Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [127]
Luckily a movie company turned up to make a picture about the Mongol hordes and Tigler was hired to be the horse expert. He recruited Indians to wear quilted Asiatic costumes and to gallop shrieking and do stunts in the saddle. It was a big thing for Volcano Lake. Credit for this windfall was claimed by Father Edmund, the Episcopal minister who in his youth had been a silent-movie star and very beautiful. In the pulpit he wore marvelous old negligees. The Indians were all film-fans. They whispered that his garments had been donated by Marion Davies or Gloria Swanson. He, said Father Edmund, with his Hollywood connections, had induced the company to come to Volcano Lake. Anyway, Kathleen became acquainted with movie people. I mention this because in her letter she spoke of selling the ranch, putting Mother Tigler out to board with people in Tungsten City while she took a job in the picture industry. People in transition often develop an interest in the movies. Either that or they begin to talk about going back to school for a degree. There must be twenty million Americans who dream of returning to college. Even Renata was forever about to enroll herself at De Paul.
I went back to the courtroom to pick up my primrose path youthful check overcoat deeply considering what to do for money if Urbanovich laid a bond on me. What a bastard he was, this Croatian American bald judge. He knew neither the children nor Denise nor me, and what right had he to take away money earned in thought and fever by such peculiar operations of the brain! Oh yes I knew how to be high-minded about money too. Yea let them take all! And I could fill out a psychological questionnaire with the best of them, certain of being in the top ten percent for magnanimity. But Humboldt—I was full of Humboldt today—used to accuse me of trying to spend my whole life in the upper stories of higher consciousness. Higher consciousness, Humboldt said, lecturing me, was “innocent, aware of no evil in itself.” When you tried to live entirely in high consciousness, purely reasonable, you saw evil in other people only, never in yourself. From this Humboldt went on to insist that in the unconscious, in the irrational core of things money was a vital substance like the blood or fluids that bathed the brain tissues. Since he was always so earnest about the higher significance of money, had he perhaps returned my six thousand seven hundred and sixty-odd bucks in his last will and testament? Of course he hadn’t, how could he? He had died broke in a flophouse. But six thousand bucks wouldn’t go far now. Szathmar alone owed me more than that. I had lent Szathmar money to buy a condominium. Then there was Thaxter. Thaxter, by defaulting on a loan, had cost me fifty shares of IBM stock posted as collateral. After many letters of warning, the bank, with ethical gestures and regrets, almost weeping to see me so cruelly stung by a conniving friend, took away those shares. Thaxter pointed out that this was a deductible loss. Both he and Szathmar often comforted me in this way. By appealing also to dignity and to absolute value. (Didn’t I, myself, aim at magnanimity, and wasn’t friendship a far bigger thing than money?) People kept me broke. And now what was I to do? I owed publishers about seventy thousand dollars in advances for books I was too paralyzed to write. I had