Humboldt's Gift (18 page)

  If I was going to feel so much about death, why didn’t I
do
something about it. This endless sensibility was awful. Such was Denise’s opinion. I agreed with that, too.

  “So you feel bad about your pal Humboldt!” she said. “But how come you haven’t looked him up? You had years to do it in. And why didn’t you speak to him today?”

  These were hard questions, very intelligent. She didn’t let me get away with a thing.

  “I suppose I could have said, ‘Humboldt, it’s me, Charlie. What about some real lunch? The Blue Ribbon is just around the corner.’ But I think he might have thrown a fit. A couple of years ago he tried to hit some dean’s secretary with a hammer. He accused her of covering his bed with girlie magazines. Some kind of erotic plot against him. They had to put him away again. The poor man is crazy. And it’s no use going back to Saint Julien or hugging lepers.”

  “Who said anything about lepers? You’re always thinking what nobody else has remotely in mind.”

  “Well okay, then, but he looked gruesome and I was all dressed up. And I’ll tell you a curious coincidence. In the helicopter this morning I was sitting next to Dr. Longstaff. So naturally I thought of Humboldt. It was Longstaff who promised Humboldt a huge grant from the Belisha Foundation. This was when we were still at Princeton. Haven’t I ever told you about that disaster?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The whole thing came back to me.”

  “Is Longstaffi still so handsome and distinguished? He must be an old man. And I’ll bet you pestered him about those old times.”

  “Yes, I reminded him.”

  “You would. And I suppose it was disagreeable.”

  “The past isn’t disagreeable to the fully justified.”

  “I wonder what Longstaff was doing in that Washington crowd.”

  “Raising money for his philanthropies, I expect.”

  twelve

  Thus went my meditation on the green sofa. Of all the meditative methods recommended in the literature I liked this new one best. Often I sat at the end of the day remembering everything that had happened, in minute detail, all that had been seen and done and said. I was able to go backward through the day, viewing myself from the back or side, physically no different from anyone else. If I had bought Renata a gardenia at an open-air stand, I could recall that I had paid seventy-five cents for it. I saw the brass milling of the three silver-plated quarters. I saw the lapel of Renata’s coat, the white head of the long pin. I remembered even the two turns the pin took in the cloth, and Renata’s full woman’s face and her pleased gaze at the flower, and the odor of the gardenia. If this was what transcendence took, it was a cinch, I could do it forever, back to the beginning of time. So, lying on the sofa, I now brought back to mind the obituary page of the
Times
.

  The
Times
was much stirred by Humboldt’s death and gave him a double-column spread. The photograph was large. For after all Humboldt did what poets in crass America are supposed to do. He chased ruin and death even harder than he had chased women. He blew his talent and his health and reached home, the grave, in a dusty slide. He plowed himself under. Okay. So did Edgar Allan Poe, picked out of the Baltimore gutter. And Hart Crane over the side of a ship. And Jarrell falling in front of a car. And poor John Berryman jumping from a bridge. For some reason this awfulness is peculiarly appreciated by business and technological America. The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets’ testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, “If
I
were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn’t get through this either. Look at these good and tender and soft men, the
best
of us. They succumbed, poor loonies.” So this, I was meditating, is how successful bitter hard-faced and cannibalistic people exult. Such was the attitude reflected in the picture of Humboldt the
Times
chose to use. It was one of those mad-rotten-majesty pictures —spooky, humorless, glaring furiously with tight lips, mumpish or scrofulous cheeks, a scarred forehead, and a look of enraged, ravaged childishness. This was the Humboldt of conspiracies, putsches, accusations, tantrums, the Bellevue Hospital Humboldt, the Humboldt of litigations. For Humboldt was litigious. The word was made for him. He threatened many times to sue me.

  Yes, the obituary was awful. The clipping was somewhere amongst these papers that surrounded me, but I didn’t want to look at it. I could remember verbatim what the
Times
said. It said, in its tinkertoy style of knobs and sticks, that Von Humboldt Fleisher had made a brilliant start. Born on New York’s Upper West Side. At twenty-two set a new style in American poetry. Appreciated by Conrad Aiken (who once had to call the cops to get him out of the house). Approved by T. S. Eliot (about whom, when he was off his nut, he would spread the most lurid improbable sexual scandal). Mr. Fleisher was also a critic, essayist, writer of fiction, teacher, prominent literary intellectual, a salon personality. Intimates praised his conversation. He was a great talker and wit.

  Here, no longer meditative, I took over myself. The sun still shone beautifully enough, the blue was wintry, of Emersonian haughtiness, but I felt wicked. I was as filled with harsh things to say as the sky was full of freezing blue. Very good, Humboldt, you made it in American Culture as Hart Schaffner & Marx made it in cloaks and suits, as General Sarnoff made it in communications, as Bernard Baruch made it on a park bench. As, according to Dr. Johnson, dogs made it on their hind legs and ladies in the pulpit—exceeding their natural limits curiously. Orpheus, the Son of Greenhorn, turned up in Greenwich Village with his ballads. He loved literature and intellectual conversation and argument, loved the history of thought. A big gentle handsome boy he put together his own combination of symbolism and street language. Into this mixture went Yeats, Apollinaire, Lenin, Freud, Morris R. Cohen, Gertrude Stein, baseball statistics, and Hollywood gossip. He brought Coney Island into the Aegean and united Buffalo Bill with Rasputin. He was going to join together the Art Sacrament and the Industrial USA as equal powers. Born (as he insisted) on a subway platform at Columbus Circle, his mother going into labor on the IRT, he intended to be a divine artist, a man of visionary states and enchantments, Platonic possession. He got a Rationalistic, Naturalistic education at CCNY. This was not easily reconciled with the Orphic. But all his desires were contradictory. He wanted to be magically and cosmically expressive and articulate, able to say
anything
; he wanted also to be wise, philosophical, to find the common ground of poetry and science, to prove that the imagination was just as potent as machinery, to free and to bless humankind. But he was out also to be rich and famous. And of course there were the girls. Freud himself believed that fame was pursued for the sake of the girls. But then the girls were pursuing something themselves. Humboldt said, “They’re always looking for the real thing. They’ve been had and had by phonies, so they pray for the real thing and they rejoice when the real thing appears. That’s why they love poets. This is the truth about girls.” Humboldt was the real thing, certainly. But by and by he stopped being a beautiful young man and the prince of conversationalists. He grew a belly, he became thick in the face. A look of disappointment and doubt appeared under his eyes.

  Brown circles began to deepen there, and he had a bruised sort of pallor in the cheeks. That was what his “frantic profession” did to him. For he always had said that poetry was one of the frantic professions in which success depends on the opinion you hold of yourself. Think well of yourself, and you win. Lose self-esteem, and you’re finished. For this reason a persecution complex develops, because people who don’t speak well of you are killing you. Knowing this, or sensing it, critics and intellectuals
had
you. Like it or not you were dragged into a power struggle. Then Humboldt’s art dwindled while his frenzy increased. The girls were dear to him. They took him for the real thing long after he had realized that nothing real was left and that he was imposing on them. He swallowed more pills, he drank more gin. Mania and depression drove him to the loony bin. He was in and out. He became a professor of English in the boondocks. There he was a grand literary figure. Elsewhere, in one of his own words, he was zilch. But then he died and got good notices. He had always valued prominence, and the
Times
was tops. Having lost his talent, his mind, fallen apart, died in ruin, he rose again on the cultural Dow-Jones and enjoyed briefly the prestige of significant failure.

  thirteen

  To Humboldt the Eisenhower landslide of 1952 was a personal disaster. He met me, the morning after, with heavy depression. His big blond face was madly gloomy. He led me into his office, Sewell’s office, which was stuffed with books—I had the adjoining room. Leaning on the small desk, the
Times
with the election results spread over it, he held a cigarette but his hands were also clasped in despair. His ashtray, a Savarin coffee can, was already full. It wasn’t simply that his hopes were disappointed or that the cultural evolution of America was stopped cold. Humboldt was afraid. “What are we going to do?” he said.

  “We’ll have to mark time,” I said. “Maybe the next administration will let us into the White House.”

  Humboldt would allow no light conversation this morning.

  “But look,” I said. “You’re poetry editor of
Arcturus
, you’re on the staff of Hildebrand & Co. and a paid adviser to the Belisha Foundation, and teaching at Princeton. You have a contract to do a textbook in modern poetry. Kathleen told me that if you lived to be a hundred and fifty you’d never be able to make good on all the advances you’ve drawn from publishers.”

  “You wouldn’t be jealous, Charlie, if you knew how hard my position is. I seem to have a lot going for me, but it’s all a bubble. I’m in danger. You, without any prospects at all, are in a much stronger position. And now there’s this political disaster.” I sensed that he was afraid of his back-country neighbors. In his nightmares they burned his house, he shot it out with them, they lynched him and carried off his wife. Humboldt said, “What do we do now? What’s our next move?”

  These questions were asked only to introduce the scheme he had in mind.

  “Our move?”

  “Either we leave the US during this administration, or we dig in.”

  “We could ask Harry Truman for asylum in Missouri.”

  “Don’t joke with me, Charlie. I have an invitation from the Free University of Berlin to teach American literature.”

  “That sounds grand.”

  He quickly said, “No, no! Germany is dangerous. I wouldn’t take a chance on Germany.”

  “That leaves digging in. Where are you going to dig?”

  “I said ‘we.’ The situation is very unsafe. If you had any sense you’d feel the same. You think because you’re such a pretty-boy, and so bright and big-eyed, that nobody would hurt you.”

  Humboldt now began to attack Sewell. “Sewell really is a rat,” he said.

  “I thought you were old friends.”

  “Long acquaintance isn’t friendship. Did
you
like him? He
received
you. He condescended, he was snotty, you were treated like dirt. He didn’t even talk to you, only to me. I resented it.”

  “You didn’t say so.”

  “I didn’t want to rouse you right away and make you angry, start you under a cloud. Do you think he’s a good critic?”

  “Can the deaf tune pianos?”

  “He’s subtle, though. He’s a subtle man, in a dirty way. Don’t underrate him. And he’s a rough infighter. But to become a professor without even a BA ... it speaks for itself. His father was just a lobsterman. His mother took in washing. She did Kit-tredge’s collars in Cambridge and she wangled library privileges for her son. He went down into the Harvard stacks a weakling and he came up a regular titan. Now he’s a Wasp gentleman and lords it over us. You and I have raised his status. He comes on with two Jews like a mogul and a prince.”

  “Why do you want to make me sore at Sewell?”

  “You’re too lordly yourself to take offense. You’re an even bigger snob than Sewell. I think you may be psychologically one of those Axel types that only cares about inner inspiration, no connection with the actual world. The actual world can kiss your ass,” said Humboldt wildly. “You leave it to poor bastards like me to think about matters like money and status and success and failure and social problems and politics. You don’t give a damn for such things.”

  “If true, why is that so bad?”

  “Because you stick
me
with all these unpoetic responsibilities. You lean back like a king, relaxed, and let all these human problems happen. There ain’t no flies on Jesus. Charlie, you’re not place bound, time bound, goy bound, Jew bound. What
are
you bound? Others abide our question. Thou art free! Sewell was stinking to you. He snubbed you and you’re sore at him, too, don’t deny it. But you can’t pay attention. You’re always mooning in your private mind about some kind of cosmic destiny. Tell me, what is this great thing you’re always working on?”

  I was now still lying on my broccoli plush sofa engaged in a meditation on this haughty freezing blue December morning. The heating engines of the great Chicago building made a strong hum. I could have done without this. Though I was beholden to modern engineering, too. Humboldt in the Princeton office stood before my mind, and my concentration was intense.