Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  Knowing Isvolsky’s domestic troubles, I understood why he dreamed of making a killing in minerals. “Anything,” he told me, “to get away from Winnetka for a while.” Then he said, “Okay, Charlie, I know what’s on your mind. When you come back here to see me you want to be shown those birds.” He referred to the museum’s great collection of birds, hoarded up over decades and stored in classified drawers. The huge workshops and laboratories behind the scenes, the sheds, storerooms, and caverns were infinitely more fascinating than the museum’s public exhibits. The preserved birds were collapsed, their legs tagged. And mainly I liked to see the hummingbirds, thousands upon thousands of little bodies, some no bigger than my fingertip, endless varieties of them, all spattered minutely with a whole Louvre of iridescent colors. So Ben took me to inspect them again. He had full cheeks and woolly hair, a bad skin but an agreeable face. The museum treasures now bored him and he said, “If this Kamuttu really has a mountain of beryllium we should go there and grab it.”

  “I’m leaving soon for Europe,” I said.

  “Ideal. George and I can pick you up. We can all fly to Nairobi together.”

  Thoughts of beryllium and Oriental rugs showed how nervous I was, and impractical. When I was in this state only one man in all the world could help me, my practical brother Julius, a real-estate operator in Corpus Christi, Texas. I loved my stout and now elderly brother. Perhaps he loved me too. In principle he was not in favor of strong family bonds. Possibly he saw brotherly love as an opening for exploitation. My feelings for him were vivid, almost hysterically intense, and I could not blame him for trying to resist them. He wished to be a man entirely of today, and he had forgotten or tried to forget the past. Unassisted he could remember nothing, he said. For my part there was nothing that I could forget. He often said to me, “You inherited the old man’s terrific memory. And before him there was that old bastard, his old man. Our grandfather was one of ten guys in the Jewish Pale who knew the Babylonian Talmud by heart. Lots of good that did. I don’t even know what it is. But that’s where you get your memory.” The admiration was not unmixed. I don’t think he was always grateful to me for remembering so well. My own belief was that without memory existence was metaphysically injured, damaged. And I couldn’t conceive of my own brother, irreplaceable Julius, having metaphysical assumptions different from mine. So I would talk to him about the past, and he would say, “Is that so? Is that a fact? And you know I can’t remember a thing, not even the way Mama looked, and I was her favorite, after all.”

  “You must remember how she looked. How could you forget her? I don’t believe that,” I said. My family sentiments tormented my stout brother sometimes. He thought me some sort of idiot. He himself, a wizard with money, built shopping centers, condominiums, motels, and contributed greatly to the transformation of his part of Texas. He wouldn’t refuse to help me. But this was purely theoretical, for although the idea of help was continually in the air between us, I never actually asked him to give me any. In fact I was extremely reserved about making such a request. I was, if I may say so, merely obsessed, filled by the need to make it.

  As I was picking up my coat, Urbanovich’s bailiff came up to me and took a piece of paper from the pocket of his cardigan. “Tomchek’s office phoned this message in,” he said. “There’s a fellow with a foreign name—is it Pierre?” said the old man.

  “Pierre Thaxter?”

  “I wrote down what they gave me. He wants you to meet him at three at the Art Institute. Also a couple came to ask for you. Fellow with a mustache. Girl with red hair, mini-skirt.”

  “Cantabile,” I said.

  “He didn’t leave no name.”

  It was now half past two. Much had happened in a short time. I went to Stop and Shop and bought sturgeon and fresh rolls, also Twining’s breakfast tea and Cooper’s vintage marmalade. If Thaxter was staying overnight I wanted to give him the breakfast he was accustomed to. He always fed me extremely well. He took pride in his table and told me in French what I was eating. I ate no mere tomatoes but salade de tomates, no bread and butter but tartines, and so it went with bouilli, brûlé, farci, fumé, and excellent wines. He dealt with the best tradespeople and nothing disagreeable to eat or drink was ever set before me.

  As a matter of fact I looked forward to Thaxter’s visit. I was always delighted to see him. Perhaps I even had the illusion that I could open my oppressed heart to him, although I really knew better than that. He would blow in from California wearing his hair long like a Stuart courtier and, under his carabiniere cloak, dressed in a charming blue velvet lounging suit from the King’s Road. His broad-brimmed hat was bought in a shop for black swingers. About his neck would be apparently valuable chains, and also a piece of knotted, soiled, but uniquely tinted silk. His light-tan boots, which came up to the ankle, were ingeniously faced with canvas, and on each of the canvas sides there was an ingenious fleur-de-lis of leather. His nose was strongly distorted, his dark face flaming, and when I saw his leopard eyes I’d give a secret cheer. There was a reason why, when the bailiff told me that he was in town, I immediately laid out five dollars on sturgeon. I was extremely fond of Thaxter. Now, then, the great question: did he or did he not know what he was doing? In a word, was he a crook? This was a question a shrewd man should be able to answer, and I couldn’t answer. Renata, when she did me the honor of treating me as her future husband, often said, “Don’t drop any more money on Thaxter. Charm? All charm. Talent? Buckets of talent. But a phony.”

  “He’s really not.”

  “What? Have a little self-respect, Charlie, about what you swallow. All that Social Register stuff of his?”

  “Oh that! Yes, but people have to boast. They’re dead if they can’t say good things about themselves. Good things have to be said. Have a heart.”

  “All right then, his special wardrobe. His special umbrella. The only umbrella with class is a natural-hook umbrella. You don’t buy an umbrella with a manufactured steam-bent hook. For Christ’s sake it’s got to grow that way. Then there’s his special wine cellar, and his special attaché case which you can buy only in one shop in London, and his special water bed with special satin sheets, where he was lying in Palo Alto with his special tootsie-roll and they were watching Davis Cup tennis on a special color TV. Not to mention a special putz named Charlie Citrine who pays for everything. Why the guy’s delirious.”

  The above conversation had taken place when Thaxter telephoned to say that he was en route to New York to sail on the France and would stop in Chicago to discuss The Ark.

  “What’s he going to Europe for?” said Renata.

  “Well, he is a crack journalist, you know.”

  “Why is a crack journalist sailing First Class on the France? That’s five days. Has he got all that time to kill?”

  “He must have a little, yes.”

  “And we’re flying Economy,” said Renata.

  “Yes, but he has a cousin who’s a director of the French Line. His mother’s cousin. They never pay. The old woman knows all the plutocrats in the world. She brings out their debutante daughters.”

  “I notice he doesn’t stick those plutocrats for fifty shares of anything. The rich know their deadbeats. How could you do such a dumb thing?”

  “Really, the bank might have waited a few days more. His check was on the way from the Banco Ambrosiano of Milano.”

  “How did the Italians get in the act? He told you his family funds were in Brussels.”

  “No, in France. You see his share of his aunt’s estate was in the Crédit Lyonnais.”

  “First he swindles you, then he fills you with garbage explanations which you go around repeating. All those high European connections are straight out of old Hitchcock movies. So now he’s coming to Chicago, and what does he do, he has his office girl get you on the phone. It’s beneath him to dial a number or answer a ring. But you answer in person and the chick says, ‘Hold the line, Mr. Thaxter is coming,’ so you stand waiting with the phone to
your ear. And the whole thing, mind you, is charged to your bill. Then he tells you he’s arriving but later he’ll let you know when.”

  As far as it went this was all true. By no means did I tell Renata everything about Thaxter. There were also blacklists and scandals at country clubs and gossip about larceny charges. My friend’s taste in trouble was old-fashioned. There were no more bounders unless, from pure love of antiquity, someone like Thaxter revived the type. But I also felt that something deep was at work and that Thaxter’s eccentricities would eventually reveal a special spiritual purpose. I knew it was risky to put up the collateral because I had seen him do other people in the eye. But not me, I thought. There has to be one exception. Thus I gambled on immunity and I lost. He was a dear friend. I loved Thaxter. I knew also that I was the last man in the world he would wish to harm. But it came to that, finally. He had run out of harmable men. As there was no one else left, it was friendship versus his life-principle. Besides, I could now call myself a patron of Thaxter’s form of art. Such things must be paid for.

  He had just lost his house in the Bay Area with the swimming pool and the tennis court, the orange grove he had had put in, the formal garden, the MG, the station wagon, and the wine cellar.

  Last September I flew to California to find out why our magazine, The Ark, was not appearing. It was a wonderfully pleasant affectionate visit. We walked out to inspect his estate under the California sunshine. At the time I was beginning to develop a new cosmological feeling for the sun. That it was in part our Creator. That there was a sun-band in our spirits. That light rose within us and came forward to meet the sun’s light. That this sun light was not just an external glory revealed to our dark senses and that as light was to the eye, thought was to the mind. So here we were. A happy blessed day. The sky was giving its marvelous temperate pulsating blue heat, while oranges hung about us. Thaxter wore his favorite outdoor garment, the black cloak, and the toes of his bare feet were pressed together like Smyrna figs. He was now having roses put in and asked me not to talk to the Ukrainian gardener. “He was a concentration-camp guard and still insanely anti-Semitic. I don’t want him to start raving.” So in this beautiful place I felt that demon-selves and silly-selves and loving-selves were intermingling. Some of Thaxter’s newest children, fair and innocent, were allowed to play with dangerous knives and poisonous rose-dust containers. Nobody came to harm. Lunch was a big production, served beside the sparkling swimming pool with two wines poured by himself in somber dignity and intense connoisseurship, with cloak and curved pipe and bare toes writhing. His darkly pretty young wife gladly attended to all preparations and presided practically in the background. She was utterly delighted with her life and there was no dough, absolutely none. The gas station at the corner refused to take his check for five dollars. I had to pay with my credit card. And behind the scenes the young woman was holding off the tennis-court and swimming-pool people, the wine people, the car people, the grand-piano people, the bank people.

  The Ark was going to be produced on new IBM equipment without expensive compositors. Never has any country given its people so many toys to play with or sent such highly gifted individuals to the remotest corners of idleness, as close as possible to the frontiers of pain. Thaxter was building a wing to house The Ark. Our magazine had to have its own premises and not interfere with his private life. He recruited some college students on a Tom Sawyer basis to dig a foundation. He went about in his MG visiting building sites to get construction hints from the hard-hats and scrounge pieces of plywood. This was an expansion I refused to subsidize. “I predict your house will slide into this hole,” I said. “Are you sure you’re within the building code?” But Thaxter had that willingness to try that makes field marshals and dictators. “We’ll throw twenty thousand men into this sector, and if we lose more than half, we’ll take a different tack.”

  In The Ark we were going to publish brilliant things. Where were we to find such brilliancy? We knew it must be there. It was an insult to a civilized nation and to humankind to assume that it was not. Everything possible must be done to restore the credit and authority of art, the seriousness of thought, the integrity of culture, the dignity of style. Renata, who must have had an unauthorized look at my bank statements, apparently knew how much I was spending as a patron. “Who needs this Ark of yours, Charlie, and who are these animals you’re gonna save? You’re not really such an idealist—you’re full of hostility, dying to attack a lot of people in your very own magazine and insult everyone right and left. Thaxter’s arrogance is nothing compared to yours. You let him think he’s getting away with murder, but that’s really because you can double his arrogance in spades.”

  “My money is running out anyhow. I’d rather spend it on this—”

  “Not spend but squander,” she said. “Why do you finance this California setup?”

  “Better than giving it to lawyers and to the government.”

  “When you start to talk about The Ark you lose me. For once tell me simply—what, why?”

  I was grateful for such a challenge really. As an aid to concentration I shut my eyes to answer. I said, “The ideas of the last few centuries are used up.”

  “Who says! See what I mean by arrogance,” Renata interrupted.

  “But so help me, they are used up. Social ideas, political, philosophical theories, literary ideas (poor Humboldt!), sexual ones, and, I suspect, even scientific ones.”

  “What do you know about all these things, Charlie? You’ve got brain fever.”

  “As the world’s masses arrive at the point of consciousness, they take these exhausted ideas for new ones. How should they know? And people’s parlors are papered with these projections.”

  “This is too serious for tongue twisters.”

  “I am serious. The greatest things, the things most necessary for life, have recoiled and retreated. People are actually dying of this, losing all personal life, and the inner being of millions, many many millions, is missing. One can understand that in many parts of the world there is no hope for it because of famine or police dictatorships, but here in the free world what excuse have we? Under pressure of public crisis the private sphere is being surrendered. I admit this private sphere has become so repulsive that we are glad to get away from it. But we accept the disgrace ascribed to it and people have filled their lives with so-called ‘public questions.’ What do we hear when these public questions are discussed? The failed ideas of three centuries. Anyhow the end of the individual, whom everyone seems to scorn and detest, will make our destruction, our superbombs, superfluous. I mean, if there are only foolish minds and mindless bodies there’ll be nothing serious to annihilate. In the highest government positions almost no human beings have been seen for decades now, anywhere in the world. Mankind must recover its imaginative powers, recover living thought and real being, no longer accept these insults to the soul, and do it soon. Or else! And this is where a man like Humboldt, faithful to failed ideas, lost his poetry and missed the boat.”

  “But he went insane. You can’t lay all the blame on him. I never knew the guy but sometimes I think you’re too hard when you attack him. I know,” she said, “you feel that he lived out the poet’s awful life in just the way the middle class expected and approved. But nobody makes the grade with you. Thaxter is just your private pet. He certainly doesn’t make it.”

  Of course she was right. Thaxter was always saying, “What we want is a major statement.” He suspected that I had a major statement up my sleeve.

  I told him, “You mean something like a life reverence, or Yogis and Commissars. You have a weakness for such terrible stuff. You’d give anything to be a Malraux and talk about the West. What is it with you and these seminal ideas? Major statements are hot air. The disorder is here to stay.” And so it is— rich, baffling, agonizing, and diverse. As for striving to be exceptional, everything was already strange enough.

  Pierre Thaxter was absolutely mad for Culture. He was a classicist, heavily
trained by monks in Latin and Greek. He learned French from a governess, and studied it in college as well. He had taught himself Arabic also, and read esoteric books, and hoped to astonish everyone by publishing in learned journals in Finland or Turkey. He spoke with peculiar respect of Panofsky or Momi-gliano. He saw himself also as Burton of Arabia or T. E. Lawrence. Sometimes he was a purple genius of the Baron Corvo type, sordidly broke in Venice, writing something queer and passionate, rare and distinguished. He could not bear to leave anything out. He played Stravinsky on the piano, knew much about the Ballets Russes. On Matisse and Monet he was something of an authority. He held views on ziggurats and Le Corbusier. He could tell you, and often did, what sort of articles to buy and where to buy them. This was what Renata was talking about. No proper attaché case, for instance, fastened at the top, the clasps had to be on the side. He was bugs about attaché cases and umbrellas. There were plantations in Morocco where proper umbrella handles grew. And on top of it all Thaxter described himself as a Tolstoyan. If you pressed him he would say that he was a Christian pacifist anarchist and confess his faith in simplicity and purity of heart. So of course I loved Thaxter. How could I help it? Besides, the fever that afflicted his poor head made him an ideal editor. The diversity of interests, you see, and his cultural nosiness. He was an excellent journalist. This was widely recognized. He had worked on good magazines. Each and every one of them had fired him. What he needed was an ingenious and patient editor to send him on suitable assignments.

  He was waiting between the lions in front of the Institute, exactly as expected in the cloak and blue velvet suit and boots with canvas sides. The only change was in his hair which he was now wearing in the Directoire style, the points coming down over his forehead. Because of the cold his face was deep red. He had a long mulberry-colored mouth, and impressive stature, and warts, and the distorted nose and leopard eyes. Our meetings were always happy and we hugged each other. “Old boy, how are you? One of your good Chicago days. I’ve missed the cold air in California. Terrific! Isn’t it. Well, we may as well start right with a few of those marvelous Monets.” We left attaché case, umbrella, sturgeon, rolls, and marmalade in the checkroom. I paid two dollars for admission and we mounted to the Impressionist collection. There was one Norwegian winter landscape by Monet that we always went to see straightaway: a house, a bridge, and the snow falling. Through the covering snow came the pink of the house, and the frost was delicious. The whole weight of snow, of winter, was lifted effortlessly by the astonishing strength of the light. Looking at this pure rosy snowy dusky light, Thaxter clamped his pince-nez on the powerful twisted bridge of his nose with a gleam of glass and silver and his color deepened. He knew what he was doing. With this painting his visit began on the right tone. Only, familiar with the whole span of his thoughts, I was sure that he was also thinking how a masterpiece like this might be stolen from the museum, and that his mind quickly touched upon twenty daring art thefts from Dublin to Denver, complete with getaway cars and fences. Maybe he even dreamed up some multimillionaire Monet fanatic who had built a secret shrine in a concrete bunker and would be willing to pay a ton of money for this landscape. Scope was what Thaxter longed for (me, too, for that matter). Still he was a puzzle to me. He was either a kindly or a brutal man, and deciding which was a torment. But now he collapsed the trick pince-nez, and turned toward me with the ruddy swarthy face, his big-cat gaze heavier than before, gloomy, and even a touch cross-eyed.