Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  “I’ve talked to a lawyer,” shouted Humboldt. “I’m prepared to sue you for that money. You’re a crook. You’re a traitor, a liar, a phony, and a Judas. You had me locked up while that whore Kathleen was going to orgies. I’m charging you with embezzlement.”

  “Humboldt, I only helped to raise that money. I haven’t got it. It’s not in my hands.”

  “Tell me where Kathleen is and I’ll call off my suit.”

  “She didn’t tell me where she was going.”

  “You’ve broken your oath to me, Citrine. And now you want to put me away. You envy me. You always envied me. I’ll put you in jail if I can. I want you to know what it’s like when the police come for you, and what a strait jacket is like.” Then, bam! he hung up, and I sat sweating in the star’s grimy dressing room, the rotten tuna salad coming up on me, and a green ptomaine sensation, a cramp, a very sore spot in my side. Actors were trying on costumes that day and passed the door in their knickers, dresses, and cocked hats. I desired help but I felt like an arctic survivor in a small boat, an Amundsen hailing ships on the horizon which turned out to be icebergs. Trenck and Lieutenant Schell passed with their rapiers and wigs. They couldn’t tell me that I was not an obvious phony, a crook, and a Judas. I couldn’t tell them what I thought was really wrong with me: namely that I suffered from an illusion, perhaps a marvelous illusion, or perhaps only a lazy one, that by a kind of inspired lévitation I could rise and dart straight to the truth. Straight to the truth. For I was too haughty to bother with Marxism, Freud-ianism, Modernism, the avant-garde, or any of these things that Humboldt, as a culture-Jew, took so much stock in.

  “I’m going to the hospital to see him,” I told Demmie.

  “You are not. That’s the worst thing you can do.”

  “But look at the state he’s in. I’ve got to go there, Demmie.”

  “I won’t allow it. He’ll attack you. I couldn’t bear for you to fight, Charlie. He’ll hit you, and he’s twice your size and crazy and strong. Besides, I won’t have you disturbed when you’re doing the play. Listen,” she deepened her voice, “I’ll take care of it. I’ll go there myself. And I forbid you.”

  She never actually got to see him. Dozens of people were in the act by now. The drama at Bellevue drew crowds from Greenwich Village and Morningside Heights. I compared them to the residents of Washington who drove out in carriages to watch the Battle of Bull Run and then got in the way of the Union troops. Since I was no longer his blood-brother, bearded stammering Orlando Huggins became Humboldt’s chief friend. Huggins obtained Humboldt’s release. Then Humboldt went to Mount Sinai Hospital and signed himself in. Acting on my instructions, lawyer Simkin paid a week in advance for his private care. However, Humboldt checked out again on the very next day and collected from the hospital an unused balance of about eight hundred dollars. Out of this he paid Scaccia’s latest bill. Then he started legal actions against Kathleen, against Magnasco, against the Police Department, and against Bellevue. He continued to threaten me but didn’t actually file suit. He was waiting to see whether Von Trenck would make money.

  I was still at the primer level in my understanding of money. I didn’t know that there were many people, persistent ingenious passionate people, to whom it was perfectly obvious that they should have all your money. Humboldt had the conviction that there was wealth in the world—not his—to which he had a sovereign claim and that he was bound to get it. He had told me once that he was fated to win a big lawsuit, a million-dollar suit. “With a million bucks,” he said, “I’ll be free to think of nothing but poetry.”

  “How will this happen?”

  “Somebody will wrong me.”

  “Wrong you a million dollars’ worth?”

  “If I’m obsessed by money, as a poet shouldn’t be, there’s a reason for it,” was what Humboldt had told me. “The reason is that we’re Americans after all. What kind of American would I be if I were innocent about money, I ask you? Things have to be combined as Wallace Stevens combined them. Who says ‘Money is the root of evils’? Isn’t it the Pardoner? Well the Pardoner is the most evil man in Chaucer. No, I go along with Horace Walpole. Walpole said it was natural for free men to think about money. Why? Because money is freedom, that’s why.”

  In the enchanting days we had had such marvelous talks, only touched a little by manic depression and paranoia. But now the light became dark and the dark turned darker.

  Still reclining, holding tight on my padded sofa, I saw those gaudy weeks in review.

  Humboldt riotously picketed Von Trench but the play was a hit. To be closer to the Belasco and my celebrity, I took a suite at the St. Regis. The art nouveau elevators had gilded gates. Demmie taught Virgil. Kathleen played blackjack in Nevada. Humboldt had returned to his command post at the White Horse Tavern. There he held literary, artistic, erotic, and philosophic exercises till far into the night. He coined a new epigram which was reported to me uptown: “I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn’t turn into a price tag.” This gave me hope. He could still get off a good wisecrack. It sounded as if normalcy might be returning.

  But no. Each day Humboldt gave himself a perfunctory shave, drank coffee, took pills, studied his notes, and went to midtown to see his lawyers. He had lots of lawyers—he collected lawyers and psychoanalysts. Treatment was. not the object of his visits with the analysts. He wanted to talk, to express himself. The theoretical climate of their offices stimulated him. As to lawyers, he had them all preparing papers and discussing strategies. Lawyers didn’t often meet writers. How was any lawyer to know what was going on? A famous poet calls for an appointment. Referred by so-and-so. The entire office is excited, the typists put on make-up. Then the poet arrives, stout and ill but still handsome pale hurt-looking terrifically agitated, timid in a way, and with strikingly small gestures or tremors for such a large man. Even seated he has leg tremors, his body is vibrating. At first the voice is from another world. Trying to smile, the man can only wince. Odd small stained teeth control a trembling lip. Although thickset, really a big bruiser, he is also a delicate plant, an Ariel, and so on. Can’t make a fist. Never heard of aggression. And he unfolds a tale—you’d think it was Hamlet’s father: fraud, deceit, betrayal of pledges; finally, as he slept in his garden, someone crept up with a vial and tried to pour stuff into his ear. At first he refuses to name his false friends and would-be murderers. They are only X and Y. Then he refers to “This Person,” “I went along with this X-Person,” he says. In his innocence he entered into agreements, exchanged promises with X, this Claudius Person. He said yes to everything. He signed a paper without reading it, about joint tenancy of the New Jersey house. He was also disappointed in a blood-brother who turned fink. Shakespeare was right, There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face: he was a gentleman on whom I built an absolute trust. But now recovering from shock he’s building a case against the said gentleman. Building cases is one of the master preoccupations of human beings. He has Citrine dead to rights—Citrine grabbed his money. But restitution is all he asks. And he fights, or seems to fight, the rising fury. This Citrine is a deceptively handsome fellow. But Jakob Boehme was wrong, the outer is not the inner visible. Humboldt says he is struggling for decency. His father had no friends, he has no friends—so much for the human material. Fidelity is for phonographs. But let’s be restrained. Not all turn into poisoned rats biting one another. “I don’t want to hurt the son of a bitch. All I want is justice.” Justice! He wanted the fellow’s guts in a shopping bag.

  Yes, he spent much time with lawyers and doctors. Lawyers and doctors would best appreciate the drama of wrongs and the drama of sickness. He didn’t want to be a poet now. Symbolism, his school, was used up. No, at this time he was a performing artist who was being real. Back to direct experience. Into the wide world. No more art-substitute for real life. Lawsuits and psychoanalysis were real.

  As for the lawyers and the shrinkers, they were delighted with him not because he represented the
real world but because he was a poet. He didn’t pay—he threw the bills out. But these people, curious about genius (which they had learned from Freud and from movies like Moulin Rouge or The Moon and Sixpence to esteem), were hungry for culture. They listened with joy as he told his tale of unhappiness and persecution. He spilled dirt, spread scandal, and uttered powerful metaphors. What a combination! Fame gossip delusion filth and poetic invention.

  Even then shrewd Humboldt knew what he was worth in professional New York. Endless conveyor belts of sickness or litigation poured clients and patients into these midtown offices like dreary Long Island potatoes. These dull spuds crushed psychoanalysts’ hearts with boring character problems. Then suddenly Humboldt arrived. Oh, Humboldt! He was no potato. He was a papaya a citron a passion fruit. He was beautiful deep eloquent fragrant original—even when he looked bruised in the face, hacked under the eyes, half-destroyed. And what a repertory he had, what changes of style and tempo. He was meek at first— shy. Then he became childlike, trusting, then he confided. He knew, he said, what husbands and wives said when they quarreled, bickerings so important to them and so tiresome to everyone else. People said ho-hum and looked at the ceiling when you started this. Americans! with their stupid ideas about love, and their domestic tragedies. How could you bear to listen to them after the worst of wars and the most sweeping of revolutions, the destruction, the death camps, the earth soaked in blood and fumes of cremation still in the air of Europe. What did the personal troubles of Americans amount to? Did they really suffer? The world looked into American faces and said, “Don’t tell me these cheerful well-to-do people are suffering!” Still, democratic abundance had its own peculiar difficulties. America was God’s experiment. Many of the old pains of mankind were removed, which made the new pains all the more peculiar and mysterious. America didn’t like special values. It detested people who represented these special values. And yet, without these special values—you see what I mean, said Humboldt. Mankind’s old greatness was created in scarcity. But what may we expect from plenitude? In Wagner the giant Fafnir—or is it a dragon?— sleeps on a magical ring. Is America sleeping, then, and dreaming of equal justice and of love? Anyway, I’m not here to discuss adolescent American love-myths—this was how Humboldt talked. Still, he said, I’d like you to listen to this. Then he began to narrate in his original style. He described and intricately embroidered. He worked in Milton on divorce and John Stuart Mill on women. After this came disclosure, confession. Then he accused, fulminated, stammered, blazed, cried out. He crossed the universe like light. He struck off X-ray films of the true facts. Weakness, lies, treason, shameful perversion, crazy lust, the viciousness of certain billionaires (names were named). The truth! And all of this melodrama of impurity, all these erect and crimson nipples, bared teeth, howls, ejaculations! The lawyers had heard this thousands of times but they wanted to hear it again, from a man of genius. Had he become their pornographer?

  Ah Humboldt had been great—handsome, high-spirited, buoyant, ingenious, electrical, noble. To be with him made you feel the sweetness of life. We used to discuss the loftiest things— what Diotima said to Socrates about love, what Spinoza meant by the amor dei intellectualis. To talk to him was sustaining, nourishing. But I used to think, when he mentioned people who had been his friends, that it could be only a question of time before I too was dropped. He had no old friends, only ex-friends. He could become terrible, going into reverse without warning. When this happened, it was like being caught in a tunnel by the Express. You could only cling to the walls, or lie between the rails, praying.

  To meditate, and work your way behind the appearances, you have to be calm. I didn’t feel calm after this summary of Humboldt, but thought of something he himself liked to mention when he was in a good humor and we were finishing dinner, a scramble of dishes and bottles between us. The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, “Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist?” The keen old prof replied, “And who is asking?”

  I directed this against myself. After entering so deeply into Humboldt’s character and career it was only right that I should take a deeper look also at myself, not judge a dead man who could alter nothing but keep step with him, mortal by mortal, if you know what I mean. I mean that I loved him. Very well, then, Von Trenck was a triumph (I shrank from the shame of it) and I was a celebrity. Humboldt now was only a crazy sansculotte picketing drunkenly with a mercurochrome sign while malicious pals cheered. At the White Horse on Hudson Street, Humboldt won hands down. But the name in the papers, the name that Humboldt stifling with envy saw in Leonard Lyons’ column, was Citrine. It was my turn to be famous and to make money, to get heavy mail, to be recognized by influential people, to be dined at Sardi’s and propositioned in padded booths by women who sprayed themselves with musk, to buy Sea Island cotton underpants and leather luggage, to live through the intolerable excitement of vindication. (I was right all along!) I experienced the high voltage of publicity. It was like picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk. It was like the rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation.

  Demmie Vonghel who had coached me all along steered me now, acting as my trainer, my manager, my cook, my lover, and my strawboss. She had her work cut out for her and was terribly busy. She wouldn’t let me see Humboldt at Bellevue. We quarreled over it. She needed a little help with all this and felt it would be a good idea for me to consult a psychiatrist also. She said, “To look as collected as you look when I know you’re falling apart and dying of excitement just isn’t good.” She sent me to a man named Ellenbogen, a celebrity himself, appearing on many talk shows, the author of liberating books on sex. Ellenbogen’s dry lean long face had big grinning sinews, redskin cheekbones, teeth like the screaming horse in Picasso’s Guernica. He hit a patient hard in order to free him. The rationality of pleasure was his ideological hammer. He was tough, New York tough, but he smiled, and how it all added up he told you with New York emphasis. Our span is short and we must make up for the shortness of the human day in frequent, intense sexual gratification. He was never sore, never offended, he repudiated rage and aggression, the bondage of conscience, et cetera. All such things were bad for copulation. Bronze figurines of amatory couples were his bookends. The air in his office was close. Dark paneling, the comfort of deep leather. During sessions he lay fully extended, shoeless feet on a hassock, his long hand under his waistband. Was he fondling his own parts? Utterly relaxed he released a lot of gas which dissolved and impregnated the confined air. His plants anyway thrived on it.

  He lectured me as follows: “You are a guilty anxious man. Depressive. An ant longing to be a grasshopper. Can’t bear success. Melancholia, I’d say, interrupted by fits of humor. Women must be chasing you. Wish I had your opportunities. Actresses. Well, give the women a chance to give you pleasure, that’s really what they want. To them the act itself is far less important than the occasion of tenderness.” Perhaps to increase my self-confidence he told me of his own wonderful experiences. A woman in the Deep South had seen him on television and came straight north to be laid by him, and when she got what she came for said with a sigh of luxury, “When I saw you on the box I knew you’d be good. And you are good.” Ellenbogen was no friend of Demmie Vonghel when he heard of her ways. He sucked sharply and said, “Bad, a bad case. Poor kid. Pushing to get married, I bet. Development immature. A pretty baby. And weighed three hundred pounds when she was thirteen. One of those greedy parties. Domineering. She’ll swallow you.”

  Demmie was unaware that she had sent me to the enemy. She said daily, “We must get married, Charlie,” and she planned a big church wedding. Fundamentalist Demmie became an Episcopalian in New York. She talked to me about a wedding dress and veil, calla lilies, ushers, photographs, engraved announcements, morning coats. As best man and maid of honor she wanted the Littlewoods. I never had told her of the wingding Eskimo-style private party Littlewood had proposed to me i
n Princeton saying, “We can have a good show, Charlie.” Demmie, if I had told her, would have been vexed with Littlewood rather than shocked. By now she had fitted herself into New York. The miraculous survival of goodness was the theme of her life. Dangerous navigation, monsters attracted by her boundless female magnetism—spells charms prayers divine protection secured by inner strength and purity of heart—this was how she saw things. Hell breathed from doorways over her feet as she passed, but she did pass safely. Boxes of pills still came in the mail from the home-town pharmacy. The delivery kid from Seventh Avenue came more and more and more often with bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label. She drank the best. After all, she was an heiress. Mount Coptic belonged to her Daddy. She was a Fundamentalist princess who liked to drink. After a few highballs Demmie was grander, statelier, her eyes great circles of blue, her love stronger. She growled in Louis Armstrong style, “You are mah man.” Then she said in earnest, “I love you with my heart. No other man better try and touch me.” When she made a fist it was surprisingly big.

  Attempts to touch were often made. Her dentist as he worked on her fillings took her hand and placed it on what she assumed to be the armrest of the chair. It was no such thing. It was his excited member. Her physician concluded an examination by kissing her violently wherever he could reach. “I can’t say that I blame the man for being carried away, Demmie. You have a bottom like a white valentine greeting.”

  “I punched him right in the neck,” she said.

  On a warm day when the air conditioning had broken down, her psychiatrist said to her, “Why don’t you take off your dress, Miss Vonghel.” A millionaire host on Long Island spoke through the ventilator of his bathroom into hers. “I need you. Give me your bod. . . .” He said in a choking perishing voice, “Give me! I am dying. Save, save . . . save me!” And this was a burly strong jolly man who piloted his own airplane.