mental aerobics, which may belie Bellow’s own experience and prejudice against women (he was married five times). Kathleen and Demmie are exceptions. Kathleen, who was once married to Humboldt, misses the poet’s ecstatic, intellectual conversations, even if she does not participate in them herself. Readers do not know Demmie’s opinion explicitly, but in all of Charlie’s remembrances, she is the model of a supportive partner. Kathleen and Demmie, of course, were never expected to participate in intellectual conversation because Charlie and Humboldt had each other to talk to.

Charlie also spends a great deal of time reminiscing. He fondly remembers Humboldt and with sadness recalls his dear, dead Demmie. He also touches ever so lightly, as if to a wound, his childhood: the tuberculosis sanatorium, his birth house in Wisconsin, playing in the streets of Chicago, and working for Doc Lutz. Charlie is as sentimental as he is intellectual; the one may temper the other, but both still leave him removed from reality.

Charlie was most successful in the real world when he was young and well-matched to the devoted Demmie, who took care of him, loved him as he was, and encouraged his artistry. As Charlie gets older and experiences a series of failures, such as his marriage, his journal of ideas The Ark, and the loss of his fortune, he starts to fumble and fail much as Humboldt did, only more quietly. Humboldt went down in a blaze of insanity; Charlie is fizzling slowly and irrevocably.

Humboldt, who knows Charlie’s soul best, even calls him a snob:

You’re too lordly yourself to take offense. You’re an even bigger snob than Sewell. I think you may be psychologically one of those Axel types that only cares about inner inspiration, no connection with the actual world. . . . You leave it to poor bastards like me to think about matters like money and status and success and failure and social problems and politics. You don’t give a damn for such things.

What Humboldt and others consider snobbery on Charlie’s part may be more accurately described as self-involvement. Having taken Humboldt’s advice that success is not about the money, Charlie is in a spiral of failure, having been unable to make a difference to the world through his work. As he searches for an answer, lost in his thoughts, Charlie does not place himself above others so much as completely ignore the fact that he needs to function in reality just like everyone else. Later in life, he does not have anyone to engage his mind as Humboldt once did, and it wears away at Charlie like overworked gears being stripped of their usefulness. Charlie hungers for mental stimulation, for conversations like he used to have with Humboldt and sometimes has with Thaxter or Dr. Scheldt. He is drawn to anthroposophy because he is looking for a cure: he believes all original ideas have been used up, and culturally, people are entering an era of boredom. “[Y]ou don’t spend years trying to dope your way out the human condition. To me that’s boring,” Renata tells Charlie. Perhaps, it is only Charlie who is bored, having fallen into the rut of an existence lacking in stimulation. People comment to him that anthroposophy is bogus, but Charlie is undaunted and does not mind being labeled eccentric. He is gradually breaking free of his material bonds, selling his Persian rugs, losing his Mercedes, and losing most of his money to Denise. Humboldt, who understands Charlie’s pursuit, accuses him, “You’re always mooning in your private mind about some kind of cosmic destiny.” Charlie hopes to someday reach a conclusion that will help humankind recover from its boredom of ideas.

Stuttering, Huggins asks Charlie: “[W]hat were you re-re-reserving yourself for? You had the star attitude, but where was the twi-twi-twink.” Charlie’s biggest problem is his failure to connect with people. He admits to Huggins that he once considered himself intellectually superior to most people but that he has given that up. If he is to be believed, he still has not given up the practice of solitude that has turned to obliviousness. Charlie seems not to hear Renata’s pleas to marry, even with the threat of Flonzaley always on the horizon. He repeatedly pours his sentimental nostalgia on Naomi even though she hates it. Naomi is clear with Charlie why they did not work out, but her words do not seem to penetrate his fog of thought. While they are married, he allows Denise to push him around and make him work on the assignments she thinks are worthwhile even if he is disinterested. Despite their great affection for each other as childhood chums, Charlie and Szathmar often seem on the verge of a fight. Charlie fails to connect partly because whenever he is in an unpleasant or boring situation, he withdraws into himself to think: the bathroom stall with Cantabile, in Cantabile’s car, in Renata’s car, waiting in the courthouse, on the airplane with Renata, at the Ritz in Madrid, at the pensión. Renata writes to Charlie in her farewell letter, “You always said that the way life happened to you was so different that you weren’t in a position to judge the desires of other people. It’s really true that you don’t know people from inside or understand what they want . . . and you never may know.”

Charlie’s growth as a person over the course of the novel is double-edged. He regains control of his life but takes the not-wholly-unexpected option of pursuing a life of pure intellect at the Anthroposophy Institute in Switzerland. Near the end of the novel, he is fixated on communicating with the dead, which necessitates that he ignore all the vibrant, fully alive individuals around him, from the lovely Renata to the eager Rebecca Volsted to even his own daughters. His self-involvement holds no malice, but his grand plan to do something beneficial for society by way of deep thought may be unrealistic. By the conclusion of Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie has grown up but not out.

Source: Carol Ullmann , Critical Essay on Humboldt’s Gift, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2008.

Easily the novelist most successful in capturing contemporary life’s realistic and grotesque aspects has been Saul Bellow. Now past sixty, he has for more than three decades proved himself this country’s most profoundly serious and exuberantly comic observer. If many writers today resort to ‘‘impressionistic journalism and innovative fantasy,’’ he retains a ‘‘Tolstoyan appetite’’ for serious ideas. Indeed, ideas are Bellow’s primary material, and usually they entangle themselves in his characters’ perceptions and emotions. Despite his intellectual concerns, however, Bellow is basically a storyteller, and one who remains in the major tradition of conscious realism, with its intense characterizations and detailed, textured descriptions of its heroes’ every physical andmental action.

He has been described as having emerged from an ‘‘ancient Jewish tradition of alarm wedded to responsibility.’’ His social concepts and interpretations bear this out. His fiction derives much of its strength from his grasp of the cultural implications of his characters’ behavior and emotions. His central Jewish loners and lamenters are perceptive, critical, overextended urban beings; they tend to separate themselves from families and friends while they strain to bring order and coherence to their private lives. For these bedeviled seekers, the pressures and constraints come as often from without as from within. Most suffer not only from minds tormented by personal fears but also froman unfeeling society’s frequent indignities. As a result, their lives often become desperate battles against not merely their own capricious, self-serving appetites but also against the wants and wishes of family members and intimates, friends and strangers.

Yet despite their antic involvements, his characters reassert Bellow’s unflagging humanism. Every individual, he insists, should adhere to a human measure or mean. Even his least cerebral heroes seek to convert America’s social chaos into coherent traditional notions about character, morality, and fate. Some critics have accused Bellow—especially with Mr. Sammler’s Planet—of souring in his humanism, liberalism, and social expectations. ‘‘There can be little doubt,’’ notes Malcolm Bradbury, that the ‘‘high ironies’’ of recent Bellow fiction ‘‘betoken a sceptical withdrawal from . . . contemporary consciousness . . . and a cold eye . . . [toward] the contemporary circus.’’ Bradbury is only half-right. For if Bellow does view present social and moral disorders with a skeptical or ‘‘cold eye,’’ he has hardly withdrawn from current happenings or ceased to care about those affected by them. Moses Herzog and Artur Sammler, for example, express concern not only for the cultural drift evident at every turn but for their own urges toward detachment or withdrawal as well.

Bellow is even more deeply involved with contemporary life in Humboldt’s Gift. Here narrator Charlie Citrine is nagged by guilt at having immersed himself in personal pursuits. He has closed his eyes, he laments, and ‘‘slept’’ through momentous historical events. Citrine’s troubled ruminations enable Bellow to explore again, directly and unequivocally, American morals and expediencies—this time as they operate in the 1970s. He does not fit, admittedly, current definitions of the ‘‘experimental’’ novelist. He retains instead specific and basic literary commitments to realism; in short, his plot structures derive from story and character, and his people exist in a tumultuous but recognizable world. Yet Bellow is hardly a static thinker or writer. In each novel he not only records meticulously his evolving responses to setting and culture, but he also ventures beyond his previous imaginative perimeters to make playful use of shifting narrative styles and forms. His realism often shades into romanticism and the absurd, into social comedy and black humor, into psychology and the picaresque, into philosophy and satire. These elements enrich The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and now Humboldt’s Gift. In these novels Bellow reaffirms that the comic view offers the most valid means of grasping an American scene by turns tragic or absurd, or both. But laughter alone, he makes clear, is never enough. In Humboldt’s Gift, therefore, as in his earlier novels, he mixes historical speculation and ‘‘metaphysics’’ with his vivid pathos and ‘‘mental farce.’’

Here his turbulent world overflows as usual with things and noises and human needs. If he evokes again his fierce love of Chicago, he leavens his nostalgia with recollections of life among such New York literati as Philip Rahv, Sidney Hook, and Lionel Abel—and especially of his troubled friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz. Moving along the periphery of that life are such political or social figures as Adlai Stevenson, the brothers Kennedy, Jacob Javits, and Harry Houdini. Others, like Dwight Macdonald, Richard Blackmur, and Carlos Baker, are thinly disguised, but play more central roles. These people, appearing in real and imagined events and places, present two familiar interlocking Bellovian themes. The first theme details the dangers posed to the artist in America by worldly success, with its inevitable attachments of money and fame, sex and excitement, and, often now, crime. Bellow has emphasized repeatedly in his fiction the gap between America’s professed ideals and practiced compromises, between its high aspirations and low opportunism. The artist or writer’s function, as he sees it, is not merely to expose but to help mend the rift between these divided value areas.

Centering on a live writer and a dead poet, Bellow tries to define the artist’s role in a society lured away by its massive material substance from its cravings for mind and beauty. In a culture so fragmented the artist too often meets professional failure, if not personal disaster. For despite his early dreams and plans, he—no less than businessmen and lawyers—generally ensnares himself in a typical American compromise, as Charlie Citrine puts it, of ‘‘crookedness with self-respect or duplicity with honor.’’ This moral confusion, Bellow suggests, is caused primarily by the artist’s refusal to confront ‘‘the main question . . . the death question.’’ In other words, the artist, like his fellow Americans, frequently fails to consider the moral or ethical—much less the spiritual—aspects of his goals and behavior. As so often in the past, Bellow is following (albeit more cynically) Walt Whitman, here the Whitman of Democratic Vistas and of ‘‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.’’

Saul Bellow embraces moral, ethical, and spiritual problems. His second theme is vintage Bellow: the comic pathos of a vain intellectual’s efforts to age with style and dignity. Bellow writes of the deeply felt loss of dead kin and friends, focusing primarily on that sharpest of human anxieties, the fear of death. Probing this and related areas, he fashions a long, loose, funny/ sad narrative of a crucial five months, in 1973– 74, in the life of an embattled writer. During that December-to-April span, Charlie Citrine seeks higher significance in his life and possible ways for his soul to transcend or defeat death. Bellow shapes his hero’s untiring monologue not into chapters but into unnumbered segments brimming with social details and philosophic speculations, narrative flashbacks and quick transitions. Charlie Citrine is the picture of the successful American man of letters. He is a cultural historian and biographer who has won Pulitzer Prizes for books on Woodrow Wilson and Harry Hopkins. He has rejected academic rewards to garner fame and money for a hit Broadway play. Top magazines have commissioned him to write articles on the Kennedys and other national leaders, and the French government has made him a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. Clearly, his is a life to admire in a success-loving age. Yet if he is so successful, why is he so blocked, Charlie wonders, in his joy and work? Why is he so accomplished in several worlds and at ease in none?

A major reason is his character. History may intrigue Charlie and literature and art fascinate him, but daily life baffles him. Indeed, unhappy events have in recent years been shattering his lengthy ‘‘slumber’’ of money, fame, and middleclass comforts. At fifty-six, he is losing his looks, his hair, and his paddle ball game. He owes his publishers $70,000 for advances on books he will never write. His ex-wife and a battery of lawyers, judges, and tax experts are stripping himof funds. So is his old friend Pierre Thaxter, a flamboyant literary con artist with a scheme for launching an intellectual quarterly. In short, despite his subtle, perceptive intelligence, Charlie is an easy mark for crooks and cranks and greedy friends.

Material problems are not his only worry. Of late, Charlie has been experiencing pangs of guilt and responsibility. He feels he should help alleviate the modern day’s spiritual and cultural shortcomings— as if they were his personal obligation. He is also haunted by recollections of his close friend and mentor, the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher. Now seven years dead, Humboldt had been the big, blond, new bard whose thin volume of early lyrics, Harlequin Ballads, had helped shape the literary landscape of the 1930s and 40s. But his book’s title suggests the clownish aspects of Humboldt’s character and fate. Charlie had read Humboldt’s first poems while still a University of Wisconsin graduate student. Charlie is a native of Appleton, Wisconsin, the home of Harry Houdini, ‘‘the great Jewish escape artist.’’ The magician’s feats are repeatedly evoked and prove to be a paradigm of Charlie’s dreams of escaping middle-class life and pressures. For Moses Herzog, the wily bankrobber Willie Sutton had served a similar emblematic role. Houdini and Sutton appeal to Bellow and his heroes as sly illusionists who evade nature and society’s laws.

Yet Von Humboldt Fleisher had been the direct agent of Charlie’s escape efforts. Eager to enter New York’s heady world of high intellect, Charlie had fled the Midwest. He had found his idol in Greenwich Village enjoying, he later recalls, ‘‘the days of his youth, covered in rainbows, uttering inspired words, affectionate, intelligent.’’ A generous if disoriented patron and guide, Humboldt had launched Charlie’s academic and literary career and filled him with manic, improbable dreams. Exhilarated by life, art, thought, Humboldt was an irrepressible creative force, ‘‘a hectic nonstop monologuist and improvisator’’ and an unending source of wit and wisdom and paradox. If he warned Charlie, for example, to view the dangerous and beautiful rich only as they are mirrored in the ‘‘shield of art’’, he hungered also for wealth and fame. He lusted to be artist and oracle, culture czar and celebrity, and a living link between art and science.

His desires filled Humboldt with ‘‘highminded lowcunning’’ and turned him into a scheming mix of sage, publicist, and tavern prophet. A masterful wheeler-dealer in literary politics, he garnered fellowships and faculty appointments, consultancies and grants. Combining talent and drive, he fashioned himself into one of the exemplary literary successes of the 1930s and 40s and won acceptance as a major American poet. What he wanted for himself, he wanted—or thought he wanted—for others. Convinced that culture was on the rise in America, and that the imminent presidency of Adlai Stevenson would make all things possible, he dreamed of transforming the nation, through its art and wealth, into a new Athens. In such a state, American social forces would be reconciled with Platonic concepts of truth and beauty.

Humboldt could not sustain his ‘‘youthful dazzle,’’ and subsequent disappointments and the opposing tensions of poetry and politics exacted a cruel toll. Expending his creative juices on the grant-and-fellowship game, writing little and orating long into the night fueled by gin and barbiturates, Humboldt began to crack. Slipping steadily into paranoia, detecting acts of betrayal everywhere, he lashed out repeatedly at his wife and friends. His special target was Charlie. As the latter’s career rose and his own sank, Humboldt turned on his old chum in envy and depression. While Charlie, his writing in demand (and propelled by an ambitious wife), visited at the White House and shared helicopters with the Kennedys, Humboldt was in and out of institutions, feeding his rancor and resentment at his pal for not impeding his fall. Once, from Bellevue, Humboldt phoned Charlie at the Belasco Theater. ‘‘Charlie, you know where I am, don’t you?’’ he yelled. ‘‘All right, Charlie, this isn’t literature. This is life.’’ He even filled in and cashed for over $6700 a blank check Charlie had signed years before at his urging as a friendship bond. The greatest shock for Charlie, however, came years later when he spotted Humboldt—broken, dirty, forlorn—on a New York street corner, a shambling, mumbling derelict. Confused and embarrased, Charlie hid and then rushed back to his own bustling world. Two months later, he read that Humboldt had dropped dead in a Times Square flophouse.

Now Humboldt is much on Charlie’s mind. Haunted by his bad conscience, Charlie mourns his friend’s accomplishments and follies and lonely death. He dwells obsessively on his last glimpse of the poet, appraising him less as an individual than as a ‘‘cause’’ or ‘‘mistreated talent’’ meriting ‘‘posthumous justice.’’ Humboldt had tried ‘‘to drape the world in radiance,’’ Charlie decides, ‘‘but he didn’t have enough material’’; and he died essentially of ‘‘unwritten poems.’’ Even worse, Humboldt had lain unidentified and unclaimed for three days. The morgue, Charlie muses sardonically, harbored ‘‘no readers of modern poetry.’’ Yet Humboldt had died, Charlie observes, as a poet in America is expected to die. He had gratified the public’s conviction of the superiority of the practical over the ideal, the material over the aesthetic. Charlie tries, however, to see his friend’s death in more positive terms; he wonders, therefore, if Humboldt had not made a ‘‘Houdini escape’’ from the world’s madness and distractions. Had he also not embodied, in his personal and professional turmoils, the confusing talents, visions, and drives of a nation committed historically to opportunity and success?

For these and other reasons, Charlie regrets not having been more tolerant and understanding of Humboldt. He wishes now to redeem his friend’s reputation and even in some way to carry out his ideas. He would also like to discover why so charged and talented a figure produced so little. By unraveling that riddle he hopes to find answers to his own creative and social dilemmas. For Charlie is as much a victim of his emotional needs and success drives as Humboldt. He is another of Bellow’s versatile but aging Jewish intellectual innocents, marked by their ‘‘talent for absurdity.’’ Caught up in this era of urban violence and public assassinations, uneasy family life and moral cynicism, he finds his vast knowledge of dusty volumes and esoteric authors of little practical value. ‘‘I knew everything I was supposed to know,’’ he complains at one point, ‘‘and nothing I really needed to know.’’ His lack of devious, pragmatic strategies leaves him desperately protecting his dignity and principles from a familiar Bellow array of greedy, dissatisfied women, voracious lawyers, and societal demands, diversions, and clutter. These pressures move Charlie to take cynical measure of his country and countrymen. The American had overcome his land’s ‘‘emptiness,’’ he observes, but ‘‘the emptiness had given him a few good licks in return.’’

Chicago offers ample evidence. The city is Charlie’s testing ground. He had grown up there and been drawn back to it. He is, he admits sardonically, ‘‘a lover of beauty who insists on living in Chicago.’’ Why? Well, New York may have better talk, he reasons, but in ‘‘raw Chicago’’ one can best ‘‘examine the human spirit under industrialism.’’ He is also intrigued by the phenomenon of boredom, and this element pervades his city in a pure, near-mystical state. New York, on the other hand, dilutes its boredom with culture. So anything significantly revealing of the boring human condition, Charlie is convinced, will more likely befall him in his hometown. Ironically, Bellow presents a vibrant, pulsating Chicago that offers quite a stimulating microcosm of the USA. He fashions the city into a living metaphor for the violent, mad, real world that differs so sharply from Humboldt’s ideal, aesthetic one. Here Charlie confronts his turbulent muddle of lawyers and alimony hearings, past and present girlfriends and vengeful exwife, petty gangsters and greedy friends.

Here also, as so often in Bellow, criminality takes comic forms. Amid his confusions Charlie entangles himself with Rinaldo Cantabile, a smalltime Mafia operator, and the plot acquires overtones of black humor. If New York’s intellectual ferment had spawned a Von Humboldt Fleisher, Chicago’s material turmoils have thrown off the opportunistic Cantabile. ‘‘One of the new mental rabble of the wised-up world’’, as Charlie describes him, this petty racketeer lives totally in the here and now; he is always ‘‘one thousand percent’’ with the action. Meeting and cheating Charlie in a poker game, Cantabile is furious when his victim stops payment on a check written to cover game losses. In revenge, he clubs Charlie’s Mercedes Benz into a shapeless wreck. When Charlie does offer the money, he is ritualistically humiliated and insulted. To make matters worse, Cantabile not only tries to replace Humboldt as Charlie’s mentor and guide, but he has a Ph.D.-candidate wife who is writing her dissertation on the poet and wants Charlie’s help.

Cantabile, like Humboldt and Charlie Citrine himself, proves one of Bellow’s great comic figures. He is literally Charlie’s ‘‘nemesis’’—a satanic spirit fated to shatter Charlie’s slumber of success and smugness and to compel him to move away from ‘‘dead center’’ and confront his true self. He also personifies the tightening bonds between an upwardly mobile middle class and a shady world of confidence men and mobsters. Charlie’s friends view this new social comradeship with indifference. They nourish, like most Americans, a steadily higher gratification threshold and an intense need to escape boredom. One major result of such attitudes is a morally and intellectually uncertain age in which ‘‘culture and corruption’’ are symbiotically entwined. The effects of this turbulent partnership are strongly visible. ‘‘What a tremendous force,’’ Charlie observes, ‘‘the desire to be interesting has in the democratic USA.’’

Charlie is fighting hard to shake off both his own boredom and the incessant demands of others. Like Tommy Wilhelm and Moses Herzog before him, however, he is enmeshed in a web of domestic court battles. Denise, his exwife, bitter at his having rejected her, has separated him from their two young daughters; now she, her lawyers, and a cooperative judge are determined to teach Charlie some hard, practical lessons by draining him of money, energy, and time. His own lawyers, accountants, and friends prove equally insatiable ‘‘reality instructors.’’ Yet, as his name suggests, Charlie Citrine, with ironic, slightly soured, self-deprecatory humor, is wryly amused at his repeated victimizing by these frenetic business toughs, literary con men, and divorce court hustlers who envy his fame and covet his money. For the money, he decides, is the world’s money. A capitalist society, for its own darkly comic motives, has granted him temporary loan of huge sums and now is taking its own back. He views his mounting losses, therefore, with bemused detachment, even seeing virtue in the process.

Time and disappointment, however, are having their effect. At fifty-six, Charlie is nearing exhaustion. Yet, exhausted or not, he remains a dedicated womanizer who fights aging by frantic devotion to yoga postures, paddle ball, and body exercises. His current mistress, the young and voluptuous Renata Koffritz, demands marriage, money, respectability. But if she pressures Charlie to marry her, Renata fears his unreliability and imminent loss of wealth. She takes the precaution, therefore, of sleeping periodically with the wealthy undertaker Harold Flonzaley. So blocked and confused are Charlie’s relationships here and elsewhere that he is repeatedly tempted to lie down and go to sleep.

Yet he fears already having slept through the high moments of his era and his life. The novel’s latter half is suffused with ‘‘sleep’’ images that suggest both Charlie’s ‘‘bemused worldliness’’ and his hunger for a higher awareness or consciousness. For if Humboldt had succumbed to high-voltage graspings for fame and success, Charlie has been given to lethargy and selfabsorption. While those about him, especially the relentless Cantabile, scheme to destroy his peaceful slumber, Charlie himself now resolves to concentrate his ‘‘whole attention’’ on his time’s ‘‘great and terrible matters’’—those same matters that for decades he had filtered out by turning inward. But he must ponder first Humboldt’s blunted career and life. Charlie is not certain how much sympathy either Humboldt or he merits. They both had enjoyed, after all, the best America had to offer: fame, money, audiences, women. If they had gone sour, where lay the fault? Had they misdirected or misapplied their intellectual and creative gifts? Or does fault lie with this country, so rich in diversity and distraction that it ignores or downgrades its creative talents and rewards mediocrity? Whatever the root cause of its dulled aesthetic sensibilities, American society has to answer for its blatant adoration of material success.

Bellow’s central figures are never mere passive, blameless victims. The novelist makes clear that the artist in America bears at least partial blame for his failures. Many problems derive from every artist’s acute sense of self or of being special. ‘‘Remember,’’ observes Humboldt in a letter he bequeathes Charlie, ‘‘we are not natural beings but supernatural beings.’’ But for most sensitized, creative individuals to view themselves as ‘‘supernatural beings’’ in a tough-grained technological world is not easy. For many artists it proves even crushing. If they feel at one with the heavens, they draw their materials from life. If given to Platonic speculations about truth and beauty, they hunger for acclaim, luxuries, acceptance. If they strive desperately for purity, achievement, art, they become speculators in mind and profit, sinking almost inevitably to performance, caricature, compromise. Delineating these cultural paradoxes, Bellow resists (more in his fiction than in essays or lectures) easy formulations or explanations.Assigning blame is, to him, not only facile but beside the point.

He expresses serious reservations, however, about the aims or motives of the modern artist— at least as exemplified by Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charlie Citrine. Bellow’s doubts are hardly new. He has stated them in his recent Nobel Prize address and on many previous occasions. He had criticized in a 1963 Library of Congress lecture those American writers who smugly mix affluence and radical chic. Such middle-class writers ‘‘are taught,’’ he charged, ‘‘that they can have it both ways. In fact they are taught to expect to enjoy everything that life can offer. They can live dangerously while managing somehow to remain safe. They can be both bureaucrats and bohemians . . . [or] conservative and radical. They are not taught to care genuinely for any man or any cause.’’ For this reason Bellow expects the reader to take Charlie Citrine seriously. Charlie does come to care about those close to him and about the artist’s place and function in American life.

Despite his faults, the artist hardly bears sole responsibility for his marginal status. Who—if not his American history, culture, and countrymen— has taught him to want the wrong things? ContemporaryAmerica for Bellow is a politically expedient, science-and-technology-oriented community uncertain about how to employ—much less celebrate—its artists. Filling them with false values, this society then stirs their anxieties and insecurities. ‘‘I don’t think we know where we are or where we’re going,’’ Bellow has told interviewers. ‘‘I see politics—ultimately—as a buzzing preoccupation that swallows up art and the life of the spirit.’’ Charlie Citrine shares these uncertainties. Can a poem, Charlie asks himself, transport you fromNew York to Chicago? Can a novel plot a condominium or an epic ‘‘compute a space shot’’? In Bellow’s America, therefore, writers generally are frustrated and ineffectual, and often they entrap themselves in social roles and institutions whose managers treat them as irresponsible, ungrateful children.

Writers who seek acceptance compound their problems: they appeal to readers or audiences who value all artists’ public images over their creative acts, their personal lives over their paintings or novels, their scandals over their music or poems. Is it even possible, then, Bellow and Citrine seem to ask, for the artist or writer in this country to express his true philosophical, religious, or even aesthetic convictions? Yet what worries Bellow and Citrine had fascinated Von Humboldt Fleisher. The collective disappointments of other artists were of little account to Humboldt. For him, as forWalt Whitman, America was promises, opportunities, excitement. America had been his world, and ‘‘the world,’’ Humboldt insisted, ‘‘had money, science, war, politics, anxiety, sickness, perplexity. It had all the voltage. Once you had picked up the high-voltage wire and were someone, a known name, you couldn’t release yourself from the electrical current. You were transfixed.’’

Where a Walt Whitman or Von Humboldt Fleisher saw opportunities, Saul Bellow and Charlie Citrine see pitfalls, indifference, neglect. ‘‘The history of literature in America,’’ Bellow has stated, ‘‘is the history of certain demonic solitaries who somehow brought it off in a society that felt no need for them.’’ Charlie Citrine voices similar sentiments. ‘‘Poets have to dream,’’ he points out, ‘‘and dreaming in America is no cinch.’’ Humboldt, having grown desperate, ‘‘behaved like an eccentric and a comic subject.’’ Many poets, declares Charlie (picking up the theme of Bellow’s 1971 essay ‘‘Culture Now’’), have become publicists or promoters, campus politicians or public clowns. Thus, for Charlie, Humboldt’s fate raises many questions. Was the poet’s deepening disenchantment, his sense of being nothing more than his society’s superfluous, comic victim, what drove him to destruction? Were his strivings for power and money less mercenary yearnings than symptoms of his growing fears and frustrations? Or was he little more than a ‘‘pathetic wool-gatherer’’ whose ‘‘comeuppance’’ was not only ‘‘inevitable’’ but ‘‘somehow correct’’? Does Humboldt’s fate prove emblematic, in other words, of the artist’s dark destiny in American life?

Whatever its prime cause, his friend’s pitiful end saddens and frightens Charlie. He is pained especially by Humboldt’s strong contribution to his own failure. He is keenly aware that the poet’s self-indulgence and lack of discipline rendered him a ‘‘farcical’’ rather than a tragic martyr. Humboldt fed in his life and in his death the popular conceptions that poets are kindred spirits to those ‘‘drunkards and misfits and psychopaths’’ who cannot confront the American reality and for whom ‘‘the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged.’’ Humboldt, by chasing ‘‘ruin and death,’’ performed in the manner expected of him. Americans derive pleasure from such sad happenings, Charlie sighs, because the poet’s failure validates their cynicism.

To make matters worse, Humboldt’s pitiful finish, alone and muttering in abject poverty, suggests to Charlie the social and moral confusion not merely of ‘‘demonic solitaries’’ but also of prudent, decorous intellectuals like himself. Has not he acted even less commendably than his erratic, disorderly comrade? Did he not reject Humboldt’s physical presence on a public street? Is not his own carefully calibrated success a denial of his friend’s failed but somehow valiant life, with its heedless, dramatic mistakes and misfortunes? Not even Humboldt’s pathetic hunger for success and fame mitigates Charlie’s guilt. Haunted by the dead poet’s voice, communing with his own ‘‘significant dead,’’ trying to withstand his living debtors, and unable to write, Charlie abandons an ambitious essay on boredom for ‘‘interior monologues’’ on life and death, rebirth and immortality.

Ironically, Charlie Citrine (like Saul Bellow) has been a tough-minded realist committed firmly to a cause-and-effect balance between man’s past and present and between his inner and outer worlds. Now, painfully aware of an aging body and diminishing lifespan, he refuses to believe that the extraordinary human soul ‘‘can be wiped out forever.’’ Charlie disagrees, therefore, with those thinkers and theorists who, having lost their own ‘‘imaginative souls,’’ dismiss any possibility that man’s consciousness can survive death’s oblivion. ‘‘If there is one historical assignment for us,’’ he argues, ‘‘it is to break with false categories’’ and to accept an ‘‘inner being’’ separate from physical nature’s finalities.

Such metaphysical faith or acceptance, however, requires the individual to confront ‘‘the big blank of death.’’ Charlie turns for help to the writings of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). One of this century’s ‘‘Scientists of the Invisible,’’ Steiner had moved from German philosophy to an occultist doctrine he called anthroposophy. Rejecting conventional scientific or even theosophical views, he developed a theory of ‘‘spiritual science’’ that involved the study of the human spirit by ‘‘scientific’’ inquiry. Steiner argued for the transmigration of souls, and he advocated self-discipline of mind and body to achieve cognition of the spiritual world. For guidance through the Steinerian maze, Charlie consults a Chicago anthroposophist, Dr. Scheldt. Their conversations dwell on the soul’s connections to ‘‘a greater, an allembracing life outside’’ the physical one—as well as on the plight of the dead, who surround the living but are ‘‘shut out’’ by modern man’s ‘‘metaphysical denial’’ of them.

His spiritualistic musings do not prevent Charlie from enjoying the pleasures of the flesh. Several reviewers have dismissed Charlie’s interest in anthroposophy, therefore, as a ‘‘highly egoistic’’ one centering on Steiner’s ideas of ‘‘transcendence and immortality of the self.’’ Yet Charlie makes clear—as had Walt Whitman—that what is true of him is true of all men. Some readers also have seen in Scheldt a counterpart to Artur Sammler’s friend Dr. Govinda Lal. That Indian scientist, too, advocated ‘‘extraterrestrial reality.’’ The rationalistic Sammler, however, rejected such fanciful views for life on a troubled earth. Charlie Citrine, on the other hand, driven by ‘‘frenzied longings’’ for existential possibilities beyond this sphere, embraces Steiner’s occultist concepts (with their strong Wordsworthian overtones) of the soul’s cycle of sleep and wakefulness.

These cogitations are interrupted by more mundane problems. A domestic relations judge rules that Charlie must give his ex-wife most of his money and orders him to post a $200,000 bond. Despite this heavy penalty, Charlie takes off on a European trip, with Renata scheduled to join him in Spain. He makes two stops. He goes first to New York to pick up Humboldt’s legacy to him, which consists of a long conciliatory letter, a movie scenario they had collaborated on, and a Humboldt original film treatment. Charlie then heads for Texas, to Corpus Christi (an ironic reference, perhaps, to his physical-spiritual meanderings). He wants to see his older brother Julius through a serious operation. Julius Citrine merits a novel of his own. A heavy-eating, fast-moving real-estate tycoon, he has the dash and drive of a Eugene Henderson or Von Humboldt Fleisher. A maker and loser of fortunes, he wheels and deals on the very eve of open-heart surgery. Charlie, despite his interest in occultist metaphysics, retains the traditional Jew’s respect for family, the past, and conventional burial rites. Julius does not. His views on death and burial reflect both his restlessness and his ease with the American here and now. ‘‘I’m having myself cremated,’’ he tells Charlie. ‘‘I need action. I’d rather go into the atmosphere. Look for me in the weather reports.’’

Julius proves a born survivor, however, and Charlie heads for Madrid. There he learns that Renata, having saddled him with her mother and son, has eloped to Italy with her undertaker. Though crushed, Charlie realizes that losing Renata was inevitable. Does not Death (here mortician Flonzaley) always ensnare Beauty? Still he mourns his loss of sexual pleasure and especially those gifts of youth—excitement, stimulation, pride—that Renata had provided to soften the advancing years. Finally alone in Madrid, and nearly broke, Charlie resumes his meditations. He hopes to reorganize his life and to reconcile his mystical readings with his rationalistic ‘‘head culture.’’ His growing sense of the tight interplay between man’s inner and outer worlds, of the soul’s power to escape into the supersensible, convinces him that the respected Western thinkers of the last three centuries offer little guidance. Most bothersome is the seeming exhaustion of modernist ideas of art and the poetic imagination so cherished by Humboldt and himself. These ideas, centering on art’s ultimate value, have emphasized metaphor, language, and style as the basic purveyors of truth, beauty, and immortality. Such concepts, Charlie now feels, have lost validity in this America of horrendous distractions and temptations. As a result, the sensitive individual finds it difficult to sustain an ethical imaginative life amid the materialistic erosions of science and art.

Charlie also finds it difficult to age and die— much less fail—with dignity in a society cherishing youth, money, and sex. His attempts to establish rapport with the accepted representatives of modern intellect and high culture have left him few solid, conventional beliefs, and his future efforts to reconcile mind and spirit will not be easy. He can expect little help, he realizes, from a ‘‘learned world’’ that disdains anthroposophy. Undaunted, he rejects all rationalist denials of communication between physical and spiritual worlds, as well as all arguments against the continuing life of the soul. Charlie is convinced that it is modern man’s failure to interpret the cosmos, to read its subtle, suggestive signs, that has turned the world turbulent. ‘‘Real life,’’ he insists, derives from the singular ‘‘relationship between here and there.’’ But how, he wonders, is he to get there from his tangled here?

Despite his doubts and uncertainties, Charlie determines to leap beyond tangible human facts and passions. ‘‘I meant to make a strange jump,’’ he declares, ‘‘and plunge into the truth. I had had it with most contemporary ways of philosophizing. Once and for all I was going to find out whether there was anything behind the incessant hints of immortality that kept dropping on me. . . . I had the strange hunch that nature itself was not out there . . . but that everything external corresponded vividly with something internal, . . . and that nature was my own unconscious being.’’ Charlie is attracted, therefore, to Steiner’s ‘‘explanations’’ of the interplay of each person’s outer setting and inner self—to those ideas, in other words, expanding man’s awareness of self and cosmos. His readings convince Charlie that the individual’s ‘‘external world’’ often blends with the internal to become indiscernible to him. He and it are one. ‘‘The outer world is now the inner,’’ he states. ‘‘Clairvoyant, you are in the space you formerly beheld. From this new circumference you look back to the center, and at the center is your own self. That self, your self, is now the external world.’’

Reviewers have expressed surprise at Saul Bellow’s visionary turn. This ‘‘worldly Chicagoan,’’ they point out, hitherto has been immersed in social realities. How seriously, some ask, does Bellow expect his readers to take Charlie Citrine’s ‘‘dubious quasi-mysticism’’? The more incredulous reviewers have looked for quibbles or qualifications, ironic jokes or subtle satire. But his public comments emphasize that Bellow is strongly taken with Steiner’s ideas on the immortal spirit and on the possibilities of the living communicating with the dead; Charlie Citrine, he makes clear, speaks for him as well as for himself. ‘‘Rudolf Steiner had a great vision,’’ Bellow states flatly, and he ‘‘was a powerful poet as well as philosopher and scientist.’’ He discovered Steiner’s anthroposophy, he adds, through the work of British writer Owen Barfield. Both Steiner and Barfield not only exemplify ‘‘the importance of the poetic imagination,’’ but they also have convinced him ‘‘that there were forms of understanding, discredited now, which had long been the agreed basis of human knowledge.’’ We believe ‘‘we can know the world scientifically,’’ Bellow declares, ‘‘but actually our ignorance is terrifying.’’

Bellow’s confidence in the occult is reminiscent ofYiddish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer and his stated acceptance of demons and spirits. Like Singer (and, for that matter, Harry Houdini), Bellow does disparage most occultist practitioners, as well as the ‘‘many cantankerous erroneous silly and delusive objects actions and phenomena [that] are in the [physical] foreground.’’ Both novelists are, however, intrigued by the great unknown—by death, rather than by miracles, tricks, or wonder workers. Bellow, despite his basic realism, has often displayed a mystical turn of mind. A careful review of his fiction reveals not only a persistent determination ‘‘to break with false categories’’ but also repeated references to the ‘‘illusory’’ nature of a ‘‘successful’’ life in America. From the dangling Joseph to Artur Sammler, his protagonists are ‘‘seeker[s] after cosmic understanding,’’ spiritual pilgrims convinced life can offer them more than meets the eye. Both Moses Herzog and Artur Sammler, for instance, though tough-minded rationalists committed to confronting ‘‘the phony with the real thing,’’ are readers of such mystics as William Blake, Meister Eckhart, John Tauler, and Jacob Boehme; they, too, attempt to satisfy yearnings toward a higher, intuitive awareness. Augie March’s earthy friend William Einhorn, it will be recalled, subscribed in the 1930s to the Rudolf Steiner Foundation publications. Charlie Citrine speaks for all Bellovian heroes, therefore, when he reasons that ‘‘this could not be it.’’ One earthly turn is not enough. ‘‘We had all been here before,’’ he insists, ‘‘and would presently be here again.’’ Though obstructed repeatedly by greedy and unscrupulous ‘‘reality instructors,’’ Bellow’s stubborn questers are merely slowed, not deterred, in their search for higher knowledge or illumination.

Yet how does Saul Bellow treat the occult here? What precisely does Charlie Citrine’s anthroposophy do for him? Clearly, he does enjoy some positive results. If nothing else, Charlie’s theosophical readings and reflections calm him; they lift his mind and attention from immediate tribulations to more permanent questions of matter and spirit. Equally clear, however, is Bellow’s flexible, even ambiguous, attitude toward ‘‘the great beyond.’’ For if Von Humboldt Fleisher indeed ‘‘speaks’’ to Charlie from beyond the grave, he does so in a surprisingly clearheaded, practical fashion. It is the dead poet who rescues the live but floundering historian from his financial problems. He has bequeathed Charlie a film treatment that is a fable of the latter’s own life—the tale of an artist destroyed by the pursuit of success. Humboldt has also left him a legally protected but seemingly worthless movie scenario on cannibalism and survival in the Arctic the two of them had concocted years earlier as a joke. Charlie puts it aside, but Rinaldo Cantabile, ever the hyperactive operator, arrives with news that this plot outline has been plagiarized and developed into a currently popular film. The ensuing settlement eases Charlie’s financial pressures and provides him a modest security. If no longer wealthy, Charlie is in a position— thanks to Humboldt’s gift—to contemplate serenely both past errors and future possibilities; he can look to a life without ambitious struggles or self-loathing, or even boredom.

Through their scenario, therefore, and his own film idea (which also proves lucrative), Humboldt has repaid Charlie money taken in life. More significantly, by ‘‘communicating’’ with Charlie, he has, like Harry Houdini, ‘‘defied all forms of restraint and confinement, including the grave,’’ and given substance to Charlie’s speculations about an existence beyond this sphere. In this limited sense at least, Rudolf Steiner’s claims of a possible dimension transcending the hereand- now exhibit some merit. Yet Charlie’s occult speculations are merely that; they are provisional meditations or possibilities to challenge his mind and imagination. They do not carry the novel’s thematic burden, and their validity or nonvalidity alters neither Charlie Citrine’s nor Von Humboldt Fleisher’s character, or the relationship of the two men to each other or to their society. At most, Charlie views anthroposophy as a possible aid in perceiving internal or external truths. If he reveals a mystical bent, Charlie Citrine is otherwise a familiar Bellovian figure whose successes and failures, betrayals and humiliations are clearly ‘‘separable from his spiritual pilgrimage.’’

In fact, he resembles strongly a number of recent literary figures. Solvent again, and seeing himself at a late station in life, Charlie decides to lie fallow for a time and to concentrate on his search for a higher selfhood. Thus he proves to be another ‘‘underground man’’ awaiting the proper moment for a return to an active life. Further, if Charlie is more mystically inclined than either Herzog or Sammler, he shares their conclusions on man’s moral contract; like them, he believes the individual, when confronted by death, should respond with dignity and style. Indeed, he has himself long been ‘‘dying to do something good,’’ and so he now returns temporarily to America to square accounts with the living and dead. Despite his spiritualism(or perhaps because of it), he views the traditional ritual of Jewish burial as a symbolic act giving order and meaning to the most disorderly life. With his share of the film profits, therefore, he has Humboldt’s body exhumed from a large public cemetery for a family reburial. He retrieves also from an old-age home Humboldt’s uncle, Waldemar Wald, and a longtime mutual friend,Menasha Klinger, and he helps the two oldmen set up their own apartment.

The novel’s final scene finds Charlie, accompanied by the old men, witnessing the transfer of the coffins of Humboldt and his mother from the public cemetery (Deathsville, New Jersey) to the Fleisher family plot. Here, as in scenes closing his other novels, Bellow brings his narrative concerns into sharp focus. For as Charlie Citrine watches the bulldozing crane tearing the soil and whirring noisily among the dead, his thoughts epitomize Bellow’s views on the continuing confrontation of death and life, society and individual, collective technology and solitary artist. ‘‘The machine in every square inch of metal,’’ thinks Charlie, had resulted from the ‘‘collaboration of engineers and other artificers.’’ Any system derived from the discoveries of numerous great minds has to overwhelm and dominate anything produced by the working of any single mind, ‘‘which of itself can do little.’’ The crane raises, then lowers Humboldt’s coffin, and Charlie adds: ‘‘Thus, the condensation of collective intelligences and combined ingenuities, its cables silently spinning, dealt with the individual poet.’’

Bellow’s narrative endings have come in for much debate. He closed Seize the Day also with a ‘‘burial scene’’—a strongly promising or optimistic one. He is given to taking leave of his heroes amid nature’s invigorating currents: Augie March philosophizing his way through Normandy’s frozen terrain, Moses Herzog meditating in his old Massachusetts country house among freshly picked summer flowers, Eugene Henderson running in circles through the Newfoundland snow bearing a young orphan. Each scene suggests a future better than the past. Is there reason, therefore, to doubt a positive intent in his present conclusion?

Certainly here, as elsewhere, Bellow does not rule out redemption. Yet if many readers are confident that better days lie ahead for Charlie Citrine, both Bellow and Charlie now seem less certain and more ambiguous about his future, in this life or the next. Charlie looks into Humboldt’s grave, for instance, to see the poet’s coffin placed within a concrete casing. ‘‘So the coffin was enclosed,’’ he muses, ‘‘and the soil did not come directly upon it. But then how did one get out? One didn’t, didn’t, didn’t! You stayed, you stayed!’’ Bellow may be paying homage to James Joyce, whom he admires, for Charlie here echoes the Irish novelist’s meditative Jewish hero, Leopold Bloom. ‘‘Once you are dead,’’ sighs Bloom, gazing at the gravestones surrounding Paddy Dignam’s burial plot, ‘‘you are dead.’’ Charlie finishes his narrative with a wry joke and a graveyard pun that underscores his doubts—and most likely would have pleased Joyce. Menasha Klinger points out a sight unexpected in a New Jersey cemetery even in April: spring flowers. ‘‘What do you suppose they’re called, Charlie?’’ Menasha asks. ‘‘Search me,’’ Charlie replies. ‘‘I’m a city boy myself. They must be crocuses.’’

Most reviewers have accepted Charlie’s response, along with others of the scene’s implications, as purposeful signs of rebirth. Admittedly, these blooming flowers—the new season’s first pastoral signs of renewal—seem indeed a gift from the dead; they seem to provide more evidence that Von Humboldt Fleisher’s true gift is his ability to touch and affect the living even after death. Yet a close attention to Charlie’s mocking urban tone and ironic play on words suggests he is certain not that the flowers are crocuses but only that all of us croak. The need to listen intently for Bellow’s mood and meaning has resulted in reviewers and critics differing more sharply in their interpretations and evaluations of Humboldt’s Gift than of any previous Bellow novel. They can not agree, for example, whether Saul Bellow here extends his familiar themes and ideas or departs sharply from them.

Most critics and readers should agree, however, that no modern novelist moves as effectively or authoritatively as does Bellow between ‘‘allusive metaphysical speculation and racy lowmimetic narrative.’’ Nor do many writers fictionalize with as cutting a comic wit the ‘‘competing urges’’ of flesh and spirit, ‘‘money-making and truth-seeking.’’ For that matter, few writers today will risk the critical mockery stirred by hints of man’s redemptive possibilities—or by challenges to intellectual fashions of cynicism and predictions of crisis and doom. More to the point, Saul Bellow and Charlie Citrine present the reader with comic yet moving insights into those crucial issues confronting every sensitive individual between his cradle and grave. If their impressions and conclusions fail to convince totally, they can hardly be faulted for failing where no one has succeeded. Certainly they render the human journey more open and challenging than before.

Source: Ben Siegel, ‘‘Artists and Opportunists in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift,’’ in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1978, pp. 143–64.

In Saul Bellow’s recent novel, Humboldt’s Gift, the protagonist, Charlie Citrine, and Von Humboldt Fleisher, the dead poet he mourns, have been readily identified by some readers as Bellow himself and Delmore Schwartz. Bellow denies these simple identifications, claiming that ‘‘Von Humboldt Fleisher is a composite’’ and that it ‘‘never was true that a character in a novel must be true to a historical person. There is a difference between a portrait and a picture. A picture allows more freedom.’’ Thus Bellow denies that Humboldt’s Gift is autobiography and that he is Charlie Citrine: ‘‘When the character of Charlie needed some quality I happen to have, I gave it to him from myself. It was only charity and enabled him to do his job in the book.’’ Despite these disclaimers, however, Bellow has bequeathed an unduly generous portion of his emotional, intellectual, and physical self to Citrine. He even has him awarded the same public honors—the Pulitzer Prize and the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres—while having Citrine’s dearest friend, the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, meet with the same tragic fate as three of Bellow’s closest writer friends. As Bellow’s fame escalated, Isaac Rosenfeld died at 38 of a heart attack in a seedy Chicago hotel, his talent waning and unappreciated. Delmore Schwartz at 53 suffered a fatal coronary in a Manhattan flophouse, poetically and emotionally bankrupt. John Berryman jumped off a University of Minnesota bridge, ‘‘praying,’’ in Bellow’s words, ‘‘to the ruined drunken poet’s God.’’ Undoubtedly, these destroyed men are the partial models for the doomed Von Humboldt Fleisher. Their sorry ends must have diminished the happiness Bellow received from his mounting acclaim and made him suffer guilt over his good fortune in light of their misfortune. Since Bellow has Citrine comically undermine his success because of Humboldt’s decline, it would seem that one of the principal traits Bellow has taken from himself and given to Citrine is his own survival guilt over certain defeated friends and his mocking attitude toward his own fame.

This same deprecation of success figures prominently in the works of other Jewish-American writers. Prosperity and recognition are outwardly the goals of their characters, but inwardly they are reluctant to give up their imposed identity as victims, to abandon the historically designated role of schlemiel. If theymanage to become successful, like Abrahan Cahan’s David Levinsky, they turn into sad millionaires, readily sacrificing their lonely affluence for the poverty and solidarity of the shtetl. Like Malamud’s heroes, they feel more at home in tomb-like grocery stores, decrepit tenements, and squalid jail cells. Like Wallant’s Sol Nazerman, they prefer to reconstruct pawnshops into their own private concentration camps. Wedded to suffering and accustomed to its pain, they are not likely to divorce themselves from it.

Bellow’s earlier protagonists do not find success a compatible bedfellow either. It is not so much that they dislike the plush surroundings, but that they imagine they are interlopers, taking someone else’s reservations. No matter how long they reside there, they never feel they have the proper credentials. Even when their rightful occupancy is without question, they cannot enjoy themselves because of the destitute who have no shelter and the dissatisfied who covet their privileged position. In Dangling Man, Joseph, the young intellectual, cannot endure being a civilian while so many innocent men have been killed in the war. To compensate for not being a casualty on the front lines, he becomes a psychological casualty in his own room. In The Victim, Asa Leventhal, editor of a minor trade journal, feels unworthy even of this minimal good fortune, since so many were outcast, ruined, effaced. He thus allows Allbee, an anti-Semitic derelict who blames him for his job loss, to invade his premises, absorb his thoughts, and almost destroy him. Eugene Henderson is also one of those ‘‘people who feel they occupy the place that belongs to another by rights.’’ Outliving a favored brother, he considers himself the unentitled heir of the family estate. Similarly, in Africa Henderson helplessly witnesses the death of King Dahfu, his Reichian therapist and lion coach. To atone for not sharing his fate, Henderson resolves to carry on Dahfu’s good works and become Dr. Leo Henderson in America. Moses Herzog regards himself an unfit heir as well, since he has spent his father’s hard-earned patrimony not on promised land, but on dilapidated property in the Massachusetts wilderness. Only in recollecting the priceless values of his Napoleon Street childhood does Herzog compensate for his prodigality. Artur Sammler is, of course, Bellow’s most obvious survivor, who has come through the worst ordeal: the Holocaust. Crawling out of a mass grave where his wife has been murdered, he is the ‘‘old Jew whom they had hacked at, shot at, but missed killing somehow.’’ Sammler also outlives his nephew, physician Elya Gruner, his benefactor in America. In a final eulogy for Gruner, Sammler contrasts his own selfish character with Gruner’s unselfish one. He mourns the loss of Gruner and the loss of his own humanity.

In all of these Bellow novels, the most grievous crime his protagonists believe themselves to have committed is to have survived and, in varying degrees, prospered. In Humboldt’s Gift the crime is the same, but the confession of the precise wrongs is more elaborate, the selfcondemnation more harsh, and the desire for atonement more earnest. Also, the self-professed criminal frequently resorts to a more self-ironic humor to cope with his transgression and remorse. This prevalent self-irony may have something to do with Roger Shattuck’s explanation as well: ‘‘the more closely Bellow projects himself into Citrine, the more mocking his voice seems to become.’’ It’s as if Bellow must employ his own form of comic censure to chasten himself for his sins of commission and omission.

In his own life Bellow has confessed to being delinquent toward cherished friends now dead. In a foreward to a posthumous collection of Isaac Rosenfeld’s essays, he acknowledged: ‘‘I love [Isaac], but we were rivals, and I was peculiarly touchy, vulnerable, hard to deal with—at times, as I can see now, insufferable, and not always a constant friend.’’ Bellow felt he was not always loyal to his friend Delmore Schwartz either. A few weeks before Schwartz’s death, he admitted to seeing him on the street but ran away from him because he could not face Schwartz in his extreme destitution. After Schwartz’s death, Bellow began a memoir, he claims, so that ‘‘Delmore would not be spurlos, versenkt [sunk without a trace],’’ which after eight years of reworking became Humboldt’s Gift. According to Schwartz’s biographer, James Atlas, the novel came into being because ‘‘Bellow, tormented by the dead, was compelled to resurrect an image of Delmore Schwartz.’’

It is impossible to know the full extent of Bellow’s torment or to understand Bellow’s complexity of motivation for the genesis of the novel. Since I cannot get into Bellow’s head to analyze the intricate dynamics of his survival guilt, I shall examine his imaginative transformation of it in Humboldt’s Gift, or what he has termed the fictional working out of his ‘‘private obsessions.’’

Professionally, Charlie Citrine is one of Bellow’s most fortunate heroes. A celebrated historian, biographer, and playwright, his talents are appreciated in the major centers of influence: Washington, Broadway, and the academy. He is wealthy enough to indulge himself in the pleasures of the affluent: a Mercedes-Benz, a magical Persian carpet, numerous trysts, and an expensive divorce. As he says, it was his turn ‘‘to be famous and to make money, to get heavy mail, to be recognized by influential people, to be dined at Sardis and propositioned in padded booths by women who sprayed themselves with musk . . . ’’ But Charlie cannot enjoy his renown because Von Humboldt Fleisher, his former mentor, died impoverished and in obscurity. Though Citrine was not in danger of death himself, he suffers from what Robert Lifton terms ‘‘survivor priority,’’ the sense of being given preferential treatment to go on living while the next person’s life is, for no good reason, terminated prematurely. Citrine also resembles those Holocaust and Hiroshima survivors whose ‘‘unconscious sense of an organic social balance makes them feel that their survival was purchased at the cost of another’s.’’ Especially in the concentration camps where the practice of selection intensified the competition for survival, survivors felt they were responsible for the deaths of those chosen to be annihilated in their place. Indeed, the literary market place is by no means the concentration camp, but to the desperate artist struggling to make or preserve his reputation, the competition for survival seems almost as fierce. He may view the person who does triumph as somehow destroying his opportunities, of usurping his place. Humboldt, for example, accuses Citrine of gaining recognition at his expense, of not reimbursing him for providing the inspiration for Citrine’s highly acclaimed Broadway play, Von Trenck. Humboldt also blames Citrine for his own decline on the ‘‘cultural Dow Jones’’ when in fact his alcoholism, insomnia, and paranoia have destroyed his native talent.

Yet Citrine believes that his meteoric rise has in some way been responsible for Humboldt’s steady descent. Citrine sees himself as a latterday Joseph selected to wear the artistic coat of many colors and Humboldt as one of the other brothers chosen to wear the shroud of death. Citrine feels uneasy about appearing in such a splendid coat, but at the same time he doesn’t want to wear Humboldt’s shroud. In this respect, Citrine is like the Holocaust survivor who, Lifton claims, is ‘‘torn by a fundamental ambivalence: he embraces the dead, pays homage to them, and joins in various rituals to perpetuate his relationship to them; but he also pushes them away, considers them tainted and unclean, dangerous and threatening.’’ Even during the final stages of Humboldt’s deterioration, when he is dead in life, Citrine hides fromhim. He fears that Humboldt’s failure and approaching mortality are infectious and that he must quarantine himself from him. Just as Herzog avoids greeting the abject poet, Nachman, his boyhood friend from Napoleon Street, so Citrine crouches behind parked cars to avoid meeting Humboldt in Manhattan. Citrine cannot confront his old friend whose face was now ‘‘dead gray’’ and whose ‘‘head looked as if the gypsy moth had . . . tented in his hair.’’ So Citrine rushes back to Chicago, repelled by Humboldt and himself. To mask his horror and shame, Citrine flippantly bids Humboldt a silent farewell: ‘‘Oh kid, goodbye, I’ll see you in the next world.’’ But when he reads Humboldt’s obituary two months later and sees his ‘‘disastrous newspaper face staring at [him] from death’s territory,’’ he is overwhelmed with grief and doesn’t want to let go of Humboldt. Indeed a good part of the novel is a protracted elegy, with Citrine weeping for Humboldt and cursing materialistic America for driving the brilliant poet to ruin. But if Humboldt’s Gift is elegaic, it is a comic elegy. Bellow criticized reviewers for treating the novel ‘‘with a seriousness which was completely out of place. They didn’t seem to realize that this is a funny book. As they were pursuing high seriousness, they fell into low seriousness.’’ They failed to grasp that the ‘‘root of the light is in the heavy and the source of all humor is in the grave.’’

Citrine is one of Bellow’s graveyard school of comics. To perpetuate his connection with the dead poet, Citrine stresses Humboldt’s antic qualities as a way of resurrecting him, of making him more vivid. In Citrine’s thoughts, Humboldt appears as Borscht Belt tummler and academic lecturer whose ‘‘spiel took in . . . Goethe in Italy, Lenin’s dead brother, Wild Bill Hickok’s costumes, the New York Giants, Ring Lardner on grand opera, Swinburne on flagellation, and John D. Rockefeller on religion.’’ Citrine also remembers Humboldt’s Pagliacci routines where he stars in what Delmore Schwartz had called the ‘‘vaudeville of humiliation,’’ the ridiculing of his faulty artistic talents and his fumbling attempts to gain recognition. Citrine calls attention to the Bergsonian comic battle of Humboldt’s gross body warring with his refined sensibilities so that for Citrine Humboldt resembles the ‘‘caricature,’’ the ‘‘stupid clown of the spirit’smotive’’ of Schwartz’s poem, ‘‘The Heavy Bear.’’ By focusing on the risible dimensions of Humboldt, Citrine makes him amusingly eccentric rather than pathetic. Thus he does not have to feel guilty for abandoning such a funny fellow whose suffering he can dismiss as zany histrionics. After all, the recriminations of a clown need not be taken seriously, nor are his threats of vengeance menacing. Even his death does not seem real. Transforming Humboldt into an indestructible comic archetype, Citrine can look forward to his reappearance in the next act.

Along with comically inflating Humboldt’s idiosyncrasies, Citrine, as guilty survivor, comically deflates his own achievements. He ridicules his fame, agreeing with Humboldt that the ‘‘Pulitzer Prize is for the birds, for the pullets . . . a dummy newspaper . . . award given by crooks and illiterates.’’ Or Citrine likens his green Legion of Honor medal from France to the one ‘‘they give to pig-breeders.’’ He jests about being a physical culture freak and would-be sexual superman. Contrasting his physical fitness with Humboldt’s decaying remains, he wryly states: ‘‘Strengthened in illusion and idiocy by these proud medical reports, I embraced a busty Renata on this Posturepedic mattress,’’ while Humboldt’s bones had probably ‘‘crumbled in Potter’s Field.’’ Like Herzog, Citrine punctures his intellectual ambitions. Of his plans to write the definitive study on boredom, he claims he can’t finish the work, because he gets ‘‘overcome by the material, like a miner with gas fumes.’’ His project, which he mock-earnestly calls ‘‘a very personal overview of the Intellectual Comedy of the modern mind,’’ he assigns to his more capable young daughter to complete. Like Herzog, Citrine makes light of his humanitarian aspirations, his sense of mission. He refers to himself as a letter which has been ‘‘stamped . . . posted and . . . waiting . . . to be delivered at an important address.’’ Citrine castigates himself for his psychic numbness, a common defense of many survivors. Like Henderson, Citrine wants ‘‘to burst the spirit’s sleep,’’ but as he playfully remarks, ‘‘I have snoozed through many a crisis while millions died.’’ In all areas Citrine comically undercuts his stature to make himself equal in size to the diminished Humboldt. It is as if the hyperbolic recounting of his flaws is the price he must pay to remain alive. A life foolishly lived, he imagines, would not incur the jealousy of the dead Humboldt. Thus dwelling on the fatuity of his earthly pursuits gives Citrine permission in effect to go on in his bungling mortal state.

Like many of Bellow’s protagonists, Citrine is comically obsessed with death, both dreading and anticipating it. Schopenhauer called death ‘‘the muse of philosophy,’’ and for Citrine it, too, is the catalyst of most of his philosophizing. He shares Henderson’s view that the ‘‘greatest problem of all’’ is how ‘‘to encounter death.’’ However, Citrine does not flee to a mythic Africa to grapple with the problem. He does not sob incoherently, like Tommy Wilhelm, before the corpse of a stranger, or, like Herzog, ruefully accept the limitations of his mortality. Rather, Citrine immerses himself in Rudolph Steiner’s anthroposophy in search of an alternative to the finality of death. Since Citrine and Bellow are both well beyond the middle of the journey, Humboldt’s Gift insists more vehemently than any previous Bellow novel that there is another destination: ‘‘the soul’s journey past the gates of death.’’ Also, because Citrine has wronged Humboldt in this world, he believes in the existence of an after world where he can make amends to Humboldt and give him the respect due him. Thus, Citrine often mentally vacates his soporific state for Steiner’s realm of the supersensible. Indeed, Citrine, less geocentric than any of Bellow’s other heroes, is more intoxicated with Steiner’s visionary after-life than with the distracting spectacles of this earth. But he is not always sure that Steiner’s heady brew is the draft that refreshes. He is intrigued with its doctrine of transcendence and the immortality of the self, yet reels from its theosophical ingredients. As an intellectual, suspicious of the occult, he mocks himself for swallowing it; yet it seems to quench his spiritual thirst.

Though Citrine is a biographer who earns his livelihood from writing about the dead, he is more interested in profiting spiritually than monetarily from his relationship to them. To obtain their otherworldly knowledge, he creates connections with the deceased which they would not permit when alive or which he was not capable of sustaining during face to face confrontations. Like Henderson, who frantically plays the violin to make contact with his dead parents, Citrine reads Steiner’s texts aloud to the departed as a way of communicating with them. As for the dead he values most, he attempts, like the distraught Holocaust survivor, to ‘‘incorporate within himself an image of the dead, and then to think, feel, and act as he imagines they did or would. He feels impelled, in other words, to place himself in the position of the person . . . maximally wronged.’’ For Citrine that person is Humboldt. Citrine feels so loyal to the dead that he starts leading their lives and acquiring their characteristics. Thus, in the course of the novel Citrine becomes ‘‘absurd in the manner of Von Humboldt Fleisher.’’ During his lifetime Humboldt relished being the solitary, misunderstood poet, but he wanted money/and acclaim as well. Similarly, Citrine, caught up in his mysticism, seems unconcerned about worldly possessions, yet he becomes highly distraught over the wreckage of his Mercedes-Benz. Humboldt blamed America for exploiting his talent, massproducing his insights. Citrine, in turn, accuses Rinaldo Cantabile, Mafia thug and culture huckster, of capitalizing on his intellect: trying to book him as a high-brow act at Mr. Kelly’s and wheedling information from him for his wife’s Ph.D. thesis. Humboldt thought his friend Citrine was conspiring to ruin him just as Citrine believes his lawyer friend is profiting from his pain. Humboldt sapped his poetic energies chasing women just as Citrine’s womanizing drains his intellectual powers. Humboldt went to psychiatrists to entertain them with his lurid confessions: Citrine visits a psychiatrist to be entertained by his lurid analyses. Humboldt performed encyclopedic arias before culturedeaf audiences, and Citrine lectures on spiritualism to uninterested materialists. Like Humboldt, Citrine knows ‘‘everything [he] was supposed to know and nothing [he] really needed to know.’’ Clearly, Citrine has become Humboldt’s comic double, the not-so secret sharer of his folly. Internalizing the manic Humboldt within him, Citrine does not feel so bereft. He finds comfort in imitating his idiocy.

Though Citrine is addicted to the past and ill-equipped to live in the present, Humboldt’s gift rather than his presence enables Citrine to live in the here and now. Humboldt’s two film scenarios provide Citrine with enough money to take up the contemplative life in Europe. But a tidy sum for retirement from crass America is the least benefit he derives from Humboldt. The film scenarios characterize Citrine’s relationship to Humboldt and provide Citrine with Humboldt’s opinion of him. One scenario concerns a fastidious author who exploits human relationships for his art and is then successful, though unfulfilled. The other, already made into a popular movie, concerns an old man who in his youth resorted to cannibalism to survive a doomed North Pole expedition. When he is forced to confess his misdeeds, the townspeople forgive him. The old sinner is likened to Oedipus at Colonus, who in old age acquired ‘‘magical properties’’ and at the time of death had ‘‘the power to curse and bless.’’ Obviously, Citrine is meant to be that exploitative, unfulfilled author. He is also the old cannibal whom Humboldt with the passage of time can forgive, thereby enabling Citrine to bless rather than curse his lot. In a farewell letter, Humboldt tells Citrine that he is redeemable in this world and the next, even though he still labors ‘‘in the fields of ridicule.’’ But the message from Humboldt which most heartens Citrine is that ‘‘we are not natural beings but supernatural beings.’’ With such assurances, Citrine’s terror of non-being is diminished. He no longer strains against the grave as did the great death-defier, Harry Houdini, his fellow escape artist. Humboldt gives Citrine faith to believe that ‘‘so extraordinary a thing as a human soul’’ cannot be destroyed forever. Humboldt also absolves Citrine of his guilt so that he no longer has to berate himself for injuring or neglecting the dying. Citrine can now transform his destructive self-blame into a constructive concern for others. Or, as Robert Lifton has shown, negative survival guilt can lead to an ‘‘energizing or animating guilt’’ and ultimately to a redefinition of survival guilt as the ‘‘anxiety of responsibility.’’ Thus Citrine comes to realize that ‘‘he had responsibility not only to fulfill his own destiny, but to carry on for certain failed friends like Von Humboldt Fleisher.’’ ‘‘The dead and the living still formed one community.’’

Like Bellow’s other keepers of the covenant, Citrine meets his obligations. He tries to retrieve the body of his lover killed in a South American plane crash. He postpones a pleasure junket to help his brother cope with fears of death the day before his open-heart surgery. Citrine shares with Humboldt’s near-dead uncle the money from his legacy and moves him and an old family friend from an old age home to a comfortable apartment.More significantly, he disinters Humboldt and his mother from one of those crowded necropolitan developments and reburies them in ample graves of their own. The funeral service he performs is his formal way of seeking true forgiveness from Humboldt, since Jewish law prescribes that the only way to obtain genuine atonement is to visit the grave of the wronged person and there ask his pardon. The funeral service also functions, as all such ceremonies do, to ‘‘speed the dead on their ‘journey’ to another plane of existence’’ and to ‘‘‘incorporate the deceased into the world of the dead.’’’ Indeed for Citrine the ceremony confirms that the dead are really dead, that dust has returned to dust. But it also keeps the buried Humboldt alive for Citrine and holds out the hope for immortality. Although ‘‘Humboldt’s flowers were aborted in the bulb’’ during his lifetime, Citrine’s discovery of crocuses at his grave suggests that his spirit is flowering elsewhere.

The novel’s end is in keeping with the conventions of the pastoral elegy: ‘‘expression of grief at the loss of a friend,’’ ‘‘praise of the dead,’’ ‘‘a statement of belief in . . . immortality,’’ and the presence of flowers as symbols of renewal. The heart of the novel, Citrine’s copious reminiscences of Humboldt, is also a form of reparation and restoration. Like the Holocaust survivors who are compelled to act as witnesses for those slain, Citrine feels obliged to tell the ruined Humboldt’s tale, to redress personal and public wrongs against him. By recapturing his unique essence, Citrine is able to give Humboldt a kind of permanence. If it is true that art is a ‘‘recreation of a once loved and once whole, but now lost and ruined object,’’ then Bellow, through Citrine, is able to give Humboldt an eternal life in his work. The title of the novel, then, has a double meaning. It refers to Humboldt’s gift to Citrine, but it also represents Citrine’s gift to Humboldt. And if we rely on the psychoanalytic wisdom of aesthetician Hanna Segal, the book could represent Bellow’s gift to himself. ‘‘Writing a book,’’ claims Segal, can be for the author like ‘‘the work of mourning in that gradually the external objects are given up, they are re-instated in the ego, and recreated in the book.’’ Thus, Bellow is able to resurrect his dead friends through his literary revival of them. Since they are a part of his internal world and have become immortalized through him, he is encouraged to believe in his own immortality.

But Bellow does not make this meaning apparent. His animal ridens leads him rather into the more circuitous route of comedy. He has Citrine caught up in what has become a typical humorous situation—the frenetic evasion of death. Like Bellow’s other protagonists, Citrine desperately clings to childhood, frantically seeks refuge in sex, and anxiously theorizes about death to circumvent it. He travels great distances to hide from death or races and connives to meet up with it. He zealously shuns the dead Humboldt or communes exclusively with him. He feels unworthy of living, yet would not exchange places with the dead. He wants to escape the ennui of this life, yet dreads an eternity of boredom.

While Citrine plays hide-and-seek with death, he is immersed in the circus of this life. He accompanies Mafia freaks in pursuit of thrilling low life. He chases voluptuous younger women who abandon him on romantic merrygo- rounds. He loses out to cannibal divorce lawyers who strip him of his possessions. He harbors madman vendettas against his exploiters. Yet Citrine doesn’t end up as a side-show grotesque. Though he is another of Bellow’s ‘‘higherthought clowns,’’ he finally recognizes the folly of his escapist actions and wayward beliefs. Aware of how precious his limited time on earth is, he resolves to be an ‘‘entity,’’ an autonomous individual who listens to the voice of his own soul, and not an ‘‘identity,’’ a self which is socially determined. By choosing his authentic self over the presentation self, he intends to stop being a creature of ‘‘foolishness, intricacy, wasted subtlety.’’ He also refuses to allow a world which is hostile to or oblivious of poetry to shape his values or restrict his tastes. Thus, like Tolstoy, Citrine advocates that we put an end to the ‘‘false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live.’’ This emphasis upon life rather than death does not rule out a divine comedy, since Citrine vows to ‘‘listen in secret to the sound of the truth that God puts into us.’’

Source: Sarah Blacher Cohen, ‘‘Comedy and Guilt in Humboldt’s Gift,’’ in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring 1979, pp. 47–57.