Humboldt's Gift (2 page)

  I knew that Humboldt would soon die because I had seen him on the street two months before and he had death all over him. He didn’t see me. He was gray stout sick dusty, he had bought a pretzel stick and was eating it. His lunch. Concealed by a parked car, I watched. I didn’t approach him, I felt it was impossible. For once my Business in the East was legitimate and I was not chasing some broad but preparing a magazine article. And just that morning I had been flying over New York in a procession of Coast Guard helicopters with Senators Javits and Robert Kennedy. Then I had attended a political luncheon in Central Park at the Tavern on the Green, where all the celebrities became ecstatic at the sight of one another. I was, as they say, “in great shape” myself. If I don’t look well, I look busted. But I knew that I looked well. Besides, there was money in my pockets and I had been window-shopping on Madison Avenue. If any Cardin or Hermès necktie pleased me I could buy it without asking the price. My belly was flat, I wore boxer shorts of combed Sea Island cotton at eight bucks a pair. I had joined an athletic club in Chicago and with elderly effort kept myself in shape. I played a swift hard game of paddle ball, a form of squash. So how could I talk to Humboldt? It was too much. While I was in the helicopter whopping over Manhattan, viewing New York as if I were passing in a glass-bottomed boat over a tropical reef, Humboldt was probably groping among his bottles for a drop of juice to mix with his morning gin.

  I became, after Humboldt’s death, an even more intense physical culturist. Last Thanksgiving Day I ran away from a mugger in Chicago. He jumped from a dark alley and I beat it. It was pure reflex. I leaped away and sprinted down the middle of the street. As a boy I was not a remarkable runner. How was it that in my middle fifties I became inspired with flight and capable of great bursts of speed? Later that same night I boasted, “I can still beat a junkie in the hundred-yard dash.” And to whom did I brag of this power of my legs? To a young woman named Renata. We were lying in bed. I told her how I took off —I ran like hell, I flew. And she said to me, as if on cue (ah, the courtesy, the gentility of these beautiful girls), “You’re in terrific shape, Charlie. You’re not a big fellow but you’re sturdy, solid, and you’re elegant also.” She stroked my naked sides. So my pal Humboldt was gone. Probably his very bones had crumbled in potter’s field. Perhaps there was nothing in his grave but a few lumps of soot. But Charlie Citrine was still outspeeding passionate criminals in the streets of Chicago, and Charlie Citrine was in terrific shape and lay beside a voluptuous friend. This Citrine could now perform a certain Yoga exercise and had learned to stand on his head to relieve his arthritic neck. About my low cholesterol Renata was well informed. Also I repeated to her the doctor’s comments about my amazingly youthful prostate and my supernormal EKG. Strengthened in illusion and idiocy by these proud medical reports, I embraced a busty Renata on this Posturepedic mattress. She gazed at me with love-pious eyes. I inhaled her delicious damp, personally participating in the triumph of American civilization (now tinged with the Oriental colors of Empire). But in some phantom Atlantic City boardwalk of the mind I saw a different Citrine, this one on the border of senility, his back hooked, and feeble. Oh very, very feeble, pushed in a wheelchair past the little salt ripples, ripples which, like myself, were puny. And who was pushing my chair? Was it Renata—the Renata I had taken in the wars of Happiness by a quick Patton-thrust of armor? No, Renata was a grand girl, but I couldn’t see her behind my wheelchair. Renata? Not Renata. Certainly not.

  Out in Chicago Humboldt became one of my significant dead. I spent far too much time mooning about and communing with the dead. Besides, my name was linked with Humboldt’s, for, as the past receded, the Forties began to be valuable to people fabricating cultural rainbow textiles, and the word went out that in Chicago there was a fellow still alive who used to be Von Humboldt Fleisher’s friend, a man named Charles Citrine. People doing articles, academic theses, and books wrote to me or flew in to discuss Humboldt with me. And I must say that in Chicago Humboldt was a natural subject for reflection. Lying at the southern end of the Great Lakes—twenty percent of the world’s supply of fresh water—Chicago with its gigantesque outer life contained the whole problem of poetry and the inner life in America. Here you could look into such things through a sort of fresh-water transparency.

  “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 knew 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.”