Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  We now went out. I held each of the old boys by a wasted arm, by the big double knobs of the elbow where radius and ulna meet, promising to stay in touch. Sauntering behind us, Renata with her white face and great hat was incomparably more substantial in person than any of us. She said unexpectedly, “If Charles says it, Charles’ll do it. We’ll go away and he’ll be thinking of you.”

  In a corner of the cold porch stood the wheelchairs, glittering, lightweight, tubular, stainless metal, with batlike folds. “I wonder if anyone would object if I sat in one of these wheelchairs,” I said.

  I got into one of them and said to Renata, “Give us a ride.”

  The old men didn’t quite know what to make of my being trundled back and forth on the stoop by this large, laughing, brilliant woman with the wonderful teeth. “Don’t carry on like a fool. You’ll offend them, Renata,” I said. “Just push.”

  “These damn handles are damn cold,” she said.

  She drew on the long gloves with charming swagger, I must say.

  twenty-eight

  In the racketing speed of the howling, weeping subway I began to read the long letter, the preface to Humboldt’s gift, handing on the onionskin pages to Renata. Incurious after she had glanced at a few of these, she said, “When you get to the story, let me know. I’m not big on philosophy.” I can’t say that I blame her. He was not her precious friend hid in death’s dateless night. There was no reason why she should be moved, as I was. She made no effort to enter into my feelings, nor did I want her to try.

  “Deer Shoveleer,” wrote Humboldt. “I am in a bad position, getting more sane as I become weaker. By a damn peculiar arrangement, lunatics always have energy to burn. And if old William James was right, and happiness is living at the energetic top and we are here to pursue happiness, then madness is pure bliss and also has supreme political sanction.” This was the sort of thing that Renata objected to. I agree that it was not a restful habit of mind. “I am living in a bad place,” he went on. “And eating bad meals. I’ve now eaten sixty or seventy delicatessen dinners in a row. You can’t get sublime art on a diet like this. On the other hand pastrami and peppery potato salad seem to nourish calm judgment. I don’t go out to dinner. I stay in my room. There is a colossal interval between supper and bedtime and I sit beside a drawn window shade (who can look out eighteen hours a day?) correcting certain old mistakes. It occurs to me sometimes that I may be petitioning death to lay off because I am deep in good works. Would I be trying, also, to keep the upper hand in dying as in the sexual act?—Do this, do that, hold still, wriggle now, kiss my ear, graze my back with your nails, but don’t touch my testicles. However, death is the passionate party in this case.”

  “Poor fellow, I can see him now. I understand his type,” said Renata.

  “So, Charlie, as these weaker saner days come and go I think often about you, and think with end-of-the-line lucidity. That I wronged you is very true. I knew even when I loused you up so elaborately and fiercely that you were in Chicago trying to do me good, consulting people behind my back to get me jobs. I called you a sell-out, Judas, fink, suck-ass, climber, hypocrite. I had first a deep black rage against you, and then a red hot rage. Both were very luxurious. The fact is that I was remorseful about the blood-brother check. I knew you were mourning the death of Demmie Vonghel. I was panting with cunning and I put one over on you. You were a Success. And if that weren’t enough and you wanted to be a big moral figure as well, then the hell with you, it was going to cost you a few thousand bucks. It was entrapment. I was going to give you a chance to forgive me. In forgiving you would be lying your head off. This fool kindliness would damage your sense of reality, and with your sense of reality damaged you’d be suffering what I suffered. All this crazy intricacy was unnecessary, of course. You were going to suffer anyway because you were stricken with the glory and the gold. Your giddy flight through the florid heavens of success, and so on! Your innate sense of truth, if nothing else, would make you sick. But my ‘reasoning,’ in endless formulae like chemistry formulae on a college blackboard, put me into swoons of rapture. I was manic. I was chattering from the dusty top of my crazy head. Afterward I was depressed and silent for long, long days. I lay in the cage. Grim gorilla days.

  “I ask myself why you figured so prominently in my obsessions and fixations. You may be one of those people who arouse family emotions, you’re a son-and-brother type. Mind, you want to arouse feeling but not necessarily to return it. The idea is that the current should flow your way. You stimulated the blood-brother oath. I was certainly wild, but I acted on a suggestion emanating from you. Nevertheless, in the words of the crooner, ‘With all your faults, I love you still.’ You are a promissory nut, that’s all.

  “Let me say a word about money. When I used your blood-brother check, I didn’t expect it to clear the bank. I put it through, outraged because you didn’t come to see me at Bellevue. I was suffering; you didn’t draw near, as a loving friend should I decided to punish hurt and fine you. You accepted the penalty, and therefore the sin, too. You borrowed my spirit to put into Trenck. My ghost was a Broadway star. All this daylight delusion, cracked, spoiled, and dirty! I don’t know how else to put it. Your girl died in the jungle. She wouldn’t let you come to Belle-vue—I found that out. Oh! the might of money and the entanglement of art with it—the dollar as the soul’s husband: a marriage nobody has had the curiosity to study.

  “And do you know what I did with the six thousand bucks? I bought an Oldsmobile with part of it. What I thought I was going to do with this big powerful car on Greenwich Street, I can’t tell you. It cost me lots of dough to keep it in a garage, more than the rent in my fifth-floor walk-up. And what happened to this automobile? I had to be hospitalized and when I got out, after a course of shock treatments, I couldn’t remember where I left it. I couldn’t find the claim check, or the registration either. I had to forget about it. But for a while I drove a hell of a car. I became capable of observing some of my own symptoms. My eyelids became deep violet with manic insomnia. Late at night I drove past the Belasco Theatre with some buddies and I said, ‘There’s the hit that paid for this powerful machine.’ I declare I had it in for you because you thought I was going to be the great American poet of the century. You came down from Madison, Wisconsin, and told me so. But I wasn’t! And how many people were waiting for that poet! How many souls hoped for the strength and sweetness of visionary words to purge consciousness of its stale dirt, to learn from a poet what had happened to the three-fourths of life that are obviously missing! But during these last years I haven’t been able to even read poetry, much less write it. Opening the Phaedrus a few months ago, I just couldn’t do it. I broke down. My gears are stripped. My lining is shot. It is all shattered. I didn’t have the strength to bear Plato’s beautiful words, and started to cry. The original, fresh self isn’t there any more. But then I think, Maybe I can recover. If I play it smart. Playing it smart means simpler kinds of enjoyment. Blake had it right with Enjoyment the food of Intellect. And if the intellect can’t digest meat (the Phaedrus) you coddle it with zwieback and warm milk.”

  When I read his words about the original fresh self, I began to cry myself, and big benign Renata shook her head when she observed this as if to say, “Men!” As if to say, “These poor mysterious monsters. You work your way down into the labyrinth and there you find the minotaur breaking his heart over a letter.” But I saw Humboldt in the days of his youth, covered in rainbows, uttering inspired words, affectionate, intelligent. In those days his evil was only an infinitesimal black point, an amoeba. The mention of zwieback brought back to me, also, the pretzel he was chewing on the curb on that hot day. On that day I made a poor showing. I behaved very badly. I should have gone up to him. I should have taken his hand. I should have kissed his face. But is it true that such actions are effective? And he was dreadful. His head was all gray webbing, like an infested bush. His eyes were red and his big body was floundering in the gray suit. He looked l
ike an old bull bison on his last legs, and I beat it. Maybe that was the very day on which he wrote this beautiful letter to me. “Now come on, kid,” said Renata, kindly. “Dry your eyes.” She gave me a fragrant hankie, oddly redolent, as if she kept it not in her pocketbook but between her legs. I put it to my face and curiously enough it did something, it gave me some comfort. That young woman had a good understanding of certain fundamentals.

  “This morning,” Humboldt went on, “the sun was bright. For certain of the living it was a very fine day. Though without sleep for several nights I remembered how it used to be to bathe and shave and breakfast and go into the world. A mild lemon light rinsed the streets. (Hope for this wild combined human operation called America?) I thought I would stroll to Brentano’s and look into a copy of Keats’s Letters. During the night I had thought of something Keats had said about Robert Burns. How a luxurious imagination deadens its delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable. For the first Americans were surrounded by thick forests, and then they were surrounded by things attainable, and these were just as thick. The problem became one of faith—a faith in the equal sovereignty of the imagination. Standing at Brentano’s I started to copy out this sentence but a clerk came up to me and took the Keats Letters away. He thought I was from the Bowery. So I went out, and that was the end of the fine day. I felt like Emil Jannings in one of his pictures. The former tycoon ruined by drink and whores comes home an old bummer and tries to peep into the window of his own house where his daughter’s wedding is being celebrated. The cop makes him move on, and so he shuffles away and a cello plays Massenet’s ‘Elégie.’

  “Now, Charles, I come to the zwieback and warm milk. Big enterprises are beyond me, obviously, but my wit oddly enough is intact. This wit, developed to cope with the disgraces of life, real or imaginary, is like a companion to me these days. It stands by me and we are on good terms. In short, my sense of humor has not disappeared and now that bigger ambitious passions have worn themselves out it has been coming before me with an old-fashioned bow out of Molière. A relationship has developed.

  “You remember how we amused ourselves in Princeton with a movie scenario about Amundsen and Nobile and Caldofreddo the Cannibal? I always thought it would make a classic. I handed it to a fellow named Otto Klinsky in the RCA Building. He promised to get it to Sir Laurence Olivier’s hairdresser’s cousin who was the sister of a scrubwoman at Time and Life who was the mother of the beautician who did Mrs. Klinsky’s hair. Somewhere in these channels our script got lost. I still have a copy of this. You will find it among these papers.” Indeed I did. I was curious to read it again. “But that is not my gift to you. After all, we collaborated, and it would be chintzy of me to call it a gift. No, I have dreamed up another story and I believe it is worth a fortune. This small work has been important to me. Among other things it has given me hours of sane enjoyment on certain nights and brought relief from thoughts of doom. The fitting together of the parts gave me the pleasure of a good intricacy. The therapy of delight. I tell you as a writer—we have had some queer American bodies to fit into art’s garments. Enchantment didn’t have enough veiling material for this monstrous mammoth flesh, for such crude arms and legs. But this preface is getting too long. On the next page begins my Treatment. I’ve tried to sell it. I’ve offered it to some people but they weren’t interested. I haven’t got the strength to follow through. People don’t want to see me. You remember how I went to see Longstaff? No more. Receptionists turn me away. I guess I look like the sheeted dead who squeaked and gibbered in the streets of Rome. Now, Charlie, you are still in the midst of life and are rich in contacts. People will pay attention to the Shoveleer, the author of Trench, the chronicler of Woodrow Wilson and Harry Hopkins. This will not reach you unless I kick the bucket. But then it will be a fabulous legacy and I want you to have it. For you are, at one and the same time, no good at all and also a darling man.

  “Good old Henry James, of whom Mrs. Henry Adams said that he chewed more than he bit off, tells us that the creative mind is better off with hints than with extensive knowledge. I have never suffered from a knowledge handicap. The donnée for this treatment comes from the gossip columns, which I have always read faithfully. Verbum sapientiae—I think that’s the dative. The original is apparently true.

  TREATMENT

  I.

  A fellow named Corcoran, a successful author, has been barren for many years. He has tried skin diving and parachute jumping as subjects but nothing has resulted. Corcoran is married to a strong-minded woman. A woman of her sort might have made Beethoven a powerful wife, but Beethoven wasn’t having any of that. To play the part of Corcoran I have in mind someone like Mastroianni.

  II.

  Corcoran meets a beautiful young woman with whom he has an affair. Had she lived, poor Marilyn Monroe would have been ideal for this role. For the first time in many years Corcoran tastes happiness. Then in a fit of enterprise, ingenuity, daring, he escapes with her to a faraway place. His disagreeable wife is nursing a sick father. Taking advantage of this, he and his girl go off. I don’t know where. To Polynesia, to New Guinea, to Abyssinia, with dulcimers, wonderful and far off. The place is still quite pure in its beauty and enchanting weeks follow. Chieftains receive Corcoran and his girl. Hunts occur, and dances and banquets are laid on. The girl is an angel. They bathe in pools together, they float among gardenias and hibiscus. At night the spots of heaven draw near. The sensors open. Life is renewed. Dross and impurities evaporate.

  III.

  Returning, Corcoran writes a marvelous book—a book of such potency and beauty that it must not be kept from the world. But

  IV.

  He cannot publish. It would hurt his wife and destroy his marriage. He himself had a mother and few people have character enough to cast off their new supersitions about mothers and sons. He would have no identity, he would not even be an American without this bitch-affliction. If Corcoran hadn’t been a writer he would not have sullied the heart of this angelic girl by writing a book about their adventure. Unfortunately, he is one of those writing fellows. He is a mere writer. Not to publish would kill him. And he is comically afraid of his wife. This wife should be matronly, jolly, frank, a bit tough but not altogether forbidding. In her own way rather attractive. A good broad, a bossy ail-American girl. I think she should be a food faddist who drinks Tiger’s Milk and eats Queen-Bee Jelly. You may be able to do something with that.

  V.

  Corcoran takes the book to his agent, a Greek American named Zane Bigoulis. This is a most important role. It should be played by Zero Mostel. He is a comedian of genius. But if he isn’t restrained, he runs away with everything. At all events, I have him in mind for this part. Zane reads the book and cries “Magnificent.” “But I can’t publish it, it would finish my marriage.” Now Charlie, My Marriage! Marriage having become one of the idols-of-the-tribe (Francis Bacon), the source of this comedy is the low seriousness which has succeeded the high seriousness of the Victorians. Corcoran has enough imagination to write a wonderful book, but he is enslaved by middle-class attitudes. As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood. Nothing remains but a few floating timbers of psychotherapy. “What shall I do?” Corcoran cries. They deliberate. Then Bigoulis says, “All you can do is take the same trip with Hepzibah that you took with Laverne. Exactly the same trip, following the book faithfully, at the same season. Having reproduced the trip, you can publish the book.”

  VI.

  “I won’t let a word be changed,” says Corcoran. “No impurity, no betrayal of the Experience.” “Leave it to me,” says Bigoulis. “I will precede you everywhere with transistors, panty hose, pocket computers, and so on, and bribe the chieftains. I’ll get them to put on the same hunts and banquets and duplicate the dances. When your publisher sees this manuscript he’ll be glad to pick up the tab.” “It’s really a frightful idea to do all this wit
h Hepzibah. And I’ll have to lie to Laverne. She feels as I do about our miraculous month on the Island. There’s something sacred about it.” But, Charlie, as The Scarlet Letter shows, love and lying have always gone together in this country. Truth is actually fatal. Dimmesdale tells it and dies. But Bigoulis argues, “You want the book published? You don’t want Hepzibah to leave you, and you want to hang on to Laverne as well? From a male viewpoint the whole thing makes complete sense. So ... we go to the Island. I can swing it for you. If you bury this book I lose a hundred grand in commissions, with picture-rights maybe more.”

  I see, Charlie, that I have now made the place an Island. Thinking of The Tempest. Prospero is a Hamlet who gets his revenge through art.

  VII.

  Thus Corcoran repeats with Hepzibah the journey he made with Laverne. Oh what a difference! All now is parody, desecration, wicked laughter. Which must be suffered. To the high types of Martyrdom the twentieth century has added the farcical martyr. This, you see, is the artist. By wishing to play a great role in the fate of mankind he becomes a bum and a joke. A double punishment is inflicted on him as the would-be representative of meaning and beauty. When the artist-agonist has learned to be sunk and shipwrecked, to embrace defeat and assert nothing, to subdue his will and accept his assignment to the hell of modern truth perhaps his Orphic powers will be restored, the stones will dance again when he plays. Then heaven and earth will be reunited. After long divorce. With what joy on both sides, Charlie! What joy!

  But this has no place in our picture. In the picture, Corcoran and his wife are bathing in a pool covered with hibiscus. She adores it. He fights his depression and prays for strength to play his role. Meantime, Bigoulis goes ahead staging each event, bribing chieftains, and hiring musicians and dancers. In this Island he sees also, on his own score, the investment opportunity of a lifetime. He is already planning to build the world’s greatest resort here. At night he sits in his tent with a map, laying out a pleasure dome. The natives will become waiters, cooks, porters, and caddies on his golf course.