Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [254]
There was, however, no need to go to Paris. A letter came from Stewart, the publisher.
He wrote: “I see you haven’t followed the papers for some time. It’s true that Pierre Thaxter was abducted in Argentina. How or why or whether he’s still in their hands I’m in no position to say. But I tell you in confidence, since you’re his old pal, that it all puzzles me and sometimes I wonder if it’s really on the level. Mind you, I don’t care to suggest that it’s a phony kidnap, out-and-out. I’m ready to believe that the people who grabbed Thaxter off the sidewalk were convinced of his importance. Nor is there any indication of a prearranged snatching as may possibly have been the case with Miss Hearst and the Sym-bionese. But I enclose an article from the Op Ed page of The New York Times by our friend Thaxter. It’s supposed to have been sent from the secret place or dungeon where they keep him. How come, I ask you, was he able to write and send to the Times this little essay on being kidnaped? Perhaps you will note, as I did, that he even makes a pitch for ransom funds. I am told that sympathetic readers have already sent checks to the US Embassy in Argentina to reunite him with his nine children. Far from being harmed, he is even crashing the big time and, if I’m not mistaken, the experience has also sharpened his literary style. This is publicity beyond price. Your guess that he may have fallen into a gold mine is probably correct. If his neck isn’t broken, he’ll be rich and famous.”
Thaxter wrote, in part, “Three men held pistols to my head as I was leaving a restaurant in a busy street in Buenos Aires. In these three muzzles I saw the vanity of all the mental strategies for outwitting violence that I had ever entertained. Until that moment I had never realized how very often a modern man anticipates this critical moment. My head, now perhaps about to be blown open, had been full of schemes for saving myself. As I got into the waiting car I thought, I’m done for. I was not subjected to physical abuse. It soon became apparent that I was in the hands of sophisticated individuals advanced in their political thinking and utterly devoted to the principles of liberty and justice as they understood them. My captors believe that they have a case to present to civilized opinion and have chosen me to state it for them, having ascertained that I was sufficiently well known as an essayist and journalist to command attention.” (Even now he gave himself a plug.) “As guerrillas and terrorists they would like it known that they are not heartless and irresponsible fanatics but that they have a high tradition of their own. They invoke Lenin and Trotsky as founders and builders who discovered that force was their indispensable instrument. They know the classics of this tradition, from nineteenth-century Russia to twentieth-century France. I have been brought up from the cellar to attend seminars on Sorel and Jean-Paul Sartre. These people are, in their own fashion, most high principled and serious. They have, furthermore, the quality to which Garcia Lorca applied the term Duende, an inner power which burns the blood like powdered glass, a spiritual intensity that does not suggest, but commands.”
I met Kathleen at a café and showed her the clippings. There was more in the same vein. I said, “Thaxter has a terrible weakness for making major statements. I think I might just ask for the three guns to be applied to the back of my head and the triggers pulled rather than sit through those seminars.”
“Don’t be too hard on him. The man is saving his life,” she said. “Also it’s a fascinating thing, really. Where does he make the ransom pitch?”
“Here. ‘... a price of fifty thousand dollars which I am allowed to take this occasion to request my friends and members of my family to contribute. In the hope of seeing my young children again,’ and so forth. The Times treats its readers to plenty of thrills. That’s a really pampered public