Since Allan Bloom died on October 7, 1992, those of us who knew him and studied with him have felt his loss like a wound, Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s novel based on Bloom, reopens this wound and brings forth a confusing array of sentiments. But Bellow has it exactly right when he ends the novel by writing, “You don’t easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death.”
In Abe Ravelstein, we do see our teacher: a stammering man, serving up unmatchable anecdotes, dirty jokes in French, Mel Brooks routines, and insights into the human condition. It is almost every inch the Bloom I knew. Reading Ravelstein brought me back to feeling like the insecure undergraduate who would knock on an apartment door at the Cloisters, to be welcomed by Bloom, smoke streaming from his nostrils, laughing his way through a phone call from Washington while Paris waited on hold.
Students, especially undergraduates, were the center of Bloom’s life. When The Closing of the American Mind became a bestseller in the spring of 1987 and Bloom was besieged by requests for interviews and speeches, he neither canceled a class nor missed an appointment — something other professors do with alacrity. That year, I was studying at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. (Bloom urged his students to study in France to enhance or temper — as the case required — their appreciation of American liberal democracy.) During spring break, Bloom came to Paris to launch the French edition of the book. He addressed the students at the Institut, noting how absurd he felt talking about his own writing, as he had spent his life teaching books by the greatest minds of the past. Afterwards, we went (as always) to the Cafe de Flore with three of Bloom’s closest French friends, the economist Jean-Claude Casanova and the political theorists Pierre Manent and Pierre Hassner. The three of them asked Bloom how the book was faring in America. Bloom asked them how I was faring in France. Bloom cared so intensely about us that we felt we were not so much his students as his children.
Bloom was a “psychologist” in the classical sense: He sought to deepen souls while educating sentiments, to give us contact with greatness, to make us aware of the transcendent. Aristophanes, Plato, Shakespeare, and Rousseau were to help us think, to teach us how to lead our lives. Bloom put himself at the center by the sheer force of his observations. When teaching, Bloom never relied on old lesson plans; he always reread the texts, frequently in the early morning hours, taking notes and finding new insights along the way. Often you would arrive in class to learn that a phrase you had skimmed over was the key to interpreting a particular passage or book.
Each of Plato’s dialogues, Bloom would note in class, constituted a whole; every single action and reference in those dialogues pointed to a deeper and more complicated meaning. In conversation, Bloom would mull over every word he uttered.
One of his favorite didactic methods was to ask your opinion of some action taken by an acquaintance or a literary character — when, in fact, what he was doing was bringing you to a deeper awareness of yourself. The truths that he taught through this indirect method, both about character and intellectual limitations, were often too painful to be shared with others. Attempting to assert one’s independence from Bloom often led one only to realize how much of that independence was owed to the man in the first place.
In bringing back these memories, Ravelstein reminds us how much richer our world was with Bloom as our teacher. Nonetheless, the book is radically incomplete. Bloom’s intellectual vitality, which drew some of the finest minds in America and Europe to his side, does not really shine through. To understand Bloom more fully, one needs to read The Closing of the American Mind, which offers his account of the state of our souls, and Love and Friendship, his journey through classical antiquity, Shakespeare, and modernity, which shows what we have forsaken in the name of sexual liberation.
Rather than serving up Bloom’s thought, Bellow expounds upon the man’s colorful habits, including his taste for luxury goods. Bellow captures the way this acquisitiveness coexisted with an “aristocrat’s indifference to material things,” as one former student put it. Bloom regularly burned cigarette holes in his neckties and shirts, spilled coffee and soup on his custom-made suits and fountain pen ink on his furniture. But without a clear understanding that Bloom’s acquisition of Lalique crystal or Lanvin jackets was a lighthearted reflection of his love for beauty itself — the form of Beauty, in Plato’s sense — he comes off in Ravelstein as merely a high-end consumer, an American fop on the Faubourg St. Honore.
To dwell on Ravelstein’s Paris shopping sprees, as Bellow does, risks leaving the impression that Bloom viewed Paris largely as a duty-free shopping center. Instead, it was for him the failing heart of a once great culture, the place on earth where the remnants of greatness could best be sensed. An hour or two of strolling the streets conversing with Bloom brought you a greater feeling for this lost world than hundreds of hours reading — nor to mention a vivid introduction to the works of Stendhal, Balzac, and Rousseau. His days in Paris were filled with discussions with everyone from taxi drivers and hotel clerks to Raymond Aron and Francois Furet.
The chief distraction in the book is the fact that Ravelstein shatters the dignity with which Bloom maintained the privacy of his personal life and, as such, will engender a reductio ad homosexualum of Bloom’s thought that he would have detested. Ravelstein’s death from AIDS is especially troubling. Bellow recently acknowledged that Bloom never spoke with him about having AIDS or HIV. Why then suggest that he did?
Allan Bloom was an extraordinarily complex man. Ravelstein presents a moving portrait of the external Bloom, especially the energetic and boisterous dinner companion. But in failing to present the life of his never-closed mind, the novel cannot capture the real Allan Bloom — or the reason so many of us found in him the teacher who shaped our souls.
Kenneth R. Weinstein is director of the Washington office of the Hudson Institute.
