Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [8]
I visited his uncle Waldemar not long ago in Coney Island. The old horse-player was in a nursing home. He said to me, “The cops rolled Humboldt. They took away his watch and his dough, even his fountain pen. He always used a real pen. He didn’t write poetry with a ball-point.”
“Are you sure he had money?”
“He never went out without a hundred dollars minimum in his pocket. You ought to know how he was about money. I miss the kid. How I miss him!”
I felt exactly as Waldemar did. I was more moved by Hum-boldt’s death than by the thought of my own. He had built himself up to be mourned and missed. Humboldt put that sort of weight into himself and developed in his face all the graver, all the more important human feelings. You’d never forget a face like his. But to what end had it been created?
Quite recently, last spring, I found myself thinking about this in an odd connection. I was in a French train with Renata, taking a trip which, like most trips, I neither needed nor desired. Renata pointed to the landscape and said, “Isn’t that beautiful out there!” I looked out, and she was right. Beautiful was indeed there. But I had seen Beautiful many times, and so I closed my eyes. I rejected the plastered idols of the Appearances. These idols I had been trained, along with everybody else, to see, and I was tired of their tyranny. I even thought, The painted veil isn’t what it used to be. The damn thing is wearing out. Like a roller-towel in a Mexican men’s room. I was thinking of the power of collective abstractions, and so forth. We crave more than ever the radiant vividness of boundless love, and more and more the barren idols thwart this. A world of categories devoid of spirit waits for life to return. Humboldt was supposed to be an instrument of this revival. This mission or vocation was reflected in his face. The hope of new beauty. The promise, the secret of beauty.
In the USA, incidentally, this sort of thing gives people a very foreign look.
It was consistent that Renata should direct my attention to the Beautiful. She had a personal stake in it, she was linked with Beauty.
Still, Humboldt’s face clearly showed that he understood what was to be done. It showed, too, that he had not gotten around to doing it. And he, too, directed my attention to landscapes. Late in the Forties, he and Kathleen, newlyweds, moved from Greenwich Village to rural New Jersey, and when I visited them he was all earth, trees, flowers, oranges, the sun, Paradise, Atlantis, Rhadamanthus. He talked about William Blake at Felpham and Milton’s Eden, and he ran down the city. The city was lousy. To follow his intricate conversation you had to know his basic texts. I knew what they were: Plato’s Timaeus, Proust on Combray, Virgil on farming, Marvell on gardens, Wallace Stevens’ Caribbean poetry, and so on. One reason why Humboldt and I were so close was that I was willing to take the complete course.
So Humboldt and Kathleen lived in a country cottage. Humboldt several times a week came to town on business—poet’s business. He was at the height of his reputation though not of his powers. He had lined up four sinecures that I knew of. There may have been more. Considering it normal to live on fifteen bucks a week I had no way of estimating his needs and his income. He was secretive but hinted at large sums. And now he got himself appointed to replace Professor Martin Sewell at Princeton for a year. Sewell was off to give Fulbright lectures on Henry James in Damascus. His friend Humboldt was his substitute. An instructor was needed in the program and Humboldt recommended me. Making good use of my opportunities in the postwar cultural boom I had reviewed bushels of books