Humboldt's Gift

by Saul Bellow

With his uncanny wit and perception, Saul Bellow tells the story of Charlie Citrine, a young man whose life is reaching a critical moment. Over several years, Charlie’s almost obsessive love of literature has led him into a deep friendship with the renowned poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, and when Humboldt dies, the young man’s life rapidly begins to unravel. A stalling career and an ugly divorce feed Charlie’s instability, and he engages in dubious friendships and an unwise liaison with the wrong woman. Amidst the chaos of a life in shambles, Charlie emerges by virtue of a legacy left by his departed companion, a legacy that offers him a glimpse of a new trajectory.  

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literature, Novels, American, Literary Fiction, Nobel Prize

494 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Novels of Saul Bellow, Canadian-American writer, include Dangling Man in 1944 and Humboldt's Gift in 1975 and often concern an alienated individual within an indifferent society; he won the Nobel Prize of 1976 for literature.

People widely regard one most important Saul Bellow of the 20th century. Known for his rich prose, intellectual depth, and incisive character studies, Bellow explored themes of identity and the complexities of modern life with a distinct voice that fused philosophical insight and streetwise humor. Herzog , The Adventures of Augie March , and Mister Sammler’s Planet , his major works, earned critical acclaim and a lasting legacy.

Born in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Saul Bellow at a young age moved with his family to Chicago, a city that shaped much worldview and a frequent backdrop in his fiction. He studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and later Northwestern, and his intellectual interests deeply informed him. Bellow briefly pursued graduate studies in anthropology, quickly turned, and first published.

Breakthrough of Saul Bellow came with The Adventures of Augie March , a sprawling, exuberance that in 1953 marked the national book award and a new direction in fiction. With energetic language and episodic structure, it introduced readers to a new kind of unapologetically intellectual yet deeply grounded hero in the realities of urban life. Over the following decades, Bellow produced a series of acclaimed that further cemented his reputation. In Herzog , considered his masterpiece in 1964, a psychological portrait of inner turmoil of a troubled academic unfolds through a series of unsent letters, while a semi-autobiographical reflection on art and fame gained the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1976, people awarded human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture of Saul Bellow. He only thrice gained the national book award for fiction and also received the medal of arts and the lifetime achievement of the library of Congress.

Beyond fiction, Saul Bellow, a passionate essayist, taught. He held academic positions at institutions, such as the University of Minnesota, Princeton, and Boston University, and people knew his sharp intellect and lively classroom presence. Despite his stature, Bellow cared about ordinary people and infused his work with humor, moral reflection, and a deep appreciation of contradictions of life.

People can see influence of Saul Bellow in the work of countless followers. His uniquely and universally resonant voice ably combined the comic, the profound, the intellectual, and the visceral. He continued into his later years to publish his final Ravelstein in 2000.

People continue to read work of Saul Bellow and to celebrate its wisdom, vitality, and fearless examination of humanity in a chaotic world.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Wrestling match between Vita Contemplativa and Vita Activa"

Let’s be honest! Humboldt’s Gift is exhausting. It is a masterpiece, a brilliant study of a man fighting the world and his inner demons by withdrawing from active participation, but it leaves the reader frequently frustrated with the narrator, Charles Citrine, and his non-response to the problems he causes by contemplating life rather than living it actively. Using a similar idea to the one explored in Dangling Man, it goes further, showing a person who is not forced to passivity due to external circumstances, but one who chooses to be passive because he rejects the mechanisms of modern life.

The dramatic conflict is inherent in the choice of character and setting: a man who loves poetry and aesthetic life spends his time in Chicago. That, he recognises himself, is a contradiction, an oxymoron. But he does not break free from the pattern. He rather accepts it as the raw material he has to work with:

"Such information about corruption, if you had grown up in Chicago, was easy to accept. It even satisfied a certain need. It harmonized with one's Chicago view of society."

Crookedness is an art form, invented in America, the narrator reflects, watching his fellow citizens engage in an epic fight to win the fame and fortune they think they are entitled to. All means are justified, even celebrated:

"They listened with joy as he told his tale of unhappiness and persecution. He spilled dirt, spread scandal, and uttered powerful metaphors. What a combination! Fame gossip delusion filth and poetic invention.
Even then shrewd Humboldt knew what he was worth in professional New York."

Bellow indeed delivers a brilliant study of grown-up men playing gangsters and hurt poets, putting on a very loud and visible show, like three-year-olds howling and showing off their scraped knees. But the narrator refuses to play the game. He gets bored, even thinks of writing a study on the impact of boredom on world history:

"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."

This boredom that he can’t shake off in the presence of his overactive environment makes him an easy target for more energetic people, celebrating the spirit of money that is a symbol for modern-day America. His ex-wife plays a court game with him that makes "Jarndyce and Jarndyce" in Bleak House look harmless. Perpetuation of the case is her ultimate goal, and Citrine can’t do anything to stop her. His girlfriend wants to marry him, and plays a seduction game, while using up his last financial resources and dumping him when he has lost his money. Nothing he can do but mourn. Passively taking the blow, he hides in a pension to meditate and search for contact with the spiritual world, which is the only one he can control and shape according to his aesthetic needs.

His relationship to his brother is equally based on the contrast between active and contemplative interpretation of the world. He is the thinker, the romantic who cherishes family relations without financial or dynastic ideas, whereas his brother is the incorporation of the successful American business man, always needing an immediate purpose, and an adversary to fight in order to release his energies:

"This visit of mine, with its intimations of final parting, bothered him. He acknowledged that I had done right to come but he loathed me for it, too. I could see it his way. Why did I come flapping around him with my love, like a death-pest? There was no way for me to win, because if I hadn't come here he'd have held it against me. He needed to be wronged. He luxuriated in anger, and he kept accounts."

Not even his poet friend Humboldt responds to Charles Citrine’s need for passive, intellectual friendship. After an act of impulsive brotherhood, including a blank cheque exchange, Humboldt cashes in thousands of dollars from Citrine, whereas he himself puts Humboldt’s cheque in a drawer, from where it disappears at some point. He does nothing about it.

Money flows out of his hands incessantly, and he is not capable to negotiate for himself without the support from his overactive part-time friends, thus demonstrating the flaw in his worldview. The most colourful character in this respect is Rinaldo Cantabile, a typical gangster with a (crooked) heart, who strongly reminded me of Mack and the boys in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, even though Cantabile plays a bigger game. In his annoying habit of disturbing Citrine’s contemplations, he is similar to Mack’s insistence on making life better for Doc, thus getting him from bad to worse instead:

"You?" I said.
"Yes", said Rinaldo Cantabile, "[...] You thought I was in jail."
"Thought, and wished. And hoped. How did you track me here, and what do you want?"
"You're sore at me. Okay, I admit that was a bad scene. But I am here to make up for it."
"Was that the purpose in coming here? What you can do for me is go away. I'd like that best."

What Citrine really wants for himself is a world immersed in literature and poetry. His reaction to everyday annoyances is always accompanied by a comparison to his favourite authors. Frustrated with being stuck with Cantabile in traffic, he transforms the experience into an adaptation of T.S.Eliot:

"The Thunderbird, puffing fumes, was beginning to block traffic. Because I had been immersed for much of the day in Humboldt's life, and because Humboldt had in turn been immersed in T.S. Eliot, I thought as he might have done of the violet hour when the human engine waits like a taxi throbbing, waiting. But I cut this out. The moment required my full presence."

He has the same impulse when his girlfriend leaves him, but realises that it is of no use to explode in metaphorical language to express and soothe his hurt feelings:

"What good would it do me to tell Renata off? Fierce and exquisite speeches, perfect in logic, mature in judgment, deep in wise rage, heavenly in poetry, were all right for Shakespeare but they wouldn't do a damn bit of good for me. The desire for emission still existed but the reception was lacking for my passionate speech."

The contemplative life Citrine wishes to lead is not compatible with the reality he faces, and in the end, he needs the help of his friend Humboldt, from beyond the grave, to get out of the massive trouble his detachment from the world has brought. Humboldt, being able to merge the active and contemplative life into a complete experience, messy but rich, takes the active steps required to turn artistic ideas and sketches into real successes. In the end, it gives Citrine the opportunity to clear up his business before retiring to the hermitage of his preference.

What is the message of the novel? The frustration of a creative man in an environment of business and over-activity? The search for truth underneath the surface of celebrated crime and crookedness? Or the fundamental right to leave the circus if you find it boring in its showy repetitiveness?

I changed my mind several times over the course of the slow reading. I am not sure I have a definite answer yet. I will be retreating to my cave to think.

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to rave a little here. Do forgive me in advance. This is my second reading of this masterpiece. It was shortly after publication of Humboldt's Gift that Bellow won the Nobel Prize. That in itself usually doesn't mean much, mostly the literature awards are given out for political reasons these days, but I think in the case of Bellow Stockholm got it right. From the start the storytelling is brilliant and it never flags. Charlie Citrine, a young man filled with a love of literature, writes to his hero poet Von Humboldt Fleisher from his home in Appleton, Wisconsin, and is invited to visit the great man in Greenwich Village. Citrine comes to New York just as Humboldt is hitting his sole crest of popularity because of his book of ballads. Humboldt, however, soon loses it all; drinking and medicating himself in a manner that can only be called suicidal. No wonder he's perpetually blocked now. In the meantime, Charlie Citrine, his protege, writes a hit Broadway play which is made into a hit Hollywood movie. Citrine is swimming in money. And Citrine's success can only be viewed by Humboldt in his madness as a betrayal. Humboldt comes to loathe Citrine whom he accuses of using his [Humboldt's] life as the basis for the main character of his play Von Trenck. When Citrine wins the Chevalier de Légion d'honneur from the French government, Humboldt hits the ceiling. "Shoveleer!," he writes, "Your name is lesion."

Charlie Citrine is one of the most fascinating characters to emerge from late 20th century American literature. What I admire so much about this book is its unflagging narrative thrust. Line by line it satisfies the reader on an almost physical level. The humor is laugh out loud. The erudition makes me giddy. Just how is it possible for Bellow to incorporate so much knowledge about literature into the book and not end up with some deadly boring piece of tripe? It's miraculous. Citrine is always talking about his reading (Rudolf Steiner, Santayana, Gide, Aristotle, and so on) which is deftly incorporated so as to reflect upon his own tribulations and those of the other characters. This is quite a rogue's gallery, too, consisting of both the high and the low: mobsters; crooked judges; writers; literary chislers, harridan exes; lawyers; Rubenesque golddiggers, old Russian bath house guys; blue collar guys; virtually all ethnicities and predilections as only a great American city like Chicago can produce. I've read all of Bellow's novels and this I think is his best one. I even prefer it to The Adventures of Augie March, which is saying something. This is also a great novel for those who want to know how to write a great novel. With this text in hand and one's own considerable talent on tap, why, you can't miss. It's all right here in black and white. Read it, please, and let me know what you think.

[Valeriu Gherghel · Rating 4 out of 5]

În aprilie 2018, abia întors din Atena, romanul lui Saul Bellow mi-a plăcut mai mult. Să fie oare adevărat că valorile suferă o mutație, cum credea E. Lovinescu? Mă îndoiesc. Mutația e în cititor...

Ca de obicei (a se vedea și Ravelstein), naratorul lui Bellow, Charlie Citrine (de fapt, un alter ego al autorului) reconstituie viața unui personaj fascinant și abject, poetul Von Humboldt Fleischer, dar, pe măsură ce povestește, hagiografia se transformă într-un pamflet hidos: „Ca poet sau gînditor nu a lăsat o operă chiar atît de impresionantă”. Ce-i drept, nici Von Humboldt nu-i rămîne dator.

În scrisoarea testamentară, care cuprinde ipoteticul lui dar (un dubios scenariu de film), Von Humboldt își portretizează discipolul infidel și ingrat în termenii cei mai sarcastici cu putință:

„Am spus despre tine că ești un trădător, o iudă, o coadă de topor, lingău, carierist, fățarnic. Întîi, am nutrit împotriva ta o furie neagră și, mai apoi, o mînie turbată, roșie și arzătoare. Amîndouă au fost însă copioase”.

Marea mea problemă cu această carte a fost o vreme cronologia ei fracturată. Naratorul sare de la o întîmplare la alta, urcă în viitor, coboară în trecut. Structura romanului se dezvăluie abia la a doua lectură. În chip firesc, amintirile lui Charlie Citrine nu curg liniar, firul epic se rupe adeseori. Am reținut, totuși, cîteva obsesii ale naratorului: relația cu poetul Von Humboldt, copilăria petrecută la Chicago, meditațiile cu privire la Rudolf Steiner (un înțelept foarte precar), conflictul cu suavul mafiot Rinaldo Cantabile, iubirea chinuitoare pentru capricioasa Renata, disprețul pentru Denise etc.

Cea mai simpatică femeie din Darul lui Humboldt rămîne Kathleen (soția freneticului poet Von Humboldt Fleischer). Cea mai inventivă în rele este, neîndoielnic, Renata.

Umorul lui Saul Bellow nu-i nici el de neglijat.

P. S. Încă din aprilie 2018 de la prima lectură, mi-a rămas în cap această propoziție formidabilă: „Ochii triști priveau inteligent în direcția greșită”. Și încă una: „Privea un cer de o trufie emersoniană”.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 4 out of 5]

When the idealism and pragmatism collide, those are the ideals that get shattered.
Idealists are full of ideas and hopes…

In The Ark we were going to publish brilliant things. Where were we to find such brilliancy? We knew it must be there. It was an insult to a civilized nation and to humankind to assume that it was not. Everything possible must be done to restore the credit and authority of art, the seriousness of thought, the integrity of culture, the dignity of style.

Pragmatists sail other vessels…

“You can forget Flonzaley. We’ve made a clean break. He’s a nice man, but I can’t go along with the undertaking business.”
“He’s very rich,” I said.
“He’s worth his wreaths in wraiths,” she said, in the style I loved her for. “As president he doesn’t have to handle corpses any more but I can never help remembering his embalming background. Of course I don’t hold with this guy Fromm, when he says how necrophilia has crept up on civilization.

It is better to be rich and healthy, maintains the pragmatic doctrine but the poor idealists remain true to their highest ideals.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of the three times I have now read Bellow, my initial first reactions have always been the same, that this could flourish into the quintessential great American novel, where he even gives me a larger proportion of encouragement over the likes of DeLillo and Roth. In the end, I found Humboldt’s Gift better than 'The Adventures of Augie March', but not quite as good as 'Herzog'. At least I can say I found myself a decent Pulitzer winner, of which, my record isn't exactly that positive. One thing I found during most of the novel's duration is actually how Un-American it started to feel, strange to say that considering the early parts take place in Chicago and New York, untypical of the way conven­tional American fiction generally reads. It's almost like Mr Bellow uses and provokes double-meanings throughout the narrative. Its complexity of intellectual argument, which I found greater than the other two I have read, is essentially like a Continental breakfast, rather than steak and eggs. Where some of his humorous and sharply drawn eccentric mix of characters felt somehow English in nature.

Humboldt’s Gift is no doubts a work conceived on a grand scale, this is both a blessing and a bit of a problem, as parts of the middle third slowly had me taking a dip in interest, where I plodded along in a slump just hoping for things to pick up, which did happen, eventually, it was just a right old slog to get there. It was a case of the starter and the dessert being better on the palate than some, but not all, of the main course. So then, the nuts and bolts of the story - a certain Charlie Citrine, like Mr Bellow a Chicago-raised author, just about 60, to the world rich and famous Pulitzer prize winner and Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. But as the book begins he is at a moment in life of crisis. His wife and a crew of hard-hitting lawyers are screwing him for all they can get as a divorce settlement; what little he has left is being grabbed by his mistress and her appalling mother, and he is being bullied by a small-time gangster (one of the novels best characters). He often dwells back his youth, where he was taken up by the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, a one-book success unfortunately, who desired only to be supported by society in the state that genius should have been accustomed to. And society’s failure to provide this had driven him to drink, madness, and finally death in squalor. Charlie has become rich and famous on the basis of work less notable than Humboldt’s, but he, too, is ripe for destruction. Humboldt will then positively impacts Charlie's plight from beyond the grave.

The narrative for the most part I found full of shrewdness and vitality, driven by an energetic, sharp-eyed Bellow. It's a novel that takes it's multivitamins on a regular basis, and where the brisk dialogue heavy sections really showcase his gift for letting flowing conversions, or in some cases heated arguments, take as long as they need to take. It also moved me far more than I expected, but it still remained remarkably funny in large chunks. It's difficult to say whether I would class Humboldt and Charlie as true close friends that would gladly take a bullet for one another, as they do have their altercations, but by the end, both men do have a big impact on the reader. It might be, to me anyway, too long for it's own good, but by it's conclusion, I did sit with a smile of satisfaction on my face.

[Violet wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

Humboldt is a poet, once revered, eventually ridiculed; Charlie Citrine, the narrator, was his acolyte, friend and enemy. Citrine, of an inferior talent, enjoys much greater commercial success than Humboldt. This anomaly is the foundation for much soul searching about the relationship between the artist and commercial success in America.

Humboldt fulfils society’s most cherished expectation of the poet – he goes nuts and dies ignominiously. In other words, he’s too delicate for this world. Something we all feel in our most sensitive moments. Poets do what we’d sometimes like to – over indulge sensibility to the point of cutting themselves off from the outside world - and we perhaps honour them for this as much as we do for their poetry. Bellow here attempts, not very successfully, the Nick/Gatsby divide in this novel – he has a prosaic narrator recounting the larger than life character, Humboldt. But a failing of this novel is that Bellow can never keep his own voice muffled for long and soon the narrator Charlie Citrine and Humboldt become almost the same character. Charlie ends up as eccentrically broken as Humboldt. And the title’s gift is a rather lame and implausible denouement.

“There's the most extraordinary, unheard of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it...the agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way.” So says Charlie. But this passage is much more applicable to DeLillo’s novels than Bellow’s. I’m not sure I ever really felt Bellow was getting to the heart of this buried poetry. DeLillo is actually much better at finding the poetry in our technological, media circus age because he’s better able to project out beyond himself; DeLillo shows where Bellow tells. Bellow often ends up sounding like the patient on the psychotherapist’s couch, gorgeously eloquent but telling rather than dramatizing.

Saul Bellow would rank pretty high as nightmare husband. He likes the sound of his own voice too much. He holds forth brilliantly but there’s a sense he doesn’t listen much. He tends to see others as appendages or anecdotes. Bellow’s novels are always about Saul Bellow, Saul Bellow and his relationship with the world, Saul Bellow and his dysfunctional relationship with women. All the novels I’ve read by him have had the same narrator. There’s a lack of versatility in his voice. The supporting cast of characters are often more like showcases for how brilliantly and wittily Bellow can write than any kind of approximation of real people. His most successful novel was Herzog because he sent up his rampant egotism in a brilliantly witty fashion. Bellow is probably a much better writer than he is novelist. His prose is fantastic; his plots often half-baked and flimsy. This one just scrapes four stars because of the quality of the prose; as a novel I found it essentially inspired and daft in equal measure.

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

Charlie Citrine, the narrator, recounts his many misadventures around Christmas in 1973, alternating nostalgic memories, dubious encounters in shady Chicago, extravagant projects, absurd situations, and sociological, philosophical, or metaphysical considerations. He dislikes intellectuals who are cut off from the world, while tending to meditate more or less on far-fetched theories in critical situations. He's a writer haunted by Humboldt, an old friend and an avant-garde poet from Greenwich Village who had little success between the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation. But as Charlie rose to recognition and won literary prizes, medals, and money, Humboldt gradually forgot and slipped into madness. Finally, they got angry, and Humboldt died in the 1960s without their reconciliation.
I won't reveal the entire plot, which is lengthy and complex, but well-paced, humorous, and ingenious. There are three main things to remember about Charlie Citrine: his confused relationship with money, women, and death. He gets ripped off or his money pumped by everyone: the State, a little crook who dreams of Al Capone, his ex-wife, his lawyers, his girlfriend, his collaborators, and even his friends. And when I say Humboldt haunts him, I'm hardly exaggerating because Charlie is very fond of theories on the immortality of the soul, based on rebirth, kabbalah, anthroposophy, or I don't know. Too much. His quest is to clear up this confusion and find a happy medium between poverty and wealth, materialism and spirituality, dry scholarship and pure foolishness.
I would have loved this novel if the translation hadn't bothered me so much. However, unfortunately, it is not only poorly written but also very bizarre, and some elements have left me perplexed.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating typical Bellow novel about a self-centered neurotic middle-aged male from Chicago. I felt it was less satisfying than Herzog or The Adventures of Augie March despite moments of brilliance. I know it is considered one of the Great Novels of Bellow and I enjoyed the characters and their existential questioning of the meanings of life and sex. The book has some amazing characters: Falstaff/Lear aspects of Humboldt, the bellowish Charlie, the boisterous Cantabile, the round and sensual Renata, the mysterious and devious Señora. It also goes into Bellow's obsession with Steiner's anthroposophy concepts. It is funny and moving, but maybe a bit long-winded at times.

Anthroposophy is an esoteric philosophy that Saul Bellow adhered to that stems from the works of Rudolph Steiner. One quote which I did appreciate, even if I admit being somewhat lost in some of Citrine’s musings about it:
Thinking, the power to think and know, is a source of freedom. Thinking will make it obvious that spirit exists. The physical body is an agent of the spirit and its mirror. It is an engine and a reflection of the spirit. It is the spirit’s ingenious memorandum to itself and the spirit sees itself in my body, just as I see my own face in a looking glass. My nerves reflect this. The early is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything. (p. 262)
I think that last bit about death was particularly thought-provoking.
I plan to read Zachary Leader’s biographies of Bellow to understand to what extent that this book was autobiographical.

I think that the Pulitzer committee had passed over Saul too many times and needed to hand him a win to retain credibility. In fact, Charlie Citrine makes an ironic comment about having won two Pulitzers in the book. I suppose that Faulkner felt the same when they rewarded his lesser works such as A Fable and (posthumously) The Reivers rather than the epics of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying or Light in August

This isn't to say that I didn't find this to be a great book, just that if you are reading Pulitzer prizes to find the best work of a particular author, the prize is not always the best indicator. It is rather hit (American Pastoral or The Goldfinch) or miss (The Underground Railroad or The Road).

My rating of all the Pulitzer Winners: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...

[Théo d'Or]

I must admit, Americans have a fairly well-developed sense of irony. Why do I say that ?
In Below's novel, we have an acid, uncompromising critique of American consumer society, which, however, did not bothered anyone, at least - in appearance.
American society, in " Humboldt's Gift", is undoubtedly portrayed as deeply acculturated, although crossed by the spirit, but a spirit "without culture".
Through the two characters, the poet Fleischer Humboldt and the younger Charles Citrine - the novelist captures two different mentalities, but which undoubtedly have much in common.
Fleischer, a great amateur of Marx, Freud, Joyce, believes in a platonic perfection, he still have that belief in an native perfection, he believe in the illusion of creating a state, in which poets are restored in their rights, a utopian vision in which politicians would walk around, reading Yeats and Joyce, and he would be a " Goethe" of a new administration...
Charles Citrine, on the other hand, is a bit more pragmatic, but not very, though.He doesn't have too many illusions about anything, and he thinks that people, actually, find what they're looking for - before they search, but they don't know it. The two - have in common the status of a poet, and both are aware that their role in American society is almost zero, because the poet is a being overwhelmed by tehnological development, and the pragmatism brought by this progress.
Humboldt, battling a severe depressive neurosis, will be defeated - finally, the Master will denie his disciple Citrine - the lover of money, and raffish.
Citrine, however, allows itself to be led by others, only in appearance, in order to discern their intimate resorts of their being. He says that " in the human being there is something beyond the body and the brain.Maybe my unhappiness comes for ignoring my methaphisical intuitions ".

I think that's exactly what poetry does, says " something else" , that something beyond the body and the brain, and the poet is the one who, through the poem, speaks to individuality through individuality, he adresses an inner life, which is already atrophied in the vast majority of people.
Although gloomy, Below's novel , by the character Charles Citrine - an alter ego of the author - also contains that hope that despite appearances, humanity has not lost its soul, and poetry, through the poet - can still act in force, on this soul.
Hope dies last, after all.

[Fabian · Rating 3 out of 5]

The labyrinthine mental processes of an exceptional man of letters-- challenging, uneven, extremely self conscious & in the end, of course, Literary.

"I have snoozed through many a crisis (while millions died)" laments our Hero. Our overthinking, overcompensating, overwhelming hero. He's a regular Danish prince-- indeed most of his life is seen through a Shakespearean filter that has more to do with complications than tragedy or romance.

There are amazing sentences and a wholly exuberant prose in this, a lauded Pulitzer (ironically, or perhaps not, the protagonist has not one but two Pulitzers under his belt... Hmmm...) & Medal of Something (I forgot) winner. What I agree with in all of this is very minimal-- the dude lives in an entirely different stratosphere as you and me. I agree with his thoughts on "the prestige of significant failure"-- beauty in a breakdown and all that. Sure. But the P.O.V. is both the plus and minus of the novel. It is very selfish and self involved (Rabbit Angstrom, anyone?). Just superior and entirely involved in gilded but droll experiences. The dead exist only to satisfy our main man, Charlie Citrine, it seems. Ugh-- it's overly long, tedious, etc.

For all it's dramatic efforts, I wasn't left impressed.

[Paolo del ventoso Est · Rating 4 out of 5]

Questo è l'anno degli americani difficilini, dopo Updike ho sfidato un poderoso Bellow. Non voglio dire "difficili" perchè insomma sono narratori vecchia scuola e quanto a intrico verbale un Faulkner se li mangia a colazione; sono penne incantevoli, renitenti a tessere con semplicità l'ordito delle loro trame. Non parlo soltanto della linearità narrativa, sì insomma so bene che c'è vita oltre Mark Twain, ma della tendenza a gonfiare oltremisura situazioni riassumibili in tre righe, del vizietto incontrollabile della digressione o meglio della ridondanza concettuale. Premetto ciò perchè oggi autori come Saul Bellow sembrano destinati a ingiallire nelle librerie antiquarie; non tutti se la sentono di "investire" tempo prezioso in letture poco accomodanti, che viaggiano sempre in terza con la mano marmorizzata sul cambio. Ebbene, sotto un paltò anni '70 (avete presente quegli arancioni assurdi?) c'è un corpo mozzafiato; l'impianto vetusto, certo sorpassato dalle celerità contemporanee, non inficia un solo grammo di bellezza. La storia piuttosto orizzontale di Charlie Citrine che se la vede con lo spettro dell'amico Humboldt e gli amori infelici ha degli spiragli di luce vivida, il dono di comporre con grazia pittorica idee e parole. C'è una introspezione "europea" dei personaggi. Come dichiara il vecchio Humboldt - personaggio magnifico, carnale e poetico - in una delle sue tirate: "Il mondo guarda in faccia gli americani e dice: Non venite a raccontarmi che questa gente, così florida e allegra, soffre davvero! Eppure, l'abbondanza democratica ha le sue singolari difficoltà. L'America è un esperimento di Dio". La gente "florida e allegra" del libro di Bellow - scrittori, editori, grandi donne, parassiti e ruffiani - cospira contro l'inalterabile Citrine e la sua inesplicabile attrazione verso il lato peggiore dell'umanità. C'è una ineffabile vitalità poetica nei peggiori, la letteratura ce lo insegna da millenni e non smette di farlo; noi continueremo ad innamorarci di iracondi poeti e sordidi approfittatori fino alla parola fine.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last night I dreamt that Saul Bellow was still alive, and that I met him. (Met him at the Chicago branch of something called the Hitler-Piedmont Bank.) I started to gush, but of all the phrases, characters and scenes of his that I admire, the only thing I praised was his description, in this novel, of Humboldt's mud-spattered station wagon as looking like "a Flanders staff-car."

[Manray9 · Rating 2 out of 5]

When Charlie Citrine’s lover Renata said “When you get to the story let me know, I’m not big on philosophy,” she hit the bulls-eye. I have never before read a more pretentious glob of self-indulgent philosophizing, high-brow name-dropping, and conceited intellectualism. You realize a novel isn’t working when you catch yourself frequently checking how many pages remain. I kept at it only out of respect for Pulitzer Prize winner and Nobel-laureate Saul Bellow as the author of the masterpiece The Adventures of Augie March. I suppose Bellow was simply past his prime and overly-praised. Maybe he just took himself too seriously?

Humboldt’s Gift is a novel characterized by sections of wit, humor and charm which serve the plot and characters. Regrettably these sections are interspersed with lengthy digressions into tedious philosophizing, boring intellectual vanity, and narcissism. Did I miss something? Was Bellow tongue in cheek? Am I one of the Philistines about whom Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charlie Citrine grumbled? Charlie’s first lover, Naomi Lutz, said to Charlie “It was always wonderful the way you talked. But off-putting too.” Yes, Naomi, 487 pages of “off-putting.”

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Roman a Clef a Trois

“Humboldt’s Gift” is generally recognised to be a roman a clef, in which the titular character is based on the poet Delmore Schwartz, an early friend and mentor of Saul Bellow.

However, there are three levels at which the roman a clef operates within the novel itself.

Firstly, Von Humboldt Fleisher accuses the narrator, Charlie Citrine, of using his life as the inspiration for his commercially successful play, “Von Trenck” (which was later turned into a film):

“I don’t say he actually plagiarised, but he did steal something from me - my personality. He built my personality into his hero.”

Then, Humboldt writes a treatment for a movie apparently based on the life and loves of Charlie Citrine. Lastly, the novel as a whole wraps all of this up in a fiction inspired by Von Humboldt/Delmore Schwartz, although Bellow/ Citrine can’t resist the temptation to make the novel primarily his own story (even if there is much self-mockery in the novel).

Noble Madness

Citrine, like his mentor, is obsessed by the concept of the author as noble:

“Mankind is stunned by the Exuberance and Beauty of certain individuals.”

“When I was young I believed that being an intellectual assured me of a higher life."

“[Humboldt and I] were rich in abilities, in sexual feeling, rich in mind and invention…highly gifted...”

Alfred Kazin would write that Delmore Schwartz had "a feeling for literary honor, for the highest standards, that one can only call noble—he loved the nobility of example presented by the greatest writers of our century, and he wanted in this sense to be noble himself, a light unto the less talented...

“So he suffered, unceasingly, because he had often to disappoint himself—because the world turned steadily more irrational and incomprehensible—because the effort of his intellectual will, of his superb intellectual culture, was not always enough to sustain him.... He was the prisoner of his superb intellectual training, a victim of the logic he respected beyond anything else. He was of the generation that does not come easily to concepts of the absurd."

Unfortunately, as both novel and biography make clear, Delmore’s nobility came at the cost of a little madness.

Robert Lowell wrote a poem in memory of Delmore that contains these lines:

"Underseas fellows, nobly mad,
We talked away our friends.
'Let Joyce and Freud,
the Masters of Joy,
be our guests here,’
you said."

Citrine describes Humboldt in the Thirties as “an avant garde writer, the first of a new generation,...handsome, fair, large, serious, witty,...learned...Humboldt had been great - handsome, high-spirited, buoyant, ingenious, electrical, noble...The guy had it all...Humboldt revealed to me new ways of doing things. I was ecstatic. I envied his luck, his talent, and his fame…”

In Greenwich Village, Humboldt would talk to Citrine, his protege, about Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, the Moscow trials, Sidney Hook’s “From Hegel to Marx”, Lenin’s “State and Revolution”, the poems of Yeats, Hegel’s “Phenomenology”, Marx’ portrait of Louis Bonaparte, Hegel’s World Historical Individual, the interpreter of the Spirit, “the mysterious leader who imposed on Mankind the task of understanding him, etc.”

Later, Citrine confides in one of his lovers, “Those were intoxicating books and I was in the thick of beauty and wild about goodness and thought and poetry and love. Wasn’t that mere adolescence?”

The Savage Noble

“In the late Forties he [Humboldt] started to sink.”

Citrine viewed him as a “poet, thinker, problem drinker, pill-taker, man of genius, manic depressive, intricate schemer, success story, he once wrote poems of great wit and beauty, but what had he done lately?”

Humboldt had become a savage noble. In contrast, “in the early Fifties I myself became famous. I even made a pile of money. Ah, money, the money! Humboldt held the money against me. [He was a fiery Failure and I was a newborn Success.]

"In the last years of his life when he wasn’t too depressed to talk, wasn’t locked up in a loony bin, he went about New York saying bitter things about me and my ‘million dollars’...What kind of writer or intellectual makes that kind of dough - a Keynes?...A genius in economics, a prince in Bloomsbury…”

The Commercial Stuff

What confounds both writers is success, particularly financial success. How to achieve it, but more importantly, how to maintain and retain it. And how not to lose your integrity to wealth:

“Don’t be taken in by the Broadway glamour and the commercial stuff...”

“It filled me with guilt and shame.”

“If Scott Fitzgerald had been a Protestant, said Humboldt, Success wouldn’t have damaged him so much.”

Humboldt even pickets Citrine’s play, a la the pomo academic Tom LeClair (with his “gang of pals and rooters”), carrying a picket sign saying, “The Author of This Play is a Traitor.”

Citrine’s ex-wife, Denise, accuses Citrine of having “delusions about being a marvelous noble person” in contrast to inhabitants of “the moronic inferno”.

Cantabile, a small-time Chicago mobster who Citrine thinks of as “one of the mental rabble of the wised-up world”, says of Citrine:

“You don’t care about the things that other people knock themselves out over. You have contempt. You’re arrogant, Citrine. You despise us. Us. People of the world...”

“What good is all this reading if you can’t use it in the crunch?”

“Was this art versus America?”

“In ancient times poetry was a force, the poet had real strength in the material world.”

“What kind of American would I be if I were innocent about money, I ask you. Why? Because money is freedom, that’s why."

“Americans had an empty continent to subdue. You couldn’t expect them to concentrate on philosophy and art as well.”

Erotica and Esoterica

Citrine reads Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy heavily in an attempt to understand the spirit. His priorities are both erotic and esoteric.

“I was by inclination the sort of person who needed microcosmic-macrocosmic ideas, or the belief that everything that takes place in man has world significance.”

At the same time, circumstances lure him into the world of business and money-making, even if he believes that all capitalism is self-interest, greed and fraud. Business is about action rather than contemplation, the intellect or the spirit.

His business partner, Thaxter, says, “I come to Chicago and find you bang in the middle of things.”

Thaxter confirms, “This is life, Charlie, not literature.”

Citrine is both practical and impractical in love. He is “a big important clever man going around so eager from woman to woman”:

“For women I had this utopian emotional love aura and made them feel I was a cherishing man. Sure, I’d cherish them in the way they all dreamed of being cherished.”

Yet his highly passionate romances end in marriage, and inevitably in divorce and expensive litigation that strangles the next romance. And creates the next need for funds.

"A Certain Intricacy and Elegance of Construction"

Humboldt’s movie scenario “gives his opinion of me - foolishness, intricacy, wasted subtlety, a loving heart, some kind of disorganised genius, a certain elegance of construction…"

And these same words can be applied to the novel itself. In it, we get Citrine (and therefore Bellow) warts and all, the subject of their own mockery. Towards the end of the novel, he tells Kathleen, Humboldt’s ex- wife, “I was just the worm that spit out the silk thread.”


ADDENDUM:

"This Eccentric Construction"

This is how Bellow described the novel in a letter to a philosopher in 1976:

“It is a comical and very American examination of the cares and trials of ‘civilised’ people in a civilised country. These cares are by now plainly ludicrous and one can’t be serious about them. The ultimate absurdity is that it is the spiritual matters, which alone deserve our seriousness, that are held to be absurd. Perhaps it was wrong of me to put this longing for spiritual fruit in a comic setting...But I followed my hunch as a writer, trusting that this eccentric construction would somehow stand steady.”

SR vs JR

This is part of the blurb for William Gaddis' "JR", the "buried book" (since acclaimed for its 770 pages of unattributed dialogue) that won the National Book Award in 1976, while "Humboldt's Gift" won the Pulitzer Prize and Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature:

"JR is a book of comparable magnitude, substance, and humor [to "The Recognitions"] - a rushing, raucous look at money and its influence, at love and its absence, at success and its failures, in the magnificently orchestrated circus of all its larger - and smaller-than-life characters; a frantic, forlorn comedy about who uses - and misuses - whom."

SOUNDTRACK:

Velvet Underground - "European Son"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igWyY...

Luna - "Renée Is Crying"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP-oZ...

[Sara · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am sorry to say I could not read this book. It was, in a word, boring. I forced myself through 64 pages, which might not seem like a lot, but actually seemed like forever while I was reading. I think this is one of those books that is very steeped in its own time period and does not play outside it. I felt like Bellow was trying to drop every current hot topic and every recognizable name of the time into the text.

I am sure there are those who would tell me I am wrong and that it improves, but I simply could not justify to myself spending any more time with a book I wasn't interested in. This is my year of unplanned reading and I have given myself permission to just say "no".

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know what it is, but Bellow's books just go down easy for me. I can (and have) read them in one or two or five very long sittings, enjoying myself enough to just refuse to take my eyes off the page.

There's something about his protagonists- the nervy, learned, spunky, earthy, thoughtful and hyper-attentive 30-40 year old males which seems to resonate with me over and over again. I seriously thought about making a special category on my bookshelves for "old-drunk-wannabe-writer" books (and it IS a genre) but I suppose I'd rather not. Demeaning.

I enjoyed this chatty, fluid, easily-digested novel each and every time I picked it up. Bellow on the page (not sure what he'd be like in person, though I suspect it wouldn't be all that different) is an idea companion to read in a place that is somewhat noisy, a little folksy, with a bit of bustle. Local pizza shop at middday, while making phone calls (if you're into that perversity), on the train, that kind of thing.

Bellow is effortlessly introspective while being open, grand, educated and beautifully exact in his perceptions. He's essentially a chatty dude from Chi-town who got seduced by Greenwich Village in full swing and never looked back. We are all the better for it.

I especially had to pick this one up because it fictionalizes an already rather interesting and larger-than-life figure who I happen to adore already. That man would be Delmore Schwartz, author of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and several books of now-underrated excellent poetry. Schwartz is the eponymous Humboldt and the character is much like the actual man: obsessive, erudite, manic, manipulative, visionary, charismatic, self-destructive, energetic, eloquent, and fucked up beyond belief. All night gin-fuled stream of consciousness captivating monologues (don't twitch; Bellow himseld throws more than a few of these adjectival pockets together without punctuation in a near-Beat stylistic choice which always warms the cockles of my heart) which somehow include Plato, Dostoevsky, Harry Hopkins, Frank Sinatra, Emerson, Whitman, Henry Ford, the politics of Weimar Republic, Eisenhower, Beethoven, Stalin, Lenin, Finnegans Wake, litigation, Houdini, Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot's sex life (!?), the Pentateuch, Yeats's visionary cycle of history, Gibbon, Chevrolet engines, Dante's bird imagery, Marx, Lenin, Mary Pickford, and a possible spot in the (never-to-be) administration of Adlai Stevenson in order to bring out an American cultural renaissance.

If lists of names and contexts and events juxtaposed in a steam of association works for you- if you'd buy this guy a beer or twelve- then this is the kind of book you'll dig. If not, well, you're pretty much like about half the people in this story, who seem to take a naieve if honest pleasure in upbraiding the narrator for his sentimental and seemingly stupid attachment to this volcanic freakshow. By the time the book starts, Humboldt is (obviously) a bit of a burnout, a has-been mixed with a never-was who has sufficiently fallen from grace to make the narrator himself have to duck behind a car when he spies his former intimate gnawing on a vendor's pretzel with extra mustard at three p.m. while standing on the sidewalk, seemingly the only food he'll have for the day.

But Charlie Citrine, writer of some reknown and fairly large income, just won't let the dream die, dammnit. Not even the fact of his own draining and costly divorce settlement or his own existential mid-life confusion or his spacey, wily, unsatisfying mistress or Humboldt's own massively jumbled legacy and final papers will let him put the matter to rest.

All I'll say is that the title obviously has more than a few symbolic levels but is, in fact, entirely literal in a very plot-based way. No big surprise there, and frankly I was getting disappointed because I thought I had called it from about 200 pages away and when a dunderhead like me catches whiffs of plot points it's probably time to knock the thing down a few pegs, aesthetically. But that disappointment, luckily, lifted. There is a gift, certainly, but it's not quite what you think even when it's pretty much what you'd assume. Bellow frames it beautifully, which is to say in a true-to-life way, in that what he is given is ironically separated from what it means and how it plays out in the Rube Goldberg wackiness of reality and chance. It's a weird but fitting denouement to a story that keeps you going in newer and better directions all through its surprising and unexpected bulk and literary heft.

If you're thinking of reading it, bump it up a couple notches and you'll be glad you did!

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I used to see Professor Bellow on the University of Chicago campus in 1975-76 when I was a graduate student there. (My wife, who worked in the office of University of Chicago Press, spoke with him a couple of times.) We left UC to work in Algeria and took along a trunkload of books which included Humboldt's Gift. I read the whole thing forcing myself, believing that the book would redeem itself soon enough. Living and working in Algeria was not easy, and I was hoping that this famous literary professor whom I had rubbed shoulders with so to speak would lift me out of my existential doldrums.

Fogeddabouded!

Fortunately, we were living on the beach between Arzew and Mostaganem, my job not too far away. So, there was plenty of beauty and frivolity playing with my family and Italian, Québécois, French and Algerian neighbors, which was better than trudging between classes in dreary ole Hyde Park. Besides reading about Algeria, Islam and trying to improve my rudimentary French (2 college years) and beginning Maghrabi Arabic, I had my books. Even so, life in Algeria itself was not joyous I would say, and Bellow could not save me. I tried reading this gray, self-absorbed author who wrote too much, I thought, about characters who were bringing me down in the environment I was living in because, I think, there was too much of himself in them, and I really didn’t give a damn about Bellow’s persona.

After Humboldt. I could not enjoy another Bellow, even though I would have liked to, such as Mr. Sammler’s Planet, which I heard was good. Cerebral writers, like Bellow—I say ‘cerebral’ because that type (and he impresses me this way) prefers to be admired in a classroom mostly populated by admiring young women rather than taking risks in more down-to-earth exploits like working with West Virginia coal miners or ranching in Texas, i.e. getting their hands dirty, viz., Hemingway or Steinbeck or Irwin Shaw or even Faulkner.

I can’t say that I don’t recommend reading Bellow to fellow readers. He’s the kind of oblique author that makes me feel that I’m just not of his ilk, but I’m not sure that’s very smart of him—to make me, a literary book lover, not like his books. I think he had a fatal flaw as a writer and that’s why he probably will not be remembered as much as McMurtry will. But then again McMurtry is a Texan and Bellow was from Montreal originally, sort of.

At this point, I decided to wikipedia Bellow {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Be...} to check some facts. I’ll tell you truly that I have to read him again. I remember liking Dangling Man and Seize the Day, so what’s wrong with me? How come I can’t square myself with Saul Bellow, or at least Herzog? I’m going to give him another try some day and let you know.

[Denis · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's interesting how passionate I get when I dislike a book. Maybe I feel ripped off? My expectations were high and that no doubt plays into it.

The setup is interesting and has great potential. A man is on a quest to make sense of his life in a world that's lost its way. The theme: Culture, the arts, advanced learning and thinking, (the only raisons-d'être for man's existence don't you know) are being quashed by modern society and its trappings. From the get-go, there are quotes or mention of zillions of philosphers, musicians, artists and other smarty pants of their ilk. So far so good.

But nothing comes of it all. The philosophical meanderings turn into banal, empty rants and we spend our time following the boring life of a pompous rebel without a clue. (Darn, I'm getting nasty, and I can't help it.)

The characters are painted in vivid colours, but that's part of the problem. There are no shades to the characters and they all come across as two-dimensional mainstream props.

I was disappointed by this, my first Bellow novel, but I will try another, seeing he's such a prodigious writer, and part Canadian, too.

[David Lentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Transcendental. Profound. Scholarly. Challenging. Invigorating. Agile. A literary treasure. Citrine lives and breathes with the perspective of a real writer surging against great existential issues like Walt Whitman's ultimate question. Humboldt is brilliant, pitiful, hilarious and, ultimately, victorious from the grave. The gangster, Cantabile, is Citrine's cosmic foil: the Dionysius of Nietzsche to Citrine's Apollo. This is potentially a life-altering work: it can change your outlook on life and death. Bellow redeems late 20th century American literature with writing so rich it has bestowed upon him a mantle of immortality. He will be long remembered as one of America's most brilliant 20th century writers. This novel confirms Bellow's consistent gift for writing as evidenced by his prolific virtuosity in Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King. What a masterful literary legacy Bellow has left us! Bag the NY Times Best Seller List and Oprah's mind numbing, witless wonders and read Bellow. Hardly anything this substantive is likely to be created hereafter.

[SCARABOOKS · Rating 5 out of 5]

In un’estate quasi tutta bellowiana la malsana tentazione di esprimere preferenze è forte. Bellow interrogato da Norman Manea su chi preferisse tra Herzog e Humboldt, prima la definì “una domanda troppo difficile”, poi vent’anni dopo, confessò: “Provo una maggiore simpatia per Humboldt, che per Herzog. Non so perché.” Poi in realtà lo disse anche il perché (si sentiva più vicino all’artista che all’intellettuale e questo nel pensiero di Bellow è un motivo importante).
Io ho amato più di tutti Sammler. Perché é il più intenso, il più carico di pathos e anche il più equilibrato. Anche dal punto di vista letterario. Il dolore lo rende nobile e la sua comicità non è subita, ma esercitata, mai esibita, spesso obbligata. Ed ha le tonalità del disincanto e dello stupore triste. Il suo modo di guardare il mondo che Bellow gli ha costruito attorno mi ha suggestionato e contagiato più di tutti gli altri personaggi.

Andando ad Humboldt, è il romanzo più divertente che abbia ri/letto sul tema della morte. Divertente senza cedere di un niente all’intelligenza e alla razionalità della riflessione su quello che è la Madre di tutti i temi, il più difficile che ci sia da leggere e da scrivere. “Che cos'è questa morte? Ci risiamo: nessuno sa. Ma l'ignoranza della morte ci distrugge”.

Humboldt non smette mai di interrogarsi sulla fine e sulla percezione che può tentare di avere avere dell’aldilà: sempre intollerabilmente limitata, claustrofobica, impotente. Eppure un dono da un qualche Aldilà gli arriva. Quel che è certo è che nella visione di Bellow non c’é rifugio in un Dio Redentore (e neppure misericordiosamente consolatore), ma non lo si trova neppure nella negazione della sua esistenza. D’altronde, ha sempre equamente distribuito il suo scetticismo tra scienza e religione.
Ne ha parlato più volte, in saggi e interviste. Qualcuno, Qualcosa, una qualche forma di intelligenza che ha messo su questo Gioco misterioso, che non capiamo, probabilmente c’è. Perché come diceva citando Einstein, è più difficile spiegare le cose con il Caso che così. E Humboldt, come Bellow nella sua vita ci prova a entrare nel Gioco, a passare dall’altra parte, in tutte le maniere. Dopodiché deve (dobbiamo) accettare che si rimane al Punto Zero, nel senso che non sappiamo nulla nè del Gioco, nè di chi è del perché lo sta giocando. E ad Humboldt viene da pensare che con questi pensieri sulla morte l’unico risultato che si ottiene è rovinarsi la vita.

E allora?
E allora per Bellow l’unica via di fuga che funziona è l’arte, è osservare e raccontare le cose, non perdere l’ancoraggio ai fatti, evitare troppe teorie. La risposta è rompere il muro delle individuali solitudini e condividere il racconto dei funambolici equilibrismi mentali (e finanziari: il modo spudorato in cui parla di soldi Bellow è incantevole) di Charlie Citrine e di Humboldt, l’oscillazione tra il pensiero e l’azione, tra il conformismo e la trasgressione, tra la vita vissuta e quella raccontata.
Quel che possiamo fare è descrivere come ci si barcameni tutti andando avanti a tentoni, nel buio di senso, finché abbiamo uno spazio in cui è possibile muoversi e dal quale è possibile entrare ed uscire. Poi, non sarà più possibile e chissà se resterà qualcosa di noi ancora capace di vagare nell’universo e continuare a partecipare in qualche forma al Grande Gioco.
“Io non ci voglio andare sottoterra. Mi farò cremare. Ho bisogno di spazio, d'azione, io. Mi dissolverò nell'atmosfera. Avrai mie notizie coi bollettini meteorologici”

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first Bellow I have read and I enjoyed the experience. It concerns Charlie Citrine, a chap in his 50s, a writer and intellectual who has an ongoing divorce, an unpredictable girlfriend, an acquaintance in the mob who decides he quite likes Charlie, various bloodsucking lawyers, friends who want money for hare-brained schemes and his relationship with his old mentor (now dead), the poet Von Humboldt Fleischer. It is an erudite book with lots of ideas in play and Bellow has great fun with all sorts of sacred cows. There are lots of comedic moments and some pure slapstick (the fate of Chalie's mercedes).
Humboldt's gift from beyond the grave presents an interesting dilemma for Charlie the intellectual, as his girlfriend runs off with an undertaker (steady job, guarenteed income, no shortage of customers).
At times this was not an easy read and Bellow plays with some off the wall ideas as well (Steiner et al).
Profound and funny; and I really loved Cantabile the gangster and Charlie's astute comments, despite his inertia in the face of Cantabile's ravings.
charlie's musings will stay with me for some time.

[Simona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un romanzo come "Il dono di Humboldt" è difficile da riassumere perché non ha una vera e propria trama. Necessita di tempo per essere assimilato, capito e vissuto.
E' un lungo stream of consciousness, un flusso di coscienza di pensieri, di sensazioni, sentimenti e poesia. E' un lungo e denso monologo interiore, in cui i dialoghi sono brevi o quasi del tutto inesistenti.
E' un compendio di rapporti umani, di bellezza, di poesia, di letteratura, quella vera, pura e salvifica. E' l'arte che si fa capolavoro e diventa sublime, è una meraviglia che terminato di leggere vi farà avvertire la "mancanza di qualcosa, all'infinito, ho il cuore gonfio, una smania lacerante".

[Esteban Forero · Rating 2 out of 5]

“El legado de Humboldt” es un chiste demasiado largo y más bien exasperante, escrito por Saul Bellow en la forma de una novela que me figuro parodia la vida del autor: un poeta joven viaja a la gran ciudad para encontrarse con la mayor promesa de las letras norteamericanas y logra el éxito en el mundo del espectáculo a costa del personaje inspirado en la personalidad de su maestro, quien lo repudia por la traición de la que se siente objeto. ¿Traición a la poesía por el dinero? ¡Viceversa!

Intenté leer este libro en clave crítica a la construcción de identidad norteamericana, a ese utilitarismo bursátil disfrazado de pragmatismo que convierte los sentimientos en obstáculo para hacer dinero. Su protagonista pasa por un hombre de reflexión víctima del engaño del sistema social que le saca todo su dinero aprovechándose de su generosidad y poca pericia para los negocios o desfalcos. Sus amigos, su exesposa y hasta la mujer de la que se enamora, lo usan para ganar dinero. Incluso aparece un personajillo que lo arrastra al mundo del hampa de un modo que da pena porque resulta de una imbecilidad inverosímil.

Por ello, habría que decirlo desde el principio para evitarse las más de seiscientas páginas de lectura: el legado que Humboldt le deja a su amigo Charles Citrine es dinero. La bendición de Humboldt para sus seres queridos son dólares; miles de ellos. Uno pensaría que habría algo más profundo, más trascendental, cuando el protagonista ve su vida dispuesta en un guion ridículo escrito en venganza por ese poeta amigo con aires de megalomanía. Pero no. Solo dinero.

[Cosimo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Con la tua poesia di dolce verità

“Ma l'amore è una divinità che non può lasciarci in pace. Non può, perché dobbiamo la vita a atti d'amore compiuti prima della nostra nascita; poiché l'amore è un debito contratto dalla nostra anima”.

L'alter ego di Saul Bellow in questo romanzo è uno scrittore nevrotico, amletico e donnaiolo di nome Charlie Citrine, figlio di emigrati ebrei dell'Europa dell'est, con una grande inclinazione al pensiero filosofico e speculativo, uno humour inestinguibile e una naturale incoscienza che lo spinge a cacciarsi nei guai e ad affezionarsi a personaggi ambigui e fallimentari con la lievità di un sognatore, sempre incantato da giovani e bellissime rappresentanti del multiforme genere femminile. Siamo a Chicago e Charlie è uno degli eroi della società cittadina: colto, autore di una commedia di successo, sempre sotto la luce dei riflettori; centro della sua esistenza e della sua fantasia è la bellezza femminile, la forma del corpo delle donne, la sensualità e il fascino, l'attrazione e l'istinto. Poi c'è la scrittura, e il talento da liberare e il danaro che ne è compagno. Si ritiene in gamba ma ha bisogno di essere amato per se stesso, non per le sue qualità, che ormai ha a noia. Sta divorziando e la moglie lo vuole mettere sul lastrico. Mentre un gangster con ambizioni mondane lo coinvolge in avventure deliranti e vicende grottesche, Charlie è alle prese con il ricordo e il testamento del suo amico di gioventù Von Humboldt Fleischer, poeta depresso e maledetto (costruito sulla maschera di Delmore Schwartz), presto dimenticato da tutti e morto in solitudine e miseria, dopo aver dimostrato di non saper stare al mondo: il suo dono è la sceneggiatura di un film che porterà ricchezza e notorietà permettendo a Charlie di dare all'amico una nuova sepoltura e occuparsi di uno zio abbandonato in un ospizio. Si narra un viaggio dell'io nella memoria e nell'inconscio, in un discorso etico su logica e assurdo, ossessione e vocazione, alla ricerca di qualcosa che possa risvegliare lo spirito e curare con intelligente ironia quella profonda angoscia per la mortalità che perseguita l'anima dello scrittore. Charlie si scopre fragile, perde le persone a cui tiene di più e affronta la sconfitta assoluta, nella contraddizione delle sue aspirazioni. Così Bellow racconta la chiave di un'amicizia tra malinconia e coraggio, orgoglio e frustrazione, ragionando sul rapporto tra potere e arte nella composizione di un quadro esistenziale carnevalesco, dove si alternano allegria e disperazione, senso di eternità e rimpianto, sacrificio e gloria. Tra letteratura e necessità, la vita interiore si riempie di disillusione e inquietudine: un sentiero verso la follia o la consapevolezza, secondo la temeraria coerenza con cui ci si relaziona al caso.

[lorinbocol · Rating 5 out of 5]

è andata così. stavo lì a trastullarmi incurante di ogni tassonomia delle priorità narrative, indulgendo a prescindibili libri e lasciando la mia frequentazione di bellow ferma a un datato, piacevole ma non risolutivo augie march e a un recente, quello sì fulminante, herzog. finché un bel giorno il dio delle letture con qualche costrutto, titillato da un torneo virtuale tra romanzi ammmericani, ha deciso di fare di me una donna onesta. e scagliando quaggiù una saetta (ZOT!) ha messo in testa a qualcuno l'idea di regalarmi quest'opera sublime e mascalzona, irresistibile con quel suo protagonista charlie citrine, simpatico cialtrone dalla tormentata vita interiore (una sensiblerie che dopo un po' dava sui nervi, come a un certo punto dice, più o meno, l'interessato). ed eccomi al dunque catapultata in un romanzo che fa l'effetto di una pièce teatrale tutta trovate a sorpresa e uscite brillanti, dove dal primo all'ultimo atto ci si lascia rapire con sommo piacere dal velluto della poltrona, dalla conversazione sottilmente padroneggiata e dai suoni del palcoscenico calcato con maestria. e insomma riemergendo solo alla fine - dal libro, dalla pièce e dalla poltrona - si realizza che in quel flusso a tratti soverchiante, e a dispetto del filo di qualche ragionamento smarrito per digressioni (l'antroposofia del vecchio rudolf! la psicopatologia quotidiana di sigmund! la benedetta noia come start up della società contemporanea!) bellow ha disquisito genialmente di molte, moltissime cose. di rapporti umani e letteratura, per cominciare. e poi di ambizione, amicizia, vil denaro, successo, memoria. ma anche cultura di massa ed élitarietà, gloriose sconfitte («i poeti sono amati ma solo perché non sanno stare al mondo») e illusioni sempre sull'uscio di casa, come vuoti a rendere.
quindi in definitiva della vita ma anche della morte, che in humboldt è anzi, per bellowiana ammissione, il fraseggio principale. epperò si aggiunga che si ride (parecchio) ad onta del tutto di cui sopra: tant'è che la morte stessa è strumento nello srotolarsi della trama, protagonista nelle riflessioni più serie, e comparsa in trovate come un rivale in amore che per campare fa il becchino. insomma la didascalia finale è che c'è un codice narrativo che scoppietta come i pop corn, in questo romanzo, e ne sono rimasta incantata. applausi a scena aperta per gli attori, e ripetute chiamate alla ribalta per la regia.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A masterful rendition of the narrator being; passive, studious, and tangled in an intellectuality that renders him apart from life and experience. How to hold this reader’s involvement for an entire novel through these set of eyes? Yet, Bellow does. He shows the narrator hustled into his own net trapped and at times suffering. Intellectuality a costly defense from the aggressive tumult of life; unmitigated experience. At the same time Bellow crafts this man as representing the life of imagination juxtaposed against the world with its willfulness, tawdry pushing and conniving to get one’s way; the rise to success and the reception of the emptiness of money and weightless awards. And as always the great scavenger; time, with its consumption of a generation fading and the new generation already entering. A time for mourning amongst the gaiety of youths.

One star lost for a portion where the narration sagged but Bellow was there to catch it. I wasn’t aware he was such a good athlete.

So, now onto the short stories of Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, whose life was related through the character of Humboldt who elicits so many different feelings in this important novel.

[Ken · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t give many books one or two stars, but that’s because I usually don’t finish them. I gave up on the gauntlet approach to book reading years ago – especially to books approaching 500 pages.

Thus, the mystery of why I finished this book. I can't even say myself, really. I only know that the first Saul Bellow is now behind me, and now I’ll be a bit Bellow-shy from here on out. Probably I should’ve chosen a shorter book as an introduction to the man, but I spent a couple of nights in the home he lived in while teaching at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, a mouthful of pretentious hyphens if ever I saw one, and this was the Bellow I had handy. Poking around his study, listening to his mice behind the walls, I grew curious enough to pick it up.

And now I am George without the Curious. Or a cat with only 8 lives (the other sacrificed to curiosity in the spirit of things).

I think this novel won a Nobel, of all things. The Nobel for Bloat, maybe? Or perhaps, to be fair, bloat was more fashionable in Bellow’s day. Or the mice kept him up, so he wrote on and on, such that his protagonist, the erudite Charlie Citrine, talks on and on. And Charlie’s not the only one. Just as Annandale-on-Hudson wears hyphens out, Bellow's characters wear quotation marks out. Talk, talk, talk. On and on and on. These characters LOVE to hear themselves talk.

What’s odd is how the talk has such little plot to hang its hat on. Charlie’s mentor and friend, Humboldt the Poet, dies after being bitter to his now more successful friend (a common problem among writers, who are as jealous as cats are curious). Charlie begins to lose money. His wife sues for divorce, hires an excellent lawyer, enjoys the advantage of a sympathetic (to women) judge. His love life wanes. He meditates on this mistress, that one, another one. Almost Mad Men-like, these ladies of yesteryear.

And then there was the subplot that annoyed. It centered on this two-bit mafia wannabe named Cantabile who keeps harassing Charlie. I think Cantabile was in the novel for over-the-top laughs, but he wasn’t funny, and every time he popped up (like the proverbial bad penny), I said, “Oh, no. Not him again. A mafia wannabe who trades in quotation marks instead of money!”

In some ways the book reads like an author trying to impress the reading public (or Nobel judges) with his erudition. The allusions to great literature are like mosquitoes in Alaska – the size and scope of collie dogs. Only a little would have gone a much longer way.

But I hung in there, if for no other reason than to see the hole closed in my reading résumé. “Stitch, stitch, stitch,” I kept saying. “Talk, talk, talk,” the book kept saying. You know what it’s like when you meet someone at a cocktail party and at first they seem just friendly and then you realize that they are boors who like to hear themselves talk? Well, there are very intelligent boors and very dumb ones both. The boor-dom here was of a higher order (asterisk Cantabile). Really, really impressive. Only my eyes wandered over their heads at time as I looked for my escape.

Still, in the end, I was happy for Charlie. And, if I may be a bit selfish, for myself. I’ve been eyeing other books now for a week! (Think Tantalus and the just-out-of-reach food.)

[Marica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ogni testa è un tribunale
Charles Citrine è una figura emblematica di un sacco di cose: intellettuale statunitense, ebreo russo di origine (Tzitrin), brav’uomo spolpato dall’ex-moglie, preda degli avvocati, amante appassionato ma superficiale di donna giovane e bella. La lettura del libro mi ha suggerito il detto: “ogni testa è un tribunale” e quella di Citrine soprattutto, perché per tutto il libro ragiona sull’estetica, la filosofia steineriana, sui suoi rapporti con le donne, con la famiglia amici e conoscenti e ripercorre le vicende travagliate del suo amico Humboldt, dibattendo ogni argomento da tutti i punti di vista. La sua aspirazione sarebbe dedicarsi indisturbato al pensiero ma gli eventi lo distolgono fastidiosamente. I personaggi con cui ha a che fare sono rappresentati in modo superbo e sembra di conoscerli, per esempio il gangster Cantabile coi baffi morbidi come pelo di castoro, vestito come un damerino e dotato di moglie laureanda in letteratura; il fratello uomo d’affari che deve essere sottoposto a un’operazione importante ed è attaccato alla vita; la bella e affascinante Renata, col suo senso pratico e la battuta perfetta; la señora, ungherese finta spagnola, madre di Renata, modello della madre intrigante. Penso che Bellow si sia divertito a scriverlo almeno quanto mi sono divertita io a leggerlo. E’ un grande interprete della commedia umana e in questo senso ho pensato spesso al migliore Woody Allen.

[Girish Gowda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Close to two weeks of finishing this. If I don't meditate on it now, it probably will never happen.

So here it goes. Out of the the 4 Pulitzer winners that I've read this year, this one I've rated the lowest, for the simplest of reasons that Bellow writes this mainly for himself.. there's this firm distance between the reader and the writer. It doesn't invite participatory reading at all. Bellow goes on a tangent after tangent for pages. On death, on the deathlessness of the human spirit and of course, the commodification of art in the world that is hideously money minded. The book is about artists who want to make few bucks that will put them in a safe spot , so that they can partake in their one true calling in life, that is to create art.

It's all fun and dandy but the list of characters in here,who pointlessly serve probably a very minute role but still come in and go incessantly without the narrative changing the pitch irritated me.

The experience has been joyless, which is a shame because Bellow really discusses some interesting things, how all the intellectuals actually struggle to lead a simple life, for instance, however, like i mentioned before I wish I felt he was inviting me into this instead of me feeling like I was gatecrashing an important event of the host who clearly didn't want me there..

I'll be reading more Bellow. A man can only hope those are better than this one..

[Jason Pettus · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called literary "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label

Essay #38: Humboldt's Gift (1975), by Saul Bellow

The story in a nutshell:
In good Postmodernist fashion, Saul Bellow's 1975 Humboldt's Gift is a semi-autobiography of sorts, one concerning a writer named Von Humboldt Fleischer -- modeled on Bellow's actual writer friend Delmore Schwartz, who you can also perhaps think of as a cross between e.e. cummings and Nelson Algren, an irascible but brilliant star of Early Modernist poetry (like cummings) but the communist-friendly product of a salty blue-collar Jewish immigrant family (like Algren) -- and the tumultuous decades-long relationship he has with his onetime protege and now award-winning millionaire Charlie Citrine -- based on Bellow himself, who you can also picture as an amalgam of John Updike, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and all the other academes who eventually became the superstars of post-Vietnam literature, but who actually got their starts in the Modernist '50s precisely by studying under people like Schwartz*.

Also in good Postmodernist fashion, then, the actual plot of Humboldt's Gift seems more like a hasty afterthought, with its main point being instead simply to watch the now middle-aged Citrine go through his daily '70s routine in Chicago where he lives (racquetball with politicians, bathhouse steams with fellow intellectuals, petty squabbles in his neighborhood of Hyde Park), while he reminisces about the changing fate over the decades of the recently deceased Humboldt, which quickly becomes a rumination on American history in general -- how in the 1930s, for example, the nation eagerly embraced the experimentation and radical liberalism of Humboldt's work; how they collectively then turned their backs on him in the conservative 1950s, even as Citrine himself became famous for a bitter Broadway comedy that parodied Humboldt's extremism; how by the Kennedy '60s, shiny ethnic progressives like Citrine and his pals had fallen back in favor with the American public, even while burned-out New Dealers like Humboldt were now cynical shadows of their former selves; and how by the '70s when our story takes place, all aspects of the arts were rapidly being overrun by corporate conglomeration and naked commercialism, a world that had no place for someone like Humboldt at all, as best typified by the low-level gangster Rinaldo Cantibile who Citrine accidentally forms a relationship with, and who spends the book constantly pitching various ways that Citrine could turn his recent Pulitzer and old relationship with Humboldt into a literal cash factory. Add a few hundred references to various minor writers and philosophers of the 20th century, and you have Bellow's book in a nutshell.

The argument for it being a classic:
Well, for starters, his fans say, it was the winner of the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for literature, and this in the same year that he also won the more prestigious Nobel Prize for literature (awarded to writers based on their entire career, not just for a specific book). More importantly, though, Humboldt's Gift is literally a textbook example of what the Postmodernist era was all about (which for the purposes of this essay series is being defined as the thirty years between Woodstock and 9/11), as well as what the intellectuals of that period treasured most in literature -- it is thoughtful, it is self-referential, it is slyly funny, the language is beautiful, and it concentrates much more on exploring character than on obsessively trying to come up with a potboiler storyline, like so many of the cheap genre novels that had mostly defined the industry only one generation previously. Just one of many titles by Bellow that were celebrated bestsellers in their day, his fans argue that this particular one is a perfect example of why he's considered one of the most important writers of the entire 20th century (and one of the most important Jewish writers in all of history), a poster-child for the changing of the guard that happened to literature in general during these years, into something that slowly became much smarter and more based on metaphor than what the industry had seen before.

The argument against:
Of course, as with many Postmodernist projects, the exact arguments just cited can be completely turned around into criticisms as well, which is exactly what you see among a whole lot of disgruntled readers online -- that books like Humboldt's Gift are actually the worst thing that could've ever happened to literature, an endlessly navel-gazing piece of academic circle-jerk crap in which nothing actually happens, no conclusions about the world are made, and one's opinion doesn't even count unless one is the holder of an MFA. After all, say its critics, this was the exact period of history when novels first stopped being the most dominant form of culture in our society, supplanted quickly in those years by film and television, which to this day still mostly dominate the mainstream arts in terms of influence and popularity; and a big reason for this was because of academes taking over the literary industry in those years, with their smartypants "deconstructionism" and "metafiction" and "it's not funny ha-ha, it's funny makes-you-think!" Humboldt's Gift is a perfect example of this, they argue, an overwritten mess so intensely hailed as a masterpiece by the ivory-tower crowd that most of the general public gave up on the very idea of trying to understand contemporary literature anymore; and as Postmodernism in general starts rapidly falling out of favor in our current post-9/11 "Age of Sincerity" (or whatever you want to call it), so too are we seeing Bellow quickly descend into the barely-remembered obscurity he actually deserves.

My verdict:
So let me make this clear before anything else, that as an overeducated intellectual, I personally really adored Humboldt's Gift, one of those slow-moving deep character studies that you don't just read but inhabit, particularly enjoying the now-forgotten political issues of Mid-Century Modernism that Bellow reminds us of here (for example, Humboldt's absolute certainty that the US would devolve into a fascist military state after the election of Eisenhower in 1952, a common but unrealized fear among post-war Rooseveltians that is hardly ever discussed in history texts anymore); and as a fellow Chicagoan and Hyde Park habitue I especially loved it, not just for his spot-on descriptions of various local landmarks (Division Street Bath! River North penthouses!), but also his pithy observations about the city and its citizens in general. ("Sensitivity in a mature Chicagoan, if genuine, [is:] a treatable form of pathology.") But that said, this book was also a legitimate chore to get through most of the time, and I found myself with a lot of sympathy for the hundreds of traumatized online haters of this book, and their nightmarish tales of slogging their way through this for sometimes two or three months just to find themselves still only a couple of hundred pages in.

It's no secret that I'm one of the people who find a lot to complain about concerning Postmodernism, and I think it's definitely fair to point to this title in particular as a great example of everything both so right and wrong about the period; because even though it really is as intelligent and subtle and quietly charming as its fans claim, it also now serves in hindsight as a bad premonition of things to come, essentially the book that gave a million professors official permission to write whiny little screeds about their miserably boring lives in the sleepy collegetowns where they live, and the ennui-filled affairs they're having with their pretentious 19-year-old students. Humboldt's Gift is sure to be loved by his fellow academes, but many others will find it intolerable, which is why today I fall thoroughly on the 'no' side of the classics equation, and recommend it only to those who are already fans of the Postmodernist masters previously mentioned.

Is it a classic? No

(And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!)

*Oh, and an interesting piece of trivia that I couldn't find a good place for in the main essay -- turns out that one of Schwartz's most famous students besides Bellow himself was edgy musician Lou Reed, who has dedicated several songs to him over the years.