Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [65]
“Come to the point,” I said to him.
His mouth seemed dry but there was nothing to drink. Pills make you thirsty. He smoked some more instead, and said, “You and I are friends. Sewell brought me here. And I brought you.”
“I’m grateful to you. But you aren’t grateful to him.”
“Because he’s a son of a bitch.”
“Perhaps.” I didn’t mind hearing Sewell called that. He had snubbed me. But with his depleted hair, his dry-cereal mustache, the drinker’s face, the Prufrock subtleties, the would-be elegance of his clasped hands and crossed legs, with his involved literary mutterings he was no wicked enemy. Although I seemed to be restraining Humboldt I loved the way he loused up Sewell. Humboldt’s wayward nutty fertility when he let himself go gratified one of my shameful appetites, no doubt about it.
“Sewell is taking advantage of us,” Humboldt said.
“How do you figure that?”
“When he comes back we’ll be turned out.”
“But I always knew it was a one-year job.”
“Oh, you don’t mind being like a rented article from Hertz’s, like a trundle bed or a baby’s potty?” said Humboldt.
Under the shepherd’s plaid of the blanket-wide jacket his back began to look humped (a familiar sign). That massing of bison power in his back meant that he was up to no good. The look of peril grew about his mouth and eyes and the two crests of hair stood higher than usual. Pale hot radiant waves appeared in his face. Pigeons, gray-and-cream-feathered, walked with crimson feet on the sandstone window sills. Humboldt didn’t like them. He saw them as Princeton pigeons, Sewell’s pigeons. They cooed for Sewell. At times Humboldt seemed to view them as his agents and spies. After all this was Sewell’s office and Humboldt sat at Sewell’s desk. The books on the walls were Sewell’s. Lately Humboldt had been throwing them into boxes. He pushed off a set of Toynbee and put up his own Rilke and Kafka. Down with Toynbee; down with Sewell, too. “You and I are expendable here, Charlie,” Humboldt said. “Why? I’ll tell you. We’re Jews, shonickers, kikes. Here in Princeton, we’re no threat to Sewell.”
I remembered thinking hard about this, knitting my forehead. “I’m afraid I still haven’t grasped your point,” I said.
“Try thinking of yourself as Sheeny Solomon Levi, then. It’s safe to install Sheeny Solomon and go to Damascus for a year to discuss The Spoils of Poynton. When you come back, your classy professorship is waiting for you. You and I are no threat.”
“But I don’t want to be a threat to him. And why should Sewell worry about threats?”
“Because he’s at war with these old guys, all the billy whiskers, the Hamilton Wright Mabie genteel crappers who never accepted him. He doesn’t know Greek or Anglo-Saxon. To them he’s a lousy upstart.”
“So? He’s a self-made man. Now I’m for him.”
“He’s corrupt, he’s a bastard, he’s covered you and me with contempt. I feel ridiculous when I walk down the street. In Princeton you and I are Moe and Joe, a Yid vaudeville act. We’re a joke—Abie Kabibble and Company. Unthinkable as members of the Princeton community.”
“Who needs their community?”
“Nobody trusts that little crook. There’s something human he just hasn’t got. The person who knew him best, his wife—when she left him she took her birds. You saw all those cages. She didn’t even want an empty cage to remind her of him.”
“Did she go away with birds sitting on her head and arms? Come on, Humboldt, what do you want?”
“I want you to feel as insulted as I feel, not stick me with the whole thing. Why don’t you have any indignation, Charlie— Ah! You’re not a real American. You’re grateful. You’re a foreigner. You have that Jewish immigrant kiss-the-ground-at-Ellis-Island gratitude. You’re also a child of the Depression. You never thought you’d have a job, with an office, and a desk, and private drawers all for yourself. It’s still