Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  “To a marvelous beautiful intelligent woman.”

  “You mentioned your wife in South Chicago. That night . . . Do you have children? What does she do?”

  “She’s no housewife, buddy, and you’d better know it. You think I’d marry some fat-ass broad who sits around the house in curlers and watches TV? This is a real woman, with a mind, with knowledge. She teaches at Mundelein College and she’s working on a doctoral thesis. You know where?”

  “No.”

  “At Radcliffe, Harvard.”

  “That’s very good,” I said. I emptied the champagne glass and refilled it.

  “Don’t brush it off. Ask me what her subject is. Of the thesis.”

  “All right, what is it?”

  “She’s writing a study of that poet who was your friend.”

  “You’re kidding. Von Humboldt Fleisher? How do you know he was my friend? ... I see. I was talking about him at George’s. Someone should have locked me in a closet that night.”

  “You didn’t have to be cheated, Charlie. You didn’t know what you were doing. You were talking away like a nine-year-old kid about lawsuits, lawyers, accountants, bad investments, and the magazine you were going to publish—a real loser, it sounded like. You said you were going to spend your own money on your own ideas.”

  “I never discuss these things with strangers. Chicago must be giving me arctic madness.”

  “Now, listen, I’m very proud of my wife. Her people are rich, upper class. . . .” Boasting gives people a wonderful color, I’ve noticed, and Cantabile’s cheeks glowed. He said, “You’re asking yourself what is she doing with a husband like me.”

  I muttered, “No, no,” though that certainly was a natural question. However, it was not exactly news that highly educated women were excited by scoundrels criminals and lunatics, and that these scoundrels etcetera were drawn to culture, to thought. Diderot and Dostoevski had made us familiar with this.

  “I want her to get her PhD,” said Cantabile. “You understand? I want it bad. And you were a pal of this Fleisher guy. You’re going to give Lucy the information.”

  “Now wait a minute—”

  “Look this over.” He handed me an envelope and I put on my glasses and glanced over the document enclosed. It was signed Lucy Wilkins Cantabile and it was the letter of a model graduate student, polite, detailed, highly organized, with the usual academic circumlocutions—three single-spaced pages, dense with questions, painful questions. Her husband kept me under close observation as I read. “Well, what do you think of her?”

  “Terrific,” I said. The thing filled me with despair. “What do you two want of me?”

  “Answers. Information. We want you to write out the answers. What’s your opinion of her project?”

  “I think the dead owe us a living.”

  “Don’t horse around with me, Charlie. I didn’t like that crack.”

  “I couldn’t care less,” I said. “This poor Humboldt, my friend, was a big spirit who was destroyed ... never mind that. The PhD racket is a very fine racket but I want no part of it. Besides, I never answer questionnaires. Idiots impose on you with their documents. I can’t bear that kind of thing.”

  “Are you calling my wife an idiot?”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting her.”

  “I’ll make allowances for you. You got hit in the guts by the Mercedes and then I ran you ragged. But don’t be unpleasant about my wife.”

  “There are things I don’t do. This is one of them. I’m not going to write answers. It would take weeks.”

  “Listen!”

  “I draw the line.”

  “Just a minute!”

  “Bump me off. Go to hell.”

  “All right, easy does it. Some things are sacred. I understand. But we can work everything out. I listened at the poker game and I know that you’re in plenty of trouble. You need somebody tough and practical to handle things for you. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I have all kinds of ideas for you. We’ll trade off.”

  “No, I don’t want to trade anything. I’ve had it. My heart is breaking and I want to go home.”

  “Let’s have a steak and finish the wine. You need red meat. You’re just tired. You’ll do it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Take the order, Giulio,” he said.

  eleven

  I wish I knew why I feel such loyalty to the deceased, Hearing of their deaths I often said to myself that I must carry on for them and do their job, finish their work. And that of course I couldn’t do. Instead I found that certain of their characteristics were beginning to stick to me. As time went on, for instance, I found myself becoming absurd in the manner of Von Humboldt Fleisher. By and by it became apparent that he had acted as my agent. I myself, a nicely composed person, had had Humboldt expressing himself wildly on my behalf, satisfying some of my longings. This explained my liking for certain individuals— Humboldt, or George Swiebel, or even someone like Cantabile. This type of psychological delegation may have its origins in representative government. However, when an expressive friend died the delegated tasks returned to me. And as I was also the expressive delegate of other people, this eventually became pure hell.

  Carry on for Humboldt? Humboldt wanted to drape the world in radiance, but he didn’t have enough material. His attempt ended at the belly. Below hung the shaggy nudity we know so well. He was a lovely man, and generous, with a heart of gold. Still his goodness was the sort of goodness people now consider out of date. The radiance he dealt in was the old radiance and it was in short supply. What we needed was a new radiance altogether.

  And now Cantabile and his PhD wife were after me to recall the dear dead days of the Village, and its intellectuals, poets, crack-ups, its suicides and love affairs. I didn’t care much for that. I had no clear view of Mrs. Cantabile as yet, but I saw Rinaldo as one of the new mental rabble of the wised-up world and anyway I didn’t feel just now like having my arm twisted. It wasn’t that I minded giving information to honest scholars, or even to young people on the make, but I just then was busy, fiercely, painfully busy—personally and impersonally busy: personally, with Renata and Denise, and Murra the accountant, and the lawyers and the judge, and a multitude of emotional vexations; impersonally, participating in the life of my country and of Western Civilization and global society (a mixture of reality and figment). As editor of an important magazine, The Ark, which would probabl never come out, I was always thinking of statements that must be made and truths of which the world must be reminded. The world, identified by a series of dates (1789-1914-1917-1939) and by key words (Revolution, Te hnology, Science, and so forth), was another cause of busyness. You owed your duty to these dates and words. The whole thing was so momentous, overmastering, tragic, that in the end what I really wanted was to lie down and go to sleep. I have always had an exceptional gift for passing out. I look at snapshots taken in some of the most evil hours of mankind and I see that I have lots of hair and am appealingly youthful. I am wearing an ill-fitting double-breasted suit of the Thirties or Forties, smoking a pipe, standing under a tree, holding hands with a plump and pretty bimbo—and I am asleep on my feet, out cold. I have snoozed through many a crisis (while millions died).

  This is all terrifically relevant. For one thing, I may as well admit that I came back to settle in Chicago with the secret motive of writing a significant work. This lethargy of mine is related to that project—I got the idea of doing something with the chronic war between sleep and consciousness that goes on in human nature. My subject, in the final Eisenhower years, was boredom. Chicago was the ideal place in which to write my master essay— “Boredom.” In raw Chicago you could examine the human spirit under industrialism. If someone were to arise with a new vision of Faith, Love, and Hope, he would want to understand to whom he was offering it—he would have to understand the kind of deep suffering we call boredom. I was going to try to do with boredom what Malthus and Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill or Durkh
eim had done with population, wealth, or the division of labor. History and temperament had put me in a peculiar position, and I was going to turn it to advantage. I hadn’t read those great modern boredom experts, Stendhal, Kierkegaard, and Baudelaire, for nothing. Over the years I had worked a lot on this essay. The difficulty was that I kept being overcome by the material, like a miner by gas fumes. I wouldn’t stop, though. I’d say to myself that even Rip van Winkle had slept for only twenty years, I had gone him at least two decades better and I was determined to make the lost time yield illumination. So I kept doing advanced mental work in Chicago, and also joined a gymnasium, playing ball with commodity brokers and gentleman-hoodlums in an effort to strengthen the powers of consciousness. Then my respected friend Durnwald mentioned, kiddingly, that the famous but misunderstood Dr. Rudolf Steiner had much to say on the deeper aspects of sleep. Steiner’s books, which I began to read lying down, made me want to get up. He argued that between the conception of an act and its execution by the will there fell a gap of sleep. It might be brief but it was deep. For one of man’s souls was a sleep-soul. In this, human beings resembled the plants, whose whole existence is sleep. This made a very deep impression on me. The truth about sleep could only be seen from the perspective of an immortal spirit. I had never doubted that I had such a thing. But I had set this fact aside quite early. I kept it under my hat. These beliefs under your hat also press on your brain and sink you down into the vegetable realm. Even now, to a man of culture like Durnwald, I hesitated to mention the spirit. He took no stock in Steiner, of course. Durnwald was reddish, elderly but powerful, thickset and bald, a bachelor of cranky habits but a kind man. He had a peremptory blunt butting even bullying manner, but if he scolded it was because he loved me—he wouldn’t have bothered otherwise. A great scholar, one of the most learned people on earth, he was a rationalist. Not narrowly rationalistic, by any means. Nevertheless, I couldn’t talk to him about the powers of a spirit separated from a body. He wouldn’t hear of it. He had simply been joking about Steiner. I was not joking, but I didn’t want to be thought a crank.

  I had begun to think a lot about the immortal spirit. Still, night after night, I kept dreaming that I had become the best player in the club, a racquet demon, that my backhand shot skimmed the left wall of the court and fell dead in the corner, it had so much English on it. I dreamed that I was beating all the best players—all those skinny, hairy, speedy fellows who in reality avoided playing with me because I was a dud. I was badly disappointed by the shallow interests such dreams betrayed. Even my dreams were asleep. And what about money? Money is necessary for the protection of the sleeping. Spending drives you into wakefulness. As you purge the inner film from the eye and rise into higher consciousness, less money should be required.

  Under the circumstances (and it should now be clearer what I mean by circumstances: Renata, Denise, children, courts, lawyers, Wall Street, sleep, death, metaphysics, karma, the presence of the universe in us, our being present in the universe itself) I had not paused to think about Humboldt, a precious friend hid in death’s dateless night, a camerado from a former existence (almost), well-beloved but dead. I imagined at times that I might see him in the life to come, together with my mother and my father. Demmie Vonghel, too. Demmie was one of the most significant dead, remembered every day. But I didn’t expect him to come at me as in life, driving ninety miles an hour in his Buick fourholer. First I laughed. Then I shrieked. I was transfixed. He bore down on me. He struck me with blessings. Humboldt’s gift wiped out many immediate problems.

  The role played by Ronald and Lucy Cantabile in this is something else again.

  Dear friends, though I was about to leave town and had much business to attend to, I decided to suspend all practical activities for one morning. I did this to keep from cracking under strain. I had been practicing some of the meditative exercises recommended by Rudolf Steiner in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. As yet I hadn’t attained much, but then my soul was well along in years and very much stained and banged up, and I had to be patient. Characteristically, I had been trying too hard, and I remembered again that wonderful piece of advice given by a French thinker: Trouve avant de chercher— Valéry, it was. Or maybe Picasso. There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down.

  And so the morning after my day with Cantabile I took a holiday. The weather was fine and clear. I drew the openwork drapes which shut out the details of Chicago and let in the bright sun and the high blue (which in their charity shone and towered even over a city like this). Cheerful, I dug out my Humboldt papers. I piled notebooks, letters, diaries, and manuscripts on the coffee table and on the covered radiator behind the sofa. Then I lay down, sighing, pulling off my shoes. Under my head I put a needlepoint cushion embroidered by a young lady (what a woman-filled life I always led. Ah, this sexually-disturbed century!), a Miss Doris Scheldt, the daughter of the anthroposophist I consulted now and then. She had given me this handmade Christmas gift the year before. Small and lovely, intelligent, strikingly strong in profile for such a pretty young woman, she liked to wear old-fashioned dresses that made her look like Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford. Her footwear, however, was provocative, quite far out. In my private vocabulary she was a little noli me tangerine. She did and did not wish to be touched. She herself knew a great deal about anthroposophy and we spent a lot of time together last year, when Renata and I had a falling-out. I sat in her bentwood rocking chair while she put her tiny patent-leather boots up on a hassock, embroidering this red-and-green, fresh-grass-and-hot-embers cushion. We chatted, etcetera. It was an agreeable relationship, but it was over. Renata and I were back together.

  This is by way of explaining that I took Von Humboldt Fleisher as the subject of my meditation that morning. Such meditation supposedly strengthened the will. Then, gradually strengthened by such exercises, the will might become an organ of perception.

  A wrinkled postcard fell to the floor, one of the last Humboldt had sent me. I read the phantom strokes, like a fuzzy graph of the northern lights:

  Mice hide when hawks are high;

  Hawks shy from airplanes;

  Planes dread the ack-ack-ack;

  Each one fears somebody.

  Only the heedless lions

  Under the Booloo tree

  Snooze in each other’s arms

  After their lunch of blood—

  I call that living good!

  Eight or nine years ago, reading this poem, I thought, Poor Humboldt, those shock-treatment doctors have lobotomized him, they’ve ruined the guy. But now I saw this as a communication, not as a poem. The imagination must not pine away—that was Humboldt’s message. It must assert again that art manifests the inner powers of nature. To the savior-faculty of the imagination sleep was sleep, and waking was true waking. This was what Humboldt now appeared to me to be saying. If that was so, Humboldt was never more sane and brave than at the end of his life. And I had run away from him on Forty-sixth Street just when he had most to tell me. I had spent that morning, as I have mentioned, grandly dressed up and revolving elliptically over the city of New York in that Coast Guard helicopter, with the two US Senators and the Mayor and officials from Washington and Albany and crack journalists, all belted up in puffy life jackets, each jacket with its sheath knife. (I’ve never gotten over those knives.) And then, after the luncheon in Central Park (I am compelled to repeat), I walked out and saw Humboldt, a dying man eating a pretzel stick at the curb, the dirt of the grave already sprinkled on his face. Then I rushed away. It was one of those ecstatically painful moments when I couldn’t hold still. I had to run. I said, “Oh, kid, good-by. I’ll see you in the next world!”

  There was nothing more to be done for him in this world, I had decided. But was that true? The wrinkled postcard now made me reconsider. It struck me that I had sinned against Humboldt. Lying down on the goose-down sofa in order to meditate, I found myself getting hot with self-criticism and shame, flushing and sweating. I pu
lled Doris Scheldt’s pillow from behind my head and wiped my face with it. Again I saw myself taking cover behind the parked cars on Forty-sixth Street. And Humboldt like a bush tented all over by the bagworm and withering away. I was stunned to see my old pal dying and I fled, I went back to the Plaza and phoned Senator Kennedy’s office to say that I had been called to Chicago suddenly. I’d return to Washington next week. Then I took a cab to La Guardia and caught the first plane to O’Hare. I return again and again to that day because it was so dreadful. Two drinks, the limit in flight, did nothing for me—nothing! When I landed I drank several double shots of Jack Daniel’s in the O’Hare bar, for strength. It was a very hot evening. I telephoned Denise and said, “I’m back.”

  “You’re days and days early. What’s up, Charles?”

  I said, “I’ve had a bad experience.”

  “Where’s the Senator?”

  “Still in New York. I’ll go back to Washington in a day or two.”

  “Well, come on home, then.”

  Life had commissioned an article on Robert Kennedy. I had now spent five days with the Senator, or rather near him, sitting on a sofa in the Senate Office Building, observing him. It was, from every point of view, a singular inspiration, but the Senator had allowed me to attach myself to him and even seemed to like me. I say “seemed” because it was his business to leave such an impression with a journalist who proposed to write about him. I liked him, too, perhaps against my better judgment. His way of looking at you was odd. His eyes were as blue as the void, and there was a slight lowering in the skin of the lids, an extra fold. After the helicopter trip we drove from La Guardia to the Bronx in a limousine, and I was in there with him. The heat was dismal in the Bronx but we were in a sort of crystal cabinet. His desire was to be continually briefed. He asked questions of everyone in the party. From me he wanted historical information —”What should I know about William Jennings Bryan?” or, “Tell me about H. L. Mencken”—receiving what I said with a kind of inner glitter that did not tell me what he thought or whether he could use such facts. We pulled up at a Harlem playground. There were Cadillacs, motorcycle cops, bodyguards, television crews. A vacant lot between two tenements had been fenced in, paved, furnished with slides and sandboxes. The playground director in his Afro and dashiki and beads received the two Senators. Cameras stood above us on trestles. The black director, radiant, ceremonious, held a basketball between the two Senators. A space was cleared. Twice the slender Kennedy, carelessly elegant, tossed the ball. He nodded his ruddy, foxy head high with hair and smiled when he missed. Senator Javits could not afford to miss. Compact and bald he too was smiling but squared off at the basket drawing the ball to his breast and binding himself by strength of will to the objective. He made two smart shots. The ball did not arch. It flew straight at the loop and went in. There was applause. What vexation, what labor to keep up with Bobby. But the Republican Senator managed very well.