As a young man I read a lot of the big American, male, authors of the mid-twentieth century, many of them named John: Updike, Cheever, Barth, Gardner, Irving. (Add in Dos Passos and Steinbeck and you’d have a pretty good college survey.) Among the non-Johns of that category I enjoyed the early novels of Philip Roth. But when I tried reading Saul Bellow I never got beyond the first pages of Henderson the Rain King. I figured the problem was me not him, but with so much else to read, I let it go. Then, a year ago, as I was finishing my last few weeks at my church job before retirement, I came across a copy of Henderson the Rain King in the free book bin at the coffee house near the church. Knowing Bellow’s reputation, attested by his numerous awards including the Nobel prize, and enjoying the serendipity of a free copy, I took another crack at it.

This time, older, more in sympathy with Bellow’s middle-aged protagonists, and more patient, having just retired, I enjoyed the novel very much while still noticing its quirks. So I determined to dig more deeply into Bellow’s work reading first The Adventures of Augie March, then Herzog, both of which I admired, again with reservations, and now this novel from 1975 borrowed from the library, the novel which won Bellow his Pulitzer Prize and set him up to win the Nobel the following year.

Humboldt’s Gift shares the endlessly unfolding and overflowing inventiveness of Augie March. Like that novel it’s invigorating at the start but exhausting by the end. New incidents continuously pile on, moving forward but also aimlessly eddying back into itself. Eventually, Augie March peters out into two very long, very strange, and to my mind very unnecessary closing stories (an adventure in Mexico, a shipwreck in the Atlantic). Humboldt’s Gift shares, though, thankfully, the constraints that Bellow similarly applied to Herzog, constraints that bind the present action principally to just a few days and a few locales. In Humboldt’s Gift those are the days leading up to Christmas (probably 1972) and then stretching into the first months of the following year and nearly entirely to Chicago, with only brief excursions to New York, Texas, and finally Madrid (not including extended recollections from the past that take place in New Jersey). So there is some helpful container for Bellow’s tendency to sprawl (Humboldt’s Gift runs just short of five hundred pages) and if the novel does eventually sag about three quarters of the way in, the plot does have a clear arc with a defined problem and a clear end point.

The story belongs to Charles Citrine, an intellectual. He writes essays for magazines, published a couple of biographies, and several years before the action of the novel he earned his popular reputation by writing a play that was a hit on Broadway and then became a popular movie. As a young man, Citrine admired a slightly older man, Von Humboldt Fleischer, who had recently published a volume of poetry which seemed to reclaim a literary stake for American arts. Citrine arranges to visit Humboldt and the two men develop a lifelong friendship with Humboldt in a mentor role. But as Citrine’s career advances, Humboldt’s fades. He succumbs to mental illness, insomnia, alcoholism. He ends up confined for a time to Bellevue, and eventually dies alone and in poverty in a New York hotel. Citrine carries a lasting guilt that close to the end he actually caught a glimpse of Humboldt in New York, briefly, and Citrine looked away.

Much of that story is told as the introduction to the novel, which eventually arrives at the present day with a chapter that begins “And now the present” (p. 34). (The novel is in chapters, but unnumbered, and separated on the page only by three asterisks and some blank space.) Present day Citrine lives in Chicago. He hasn’t been writing much lately and his money is going fast. He and his wife, Denise, are divorcing and she and her lawyers are eager to wring every cent they can from him. Citrine has a sexy girlfriend he adores, Renata, who hopes to be the next Mrs. Citrine, but as Citrine delays marriage she also has an affair with a Mr. Flonzaley who owns a mortuary.

Death is a constant concern for Citrine. He’s 60 so he feels his own mortality closing in. He feels that the question of death is really the essential question, for philosophy, for art. He’s recently become attracted to the anthroposophical writings of Rudolf Steiner. A lot of the book has Citrine musing on ideas of reincarnation and the soul’s journey, and the “material body” vs. the “ether body” and so on. Of course Humboldt’s death hovers over Citrine. Citrine’s earlier love, before he met Denise, died in a plane crash. The death theme appears again late in the novel when Citrine’s older brother, Julius, undergoes open heart surgery.

The day before the “present” day of the beginning of the novel, Citrine had joined a poker game arranged by an old Chicago friend. During the game he’d gotten drunk and talked a lot about his friendship with Humboldt and his literary ideas, and he’d lost a small amount of money to a minor gangster and his friend who were cheating. Because everyone else at the game saw the cheating, the friend who hosted the game tells Citrine not to pay the gangster the gambling debt. But the gangster, named Cantabile, doesn’t let him off, instead he hounds him, destroys Citrine’s Mercedes with a baseball bat, and forces Citrine into some of his schemes. Cantabile’s wife, improbably, is writing a PhD dissertation on Humboldt and Cantabile wants Citrine to allow himself to be interviewed by her for research.

This opening section of the novel follows Citrine through several days in Chicago, at the divorce court, at Citrine’s club, Cantabile driving Citrine around town, mixed in with reminiscences of earlier life in New York and New Jersey with Humboldt and Humboldt’s long-suffering wife Kathleen, and numerous asides about literature and spirituality. There is one long episode that becomes important later when Humboldt gets Citrine a temporary position at Princeton and then Humboldt persuades Citrine to advocate for Princeton to create an endowed chair for Humboldt, which Citrine does, but which quickly falls through.

All during these few days in Chicago, Citrine is planning to travel to Europe with his girlfriend Renata who is on a mission to find the man in Italy who may be her biological father. When they finally leave for the trip, they stop first in New York for a few days staying at the Plaza. Renata goes to a showing of Deep Throat, without Citrine, which dates the novel to 1972. In New York, Citrine learns that his brother in Texas is soon to have open-heart surgery. Here also, Citrine learns from the executor of Humboldt’s estate, that there is a sealed envelope with Citrine’s name on it among the papers that Humboldt’s uncle gathered up from the hotel room where Humboldt was staying when he died. Citrine takes the train out to the old folks home in Coney Island where Humboldt’s uncle is living and retrieves the papers.

Now, finally, page 343, we learn the gift named in the title. Humboldt, in a period of sanity before his death, wrote Citrine a long letter outlining a movie scenario, by Humboldt, which Humboldt thinks Citrine can develop into a money-making movie, the way Citrine had done with the earlier movie based on his play. Bellow includes a several page outline of the story. It’s about a married man, an author who takes a fantastic, exotic, romantic, month-long trip with his mistress. When he returns, he writes up the experience as a novel. He shows the novel to his publisher; it’s beautiful, but he can’t publish the novel because it would destroy his wife and their marriage. The publisher then suggests a scheme for the author to take the same trip a second time, this time with his wife, reproduce every experience, with the publisher picking up the tab based on future profits, then claim the book is about the trip he made with his wife. The author retakes the trip. Now it’s a disaster, a farce. When they return he publishes the novel but his wife sees through the ruse, and his mistress is furious that he would sully their perfect experience by doing it twice. I was reminded of the scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall where he tries to recreate a charming experience he previously had with Diane Keaton with a new girl who is entirely uncharmed. I was also reminded reading this of Borges’ work where he often found it easier to write about an imaginary creative work as though it existed rather than actually writing the thing itself.

Citrine doesn’t think there’s much possibility in the movie scenario, and neither does Renata. She goes on to Italy to find her father while Citrine visits his brother in Texas, the two of them intending to meet in Madrid in a few days where Citrine has work to do on a potential writing project. When Citrine gets to Madrid, Renata hasn’t arrived. She stays in Italy where it turns out she meets up with her other boyfriend, the mortuary owner Flonzaley. They get married. Meanwhile, Renata’s mother shows up in Madrid with Renata’s young son by her previous husband and the grandmother disappears leaving Citrine with the kid. The writing project never comes through so Citrine moves from the Ritz to a cheap pensione. This is where the novel seriously dragged for me. Come on with it, I thought, what about the movie idea?

Next, Cantabile shows up with the news that a movie has been released, to great success, that appears to be made on an idea that Citrine and Humboldt had come up with together back during their days at Princeton: not the idea in Humboldt’s letters but an idea which Citrine had babbled about during that poker game back in Chicago. (Bellow also gives us a description of that story having to do with an arctic explorer and a survivor who resorted to canabilism, which is revealed to his neighbors many years later when a film-making team tracks him down to do a documentary on the expedition.) Humboldt had tried to sell the idea back in the day, to no success, but apparently one of the folks he had showed the idea to had stolen it and sold it. Fortunately Humboldt, wisely for once, had proven ownership by mailing himself a copy of the idea in a sealed envelope with a postmark, a sealed envelope that is now in the papers Citrine has with him. Citrine is able to get a payment from the movie producers solving his money problems. He gives a commission to Cantabile. And he gives half (Humboldt’s share) to Humboldt’s uncle. As a bonus, on the proven success of the current movie, he’s able to sell the other movie idea, Humboldt’s gift.

Finally, to close the novel. Citrine comes back to New York and with Humboldt’s uncle they arrange to move Humboldt’s body from the pauper’s grave where it had been to a respectable spot. The final scene has them lowering the casket into the grave, and then as winter turns to spring (it’s now April) Citrine notices a crocus coming up through the snow.

The novel is an odd mix of serious philosophy and fanciful spiritualism. Citrine pursues hefty intellectual work but makes his fortune with popular entertainment. There are crass bits, mostly involving the Cantabile character, and other parts like the recurring meditations on mortality that ask to be taken seriously. It makes for a frustrating tone. The novel is too long and too meandering, as is Augie March. And like Augie March, the character of Citrine is frustratingly passive, letting the incidents of the novel land on him rather than making things happen for himself. I grew impatient with his obsession with Renata even after she abuses him. I wanted Citrine to do something to extricate himself from Cantabile. I wanted him to make some finality of the divorce proceedings. Instead he moons about the past, does no actual writing at any time in the novel, reads spirituality pamphlets and meditates. Ho hum.

There’s much of Bellow himself in this novel and echoes of his other novels. The Chicago setting is familiar. An ambitious older brother: he’s called Simon in Augie March, Julius here). There’s the same marriage and divorce and girlfriend problems. The literary main character. I’m told that the Humboldt character is based on Bellow’s real-life relationship with Delmore Schwartz. Like Humboldt, Schwartz had an early, promising success (the short story and poetry collection titled In Dreams Begin Responsibilities) and then failed to fulfill that promise. But the similarities between Humboldt and Schwartz are only in incidentals: holding court at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, dying alone in a New York hotel, so it isn’t necessary to know anything about Delmore Schwartz in order to understand Von Humboldt Fleisher.

I started the novel a couple of weeks ago, at home. I read much of it on the plane ride to and from New York where Jim and I spent last week. I read the last ninety pages last night, back at home again. I’ll probably read more of Bellow at some point. I might read Delmore Schwartz, too.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature. To see what else is on my reading list click here.