Pulitzer Project: Humboldt's Gift

Humboldt's Gift is an odd book. I had no trouble reading it -- Saul Bellow could write -- but I did kind of wonder why I was bothering. Humboldt's Gift  is told from the perspective of a successful writer, Charlie Citrine, a guy who is apparently somewhere in his 50s at the time. The narration shifts back and forth from the present (early 1970s) to memories of the narrator's friendship with a renowned poet, Von Humboldt Fleischer.

Referred to as Humboldt by his friends and wide circle of acquaintances, Fleischer enjoyed early success but then kind of stalled out. He's able to earn a living, has an influential position as an editor and as visiting faculty as Princeton University, but his poetry doesn't have the impact he desires. He's sliding into becoming irrelevant, one of those authors whose early work gets described as "ground breaking" or "seminal" while the still-living author gets talked about as though he's dead. As time passes, Fleischer abuses drugs and alcohol more and more, becomes increasingly eccentric and paranoid, and ends up dying alone and unrecognized in a cheap New York City SRO hotel.

When the novel opens, Charlie Citrine is living in Chicago, his hometown. Fleischer has been dead for awhile, long enough that he's become the subject of Ph.D. dissertations, so Citrine finds himself pursued by graduate students hoping for some special insight or biographical tidbits that will make their research stand out. Citrine really doesn't want to talk about Fleischer or their friendship. His own life is enough of a mess that he's not interested in taking trips down Memory Lane with strangers. He's in the middle of a messy divorce, his writing has kind of stalled out, and he's involved with a youger woman, a person he admits he's seeing primarily for the sex. He recognizes that her primary interest in him is the money she thinks he has. The truth is, of course, that between his lack of recent work and the efforts of his wife to suck every last dime from him in divorce proceedings, he's got a cash flow problem.

In any case, the book flips back and forth between Citrine's current messed up life and his memories of Fleischer. He recalls Fleischer befriending him when Citrine first came to New York as a young, naïve wannabe writer and how their career trajectories intersected. Citrine went from being unknown to successful; Fleischer slid from famous and successful into obscurity. Their friendship splintered as the older writer became increasingly self-destructive. Citrine remembers the last time he saw Fleischer on the street in New York. The sight of Fleischer looking like a down and out wino spooked Citrine so much he found himself unable to cross the street to talk to his old friend. Instead, he had a panic attack and dashed back to the safety of Chicago. Shortly after that almost meeting, he learned Fleischer is dead.

Saul Bellow has Citrine revisit this memory multiple times in the book. You can tell it preys on Citrine; he's carrying a fair amount of guilt around for losing contact with the man who had been his mentor and had encouraged his ambitions back when he was unknown and struggling. At the same time, he's trying to deal with his wife's legal machinations, his girlfriend's mercenary instincts, a borderline Chicago mafia type who inserts himself into Citrine's life over a gambling debt, and his increasing financial woes. Citrine is a mess.

He's also not particularly likable. He's basically your standard issue self centered middle aged white guy misogynistic racist pig. I kept hoping the minor league Mafioso would decide to shove Citrine off a high-rise construction girder or stuff him into a garbage truck. No such luck. Four hundred plus pages and the jerk kept breathing. There was no happy ending in this book, unless Fleischer getting moved to a grave in a better location counts as one.

After I finished the book, I did some Googling. I try not to do that before reading the books on the list because I try to approach the Pulitzer winners with an open mind. Turns out that Humboldt's Gift is autobiographical. It's a fictionalized version of Saul Bellow's friendship with the poet Delmore Schwarz. Given that I had never heard of Delmore Schwarz but was familiar with Bellow's name (although I hadn't read anything he'd written) it does appear there were strong parallels when it came to the rise and fall of name recognition/notoriety/success. I also learned that the first incarnation of Humboldt's Gift was a short story published in Playboy. How a short story goes from a few thousand words to filling 400+ pages is a mystery, but Bellow must have been feeling inspired.

Would I recommend the book to other readers? It's a toss-up. Bellow could write. The book does have a certain flow and some of the elements do suck you in -- why does the Mafioso type decide he wants to be Citrine's friend instead of fitting him with cement shoes? how did Citrine become a supposedly successful journalist with access to political figures like Jacob Javits and Robert Kennedy when he's so clueless about people in his social life? -- but Citrine himself is sufficiently repellant that by the time I got to the end I was feeling like I'd just escaped from having lunch with Harvey Weinstein.

Next up on the list: Elbow Room, a collection of short stories by James Alan McPherson. This is the first book where I had to make a choice -- skip it or buy it because it was not available through Interlibrary Loan. I bought it, which means it won't get read for awhile.