Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [244]
“You bitch!” he yelled at her, and wanted to chase her up the aisle.
I caught him by the arm and said, “Cool it.”
Again I was part of a French audience. Last April Renata and I had come to this very theater. In fact I had lived in Paris in 1955. I quickly learned that this was no place for me. I need a little more fondness from people than a foreigner is likely to get here, and I was then still suffering from Demmie’s death. However, there was no time now to think of such things. The picture was beginning. Cantabile said, “Feel in your pocket, make sure you’ve still got that check. We’re screwed if you’ve lost it.”
“It’s here. Easy, boy,” I said.
“Hand it over. Let me enjoy the picture,” he said. I ignored him.
Then with great crashes of music the film began to roll. It opened with shots from the Twenties in the old newsreel manner—the first conquest of the North Pole by Amundsen and Umberto Nobile who flew in a dirigible from Scandinavia to Alaska. This was played by excellent comedians, highly stylized. I was enormously pleased. They were delicious. We saw the Pope blessing the expedition and Mussolini haranguing from his balcony. The competition between Amundsen and Nobile increased in hostility. When a little girl presented Amundsen with a bouquet, Nobile snatched it away; Amundsen gave orders, Nobile countermanded them. The Norwegians bickered with the Italians on the airship. Gradually we recognized, behind the Time Marches On style of these events, the presence of old Mr. Caldofreddo now in his ancient Sicilian village. These flashes of recollection were superimposed upon the daily existence of this amiable old gent, the ice-cream vendor who is loved by the kiddies, the affectionate father of Silvia Sottotutti. In his youth Caldofreddo had served with Nobile on two transpolar flights. The third, under Nobile’s sole command, ended in a disaster. The dirigible went down in the Arctic seas. The crew was scattered over the ice floes. Receiving radio signals from the survivors, the Russian icebreaker Krassin came to the rescue. Amundsen was handed a cable telling of the disaster while he was drinking deeply at a banquet—according to Humboldt, who had private information about everything, the man had been drinking like a fish. Immediately he announced that he was organizing an expedition to save Nobile. It was all as we had laid it out in Princeton years and years ago. Amundsen chartered a plane. He quarreled violently with his French pilot, who warned him that the aircraft was dangerously overloaded. He commanded him to take off, anyhow. They crashed into the sea. I was shocked to see how effective the comic interpretation of this disaster was. I remembered now that Humboldt and I had disagreed on this. He had insisted that it would be extremely funny. And so it was. The plane sank. Thousands of people were laughing. I wondered how he would have liked that.
The next portion of the film was all mine. It was I who did the research and wrote the scenes in which the rescued Caldofreddo ran wild aboard the Krassin. The sin of eating human flesh was too much for him to bear. To the astonishment of the Russian crew, he ran amuck, shouting gibberish. He hacked at a table with a large knife, he tried to drink scalding water, he hurled his body against the bulkheads. The sailors wrestled him to the ground. The suspicious ship’s doctor emptied his stomach with a pump and found human tissue under the microscope. I was responsible also for the big scene in which Stalin directs the contents of Caldofreddo’s stomach to be exhibited in a jar on Red Square under great banners denouncing cannibalistic capitalism. I added also the rage of Mussolini at this news, the calm of Calvin Coolidge in the White House as he prepared to get into bed for his daily siesta. All this I watched in a state of elation.