Humboldt's Gift

by Saul Bellow

  When I asked Humboldt about this incident he said, “I felt I had to celebrate, and I understood these Bennington girls went for poets. Too bad about this Ginnie.. She’s very pretty but she’s honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won’t spread.”

  “Did you go elsewhere?”

  “I gave up on erotic relief. I went around and visited lots of people.”

  “And showed them Longstaff’s letter.”

  “Of course.”

  In any case, the scheme worked. Princeton couldn’t refuse the Belisha gift. Ricketts was outgeneraled. Humboldt was appointed. The Times and the Herald Tribune both carried the story. For two or three months things were smoother than velvet and cashmere. Humboldt’s new colleagues gave cocktail and dinner parties for him. Nor did Humboldt in his happiness forget that we were blood-brothers. Almost daily he would say, “Charlie, today I had a terrific idea for you. For the title role in your play … Victor McLaglen is a fascist of course. Can’t have him. But … I’m going to get in touch with Orson Welles for you… .”

  But then, in February, Longstaff’s trustees rebelled. They had had enough, I guess, and rallied for the honor of American monopoly-capital. Longstaff’s proposed budget was rejected, and he was forced to resign. He was not sent away quite empty-handed. He got some money, about twenty million, to start a little foundation of his own. But in effect they gave him the ax. The appropriation for Humboldt’s chair was a tiny item in that rejected budget. When Longstaff fell, Humboldt fell with him. “Charlie,” Humboldt said when he was at last able to talk about it, “it was just like my father’s experience when he was wiped out in the Florida boom. One year more and we would have made it. I’ve even asked myself, I’ve wondered, whether Long-staff knew when he sent the letter that he was on his way out … ?”

  “I can’t believe that,” I said. “Longstaff is certainly mischievous, but he isn’t mean.”

  The Princeton people behaved well and offered to do the gentlemanly thing. Ricketts said, “You’re one of us now, Hum, you know? Don’t worry, we’ll find the dough for your chair somehow.” But Humboldt sent in his resignation. Then in March, on a back road in New Jersey, he tried to run Kathleen down in the Buick. She jumped into a ditch to save herself.

  sixteen

  At this moment I must say, almost in the form of deposition, without argument, that I do not believe my birth began my first existence. Nor Humboldt’s. Nor anyone’s. On esthetic grounds, if on no others, I cannot accept the view of death taken by most of us, and taken by me during most of my life—on esthetic grounds therefore I am obliged to deny that so extraordinary a thing as a human soul can be wiped out forever. No, the dead are about us, shut out by our metaphysical denial of them. As we lie nightly in our hemispheres asleep by the billions, our dead approach us. Our ideas should be their nourishment. We are their grainfields. But we are barren and we starve them. Don’t kid yourself, though, we are watched by the dead, watched on this earth, which is our school of freedom. In the next realm, where things are clearer, clarity eats into freedom. We are free on earth because of cloudiness, because of error, because of marvelous limitation, and as much because of beauty as of blindness and evil. These always go with the blessing of freedom. But this is all I have to say about the matter now, because I’m in a hurry, under pressure—all this unfinished business!

  As I was meditating on Humboldt, the hall-buzzer went off. I have a dark little hall where I press the button and get muffled shouts on the intercom from below. It was Roland Stiles, the doorman. My ways, the arrangements of my life, diverted Stiles a lot. He was a skinny witty old Negro. He was, so to speak, in the semifinals of life. In his opinion, so was I. But I didn’t seem to see it that way, for some strange white man’s reason, and I continued to carry on as if it weren’t yet time to think of death. “Plug in your telephone, Mr. Citrine. Do you read me? Your number-one lady friend is trying to reach you.” Yesterday my car was bashed. Today my beautiful mistress couldn’t get in touch. To him I was as good as a circus. At night Stiles’s missus liked stories about me better than television. He told me so himself.

  I dialed Renata and said, “What is it?”

  “What is it! For Christ’s sake! I’ve called ten times. You have to see Judge Urbanovich at half past one. Your lawyer’s been trying to get you, too. And he finally phoned Szathmar, and Szathmar phoned me.”

  “Half past one! They changed the time on me! For months they ignore me, then they give me two hours’ notice, curse them.” My spirit began to jump up and down. “Oh hell, I hate them, those crap artists.”

  “Maybe you can wind the whole thing up now. Today.”

  “How? I’ve surrendered five times. Each time I surrender Denise and her guy up their demands.”

  “In just a few days thank God I’m getting you out of here. You’ve been dragging your feet, because you don’t want to go, but believe me, Charlie, you’ll bless me for it when we’re in Europe again.”

  “Forrest Tomchek doesn’t even have time to discuss the case with me. Some lawyer Szathmar recommended.”

  “Now Charlie, how will you get downtown without your car? I’m surprised that Denise hasn’t tried to hitch a ride to court with you.”

  “I’ll get a cab.”

  “I have to take Fannie Sunderland to the Mart, anyway, for her tenth look at upholstery material for one fucking sofa.” Renata laughed, but she was unusually patient with her clients. “I must take care of this before we pull out for Europe. We’ll pick you up at one o’clock sharp. Be ready, Charlie.”

  Long ago I read a book called Ils Ne M’auront Pas (They Aren’t Going to Get Me) and at certain moments I whisper, “Ils ne m’auront pas.” I did that now, determined to finish my exercise in contemplation or Spirit-recollection (the purpose of which was to penetrate into the depths of the soul and to recognize the connection between the self and the divine powers). I lay down again on the sofa. To lie down was no small gesture of freedom. I am only being factual about this. It was a quarter of eleven, and if I left myself five minutes for a container of plain yoghurt and five minutes to shave I could continue for two hours to think about Humboldt. This was the right moment for it.

  Well, Humboldt tried to run down Kathleen in his car. They were driving home from a party in Princeton, and he was punching her, steering with the left hand. At a blinking light, near a package store, she opened the door and made a run for it in her stocking feet—she had lost her shoes in Princeton. He chased her in the Buick. She jumped into a ditch and he ran into a tree. The state troopers had to come and release him because the doors were jammed by the collision.

  Anyhow, the trustees had risen up against Longstaff, and the Poetry chair had disintegrated. Kathleen later told me that Humboldt had kept this from her all that day. He put down the phone and with his shuffling feet and sumo-wrestler’s belly came into the kitchen and poured himself a large jam-jar full of gin. Standing beside the dirty sink in his sneakers he drank this as if it had been milk.

  “What was that call?” said Kathleen.

  “Ricketts called.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Nothing. Just routine,” said Humboldt.

  “He turned a funny color under the eyes when he drank all that gin,” Kathleen told me. “A kind of light greeny purple. You sometimes see that shade of purple in artichoke hearts.”

  A little later on the same morning he seems to have had another talk with Ricketts. This was when Ricketts told him that Princeton would not renege. Money would be found. But this put Ricketts in the morally superior position. A poet could not allow a bureaucrat to surpass him. Humboldt locked himself in his office with the gin bottle and all day long wrote drafts of a letter of resignation.

  But that evening, on the road as they were driving in to attend a party at the Littlewoods’ he went to work on Kathleen. Why did she let her father sell her to Rockefeller? Yes the old guy was supposed to be just a pleasant character, a bohemian antique fro
m Paris, one of the gang from the Closerie des Lilas, but he was an international criminal, a Dr. Moriarty, a Lucifer, a pimp and didn’t he try to have sexual relations with his own daughter? Well, how was it with Rockefeller? Did Rockefeller’s penis thrill her more? Did the billions enter in? Did Rockefeller have to take a woman away from a poet in order to get it up? So they drove in the Buick skidding on the gravel and booming through clouds of dust. He began to shout that her great calm-and-lovely act didn’t take him in at all. He knew all about these things. From a bookish viewpoint he actually did know a lot. He knew the jealousy of King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. Mario Praz he knew. And Proust—caged rats tortured to death, Charlus flogged by some killer-concierge, some slaughterhouse brute with a scourge of nails. “I know all that lust garbage,” he said. “And I know the game has to be played with a calm face like yours. I know all about this female masochistic business. I understand your thrills, and you’re just using me!”

  So they got to the Littlewoods’ and Demmie and I were there. Kathleen was white. Her face looked heavily powdered. Humboldt walked in silent. He wasn’t talking. This was in fact his last night as the Belisha Professor of Poetry at Princeton. Tomorrow the news would be out. Maybe it was out already. Ricketts behaved honorably but he might not have been able to resist telling everyone. But Littlewood seemed not to know anything. He was trying hard to make his party a success. His cheeks were red and jolly. He looked like Mr. Tomato with a top hat in the juice ad. He had wavy hair and a fine worldly manner. When he took a lady’s hand you wondered just what he was going to do with it. Littlewood was an upper-class bad boy, a minister’s randy son. He knew London and Rome. He especially knew Shepheard’s famous bar in Cairo, and had acquired his British Army slang there. He had friendly endearing spaces between his teeth. He loved to grin, and at every party he did imitations of Rudy Vallee. To cheer up Humboldt and Kathleen I got him to sing “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover.” It did not go over well.

  I was present in the kitchen when Kathleen made a serious mistake. Holding her drink and an unlit cigarette she reached into a man’s pocket for a match. He was not a stranger, we knew him well, his name was Eubanks, and he was a Negro composer. His wife was standing near him. Kathleen was beginning to recover her spirits and was slightly drunk herself. But just as she was getting the matches out of Eubanks’s pocket Humboldt came in. I saw him coming. First he stopped breathing. Then he clutched Kathleen with sensational violence. He twisted her arm behind her back and ran her out of the kitchen into the yard. A thing of this sort was not unusual at a Littlewood party, and others decided not to notice, but Demmie and I hurried to the window. Humboldt punched Kathleen in the belly, doubling her up. Then he pulled her by the hair into the Buick. As there was a car behind him he couldn’t back out. He wheeled over the lawn and off the sidewalk, hacking off the muffler on the curb. I saw it there next morning like the case of a super-insect, flaky with rust, and a pipe coming out of it. Also I found Kathleen’s shoes stuck by the heels in the snow. There was fog, ice, dirty cold, the bushes glassy, the elm twigs livid, the March snow brocaded with soot.

  And now I recalled that the rest of the night had been a headache because Demmie and I were overnight guests, and when the party broke up Littlewood took me aside and proposed man to man that we do a swap. “An Eskimo wife deal. What say we have a romp,” he said. “A wingding.”

  “Thanks, no, it isn’t cold enough for this Eskimo stuff.”

  “You’re refusing on your own? Aren’t you even going to ask Demmie?”

  “She’d haul off and hit me. Perhaps you’d like to try her. You wouldn’t believe how hard she can punch. She looks like a fashionable broad, and elegant, but she’s really a big honest hick.”

  I had my own reasons for giving him a soft answer. We were overnight guests here. I didn’t want to go at 2 a.m. to sit in the Pennsylvania waiting room. Entitled to my eight hours of oblivion and determined to have them, I got into bed in the smoky study through which the party had swirled. But now Demmie had put on her nightgown and was a changed person. An hour ago in a black chiffon dress and the hair brushed gold and long on her head and fastened with an ornament she was a young lady of breeding. Humboldt, when he was in a balanced state, loved to cite the important American social categories, and Demmie belonged to them all. “She’s pure Main Line. Quaker schools, Bryn Mawr. Real class,” Humboldt said. She had chatted with Little-wood, whose subject was Plautus, about Latin translation and New Testament Greek. I didn’t love the farmer’s daughter in Demmie less than the society girl. She now sat on the bed. Her toes were deformed by cheap shoes. Her large collarbones formed hollows. When they were children, she and her sister, similarly built, filled up these collarbone hollows with water and ran races.

  Anything to stave off sleep. Demmie took pills but she deeply feared to sleep. She said she had a hangnail and sat on the bed filing away, the long flexible file going zigzag. Suddenly lively, she faced me cross-legged with round knees and a show of thigh. In this position she released the salt female odor, the bacterial background of deep love. She said, “Kathleen shouldn’t have reached for Eubanks’s matches. I hope Humboldt didn’t hurt her, but she shouldn’t have done it.”

  “But Eubanks is an old friend.”

  “Humboldt’s old friend? He’s known him a long time—there’s a difference. It means something if a woman goes into a man’s pocket. And we saw her do it. … I don’t completely blame Humboldt.”

  Demmie was often like this. Just as I was ready to close my eyes for the night, having had enough of my conscious and operating self, Demmie wanted to talk. At this hour she preferred exciting topics—sickness, murder, suicide, eternal punishment, and hellfire. She got into a state. Her hair bristled and her eyes deepened with panic and her deformed toes twisted in all directions. She then closed her long hands upon her smallish breasts. With baby tremors of the lip she sank at times into a preverbal baby stammer. It was now three o’clock in the morning and I thought I heard the depraved Littlewoods carrying on above us in the master bedroom, perhaps to give us an idea of what we were missing. This was probably imaginary.

  I rose, anyway, and took away Demmie’s nail file. I tucked her in. Her mouth was naively open as she gave up the file. I got her to lie down but she was disturbed. I could see that. As she laid her head on the pillow, in profile, one large lovely eye stared out childishly. “Off you go,” I said. She shut the staring eye. Her sleep was instantaneous and seemed deep.

  But in a few minutes I heard what I expected to hear—her night voice. It was low hoarse and deep almost mannish. She moaned. She spoke broken words. She did this almost every night. The voice expressed her terror of this strange place, the earth, and of this strange state, being. Laboring and groaning she tried to get out of it. This was the primordial Demmie beneath the farmer’s daughter beneath the teacher beneath the elegant Main Line horsewoman, Latinist, accomplished cocktail-sipper in black chiffon, with the upturned nose, this fashionable conversationalist. Thoughtful, I listened to this. I let her go on awhile, trying to comprehend. I pitied her and loved her. But then I put an end to it. I kissed her. She knew who it was. She pressed her toes to my shins and held me with powerful female arms. She cried “I love you” in the same deep voice, but her eyes were still shut blind. I think she never actually woke up.

  seventeen

  In May, when the Princeton term was ended, Humboldt and I met, as blood-brothers, for the last time.

  As deep as the huge cap of December blue behind me entering the window with thermal distortions from the sun, I lay on my Chicago sofa and saw again everything that had happened. One’s heart hurt from this sort of thing. One thought, How sad, about all this human nonsense which keeps us from the large truth. But perhaps I can get through it once and for all by doing what I am doing now.

  Very good, Broadway was the word then. I had a producer, a director, and an agent. I was part of the theater world, in Hum-boldt’s eyes. There were actresses wh
o said “dahling” and kissed you when you met. There was a Hirschfeld caricature of me in the Times. Humboldt took much credit for this. By bringing me to Princeton he had put me in the majors. Through him I met useful people in the Ivy League. Besides, he felt I had modeled Von Trenck, my Prussian hero, on him. “But look out, Charlie,” he said. “Don’t be taken in by the Broadway glamour and the commercial stuff.”

  Humboldt and Kathleen descended on me in the repaired Buick. I was in a cottage on the Connecticut shore, down the road from Lampton, the director, making revisions under his guidance—writing the play he wanted, for that was what it amounted to. Demmie was with me every weekend, but the Fleishers arrived on a Wednesday, when I was alone. Humboldt had just given a reading at Yale and they were going home. We sat in the small stone kitchen drinking coffee and gin, having a reunion. Humboldt was being “good,” serious, high-minded. He had been reading De Anima and was full of ideas about the origins of thought. I noticed, however, that he didn’t let Kathleen out of his sight. She had to tell him where she was going. “I’m just getting my cardigan.” Even to go to the bathroom, she needed permission. Also he seemed to have punched her in the eye. She sat quietly and low in her chair, arms folded and long legs crossed, but she had a shiner. Humboldt finally spoke of it himself. “It wasn’t me this time,” he said. “You won’t believe it, Charlie, but she fell against the dashboard when I made a fast stop. Some clunk in a truck came barreling out of a side road and I had to jump the brakes.”

  Perhaps he hadn’t hit her, but he did watch her; he watched like a bailiff escorting a prisoner from one jail to another. He moved his chair all the while he was lecturing about De Anima, to make sure we didn’t exchange eye-signals. He laid it on so thick that we were bound to try to outwit him. And we did. We managed at last to have a few words at the clothesline in the garden. She had rinsed her stockings and came out into the sunshine to hang them. Humboldt was probably satisfying a natural need.