Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  “Try living with it,” said Renata. “Charlie’s kinky theorizing puts together combinations nobody else could imagine, like the way the US Congress does its business, with Immanuel Kant, Russian Gulag camps, stamp collecting, famine in India, love and sleep and death and poetry. The less said about the way his mind works, the better. But if you do have to be a guru, Charlie, go the whole distance—wear a silk gown, get a turban, grow a beard. You’d make a hell of a good-looking spiritual leader with a beard and those paisley nostrils of yours. I’d dress up with you, and we’d be a smash. The way you carry on and for free! I sometimes have to pinch myself. I think I’ve taken fifty Valiums and am hearing things.”

  “People of powerful intellect never are quite sure whether or not it’s all a dream.”

  “Well, people who don’t know whether they’re awake or dreaming don’t necessarily have that powerful intellect,” Renata answered. “My theory is that you’re punishing me with this anthroposophy. You know what I mean. That blonde runt introduced you to her dad, and since then it’s all been really spooky.”

  “I wish you’d finish what you started to say,” Thaxter turned again to me.

  “It comes to this, that the individual has no way to prove out what’s in his heart—I mean the love, the hungering for the external world, the swelling excitement over beauty for which there are no acceptable terms of knowledge. True knowledge is supposed to be a monopoly of the scientific world view. But human beings have all sorts of knowledge. They don’t have to apply for the right to love the world. But to see what goes on in this respect, take the career of someone like Von Humboldt Fleisher. . . .”

  “Ah, that guy again,” said Renata.

  “Is it true that as big-time knowledge advances poetry must drop behind, that the imaginative mode of thought belongs to the childhood of the race? A boy like Humboldt, full of heart and imagination, going to the public library and finding books, leading a charmed life bounded by lovely horizons, reading old masterpieces in which human life has its full value, filling himself with Shakespeare, where there is plenty of significant space around each human being, where words mean what they say, and looks and gestures also are entirely meaningful. Ah, that harmony and sweetness, that art! But there it ends. The significant space dwindles and disappears. The boy enters the world and learns its filthy cutthroat tricks, the enchantment stops. But is it the world that is disenchanted?”

  “No,” said Renata. “I know the answer to that one.”

  “It’s rather our minds that have allowed themselves to be convinced that there is no imaginative power to connect every individual to the creation independently.”

  It occurred to me suddenly that Thaxter in his home-on-the-range outfit might as well have been in church and that I was behaving like his minister. This was not a Sunday, but I was in my Palm Court pulpit. As for Renata, smiling—her dark eyes, red mouth, white teeth, smooth throat—though she interrupted and heckled during these sermons she got a kick out of the way I delivered them. I knew her theory well. Whatever was said, whatever was done, either increased or diminished erotic satisfaction, and this was her practical test for any idea. Did it produce a bigger bang? “We could have been at the Scala tonight,” she said, “and part of a brilliant audience hearing Rossini. Instead, do you know what we were doing today, Thaxter? We went out to Coney Island so Charlie could collect his inheritance from his dear dead old pal Humboldt Fleisher. It’s been Humboldt, Humboldt, Humboldt, like ‘Figaro, Figaro.’ Humboldt’s eighty-year-old uncle gave Charlie a bunch of papers, and Charlie read ‘em and wept. Well, for a month now I’ve heard nothing but Humboldt and death and sleep and metaphysics and how the poet is the arbiter of the diverse and Walt Whitman and Emerson and Plato and the World Historical Individual. Charlie is like Lydia the Tattooed Lady, covered with information. You remember that song, ‘You Can Learn a Lot from Lydia’?”

  “Could I see those papers?” said Thaxter.

  “Come with me to Italy tomorrow,” said Renata to me.

  “Darling, I’ll join you there in a few days.”

  The Palm Court Trio, returning, began to play Sigmund Romberg, and Renata said, “Why, it’s four o’clock. I don’t want to miss Deep Throat. It starts at four-twenty.”

  “Yes, and I’ve got to go to the dock,” said Thaxter. “You are coming, aren’t you, Charlie?”

  “I hope to. I’ve got to wait here for Kathleen.”

  “I’ve written out my itinerary for the dictators,” said Thaxter, “so you can get in touch if you have a mind to go to Madrid and start our project. Say the word, and I’ll begin organizing. I know people are giving you the business in Chicago. I’m sure you’ll be needing lots of money. . . .” He glanced at Renata, who was organizing herself to leave. “And there’s real dough in my proposal.”

  “I’ve got to run,” said Renata. “I’ll see you back here later.” She slung the bag over her shoulder and preceded Thaxter across the vast luxurious carpet, part of the Christmas display, a blast of gold within the bristling green, and through the swinging doors.

  thirty

  In her large bag Renata carried off my shoe. I realized this when I looked under the table for it. Gone! She had taken it. By means of this prank she told me how she felt about going to the movies alone while I visited sentimentally with an old friend, recently widowed and possibly available. I couldn’t go upstairs now, Kathleen would arrive any minute, so I sat waiting, feeling the chill in one foot while the music played. Renata in high spirits had symbolic reasons for pinching my loafer; I was hers. Was she correspondingly mine? When she was proprietary I became uneasy. I felt that as soon as she was sure of one man she became free to contemplate her future with another. And I? Evidently I longed most to possess most the woman that threatened me most.

  “Ah, Kathleen, I’m glad to see you,” I said as Kathleen came up. I rose, my peculiar foot missing its peculiar shoe. She kissed me—an old friend’s warm kiss on the cheek. The Nevada sun hadn’t given her an outdoor color. Her fair hair was lighter from the admixture of gray. She hadn’t grown stout but she was fleshier, a big woman. This was only the normal effect of the decades, a slackening and softening and a saddening of the cheeks, an attractive melancholy or hollowing. She had once had pale freckles. Now her face had larger spots. Her upper arms were heavier, her legs were thicker, her back wider, her hair paler. Her dress was black chiffon, thinly trimmed with gold at the neck.

  “Lovely to see you,” I said, for so it was.

  “And to see you, Charlie.”

  She sat down but I remained standing. I said, “I took off a shoe to be more comfortable and now the thing is gone.”

  “How odd. Maybe the busboy took it. Why don’t you try Lost and Found?” So for form’s sake I beckoned to the waiter. I made a distinguished inquiry but then I said, “I’ll have to go up and get another pair.”

  Kathleen offered to come with me but as Renata’s underclothes were all over the floor and the bed was unmade at one corner in a way that I thought baldly telling, I said, “No, no, why don’t you wait for me. This lousy high-toned pimble-pamble music is driving me nuts. I’ll come right down and we’ll go out for a drink. I want to get my coat, anyway.”

  So I went up again in the luxurious cage of the elevator thinking what a bold original Renata was and what a struggle she made continually against the threat of passivity, the universal threat. If I thought it, it had to be universal. I wasn’t fooling around these days. This universalizing was becoming a craze with me, I suspected, as I put on my other pair of shoes. These were light, weightless red shoes from Harrods, a little short in the toe, but admired by the black shoeshine man at the Downtown Club for their weightlessness and style. In these, a little cramped but fine, I went down again.

  This day belonged to Humboldt, it was charged with his spirit. I realized how emotional I was becoming under this influence when, trying to adjust my hat, I felt uncontrollable tremors in my arms. As I approached Kathleen, one side
of my face also twitched. I thought, Old Dr. Galvani has got me. I saw two men, husbands, in their graves, decomposing. This beautiful lady’s affections had not saved them from death. Next a vision of Humboldt’s shade went through my head in the form of a dark gray cloud. His cheeks were fat and the abundant hair was piled on his head. I walked toward Kathleen as the three-piece group played what Renata called “frill-paper cup-cake music.” They had dipped into Carmen now and I said, “Let’s go to a dark, quiet bar. Above all, quiet.” I signed the waiter’s staggering check and Kathleen and I walked up and down in the cold streets until we found an agreeable place on West Fifty-sixth, dark enough for any taste and not too Christmasy.

  We had a lot of catching up to do. First of all we had to speak of poor Tigler. I couldn’t bring myself to say what a nice man he had been, for he hadn’t been nice at all. The old wrangler could stamp his foot like Rumpelstiltskin and flew into tantrums when he was crossed. It gave him keen satisfaction to stick and screw people. He despised them all the more if they were too timid to complain. His dudes, and I had been one of them, got no hot water. The lights went out and they sat in the dark. If they went to Kathleen to beef they came away pitying and forgiving, hating him and loving her. She was not, however, one of my contrast-gainers. Her own merits were clear, this large-limbed pale freckled quiet woman. Her quietness was most important. While Humboldt played the Furious Turk she was his Christian Captive, reading in the book-stuffed cottage parlor set in the barren chicken country while the ruddy sun persisted in trying to force color through the soiled small-framed windows. Then Humboldt ordered her to put on a sweater and come outside. They chased a football like two fair-haired rookies. Staggering backward on clumsy heels he threw passes over the clothesline and through the autumn maples. My recollection of this was complete—how as Kathleen ran to make the catch her voice trailed and she reached out her arms and brought the wagging ball to her bosom, and how she and Humboldt had sat together on the Castro sofa drinking beer. I recalled this so fully that I saw the cats, one with a Hitler mustache, at the window. I heard my own voice. Twice now she had been a sleeping maiden under the spell of demon lovers. “You know what my hillbilly neighbors say,” Humboldt told me, “they say, keep ‘em in their stocking feet. Sometimes,” he said, “I think of Eros and Psyche.” He flattered himself. Eros was beautiful and he came and went in dignity. Where was Hum-boldt’s dignity? He confiscated Kathleen’s driver’s license. He hid the car keys. He wouldn’t allow her to keep a garden because, he said, gardening expressed the Philistine-improving impulse of city people when they bought a dream house in the country. A few tomatoes grew at the kitchen door but these had reseeded themselves when raccoons overturned the garbage cans. He said seriously, “Kathleen and I have mental work to do. Besides, if we had fruits and flowers it would make us conspicuous out here.” He was afraid of sheeted night-riders and of burning crosses in his yard.

  I sympathized greatly with Kathleen because she was a sleeper. I wondered about her dreaminess. Was she born to be kept in the dark? Not to reach consciousness was a condition of Psyche’s bliss. But perhaps there was a more economical explanation. Tigler’s tight denims had revealed an enormous sexual lump in front, and Humboldt, when he pursued Demmie’s friend to her apartment, among the dachshund puppies, had shouted, “I’m a poet, I have a big cock!” But my guess was that Humboldt had the character of a tyrant who wanted a woman to hold still and that his lovemaking was frenzied dictatorship. Even his last letter to me confirmed this interpretation. Still, how was one to know? And a woman without secrets was no woman at all. And probably Kathleen had decided to marry Tigler only because life in Nevada was so lonely. Enough of this ingenious analysis.

  Giving in to my weakness for telling people what they wish to hear, I said to Kathleen, “The West has agreed with you.” It was, however, more or less true.

  “You look well but a little drawn, Charlie.”

  “Life is too vexatious. Maybe I should try the West myself. When the weather was nice I did like lying under the elder trees at your ranch watching the mountains all day long. Anyway, Huggins says you’ve got some sort of job in the picture business and you’re on your way to Europe.”

  “Yes. You were there when that company came out to Volcano Lake to make a movie about Outer Mongolia and all the Indians were hired to ride their ponies.”

  “And Tigler was technical consultant.”

  “And Father Edmund—you remember him, the silent-film-star Episcopal minister—was so excited. Poor Father Edmund never got ordained. He hired somebody to take his written exam in theology and they were caught. It’s too bad because the Indians loved him and they were so proud that his robes were those stars’ negligees. But yes, I’m going to Yugoslavia and then to Spain. Those are big for film-making these days. You can hire Spanish soldiers by the regiment, and Andalusia is perfect for Westerns.”

  “It’s odd that you should mention Spain. I’ve thought of going there myself.”

  “Have you? Well, from March first I’m going to be in the Grand Hotel of Almería. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see you there.”

  “It’s a good change for you,” I said.

  “You always wished me well, Charlie. I know that,” said Kathleen.

  “This has been a big Humboldt day, a major day, an accelerating spiral since this morning and I’m in a very emotional state; At Uncle Waldemar’s nursing home, to add to the excitement, I met a man I’ve known since I was a kid. Now you’re here. I’m all worked up.”

  “I heard from Huggins that you were going to Coney Island. You know, Charlie, there were times in Nevada when I thought you were overdoing your attachment to Humboldt.”

  “That’s possible, and I’ve tried to check it. I ask myself, why so much enthusiasm? As a poet or thinker his record wasn’t all that impressive. And I’m not longing for the good old days. Is it that the number of people who got serious about Art and Thought in the USA is so small that even those who flunked out are unforgettable?” Here we were closer to the real topic. I meant to interpret the good and evil of Humboldt, understand his ruin, translate the sadness of his life, find out why such gifts produced negligible results, and so forth. But these were aims difficult to discuss even when I was flying high, full of affection for Kathleen and of wonderful pangs. “For me he had charm, he had the old magic,” I said.

  “I guess you loved him,” she said. “Of course I was crazy about him. We went to New Jersey—that would have been hell even if he had had no crazy spells. The little cottage seems now like part of a terrible frame-up. But I would have gone to the Arctic with him. And the college girl’s thrill at getting into the literary life was only a small part of it. I didn’t care for most of his literary friends. They came to watch the show Humboldt put on, his routines. When they left, and he was still inspired, he’d go after me. He was a sociable person. He used to say how much he would like to move in brilliant circles, be a part of the literary world.”

  “That’s just it. There never was such a literary world,” I said. “In the nineteenth century there were several solitaries of the highest genius—a Melville or a Poe had no literary life. It was the customhouse and the barroom for them. In Russia, Lenin and Stalin destroyed the literary world. Russia’s situation now resembles ours—poets, in spite of everything against them, emerge from nowhere. Where did Whitman come from, and where did he get what he had? It was W. Whitman, an irrepressible individual, that had it and that did it.”

  “Well, if there had been a rich literary life, and if he had been able to drink tea with Edith Wharton and see Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot twice a week, poor Humboldt would have felt supported and appreciated and rewarded for his talent. He just didn’t feel able to fill up all the vacancy he felt around him,” said Kathleen. “Of course he was a wizard. He made me feel so slow, slow slow! He invented the most ingenious things to accuse me of. All that invention should have gone into his poetry. Humboldt had too many personal arrangements. Too muc
h genius went into the arrangements. As his wife I had to suffer the consequences. But let’s not go on talking about it. Let me ask . . . you two wrote a scenario once. . . ?”

  “Just some nonsense to pass the time in Princeton. You said something about it to that young woman, Mrs. Cantabile. What is Mrs. Cantabile like?”

  “She’s pretty. She’s polite in an old-fashioned Emily Post way, and sends proper notes to thank you for a delicious lunch. At the same time she paints her nails in gaudy colors, wears flashy clothes, and has a harsh voice. When she chats with you she’s screaming. She sounds like a gun-moll but asks graduate-student questions. Anyway I’m getting into the film business now, and I’m curious about something that you and Humboldt did together. After all a successful movie was made of your play.”

  “Oh, our scenario could never have made a picture. Our cast included Mussolini, the Pope, Stalin, Calvin Coolidge, Amundsen, and Nobile. Our hero was a cannibal. We had a dirigible and a Sicilian village. W. C. Fields might have loved it, but only a mad producer would ever have put a penny into it. Of course no one ever does know about these things. In 1913, who would have looked twice at an advance-scenario of World War One? Or if, before I was born, you had submitted the tale of my own life to me and invited me to live with it, wouldn’t I have turned you down flat?”

  “But what about your hit play?”

  “Kathleen, believe me. I was just the worm that spit out the silk thread. Other people created the Broadway garment. Now tell me, what did Humboldt leave you?”

  “Well, first of all, he wrote me an extraordinary letter.”

  “Me too. And a perfectly sane one.”

  “Mine is more mixed. It’s too personal to show, even now. He spelled out all the crimes I was supposed to have committed. His purpose was to forgive me, whatever I had done, but he forgave in full detail and he was still talking about the Rockefellers. But there were patches of perfect sanity. Really moving, true things.”