Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [72]
I remembered saying, “Stingy-rich is just ordinary camp.”
“Yes, but he overdoes it. Try eating dinner at his house. He starves you. And why did Longstaff hire Hildebrand for thirty thousand to plan a program for writers? He hired him because of me. If you’re a Foundation you don’t deal with poets, you go to the man who owns a stable of poets. So I do all the work and get only eight thousand.”
“Eight for a part-time job isn’t bad, is it?”
“Charlie, it’s cheap of you to pull this fair-mindedness on me. I say I’m an underdog and then you slip it in that I’m so privileged, meaning that you’re an under-underdog. Hildebrand gets full value from me. He never reads a manuscript. He’s always on a cruise or skiing in Sun Valley. Without my advice he’d publish toilet paper. I save him from being a millionaire Philistine. He got to Gertrude Stein because of me. Also to Eliot. Because of me he has something to offer Longstaff. But I’m forbidden absolutely to talk to Longstaff.”
“No.”
“Yes! I tell you,” said Humboldt. “Longstaff has a private elevator. No one gets to his penthouse from the lower ranks. I see him from a distance as he comes and goes but my instructions are to stay away from him.”
Years afterward, I, Citrine, sat next to Wilmoore Longstaff on that Coast Guard helicopter. He was quite old then, finished, fallen from glory. I had seen him when the going was good, and he had looked like a movie star, like a five-star general, like Machiavelli’s Prince, like Aristotle’s great-souled man. Longstaff had fought technocracy and plutocracy with the classics. He forced some of the most powerful people in the country to discuss Plato and Hobbes. He made airline presidents, chairmen, governors of the Stock Exchange perform Antigone in board rooms. Truth, however, is truth and Longstaff was in many respects first rate. He was a distinguished educator, he was even noble. His life would perhaps have been easier if his looks had been less striking.
At any rate, Humboldt did the bold thing, just as we had all seen it done in the old go-getter movies. Unauthorized, he entered Longstaffs private elevator and pushed the button. Materializing huge and delicate in the penthouse, he gave his name to the receptionist. No, he had no appointment (I saw the sun on his cheeks, on his soiled clothes—it was shining as it shines through the purer air in skyscrapers), but he was Von Humboldt Fleisher. The name was enough. Longstaff had him shown in. He was very glad to see Humboldt. This he told me during the flight, and I believed him. We sat in the helicopter belted up in orange puffy life jackets, and we were armed with those long knives. Why the knives? Perhaps to fight sharks if one fell into the harbor. “I had read his ballads,” Longstaff told me. “I considered him to have great talent.” I knew of course that for Longstaff Paradise Lost was the last real poem in English. Long-staff was a greatness-freak. What he meant was that Humboldt was undoubtedly a poet and a charming man. That he was. In Longstaff’s office Humboldt must have been swooning with wickedness and ingenuity, swollen with manic energy, with spots before his eyes and maculations of the heart. He was going to persuade Longstaff, do in Sewell, outfox Ricketts, screw Hildebrand,