Read Humboldt's Gift for Free Online
Authors: Saul Bellow
sue anyone. The neighbors raised poultry on this slummy land. Burdocks, thistles, dwarf oaks, cottonweed, chalky holes, and whitish puddles everywhere. It was all pauperized. The very bushes might have been on welfare. Across the way, the chickens were throaty—they sounded like immigrant women—and the small trees, oaks sumacs ailanthus, were underprivileged, dusty, orphaned-looking. The autumn leaves were pulverized and the fragrance of leaf-decay was pleasant. The air was empty but good. As the sun went down the landscape was like the still frame of an old movie on sepia film. Sunset. A red wash spreading from remote Pennsylvania, sheep bells clunking, dogs in the brown barnyards. I was trained in Chicago to make something of such a scant setting. In Chicago you became a connoisseur of the near-nothing. With a clear eye I looked at a clear scene, I appreciated the red sumac, the white rocks, the rust of the weeds, the wig of green on the bluff over the crossroads.
It was more than appreciation. It was already an attachment. It was even love. The influence of a poet probably contributed to the feeling for this place that developed so quickly. I’m not referring to the privilege of being admitted to the literary life, though there may have been a touch of that. No, the influence was this: one of Humboldt’s themes was the perennial human feeling that there was an original world, a home-world, which was lost. Sometimes he spoke of Poetry as the merciful Ellis Island where a host of aliens began their naturalization and of this planet as a thrilling but insufficiently humanized imitation of that home-world. He spoke of our species as castaways. But good old peculiar Humboldt, I thought (and I was peculiar enough in my own right), now has taken on the challenge of challenges. You needed the confidence of genius to commute between this patch, Nowhere, New Jersey, and the home-world of our glorious origin. Why did the crazy son of a bitch make things so hard for himself? He must have bought this joint in a blaze of mania. But now, running far into the weeds to catch the waggle-tailed ball as it flew over the clotheslines in the dusk, I was really very happy. I thought, Maybe he can swing it. Perhaps, being lost, one should get loster; being very late for an appointment, it might be best to walk slower, as one of my beloved Russian writers advised.
I was dead wrong. It wasn’t a challenge, and he wasn’t even trying to swing it.
When it grew too dark to play we went inside. The house was Greenwich Village in the fields. It was furnished from thrift shops, rummage sales, and church bazaars, and seemed to rest on a foundation of books and papers. We sat in the parlor drinking from peanut-butter glasses. Big fair wan lovely pale-freckled Kathleen with that buoyant bust gave kindly smiles but mostly she was silent. Wonderful things are done by women for their husbands. She loved a poet-king and allowed him to hold her captive in the country. She sipped beer from a Pabst can. The room was low pitched. Husband and wife were large. They sat together on the Castro sofa. There wasn’t enough room on the wall for their shadows. They overflowed onto the ceiling. The wallpaper was pink—the pink of ladies’ underclothing or chocolate creams—in a rose-and-lattice pattern. Where a stovepipe had once entered the wall there was a gilt-edged asbestos plug. The cats came and glared through the window, humorless. Humboldt and Kathleen took turns letting them in. There were old-fashioned window pins to pull. Kathleen laid her chest to the panes, lifting the frame with the heel of her hand and boosting also with her bosom. The cats entered bristling with night static.
Poet, thinker, problem drinker, pill-taker, man of genius, manic depressive, intricate schemer, success story, he once wrote poems of great wit and beauty, but what had he done lately? Had he uttered the great words and songs he had in him? He had not.
It was more than appreciation. It was already an attachment. It was even love. The influence of a poet probably contributed to the feeling for this place that developed so quickly. I’m not referring to the privilege of being admitted to the literary life, though there may have been a touch of that. No, the influence was this: one of Humboldt’s themes was the perennial human feeling that there was an original world, a home-world, which was lost. Sometimes he spoke of Poetry as the merciful Ellis Island where a host of aliens began their naturalization and of this planet as a thrilling but insufficiently humanized imitation of that home-world. He spoke of our species as castaways. But good old peculiar Humboldt, I thought (and I was peculiar enough in my own right), now has taken on the challenge of challenges. You needed the confidence of genius to commute between this patch, Nowhere, New Jersey, and the home-world of our glorious origin. Why did the crazy son of a bitch make things so hard for himself? He must have bought this joint in a blaze of mania. But now, running far into the weeds to catch the waggle-tailed ball as it flew over the clotheslines in the dusk, I was really very happy. I thought, Maybe he can swing it. Perhaps, being lost, one should get loster; being very late for an appointment, it might be best to walk slower, as one of my beloved Russian writers advised.
I was dead wrong. It wasn’t a challenge, and he wasn’t even trying to swing it.
When it grew too dark to play we went inside. The house was Greenwich Village in the fields. It was furnished from thrift shops, rummage sales, and church bazaars, and seemed to rest on a foundation of books and papers. We sat in the parlor drinking from peanut-butter glasses. Big fair wan lovely pale-freckled Kathleen with that buoyant bust gave kindly smiles but mostly she was silent. Wonderful things are done by women for their husbands. She loved a poet-king and allowed him to hold her captive in the country. She sipped beer from a Pabst can. The room was low pitched. Husband and wife were large. They sat together on the Castro sofa. There wasn’t enough room on the wall for their shadows. They overflowed onto the ceiling. The wallpaper was pink—the pink of ladies’ underclothing or chocolate creams—in a rose-and-lattice pattern. Where a stovepipe had once entered the wall there was a gilt-edged asbestos plug. The cats came and glared through the window, humorless. Humboldt and Kathleen took turns letting them in. There were old-fashioned window pins to pull. Kathleen laid her chest to the panes, lifting the frame with the heel of her hand and boosting also with her bosom. The cats entered bristling with night static.
Poet, thinker, problem drinker, pill-taker, man of genius, manic depressive, intricate schemer, success story, he once wrote poems of great wit and beauty, but what had he done lately? Had he uttered the great words and songs he had in him? He had not.