ISSUE: Winter 1976
SAUL BELLOW published his first novel in 1944. Humboldt’s Gift, his eighth, shows how well his mastery over long fiction has progressed in the three decades since. In addition Bellow has written a book of short stories, several (produced) plays and many essays, and has had a distinguished career as a teacher, From the start he has been concerned with meaning—whether it exists and, if so, whether it is hospitable to human life. Yet he has evolved an elastic, racy style that deals casually with erudition and philosophy. Morally serious, imaginatively dazzling, he is rightly one of our most celebrated authors.
His work has been unmistakably autobiographical in its broad outlines, drawing on his Mid-Western background, his professorial experience, his divorces (though not really his marriages). Still, nothing in his books suggests personal history ravaged for quick marketing: no small accomplishment in a period when it is all too easy for the famous to recycle the gossip about themselves in literary form. If Bellow has avoided self-parody and the narcissism often so hard to resist in his position, he has apparently been aware of the temptations. In Humboldt’s Gift, he turns to the subject of art and the artist in America and careens through variously related reflections on commercialism, crime, social fluidity, money, religion, age, sex, life and death. He is appalled by the vacuum which literature (art) is supposed to fill in our capitalist democracy; he is terrified by the way art disappears into that vacuum. His book suggests that the American artist is not only susceptible to the fevers of the society he addresses, but can also end up dead from terminal individualism. Bellow has his own answer to this, but first a look at his artist who is, I feel, the only weak link in a strong argument.
Except for his conventionally structured second novel, The Victim, Bellow’s method has been centrifugal, spinning out in all directions from a center which will not hold. His characters typically confront upheaval in their intellectual lives and breakdown in their human relations; the hero of Humboldt’s Gift is no exception. Charlie Citrine is a Pulitzer prize winning political biographer, the author of a moneymaking play, a success beached in middle age. Gasping for renewal, he returns to his home town, Chicago, a city which for Bellow is the emblem of all the freewheeling creativity in American energies. Charlie is bombarded by a complex, even dangerous present: his former wife is suing him for more money; his career is at a standstill; a comic underworld figure alternately courts his friendship and threatens his life. In his spiritual condition, there is not much Charlie can do about all this except worry. He worries about his daughters who see him through his ex-wife’s bitter eyes. He worries about his relationship to Renata, an affectionate, erotic woman who would like to solve his problems and hers by getting married. He worries about democracy. He worries about money. He worries a lot about death and his dead friends. He worries period.
Where is Humboldt in all this? In Charlie’s past and the first half of the book is devoted to Citrine’s recollections of his genius/drunk/tyrant/poet/pal. As a student in Wisconsin, Charlie first reads The Harlequin Ballads that make Humboldt famous and takes off to the East to meet his hero. They become friends, though “friend” may be the wrong word for anyone connected to this archetypical manic-depressive, this homegrown American seer-maniac. Supposedly modelled on Delmore Schwartz, Humboldt also suggests shades of Jarrell, Lowell, Berryman, Roethke, all the incorrigible, sensitive wild men who’ve risked (and sometimes given) their lives for insight. That anyway is the book’s romantic version of the artist’s hardship in our difficult country (a companion cliché to the one about how lonely it is to be President).
Powerful cases have been made for insanity as the embodiment of the suppressed poetic truth about society, but Bellow assumes it, rather he wills it to be the basis of Humboldt’s predicament. This predicament is roughly as follows: Humboldt rises to literary power in the forties, sinks into oblivion and madness in the fifties, dies an early death in the sixties. Success undoes him. Makes him money mad and paranoid. Drives him to self-conscious feats of knowledge which, though pioneering in unusual connections, undermine the emotional wholeness crucial to poetry. Humboldt marries, fornicates, drinks, takes pills, hogs the conversation, cons men, women and institutions and yet, despite his frantic activity, he never draws a natural breath.
In the second half of the novel, as Humboldt ceases to dominate and Charlie ascends with (amazingly enough) Rudolf Steiner, the book speeds up, Once Bellow is back in the mind of his main character, in a sense his only character, the man who has taken on the Crisis in Western Culture and seen it, decade by decade, through the author’s intellectual changes, Bellow is back in touch with his powers, Now he leaps from high reflection to low comedy with an incongruity that adds both variety and suspense, His language is more austere and elegant as he rummages around the problem of whether Charlie’s life is permanently stuck where Humboldt’s left off. Will Charlie also die an early death of the spirit, with a bodily decease following hard on its heels? Charlie’s anthroposophic speculations are woven in and out of his adventures with his wife, mistress, crook contact and Humboldt’s gift, a movie script which the two men long ago had written together as a lark and which the poet leaves to Charlie in his will. Citrine’s involvement with the immortality of the soul parallels Humboldt’s return from the dead in the forms of newly discovered letters, the script and other literary projects, leading to many happy endings, not the least of which is the surprise commercial success of the movie.
Though the book raises Jamesian themes—the commercial materialism of our democracy, its proliferation of parodies (fake art, fake artists), its rapacity when the “real thing” does appear—Bellow resolves them in a Jewish, actually a rabbinical manner. In addition to the obvious resemblance between Steiner’s work and Jewish mystical writings, a resemblance noted in the book, Bellow’s primary sense of answerability is to a Maker, even a missing Maker. His preoccupation with this dialogue renders him, finally, antisocial. Despite Charlie’s appreciation of his luscious mistress, he is basically governed by an Old Testament taboo. This taboo is not against sex per se, nor really against women, but against lust as a lower activity, one which obscures spiritual perception. At the end, Charlie is once more alone, seeing that proper spiritual justice is done by having his friend reburied near his family. “I felt that Humboldt, out there in death, stood in need of my help. The dead and the living still formed one community. This planet was still the base of operations.”
Though anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner are treated with Bellow’s Midas touch for comedy, the theme is not a joke. It is not only in accord with his religiousness, but also what I see as his modernism. For Bellow, the mind is the sole source of meaning. We live by private fictions. We are private fictions. This partially explains why character and human relations are handled in his work the way certain Renaissance instruments are still learned and played: out of scholarship, out of the love of a bygone craft and not because contemporary experience assumes these artistic forms. For the modernist there are no real outsiders, no friendships; there is only the life of the imaginative mind, playing over the apparent world, taking into itself the color and tone of emotion, speculating, analysing, sifting its own disparate and colorful materials.
But Bellow is no solipsist. The confluence of his modernism and religiousness result in a deep concern with morality. Imagination may be a world unto itself, but for Bellow it also has a responsibility. Though the imagination may only be approximate in its apprehension of the truth, and though we may not be able to reproduce even this approximation faithfully, we still depend on its vision to give us our purpose. “On the metaphysical assumptions about death everyone had apparently reached, everyone would be snatched, ravished by death, throttled, smothered. This terror and murdering were the most natural things in the world. And these same conclusions were incorporated into the life of society and present in all its institutions, in politics, education, banking, justice.” In Humboldt’s Gift Bellow reacts to society’s rational excesses by tossing his net over what has been the domain of belief. That is, by making the other world or afterworld a matter of imaginativeness, he eludes the questions reason traditionally raises about faith and God and heaven. Neither reason nor faith are issues; it’s whether or not people have the imagination to conceive of life as more than the bodies it is written on. The way Bellow treats the task of raising people’s moral estimation of themselves—his lavish inventiveness and tonal subtlety in probing the world beyond the one we think we know—makes Humboldt’s Gift worth reading.
