{"id":1506,"date":"2009-04-16T00:01:23","date_gmt":"2009-04-16T04:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=1506"},"modified":"2018-01-15T19:16:18","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T23:16:18","slug":"saul-bellows-humboldts-gift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2009\/04\/16\/saul-bellows-humboldts-gift\/","title":{"rendered":"Saul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Humboldt’s Gift<\/span>
\n<\/strong><\/em> by Saul Bellow (1975)<\/span>
\n Penguin Classics (2008) <\/span>
\n494 pp<\/span><\/p><\/h3><\/div>

\"humboldts-gift\"<\/p>\n

I<\/span> have been very<\/em> intimidated to start any book by Saul Bellow.\u00a0For one thing, I feel almost obligated to like him yet ill-equipped to do so.\u00a0I know that he’s highly erudite. And I don’t know Chicago like I know New Jersey and New York, so that personal connection is gone.\u00a0So it is with a great sense of pride that I write this post because I got over my fear. Thanks to this little lead-up-to-the-Pulitzer project I’ve been doing this month, I took a deep breath and dove head first into Humboldt’s Gift<\/em>.\u00a0This might be slightly ironic considering this paragraph found early in the novel:<\/p>\n

\n

When reports were brought of the damaging remarks he made I often found that I agreed with him. “They gave Citrine a Pulitzer prize for his book on Wilson and Tumulty.\u00a0The Pulitzer is for the birds\u00a0— for the pullets. It’s just a dummy newspaper publicity award given by crooks and illiterates. You become a walking Pulitzer ad, so even when you croak the first words of the obituary are ‘Pulitzer prizewinners passes.'”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sidestepping briefly:\u00a0this is one worth buying for the brilliant cover alone.<\/p>\n

In his introduction to this edition of the novel, Jeffrey Eugenides encouragingly remarks that this book was not well received by critics at first (though it was a huge commercial success for Bellow, and didn’t take long to get some critical praise since it won the Pulitzer).\u00a0Further making me wonder what I’m about to get into, he calls\u00a0Humboldt’s Gift<\/em>\u00a0Bellow’s detour de force<\/em>. When Eugenides calls this\u00a0book a detour<\/em> he\u00a0is referring to the fact that this large comical work came after several more serious novels, particularly Mr. Sammler’s Planet<\/em>, which deals with the Holocaust.\u00a0For some critics, this seemed like a major regression.\u00a0Besides that, though, I’m sure\u00a0Eugenides\u00a0is also referring to the book’s narrative path, which\u00a0winds around and\u00a0around everything it almost touches. Apparently\u00a0Bellow\u00a0originally intended it\u00a0to be a short story about the relationship between a writer and his prot\u00e9g\u00e9, and I got the impression that Bellow wrote the short story and then just added added added material around it, going around and about the main narrative, never quite settling down before moving again off into a different direction.<\/p>\n

Largely, this is a book about a now-dead writer, Von Humboldt Fleischer, and his younger friend and prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Charlie Citrine. They started their relationship well (and with similarities to\u00a0Roth’s The Ghost Writer<\/em>: “Having written Humboldt a long fan letter, I was invited to Greenwich Village to discuss literature and ideas.”).\u00a0Together they discussed art and philosophy, and Humboldt (like Bellow) managed to fit in hundreds of cultural \/ philosophical \/ historical \/ lyrical footnotes into any discussion. Later, though, when Charlie started experiencing success, mainly in the form of a Broadway play called Von Trenck<\/em>, Humboldt accuses him of selling out and of stealing his personality for Von Trenck.\u00a0They had a falling out, and it seemed that in his senescence Humboldt lost himself to madness.\u00a0Now, a while later, Charlie’s life is going downhill fast.\u00a0He’s mired in a lengthy divorce proceeding that is taking him for all he’s worth.\u00a0He’s also going broke by squandering his money on a younger woman who really only wants his money. And, though unwilling,\u00a0he’s getting more and more involved with a lapsed gangster, Rinaldo Cantabile.\u00a0As things get worse, he comes upon a gift left to him by Humboldt.<\/p>\n

That’s a fair rundown of the\u00a0book’s foundation, but I can’t begin to explain the circuitous pathway Bellow takes to lead us through the book’s plot.\u00a0It is largely driven by a philosophy.\u00a0In fact, for many of the pages, Charlie is lying on his couch thinking about the past and infusing the memories with a kind of philosophy about the soul. At times (many, actually) I was annoyed by this.\u00a0The book began to feel more a philosophical tract than a novel. And the philosophy seemed rather droll and unoriginal to me (I’m sure it’s my own ignorance that prevented my appreciation, however).\u00a0One reason this book wasn’t well received was because of\u00a0Bellow’s apparent infatuation with\u00a0and preaching of anthroposophy, a philosophy whose nuances\u00a0I\u00a0have not tried to understand,\u00a0but that has something to do with gaining insight into the human condition by accessing an objective spiritual world. Access to this world is gained by inner cultivation.\u00a0Events and movements over the last three hundred years have stifled this inner cultivation.<\/p>\n

\n

There came a time (Early Modern) when, apparently, life lost the ability to arrange\u00a0 itself.\u00a0 It had to be<\/em> rearranged.\u00a0Intellectuals took this as their job.\u00a0From, say, Machiavelli’s time to our own this arranging has been the one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This rearranging by intellectuals leads to the commodification in modern America, leading to the degredation of the individual and his or her inability to access the spiritual world, thereby living blindly in this modern world.\u00a0I wonder what Bellow would think today.\u00a0It hasn’t been a decade since he died, but the world is a very different place.\u00a0Some of his passages felt very relevant (as I’m sure they were when he wrote).<\/p>\n

\n

The world, identified by a series of dates (1789 \u2013 1914 \u2013 1917 \u2013 1939) and by key words (Revolution, Technology, Science, and so forth), was another cause of busyness.\u00a0You owed your duty to these dates and words.\u00a0The whole thing was so momentous, overmastering, tragic, that in the end what I really wanted was to lie down and go to sleep. I have always had an exceptional gift for passing out.\u00a0I look at snapshots taken in some of the most evil hours of mankind and I see that I have lots of hair and am appealingly youthful. I am wearing an ill-fitting double-breasted suit of the Thirties or Forties, smoking a pipe, standing under a tree, holding hands with a plump and pretty bimbo — and I am asleep on my feet, out cold.\u00a0I have snoozed through many a crisis (while millions died).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’m glad to say that after hearing so much about Bellow’s writing, I am<\/em>\u00a0a fan. Many of his sentences are beautiful, stand-alone poems: “Some women wept as softly as a watering can in the garden.”\u00a0And he has a great ability to evoke a sense of place and of discomfort.\u00a0Here is a segment where Charlie remembers nights in Chicago without an air conditioner.<\/p>\n

\n

I kept Denise from installing it. The temperature was in the nineties, and on hot nights Chicagoans feel the city body and soul.\u00a0The stockyards are gone, Chicago is no longer a slaughter-city, but the old smells revive in the night heat. Miles of railroad siding along the streets once were filled with red cattle cars, the animals waiting to enter the yards lowing and reeking.\u00a0The old stink still haunts the place.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And much of his\u00a0meanderings reminded me about what I like about Philip Roth: the prose is generally tight yet playful; a sentence can seem to be going in one direction but then turn around on itself to end in an unexpected\u00a0coda that subverts what was said before; a topic can be dealt with from a comedic perspective, making me laugh out loud,\u00a0and then shift into dead seriousness with profound insight.\u00a0The following is an example of that last quality.\u00a0Here Charlie has just come out of his house to find his Mercedes has been beaten by a bat.<\/p>\n

\n

The attack on this car was hard on me also in a sociological sense, for I always said that I knew Chicago and I was convinced that hoodlums, too, respected lovely automobiles.\u00a0Recently a car was sunk in the Washington Park lagoon and a man was found in the trunk who had tried to batter his way out with tire-tools. Evidently he was the victim of robbers who decided to drown him — get rid of the witness.\u00a0But I recall thinking that his car was only a Chevrolet. . . .<\/span><\/p>\n

So on this morning I was wiped out as an urban psychologist.\u00a0I recognized that it hadn’t been\u00a0 psychology but only swagger, or perhaps protective magic.\u00a0I knew that what you needed in a big American city was a deep no-affect belt, a critical mass of indifference.\u00a0Theories also were very useful in the building of such a protective mass.\u00a0The idea, anyway, was to ward off trouble.\u00a0But now the moronic inferno had caught up with me.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I found the book\u00a0flawed, however, in its excess.\u00a0Though the detours often brings new and welcome vistas, sometimes\u00a0they\u00a0add nothing to the journey but time. It’s obvious Bellow was deliberate in this. Late in\u00a0the book, Charlie begins\u00a0a section of the narrative by saying he was going to visit a woman. But first, he says, he’d like to talk about another subject.\u00a0It takes us five pages to get back to the visit he introduced in his first sentence and hasn’t brought up since, and I didn’t feel I got anything from the interim. It felt like it was set up to be nothing more than a detour.\u00a0This does say something about Charlie’s mind, and someone more interested in the intricacies of his character might find this profound.\u00a0I found it annoying due to overuse. Fortunately, Bellow’s prose is so amusing that,\u00a0for the most part,\u00a0I was willing to follow him as he wandered around the block; however, in the end I suffocated under the book’s weight.\u00a0Five hundred small-type pages with nothing but an extra hard return to separate sections made this book my longest read of the year, and often I felt I was trudging through the deep mud of Bellow’s philosophy to get to Bellow’s narrative.\u00a0It was enough to make me anxious to read Bellow’s (three!<\/em>) National Book Award winning books (The Adventures of Augie March<\/em>, Herzog<\/em>, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet<\/em>), but not enough to make me want to indulge in all things Bellow.<\/p>\n<\/div>