Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [180]
“And do you know what I did with the six thousand bucks? I bought an Oldsmobile with part of it. What I thought I was going to do with this big powerful car on Greenwich Street, I can’t tell you. It cost me lots of dough to keep it in a garage, more than the rent in my fifth-floor walk-up. And what happened to this automobile? I had to be hospitalized and when I got out, after a course of shock treatments, I couldn’t remember where I left it. I couldn’t find the claim check, or the registration either. I had to forget about it. But for a while I drove a hell of a car. I became capable of observing some of my own symptoms. My eyelids became deep violet with manic insomnia. Late at night I drove past the Belasco Theatre with some buddies and I said, ‘There’s the hit that paid for this powerful machine.’ I declare I had it in for you because you thought I was going to be the great American poet of the century. You came down from Madison, Wisconsin, and told me so. But I wasn’t! And how many people were waiting for that poet! How many souls hoped for the strength and sweetness of visionary words to purge consciousness of its stale dirt, to learn from a poet what had happened to the three-fourths of life that are obviously missing! But during these last years I haven’t been able to even read poetry, much less write it. Opening the Phaedrus a few months ago, I just couldn’t do it. I broke down. My gears are stripped. My lining is shot. It is all shattered. I didn’t have the strength to bear Plato’s beautiful words, and started to cry. The original, fresh self isn’t there any more. But then I think, Maybe I can recover. If I play it smart. Playing it smart means simpler kinds of enjoyment. Blake had it right with Enjoyment the food of Intellect. And if the intellect can’t digest meat (the Phaedrus) you coddle it with zwieback and warm milk.”
When I read his words about the original fresh self, I began to cry myself, and big benign Renata shook her head when she observed this as if to say, “Men!” As if to say, “These poor mysterious monsters. You work your way down into the labyrinth and there you find the minotaur breaking his heart over a letter.” But I saw Humboldt in the days of his youth, covered in rainbows, uttering inspired words, affectionate, intelligent. In those days his evil was only an infinitesimal black point, an amoeba. The mention of zwieback brought back to me, also, the pretzel he was chewing on the curb on that hot day. On that day I made a poor showing. I behaved very badly. I should have gone up to him. I should have taken his hand. I should have kissed his face. But is it true that such actions are effective? And he was dreadful. His head was all gray webbing, like an infested bush. His eyes were red and his big body was floundering in the gray suit. He looked like an old bull bison on his last legs, and I beat it. Maybe that was the very day on which he wrote this beautiful letter to me. “Now come on, kid,” said Renata, kindly. “Dry your eyes.” She gave me a fragrant hankie, oddly redolent, as if she kept it not in her pocketbook but between her legs. I put it to my face and curiously enough it did something, it gave me some comfort. That young woman had a good understanding of certain fundamentals.
“This morning,” Humboldt went on, “the sun was bright. For certain of the living it was a very fine day. Though without sleep for several nights I remembered how it used to be to bathe and shave and breakfast and go into the world. A mild lemon light rinsed the streets. (Hope for this wild combined human operation called America?) I thought I would stroll to Brentano’s and look into a copy of Keats’s Letters. During the night I had thought of something Keats had said about Robert Burns. How a luxurious imagination deadens its delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable. For the first Americans