Humboldt’s Gift, (1975) represents a distinct change in tone and focus from the previous novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet. It is a comic novel that portrays the spiritual plight of Charlie Citrine, a Chicagoan with a taste for low pursuits, gangland excitement, pneumatic young women, and a poetic gift he has almost lost. This “Chicago condition” which has destroyed his poet friend, Humboldt, engages Charlie in the same kind of dialectal contest fought by Joseph and Tu A Raison Aussi, Tommy and Tamkin, Henderson and the lioness, Herzog and the modern philosophers. In part a serious religious discussion couched in a deflecting comic idiom, this novel also focuses on everything Bellow felt he had lost in life or been accused of. It carefully juxtaposes of two symbolic and mutually exclusive gender constructs—an overweening “hypermasculinity” on the one hand, and an all but culturally eclipsed “poetic feminine” on the other. While the hypermasculine construct is elaborated through a rich taxonomy of destructive American male alter egos instrumental in Charlie’s poetic failure, the “poetic feminine” construct is symbolized almost entirely in Jungian terms. The story becomes in part a parable about a capitalistic American culture in which hypermasculine striving for dominance, power, and self-aggrandizement has all but excluded love, the soul, beauty, and poetic visionary states. The novel suggests that this is what destroys the American artist represented by men of feeling such as Poe, Humboldt, and Charlie. However, Charlie finally does recover that valuable dimension of human experience and vision as he deconstructs his own peculiarly American brand of hypermasculinity. Charlie sets himself up against a naturalist sexual ideology, technological rationalism, and materialistic sloth while meditating furiously on Humboldt’s and American poetry’s spectacular failure. As Charlie attempts to chart a path for survival, he locates the source of the malaise in a variety of places: Kinsey, Masters and Erickson, capitalism, and alienation ethics. Such failed modernist ideas, he decides, have transformed Humboldt, representative modern poet, from the young Orpheus of the Harlequin Ballads, to the manic-depressive pill taker, politician, schemer, paranoiac, and blasted tyrant who has tried to combine subterfuge with lyricism, poetic passion with worldly success—in a word, outer America with inner America.

It is also a novel in which Bellow’s disgust with Freud culminates. Charlie attributes Humboldt’s final explosion of madness and despair to his modernist education and his reading of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Aware that the plight of the twentieth-century artist in America is his plight as well, Charlie resolves to “interpret the good and the evil of Humboldt, understand his ruin, translate the sadness of his life, find out why such gifts produced such negligible results.” His subsequent meditation produces a vision of a modern world steeped in spiritual sloth, materialistic hedonism, and lacking an inner life. In Chicago, he observes, you could truly “examine the spirit under industrialism,” in all its agony and nightmare. He concludes that he must erect a giant buffer zone between himself and Chicago. This planet, he concludes, is “a thrilling but insufficiently humanized imitation of the platonic home-world.” He must prove the equal sovereignty of the imagination with modern science so that its truths become powerful again. Charlie, now a sixty-year-old-writer, must now forgo dreaminess, sexual hubris, false art, and the lure of a media-oriented capitalist society, his erotic obsessions, and his high gratification levels. At the same time he must cope with the mutual betrayals in his relationship with Humboldt, family of childhood, and his business affairs. We last see him contemplating the miracle of the yellow crocus he sees growing through the cracks of the hard city pavement, realizing that it is but a small and beautiful reminder that much of what has eluded him up to this point is still there to be discovered.