Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) Read online

  Renata had forbidden me to drive a Dart. I tried to negotiate with the Mercedes salesman for a secondhand 250-C, but in the showroom Renata—roused, florid, fragrant, large—had put her hand on the silver hood and said, “This one—the coupe.” The touch of her palm was sensual. Even what she did to the car I felt in my own person.

  five

  But now something had to be done about this wreck. I went to the Receiving Room and fetched Roland the doorman—skinny, black, elderly, never-shaven Roland. Roland Stiles, unless I deceived myself (a strong likelihood), was on my side. In my fantasies of solitary death it was Roland whom I saw in my bedroom filling a flight bag with a few articles before calling the police. He did so with my blessing. He particularly needed my electric razor. His intensely black face was pitted and spiky. Shaving with a blade must have been nearly impossible.

  Roland, in the electric-blue uniform, was perturbed. He had seen the ruined car when he came to work in the morning but, he said, “I couldn’t be the one to tell you, Mist’ Citrine.” Tenants on their way to work had seen it, too. They knew of course to whom it belonged. “This is a real bitch,” said Roland soberly, his lean old face twisted and his mouth and mustache puckered. Quickwitted, he had always kidded me about the beautiful ladies who called on me. “They come in Volkswagens and Cadillacs, on bikes and motorcycles, in taxis and walkin’. They ask when you went out, and when you comin’ back, and they leave notes. They come, they come, they come. You some ladies’ man. Plenty of husbands got it in for you, I bet.” But the amusement was gone. Roland hadn’t been a black man sixty years for nothing. He knew moronic infernos. I had lost the immunity which made my ways so entertaining. “You in trouble,” he said. He muttered something about “Miss Universe.” He called Renata Miss Universe. Sometimes she paid him to entertain her little boy in the Receiving Room. The child played with parcels while his mother lay in my bed. I didn’t like it, but you can’t be a ridiculous lover by halves.

  “Now what?”

  Roland twisted his hands outward. He lifted his shoulders. Shrugging, he said, “Call the cops.”

  Yes, a report had to be filed, if only because of the insurance. The insurance company would find this a very queer case. “Well, flag the squad car when it passes. Have those useless fellows look at this ruin,” I said. “And then send them up.”

  I gave him a dollar for his trouble. I usually did that. And now the flow of malevolence had to be reversed.

  Through my apartment door I heard the telephone. It was Cantabile.

  “All right, smart-ass.”

  “Insane!” I said. “Vandalism! Beating a machine. . . !”

  “You’ve seen your car—you saw what you made me do!” He yelled. He forced his voice. Nevertheless it shook.

  “What’s that? You’re blaming me?”

  “You were warned.”

  “I made you hammer that beautiful automobile?”

  “You made me. Yes, you. You sure did. You think I don’t have feelings? You wouldn’t believe how I feel about a car like that. You’re stupid. This is nobody’s fault but yours.” I tried to answer but he shouted me down. “You forced me! You made me! Okay, last night was only step one.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t pay me and you’ll see what it means.”

  “What kind of threat is that? This is getting out of hand. Do you mean my daughters?”

  “I’m not going to a collection agency. You don’t know what you’re into. Or who I am. Wake up!”

  I often said “Wake up!” to myself, and many people also have cried, “Wake, wake!” As if I had a dozen eyes, and stubbornly kept them sealed. “Ye have eyes and see not.” This, of course, was absolutely true.

  Cantabile was still speaking. I heard him say, “So, go and ask George Swiebel what to do. He gave you the advice. He, like, smashed your car.”

  “Let’s stop all this. I want to settle.”

  “No settle. Pay. Make good the check. The full amount. And cash. No money orders, no cashier’s check, no more fucking around. Cash. I’ll call you later. We’ll make a date. I want to see you.”

  “When?”

  “Never mind when. You stick by the telephone till I call.”

  Next instant I heard the interminable universal electronic miaow of the phone. And I was desperate. I had to tell what had happened. I needed to consult.

  A sure sign of distress: telephone numbers stormed through my head—area codes, digits. I must telephone someone. The first person I called was George Swiebel, of course; I had to tell him what had happened. I also had to warn him. Cantabile might attack him, too. But George was out with a crew. They were pouring a concrete footing somewhere, said Sharon, his secretary. George, before he became a businessman, was, as I have said, an actor. He started out in the Federal Theater. Afterward he was a radio announcer. He had tried television and Hollywood as well. Among business people he spoke of his show-business experience. He knew his Ibsen and his Brecht and he often flew to Minneapolis to see plays at the Guthrie Theatre. In South Chicago he was identified with Bohemia and the Arts, with creativity, with imagination. And he was vital, generous, had an open nature. He was a good guy. People formed strong attachments to him. Look at this little Sharon, his secretary. She was a hillbilly, dwarfish and queer-faced, and looked like Mammy Yokum in the funnies. Yet George was her brother, her doctor, her priest, her tribe. She had, as it were, surveyed South Chicago and found only one man there, George Swiebel. When I spoke to her, I had enough presence of mind to dissemble, for if I had told Sharon how shocking things were she would not have given George the message. George’s average day, as he and his people saw it, was one crisis after another. Her job was to protect him. “Ask George to call me,” I said. I hung up thinking of the crisis-outlook in the USA, a legacy from old frontier times, etcetera. I thought these things from force of habit. Just because your soul is being torn to pieces doesn’t mean that you stop analyzing the phenomena.

  I restrained my real desire, which was to scream. I recognized that I would have to recompose myself unassisted. I didn’t dial Renata. Renata is not especially good at giving consolation over the phone. You have to get it from her in person.

  Now I had Cantabile’s ring to wait for. And the police as well. I had to explain to Murra the CPA that I wouldn’t be coming in. He’d charge me for the hour anyway, after the manner of psychiatrists and other specialists. That afternoon I was to have taken my small daughters Lish and Mary to their piano teacher. For, as the Gulbransen Piano Co. used to say on the brick walls of Chicago, “The richest child is poor without a musical education.” And mine were rich man’s daughters, and it would be a disaster if they grew up unable to play “Fur Elise” and the “Happy Farmer.”

  I had to recover my calm. Seeking stability, I did the one Yoga exercise I know. I took the small change and the keys out of my pockets, I removed my shoes, took a position on the floor, advancing my toes, and, with a flip, I stood on my head. My loveliest of machines, my silver Mercedes 280, my gem, my love-offering, stood mutilated in the street. Two thousand dollars’ worth of bodywork would never restore the original smoothness of the metal skin. The headlights were crushed blind. I hadn’t the heart to try the doors, they might be jammed shut. I tried to concentrate on hatred and fury—revenge, revenge! But I couldn’t get anywhere with that. I could only see the German steward at the shop in his long white smock, like a dentist, telling me that parts would have to be imported. And I, clutching my half-bald head in both hands as if in despair, fingers interlocked, had my trembling aching legs in the air, tufts of side-hair sticking out, and the green Persian carpet flowing under me. I was heart-injured. I was desolate. The beauty of the carpet was one of my comforts. I have become deeply attached to carpets, and this one was a work of art. The green was soft and varied with great subtlety. The red was one of those surprises that seem to spring straight from the heart. Stribling, my downtown expert, told me that I could get far more than I had pai
d for this rug. Everything that wasn’t mass-produced was zooming in value. Stribling was an obese excellent man who kept horses but now was too heavy to ride. Few people seemed to be consummating anything good, these days. Look at me. I couldn’t be serious, becoming involved in this sort of grotesque comic Mercedes-and-Underworld thing. As I stood on my head, I knew (I would know!) that there was a sort of theoretical impulse behind this grotesqueness too, one of the powerful theories of the modern world being that for self-realization it’s necessary to embrace the deformity and absurdity of the inmost being (we know it’s there!). Be healed by the humiliating truth the Unconscious contains. I didn’t buy this theory, but that didn’t mean that I was free from it. I had a talent for absurdity, and you don’t throw away any of your talents.

  I was thinking that I’d never get a penny from the insurance company on a queer claim like this. I had bought every kind of protection they offered, but somewhere in the small print they were sure to have the usual foxy clauses. Under Nixon the great corporations became drunk with immunity. The good old bourgeois virtues, even as window dressing, are gone forever.

  It was from George that I had learned this upside-down position. George warned that I was neglecting my body. Several years ago he began to point out that my throat was becoming crepy, my color was poor, and I was easily winded. At a certain point in middle age you had to make a stand, he argued, before the abdominal wall gives, the thighs get weak and thin, the breasts female. There was a way to age that was physically honorable. George interpreted this for himself with peculiar zeal. Immediately after his gall-bladder operation he got out of bed and did fifty push-ups—his own naturopath. From this exertion, he got peritonitis and for two days we thought he was dying. But ailments seemed to inspire him, and he had his own cures for everything. Recently he told me, “I woke up day before yesterday and found a lump under my arm.”

  “Did you go to the doctor?”

  “No. I tied it with dental floss. I tied it tight, tight, tight. . . .”

  “What happened?”

  “Yesterday when I examined it, it had swelled up to the size of an egg. Still I didn’t call the doctor. To hell with that! I took more dental floss and tied it tight, tight, even tighter. And now it’s cured, it’s gone. You want to see?”

  It was when I told him of my arthritic neck that he prescribed standing on my head. Though I threw up my palms and shrieked with laughter (looking like one of Goya’s frog caricatures in the Vision Burlesca—the creature with the locks and bolts) I did as he advised. I practiced and learned the headstand, and I was cured of the neck pains. Next, when I had a stricture, I asked George for a remedy. He said, “It’s the prostate gland. You start, then you stop, then you trickle again, it burns a bit, you feel humiliated?”

  “All correct.”

  “Don’t worry. Now as you stand on your head, tighten your buttocks. Just suck them in as if you were trying to bring the cheeks together.”

  “Why must this be done as you stand on your head? I already feel like Old Father William.”

  But he was adamant and said, “On your head.”

  Again his method worked. The stricture went away. Others may see in George a solid high-colored good-humored building contractor; I see a hermetical personage; I see a figure from the tarot deck. If I was on my head now I was invoking George. When I’m in despair he’s always the first person I telephone. I’ve reached an age at which you can see your neurotic impulses advancing on you. There’s not much that I can do when the dire need of help comes over me. I stand at the edge of a psychic pond and I know that if crumbs are thrown in, my carp will come swimming up. You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside. At one time I thought the civilized thing to do was to make a park and a garden for them, to keep these traits, your quirks, like birds, fishes, and flowers.

  However, the fact that I had no one but myself to turn to was awful. Waiting for bells to ring is a torment. The suspense claws at my heart. Actually, standing on my head did relieve me. I breathed again. But I saw, when I was upside-down, two large circles in front of me, very bright. These occasionally appear during this exercise. Reversed on your cranium, of course you do think of being caught by a cerebral hemorrhage. A physician advising against the headstand said to me that a chicken held upside-down would die in seven or eight minutes. But that’s obviously because of terror. The bird is scared to death. I figure that the bright rings are caused by pressure on the cornea. The weight of the body set upon the skull buckles the cornea and produces an illusion of big diaphanous rings. Like seeing eternity. Which, believe me, I was ready for on this clay.

  Behind me, I had a view of the bookcase, and when my head was readjusted, with more weight shifted to the forearms, the pellucid rings swam away, the shades of a fatal hemorrhage with them. In reverse, I saw rows and rows of my own books. I had stacked them at the back of my closets, but Renata had brought them out again to make a display. I prefer, when I’m on my head, to have a view of the sky and the clouds. It’s good fun to study the clouds upside-down. But now I was looking at the titles which had brought me money, recognition, prizes, my play, Von Trench, in many editions and languages, and a few copies of my favorite, the failure Some Americans: The Sense of Being in the USA. Von Trench while it was running brought in about eight thousand dollars a week. The government, which had taken no previous interest in my soul, immediately claimed seventy percent in the result of its creative efforts. But this was not supposed to affect me. You rendered unto Caesar what was Caesar’s. At least you knew that you should. Money belonged to Caesar. There was also Radix malorum est cupiditas. I knew all that, too.

  I knew everything I was supposed to know and nothing I really needed to know. I had bungled the whole money thing. It was highly educational, of course, and education has become the great and universal American recompense. It has even replaced punishment in the federal penitentiaries Every great prison is now a thriving seminar. The tigers of wrath are crossed with the horses of instruction, making a hybrid undreamed of in the Apocalypse. Not to labor the matter too much, I had lost most of the money that Humboldt had accused me of making. The dough came between us immediately. He put through a check for thousands of dollars. I didn’t contest this. I didn’t want to go to law. Humboldt would have been fiercely delighted with a trial. He was very litigious. But the check he cashed was actually signed by me, and I would have had a hard time explaining this in court. Besides, courts kill me. Judges, lawyers, bailiffs, stenotypists, the benches, the woodwork, the carpets, even the water glasses I hate like death. Moreover, I was actually in South America when he cashed the check. He was then running wild in New York, having been released from Bellevue. There was no one to restrain him. Kathleen had gone into hiding. His nutty old mother was in a nursing home. His uncle Waldemar was one of those eternal kid brothers to whom responsibilities are alien. Humboldt was jumping and prancing about New York being mad. Perhaps he was aware dimly of the satisfaction he was giving to the cultivated public which gossiped about his crack-up. Frantic desperate doomed crazy writers and suicidal painters are dramatically and socially valuable. And at that time he was a fiery Failure and I was a newborn Success. Success baffled me. It filled me with guilt and shame. The play performed nightly at the Belasco was not the play I had written. I had only provided a bolt of material from which the director had cut shaped basted and sewn his own Von Trenck. Brooding, I muttered to myself that after all Broadway adjoins the garment district and blends with it.

  Cops have their own way of ringing a doorbell. They ring like brutes. Of course, we are entering an entirely new stage in the history of human consciousness. Policemen take psychology courses and have some feeling for the comedy of urban life. The two heavy men who stood on my Persian carpet carried guns, clubs, cuffs, bullets, walkie-talkies. Such an unusual case—a Mercedes beaten in the street—amused them. This pair of black giants had a squad-car odor, the smell of close quarters. Their hardware clinked, their hips and bel
lies swelled and bulged.

  “I never saw such massacre on an automobile,” said one of them. “You in trouble with some real bad actors.” He was probing, hinting. He didn’t actually want to hear about the Mob, about juice men or gang-entanglements. Not one word. But it was all obvious. I didn’t look like a fellow in the rackets, but maybe I was one. Even the cops had seen The Godfather, The French Connection, The Valachi Papers, and other blast-and-bang thrillers. I was drawn to this gang stuff myself, as a Chicagoan, and I said, “I don’t know anything.” I dummied up, and I believe the police approved of this.

  “You keep your car in the street?” said one of the cops—he had volumes of muscle and a great slack face. “If I didn’t have a garage, I wouldn’t own but a piece of junk.” Then he saw my medal, which Renata had framed in plush on the wall, and he said, “Were you in Korea?”

  “No,” I said. “The French government gave me that. The Legion of Honor. I’m a knight, a chevalier. Their ambassador decorated me.”

  On that occasion, Humboldt had sent me one of his unsigned post cards. “Shoveleer! Your name is now lesion!”

  He had been on a Finnegans Wake kick for years. I remembered our many discussions of Joyce’s view of language, of the poet’s passion for charging speech with music and meaning, of the dangers that hover about all the works of the mind, of beauty falling into abysses of oblivion like the snow chasms of the Antarctic, of Blake and Vision versus Locke and the tabula rasa. As I saw the cops out I was remembering with sadness of heart the lovely conversations Humboldt and I used to have. Humanity divine incomprehensible!

  “You better square this thing,” the cop advised me, low and kindly. His great black weight moved toward the elevator. The Shoveleer inclined politely. I felt my eyes ache with a helpless craving for help.