose, “It’s him—I mean the character who wrote me the note.”
“Oh-oh.”
“He’s a determined little guy…. That’s quite a fur coat he’s wearing. It must have been designed by F. A. O. Schwarz.” It seemed to sweeten his temper to have said this. He smiled a little.
“That_is an expensive garment,” said Katrina.
It was a showy thing, beautifully made but worn carelessly. In circles of fur, something like the Michelin tire circles, it reached almost to the floor. Larry Wrangel was slight, slender, his bald head was unusually long. The grizzled side hair, unbrushed, looked as if he had slept on it when it was damp. A long soiled white scarf, heavy silk, drooped over the fur. Under the scarf a Woolworth’s red bandanna was knotted. The white fur must have been his travel coat. For it wouldn’t have been of any use in Southern California. His tanned face was lean, the skin stretched—perhaps a face-lift? Katrina speculated. His scalp was spotted with California freckles. The dark eyebrows were nicely arched. His mouth was thin, shy and also astute.
Victor said as they were shaking hands, “I couldn’t get back to you last night.”
“I didn’t really expect it.”
Wrangel pulled over one of the Swedish-modern chairs and sat forward in his rolls of white fur. Not removing the coat was perhaps his way of dealing with the difference in their sizes—bulk against height.
He said, “I guessed you would be surrounded, and also bushed by late evening. Considering the weather, you had a good crowd.”
Wrangel did not ignore women. As he spoke he inspected Katrina. He might have been trying to determine why Victor should have taken up with this one. Whole graduating classes of girls on the make used to pursue Victor.
Katrina quickly reconciled herself to Wrangel—a little, smart man, not snooty with her, no enemy. He was eager only to have a talk, long anticipated, a serious first-class talk. Victor, unwell, feeling damaged, was certainly thinking how to get rid of the man.
Wrangel was chatting rapidly, wanting to strike the right offering while avoiding loss of time. His next move was to try the Cedar Bar and the Artists’
Club on Eighth Street. He spoke of Baziotes and of Arshile Gorky, of Gorky’s loft on Union Square. He recalled that Gorky couldn’t get Walt Whitman’s name straight and that he spoke of him as “Vooterman.” He mentioned Parker Tyler, and Tyler’s book on Pavel Tchelitchew, naming also Edith Sitwell, who had been in love with Tchelitchew (Wulpy grimaced at Edith Sitwell and said, “Tinkle poems, like harness bells”). Wrangel laughed, betraying much tension in his laughter. Shyness and shrewdness made him seem to squint and even to jeer. He wished to become expansive, to make himself agreeable. But he didn’t have the knack for this. An expert in pleasing Victor, Katrina could have told him where he was going wrong. Victor’s attitude was one of angry restraint and thinly dissimulated impatience. Trina felt that he was being too severe. This Wrangel fellow should be given half a chance. He was being put down too hard because he was a celebrity.
On closer inspection, the white furs which should have been immaculate were spotted by food and drink; nor was there any reason (he was so rich!) why the silk scarf should be so soiled. She took a liking to Wrangel, though, because he made a point of including her in the conversation. If he mentioned a name like Chiaromonte or Barrett, he would say, aside, “A top intellectual in that circle,” or, “The fellow who introduced Americans to German phenomenology.”
But Victor wouldn’t have any of this nostalgia, and he said, “What are you doing in Buffalo anyway? This is a hell of a season to leave California.”
“I have a screwy kind of motive,” said Wrangel. “Clinical psychologists, you see, often send me suggestions for films, inspired by the fantasies of crazy patients. So once a year I make a swing of selected funny farms. And here in Buffalo I saw some young fellows who were computer bugs—now institutionalized.”
“That’s a new wrinkle,” said Victor. “I would have thought that you didn’t need to leave California, then.”
“The maddest mad are on the Coast? Do you think so?”
“Well, not now, maybe,” Victor said. Then he made one of his characteristic statements: “It takes a serious political life to keep reality real. So there are sections of the country where brain softening is accelerated. And Southern California from the first has been set up for the maximum exploitation of whatever goes wrong with the American mind. They farm the kinks as much as they do lettuces and oranges.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Wrangel.
“As for the part played by intellectuals… Well, I suppose in this respect there’s not much difference between California and Massachusetts. They’re in the act together with everybody else. I mean intellectuals. Impossible for them to hold out. Besides, they’re so badly educated they can’t even identify the evils. Even Vespasian when he collected his toilet tax had to justify himself: Pecunia non olet._ But we’ve come to a point where it’s only_ money that doesn’t stink.”
“True, intellectuals are in shameful shape….”
Katrina observed that Wrangel’s eyes were iodine-colored. There was an iodine tinge even to the whites.
“The main money people despise the intelligentsia, I mean especially the fellows that bring the entertainment industry suggestions for deepening the general catalepsy. Or the hysteria.”
Wrangel took this meekly enough. He seemed to have thought it all through for himself and then passed on to further considerations. “The banks, of course…” he said. “It can take about twenty million bucks to make one of these big pictures, and they need a profit in the neighborhood of three hundred percent. But as for money, I can remember when Jackson Pollock was driving at top speed in and out of the trees at East Hampton while loving up a girl in his jeep. He wouldn’t have been on welfare and food stamps, if he had lived. He played with girls, with art, with death, and wound up with dollars. What do those drip canvases fetch now?” Wrangel said this in a tone so moder
ate that he got away with it. “Sure, the investment golems think of me as a gold mine, and they detest me. I detest them right back, in spades.” He said to Katrina, “Did you hear Victor’s lecture last night? It was the first time in forty years that I actually found myself taking notes like a student.”
Katrina couldn’t quite decide what opinion Victor was forming of this Wrangel. When he’d had enough, he would get up and go. No boring end-men would ever trap him in the middle. As yet there was no sign that he was about to brush the man off. She was glad of that; she found Wrangel entertaining, and she was as discreet as could be in working the band of her watch forward on her wrist. Tactful, she drew back her sleeve to see the time. Very soon now the kids would be having their snack. Silent Pearl, wordless Soolie. She had failed to get a rise out of them with the elephant story. A lively response would have helped her to finish it. But you simply couldn’t get them to react. Not even Lieutenant Krieggstein with his display of guns impressed them. Krieggstein may have confused them when he pulled up his trousers and showed the holster strapped to his stout short leg. Then, too, he sometimes wore his wig and sometimes not. That also might have been confusing.
Victor had decided to give Wrangel a hearing. If this proved to be a waste of time, he would start forward, assemble his limbs, take his stick upside down like a polo mallet, and set off, as silent as Pearl, as wordless as Soolie. Since he loved conversation, his cutting out would be a dreadful judgment on the man. “You gave me a lot to think about during the night,” said Wrangel. “Your comments on the nonrevolution of Louis Napoleon and his rabble of deadbeats, and especially the application of that to the present moment—what you called the proletarianized present.” He took out a small notebook, which Trina identified as a Gucci product, and read out one of his notes. ” ‘Proletarianization: people deprived of everything that formerly defined humanity to itself as human.’ “
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.
