Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  “Was that all you got from him?”

  “Well, no, Charlie, there was something else he gave me. A document. Another idea for a movie. This is why I was asking you about the thing you two invented in Princeton. Tell me, what did he leave you, apart from this letter?”

  “Astonishing!” I said.

  “What’s astonishing?”

  “What Humboldt did. Sick as he was, dying, decaying, but still so ingenious.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Tell me, Kathleen, is this document, this film idea, about a writer? And does the writer have a domineering wife? And does he also have a beautiful young mistress? And do they take a journey? And does he then write a book he can’t publish?”

  “Ah, yes. I see. Of course. That’s it, Charlie.”

  “What a son of a bitch. How marvelous! He duplicated everything. The same journey with the wife. And the same document for us both.”

  Silent, she studied me. Her mouth moved. She smiled. “Why do you suppose he gave the same gift to each of us?”

  “Are you perfectly sure that we’re his only heirs? Ha-ha, well, let’s drink to his crazy memory. He was a dear man.”

  “Yes, he was a dear man. And how I wish—you think it was all done according to plan?” said Kathleen.

  “Who was it, Alexander Pope, who couldn’t drink a cup of tea without a stratagem? That was Humboldt, too. And he kept dreaming about miraculous money until the end. He was dying and still he wanted to make us both rich. Anyway, if he kept his sense of humor, or traces of it, to the last, that was astonishing. And crazy as he was he wrote two sane letters at least. I’m going to make an odd comparison—Humboldt had to break out of his case of hardened madness to do that. You might say that he had emigrated into this madness long ago. Became a settler there. For us, maybe, he managed a visit to the Old Country. To see his friends once more? And it may have been as hard for him to do it as it might be for someone—myself, for instance—to go from this world to the spirit world. Or, another odd comparison —he made a Houdini escape from the hardened projections of paranoia, or manic depression, or whatever it was. Sleepers do awaken. Exiles and emigrants do make it back, and dying genius can revive. ‘End-of-the-line lucidity,’ he wrote in my letter.”

  “I don’t think at the end he had the strength for two separate gifts, one for each of us,” she said.

  “Or look at it this way,” I said. “He showed us what he had most of—scheming, plotting, and paranoia. He did as much with it as any man could. Don’t you remember the famous Longstaff scheme?”

  “Do you think he might have had anything else in mind?” said Kathleen.

  “One single thing?” I said.

  “A kind of posthumous character test,” she said.

  “He was absolutely sure that my character was hopeless. Yours, too, maybe. Well, he’s given us a very lively moment. Here we are laughing and admiring, and how sad it is. I’m very touched. We both are.”

  Quiet and large, Kathleen was mildly smiling, but the color of her large eyes suddenly changed. Tears came into them. Still she sat passive. That was Kathleen. It was not appropriate to mention this, but possibly Humboldt’s idea was to bring us together. Not to become man and wife necessarily, but perhaps to combine our feelings for him and create a sort of joint memorial. For after he died, we would continue (for a time) to be active in life in this deluded human scene, and perhaps it would be a satisfaction to him and ease the boredom of the grave to think that we were busy with his enterprises. For when a Plato or a Dante or Dostoevski argued for immortality, Humboldt, a deep admirer of these men couldn’t say, “They were geniuses, but we don’t have to take their ideas seriously.” But did he himself take immortality seriously? He didn’t say. What he said was that we were supernatural, not natural. I would have given anything to find out what he meant.

  “These scenarios or treatments are very hard to copyright,” Kathleen explained. “And Humboldt must have gotten professional advice about legal protection. . . . He sealed a copy of his script in an envelope and went to the post office and registered it and had it delivered to himself by registered mail. So that it’s never been opened. We’ve read the duplicates.”

  “That’s right. I have two such sealed envelopes.”

  “Two?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The other is the one we’d dreamed up at Princeton. Now I know how Humboldt was amusing himself in that rotten hotel. He spent his time working all this out in meticulous detail and with ceremonious formalities. That was right up his alley.”

  “Listen, Charles, we must go fifty-fifty,” Kathleen said.

  “Bless you, commercially it’s zero,” I told her.

  “On the contrary,” Kathleen said firmly. I looked again at her, hearing this. It was out of character for Kathleen, normally diffident, to be so positively contradictory. “I submitted this to people in the business and I actually signed a contract and took an option payment of three thousand dollars. Half of that is yours.”

  “You mean that someone has actually paid out money for this?”

  “I had two offers to choose from. I accepted the one from Steinhals Productions. Where shall I send your check?”

  “At the moment I have no address. I’m in transit. But no, Kathleen, I won’t take any of this money.” I was thinking how I would give this news to Renata. She had ridiculed Humboldt’s gift so brilliantly, and on behalf of our vanishing generation, Humboldt’s and mine, I had felt hurt. “And is a script being written?”

  “It’s receiving serious consideration,” said Kathleen. Occasionally her voice soared into a girlish treble. It broke.

  “How interesting. How goofy. A solid mass of improbabilities,” I said. “Although I’ve always been a little proud of my personal oddities, I’ve begun to suspect that they may be only faint images of a thousand real and much more powerful oddities out there, somewhere—that they may not be so personal after all and that maybe this is a general condition. That’s why Humboldt’s burlesque of love and ambition and all the rest of those monkey-shines can sound plausible to business people.”

  “I had good legal advice and my contract with Steinhals is for a minimum of thirty thousand dollars if the option is picked up. We could go over seventy thousand, depending on the budget. We should know in about two months. End of February. And what I feel now, Charlie, is that as joint owners you and I should draw a separate contract.”

  “Now, Kathleen, let’s not add to the unreality of things. No contracts. And I don’t need this money.”

  “I would have thought so too, before today, with everybody talking about your million-dollar fortune. But before you signed the check at the Palm Court you added it twice from top to bottom and again from the bottom. You lost your color. And then I saw you struggling to decide on a tip. Now don’t be embarrassed, Charles.”

  “No, no, Kathleen. I’ve got plenty. It’s only one of my Depression hang-ups. Besides, what a rip-off! It makes old-timers indignant.”

  “But I know you’re being sued. I know what happens when the judges and lawyers get after a man. I haven’t run a Nevada dude ranch for nothing.”

  “Hanging on to money is hard, of course. It’s like clutching an ice cube. And you can’t just make it and then live easy. There’s no such thing. That’s what Humboldt probably didn’t understand. I wonder, did he think money made the difference between success and failure? Then he didn’t understand. When you get money you go through a metamorphosis. And you have to contend with terrific powers inside and out. There’s almost nothing personal in success. Success is always money’s own success.”

  “You’re merely trying to change the subject. You’ve always been a great observer. For years I’ve watched you looking at people cannily. As if you saw them but they didn’t see you. But come now, Charlie, you aren’t the only observer.”

  “Would I be staying at the Plaza if I were going broke?”

  “With a young lady you might, yes.”
<
br />   This large, altered but still handsome woman with the occasionally breaking piercing voice, her cheeks looped inward with attractive melancholy, had been studying me. Her glance, though still a bit averted and oblique from the long habit of passivity, was warm and kindly. I am quickly and deeply touched when people take the trouble to note my situation.

  “I understand you’re on your way to Europe with this lady. So Huggins told me.”

  “True,” I said, “that’s right.” ‘

  “To. . . ?”

  “To what?” I said, “God knows.” I might have told her more. I might have confessed that I no longer took seriously questions taken seriously by many serious people, questions of metaphysics or of politics, wrongly formulated. Was there then any reason why I should have a precise or practical motive for flying to Italy with a beautiful creature? I was pursuing a special tenderness, I was pursuing love and gratification from motives that would have been appropriate thirty years ago. What would it be like to overtake in my sixties what I had longed for in my twenties? What would I do with it when I got it? I had half a mind to open my heart to this fine woman. I believed that I saw signs that she too was coming out of a state of spiritual sleep. We might have discussed lots of fascinating subjects—for instance, why slumber sealed people’s spirits, why waking was so convulsive, and whether she thought that the spirit could move independently of the body and if she felt that there might not be a kind of consciousness that needed no biological footing. I was tempted to tell her that I, personally, had some notion of doing something about the problem of death. I considered whether to discuss with her seriously the assignment set for writers by Walt Whitman, who was convinced that democracy would fail unless its poets gave it great poems of death. I felt that Kathleen was a woman to whom I could talk. But the position was an embarrassing one. An old chaser who had lost his head over a beautiful gold-digging palooka, a romancer who was going to fulfill the dreams of his youth, suddenly wanting to discuss supersensible consciousness and democracy’s great poem of death! Come, Charlie, let’s not make the world queerer than it already is. It was precisely because Kathleen was a woman to whom I could talk that I kept silent. Out of respect. I thought I would wait until I had considered all these questions more ripely, until I knew more.

  She said, “I’ll be at the Metropol in Belgrade next week. Let’s stay in touch. I’m going to have a contract drawn, and I’ll sign it and send it to you.”

  “No, no, let’s not bother.”

  “Why, because I’m a widow you won’t accept your own money from me? But I don’t want your share. Think of it that way.”

  She was a kind woman. And she recognized the truth—I was spending big money on Renata and I was quickly going broke.

  thirty-one

  My dear, why did you steal my shoe?”

  “I couldn’t resist,” said great Renata. “How did you hobble upstairs on one shoe? What did your friend think? I bet it was a riot. Charlie, humor is a bond we have. That I know for a fact.”

  Humor had an edge over love in this relationship. My character and my ways entertained Renata. This entertainment was so extensive that I thought it might merge by degrees with love. For I didn’t under any circumstances propose to do without love.

  “You also took off my boot under the table in Paris.”

  “Yes, that was the night that horrible fellow told you how worthless your Legion ribbon was and put you in a class with garbage collectors and pig breeders. It was like revenge, consolation, kicks, all at the same time,” said Renata. “Do you remember what I said afterward, that I thought was so funny?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “What did I say, Charlie?”

  “You said, to air it is human.”

  “To air it is human, to bare it divine.” All made up, dark-haired and dressed in a crimson traveling costume, she laughed. “Oh, Charlie, give up this dumb trip to Texas. I need you in Milan. It isn’t going to be easy for me with Biferno. Your brother doesn’t want your visit and you don’t owe him anything. You love him but he bullies you, and you have no defenses against bullies. You go to them with an aching heart and they always kick you in the ass. You know and I know what he’s going to think. He’s going to think that you’re flying down at a tender moment to con him into putting you in one of his profitable deals. Let me ask you something, Charlie, will he be partly right? I don’t want to pry into your present situation, but I suspect you may need a break financially right now. There’s one thing more: it’ll be nip and tuck between you and his wife as to who has the right to be chief mourner if something happens, and why should he want to face both of his chief mourners just as he goes under the knife? In short, you’re wasting your time. Come with me. I dream of marrying you in Milan under my true maiden name, Biferno, with my real father giving me away.”

  I wanted to humor Renata. She deserved to have things her way. We were at Kennedy now and, in her incomparable hat and the suède maxi-coat, her Hermès scarves, her elegant boots, she was no more to be privately possessed than the Tower of Pisa. And yet she claimed her private rights, the right to an identity-problem, the right to a father, a husband. How silly, what a comedownl However, from the next hierarchical level, and to an invisible observer, I might appear to be making similar claims to order, rationality, prudence, and other middle-class things.

  “Let’s have a drink in the VIP Lounge. I don’t want to drink where it’s so noisy and the glasses are sticky.”

  “But I don’t belong any more.”

  “Charles,” she said, “there is that guy Zitterbloom—the one who lost you twenty thousand dollars in oil wells a year ago when he was supposed to be buying you tax shelter. Get him on the phone and have him fix it. He suggested it himself last year. ‘Anytime at all, Charlie.’ “

  “You make me feel like the fisherman in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the one whose wife sent him to the seashore to ask the magic fish for a palace.”

  “Watch how you talk. I’m no nag,” she said. “We have a right to our last drink with a little class, not pushed around by a lousy crowd.”

  So I telephoned Zitterbloom, whose secretary easily arranged the matter. It made me think how much a man might salvage from his defeats and losses if he wanted to put his mind to it. In a gloomy farewell spirit, I sipped my bloody mary, thinking what a risk I was running for my brother’s sake and how little he would appreciate it. Still, I must have confidence in Renata. Ideal manhood demanded it and practical judgment would have to live with the demand of ideal manhood. I did not, however, wish to be asked on the spot to predict how it would all come out, for if I had to predict, everything would disappear in a whirlwind. “What about a bottle of ‘Ma Griffe,’ duty-free?” she said. I bought her a large-sized bottle, saying, “They’ll deliver it on the plane and I won’t be there to smell it.”

  “Don’t you worry, we’re going to save everything for the reunion. Don’t let your brother fix you up with women in Texas.”

  “That would be about the last thing on his mind. But what about you, Renata, when was the last time you spoke with Flonzaley?”

  “You can forget Flonzaley. We’ve made a clean break. He’s a nice man, but I can’t go along with the undertaking business.”

  “He’s very rich,” I said.

  “He’s worth his wreaths in wraiths,” she said, in the style I loved her for. “As president he doesn’t have to handle corpses any more but I can never help remembering his embalming background. Of course I don’t hold with this guy Fromm, when he says how necrophilia has crept up on civilization. To be perfectly serious, Charlie, with a build like mine if I don’t stay strictly normal where am I at?”

  I was quite sad, nevertheless, wondering what part of the truth she was telling me and even whether we would see each other again. But despite the many pressures I was under I felt that I was making progress spiritually. At the best of times, separations and departures unnerve me and I experienced great anxiety now but felt I had somethin
g reliable within.

  “So good-by, darling. I’ll phone you from Milan tomorrow in Texas,” said Renata, and we kissed many times. She seemed on the point of crying, but there were no tears.

  I walked through the TWA tunnel, like an endless arched gullet or a corridor in an expressionistic film, and then I was searched for weapons and got on a plane to Houston. All the way to Texas I read occult books. There were many stirring passages in them, to which I shall come back in a while. I reached Corpus Christi in the afternoon and checked into a motel. Then I went over to Julius’s house, which was large and new and surrounded by palms and jacarandas and loquats and lemon trees. The lawns looked artificial, like green excelsior or packing material. Expensive automobiles were parked in the driveway, and when I rang the bell there was a great gonging and tolling and dogs began to bark inside. The security arrangements were elaborate. Heavy locks were undone and then my sister-in-law, Hortense, opened the wide door covered with Polynesian carvings. She hollered at the dogs but with underlying affection. Then she turned to me. She was a blunt, decent person with blue eyes and chub lips. A bit blinded by the smoke of her own cigarette, which she did not remove from her mouth, she said, “Charles! How did you get here?”

  “Hired a car from Avis. How are you, Hortense?”

  “Julius is expecting you. He’s dressing. Go on in.”

  The dogs were not much smaller than horses. She restrained them and I went toward the master bedroom, greeting the chil-dren, my nephews, who answered nothing. I wasn’t altogether sure that for them I was a full member of the family. Entering, I found Ulick, my brother, in candy-striped boxer shorts reaching to his knees. “I thought that must be you, Chuckie,” he said.

  “Well, Ulick, here we are,” I said. He did not look well. His belly was large and his titties were pointed. Between them grew profuse gray silk. He was, however, in full control, as usual. His long head was masterful with its straight nose and well-barbered smooth white hair, the commanding mustache and witty, hard-glinting pouchy eyes. He had always worn roomy shorts, he liked them better. Mine were as a rule shorter and snugger. He gave me one of his undershot glances. A whole lifetime was between us. With me it was continuous, but Ulick was the sort of man who wanted to renegotiate the terms again and again. Nothing was to be assumed permanently. The brotherly emotions I brought with me mystified and embarrassed him, flattered him, and filled him with suspicion. Was I a nice fellow? Was I really innocent? And was I really any good? Ulick had, with me, the difficulties of a final determination which I myself had with Thaxter.