Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“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 The created soul has been replaced by an artificial one, so there’s nothing real that human beings can refer to when they try to judge any matter for themselves.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 plane 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?