Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [0]
SAUL BELLOW
THE VIKING PRESS • NEW YORK
Copyright © 1973, 1974, 1975 by Saul Bellow
All rights reserved
First published in 1975 by The Viking Press, Inc.
625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022
Published simultaneously in Canada by The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited
Excerpts originally appeared in Playboy Magazine and Esquire.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Bellow, Saul Humboldt’s gift.
I. Title.
Pz3.n41937Hu 813’.5’2 [ps3503.E4488]
ISBN 0-670-38655-3 75-12595
Printed in U.S.A.
Second printing August 1975
HUMBOLDT’S GIFT
one
The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the Thirties was an immediate hit. Humboldt was just what everyone had been waiting for. Out in the Midwest I had certainly been waiting eagerly, I can tell you that. An avant-garde writer, the first of a new generation, he was handsome, fair, large, serious, witty, he was learned. The guy had it all. All the papers reviewed his book. His picture appeared in Time without insult and in Newsweek with praise. I read Harlequin Ballads enthusiastically. I was a student at the University of Wisconsin and thought about nothing but literature day and night. Humboldt revealed to me new ways of doing things. I was ecstatic. I envied his luck, his talent, and his fame, and I went east in May to have a look at him—perhaps to get next to him. The Grey hound bus, taking the Scranton route, made the trip in about fifty hours. That didn’t matter. The bus windows were open. I had never seen real mountains before. Trees were budding. It was like Beethoven’s Pastorale. I felt showered by the green, within. Manhattan was fine, too. I took a room for three bucks a week and found a job selling Fuller Brushes door to door. And I was wildly excited about everything. Having written Humboldt a long fan letter, I was invited to Greenwich Village to discuss literature and ideas. He lived on Bedford Street, near Chumley’s. First he gave me black coffee, and then poured gin in the same cup. “Well, you’re a nice-looking enough fellow, Charlie,” he said to me. “Aren’t you a bit sly, maybe? I think you’re headed for early baldness. And such large emotional handsome eyes. But you certainly do love literature and that’s the main thing. You have sensibility,” he said. He was a pioneer in the use of this word. Sensibility later made it big. Humboldt was very kind. He introduced me to people in the Village and got me books to review. I always loved him.
Humboldt’s success lasted about ten years. In the late Forties he started to sink. In the early Fifties I myself became famous. I even made a pile of money. Ah, money, the money! Humboldt held the money against me. In the last years of his life when he wasn’t too depressed to talk, wasn’t locked up in a loony bin, he went about New York saying bitter things about me and my “million dollars.” “Take the case of Charlie Citrine. He arrived from Madison, Wisconsin, and knocked on my door. Now he’s got a million bucks. What kind of writer or intellectual makes that kind of dough—a Keynes? Okay. Keynes, a world figure. A genius in economics, a prince in Bloomsbury,” said Humboldt. “Married to a Russian ballerina. The money follows. But who the hell is Citrine to become so rich? We used to be close friends,” Humboldt accurately said. “But there’s something perverse with that guy. After making this dough why does he bury himself in the sticks? What’s he in Chicago for? He’s afraid to be found out.”
Whenever his mind was sufficiently clear he used his gifts to knock me. He did a great job.
And money wasn’t what I had in mind. Oh God, no, what I wanted was to do good. I was dying to do something good. And this feeling for good went back to my early and peculiar sense of existence—sunk in the glassy depths of life and groping, thrill-ingly and desperately, for sense, a person keenly aware of painted veils, of Maya, of domes of many-colored glass staining the white radiance of eternity, quivering in the intense inane and so on. I was quite a nut about such things.