I do recall thinking, everything's out of control: population, the weather, the cells of each and every body. Things seemed to be converging in a disastrous way. Arlene had had leukemia for six years. She was in a state of remission. We never mentioned the subject. But it was always there.
Then there was me dead broke because there weren't any planes to test due to the recession or depression. There was… . As I put down the receiver, I was suddenly glad that I was going to India, to Nepal, to meet an American who said he was Kalki, come to end the world because, I said out loud, "Things can't get any worse."
"Nought may endure but mutability."
-- Shelley
Kalki: A Novel (1978) by Gore Vidal
In his "entertainments" Vidal (1925-2012) does not aim for the density of his historical novels. Myra Breckinridge (1968), Duluth (1983) and Live From Golgotha (1992), are playful holidays where theme and variation are visited upon literary-academic pretensions Vidal enjoyed skewering in essays and editorial page letters.
Kalki (1978), a droll pseudo-SF exercise in the grotesque, is the most energetic of these entertainments. It is a Walpurgisnacht wherein the world's goblins roar with the pleasure at the prospect of terrifying the countryside for a night.
Vidal the jaded and epicene critic commenced Kalki in early 1976 (Parini, 279) after completing 1876, that most diffuse and flacid of historical fictions. Kalki is a novel that reads like a jailbreak from proportion and propriety.
It is first and foremost a Chicken Little novel. Kalki predates the panics of The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Paul Theroux's O-Zone (1986) by nearly a decade. In Vidal's mid-1970s, everything sucks: smog, high crime, the colonial world, and US hypocrisy about sex, drugs, and gender roles. The author must have felt like his muse was sending down the pages by the bucketful each morning.
All the 1970s obsessions that animated people like Barry Commoner and Jeremy Rifkin are embedded in Kalki: overpopulation, growth limits, ozone holes, the approaching global food and energy crack-ups that would soon lead to famine and death. Vidal and his characters, privileged bourgois types, can only imagine one solution for themselves: pulling up the gang-plank before the immense majority of humanity at home and abroad puts their stamp on events.
* * *
Kalki's plotters and plot
James Joseph Kelly [Kalki], Former Sergeant, U.S. Army, serving in Vietnam. Expert in biological weapons, drug lord, messiah.
Giles Lowell, M. D. [Alias Dr. Ashok] Kelly's teacher and lieutenant. The worm in the apple of the new Eden.
Lakshmi, Kelly's consort.
Geraldine, Lakshmi's particular friend and Kalki's biochemist.
Theodora Hecht Ottinger, winner of aviation's International Harmon Trophy, author of Beyond Motherhood, freelance journalist. Our narrator.
Like M. P. Shiel's sublime masterpiece The Purple Cloud (1901), Kalki spends its final chapters with the last members of the human race as they live and die athwart consequences of their "carnival of fetishized subjectivism." (Lukacs)
Narrator Teddy Ottinger tells us Kalki and his consort Lakshmi plan to repopulate the world, aided by the scientific expertise of Giles and Geraldine. But the dream of a utopia of New Children ends in tears.
....Lakshmi miscarried. The baby — a girl, as predicted — was born dead, and deformed.
Lakshmi went into a deep depression. Kalki was grim. Giles was soothing; he assured us that nothing serious had gone wrong. He was absolutely certain that the next baby would be healthy. He gave his reasons. But then, unknown to Giles, Geraldine did blood studies of both Kalki and Lakshmi.
On a cold, rainy morning Geraldine came into the living room at the Hay-Adams. She was still wearing her laboratory smock. When she is nervous, she develops a slight tic in her left cheek. The tic was in evidence that morning.
"Lakshmi is Rh-negative," said Geraldine. "Kalki is Rh-positive." She sat in the chair opposite my desk.
I knew exactly what she meant. Every mother knows about those incompatibilities of blood that can exist between male and female. In great detail, Geraldine spelled it out for me while rain fell in sheets, made opaque the windows, darkened the room.
Before Kalki, 13 percent of all American couplings occurred between Rh-negative women and Rh-positive men. Although the first child of such a union might be normal, subsequent births would sometimes be disastrous — until the development of a prophylactic serum called RhoGAM. If an Rh-negative woman was treated with RhoGAM immediately after the birth of her first child, her next child would be normal. Untreated, subsequent children could suffer fetal hydrops, stillbirth, kernicterus. Lakshmi had not been treated.
Geraldine was precise, angry, guilty because, "I should have known their blood chemistry …"
"Why?" I tried to comfort her. "After all, you're not their doctor. Giles is."
"Yes," said Geraldine. "Giles is their doctor."
When I saw what was in her mind, I joined her in a state of shock.
From far away, I could hear my own voice saying what I hoped was true. "He must not have known."
"He knew."
"Are you sure? I mean, isn't it possible that he made a perfectly honest mistake?" I chattered, hoping that the truth was not true and that the crime could be expunged with words.
"Giles has known from the beginning that they were incompatible. So …" Geraldine stopped.
"Why?" I asked.
"Why," she repeated. Then she telephoned Kalki.
When Geraldine and I entered the Oval Office, Giles was already there. Lakshmi was not. She had taken to her bed. Would not speak to anyone. Had to be forcibly fed.
Kalki sat at the president's desk. For the first time since The End, he wore the saffron robe. Through the window back of his chair, I could see the chickens in the overgrown Rose Garden. They clucked contentedly as they pecked for food.
Giles sprang to his feet, face vivid with energy, intelligence. "Geraldine! Teddy!" He tried to kiss Geraldine. She pushed him away.
Then Geraldine sat in a chair opposite Kalki's desk; opened her handbag; produced a sheaf of papers. "Now," she said, "this is the problem…"
Giles interrupted her. He was entirely manic. "There is no problem! How could there be? I have personally studied every blood chemistry report ever done on Kalki and Lakshmi …"
"Shut up, Giles." Kalki's voice was without emphasis.
As Geraldine gave her analysis, Giles paced the room, wanting to interrupt but not daring to. Medical words like "erythroblastosis" were used. But despite the elaborate terminology, the meaning was altogether too clear. As was the solution, which Geraldine proposed.
"You and Lakshmi," she said, "can only have children if, within seventy-two hours of delivery, Lakshmi is desensitized with RhoGAM, which contains a high titer of anti-Rh antibody. This will render the killer antigen in the blood ineffective, and make it possible for her to bear normal children."
Kalki got the essential point. There was still time. "Where can we find this RhoGAM?"
"I suppose we can find it at any hospital," said Giles. "But I don't agree with Geraldine. After all, this is my field . .
"We'll discuss that later," said Kalki.
The RhoGAM was found, but it was too late. Lakshmi was how permanently sensitized. Any child she might conceive by Kalki would be born dead or, technically speaking, not really born at all.
Kalki broke the news to Lakshmi. I don't know what he told her. She has never mentioned the subject to either Geraldine or me.
For a week, Kalki and Lakshmi went into seclusion. I rang Kalki once. I offered to do my usual chores in the garden. Kalki said that he would rather not see anyone. According to Geraldine, Lakshmi was still in a state of deep depression. She was not the only one.
I now spend most of my time in the lobby of the Hay-Adams, looking after Jack and Jill. The Child has developed into a lively little girl, with a very definite and charming personality. I call her Eve. Yes, obvious connotation. I should note that in the last two years, Jack and Jill have had two more babies, a boy and a girl. I enjoy being with them. Geraldine does not share my enjoyment. She treats them neutrally and they respond, sensitively, in kind. Geraldine still works long hours in her laboratory. Since we never discuss her work, I have no idea what she's doing.
Eight days after the scene in the Oval Office, Kalki suddenly appeared in the lobby. Eve jumped up on his shoulder. She pulled his hair. She is very fond of him, and she does not like many people. In fact, from the very beginning she hated her mother and Giles and, I'm afraid, Geraldine, too. She tolerates Jack. She adores Kalki and me. Kalki is very nice with her.
"We've missed you," I said, helping Kalki get Eve's fingers out of his hair.
"We've missed you, too. We want you to come to dinner tonight." Kalki cleared apple cores off the last undestroyed sofa. I apologized for the mess.
Kalki sat down. He was unshaven, pale. "Giles knew about us all along," Kalki spoke as if this were news.
"So we guessed. But why didn't he warn you? And why didn't he give Lakshmi that serum from the beginning?"
"Because he didn't want to." Kalki stared off into space. Then he spoke with slow precision. "Yesterday I went to see him at Blair House. He told me everything. He told me that he had always known our problem. He told me that he had expected Lakshmi to become sensitized to me. He told me that he had never had a vasectomy. He told me that he loved Lakshmi. He told me that if the human race was to continue, it was now necessary for her to have his child."
I saw what was coming with all the clarity of a pilot about to crash-land a plane. "And when she does, he and not you will be the father of the new human race."
"Yes," said Kalki.
"What did you do?"
"I killed him."
I have brought this record up to date only to please Kalki. I can't think why he wants it. There will be no one to read it in the future....
Teddy ends her days inhabiting a Washington, D. C. inherited by descendants of big cats, giraffes, wolves, and monkeys Gerldine freed from the National Zoo .
Vidal gives real emotional heft to his droll ending: the sense of last things, of belatedness, is enough to make the reader's chest ache.
Jay
16 September 2021
❖
The above forms most of chapter six of my unwritten book The Fantastika of Gore Vidal. Below I have also appended a table of contents and a rough introduction.
The Fantastika of Gore Vidal
1. Introduction: My Gore Vidal Itinerary
2. A Search for the King: A Twelfth Century Legend (1950)
3. Messiah (1954)
4. Myra Breckenridge (1968)
5. Myron (1974)
6. Kalki (1978)
7. Creation (1981)
8. Duluth (1983)
9. Live from Golgotha (1992)
10. The Smithsonian Institution (1998)
11. Vacations of a Public Intellectual
Introduction: My Gore Vidal Itinerary
I have been in an on-again off-again relationship with Gore Vidal (1925-2012) since high school. I checked Julian (1964) out of the Bucyrus, Ohio public library in early 1982, soon after catching Vidal on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
Initially I appreciated his contrarian political wit, though after becoming a partisan of the Socialist Workers Party I found his brand of ride-or-die Democrat Party bourgeois cretinism a tiresome dead-end time-waster. Like Chomsky, any rationalization was good enough to promote voting for Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore or Obama. From about 1986 his bald expressions of Jew-hate, rationalized by himself and cronies as "antizionism," was a rancid spectacle.
As my adolescent appreciation of Vidal's politics evaporated, my appreciation for his skills as a novelist waxed. This was a long process, and did not culminate until summer 2004, when I read all his so-called Narratives of Empire. Vidal dragooned many of his 1960s and 1970s historical novels into the Narratives of Empire, but reading them in order of publication (not in order of retcon) was a fruitful experience.
* * *
The City and the Pillar (1948), which I read in the revised 1965 edition, I found fascinating, noirish, and grim as hell.
Messiah (1954) is a richly textured fantasy perfectly delineating a stultified and increasingly irrational Cold War hothouse culture. In it, a Madison Avenue pro helps create and market a pseudoscience death cult that quickly overruns the US before the real meaning of life — "more life" — is discovered.
Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), and The Golden Age (2000) tell the story of Vidal's finest fictional creation, Caroline Sanford. From 1898 onward, she participates in everything from Hearst journalism to pre-code Hollywood to the Cold War. Along the way she meets such Vidal touchstones as Henry Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt. The power and drama of these novels, and the faultless unity they attain in following the growth and triumph of a single character, give them a matchless authority. These novels embrace the contradictions history imposes on characters (real and invented) who have a sense — like their creator — that they inhabit history as citizens of time and are being judged accordingly.
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