Humboldt's Gift

Criticism

• Baker, Carlos. "Bellow's Gift." Theology Today Jan. 1976: 411-13.
  

  Contains a brief biographical sketch of Bellow and Delmore Schwartz at Princeton under R. P. Blackmur. Touches briefly on Citrine's character, the influence of George Steiner, and assorted spiritual themes in HG.

• Bartz, Fredrica K. "Humboldt's Gift and the Myth of the Artist in America." South Carolina Review 15.1 (1982): 79–83; University of Portland Review 34.1 (1982): 3–8.
  

  HG has been identified as one more "artist-in-America-myth," but in this novel there is the new dimension of Steinerian thought. This a new dimension suggests that Humboldt's tragedy is not caused just by materialistic America, but also by being a poet with too little strength of soul and too little concern for his mystic mission.

• Bartz, Fredrica K. "The Role of Rudolph Steiner in the Dreams of Humboldt's Gift." Ball State University Forum 24.1 (1983): 27-29.
  

  Details the influence of Rudolph Steiner's thought on Bellow through an examination of Humboldt's dreams from the perspective of Steinerian dream theory. Identifies two dream motifs: 1) the unbeatable paddle ball champion and 2) the meeting with Humboldt. Claims Bellow has drawn very deeply on Steiner's anthroposophical thought in the entire novel.

• Bell, Pearl K. "Bellow's Best and Worst." New Leader I Sept. 1975: 19, 20.
  
  
• Bradbury, Malcolm. "The It & the We: Saul Bellow's New Novel." Encounter Nov. 1975: 61–67.
  

  Bellow novels now cover and record with an acute historical sense thirty years of stressful American history. But with HG Bellow has bounced back to the panoramic, picaresque, ebullient vein of some of his earlier novels, and back too, to his resilient registering of the contemporary consciousness. Bellow is one of the great novelists of the attempt to reconcile the mind with all its wonderful inventiveness, with the burdensome body, the heavy weight of history, and the extravagant and absurd material of the modern environment.

• Bragg, Melvyn. "'Off the Couch by Christmas': Saul Bellow on his New Novel." Listener 20 Nov. 1975: 675–76.
  

  This interview between Bellow and Bragg contains much valuable commentary from Bellow on the character of Humboldt and the major thematic issues in the novel.

• Busby, Mark. "Castaways, Cannibals, and the Function of Art in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift." South Central Bulletin 41.4 (1981): 91–94.
  

  Examines the cannibalism motif as it relates to questions of nature, innocence, art, and society in HG, and particularly with respect to the relationship between Citrine and Cantabile.

• Campbell, Jeff H. "The Artist as American Dreamer: Humboldt's Gift." Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas 9 (1978): 3–10.
  

  Argues that this is Bellow's most personal and most American novel. Concentrates on the character of the creative artist as explored by the novel.

• Casey, Jane Barnes. "Bellow's Gift." Virginia Quarterly Review 52.1 (1976): 150–54.
  

  Argues that in HG Bellow reacts to society's rational excesses by tossing his net over what has previously been the domain of belief. By making the other world or afterworld a matter of imaginativeness, he eludes the questions reason traditionally raises about faith and God and heaven. Neither reason nor faith are issues; it is whether or not people have the imagination to conceive of life as more than the bodies it is written on. HG is worth reading because Bellow treats the task of raising people's moral estimation of themselves with lavish inventiveness and tonal subtlety in probing the world beyond the one we think we know.

• Chavkin, Allan. "Baron Humboldt and Bellow's Von Humboldt Fleisher: Success and Failure in Humboldt's Gift." Notes on Contemporary Literature 10.2 (1980): 11–12.
  

  Points out that the name Von Humboldt Fleisher is derived from Baron Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Illustrates how Bellow's intention was to contrast the careers of the two men in order to reveal the source of Fleisher's failure?a failure that is meant to serve as paradigm for the tragic careers of so many American writers of promise.

• Chavkin, Allan. "Humboldt's Gift and the Romantic Imagination." Philological Quarterly 62.1 (1983): 1–19.
  

  Illustrates that although no single ideology can be relied on to provide an understanding of this ambivalent novel, there is clearly at the core of the work a romantic sensibility, a Wordsworthian faith in the power of the imagination to renovate the individual who has lost the visionary gleam and is suffering from boredom and fear of the darkness of the grave. Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" must have been very much in Bellow's mind as he wrote HG. The novel is a discursive meditation upon the disturbing fact of death and the reassuring possibility of immortality that underlie the poem.

• Clayton, John J. "Humboldt's Gift: Transcendence and the Flight from Death." Saul Bellow and His Work. Ed. Edmond Schraepen. Brussels: Centruum voor Taal-en Literatuur-wetenschap Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1978. 31–48. Proceedings of a symposium held at the Free University of Brussels (V.U.B.) on 10–11 Dec. 1977.
  

  Clayton argues that this novel is built on the dichotomy between the world of distraction and world of love, where the soul?if not the absurd personality?is worth saving. Other dichotomies include that of tough reality instructors and innocents, the modern individual and the great chain of being leading up to God, and the view of man as part of the natural world held against the view of man as part of a supernatural world.

• Cohen, Sarah Blacher. "Comedy and Guilt in Humboldt's Gift." Modern Fiction Studies 25.1 (1979): 47–57.
  

  Guilt in HG derives from the protagonist's belief that there is something wrong with having survived and prospered. This is true of all of Bellow's Jewish protagonists. But in this novel the precise wrongs are more elaborated, the condemnation more harsh and the desire for atonement more earnest. In addition, the self-confessed criminal, Charlie Citrine, resorts to a more self-ironic humor to cope with his transgression and remorse. Cohen examines the imaginative transformation of Bellow's personal guilt and private obsessions in HG.

• Coleman, William B. "Rip Van Citrine. Failure of Love and Marriage vs. Sanctity of Male Relationships in Humboldt's Gift." Saul Bellow Journal 8.1 (1989): 12–23.
  

  Rehearses Leslie Fiedler's thesis in Love and Death in the American Novel that it is the double resolve of the American hero to deprecate marriage and to define some nobler human communion between men. Applies this thesis to the love-failure pattern in HG by comparing the text to the story of Rip Van Winkle, an early archetype of the marriage and love failure story replete with the wife as shrew. Suggests that Rip perhaps doffs his comic role and appears in new guises, but is still essentially the man on the run from his wife and the yoke of matrimony. Asks if perhaps Charlie Citrine is a Rip Van Winkle who suggests disconcertingly a general superiority of the love of man for man over the ignoble lust of man for woman. Also traces the death theme in HG back to Fiedler's thesis. Concludes by recommending a closer Fiedlerian reading not just of the novels, but of society as a whole, and of American male attitudes toward heterosexual love and marriage. Suggests the possibility that American males, both writers and readers, still cling to their old-fashioned ideals through fiction in which their heroes, as they have for centuries, still associate love and marriage with tragedy.

• Cowles, David L. "Gender and Self-Deception in Humboldt's Gift." Saul Bellow Journal 8.2 (1989): 14–23.
  

  Discusses the novelistic world view in Bellow and other fiction as a sort of transcendental signifier in its own closed language system. In this context describes the complex issue of self-deception in HG: rationalization, evasion, displacement regarding motives, repression, and so forth. Argues that two particular aspects dominate with regard to gender:, collusion and inauthenticity. Concludes that in HG Bellow has suggested a general method for rising above the bonds of American gender-based self-deception and inauthenticity.

• Cronin, Gloria L. "Art vs. Anarchy: Citrine's Transcendental Experiment in Humboldt's Gift." Indian Journal of American Studies 15.1 (1985): 33–43.
  

  A close textual reading of HG reveals a carefully structured novel that derives its shape primarily from its concentration on such themes as the ill effects of rationalism and naturalism, the exhaustion of the inner life, the failure of poetic sensibility, the bankrupting of Western humanism, the diminishment of the private life by crises, and the Heraclitan search for the essence of things. This is one more attempt by Bellow to purge American intellectual life of the banalities of historicism, the illogic of absurdism, and the horror of the void.

• Cronin, Gloria L. "The Quest for the Feminine Poetic in Humboldt's Gift." Saul Bellow at Seventy-five: A Collection of Critical Essays. Studies & Texts in English 9. Tübingen: Narr, 1991. 93–112.
  

  Argues that readings of Bellow as anti-modernist late romantic who clings to notions of transcendence and a belief in the universality of the Western humanist self have dominated Bellow criticism since the 1960s, and that Bellow critics have largely ignored the many tasks of cultural criticism: gender critique, Marxist approaches, deconstructionist insights, and new historicist approaches. Posits that Bellow, the social realist, would be the first to admit that his own and all writing is culturally marked by class, ethnicity, and gender. Discusses HG as Bellow's examination of American culture which focuses directly on the dilemma of Jewish–American male writers whose poetic powers are all but blasted by their acculturation in a predominantly protestant, "hypermasculine" capitalist American culture which has gendered the domain of the "poetic feminine," and therefore outside of normative masculinities. Shows how Bellow demonstrates through Charlie Citrine how this valuable "feminine" dimension of human experience can be reglimpsed by deconstructing his own peculiarly American brand of hypermasculinity.

• Epstein, Seymour. "Bellow's Gift." Denver Quarterly 10.4 (1975): 35–50.
  

  Argues that a central thematic concern in this novel arises from the speech by Citrine on boredom and the response to it from Renata when she writes to explain her marriage to the mortician. The failures of Western civilization and the pleasures of it spin out the thematic thread that runs through all the novels. Details the falling short of a host of contemporary writers to deal effectively with this theme. Traces Bellow's treatment of it through the earlier novels and in relation to HG.

• Estrin, Barbara L. "Recomposing Time: Humboldt's Gift and Ragtime." Denver Quarterly 17.1 (1982): 16–31.
  

  Like the narrator of Delmore Schwartz's story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," who wants to stop his own conception and turn history back, the central characters of Ragtime and HG want to avert the crises of twentieth century history. HG inherits from the fictionalized Schwartz a certain sense of hysteria found in Portnoy's Complaint and Fear of Flying. The process of writing the novel enables the narrator to circumvent the tension dominating his life, to divest himself of the past by telling it, and to accept the gift of his friend.

• Goldman, Mark. "Humboldt's Gift and the Case of the Split Protagonist." Modern Language Studies 11.2 (1981): 3–16.
  

  Argues that Bellow's use of Delmore Schwartz's character for Humboldt is more meaningful when viewed in terms of Bellow's characteristic use of subject and form. Discusses the dual point-of-view characters have in HG, and shows how finally Humboldt serves as a mirror image embodying moral meaning for Citrine. Establishes that he is never given more depth and scope as a character because of his purpose as mere mirror to the actual protagonist, Charlie Citrine.

• Grigorescu, Dan. "Adevaratul dar al lui Humboldt" [The True Gift of Humboldt]. Darul lui Humboldt [Humboldt's Gift]. Bucharest: Univers, 1979. v–xxxii. Cited in Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, 1979.
  
  
• Gunn, Drewey Wayne. "The Followers of Humboldt." American and British Writers in Mexico 1556–1973. Drewey Wayne Gunn. Austin: U of Texas P, 14–36.
  

  A crucial chapter for background material on Alexander Von Humboldt. Has relevance for source studies in both HG and AAM.

• Kernan, Alvin B. "Mighty Poets in their Misery Dead: The Death of the Poet in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift." The Imaginary Library: An Essay on Literature and Society. Alvin B. Kernan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. 37–65. Abridged version rpt. in Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 179–93.
  

  Kernan spends considerable time tracing the historical evolution and devolution of the social role of the poet. Comments that in modern times poets within works are depicted as dismembered and demystified, not by philosophical and psychological anxieties, but by historical and social events generating those anxieties. Sees HG as a novel in which literature as a social institution is subject for its continued validity to the situation in the larger society. HG offers insights into the nature of the social changes that are unmaking that grand image of the poet and his powers that Petrarch constructed so long ago in Rome.

• Kerner, David. "The Incomplete Dialectic of Humboldt's Gift." Dalhousie Review 62.1 (1982): 14–35. Rpt. in Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 161–77.
  

  HG centers on the theme of spiritual rebirth and escape from mortality, as evidenced by Humboldt's escape from madness and his spiritual return seven years later. This irrepressibility establishes the connections between the self and the divine powers so that the reprieved Humboldt can claim we are supernatural beings, but these divine powers are the inner powers of nature which art manifests. Bellow shows us Humboldt's box and chains from the outside only as a showman presenting an escape artist who is afraid to let us examine the arrangements too closely.

• Kirsch, Robert. "Bellow Looks Beneath the Laughter." Los Angeles Times Book Review 24 Aug. 1975: 1, 12.
  
  
• Kistler, Suzanne F. "Bellow's Man-Eating Comedy: Cannibal Imagery in Humboldt's Gift." Notes on Modern American Literature 2.1 (1977): Item 8.
  

  In this article cannibalism is seen as the extended metaphor through which Bellow presents his vision of exploitative twentieth-century Western society. Explores the references to the Cannibal Society of the Kwakiutl Indians found in HG and their thematic importance.

• Krupnick, Mark. "The Gift." Salmagundi 106–07 (1995): 85–88.
  

  Contains a brief anecdotal tribute to Bellow. Describes HG as a complete course in the canon of great books and leading ideas of New York intellectuals in the postwar period. Criticizes its silly plot and its anthroposophy as lifeless, and praises its faithful rendering of the cacophony of New York voices and polemics.

• Kuzma, Faye. "'We Flew On': Flights of Imagination in Humboldt's Gift." Michigan Academician 25.2 (1993): 159–77.
  

  Examines the use of rational and apparently neutral discourse as it defines the modernist's project using Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia or competing discourses. Shows how the appearance in the text of an occult discourse deriving from Rudolph Steiner's turn-of-the-century lectures on anthroposophy has caused critical debate, but may now be explained by further reference to Bakhtin's concept of interillumination as a means of deprivileging language. Argues that Steiner's scientific approach to spirituality provides Citrine with a language through which to explore his ongoing relationship to his dead mentor. By focussing on consciousness and imagination as a basis of experience within Steiner's rhetoric, Citrine glimpses an alternate vision of reality, one that goes beyond the powers of intellect and neutral observation. It also functions to give Citrine an outsider's perspective on the ostensibly objective discourse privileged in the twentieth century. The journey across the boundaries of language that Citrine's narrative enacts builds a provisional space for finding a way through the "dog-food level of things" to rediscover a child's outlook.

• Mano, Keith. "Bellow's Dead Center." Rev. of Humboldt's Gift. National Review 7 Nov. 1975: 1246–47.
  

  Accuses Bellow of having produced a sloppy piece of work flawed by his preoccupation with the "so-what-ness" of mortality. Points out the weaknesses in the prose and characterization, and the physical heaviness and imperfection of the protagonists. Concedes that while this is not Bellow's best book, it is his most significant.

• Marovitz, Sanford E. "The Emersonian Lesson of Humboldt's Gift." Saul Bellow Journal 14:1 (1996): 84–95.
  

  Makes a clear distinction between Charlie Citrine's and Bellow's respective stances toward idealism. Argues that Emersonian transcendentalism is finally more important to the novel than anthroposophism. Traces the influence of Emerson concentrating on the acquisition of self-reliance based on strength of character, and nourished by what Emerson called "the moral sentiment." Concludes that only when Charlie comes to understand with Emerson that the "mid-world" is best, that to listen within to the secret sound of truth that God puts into us, and to begin simply to live minus the comedy of history, does he become the exemplar of Emerson's wise man nourished by nature without and soul within.

• McSweeney, Kerry. "Saul Bellow and the Life to Come." Critical Quarterly 18.1 (1976): 67–72.
  

  Although Citrine is another incarnation of the traditional Romantic hero of the earlier novels, in HG he comes to a belief in the immortality of souls, and the ability to come close to and contact spirits of the dead. Unlike earlier novels in which transcendental postulates were a matter of choice, in this novel the task is really to penetrate eternity. McSweeney goes on to criticize the novel for its excesses, particularly when this causes the clumsy use of the crocus image at the end of the novel to be taken as evidence of Bellow's inability to incorporate satisfactorily in fictional form his new-found interest in the life to come.

• Mowat, John. "Humboldt's Gift: Bellow's 'Dejection' Ode." Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 8 (1978): 184–201.
  

  Complains that Bellow has devised a manner and a prose that affront the reader. These he describes as didactic, knowing, and casual in the handling of prodigious generalities. It is a presumptuous book that makes a comedy of death, and whose language, instead of being the measure of value, acts as a solvent.

• Nault, Marianne. "Saul Bellow's Humboldt the First." American Notes and Queries 15.6 (1977): 88–89.
  

  Nault points out that there are several persons on whom Humboldt's character is based, as evident from examination of the various manuscript re-writings of both H and HG. Humboldt assumes a variety of identities: Vic Driver, Jonas Amilcar, and Abraham Hamilcar. Charlie Citrine appears as J. J. Orlansky, a Polish writer rather than a Jew.

• Newman, Judie. "Bellow's 'Indian Givers': Humboldt's Gift." Journal of American Studies 15.2 (1981): 231–38.
  

  Provides a sophisticated anthropological account of gift-giving customs among the Kwakiutl Indians and elucidates the thematic implications of Humboldt's gift giving in HG. Concludes that society functions as a web of obligations in which Citrine and Humboldt are trapped. Yet Humboldt also uses this gift as an opportunity to avenge himself of Charlie's earlier betrayal of him.

• Newman, Judie. "Saul Bellow: Humboldt's Gift?The Comedy of History." Durham University Journal 72 (Dec. 1979): 79–87.
  

  This novel forces us again and again away from the celebration of order into the chaos and contingency of history, forever demonstrating that wholeness of mind is merely an illusion of mind, and that patterns imposed upon events are arbitrary and even dangerous. In HG Bellow explores an encyclopedic assortment of different approaches to history, both in terms of literary stereotypes and of culture readings, thus parodying the hero's attempt to escape from time.

• Novaceanu, Darie. "Balada din Chicago." Romania Literara 8 Nov. 1979: 20. Cited in Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, 1979.
  
  
• Possler, Katherine E. "Cannibalism in Humboldt's Gift." Gypsy Scholar: .4 Graduate Forum for Literary Criticism 5.1 (1978): 18–21.
  

  In Bellow's earlier books cannibalism has not the outstanding and direct expression it acquires in HG. Relates this metaphor to the issues of plagiarism, materialism and mutual aid in the novel.

• Quayum, M. A. "Adopting Emerson's Vision of Equilibrium: Citrine and the Two Opposite Poles of Twentieth-Century Consciousness in Humboldt's Gift." Studies in American Jewish Literature 10.1 (1991): 8–23.
  

  Focuses on the equilibrist perspective of Emerson. Argues that just as Emerson does in the body of his works, Bellow's protagonist, Charlie Citrine, also develops a vision of "double consciousness" and balance, unity, equipoise, meditation, moderation, and middle ground in HG. Shows how although he advocates the transcendental vision of "double consciousness," Citrine continues to waver in the novel, and fails to emerge with his own faith or only until he is boosted by a moral transformation to live according to his own faith. Concludes that this places Bellow in the mainstream tradition of American literature.

• Quayam, M. Am. "Emerson's 'Humboldt' and Bellow's Von Humboldt Fliesher: A Study in the Decline and Fall of the Modernist Poet in Humboldt's Gift." Indian Journal of American Studies 21.1 (1991): 99–105.
  

  A brief source note which suggests that Bellow is indebted to the German Baron Alexander von Humboldt for the name of the title figure in HG, notes Siegel's and Chavkin's earlier identification of this historical figure, and adds that Bellow was also drawn to the Baron's name from his reading of Emerson's "Humboldt." Notes that Bellow makes up to thirteen references in the novel to Emerson's works. Notes further Emerson's centennial speech on Baron Humboldt, 14 September 1869. Concludes that Bellow has deliberately created his Humboldt in direct contrast to Emerson's to provide a critique of contemporary American culture and to underscore his agreement with Emerson's.

• Radner, Sanford. "The Woman Savior in Humboldt's Gift." Saul Bellow Newsletter 1.1 (1981): 22–25.
  

  Close study of the imagery of HG provides evidence of a shift in the consciousness of Charlie Citrine. In phase one women are the ultimate source of nourishment and comfort for men. In phase two women are deceitful depleters and men's succor must come from other men. Imagery that supports this shift centers on parts of the body to do with breathing and depleting, and with words and money used symbolically for all of the others.

• Riese, Utz. "The Authority of Representation and the Discourse of Post-Modernity: Humboldt's Gift." Saul Bellow at Seventy-five: A Collection of Critical Essays. Studies & Texts in English 9. Tübingen: Narr, 1991. 113–23.
  

  Discusses in detail the ethical and philosophical issues raised by Derrida concerning "representation." Then notes that from contemporary information theory Bellow seems to extract the concept of "noise," to signify one of the major problems with multiple representations of a calculable but innumerable subjectivities. Argues that the authority of representation is a mixed blessing; it is emancipatory as well as repressive and suppressive. Discusses MSP as Bellow's answer to this question: If "intermediacy and representation" are unavoidable, "chose higher representations" (153). After a detailed discussion of MSP, he concludes that postmodern authority or representation is like the discourse of schizophrenia: different voices echo each other, negating, affirming, elating, distracting, without any clear evidence of a center. However, the center is in the midst of textual schizophrenia, and in the midst of the chaos of farcical signification, as in the eye of a storm. It is in the feminine order of mourning, enacted in the ethical space of meditation.

• Rodgers, Bernard F., Jr. "Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Biography and Autobiography in Humboldt's Gift." Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny 27.4 (1980): 439–54.
  

  This article is an attempt to answer such questions as: 1) how autobiographical is the fiction? 2) what purposes dictated this approach? 3) where have the facts been altered? 4) what is the significance of the alterations? 5) and how effectively does the author use the particulars of his experience to touch the universal elements in it? Rodgers confines himself primarily to HG. Concludes that Bellow has learned to use his preoccupations with self-consciousness, a practice which appeals to us because it touches our own habits.

• Rosenburg, Ruth. "Three Jewish Narrative Strategies in Humboldt's Gift." Melus 6.4 (1979): 59–66.
  

  Rosenburg claims that there are three distinctly Jewish narrative strategies in HG: a characteristic narrative perspective, a characteristic mode of ordering events and a characteristic mode of closure.

• Rosenfeld, Alvin H. "Poet, Magician, and Anthroposophist: Saul Bellow's Latest Fiction." Midstream Dec. 1975: 62–67.
  

  Begins with some biographical material about Delmore Schwartz and then provides a long review essay on a variety of topics of general interest in HG.

• Ryan, Steven T. "The Soul's Husband: Money in Humboldt's Gift." Money Talks: Language and Lucre in American Fiction. Ed. Roy R. Male. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P,1981. 111–21.Previously published as special topic issue of Genre 13.1 (1980).
  

  Argues that Bellow's concern for wealth as a theme is unusual for a contemporary American writer. Traces this interest through several early short stories and shows how these ideas concerning money carry over into the novels and into HG in particular. Shows how Citrine ultimately makes his peace with the business world and how though money "has become a vital substance, an authentic shaper of worldly events," he permits only the "position of husband, the apparent power and provider."

• Sale, Roger. "The Realms of Gold." Hudson Review 28.4 (1975–1976): 616–28.
  

  Reviews the major novels up to 1975 and feels that HG fails at the end, but "at a level no other American author tries to reach.

• Schraepen, Edmond. "Humboldt's Gift: A New Bellow." English Studies 62.2 (1981): 164–70.
  

  Claims two features in HG stand out: 1) the world of distraction, 2) the outspoken mystical strain. A closer look reveals thematic antitheses which are related to the basic opposition between the distracting world and the transcendental world. Examines how successfully Bellow attempts to integrate these experiences into his comic form for the novel.

• Sharma, R. K. "Bellow's Immortality Ode: Humboldt's Gift." Journal of Literature and Aesthetics [India] 1.4 (Sept. 1981): 33–42.
  

  Discusses the influence of Wordsorth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" and the relationship between Plato's discussion of immortality in Phaedrus, and the Hindu ideas of prexistent soul in Hindu scriptures. Describes Charlie Citrine's hungering for truth and self-realization in relation to each of these texts and traditions.

• Siegel, Ben. "Artists and Opportunists in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift." Contemporary Literature 19.2 (1978): 143–64. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Ha!l, 1979. 158–74.
  

  Centering on a live writer and a dead poet, Bellow tries to define the artist's role in a society lured away by its massive material substance from its cravings for the mind and beauty. He portrays the artist as one who, like his fellow Americans, frequently fails to consider moral and ethical?much less spiritual?aspects of his goals and behavior. His second major theme is the comic pathos of a vain intellectual's efforts to age with style and dignity. If Charlie's and Bellow's impressions and conlusions fail to convince totally, they can hardly be faulted for trying where no one else has succeeded. They do render the human journey more open and challenging than before.

• Simpson, Louis. "The Ghost of Delmore Schwartz." New York Times Magazine 7 Dec. 1975: 38, 40–43, 48, 52, 56.
  

  Describes Delmore Schwartz as model for Humboldt.

• Sloan, Benjamin. "Humboldt's Gift: The Memorialization and Exploitation of Delmore Schwartz." Saul Bellow Journal 10.1 (1991): 25–31.
  

  Argues that at the core of HG lurks a split personality that both memorializes Delmore Schwartz's idealism and draws attention to an ongoing series of compromises an author must make to survive in the market place. Establishes the history of Schwartz's two Partisan Review articles, of 1944 and 1954 which helped establish Bellow first as a promising writer and then as an important novelist. Draws the parallels between this history and the fictional relationship between Humboldt and Citrine. Argues, however, that there was a fundamental difference because while Schwartz struggled within a community of writers to encourage qualities in their work, he sometimes alienated his friends by his criticism of their shortcomings. After a lengthy detailed development of this difference, argues that fiction meets non-fiction at the point where Bellow examines Delmore Schwartz's contribution to his own life and through the ruminations of Charles Citrine.

• Smith, Herbert J. "Humboldt's Gift and Rudolph Steiner." Centennial Review 22.4 (1978): 479–89.
  

  HG, unlike other novels, explores the dialectical tension between human ideals and human actuality, between the spirit and the void, within the framework of Steiner's anthroposophy?a new influence on Bellow's fiction. Connects Steiner's thought with that of the American transcendentalists and with Goethe's World-Conception. Bellow uses Steiner's ideas to foster a more complete defense of man.

• Terakado, Yasuhiko. "Saul Bellow Humboldt no Okurimono: Jinchigaku to Cannibalism." Bungaku to ,4merica: Ohashi Kenzaburo Kyoju Kanreki Kinen Ronbunshu. Tokyo: Nanundo, 1980. 345–58. Vol. 2. Cited in ML,4 Bibliography, 1981.
  
  
• Tintner, Adeline R. "'The Beast in the Jungle' and Saul Bellow's The Actual." Henry James's Legacy: The Afterlife of His Figure and Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1998. 431–32.
  

  Sees TA as a contemporary version of Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle" with regard to characters and fantasies of old age on the part of the authors. Both heroes are out of touch with reality, and both are men withholding love from women. Other similarities lie in their country house settings, cemetery settings, art collecting, and the likenesses between James himself and Harry. However, Bellow reverses Marchov's realization of the failure of his life by allowing Harry the revelation that allows him to make up for his former mistakes, thus making a happy fable out of James' tragic adventure into the dark places within personal relationships.

• Toynbee, Philip. "Matter of Life and Death." Observer 5 Oct. 1975: 23.
  

  Comments that the novel is overburdened with secondary characters. Also notes that he has transcended though not neglected the whole socio-political field in favor of a fervent look at the soul. Sees it as the nearest work to Dostoyevsky's The Idiot.

• Updike, John. "Draping Radiance with a Worn Veil." New Yorker 15 Sept. 1975: 122, 125–30.
  

  Reviews character and content in HG and goes on to praise Bellow for his observance of the eccentric particulars of American life. Complains that he abandons a wonderful regional portrait of Chicago when he switches settings in the middle of the novel, and also of the tenuousness of the Madrid section. Finds that the novel has too many characters and exhibits a loss of stylistic verve. Concludes that 'HG washed up on our drear cultural shore like some large, magnificently glistening but beached creature from another element.'

• Vinoda. 'Renewing Universal Connections: A Study of Humboldt's Gift." Journal of English Studies [India] 13.1 (1981): 876–80.
  

  HG probes the issue of what being human is, human ethics, and the issue of death. Citrine's interest in the life of the soul cannot be understood in light of moral concerns; however, it can be understood in light of his relationship with Humboldt.

• Weinstein, Mark. H. "Charles Citrine: Bellow's Holy Fool." Saul Bellow Journal 3.1 (1983): 28–37.
  

  Sees Charlic as one of the higher types of martyr the twentieth century has added?the farcical martyr as the artist. Comments on the numerous religious references throughout the book and its affirmative ending.

• Weinstein, Mark. "Music in the Conclusion of Humboldt's Gift and the Climax of The Magic Mountain." Saul Bellow Journal 9.1 (1990): 49–51.
  

  A brief source and influence piece in which Weinstein compares The Magic Mountain and HG as comedies about death, the main characters of which have repeated and intimate contact with death. Describes their respective attempts to transcend the brute reality of death and find comfort in music.

• Woelfel, James W. "Charlie Citrine and the Argument from Absurdity." Religion in Life 47.4 (1978): 460–76.
  

  Examines the character of Charlie Citrine "as a powerful and haunting contemporary literary expression of an old and many-faceted case for supernaturalism." Develops his thesis using Camus's idea of "incommensurability" or sense of nostalgia for meanings we can never attain.

• Yetman, Michael G. "Who Would Not Sing for Humboldt?" ELH 48.4 (1981): 935–51.
  

  Examines some parallel contributions of literary romanticism to 1) the author's use of one character in the creation of another and 2) his critique of the plight of the writer in contemporary America. In addition, he scrutinizes the way the book privileges a romantic interpretation of both the poet and the poetic imagination and concludes that these novelistic preoccupations are central to our understanding of the complex thought of the narrator-main character.

• Crimmons, Mark. “Four Doctrines of Religiocentric Reflection: Meditative Digressivity in Humboldt’s Gift.” Saul Bellow Journal. 21.1–2 (2005–06): 77–96.

  
  

  Sees HG as the culmination of Bellow’s digressive style and his experimental narrative technique. Reviews the critics who argue that this novel suggests Bellow’s decline, then details the critics who find this Bellow’s finest work. Begins with the premise that this is much more than a story of a dead poet whose legacy saves an old friend from financial difficulties. Argues for the narrative complexity of HG, its dialogic digressivity, monologues, lectures, and ventriloquized dialogues. Suggests it is architectonic of interior meditations and interior states—all of which achieve transcendental proportions. Citrine is the essential “Bellowian Self,” offering many alternatives to epistemologies of rationality. Details the discussions on the soul, life after death, Citrine’s testimony, and aesthetic rejections of nihilism. Treats Citrine’s other ways of “knowing,” meditative exercises, belief in imagination, cosmic views, and rejection of intellectual orthodoxies. Concludes that Citrine’s meditations about Humboldt strengthen his resistance to all those forces, thus allowing him to avoid Humboldt’s fate and reclaim an inner space from which to “look behind appearances” toward what is “fundamental, enduring, essential” (It All Adds Up 97). 

• Quayum, M.A. “Chapter 5: Humbolt’s Gift.” Saul Bellow and American Transcendentalism. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 167–220. Print.

  
  

  Describes how this novel harks back to the salvational mode of the earlier novels. Charlie Citrine is a character who, having experienced the “puny, picayunish, pugnacious polarities of American life,” now wants to restore the poetic proclivity, “sanity” inner equilibrium, and middle ground of his personality (167). The novel also chronicles the life and mind of Humboldt Von Fliescher, his flashy success, fiery failure, atonement, and redemption. It is the gradual shedding of excesses that reveal the Emersonian Whitmanesque tendencies of both Humboldt and Charlie. Finally, in a series of comical reversals, Citrine reburies Humboldt in Chicago. Only then does he regain his own equilibrium and inner sense of order sufficient to place himself in relationship with the transcendental tradition. 

Reviews

• Aaron, Daniel. "Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow." New Republic 20 Sept. 1975: 28–30.
  
  
• Aldridge, John W. "Saul Bellow at 60: A Turn to the Mystical." Saturday Review 6 Sept. 1975: 22–25. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 49–54.
  
  
• Blank, Barbara Trainin. "The Actual: A Novella." Hadassah Magazine Feb. 1999: 46.
  

  Details the plot of TA and commends the book for its irony, laconic style, turbulent emotions, mastery of the novella form, and its interesting characters. The novel only falls short in its didacticism, enigmatic and over-intellectualized treatment of Harry, and its cop-out ending.

• Cushman, Keith.'"Discriminating Gusto." Chicago Review 27 (1975–76): 145–48.
  
  
• Dame, Enid. "Bellow & Potok: The Saving Force." Congress Monthly Apr. 1976: 20–22.
  
  
• Gilman, Richard. "Humboldt's Gift." New York Times Book Review 17 Aug. 1975: 1–3.
  
  
• Kipphoff, Petra. "Leer und bunt: Saul Bellows Roman Humboldt's Vermächtnis." Die Zeit 17 Sept. 1976: 14.
  
  
• Lodge, David. "Dead Reckoning." Times Literary Supplement 10 Oct. 1975: 1173.
  
  
• Mayne, Richard. "A Long Cool Summa." Listener 9 Oct. 1975: 484–85.
  
  
• Newman, Charles. "Lives of the Artists." Harper's Oct. 1975: 82–83, 85.
  
  
• Pritchard, William H. "Actual Fiction." Hudson Review. 50 (Winter 1998): 656–64.
  

  Complains about instances where the novel is hindered by an inelegantly declarative style that seems to be there by design. Yet praises Bellow for his delicacy of observation, unique phrases, and unique caginess.

• Pritchett, V. S. "Potato Pie." New Statesman 10 Oct. 1975: 442–43.
  
  
• Raphael, Frederic. "Mr. Bellow's Big Idea." Sunday Times 5 Oct. 1975: 35.
  
  
• Rhodes, Richard. "In Bellow's Work the Talk Is All and Marvelous Talk It Is." Chicago Tribune Book World 24 Aug. 1975: 1.
  
  
• Richardson, Jack. "A Burnt-Out Case." Commentary Nov. 1975: 74, 76–78.
  
  
• Sarotte, Georges-Michel. "Le plus grand peut-etre." Quinzaine Litteraire 283 (1978): 7.
  
  
• Shattuck, Roger. "A Higher Selfishness." New York Review of Books 18 Sept. 1975: 21–25. Sheppard, R. Z. "Scribbler on the Roof." Time 25 Aug. 1975: 62.
  
  
• Sire, James W. "Saul Bellow: Higher-Thought Clown." Christianity Today 12 Mar. 1976: 26–27.
  
  
• Stern, Daniel. "The Bellow-ing of the Culture." Commonwealh 24 Oct. 1975: 502–04.