Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  I suppose that it was the receptionist who had sent for the blue-and-white squad car now waiting for us. She was a very pretty young woman. I had looked at her as we were leaving the office and thought, Here’s a sentimental girl. Well brought up. Lovely. Distressed to see people arrested. Tears in her eyes.

  “In the back seat, you,” said the plainclothesman to Canta-bile, who, in his pinch hat, white in the face, hair sticking out at the sides, got in. At this moment, disheveled, he seemed for the first time genuinely Italian.

  “The main thing is Renata. Get in touch with Renata,” I told Thaxter as I got into the front seat. “I’ll be in trouble if you don’t—trouble!”

  “Don’t worry. People won’t let you disappear from sight forever,” said Thaxter.

  His words of comfort gave me my first moment of deeper anxiety.

  He did indeed try to get in touch with Renata and with Szathmar. But Renata was still at the Merchandise Mart with her client, picking fabrics, and Szathmar had already closed his office. Somehow Thaxter forgot what I had told him about Tomchek and Srole. To kill time, therefore, he went to a Black Kung Fu movie on Randolph Street. When the show let out he reached Renata at home. He said that since she knew Szathmar so well he thought he could leave things to her, entirely. After all, he was a stranger in town. The Boston Celtics were playing the Chicago Bulls and Thaxter bought a ticket to the basketball game from a scalper. En route to the Stadium the cab stopped at Zimmerman’s and he bought a bottle of Piesporter. He couldn’t get it chilled properly, but it went well with the sturgeon sand-wiches.

  Cantabile’s dark form was riding before me in the front seat of the squad car. I addressed my thoughts to it. A man like Can-tabile took advantage of my inadequate theory of evil, wasn’t that it? He filled all the gaps in it to the best of his histrionic ability with his plunging and bluffing. Or did I, as an American, have a theory of evil? Perhaps not. So he entered the field from that featureless and undemarcated side where I was weak, with his ideas and conceits. This pest delighted the ladies, it seemed— he pleased Polly and, apparently, his wife the graduate student as well. It was my guess that he was an erotic lightweight. But after all it’s the imagination that counts for most with women. So he made his progress through life with his fine riding gloves and his calfskin boots, and the keenly gleaming fuzz of his tweeds, and the Magnum he carried in his waistband, threatening everybody with death. Threats were what he loved. He had called me in the night to threaten me. Threats had affected his bowels yesterday on Division Street. This morning he had gone to threaten Stronson. In the afternoon he offered, or threatened, to have Denise knocked off. Yes, he was a queer creature, with his white face, his long ecclesiastical-wax nose with its dark flues. He was very restless in the front seat. He seemed to be trying to get a look at me. He was almost limber enough to twist his head about and preen his own back feathers. What might it mean that he had tried to pass me off as a murderer? Did he find the original suggestion for that in me? Or was he trying in his own way to bring me out, to carry me into the world, a world from which I had the illusion that I was withdrawing? On the Chicago level of judgment I dismissed him as ready for the bughouse. Well, he was ready for the bughouse, certainly. I was sophisticated enough to recognize that in what he proposed that we two should do with Polly there was a touch of homosexuality, but that wasn’t very serious. I hoped that they would send him back to prison. On the other hand I sensed that he was doing something for me. In his gleaming tweed fuzz, the harshness of which suggested nettles, he had materialized in my path. Pale and crazy, with his mink mustache, he seemed to have a spiritual office to perform. He had appeared in order to move me from dead center. Because I came from Chicago no normal and sensible person could do anything of this sort for me. I couldn’t be myself with normal sensible people. Look at my relations with a man like Richard Durnwald. Much as I admired him, I couldn’t be mentally comfortable with Durnwald. I was slightly more successful with Dr. Scheldt the anthroposophist, but I had my troubles with him too, troubles of a Chicago nature. When he spoke to me of esoteric mysteries I wanted to say to him, “Don’t give me that spiritual hokum, friend!” And after all, my relations with Dr. Scheldt were tremendously important. The questions I raised with him couldn’t have been more serious.

  All this went to my head, or flowed to my head, and I recalled Humboldt in Princeton quoting to me, “Es schwindelt!” The words of V. I. Lenin at the Sniolny Institute. And things were schwindling now. Now was it because, like Lenin, I was about to found a police state? It was from a flux or inundation of sensations, insights, and ideas.

  Of course the cop was right. Strictly speaking, I was no killer. But I did incorporate other people into myself and consume them. When they died I passionately ‘mourned. I said I would continue their work and their lives. But wasn’t it a fact that I added their strength to mine? Didn’t I have an eye on them in the days of their vigor and glory? And on their women? I could already see the outline of my soul’s purgatorial tasks, when it entered the next place.

  “Watch it, Charlie,” Thaxter had admonished me. He wore his cape and held the ideal attaché case and the natural hook umbrella, as well as the sturgeon sandwiches. I watched it. A plus forte raison, I watched it. Watching, I was aware that in the squad car I was following in Humboldt’s footsteps. Twenty years ago in the hands of the law, he had wrestled with the cops. They had forced him into a strait jacket. He had had diarrhea in the police wagon as they rushed him to Bellevue. They were trying to cope, to do something with a poet. What did the New York police know about poets! They knew drunks and muggers, they knew rapists, they knew women in labor and hopheads, but they were at sea with poets. Then he had called me from a phone booth in the hospital. And I had answered from that hot grimy flaking dressing room at the Belasco. And he had yelled, “This is life, Charlie, not literature!” Well, I don’t suppose the Powers, Thrones and Dominions, the Archai, the Archangels and the Angels read poetry. Why should they? They are shaping the universe. They’re busy. But when Humboldt cried, “Life!” he didn’t mean the Thrones, Exousiai, and Angels. He only meant realistic, naturalistic life. As if art hid the truth and only the sufferings of the mad revealed it. This was impoverished imagination?

  We arrived and Cantabile and I were separated. They kept him at the desk, I went inside.

  Anticipating the job I had cut out for me in purgatory, I didn’t find it necessary to take jail too seriously. What was it, after all? A lot of bustle, and people who specialized in giving you a hard time. They photographed me, front and sides. Good. After these mug shots I was fingerprinted too. Very well. Following this, I expected to go into the lockup. There was a fat domestic-looking policeman waiting to take me to the slammer. Inside duties make these cops obese. There he was, housewifely, in a coat sweater and slippers, with belly and gun, a big pouting lip, and fat furrows at the back of his head. He was steering me in when someone said, “You! Charles Citrine! Outside!” I went back into the main corridor. I wondered how Szathmar had gotten here so fast. But it wasn’t Szathmar who was waiting for me, it was Stronson’s young receptionist. This beautiful girl said that her employer had decided to drop the case against me. He was going to concentrate on Cantabile.

  “And did Stronson send you over?”

  She explained, “Well, I really wanted to come. I knew who you were. As soon as I found out your name, I did. So I explained it to my boss. He’s been like in shock these days. You can’t exactly blame Mr. Stronson, when people come and say he’s going to be murdered. But I finally got him to understand that you were a famous person, not a hit man.”

  “Ah, I see. And you’re a dear girl as well as a beautiful one. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. Talking to him couldn’t have been easy.”

  “He really was scared. Now he’s mostly depressed. Why are your hands so dirty?” she said.

  “Fingerprinting. The ink they used.”

  She was upset. “My God! Imagine fingerprinting a
man like you!” She opened her purse and began to moisten paper tissues and to rub my stained fingertips.

  “No, thank you. No, no, don’t do that,” I said. Such attentions always get to me, and it seemed a dreadfully long time since anyone had done me any intimate kindness like this. There are days when one wants to go to the barber, not for a haircut (there’s not much hair to cut) but just for the sake of the touch.

  “Why not?” said the girl. “I feel that I’ve always known you.”

  “From books?”

  “Not books. I’m afraid I never read any of your books. I understand they’re history books and history has never been my bag. No, Mr. Citrine, through my mother.”

  “Do I know your mother?”

  “Since I was a kid, I’ve heard you were her school-days sweetheart.”

  “Your mother isn’t Naomi Lutz!”

  “Yes, she was. I can’t tell you how thrilled she and Doc were when they ran into you at that bar downtown.”

  “Yes, Doc was with her.”

  “When Doc passed away, Mother was going to call you. She says now you’re the only one she can talk old times with. There are things she wants to remember and can’t place. Just the other day she couldn’t recall the name of the town where her Uncle Asher lived.”

  “Her Uncle Asher lived in Paducah, Kentucky. Of course I’ll call her. I loved your mother, Miss . . .”

  “Maggie,” she said.

  “Maggie. You’ve inherited her curves from the waist down. I never saw another back-curve so lovely till this moment, and in jail, of all places. You also have her gums and teeth, a bit short in the teeth, and the same smile. Your mother was beautiful. You’ll excuse me for saying this, it’s an exciting moment, but I always felt that if I could have embraced your mother every night for forty years, as her husband, of course, my life would have been completely fulfilled, a success—instead of this. How old are you, Maggie?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “O Lord!” I said as she washed my fingers in the freezing drinking water. My hand is very sensitive to a feminine touch. A kiss in the palm can send me out of my head.

  She took me home in her Volkswagen, weeping a little as she drove. She was thinking perhaps of the happiness her mother and I had missed. And when, I wondered, would I rise at last above all this stuff, the accidental, the merely phenomenal, the wastefully and randomly human, and be fit to enter higher worlds?

  twenty-four

  So before leaving town I paid a visit to Naomi. Her married name was Wolper.

  But I didn’t go immediately to see her. I had a hundred chores to do first.

  The last days in Chicago were crowded. As if to make up for the hours Cantabile’s mischief had cost me, I followed a busy schedule. My accountant, Murra, gave me a whole hour of his time. In his smooth offices, decorated by the famous Richard Himmel and overlooking the lightest green part of the Chicago River, he told me that he had failed to convince the 1RS that it had no case against me. His own bill was high. I owed him fifteen hundred dollars for getting nowhere. When I left his building I found myself in the gloom of Michigan Avenue in front of the electric-light shop near Wacker Drive. Always drawn to this place, with its ingenious new devices, the tints and shapes of bulbs and tubes, I bought a 300-watt flood reflector. I had no use for this article. I was going away. What did I need it for? The purchase only expressed my condition. I was still furnishing my retreat, my sanctuary, my Fort Dearborn deep in Indian (Materialistic) Territory. Also I was in the grip of departure anxieties—jet engines would tear me from the ground at two thousand miles per hour but where was I going, and what for? The reasons for this terrific speed remained unclear.

  No, buying a bulb didn’t help much. What did give me great comfort was to talk with Dr. Scheldt. I questioned him about the Spirits of Form, the Exousiai, known in Jewish antiquity by another name. These shapers of destiny should long ago have surrendered their functions and powers to the Archai, the Spirits of Personality who stand one rank closer to man in the universal hierarchy. But a number of dissident Exousiai, playing a backward role in world history, had for centuries refused to let the Archai take over. They obstructed the development of a modern sort of consciousness. Refractory Exousiai belonging to an earlier phase of human evolution were responsible for tribalism and the persistence of peasant or folk consciousness, hatred of the West and of the New, they nourished atavistic attitudes. I wondered whether this might not explain how Russia in 1917 had put on a revolutionary mask to disguise reaction; and whether the struggle between these same forces might not lie behind Hitler’s rise to power as well. The Nazis also adopted the modern disguise. But you couldn’t entirely blame these Russians, Germans, Spaniards, and Asiatics. The terrors of freedom and modernity were fearful. And this was what made America appear so giddy and monstrous in the eyes of the world. It also made certain countries seem, to American eyes, desperately, monumentally dull. Fighting to retain their inertias the Russians had produced their incomparably boring and terrifying society. And America, under the jurisdiction of the Archai, or Spirits of Personality, produced autonomous modern individuals with all the giddiness and despair of the free, and infected with a hundred diseases unknown during the long peasant epochs.

  After visiting with Dr. Scheldt I took my small daughters, Lish and Mary, to the Christmas pageant after all, outmaneu-vered by Denise, who had put them on the phone in tears. Unexpectedly, however, the pageant was very stirring. I do love theatricals, with their breaking voices, missed cues, and silly costumes. All the fine costumes were in the audience. Hundreds of excited kiddies were brought by their Mamas, many of these Mamas being tigresses of the subtlest sort. And dressed, arrayed, perfumed to a degree! Rip van Winkle was given as a curtain raiser. To me it was immensely relevant. It was all very well to blame the dwarfs for making Rip drunk, but he had his own good reasons for passing out. The weight of the sense world is too heavy for some people, and getting heavier all the time. His twenty years of sleep, let me tell you, went straight to my heart. My heart was sensitive today—worry, anticipated problems, and remorse made it tender and vulnerable. An idiotic old lecher was leaving two children to follow an obvious gold digger to corrupt Europe. As one of the few fathers in the audience I felt how wrong this was. I was encompassed by feminine judgment. The views of all these women were unmistakably expressed. I saw for instance that the mothers resented the portrayal of Mrs. van Winkle, clearly the American Bitch in an early version. Myself, I reject all such notions about American Bitches. The mothers, however, were angry, they smiled but were hostile. The kids, though, were innocent, and they clapped and cheered when Rip was told that his wife had died of apoplexy during a fit of rage.

  I was thinking of the higher significance of these things— naturally. For me the real question was how Rip would have spent his time if the dwarfs had not put him to sleep. He had an ordinary human American right, of course, to hunt and fish and roam the woods with his dog—much like Huckleberry Finn in the Territory Ahead. The following question was more intimate and difficult: what would I have done if I hadn’t been asleep in spirit for so long? Amid the fluttering and squealing and clapping and writhing of little children, so pure of face, so fragrant (even the small gases released, inevitably, by a crowd of children were pleasant if you breathed them in a paternal spirit), so savable, I forced myself to stop and answer—I was obliged to do it. If you believed one of the pamphlets Dr. Scheldt had given me to read, this sleeping was no trifling matter. Our unwillingness to come out of the state of sleep was the result of a desire to evade an impending revelation. Certain spiritual beings must achieve their development through men, and we betray and abandon them by this absenteeism, this will-to-snooze. Our duty, said one bewitching pamphlet, is to collaborate with the Angels. They appear within us (as the Spirit called the Maggid manifested himself to the great Rabbi Joseph Karo). Guided by the Spirits of Form, Angels sow seeds of the future in us. They inculcate certain pictures into us of which we are
“normally” unaware. Among other things they wish to make us see the concealed divinity of other human beings. They show man how he can cross by means of thought the abyss that separates him from Spirit. To the soul they offer freedom and to the body they offer love. These facts must be grasped by waking consciousness. Because, when he sleeps, the sleeper sleeps. Great world events pass him by. Nothing is momentous enough to rouse him. Decades of calendars drop their leaves on him just as the trees dropped leaves and twigs on Rip. Moreover, the Angels themselves are vulnerable. Their aims must be realized in earthly humanity itself. Already the brotherly love they put into us has been corrupted into sexual monstrosity. What are we doing with each other in the sack? Love is being disgracefully perverted. Then, too, the Angels send us radiant freshness and we, by our own sleeping, make it all dull. And in the political sphere we can hear, semi-conscious though we are, the grunting of the great swine empires of the earth. The stink of these swine dominions rises into the upper air and darkens it. Is it any wonder that we invite slumber to come quickly and seal our spirits? And, said the pamphlet, the Angels, thwarted by our sleep during waking hours, have to do what they can with us in the night. But then their work cannot touch our feeling or thinking, for these are absent during sleep. Only the unconscious body and the sustaining vital principle, the ether body, lie there in bed. The great feelings and the thoughts are gone. So also in the day, sleepwalking. And if we will not awaken, if the Spiritual Soul can’t be brought to participate in the work of the Angels, we will be sunk. For me the clinching argument was that the impulses of higher love were corrupted into sexual degeneracy. That really went home. Perhaps I had more basic, ultimate reasons for going off with Renata, leaving two little girls in dangerous Chicago, than I was aware enough to produce at a moment’s notice. I might, just possibly, justify what I was doing. After all, Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress had taken off, too, and left his family to pursue salvation. Before I could do the children any real good, I had to wake up. This muddiness, this failure to focus and to concentrate, was very painful. I could see myself as I had been thirty years ago. I didn’t need to look in the picture album. That damning photograph was unforgettable. There I was, a pretty young man under a tree, holding hands with an attractive girl. But I might as well have been wearing flannel pajamas as that flapping double-breasted suit—the gift of my brother Julius —for in the flower of my youth and at the height of my powers I was out cold.