Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [73]
Longstaff too was riding high. He bullied his trustees with Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas, he had the whammy on them. And probably Longstaff had old scores to settle with Princeton, a pillbox of the educational establishment at which he aimed his radical flame thrower. I knew from Ickes’ Diaries that Longstaff had made up to FDR. He wanted Wallace’s place on the ticket, and Truman’s, later. He dreamed of being Vice President and President. But Roosevelt had strung him along, had kept him waiting on tiptoes but never kissed him. That was Roosevelt all over. In this I sympathized with Longstaff (an ambitious man, a despot, a czar in my secret heart).
So as the helicopter tilted back and forth over New York I studied this handsome aged Dr. Longstaff trying to understand how Humboldt must have looked to him. In Humboldt he perhaps had seen Caliban America, heaving and yapping, writing odes on greasy paper from the fish shop. For Longstaff had no feeling for literature. But he had been delighted when Humboldt explained that he wanted the Belisha Foundation to endow a chair for him at Princeton. “Exactly right!” said Longstaff. “Just the thing!” He buzzed his secretary and dictated a letter. Then and there Wilmoore Longstaff committed the Foundation to an extended grant. Soon Humboldt, palpitating, held a signed copy of the letter in his hand, and he and Longstaff drank martinis, gazing at Manhattan from the sixtieth floor, and talked about Dante’s bird imagery.
As soon as he left Longstaff, Humboldt rushed downtown by cab to visit a certain Ginnie in the Village, a Bennington girl to whom Demmie Vonghel and I had introduced him. He pounded on her door and said, “It’s Von Humboldt Fleisher. I have to see you.” Stepping into the vestibule, he propositioned her immediately. Ginnie said, “He chased me around the apartment, and it was a scream. But I was worried about the puppies underfoot.” Her dachshund had just had a litter. Ginnie locked herself in the bathroom. Humboldt shouted, “You don’t know what you’re missing. I’m a poet. I have a big cock.” And Ginnie told Demmie, “I was laughing so hard I couldn’t have done it anyway.”
When I asked Humboldt about this incident he said, “I felt I had to celebrate, and I understood these Bennington girls went for poets. Too bad about this Ginnie.. She’s very pretty but she’s honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won’t spread.”
“Did you go elsewhere?”
“I gave up on erotic relief. I went around and visited lots of people.”
“And showed them Longstaff’s letter.”
“Of course.”
In any case, the scheme worked. Princeton couldn’t refuse the Belisha gift. Ricketts was outgeneraled. Humboldt was appointed. The Times and the Herald Tribune both carried the story. For two or three months things were smoother than velvet and cashmere. Humboldt’s new colleagues gave cocktail and dinner parties for him. Nor did Humboldt in his happiness forget that we were blood-brothers. Almost daily he would say, “Charlie, today I had a terrific idea for you. For the title role in your play . . . Victor McLaglen is a fascist of course. Can’t have him. But . . . I’m going to get in touch with Orson Welles for you. . . .”
But then, in February, Longstaff’s trustees rebelled. They had had enough, I guess, and rallied for the honor of American monopoly-capital. Longstaff’s proposed budget was rejected, and he was forced to resign. He was not sent away quite empty-handed. He got some money, about twenty million, to start a little foundation of his own. But in effect they gave him the ax. The appropriation for Humboldt’s chair was a tiny item in that rejected budget. When Longstaff fell, Humboldt fell with him. “Charlie,” Humboldt said when he was at last able to talk about it, “it was just like my father’s experience when he was wiped out in the Florida boom.