Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [2]
I did, once, see Humboldt’s mother in her dark apartment on West End Avenue. Her face was like her son’s. She was mute, fat, broad-lipped, tied up in a bathrobe. Her hair was white, bushy, Fijian. The melanin was on the back of her hands and on her dark face still darker spots as large as her eyes. Humboldt bent over to speak to her, and she answered nothing but stared out with some powerful female grievance. He was gloomy when we left the building and he said, “She used to let me go to Chicago but I was supposed to spy on the old man and copy out bank statements and account numbers and write down the names of his hookers. She was going to sue him. She’s mad, you see. But then he lost everything in the crash. Died of a heart attack down in Florida.”
This was the background of those witty cheerful ballads. He was a manic depressive (his own diagnosis). He owned a set of Freud’s works and read psychiatric journals. Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life you knew that everyday life was psychopathology. That was all right with Humboldt. He often quoted me King Lear: “In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ‘twixt son and father. . . .” He stressed “son and father.” “Ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.”
Well, that’s where ruinous disorders followed him seven years ago. And now as new anthologies came out I went down to Brentano’s basement and checked them. Humboldt’s poems were omitted. The bastards, the literary funeral directors and politicians who put together these collections had no use for old-hat Humboldt. So all his thinking, writing, feeling counted for nothing, all the raids behind the lines to bring back beauty had no effect except to wear him out. He dropped dead in a dismal hotel off Times Square. I, a different sort of writer, remained to mourn him in prosperity out in Chicago.
The noble idea of being an American poet certainly made Humboldt feel at times like a card, a boy, a comic, a fool. We lived like bohemians and graduate students in a mood of fun and games. Maybe America didn’t need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we. So Humboldt behaved like an eccentric and a comic subject. But occasionally there was a break in his eccentricity when he stopped and thought. He tried to think himself clear away from this American world (I did that, too). I could see that Humboldt was pondering what to do between then and now, between birth and death, to satisfy certain great questions. Such brooding didn’t make him any saner. He tried drugs and drink. Finally, many courses of shock treatment had to be administered. It was, as he saw it, Humboldt versus madness. Madness was a whole lot stronger.
I wasn’t doing so well myself recently when Humboldt acted from the grave, so to speak, and made a basic change in my life. In spite of our big fight and fifteen years of estrangement he left me something in his will. I came into a legacy.
two
He was a great entertainer but going insane. The pathologic element could be missed only by those who were laughing too hard to look. Humboldt, that grand erratic handsome person with his wide blond face, that charming fluent deeply worried man to whom I was so attached, passionately lived out the theme of Success. Naturally he died a Failure. What else can result from the capitalization of such nouns? Myself, I’ve always held the number of sacred words down. In my opinion Humboldt had too long a list of them—Poetry, Beauty, Love, Waste Land, Alienation, Politics, History, the Unconscious. And, of course, Manic and Depressive,