Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [131]
Last September I flew to California to find out why our magazine, The Ark, was not appearing. It was a wonderfully pleasant affectionate visit. We walked out to inspect his estate under the California sunshine. At the time I was beginning to develop a new cosmological feeling for the sun. That it was in part our Creator. That there was a sun-band in our spirits. That light rose within us and came forward to meet the sun’s light. That this sun light was not just an external glory revealed to our dark senses and that as light was to the eye, thought was to the mind. So here we were. A happy blessed day. The sky was giving its marvelous temperate pulsating blue heat, while oranges hung about us. Thaxter wore his favorite outdoor garment, the black cloak, and the toes of his bare feet were pressed together like Smyrna figs. He was now having roses put in and asked me not to talk to the Ukrainian gardener. “He was a concentration-camp guard and still insanely anti-Semitic. I don’t want him to start raving.” So in this beautiful place I felt that demon-selves and silly-selves and loving-selves were intermingling. Some of Thaxter’s newest children, fair and innocent, were allowed to play with dangerous knives and poisonous rose-dust containers. Nobody came to harm. Lunch was a big production, served beside the sparkling swimming pool with two wines poured by himself in somber dignity and intense connoisseurship, with cloak and curved pipe and bare toes writhing. His darkly pretty young wife gladly attended to all preparations and presided practically in the background. She was utterly delighted with her life and there was no dough, absolutely none. The gas station at the corner refused to take his check for five dollars. I had to pay with my credit card. And behind the scenes the young woman was holding off the tennis-court and swimming-pool people, the wine people, the car people, the grand-piano people, the bank people.
The Ark was going to be produced on new IBM equipment without expensive compositors. Never has any country given its people so many toys to play with or sent such highly gifted individuals to the remotest corners of idleness, as close as possible to the frontiers of pain. Thaxter was building a wing to house The Ark. Our magazine had to have its own premises and not interfere with his private life. He recruited some college students on a Tom Sawyer basis to dig a foundation. He went about in his MG visiting building sites to get construction hints from the hard-hats and scrounge pieces of plywood. This was an expansion I refused to subsidize. “I predict your house will slide into this hole,” I said. “Are you sure you’re within the building code?” But Thaxter had that willingness to try that makes field marshals and dictators. “We’ll throw twenty thousand men into this sector, and if we lose more than half, we’ll take a different tack.”
In The Ark we were going to publish brilliant things. Where were we to find such brilliancy? We knew it must be there. It was an insult to a civilized nation and to humankind to assume that it was not. Everything possible must be done to restore the credit and authority of art, the seriousness of thought, the integrity of culture, the dignity of style. Renata, who must have had an unauthorized look at my bank statements, apparently knew how much I was spending as a patron. “Who needs this Ark of yours, Charlie, and who are these animals you’re gonna save? You’re not really such an idealist—you’re full of hostility, dying to attack a lot of people in your very own magazine and insult everyone right and left. Thaxter’s arrogance is nothing compared to yours. You let him think he’s getting away with murder, but that’s really because you can double his arrogance in spades.”
“My money is running out anyhow. I’d rather spend it on this—”
“Not spend but squander,” she said. “Why do you finance this California setup?”
“Better than giving it to lawyers and to the government.”
“When you start to talk about The Ark you lose me. For once tell me simply—what,