Scribbler on the Roof

By R.Z. Sheppard

HUMBOLDT'S GIFT by SAUL BELLOW 487 pages. Viking. $10.

At a time when many writers are turning to impressionistic journalism and innovative fantasy, 60-year-old Saul Bellow still confronts America's baffling ocean of desires and sorrows with old-fashioned characters and a Tolstoyan appetite for presenting big ideas as if they were messages from a philosophical sponsor. In short, Bellow is self-consciously a Serious Writer, especially during those frequent moments when he is being genuinely humorous.

As in Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King and Herzog, there is also a vigorous mix of farce and moral fervor in Humboldt's Gift. Charles Citrine, the book's late middle-aged hero, is--like Bellow--a dedicated resident and booster of Chicago. The son of Jewish immigrants, he has made a name for himself as a Pulitzer-prizewinning biographer, essayist and playwright. LIFE has commissioned him to write an intimate article on Bobby Kennedy. The French government has honored him with an Order of the Chevalier, which entitles him to wear a green ribbon in his lapel. As it turns out, the decoration is about as prestigious as the alligator on a tennis shirt.

Such disenchantments extend to nearly all of Charlie's earthly endeavors. His paddleball game is slowing down; he owes his publishers $70,000 on advances for books he has yet to write; his wife Denise is suing him for divorce and stripping him of everything but his costly cotton undershorts; his old friend Thaxter, an eccentric literary conman with expensive tastes, has squandered thousands of Citrine's dollars given to start an intellectual quarterly. In addition, Citrine's silver-gray Mercedes has been vandalized by a petty hood, a Mafia buffo character named Ronald Cantabile, to whom Citrine unwittingly gave a bad check in payment for a minor gambling debt.

Mental Occasions. These troubles, and the boisterous episodes they cause, provide the background for what Citrine calls his "mental occasions." They include elaborate discourses on American materialism and the demise of the poetic imagination, the aridity of modern art (Picasso's huge Chicago sculpture is "only the idea of a work of art"), notions about modern boredom as a profound spiritual problem, and ruminations on death and immortality, with special emphasis on Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, .the study of the divine spirit through scientific inquiry.

Caught between some of Chicago's most colorful denizens and some of philosophy's most challenging questions, Citrine often seems as if he were becoming a hybrid of two other famous home-town boys: Robert Hutchins and Nelson Algren. His real confusion, however, grows out of a bad conscience about the death of an old friend.

Von Humboldt Fleisher was a major American poet of the 1930s who died during the '60s unknown, unmourned and unmoored from his sanity. Citrine was Humboldt's friend and protege, but they have had a falling out, largely because of Humboldt's jealousy about Citrine's success. Just days before the poet's death, Charlie spotted him on a New York street. He was a shuffling derelict; yet Citrine made no effort to help or effect a reconciliation. Haunted by memories of Humboldt's accomplishments and outrages, Citrine sees the dead poet as an embodiment of all the puzzling genius, vision and demonic energy of an America once full of large opportunities. He was what Charlie would call a great "positive sinner," as distinguished from "negative sinners" like himself, who smugly think their way into self-satisfied inaction.

The novel bustles with positive sin ners. There is Citrine's girl friend Renata, a voluptuous, sexually robust and aggressively practical woman who strongly resembles Ramona of Herzog. Such women seem to be Bellow's idea of a consolation prize for agonizing intellectuals. There is also Charlie's brother Julius, a Texas real estate million aire, who on the eve of open-heart surgery is still wheeling and dealing and rejecting the idea of burial as out of date and somehow unAmerican. "I'm having myself cremated," he cries exuberantly. "I need action. I'd rather go into the atmosphere. Look for me in the weather reports."

Crash Course. To Charlie, the ritual of traditional burial becomes the clear symbolic act that gives his messy life meaning. Through a series of improbable, only-in-America events, Humboldt's gift -- a strange film script about survival and cannibalism in the Arctic -- is willed to Citrine and made into a successful movie. With his share of the profits, Charlie has Humboldt's body exhumed from a potter's field and reburied with dignity.

Bellow's own great gifts as a story teller and his talent for vital characterization save what could have been a morose and tedious novel. Shorn of the author's unique knack for combining intellectual abstractions with gritty American idiom, Citrine's "mental occasions" read like a crash course in attaining peace of mind. Fortunately, this is not out of place in a nation addicted to self-help and how-to books. In fact, Humboldt's Gift might have been subtitled The Power of Positive Sinning, or even The Joy of Mourning.

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