Humboldt's Gift (49 page)

  “Now, Charles, I come to the zwieback and warm milk. Big enterprises are beyond me, obviously, but my wit oddly enough is intact. This wit, developed to cope with the disgraces of life, real or imaginary, is like a companion to me these days. It stands by me and we are on good terms. In short, my sense of humor has not disappeared and now that bigger ambitious passions have worn themselves out it has been coming before me with an old-fashioned bow out of Molière. A relationship has developed.

  “You remember how we amused ourselves in Princeton with a movie scenario about Amundsen and Nobile and Caldofreddo the Cannibal? I always thought it would make a classic. I handed it to a fellow named Otto Klinsky in the RCA Building. He promised to get it to Sir Laurence Olivier’s hairdresser’s cousin who was the sister of a scrubwoman at Time and Life who was the mother of the beautician who did Mrs. Klinsky’s hair. Somewhere in these channels our script got lost. I still have a copy of this. You will find it among these papers.” Indeed I did. I was curious to read it again. “But that is not my gift to you. After all, we collaborated, and it would be chintzy of me to call it a gift. No, I have dreamed up another story and I believe it is worth a fortune. This small work has been important to me. Among other things it has given me hours of sane enjoyment on certain nights and brought relief from thoughts of doom. The fitting together of the parts gave me the pleasure of a good intricacy. The therapy of delight. I tell you as a writer—we have had some queer American bodies to fit into art’s garments. Enchantment didn’t have enough veiling material for this monstrous mammoth flesh, for such crude arms and legs. But this preface is getting too long. On the next page begins my Treatment. I’ve tried to sell it. I’ve offered it to some people but they weren’t interested. I haven’t got the strength to follow through. People don’t want to see me. You remember how I went to see Longstaff? No more. Receptionists turn me away. I guess I look like the sheeted dead who squeaked and gibbered in the streets of Rome. Now, Charlie, you are still in the midst of life and are rich in contacts. People will pay attention to the Shoveleer, the author of
Trench
, the chronicler of Woodrow Wilson and Harry Hopkins. This will not reach you unless I kick the bucket. But then it will be a fabulous legacy and I want you to have it. For you are, at one and the same time, no good at all and also a darling man.

  “Good old Henry James, of whom Mrs. Henry Adams said that he chewed more than he bit off, tells us that the creative mind is better off with hints than with extensive knowledge. I have never suffered from a knowledge handicap. The
donnée
for this treatment comes from the gossip columns, which I have always read faithfully.
Verbum sapientiae
—I think that’s the dative. The original is apparently true.

              
TREATMENT

  I.

  A fellow named Corcoran, a successful author, has been barren for many years. He has tried skin diving and parachute jumping as subjects but nothing has resulted. Corcoran is married to a strong-minded woman. A woman of her sort might have made Beethoven a powerful wife, but Beethoven wasn’t having any of that. To play the part of Corcoran I have in mind someone like Mastroianni.

  II.

  Corcoran meets a beautiful young woman with whom he has an affair. Had she lived, poor Marilyn Monroe would have been ideal for this role. For the first time in many years Corcoran tastes happiness. Then in a fit of enterprise, ingenuity, daring, he escapes with her to a faraway place. His disagreeable wife is nursing a sick father. Taking advantage of this, he and his girl go off. I don’t know where. To Polynesia, to New Guinea, to Abyssinia, with dulcimers, wonderful and far off. The place is still quite pure in its beauty and enchanting weeks follow. Chieftains receive Corcoran and his girl. Hunts occur, and dances and banquets are laid on. The girl is an angel. They bathe in pools together, they float among gardenias and hibiscus. At night the spots of heaven draw near. The sensors open. Life is renewed. Dross and impurities evaporate.

  III.

  Returning, Corcoran writes a marvelous book—a book of such potency and beauty that it must not be kept from the world. But

  IV.

  He cannot publish. It would hurt his wife and destroy his marriage. He himself had a mother and few people have character enough to cast off their new supersitions about mothers and sons. He would have no identity, he would not even be an American without this bitch-affliction. If Corcoran hadn’t been a writer he would not have sullied the heart of this angelic girl by writing a book about their adventure. Unfortunately, he is one of those writing fellows. He is a mere writer. Not to publish would kill him. And he is comically afraid of his wife. This wife should be matronly, jolly, frank, a bit tough but not altogether forbidding. In her own way rather attractive. A good broad, a bossy ail-American girl. I think she should be a food faddist who drinks Tiger’s Milk and eats Queen-Bee Jelly. You may be able to do something with that.

  V.

  Corcoran takes the book to his agent, a Greek American named Zane Bigoulis. This is a most important role. It should be played by Zero Mostel. He is a comedian of genius. But if he isn’t restrained, he runs away with everything. At all events, I have him in mind for this part. Zane reads the book and cries “Magnificent.” “But I can’t publish it, it would finish my marriage.” Now Charlie,
My Marriage
! Marriage having become one of the idols-of-the-tribe (Francis Bacon), the source of this comedy is the low seriousness which has succeeded the high seriousness of the Victorians. Corcoran has enough imagination to write a wonderful book, but he is enslaved by middle-class attitudes. As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood. Nothing remains but a few floating timbers of psychotherapy. “What shall I do?” Corcoran cries. They deliberate. Then Bigoulis says, “All you can do is take the same trip with Hepzibah that you took with Laverne. Exactly the same trip, following the book faithfully, at the same season. Having reproduced the trip, you can publish the book.”

  VI.

  “I won’t let a word be changed,” says Corcoran. “No impurity, no betrayal of the Experience.” “Leave it to me,” says Bigoulis. “I will precede you everywhere with transistors, panty hose, pocket computers, and so on, and bribe the chieftains. I’ll get them to put on the same hunts and banquets and duplicate the dances. When your publisher sees this manuscript he’ll be glad to pick up the tab.” “It’s really a frightful idea to do all this with Hepzibah. And I’ll have to lie to Laverne. She feels as I do about our miraculous month on the Island. There’s something sacred about it.” But, Charlie, as
The Scarlet Letter
shows, love and lying have always gone together in this country. Truth is actually fatal. Dimmesdale tells it and dies. But Bigoulis argues, “You want the book published? You don’t want Hepzibah to leave you, and you want to hang on to Laverne as well? From a male viewpoint the whole thing makes complete sense. So ... we go to the Island. I can swing it for you. If you bury this book I lose a hundred grand in commissions, with picture-rights maybe more.”

  I see, Charlie, that I have now made the place an Island. Thinking of
The Tempest
. Prospero is a Hamlet who gets his revenge through art.

  VII.

  Thus Corcoran repeats with Hepzibah the journey he made with Laverne. Oh what a difference! All now is parody, desecration, wicked laughter. Which must be suffered. To the high types of Martyrdom the twentieth century has added the farcical martyr. This, you see, is the artist. By wishing to play a great role in the fate of mankind he becomes a bum and a joke. A double punishment is inflicted on him as the would-be representative of meaning and beauty. When the artist-agonist has learned to be sunk and shipwrecked, to embrace defeat and assert nothing, to subdue his will and accept his assignment to the hell of modern truth perhaps his Orphic powers will be restored, the stones will dance again when he plays. Then heaven and earth will be reunited. After long divorce. With what joy on both sides, Charlie! What joy!

  But this has no place in our picture. In the picture, Corcoran and his wife are bathing in a pool covered with hibiscus. She adores it. He fights his depression and prays for strength to play his role. Meantime, Bigoulis goes ahead staging each event, bribing chieftains, and hiring musicians and dancers. In this Island he sees also, on his own score, the investment opportunity of a lifetime. He is already planning to build the world’s greatest resort here. At night he sits in his tent with a map, laying out a pleasure dome. The natives will become waiters, cooks, porters, and caddies on his golf course.

  VIII.

  The terrible trip over, Corcoran comes back to New York and publishes his book. It is a great success. His wife leaves him and sues for divorce. She knows she is not the heroine of those tender scenes. Laverne is outraged when she discovers that he repeated the same trip, sacred to her, with Hepzibah. She can never, she says, love a man capable of such a betrayal. To make love with another woman among those flowers, by moonlight! She knew he was a married man. That, she was willing to tolerate. But not this, not the breaking of the faith. She never wants to see him again.

  He is therefore alone with his success, and his success is enormous. You know what that means....

  “Charles, here is my gift to you. It is worth a hundred times more than the check I put through. A picture like this should gross millions and fill Third Avenue with queues for a year. Insist on a box-office percentage.

  “You will make a good script of this outline if you will remember me as I kept remembering you in plotting this out. You took my personality and exploited it in writing your
Trench
. I have borrowed from you to create this Corcoran. Don’t allow the caricatures to get out of hand. Let me call your attention to the opinion of Blake on this subject. ‘Fun I love,’ he says, ‘but too much Fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than Fun, & Happiness is better than Mirth. I feel that a Man may be happy in This World. And I know that This World Is a World of Imagination &: Vision. . . . The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing which stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule & Deformity, & by these I shall not regulate my proportions.” “

  Humboldt added a few sentences more. “I have explained why I wrote such a Treatment. I wasn’t really strong enough to bear the great burdens. I haven’t made it here, Charlie. Not to be guilty of a final failure of taste, I will avoid the heavy declaration. Let’s say I have a leg already over the last stile and I look back and see you far back laboring still in fields of ridicule.

  “Help my Uncle Waldemar all you can. Be sure that if there is a hereafter I will be pulling for you. Before you sit down to work at this scenario play a few sides of
The Magic Flute
on the phonograph, or read
The Tempest
. Or E. T. A. Hoffmann. You are lazy, disgraceful, tougher than you think but not yet a dead loss. In part you are humanly okay. We are supposed to do something for our kind. Don’t get frenzied about money. Overcome your greed. Better luck with women. Last of all— remember: we are not natural beings but supernatural beings.

                    Lovingly, Humboldt”

  twenty-nine

  So now I know why we missed the Scala,” said Renata. “We had tickets for tonight. All that glow—that gorgeous performance of
The Barber of Seville
—a chance to be part of the greatest musical audience in Europe! And we sacrificed it. And for what? To go to Coney Island. Coming back with what? A goofy outline. I could laugh about it,” she said. In fact she was laughing. She was in a good humor and had seldom been more beautiful, the dark hair drawn back and secured at the top, giving a sense—well, a sense of rescue, silken and miraculous. The dark hues with the red suited Renata best. “
You
don’t mind missing out on the Scala. In spite of all your credentials you don’t really care much for culture. Deep down, you’re from Chicago after all.”

  “Let me make it up to you. What’s at the Met tonight?”

  “No, it’s Wagner, and that “Liebestod” drags me. Actually, as everybody is talking about it, let’s see if we can get in to see
Deep Throat
. All right, I can see you getting ready to make a remark about sex films. Don’t do it. I’ll tell you what your attitude is—When it’s done it’s fun, but when it’s seen it’s unclean. And remember that your wisecracks show no respect for me. First I do things for you, and then I become a woman of a certain class.”

  Still, she was in good heart, chatty and highly affectionate. We were lunching at the Oak Room, far from the beans and wieners of the nursing home. We should have given those two old geezers a treat and taken them out. At lunch Menasha might have told me much about my mother. She died when I was an adolescent and I longed to hear her described by a mature man, if such Menasha was. She had come to be a sacred person. Julius always insisted that he couldn’t remember her at all. He had his doubts about my memory altogether. Why such keenness (approaching hysteria) for the past? Clinically speaking, I guess the problem was hysteria. Philosophically, I came out better. Plato links recollection with love. But I couldn’t ask Renata to creep along with two old boys to some seafood joint on the boardwalk and spend a whole afternoon helping them to read the menu and to deal with clams, wiping butter from their pants, looking away when they popped out their detachable bridges, just so I could discuss my mother. To her it was odd that an elderly fellow like me should be so eager to hear reminiscences of his mother. Contrast with these very old guys might make me look a bit younger, still it was also possible that she would lump us all together in her irritation. Thus Menasha and Waldemar were deprived of a treat.

  In the Oak Room she ordered Beluga caviar. She said it was her reward for taking the subway. “And after that,” she told the waiter, “lobster salad. For dessert, the
profiterole
. Mr. Citrine will have the
omelette fines-herbes
. I’ll let him order the wine.” And so I did, having been told what she wanted. I commanded a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. When the waiter left, Renata said, “I notice that your eye goes from right to left as you read the menu. There is no reason for the poor-boy bit. You can always make money, piles of it. Especially if you team up with me, I promise we’ll be Lord and Lady Citrine. I know the visit to Coney Island has made you downhearted. So I’ll give you a blessing to count. Look around this dining room and look at the women—see what kind of dogs important brokers, corporation executives, and big-time lawyers get stuck with. Then compare.”