Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [205]
Ulick wanted to show me how Hortense had redecorated the children’s rooms, he said. I knew that he was looking for candy bars. In the kitchen the cupboards were padlocked, and the refrigerator was out of bounds. “She’s absolutely right,” he said, “I must stop eating. I know you always said it was all false appetite. You advised me to put my finger down my throat and gag when I thought I was hungry. What’s that supposed to do, reverse the diaphragm muscle or something? You were always a strong-willed fellow and a jock, chinning yourself and swinging clubs and dumbbells and punching the bag in the closet and running around the block and hanging from the trees like Tar-zan of the Apes. You must have had a bad conscience about what you did when you locked yourself in the toilet. You’re a sexy little bastard, never mind your big-time mental life. All this fucking art! I never understood the play you wrote. I went away in the second act. The movie was better, but even that had dreary parts. My old friend Ev Dirksen had a literary period, too. Did you know the Senator wrote poems for greeting cards? But he was a deep old phony—he was a real guy, as cynical as they come. He at least kidded his own hokum. Say, listen, I knew the country was headed for trouble as soon as there began to be big money in art.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “To make capitalists out of artists was a humorous idea of some depth. America decided to test the pretensions of the esthetic by applying the dollar measure. Maybe you read the transcript of Nixon’s tape where he said he’d have no part of this literature and art shit. That was because he was out of step. He lost touch with the spirit of Capitalism. Misunderstood it completely.”
“Here, here, don’t start one of your lectures on me. You were always spouting some theory to us at the table—Marx, or Darwin, or Schopenhauer, or Oscar Wilde. If it wasn’t one damn thing it was another. You had the biggest collection of Modern Library books on the block. And I’d bet you fifty to one you’re ass-deep in a crank theory this minute. You couldn’t live without it. Let’s get going. We have to pick up the two Cubans and that Boston Irishman who’s coming along. I never went for this art stuff, did I?”
“You tried becoming a photographer,” I said.
“Me? When was that?”
“When they had funerals in the Russian Orthodox church—you remember, the stucco one with the onion dome on Leavitt, corner of Haddon?—they opened the coffins on the front steps and took pictures of the family with the corpse. You tried to make a deal with the priest and be appointed official photographer.”
“Did I? Good for me!” It pleased Ulick to hear this. But somehow he smiled quietly, with mild fixity, musing at himself. He felt his hanging cheeks and said that he had shaved too close today, his skin was tender. It must have been a rising soreness from the breast that made him touchy about the face. This visit of mine, with its intimations of final parting, bothered him. He acknowledged that I had done right to come but he loathed me for it, too. I could see it his way. Why did I come flapping around him with my love, like a death-pest? There was no way for me to win, because if I hadn’t come here he’d have held it against me. He needed to be wronged. He luxuriated in anger, and he kept accounts.
For fifty years, ritualistically, he had been repeating the same jokes, laughing at them because they were so infantile and stupid. “You know who’s in the hospital? Sick people”; and, “I took first prize in history once, but they seen me taking it and made me put it back.” And in the days when I still argued with him I would say, “You’re a real populist