Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [14]
He was a handsome man still, Kathleen adored him. He, however, suffered keen Jewish terrors in the country. He was an Oriental, she a Christian maiden, and he was afraid. He expected the KKK to burn a cross in his yard or shoot at him through the window as he lay on the Castro sofa reading Proust or inventing scandal. Kathleen told me that he looked under the hood of the Buick for booby traps. More than once Humboldt tried to get me to confess that I had similar terrors about Demmie Vonghel.
A neighboring farmer had sold him green logs. These smoked in the small fireplace as we sat after dinner. On the table was the stripped skeleton of a turkey. The wine and beer were going fast. There was an Ann Page coffee cake and melting maple-walnut ice cream. A slight cesspool smell rose to the window, and the Skellgas cylinders resembled silver artillery shells. Humboldt was saying that Stevenson was a man of real culture, the first really since Woodrow Wilson. But Wilson was inferior in this respect to Stevenson and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln knew Shakespeare well and quoted him at the crises of his life. “There’s nothing serious in mortality, All is but toys. . . . Duncan is in his grave; After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well . . .” These were Lincoln’s premonitions just as Lee was about to surrender. Frontiei-smen were never afraid of poetry. It was Big Business with its fear of femininity, it was the eunuchoid clergy capitulating to vulgar masculinity that made religion and art sissy things. Stevenson understood that. If you could believe Humboldt (and I couldn’t) Stevenson was Aristotle’s great-souled man. In his administration cabinet members would quote Yeats and Joyce. The new Joint Chiefs would know Thucydides. Humboldt would be consulted about each State of the Union message. He was going to be the Goethe of, the new government and build Weimar in Washington. “You be thinking what you might like to do, Charlie. Something in the Library of Congress, for a start.”
Kathleen said, “There’s a good program on the Late Late Show. An old Bela Lugosi movie.”
She saw that Humboldt was overexcited. He would not sleep tonight.
Very good. We tuned in the horror picture. Bela Lugosi was a mad scientist who invented synthetic flesh. He daubed it on himself, making a fearful mask, and he broke into the rooms of beautiful maidens who screamed and fell unconscious. Kathleen, more fabulous than scientists, more beautiful than any of the ladies, sat with a hazy absent freckled half-smile. Kathleen was a somnambulist. Humboldt had surrounded her with the whole crisis of Western Culture. She went to sleep. What else could she do? I understand these decades of sleep. This is a subject 1 know well. Meantime Humboldt kept us from going to bed. He took Amytal to overcome the Benzedrine, on top of which he drank gin.
I went out and walked in the cold. Light poured from the cottage into ruts and gullies, over the tangled road-crown of wild carrot and ragweed. Yapping dogs, foxes maybe, piercing stars. The late-late spooks jittered through the windows, the mad scientist shot it out with the police, his lab exploded, and he died in flames, the synthetic flesh melting from his face.
Demmie on Barrow Street would be watching this same picture. She didn’t have insomnia. She dreaded sleep and preferred horror movies to bad dreams. Toward bedtime Demmie always grew restless. We would take in the 10 o’clock news and walk the dog and play backgammon and double solitaire. Then we would sit on the bed and watch Lon Chaney throwing knives with his feet.
I hadn’t forgotten that Humboldt tried to make himself into Demmie’s protector, but I no longer had it in for him. As soon as they met, Demmie and Humboldt would begin at once to talk about old movies and new pills. When they discussed Dexamil so passionately and learnedly they lost me. But it pleased me that they had