This week’s leisure time was spent in hot pursuit of the last page of Saul Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize winning Humboldt’s Gift.

Why bother mentioning the prize?  Not because I care much for it- the only literary award I’m interested in is the Caldecott medal, but because the eponymous character says this on the third page:

The Pulitzer is for the birds- for the pullets.  It’s just a dummy newspaper publicity award given by crooks and illiterates.  You become a walking Pulitzer ad, so even when you croak the first words of the obituary are ‘Pulitzer Prizewinner passes.’

As it happens, Bellow also got the Nobel, which generally precedes the Pulitzer in the obits.

I’ve read a handful of Bellow‘s books, and each one has been better than the last.  That’s probably just because I’ve inadvertently read them in chronological order, and Bellow’s talent grew as he aged.  That said, I’ve never read The Adventures of Augie March, and it’s one of his earlier works.  Humboldt’s Gift is narrated by wealthy, famous writer Charlie Citrine.  The main plot of the novel occupies just a few months in Citrin’es life, however much of the plot has Charlie  reminiscing on his life and his relationship with Von Humboldt Fleisher, a “poet, thinker, problem drinker, pill-taker, man of genius, manic depressive, intricate schemer, success story [who] once wrote poems of great wit and beauty but what had he done lately?”  Humboldt’s literary star is rising when Citrine first meets him, they become great friends, but as Humboldt’s success wanes while Citrine’s waxes, eventually eclipsing Humboldt’s until he’s become a paranoid, resentful, crazy neutron star of a man.  (How’s that for a mixed-astronomical metaphor?  Pretty terrible, but I’m keeping it.)

I’d been taught to first think of a book’s title when you’re organizing your ideas, and I spent most of my reading time wonder what the deal with the gift would be.  It turns out, there is a real, physical gift, which I won’t mention, though I suspect the real physical gift ain’t all that important.  The book belongs to a type I’ve come to really enjoy: a brilliant intellectual writer telling the story of  another brilliant, intellectual writer.  Bolaño’s 2666 and The Savage Detectives are great examples(1). It give the author a chance to really just pile on the literary tricks illusions allusions without seeming pretentious or like he’s trying to impress you.   Maybe it is pretentious, and maybe they are trying to impress you, but they have an excuse: “This is what a brilliant intellectual writer is like; this is how his mind works.”  So it’s a lot of fun to read, though as is my habit, I had to read with wikipedia opened up on my phone to make sure I was getting everything.  That might seem tedious and annoying to a lot of people, but I get a kick out of it, and when I’m feeling too lazy to understand exactly what’s going on, I can still keep going without too much worry.

Most of the narrative takes place in Chicago, and I get a kick out of that.  I suppose those that live in New York don’t care so much about reading books that take place in real, New York places (since so many books do), but when there’s a scene in front of the Art Institute, I like knowing exactly where they’re standing when he’s in front of the lions.  People work in buildings where some of my friends work, they’re riding the same trains I ride, and so forth.  The best example of this occurred when Citrine is taking a cab from downtown to Division St, then turns north on Kedzie and drives for 15 minutes or so.  After driving 10 minutes on Kedzie,  you’re about three blocks from my house. Obviously nobody cares, but it’s funny.  While in the cab ride he comments on how the houses are dilapidated and nothing like they used to be, and I can understand.  (Kedzie is full of old, beautiful homes fallen into disrepair.  I can imagine it was a lot worse in the 70s.)  Another character mistakenly calls the poet “Humboldt Park” rather than his real name.

Not only do the place names hit home, but the way he and others talk about Chicago feels right.  The comedian John Hodgman jokes about how Chicago doesn’t really exist, and the people in the story are always wondering why Citrine, the brilliant mind that he is, lives in Chicago rather than New York or London or Rome.  There’s also the constant workings of the Chicago above-ground underground(2)- how everything is corrupt and run by the Mafia.  Our governor having just been impeached yesterday, it’s a shame to see that so little has changed in forty years.  Another way this was personal is that Citrine is a racquetballer(3).  Awesome.

A recurring element is the way people try to trap each other: in romance, in marriage, after marriage, in business, in philosophy, in graft.  Everyone’s trying to put each other in their pockets and be in control.   Every relationship Citrine has feels claustrophobic- I kept waiting for him to either find a way out of suffocate inside someone else’s plans.  Not until the opening of Humboldt’s gift is Citrine able to free himself, and even then the book ends before we can see if ever makes it out.

So that’s it for that.  Some favorite quotations:

On Chicago:

If this is literally all what life is, then Renata’s little rhyme about Chicago is right on the head: “Without O’Hare, it’s sheet despair.”  And all O’Hare can do is change the scene for you and take you from dismal to dismal, from boredom to boredom.

On Deep Throat, the movie:

When it’s done it’s fun, but when it’s seen it’s unclean.

On internet memes:

I recalled this so fully that I saw the cats, one with a Hitler mustache, at the window.

On Obamamania:

At this time [Humboldt] was sold on Adlai Stevenson.  He thought that if Adlai cold beat Ike in the November election, Culture would come into its own in Washington.  “Now that America is a world power, philistinism is finished.  Finished and politically dangerous,” he said.  “If Stevenson is in, literature is in- we’re in, Charlie.”

On The Watchmen:

A man like Humboldt, inspired, shrewd, nutty, was brimming over with the discovery that the human enterprise, so grand and infinitely varied, had now to be managed by exceptional persons.  He was an exceptional person, therefore he was an eligible candidate for power.

On lawyers,(Obama’s Lincolnmania:

“I now have two attorneys there and that’s double trouble.” [-Citrine]

“You haven’t much confidence in lawyers.” [woman]

“Well, Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer and I always venerated him.  But he’s nothing now but a name they put on license plates in the state of Illinois.”

1- There’s a handful more similarities between 2666 and H’sG: On a straightforward level, they feature eccentric Prussian writers with funny names (Benno von Archimboldi/Von Humboldt Fleisher) who are adored by other great thinkers (the critics/Citrine), and who, by the end of the novel, are made famous (or made famous again, in the case of VHf) through the work of their followers.  Both novels spend great deal of pages contemplating death (The Part About the Murders / Citrine’s monologues).
2- It strikes me that Chicago has a habit of putting things above ground that are generally supposed to be underground.  Examples: trains, pools, political corruption.

3- “I said to myself, ‘Tranquility, tranquility, tranquility.’  As on the racquet-ball court I said, ‘Dance, Dance, Dance!'”