Humboldt's Gift is a 1976 novel by Saul Bellow.
The protagonist is one Charlie Citrine, a writer who's had a very successful career with plays and novels and screenplays. However, he's getting old, pushing sixty, and his career is stagnating. He also is having financial problems: his ex-wife Denise (assisted by a sympathetic judge) is bleeding him dry, and he has unwisely gotten mixed up with a con artist named Thaxter who has roped him into publishing a literary magazine that never went to press. Charlie also has a younger girlfriend, Renata, who expects to be kept in style. Meanwhile Charlie's being pursued by a gangster, Cantabile, who is after him for an unpaid poker debt.
All this has Charlie thinking back on his old friend Von Humboldt Fleisher. Humboldt was a poet and author who was once Charlie's best friend, and who was a name in the literary world when Charlie was nobody. However, while Charlie rose to heights of great success, Humboldt was brought down by alcoholism and madness, and died in poverty. Charlie, at a crossroads in his life, can't help but wonder if his friend Humboldt was the better artist.
Tropes:
- Anachronic Order: The present-day narrative with Charlie's struggles is continually interrupted by extensive flashbacks where Charlie remembers, and tells stories about, Humboldt.
- Buxom Beauty Standard: Charlie often speaks admiringly of his girlfriend Renata's great body and "marvelous breasts".
- Distant Prologue: The novel starts out with Charlie remembering how he, then a student in college, sought out Humboldt Fleisher back in the '30s when Humboldt had just hit it big with a book of poetry.
- Divorce in Reno: As Humboldt became an abusive alcoholic and slowly went insane, his wife Kathleen went to Reno to divorce him. Charlie did this as well, staying at the ranch owned by the Reno rancher that Kathleen married after getting her divorce.
- Domestic Abuse: As Humboldt descends into alcoholism and mental illness and professional failure, he starts beating his wife Kathleen. Eventually she leaves him.
- Ending Memorial Service: Ends with Humboldt being disinterred from a potter's field and reburied, after the scenario that he wrote with Charlie was turned into a lucrative movie.
- Faked Kidnapping: Charlie suspects that Thaxter might have staged his own kidnapping as a scam. Thaxter certainly issued an awfully formal, well-written plea for ransom.
- Fan Disservice: Charlie goes to a steam room and speaks rather vividly of the old men he sees there. He describes one old guy crawling over to shut the latch of the furnace, "with testicles swinging on a long sinew and the clean anus staring out."
- Footsie Under the Table: Renata gets hold of Charlie's foot, puts it up against her crotch, and actually manages to rub herself to orgasm. Thaxter, sitting at the same table and nattering away, doesn't even notice.
- Life/Death Juxtaposition: The last paragraph of the novel has Charlie walking away from Humboldt's grave, as the dirt is shoveled in, and noticing the first spring flowers coming up out of the ground.
- The Mafia: Renaldo Cantabile, a low-level gangster, smashes the hell out of Charlie's car for not paying a poker debt. After intimidating Charlie into handing the money over, Renaldo becomes Charlie's friend in a weird way, even acting as his unofficial agent while also offering to kill Charlie's troublesome ex-wife.
- Most Writers Are Writers: Charlie Citrine is a famous playwright and novelist. He spends many long, long passages filibustering about the nature of art.
- My Greatest Failure: Charlie remembers the last time he saw Humboldt, when Humboldt, mired in poverty and looking dirty, was standing on a street corner eating a pretzel. Charlie ran away before Humboldt could spot him, and now he's ashamed over not helping his old friend.
- Posthumous Character: At the start of the story, Humboldt has been dead seven years. Charlie, at a low point in his life, can't stop talking and thinking about his old friend, and blaming himself for not helping Humboldt more.
- Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic: The novel is filled with long, wordy discourses on life and art, sometimes delivered by Charlie in narration, but sometimes in actual dialogue. Here is some dialogue he says to Renata, when she's challenging him over why he's wasting so much money on a literary magazine that still hasn't even gone to press.Charlie: The greatest things, the things most necessary for life, have recoiled and retreated. People are actually dying of this, losing all personal life, and the inner being of millions, many many millions, is missing. One can understand that in many parts of the world there is no hope for it because of famine or police dictatorships, but here in the free world what excuse have we?....Anyhow the end of the individual, whom everyone seems to scorn and detest, will make our destruction, our superbombs, superfluous....Mankind must recover its imaginative powers, recover living thought and real being, no longer accept these insults to the soul, and do it soon. Or else!
- Recitation Hand Clasp: Menasha, the amateur opera singer who is actually a terrible singer, "clasped his hands" before singing an aria at Humboldt's funeral. This little detail is meant to underline both how awful and how sincere Menasha is.
- Roman à Clef:
- Inspired by the lives of Saul Bellow, successful novelist, and Delmore Schwartz, poet and Bellow's good friend who died forgotten and broke in a hotel.
- In-Universe, Charlie had a hit play called Von Trenck, which was made into a hit movie, with a protagonist that was based on Von Humboldt Fleisher. Humboldt was miffed about this.
- Title Drop: What Charlie called "Humboldt's gift" was a bequest, namely, an old movie treatment that Charlie and Humboldt wrote together. To Charlie's surprise it turns out to be highly valuable, as Hollywood producers have already made a hit movie out of it. Charlie gets a lucrative settlement and more screenplay offers.
- Trade Your Passion for Glory: A theme. Humboldt, who remained true to his art and as a consequence died destitute, resented Charlie for hitting it big, especially because Charlie hit it big by writing a play that was about Humboldt. Humboldt thinks that Charlie sold out. Charlie eventually concludes that Humboldt was right, and at the end, after having recovered his financial situation through the old movie treatment that Humboldt left him, Charlie declines further screenwriting offers.
- Wrong-Name Outburst: At one point when Renata has dumped him, Charlie takes up with a girl named Doris, only to cry out "Renata! Oh Renata!" during sex. Doris, who is accommodating to the point of submissiveness, doesn't mind.
