Humboldt's Gift (37 page)

  “My money is running out anyhow. I’d rather spend it on this—”

  “Not spend but squander,” she said. “Why do you finance this California setup?”

  “Better than giving it to lawyers and to the government.”

  “When you start to talk about
The Ark
you lose me. For once tell me simply—what, why?”

  I was grateful for such a challenge really. As an aid to concentration I shut my eyes to answer. I said, “The ideas of the last few centuries are used up.”

  “Who says! See what I mean by arrogance,” Renata interrupted.

  “But so help me, they are used up. Social ideas, political, philosophical theories, literary ideas (poor Humboldt!), sexual ones, and, I suspect, even scientific ones.”

  “What do you know about all these things, Charlie? You’ve got brain fever.”

  “As the world’s masses arrive at the point of consciousness, they take these exhausted ideas for new ones. How should they know? And people’s parlors are papered with these projections.”

  “This is too serious for tongue twisters.”

  “I
am
serious. The greatest things, the things most necessary for life, have recoiled and retreated. People are actually dying of this, losing all personal life, and the inner being of millions, many many millions, is missing. One can understand that in many parts of the world there is no hope for it because of famine or police dictatorships, but here in the free world what excuse have we? Under pressure of public crisis the private sphere is being surrendered. I admit this private sphere has become so repulsive that we are glad to get away from it. But we accept the disgrace ascribed to it and people have filled their lives with so-called ‘public questions.’ What do we hear when these public questions are discussed? The failed ideas of three centuries. Anyhow the end of the individual, whom everyone seems to scorn and detest, will make our destruction, our superbombs, superfluous. I mean, if there are only foolish minds and mindless bodies there’ll be nothing serious to annihilate. In the highest government positions almost no human beings have been seen for decades now, anywhere in the world. Mankind must recover its imaginative powers, recover living thought and real being, no longer accept these insults to the soul, and do it soon. Or else! And this is where a man like Humboldt, faithful to failed ideas, lost his poetry and missed the boat.”

  “But he went insane. You can’t lay all the blame on him. I never knew the guy but sometimes I think you’re too hard when you attack him. I know,” she said, “you feel that he lived out the poet’s awful life in just the way the middle class expected and approved. But nobody makes the grade with you. Thaxter is just your private pet. He certainly doesn’t make it.”

  Of course she was right. Thaxter was always saying, “What we want is a major statement.” He suspected that I had a major statement up my sleeve.

  I told him, “You mean something like a life reverence, or Yogis and Commissars. You have a weakness for such terrible stuff. You’d give anything to be a Malraux and talk about the West. What is it with you and these seminal ideas? Major statements are hot air. The disorder is here to stay.” And so it is— rich, baffling, agonizing, and diverse. As for striving to be exceptional, everything was already strange enough.

  Pierre Thaxter was absolutely mad for Culture. He was a classicist, heavily trained by monks in Latin and Greek. He learned French from a governess, and studied it in college as well. He had taught himself Arabic also, and read esoteric books, and hoped to astonish everyone by publishing in learned journals in Finland or Turkey. He spoke with peculiar respect of Panofsky or Momi-gliano. He saw himself also as Burton of Arabia or T. E. Lawrence. Sometimes he was a purple genius of the Baron Corvo type, sordidly broke in Venice, writing something queer and passionate, rare and distinguished. He could not bear to leave anything out. He played Stravinsky on the piano, knew much about the Ballets Russes. On Matisse and Monet he was something of an authority. He held views on ziggurats and Le Corbusier. He could tell you, and often did, what sort of articles to buy and where to buy them. This was what Renata was talking about. No proper attaché case, for instance, fastened at the top, the clasps had to be on the side. He was bugs about attaché cases and umbrellas. There were plantations in Morocco where proper umbrella handles grew. And on top of it all Thaxter described himself as a Tolstoyan. If you pressed him he would say that he was a Christian pacifist anarchist and confess his faith in simplicity and purity of heart. So of course I loved Thaxter. How could I help it? Besides, the fever that afflicted his poor head made him an ideal editor. The diversity of interests, you see, and his cultural nosiness. He was an excellent journalist. This was widely recognized. He had worked on good magazines. Each and every one of them had fired him. What he needed was an ingenious and patient editor to send him on suitable assignments.

  He was waiting between the lions in front of the Institute, exactly as expected in the cloak and blue velvet suit and boots with canvas sides. The only change was in his hair which he was now wearing in the Directoire style, the points coming down over his forehead. Because of the cold his face was deep red. He had a long mulberry-colored mouth, and impressive stature, and warts, and the distorted nose and leopard eyes. Our meetings were always happy and we hugged each other. “Old boy, how are you? One of your good Chicago days. I’ve missed the cold air in California. Terrific! Isn’t it. Well, we may as well start right with a few of those marvelous Monets.” We left attaché case, umbrella, sturgeon, rolls, and marmalade in the checkroom. I paid two dollars for admission and we mounted to the Impressionist collection. There was one Norwegian winter landscape by Monet that we always went to see straightaway: a house, a bridge, and the snow falling. Through the covering snow came the pink of the house, and the frost was delicious. The whole weight of snow, of winter, was lifted effortlessly by the astonishing strength of the light. Looking at this pure rosy snowy dusky light, Thaxter clamped his pince-nez on the powerful twisted bridge of his nose with a gleam of glass and silver and his color deepened. He knew what he was doing. With this painting his visit began on the right tone. Only, familiar with the whole span of his thoughts, I was sure that he was also thinking how a masterpiece like this might be stolen from the museum, and that his mind quickly touched upon twenty daring art thefts from Dublin to Denver, complete with getaway cars and fences. Maybe he even dreamed up some multimillionaire Monet fanatic who had built a secret shrine in a concrete bunker and would be willing to pay a ton of money for this landscape. Scope was what Thaxter longed for (me, too, for that matter). Still he was a puzzle to me. He was either a kindly or a brutal man, and deciding which was a torment. But now he collapsed the trick pince-nez, and turned toward me with the ruddy swarthy face, his big-cat gaze heavier than before, gloomy, and even a touch cross-eyed.

  “Before the shops close,” he said, “I have an errand in the Loop. Let’s go out. I can’t take in anything more after this picture.” So we retrieved our things and passed through the revolving door. In the Mailers Building there was a dealer named Bartelstein, who sold antique fish knives and forks. Thax-ter wanted to obtain a set. “There’s a controversy over the silver,” he said decisively. “Fish on silver is now supposed to give a bad flavor. But I believe in the silver.”

  Why fish knives? And with what, and for whom? The bank was putting him out of his Palo Alto house, still he never ran out of resources. He occasionally spoke of other houses that he owned, one in the Italian Alps, one in Brittany.

  “The Mailers Building?” I said.

  “This Bartelstein has a world reputation. My mother knows him. She needs the knives for one of her Social Register clients.”

  At this moment Cantabile and Polly approached us, both breathing December vapor, and I saw the white Thunderbird idling at the curb, its door hanging open, and the blood-red upholstery. Cantabile was smiling and his smile was somewhat unnatural, less an expression of pleasure than something else. Perhaps it was a reaction to Thaxter’s cloak and hat and zooty shoes and flaming face. I, too, felt red in the face. Cantabile, on the other hand, was peculiarly white. He breathed the air as if he were stealing it. He had a look of eagerness and of distemper. The Thunderbird, puffing fumes, was beginning to block traffic. Because I had been immersed for much of the day in Humboldt’s life and because Humboldt had in turn been immersed in T. S. Eliot, I thought as he might have done of the violet hour when the human engine waits like a taxi throbbing, waiting. But I cut this out. The moment required my full presence. I made quick introductions left and right: “Mrs. Palomino Mr. Thaxter—and Cantabile.”

  “Hurry, quick, jump in,” said Cantabile, a man to be obeyed.

  I wasn’t having any of this. “No,” I said. “We’ve got lots to discuss and I’d just as soon walk two blocks to the Mailers Building than be stuck in traffic with you.”

  “For Christ’s sake get in the car.” He had been stooping over me. But then he cried this out so loud that he jerked himself straight.

  Polly lifted her pleasant face. She enjoyed it all. Her straight hair, Japanese in texture but very red and cut like a fall, showed thick and even against her green loden coat. The pleasant cheeks meant that one could be sexually pleasant with Polly. It would gratify, it would be a success. Why was it that some men knew how to find women who naturally pleased and could be pleased? By their cheeks and smiles, even I could identify them—after they had been found. Meantime bits of snow fell from the gray invisibility that lay upon the skyscrapers and something like soft thunder occurred behind us. This might have been sonic boom or jet noise over the lake, for thunder meant warmth and the chill was biting at our reddened faces. In this deepening dusky gray the lake surface would be pearly, and its polar fringe had formed early this winter, white—soiled but white. In the matter of natural beauty Chicago had its piece of the action despite the fact that its over-all historical destiny made it materially coarse, the air coarse, the soil coarse. The trouble was that such pearly water with its arctic edging and the gray air snowing could not be appreciated while these Cantabiles were carrying on, pushing me toward the Thunderbird and gesturing with the finest of fox-hunter’s gloves. Nevertheless, one goes to a concert to think one’s thoughts against the fine background of chamber music and one may make similar use of a Cantabile. A man who had been for years closely shut up and sifting his inmost self with painful iteration, deciding that the human future depended on his spiritual explorations, frustrated utterly in all his efforts to reach an understanding with those representatives of modern intellect whom he had tried to reach, deciding instead to follow the threads of spirit he had found within himself to see where they might lead, found a peculiar stimulus in a fellow like this Cantabile fellow.

  “Let’s go!” he bawled at me.

  “No. Mr. Thaxter and I have our own business to discuss.”

  “Oh, there’s time for that—plenty of time,” said Thaxter.

  “And what about the fish knives? Suddenly you’re not so keen on the fish knives,” I said to Thaxter.

  Cantabile’s voice was jagged and high with exasperation. “I’m trying to do you some good, Charlie! Fifteen minutes of your time is all, and then I’ll whip you back to the Mailers Building for these fucking knives. How’d you do in court, pal? I know how you did! They’ve got a case full of nice clean bottles waiting for your blood. You already look drained. You’ve got a damn haggard look. You’ve aged ten years since lunchtime. But I’ve got the answer for you and I’ll prove it. Charlie, ten grand today will get you fifteen by Thursday—if not, I’ll let you beat me on the head with the bat I used on your Mercedes. I’ve got Stronson waiting. He needs cash badly.”

  “I want no part of that. I’m not a juice man,” I said.

  “Don’t be stupid. We’ve got to move fast.”

  I glanced at Polly. She had warned me against Cantabile and Stronson and I checked silently with her. Her smile confirmed the caution she had given me. But she was highly amused by Cantabile’s determination to drive us into the Thunderbird, to cram us into the red leather upholstery of the throbbing open car. He made it seem like a kidnap. We were on the broad sidewalk in front of the Institute, and lovers of criminal legend could tell you that the celebrated Dion O’Banion used to drive his Bugatti at a hundred mph over the very spot where we were standing while pedestrians fled. I had in fact mentioned this to Thaxter. Wherever he went, Thaxter wished to experience the characteristic thing, the essence. Getting the essence of Chicago, he was delighted, he was grinning, and he said, “If we miss Bartelstein now we can stop in the morning en route to the airport.”

  “Poll,” said Cantabile, “get behind the wheel. I see the squad car.” Buses were trying to squeeze past the parked Thunderbird. Traffic was tied up. The cops were already spinning their blue lights at Van Buren Street. Thaxter followed Polly to the car and I said to Cantabile, “Ronald, go away. Let me alone.”

  He gave me a look of open and terrible disclosure. I saw a spirit striving with complications as dense as my own, in another, faraway division. “I didn’t want to spring this on you,” he said, “but you force me to twist your arm.” His fingers in the horseman’s gloves, skin-tight, took me by the sleeve. “Your lifelong friend Alec Szathmar is in hot trouble, or could be in hot trouble—that’s up to you.”

  “Why? How come?”

  “I’m telling you. There’s this pretty young woman—her husband is one of my people—and she’s a kleptomaniac. She was caught in Field’s pinching a cashmere cardigan. And Szathmar is her lawyer, dig? It was me that recommended Szathmar. He went to court and told the judge not to send her to jail, she needed psychiatric treatment and he’d see that she got it. So the court released her in his custody. Then Szathmar brought this chick straight to a motel and took her clothes off, but before he could screw her she escaped. She didn’t have more on than the strip of paper they stretch across the toilet seat when she streaked out. There are plenty of witnesses. Now this girl is straight. She doesn’t go for the motel bit. Her only bag is stealing. For your sake, I’m restraining the husband.”

  “All I hear from you, Cantabile, is nonsense, more and more and more nonsense. Szathmar can act like a jerk, but he’s not a monster.”

  “All right, I’ll unleash the husband. You think your buddy wouldn’t be disbarred? He would be—fucking-A-right.”

  “You’ve hoked up all this for some goofy reason,” I said. “If you had anything on Szathmar you’d be blackmailing him right now.”

  “So have it your way, don’t cooperate, I’ll slaughter and butcher the son of a bitch.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that. You know what you are? You’re an isolationist, that’s what you really are. You don’t want to know what other people are into.”

  Everyone is forever telling me what my faults are, while I stand with great hungry eyes, believing and resenting all. Without metaphysical stability a man like me is the Saint Sebastian of the critical. The odd thing is that I hold still for it. As now, clutched by the sleeve of my checked coat, with Cantabile steaming intrigues and judgments at me from the flues of his white nose. With me it’s not how all occasions do inform against me, but how I employ occasions to extract buried information. The latest information seemed to be that I was by inclination the sort of person who needed microcosmic-macrocosmic ideas, or the belief that everything that takes place in man has world significance. Such a belief warmed the environment for me, and brought out the sweet glossy leaves, the hanging oranges of the groves where the unpolluted self was virginal and gratefully communed with its Maker, and so on. It was possible that this was the only way for me to be my own true self. But in the actual moment we were on the wide freezing pavement, on Michigan Boulevard, the Art Institute behind us, and over against us all the colored lights of Christmas traffic and the white façades of Peoples Gas and other companies.

  “Whatever I am, Cantabile, my friend and I aren’t going with you.” I hurried to the Thunderbird to try to stop Thaxter, who was getting in. He was already pulling in his cloak about him, sinking into the supple upholstery. He looked very pleased. I put my head in and said, “Come out of there. You and I are walking.”

  But Cantabile shoved me in to the car beside Thaxter. He put his hands on my rear and thrust me in. Then he jammed the front seat back to keep me there. In the next motion he pulled the door shut with a slam and said, “Take off, Polly.” Polly did just that.

  “Now what the hell do you think you’re doing, pushing and trapping me in here,” I said.

  “The cops are right on top of us. I didn’t have time to argue,” Cantabile said.

  “Well, this is nothing but a kidnap,” I told him. And as soon as I pronounced the word “kidnap” my heart was instantly swollen with a childish sense of terrible injury. But Thaxter was laughing, chuckling through his wide mouth, and his eyes were wrinkling and twinkling. He said, “Hee-hee, don’t take it so hard, Charlie. It’s a very funny moment. Enjoy it.”

  Thaxter couldn’t have been happier. He was having a real Chicago treat. For his sake, the city was living up to its reputation. Observing this, I cooled off somewhat. I guess I really love to entertain my friends. Hadn’t I brought sturgeon and fresh rolls and marmalade when the bailiff said that Thaxter was in town? I was still holding the paper bag from Stop and Shop.

  Traffic was thick but Polly’s mastery of the car was extraordinary. She worked the white Thunderbird into the left lane without touching the brake, without a jolt, with fearless competency, a marvelous driver.

  Restless Cantabile twisted about to the rear to face us and said to me, “Look what I’ve got here. An early copy of tomorrow morning’s paper. I bought it from a guy in the press room. It cost me plenty. You want to know something? You and I made Mike Schneiderman’s column. Listen,” he read. “ ‘Charlie Citrine, the Chevrolet of the French Legion and Chicago scribe, who authored the flick
Von Trenck
, made a card-debt payoff to an underworld figure at the Playboy Club. Better go take a poker seminar at the University, Charles.’ What do you say, Charlie. It’s a pity Mike didn’t know all the facts about your car and the skyscraper and all the rest of it.
Now
what do you think?”

  “What do I think? I won’t accept author as a verb. I also want to get out at Wabash Avenue.”

  Chicago was more bearable if you didn’t read the papers. We had turned west on Madison Street and passed under the black frames of the El. “Don’t pull up, Polly,” said Cantabile. We moved on toward the Christmas ornaments of State Street, the Santa Clauses and the reindeer. The only element of stability in this moment lay in Polly’s wonderful handling of the machine.

  “Tell me about the Mercedes,” said Thaxter. “What happened to it? And what was the skyscraper thing, Mr. Cantabile? Is the underworld figure at the Playboy Club you yourself?”

  “Those in the know will know,” said Cantabile. “Charlie, how much will they charge for the bodywork on your car? Did you take it back to the dealer? I hope you keep away from those rip-off specialists. Four hundred bucks a day for one grease monkey. What crooks! I know a good cheap shop.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Don’t be ironical with me. But the least I can do is make you back some of the money this will cost.”

  I made no answer. My heart hammered upon a single theme: I urgently desired to be elsewhere. I simply didn’t want to be here. It was utter misery. This was not the moment to remember certain words of John Stuart Mill, but I remembered them anyway. They went something like this: The tasks of noble spirits at a time when the works which most of us are appointed to do are trivial and contemptible—da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da. Well the only thing valuable in these contemptible works is the spirit in which they are done. I couldn’t see any values in the vicinity at all. But if the tasks of the
durum genus hominum
, said the great Mill, were performed by a supernatural agency and there was no demand for wisdom or virtue O! then there would be little that man could prize in man. This was exactly the problem America had set for itself. The Thunderbird would do as the supernatural agency. And what else was man prizing? Polly was transporting us. Under that mass of red hair lay a brain which certainly knew what to prize, if anyone cared to ask. But no one was asking, and she didn’t need much brain to drive this car.

  We now passed the towering upswept frames of the First National Bank, containing layer upon layer of golden lights. “What’s this beautiful structure?” asked Thaxter. No one answered. We charged up Madison Street. At this rate, and due west, we would have reached the Waldheim Cemetery on the outskirts of the city in about fifteen minutes. There my parents lay under snow-spattered grass and headstones; objects would still be faintly visible in the winter dusk, etcetera. But of course we were not bound for the cemetery. We turned into La Salle Street where we were held up by taxicabs and newspaper trucks and the Jaguars and Lincolns and Rolls-Royces of stockbrokers and corporation lawyers—of the deeper thieves and the loftier politicians and the spiritual elite of American business, the eagles in the heights far above the daily, hourly, and momentary destinies of men.

  “Hell, we’re going to miss Stronson. That fat little son of a bitch is always tearing off in his Aston-Martin as soon as he can lock his office,” said Cantabile.

  But Polly sat silent at the steering wheel. Traffic was jammed. Thaxter succeeded at last in getting Cantabile’s attention. And I sighed and, left to myself, tuned out. Just as I had done yesterday when forced, practically at gunpoint, into the stinking closet of the Russian Bath. This is what I thought: certainly the three other souls in the warm darkness of this glowing, pulsating and lacquered automobile had thoughts just as peculiar as my own. But they were apparently less aware of them than I. And what was it that I was so aware of? I was aware that I used to think that I knew where I stood (taking the universe as a frame of reference). But I was mistaken. However, I could at least say that I had been spiritually efficient enough not to be crushed by ignorance. However, it was now apparent to me that I was neither of Chicago nor sufficiently beyond it, and that Chicago’s material and daily interests and phenomena were neither actual and vivid enough nor symbolically clear enough to me. So that I had neither vivid actuality nor symbolic clarity and for the time being I was utterly nowhere. This was why I went to have long mysterious conversations with Professor Scheldt, Doris’s father, on esoteric subjects. He had given me books to read about the etheric and the astral bodies, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul, and the unseen Beings whose fire and wisdom and love created and guided this universe. I was far more thrilled by Dr. Scheldt’s talks than by my affair with his daughter. She was a good kid actually. She was attractive and lively, a fair, sharp-profiled, altogether excellent small young woman. True, she insisted on serving fancy dishes like Beef Wellington and the pastry crust was always underdone, and so was the meat, but those were minor matters. I had taken up with her only because Renata and her mother had expelled me and put Flonzaley in my place. Doris couldn’t hold a candle to Renata. Renata? Why, Renata didn’t need an ignition key to start a car. One of her kisses on the hood would turn it on. It would roar for her. Moreover, Miss Scheldt was ambitious socially. In Chicago, husbands with higher mental interests aren’t easy to find, and it was obvious that Doris wanted to be Madame Chevalier Citrine. Her father had been a physicist at the old Armour Institute, an executive of IBM, a NASA consultant who improved the metal used in space ships. But he was also an anthroposophist. He didn’t wish to call this mysticism. He insisted that Steiner had been a Scientist of the Invisible. But Doris, with reluctance, spoke of her father as a crank. She told me many facts about him. He was a Rosicrucian and a Gnostic, he read aloud to the dead. Also at a time when girls have to do erotic things whether or not they have the talent for them, the recent situation being what it is, Doris behaved quite bravely with me. But it was all wrong, I was simply not myself with her and at the wrongest possible time I cried out, “Renata! Oh Renata!” Then I lay there shocked with myself and mortified. But Doris didn’t take my outcry at all hard. She was thoroughly understanding. That was her main strength. And when my talks with the Professor began she was decent about that as well, understanding that I was not going to sleep with the daughter of my guru.

  Sitting in the Professor’s clean parlor—I have seldom sat in a room so utterly clean, the parquet floors of light wood limpid with wax and the Oriental scatter rugs lint-free, and the park below with the equestrian statue of General Sherman prancing on clean air—I was entirely happy. I respected Dr. Scheldt. The strange things he said were at least deep things. In this day and age people had ceased to say such things. He was from another time, entirely. He even dressed like a country-club member of the Twenties. I had caddied for men of this type. A Mr. Masson, one of my regulars at Sunset Ridge in Winnetka, had been the image of Professor Scheldt. I assumed that Mr. Masson had long ago joined the hosts of the dead and that in all the universe there was only me to remember how he had looked when he was climbing out of a sand trap.

  “Dr. Scheldt. . . .” The sun is shining clear, the water beyond is as smooth as the inner peace I have not attained, as wrinkled as perplexity, the lake is strong with innumerable powers, flexuous, hydromuscular. In the parlor is a polished crystal bowl filled with anemones. These flowers are capable of nothing except grace and they are colored with an untranslatable fire derived from infinity. “Now Dr. Scheldt,” I say. I’m speaking to his interested and plain face, calm as a bull’s face and trying to determine how dependable his intelligence is—i.e., whether we are real here or crazy here. “Let me see if I understand these things at all—thought in my head is also thought in the external world. Consciousness in the self creates a false distinction between object and subject. Am I getting it right?”