Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  “Will they settle with you? They should. You’ve got a real case against them, haven’t you?”

  “I die when I think of a lawsuit. Ten more years in the courts? That would be worth fees of four or five hundred thousand to my lawyers. But for me, a man approaching sixty and heading for seventy, there wouldn’t be a penny left. I’ll take my forty or fifty thousand now.”

  “Like a mere nuisance claim?” said Kathleen, indignant.

  “No, like a man lucky enough to have his higher activities subsidized for a few years. I’ll divide the money with Uncle Waldemar, of course. Kathleen, when I heard of Humboldt’s will I thought it was just his posthumous way of carrying on more of the same touching tomfoolery. But the legal steps he took were all sound and he was right, damn it, about the value of his papers. He always had a wild hope of hitting the big time. And what do you know? He did! And it wasn’t his serious work that the world found a use for. Just these capers.”

  “Also your capers,” said Kathleen. When she smiled quietly she showed a great many small lines in her skin. I was sorry to see these signs of age in a woman whose beauty I remembered so well. But you could live with such things if you took the right view of them. After all, these wrinkles were the result of many many many years of amiability. They were the mortal toll taken by a good thing. I was beginning to understand how one might be reconciled to such alterations. “But to be taken seriously, what do you suppose Humboldt should have done?”

  “How can I say that, Kathleen? He did what he could, and lived and died more honorably than most. Being crazy was the conclusion of the joke Humboldt tried to make out of his great disappointment. He was so intensely disappointed. All a man of that sort really asks for is a chance to work his heart out at some high work. People like Humboldt—they express a sense of life, they declare the feelings of their times or they discover meanings or find out the truths of nature, using the opportunities their time offers. When those opportunities are great, then there’s love and friendship between all who are in the same enterprise. As you can see in Haydn’s praise for Mozart. When the opportunities are smaller, there’s spite and rage, insanity. I’ve been attached to Humboldt for nearly forty years. It’s been an ecstatic connection. The hope of having poetry—the joy of knowing the kind of man that created poetry. You know? There’s the most extraordinary, unheard-of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it. But now this is true of the world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. Now I begin to understand what Tolstoi was getting at when he called on mankind to cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live. It’s become clearer and clearer to me in Humboldt’s heartbreak and madness. He performed all the stormy steps of that routine. That performance was conclusive. That—it’s perfectly plain, now—can’t be continued. Now we must listen in secret to the sound of the truth that God puts into us.”

  “And that’s what you call the higher activity—and this is what the money you get from Caldofreddo will subsidize. ... I see,” said Kathleen.

  “On the assumption commonly made the commonest events of life can only be absurd. Faith was called absurd. But now faith will perhaps move these mountains of commonsense absurdity.”

  “I was going to suggest that you leave Madrid and come down to Almería.”

  “I see. You’re worried about me. I look bad.”

  “Not exactly. But I can tell you’ve been under a huge strain. It’ll be pleasant weather on the Mediterranean now.”

  “The Mediterranean, yes. How I’d love a month of blessed peace. But I haven’t got much money to maneuver with.”

  “You’re broke? I thought you were loaded.”

  “I’ve been unloaded.”

  “It was bad of me then not to send the fifteen hundred dollars. I assumed it would be a trifle.”

  “Well, until a few months ago it was a trifle. Can you find something for me to do in Almería?”

  “You wouldn’t want that.”

  “I don’t know what ‘that’ is.”

  “To take a job in this picture—Memoirs of a Cavalier. Based on Defoe. There are sieges and such.”

  “I’d wear a costume?”

  “It’s not for you, Charlie.”

  “Why not? Listen, Kathleen. If I may speak good English for a moment. . . ,”

  “Be my guest.”

  “To efface the faults or remedy the defects of five decades I’m prepared to try anything. I am not too good to work in the movies. You little know how much it would please me to be an extra in this historical picture. Could I wear boots and bloomers? A casque, or a hat with plumes? It would do me a world of good.”

  “Wouldn’t it be too distracting, mentally? You have . . . things to do.”

  “If these things I have to do can’t find their way around those mountains of absurdity there’s no hope for them. It’s not as though my mind were free, you know. I worry about my daughters, and I worry terribly about my friend Thaxter. He was kidnaped by Argentine terrorists.”

  “I wondered about him,” said Kathleen. “I read it in the Herald-Tribune. Is that the same Mr. Thaxter I met in the Plaza? He wore a ten-gallon hat and asked me to come back later. Your name was mentioned in the article. He appealed to you for help.”

  “I’m upset by this. Poor Thaxter. If the scenarios do earn money I may have to pay it out to ransom him. I don’t care too much. My own romance with wealth is over. What I intend to do now isn’t very expensive. . . .”

  “You know, Charles, Humboldt used to say wonderful things. You remind me of that. Tigler was lots of fun. He was an active, engaging person. We were always out hunting and fishing—doing something. But he wasn’t much for conversation and nobody has talked to me like this in a long, long, long time, and I’m out of listening practice. I love it when you sound off. But it isn’t very clear to me.”

  “I’m not surprised, Kathleen. It’s my fault. I talk too much to myself. But human beings are far too deep in that false unnecessary comedy of history—in events, in developments, in politics. The common crisis is real enough. Read the papers—all that criminality and filth, murder, perversity, and horror. We can’t get enough of it—we call it the human thing, the human scale.”

  “But what else is there?”

  “A different scale. I know Walt Whitman compared us unfavorably to the animals. They don’t whine about their condition. I see his point. I used to spend lots of time watching sparrows. I always adored sparrows. I do to this day. I spend hours in the park watching them bob and hop around and take dust baths. But I know they have less mental life than apes do. Orangutans are very charming. An orangutan friend sharing my apartment would make me very happy. But I know that he would understand less than Humboldt did. The question is this: why should we assume that the series ends with us? The fact is, I suspect, that we occupy a point within a great hierarchy that goes far far beyond ourselves. The ruling premises deny this. We feel suffocated and don’t know why. The existence of a soul is beyond proof under the ruling premises, but people go on behaving as though they had souls, nevertheless. They behave as if they came from another place, another life, and they have impulses and desires that nothing in this world, none of our present premises, can account for. On the ruling premises the fate of humankind is a sporting event, most ingenious. Fascinating. When it doesn’t become boring. The specter of boredom is haunting this sporting conception of history.”

  Kathleen again said that she had missed conversations of this kind in her married life with Tigler, the horse-wrangler. She certainly hoped I would come to Almería and work as a halberdier. “It’s such an agreeable town.”

  “I’m about ready to get out of the pensión, too. People are breathing down my neck. But I’d better stay in Madrid so that I can keep track of everything—Thaxter, Paris. I may even have to go back to France for a while. I now have two attorneys there and th
at’s double trouble.”

  “You haven’t much confidence in lawyers.”

  “Well, Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer and I always venerated him. But he’s nothing now but a name they put on license plates in the state of Illinois.”

  There was, however, no need to go to Paris. A letter came from Stewart, the publisher.

  He wrote: “I see you haven’t followed the papers for some time. It’s true that Pierre Thaxter was abducted in Argentina. How or why or whether he’s still in their hands I’m in no position to say. But I tell you in confidence, since you’re his old pal, that it all puzzles me and sometimes I wonder if it’s really on the level. Mind you, I don’t care to suggest that it’s a phony kidnap, out-and-out. I’m ready to believe that the people who grabbed Thaxter off the sidewalk were convinced of his importance. Nor is there any indication of a prearranged snatching as may possibly have been the case with Miss Hearst and the Sym-bionese. But I enclose an article from the Op Ed page of The New York Times by our friend Thaxter. It’s supposed to have been sent from the secret place or dungeon where they keep him. How come, I ask you, was he able to write and send to the Times this little essay on being kidnaped? Perhaps you will note, as I did, that he even makes a pitch for ransom funds. I am told that sympathetic readers have already sent checks to the US Embassy in Argentina to reunite him with his nine children. Far from being harmed, he is even crashing the big time and, if I’m not mistaken, the experience has also sharpened his literary style. This is publicity beyond price. Your guess that he may have fallen into a gold mine is probably correct. If his neck isn’t broken, he’ll be rich and famous.”

  Thaxter wrote, in part, “Three men held pistols to my head as I was leaving a restaurant in a busy street in Buenos Aires. In these three muzzles I saw the vanity of all the mental strategies for outwitting violence that I had ever entertained. Until that moment I had never realized how very often a modern man anticipates this critical moment. My head, now perhaps about to be blown open, had been full of schemes for saving myself. As I got into the waiting car I thought, I’m done for. I was not subjected to physical abuse. It soon became apparent that I was in the hands of sophisticated individuals advanced in their political thinking and utterly devoted to the principles of liberty and justice as they understood them. My captors believe that they have a case to present to civilized opinion and have chosen me to state it for them, having ascertained that I was sufficiently well known as an essayist and journalist to command attention.” (Even now he gave himself a plug.) “As guerrillas and terrorists they would like it known that they are not heartless and irresponsible fanatics but that they have a high tradition of their own. They invoke Lenin and Trotsky as founders and builders who discovered that force was their indispensable instrument. They know the classics of this tradition, from nineteenth-century Russia to twentieth-century France. I have been brought up from the cellar to attend seminars on Sorel and Jean-Paul Sartre. These people are, in their own fashion, most high principled and serious. They have, furthermore, the quality to which Garcia Lorca applied the term Duende, an inner power which burns the blood like powdered glass, a spiritual intensity that does not suggest, but commands.”

  I met Kathleen at a café and showed her the clippings. There was more in the same vein. I said, “Thaxter has a terrible weakness for making major statements. I think I might just ask for the three guns to be applied to the back of my head and the triggers pulled rather than sit through those seminars.”

  “Don’t be too hard on him. The man is saving his life,” she said. “Also it’s a fascinating thing, really. Where does he make the ransom pitch?”

  “Here. ‘... a price of fifty thousand dollars which I am allowed to take this occasion to request my friends and members of my family to contribute. In the hope of seeing my young children again,’ and so forth. The Times treats its readers to plenty of thrills. That’s a really pampered public that gets the Op Ed page.”

  “I don’t suppose that the terrorists would get him to write an apology to world opinion and then bump him off,” she said.

  “Well, it wouldn’t be a hundred percent consistent. Who knows what those fellows will do. But I am a bit relieved. I think he’s going to be all right.”

  Kathleen had questioned me closely, asking what I would like to do if Thaxter were out of the woods, if life became calmer and more settled. I answered her that I would probably spend a month at Dornach, near Basel, at the Swiss Steiner Center, the Goetheanum. Perhaps I could rent a house there where Mary and Lish could spend the summer with me.

  “You should get quite a lot of money from the Caldofreddo people,” she said. “And it seems that Thaxter is wiggling out of it, if he ever was really in it. For all you know he’s free now.”

  “That’s right. I still intend to split with Uncle Waldemar and give him Humboldt’s full share.”

  “And how much would you estimate the settlement to be?”

  “Oh, thirty thousand dollars,” I said, “forty at the most.”

  But this guess was far too conservative. Barbash ended by bidding the producers up to eighty thousand dollars. They paid five thousand also to read Humboldt’s scenario and eventually took an option on that as well. “They couldn’t afford to pass it by,” said Barbash, on the telephone. Cantabile was at that moment in the lawyer’s office, talking loudly and urgently. “Yes, he’s with me,” said Barbash. “He’s the most difficult bastard I ever had to deal with. He went over my head, he’s been noisy, and lately he’s begun to make threats. He’s a real pain in the ass and if he weren’t your authorized representative, Mr. Citrine, I’d have thrown him out long ago. Let me pay his ten percent and get him off my back.”

  “Mr. Barbash, you have my permission to disburse his eight thousand dollars immediately,” I said. “What sort of terms are being offered for the second scenario?”

  “They started at fifty thousand. But I argued that it was obvious the late Mr. Fleisher really had something. Contemporary, you know what I mean? Just the stuff the public was hungry for right now. You may have it yourself, Mr. Citrine. If you don’t mind my saying so, I believe you shouldn’t quit now. If you want to write the screenplay for the new vehicle I can make you one hell of a deal. Would you do it for two thousand a week?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not interested, Mr. Barbash. I have other plans.”

  “What a pity. Won’t you reconsider? They’ve asked many times.”

  “No thanks. No, I’m engaged in a very different kind of activity,” I said.

  “What about consultation?” said Mr. Barbash. “These people have got nothing but money and they’d be glad to pay twenty thousand bucks just because you understood the mind of Von Humboldt Fleisher. Caldofreddo is sweeping the world.”

  “Don’t say no to everything.” This was Cantabile who had taken the phone. “And listen, Charlie, I should get a cut on the other thing because if it wasn’t for me none of this would have started. Besides, you owe me for planes, taxis, hotels, and meals.”

  “Mr. Barbash will settle your bill,” I said. “Now go away, Cantabile, our relationship has drawn to a close. Let’s become strangers again.”

  “Oh, you ungrateful, intellectual, ass-hole bastard,” he said.

  Barbash recovered the phone. “Where shall we be in touch? Are you staying in Madrid for a while?”

  “I may fly down to Almería for a week or so, and then return to the USA,” I said. “I’ve got a houseful of things in Chicago to dispose of. Children to see, and I’ve got to talk to Mr. Fleisher’s uncle. When I’ve taken care of these necessary items and tied up a few loose ends I’m coming back to Europe. To take up a different kind of life,” I added.

  Inquire a little and I’ll tell you all. I was still explaining myself in full to people who couldn’t have cared less.

  forty-one

  So this this was how, in warm April, it happened that Waldemar Wald and I, together with Menasha Klinger, reburied Humboldt and his mother side by si
de in new graves at the Valhalla Cemetery. I took a very sad pleasure in doing this handsomely, in real style. Humboldt had been buried not in potter’s field but far out in Deathsville, New Jersey, one of those vast, necropolitan developments described by Koffritz, Renata’s first husband, to old Myron Swiebel in the steam room of the Division Street Bath. “They cheat,” he had said about those places, “they skimp, they don’t give the statutory number of feet. You lie there with your legs up, short-sheeted. Aren’t you entitled to a full stretch for eternity?”

  Investigating, I found that Humboldt’s funeral had been arranged by someone at the Belisha Foundation. Some sensitive person there, subordinate to Longstaff, recalling that Humboldt had once been an employee, had gotten him out of the morgue and had given him a send-off from the Riverside Chapel.

  So Humboldt was exhumed and brought in a new casket over the George Washington Bridge. I had stopped for the old boys at their recently rented flat on the Upper West Side. A woman came to cook and clean for them and they were properly fixed up. Turning over a large sum to Uncle Waldemar made me uneasy and I told him so. He answered, “Charlie, my boy, listen —all the horses I ever knew became spooks years ago. And I wouldn’t even know how to contact a bookie. It’s all Puerto Rican up there in the old neighborhood now. Anyway, Menasha is keeping an eye on me. I want to tell you, kid, not many younger fellows would have given me the full split the way you did. If anything is left over at the end, you’ll get it back.”

  We waited in the hired limousine at the New York end of the cabled bridge, the Hudson before us, till the hearse crossed over and we followed it to the cemetery. A blustery day might have been easier to tolerate than this heavy watered-silk blue close day. In the cemetery we wound about among dark trees. These should have been giving shade already but they stood brittle and schematic among the graves. For Humboldt’s mother a new coffin also was provided, and this was already in position, ready to be lowered. Two attendants were opening the hearse as we came around to the back, moving slowly. Waldemar was wearing all the mourning he could find in his gambler’s wardrobe. Hat, trousers, and shoes were black, but his sport coat had large red houndstooth checks and in the sunshine of a delayed overwarm spring the fuzz was shining. Menasha, sad, smiling in thick glasses, felt his way over grass and gravel, his feet all the more cautious because he was looking up into the trees. He couldn’t have been seeing much, a few sycamores and elms and birds and the squirrels coming and going in their fits-and-starts fashion. It was a low moment. There was a massive check threatened, as if a general strike against nature might occur. What if blood should not circulate, if food should not digest, breath fail to breathe, if the sap should not overcome the heaviness of the trees? And death, death, death, death, like so many stabs, like murder—the belly, the back, the breast and heart. This was a moment I could scarcely bear. Humboldt’s coffin was ready to move. “Pallbearers?” said one of the funeral directors. He looked the three of us over. Not much manpower here. Two old fuddyduddies and a distracted creature not far behind them in age. We took honorific positions along the casket. I held a handle—my first contact with Humboldt. There was very little weight within. Of course I no longer believed that any human fate could be associated with such remains and superfluities. The bones were very possibly the signature of spiritual powers, the projection of the cosmos in certain calcium formations. But perhaps even such elegant white shapes, thigh bones, ribs, knuckles, skull, were gone. Exhuming, the grave diggers might have shoveled together certain tatters and sooty lumps of human origin, not much of the charm, the verve and feverish invention, the calamity-making craziness of Humboldt. Humboldt, our pal, our nephew and brother, who loved the Good and the Beautiful, and one of whose slighter inventions was entertaining the public on Third Avenue and the Champs-Elysées and earning, at this moment, piles of dollars for everyone.