Humboldt's Gift

Summary

Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money. He looks back on his friendship with Von Humboldt Fleisher, a brilliant, voluble poet who burst onto the literary scene in the 1930s with a celebrated first book and became Charlie's mentor when Charlie arrived in Greenwich Village as a young admirer from the Midwest. Humboldt dreamed of using poetry to redeem America, but his talent dwindled amid drink, pills, paranoia and manic schemes to secure a chair at Princeton through political manoeuvring. He accused Charlie of stealing his personality for the von Trenck character, cashed a blank cheque Charlie had given him as a token of blood brotherhood, was committed to Bellevue after a violent episode, and died alone and impoverished in a shabby Times Square hotel; Charlie, who glimpsed him on the street shortly before but avoided him, carries guilt. In the present, Charlie's life is a comic chaos: his ex-wife Denise is pursuing him through the courts for more money; his voluptuous girlfriend Renata wants to marry him; a small-time Chicago hoodlum named Rinaldo Cantabile, to whom Charlie owes a gambling debt, smashes his Mercedes with a baseball bat and then attaches himself to him with a scheme; and Charlie studies the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, meditating on the dead and the immortality of the soul. Charlie's fortunes collapse: Renata leaves him in Madrid for an undertaker, leaving him to look after her son, and he is reduced to living in a cheap pension. Then Humboldt's posthumous gift arrives: a letter and two film treatments, one of which Humboldt and Charlie had written together years ago. One has already been plagiarised into a hit film, and Charlie, with Cantabile's help, negotiates a settlement that restores his finances. He uses part of the money to rebury Humboldt and Humboldt's mother in a better cemetery. At the reburial, in spring, a companion points out a flower, and Charlie identifies it as a crocus.

Top Lessons

• America and the poet

  Humboldt's collapse is presented as partly personal and partly the fate of a poet in a country that worships money and celebrity. Bellow asks what place art and spirit have in a commercial culture.

• Guilt and repair

  Charlie avoided his dying friend and lives with that failure. The novel's ending, with its reburial, suggests that some debts to the dead can still be paid.

• Comedy and metaphysics

  Bellow mixes slapstick about smashed cars and lawsuits with meditation on death and the soul. The novel insists that big questions arise in messy ordinary lives.

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Medical Lens

Humboldt's arc is a vivid literary portrait of what modern readers often recognise as bipolar illness complicated by substance use: grandiose schemes, pressured talk, insomnia, paranoid jealousy, violent episodes, and mixing of alcohol with prescription stimulants and sedatives. The novel depicts his commitment to Bellevue and the legal manoeuvres around it, and his lonely death. Because Humboldt is modelled on Delmore Schwartz, whose documented history included psychiatric hospitalisation and drug and alcohol use, the novel is a useful case for discussing the relation between creativity and mood disorder, but diagnostic labels should be presented as readings. Charlie's guilt and his meditations on contact with the dead are an extended study of grief.

• Early sections (Charlie's memories)

  Humboldt's torrential talk, grand plans and sleepless energy in the 1940s and 1950s.

• Middle sections

  Humboldt's paranoid accusations, violence toward his wife, use of drink and pills, and commitment to Bellevue.

• Middle sections

  Humboldt's death alone in a Times Square hotel, and Charlie's memory of avoiding him shortly before.

• Final section

  Reburial of Humboldt and his mother.