by Jean Elshtain

hat a fuss! The publication of Saul Bellow’s intriguing new novel, a memoir in novelistic form, has occasioned a tempest in more than one teapot. Some believe that Bellow has gone beyond the boundaries of reticence altogether, even allowing for our usual acceptance of novelists’ routine violations of our customary sense of privacy at least some of the time. Others, no doubt, hold that it is high time that Allan Bloom (RavelsteinRavelstein) was outed, although Bloom’s homosexuality was a very open secret during his lifetime, even to those of us who were not—in my own case, at least, not then—citizens of that very particular place in Chicago called Hyde Park and teachers or students at that remarkable institution the University of Chicago. Bellow, who is refusing to respond directly to his critics, sees RavelsteRavelsteinin as a complex tribute, and a loving one, to a complex, tempestuous, eccentric, self-indulgent, and brilliant man who was his dear friend.

Although it is impossible to read RavelsteinRavelstein in some pristine way, it seems fair enough to try to set aside all the Bloom furor and evaluate it as a novel. I am not a literary critic, and my reviews are not often about novels because I am not often asked to do that. Presumably, those who assign reviews are rather dubious about whether social and political theorists are up to that delicate task. Having, however, been asked and having read most, if not all, of Bellow’s previous works, my assessment is that RavelsteinRavelstein bears comparison with Bellow novels of the second tier; it does not rank with his greatest work but is a cut above his least compelling fiction. The book lacks many of the features commonly associated with novels. There isn’t much of a plot—although I realize that nowadays “enplotment” is not widely regarded as necessary. RavelsteinRavelstein is also clearly memoiristic and would, I believe, be read as such even by a reader who knew nothing of the ins and outs of faculty relationships and the deep and abiding friendship between RavelsteinRavelstein (Bloom) and Chick (Bellow). The conventional novelistic pretense of fictional license is effaced nearly altogether. There are moments of repetition, it must be said, and it is not at all clear that Bellow means these for emphasis; it seems, instead, that the proofing of RavelsteinRavelstein was perhaps a bit less than rigorous.



That said, RavelsteinRavelstein is a gripping read largely because the portrait of RavelsteinRavelstein is so delicately and, at the same time, fiercely limned. By novel’s end, we sense that we really know this character and that our reactions—mine were deeply ambivalent, to put it mildly—are made possibly only because Bellow has done such a potent job of sketching him, inside and out. We enter RavelsteinRavelstein’s world at the height of his public acclaim. According to Chick, who serves as narrator, RavelsteinRavelstein had “gone public with his ideas. He had written a book—difficult but popular—a spirited, intelligent, warlike book, and it had sold and was still selling in both hemispheres and on both sides of the equator. The thing had been done quickly but in real earnest: no cheap concessions, no popularizing, no mental monkey business, no apologetics, no patrician airs.” I would cavil at the “no patrician airs” part, but the characterization of Bloom’s unlikely bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), is accurate enough. It was indeed “spirited” and “warlike” and “intelligent.” Its patrician airs, however, were obvious, in large part because Bloom’s contempt for ordinary folks burst off the page like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. It is rather ironic that the book made Bloom a darling for many Americans who, as defenders of the solidity and integrity of what is most often called “the traditional family,” Bloom himself had no truck for. These readers were drawn to Bloom’s skillful wielding of a formidable polemic scythe against all defenders of relativism (read “Nietzscheanism”) in the academy, which made the book an all-out assault on academic elitism and its disconnect from the values that animate much of the polity.

But, of course, The Closing of the American Mind wasn’t that at all. Bloom had no use for Nietzscheanism but, if anything, he had even less use for all those moms and dads in the heartland footing the bills for their bright kids to go to places like the University of Chicago. What Bloom favored was an “authentic” elitism, a world of cognoscenti who had been inducted into its deep secrets and mysteries by none other than Bloom himself. It was a world only a few entered, and those few were most often male students. (It was never my impression that women, in general, had what it took, in Bloom’s view, to make the grade. That said, it must be added that there were female students of Bloom’s who revered him, such as Bellow’s fifth wife, the model for the young scholar Rosamund, who becomes Chick’s wife in RavelsteinRavelstein.)

With all his peculiarities and gifts—all the markings of what Bellow calls the “aesthete, flaneur,” including his grotesque, profligate expenditures for the finest of everything (especially breathtaking for me were the French-silk ties that had to be sent back there to be cleaned)—RavelsteinRavelstein//Bloom is a familiar figure in many ways. Americans love to be attacked as narrow-minded and idiotic. We lap it up. Sinclair Lewis savaged the American middle class who gobbled up his ham-fisted satires with alacrity and now advertise his birthplace with pride. H. L. Mencken made a good living by dubbing nearly everybody else mentally or morally deficient, referring to his fellow citizens collectively as the “Boobi Americani.” Chick/Bellow refers to the “Boobus Americanus” as part of the world within which RavelsteinRavelstein must be situated.

Bloom’s preferred world, as is evident in his bestseller, is one in which a tiny number of select men make the transition from “natural savages” to “knowers.” Bloom’s prototypical youth is a figment of a human mind feeding on very lofty notions. In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom personally dictates who among his students is a “serious candidate for culture,” an honor denied one “naïve and good-natured” student who once posed a question to Bloom that charmed Bloom but indicated, at the same time, that “the lad” was so far gone in the ways of American culture that he could never glimpse “the sublime.” Bloom assumes that “young Americans,” at a happy, earlier point in time, arrived at the university as “clean slates unaware of their deeper selves and the world beyond superficial experience.” Their lives were “spiritually empty,” regardless of whether they came from the city or the country, from devout Christian or Jewish families, whether they had dedicated high-school teachers, wise pastors or priests, devoted mothers or fathers—it mattered not to Bloom. They were ciphers. Arriving at the university, the best of them found their slates being written upon by male professors who communed with the distant and the deep and were not afraid, as Plato insists his Guardians must not cavil, at treating human material as blank slates. Their very blankness was, for Bloom, “a large part of the charm of American students.”

But by the time we get to Bloom’s fierce denunciation of American culture, this charm is largely gone, replaced by a kind of dementia characteristic of beings immersed in various “gutter phenomena,” especially rock music. If one adds to rock music and popular culture in general all those dreadful families, well, it’s no surprise that America’s young people are a mess. But a few, a precious few, can be saved. Enter RavelsteinRavelstein /Bloom. Bellow’s portrait is vivid and tracks precisely with Bloom’s arguments in The Closing of the American Mind. Although RavelsteinRavelstein is both a “materialist” and an “atheist”—“militantly so”—he cannot abide the “soullessness” of modern “mass democracy” and “its characteristic-woeful-human product.” RavelsteinRavelstein’s first move “when they [students] arrived was to order them to forget about their families . . . bit by bit, RavelsteinRavelstein also got them to confide in him . . . it was amazing how much RavelsteinRavelstein learned about them. It was partly his passion for gossip that brought in the information he wanted. He not only trained them, he formed them, he distributed them into groups and subgroups and placed them in sexual categories, as he thought appropriate. . . . He had hated and shaken off his own family. He told students that they had come to the university to learn something, and this meant that they must rid themselves of the opinions of their parents. He was going to direct them to a higher life . . .”

Ravelstein’s incessant drumbeat against Mom and Dad is consistent with Bloom’s own writings. “RavelsteinRavelstein,” notes Chick, “urged his young men [they have become “his” by now] to rid themselves of their parents. But in the community that formed around him his role became, bit by bit, that of a father. Of course, if they weren’t going to make it he didn’t hesitate to throw them out. But once they became his intimates, he planned their futures.” The interesting thing, surely, is that RavelsteinRavelstein becomes a far more tyrannical father, in Bellow’s portrait, than nearly any middle-class American father living today. And this is a good thing because RavelsteinRavelstein is leading students to higher things. “He hated his own family and never tired of weaning his gifted students from their families. His students, as I’ve said, had to be cured of the disastrous misconceptions, the ‘standardized unrealities’ imposed on them by mindless parents.” RavelsteinRavelstein had rid himself of all other RavelsteinRavelsteins, and “his” students should follow this course, following him into heroic atheism. As a result of this wrenching out of the “average,” this loathing of the quotidian, RavelsteinRavelstein’s special students—“his young men”—were “mad for him.”

In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom tells us that many of his modern knowers, this tiny band of true souls, may, at times, become morose. Having found out “what happened to Glaucon during his wonderful night with Socrates”—and the sexual frisson is palpable—they may despair of recreating that magical Athenian atmosphere. But he urged his students not to give in to cultural despair. They should follow him into a larger existence of great passion that is bound to break the rules because the “great passions are antinomian,” as Chick/Bellow writes of his friend’s philosophy of life and life of philosophy. But Chick observes that RavelsteinRavelstein,, whose enormous, indeed gargantuan, appetites are cataloged lovingly, was “destroyed by his reckless sex habits”—this said by way of matter-of-fact description, not condemnation. For Chick the issue isn’t homosexuality per se but “habits”—the way one enacts one’s life-projects, including the erotic ones. RavelsteinRavelstein does nothing—nothing—in half-measures.

Hatred of families and contempt for those who try to live unheroic lives is among the least attractive of RavelsteinRavelstein’s traits, as is the extraordinary notion that the lives of others are a kind of Silly Putty to be molded as Ravelstein sees fit. But there is much that is, to employ one of Ravelstein’s rather overused terms, “charming” about Ravelstein’s devotion to friendship—here his friendship with Chick—and his ability to pierce straightforwardly through much of the sham and folderol of late modernity. For Ravelstein, friendship is an expression of love that recognizes the neediness, incompleteness, and even amputated and partial nature of the self and that longs, therefore, for wholeness. Ravelstein’s observations on Chick’s deteriorating marriage to Vela, before the good Rosamund rescues him, are deliciously apt and forthright and filled with insight into the intricate choreography of an unraveling marriage.

The Jewish question also looms large in this text and is debated explicitly in Chick’s and Ravelstein’s conversations. Ravelstein emerges from these discussions as a figure with an incisive moral compass. He insists that Chick not flinch from facing some unpleasant facts, including the shady, shadowy, allegedly fascistic past of another famous faculty member. Chick and Ravelstein are plagued by the hideous history of the twentieth century, with its “destruction of millions . . . the great death populations of the Gulags and the German labor camps. Why does the century—I don’t know how else to put it—underwrite so much destruction? There is a lameness that comes over all of us when we consider these facts.” Ravelstein argues insistently that Jews must face up to attempts to wipe them out. As Ravelstein sets about the business of dying with much of the panache with which he lived, he concludes that “a Jew should take a deep interest in the history of the Jews—in their principles of justice, for instance.” Thinking about his own Jewishness, Chick notes that the “American language [is] not a language that’s helpful with dark thoughts,” and this discomfort with tragedy—especially the finality of death—is Chick’s real motive in writing this memoir of Ravelstein.

As Ravelstein lies dying, Chick promises that he will write an account of his friend’s life. But he finds that he cannot do it. He cannot even get started, not until he himself nearly dies (as did Bellow), from a terrible case of food poisoning. Nursed back to health by the wonderful Rosamund, Chick begins to think once again about Ravelstein, with “his endlessly diverting character, and his intellect entirely motionless.” Chick realizes that he cannot get rid of the dead. He has a way of “hanging on to them” as he clings to the “persistent hunch” that “they are not gone for good.” “No one,” Chick concludes, “can give up on the pictures. The pictures must and will continue. If Ravelstein the atheist-materialist had implicitly told me that he would see me sooner or later, he meant that he did not accept the grave to be the end. Nobody can and nobody does accept this. We just talk tough . . . but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.” Chick goes on living, and part of that living is to finally make good on his pledge to Ravelstein: he will write the memoir because you “don’t easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death.”

Creature is a brilliant word for Bellow to deploy here, for his Ravelstein seems a being who inhabits realms both below and above those where most persons dwell. Ravelstein is more intellectually ethereal and more unapologetically and energetically creaturely without limit than—thankfully—the vast majority of us. Ravelstein’s world could not get going and stay running for long. The ordinariness Bloom despised makes possible the space inhabited by a “creature” such as Ravelstein who, in his very excess, helps us take the measure of our own, less-torrid lives. This book is not a scandal. It is a complex, troubling portrait that discomfits and enthralls.

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