C*nt-struck in Chicago: Humboldt’s Gift (1975) by Saul Bellow

A Book Review

The temperature was in the nineties, and on hot nights Chicagoans feel the city body and soul. The stockyards are gone, Chicago is no longer slaughter-city, but the old smells revive in the night heat. Miles of railroad siding along the streets once were filled with red cattle cars, the animals waiting to enter the yards lowing and reeking. The old stink still haunts the place. It returns at times, suspiring from the vacated soil, to remind us all that Chicago had once led the world in butcher-technology and that billions of animals had died here. And that night the windows were open wide and the familiar depressing multilayered stink of meat, tallow, blood-meal, pulverized bones, hides, soap, smoked slabs, and burnt hair came back. Old Chicago breathed again through leaves and screens. I heard fire trucks and the gulp and whoop of ambulances, bowel-deep and hysterical. (114-115)

I apologize for the vulgarity; the title of this review popped into my head like an intrusive thought and refused to leave a couple of weeks ago, before I even finished the book. The c-word has a unique power to shock American English speakers. I think our Puritan prudishness creates a certain squeamishness with respect to female genitalia that makes the word taboo even amongst avid users of every other four-letter word. Humboldt’s Gift (1975) deployed this word—and its variations— more frequently than any novel I can recall reading, aside from maybe the Scottish Trainspotting. The adjective “cunt-struck” appears at least three times. It’s a fantastic word that captures the chthonic power of womanhood over a helpless man—much more evocative than the equivalent (and more common) “pussy-whipped.” And it’s perfect for the narrator of this story.

Cunt-struck in Chicago: just like Sleepless in Seattle, but with 1000% more Baudelaire references! Humboldt’s Gift is as close as Saul Bellow gets to writing a rom com. It’s a funny book about death. It’s a horny book about boredom. It’s a boring book about Chicago. It’s a Chicago book about money. 

Our narrator, successful playwright and biographer Charlie Citrine, Pulitzer-winner, chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, entrant in Who’s Who, is in the midst of a very messy, very expensive divorce. Now (in the mid-1970s) in his mid-fifties, Charlie has moved back to his native Chicago and spends his time playing racquetball with Outfit mob bosses on Division Street, sinking money into a failed journal (called The Ark) that will never publish, arranging notes for a “major work” on the nature of boredom, and trying to please a buxom, tempestuous, 29-year-old single mother named Renata who is constantly threatening to leave him for a mortician ex-lover. Most of all, he thinks and reads. 

Citrine is a big thinker and great talker. He is learned, erudite, and incomprehensible to most of the people in his life. His musings are densely referential, jumping seamlessly from Plato to Goethe to Marx to Augustine. Most of all, Citrine is obsessed with Rudolph Steiner, a 19th century pseudoscientific mystic who peddled an esoteric spiritual movement called anthroposophy. He is preoccupied with the idea of spiritual slumber, sloth, and boredom. He’s obsessed with the grave; his ‘significant dead’ haunt the pages. His form of a midlife crisis is to imagine that he is awakening from a decades-long spiritual and intellectual slumber to generate a major new work on boredom. At the same time, he enjoys slumming with his old West Side Chicago school chums who are by turns delighted, baffled, and annoyed with his academic techno-babble.

But Citrine isn’t the best talker of the book. That would be the eponymous Von Humboldt Fleisher, poet, one of Citrine’s ‘significant dead.’ Humboldt was a poet of some prominence in the Greenwich Village literary scene of the 1930s and 40s, who later succumbed to madness, jealousy, and alcoholism, dying alone in the garbage room of a cheap motel where he read Yeats and Hegel. His body went unclaimed for three days. Humboldt is modeled on the American poet Delmore Schwartz, with whom Saul Bellow was acquainted as a young writer in Greenwich Village in the 1930s.

But in his prime, Humboldt was “the Mozart of conversation,” “a wonderful talker, a hectic nonstop monologuist and improvisator, a champion detractor.” He entranced young Citrine when he sought out Humboldt in New York City as a recent college grad from the Midwest. Humboldt was also, in anachronistic terms, a bipolar, narcissistic abuser. He terrorized his wife Kathleen, bullied Citrine, and sexually attacked other women. He indulged paranoid fantasies about Kathleen’s supposed indiscretions, beating her up at parties and mentally torturing her. He stole a significant sum of money from Citrine, resentful when his protege was met with success as his own star waned. 

The gift of the title is teased at the very start of the book. When the story opens, Humboldt has been dead for six years. Charlie is being wrung dry by his wife’s divorce attorneys and his gold-digging floozy, Renata. Amid this, Charlie learns that Humboldt has left something to him in his will. For most of the book, the gift is a MacGuffin, barely hinted at as we are treated instead to hundreds of pages of Citrine’s labyrinthine internal monologue, meditations on the past, infuriating divorce proceedings, transparent shakedowns from his unfaithful mistress, and increasingly absurd run-ins with a low-level Italian gangster. 

It’s a funny book, almost slapstick at times, but Charlie’s endless ability to abstract and theorize can turn action-packed sequences into a meandering lecture. This, too, becomes part of the joke. Boredom as subject; boredom as punchline. As much as Rudolph Steiner’s latter-day adherents might like to think otherwise, my bet is that Bellow was not a believer in the mysticism of anthroposophy. Instead, he was using the New Age-y ideology to make Charlie into even more of a fool. Even his ‘serious’ thoughts were rooted in nonsense.

When he’s not thinking about anthroposophy, Citrine is pondering boredom:

What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death. […] 

The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought. As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realization, of the realization of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense. The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer—has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of non existence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful! (201-202)

It’s true that we are a society terrified of boredom. Our every moment is engineered to be maximally diverting; we carry distraction machines in our pockets at all times. The leap from boredom to Hitler to death is characteristic of Citrine’s chaotic trains of thought, a connection that feels both delightful and unconvincing— it’s a pleasure to watch his mind dance from subject to subject, but I found myself raising an amused eyebrow at many of his conclusions.

On the sentence level, Humboldt’s Gift is magnificent. I lost track of how many times I stopped to read a passage aloud to my husband, awed by the mastery of the craft. There are extended paeans to the city of Chicago, like the one I quote at the start of this review; a delight to anyone who knows the city, Bellow captures the specificity of each neighborhood and brings it to gasping, imperfect life. His character studies are scathing, unsparing, and somehow tender. Charlie’s remembrances of Demmie, an early love and one of his ‘significant dead,’ are deeply human and moving:

She was sometimes a van der Weyden beauty, sometimes Mortimer Snerd, sometimes a Ziegfeld girl. The slight silken scrape of her knock-knees when she walked quickly was, I repeat, highly prized by me. I thought that if I were a locust such a sound would send me soaring over mountain ranges. When Demmie’s face with the fine upturned nose was covered with pancake makeup her big eyes, all the more mobile and clear because she had laid on so much dust, revealed two things: one was that she had a true heart and the other that she was a dynamic sufferer. More than once I rushed into Barrow Street to flag down a cab and take Demmie to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s. (153)

He’s also great with a quip, witty and melancholic at the same time:

“She may think she’s offering me the blessings of an American marriage. Real Americans are supposed to suffer with their wives, and wives with husbands. Like Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. It’s the classic US grief, and a child of immigrants like me ought to be grateful. For a Jew it’s a step up.” (43)

Or:

Whom women will embrace is one of the unfathomable mysteries. But of course the race has to keep going. (206)

The eroticism of the book is… unsettling. Charlie Citrine’s dependence on women and sex is unseemly, undignified. This is not the fun, sexy kind of writing about sex. Citrine spends a lot of time thinking about how women’s vaginas smell. He remarks an uncomfortable number of times about “the deep female odor,” “the salt female odor,” and “personal emanations.” These moments come during otherwise nonsexual interactions. It feels confessional, embarrassing, invasive, pathetic, and true.

Citrine is not alone in his lechery. He surrounds himself with a depraved cast of characters who join the vulgar with the lofty, like his old friend Szathmar, who is Renata’s divorce lawyer:

And we two boyhood pals were going to continue lustful to the end, if he had his way. He made this decorous. He did it all with philosophy, poetry, ideology. He quoted, he played records, and he theorized about women. He tried to keep up with the rapidly changing erotic slang of successive generations. So were we to end our lives as cunt-struck doddering wooers left over from a Goldoni farce? Or like Balzac’s Baron Hulot d’Ervy whose wife on her deathbed hears the old man propositioning the maid? (204-205)

Did I like this book? I struggle to answer the question. It took me six months to finish reading it. Mostly, I chipped away at it a handful of pages at a time before bed. There are some beautiful passages and breathtaking insights. But they’re separated by these long passages about goddamn Rudolph Steiner and goddamn anthroposophy. If I’m being honest, I zoned out during some of Citrine’s lengthier digressions. Is it just that I’m not smart enough or well-read enough to follow his monologues? That’s a distinct possibility.

I watched this 1975 interview with Saul Bellow about Humboldt’s Gift, and I found myself captivated by his eyes. They danced, they sparkled, they laughed. Those are Nobel-worthy eyes. They seemed more alive than any pair I’d ever seen. They are Charlie Citrine’s eyes, but they see even more of himself and his world than Charlie’s could ever. Regardless of how enjoyable any given page was to read, I’m glad that I read Humboldt’s Gift. It’s a gift just to feel what it’s like to see through eyes like that.

---

Humboldt’s Gift (1975) by Saul Bellow: 6.9/10 (nice)