Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  The Señora’s chief claim to sanity was founded upon motherhood. She had many plans for Renata. These were extravagant in the distant reaches, but near at hand they were quite practical. She had invested a lot in Renata’s upbringing. She must have spent a fortune on orthodontia. The results were of a very high order. It was a privilege to see Renata open her mouth, and when she kidded me and laughed brilliantly I was struck with admiration. All my mother could do for my teeth in the ignorant old days was to wrap a lid from the coal stove in flannel, or to put hot dry buckwheat in a Bull Durham tobacco sack to apply to my face when I had toothaches. Hence my respect for those beautiful teeth. Also, for a big girl, Renata had a light voice. When she laughed she ventilated her entire being—down to the uterus, I thought. She put up her hair with silk scarves, showing the line of a wonderfully graceful feminine neck, and she walked about—how she walked about! No wonder her mother didn’t want to waste her on me with my dewlaps and my French medal. But since Renata did have a weakness for me, why not set up housekeeping? The Señora was for this. Renata was going on thirty, divorced, with a nice little boy named Roger, of whom I was very fond. The old woman (like Cantabile, come to think of it) urged me to buy a condominium on the near-North Side. She omitted herself from these suggested arrangements. “I need privacy. I have my affaires de coeur.” “But,” said the Señora, “Roger should be in a household that has a male figure in it.”

  Renata and the Señora collected news items about May-December marriages. They sent me clippings about old husbands and interviews with their brides. In one year they lost Steichen, Picasso, and Casals. But they still had Chaplin and Senator Thurmond and Justice Douglas. From the sex columns of the News the Señora even culled scientific statements about sex for the aging. And even George Swiebel said, “Maybe this would be a good deal for you. Renata wants to settle down. She’s been around and seen a lot. She’s had it. She’s ready.”

  “Well, she’s certainly not one of those little noli me tangerines,” I said.

  “She’s a good cook. She’s lively. She has plants and knick-knacks and the lights are on and the kitchen is steaming and goy music plays. Does she flow for you? Does she get wet when you lay a hand on her? Stay away from those dry mental broads. I have to be basic with you otherwise you’ll shilly-shally. You’ll be trapped again by a woman who says she shares your mental interests or understands your higher aims. That type already has shortened your life. One more will kill you! Anyhow, I know you want to make it with Renata.”

  I most certainly did! It’s hard for me to stop praising her. In her hat and fur coat she drove the Pontiac, her outthrust leg in spangled textured panty hose bought in a theatrical-specialty house. Her personal emanations affected even the skins of the animals which composed her coat. They not only covered her body but were still in there trying. There was a certain similarity here. I too was trying. Yes, I longed to make it with Renata. She was helping me to consummate my earthly cycle. She had her irrational moments but she was also kindly. True, as a carnal artist she was disheartening as well as thrilling, because, thinking of her as wife-material, I had to ask myself where she had learned all this and whether she had taken the PhD once and for all. Furthermore our relationship made me entertain vain and undignified ideas. An ophthalmologist told me in the Downtown Club that a simple incision would remove the bags under my eyes. “It’s just a hernia of one of the tiny muscles,” Dr. Klosterman said, and described the plastic surgery and how the skin would be sliced and tucked back. He added that I had plenty of backhair left which could be transplanted to the top. Senator Proxmire had it done and for a time wore a turban on the Senate floor. He had claimed a deduction, disallowed by the IRS—but one could try again. I considered these suggestions but realized presently that I must stop this foolishness! I must fix my whole attention on the great and terrible matters that had put me to sleep for decades. Besides, something might be done at the front of a person but what about the rear? Even if the baggy eyes were fixed and the hair was fixed, wasn’t there still the back of my neck? I was trying on a fancy check overcoat at Saks not long ago and in the triple mirror I saw how fissured, how deeply hacked I was between the ears.

  I bought the coat anyway, Renata urged me to, and I was wearing it today. When I got out at the county building, giant Mrs. Sunderland said, “Golly, what a jazzy coat!”

  twenty

  Renata and I had met in this same skyscraper, the new county building, while doing jury duty.

  There was, however, an earlier, indirect connection between us. George Swiebel’s father, old Myron, knew Gaylord Koffritz, Renata’s ex-husband. These two had had an unusual encounter in the Russian Bath on Division Street. George had told me about it.

  He was a simple modest person, George’s father. All he wanted was to live forever. George came by his vitalism directly. He got it from Myron who had it in a more primitive form. Myron declared that he owed his longevity to heat and vapor, to black bread raw onion bourbon whisky herring sausage cards billiards race horses and women.

  Now in the steam room with its wooden bleachers and its sizzling boulders and buckets of ice water the visual distortion was considerable. From the rear if you saw a slight figure with small buttocks you thought it to be a child, but there were no children here and from the front you discovered a rosy and shrunken old man. Father Swiebel, clean-shaven and seen from the back just like a little boy, met a bearded man in the steam and because of the glittering beard took him to be much older. He was however only in his thirties, and very well built. They sat down together on the wooden trestles, two bodies covered with drops of moisture, and Father Swiebel said, “What do you do?”

  The bearded man was unwilling to say what he did. Father Swiebel urged him to talk. This was wrong. It was, in the demented jargon of the educated, against the “ethos” of the place. Here, as at the Downtown Club, business was not discussed. George liked to say that the steam bath was like the last refuge in the burning forest where hostile animals observed a truce and the law of fang and claw was suspended. I’m afraid he got this from Walt Disney. The point he wanted to remind me of was that it was wrong to ply your trade or make a pitch while steaming. Father Swiebel was to blame and admitted it. “This fellow with the hair didn’t want to talk. I egged him on. So then he let me have it.”

  Where men are as nude as the troglodytes of Stone Age Adriatic caverns and sit together dripping and red, like sunset in a mist, and, as in this case, one has a full brown sparkling beard, and eyes are meeting eyes through streaming sweat and vapor, strange things are apt to be spoken. It turned out that the stranger was a salesman whose line was crypts tombs and mausoleums. When Father Swiebel heard this he wanted to back off. But now it was too late. With arched brows, with white teeth and living lips within the dense fell of the beard, the man spoke:

  Has your last rest been arranged? Is there a family plot? Are you provided? No? But why not? Can you afford such neglect? Do you know how they will bury you? Amazing! Has anybody talked to you about conditions in the new cemeteries? Why, they’re nothing but slums. Death deserves dignity. Out there the exploitation is terrible. It’s one of the biggest real-estate swindles going. They cheat you. They don’t give the statutory number of feet. You have to lie cramped forever. The disrespect is ferocious. But you know what politics and rackets are. High and low, everybody is on the take. One of these days there’ll be a grand-jury investigation and a scandal. Guys will go to jail. But it’ll be too late for the dead. They aren’t going to open your grave and rebury you. So you’ll lie there short-sheeted. Frogged. As kids do to each other in summer camp. And there you are with hundreds of thousands of bodies in a flattened-out death-tenement, with your knees up. Aren’t you entitled to a full stretch? And in these cemeteries they don’t allow you a headstone. You have to settle for a brass plate with your name and your dates. Then machines come to cut the grass. They use a gang-mower. You might as well be buried in a public golf course. The blades nick away the
brass letters. Pretty soon they’re obliterated. Then you can’t even be located. Your kids can’t find the place. You’re lost forever—”

  “Stop!” Myron said. The fellow continued:

  Now in a mausoleum it’s different. It doesn’t cost as much as you think. These new jobs are prefabricated but they’re copies from the best models, starting with Etruscan tombs, up through Bernini and finally there’s Louis Sullivan, art nouveau. People are mad now for art nouveau. They’ll pay thousands for a Tiffany lamp or ceiling fixture. By comparison, an art nouveau prefab tomb is cheap. And then you’re out of the crowd. You’re on your own property. You don’t want to get caught for eternity in a kind of expressway traffic jam or subway rush.

  Father Swiebel said that Koffritz looked very sincere and that he saw in the steam only a respectful sympathetic troubled bearded face—an expert, a specialist, fair-minded, sensible. But the by-intimations were devastating. The vision got me, too—death seething under the treeless fairway, and the glitter-less brass of nameless name plates. This Koffritz with his devilish sales-poetry clutched the heart of Father Swiebel. He grabbed mine as well. For at the time this was reported to me I was suffering intense death-anxieties. I wouldn’t even attend funerals. I couldn’t bear to see the coffin shut and the thought of being screwed into a box made me frantic. This was aggravated when I read a newspaper account of some Chicago children who found a heap of empty caskets near the crematory of a cemetery. They dragged them down to a pond and boated in them. Because they were reading Ivanhoe at school they tilted like knights, with poles. One kid was capsized and caught in the silk lining. They saved him. But there gaped in my mind a display of coffins lined with puffy rose taffeta and pale green satin, all open like crocodiles’ jaws. I saw myself put down to suffocate and rot under the weight of clay and stones—no, under sand; Chicago is built on Ice Age beaches and marshes (Late Pleistocene). For relief, I tried to convert this into serious intellectual subject matter. I believe I did this kind of thing rather well—thinking how the death problem is the bourgeois problem, relating to material prosperity and the conception of life as pleasant and comfortable, and what Max Weber had written about the modern conception of life as an infinite series of segments, gainful advantageous and “pleasant,” failing to provide the feeling of a life cycle, so that one couldn’t die “full of years.” But these learned high-class exercises didn’t take the death-curse off for me. I could only conclude how bourgeois it was that I should be so neurotic about stifling in the grave. And I was furious with Edgar Allan Poe for writing so accurately about this. His tales of catalepsy and live burial poisoned my childhood, and still killed me. I couldn’t even bear to have the sheet over my face at night or my feet tucked in. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to be dead. Burial at sea might be the answer.

  The samples that had worn a hole in Renata’s Pontiac were, then, models of crypts and tombs. When I met her I not only had been brooding over death (would it help to have a wooden partition in the grave, a floor just above the coffin to keep off the direct smothering weight?) but I had also developed a new oddity. On business errands on La Salle Street, zooming or plunging in swift elevators, every time I felt a check in the electrical speed and the door was about to open, my heart spoke up. Entirely on its own. It exclaimed, “My Fate!” It seems I expected some woman to be standing there. “At last! You!” Becoming conscious of this hungry demeaning elevator phenomenon I tried to do the right thing and get back on a mature standard. I even attempted to be scientific. But all science can do for you is to affirm again that when something like this happens there must be a natural necessity for it. This being sensible got me nowhere. What was there to be so sensible about if, as I felt, I had waited many thousands of years for God to send my soul to this earth? Here I was supposed to capture a true and clear word before I returned, as my human day ended. I was afraid to go back empty-handed. Being sensible could do absolutely nothing to mitigate this fear of missing the boat. Anyone can see that.

  Called to jury duty I grumbled at first that it was a waste of time. But then I became a happy eager juror. To leave the house in the morning like everybody else was bliss. Wearing a numbered steel badge I sat joyfully with hundreds of others in the jury pool, high up in the new county skyscraper, a citizen among fellow citizens. The glass walls, the russet and plum steel beams were very fine—the large sky, the ruled space, the faraway spools of storage tanks, the orange delicate distant filthy slums, the green of the river strapped by black bridges. Looking out from the jurors’ hall I began to have Ideas. I brought books and papers downtown (so it shouldn’t be a total loss). For the first time I read through the letters my colleague Pierre Thaxter had been sending me from California.

  I am not a careful letter reader and Thaxter’s letters were very long. He composed and dictated them in his orange grove near Palo Alto where he sat thinking in a canvas officer’s chair. He wore a black carabiniere cloak, his feet were bare, he drank Pepsi-Cola, he had eight or ten children, he owed money to everyone, and he was a cultural statesman. Adoring women treated him like a man of genius, believed all that he told them, typed his manuscripts, gave birth to his kids, brought him Pepsi-Cola to drink. Reading his voluminous memoranda which dealt with the first number of The Ark (in the planning stage for three years, and the costs were staggering), I realized that he had been pressing me to complete a group of studies on “Great Bores of the Modern World.” He kept suggesting possible lines of approach. Certain types were obvious, of course—political, philosophical, ideological, educational, therapeutic bores—but there were others frequently overlooked, for instance innovative bores. I however had lost interest in the categories and came presently to care only for the general and theoretical aspect of the project.

  I had a lively time in the vast jurors’ hall going over my boredom notes. I saw that I had stayed away from problems of definition. Good for me. I didn’t want to get mixed up with theological questions about accidia and tedium vitae. I found it necessary to say only that from the beginning mankind experienced states of boredom but that no one had ever approached the matter front and center as a subject in its own right. In modern times the question had been dealt with under the name of anomie or Alienation, as an effect of capitalist conditions of labor, as a result of leveling in Mass Society, as a consequence of the dwindling of religious faith or the gradual using up of charismatic or prophetic elements, or the neglect of Unconscious powers, or the increase of Rationalization in a technological society, or the growth of bureaucracy. It seemed to me, however, that one might begin with this belief of the modern world—either you burn or you rot. This I connected with the finding of old Binet the psychologist that hysterical people had fifty times the energy, the endurance, the power of performance, the keenness of faculties, the creativity in their hysterical fits as they had in their quiet periods. Or as William James put it, human beings really lived when they lived at the top of their energies. Something like the Wille zur Macht. Suppose then that you began with the proposition that boredom was a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents, and was accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capacities. (I try to guard against falling into the social-science style on these mental occasions.) Nothing actual ever suits pure expectation and such purity of expectation is a great source of tedium. People rich in abilities, in sexual feeling, rich in mind and in invention—all the highly gifted see themselves shunted for decades onto dull sidings, banished exiled nailed up in chicken coops. Imagination has even tried to surmount the problems by forcing boredom itself to yield interest. This insight I owe to Von Humboldt Fleisher who showed me how it was done by James Joyce, but anyone who reads books can easily find it out for himself. Modern French literature is especially preoccupied with the theme of boredom. Stendhal mentioned it on every page, Flaubert devoted books to it, and Baudelaire was its” chief poet. What is the reason for this peculiar French sensitivity? Can it be because the a
ncien régime, fearing another Fronde, created a court that emptied the provinces of talent? Outside the center, where art philosophy science manners conversation thrived, there was nothing. Under Louis XIV, the upper classes enjoyed a refined society, and, whatever else, people didn’t need to be alone. Cranks like Rousseau made solitude glamorous, but sensible people agreed that it was really terrible. Then in the eighteenth century being in prison began to acquire its modern significance. Think how often Manon and Des Grieux were in jail. And Mirabeau and my own buddy Von Trenck and of course the Marquis de Sade. The intellectual future of Europe was determined by people impregnated with boredom, by the writings of prisoners. Then, in 1789, it was young men from the sticks, provincial lawyers scribblers and orators, who assaulted and captured the center of interest. Boredom has more to do with modern political revolution than justice has. In 1917, that boring Lenin who wrote so many boring pamphlets and letters on organizational questions was, briefly, all passion, all radiant interest. The Russian revolution promised mankind a permanently interesting life. When Trotsky spoke of permanent revolution he really meant permanent interest. In the early days the revolution was a work of inspiration. Workers peasants soldiers were in a state of excitement and poetry. When this short brilliant phase ended, what came next? The most boring society in history. Dowdiness shabbiness dullness dull goods boring buildings boring discomfort boring supervision a dull press dull education boring bureaucracy forced labor perpetual police presence penal presence, boring party congresses, et cetera. What was permanent was the defeat of interest.