AFTER The Dean’s December it would be almost twenty years before Bellow produced another major novel. (More Die of Heartbreak, which he published in 1987, is a minor book, and something of a rush job: Bellow wrote it in six months.) During much of this time he was teaching classes at Chicago with his raucous, charismatic friend Allan Bloom. Bloom was Bellow’s new best friend on the Committee on Social Thought, his replacement for Shils. The passionate Bloom was the antithesis to Shils: unbuckled, hilarious, and greedy for life in the moment. Bloom would become Abe Ravelstein, a world-hungry intellectual who couldn’t be more different from the straitlaced Artur Sammler.
The classes that Bloom and Bellow taught together usually focused on Stendhal, Flaubert, Conrad, Dostoevsky: Bellow’s pantheon. Bloom had been a student of the hugely influential emigré political philosopher Leo Strauss, and like Strauss he became a cult figure among his students. He had the verve of a tummler and vaudevillian, he shared Bellow’s ingrained suspicion of the intellectual establishment, and he was the kind of insatiable, never-resting personality that Bellow had always been drawn to. At the very end of the twentieth century, Bellow’s last novel resurrects the emphatic, ravenous Jewish intellectual in a more achieved form than ever before in his work. Ravelstein is Humboldt and Zetland perfected. Bloom/Ravelstein thankfully lacks the madness that had afflicted Delmore Schwartz and, unlike Isaac Rosenfeld, he died only after he had had his vision, made his mark on the world.
Bloom, who was in all likelihood HIV-positive, fell ill with Guillain-Barré syndrome in 1990 and died in 1992. Bellow was by his bedside every day during his final months. Bloom wanted Bellow to tell his story, warts and all. Not until three years after Bloom’s death did Bellow begin writing Ravelstein, his passionate homage to him. Bloom’s ideas jibed with much of what Bellow had been thinking, though Bellow—unlike Bloom—didn’t look for answers in the Greek classics. “Athens and Jerusalem is not my dish,” Bellow wrote in Ravelstein.
To grasp the labor of love that is Ravelstein, and to see how Bellow ennobled Bloom in his last novel, we must read Ravelstein together with Bloom’s own version of himself. In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom wrote that from the moment he arrived at the University of Chicago as a teenager, “it seemed plausible to spend all my time thinking about what I am, a theme that was interesting to me but had never appeared a proper or possible subject of study.” When he became a professor, Bloom passed this same high self-concern on to his students. Studying what you are, what you value, and then what you should value, forces you away from the easy pieties that you drank in from your parents and your hometown friends, before you met Bloom and started reading Thucydides, Plato, and the rest. Bellow in Ravelstein thinks hard about what Bloom was: a man who had gone far from his working-class Jewish roots to encounter ancient Greek wisdom, but who in his last days was more concerned with Jewishness than with any other topic.
Largely as a result of Bellow’s urging, Bloom had become an influential figure in America. Bellow had for some time been prodding Bloom to write a book for a general audience, and sent Bloom to his agent, Harriet Wasserman. Bloom’s commentaries on Plato and Rousseau were intricate scholarly contraptions, but he was learning to write more accessibly. The Closing of the American Mind became a best seller, and not just in America. Bloom’s book was an opening salvo in the Culture Wars, and got him invitations from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to discuss his ideas. Bloom did in Chicago what Trilling, Howe, and the others couldn’t do in New York, stir a wide audience with his call to intellectual arms. He asked some basic questions: What kinds of people are needed in a liberal democracy like the United States? How can independence of thought be protected? In his book Bloom lambasted the America of the eighties, drenched, as he saw it, with too-easy formulas for personal fulfillment. He traced the American mania for self-seeking back to Nietzsche, who had spoken of creating one’s own values. But America, Bloom said, had diluted the Nietzschean vision and toned it down, proclaiming that you had to choose the values that were right for you, rather than searching strenuously for the true ones. Relativism reigned, and in it Bloom detected a facile nihilism that was afraid to seek truth.
Officially, Bloom was a Platonist. But the secret hero of The Closing of the American Mind is Nietzsche—the real Nietzsche, not the limp American version. Bloom powerfully summarized Nietzsche’s program: “In the present exhaustion of the old values, men must be brought to the abyss, terrified by their danger and nauseated by what could become of them. . . . Chaos, the war of opposites, is, as we know from the Bible, the condition of creativity, which must be mastered by the creator. The self must also bring forth arrows out of its longing.” Like Nietzsche, Bloom despised the “peace virtuosos” determined to reduce conflict, the “skilled bow unbenders” who want us to adjust ourselves to reality.
Bloom was also, in his best seller, a follower of Thomas Mann. In Mann’s Death in Venice, Bloom writes, Aschenbach’s desires
are somehow premonitory and like cries of the damned plunging into nothingness. Such desires search for significance—perhaps this is the case with everything erotic—but nothing in the world can give it to them. These desires are certainly not satisfied with the transfer of their cases from the tribunal of the judge and the priest to that of the doctor, or with being explained away. People can readily accept reductionism in everything except what most concerns them.
Bloom’s paragraph on Mann, like his description of Nietzsche, has a taut personal intensity lacking from his mentions of Plato. The tolerance of sex that had come into fashion since the sixties was a cheapening of desire, Bloom writes, a reduction of eros to itching and scratching (Plato’s pejorative image in the Gorgias). By contrast Mann hymns eros: its glory, its piercing independence from all social use and respectability. Bloom was, more than anything, a romantic solipsist who championed erotic and spiritual torment. Bellow, when he turned Bloom into Ravelstein, would change that. He transformed Bloom into a shadchen or matchmaker, an apostle of love and friendship. Gone was the severe Nietzschean Bloom of his best-selling book. In his place was Ravelstein with his intense sociability, which provides something that Alexandra, called Vela in the novel, is supposed to lack: a loving curiosity about other people.
Bellow’s Ravelstein is at once an intellectual and a man of the people. Addicted to gossip, he watches the Chicago Bulls with his students. He wears expensive designer suits, which he ruins with coffee spills. Ravelstein is at heart a big kid who wants to rule the world: he stuffs himself on lime half-moon candies, studies Plato at all hours, and sends his students to work in the State Department. He rebels against the hidebound ideologists of the academy, since he holds to a higher idea of education. Ravelstein thrives on passionate involvement, and feels no need to hold back. His is a charmed life.
And so Bellow’s writing is charmed too, in this, his final book. Bellow’s style reaches in Ravelstein a high pitch of the art-that-conceals-art. His sentences wheel in circles as they try to encompass Ravelstein. Bellow’s paragraphing in the novel becomes an art in itself, wielded like the supersharp pizza cutter that the “handsome Chinese prince” Nikki, Ravelstein’s companion (based on Michael Wu, Bloom’s boyfriend), uses to slice the pies delivered for the Chicago Bulls games that Ravelstein watches with his grad students. The loose sonatalike pattern of Bellow’s book lets him downplay the majesty of his concern with the dead man. Many key scenes and even some sentences come back around in the text with musical variation. Didn’t he already talk about that? the reader asks the author at first, and then realizes that the repetitions are deliberate. Memories of the loved friend recur: Bellow thinks about the fabulous creature Ravelstein and his death in a way that is neither brooding nor melancholy but instead becomes more lively with each recapitulation. Like all superb teachers, Ravelstein has his greatest hits, the lines he loves to say, the points he was born to make. Bellow echoes him by returning from time to time to his own favorite angles, his best sights of Ravelstein.
Ravelstein, the book and the man, is loaded with gossip. But here gossip becomes a way to get at the enigma of a person. Even disreputable details should be worn with pride, Ravelstein suggests— “it’s not gossip, it’s social history,” he jokes. The novel sketches barely veiled portraits of many of the friends and ex-friends of Bloom and Bellow: Edward Shils, Mircea Eliade, Paul Wolfowitz, Werner Dannhauser. Just as Alexandra, Bellow’s ex-wife, becomes Vela, so does Janis Freedman, his new wife, become Rosamund. Rosamund is the ex-student of Ravelstein now married to Chick, Bellow’s narrator. Rosamund’s knowledge, like Ravelstein’s, is on the side of life—she even revives Chick from near death. (Bellow had gone into a coma after eating poisoned fish on a 1994 trip he took to Saint Martin with Janis, an episode retold in the novel.)
Vela by contrast is the chilly scientist, alienated from personality and therefore from love. Alexandra asked Bellow for a divorce in 1985, the same year both his brothers died. Writing about the event more than ten years later, Bellow, it is clear, has not forgiven Alexandra. In his account she drifted silently, implacably away at the worst possible moment, just when his brothers had gone from him. Alexandra’s own version is different. “He needed to renew himself,” she said. “He needed new sources of inspiration. Toward the end of our marriage he would say, ‘Look, she locks herself up in her study, I don’t hear from her all morning, she doesn’t care about me’—but that’s the way things were from the very beginning, when he took great pride in me. He needed change, the old muse had to be deposed, and the new muse was waiting in the wings to be installed and anointed. So that was the natural process of things, I think now, in retrospect, but at the time I was very bewildered.” The new muse was Janis, a woman forty-four years Bellow’s junior.
Earlier, while their marriage was faltering, he had written to Maggie Staats criticizing Alexandra: “Where a woman’s warmest sympathies should be there is a gap, something extracted in the earliest years of life which now is not even felt, not recognized as absent.” Leon Wieseltier has a different take on Bellow and Alexandra. “He couldn’t squash her,” Wieseltier commented in our interview, adding, “the first one either” (referring to Anita, Bellow’s first wife). Sondra and Susan had been awed by Bellow’s creativity. But Alexandra lived in her own world, happily adjacent to her husband’s but in many respects utterly unaffected by him. Knowing no math, Bellow could not share her deepest thinking. She remained strong and apart.
Bloom was the opposite of Alexandra: his high-pitched energy battled against her calm and reserved nature. The two became rivals. Bellow liked to have dinner with Bloom several times a week, and so Alexandra accused Saul of having an affair with him, a charge repeated, and rebutted, in Ravelstein. There was no affair, but as the marriage waned, Bloom became, more than Alexandra, Bellow’s destined partner.
Yet Bloom had something in common with Alexandra: he too directed his thought upward toward heavenly patterns, Plato’s ideas. Bellow in contrast was always a realist. Yet as he grew older he needed an interlocutor to instruct him in ideals, someone with a cosmic perspective on things. He wanted to test his novelist’s realism against its opposite, whether it was Steiner’s metaphysics, Alexandra’s mathematics, or Bloom’s political philosophy. Bellow had never before Alexandra known a living example of the pure idealist, someone devoted to the forms. Bloom too loved the forms, though his metaphysics was blended with lust: his trips to Paris, it was rumored, were filled with not just high culture but boys.
The final movement of Ravelstein centers on Jewishness, a subject that increasingly preoccupied Bellow in his final years. Jewishness was real but also metaphysical, since it was ideas and not worldly power that enabled the Jews to thrive. Ravelstein and Chick—Bloom and Bellow—agree that “it is impossible to get rid of one’s origins, it is impossible not to remain a Jew.” In his last days Ravelstein speaks often of Jews, and especially the Shoah. This in spite of the fact that Ravelstein has fled from his family and tried to become, in some basic soul sense, an ancient Greek.
“The war made it clear that most people thought that almost everybody agreed that the Jews had no right to live,” Chick remarks, adding, “That goes straight to your bones.” The Jews “had lost the right to exist and were told as much by their executioners—‘There is no reason why you should not die.’ ” What does it mean to the Jews that “so many others, millions of others, willed their death”? Chick and Ravelstein circle around this highly painful question. The Jews were chosen by the twentieth century, they conclude. The immense rage felt by so many at their mere existence, and the satisfaction and relief felt when Jews began to disappear, shows the darkest side of recent history. Chick says to Rosamund that in the twentieth century “there was a general willingness to live with the destruction of millions,” in the Gulags, the labor camps. “It was like the mood of the century to accept it.”
In Bellow’s novel, the Holocaust continues to echo forty years later in Chicago. Ravelstein is concerned by the friendship that the eminent professor Radu Grielescu, Vela’s fellow Romanian, has shown to Chick and Vela. Grielescu is drawn from Mircea Eliade, the courteous polymath scholar who enchanted generations of students with his wide-ranging reflections on myth, and who was close friends with Alexandra. Eliade in his youth had been a promoter of the viciously anti-Semitic Iron Guard. Ravelstein reminds Chick that Grielescu had supported the Guard, the “sadists who hung living Jews on meat hooks.” In 1939 Eliade wrote, “The Poles’ resistance in Warsaw is Jewish resistance. Only yids are capable of blackmail by putting women and children in the front line.” Ravelstein, for his part, offers a piece of advice to Chick: “Just give a thought now and then to those people on the meat hooks.”
Like Herzog, Ravelstein travels back to Bellow’s childhood. In the middle of the book Bellow plants a loving quarrel between Chick and Ravelstein about Chick’s “private metaphysics,” his deep attachment to the pictures of the world that he saw as a little boy in Montreal. Before birth, “I had waited for millennia to see this,” Bellow writes (a notion from the Russian thinker Vasily Rozanov). “Then when I had learned to walk—in the kitchen—I was sent down into the street to inspect it more closely”:
On Roy Street in Montreal a dray horse has fallen down on the icy pavement. . . . The long-haired Percheron with startled eyes and staring veins will need a giant to save him, but on the corner a crowd of small men can only call out suggestions. . . . Then there is a strange and endless procession of schoolgirls marching by twos in black uniform dresses. Their faces white enough to be tubercular. The nuns who oversee them keep their hands warm within their sleeves. The puddles in this dirt street are deep and carry a skim of ice.
Bellow had remembered the fallen horse half a century before, in his first novel, Dangling Man. Now he has come full circle. We see again Bellow’s fierce attachment to his childhood memories, which appear in his work as pure and transparent as in Wordsworth’s. This is his one turn to live, he says, to see, hear, and touch.
Ravelstein argues against Chick’s private metaphysics. He says that “mankind [has] first claim on our attention,” that we should pursue the pressing questions of truth and value, and avoid purely personal memories. But Chick, and Bellow, win the argument, and the proof is in Ravelstein itself, with its unparalleled portrait of a personality, Abe Ravelstein, who is in love not just with ideas but with people. Chick’s early fledgling perceptions become in time a desire for the others who move close to you, letting you see their wrinkles, falterings, and strengths. Abe is just as drawn by people as Chick. Ravelstein quotes a Russian proverb, “the soul of another is a dark forest,” and he plunges into that forest more often than he turns toward the Platonic sun.
After Ravelstein’s death, while Chick and Rosamund are on their Caribbean vacation, Chick realizes that before he too dies he must finish his book about Ravelstein: “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.” Neither Chick nor Abe will live forever, none of us will, but, thanks to Chick, Abe’s personal stamp will survive.
Bellow’s writing becomes a way to make Bloom’s charismatic personality live on, and to convince us he was a man who responded fully to others, someone who, like Bellow himself, led you to discover the true heft of people—not ideas, but people. (Of course, Bellow has turned Bloom into Ravelstein; the actual Bloom might have been less responsive, and less of a mensch, but it is the man in the novel who matters.) Bellow, revising Plato’s myth of the cave, and alluding to the title of Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, sees Bloom as his true other half:
Since we are so often called upon for judgments, we naturally coarsen them by constant use or abuse. Then of course you see nothing original, nothing new; you are, in the end, no longer moved by any face, or any person. This is where Ravelstein had come in. He turned your face again toward the original. He forced you to reopen what you had closed.
“This is where Ravelstein had come in”: a phrase from old-time movie houses, where spectators routinely entered after the picture had started. (Hollywood movies were, sometimes still are, designed to make sense to such latecomers.) This is where I came in, says Ravelstein, as he turns you toward the light.
Ravelstein is the perfect ending to Bellow’s life of writing. Bellow’s unexpected kind of literary revolution gravitates to the intimate and the gossipy, the life unraveled in faces and postures and loose talk. He goes in the opposite direction from high modernism, which too often sank the individual in grand ideas about culture, history, and society. Bellow also goes against the sense that we can make ourselves up freely, the facile low-rent Nietzscheanism that Bloom derided.
The way of writing that Bellow perfected was disarmingly personal. He let life invade his novels in a way matched by none of his contemporaries. Bellow is our biggest celebrator of personalities in all their strange, needy too-muchness. He had a deeply contrarian agenda, one we need now more than ever. The world is always telling us to invent a self, to become the person we want to be, to play a new role, or to savor a new twist of culture. Bellow tells us something else: we always are what we always were, body and soul. He opens us up, and we see.