Humboldt's Gift (19 page)

  “Come to the point,” I said to him.

  His mouth seemed dry but there was nothing to drink. Pills make you thirsty. He smoked some more instead, and said, “You and I are friends. Sewell brought me here. And I brought you.”

  “I’m grateful to you. But you aren’t grateful to him.”

  “Because he’s a son of a bitch.”

  “Perhaps.” I didn’t mind hearing Sewell called that. He had snubbed me. But with his depleted hair, his dry-cereal mustache, the drinker’s face, the Prufrock subtleties, the would-be elegance of his clasped hands and crossed legs, with his involved literary mutterings he was no wicked enemy. Although I seemed to be restraining Humboldt I loved the way he loused up Sewell. Humboldt’s wayward nutty fertility when he let himself go gratified one of my shameful appetites, no doubt about it.

  “Sewell is taking advantage of us,” Humboldt said.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “When he comes back we’ll be turned out.”

  “But I always knew it was a one-year job.”

  “Oh, you don’t mind being like a rented article from Hertz’s, like a trundle bed or a baby’s potty?” said Humboldt.

  Under the shepherd’s plaid of the blanket-wide jacket his back began to look humped (a familiar sign). That massing of bison power in his back meant that he was up to no good. The look of peril grew about his mouth and eyes and the two crests of hair stood higher than usual. Pale hot radiant waves appeared in his face. Pigeons, gray-and-cream-feathered, walked with crimson feet on the sandstone window sills. Humboldt didn’t like them. He saw them as Princeton pigeons, Sewell’s pigeons. They cooed for Sewell. At times Humboldt seemed to view them as his agents and spies. After all this was Sewell’s office and Humboldt sat at Sewell’s desk. The books on the walls were Sewell’s. Lately Humboldt had been throwing them into boxes. He pushed off a set of Toynbee and put up his own Rilke and Kafka. Down with Toynbee; down with Sewell, too. “You and I are expendable here, Charlie,” Humboldt said. “Why? I’ll tell you. We’re Jews, shonickers, kikes. Here in Princeton, we’re no threat to Sewell.”

  I remembered thinking hard about this, knitting my forehead. “I’m afraid I still haven’t grasped your point,” I said.

  “Try thinking of yourself as Sheeny Solomon Levi, then. It’s safe to install Sheeny Solomon and go to Damascus for a year to discuss
The Spoils of Poynton
. When you come back, your classy professorship is waiting for you. You and I are no threat.”

  “But I don’t want to be a threat to him. And why should Sewell worry about threats?”

  “Because he’s at war with these old guys, all the billy whiskers, the Hamilton Wright Mabie genteel crappers who never accepted him. He doesn’t know Greek or Anglo-Saxon. To them he’s a lousy upstart.”

  “So? He’s a self-made man. Now I’m for him.”

  “He’s corrupt, he’s a bastard, he’s covered you and me with contempt. I feel ridiculous when I walk down the street. In Princeton you and I are Moe and Joe, a Yid vaudeville act. We’re a joke—Abie Kabibble and Company. Unthinkable as members of the Princeton community.”

  “Who needs their community?”

  “Nobody trusts that little crook. There’s something human he just hasn’t got. The person who knew him best, his wife—when she left him she took her birds. You saw all those cages. She didn’t even want an empty cage to remind her of him.”

  “Did she go away with birds sitting on her head and arms? Come on, Humboldt, what do you want?”

  “I want you to feel as insulted as I feel, not stick me with the whole thing. Why don’t you have any indignation, Charlie— Ah! You’re not a real American. You’re grateful. You’re a foreigner. You have that Jewish immigrant kiss-the-ground-at-Ellis-Island gratitude. You’re also a child of the Depression. You never thought you’d have a job, with an office, and a desk, and private drawers all for yourself. It’s still so hilarious to you that you can’t stop laughing. You’re a Yiddisher mouse in these great Christian houses. At the same time, you’re too snooty to look at anyone.”

  “These social wars are nothing to me, Humboldt. And let’s not forget all the hard things you’ve said about Ivy League kikes. And only last week you were on the side of Tolstoi—it’s time we simply refused to be inside history and playing the comedy of history, the bad social game.”

  It was no use arguing. Tolstoi? Tolstoi was last week’s conversation. Humboldt’s big intelligent disordered face was white and hot with turbulent occult emotions and brainstorms. I felt sorry for us, for both, for all of us, such odd organisms under the sun. Large minds abutting too close on swelling souls. And banished souls at that, longing for their home-world. Everyone alive mourned the loss of his home-world.

  Sunk into the pillow of my green sofa it was all clear to me. Ah, what this existence was! What being human was!

  Pity for Humboldt’s absurdities made me cooperative. “You’ve been up all night thinking,” I said.

  Humboldt said with an unusual emphasis, “Charlie, you trust me, don’t you?”

  “Christ, Humboldt! Do I trust the Gulf Stream? What am I supposed to trust you in?”

  “You know how close I feel to you. Interknitted. Brother and brother.”

  “You don’t have to soften me up. Spill it, Humboldt, for Christ’s sake.”

  He made the desk seem small. It was manufactured for lesser figures. His upper body rose above it. He looked like a three-hundred-pound pro linebacker beside a kiddie car. His nail-bitten fingers held the ember of a cigarette. “First we’re going to get me an appointment here,” he said.

  “You want to be a Princeton prof?”

  “A chair in modern literature, that’s what I want. And you’re going to help. So that when Sewell comes back he finds me installed. With tenure. The US Gov has sent him to dazzle and oppress those poor Syrian wogs with
The Spoils of Poynton
. Well, when he’s wound up a year of boozing and mumbling long sentences under his breath he’ll come back and find that the old twerps who wouldn’t give him the time of day have made me full professor. How do you like it?”

  “Not much. Is that what kept you up last night?”

  “Call on your imagination, Charlie. You’re overrelaxed. Grasp the insult. Get sore. He hired you like a spittoon-shiner. You’ve got to cut the last of the old slave-morality virtues that still bind you to the middle class. I’m going to put some hardness in you, some iron.”

  “Iron? This will be your fifth job—the fifth that
I
know of. Suppose I were hard—I’d ask you what’s in it for me. Where do I come in?”

  “Charlie!” He intended to smile; it was not a smile. “I’ve got a blueprint.”

  “I know you have. You’re like what’s-his-name, who couldn’t drink a cup of tea without a stratagem—like Alexander Pope.”

  Humboldt seemed to take this as a compliment, and laughed between his teeth, silently. Then he said, “Here’s what you do. Go to Ricketts and say: ‘Humboldt is a very distinguished person —poet, scholar, critic, teacher, editor. He has an international reputation and he’ll have a place in the literary history of the United States’—all of which is true, by the way. ‘And here’s your chance, Professor Ricketts, I happen to know that Hum-boldt’s tired of living like a hand-to-mouth bohemian. The literary world is going fast. The avant-garde is a memory. It’s time Humboldt led a more dignified settled life. He’s married now. I know he admires Princeton, he loves it here, and if you made him an offer he’d certainly consider it. I might talk him into it. I’d hate for you to miss this opportunity, Professor Ricketts. Princeton has got Einstein and Panofsky. But you’re weak on the literary creative side. The coming trend is to have artists on the campus. Amherst has Robert Frost. Don’t fall behind. Grab Fleisher. Don’t let him get away, or you’ll end up with some third-rater.’ “

  “I won’t mention Einstein and Panofsky. I’ll start right out with Moses and the prophets. What a cast-iron plot! Ike has inspired you. This is what I call high-minded low cunning.”

  However, he didn’t laugh. His eyes were red. He’d been up all night. First he watched the election returns. Then he wandered about the house and yard gripped by despair, thinking what to do. Then he planned out this putsch. Then filled with inspiration he drove in his Buick, the busted muffler blasting in the country lanes and the great long car skedaddling dangerously on the curves. Lucky for the woodchucks they were already hibernating. I know what figures crowded his thoughts—Walpole, Count Mosca, Disraeli, Lenin. While he thought also, with un-contemporary sublimity, about eternal life. Ezekiel and Plato were not absent. The man was noble. But he was all asmolder, and craziness also made him vile and funny. Heavy-handed, thick-faced with fatigue, he took a medicine bottle from his briefcase and fed himself a few little pills out of the palm of his hand. Tranquilizers, perhaps. Or maybe amphetamines for speed. He swallowed them dry. He doctored himself. Like Demmie Vonghel. She locked herself in the bathroom and took many pills.

  “So you’ll go to Ricketts,” Humboldt told me.

  “I thought he was only a front man.”

  “That’s right. He’s a stooge. But the old guard can’t disown him. If we outsmart him, they’ll have to back him up.”

  “But why should Ricketts pay attention to what I say?”

  “Because, friend, I passed the word around that your play is going to be produced.”

  “You did?”

  “Next year, on Broadway. They look on you as a successful playwright.”

  “Now why the hell did you do that? I’m going to look like a phony.”

  “No, you won’t. We’ll make it true. You can leave that to me. I gave Ricketts your last essay in the
Kenyan
to read, and he thinks you’re a comer. And don’t pretend with me. I know you. You love intrigue and mischief. Right now your teeth are on edge with delight. Besides, it’s not just intrigue. . . .”

  “What? Sorcery!
Fucking sortilegio
!”

  “It’s not
sortilegio
. It’s mutual aid.”

  “Don’t give me that stuff.”

  “First me, then you,” he said.

  I distinctly remember that my voice jumped up. I shouted, “What!” Then I laughed and said, “You’ll make me a Princeton professor, too? Do you think I could stand a whole lifetime of this drinking, boredom, small talk, and ass-kissing? Now that you’ve lost Washington by a landslide, you’ve settled pretty fast for this academic music box. Thank you, I’ll find misery in my own way. I give you two years of this goyish privilege.”

  Humboldt waved his hands at me. “Don’t poison my mind. What a tongue you have, Charlie. Don’t say those things. I’ll expect them to happen. They’ll infect my future.”

  I paused and considered his peculiar proposition. Then I looked at Humboldt himself. His mind was executing some earnest queer labor. It was swelling and pulsating oddly, painfully. He tried to laugh it all off with his nearly silent panting laugh. I could hardly hear the breath of it.

  “You wouldn’t be lying to Ricketts,” he said. “Where would they get somebody like me?”

  “Okay, Humboldt. That is a hard question.”

  “Well, I am one of the leading literary men of this country.”

  “Sure you are, at your best.”

  “Something should be done for me. Especially in this Ike moment, as darkness falls on the land.”

  “But why this?”

  “Well, frankly, Charlie, I’m out of kilter, temporarily. I have to get back to a state in which I can write poetry again. But where’s my equilibrium? There are too many anxieties. They dry me out. The world keeps interfering. I have to get the enchantment back. I feel as if I’ve been living in a suburb of reality, and commuting back and forth. That’s got to stop. I have to locate myself. I’m here” (here on earth, he meant) “to do something, something good.”

  “I know, Humboldt. Here isn’t Princeton, either, and everyone is waiting for the good thing.”

  Eyes reddening still more, Humboldt said, “I know you love me, Charlie.”

  “It’s true. But let’s only say it once.”

  “You’re right. I’m a brother to you, too, though. Kathleen also knows it. It’s obvious how we feel about one another, Demmie Vonghel included. Humor me, Charlie. Never mind how ridiculous this seems. Humor me, it’s important. Call up Ricketts and say you have to talk to him.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  Humboldt put his hands on Sewell’s small yellow desk and thrust himself back in the chair so that the steel casters gave a wicked squeak. The ends of his hair were confused with cigarette smoke. His head was lowered. He was examining me as if he had just surfaced from many fathoms.

  “Have you got a checking account, Charlie? Where do you keep your money?”

  “What money?”

  “Haven’t you got a checking account?”

  “At Chase Manhattan. I’ve got about twelve bucks.”

  “My bank is the Corn Exchange,” he said. “Now, where’s your checkbook?”

  “In my trench coat.”

  “Let’s see.”

  I brought out the flapping green blanks, curling at the edges. “I see my balance is only eight,” I said.

  Then Humboldt reaching into his plaid jacket brought out his own checkbook and undipped one of his many pens. He was bandoliered with fountain pens and ball-points.

  “What are you doing, Humboldt?”

  “I’m giving you
carte blanche
power to draw on my account. I’m signing a blank check in your name. And you make one out to me. No date, no amount, just ‘Pay to Von Humboldt Fleisher.’ Sit down, Charlie, and fill it out.”

  “But what’s it about? I don’t like this. I have to understand what’s going on.”

  “With eight bucks in the bank, what do you care?”

  “It’s not the money. . . .”

  He was very moved, and he said, “Exactly. It isn’t. That’s the whole point. If you’re ever up against it, fill in any amount you need and cash it. The same applies to me. We’ll take an oath as friends and brothers never to abuse this. To hold it for the worst emergency. When I said mutual aid you didn’t take me seriously. Well, now you see.” Then he leaned on the desk in all his heaviness and in a tiny script he filled in my name with trembling force.