Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) Read online

  “How do you account, Mr. Citrine, for the rise and fall of Von Humboldt Fleisher?”

  “Young people, what do you aim to do with the facts about Humboldt, publish articles and further your careers? This is pure capitalism.”

  I thought about Humboldt with more seriousness and sorrow than may be apparent in this account. I didn’t love so many people. I couldn’t afford to lose anyone. One infallible sign of love was that I dreamed of Humboldt so often. Every time I saw him I was terribly moved, and cried in my sleep. Once I dreamed that we met at Whelan’s Drugstore on the corner of Sixth and Eighth in Greenwich Village. He was not the stricken leaden swollen man I had seen on Forty-sixth Street, but still the stout normal Humboldt of middle life. He was sitting beside me at the soda fountain with a Coke. I burst into tears. I said, “Where have you been? I thought you were dead.”

  He was very mild, quiet, and he seemed extremely well pleased, and he said, “Now I understand everything.”

  “Everything? What’s everything?”

  But he only said, “Everything.” I couldn’t get more out of him, and I wept with happiness. Of course it was only a dream such as you dream if your soul is not well. My waking character is far from sound. I’ll never get any medals for character. And all such things must be utterly clear to the dead. They have finally left the problematical cloudy earthly and human sphere. I have a hunch that in life you look outward from the ego, your center. In death you are at the periphery looking inward. You see your old pals at Whelan’s still struggling with the heavy weight of selfhood, and you hearten them by intimating that when their turn comes to enter eternity they too will begin to comprehend and at last get an idea of what has happened. As none of this is Scientific, we are afraid to think it.

  All right, then, I will try to summarize: at the age of twenty-two Von Humboldt Fleisher published his first book of ballads. You would have thought that the son of neurotic immigrants from Eighty-ninth and West End—his extravagant papa hunting Pancho Villa and, in the photo Humboldt showed me, with a head so curly that his garrison cap was falling off; his mama, from one of those Potash and Perlmutter yapping fertile baseball-and-business families, darkly pretty at first, then gloomy mad and silent—that such a young man would be clumsy, that his syntax would be unacceptable to fastidious goy critics on guard for the Protestant Establishment and the Genteel Tradition. Not at all. The ballads were pure, musical, witty, radiant, humane. I think they were Platonic. By Platonic I refer to an original perfection to which all human beings long to return. Yes, Humboldt’s words were impeccable. Genteel America had nothing to worry about. It was in a tizzy—it expected Anti-Christ to burst out of the slums. Instead this Humboldt Fleisher turned up with a love-offering. He behaved like a gentleman. He was charming. So he was warmly welcomed. Conrad Aiken praised him, T. S. Eliot took favorable notice of his poems, and even Yvor Winters had a good word to say for him. As for me, I borrowed thirty bucks and enthusiastically went to New York to talk things over with him on Bedford Street. This was in 1938. We crossed the Hudson on the Christopher Street ferry to eat clams in Hoboken and talked about the problems of modern poetry. I mean that Humboldt lectured me about them. Was Santayana right? Was modern poetry barbarous? Modern poets had more wonderful material than Homer or Dante. What they didn’t have was a sane and steady idealization. To be Christian was impossible, to be pagan also. That left you-know-what.

  I had come to hear that great things might be true. This I was told on the Christopher Street ferry. Marvelous gestures had to be made and Humboldt made them. He told me that poets ought to figure out how to get around pragmatic America. He poured it on for me that day. And there I was, having raptures, gotten up as a Fuller Brush salesman in a smothering wool suit, a hand-me-down from Julius. The pants were big in the waist and the shirt ballooned out, for my brother Julius had a fat chest. I wiped my sweat with a handkerchief stitched with a J.

  Humboldt himself was just beginning to put on weight. He was thick through the shoulders but still narrow at the hips. Later he got a prominent belly, like Babe Ruth. His legs were restless and his feet made nervous movements. Below, shuffling comedy; above, princeliness and dignity, a certain nutty charm. A surfaced whale beside your boat might look at you as he looked with his wide-set gray eyes. He was fine as well as thick, heavy but also light, and his face was both pale and dark. Golden-brownish hair flowed upward—two light crests and a dark trough. His forehead was scarred. As a kid he had fallen on a skate blade, the bone itself was dented. His pale lips were prominent and his mouth was full of immature-looking teeth, like milk teeth. He consumed his cigarettes to the last spark and freckled his tie and his jacket with burns.

  The subject that afternoon was Success. I was from the sticks and he was giving me the low-down. Could I imagine, he said, what it meant to knock the Village flat with your poems and then follow up with critical essays in the Partisan and the Southern Review? He had much to tell me about Modernism, Symbolism, Yeats, Rilke, Eliot. Also, he was a pretty good drinker. And of course there were lots of girls. Besides, New York was then a very Russian city, so we had Russia all over the place. It was a case, as Lionel Abel said, of a metropolis that yearned to belong to another country. New York dreamed of leaving North America and merging with Soviet Russia. Humboldt easily went in his conversation from Babe Ruth to Rosa Luxemburg and Béla Kun and Lenin. Then and there I realized that if I didn’t read Trotsky at once I wouldn’t be worth conversing with. Humboldt talked to me about Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, the Smolny Institute, the Shakhty engineers, the Moscow trials, Sidney Hook’s From Hegel to Marx, Lenin’s State and Revolution. In fact, he compared himself to Lenin. “I know,” he said, “how Lenin felt in October when he exclaimed, ‘Es schwindelt!’ He didn’t mean that he was schwindling everyone but that he felt giddy. Lenin, tough as he was, was like a young girl waltzing. Me too. I have vertigo from success, Charlie. My ideas won’t let me sleep. I go to bed without a drink and the room is whirling. It’ll happen to you, too. I tell you this to prepare you,” Humboldt said. In flattery he had a marvelous touch.

  Madly excited, I looked diffident. Of course I was in a state of intense preparation and hoped to knock everybody dead. Each morning at the Fuller Brush sales-team pep meeting we said in unison, “I’m fine and dandy, how are you?” But I actually was fine and dandy. I didn’t have to put it on. I couldn’t have been more eager—eager to greet housewives, eager to come in and see their kitchens, eager to hear their tales and their complaints. The passionate hypochondria of Jewish women was new to me then, I was keen to hear about their tumors and their swollen legs. I wanted them to tell me about marriage, childbirth, money, sickness, and death. Yes, I tried to put them into categories as I sat there drinking coffee. They were petty bourgeois, husband-killers, social climbers, hysterics, etcetera. But it was no use, this analytical skepticism. I was too enthusiastic. So I eagerly peddled my brushes, and just as eagerly I went to the Village at night and listened to the finest talkers in New York—Schapiro, Hook, Rahv, Huggins, and Gumbein. Under their eloquence I sat like a cat in a recital hall. But Humboldt was the best of them all. He was simply the Mozart of conversation.

  On the ferryboat Humboldt said, “I made it too young, I’m in trouble.” He was off then. His spiel took in Freud, Heine, Wagner, Goethe in Italy, Lenin’s dead brother, Wild Bill Hickok’s costumes, the New York Giants, Ring Lardner on grand opera, Swinburne on flagellation, and John D. Rockefeller on religion. In the midst of these variations the theme was always ingeniously and excitingly retrieved. That afternoon the streets looked ashen but the deck of the ferry was bright gray. Humboldt was slovenly and grand, his mind undulating like the water and the waves of blond hair rising on his head, his face with widely separated gray eyes white and tense, his hands deep in his pockets, and his feet in polo boots set close together.

  If Scott Fitzgerald had been a Protestant, said Humboldt, Success wouldn’t have damaged him so much. Look at Rockefeller Senior, he k
new how to handle Success, he simply said that God had given him all his dough. Of course that was stewardship. That was Calvinism. Once he had spoken of Calvinism, Humboldt was bound to go on to Grace and Depravity. From Depravity he moved to Henry Adams, who said that in a few decades mechanical progress would break our necks anyway, and from Henry Adams he went into the question of eminence in an age of revolutions, melting pots, and masses, and from this he turned to Tocqueville, Horatio Alger, and Ruggles of Red Gap. Movie-mad Humboldt followed Screen Gossip magazine. He personally remembered Mae Murray like a goddess in sequins on the stage of Loew’s inviting kids to visit her in California. “She starred in The Queen of Tasmania and Circe the Enchantress, but she ended as a poorhouse crone. And what about what’s-his-name who killed himself in the hospital? He took a fork and hammered it into his heart with the heel of his shoe, poor fellow!”

  This was sad. But I didn’t really care how many people bit the dust. I was marvelously happy. I had never visited a poet’s house, never drunk straight gin, never eaten steamed clams, never smelled the tide. I had never heard such things said about business, its power to petrify the soul. Humboldt spoke wonderfully of the wonderful, abominable rich. You had to view them in the shield of art. His monologue was an oratorio in which he sang and played all parts. Soaring still higher he began to speak about Spinoza and of how the mind was fed with joy by things eternal and infinite. This was Humboldt the student who had gotten A’s in philosophy from the great Morris R. Cohen. I doubt that he would have talked like this to anyone but a kid from the sticks. But after Spinoza Humboldt was a bit depressed and said, “Lots of people are waiting for me to fall on my face. I have a million enemies.”

  “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 severa
l 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.”