Humboldt's Gift (3 page)

  “You do? But why?”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve read about the Cannibal Society of the Kwakiutl Indians,” said learned Humboldt. “The candidate when he performs his initiation dance falls into a frenzy and eats human flesh. But if he makes a ritual mistake the whole crowd tears him to pieces.”

  “But why should poetry make you a million enemies?”

  He said this was a good question but it was obvious that he didn’t mean it. He turned gloomy and his voice went flat—plink —as though there were one note of tin in his brilliant keyboard. He struck it now. “I may think I’m bringing an offering to the •altar, but that’s not how they see it.” No, it was not a good question, for the fact that I asked it meant that I didn’t know Evil, and if I didn’t know Evil my admiration was worthless. He forgave me because I was a boy. But when I heard the tinny plink I realized that I must learn to defend myself. He had tapped my affection and admiration, and it was flowing at a dangerous rate. This hemorrhage of eagerness would weaken me and when I was weak and defenseless I would get it in the neck. And so I figured, ah ha! he wants me to suit him perfectly, down to the ground. He’ll bully me. I’d better look out.

  On the oppressive night when I achieved
my
success, Humboldt picketed the Belasco Theatre. He had just been let out of Bellevue. A huge sign,
Von Trenck by Charles Citrine
, glittered above the street. There were thousands of electric bulbs. I arrived in black tie, and there was Humboldt with a gang of pals and rooters. I swept out of the taxi with my lady friend and was caught on the sidewalk in the commotion. Police were controlling the crowd. His cronies were shouting and rioting and Humboldt carried his picket sign as though it were a cross. In streaming characters, mercurochrome on cotton, was written, “The Author of this Play is a Traitor.” The demonstrators were pushed back by the police, and Humboldt and I did not meet face to face. Did I want him run in? the producer’s assistant asked me.

  “No,” I said, wounded, trembling. “I used to be his protégé. We were pals, the crazy son of a bitch. Let him alone.”

  Demmie Vonghel, the lady who was with me, said, “Good man! That’s right, Charlie, you’re a good man!”

  
Von Trenck
ran for eight months on Broadway. I had the attention of the public for nearly a year, and I taught it nothing.

  three

  Now as to Humboldt’s actual death: he died at the Ilscombe around the corner from the Belasco. On his last night, as I have reconstructed it, he was sitting on his bed in this decayed place, probably reading. The books in his room were the poems of Yeats and Hegel’s
Phenomenology
. In addition to these visionary authors he read the
Daily News
and the
Post
. He kept up with sports and with night life, with the jet set and the activities of the Kennedy family, with used-car prices and want ads. Ravaged as he was he maintained his normal American interests. Then at about 3 a.m.—he wasn’t sleeping much toward the end—he decided to take his garbage down and suffered a heart attack in the elevator. When the pain struck he seems to have fallen against the panel and pressed all the buttons, including the alarm button. Bells rang, the door opened, he stumbled into a corridor and fell, spilling cans, coffee grounds, and bottles from his pail. Fighting for breath, he tore off his shirt. When the cops came to take the dead man to the hospital his chest was naked. The hospital didn’t want him now, so they carried him on to the morgue. At the morgue there were no readers of modern poetry. The name Von Humboldt Fleisher meant nothing. So he lay there, another derelict.

  I visited his uncle Waldemar not long ago in Coney Island. The old horse-player was in a nursing home. He said to me, “The cops rolled Humboldt. They took away his watch and his dough, even his fountain pen. He always used a real pen. He didn’t write poetry with a ball-point.”

  “Are you sure he had money?”

  “He never went out without a hundred dollars minimum in his pocket. You ought to know how he was about money. I miss the kid. How I miss him!”

  I felt exactly as Waldemar did. I was more moved by Hum-boldt’s death than by the thought of my own. He had built himself up to be mourned and missed. Humboldt put that sort of weight into himself and developed in his face all the graver, all the more important human feelings. You’d never forget a face like his. But to what end had it been created?

  Quite recently, last spring, I found myself thinking about this in an odd connection. I was in a French train with Renata, taking a trip which, like most trips, I neither needed nor desired. Renata pointed to the landscape and said, “Isn’t that beautiful out there!” I looked out, and she was right. Beautiful was indeed there. But I had seen Beautiful many times, and so I closed my eyes. I rejected the plastered idols of the Appearances. These idols I had been trained, along with everybody else, to see, and I was tired of their tyranny. I even thought, The painted veil isn’t what it used to be. The damn thing is wearing out. Like a roller-towel in a Mexican men’s room. I was thinking of the power of collective abstractions, and so forth. We crave more than ever the radiant vividness of boundless love, and more and more the barren idols thwart this. A world of categories devoid of spirit waits for life to return. Humboldt was supposed to be an instrument of this revival. This mission or vocation was reflected in his face. The hope of new beauty. The promise, the secret of beauty.

  In the USA, incidentally, this sort of thing gives people a very foreign look.

  It was consistent that Renata should direct my attention to the Beautiful. She had a personal stake in it, she was linked with Beauty.

  Still, Humboldt’s face clearly showed that he understood what was to be done. It showed, too, that he had not gotten around to doing it. And he, too, directed my attention to landscapes. Late in the Forties, he and Kathleen, newlyweds, moved from Greenwich Village to rural New Jersey, and when I visited them he was all earth, trees, flowers, oranges, the sun, Paradise, Atlantis, Rhadamanthus. He talked about William Blake at Felpham and Milton’s Eden, and he ran down the city. The city was lousy. To follow his intricate conversation you had to know his basic texts. I knew what they were: Plato’s
Timaeus
, Proust on Combray, Virgil on farming, Marvell on gardens, Wallace Stevens’ Caribbean poetry, and so on. One reason why Humboldt and I were so close was that I was willing to take the complete course.

  So Humboldt and Kathleen lived in a country cottage. Humboldt several times a week came to town on business—poet’s business. He was at the height of his reputation though not of his powers. He had lined up four sinecures that I knew of. There may have been more. Considering it normal to live on fifteen bucks a week I had no way of estimating his needs and his income. He was secretive but hinted at large sums. And now he got himself appointed to replace Professor Martin Sewell at Princeton for a year. Sewell was off to give Fulbright lectures on Henry James in Damascus. His friend Humboldt was his substitute. An instructor was needed in the program and Humboldt recommended me. Making good use of my opportunities in the postwar cultural boom I had reviewed bushels of books for
The New Republic
and the
Times
. Humboldt said, “Sewell has read your pieces. Thinks you’re pretty good. You
seem
pleasant and harmless with your dark ingenu eyes and your nice Midwestern manners. The old guy wants to look you over.”

  “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 mouth slightly open. Her long elegant head grew golden hair and she parted it evenly, like the curtains of a neat house. Hers was the sort of face you might have seen in a Conestoga wagon a century ago, a pioneer face, a very white sort of face. But I fell first for her legs. They were extraordinary. And these beautiful legs had an exciting defect—her knees touched and her feet were turned outward so that when she walked’fast the taut silk of her stockings made a slight sound of friction. In a cocktail crowd, where I met her, I could scarcely understand what she was saying, for she muttered in the incomprehensible fashionable Eastern lockjaw manner. But in her nightgown she was the perfect country girl, the farmer’s daughter, and pronounced her words plainly and clearly. Regularly, at about 2 a.m., her nightmares woke her. Her Christianity was the delirious kind. She had unclean spirits to cast out. She feared hell. She moaned in her sleep. Then she sat up sobbing. More than half asleep myself, I tried to calm and reassure her. “There is no hell, Demmie.”

  “I know there is hell. There
is
a hell—there
is
!”

  “Just put your head on my arm. Go back to sleep.”

  On a Sunday in September 1952 Humboldt picked me up in front of Demmie’s apartment building on Barrow Street near the Cherry Lane Theatre. Very different from the young poet with whom I went to Hoboken to eat clams, he now was thick and stout. Cheerful Demmie called down from the third-floor fire escape where she kept begonias—in the morning there was not a trace of nightmare. “Charlie, here comes Humboldt driving the four-holer.” He charged down Barrow Street, the first poet in America with power brakes, he said. He was full of car mystique, but he didn’t know how to park. I watched him trying to back into an adequate space. My own theory was that the way people parked had much to do with their intimate self-image and revealed how they felt about their own backsides. Humboldt twice got a rear wheel up on the curb and finally gave up, turning off the ignition. Then in a checked sport jacket and strap-fastened polo boots he came out, swinging shut a door that seemed two yards long. His greeting was silent, the large lips were closed. His gray eyes seemed more widely separated than ever—the surfaced whale beside the dory. His handsome face has thickened and deteriorated. It was sumptuous, it was Buddhistic, but it was not tranquil. I myself was dressed for the formal professorial interview, all too belted furled and buttoned. I felt like an umbrella. Demmie had taken charge of my appearance. She ironed my shirt, chose my necktie, and brushed flat the dark hair I still had then. I went downstairs. And there we were, with the rough bricks, the garbage cans, the sloping sidewalks, the fire escapes, Demmie waving from above and her white terrier barking at the window sill.