by Saul Bellow
“Did he sock you or not?”
“No, I fell on the dashboard. But it’s hell, Charlie. Worse than ever.”
The clothesline was old and dark gray. It had burst open and was giving up its white pith.
“He says I’m carrying on with a critic, a young, unimportant, completely innocent fellow named Magnasco. Very nice, but my God! And I’m tired of being treated like a nymphomaniac and told how I’m doing it on fire escapes or standing up, in clothes closets, every chance I get. And at Yale he made me sit on the platform during his reading. Then he blamed me for showing my legs. At every service station he forces his way into the ladies’ room with me. I can’t go back to New Jersey with him.”
“What will you do?” said eager, heart-melting, concerned Citrine.
“Tomorrow when we get back to New York I’m going to get lost. I love him but I can’t take any more. I’m telling you to prepare you, because you guys love each other, and you’ll have to help him. He has some money. Hildebrand fired him. But he did get a Guggenheim, you know.”
“I didn’t even know he applied.”
“Oh he puts in for everything… . Now he’s watching us from the kitchen.”
And there indeed was Humboldt bulging out the coppery webbing of the screen door like a fisherman’s strange catch.
“Good luck.”
As she went back to the house her legs were eagerly beaten by the grass of May. Through stripes of shrub shadow and country sunshine, the cat was strolling. The clothesline surrendered the pith of its soul, and Kathleen’s stockings, hung at the wide end, now suggested lust. Such was Humboldt’s effect. He came straight to me at the clothesline and ordered me to tell him what we had been talking about.
“Oh lay off, will you Humboldt? Don’t force me into this neurotic superdrama.” I was appalled by what I foresaw. I wished they would go—pile into their Buick (more than ever the muddy Flanders Field staff car) and pull out, leaving me with my Trenck troubles, the tyranny of Lampton, and the clean Atlantic shore.
But they stayed over. Humboldt didn’t sleep. The wooden treads of the backstairs creaked all night under his weight. The tap ran and the refrigerator door slammed. When I came into the kitchen in the morning I found that the quart of Beefeater’s gin, the house present they had brought was empty on the table. The cotton wads of his pill bottles were all over the place, like rabbit droppings.
So Kathleen disappeared from Rocco’s Restaurant on Thompson Street and Humboldt went wild. He said she was with Mag-nasco, that Magnasco kept her hidden in his room at the Hotel Earle. Somewhere Humboldt obtained a pistol and he hammered on Magnasco’s door with the butt until he shredded the wood. Magnasco called the desk, and the desk sent for the cops, and Humboldt took off. But next day he jumped Magnasco on Sixth Avenue in front of Howard Johnson’s. A group of lesbians gotten up as longshoremen rescued the young man. They had been having ice-cream sodas, and they came out and broke up the fight, pinning Humboldt’s arms behind him. It was a blazing afternoon and the women prisoners at the detention center on Greenwich Avenue were shrieking from the open windows and unrolling toilet-paper streamers.
Humboldt phoned me in the country and said, “Charlie, where is Kathleen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Charlie, I think you do know. I saw her talking to you.”
“But she didn’t tell me.”
He hung up. Then Magnasco called. He said, “Mr. Citrine? Your friend is going to hurt me. I’ll have to swear out a warrant.”
“Is it really that bad?”
“You know how it is, people go further than they mean to, and then where are you? I mean, where am I? I’m calling because he threatens me in your name. He says you’ll get me if he doesn’t—his blood-brother.”
“I won’t lay a hand on you,” I said. “Why don’t you leave town for a while?”
“Leave?” said Magnasco. “I only just got here. Down from Yale.”
I understood. He was on the make, had long prepared for his career.
“The Trib is trying me out as a book reviewer.”
“I know how it is. I have a show opening on Broadway. My first.”
When I met Magnasco, he proved to be overweight, round-faced, young in calendar years only, steady, unflappable, born to make progress in cultural New York. “I won’t be driven out,” he said. “I’ll put him on a peace bond.”
“Well, do you need my permission?” I said.
“It won’t exactly make me popular in New York to do this to a poet.”
I then said to Demmie, “Magnasco is afraid of getting in bad with the New York culture crowd by calling the cops.”
Night-moaning, hell-fearing, pill-addicted Demmie was also a most practical person, a supervisor and programmer of genius. When she was in her busy mood, domineering and protecting me, I used to think what a dolls’ generalissimo she must have been in childhood. “And where you’re concerned,” she would say, “I’m a tiger-mother and a regular Fury. Isn’t it about a month since you saw Humboldt? He’s staying away. That means he’s beginning to blame you. Poor Humboldt, he’s flipped out, hasn’t he! We have to help him. If he keeps attacking this Magnasco character they’re going to lock him up. If the police put him in Bellevue, what you have to do is get ready to bail him out. He’ll have to be sobered up, calmed down, and cooled off. The best place for that is Payne Whitney. Listen, Charlie, Ginnie’s cousin Albert is the admitting physician at Payne Whitney. Bellevue is hell. We should raise some money and transfer him to Payne Whitney. Maybe we could get him a sort of scholarship.”
She went into this with Ginnie’s cousin Albert, and, in my name, she telephoned people and collected money for Humboldt, taking over because I was busy with Von Trenck. We had come back from Connecticut and were going into rehearsal at the Belasco. Efficient Demmie soon raised about three thousand dollars. Hildebrand alone contributed two thousand but he was still sore at Humboldt. He stipulated that the money was for psychiatric treatment and for bare necessities only. A Fifth Avenue lawyer, Simkin, held this fund in escrow. Hildebrand knew, by now we all knew, that Humboldt had hired a private detective, a man named Scaccia, and that this Scaccia had already gotten most of Humboldt’s Guggenheim grant. Kathleen herself had done an uncharacteristic thing. Leaving New York at once she headed for Nevada to file for divorce. But Scaccia kept telling Humboldt that she was still in New York and doing lascivious things. Humboldt elaborated a new Proustian sensational scandal involving, this time, a vice ring of Wall Street brokers. If he could catch her in adultery, he would get the “property,” the shack in New Jersey, worth about eight thousand dollars, with a mortgage of five, as Orlando Huggins told me—Orlando was one of those radical bohemians who knew money. In avant-garde New York everybody knew money.
The summer went quickly. In August rehearsals began. The nights were hot, tense, and tiring. Each morning I rose already worn out and Demmie gave me several cups of coffee and at the breakfast table also a good deal of counsel about the theater and Humboldt and the conduct of life. The little white terrier, Cato, begged for crusts and snapped his teeth while dancing backward on his hind legs. I thought that I too would prefer sleeping all day on his cushion by the window, near Demmie’s begonias, than sit in the antique filth of the Belasco and listen to dreary actors. I began to hate the theater, the feelings wickedly distended by histrionics, all the old gestures, clutchings, tears, and supplications. Besides, Von Trench was no longer my play. It belonged to goggled Harold Lampton for whom I obligingly wrote new dialogue in the dressing rooms. His actors were a bunch of sticks. All the talent in New York seemed to be in the melodrama enacted by feverish, delirious Humboldt. Pals and admirers were his audience at the White Horse on Hudson Street. There he lectured and hollered. He also consulted lawyers and was seeing a psychiatrist or two.
Demmie, I felt, could understand Humboldt better than I because she too swallowed mysterious pills. (There were other affinities as well.) An obese child, she had weighe
d two hundred and eighty pounds at the age of fourteen. She showed me pictures I could hardly believe. She was given hormone injections and pills and she grew slender. Judging by the exophthalmic bulge, it must have been thyroxine that they put her on. She thought her pretty breasts disfigured by the rapid weight loss. The insignificant wrinkles in them were a grief to her. She sometimes cried, “They hurt my titties with their goddamn medicine.” Brown-paper packets were still arriving from the Mount Coptic Drugstore. “But I am attractive, though.” Indeed she was. Her Dutch hair positively gave light. She wore it sometimes combed to the side, sometimes with bangs, depending on what she had done to herself at the hairline with her nails. She often scratched herself. Her face was either childishly circular or like a frontierwoman’s, gaunt. She was sometimes a van der Weyden beauty, sometimes Mortimer Snerd, sometimes a Ziegfeld girl. The slight silken scrape of her knock-knees when she walked quickly was, I repeat, highly prized by me. I thought that if I were a locust such a sound would send me soaring over mountain ranges. When Demmie’s face with the fine upturned nose was covered with pancake make-up her big eyes, all the more mobile and clear because she had laid on so much dust, revealed two things: one was that she had a true heart and the other that she was a dynamic sufferer. More than once I rushed into Barrow Street to flag down a cab and take Demmie to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s. She sun-bathed on the roof and was burned so badly that she became delirious. Then, slicing veal, she cut her thumb to the bone. She went to throw garbage down the incinerator and a gush of flame from the open chute singed her. As a good girl, she did her Latin lesson-plans for an entire term, she laid away scarves and gloves in labeled boxes, she scrubbed the house. As a bad girl she drank whisky, she had hysterics, or took up with thieves and desperadoes. She stroked me like a fairy princess or punched me in the ribs like a cowhand. In hot weather she stripped herself naked to wax the floors on her knees. Then there appeared big tendons, lanky arms, laboring feet. And when it was seen from behind the organ I adored in a different context as small, fine, intricate, rich in delightful difficulties of access, stood out like a primitive limb. But after the waxing, a seizure of sweating labor, she sat with lovely legs in a blue frock having a martini. Fundamentalist Father Vonghel owned Mount Coptic. He was a violent man. There was a scar on Demmie’s head where he had banged the child’s head on a radiator, there was another on her face where he had jammed a wastepaper basket over it—the tinsmith had to cut her free. With all this she knew the gospels by heart, she had been a field-hockey star, she could break Western horses, and she wrote charming bread-and-butter notes on Tiffany paper. Still, when she took a spoonful of her favorite vanilla custard, she was again the fat child. She savored the dessert at the tip of her tongue, open-mouthed, and the great blue mid-summer ocean-haze eyes in a trance, so that she started when I said, “Swallow your pudding.” Evenings we played backgammon, we translated Lucretius, she expounded Plato to me. “People take credit for their virtues. But he sees—what else can you be but virtuous? There is nothing else.”
Just before Labor Day Humboldt threatened Magnasco again, and Magnasco went to the police and persuaded a plainclothesman to come back to the hotel with him. They waited in the lobby. Then Humboldt roared in and went for Magnasco. The dick got between them, and Humboldt said, “Officer, he has my wife in his room.” The reasonable thing was to make a search. They went upstairs, all three. Humboldt looked in all the closets, he searched under the pillows for her nightgown, he ran his hand under the lining papers of the drawers. There were no underthings. Nothing.
The plainclothesman said, “So, where is she? Was it you who banged hell out of this door with the butt of your gun?”
Humboldt said, “I have no gun. You want to frisk me?” He lifted his arms. Then he said, “Come to my room and look, if you like. See for yourself.”
But when they got to Greenwich Street, Humboldt put the key in the lock and said, “You can’t come in.” He shouted, “Have you got a search warrant?” Then he whirled in and slammed and bolted his door.
This was when Magnasco filed the complaint or took a peace bond—I don’t know which—and on a smoggy and stifling night the police came for Humboldt. He fought like an ox. He struggled also in the police station. An anointed head rolled on the filthy floor. Was there a strait jacket? Magnasco swore there wasn’t. But there were handcuffs, and Humboldt wept. On the way to Bellevue he had diarrhea, and they locked him away for the night in a state of filth.
Magnasco let it transpire that he and I together had decided to do this, to prevent Humboldt from committing a crime. Everyone then said that the man responsible was Charles Citrine, Humboldt’s blood-brother and protégé. I suddenly had many detractors and enemies, unknown to me.
And I’ll tell you how I saw it from the plush decay and heated darkness of the Belasco Theatre. I saw Humboldt whipping; his team of mules and standing up in his crazy wagon like an Oklahoma land-grabber. He rushed into the territory of excess to stake himself a claim. This claim was a swollen and quaking heart-mirage.
I didn’t mean, The poet is off his nut… . Call the cops and damn the clichés. No, I suffered when the police laid hands on him, it threw me into despair. What then did I mean? Something perhaps like this: suppose the poet had been wrestled to the ground by the police, strapped into a strait jacket or handcuffed, and rushed off dingdong in a paddy wagon like a mad dog, arriving foul, and locked up raging! Was this art versus America? To me Bellevue was like the Bowery: it gave negative testimony. Brutal Wall Street stood for power, and the Bowery, so near it, was the accusing symbol of weakness. And so with Bellevue, where the poor and busted went. And so even with Payne Whitney where the monied derelicts lay. And poets like drunkards and misfits or psychopaths, like the wretched, poor or rich, sank into weakness—was that it? Having no machines, no transforming knowledge comparable to the knowledge of Boeing or Sperry Rand or IBM or RCA? For could a poem pick you up in Chicago and land you in New York two hours later? Or could it compute a space shot? It had no such powers. And interest was where power was. In ancient times poetry was a force, the poet had real strength in the material world. Of course, the material world was different then. But what interest could a Humboldt raise? He threw himself into weakness and became a hero of wretchedness. He consented to the monopoly of power and interest held by money, politics, law, rationality, technology because he couldn’t find the next thing, the new thing, the necessary thing for poets to do. Instead he did a former thing. He got himself a pistol, like Verlaine, and chased Magnasco.
From Bellevue he phoned me at the Belasco Theatre. I heard his voice shaking, raging but rapid. He yelled, “Charlie, you know where I am, don’t you? All right, Charlie, this isn’t literature. This is life.”
In the theater I was in the world of illusion while he, Hum-boldt, had broken out—was that it?
But no, instead of being a poet he was merely the figure of a poet. He was enacting “The Agony of the American Artist.” And it was not Humboldt, it was the USA that was making its point: “Fellow Americans, listen. If you abandon materialism and the normal pursuits of life you wind up at Bellevue like this poor kook.”
He now held court and made mad-scenes at Bellevue. He openly blamed me. Scandal-lovers were tisking when my name was mentioned.
Then Scaccia the private eye came to the Belasco with a note from Humboldt. He wanted the money I had raised and wanted it right now. So Mr. Scaccia and I faced each other in the gloomy musty cement exit alley outside the stage door. Mr. Scaccia wore open sandals and white silk socks, very soiled. At the corners of his mouth was a grimy deposit.
“The fund is held in escrow by a lawyer, Mr. Simkin, on Fifth Avenue. It’s for medical expenses only,” I said.
“You mean psychiatric. You think Mr. Fleisher is off his nut?”
“I don’t make diagnoses. Just tell Humboldt to talk to Simkin.”
“We’re speaking of a man of genius. Who says a genius needs treatment?”
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br /> “You’ve read his poems?” I said.
“Fucking right. I won’t take a put-down from you. You’re supposed to be his friend? The man loves you. He loves you still. Do you love him?”
“And where do you come in?”
“I’m retained by him. And for a client I go all out.”
If I didn’t give the private eye the money he would go to Bellevue and tell Humboldt that I thought he was insane. My impulse was to kill Scaccia in this back alley. Natural justice was on my side. I could grab this blackmailer by the throat and strangle him. O, that would be delicious! And who could blame me! A gust of murderous feeling made me look modestly at the ground. “Mr. Fleisher will have to explain to Simkin what he wants the money for,” I said. “It wasn’t raised for you.”
After this there came a series of calls from Humboldt. “The cops put me in a strait jacket. Did you have anything to do with that? My blood-brother? They manhandled me, too, you fucking Thomas Hobbes!”
I understand the reference. He meant that I cared only for power.
“I’m trying to help,” I said. He hung up. Immediately the phone rang again.
“Where’s Kathleen?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“She talked to you out by the clothesline. You know where she is all right. Listen to me, handsome, you’re sitting on this money. It’s mine. You want to put me away with the little guys in the white coats?”
“You need calming down, that’s all.”
He called later in the day when the afternoon was gray and hot. I was having a tinny-tasting sandwich of crumbling wet tuna fish at the Greek’s across the street when they summoned me to the telephone. I took the call in the star’s dressing room.