Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [9]
“Look me over? He’s too drunk to find his way out of a sentence.”
“As I said, you seem to be a pleasant ingenu, till your touchiness is touched. Don’t be so haughty. It’s just a formality. The fix is already in.”
“Ingénu” was one of Humboldt’s bad words. Steeped in psychological literature, he looked quite through my deeds. My mooning and unworldliness didn’t fool him for a minute. He knew sharpness and ambition, he knew aggression and death. The scale of his conversation was as big as he could make it, and as we drove to the country in his secondhand Buick Humboldt poured it on as the fields swept by—the Napoleonic disease, Julien Sorel, Balzac’s jeune ambitieux, Marx’s portrait of Louis Bonaparte, Hegel’s World Historical Individual. Humboldt was especially attached to the World Historical Individual, the interpreter of the Spirit, the mysterious leader who imposed on Mankind the task of understanding him, etcetera. Such topics were common enough in the Village, but Humboldt brought a peculiar inventiveness and a manic energy to such discussions, a passion for intricacy and for Finneganesque double meanings and hints. “And in America,” he said, “this Hegelian individual would probably come from left field. Born in Appleton, Wisconsin, maybe, like Harry Houdini or Charlie Citrine.”
“Why start on me? With me you’re way off.”
I was annoyed with Humboldt just then. In the country, one night, he had warned my friend Demmie Vonghel against me, blurting out at dinner, “You’ve got to watch it with Charlie. I know girls like you. They put too much into a man. Charlie is a real devil.” Horrified at what he had blurted out, he then heaved himself up from the table and ran out of the house. We heard him pounding heavily on the pebbles of the dark country road. Demmie and I sat awhile with Kathleen. Kathleen finally said, “He dotes on you, Charlie. But there’s something in his head. That you have a mission—some kind of secret thing—and that people like that arc not exactly trustworthy. And he likes Demmie. He thinks he’s protecting her. But it isn’t even personal. You aren’t sore, are you?”
“Sore at Humboldt? He’s too fantastic to be sore at. And especially as a protector of maidens.”
Demmie appeared amused. And any young woman would find value in such solicitude. She asked me later in her abrupt way, “What’s this mission stuff about?”
“Nonsense.”
“But you once said something to me, Charlie. Or is Humboldt only talking through his hat?”
“I said I had a funny feeling sometimes, as if I had been stamped and posted and they were waiting for me to be delivered at an important address. I may contain unusual information. But that’s just ordinary silliness.”
Demmie—her full name was Anna Dempster Vonghel—taught Latin at the Washington Irving School, just east of Union Square, and lived on Barrow Street. “There’s a Dutch corner in Delaware,” said Demmie. “And that’s where the Vonghels came from.” She had been sent to finishing school, studied classics at Bryn Mawr, but she had also been a juvenile delinquent and at fifteen she belonged to a gang of car thieves. “Since we love each other, you have a right to know,” she said. “I have a record —hubcap-stealing, marijuana, sex offenses, hot cars, chased by cops, crashing, hospital, probation officers, the whole works. But I also know about three thousand Bible verses. Brought up on hellfire and damnation.” Her Daddy, a backwoods millionaire, raced around in his Cadillac spitting from the window. “Brushes his teeth with kitchen cleanser. Tithes to his church. Drives the Sunday-school bus. The last of the old-time Fundamentalists. Except that there are scads of them down there,” she said.
Demmie had blue eyes with clean whites and an upturned nose that confronted you almost as expressively and urgently as the eyes. The length of her front teeth kept her