Humboldt's Gift (21 page)

  “Yes, but he overdoes it. Try eating dinner at his house. He starves you. And why did Longstaff hire Hildebrand for thirty thousand to plan a program for writers? He hired him because of me. If you’re a Foundation you don’t deal with poets, you go to the man who owns a stable of poets. So I do all the work and get only eight thousand.”

  “Eight for a part-time job isn’t bad, is it?”

  “Charlie, it’s cheap of you to pull this fair-mindedness on me. I say I’m an underdog and then you slip it in that I’m so privileged, meaning that you’re an under-underdog. Hildebrand gets full value from me. He never reads a manuscript. He’s always on a cruise or skiing in Sun Valley. Without my advice he’d publish toilet paper. I save him from being a millionaire Philistine. He got to Gertrude Stein because of me. Also to Eliot. Because of me he has something to offer Longstaff. But I’m forbidden absolutely to talk to Longstaff.”

  “No.”

  “Yes! I tell you,” said Humboldt. “Longstaff has a private elevator. No one gets to his penthouse from the lower ranks. I see him from a distance as he comes and goes but my instructions are to stay away from him.”

  Years afterward, I, Citrine, sat next to Wilmoore Longstaff on that Coast Guard helicopter. He was quite old then, finished, fallen from glory. I had seen him when the going was good, and he had looked like a movie star, like a five-star general, like Machiavelli’s Prince, like Aristotle’s great-souled man. Longstaff had fought technocracy and plutocracy with the classics. He forced some of the most powerful people in the country to discuss Plato and Hobbes. He made airline presidents, chairmen, governors of the Stock Exchange perform
Antigone
in board rooms. Truth, however, is truth and Longstaff was in many respects first rate. He was a distinguished educator, he was even noble. His life would perhaps have been easier if his looks had been less striking.

  At any rate, Humboldt did the bold thing, just as we had all seen it done in the old go-getter movies. Unauthorized, he entered Longstaffs private elevator and pushed the button. Materializing huge and delicate in the penthouse, he gave his name to the receptionist. No, he had no appointment (I saw the sun on his cheeks, on his soiled clothes—it was shining as it shines through the purer air in skyscrapers), but he
was
Von Humboldt Fleisher. The name was enough. Longstaff had him shown in. He was very glad to see Humboldt. This he told me during the flight, and I believed him. We sat in the helicopter belted up in orange puffy life jackets, and we were armed with those long knives. Why the knives? Perhaps to fight sharks if one fell into the harbor. “I had read his ballads,” Longstaff told me. “I considered him to have great talent.” I knew of course that for Longstaff
Paradise Lost
was the last real poem in English. Long-staff was a greatness-freak. What he meant was that Humboldt was undoubtedly a poet and a charming man. That he was. In Longstaff’s office Humboldt must have been swooning with wickedness and ingenuity, swollen with manic energy, with spots before his eyes and maculations of the heart. He was going to persuade Longstaff, do in Sewell, outfox Ricketts, screw Hildebrand, and bugger fate. At the moment he looked like the Roto Rooter man come to snake out the drains. Yet he was bound for a chair at Princeton. Ike had conquered, Stevenson had gone down, but Humboldt was vaulting into penthouses and beyond.

  Longstaff too was riding high. He bullied his trustees with Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas, he had the whammy on them. And probably Longstaff had old scores to settle with Princeton, a pillbox of the educational establishment at which he aimed his radical flame thrower. I knew from Ickes’
Diaries
that Longstaff had made up to FDR. He wanted Wallace’s place on the ticket, and Truman’s, later. He dreamed of being Vice President and President. But Roosevelt had strung him along, had kept him waiting on tiptoes but never kissed him. That was Roosevelt all over. In this I sympathized with Longstaff (an ambitious man, a despot, a czar in my secret heart).

  So as the helicopter tilted back and forth over New York I studied this handsome aged Dr. Longstaff trying to understand how Humboldt must have looked to him. In Humboldt he perhaps had seen Caliban America, heaving and yapping, writing odes on greasy paper from the fish shop. For Longstaff had no feeling for literature. But he had been delighted when Humboldt explained that he wanted the Belisha Foundation to endow a chair for him at Princeton. “Exactly right!” said Longstaff. “Just the thing!” He buzzed his secretary and dictated a letter. Then and there Wilmoore Longstaff committed the Foundation to an extended grant. Soon Humboldt, palpitating, held a signed copy of the letter in his hand, and he and Longstaff drank martinis, gazing at Manhattan from the sixtieth floor, and talked about Dante’s bird imagery.

  As soon as he left Longstaff, Humboldt rushed downtown by cab to visit a certain Ginnie in the Village, a Bennington girl to whom Demmie Vonghel and I had introduced him. He pounded on her door and said, “It’s Von Humboldt Fleisher. I have to see you.” Stepping into the vestibule, he propositioned her immediately. Ginnie said, “He chased me around the apartment, and it was a scream. But I was worried about the puppies underfoot.” Her dachshund had just had a litter. Ginnie locked herself in the bathroom. Humboldt shouted, “You don’t know what you’re missing. I’m a poet. I have a big cock.” And Ginnie told Demmie, “I was laughing so hard I couldn’t have done it anyway.”

  When I asked Humboldt about this incident he said, “I felt I had to celebrate, and I understood these Bennington girls went for poets. Too bad about this Ginnie.. She’s very pretty but she’s honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won’t spread.”

  “Did you go elsewhere?”

  “I gave up on erotic relief. I went around and visited lots of people.”

  “And showed them Longstaff’s letter.”

  “Of course.”

  In any case, the scheme worked. Princeton couldn’t refuse the Belisha gift. Ricketts was outgeneraled. Humboldt was appointed. The
Times
and the
Herald Tribune
both carried the story. For two or three months things were smoother than velvet and cashmere. Humboldt’s new colleagues gave cocktail and dinner parties for him. Nor did Humboldt in his happiness forget that we were blood-brothers. Almost daily he would say, “Charlie, today I had a terrific idea for you. For the title role in your play . . . Victor McLaglen is a fascist of course. Can’t have him. But . . . I’m going to get in touch with Orson Welles for you. . . .”

  But then, in February, Longstaff’s trustees rebelled. They had had enough, I guess, and rallied for the honor of American monopoly-capital. Longstaff’s proposed budget was rejected, and he was forced to resign. He was not sent away quite empty-handed. He got some money, about twenty million, to start a little foundation of his own. But in effect they gave him the ax. The appropriation for Humboldt’s chair was a tiny item in that rejected budget. When Longstaff fell, Humboldt fell with him. “Charlie,” Humboldt said when he was at last able to talk about it, “it was just like my father’s experience when he was wiped out in the Florida boom. One year more and we would have made it. I’ve even asked myself, I’ve wondered, whether Long-staff knew when he sent the letter that he was on his way out ... ?”

  “I can’t believe that,” I said. “Longstaff is certainly mischievous, but he isn’t mean.”

  The Princeton people behaved well and offered to do the gentlemanly thing. Ricketts said, “You’re one of us now, Hum, you know? Don’t worry, we’ll find the dough for your chair somehow.” But Humboldt sent in his resignation. Then in March, on a back road in New Jersey, he tried to run Kathleen down in the Buick. She jumped into a ditch to save herself.

  sixteen

  At this moment I must say, almost in the form of deposition, without argument, that I do not believe my birth began my first existence. Nor Humboldt’s. Nor anyone’s. On esthetic grounds, if on no others, I cannot accept the view of death taken by most of us, and taken by me during most of my life—on esthetic grounds therefore I am obliged to deny that so extraordinary a thing as a human soul can be wiped out forever. No, the dead are about us, shut out by our metaphysical denial of them. As we lie nightly in our hemispheres asleep by the billions, our dead approach us. Our ideas should be their nourishment. We are their grainfields. But we are barren and we starve them. Don’t kid yourself, though, we are watched by the dead, watched on this earth, which is our school of freedom. In the next realm, where things are clearer, clarity eats into freedom. We are free on earth because of cloudiness, because of error, because of marvelous limitation, and as much because of beauty as of blindness and evil. These always go with the blessing of freedom. But this is all I have to say about the matter now, because I’m in a hurry, under pressure—all this unfinished business!

  As I was meditating on Humboldt, the hall-buzzer went off. I have a dark little hall where I press the button and get muffled shouts on the intercom from below. It was Roland Stiles, the doorman. My ways, the arrangements of my life, diverted Stiles a lot. He was a skinny witty old Negro. He was, so to speak, in the semifinals of life. In his opinion, so was I. But I didn’t seem to see it that way, for some strange white man’s reason, and I continued to carry on as if it weren’t yet time to think of death. “Plug in your telephone, Mr. Citrine. Do you read me? Your number-one lady friend is trying to reach you.” Yesterday my car was bashed. Today my beautiful mistress couldn’t get in touch. To him I was as good as a circus. At night Stiles’s missus liked stories about me better than television. He told me so himself.

  I dialed Renata and said, “What is it?”

  “What is it! For Christ’s sake! I’ve called ten times. You have to see Judge Urbanovich at half past one. Your lawyer’s been trying to get you, too. And he finally phoned Szathmar, and Szathmar phoned me.”

  “Half past one! They changed the time on me! For months they ignore me, then they give me two hours’ notice, curse them.” My spirit began to jump up and down. “Oh hell, I hate them, those crap artists.”

  “Maybe you can wind the whole thing up now. Today.”

  “How? I’ve surrendered five times. Each time I surrender Denise and her guy up their demands.”

  “In just a few days thank God I’m getting you out of here. You’ve been dragging your feet, because you don’t want to go, but believe me, Charlie, you’ll bless me for it when we’re in Europe again.”

  “Forrest Tomchek doesn’t even have time to discuss the case with me. Some lawyer Szathmar recommended.”

  “Now Charlie, how will you get downtown without your car? I’m surprised that Denise hasn’t tried to hitch a ride to court with you.”

  “I’ll get a cab.”

  “I have to take Fannie Sunderland to the Mart, anyway, for her tenth look at upholstery material for one fucking sofa.” Renata laughed, but she was unusually patient with her clients. “I must take care of this before we pull out for Europe. We’ll pick you up at one o’clock sharp. Be ready, Charlie.”

  Long ago I read a book called
Ils Ne M’auront Pas
(
They Aren’t Going to Get Me
) and at certain moments I whisper, “
Ils ne m’auront pas
.” I did that now, determined to finish my exercise in contemplation or Spirit-recollection (the purpose of which was to penetrate into the depths of the soul and to recognize the connection between the self and the divine powers). I lay down again on the sofa. To lie down was no small gesture of freedom. I am only being factual about this. It was a quarter of eleven, and if I left myself five minutes for a container of plain yoghurt and five minutes to shave I could continue for two hours to think about Humboldt. This was the right moment for it.

  Well, Humboldt tried to run down Kathleen in his car. They were driving home from a party in Princeton, and he was punching her, steering with the left hand. At a blinking light, near a package store, she opened the door and made a run for it in her stocking feet—she had lost her shoes in Princeton. He chased her in the Buick. She jumped into a ditch and he ran into a tree. The state troopers had to come and release him because the doors were jammed by the collision.

  Anyhow, the trustees had risen up against Longstaff, and the Poetry chair had disintegrated. Kathleen later told me that Humboldt had kept this from her all that day. He put down the phone and with his shuffling feet and sumo-wrestler’s belly came into the kitchen and poured himself a large jam-jar full of gin. Standing beside the dirty sink in his sneakers he drank this as if it had been milk.

  “What was that call?” said Kathleen.

  “Ricketts called.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Nothing. Just routine,” said Humboldt.

  “He turned a funny color under the eyes when he drank all that gin,” Kathleen told me. “A kind of light greeny purple. You sometimes see that shade of purple in artichoke hearts.”

  A little later on the same morning he seems to have had another talk with Ricketts. This was when Ricketts told him that Princeton would not renege. Money would be found. But this put Ricketts in the morally superior position. A poet could not allow a bureaucrat to surpass him. Humboldt locked himself in his office with the gin bottle and all day long wrote drafts of a letter of resignation.

  But that evening, on the road as they were driving in to attend a party at the Littlewoods’ he went to work on Kathleen. Why did she let her father sell her to Rockefeller? Yes the old guy was supposed to be just a pleasant character, a bohemian antique from Paris, one of the gang from the Closerie des Lilas, but he was an international criminal, a Dr. Moriarty, a Lucifer, a pimp and didn’t he try to have sexual relations with his own daughter? Well, how was it with Rockefeller? Did Rockefeller’s penis thrill her more? Did the billions enter in? Did Rockefeller have to take a woman away from a poet in order to get it up? So they drove in the Buick skidding on the gravel and booming through clouds of dust. He began to shout that her great calm-and-lovely act didn’t take him in at all. He knew all about these things. From a bookish viewpoint he actually did know a lot. He knew the jealousy of King Leontes in
The Winter’s Tale
. Mario Praz he knew. And Proust—caged rats tortured to death, Charlus flogged by some killer-concierge, some slaughterhouse brute with a scourge of nails. “I know all that lust garbage,” he said. “And I know the game has to be played with a calm face like yours. I know all about this female masochistic business. I understand your thrills, and you’re just using me!”