“THE PROUD and regal name Delmore,” sang Lou Reed on one of his mournful solo albums, The Blue Mask. Reed was honoring his favorite teacher Delmore Schwartz, who by the early sixties, when he taught Reed at Syracuse University, had become a shambling wreck, wearing a torn overcoat smeared with toothpaste and capable of leaving the house with only one shoe. Years earlier he had slouched, as he put it, from “il faut tenter de vivre” to “il faut get out of the pajamas every other day.” Delmore popped handfuls of Dexedrine as he sat in the Orange Bar, a popular Syracuse hangout, encircled by students: now spinning a bedraggled story about the Rockefellers, who had, he said, abducted his wife, now denouncing his endless turncoat friends, for instance his old pal Saul Bellow. Saul had raised money for him and then taken it all back, stipulating that the cash was to be used only for a stay in Payne Whitney, the high-class sanatorium where, Delmore’s friends hoped, he would somehow piece himself together. At the Orange Bar, Delmore spoke to his disciples with rapture about everything from the New York Giants to Heinrich Heine, Buffalo Bill, and the sex life of T. S. Eliot. “Dwight [Macdonald] cheated him out of a house, Saul withheld money”: so John Berryman, another of America’s lost poètes maudits, recited Delmore’s woes in one of the Dream Songs he dedicated to “the sacred memory of Delmore Schwartz.”
In January 1966 Delmore abruptly left Syracuse and the last of a series of long-suffering student girlfriends and returned for his last few months of life to a seedy hotel in New York, where he read the tabloids and Finnegans Wake, drank his gin from a jar in the morning, and went out only to slurp soup at a deli counter or hunch warily over the bar at Cavanagh’s, the old-time Irish saloon on Twenty-Third Street long ago favored by Diamond Jim Brady and the Tammany Hall crew. Delmore died on July 11, 1966, at the age of fifty-two of a heart attack in the corridor of the Columbia Hotel, trying to take out the trash.
“His mission was obscure. His mission was real, / But obscure,” wrote Berryman about Delmore. And Bellow knew more about Delmore’s mission than anyone. Delmore the kind, handsome, noble, crazy, illuminated, in spite of his mad vindictive streak the best-loved presence among the New York intellectuals, the one among them who stood perfectly for the artist, the dreamer, the man of mind and heart, all this about Delmore came through in Bellow’s superb novel Humboldt’s Gift, published in 1975. Delmore figures in Bellow’s book as Von Humboldt Fleisher, the beautiful young poet and intellectual rhapsodist who eventually, beset by black paranoia, becomes a drug- and alcohol-addled conspiracy-monger. In the novel’s opening pages Humboldt casts his spell on Charlie Citrine, an upward-hoping fledgling writer from Appleton, Wisconsin, Harry Houdini’s hometown, who has just landed in New York: Charlie is Bellow’s narrator and a clear stand-in for the author.
Bellow starts his book with a bright portrait of Humboldt. Charlie takes the ferry with Humboldt to Hoboken, where they eat steamed clams, drink beer, and smell the river breeze, and where Humboldt delivers to Charlie the first of many wide-swinging monologues. Frantic, hopped-up, Humboldt covers what seems like the whole history of the world. Just listen to this aria, as Charlie reports it: “His spiel took in Freud, Heine, Wagner, Goethe in Italy, Lenin’s dead brother, Wild Bill Hickok’s costumes, the New York Giants, Ring Lardner on grand opera, Swinburne on flagellation, and John D. Rockefeller on religion.”
Humboldt is obsessed with the Abishag motif, the fall from grace to depravity, stardom to poverty; he too will fall on grim hard times, a spurned Hurstwood out of Sister Carrie. He says of Mae Murray, “She starred in The Queen of Tasmania and Circe the Enchantress, but she ended as a poorhouse crone.” Even worse, there is “what’s-his-name who killed himself in the hospital[.] He took a fork and hammered it into his heart with the heel of his shoe, poor fellow!” (Humboldt is thinking of the silent-film star Lou Tellegen, who stabbed himself to death with a pair of scissors in Hollywood’s Cudahy Mansion.)
Bellow plucked the name Humboldt for his hero from the annals of European Wissenschaft, but also from Humboldt Park, his immigrant neighborhood in Chicago. As with Humboldt, everyone knew Delmore Schwartz by the high-toned first name his mother had picked for him. From time to time he claimed that his mother got the idea to call him Delmore from the sign on a delicatessen across the street from his house, but in fact Rose Schwartz had borrowed it from a neighboring family whose son was also a Delmore: such a beautiful name, she said.
Even in his last years, Delmore still had a noble spark, he was still from time to time the young man who had stunned the New York intellectuals with a quietly ravishing short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” written when he was twenty-one and featured in the first issue of Partisan Review, in the fall of 1937. Delmore’s story opened the issue, before Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, before Picasso and James T. Farrell and Mary McCarthy, before Wallace Stevens and James Agee. Delmore was on his way, and he knew it, cutting his bright swath, heralded so young as a talent who might even rival the modernist colossi.
“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” though a work of fiction, tells Delmore’s own story. Delmore’s father, a hard-boiled, cynical gambler, left the family when the boy was nine, and so Delmore was raised by an overbearing mother whose love and resentment were both suffocating. Rose followed Delmore and his brother to summer camp, but she also later hounded Delmore with demands that he pay her back for his college education. Delmore admired his lost father (turned by Bellow in Humboldt’s Gift into a Jewish cowboy who rode with Pancho Villa in Mexico). But he was temperamentally much closer to his brooding, sensitive mother. The startling conceit of “In Dreams,” which Delmore wrote in a fever of creativity during one summer night in July 1935, is that a young man goes to the movies and sees a film of his own parents’ courtship. The soon-to-be couple stroll at Coney Island, pose for a photograph, visit a fortune-teller, and gaze at the blind, restless waves that foreshadow their bleak future. Close to the story’s end, the young man in the movie theater, observing his mother and father, rises to his feet and shouts, “Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.” Family scandal was a piercing memory for Delmore: in 1921, during one of his parents’ separations, Delmore’s mother took him, then seven years old, by the hand and strode into a roadhouse restaurant. There she surprised Harry Schwartz with another woman, whom she denounced as a whore.
When “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” appeared, Delmore was saluted as a new master. Years later, Vladimir Nabokov quietly asserted that “In Dreams” was one of his favorite stories, a rare occasion on which Nabokov praised a living author. One can see why: the story has a Nabokov-like irony wrapped around a flat but finely crafted prose style. Yet “In Dreams” never displays the connoisseur’s grace with which Nabokov treats fate. The story depicts instead the most dire and inescapable destiny, and the most ordinary one, too: being born in just this way to just these people.
The photos of Delmore that came out in Vogue after his first book was published in 1938 show an electrically handsome, inspired-looking bard. In one, Greek-god-like, he poses with a Hellenic bust; in another, smoldering Byronically, he gazes into a mirror with “the eye of a Mongol horseman,” as Robert Lowell wrote in a sonnet about Delmore. Delmore made his mark on the literary world before Lowell’s and Randall Jarrell’s obsession with childhood, before Berryman’s self-lacerating ego, before Sylvia Plath’s suicidal glamor. The precarious narcissistic grandeur of these later poets, all of them except Plath friends of Delmore, was inspired in part by him, their elder brother.
“In Dreams” shows Delmore’s bondage to the heavy weight of the past. More and more as the years went by, Delmore was disastrously obsessed by Freud, convinced he could never win the family struggle, that everything had been determined from before his own birth. The epic autobiographical poem he completed in 1942, called Genesis, was a hopeless excursion into the family romance; a nervous mock-solemnity mars the book. Delmore considered Genesis his masterpiece, but the critics didn’t agree. For them, he was a once promising young man who had floundered, sunk by the idea that his parents’ doomed marriage had once and for all sealed his fate.
In Genesis, Delmore was riffling through the details of his past, searching desperately for the answer to the riddle of his character, which was sometimes melancholy and idealizing, sometimes pulsing with manic life. But however much he sought the origins of his self in his childhood memories, he could never recover his creative spark. He was a lost soul, convinced of his failure, and his rebellion against the successful ones—against people like Bellow—turned more bitter and helpless as the years passed. He was galvanized by gossip and rumor, and could be conniving, gloating, vengeful. When Mary McCarthy left Philip Rahv for Edmund Wilson in 1937, Delmore’s biographer James Atlas writes, this was “a development Delmore dwelled on with great exuberance.” Delmore disliked Rahv, about whom he quipped, Oscar Wilde style, “Philip has scruples, but he never lets them stand in his way.” But he also enraged Wilson, along with everyone else who had helped his career. Delmore’s fantasies about people with power, money, and success turned out-and-out crazy, and his urge to pick fights ensured his isolation. One friend after another disappeared, disheartened by Delmore’s accusations. Drugs were becoming a problem, too, and the problem would get worse. “Just before eating a small lunch, five, six, seven, eight Dex” is a typical Delmore journal entry from the fifties, when he headed more steeply downward.
Among the New York intellectuals Delmore had no closer friend than William Barrett, an Irish working-class boy who quickly assimilated to the nervous energy of the Jewish thought-mavens in the Partisan Review crowd. Barrett remarked on Delmore’s “curious hop, as if he couldn’t stand still with glee, his arms flapping against his sides like a chicken’s wings.” Delmore’s original gaiety enthralled his friends, but as time went on his energy turned manic, uncontrollable. While lecturing at Columbia in 1948 on “The Literary Dictatorship of T. S. Eliot,” Delmore drank a tumbler of straight gin to settle his nerves. He was auditioning for a teaching position, but Trilling, aware of Delmore’s erratic behavior, nixed the appointment.
Bellow met and got to know Delmore sometime in the late forties, during one of his trips to New York. In 1944 Delmore praised Dangling Man, Bellow’s first novel. By 1952 he had secured one-year teaching positions for both himself and Bellow at Princeton: Delmore was in his hopped-up, plotting phase. In Partisan Review Delmore claimed that Augie March was better than Huckleberry Finn. In a 1954 letter to Sam Freifeld, Bellow described Delmore as “my strange delightful buddy.” By October 1957, he was writing to James Laughlin, “About Delmore, I’m just as depressed as you are. He’s got it in his mind that I’m one of his ill-wishers . . . and he phoned me in the middle of the night using techniques the GPU might have envied.” Delmore, convinced that Hilton Kramer was having an affair with his wife, was equally sure that Bellow was in cahoots with Kramer; he put a private detective on Bellow’s tail. The relationship between the two men would not recover. In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow honors Delmore by looking back at him, and taking a loving, battered view of both the bold inspired young poet and the distracted middle-aged wreck.
Humboldt’s Gift is a pure romp, a tremendous achievement for a book about sex, death, madness, and money. It is more than anything else a comic novel. Humboldt’s first hundred pages are a whirlwind, a virtuoso rapture that can rival anything in American literature for gusto. The comedy comes from the antic spirit of Humboldt, but also from Charlie Citrine, the Bellow character. Charlie is realist enough to reject Humboldt’s enraptured delusions, but he himself has Rudolf Steiner–spurred dreams of surmounting mortality. (After his Reichian enthusiasm ebbed, Bellow became a Steiner fan.) Charlie is aware of his own ridiculousness, both in amorous matters—Renata, a voluptuous younger woman, holds him captive—and in his eccentric methods of self-help. Standing on his head in the only yoga position he knows after his Mercedes has been smashed to pieces by a thug, Charlie courts a lighter brand of absurdity than the one the modernist mythmakers endorsed. In Humboldt’s Gift no abysses are stared into, but the novel is for all its loony touches a work of high seriousness.
Bellow is at his most serious in Humboldt when he shows how Humboldt, the high-dreaming bard, mistakenly sees a kind of beauty in fame, influence, and money. (Charlie is susceptible to this gospel too.) Humboldt wants real worldly power, and in this he echoes Delmore. When Adlai Stevenson ran against Eisenhower in 1952, Delmore, stirred with excitement, said he had it on very good authority that Stevenson was reading his poems on the campaign trail. Stevenson was going to make it to the White House, Delmore insisted in hushed tones, and then he would become Adlai’s cultural advisor. Thus would bloom a new Weimar—but it was not to be. What came instead was dull, slumbering, anti-intellectual Ike.
Like Delmore, Humboldt was crestfallen after the dismal 1952 election returns, when Adlai lost to Ike by a wide margin. Humboldt hatches a new plot: to become professor of poetry at Princeton. If Humboldt cannot sway Washington, he can, he thinks, at least ascend to the top of the Ivy League heap. The added kick for him is that a Jew will get to infiltrate the WASP inner sanctum. Charlie goes to Princeton with Humboldt to secure English Department jobs for both of them.
This strand of Bellow’s story is closely based on fact. In 1952 the influential critic R. P. Blackmur, a hard-drinking, loquacious poor boy who had climbed the ivory tower and become one of America’s preeminent literary critics, was about to leave for a yearlong Fulbright in the Middle East. In Humboldt’s Gift, a Professor Sewell, closely modeled on Blackmur, is similarly about to depart Princeton for a Fulbright in Damascus, and Humboldt proposes to replace him for a year. Charlie, Humboldt, and Sewell go to lunch together, and so the plot advances: Humboldt easily engineers a position for himself as Sewell’s replacement, with Charlie in tow as his assistant. Charlie’s line on Sewell is devastating: he sees in him “a muttering subtle drunken backward-leaning hollow-faced man,” with sparse hair and a “dry-cereal” moustache, crossing his legs with spurious elegance. Sewell looks like the sterile butt-end of high modernism, a hollow man, headpiece filled with straw. Humboldt, by contrast, is full of ardent life, a drink from romantic springs.
Just as memorable as Humboldt is the gangster Rinaldo Cantabile, who savages Charlie’s treasured Mercedes. Cantabile cuts a major figure in Humboldt’s Gift: “raging from the neck up,” he is a mink-moustached, testosterone-piloted zany, a dandy in a raglan coat who matches Humboldt himself in kooky ardor, and whose bizarre ingenious plots outdo even Humboldt’s. Another Bellovian reality instructor, he plays both Charlie’s louche tormentor and his pal. Charlie has refused to give Cantabile his winnings from a poker game, since Cantabile was cheating (he is egged on by his bull-necked friend George Swiebel, based on Dave Peltz, who angrily shouts at him “No pay!”). So the gangster whacks Charlie’s car to pieces. After Charlie crumples and gives Cantabile the money he owes him, Cantabile takes him up to a lofty construction site where he makes the terrified Charlie stalk gingerly from beam to beam. He sails Charlie’s fifty-dollar bills from the shining steel girders far up in the air. This is my temptation in the wilderness, Charlie thinks. Many hundreds of feet high, unforgiving winds buffet these two aging boys, the writer and the hoodlum.
Cantabile bonds Charlie to him in outrageous ways. Suddenly needing to shit, he drags Charlie with him into the toilet stall at the Russian Baths on Division Street, cementing a fetid intimacy between the two men. Later, he proposes a ménage à trois. The emotional scuffling between Charlie and Cantabile leads to a cankered friendship: both have their labyrinthine soul struggles.
Charlie’s gorgeous wrecked Mercedes, maimed by Cantabile’s baseball bat, is a smashed love object, an image of fleshly vulnerability. The car’s frailty resembles that of the body, and tells us that the proud, anxious ladies man Charlie, with his devotion to the gym and his will to keep his sex life going strong, has been fooling himself. He sees himself as a Marc Antony cruising the city with Renata, his Cleopatra, royally defying middle age. But the slow waning of life turns out to be more powerful than the hectic effort to keep up. Humboldt’s Gift ends, after Charlie has lost Renata, in a recognition of age and death, and a clinging to the memory of the dead.
The most vivid character in Humboldt’s female cast list is the smart-talking, nervous Demmie Vonghel, Renata’s forceful opposite number, based closely on Bellow’s longtime girlfriend Maggie Staats. The ex-debutante Demmie is forthright, comforting, has bad dreams about hell, and is a whiz at cards. Like Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment pronouncing “shut up and deal,” she growls to Charlie during a gin game, “I’m gonna clean you out, sucker.” When Demmie sends Charlie off to his interview in Princeton, Bellow describes a marvel of tenderness: “In her cloth coat with the marten collar, with her sublime sexual knees that touched, and the pointed feet of a princess, and her dilated nostrils presented almost as emotionally as her eyes, and breathing with a certain hunger, she had kissed me with her warm face.” Bellow makes Demmie die in a plane crash over South America. The real Maggie Staats lived on; for a time Bellow divided his affections between her and Arlette Landes, on whom he based his portrait of Renata.
Humboldt keeps his own beloved in purdah. Kathleen, based on Delmore’s wife, the novelist Elizabeth Pollet, is Humboldt’s near captive in his decaying New Jersey house. Bellow depicts Kathleen as a sweet, out-of-tune companion to Humboldt, playing touch football with him in their yard in “Nowhere, New Jersey,” then sitting by Humboldt and Charlie as they watch the late show, a Bela Lugosi horror movie about a mad scientist who creates synthetic flesh.
Here Bellow stays close to Delmore’s biography. Delmore had bought a ramshackle home in New Jersey, far from the epicenter of New York and its cultural titans. There he shared his cornered existence with Elizabeth, who had become a best-selling novelist. Delmore’s paranoid jealousy ballooned to epic proportions. In his wilder fits Delmore claimed that behind his back Elizabeth was having affairs with a host of strange men. Once Delmore dragged Elizabeth violently away from a Princeton party after she plucked a match from Ralph Ellison’s pocket; he threw her into their car and drove recklessly, violently away. (This was the party that Bellow attended with Sondra Tschacbasov, already described in Chapter Four.) Bellow tells the tale of this bizarre, frightening night in Humboldt’s Gift: Kathleen’s shoes are left on the lawn, and the car winds up in a ditch.
As Humboldt declines, Charlie rises: so it was with Delmore and Bellow. Charlie becomes a famous man after the runaway success of his Broadway play, whose hero, named von Trenck, was, so Humboldt angrily thinks, based on him. Humboldt seethes: Charlie has exploited and betrayed him.
Humboldt’s gallery of characters peaks in Bellow’s courtroom scenes. Exhausting legal wars with Susan Glassman exercised Bellow during Humboldt’s writing. Susan’s lawsuit claiming that he had underreported his income, which dragged through the courts for much of the seventies, seemed to Bellow surreally vindictive. (She won, eventually.) The battered Bellow took his literary revenge in Humboldt’s Gift, where Denise’s divorce lawyer is a showy brute, “cannibal Pinsker” in his loud, checked yellow suit and two-tone tan shoes. Cantabile gleefully tells Charlie about Pinsker: “Yiy! Pinsker, that man-eating kike! . . . He’ll chop up your liver with egg and onion”—and so it turns out. In his courtroom scenes Bellow mightily skewers Susan’s rapacity, as he saw it. He is reported to have said after one particularly draining courtroom session in 1971, “I watch her, and as a character in a novel she’s delicious, but in real life she’s a monster.”
Humboldt ends with Menasha Klinger’s aria at Humboldt’s grave. Menasha was a boarder in Charlie’s house when he was a kid. Even then, working as a punch-press operator, he had a bad, roosterish voice and the indefatigable yen to become an opera singer. Many decades later, Charlie visits Menasha and Humboldt’s uncle Waldemar Wald at Coney Island, a poignant and hilarious scene that Roth leaned on for his portrait of Cousin Fish in Sabbath’s Theatre. At the very end of Humboldt’s Gift Waldemar and Menasha preside with Charlie over the reburial of Humboldt and his mother in Valhalla, a prestigious cemetery for German Jews. No one remembers the kaddish, or any other prayer for that matter, and so Menasha steps in and performs two songs, “In questa tomba oscura” from Aida and the old spiritual “Goin’ Home.” Menasha clasps his hands and, “rising on his toes, and as emotionally as in our kitchen on Rice Street, weaker in voice, missing the tune still, and crowing but moved, terribly moved, he sang his aria.”
Bellow picks for Humboldt’s closing note an old man with a long-ago-shot voice singing a Verdi aria in beautifully deluded, cracked style. This is off-kilter amateur ambition as the antidote to the grandiose Humboldt, and antidote too to Charlie’s sorrow for his middle-aged self.
Menasha Klinger’s aria clues us in that Humboldt’s Gift aims to be what the critic Manny Farber called termite art. According to Farber in his 1962 essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” the termite artist rebels against “the idea of art as an expensive hunk of well-regulated area,” and instead chews away with “eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” The enemy of termite art is white elephant art, which is Farber’s name for masterpiece art. The white elephant artist wants to “install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities”: all too perfect, too just right.
Farber in his essay was concerned mostly with paintings and movies. He should have spent some time on novels, because novels more than any other form are naturally hospitable to termites. The nature of storytelling is to spill over, rush ahead, and get sidetracked. The novelist who tries to fill every nook with perfectly suitable detail has mistaken the character of the form, which dotes on the ragged. Dostoevsky is a termite artist par excellence. So is Dickens, another of Bellow’s favorites. Bellow, in a radically different emotional key from Dostoevsky or Dickens, like them wants the looseness and the power that come from lack of order. He packs the ending of Humboldt with odd lightweight divagations: George Swiebel goes to Nairobi in search of beryllium, Pierre Thaxter gets captured by terrorists. (The dandyish Thaxter, based on Keith Botsford, is a curious cosmopolitan man of letters, looking like Puss in Boots with his blue velvet suit, his cloak, and his tilted-brim black hat, delighted by Chicago crooks, shifty with money, full of grandiose schemes.)
Termite artists refuse “the continuity, harmony, involved in constructing a masterpiece,” Farber declares. They have their own kind of ambition: above all they refuse to get caught and sent to the zoo like the white elephant. What tripped up Delmore was the prestige of T. S. Eliot (“Uncle Tom,” as he called him), who more than anyone else stood for white elephant art. Delmore’s essays abound in judicious Eliotic rhetoric. He evaluates, discerns, pronounces judgment. But Eliot’s high church outfit never really suited the psychically unkempt Delmore. Bellow’s own judgment on Delmore’s aloof high culture posturing comes near the end of Humboldt’s Gift. Humboldt, he says, had made himself boring.
Humboldt’s proclamations about art and culture run up a blind alley. His true forte turns out to be the termite art of the two rude, bizarre film treatments he bequeaths to Charlie, recounted by Bellow in a wild scherzo out of Preston Sturges. One treatment, which Charlie and Humboldt cooked up together during their Princeton days, concerns an Italian Arctic explorer reduced to cannibalism during a polar expedition. Back in Italy, he sells gelato to adoring schoolchildren under the name Signore Caldofreddo; the media discovers his tragic secret, but the townspeople forgive him. Crazily, the absurd Caldofreddo scenario gets turned into a movie and becomes a massive hit in Europe. Humboldt’s other movie idea concerns a screenwriter who takes his mistress on a tropical vacation and turns the voyage into a screenplay—but not before retaking the same trip with his wife in a futile effort to quiet her suspicions, in a madcap riff on Kierkegaard’s Repetition.
The fact that Bellow makes a place in his book for the two treatments, these strange and flimsy jeux d’esprit, shows that he values properly what was most remarkable in Delmore: not his ambition to write a great poem or to become an arbiter of culture, but his talent for throwaway gestures and antic tale-telling. By taking on Delmore’s termite energy, Bellow was able to write Humboldt’s Gift, the freest and the strangest among his many books.
In a letter to his publisher James Laughlin, Delmore recommended to him a French novel
in which the hero is Thomas Alva Edison, who is very sad because he was born too late to make phonograph recordings of all the great sounds of history—the fall of Jericho, the Flood, the opening of the Red Sea, and the like[.] An Englishman in love with a very beautiful and very stupid opera singer commissions Edison to make a dummy automaton who looks just like the singer and sings like her, so that he will be free of his infatuation. Edison does, and the two ladies meet and it is all quite profound, in its way.
Termite art! There was, of course, no such novel. Delmore had made it all up, and it was Delmore all the way, just as demented as Bellow’s tale of the old Italian cannibal.
In Humboldt’s Gift Bellow marvelously describes Verlaine and Poincaré on their separate ways to lunch in fin-de-siècle Paris, “Verlaine drunken and bloated pounding his cane wildly on the sidewalk as he went to lunch, and shortly afterward the great mathematician Poincaré, respectably dressed and following his huge forehead while describing curves with his fingers, also on his way to lunch.” Delmore was both these men, the sodden crazy Verlaine and, in his best poems, the beautifully precise Poincaré, a Platonic perfectionist. Bellow zeroed in on Delmore the wild character, who was in the end far more intriguing than the writing he could not sustain.
Shortly before Humboldt’s death, Charlie glimpses the mad-eyed writer gnawing a pretzel stick on the street and darts away to avoid his gaze. These are Humboldt’s “grim gorilla days,” when he paces the cage of his sickness. Years later he remembers the “mad-rotten majesty” picture the New York Times chose to print beside its obituary of Humboldt. Here Bellow clearly nods to the famous photo of Delmore taken by Rollie McKenna: the poet sits on a bench in Washington Square Park, his gaze frantic and unsettled, at his feet a wind-blown copy of the Daily News with the headline “Heiress Keeps Her Millions.” Delmore’s thirst for high-society gossip stayed with him to the end, along with his need for great literature and for wild conspiracy theories. We do best to remember him, not in the megalomaniac glory of his youth, and not in his final bitter siege at the Columbia Hotel, but quietly absorbed, reading Finnegans Wake in his seat at the Polo Grounds, loyal to the Giants.