Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [236]
George wrote as follows: “Our buddy from the Field Museum was unable to make this trip with me. Ben simply couldn’t swing it. The suburbs wouldn’t give him a release. He invited me for Sunday dinner so I could see for myself what a hell his life was. It didn’t look too terrible to me. His wife is fat but she looks good-natured and there’s a nice kid and a sort of standard mother-in-law and an English bulldog and a parrot. He says his mother-in-law lives on nothing but almond rings and cocoa. She must eat in the night because he’s never yet seen her taking a bite, not in fifteen years. Well, I thought, a lot he’s got to holler. His twelve-year-old boy is a Civil War buff and he and Daddy and the parrot and the bulldog have a kind of club. Besides, he has a nice profession looking after his fossils, and every summer he and the kid take a trip in the camper and fetch home more rocks. So what is he beefing? For old times’ sake I let him into our deal, but he was not the one I took to East Africa with me.
“To tell the truth I didn’t want to make that long trip alone. Then Naomi Lutz invited me to dinner to meet her son, the one who wrote those articles for the Southtown paper about how he kicked the drug habit. I read them and developed a real interest in this young fellow. Naomi said why not let him come with you? And I actually began to think he would be good company.”
I interrupt to observe that George Swiebel conceived himself to be especially gifted with young people. They never saw him as a funny old fellow. He took pride in his readiness to understand. He had many special and privileged relationships. He was accepted by youth, by the blacks, by gypsies and bricklayers, by Arabs in the desert, and by tribesmen in every remote place he had ever visited. With exotics he was a hit, making instantaneous human contact, invited to their tents and their cellars and their most intimate private circles. As Walt Whitman did with the draymen, clam diggers, and roughs, as Hemingway did with the Italian infantry and Spanish bullfighters, so George always did in Southeast Asia or in the Sahara or in Latin America, or wherever he went. He made his trips of this sort as often as he could manage, and the natives were always his brothers and were mad about him.
His letter went on: “Naomi really wanted the boy to be with you. Remember we were going to meet in Rome? But when I was ready to leave, Szathmar still hadn’t heard from you. My contact in Nairobi was waiting and when Naomi begged me to take her son, Louie—he needed adult masculine influences and her own boy friend, with whom she drinks beer and goes to the hockey game, was not the type to help and, in fact, was part of the kid’s problem—I was sympathetic. I thought I would like to learn about the dope scene anyway, and the boy must have some character, you know, if he got the monkey off his back (as they used to say in our time) without outside help. Naomi sets a good table, there was lots to eat and drink, I got pretty mellow, and I said to this Louie with the beard, ‘Okay, kid, meet me at O’Hare, TWA flight so and so, Thursday, half past five.’ I told Naomi I’d drop him off with you on the return trip. She’s a good old broad. I think you should have married her thirty years ago. She’s our kind of people. She gave me a thank-you hug and cried quite a bit. So Thursday at flight time this skinny young character with the beard is hanging around near the gate