Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  Sitting in the Professor’s clean parlor—I have seldom sat in a room so utterly clean, the parquet floors of light wood limpid with wax and the Oriental scatter rugs lint-free, and the park below with the equestrian statue of General Sherman prancing on clean air—I was entirely happy. I respected Dr. Scheldt. The strange things he said were at least deep things. In this day and age people had ceased to say such things. He was from another time, entirely. He even dressed like a country-club member of the Twenties. I had caddied for men of this type. A Mr. Masson, one of my regulars at Sunset Ridge in Winnetka, had been the image of Professor Scheldt. I assumed that Mr. Masson had long ago joined the hosts of the dead and that in all the universe there was only me to remember how he had looked when he was climbing out of a sand trap.

  “Dr. Scheldt. . . .” The sun is shining clear, the water beyond is as smooth as the inner peace I have not attained, as wrinkled as perplexity, the lake is strong with innumerable powers, flexuous, hydromuscular. In the parlor is a polished crystal bowl filled with anemones. These flowers are capable of nothing except grace and they are colored with an untranslatable fire derived from infinity. “Now Dr. Scheldt,” I say. I’m speaking to his interested and plain face, calm as a bull’s face and trying to determine how dependable his intelligence is—i.e., whether we are real here or crazy here. “Let me see if I understand these things at all—thought in my head is also thought in the external world. Consciousness in the self creates a false distinction between object and subject. Am I getting it right?”

  “Yes, I think so, sir,” the strong old man says.

  “The quenching of my thirst is not something that begins in my mouth. It begins with the water, and the water is out there, in the external world. So with truth. Truth is something we all share. Two plus two for me is two plus two for everyone else and has nothing to do with my ego. That I understand. Also the answer to Spinoza’s argument that if the dislodged stone had consciousness it could think, ‘I am flying through the air,’ as if it were freely doing it. But if it were conscious, it would not be a mere stone. It could also originate movement. Thinking, the power to think and to know, is a source of freedom. Thinking will make it obvious that spirit exists. The physical body is an agent of the spirit and its mirror. It is an engine and a reflection of the spirit. It is the spirit’s ingenious memorandum to itself and the spirit sees itself in my body, just as I see my own face in a looking glass. My nerves reflect this. The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything. Every perception causes a certain amount of death in us, and this darkening is a necessity. The clairvoyant can actually see that when he learns how to obtain the inward view. To do this, he must get out of himself and stand far off.”

  “All this is in the texts,” says Dr. Scheldt, “I can’t be sure that you have grasped it all, but you’re fairly accurate.”

  “Well, I understand in part, I think. When our understanding wants it, divine wisdom will flow toward us.”

  Then Dr. Scheldt begins to speak on the text, I am the light of the world. To him that light is understood also as the sun itself. Then he speaks of the gospel of Saint John as drawing upon the wisdom-filled Cherubim, while the gospel of Saint Luke draws upon the fiery love the Seraphim—Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones being the three highest spiritual hierarchy. I am not at all certain that I am following. “I have no experience of any of this advanced stuff, Dr. Scheldt, but I still find it peculiarly good and comforting to hear it all said. I don’t at all know where I’m at. One of these days when life is quieter I’m going to buckle down to the training course and do it in earnest.”

  “When will life be quieter?”

  “I don’t know. But I suppose people have told you before this how much stronger the soul feels after such a conversation.”

  “You shouldn’t wait for things to become quieter. You must decide to make them quieter.”

  He saw that I was fairly skeptical still. I couldn’t make my peace with things like the Moon Evolution, the fire spirits, the Sons of Life, with Atlantis, with the lotus-flower organs of spiritual perception or the strange mingling of Abraham with Zarathustra, or the coming together of Jesus and the Buddha. It was all too much for me. Still, whenever the doctrine dealt with what I suspected or hoped or knew of the self, or of sleep, or of death, it always rang true.

  Moreover, there were the dead to. think of. Unless I had utterly lost interest in them, unless I were satisfied to feel only a secular melancholy about my mother and my father or Demmie Vonghel or Von Humboldt Fleisher, I was obliged to investigate, to satisfy myself that death was final, that the dead were dead. Either I conceded the finality of death and refused to have any further intimations, condemned my childish sentimentality and hankering, or I conducted a full and proper investigation. Because I simply didn’t see how I could refuse to investigate. Yes, I could force myself to think of it all as the irretrievable loss of shipmates to the devouring Cyclops. I could think of the human scene as a battlefield. The fallen are put into holes in the ground or burned to ash. After this, you are not supposed to inquire after the man who gave you life, the woman who bore you, after a Demmie whom you had last seen getting into a plane at Idlewild with her big blond legs and her make-up and her earrings, or after the brilliant golden master of conversation Von Humboldt Fleisher, whom you had last beheld eating a pretzel in the West Forties. You could simply assume that they had been forever wiped out, as you too would one day be. So if the daily papers told of murders committed in the streets before crowds of neutral witnesses, there was nothing illogical about such neutrality. On the metaphysical assumptions about death everyone in the world had apparently reached, everyone would be snatched, ravished by death, throttled, smothered. This terror and this murdering were the most natural things in the world. And these same conclusions were incorporated into the life of society and present in all its institutions, in politics, education, banking, justice. Convinced of this, I saw no reason why I shouldn’t go to Dr. Scheldt to talk about Seraphim and Cherubim and Thrones and Dominions and Exousiai and Archai and Angels and Spirits.

  I said to Dr. Scheldt at our last meeting, “Sir, I have studied the pamphlet called The Driving Force of Spiritual Powers in World History, and it contains a fascinating passage about sleep. It seems to say that mankind doesn’t know how to sleep any more. That something should be happening during sleep that simply isn’t happening and that this is why we wake up feeling so stale and unrested, sterile, bitter, and all the rest of it. So let me see if I’ve got it right. The physical body sleeps, and the etheric body sleeps, but the soul goes off.”

  “Yes,” said Professor Scheldt. “The soul, when you sleep, enters the supersensible world, or at least one of its regions. To simplify, it enters its own element.”

  “I’d like to think that.”

  “Why shouldn’t you?”

  “Well, I will, just to see if I understand it. In the supersensible world the soul meets the invisible forces which were known by initiates in the ancient world in their Mysteries. Not all the beings of the hierarchy are accessible to the living, only some of them, but these are indispensable. Now, as we sleep, the pamphlet says, the words that we have spoken all day long are vibrating and echoing about us.”

  “Not literally, the words,” Dr. Scheldt corrected.

  “No, but the feeling-tones, the joy or pain, the purpose of the words. Through the vibrations and echoes of what we have thought and felt and said we commune as we sleep with the beings of the hierarchy. But now, our daily monkeyshines are such, our preoccupations are so low, language has become so debased, the words so blunted and damaged, we’ve said such stupid and dull things, that the higher beings hear only babbling and grunting and TV commercials—the dog-food level of things. This says nothing to them. What pleasure can these higher beings take in this kind of materialism, devoid of higher thought or poetry? As a result, all that we can h
ear in sleep is matter creaking and hissing and washing, the rustling of plants, and the air conditioning. So we are incomprehensible to the higher beings. They can’t influence us and they themselves suffer a corresponding privation. Have I got it right?”

  “Yes, by and large.”

  “It makes me wonder about a late friend of mine who used to complain of insomnia. He was a poet. And I can see now why he may have had such a problem about sleeping. Maybe he was ashamed. Out of a sense that he had no words fit to carry into sleep. He may actually have preferred insomnia to such a nightly shame and disaster.”

  Now the Thunderbird pulled up beside the Rookery on La Salle Street. Cantabile jumped out. As he was holding the door open for Thaxter I said to Polly, “Now Polly—tell me something helpful, Polly.”

  “This Stronson fellow is in big trouble,” she said, “big, big, big trouble. Look in tomorrow’s paper.”

  We went through the tiled, balustraded Rookery lobby and up in a swift elevator, Cantabile repeating, as though he wanted to hypnotize me, “Ten grand today will get you fifteen by Thursday. That’s fifty percent in three days. Fifty percent.” We came out into a white corridor and then up against two grand cedar doors lettered Western Hemisphere Investment Corporation. On these doors Cantabile gave a coded set of knocks: three times; pause; once; then a final once. It was odd that this should be necessary, but after all a man who could give such a return on money must be fighting off investors. A beautiful receptionist let us in. The anteroom was carpeted heavily. “He’s here,” said Cantabile. “Just wait a few minutes, you guys.”

  Thaxter sat down on a low orange loveseat sort of thing. A man was vacuuming loudly around us, wearing a gray porter’s jacket. Thaxter removed his wide dude hat and smoothed the Directoire points over his irregularly formed forehead. He took the stem of his curved pipe into his straight lips and said, “Sit down.” I gave him the sturgeon and marmalade to hold and overtook Cantabile at the door to Stronson’s private office. I pulled tomorrow’s paper from under his arm. He grabbed at it and we both tugged. His coat came open and I saw the pistol in his belt but this no longer deterred me. “What do you want?” he said.

  “I just want to have a look at Schneiderman’s column.”

  “Here, I’ll tear it out for you.”

  “You do that and I’m leaving.”

  He pushed the paper at me violently and went into Stronson’s office. Rapidly leafing, I found an article in the financial section describing the difficulties of Mr. Stronson and the Western Hemisphere Investment Corporation. A complaint had been filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission against him. He was charged with violation of the federal securities regulations. He had used the mails to defraud and had dealt in unregistered securities. An explanatory affidavit filed by the SEC alleged that Guido Stronson was a complete phony, not a Harvard graduate, but only a New Jersey high-school dropout and gas-station attendant, until recently a minor employee in a bill-collecting agency in Plainfield. He had abandoned a wife and four children. They were now on welfare in the East. Coming to Chicago, Guido Stronson had opened a grand office on La Salle Street and produced glittering credentials, including a degree from the Harvard Business School. He said he had been conspicuously successful in Hartford as an insurance executive. His investment company soon had a very large clientele for hog bellies, cocoa, gold ore. He had bought a mansion on the North Shore and said he wanted to go in for fox hunting. Complaints lodged by clients had led to these federal investigations. The report concluded with the La Salle Street rumor that Stronson had many Mafia clients. He had apparently cost these clients several millions of dollars.

  By tonight Greater Chicago would know these facts and tomorrow this office would be mobbed by cheated investors and Stronson would need police protection. But who would protect him the day after tomorrow from the Mafia? I studied the man’s photograph. Newspapers distort faces peculiarly—I knew that from personal experience, but this photograph, if it did Stronson justice in any degree, inspired no sympathy. Some faces gain by misrepresentation.

  Now why had Cantabile brought me here? He promised me fast profits, but I knew something about modern life. I mean, I could read a little in the great mysterious book of urban America. I was too fastidious and skittish to study it closely—I had used the conditions of life to test my powers of immunity; the sovereign consciousness trained itself to avoid the phenomena and to be immune to their effects. Still, I did know, more or less, how swindlers like Stronson operated. They hid away a good share of their stolen dollars, they were sentenced to prison for eight or ten years, and when they got out, they retired quietly to the West Indies or the Azores. Maybe Cantabile was now trying to get his hands on some of the money Stronson had stashed—in Costa Rica, perhaps. Or maybe if he was losing twenty thousand dollars (some of it possibly Cantabile family money) he intended to make a big scene. He would want me to see such a scene. He liked me to be present. Because of me he had gotten into Mike Schneiderman’s column. He must have been thinking of something even more brilliant, more sensationally inventive. He needed me. And why was I so often involved in such things? Szathmar too did this to me; George Swiebel had staged a poker party in order to show me a thing or two; this afternoon even Judge Urbanovich had acted up in chambers for my sake. I must have been associated in Chicago with art and meaning, with certain upper values. Wasn’t I the author of Von Trenck (the movie), honored by the French government and the Zig-Zag Club? I still carried in my wallet a thin wrinkled length of silk ribbon for the buttonhole. And O! we poor souls, all of us so unstable, ignorant, perturbed, so unrested. Couldn’t even get a good night’s sleep. Failing in the night to make contact with the merciful, regenerative angels and archangels who were there to strengthen us with their warmth and their love and wisdom. Ah, poor hearts that we were, how badly we were all doing and how I longed to make changes or amends or corrections. Something!

  Cantabile had shut himself up in conference with Mr. Stronson, and this Stronson, represented in the paper with a brutally thick face and hair done in pageboy style, was probably frantic. Maybe Cantabile was offering him deals—deals upon deals upon deals. Advice on how to come to terms with his furious Mafia customers.

  Thaxter was lifting his legs to let the porter vacuum under them.

  “I think we’d better go,” I said.

  “Leave? Now?”

  “I think we should get out of here.”

  “Oh, come on, Charlie, don’t make me leave. I want to see what happens. There’ll never be another occasion like this. This man Cantabile is absolutely wild. He’s fascinating.”

  “I wish you hadn’t rushed into his Thunderbird without asking me. So excited by gangland Chicago you just couldn’t wait. I suppose you expect to make use of this experience, send it to the Reader’s Digest or something nonsensical like that—you and I have all kinds of things to discuss.”

  “They can wait, Charles. You know I’m sort of impressed by you. You always complain that you’re isolated, then I come to Chicago and find you bang in the middle of things.” He flattered me. He knew how much I liked to be thought a Chicago expert. “Is Cantabile one of the ballplayers at your club?”

  “I don’t think Langobardi would let him join. He doesn’t suffer minor hoodlums gladly.”

  “Is that what Cantabile is?”

  “I don’t know exactly what he is. He carries on like a Mafia Don. He’s some sort of silly-billy. He has a wife who’s getting a PhD.”

  “You mean that smashing redhead with the platform shoes?”

  “She’s not the one.”

  “Wasn’t it grand how he gave that code knock on the door? And the pretty receptionist opened? Notice these glass cases with the pre-Columbian art and the collection of Japanese fans. I tell you, Charles, nobody actually knows this country. This is some country. The leading interpreters of America stink. They do nothing but swap educated formulas about it. You, yes you! Charles, should write about it, describe your life day
by day and apply some of your ideas to it.”

  “Thaxter, I told you how I took my little girls to see the beavers out in Colorado. All around the lake the Forestry Service posted natural-history placards about the beaver’s life cycle. The beavers didn’t know a damn thing about this. They just went on chewing and swimming and being beavers. But we human beavers are all shook up by descriptions of ourselves. It affects us to hear what we hear. From Kinsey or Masters or Eriksen. We read about identity crisis, alienation, etcetera, and it all affects us.”

  “And you don’t want to contribute to the deformation of your fellow man with new inputs?—God, how I loathe the word “input.” But you yourself continually make high-level analyses. What about the piece for The Ark you sent me—I think it’s right here in my attaché case—in which you offer an economic interpretation of personal eccentricities. Let’s see, I’m sure I’ve got it here. You argue that there may be a connection at this particular stage of capitalism between the shrinking of investment opportunities and the quest for new roles or personality investments. You even quoted Schumpeter, Charlie. Yes, here it is: ‘These dramas may appear purely internal but they are perhaps economically determined . . . when people think they are being so subtly inventive or creative they merely reflect society’s general need for economic growth.’ “