Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [70]
Making my meditation as detailed as possible, no fact too small to be remembered, I could see how Humboldt had looked when he coached me on the way to handle Ricketts. Humboldt’s face, with a persuasive pumpkin smile, came so close to mine that I felt the warmth or fever of his cheeks. Humboldt said, “You have a talent for this kind of errand. I know it.” Did he mean I was a born meddler? He said, “A man like Ricketts didn’t make it big in the Protestant establishment. Not fit for the important roles—corporation president, board chairman, big banks, Republican National Committee, Joint Chiefs, Budget Bureau, Federal Reserve. To be a prof, of his kind means to be the weak kid brother. Or maybe even sister. They get taken care of. He’s probably a member of the Century Club. Okay to teach The Ancient Mariner to young Firestones or Fords. Humanist, scholar, scoutmaster, nice but a numbskull.”
Maybe Humboldt was right. I could see that Ricketts was unable to cope with me. His sincere brown eyes seemed to ache. He waited for me to get on with this, to finish the interview. I didn’t like backing him into a corner, but behind me I had Humboldt. Because Humboldt didn’t sleep on the night Ike was elected, because he was drugged with pills and booze or toxic with metabolic wastes, because his psyche didn’t refresh itself by dreaming, because he renounced his gifts, because he lacked spiritual strength, or was too frail to stand up to the unpoetic power of the USA, I had to come here and torment Ricketts. I felt pity for Ricketts. And I couldn’t see that Princeton was such a big deal as Humboldt made out. Between noisy Newark and squalid Trenton it was a sanctuary, a zoo, a spa, with its own choochoo and elms and lovely green cages. It resembled another place I was later to visit as a tourist—a Serbian watering place called Vrnatchka Banja. But maybe what Princeton was not counted for more. It was not the factory or department store, not the great corporation office or bureaucratic civil service, it was not the routine job-world. If you could arrange to avoid that routine job-world, you were an intellectual or an artist. Too restless, tremorous, agitated, too mad to sit at a desk eight hours a day, you needed an institution—a higher institution.
“A chair in poetry for Humboldt,” I said.
“A chair in poetry! A chair! Oh!—What a grand idea!” said Ricketts. “We’d love it. I speak for everyone. We’d all vote for it. The only thing is the dough! If only we had enough dough! Charlie, we’re real poor. Besides, this outfit, like any outfit, has its table of organization.”
“Table of organization? Translate, please.”
“A chair like that would have to be created. It’s a big deal.”
“How would a chair be set up?”
“Special endowment, as a rule. Fifteen or twenty grand a year, for about twenty years. Half a million bucks, with the retirement fund. We just ain’t got it, Charlie. Christ, how we’d love to get Humboldt. It breaks my heart, you know that.” Ricketts was now wonderfully cheerful. Minutely observant, my memory brought back, without my especially asking for it, the white frieze of his vigorous short hair, his brownish oxheart cherry eyes, the freshness of his face, his happy full cheeks.
I figured that was that, when we shook hands. Ricketts, having gotten rid of us, was rapturously friendly. “If only we had the money!” he kept saying.
And though Humboldt was waiting for me in a fever, I claimed a moment for myself in the fresh air. I stood under a brown-stone arch, on foot-hollowed stone, while panhandling squirrels came at me from all directions across the smooth quadrangles, the lovely walks. It was chilly and misty, the blond dim November sun binding the twigs in circles of light. Demmie Vonghel’s face had such a blond pallor. In her cloth coat with the marten collar, with her sublime sexual knees that touched, and the pointed feet of a princess, and