Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [67]
However, he didn’t laugh. His eyes were red. He’d been up all night. First he watched the election returns. Then he wandered about the house and yard gripped by despair, thinking what to do. Then he planned out this putsch. Then filled with inspiration he drove in his Buick, the busted muffler blasting in the country lanes and the great long car skedaddling dangerously on the curves. Lucky for the woodchucks they were already hibernating. I know what figures crowded his thoughts—Walpole, Count Mosca, Disraeli, Lenin. While he thought also, with un-contemporary sublimity, about eternal life. Ezekiel and Plato were not absent. The man was noble. But he was all asmolder, and craziness also made him vile and funny. Heavy-handed, thick-faced with fatigue, he took a medicine bottle from his briefcase and fed himself a few little pills out of the palm of his hand. Tranquilizers, perhaps. Or maybe amphetamines for speed. He swallowed them dry. He doctored himself. Like Demmie Vonghel. She locked herself in the bathroom and took many pills.
“So you’ll go to Ricketts,” Humboldt told me.
“I thought he was only a front man.”
“That’s right. He’s a stooge. But the old guard can’t disown him. If we outsmart him, they’ll have to back him up.”
“But why should Ricketts pay attention to what I say?”
“Because, friend, I passed the word around that your play is going to be produced.”
“You did?”
“Next year, on Broadway. They look on you as a successful playwright.”
“Now why the hell did you do that? I’m going to look like a phony.”
“No, you won’t. We’ll make it true. You can leave that to me. I gave Ricketts your last essay in the Kenyan to read, and he thinks you’re a comer. And don’t pretend with me. I know you. You love intrigue and mischief. Right now your teeth are on edge with delight. Besides, it’s not just intrigue. . . .”
“What? Sorcery! Fucking sortilegio!”
“It’s not sortilegio. It’s mutual aid.”
“Don’t give me that stuff.”
“First me, then you,” he said.
I distinctly remember that my voice jumped up. I shouted, “What!” Then I laughed and said, “You’ll make me a Princeton professor, too? Do you think I could stand a whole lifetime of this drinking, boredom, small talk, and ass-kissing? Now that you’ve lost Washington by a landslide, you’ve settled pretty fast for this academic music box. Thank you, I’ll find misery in my own way. I give you two years of this goyish privilege.”
Humboldt waved his hands at me. “Don’t poison my mind. What a tongue you have, Charlie. Don’t say those things. I’ll expect them to happen. They’ll infect my future.”
I paused and considered his peculiar proposition. Then I looked at Humboldt himself. His mind was executing some earnest queer labor. It was swelling and pulsating oddly, painfully. He tried to laugh it all off with his nearly silent panting laugh. I could hardly hear the breath of it.
“You wouldn’t be lying to Ricketts,” he said. “Where would they get somebody like me?”
“Okay, Humboldt. That is a hard question.”
“Well, I am one of the leading literary men of this country.”
“Sure you are, at your best.”
“Something should be done for me. Especially in this Ike moment, as darkness falls on the land.”
“But why this?”
“Well, frankly, Charlie, I’m out of kilter, temporarily. I have to get back to a state in which I can write poetry again. But where’s my equilibrium? There are too many anxieties. They dry me out. The world keeps interfering. I have to get the enchantment back. I feel as if I’ve been living in a suburb of reality, and commuting back and forth. That’s got to stop. I have to locate myself. I’m here” (here on earth, he meant) “to do something, something good.”
“I know, Humboldt. Here isn’t Princeton, either, and everyone is waiting for the good thing.”
Eyes reddening still more, Humboldt said, “I know you love me, Charlie.”
“It’s true. But let’s only say it once.”
“You’re right. I’m a brother to you, too, though. Kathleen also knows it. It’s obvious how we feel about one another, Demmie Vonghel included. Humor me, Charlie. Never mind how ridiculous this seems. Humor