Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [75]
Well, Humboldt tried to run down Kathleen in his car. They were driving home from a party in Princeton, and he was punching her, steering with the left hand. At a blinking light, near a package store, she opened the door and made a run for it in her stocking feet—she had lost her shoes in Princeton. He chased her in the Buick. She jumped into a ditch and he ran into a tree. The state troopers had to come and release him because the doors were jammed by the collision.
Anyhow, the trustees had risen up against Longstaff, and the Poetry chair had disintegrated. Kathleen later told me that Humboldt had kept this from her all that day. He put down the phone and with his shuffling feet and sumo-wrestler’s belly came into the kitchen and poured himself a large jam-jar full of gin. Standing beside the dirty sink in his sneakers he drank this as if it had been milk.
“What was that call?” said Kathleen.
“Ricketts called.”
“What did he want?”
“Nothing. Just routine,” said Humboldt.
“He turned a funny color under the eyes when he drank all that gin,” Kathleen told me. “A kind of light greeny purple. You sometimes see that shade of purple in artichoke hearts.”
A little later on the same morning he seems to have had another talk with Ricketts. This was when Ricketts told him that Princeton would not renege. Money would be found. But this put Ricketts in the morally superior position. A poet could not allow a bureaucrat to surpass him. Humboldt locked himself in his office with the gin bottle and all day long wrote drafts of a letter of resignation.
But that evening, on the road as they were driving in to attend a party at the Littlewoods’ he went to work on Kathleen. Why did she let her father sell her to Rockefeller? Yes the old guy was supposed to be just a pleasant character, a bohemian antique from Paris, one of the gang from the Closerie des Lilas, but he was an international criminal, a Dr. Moriarty, a Lucifer, a pimp and didn’t he try to have sexual relations with his own daughter? Well, how was it with Rockefeller? Did Rockefeller’s penis thrill her more? Did the billions enter in? Did Rockefeller have to take a woman away from a poet in order to get it up? So they drove in the Buick skidding on the gravel and booming through clouds of dust. He began to shout that her great calm-and-lovely act didn’t take him in at all. He knew all about these things. From a bookish viewpoint he actually did know a lot. He knew the jealousy of King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. Mario Praz he knew. And Proust—caged rats tortured to death, Charlus flogged by some killer-concierge, some slaughterhouse brute with a scourge of nails. “I know all that lust garbage,” he said. “And I know the game has to be played with a calm face like yours. I know all about this female masochistic business. I understand your thrills, and you’re just using me!”
So they got to the Littlewoods’ and Demmie and I were there. Kathleen was white. Her face looked heavily powdered. Humboldt walked in silent. He wasn’t talking. This was in fact his last night as the Belisha Professor of Poetry at Princeton. Tomorrow the news would be out. Maybe it was out already. Ricketts behaved honorably but he might not have been able to resist telling everyone. But Littlewood seemed not to know anything. He was trying hard to make his party a success. His cheeks were red and jolly. He looked like Mr. Tomato with a top hat in the juice ad. He had wavy hair and a fine worldly manner. When he took a lady