Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  The same things are done by us, over and over, with terrible predictability. One may be forgiven, in view of this, for wishing at least to associate with beauty.

  twenty-one

  And now—with her fur coat and her wonderful, soft, versatile, flexible amethyst hat, with belly and thighs under an intermediate sheath of silk—Renata dropped me in front of the county building. And she and her client, the big potent-looking lady in the polka-dot poplin, said, “Ciao, so long.” And there was the handsome russet and glass skyscraper, and there was the insignificant Picasso sculpture with its struts and its sheet metal, no wings, no victory, only a token, a reminder, only the idea of a work of art. Very similar, I thought, to the other ideas or reminders by which we lived—no more apples but the idea, the pomologist’s reconstruction of what an apple once was, no more ice cream but the idea, the recollection of something delicious made of substitutes, of starch, glucose, and other chemicals, no more sex but the idea or reminiscence of that, and so with love, belief, thought, and so on. On this theme I rose in an elevator to see what the court, with its specters of equity and justice, wanted of me. When the door of the elevator opened, it merely opened, no voice said, “My Fate!” Either Renata really filled the bill, or the voice had become too discouraged to speak.

  I got out and saw my lawyer Forrest Tomchek and his junior associate Billy Srole waiting at the end of the wide open light gray corridor outside Judge Urbanovich’s courtroom—two honest-looking deceitful men. According to Szathmar (Szathmar who couldn’t even remember a simple name like Crawley), I was represented by Chicago’s finest legal talent.

  I said, “Then why don’t I feel safe with Tomchek?”

  “Because you’re hypercritical, nervous, and a damn fool,” said Szathmar. “In his branch of the law nobody has more respect and clout. Tomchek is one of the most powerful guys in the legal community. In Divorce and Post-Decree these guys form a club. They commute, they play golf, they fly to Acapulco together. Behind the scenes, he tells the other guys how it’s all going to be done. Understand? That includes the fees, the tax consequences. Everything.”

  “You mean,” I said, “they’ll study my tax returns and so forth and then decide how to cut me up.”

  “My God!” said Szathmar. “Keep your opinion of lawyers to yourself.” He was deeply offended, infuriated really, by my disrespect for his profession. Oh, I agreed with him that I must keep my feelings to myself. I made every effort to be pleasant and deferential to Tomchek, but I wasn’t very good at this. The harder I tried, murmuring at Tomchek’s pretensions, saying the right thing, the more he mistrusted and disliked me. He kept score. In the end I would pay a heavy price, an enormous fee, I knew that. So here was Tomchek. With him stood Billy Srole, the associate. Associate is a wonderful word, a wonderful category. Srole was chubby, pale, his attitude highly professional. He wore his hair long and kept it flowing by stroking it with a heavy white palm and looping it behind the ears. His fingers bent backward at the tips. He was a bully. These were bully refinements. I know bullies.

  “What’s up,” I said.

  Tomchek put his arm about my shoulder and we went into a brief huddle.

  “Nothing to worry about,” said Tomchek. “Urbanovich was suddenly free to meet with both parties.”

  “He wants to wrap the thing up. He’s proud of his record as a negotiator,” Srole told me.

  “Look, Charlie,” said Tomchek. “Here’s the technique Urbanovich uses. He’ll throw a scare into you. He’ll tell you how much harm he can do and stampede you into an agreement. Don’t panic. Legally we’ve put you in a good position.”

  I saw the healthy grim folds of Tomchek’s close-shaven face. His breath was sourly virile. He gave off an odor which I associated with old-fashioned streetcar brakes, and with metabolism, and with male hormones. “No, I won’t give any more ground,” I said. “It doesn’t work. If I meet her demands she makes brand-new ones. Since the Emancipation Proclamation there’s been a secret struggle in this country to restore slavery by other means.” This was the sort of statement that caused Tomchek and Srole to be suspicious of me.

  “Okay, draw the line and hold it,” said Srole. “And leave the rest to us. Denise makes things tough for her own lawyer. Pinsker doesn’t want a hassle. He only wants his dough. He doesn’t like this situation. She’s getting legal advice on the side from that fellow Schwirner. Completely unethical.”

  “I hate Schwirner! That son of a bitch,” said Tomchek, violent. “If I could prove that he was banging the plaintiff and interfering in my case I’d fix his clock for him. I’d have him before the Ethics Committee.”

  “Is Gumballs Schwirner still carrying on with Charlie’s wife?” said Srole, “I thought he just got married.”

  “So what if he got married? He still hasn’t stopped meeting this crazy broad in motels. She gets strategy ideas from him in the sack, then she bugs Pinsker with them. They’re confusing the hell out of Pinsker. How I’d love to get that Schwirner.”

  I offered no comment and scarcely seemed to hear what they were saying. Tomchek wanted me to suggest that we hire a private investigator to get the goods on Schwirner. I recalled Von Humboldt Fleisher and Scaccia, the private eye. I was having no part of this. “I expect you guys to restrain Pinsker,” I said. “Don’t let him tear at my guts.”

  “What, in chambers? He’ll behave himself. He rags you on the witness stand but in conference it’s different.”

  “He’s an animal,” I said.

  They answered nothing.

  “He’s a beast, a cannibal.”

  This made an unpleasant impression. Tomchek and Srole, like Szathmar, were touchy about the profession. Tomchek remained silent. It was for Srole, the associate and stooge, to deal with captious Citrine. Mild, distant, Srole said, “Pinsker is a very tough man. Tough opponent. A gut fighter.”

  Okay, they weren’t going to let me knock lawyers. Pinsker belonged to the club. Who, after all, was I? A filmy transient figure, eccentric and snooty. They disliked my style entirely. They hated it. But then why should they like it? Suddenly I saw the thing from their viewpoint. And I was extremely pleased. In fact I was illuminated. Maybe these sudden illuminations of mine were an effect of the metaphysical changes I was undergoing. Under the recent influence of Steiner I seldom thought of death in the horrendous old way. I wasn’t experiencing the suffocating grave or dreading an eternity of boredom, nowadays. Instead I often felt unusually light and swift-paced, as if I were on a weightless bicycle and sprinting through the star world. Occasionally I saw myself with exhilarating objectivity, literally as an object among objects in the physical universe. One day that object would cease to move and when the body collapsed the soul would simply remove itself. So, to speak again of the lawyers, I stood between them, and there we were, three naked egos, three creatures belonging to the lower grade of modern rationality and calculation. In the past the self had had garments, the garments of station, of nobility or inferiority, and each self had its carriage, its looks, wore the sheath appropriate to it. Now there were no sheaths and it was naked self with naked self burning intolerably and causing terror. I saw this now, in a fit of objectivity. It felt ecstatic.

  What was I to these fellows anyway? An oddball and a curiosity. To build himself up Szathmar bragged about me, he oversold me, and people became horribly annoyed because he told them to look me up in reference books and read about my prizes and my medals and Zig-Zag awards. He hammered them with this, he said they should be proud to have a client like me so of course they detested me sight unseen. The quintessence of their prejudice was once expressed by Szathmar himself when he lost his temper and shouted, “You’re nothing but a prick with a pen!” He was so sore that he surpassed himself and yelled even louder, “With or without a pen you’re a prick!” But I wasn’t offended. I thought this was a whopping epithet and I laughed. If you only put it right you could say what you liked to me. However, I knew exactly how I made Tomchek and Srole feel. From
their side they inspired me with an unusual thought. This was that History had created something new in the USA, namely crookedness with self-respect or duplicity with honor. America had always been very upright and moral, a model to the entire world, so it had put to death the very idea of hypocrisy and was forcing itself to live with this new imperative of sincerity, and it was doing an impressive job. Just consider Tomchek and Srole: they belonged to a prestigious honorable profession; that profession had its own high standards and everything was hotsy-totsy until some impossible exotic like me who couldn’t even keep a wife in line, an idiot with a knack for stringing sentences together, came and disseminated a sense of wrongdoing. I carried an old accusing smell. It was, if you see what I mean, totally unhistorical of me. Owing to this I got a filmy side glance from Billy Srole, as if he were bemused by all the things he could do to me, under law or near the law, if I should ever step out of line. Watch out! He’d hack me up, he’d chop me into bits with his legal cleaver. Tom-chek’s eyes, unlike Srole’s, needed no film, for his deeper opinions never reached his gaze. And I was completely dependent upon this fearful pair. In fact this was part of my ecstasy. It was terrific. Tomchek and Srole were just what I deserved. It was only right that I should pay a price for coming on so innocent and expecting the protection of those less pure, of people completely at home in the fallen world. Where did I get off, laying the fallen world on everyone else! Humboldt had used his credit as a poet when he was a poet no longer, but only crazy with schemes. And I was doing much the same thing, for I was really far too canny to claim such unworldliness. I believe the word is disingenuous. But Tomchek and Srole would set me straight. They had the assistance of Denise, Pinsker, Urbanovich, and a cast of thousands.

  “I wish I knew what the hell made you look so pleased,” said Srole.

  “Only a thought.”

  “Lucky you, with your nice thoughts.”

  “But when do we go in?” I said.

  “When the other side comes out.”

  “Oh, are Denise and Pinsker talking to Urbanovich now? Then I think I’ll go and relax in the courtroom, my feet are beginning to hurt.” A little of Tomchek and Srole went a long way. I wasn’t going to stand chatting with them until we were summoned. My consciousness couldn’t take much more of them. They quickly tired me.

  I refreshed myself by sitting on a wooden bench. I had no book to read, I took this opportunity to meditate briefly. The object I chose for meditation was a bush covered with roses. I often summoned up this bush, but sometimes it made its appearance independently. It was filled, it was dense, it was choked with tiny dark garnet roses and fresh healthy leaves. So for the moment I thought “rose”—-”rose” and nothing else. I visualized the twigs, the roots, the harsh fuzz of the new growth hardening into spikes, plus all the botany I could remember: phloem xylem cambium chloroplasts soil sun water chemistry, attempting to project myself into the very plant and to think how its green blood produced a red flower. Ah, but new growth in rosebushes was always red before it turned green. I recalled very accurately the inset spiral order of rose petals, the whitey faint bloom over the red and the slow opening that revealed the germinating center. I concentrated all the faculties of my soul on this vision and immersed it in the flowers. Then I saw, next to these flowers, a human figure standing. The plant, said Rudolf Steiner, expressed the pure passionless laws of growth, but the human being, aiming at higher perfection, assumed a greater burden—instincts, desires, emotions. So a bush was a sleeping life. But mankind took a chance on the passions. The wager was that the higher powers of the soul could cleanse these passions. Cleansed, they could be reborn in a finer form. The red of the blood was a symbol of this cleansing process. But even if all this wasn’t so, to consider the roses always put me into a kind of bliss.

  After a while I contemplated something else. I visualized an old black iron Chicago lamppost from forty years back, the type with a lid like a bullfighter’s hat or a cymbal. Now it was night, there was a blizzard. I was a young boy and I watched from my bedroom window. It was a winter gale, the wind and snow banged the iron lamp, and the roses rotated under the light. Steiner recommended the contemplation of a cross wreathed with roses but for reasons of perhaps Jewish origin I preferred a lamppost. The object didn’t matter as long as you went out of the sensible world. When you got out of the sensible world, you might feel parts of the soul awakening that never had been awake before.

  I had made quite a lot of progress in this exercise when Denise came out of the chambers and passed through the swinging gate to join me.

  This woman, the mother of my children, though she made so much trouble for me, often reminded me of something Samuel Johnson had said about pretty ladies: they might be foolish, they might be wicked, but beauty was of itself very estimable. Denise was in this way estimable. She had big violet eyes and a slender nose. Her skin was slightly downy—you could see this down when the light was right. Her hair was piled on top of her head and gave it too much weight. If she hadn’t been beautiful you wouldn’t have noticed the disproportion. The very fact that she wasn’t aware of the top-heavy effect of her coiffure seemed at times a proof that she was a bit nutty. At court, having dragged me here with her suit, she always wanted td be chummy. And as she was unusually pleasant today I figured she had had a successful session with Urbanovich. The fact that she was going to beat me like a dog released her affections. For she was fond of me. She said, “Ah, you’re waiting?” and her voice was high and tremulous, breaking slightly, but also militant. The weak, at war, never know how hard they are hitting you. She wasn’t of course so weak. The strength of the social order was on her side. But she always felt weak, she was a burdened woman. Getting out of bed to make breakfast was almost more than she could face. Taking a cab to the hairdresser was also very hard. The beautiful head was a burden to the beautiful neck. So she sat down beside me, sighing. She hadn’t been to the beauty salon lately. When her hair was thinned out by the hairdresser she didn’t look quite so huge-eyed and goofy. There were holes in her stockings, for she always wore rags to court. “I’m absolutely exhausted,” she said. “I never get any sleep before these court days.”

  I muttered, “Dreadfully sorry.”

  “You don’t seem so well yourself.”

  “The girls tell me sometimes, ‘Daddy, you look like a million dollars—green and wrinkled.’ How are they, Denise?”

  “As well as they can be. They miss you.”

  “That’s normal, I suppose.”

  “Nothing is normal for them. They miss you painfully.”

  “You are to sorrow what Vermont is to syrup.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Only ‘okay,’ or ‘not okay,’ “ I said.

  “Syrup! As soon as something enters your head you blurt it out. That’s your big weakness, your worst temptation.”

  This was my day to see the other fellow’s point of view. How does anyone strengthen himself? Denise had it right, you know— by overcoming the persistent temptation. There’ve been times when just because I kept my mouth shut and didn’t say what I thought, I felt my strength increasing. Still, I don’t seem to know what I think till I see what I say.

  “The girls are making Christmas plans. You’re supposed to take them to the pageant at the Goodman Theater.”

  “No, nothing doing. That’s your idea.”

  “Are you too big a figure to take them to a show like any ordinary father? You told them you would.”

  “Me? Never. You did that yourself, and now you imagine that I told them.”

  “You’re going to be in town, aren’t you?”

  I wasn’t in fact. I was leaving on Friday. I hadn’t gotten around to informing Denise of this, and I said nothing now.

  “Or are you planning a trip with Renata Fat-Tits?”

  On this level, I was no match for Denise. Again, Renata! She wouldn’t even allow the children to play with little Roger Koffritz. She once said, “Later they’ll be
come immune to that kind of whore influence. But they came home once shaking their little behinds and I knew you had broken your promise to keep them away from Renata.” Denise’s information network was unusually effective. She knew all about Harold Flonzaley, for instance. “How is your rival the undertaker?” she sometimes asked me. For Renata’s suitor Flonzaley owned a chain of funeral parlors. One of her ex-husband’s business connections, Flonzaley had a ton of money, but his degree from the state university, it couldn’t be denied, was in embalming. This gave our romance a gloomy tinge. I quarreled once with Renata because her apartment was filled with flowers and I knew that they were surplus funeral flowers abandoned by heartbroken mourners and delivered in Flonzaley’s special flower-Cadillac. I made her throw them down the rubbish chute. Flonzaley was still wooing her.

  “Are you working at all?” said Denise.

  “Not too much.”

  “Just playing paddle ball with Langobardi, relaxing with the Mafia? I know you aren’t seeing any of your serious friends on the Midway. Durnwald would give you what-for but he’s in Scotland. Too bad. I know he doesn’t like Fat-Tits much more than I do. And he told me once how he disapproved of your buddy Thaxter, and your being involved in The Ark. You’ve spent a barrel of money probably on that magazine, and where is the first issue? Nessuno sa.” Denise was an opera lover and she took a season ticket at the Lyric and quoted often from Mozart or from Verdi. Nessuno sa was from Cosi Fan Tutte. Where does one find the fidelity of women, sings Mozart’s worldly wiseman—dove sia? dove sia? Nes-su-no sa! Again she was referring to the curious delinquency of Renata, and I knew it perfectly well.

  “As a matter of fact, I’m expecting Thaxter. Maybe today.”