Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [81]
Just before Labor Day Humboldt threatened Magnasco again, and Magnasco went to the police and persuaded a plainclothesman to come back to the hotel with him. They waited in the lobby. Then Humboldt roared in and went for Magnasco. The dick got between them, and Humboldt said, “Officer, he has my wife in his room.” The reasonable thing was to make a search. They went upstairs, all three. Humboldt looked in all the closets, he searched under the pillows for her nightgown, he ran his hand under the lining papers of the drawers. There were no underthings. Nothing.
The plainclothesman said, “So, where is she? Was it you who banged hell out of this door with the butt of your gun?”
Humboldt said, “I have no gun. You want to frisk me?” He lifted his arms. Then he said, “Come to my room and look, if you like. See for yourself.”
But when they got to Greenwich Street, Humboldt put the key in the lock and said, “You can’t come in.” He shouted, “Have you got a search warrant?” Then he whirled in and slammed and bolted his door.
This was when Magnasco filed the complaint or took a peace bond—I don’t know which—and on a smoggy and stifling night the police came for Humboldt. He fought like an ox. He struggled also in the police station. An anointed head rolled on the filthy floor. Was there a strait jacket? Magnasco swore there wasn’t. But there were handcuffs, and Humboldt wept. On the way to Bellevue he had diarrhea, and they locked him away for the night in a state of filth.
Magnasco let it transpire that he and I together had decided to do this, to prevent Humboldt from committing a crime. Everyone then said that the man responsible was Charles Citrine, Humboldt’s blood-brother and protégé. I suddenly had many detractors and enemies, unknown to me.
And I’ll tell you how I saw it from the plush decay and heated darkness of the Belasco Theatre. I saw Humboldt whipping; his team of mules and standing up in his crazy wagon like an Oklahoma land-grabber. He rushed into the territory of excess to stake himself a claim. This claim was a swollen and quaking heart-mirage.
I didn’t mean, The poet is off his nut. . . . Call the cops and damn the clichés. No, I suffered when the police laid hands on him, it threw me into despair. What then did I mean? Something perhaps like this: suppose the poet had been wrestled to the ground by the police, strapped into a strait jacket or handcuffed, and rushed off dingdong in a paddy wagon like a mad dog, arriving foul, and locked up raging! Was this art versus America? To me Bellevue was like the Bowery: it gave negative testimony. Brutal Wall Street stood for power, and the Bowery, so near it, was the accusing symbol of weakness. And so with Bellevue, where the poor and busted went. And so even with Payne Whitney where the monied derelicts lay. And poets like drunkards and misfits or psychopaths, like the wretched, poor or rich, sank into weakness—was that it? Having no machines, no transforming knowledge comparable to the knowledge of Boeing or Sperry Rand or IBM or RCA? For could a poem pick you up in Chicago and land you in New York two hours later? Or could it compute a space shot? It had no such powers. And interest was where power was. In ancient times poetry was a force, the poet had real strength in the material world. Of course, the material world was different then. But what interest could a Humboldt raise? He threw himself into weakness and became a hero of wretchedness. He consented to the monopoly of power and interest held by money, politics, law, rationality, technology because he couldn’t find the next thing, the new thing, the necessary thing for poets to do. Instead he did a former thing. He got himself a pistol, like Verlaine, and chased Magnasco.
From Bellevue he phoned me at the Belasco Theatre. I heard his voice shaking, raging but rapid. He yelled, “Charlie, you know where I am, don’t you? All right, Charlie, this isn’t literature. This is life.”
In the theater I was in the world of illusion while