Humboldt's Gift
by Saul Bellow
Summary
Charlie Citrine is rich, famous, in his fifties and being taken apart. He made a great deal of money from a Broadway hit and has spent the years since on books he cannot finish. His former wife's lawyers are stripping him in a Chicago courtroom. His girlfriend Renata wants marriage and a better class of car. And a small time hood named Rinaldo Cantabile, owed a few hundred dollars from a poker game, has just beaten Citrine's Mercedes to pieces with a baseball bat in front of an audience.
Under all of it is Von Humboldt Fleisher, the poet who taught him what literature was for. Humboldt was brilliant at twenty five, a public figure, and then paranoid, litigious, medicated and finished, and he died in a cheap hotel with nobody around him and went into a pauper's grave. Citrine, who avoided him at the end, cannot stop arguing with him.
The novel is a comic monologue: Chicago money, Chicago violence, sex, lawyers, Rudolf Steiner on the dead, and Citrine's private conviction that the soul survives and that America has no room for anyone who says so.
Bellow's sentences are the reason to read it. They pile up, digress, and land a joke and a metaphysical claim inside the same clause, and the effect is very close to being talked at brilliantly for nearly five hundred pages.
Best for readers who like their comedy loud and their ideas unresolved. Anyone who needs a plot to advance steadily will find it maddening, and the women in it exist mostly as weather.
Historical Context & Significance
Humboldt's Gift won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the Nobel Prize in Literature followed for Saul Bellow later the same year, which is why this is the book his laureateship tends to be attached to.
Von Humboldt Fleisher is Delmore Schwartz, whose In Dreams Begin Responsibilities made him famous at twenty five and who died of a heart attack in a Times Square hotel in 1966, his body unidentified for days. Bellow had known him since the late 1930s in New York and acknowledged the portrait.
The novel is rude about prizes. Humboldt calls the Pulitzer a dummy newspaper publicity award given by crooks and illiterates, Citrine agrees, and Bellow, asked about that after winning it, said he accepted in dignified silence. Three earlier juries had recommended his books and been overruled.
The Pulitzer and the Nobel completed a run that already held three National Book Awards, for The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog and Mr Sammler's Planet.