Humboldt's Gift

  Sewell an anti-Semite? Nonsense. It suited Humboldt to hoke that up. As for blood-brotherhood and covenants, they were somewhat more genuine. Blood-brotherhood dramatized a real desire. But not genuine enough. And now I tried to remember our endless consultations and briefings before I called on Ricketts. I said, at last, to Humboldt, “Enough. I know how to do this. Not another word.” Demmie Vonghel coached me too. She thought Humboldt very funny. On the morning of the interview she made sure that I was correctly dressed and took me to Penn Station in a cab.

  This morning in Chicago I found that I could recall Ricketts without the slightest difficulty. He was youthful but white-haired. His crew cut sat low on his forehead. He was thick, strong, and red-necked, a handsome furniture-mover sort of man. Years after the war, he still clung to GI slang, this burly winsome person. A bit heavy for frolic, in his charcoal-gray flannels, he tried to take a light manner with me. “I hear you guys are going great in Sewell’s program, that’s the scuttlebutt.”

  “Ah, you should have heard Humboldt speak on Sailing to Byzantium.”

  “People have said that. I couldn’t make it. Administration. Tough titty for me. Now what about you, Charlie?”

  “Enjoying every minute here.”

  “Terrific. Keeping up your own work, I hope? Humboldt tells me you’re going to have a Broadway production next year.”

  “He’s a little ahead of himself.”

  “Ah, he’s a great guy. Wonderful thing for us all. Wonderful for me, my first year as chairman.”

  “Is it, now?”

  “Why yes, it’s my shakedown cruise, too. Glad to have both of you. You look very cheerful, by the way.”

  “I feel cheerful, generally. People find fault with it. A drunken lady last week asked me what the hell my problem was. She said. I was a compulsive-heimischer type.”

  “Really? I don’t think I ever heard that expression.”

  “It was new to me too. Then she told me I was existentially out of step. And the last thing she said was, ‘You’re apparently having a hell of a good time, but life will crush you like an empty beer can.’ ”

  Under the crew-cut crown Rickett’s eyes were shame-troubled. Perhaps he too was oppressed by my good spirits. In reality I was only trying to make the interview easier. But I began to realize that Ricketts was suffering. He sensed that I had come to do mischief. For why was I here, what sort of call was this? That I was Humboldt’s emissary was obvious. I brought a message, and a message from Humboldt meant nothing but trouble.

  Sorry for Ricketts, I made my pitch as quickly as possible. Humboldt and I were pals, great privilege for me to be able to spend so much time with him down here. Oh, Humboldt! Wise warm gifted Humboldt! Poet, critic, scholar, teacher, editor, original….

  Eager to help me through this, Ricketts said, “He’s just a man of genius.”

  “Thanks. That’s what it amounts to. Well, this is what I want to say to you. Humboldt wouldn’t say it himself. It’s my idea entirely. I’m only passing through, but it would be a mistake not to keep Humboldt here. You shouldn’t let him get away.”

  “That’s a thought.”

  “There are things that only poets can tell you about poetry.”

  “Yes, Dryden, Coleridge, Poe. But why should Humboldt tie himself down to an academic position?”

  “That’s not the way Humboldt sees things. I think he needs an intellectual community. You can imagine how overpowering the great social structure of the country would be to inspired men of his type. Where to turn, is the question. Now the trend in the universities is to appoint poets, and you’ll do it, too, sooner or later. Here’s your chance to get the best.”

  Making my meditation as detailed as possible, no fact too small to be remembered, I could see how Humboldt had looked when he coached me on the way to handle Ricketts. Humboldt’s face, with a persuasive pumpkin smile, came so close to mine that I felt the warmth or fever of his cheeks. Humboldt said, “You have a talent for this kind of errand. I know it.” Did he mean I was a born meddler? He said, “A man like Ricketts didn’t make it big in the Protestant establishment. Not fit for the important roles—corporation president, board chairman, big banks, Republican National Committee, Joint Chiefs, Budget Bureau, Federal Reserve. To be a prof. of his kind means to be the weak kid brother. Or maybe even sister. They get taken care of. He’s probably a member of the Century Club. Okay to teach The Ancient Mariner to young Firestones or Fords. Humanist, scholar, scoutmaster, nice but a numbskull.”

  Maybe Humboldt was right. I could see that Ricketts was unable to cope with me. His sincere brown eyes seemed to ache. He waited for me to get on with this, to finish the interview. I didn’t like backing him into a corner, but behind me I had Humboldt. Because Humboldt didn’t sleep on the night Ike was elected, because he was drugged with pills and booze or toxic with metabolic wastes, because his psyche didn’t refresh itself by dreaming, because he renounced his gifts, because he lacked spiritual strength, or was too frail to stand up to the unpoetic power of the USA, I had to come here and torment Ricketts. I felt pity for Ricketts. And I couldn’t see that Princeton was such a big deal as Humboldt made out. Between noisy Newark and squalid Trenton it was a sanctuary, a zoo, a spa, with its own choochoo and elms and lovely green cages. It resembled another place I was later to visit as a tourist—a Serbian watering place called Vrnatchka Banja. But maybe what Princeton was not counted for more. It was not the factory or department store, not the great corporation office or bureaucratic civil service, it was not the routine job-world. If you could arrange to avoid that routine job-world, you were an intellectual or an artist. Too restless, tremorous, agitated, too mad to sit at a desk eight hours a day, you needed an institution—a higher institution.

  “A chair in poetry for Humboldt,” I said.

  “A chair in poetry! A chair! Oh!—What a grand idea!” said Ricketts. “We’d love it. I speak for everyone. We’d all vote for it. The only thing is the dough! If only we had enough dough! Charlie, we’re real poor. Besides, this outfit, like any outfit, has its table of organization.”

  “Table of organization? Translate, please.”

  “A chair like that would have to be created. It’s a big deal.”

  “How would a chair be set up?”

  “Special endowment, as a rule. Fifteen or twenty grand a year, for about twenty years. Half a million bucks, with the retirement fund. We just ain’t got it, Charlie. Christ, how we’d love to get Humboldt. It breaks my heart, you know that.” Ricketts was now wonderfully cheerful. Minutely observant, my memory brought back, without my especially asking for it, the white frieze of his vigorous short hair, his brownish oxheart cherry eyes, the freshness of his face, his happy full cheeks.

  I figured that was that, when we shook hands. Ricketts, having gotten rid of us, was rapturously friendly. “If only we had the money!” he kept saying.

  And though Humboldt was waiting for me in a fever, I claimed a moment for myself in the fresh air. I stood under a brown-stone arch, on foot-hollowed stone, while panhandling squirrels came at me from all directions across the smooth quadrangles, the lovely walks. It was chilly and misty, the blond dim November sun binding the twigs in circles of light. Demmie Vonghel’s face had such a blond pallor. In her cloth coat with the marten collar, with her sublime sexual knees that touched, and the pointed feet of a princess, and her dilated nostrils presented almost as emotionally as her eyes, and breathing with a certain hunger, she had kissed me with her warm face, and pressed me with her tight-gloved hand, saying, “You’ll do great, Charlie. Just great.” We had parted at Penn Station that morning. Her cab had waited.

  I didn’t think that Humboldt would agree.

  But I was astonishingly wrong. When I showed up in the doorway he sent away his students. He had them all in a state of exaltation about literature. They were always hanging around, waiting in the corridor with their manuscripts. “Gentlemen,” he announced, “something has come up. Appointments are cance
led—moved up one hour. Eleven is now twelve. Two-thirty is three-thirty.” I came in. He locked the door of the hot book-crammed smoky office. “Well?” he said.

  “He hasn’t got the money.”

  “He didn’t say no?”

  “You’re famous, he loves you, admires you, desires you, but he can’t create a chair without the dough.”

  “And that’s what he said?”

  “Exactly what he said.”

  “Then I think I’ve got him! Charlie, I’ve got him! We’ve done it!”

  “How have you got him? How have we done it?”

  “Because—ho, ho! He hid behind the budget. He didn’t say, ‘no dice.’ Or ‘under no circumstances.’ Or ‘get the hell out of here.’ ” Humboldt was laughing that nearly silent, panting laugh of his, through tiny teeth, while a scarf of smoke flowed about him. He looked Mother-Goosey when he did this. The cow jumped over the moon. The little dog laughed to see such fun. Humboldt said, “Monopoly capitalism has treated creative men like rats. Well, that phase of history is ending….” I didn’t quite see how that was relevant, even if true. “We’re going places.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  “I’ll tell you later. But you did great.” Humboldt had started to pack, to stuff his briefcase, as he did at all decisive moments. Unbuckling, he threw back the slack flap and began to pull out certain books and manuscripts and pill bottles. He made odd foot movements, as though his cats were clawing at his trouser cuffs. He restuffed the scraped leather case with other books and papers. He lifted his broad-brimmed hat from the coat tree. Like a silent-movie hero taking his invention to the big city, he was off for New York. “Put a note up for the kids. I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said.

  I walked him to the train but he told me nothing more. He sprang into the antique Dinkey car. He wagged his fingers at me through the dirty window. And he left.

  I might have gone back to New York with him, because I had come down only for the interview with Ricketts. But he was Manic and it was best to let him be.

  So I, Citrine, comfortable, in the midst of life, extended on a sofa, in cashmere socks (considering how the feet of those interred shredded away like leaf tobacco—Humboldt’s feet), reconstructed the way in which my stout inspired pal declined and fell. His talent had gone bad. And now I had to think what to do about talent in this day, in this age. How to prevent the leprosy of souls. Somehow it appeared to be up to me.

  I meditated like anything. I followed Humboldt in my mind. He was smoking on the train. I saw him passing quick and manic through the colossal hall of Penn Station with its dusty dome of single-colored glass. And then I saw him get into a cab—the subway was good enough, as a rule. But today each move was unusual, without precedent. This was because he couldn’t count on reason. Reason was coming and going in shorter cycles, and one of these days it might go for good. And then what would he do? Should he lose it once and for all, he and Kathleen would need lots of money. Also, as he had said to me, you could be gaga in a tenured chair at Princeton, and would anybody notice? Ah, poor Humboldt! He might have been—no, he was so fine!

  He was soaring now. His present idea was to go straight to the top. When he got there, this blemished spirit, the top saw the point. Humboldt met with interest and consideration.

  Wilmoore Longstaff, the famous Longstaff, archduke of the higher learning in America, was the man Humboldt went to see. Longstaff had been appointed the first head of the new Belisha Foundation. The Belisha was richer than Carnegie and Rockefeller, and Longstaff had hundreds of millions to spend on science and scholarship, on the arts, and on social improvement. Humboldt already had a sinecure with the Foundation. His good friend Hildebrand had gotten it for him. Hildebrand the playboy publisher of avant-garde poets, himself a poet, was Humboldt’s patron. He had discovered Humboldt at CCNY, he admired his work, adored his conversation, protected him, kept him on the payroll at Hildebrand & Co. as an editor. This caused Humboldt, to lower his voice when he slandered him. “He steals from the blind, Charlie. When the Blind Association mails in pencils, Hildebrand keeps those charity pencils. He never donates a penny.”

  I remembered saying, “Stingy-rich is just ordinary camp.”

  “Yes, but he overdoes it. Try eating dinner at his house. He starves you. And why did Longstaff hire Hildebrand for thirty thousand to plan a program for writers? He hired him because of me. If you’re a Foundation you don’t deal with poets, you go to the man who owns a stable of poets. So I do all the work and get only eight thousand.”

  “Eight for a part-time job isn’t bad, is it?”

  “Charlie, it’s cheap of you to pull this fair-mindedness on me. I say I’m an underdog and then you slip it in that I’m so privileged, meaning that you’re an under-underdog. Hildebrand gets full value from me. He never reads a manuscript. He’s always on a cruise or skiing in Sun Valley. Without my advice he’d publish toilet paper. I save him from being a millionaire Philistine. He got to Gertrude Stein because of me. Also to Eliot. Because of me he has something to offer Longstaff. But I’m forbidden absolutely to talk to. Longstaff.”

  “No.”

  “Yes! I tell you,” said Humboldt. “Longstaff has a private elevator. No one gets to his penthouse from the lower ranks. I see him from a distance as he comes and goes but my instructions are to stay away from him.”

  Years afterward, I, Citrine, sat next to Wilmoore Longstaff on that Coast Guard helicopter. He was quite old then, finished, fallen from glory. I had seen him when the going was good, and he had looked like a movie star, like a five-star general, like Machiavelli’s Prince, like Aristotle’s great-souled man. Longstaff had fought technocracy and plutocracy with the classics. He forced some of the most powerful people in the country to discuss Plato and Hobbes. He made airline presidents, chairmen, governors of the Stock Exchange perform Antigone in board rooms. Truth, however, is truth and Longstaff was in many respects first rate. He was a distinguished educator, he was even noble. His life would perhaps have been easier if his looks had been less striking.

  At any rate, Humboldt did the bold thing, just as we had all seen it done in the old go-getter movies. Unauthorized, he entered Longstaff’s private elevator and pushed the button. Materializing huge and delicate in the penthouse, he gave his name to the receptionist. No, he had no appointment (I saw the sun on his cheeks, on his soiled clothes—it was shining as it shines through the purer air in skyscrapers), but he was Von Humboldt Fleisher. The name was enough. Longstaff had him shown in. He was very glad to see Humboldt. This he told me during the flight, and I believed him. We sat in the helicopter belted up in orange puffy life jackets, and we were armed with those long knives. Why the knives? Perhaps to fight sharks if one fell into the harbor. “I had read his ballads,” Longstaff told me. “I considered him to have great talent.” I knew of course that for Longstaff Paradise Lost was the last real poem in English. Longstaff was a greatness-freak. What he meant was that Humboldt was undoubtedly a poet and a charming man. That he was. In Longstaff’s office Humboldt must have been swooning with wickedness and ingenuity, swollen with manic energy, with spots before his eyes and maculations of the heart. He was going to persuade Longstaff, do in Sewell, outfox Ricketts, screw Hildebrand, and bugger fate. At the moment he looked like the Roto Rooter man come to snake out the drains. Yet he was bound for a chair at Princeton. Ike had conquered, Stevenson had gone down, but Humboldt was vaulting into penthouses and beyond.

  Longstaff too was riding high. He bullied his trustees with Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas, he had the whammy on them. And probably Longstaff had old scores to settle with Princeton, a pillbox of the educational establishment at which he aimed his radical flame thrower. I knew from Ickes’ Diaries that Longstaff had made up to FDR. He wanted Wallace’s place on the ticket, and Truman’s, later. He dreamed of being Vice President and President. But Roosevelt had strung him along, had kept him waiting on tiptoes but never kissed him. That was Roosevelt all over. In this I sympathized with
Longstaff (an ambitious man, a despot, a czar in my secret heart).

  So as the helicopter tilted back and forth over New York I studied this handsome aged Dr. Longstaff trying to understand how Humboldt must have looked to him. In Humboldt he perhaps had seen Caliban America, heaving and yapping, writing odes on greasy paper from the fish shop. For Longstaff had no feeling for literature. But he had been delighted when Humboldt explained that he wanted the Belisha Foundation to endow a chair for him at Princeton. “Exactly right!” said Longstaff. “Just the thing!” He buzzed his secretary and dictated a letter. Then and there Wilmoore Longstaff committed the Foundation to an extended grant. Soon Humboldt, palpitating, held a signed copy of the letter in his hand, and he and Longstaff drank martinis, gazing at Manhattan from the sixtieth floor, and talked about Dante’s bird imagery.

  As soon as he left Longstaff, Humboldt rushed downtown by cab to visit a certain Ginnie in the Village, a Bennington girl to whom Demmie Vonghel and I had introduced him. He pounded on her door and said, “It’s Von Humboldt Fleisher. I have to see you.” Stepping into the vestibule, he propositioned her immediately. Ginnie said, “He chased me around the apartment, and it was a scream. But I was worried about the puppies underfoot.” Her dachshund had just had a, litter. Ginnie locked herself in the bathroom. Humboldt shouted, “You don’t know what you’re missing. I’m a poet. I have a big cock.” And Ginnie told Demmie, “I was laughing so hard I couldn’t have done it anyway.”

  When I asked Humboldt about this incident he said, “I felt I had to celebrate, and I understood these Bennington girls went for poets. Too bad about this Ginnie. She’s very pretty but she’s honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won’t spread.”

  “Did you go elsewhere?”