Humboldt's Gift (8 page)

  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 bellies 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.

  Yes, the medal reminded me of Humboldt. Yes, when Napoleon gave the French intellectuals ribbons stars and baubles, he knew what he was doing. He took a boatload of scholars with him to Egypt. He ditched them. They came up with the Rosetta stone. From the time of Richelieu and earlier, the French had been big in the culture business. You’d never catch De Gaulle wearing one of these ridiculous trinkets. He had too much self-esteem. The fellows who bought Manhattan from the Indians didn’t wear beads themselves. I would gladly have given this gold medal to Humboldt. The Germans tried to honor him. He was invited to Berlin in 1952 to lecture at the Free University. He wouldn’t go. He was afraid of being abducted by the GPU or the NKVD. He was a longtime contributor to the
Partisan Review
and a prominent anti-Stalinist, so he was afraid that the Russians would try to kidnap and kill him. “Also, if I spent a year in Germany I’d be thinking of one thing only,” he stated publicly (I was the only one listening). “For twelve months I’d be a Jew and nothing else. I can’t afford to give an entire year to that.” But I think a better explanation is that he was having a grand time being mad in New York. He was seeing psychiatrists and making scenes. He invented a lover for Kathleen and then he tried to kill the man. He smashed up the Buick Roadmaster. He accused me of stealing his personality for the character of Von Trenck. He drew a check on my account for six thousand seven hundred and sixty-three dollars and fifty-eight cents and bought an Oldsmobile with it, among other things. Anyway, he didn’t want to go to Germany, a country where no one could follow his conversation.

  From the papers he later learned that I had become a Shoveleer. I had heard that he was living with a gorgeous black girl who studied the French horn at the Juilliard School. But when I last saw him on Forty-sixth Street I knew that he was too destroyed to be living with anyone. He was destroyed—I can’t help repeating this. He wore a large gray suit in which he was floundering. His face was dead gray, East River gray. His head looked as if the gypsy moth had gotten into it and tented in his hair. Nevertheless I should have approached and spoken to him. I should have drawn near, not taken cover behind the parked cars. But how could I? I had had my breakfast in the Edwardian Room of the Plaza, served by rip-off footmen. Then I had flown in a helicopter with Javits and Bobby Kennedy. I was skirring around New York like an ephemerid, my jacket lined with jolly psychedelic green. I was dressed up like Sugar Ray Robinson. Only I didn’t have a fighting spirit, and seeing that my old and close friend was a dead man I beat it. I went to La Guardia and took a 727 back to Chicago. I sat afflicted in the plane, drinking whisky on the rocks, overcome with horror, ideas of Fate and other humanistic lah-de-dah—compassion. I had gone around the corner and gotten lost on Sixth Avenue. My legs trembled and my teeth were set hard. I said to myself, Humboldt good-by, I’ll see you in the next world. And two months after this in the Ilscombe Hotel, which has since collapsed, he started down at 3 a.m. with his garbage pail and died in the corridor.

  At a Village cocktail party in the Forties I heard a beautiful girl tell Humboldt, “Do you know what you’re like? You’re like a person from a painting.” Sure, women dreaming of love might have visions of Humboldt at twenty stepping down from a Renaissance or an Impressionist masterpiece. But the picture on the obituary page of the
Times
was frightful. I opened the paper one morning and there was Humboldt, ruined, black and gray, a disastrous newspaper face staring at me from death’s territory. That day, too, I was flying from New York to Chicago—wafting back and forth, not always knowing why. I went to the can and locked myself in. People knocked but I was weeping and wouldn’t come out.

  six

  “Actually Cantabile didn’t make me wait too long. He phoned just before noon. Maybe he was getting hungry. I remembered that someone or other in Paris toward the end of the nineteenth century used to see Verlaine drunken and bloated pounding his cane wildly on the sidewalk as he went to lunch, and shortly afterward the great mathematician Poincaré, respectably dressed and following his huge forehead while describing curves with his fingers, also on his way to lunch. Lunchtime is lunchtime, whether you are a poet or a mathematician or a gangster. Can-tabile said, “All right, you dumb prick, we’re going to meet right after lunch. Bring cash. And that’s all you bring. Don’t make any more bad moves.”

  “I wouldn’t know what or how,” I said.

  “That’s true, as long as you don’t cook up anything with George Swiebel. You come alone.”