Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  “You want to play a short game?” he said.

  “No, Vito, I came to get something from my locker.”

  The usual casting about, I was thinking as I went back to the beat-up Mercedes. How typical of me. The usual craving. I looked for help. I longed for someone to do the stations of the cross with me. Just like Pa. And where was Pa? Pa was in the cemetery.

  eight

  At the Mercedes shop the distinguished official and technician in the white smock was naturally curious but I refused to answer questions. “I don’t know how this happened, Fritz. I found it this way. Fix it. I don’t want to see the bill, either. Just send it to the Continental Illinois. They’ll pay it.” Fritz charged like a brain surgeon.

  I flagged a taxi in the street. The driver was wild-looking with an immense Afro Jike a shrub from the gardens at Versailles. The back of his cab was dusty with cigarette ashes and had a tavern odor. There was a bullet-proof screen between us. He made a fast turn and charged due west on Division Street. I could see little, because of the blurred Plexiglas and the Afro, but I didn’t really need to look, I knew it all by heart. Large parts of Chicago decay and fall down. Some are rebuilt, others just lie there. It’s like a film montage of rise fall and rise. Division Street where the old Bath stands used to be Polish and now is almost entirely Puerto Rican. In the Polish days, the small brick bungalows were painted fresh red, maroon, and candy green. The grass plots were fenced with iron pipe. I always thought that there must be Baltic towns that looked like this, Gdynia for instance, the difference being that the Illinois prairie erupted in vacant lots and tumbleweed rolled down the streets. Tumbleweed is so melancholy.

  In the old days of ice wagons and coal wagons householders used to cut busted boilers in half, set them out on the grass plots, and fill them with flowers. Big Polish women in ribboned caps went out in the spring with cans of Sapolio and painted these boiler-planters so that they shone silver against the blaring red of the brick. The double rows of rivets stood out like the raised-skin patterns of African tribes. Here the women grew geraniums, sweet William, and other low-grade dusty flowers. I showed all of this to Humboldt Fleisher years ago. He came to Chicago to give a reading for Poetry magazine and asked me for a tour of the city. We were dear friends then. I had come back to see my father and to put the last touches on my book, New Deal Personalities, at the Newberry Library. I took Humboldt on the El to the stockyards. He saw the Loop. We went to the lakeshore and listened to the foghorns. They bawled melancholy over the limp silk fresh lilac drowning water. But Humboldt responded mostly to the old neighborhood. The silvered boiler rivets and the blazing Polish geraniums got him. He listened pale and moved to the buzzing of roller-skate wheels on the brittle cement. I too am sentimental about urban ugliness. In the modern spirit of ransoming the commonplace, all this junk and wretchedness, through art and poetry, by the superior power of the soul.

  Mary, my eight-year-old daughter, has discovered this about me. She knows my weakness for ontogeny and phylogeny. She always asks to hear what life was like way-back-when.

  “We had coal stoves,” I tell her. “The kitchen range was black, with a nickel trim—huge. The parlor stove had a dome like a little church, and you could watch the fire through the isinglass. I had to carry up the scuttle and take down the ashes.”

  “What did you wear?”

  “A leatherette war-ace cap with rabbit-fur flaps, high-top boots with a sheath for a rusty jackknife, long black stockings, and plus fours. Underneath, woolly combinations which left lint in my navel and elsewhere.”

  “What else was it like?” my younger daughter wanted to know. Lish, who is ten years old, is her mother’s child and such information would not interest her. But Mary is less pretty, though to my mind she is more attractive (more like her father). She is secretive and greedy. She lies and steals more than most small girls, and this is also endearing. She hides chewing gum and chocolates with stirring ingenuity. I find her candy buried under the upholstery or in my filing cabinet. She has learned that I don’t often look at my research materials. She flatters and squeezes me precociously. And she wants to hear about old times. She has her own purposes in evoking and manipulating my emotions. But Papa is quite willing to manifest the old-time feelings. In fact I must transmit these feelings. For I have plans for Mary. Oh, nothing so definite as plans, perhaps. I have an idea that I may be able to pervade the child’s mind with my spirit so that she will later take up the work I am getting too old or too weak or too silly to continue. She alone, or perhaps she and her husband. With any luck. I worry about the girl. In a locked drawer of my desk I keep notes and memos for her, many of them written under the influence of liquor. I promise myself to censor these one day, before death catches me off base on the racquet-ball court or on the Posturepedic mattress of some Renata or other. Mary is sure to be an intelligent woman. She interprets “Fur Elise” much better than Lish. She feels the music. My heart is often troubled for Mary, however. She will be a straight-nosed thin broad who feels the music. And personally I prefer plump women with fine breasts. So I felt sorry for her already. As for the project or purpose I want her to carry on, it is a very personal overview of the Intellectual Comedy of the modern mind. No one person could do this comprehensively. By the end of the nineteenth century what had been the ample novels of Balzac’s Comedy had already been reduced to stories by Chekhov in his Russian Comédie Humaine. Now it’s even less possible to be comprehensive. I never had a work of fiction in mind but a different kind of imaginative projection. Different also from Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas. . . . This is not the moment to explain it. Whatever it was, I conceived of it while still a youngish man. It was actually Humboldt who lent me the book of Valéry that suggested it. Valéry wrote of Leonardo, “Cet Apollon me ravissait au plus haut degré de moi-même.” I too was ravished with permanent effect—perhaps carried beyond my mental means. But Valéry had added a note in the margin: “Trouve avant de chercher.” This finding before seeking was my special gift. If I had any gift.

  However, my small daughter would say to me with deadly accuracy of instinct, “Tell me what your mother used to do. Was she pretty?”

  “I think she was very pretty. I don’t look like her. And she did cooking, baking, laundry and ironing, canning and pickling. She could tell fortunes with cards and sing trembly Russian songs. She and my father took turns visiting me at the sanatorium, every other week. In February the vanilla ice cream they brought was so hard you couldn’t cut it with a knife. And what else—ah yes, at home when I lost a tooth she would throw it behind the stove and ask the little mouse to bring a better one. You see what kind of teeth those bloody mice palmed off on me.”

  “You loved your mother?”

  Eager swelling feeling suddenly swept in. I forgot that I was talking to a child and I said, “Oh, I loved them all terribly, abnormally. I was all torn up with love. Deep in the heart. I used to cry in the sanatorium because I might never make it home and see them. I’m sure they never knew how I loved them, Mary. I had a TB fever and also a love fever. A passionate morbid little boy. At school I was always in love. At home if I was first to get up in the morning I suffered because they were still asleep. I wanted them to wake up so that the whole marvelous thing could continue. I also loved Menasha the boarder and Julius, my brother, your Uncle Julius.”

  I shall have to lay aside these emotional data.

  At the moment money, checks, hoodlums, automobiles preoccupied me.

  Another check was on my mind. It had been sent by my friend Thaxter, the one whom Huggins accused of being a CIA agent. You see Thaxter and I were preparing to bring out a journal, The Ark. We were all ready. Wonderful things were to be printed in it—pages from my imaginative reflections on a world transformed by Mind, for example. But meantime Thaxter had defaulted on a certain loan.

  It’s a long story and one that I’d rather not go into at this point. For two reasons. One is that I love Thaxter, whatever he does. The other
is that I actually do think too much about money. It’s no good trying to conceal it. It’s there and it’s base. Earlier when I described how George saved Sharon’s life when her throat was cut, I spoke of blood as a vital substance. Well, money is a vital substance, too. Thaxter was supposed to repay part of the defaulted loan. Broke but grandiose he had ordered a check from his Italian bank for me, the Banco Ambrosiano of Milan. Why the Banco? Why Milan? But all of Thaxter’s arrangements were out of the ordinary. He had had a transatlantic upbringing and was equally at home in France and in California. You couldn’t mention a region so remote that Thaxter didn’t have an uncle there, or an interest in a mine, or an old château or villa. Thaxter with his exotic ways was another of my headaches. But I couldn’t resist him. However, that too must wait. Only one last word: Thaxter wanted people to believe that he was once a CIA agent. It was a wonderful rumor and he did everything to encourage it. It greatly added to his mysterious-ness, and mystery was one of his little rackets. This was harmless and in fact endearing. It was even philanthropic, as charm always is—up to a point. Charm always is a bit of a racket.

  The cab pulled up at the Bath twenty minutes early and I wasn’t going to loiter there so I said through the perforations of the bulletproof screen, “Go on, drive west. Take it easy, I just want to look around.” The cabbie heard me and nodded his Afro. It was like an enormous black dandelion in seed, blown, all its soft spindles standing out.

  In the last six months more old neighborhood landmarks had been torn down. This shouldn’t have mattered much. I can’t say why it made such a difference. But I was in a state. It almost seemed to me that I could hear myself rustling and fluttering in the back seat like a bird touring the mangroves of its youth, now car dumps. I stared with pulsatory agitation through the soiled windows. A whole block had gone down. Lovi’s Hungarian Restaurant had been swept away, plus Ben’s Pool Hall and the old brick carbarn and Gratch’s Funeral Parlor, out of which both my parents had been buried. Eternity got no picturesque interval here. The ruins of time had been bulldozed, scraped, loaded in trucks, and dumped as fill. New steel beams were going up. Polish kielbasa no longer hung in butchers’ windows. The sausages in the carniceria were Caribbean, purple and wrinkled. The old shop signs were gone. The new ones said HOY. MUDANZAS. IGLESIA.

  “Keep going west,” I said to the driver. “Past the park. Turn right on Kedzie.”

  The old boulevard now was a sagging ruin, waiting for the wreckers. Through great holes I could look into apartments where I had slept, eaten, done my lessons, kissed girls. You’d have to loathe yourself vividly to be indifferent to such destruction or, worse, rejoice at the crushing of the locus of these middle-class sentiments, glad that history had made rubble of them. In fact I know such tough guys. This very neighborhood produced them. Informers to the metaphysical-historical police against fellows like me whose hearts ache at the destruction of the past. But I had come here to be melancholy, to be sad about the wrecked walls and windows, the missing doors, the fixtures torn out, and the telephone cables ripped away and sold as junk. More particularly, I had come to see whether the house in which Naomi Lutz had lived was still standing. It was not. That made me feel very low.

  In my highly emotional adolescence I had loved Naomi Lutz. I believe she was the most beautiful and perfect young girl I have ever seen, I adored her, and love brought out my deepest peculiarities. Her father was a respectable chiropodist. He gave himself high medical airs, every inch the Doctor. Her mother was a dear woman, slipshod, harum-scarum, rather chin-less, but with large glowing romantic eyes. Night after night I had to play rummy with Dr. Lutz, and on Sundays I helped him to wash and simonize his Auburn. But that was all right. When I loved Naomi Lutz I was safely within life. Its phenomena added up, they made sense. Death was an after all acceptable part of the proposition. I had my own little Lake Country, the park, where I wandered with my Modern Library Plato, Wordsworth, Swinburne, and Un Coeur Simple. Even in winter Naomi petted behind the rose garden with me. Among the frozen twigs I made myself warm inside her raccoon coat. There was a delicious mixture of coon skin and maiden fragrance. We breathed frost and kissed. Until I met Demmie Vonghel many years later, I loved no one so much as Naomi Lutz. But Naomi, while I was away in Madison, Wisconsin, reading poetry and studying rotation pool at the Rathskeller, married a pawnbroker. He dealt also in rebuilt office machinery and had plenty of money. I was too young to give her the charge accounts she had to have at Field’s and Saks, and I believe the mental burdens and responsibilities of an intellectual’s wife had frightened her besides. I had talked all the time about my Modern Library books, of poetry and history, and she was afraid that she would disappoint me. She told me so. I said to her, if a tear was an intellectual thing how much more intellectual pure love was. It needed no cognitive additives. But she only looked puzzled. It was this sort of talk by which I had lost her. She did not look me up even when her husband lost all his money and deserted her. He was a sporting man, a gambler. He had to go into hiding at last, because the juice men were after him. I believe they had even broken his ankles. Anyway, he changed his name and went or limped to the Southwest. Naomi sold her classy Winnetka house and moved to Marquette Park, where the family owned a bungalow. She took a job in the linen department at Field’s.

  As the cab went back to Division Street I was making a wry parallel between Naomi’s husband’s Mafia troubles and my own. He had muffed it, too. I couldn’t help thinking what a blessed life I might have led with Naomi Lutz. Fifteen thousand nights embracing Naomi and I would have smiled at the solitude and boredom of the grave. I would have needed no bibliography, no stock portfolios, no medal from the Legion of Honor.

  So we drove again through what had become a tropical West Indies slum, resembling the parts of San Juan that stand beside lagoons which bubble and smell like stewing tripe. There was the same crushed plaster, smashed glass, garbage in the streets, the same rude amateur blue chalk lettering on the shops.

  But the Russian Bath where I was supposed to meet Rinaldo Cantabile stood more or less unchanged. It was also a proletarian hotel or lodging house. On the second floor there had always lived aged workingstiffs, lone Ukrainian grandfathers, retired car-line employees, a pastry cook famous for his icings who had to quit because his hands became arthritic. I knew the place from boyhood. My father, like old Mr. Swiebel, had believed it was healthful, good for the blood to be scrubbed with oak leaves lathered in old pickle buckets. Such retrograde people still exist, resisting modernity, dragging their feet. As Menasha the boarder, an amateur physicist (but mostly he wanted to be a dramatic tenor and took voice lessons: he had worked at Brunswick Phonograph Co. as a punch-press operator), once explained to me, human beings could affect the rotation of the earth. How? Well, if the whole race at an agreed moment were to scuff its feet the revolution of the planet would actually slow down. This might also have an effect on the moon and on the tides. Of course Menasha’s real topic was not physics but concord, or unity. I think that some through stupidity and others through perversity would scuff the wrong way. However, the old guys at the Bath do seem to be unconsciously engaged in a collective attempt to buck history.

  These Division Street steam-bathers don’t look like the trim proud people downtown. Even old Feldstein pumping his Exercycle in the Downtown Club at the age of eighty would be out of place on Division Street. Forty years ago Feldstein was a swinger, a high roller, a good-time Charlie on Rush Street. In spite of his age he is a man of today, whereas the patrons of the Russian Bath are cast in an antique form. They have swelling buttocks and fatty breasts as yellow as buttermilk. They stand on thick pillar legs affected with a sort of creeping verdigris or blue-cheese mottling of the ankles. After steaming, these old fellows eat enormous snacks of bread and salt herring or large ovals of salami and dripping skirt-steak and they drink schnapps. They could knock down walls with their hard stout old-fashioned bellies. Things are very elementary here. You feel that these people are almo
st conscious of obsolescence, of a line of evolution abandoned by nature and culture. So down in the super-heated subcellars all these Slavonic cavemen and wood demons with hanging laps of fat and legs of stone and lichen boil themselves and splash ice water on their heads by the bucket. Upstairs, on the television screen in the locker room, little dudes and grinning broads make smart talk or leap up and down. They are unheeded. Mickey who keeps the food concession fries slabs of meat and potato pancakes, and, with enormous knives, he hacks up cabbages for coleslaw and he quarters grapefruits (to be eaten by hand). The stout old men mounting in their bed sheets from the blasting heat have a strong appetite. Below, Franush the attendant makes steam by sloshing water on the white-hot boulders. These lie in a pile like Roman ballistic ammunition. To keep his brains from baking Franush wears a wet felt hat with the brim torn off. Otherwise he is naked. He crawls up like a red salamander with a stick to tip the latch of the furnace, which is too hot to touch, and then on all fours, with testicles swinging on a long sinew and the clean anus staring out, he backs away groping for the bucket. He pitches in the water and the boulders flash and sizzle. There may be no village in the Carpathians where such practices still prevail.