Humboldt's Gift (16 page)

  My chief worry now was how to get down. Though the papers underplay it people are always falling off. But however scared and harassed, my sensation-loving soul also was gratified. I knew that it took too much to gratify me. The gratification-threshold of my soul had risen too high. I must bring it down again. It was excessive. I must, I knew, change everything.

  He sailed off more of the fifties. Tiny paper planes. Origami (my knowledgeable mind, keeping up its indefatigable pedantry —my lexical busybody mind!), the Japanese paper-folder’s art. An international congress of paper-aircraft freaks had been held, I think, last year. It seemed last year. The hobbyists were mathematicians and engineers.

  Cantabile’s green bills went off like finches, like swallows and butterflies, all bearing the image of Ulysses S. Grant. They brought crepuscular fortune to people down in the streets.

  “The last two I’m going to keep,” said Cantabile. “To blow them on drinks and dinner for us.”

  “If I ever get down alive.”

  “You did fine. Go on, lead the way, start back.”

  “These leather heels are awfully tricky. I hit an ordinary piece of wax paper in the street the other day and went down. Maybe I should take my shoes off.”

  “Don’t be crazy. Go on your toes.”

  If you didn’t think of falling, the walkways were more than adequate. I crept along, fighting paralysis of the calves and the thighs. My face was sweating faster than the wind could dry it as I took hold of the final pillar. I thought that Cantabile had been treading much too close behind. More hard-hats waiting for the elevator probably took us for union guys or architect’s men. It was night now and the hemisphere was frozen all the way to the Gulf. Gladly I fell into the seat of the Thunderbird when we got down. He removed his hard hat and mine. He cocked the wheel and started the motor. He should really let me go now. I had given him enough satisfaction.

  But he was off again, driving fast. He sped away toward the next light. My head hung back over the top of the seat in the position you take to stop a nosebleed. I didn’t know exactly where we were. “Look, Rinaldo,” I said. “You’ve made your point. You bashed my car, you’ve run me all day long, and you’ve just given me the scare of my life. Okay, I see it wasn’t the money that upset you. Let’s stuff the rest of it down a sewer so I can go home.”

  “You’ve had it with me?”

  “It’s been a whole day of atonement.”

  “You’ve seen enough of the whatchamacallems?—I learned some new words at the poker game from you.”

  “Which words?”

  “Proles,” he said, “
Lumps
.
Lumpenproletartat
. You gave us a little talk about Karl Marx.”

  “My lord, I did carry on, didn’t I. Completely unbuttoned. What got into me!”

  “You wanted to mix with riffraff and the criminal element. You went slumming, Charlie, and you had a great time playing cards with us dumbheads and social rejects.”

  “I see. I was insulting.”

  “Kind of. But you were interesting, here and there, about the social order and how obsessed the middle class was with the
Lumpenproletariat
. The other fellows didn’t know what in hell you were talking about.” For the first time, Cantabile spoke more mildly to me. I sat up and saw the river flashing night-lights on the right, and the Merchandise Mart decorated for Christmas. We were going to Gene and Georgetti’s old steak house, just off the spur of the Elevated train. Parking among other sinister luxury cars we went into the drab old building where—hurrah for opulent intimacy!—a crash of jukebox music fell on us like Pacific surf. The high-executive bar was crowded with executive drinkers and lovely companions. The gorgeous mirror was peopled with bottles and resembled a group photograph of celestial graduates.

  “Giulio,” Rinaldo told the waiter. “A quiet table, and we don’t want to sit by the rest rooms.”

  “Upstairs, Mr. Cantabile?”

  “Why not?” I said. I was shaky and didn’t want to wait at the bar for seating. It would lengthen the evening, besides.

  Cantabile stared as if to say, Who asked you! But he then consented. “Okay, upstairs. And two bottles of Piper Heidsieck.”

  “Right away, Mr. Cantabile.”

  In the Capone days hoodlums fought mock battles with champagne at banquets. They jigged the bottles up and down and shot each other with corks and foaming wine, all in black tie, and like a fun-massacre.

  “Now I want to tell you something,” said Rinaldo Cantabile, “and it’s a different subject altogether. I’m married, you know.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “To a marvelous beautiful intelligent woman.”

  “You mentioned your wife in South Chicago. That night . . . Do you have children? What does she do?”

  “She’s no housewife, buddy, and you’d better know it. You think I’d marry some fat-ass broad who sits around the house in curlers and watches TV? This is a real woman, with a mind, with knowledge. She teaches at Mundelein College and she’s working on a doctoral thesis. You know where?”

  “No.”

  “At Radcliffe, Harvard.”

  “That’s very good,” I said. I emptied the champagne glass and refilled it.

  “Don’t brush it off. Ask me what her subject is. Of the thesis.”

  “All right, what is it?”

  “She’s writing a study of that poet who was your friend.”

  “You’re kidding. Von Humboldt Fleisher? How do you know he was my friend? ... I see. I was talking about him at George’s. Someone should have locked me in a closet that night.”

  “You didn’t have to be cheated, Charlie. You didn’t know what you were doing. You were talking away like a nine-year-old kid about lawsuits, lawyers, accountants, bad investments, and the magazine you were going to publish—a real loser, it sounded like. You said you were going to spend your own money on your own ideas.”

  “I never discuss these things with strangers. Chicago must be giving me arctic madness.”

  “Now, listen, I’m very proud of my wife. Her people are rich, upper class. . . .” Boasting gives people a wonderful color, I’ve noticed, and Cantabile’s cheeks glowed. He said, “You’re asking yourself what is she doing with a husband like me.”

  I muttered, “No, no,” though that certainly was a natural question. However, it was not exactly news that highly educated women were excited by scoundrels criminals and lunatics, and that these scoundrels etcetera were drawn to culture, to thought. Diderot and Dostoevski had made us familiar with this.

  “I want her to get her PhD,” said Cantabile. “You understand? I want it bad. And you were a pal of this Fleisher guy. You’re going to give Lucy the information.”

  “Now wait a minute—”

  “Look this over.” He handed me an envelope and I put on my glasses and glanced over the document enclosed. It was signed Lucy Wilkins Cantabile and it was the letter of a model graduate student, polite, detailed, highly organized, with the usual academic circumlocutions—three single-spaced pages, dense with questions, painful questions. Her husband kept me under close observation as I read. “Well, what do you think of her?”

  “Terrific,” I said. The thing filled me with despair. “What do you two want of me?”

  “Answers. Information. We want you to write out the answers. What’s your opinion of her project?”

  “I think the dead owe us a living.”

  “Don’t horse around with me, Charlie. I didn’t like that crack.”

  “I couldn’t care less,” I said. “This poor Humboldt, my friend, was a big spirit who was destroyed ... never mind that. The PhD racket is a very fine racket but I want no part of it. Besides, I never answer questionnaires. Idiots impose on you with their documents. I can’t bear that kind of thing.”

  “Are you calling my wife an idiot?”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting her.”

  “I’ll make allowances for you. You got hit in the guts by the Mercedes and then I ran you ragged. But don’t be unpleasant about my wife.”

  “There are things I don’t do. This is one of them. I’m not going to write answers. It would take weeks.”

  “Listen!”

  “I draw the line.”

  “Just a minute!”

  “Bump me off. Go to hell.”

  “All right, easy does it. Some things are sacred. I understand. But we can work everything out. I listened at the poker game and I know that you’re in plenty of trouble. You need somebody tough and practical to handle things for you. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I have all kinds of ideas for you. We’ll trade off.”

  “No, I don’t want to trade anything. I’ve had it. My heart is breaking and I want to go home.”

  “Let’s have a steak and finish the wine. You need red meat. You’re just tired. You’ll do it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Take the order, Giulio,” he said.

  eleven

  I wish I knew why I feel such loyalty to the deceased, Hearing of their deaths I often said to myself that I must carry on for them and do their job, finish their work. And that of course I couldn’t do. Instead I found that certain of their characteristics were beginning to stick to me. As time went on, for instance, I found myself becoming absurd in the manner of Von Humboldt Fleisher. By and by it became apparent that he had acted as my agent. I myself, a nicely composed person, had had Humboldt expressing himself wildly on my behalf, satisfying some of my longings. This explained my liking for certain individuals— Humboldt, or George Swiebel, or even someone like Cantabile. This type of psychological delegation may have its origins in representative government. However, when an expressive friend died the delegated tasks returned to me. And as I was also the expressive delegate of other people, this eventually became pure hell.

  Carry on for Humboldt? Humboldt wanted to drape the world in radiance, but he didn’t have enough material. His attempt ended at the belly. Below hung the shaggy nudity we know so well. He was a lovely man, and generous, with a heart of gold. Still his goodness was the sort of goodness people now consider out of date. The radiance he dealt in was the old radiance and it was in short supply. What we needed was a new radiance altogether.

  And now Cantabile and his PhD wife were after me to recall the dear dead days of the Village, and its intellectuals, poets, crack-ups, its suicides and love affairs. I didn’t care much for that. I had no clear view of Mrs. Cantabile as yet, but I saw Rinaldo as one of the new mental rabble of the wised-up world and anyway I didn’t feel just now like having my arm twisted. It wasn’t that I minded giving information to honest scholars, or even to young people on the make, but I just then was busy, fiercely, painfully busy—personally and impersonally busy: personally, with Renata and Denise, and Murra the accountant, and the lawyers and the judge, and a multitude of emotional vexations; impersonally, participating in the life of my country and of Western Civilization and global society (a mixture of reality and figment). As editor of an important magazine,
The Ark
, which would probabl never come out, I was always thinking of statements that must be made and truths of which the world must be reminded. The world, identified by a series of dates (1789-1914-1917-1939) and by key words (Revolution, Te hnology, Science, and so forth), was another cause of busyness. You owed your duty to these dates and words. The whole thing was so momentous, overmastering, tragic, that in the end what I really wanted was to lie down and go to sleep. I have always had an exceptional gift for passing out. I look at snapshots taken in some of the most evil hours of mankind and I see that I have lots of hair and am appealingly youthful. I am wearing an ill-fitting double-breasted suit of the Thirties or Forties, smoking a pipe, standing under a tree, holding hands with a plump and pretty bimbo—and I am asleep on my feet, out cold. I have snoozed through many a crisis (while millions died).

  This is all terrifically relevant. For one thing, I may as well admit that I came back to settle in Chicago with the secret motive of writing a significant work. This lethargy of mine is related to that project—I got the idea of doing something with the chronic war between sleep and consciousness that goes on in human nature. My subject, in the final Eisenhower years, was boredom. Chicago was the ideal place in which to write my master essay— “Boredom.” In raw Chicago you could examine the human spirit under industrialism. If someone were to arise with a new vision of Faith, Love, and Hope, he would want to understand to whom he was offering it—he would have to understand the kind of deep suffering we call boredom. I was going to try to do with boredom what Malthus and Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill or Durkheim had done with population, wealth, or the division of labor. History and temperament had put me in a peculiar position, and I was going to turn it to advantage. I hadn’t read those great modern boredom experts, Stendhal, Kierkegaard, and Baudelaire, for nothing. Over the years I had worked a lot on this essay. The difficulty was that I kept being overcome by the material, like a miner by gas fumes. I wouldn’t stop, though. I’d say to myself that even Rip van Winkle had slept for only twenty years, I had gone him at least two decades better and I was determined to make the lost time yield illumination. So I kept doing advanced mental work in Chicago, and also joined a gymnasium, playing ball with commodity brokers and gentleman-hoodlums in an effort to strengthen the powers of consciousness. Then my respected friend Durnwald mentioned, kiddingly, that the famous but misunderstood Dr. Rudolf Steiner had much to say on the deeper aspects of sleep. Steiner’s books, which I began to read lying down, made me want to get up. He argued that between the conception of an act and its execution by the will there fell a gap of sleep. It might be brief but it was deep. For one of man’s souls was a sleep-soul. In this, human beings resembled the plants, whose whole existence is sleep. This made a very deep impression on me. The truth about sleep could only be seen from the perspective of an immortal spirit. I had never doubted that I had such a thing. But I had set this fact aside quite early. I kept it under my hat. These beliefs under your hat also press on your brain and sink you down into the vegetable realm. Even now, to a man of culture like Durnwald, I hesitated to mention the spirit. He took no stock in Steiner, of course. Durnwald was reddish, elderly but powerful, thickset and bald, a bachelor of cranky habits but a kind man. He had a peremptory blunt butting even bullying manner, but if he scolded it was because he loved me—he wouldn’t have bothered otherwise. A great scholar, one of the most learned people on earth, he was a rationalist. Not narrowly rationalistic, by any means. Nevertheless, I couldn’t talk to him about the powers of a spirit separated from a body. He wouldn’t hear of it. He had simply been joking about Steiner. I was not joking, but I didn’t want to be thought a crank.