Humboldt's Gift

by Saul Bellow

  So on this morning I was wiped out as an urban psychologist. I recognized that it hadn’t been psychology but only swagger, or perhaps protective magic. I knew that what you needed in a big American city was a deep no-affect belt, a critical mass of indifference. Theories also were very useful in the building of such a protective mass. The idea, anyway, was to ward off trouble. But now the moronic inferno had caught up with me. My elegant car, my shimmering silver motor tureen which I had had no business to buy—a person like me, hardly stable enough to drive this treasure—was mutilated. Everything! The delicate roof with its sliding panel, the fenders, hood, trunk, doors, locks, lights, the smart radiator emblem had been beaten and clubbed. The shatterproof windows had held up, but they looked spat on all over. The windshield was covered with white fracture-blooms. It had suffered a kind of crystalline internal hemorrhage. Appalled, I nearly broke down, I felt like swooning.

  Someone had done to my car as rats, I had heard, did when they raced through warehouses by the thousands and tore open sacks of flour for the hell of it. I felt a similar rip at my heart. The machine belonged to a time when my income was in excess of a hundred thousand dollars. Such an income had attracted the attention of the 1RS, which now examined all my returns, yearly. I had set out this morning to see William Murra, that well-dressed marvelous smooth expert, the CPA who was defending me in two cases against the federal government. Although my income had now dropped to its lowest level in many years they were still after me.

  I had really bought this Mercedes 280-SL because of my friend Renata. When she saw the Dodge compact I was driving when we met she said, “What kind of car is this for a famous man? There’s some kind of mistake.” I tried to explain to her that I was too susceptible to the influence of things and people to drive an eighteen-thotisand-dollar automobile. You had to live up to such a grand machine, and consequently you were not yourself at the wheel. But Renata dismissed this. She said that I didn’t know how to spend money, that I neglected myself, and that I shirked the potentialities of my success and was afraid of it. She was an interior decorator by trade, and style or panache came natural to her. Suddenly I got the idea. I went into what I called an Antony and Cleopatra mood. Let Rome in Tiber melt. Let the world know that such a mutual pair could wheel through Chicago in a silver Mercedes, the engines ticking like wizard-made toy millipedes and subtler than a Swiss Accutron—no, an Audemars Piguet with jeweled Peruvian butterfly wings! In other words, I had allowed the car to become an extension of my own self (on the folly and vanity side), so that an attack on it was an attack on myself. It was a moment terribly fertile in reactions.

  How could such a thing happen on a public street? The noise must have been louder than rivet guns. Of course the lessons of jungle guerrilla tactics were being applied in all the great cities of the world. Bombs were exploding in Milan and London. Still, mine is a relatively quiet Chicago neighborhood. I was parked around the corner from my high-rise, in a narrow side street. But wouldn’t the doorman have heard such clattering in the middle of the night? No, people generally hide under the covers when there are disturbances. Hearing pistol shots they say, “Backfire,” to one another. As for the night-man he locks up at 1 a.m. and washes the floors. He changes in the cellar into a gray denim suit saturated with sweat. Entering the lobby late you smell the combined odors of soap powder and the musk of his denims (like rotting pears). No, the criminals who battered my car would have had no problems with the doorman. Nor with the police. As soon as the squad car had passed, knowing that it wouldn’t return for fifteen minutes, they had jumped out of hiding and fallen on my car with bats, clubs, or hammers.

  I knew perfectly well who was responsible for this. I had been warned over and over again. Late at night the phone often rang. Stumbling toward consciousness I picked it up and even before I could bring it to my ear I already heard my caller yelling, “Citrine! You! Citrine!”

  “Yes? Yes, this is Citrine. Yes?”

  “You son of a bitch. Pay me. Look what you’re doing to me.”

  “Doing to you?”

  “To me! Fucking-A-right. The check you stopped was to me. Make good, Citrine. Make that lousy check good. Don’t force me to do something.”

  “I was fast asleep—”

  “I’m not sleeping, why should you be?”

  “I’m trying to wake up, Mr.—”

  “No names! All we have to talk about is a stopped check. No names! Four hundred and fifty bucks. That’s our only subject.”

  These gangster threats in the night against me—me! of all people! a peculiar soul and, in my own mind, almost comically innocent—made me laugh. My way of laughing has often been criticized. Well-disposed people are amused by it. Others can be offended.

  “Don’t laugh,” said my night caller. “Knock it off. That’s not a normal sound. Anyhow, who the hell do you think you’re laughing at? Listen, Citrine, you lost the dough to me in a poker game. You’ll say it was just a family evening, or you were drunk, but that’s a lot of crap. I took your check, and I won’t hold still for a slap in the face.”

  “You know why I stopped payment. You and your buddy were cheating.”

  “Did you see us?”

  “The host saw. George Swiebel swears you were flashing cards to each other.”

  “Why didn’t he speak up, that dumb prick. He should have thrown us out.”

  “He may have been afraid to tackle you.”

  “Who, that health fiend, with all the color in his face? For Christ sake he looks like an apple, with all that jogging five miles a day, and the vitamins I saw in his medicine chest. There were seven, eight people at the game. They could have bounced us. Your friend has no guts.”

  I said, “Well, it wasn’t a good evening. I was high, though you don’t believe it. Nobody was rational. Everyone was out of character. Let’s be sensible.”

  “What, I have to hear from my bank about your stop order, which is like a kick in the ass, and then be sensible? You think I’m a punk? It was a mistake to get into all that talk about education and colleges. I saw the look you gave when I told the name of the cow-college I went to.”

  “What’s colleges got to do with it?”

  “Don’t you understand what you’re doing to me? You’ve written all that stuff. You’re in Who’s Who. But you dumb asshole you don’t understand anything.”

  “At two in the morning it’s hard for me to understand. Can’t we meet in the daytime when my head is clear?”

  “No more talk. Talk is finished.”

  He said this many times, however. I must have received ten such calls from Rinaldo Cantabile. The late Von Humboldt Fleisher had also used the dramatic properties of night to bully and harass people.

  George Swiebel had ordered me to stop the check. My friendship with George goes back to the fifth grade, and to me such pals are a sacred category. I have been warned often against this terrible weakness or dependency on early relationships. Once an actor, George had given up the stage decades ago and become a contractor. He was a wide-built fellow with a ruddy color. There was nothing subdued about his manner, his clothing, his personal style. For years he had been my self-designated expert on the underworld. He kept me informed about criminals, whores, racing, the rackets, narcotics, politics, and Syndicate operations. Having been in radio and television and journalism, his connections were unusually extensive, “from putrid, to pure,” he would say. And I was well up among the pure. I make no such claims for myself. This is to explain how George saw me.

  “You lost that money at my kitchen table, and you’d better listen,” he said. “Those punks were cheating.”

  “Then you should have called them on it. Cantabile has a point.”

  “He’s got nothing, and he’s nobody. If he owed you three bucks, you’d have to chase him for it. Also he was spaced out on drugs.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “You didn’t notice anything. I gave you the high sign a dozen times.”

 
“I didn’t see. I can’t remember. , . .”

  “Cantabile was working on you every minute. He snowed you. He was smoking pot. He was talking art and culture and psychology and the Book-of-the-Month Club and bragging about his educated wife. You bet every hand you were dealt. And every single subject I ever asked you not to mention you were discussing freely.”

  “George, these night calls of his are wearing me down. I’ll pay him. Why not? I pay everybody. I have to get rid of this creep.”

  “No pay!” Trained as an actor, George had learned to swell his voice theatrically, to glare, to seem startled and to have a startling effect. He shouted at me, “Charlie, you listen!”

  “But I’m dealing with a gangster.”

  “There are no Cantabiles in the rackets any more. They all got thrown out years ago. I told you… .”

  “He puts on a damned good imitation then. At two a.m. I’m convinced that he’s a real hoodlum.”

  “He’s seen The Godfather or something, and he’s grown a dago mustache. He’s only a confused big-mouth kid and a dropout. I shouldn’t have let him and his cousin into the house. Now you forget this. They were playing gangster and they cheated. I tried to stop you giving him the check. Then I made you stop payment. I won’t let you give in. Anyhow, the whole thing— take it from me—is over.”

  So I submitted. I couldn’t challenge George’s judgment. Now Cantabile had hit my car with everything he had. The blood left my heart when I saw what he had done. I dropped back against the building for support. I had gone out one evening to amuse myself in vulgar company and I had fallen into the moronic inferno.

  Vulgar company was not my own expression. What I was in fact hearing was the voice of my ex-wife. It was Denise who used terms like “common clay” and “vulgar company.” The fate of my poor Mercedes would have given her very deep satisfaction. This was something like war, and she had an intensely martial personality. Denise hated Renata, my lady friend. She correctly identified Renata with this automobile. And she loathed George Swiebel. George, however, took a complex view of Denise. He said that she was a great beauty but not altogether human. Certainly Denise’s huge radial amethyst eyes in combination with a low-lined forehead and sharp sibylline teeth supported this interpretation. She is exquisite, and terribly fierce. Down-to-earth George is not without myths of his own, especially where women are concerned. He has Jungian views, which he expresses coarsely. He has fine feelings which frustrate him because they fiddle his heart, and he overreacts grossly. Anyway, Denise would have laughed with happiness at the sight of this ruined car. And I? You would have thought that being divorced I had escaped the marital “I-told-you-so.” But here I was, supplying it myself.

  For Denise continually spoke to me about myself. She would say, “I just can’t believe the way you are. The man who’s had all those wonderful insights, the author of all these books, respected by scholars and intellectuals all over the world. I sometimes have to ask myself, ‘Is that my husband? The man I know?’ You’ve lectured at the great Eastern universities and had grants and fellowships and honors. De Gaulle made you a knight of the Legion of Honor and Kennedy invited us to the White House. You had a successful play on Broadway. Now what the hell do you think you’re doing? Chicago! You hang around with your old Chicago school chums, with freaks. It’s a kind of mental suicide, death wish. You’ll have nothing to do with really interesting people, with architects or psychiatrists or university professors. I tried to make a life for you when you insisted on moving back here. I put myself out. You wouldn’t have London or Paris or New York, you had to come back to this—this deadly, ugly, vulgar, dangerous place. Because at heart you’re a kid from the slums. Your heart belongs to the old West Side gutters. I wore myself out being a hostess… .”

  There were large grains of truth in all of this. My old mother’s words for Denise would have been “Edel, gebildet, gelassen,” for Denise was an upper-class person. She grew up in Highland Park. She went to Vassar College. Her father, a federal judge, also came from the West Side Chicago gutters. His father had been a precinct captain under Morris Eller in the stormy days of Big Bill Thompson. Denise’s mother had taken the judge when he was a mere boy, only the son of a crooked politician, and straightened him out and cured him of his vulgarity. Denise had expected to do as much with me. But oddly enough her paternal inheritance was stronger than the maternal. On days when she was curt and tough, in her high tense voice you heard that old precinct captain and bagman, her grandfather. Because of this background, perhaps, she hated George fiercely. “Don’t bring him to the house,” she said. “I can’t bear to see his ass on my sofa, his feet on my rug.” Denise said, “You’re like one of those overbred race horses that must have a goat in his stall to calm his nerves. George Swiebel is your billy goat.”

  “He’s a good friend to me, an old friend.”

  “Your weakness for your school chums isn’t to be believed. You have the nostalgie de la boue. Does he take you around to the whores?”

  I tried to give a dignified answer. But as a matter of fact I wanted the conflict to increase, and I provoked Denise. On the maid’s night out I once brought George home to dinner. Maid’s night out threw Denise into an anguish of spirit. Housework was insufferable. It killed her to have to cook. She wanted to go to a restaurant, but I said I didn’t feel like dining out. So at six o’clock, she hastily mixed ground meat with tomatoes, kidney beans, and chili powder. I said to George, “Share our chili con carne tonight. We can open a few bottles of beer.”

  Denise signaled me to come into the kitchen. She said, “I won’t have this.” She was warlike and shrill. Her voice was clear, thrilling, and minutely articulate—the rising arpeggios of hysteria.

  “Oh, come on. Denise, he can hear you.” I lowered my voice and said, “Let George have some of this chili con carne.”

  “There’s not enough. It’s just half a pound of hamburger. But that’s not the point. The point is I won’t serve him.”

  I laughed. Partly from embarrassment. I am normally a low baritone, almost basso profundo, but under certain kinds of provocation my voice disappears into the higher registers, perhaps into the bat range.

  “Listen to that screeching,” said Denise. “You give yourself away when you laugh like this. You were born in a coal scuttle. Brought up in a parrot-house.”

  Her great violet eyes were unyielding.

  “All right,” I said. I took George to the Pump Room. We ate shashlik brought in flaming by turbaned Moors.

  “I don’t want to interfere in your marriage, but I notice you’ve stopped breathing,” said George.

  George feels that he can speak for Nature. Nature, instinct, heart guide him. He is biocentric. To see him rub his large muscles, his Roman Ben Hur chest and arms with olive oil is a lesson in piety toward the organism. Concluding, he takes a long swig from the bottle. Olive oil is the sun and the ancient Mediterranean. Nothing is better for the bowels, the hair, the skin. He holds his own body in numinous esteem. He is a priest to the inside of his nose, his eyeballs, his feet. “You’re not getting enough air with that woman. You look as if you’re suffocating. Your tissues aren’t getting any oxygen. She’ll give you cancer.”

  “Oh,” I said. “She may think she’s offering me the blessings of an American marriage. Real Americans are supposed to suffer with their wives, and wives with husbands. Like Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. It’s the classic US grief, and a child of immigrants like me ought to be grateful. For à Jew it’s a step up.”

  Yes, Denise would be overjoyed to hear of this atrocity. She had seen Renata speeding past in the silver Mercedes. “And you, the passenger,” said Denise, “getting to be as bald as a barber pole, even if you comb your side-hair over to hide it, and grinning. She’ll give you something to grin about, that fat broad.” From insult Denise went into prophecy. “Your mental life is going to dry out. You’re sacrificing it to your erotic needs (if that’s the term for what you have). After sex, what can you
two talk about… ? Well, you wrote a few books, you wrote a famous play, and even that was half ghosted. You associated with people like Von Humboldt Fleisher. You took it into your head that you were some kind of artist. We know better, don’t we. And what you really want is to get rid of everybody, to tune out and be a law unto yourself. Just you and your misunderstood heart, Charlie. You couldn’t bear a serious relationship, that’s why you got rid of me and the children. Now you’ve got this tramp with the fat figure who wears no bra and shows her big nipples to the world. You’ve got ignorant kikes and hoodlums around you. You’re crazy with your own brand of pride and snobbery. There’s nobody good enough for you. … I could have helped you. Now it’s too late!”

  I would not argue with Denise. I felt a certain sympathy with her. She said I was living badly. I agreed. She thought I wasn’t all there, and I would have had to be completely crazy to deny it. She said I was writing stuff that made sense to no one. Maybe so. My last book, Some Americans, subtitled The Sense of Being in the USA, was quickly remaindered. The publishers had begged me not to print it. They offered to forget a debt of twenty thousand dollars if I would shelve it. But now I was perversely writing Part II. My life was in great disorder.

  I was, however, loyal to something. I had an idea.

  “Why did you ever bring me back to Chicago?” said Denise. “Sometimes I think you did it because your dead are buried here. Is that the reason? Land where my Jewish fathers died? And you dragged me to your graveyard so you could get into the anthem? And what’s it about? All because you have delusions about being a marvelous noble person. Which you are—like hell!”

  Such abuse does Denise more good than vitamins. As for me, I find that certain kinds of misunderstanding are full of useful hints. But my final though silent answer to Denise was always the same. Despite her intelligence, she had been bad for my idea. From that standpoint, Renata was the better woman—better for me.