Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“Did you?”

“This very hand shook the hand of the Caudillo. Would you like to touch it for yourself?”

“Why should I?”

“Go on,” said Mosby. “It may mean something. Shake the hand that shook the hand.”

Very strangely, then, Lustgarten extended padded, swarthy fingers. He looked partly subtle, partly ill. Grinning, he said, “Now I’ve made contact with real politics at last. But I’m serious about the New Leader. You probably know Bohn. I need credentials for Yugoslavia.”

“Have you ever written for the papers?”

“For the Militant.”

“What did you write?”

Guilty Lustgarten did not lie well. It was heartless of Mosby to amuse himself in this way.

“I have a scrapbook somewhere,” said Lustgarten.

But it was not necessary to write to the New Leader. Lustgarten, encountered two days later on the boulevard, near the pork butcher, had taken off the sling and scarcely needed the cane. He said, “I’m going to Yugoslavia. I’ve been invited.”

“By whom?”

“Tito. The government. They’re asking interested people to come as guests to tour the country and see how they’re building socialism. Oh, I know,” he quickly said, anticipating standard doctrinal objection, “you don’t build socialism in one country, but it’s no longer the same situation. And I really believe Tito may redeem Marxism by actually transforming the dictatorship of the proletariat. This brings me back to my first love—the radical movement. I was never meant to be an entrepreneur.”

“Probably not.”

“I feel some hope,” Lustgarten shyly said. “And then also, it’s getting to be spring.” He was wearing his heavy moose-colored bristling hat, and bore many other signs of interminable winter. A candidate for resurrection. An opportunity for the grace of life to reveal itself. But perhaps, Mosby thought, a man like Lustgarten would never, except with supernatural aid, exist in a suitable form.

“Also,” said Lustgarten touchingly, “this will give Trudy time to reconsider.”

“Is that the way things are with you two? I’m sorry.”

“I wish I could take her with me, but I can’t swing that with the Yugoslavs. It’s sort of a VIP deal. I guess they want to affect foreign radicals. There’ll be seminars in dialectics, and so on. I love it. But it’s not Trudy’s dish.”

Steady-handed, Mosby on his patio took ice with tongs, and poured more mescal flavored with gusano de maguey —a worm or slug of delicate flavor. These notes on Lustgarten pleased him. It was essential, at this point in his memoirs, to disclose new depths. The preceding chapters had been heavy. Many unconventional things were said about the state of political theory. The weakness of conservative doctrine, the lack, in America, of conservative alternatives, of resistance to the prevailing liberalism. As one who had personally tried to create a more rigorous environment for slovenly intellectuals, to force them to do their homework, to harden the categories of political thought, he was aware that on the right as on the left the results were barren. Absurdly, the college-bred dunces of America had longed for a true leftwing movement on the European model. They still dreamed of it. No less absurd were the rightwing idiots. You cannot grow a rose in a coal mine. Mosby’s own rightwing graduate students had disappointed him. Just a lot of television actors. Bad guys for the Susskind interview programs. They had transformed the master’s manner of acid elegance, logical tightness, factual punctiliousness, and merciless laceration in debate into a sort of shallow Noыl Coward style. The real, the original Mosby approach brought Mosby hatred, got Mosby fired. Princeton University had offered Mosby a lump sum to retire seven years early. One hundred and forty thousand dollars. Because his mode of discourse was so upsetting to the academic community. Mosby was invited to no television programs. He was like the Guerrilla Mosby of the Civil War. When he galloped in, all were slaughtered.

Most carefully, Mosby had studied the memoirs of Santayana, Malraux, Sartre, Lord Russell, and others. Unfortunately, no one was reliably or consistently great. Men whose lives had been devoted to thought, who had tried mightily to govern the disorder of public life, to put it under some sort of intellectual authority, to get ideas to save mankind or to offer it mental aid in saving itself, would suddenly turn into gruesome idiots. Wanting to kill everyone. For instance, Sartre calling for the Russians to drop A-bombs on American bases in the Pacific because America was now presumably monstrous. And exhorting the blacks to butcher the whites. This moral philosopher! Or Russell, the Pacifist of World War I, urging the West to annihilate Russia after World War II. And sometimes, in his memoirs—perhaps he was gaga—strangely illogical. When, over London, a Zeppelin was shot down, the bodies of Germans were seen to fall, and the brutal men in the street horribly cheered, Russell wept, and had there not been a beautiful woman to console him in bed that night, this heartlessness of mankind would have broken him utterly. What was omitted was the fact that these same Germans who fell from the Zeppelin had come to bomb the city. They were going to blow up the brutes in the street, explode the lovers. This Mosby saw.

It was earnestly to be hoped—this was the mescal attempting to invade his language—that Mosby would avoid the common fate of intellectuals. The Lustgarten digression should help. The correction of pride by laughter.

There were twenty minutes yet before the chauffeur came to take the party to Mitla, to the ruins. Mosby had time to continue. To say that in September the Lustgarten who reappeared looked frightful. He had lost no less than fifty pounds. Sun-blackened, creased, in a filthy stained suit, his eyes infected. He said he had had diarrhea all summer.

“What did they feed their foreign VIPs?”

And Lustgarten shyly bitter—the lean face and inflamed eyes materializing from a spiritual region very different from any heretofore associated with Lustgarten by Mosby—said, “It was just a chain gang. It was hard labor. I didn’t understand the deal. I thought we were invited, as I told you. But we turned out to be foreign volunteers-of-construction. A labor brigade. And up in the mountains. Never saw the Dalmatian coast. Hardly even shelter for the night. We slept on the ground and ate shit fried in rancid oil.”

“Why didn’t you run away?” asked Mosby.

“How? Where?”

“Back to Belgrade. To the American embassy at least?”

“How could I? I was a guest. Came at their expense. They held the return ticket.”

“And no money?”

“Are you kidding? Dead broke. In Macedonia. Near Skoplje. Bug-stung, starved, and running to the latrine all night. Laboring on the roads all day, with pus in my eyes, too.”

“No first aid?”

“They may have had the first, but they didn’t have the second.”

Mosby though it best to say nothing of Trudy. She had divorced Lustgarten.

Commiseration, of course.

Mosby shaking his head.

Lustgarten with a certain skinny dignity walking away. He himself seemed amused by his encounters with capitalism and socialism.

The end? Not quite. There was a coda: The thing had quite good form.

Lustgarten and Mosby met again. Five years later. Mosby enters an elevator in New York. Express to the forty-seventh floor, the executive dining room of the Rangeley Foundation. There is one other passenger, and it is Lustgarten. Grinning. He is himself again, filled out once more.

“Lustgarten!”

“Willis Mosby!”

“How are you, Lustgarten?”

“I’m great. Things are completely different. I’m happy. Successful. Married. Children.”