HUMBOLDT'S GIFT OVERVIEW

HUMBOLDT'S GIFT OVERVIEW

Bellow's grief over the failure of his most recent marriage colors all of Humboldt's Gift (1975). It represents a distinct change in tone. It details the extent to which modernism has depleted the inner life of the artist, the failure of poetic sensibility, the bankrupting of Western humanism, destructive rationalism, and the diminution of the private life through crisis mentality. It is a comic novel that portrays the spiritual plight of Charlie Citrine, a Chicagoan with a taste for low pursuits, gangland excitement, pneumatic young women, and a poetic gift he has almost lost. This "Chicago condition" which has destroyed his poet friend, Humboldt, engages Charlie in the same kind of contest fought by Joseph and Tu A Raison Aussi, Tommy and Tamkin, Henderson and the lioness, Herzog and the modern philosophers. Charlie 131q1610b sets himself up against a naturalist sexual ideology, technological rationalism, and materialistic sloth while meditating furiously on Humboldt's and American poetry's spectacular failure. As Charlie attempts to chart a path for survival, he locates the source of the malaise in a variety of places: Kinsey, Masters and Erickson, capitalism, and alienation ethics. Such failed modernist ideas, he decides, have transformed Humboldt, representative modern poet, from the young Orpheus of the Harlequin Ballads, to the manic-depressive pill taker, politician, schemer, paranoiac, and blasted tyrant who has tried to combine subterfuge with lyricism, poetic passion with worldly success--in a word, outer America with inner America. Charlie attributes Humboldt's final explosion of madness and despair to his modernist education. Once you had read Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology." Aware that the plight of the twentieth-century artist in America is his plight as well, Charlie resolves to "interpret the good and the evil of Humboldt, understand his ruin, translate the sadness of his life, find out why such gifts produced such negligible results." His social critique produces a view of the modern world which has resulted in spiritual sloth, materialistic hedonism, and loss of the inner life. In Chicago, he observes, you could truly "examine the spirit under industrialism," in all its agony and nightmare. He concludes that he must emerge from his spirit's sleep and recover his Heraclitan powers in order to listen to the truest essence of things. Above all, he knows he must erect a giant buffer zone between himself and Chicago. This planet, he concludes, is "a thrilling but insufficiently humanized imitation of the platonic home-world." He must prove the equal sovereignty of the imagination with modern science so that its truths become powerful again. The external progression of the novel focuses on Charlie's plight as a sixty-year-old-writer who must now forgo dreaminess, sexual hubris, false art, and the lure of a media-oriented capitalist society. Come the conclusion of the novel, Charlie rejects his erotic obsessions, his high gratification levels, at the same time as he copes with the mutual betrayals in his relationship with Humboldt, family of childhood, and his business affairs. We last see him contemplating the miracle of the crocus he sees growing through the cracks of the hard city pavement, and realizing that it is but a small and beautiful reminder that much of what has eluded him spiritually, is still there to be discovered. 

During this period of time, Bellow registered in essay and fiction his final disapproval of Freud's notions on the unconscious and sought further understanding about meditative states and transcendental experience through his reading of Rudolph Steiner and Owen Barfield. He had begun his discussions on anthroposophy with Professor Le May, a trusted mentor, discussions which lasted until Le May's death in 1983. His relationship with the famous British anthroposophist, Barfield, seems to have been almost entirely one-sided. While Bellow sought understanding from Barfield, it seems that Barfield eschewed the mentor role and made at least two fairly public statements about how little Bellow's fiction moved or interested him. Nevertheless, Bellow had enrolled himself in the "theosophical kindergarten" in his attempts to penetrate the contemporary barriers to higher consciousness. 

Humboldt's Gift reflects these interests and is in part a serious religious discussion couched in a deflecting comic idiom. But is is also preoccupied with harsh social analysis much autobiography. In it he looks at everything he has lost in life or been accused of. As Miller points out, it was a case of "Vacate the personae." One of the most interesting and unremarked aspects of the novel is its careful juxtaposition of two symbolic and mutually exclusive gender constructs--an overweening "hypermasculinity" on the one hand, and an all but culturally eclipsed "poetic feminine" on the other. While the hypermasculine construct is elaborated through a rich taxonomy of destructive American male alter egos instrumental in Charlie's poetic failure, the "poetic feminine" construct is symbolized almost entirely in Jungian terms. The story becomes in part a parable about a capitalistic American culture in which hypermasculine striving for dominance, power, and self-aggrandizement has all but excluded love, the soul, beauty, and poetic visionary states. As such, it destroys men of feeling such as Poe, Humboldt, and Charlie. However, Bellow demonstrates through Charlie that this valuable dimension of human experience and vision can be re-glimpsed by deconstructing his own peculiarly American brand of hypermasculinity. 

Humboldt's Gift.

There was in fact only a two year difference in the ages of Schwartz and Bellow. Charlie is a saint. He likes and trusts everybody. He has had a number of lovers: Naomi, Dimmie, Denise, Sylvie and Renata, but his only mistakes were to marry Denise and not to marry Renata who runs off to be married to an undertaker. In terms of narrative strategy the book gathers impetus logically rather that sequentially. Only after essential events have been recalled at random does the book begin to cover events in temporal order. Chapters have neither titles nor numbers, which made me feel at first that I was travelling on a road where the signposts were all blank. The nature of Humboldt's gift is not clear until we have read most of the book and then we discover that the use of the word gift is not ironical after all. It is a real and practical gift, a bequest of value to his friend Charlie Citrine and to Uncle Waldemar, Humboldt's only surviving family member.

Charlie is in a sad condition but he has friends to help him out. At a poker game arranged by such a friend he gets drunk and talks too much. A crook, Rinaldo Cantabile, cheats him at cards and stores away enough of Charlie's drunken conversation to weasel his way into Charlie's life. This leads to vandalism inflicted on Charlie's Mercedes and a scene on the girders of an unfinished skyscraper that recalls Satan's temptation of Christ. From now until the end of the book Cantabile is ingrained in Charlie's life. His lawyer, another childhood friend, has provided him with a clever divorce attorney in the struggle with Charlie's ex-wife Denise. She is insatiable and the judge is on her side. Both she and the judge are determined to ruin Charlie and his own attorney is perfectly willing to let that happen. He is about to leave for Europe with Renata and to all appearances this trip represents escape from all his troubles. On the way he stops at Coney Island to visit with Uncle Waldemar, the last of Von Humboldt Fleishman's family. Uncle Waldemar gives Fleishman's bequest to Charlie. This turns out to be a movie scenario of a superficially impractical sort.

In Madrid he learns that the Chicago judge has decided to crush him by requiring that he post a bond that will impoverish him. For the first time in years he faces poverty. Renata leaves him. He finds that his friend Pierre Thaxter has lied to him about the publisher paying his expenses and he moves into a cheap pension with Renata's son. She has left her lover to baby sit while she honeymoons with her husband. Into this black situation Cantabile thrusts himself. The movie scenario that Humboldt and Charlie wrote for fun has become a successful motion picture. Humboldt's bequest will prove that the finished and very popular movie was a plagiarism. Charlie settles out of court with a handsome result and he splits this with Uncle Waldemar. In the final scene he, Uncle Waldemar and their friend Menasha attend the reburial of Humboldt and Humboldt's mother in the section of a cemetery known as the Jewish Valhalla.

Such a brief survey may help to understand what Bellow was after in writing this book but it fails to convey the flavour of the work itself. It is soaked in Shakespeare and Humboldt and Charlie help themselves with both hands to applications of Shakespeare to situations that they face. And it is not only Shakespeare of whom they exact tribute. "He [Humboldt] said that history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night's rest." Readers of Joyce will recognize this. There are telling observations of the same quality throughout the book. Here is an observation on Humboldt that many have made of Delmore Schwartz, his real life counterpart: "He was simply the Mozart of conversation." The author's own observations are similarly sharp. Of an impoverished New Jersey landscape he remarks: "The very bushes might have been on welfare." And "Some women wept as softly as a watering can in the garden." But Charlie is not only good and loyal, he is also honest. He tries to make sense of life in the largest sense that he can manage. This leads him to anthroposophy, a view of existence that tries to tie everything together in one mystical bundle. Charlie has doubts about it but, as his material well being dissolves in Madrid, he finds consolation and enlightenment in mysticism. It proves to be a sound bulwark against the attacks of stupidity and malice. If Charlie is too unbelievably the saint, it is no different from the self-acceptance of a Huckleberry Finn. And the likeness, hinted at in the beginning of this review, is more than passing.

Humboldt's Gift has its picaresque side and the selection of types and traumas may be looked at as modern translations of Huck's own troubles and concerns. The honesty of the writer is a fierce and purging power that gives his book conviction and durability. It will be read and - more importantly - reread when many more superficially compelling books are forgotten.