Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [31]
I said to George’s secretary, “Sharon? He’s not back? Now listen, tell him not to go to the schwitz on Division Street today. Not! It’s serious.”
George said of Sharon, “She digs emergencies.” This is understandable. Two years ago she had her throat cut by a total stranger. This unknown black man stepped into George’s South Chicago office with an open razor. He swept it over Sharon’s throat like a virtuoso and disappeared forever. “The blood fell like a curtain,” said George. He knotted a towel about Sharon’s neck and rushed her to the hospital. George digs emergencies himself. He’s always looking for something basic, “honest,” “of the earth,” primordial. When he saw blood, a vital substance, he knew what to do. But of course George is also theoretical; he is a primitivist. This ruddy, big-muscled, blunt-handed George with his brown, humanly comprehensive eyes is not stupid except when he proclaims his ideas. He does this loudly, fiercely. And then I only grin at him because I know how kindly he is. He takes care of his old parents, of his sisters, of his ex-wife and their grown children. He denounces eggheads, but he really loves culture. He spends whole days trying to read difficult books, knocking himself out. Not with great success. And when I introduce him to intellectuals like my learned friend Durnwald, he shouts and baits them and talks dirty, his face gets red. Well, it’s that sort of curious moment in the history of human consciousness when the mind universally awakens and democracy originates, an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age. Humboldt, boyish, loved the life of the mind and I shared his enthusiasm. But the intellectuals one meets are something else again. I didn’t behave well with the mental beau monde of Chicago. Denise invited superior persons of all kinds to the house in Kenwood to discuss politics and economics, race, psychology, sex, crime. Though I served the drinks and laughed a great deal I was not exactly cheerful and hospitable. I wasn’t even friendly. “You despise these people!” Denise said, angry. “Only Durnwald is an exception, that curmudgeon.” This accusation was true. I hoped to lay them all low. In fact it was one of my cherished dreams and dearest hopes. They were against the True, the Good, the Beautiful. They denied the light. “You’re a snob,” she said. This was not accurate. But I wouldn’t have a thing to do with these bastards, the lawyers, Congressmen, psychiatrists, sociology professors, clergy, and art-types (they were mostly gallery-owners) she invited.
“You’ve got to meet real people,” George said to me later. “Denise surrounded you with phonies, and now day in, day out you’re alone with tons of books and papers in that apartment and I swear you’re going to go nuts.”
“Why no,” I said, “there’s yourself and Alec Szathmar, and my friend Richard Durnwald. And also Renata. And what about the people at the Downtown Club.”
“Lots of good this guy Durnwald will do you. He’s the professor’s professor. And nobody can interest him. He’s heard it or read it all. When I try to talk to him I feel that I’m playing the ping-pong champion of China. I serve the ball, he smashes it back, and that’s the end of that. I have to serve again and pretty soon I’m out of balls.”
He always came down heavily on Durnwald. There was a certain rivalry. He knew how attached I was to Dick Durnwald. In crude Chicago Durnwald, whom I admired and even adored, was the only man with whom I exchanged ideas. But for six months Durnwald had been at the University of Edinburgh,