Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [196]
“I guess you loved him,” she said. “Of course I was crazy about him. We went to New Jersey—that would have been hell even if he had had no crazy spells. The little cottage seems now like part of a terrible frame-up. But I would have gone to the Arctic with him. And the college girl’s thrill at getting into the literary life was only a small part of it. I didn’t care for most of his literary friends. They came to watch the show Humboldt put on, his routines. When they left, and he was still inspired, he’d go after me. He was a sociable person. He used to say how much he would like to move in brilliant circles, be a part of the literary world.”
“That’s just it. There never was such a literary world,” I said. “In the nineteenth century there were several solitaries of the highest genius—a Melville or a Poe had no literary life. It was the customhouse and the barroom for them. In Russia, Lenin and Stalin destroyed the literary world. Russia’s situation now resembles ours—poets, in spite of everything against them, emerge from nowhere. Where did Whitman come from, and where did he get what he had? It was W. Whitman, an irrepressible individual, that had it and that did it.”
“Well, if there had been a rich literary life, and if he had been able to drink tea with Edith Wharton and see Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot twice a week, poor Humboldt would have felt supported and appreciated and rewarded for his talent. He just didn’t feel able to fill up all the vacancy he felt around him,” said Kathleen. “Of course he was a wizard. He made me feel so slow, slow slow! He invented the most ingenious things to accuse me of. All that invention should have gone into his poetry. Humboldt had too many personal arrangements. Too much genius went into the arrangements. As his wife I had to suffer the consequences. But let’s not go on talking about it. Let me ask . . . you two wrote a scenario once. . . ?”
“Just some nonsense to pass the time in Princeton. You said something about it to that young woman, Mrs. Cantabile. What is Mrs. Cantabile like?”
“She’s pretty. She’s polite in an old-fashioned Emily Post way, and sends proper notes to thank you for a delicious lunch. At the same time she paints her nails in gaudy colors, wears flashy clothes, and has a harsh voice. When she chats with you she’s screaming. She sounds like a gun-moll but asks graduate-student questions. Anyway I’m getting into the film business now, and I’m curious about something that you and Humboldt did together. After all a successful movie was made of your play.”
“Oh, our scenario could never have made a picture. Our cast included Mussolini, the Pope, Stalin, Calvin Coolidge, Amundsen, and Nobile. Our hero was a cannibal. We had a dirigible and a Sicilian village. W. C. Fields might have loved it, but only a mad producer would ever have put a penny into it. Of course no one ever does know about these things. In 1913, who would have looked twice at an advance-scenario of World War One? Or if, before I was born, you had submitted the tale of my own life to me and invited me to live with it, wouldn’t I have turned you down flat?”
“But what about your hit play?”
“Kathleen, believe me. I was just the worm that spit out the silk thread. Other people created the Broadway garment. Now tell me, what did Humboldt leave you?”
“Well, first of all, he wrote me an extraordinary letter.”
“Me too. And a perfectly sane one.”
“Mine is more mixed. It’s too personal to show, even now. He spelled out all the crimes I was supposed to have committed. His purpose was to forgive me, whatever I had done, but he forgave in full detail and he was still talking about the Rockefellers. But there were patches of perfect sanity. Really moving, true things.”
“Was that all you got from him?”
“Well, no, Charlie, there was something else