Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

The attendant had brought Katrina a small bottle of Dewar’s. Pouring it, she held the glass to the light to look at the powerful spirit of the spirit, like a spiral, finer than smoke. Then she said, “It may do some good to look at the notes I typed for you.”

“Yes, let’s.”

She used reading glasses; Victor had no need of them. In some respects he hadn’t aged at all. For a big man he was graceful, and for an old one he was youthful. Krieggstein might be right, and the excitement of thought did prevent decay—her policeman friend must have overheard this somewhere, or picked it up in the “Feminique” section of the Tribune. On his own he couldn’t make such observations.

The fixtures in the lounge were like those in the cabin of a plane, and Victor had to hold up the paper to catch the slanted ceiling-light beam. “A quick onceover,” he said. “I don’t expect much. ‘Why people have taken to saying that truth is stranger’—or did I say’stronger’?—‘than fiction. Because liberal democracy makes for enfeebled forms of self-consciousness—who was the fellow who said that speaking for himself he would never exchange the public world, for all its harshness and imperfections, for the stuffiness of a private world? Weak self-conceptions, poor fictions. Lack of an Idea. Collective preemption of Ideas by professional groups (lawyers, doctors, engineers). They make a simulacrum of “standards,” and this simulacrum becomes the morality of their profession. All sense of individual cheating disappears. First step toward “stability,” for them, is to cancel individual moral judgments. Leadership can then be assumed by fictional personages.’”

“Would you say our leaders are fictional personages?” said Katrina.

“Wouldn’t you?”

Victor didn’t look well now. The red in his cheeks was an irritable red, and there were other dangerous signs of distemper. He stared at her in that way he had of seeming, once more, to review her credentials. It was humiliating. But she joined him in his doubts and was sorry for him. It was best for him now to talk. Even when he had to forgo the certainty of being understood. He lowered his head like a bull deciding whether or not to gore, and then he went on talking. She liked it best when his talk was mischievous and mean—when he said that a man had no brain but a fish bladder in his skull. Seriousness was more worrisome, and at present he was being serious. He told Katrina now that he didn’t think these were useful notes. He had said the same things in his Marx lecture and said them better. Marx connected individual wakefulness with class struggle. When social classes found themselves prevented from acting politically, and class struggle fell into abeyance, temporarily, consciousness also became confused—waking, sleeping, dreaming, all mixed up.

Did he still consider himself a Marxist? Katrina wanted to know. She was scared by her own temerity, but even more afraid of being dumb. “I ask because you speak of class struggle. But also because you consider the Communist countries such a failure.”

He said that, well, he had trained his mind on hard Marxist texts in his formative years and was permanently influenced—and why not? After reading The Eighteenth Brumaire again, he was convinced that Marx had America’s present number. Here Victor, his leg extended like one of Admiral Nelson’s cannon under wraps, gave a characteristically dazzling glance from beneath the primeval tangle of his brows and said that the Buffalo talk and the Chicago one would be connected. When wage earners, the middle class, the professions, lose track of their true material interests, they step outside history, so to speak, and then non-class interests take over, and when that happens society itself collapses into neuroses. An era of playacting begins. Vast revolutionary changes are concealed by the trivialities of the actors. Clowns and ham actors govern, or seem to. Superficially, it looks like farce. The deeper reality is anything but.

He was such an exceptional being altogether that because of the vast difference (to lesser people, Katrina meant), he himself might strike you as an actor. The interval of serious conversation had made him look more like himself—it had revived him. Katrina now admitted, “I was worried about you, Vic.”

“Why? Because I asked you to come? I’m sore at those guys in Chicago and I wanted to tell you about it. I felt frustrated and depleted.”

He can tell me things he’s too dignified to say otherwise. He can be the child, Katrina concluded. Which not even my own kids will be with me. As a mother I seem to be an artificial product. Would that be because I can’t put any sex into being a mother? She said to Victor, “My guess was that the bleak weather and the travel were getting you down.”

Oh, as for bleakness. Examining her, he established that “bleak” was a different thing for him. Nor did he mean low spirits when he said “depleted.” He wasn’t low, he was higher than he liked, very high, in danger of being disconnected. He was superlucid, which he always wanted to be, but this lucidity had its price: clear ideas becoming ever more clear the more the ground opened under your feet—illumination increasing together with your physiological progress toward death. I never expected to live forever, but neither did I expect this. And there was no saying what this was, precisely. It was both definite and cloudy. And here Katrina gave him support, materially. Katrina, a lady with a full body, sat on her swelling bottom line. She wore a knitted dark-green costume. She had strong legs in black boots. Where the ostrich quills once grew, the surface of the leather was bubbled. Very plain to him in her figure were the great physical forces of the human trunk and the weight of the backswell, the separation of the thighs. The composure of her posture had a whore effect on him—did she know this or not? Was she aware that her neatness made him horny? He kept it from her, so that she had no idea of the attraction of her hands, especially the knuckle folds and the tips of what he called, to himself only, her touch-cock fingers. Katrina was his manifest Eros, this worried, comical lady for whom he had such complex emotions, for the sake of which he put up with so many idiocies, struggled with so many irritations. She could irritate him to the point of heartbreak, so that he asked was it worth it, and why didn’t he spin off this stupid cunt; and couldn’t he spend his old age better, or had his stars run out of influence altogether? He used to be able to take his business where he liked. That pagan availability was closing out. At first, she had been his lump of love. He counted the stages. At first, just fun. The next stage was laughable, as he recognized through her that his erotic epoch might after all be the Victorian, with its special doodads. Then there seemed to be a kind of Baudelairean phase,… tu connais la caresse Qui fait revivre les morts…

Only he didn’t in fact buy that. His wasn’t an example of clinically disturbed sexuality. He felt detached from all such fancy stuff. She did in fact have the touch that brought back the dead—his dead. But there was no witchery or sadic darkness about it. Evidently, whether he liked it or not, his was a common sexual type. He was beyond feeling the disgrace of its commonness. She kept him going, and he had to confess that he wouldn’t know what to do at all if he didn’t keep going. Therefore he went flying around. He was not ready to succumb. He paid no more attention to death than to a litter of puppies pulling at the cuffs of his pants.

About bleak winter, he was saying to Katrina, “I have trouble staying warm. I’ve heard that capsicum helps. For the capillaries. Last night was bad. I put my feet in hot water. I had to wear double socks and still was cold.”