Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [5]
All right, then, I will try to summarize: at the age of twenty-two Von Humboldt Fleisher published his first book of ballads. You would have thought that the son of neurotic immigrants from Eighty-ninth and West End—his extravagant papa hunting Pancho Villa and, in the photo Humboldt showed me, with a head so curly that his garrison cap was falling off; his mama, from one of those Potash and Perlmutter yapping fertile baseball-and-business families, darkly pretty at first, then gloomy mad and silent—that such a young man would be clumsy, that his syntax would be unacceptable to fastidious goy critics on guard for the Protestant Establishment and the Genteel Tradition. Not at all. The ballads were pure, musical, witty, radiant, humane. I think they were Platonic. By Platonic I refer to an original perfection to which all human beings long to return. Yes, Humboldt’s words were impeccable. Genteel America had nothing to worry about. It was in a tizzy—it expected Anti-Christ to burst out of the slums. Instead this Humboldt Fleisher turned up with a love-offering. He behaved like a gentleman. He was charming. So he was warmly welcomed. Conrad Aiken praised him, T. S. Eliot took favorable notice of his poems, and even Yvor Winters had a good word to say for him. As for me, I borrowed thirty bucks and enthusiastically went to New York to talk things over with him on Bedford Street. This was in 1938. We crossed the Hudson on the Christopher Street ferry to eat clams in Hoboken and talked about the problems of modern poetry. I mean that Humboldt lectured me about them. Was Santayana right? Was modern poetry barbarous? Modern poets had more wonderful material than Homer or Dante. What they didn’t have was a sane and steady idealization. To be Christian was impossible, to be pagan also. That left you-know-what.
I had come to hear that great things might be true. This I was told on the Christopher Street ferry. Marvelous gestures had to be made and Humboldt made them. He told me that poets ought to figure out how to get around pragmatic America. He poured it on for me that day. And there I was, having raptures, gotten up as a Fuller Brush salesman in a smothering wool suit, a hand-me-down from Julius. The pants were big in the waist and the shirt ballooned out, for my brother Julius had a fat chest. I wiped my sweat with a handkerchief stitched with a J.
Humboldt himself was just beginning to put on weight. He was thick through the shoulders but still narrow at the hips. Later he got a prominent belly, like Babe Ruth. His legs were restless and his feet made nervous movements. Below, shuffling comedy; above, princeliness and dignity, a certain nutty charm. A surfaced whale beside your boat might look at you as he looked with his wide-set gray eyes. He was fine as well as thick, heavy but also light, and his face was both pale and dark. Golden-brownish hair flowed upward—two light crests and a dark trough. His forehead was scarred. As a kid he had fallen on a skate blade, the bone itself was dented. His pale lips were prominent and his mouth was full of immature-looking teeth, like milk teeth. He consumed his cigarettes to the last spark and freckled his tie and his jacket with burns.
The subject that afternoon was Success. I was from the sticks and he was giving me the low-down. Could I imagine, he said, what it meant to knock the Village flat with your poems and then follow up with critical essays in the Partisan and the Southern Review? He had much to tell me about Modernism, Symbolism, Yeats, Rilke, Eliot. Also, he was a pretty good drinker. And of course there were lots of girls. Besides, New York was then a very Russian city, so we had Russia all over the place. It was a case, as Lionel Abel said,