Humboldt’s Gift (1975)

Published the year before he would receive the coveted Nobel Prize in literature, Humboldt’s Gift is a masterwork on a smaller scale than Herzog. Where Herzog gives the reader a tour through much of 20th-century philosophy with the hysterical academic Moses Herzog as guide, Humboldt’s Gift tells the sad, but comical, tale of foils Charlie Citrine and Humboldt von Fleischer. Humboldt was modeled on the writer Delmore Schwartz, an artist touted as the great new hope of modern poetry in the 1950s, only to die at a young age after a struggle with mental illness and substance abuse.

At the beginning of Bellow’s 1975 novel, Citrine is himself a middling poet, who wastes his time pursuing troubled women and the excitement of petty crime. Gradually, however, Citrine becomes Bellow’s eyes and ears. He sets his penetrating gaze on the failing poet Humboldt and narrates a pitch-perfect tale of the great man’s decline that becomes a meditation on the failure of modern society to support artistic genius.

All the ideals of modern society, from the science-minded surveys of Kinsey and Gallup to the alienating structures of capitalism and the theories of Freud, combine to subvert Humboldt’s gift, according to Citrine. Humboldt’s descent into madness, which Citrine gorgeously and comically narrates in Humboldt’s Gift, is a metaphor for the larger social decline that he observes in the 20th century.

The 60-year-old Citrine begins to realize that he must leave his home in Chicago and begin a quest for spiritual fulfillment, far from the maddening world that felled Humboldt. In the last pages of the novel, Humboldt sees crocuses pushing up through the cracks in the sidewalk and has a moment of awakening, an “epiphanic” moment in which he begins to see the beauty in the world around him and a means of avoiding the sad fate of the sensitive artist in the cold modern world.

For Discussion or Writing
1. At the time that Bellow wrote Humboldt’s Gift, he was undergoing his own transformation, coming under the sway of the mystical school of anthroposophy founded by Rudolph Steiner. Consult an encyclopedia or trustworthy Internet site and learn about anthroposophy. How do such transcendental schools of thought and theories of essential self play a part in Humboldt’s Gift? If you are also familiar with some of Freud’s ideas, do you see Bellow commenting on those ideas in the novel? Why or why not?

2. As many readers of the time knew, Humboldt von Fleischer was a thinly veiled stand-in for the poet Delmore Schwartz. Look up Delmore Schwartz in a literary encyclopedia and look at his famous first work, In Dreams Come Responsibilities. Why was he such an emblematic author for writers of Bellow’s generation? How does his character shine a light on the failures of society in Humboldt’s Gift?

3. Again, in 1975’s Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow focuses on the subject of madness, this time through Humboldt’s struggle with manic depression. How does madness work in this novel? How is it employed differently here than in Herzog, Bellow’s other great novel of madness?

4. Gender plays an important role in Humboldt’s Gift, as it does elsewhere in Bellow’s oeuvre. Compare the portrayal of masculinity in this novel and in the earlier works Seize the Day and “Looking for Mr. Green.” What might Bellow be trying to say about the power of masculine ideals in American society in these works?

Works Cited and Additional Resources:
Atlas, James. Bellow. New York: Random House, 2000.
Bach, Gerhard, and Gloria L. Cronin, eds. Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000.

Bach, Gerhard, and Jakob J. Kollhofer, eds. Saul Bellow at Seventy-Five: A Collection ofCritical Essays. Tubingen: G. Narr, 1991.
Bellow, Saul. “Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.” Nobel- prize.org. Available online. URL: http://nobel- prize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1976/ bellow-lecture.html. Accessed May 28, 2007.