Bellow’s Bloom

Mostly, though, Ravelstein is about surviving the 1992 death of Allan Bloom, the master teacher at the University of Chicago and author of that conservative publishing phenomenon of the 1980s, The Closing of the American Mind. Lightly fictionalizing his friend as “Abe Ravelstein,” Saul Bellow attempts in his book to ensure, through elegy, the survival of Allan Bloom in all his extravagant thinking, extravagant talking, and extravagant living: “You don’t easily give up,” the last line runs, “a creature like Ravelstein to death.”

Ravelstein consists of four movements. The opening chapter paints a textured, comic, and yet moving portrait of a visit to Paris by Ravelstein, a larger-than-life college professor whose lavish, spendthrift ways have recently been matched with funds thanks to his unlikely success with a book whose working title was (as The Closing of the American Mind’s was) “Souls Without Longing.” Accompanying him as they shop and dine and listen to Ravelstein’s endless combination of philosophical discourse, vaudeville routines, and gossip, are Chick, an elderly writer who is Ravelstein’s close friend, Chick’s young wife Rosamund, and Ravelstein’s homosexual lover, Nikki.

The second movement is an account of Ravelstein’s dying from AIDS in a Chicago hospital, mixed with pictures of his visiting friends and the narrating Chick’s memories of earlier times, particularly the breakup of his marriage to a physicist named Vera and his taking of a new wife in Rosamund, who had been one of Ravelstein’s students.

After Ravelstein’s death, the novel turns to Chick’s dangerous infection — drawn from Bellow’s own experience — with a tropical fever from eating bad fish on a vacation in the Caribbean, his own close call with death, his recovery, and his decision to fulfill, at last, his promise to write a memoir of his dead friend. And in the last movement, the book returns to Chick’s portrait of Ravelstein — which is to say, Saul Bellow’s portrait of Allan Bloom.

To some degree, Bellow has been here before. Novelists are often capable of enormous cruelty, for painful family stories and the desperate emotions that swirl around friends’ crises are at last too valuable not to be cashed in as fiction. Bellow famously used his acquaintances as fodder when he rendered the poet Delmore Schwartz as the sad failure Von Humboldt Fleisher in the 1975 Humboldt’s Gift and the art critic Harold Rosenberg as Victor Wulpy in the 1984 story “What Kind of Day Did You Have?”

And, to some degree, it doesn’t matter. No novel stands or falls entirely on the accuracy, or the morality, with which it portrays the originals of its characters. Thomas Mann’s greatest weakness as a writer was his difficulty in finding plots, and he ruthlessly seized upon private events, deeply hurting his children, his brother, and his wife’s family. Mann’s late Dr. Faustus wounded fellow German refugees such as the composer Arnold Schoenberg by annexing them, but it remains nonetheless a monumental work — perhaps the only great novel ever written by an old, old man — and the controversy over its origins has long since faded from view.

But the case of Ravelstein appears different, somehow, for Allan Bloom is less the model than the reason for Saul Bellow’s book. Through reports from Bellow’s friends and interviewers, everyone has seemed to know for years that the novelist was thinking about a book based on Bloom. The prepublication notices of Ravelstein in Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews mentioned Bloom prominently, as a signal to reviewers across the nation that the topic of conversation about the book would be its portrayal of Bellow’s friend.

Indeed, the author cannot quite claim the traditional immunity of novelists, for Bellow is a major source of our knowledge that Allan Bloom is Abe Ravelstein — and the real-life critic Edward Shils is Rakhmiel Kogon (described as a professor who makes a homosexual pass at a student while drunk), the political theorist Leo Strauss is Felix Davarr, the philosophical historian Werner Dannhauser is Morris Herbst, and so on, and so on, deeper and deeper into the overlapping worlds of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, the followers of Straussian political philosophy, and the heavyweights of conservative academia. In all the work he’s done to promote the book — the early review materials given to Esquire, the publication of the first chapter’s brilliant word portrait in the New Yorker, a pair of extraordinary interviews in the New York Times, the notices (with the author posing for pictures with his wife and child) in Newsweek and Time — Bellow himself has kept the Bloom connection in the air.

The picture of Bloom given in Ravelstein, particularly the assertion of his open homosexuality and his death from AIDS, has caused some debate, though, in truth, there has been much more declaration that Ravelstein will provoke controversy than there has been actual controversy. Taking Bloom and Ravelstein as identical (and, what every other early reviewer refrained from, repeatedly naming one of Bloom’s friends as the original for Ravelstein’s homosexual lover Nikki), Andrew Sullivan in the New Republic denounced those who see in the combination of homosexuality and conservative thought “either hypocrisy or shame” — though, in fact, he could find no published example to quote. The New York Times mentioned “critics who have assailed Mr. Bellow for ‘outing’ the late Bloom and suggesting that he died of AIDS,” though it could cite no particular critics’ reviews.

Bellow himself has now backed away from the claim of AIDS: “For a long time, I thought I knew what Allan died of, and then I discovered other things that didn’t jibe with that, so I really can’t say now,” he recently told an interviewer. But the descriptions of homosexuality in Ravelstein are not unimportant, for they raise questions about what constitutes serious conservative thought, what relation that thought ought to bear to the behavior of those who hold it, and what creates the rare Eros — the drive, the love, the urgent passion — that makes a great teacher.

Unfortunately, those are not the questions actually taken up in Ravelstein. The reason so many reviewers have written as though the potential controversy about Allan Bloom might be more interesting than the book about Abe Ravelstein is that the controversy is more interesting. There’s much to commend in Ravelstein. It has bursts of such comic prose as “He came out of intensive care unable to walk. But he quickly recovered partial use of his hands. He had to have hands because he had to smoke.” It has an opening chapter with such sharp observation as “In the matter of language the Brits had it all over us. Especially when their strength began to bleed away and language became one of their important resources.” And it has a concluding page and a half of perfectly judged sentimentality, narrated in a sudden shift to a continuous present tense that makes its subject seem entirely alive: “He winds up his tie lifting the collar that crackles with starch. He makes a luxurious knot. The unsteady fingers, long, ill-coordinated, nervous to the point of decadence, make a double lap. Ravelstein likes a big tie-knot — after all, he is a large man.”

But, on its face, the book is a mess. Ravelstein is sadly disjointed, cobbled with transitions like: “I must drop Paris now and get back to New Hampshire,” “Morris Herbst, to get back to him,” “But in continuing this narrative, I see that I have to begin by closing out Vera.” Though Bellow told Newsweek of the energy brought back into his life in recent years, there are signs of real tiredness. When we get old, Graham Greene once said, we all write short. The memoir of Delmore Schwartz in Humboldt’s Gift ran 471 tightly packed pages; the memoir of Allan Bloom in Ravelstein runs only 233 pages in large print. Especially in the middle chapters, paragraphs begin strong and sputter down into sentence fragments. Characters start out fresh and trail off into stock figures from the traditional Bellow repertory company. Reiteration sets in early: Ravelstein’s head is always “melon-shaped,” Rosamund’s is always “pretty,” and whole subordinate clauses are lifted up and attached to different sentences throughout the book. The narrating Chick is impossibly bifurcated: a “far from important sort” of writer (in order to allow Ravelstein to dominate), of whom it can also be said that “being seen in public with you was worth a lot” to a social-climbing Romanian intellectual refugee named Grielescu.

Such minor incoherencies, however, are relatively unimportant, except insofar as they mask the deeper incoherence of Bellow’s project. Humboldt’s Gift had its elegiac moments: “They were all gone but ourselves” (the line at the end of the novel as the narrating Charlie Citrine and his wife stand above Humboldt’s grave) belongs to the classic tradition of Ubi Sunt poetry. But Humboldt’s Gift really aimed only at being a successful novel. Saul Bellow, I think, knew Allan Bloom better than he knew Delmore Schwartz — loved him better, too — and he wants Ravelstein to be both a novel and an elegy, forgetting that novels are not, in the end, good devices for elegy. Some of the awkward transitions in the book come directly from this, for continuous prose narrative quickly turns discontinuous when it attempts the tasks of poetry in memorializing the dead and expressing grief. The things Bellow does to make Ravelstein an elegy weaken it as a novel, and the things he does to make it a novel destroy it as elegy. Indeed, the novelistic elements end up turning the book into a far more cruel picture of Bloom and the homosexual life than reviewers have allowed themselves to admit — far more cruel, in fact, than Bellow himself seems to realize.

In my conversations with Bloom’s friends, two themes — Ravelstein’s demand (repeated nine times) that the narrating Chick write a memoir of their friendship, and the relation between Ravelstein and Chick’s wife Rosamund — are invariably cited as the least accurate in Ravelstein. But Bellow has an absolute need for both. Ravelstein’s command is the device and the invariable signal by which Bellow turns back from his novel to his elegy, and Rosamund is the figure by which he tries to build a novel. What unity the book has derives from its narrative of a writer’s attempt, as he travels with his new wife, to write a book about his dead friend.

From the beginning, novelistic elements abound. The fiction writer’s hand shows through in the names he chooses: the tangled skein of “Ravelstein,” the innocence of “Chick,” the womanhood of the Shakespearean “Rosamund.” Much of Ravelstein recounts real incidents from the lives of Bloom and Bellow, but only in the sense of trouvailles, the found objects and details by which an artist reveals his artistic eye. The opening chapter mentions the true story of green parrots that escaped their cages and began to breed in Chicago — but the novelist eventually transforms it into an image for Chick’s trip to the Caribbean, for Ravelstein’s chattering life of talk, for the ability of the exotic to flourish in the midst of the mundane, and for the richness and strangeness of the world.

In the opening of Ravelstein, these elements intrude only a little, small signals that more is coming in the later chapters. “Be as hard on me as you like,” Ravelstein tells him, “without softeners or sweeteners.” But Chick recognizes that, insofar as he has been called upon to write even an unsentimental elegy, he cannot make real moral evaluations: “In my trade you have to make more allowances, taking all sorts of ambiguities into account — to avoid hard-edged judgments.”

As the book develops and the novelistic elements come to the fore, however, the novel itself begins to make the judgment its narrator refuses. In the last chapter of his posthumous volume Love and Friendship, Bloom observed, “The Eros of the soul can never be understood as a mere borrowing from the Eros of the body” — which is the point many of Ravelstein’s critics claim Bellow misses in presenting Bloom’s eccentric exterior without fully conveying the intellectual interior that made him, in some sense, a great man.

But then, in his final paragraph, Bloom wrote, “Love and friendship each make a demand of loyalty and exclusivity that is likely to bring them into conflict.” And this line Bellow doesn’t miss. Wrapped around the topic of death, it becomes the fundamental theme of his novel: the difference between the love of a wife and the friendship of a man.

It is only after his own illness that Chick finds the will to fulfill his promise to Ravelstein, for when Chick comes near to dying after eating bad fish, he is rendered at last just like Ravelstein (as Bellow insists with somewhat heavy-handed parallel scenes set in hospital rooms). But from the beginning a difference between the mortality of Ravelstein and Chick has been signaled. In the first chapter, as he takes Chick shopping in the expensive shops of Paris, Ravelstein worries that the green corduroy fedora he has picked out for Chick “may be too heavy for June.” “Well,” Chick replies, “I expect to be still alive in October.”

The difference turns out to be Rosamund: “I did not feel myself to be in the threatened category for I’d fallen in love with a young woman and married her.” On vacation, immediately before he becomes ill, Chick writes, “As Rosamund in her lovely voice sang ‘Live-for-ever,’ I thought of Ravelstein in his grave, all his gifts, his endlessly diverting character, and his intellect entirely motionless.”

There are several passages in the novel about the necessity to preserve the memory of the dead. Chick can write, in a typical moment, “Many people want to be rid of the dead. I, on the contrary, have a way of hanging on to them.” But this need to keep the dead alive is subordinated to the theme of the life-providing love of a wife. In the hospital, “survival was not a likely option,” but “Rosamund was keeping me on this side of the death-line” — the death-line Ravelstein, with all his vitality, could not stop himself from crossing, because of the AIDS he had contracted from homosexual encounters with “rent-boys” and casual lovers.

This is the corner into which Bellow has painted himself, and it is what lies behind the most awkward — and revealing — transition in Ravelstein, the turn to the continuous-present narration with which the book ends: “But I would rather see Ravelstein again than explain matters it doesn’t help to explain.” In the paragraph immediately before this, Chick breaks into a deeply embarrassing sentimentality about his wife, which is, I’m afraid, Bellow talking about his own wife and the difference between himself and Allan Bloom:

Rosamund kept me from dying. I can’t represent that without taking it on frontally and I can’t take it on frontally while my interests remain centered on Ravelstein. Rosamund had studied love — Rousseauan romantic love and the Platonic Eros as well, with Ravelstein — but she knew far more about it than either her teacher or her husband.

As Ravelstein returns in its final pages to memorializing, it becomes again what it had been at the beginning: an elegy for male friendship and an attempt to maintain the memory of those who have gone before. But the novel in between is a paean to female love and a declaration of what such love brings that friendship never can. Bellow is our last survivor, and Ravelstein is a book about surviving. But it’s a very sad one, for it teaches more than its author must have intended when he decided to intrude a hymn to his young wife into a memorial to his dead friend: Love lives, but friendship dies.

J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.