Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [86]
Demmie Vonghel who had coached me all along steered me now, acting as my trainer, my manager, my cook, my lover, and my strawboss. She had her work cut out for her and was terribly busy. She wouldn’t let me see Humboldt at Bellevue. We quarreled over it. She needed a little help with all this and felt it would be a good idea for me to consult a psychiatrist also. She said, “To look as collected as you look when I know you’re falling apart and dying of excitement just isn’t good.” She sent me to a man named Ellenbogen, a celebrity himself, appearing on many talk shows, the author of liberating books on sex. Ellenbogen’s dry lean long face had big grinning sinews, redskin cheekbones, teeth like the screaming horse in Picasso’s Guernica. He hit a patient hard in order to free him. The rationality of pleasure was his ideological hammer. He was tough, New York tough, but he smiled, and how it all added up he told you with New York emphasis. Our span is short and we must make up for the shortness of the human day in frequent, intense sexual gratification. He was never sore, never offended, he repudiated rage and aggression, the bondage of conscience, et cetera. All such things were bad for copulation. Bronze figurines of amatory couples were his bookends. The air in his office was close. Dark paneling, the comfort of deep leather. During sessions he lay fully extended, shoeless feet on a hassock, his long hand under his waistband. Was he fondling his own parts? Utterly relaxed he released a lot of gas which dissolved and impregnated the confined air. His plants anyway thrived on it.
He lectured me as follows: “You are a guilty anxious man. Depressive. An ant longing to be a grasshopper. Can’t bear success. Melancholia, I’d say, interrupted by fits of humor. Women must be chasing you. Wish I had your opportunities. Actresses. Well, give the women a chance to give you pleasure, that’s really what they want. To them the act itself is far less important than the occasion of tenderness.” Perhaps to increase my self-confidence he told me of his own wonderful experiences. A woman in the Deep South had seen him on television and came straight north to be laid by him, and when she got what she came for said with a sigh of luxury, “When I saw you on the box I knew you’d be good. And you are good.” Ellenbogen was no friend of Demmie Vonghel when he heard of her ways. He sucked sharply and said, “Bad, a bad case. Poor kid. Pushing to get married, I bet. Development immature. A pretty baby. And weighed three hundred pounds when she was thirteen. One of those greedy parties. Domineering. She’ll swallow you.”
Demmie was unaware that she had sent me to the enemy. She said daily, “We must get married, Charlie,” and she planned a big church wedding. Fundamentalist Demmie became an Episcopalian in New York. She talked to me about a wedding dress and veil, calla lilies, ushers, photographs, engraved announcements, morning coats. As best man and maid of honor she wanted the Littlewoods. I never had told her of the wingding Eskimo-style private party Littlewood had proposed to me in Princeton saying, “We can have a good show, Charlie.” Demmie, if I had told her, would have been vexed with Littlewood rather than shocked. By now she had fitted herself into New York. The miraculous survival of goodness was the theme of her life. Dangerous navigation, monsters attracted by her boundless female magnetism—spells charms prayers divine protection secured by inner strength and purity of heart—this was how she saw things. Hell breathed from doorways over her feet as she passed, but she did pass safely.