Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“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 moderate 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.”