Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“Victor was meant to be a great man. Very, very smart. A powerful mind. A subtle mind. Completely independent. Not really a Marxist, either. I went to visit Sidney Hook last week, who used to be my teacher at NYU, and we were talking about the radicals of the older generation in New York. Sidney pooh-poohed them. They never had been serious, never organized themselves to take control as the European left did. They were happy enough, talking. Talk about Lenin, talk about Rosa Luxemburg, or German fascism, or the Popular Front, or Léon Blum, or Trotsky’s interpretation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or about James Burnham or whomever. They spent their lives discussing everything. If they felt their ideas were correct, they were satisfied. They were a bunch of mental hummingbirds. The flowers were certainly red, but there couldn’t have been any nectar in them. Still, it was enough if they were very ingenious, and if they drew a big, big picture—the very biggest picture. Now apply this to what Victor said one plane hop back, in Buffalo, that it takes a serious political life to keep reality real….”

Katrina pretended that he was saying this to the wrong party. “I don’t have any theoretical ability at all,” she said, and she bent toward him as if to call attention to her forehead, which couldn’t possibly have had real thoughts behind it. She was the farmer’s daughter who couldn’t remember how many made a dozen. But she saw from Wrangel’s silent laugh—his skin was so taut, had he or hadn’t he had a face-lift in California?—saw from the genial scoff lines around his mouth that she wasn’t fooling him for a minute.

“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.”