BOOKS
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It is hard for modern ears to refrain from smiling at words of
ultimate seriousness, however eloquent-hard not to feel their futility .
The saving grace in these words of seriousness is a holy "levity" to be
distinguished from wisecracking. Still, it is not easy to get back the
great nineteenth-century sentiment: the reverence for life . The
language of art, as Bellow knows as well as anyone, may be aggres–
sive and hard: how to keep it from mean-spiritedness?
Bellow's solution is to invent harsh, large-souled charac–
ters-like Wulpy, in "What Kind of Day Did You Have?". Harold
Rosenberg-like in his giant physical size and intellectual sensibility,
Wulpy is a prince of men, a world-class artist-intellectual who
assumes "a kind of presidential immunity from all inconveniences ."
We see Wulpy's life through the eyes of Katerina, his lover (an ad–
mirable addition to Bellow's gallery of voluptuous, generous and suf–
fering matronly women). Wulpy, with his gimpy leg and poor
health, is as difficult and demanding a lover as he is an imperious in–
tellect. Bellow shows Wulpy contending with the unpleasant realities
of the lecture tour: air travel in inclement weather, missed connec–
tions , importuning characters who want to meet the great man, and
loneliness in a hotel room. But the power of this story is in Bellow's
aphoristic creation of Wulpy's character.
At the age of seventy, he had arranged his ideas in well-nigh
final order: none of the weakness, none of the drift that made
supposedly educated people contemptible. How can you call
yourself a modern thinker if you lack the realism to identify a
weak marriage quickly, if you don't know what hypocrisy is, if
you haven't come to terms with lying- if, in certain connections,
people can still say about you, "He's a sweetheart!"? Nobody
would dream of calling Victor "a sweetheart!"
[Katerina) was with him in his lighthearted, quick-moving
detachment from everything that people (almost all of them)
were attached to. In a public-opinion country, he made his own
opinions. Katerina was enrolled as his only pupil. She paid her
tuition with joy.
Wulpy's adversary is the seductive filmmaker Wrangel, an intellec–
tual entertainer and promoter of bad faith, who justifies his trivializ–
ing of ideas (he pretends to be a great admirer of W ulpy) by claiming
that caricature clarifies abstract ideas. Another threat to Wulpy
comes from Police Lieutenant Krieggstein, candidate for a Ph.D in
criminology and rival for Katerina's affections . Krieggstein is in the
