"John Kessel - Buffalo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

had two more children. There were good years and bad ones.
He held a lot of jobs. The recession of 1958 just about
flattened him; our family had to go on welfare. Things got
better, but they never got good. After the 1950s, the
economy of Buffalo, like that of all U.S. industrial cities
caught in the transition to a post-industrial age, declined
steadily. Kessel never did work for himself, and as an old
man was no more prosperous than he had been as a young one.

In the years preceding his death in 1945 Wells was to go
on to further disillusionment. His efforts to create a sane
world met with increasing frustration. He became bitter,
enraged. Moura Budberg never agreed to marry him, and he
lived alone. The war came, and it was, in some ways, even
worse than he had predicted. He continued to propagandize
for the socialist world state throughout, but with
increasing irrelevance. The new leftists like Orwell
considered him a dinosaur, fatally out of touch with the
realities of world politics, a simpleminded technocrat with
no understanding of the darkness of the human heart. Wells's
last book, _ M_ i_ n_ d _ a_ t _ t_ h_ e _ E_ n_ d _ o_ f _ I_ t_ s
_ T_ e_ t_ h_ e_ r, proposed that
the human race faced an evolutionary crisis that would lead
to its extinction unless humanity leapt to a higher state of
consciousness; a leap about which Wells speculated with
little hope or conviction.

Sitting there in the Washington ballroom in 1934, Wells
might well have understood that for all his thinking and
preaching about the future, the future had irrevocably
passed him by.

But the story isn't quite over yet. Back in the
Washington ballroom Wells sits humiliated, a little guilty
for sending Kessel away so harshly. Kessel, his back to the
dance floor, stares humiliated into his glass of beer.
Gradually, both of them are pulled back from dark thoughts
of their own inadequacies by the sound of Ellington's
orchestra.

Ellington stands in front of the big grand piano, behind
him the band: three saxes, two clarinets, two trumpets,
trombones, a drummer, guitarist, bass. "Creole Love Call,"
Ellington whispers into the microphone, then sits again at
the piano. He waves his hand once, twice, and the clarinets
slide into a low, wavering theme. The trumpet, muted,
echoes it. The bass player and guitarist strum ahead at a
deliberate pace, rhythmic, erotic, bluesey. Kessel and
Wells, separate across the room, each unaware of the other,
are alike drawn in. The trumpet growls eight bars of