THE BELLOW-ING OF THE CULTURE
Stern, Daniel
BOOKS THE BELLOW-ING OF THE CULTURE DANIEL STERN Humboldt's Gift SAUL BELLOW Viking, $10 In Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow has written not only the best book of his career (save perhaps that...
...His ex-wife Denise, wants his money...
...The fact that the ideas of Citrine's youth (and here one is forced to say Citrine/Bellow) have not resulted in happiness, poise and hope may be more a valid function of his age, the late fifties than of our age...
...But novels are not made of ideas, anyway...
...Seen in this light (or damned near any light) Bellow has created a magnificent, major work of the cultured imagination, stymied at the crossroads of life, death and thought...
...And Humboldt/ Schwartz is the shining memory of a life so devoted to pure poetry and the detritus of Western culture that it degenerated into paranoia, poverty and early death...
...Still, there is a serious question underlying the novel's enormously entertaining texture...
...He has taken the enduring themes of his concern: the exhaustion of the Western mind and its received ideas...
...He is famous, well-off and always on the brink of financial and psychological disaster...
...Fleischer, as everyone knows, is based upon Delmore Schwartz, that Roman candle of pre- and post-war poetry and letters...
...But Charley wants - well, Charley knows the truth of Yeats's claim: "An aged man is but a paltry thing, a coat upon a stick, unless soul clap hands and sing...
...But their underlying ideas cannot be used up like the quantity of oil in the earth...
...But all this only gives a hint of the rich texture of the book...
...Thus Humboldt stands for our "exhausted" Western culture of science and art...
...The sense of a meaningful existence promised in youth by Charley's apostle-ship to Humboldt and his passionate belief in the value of Art and Culture have degenerated to the point at which we encounter Charley: having stopped a poker-debt check to a small time hood and having his Mercedes 280 SL totaled by a baseball bat as a result...
...Humboldt is eloquently laid to rest in the book and in Charley's life, if not in the history of ideas...
...As Frank Kermode points out in "The Sense of an Ending," it is in the nature of societies to believe that they are living at the end of time...
...Theories can fail...
...And laughing all the while...
...the maniacal distractions among which people of good will and good minds must live...
...Still, Bellow beautifully balances his Chicago-a Chicago that becomes a metaphor for the savage, violent, loony "real" world-against the lost world that was Humboldt's original gift to him...
...But those very traditional ideas were the stuff of Humboldt's hold on Citrine's imagination...
...This philosophical fatigue has led him to tentatively embrace a system called Anthroposophy and its prophet Rudolf Steiner...
...Charley is now closer to death than to birth and the book is death-haunted...
...It is not unique to post-existential man...
...And his own death is rarely far from his thoughts...
...The central figure, the un-heroic tenor if you will, is Charlie Citrine, who tries hard to live up to the citrus-like image evoked by his name...
...Often, all in the same paragraph...
...Charley lives in his real and metaphorical Chicago, fighting age via paddle-ball, yoga head-stands and the luxurious sensual ministrations of a pneumatic young woman, Renata, who wants his last name more than his mind and body...
...The result, stylistically, is an enchanting ambience of language in which the wit modifies the regret and the epigrams enlarge the wit into something close to wisdom...
...Put simply: that the ideas of the last three centuries have been used up...
...blocked in his work, tormented by money worries, women-worries and worst of all, the sense that he has essentially dozed through the high moments of his time and his own life...
...A philosophy that believes in a spirit independent of the body and in the transmigration of souls...
...It proves to be an unexpected deus ex machina...
...BOOKS THE BELLOW-ING OF THE CULTURE DANIEL STERN Humboldt's Gift SAUL BELLOW Viking, $10 In Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow has written not only the best book of his career (save perhaps that lapidary novella Seize The Day) but one of the most vivid, funny, touching and brilliant novels to come along in years...
...as well as an ensuing comedy of errors involving his ex-wife's financial vengeance and a flight to New York and Europe with the body-delighting Renata...
...Into this ironic and comic chaos comes the news that Humboldt has left Citrine a legacy-the "gift" of the title...
...A cracked junior-member of the Chicago Mafia, Ronald Cantabile, wants his attention, respect and prestige by association...
...Humboldt's Gift is a gift, indeed...
...One reads it with gratitude that Bellow is working among us, writing, quarreling with himself and growing into the major artist he has always been...
...the difficulty of the ethical and imaginative life in America...
...A rueful writer in his late fifties who has gained considerable fame for his one hit Broadway play, and biographies of Woodrow Wilson and Harry Hopkins, he manages to refer even to his decoration by the French Government in acid terms...
...The writing is expansive with wit, shimmering with epigrams and lyrical with regret...
...While Citrine went on to what Humboldt considered to be a cheap literary and financial success...
...The closest Charley's soul can come to that is to dwell in fond and pained remembrance of Von Humboldt Fleischer, the friend of his youth, the damned mad poet of the forties...
...But the notion that ideas can be "used up" or "fail" is questionable...
...Charlie is stymied by the backwash of that success...
...Citrine would have us believe that his dilemma is really ours...
...Citrine's dead are always with him, not least of all the hypnotic Humboldt...
...Ideas develop and metamorphosize into other ideas...
...a subtle one with a touch of reverse English...
...They are made of experience and language, balanced against the ethical and philosophical concerns of the characters...
...the Yeatsian paradox of aging and dying in the midst of heedless enthusiasm . . . and has orchestrated them in a wonderful, exuberant opera of a novel...
...They were, in sum, the modernist legacy: the ultimate value of art, the corrupting nature of commercial society, the idea that truth and immortality could only be found in metaphor, that is to say, in beauty...
Vol. 102 • October 1975 • No. 16
