Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [252]
“I die when I think of a lawsuit. Ten more years in the courts? That would be worth fees of four or five hundred thousand to my lawyers. But for me, a man approaching sixty and heading for seventy, there wouldn’t be a penny left. I’ll take my forty or fifty thousand now.”
“Like a mere nuisance claim?” said Kathleen, indignant.
“No, like a man lucky enough to have his higher activities subsidized for a few years. I’ll divide the money with Uncle Waldemar, of course. Kathleen, when I heard of Humboldt’s will I thought it was just his posthumous way of carrying on more of the same touching tomfoolery. But the legal steps he took were all sound and he was right, damn it, about the value of his papers. He always had a wild hope of hitting the big time. And what do you know? He did! And it wasn’t his serious work that the world found a use for. Just these capers.”
“Also your capers,” said Kathleen. When she smiled quietly she showed a great many small lines in her skin. I was sorry to see these signs of age in a woman whose beauty I remembered so well. But you could live with such things if you took the right view of them. After all, these wrinkles were the result of many many many years of amiability. They were the mortal toll taken by a good thing. I was beginning to understand how one might be reconciled to such alterations. “But to be taken seriously, what do you suppose Humboldt should have done?”
“How can I say that, Kathleen? He did what he could, and lived and died more honorably than most. Being crazy was the conclusion of the joke Humboldt tried to make out of his great disappointment. He was so intensely disappointed. All a man of that sort really asks for is a chance to work his heart out at some high work. People like Humboldt—they express a sense of life, they declare the feelings of their times or they discover meanings or find out the truths of nature, using the opportunities their time offers. When those opportunities are great, then there’s love and friendship between all who are in the same enterprise. As you can see in Haydn’s praise for Mozart. When the opportunities are smaller, there’s spite and rage, insanity. I’ve been attached to Humboldt for nearly forty years. It’s been an ecstatic connection. The hope of having poetry—the joy of knowing the kind of man that created poetry. You know? There’s the most extraordinary, unheard-of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it. But now this is true of the world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. Now I begin to understand what Tolstoi was getting at when he called on mankind to cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live. It’s become clearer and clearer to me in Humboldt’s heartbreak and madness. He performed all the stormy steps of that routine. That performance was conclusive. That—it’s perfectly plain, now—can’t be continued. Now we must listen in secret to the sound of the truth that God puts into us.”
“And that’s what you call the higher activity—and this is what the money you get from Caldofreddo will subsidize. ... I see,” said Kathleen.
“On the assumption commonly made the commonest events of life can only be absurd. Faith was called absurd. But now faith will perhaps move these mountains of commonsense absurdity.”
“I was going to suggest that you leave Madrid and come down to Almería.”
“I see. You’re worried about me. I look bad.”
“Not exactly. But I can tell you’ve been under a huge strain. It’ll be pleasant weather on the Mediterranean now.”
“The Mediterranean, yes. How I’d love a month of blessed peace. But I haven’t got much money to maneuver with.”
“You’re broke? I thought you were loaded.”
“I’ve been unloaded.”
“It was bad of me then not to send the fifteen hundred dollars. I assumed it would be a trifle.”
“Well, until a few months ago it was a trifle. Can you find something for me to do in Almer