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By Root 6062 0

was one of those eternal kid brothers to whom responsibilities are alien. Humboldt was jumping and prancing about New York being mad. Perhaps he was aware dimly of the satisfaction he was giving to the cultivated public which gossiped about his crack-up. Frantic desperate doomed crazy writers and suicidal painters are dramatically and socially valuable. And at that time he was a fiery Failure and I was a newborn Success. Success baffled me. It filled me with guilt and shame. The play performed nightly at the Belasco was not the play I had written. I had only provided a bolt of material from which the director had cut shaped basted and sewn his own Von Trenck. Brooding, I muttered to myself that after all Broadway adjoins the garment district and blends with it.

Cops have their own way of ringing a doorbell. They ring like brutes. Of course, we are entering an entirely new stage in the history of human consciousness. Policemen take psychology courses and have some feeling for the comedy of urban life. The two heavy men who stood on my Persian carpet carried guns, clubs, cuffs, bullets, walkie-talkies. Such an unusual case—a Mercedes beaten in the street—amused them. This pair of black giants had a squad-car odor, the smell of close quarters. Their hardware clinked, their hips and bellies swelled and bulged.

“I never saw such massacre on an automobile,” said one of them. “You in trouble with some real bad actors.” He was probing, hinting. He didn’t actually want to hear about the Mob, about juice men or gang-entanglements. Not one word. But it was all obvious. I didn’t look like a fellow in the rackets, but maybe I was one. Even the cops had seen The Godfather, The French Connection, The Valachi Papers, and other blast-and-bang thrillers. I was drawn to this gang stuff myself, as a Chicagoan, and I said, “I don’t know anything.” I dummied up, and I believe the police approved of this.

“You keep your car in the street?” said one of the cops—he had volumes of muscle and a great slack face. “If I didn’t have a garage, I wouldn’t own but a piece of junk.” Then he saw my medal, which Renata had framed in plush on the wall, and he said, “Were you in Korea?”

“No,” I said. “The French government gave me that. The Legion of Honor. I’m a knight, a chevalier. Their ambassador decorated me.”

On that occasion, Humboldt had sent me one of his unsigned post cards. “Shoveleer! Your name is now lesion!”

He had been on a Finnegans Wake kick for years. I remembered our many discussions of Joyce’s view of language, of the poet’s passion for charging speech with music and meaning, of the dangers that hover about all the works of the mind, of beauty falling into abysses of oblivion like the snow chasms of the Antarctic, of Blake and Vision versus Locke and the tabula rasa. As I saw the cops out I was remembering with sadness of heart the lovely conversations Humboldt and I used to have. Humanity divine incomprehensible!

“You better square this thing,” the cop advised me, low and kindly. His great black weight moved toward the elevator. The Shoveleer inclined politely. I felt my eyes ache with a helpless craving for help.

Yes, the medal reminded me of Humboldt. Yes, when Napoleon gave the French intellectuals ribbons stars and baubles, he knew what he was doing. He took a boatload of scholars with him to Egypt. He ditched them. They came up with the Rosetta stone. From the time of Richelieu and earlier, the French had been big in the culture business. You’d never catch De Gaulle wearing one of these ridiculous trinkets. He had too much self-esteem. The fellows who bought Manhattan from the Indians didn’t wear beads themselves. I would gladly have given this gold medal to Humboldt. The Germans tried to honor him. He was invited to Berlin in 1952 to lecture at the Free University. He wouldn’t go. He was afraid of being abducted by the GPU or the NKVD. He was a longtime contributor to the Partisan Review and a prominent anti-Stalinist, so he was afraid that the Russians would try to kidnap and kill him. “Also, if I spent a year in Germany