SOURCE: Nichols, David K. “On Bellow's Ravelstein.

” Perspectives on Political
Science 32, no. 1 (winter 2003): 14-21.

[In the following essay, Nichols deems Ravelstein a book about ideas, contending that “the
biggest mistake that reviewers make is their failure to appreciate both the political and
intellectual weight” of the novel.]

Saul Bellow has written Ravelstein as a tribute to Allan Bloom, who died in 1992, a teacher
and philosopher most famous for his 1987 critique of education in The Closing of the
American Mind. However, the inevitable speculation about the correspondence between
Bloom the man and Ravelstein the character, or between Chick the narrator and Bellow the
author, ironically may have distracted the audience from the text. Bellow has given us and
given Bloom a story, and it is a story that deserves to be taken seriously. Chick begins: “Odd
that mankind's benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is often the
case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain it” (1).1 Chick clearly refers to
his entertaining friend Ravelstein, whose story he is about to tell, but he may also be referring
to himself as a novelist, who seeks to entertain, and if not govern at least enlighten his
readers.
The biggest mistake that reviewers make is their failure to appreciate both the political and
intellectual weight of Ravelstein. It is a book about ideas, and it is also a very political book.
There is no doubt that when Chick recounts that during the Civil War people complained
about Abraham Lincoln's funny stories and accused him of being frivolous, he reminds us of
Ravelstein's critics and their failure to appreciate “that strict seriousness was far more
dangerous than any joke” (1). He also tells us a great deal about what he, as an author, is
about to do. Chick knows that his book may be taken as a light and gossipy portrait of a
friend, a portrait too kind to satisfy Ravelstein's critics and too critical to satisfy his friends,
but from the beginning Chick puts the reader on notice that frivolous stories may capture an
important political teaching. The model for Chick's book is the funny and often crude stories
of Abe Lincoln, the man his Secretary of War described as an ape.
If Lincoln's stories are the model, we must realize that the context for the model changes.
When Chick turns from Lincoln the ape to H. L. Mencken and the Scopes trial, he suggests
that times have indeed changed; what was a nasty slur in Lincoln's time had become a
scientific fact. Not only was Lincoln an ape, but so are we all, or at least our ancestors. This
is the meaning of progress, or it was for Mencken and the “debunkers and spoofers” who
formed the “tastes and minds of [a] generation” (1).
At first it is tempting to see Chick and Ravelstein as the new Menckens, who will spoof and
debunk our current myths and if successful form the souls of a new generation. But is that
possible in an age where poetry has lost its power? Can souls survive “science, modernity and
progress”? Is anyone who challenges these contemporary doctrines destined to be an
absurdity?
On the surface there is little to suggest a kinship between the farm-belt politician who
preached the virtues of free silver with an “old-style congressional oratory,” and who died
because of his appetite for “huge Nebraska farm dinners,” and the academic philosopher
dressed in Armani suits, who carefully studied classical texts and dined in the finest Paris
restaurants (1-2). His protests to the contrary, Chick quickly pulls us beneath the surface to
see the similarities between these two souls and their fates. These two sons of the Midwest
each appealed to standards that had lost their legitimacy. Both were the subjects of extreme
ridicule by their contemporaries, and both died as a result of their hungers and passions. One
is left to wonder what implications to draw from Chick's conclusion that “Bryan went the
way of the pterodactyl—the clumsy version of an idea which later succeeded—the gliding
reptiles becoming warm-blooded birds that flew and sang” (2). Is Chick saying that
Ravelstein, too, was a pterodactyl? Is Ravelstein's idea of philosophy threatened with
extinction just as Bryan's old-time religion was destroyed by science, modernity, and progress
(1)? Is Ravelstein the warm-blooded bird who will succeed where Bryan, the pterodactyl,
failed? Or is Chick's task to rescue Ravelstein from the cold-bloodedness of the world of
ideas or at least to put warmth and life into those ideas? Can Chick replace Mencken's form
of democratic entertainment with Lincoln's? Can he exchange wit and irony for a more
humane portrait of humor, self-reflection, and greatness? Or does Chick show us the path
from a modern to an ancient sense of irony by which Ravelstein sought to rescue modernity
from itself? And is the greatest irony that at the end of his life Ravelstein turns to his own
old-time religion as an alternative to both the modern and the ancient worlds of ideas? It is
with this footnote that Chick begins his portrait of a friend, and it is from this footnote that he
takes us to the more serious matters of Ravelstein and Michael Jackson in Paris.
Ravelstein is pleased by the “pop circus” surrounding Jackson's presence (2). It was an
appropriate entertainment for the conquering hero who had Paris at his feet. Chick notes that
the “pompous bridges, palaces, [and] gardens of Paris … were the greater today for being
shown by Ravelstein” (3). Ravelstein had at last achieved his rightful station in life at the top
of the most luxurious hotel in Paris. Rightful because “[n]obody in the days before he struck
it rich had ever questioned Ravelstein's need for Armani suits or Vuitton luggage, for Cuban
cigars, unobtainable in the U.S., for Dunhill accessories, for solid-gold Mont Blanc pens or
Baccarat or Lalique crystal to serve wine in—or have it served” (3). Ravelstein's nature had
always entitled him to such luxuries, even if his bank account fell short. He was a large man
whose hands shook, not from “weakness but a tremendous energy that shook him when it was
discharged” (3). Chick's book is a portrait of that energy, an attempt to capture it the way a
spiritualist might try to photograph ectoplasm. If it cannot be seen directly, Chick tries to
show it in its effect on its surroundings. The Lalique crystal and the Mont Blanc pen do not
make Ravelstein a great man; they are merely the pale reflections of his greatness. They
provide a material reflection of Ravelstein's soul the way a religious man might find the
reflection of God's love in the petal of a flower.
Chick may push the limits of credulity by interpreting everything—from Ravelstein's
trembling hand to Michael Jackson and the whole of Paris—primarily in reference to
Ravelstein's soul. But if he does, he does not stray far from Ravelstein's own
self-understanding. When Ravelstein speaks of Jackson's refusal to eat the hotel food that had
been good enough for Nixon and Kissinger, he is reminded of a story in the Bible of crippled
kings living under the table of their conqueror, feeding on what fell to the floor (4).
Ravelstein has overshadowed Jackson by becoming a pop figure himself. Although the fans
are in Paris to see Jackson, Jackson is relegated to a suite two floors below Ravelstein's.
However Ravelstein had not achieved this status by pandering. As Chick describes it, there
“were no cheap concessions, no popularizing, no mental monkey business, no apologetics, no
patrician airs” (4). In some way, Chick cannot get away from the imagery of the Scopes trial,
and we are led to compare Ravelstein's lack of monkey business with the “glamour monkey”
in the suite below (4). Is one celebrity the same as another? Chick suggests that there is a
difference because in Ravelstein's case “his intellect had made him a millionaire” and this is
“no small matter” (4). One other difference is that Ravelstein, like Kissinger and Nixon, finds
the Crillon's food acceptable. He has a kinship with these politicians who are alien to
Jackson's world.
On the next page Ravelstein urges Chick to be more political, to take an interest in public life,
and to that end he asks Chick to write about J. M. Keynes's account of the negotiations over
German reparations in 1919. In addition to filling a lacuna in Chick's political education, the
task is meant as preparation for Chick's portrait of Ravelstein. Ravelstein approves of Chick's
sketch of Keynes, although he is “not quite satisfied” (6). Whatever Ravelstein's criticism,
Chick is not willing to accept it, arguing that “too much emphasis on the literal facts
narrowed the wider interest of the enterprise” (6). He speaks of Thomas Macaulay's essay on
Boswell's Life of Johnson, etching in his mind the picture of “the poor convulsive Johnson
touching every lamppost on the street and eating spoiled meat and rancid puddings” (6). This,
we suppose, is the kind of portrait Chick wants to present of Ravelstein. Chick will play
Macaulay to Ravelstein, who himself played Boswell to a philosophic tradition. But if things
were not complicated enough in thinking about Macaulay's account of Boswell's account of
Johnson, Chick adds another twist, “Crazy Morford,” his high school English teacher, who
introduced him to Macaulay's work.
Chick says later in the book that he sees Ravelstein primarily as a teacher, although one who
has little in common with Morford, the alcoholic who wore the same fire-sale suit every day
and performed his duties in a lifeless and impersonal manner. Ravelstein was not much
interested in Chick's description of Morford, perhaps because Morford the teacher was
unrecognizable to Ravelstein the teacher. Chick leaves unanswered the question of why he
invited Ravelstein “to see the Morford [he] remembered” (7). Or perhaps he asks a question
that he has already, answered when he repeated the lines he learned in Morford's class, “How
weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world,” and tells us how the
memory of Morford the man was for him the embodiment of those words (7). In Ravelstein,
Chick finds the embodiment of other words and of other sentiments. More than once Chick
reminds us of the flatness of his world without Ravelstein and of Ravelstein's efforts to
restore some depth and dimension to the world into which he was born.
Chick's description of Keynes and his Bloomsbury associates in many ways remind us of
Ravelstein. Keynes is gay, although married. He is a cultivated man who loves to gossip and
he is part of a “set,” a group of like-minded individuals. The most striking part of Chick's
account of Keynes's description of the peace conference is his report of an anti-Semitic rant
staged by Lloyd George against one of the German negotiators, a description that
foreshadows Ravelstein's concerns about anti-Semitism and his own Jewishness (8).
Lloyd George's reaction is a reflection of the pervasiveness and depth of anti-Semitism in the
twentieth-century world. Ravelstein mentions Lloyd George's later attraction to Hitler. As he
explains, “Hitler was a dream of political leaders. Whatever he wanted done was done, and
quickly” (11). There is something in human nature that desires tyranny, and that desire can
lead to disastrous consequences. But it is Ravelstein and not Keynes who is aware of these
dangers. The Bloomsbury group's objection to Lloyd George was cultural rather than
political: “They wouldn't have really cared for a man as common as Lloyd George” (10).
Ravelstein also did not like the Bloomsbury crowd's “queer antics,” and he concluded that
they were not intellectually serious (8). Their lack of political and intellectual seriousness is
what opened the group to become a recruiting ground for communists in later years. It also
led to their failure to see the dangers posed by Germany. They failed to understand the
connection between the Germany of World War I and Hitler's Germany. Despite his learning
and culture, the Jewish German negotiator was defending an anti-democratic political system,
and despite his crudeness and anti-Semitism, Lloyd George was defending a democracy that
would give rise to Winston Churchill. Churchill may have liked Keynes, but he differed from
Keynes in a decisive respect—he saw the character of the German threat.
The decisive political question of the twentieth century was the conflict between Western
democracy and totalitarian despotism. Ravelstein admired Churchill because he was able to
see and respond to this conflict. Chick may have been attracted to Ravelstein because
Ravelstein was able to show him the connection between the political conflict and the ideas
that lie behind modern democracy and modern totalitarianism. Ravelstein showed him the
need for intellectual integrity. One cannot tolerate ideas that deny fundamental aspects of
human nature and thereby threaten the foundations of civility and human decency. Through
Ravelstein, Chick came to see that intellectual openness and passivity might lead to the most
horrible and extreme form of intolerance. Part of Ravelstein's enterprise was to open modern
minds to that possibility.
Ravelstein is like Churchill in that his cultivation and his love of gossip have an intellectual
and a political anchor. Ravelstein's love of gossip with his former students sometimes leads to
an ongoing seminar on the great political and philosophic questions, and his cultivation is
grounded in an appreciation of the political and intellectual supports necessary for a civilized
society. Nonetheless, culture remains important for Ravelstein. Keynes was wrong about the
Versailles Treaty; he played into the hands of the Nazis, and he was not as good an economist
as Hayek or Friedman, but Friedman “was a free market fanatic and had no use for culture”
(11). Ravelstein could never settle for a view of human nature that reduced human behavior
to economic calculation, nor was he attracted to the kind of person who held such views. A
biographer of Friedman would be wholly inadequate to write a biography of Ravelstein.
Despite his limitations, Keynes was simply a more interesting person, someone whom
Churchill could describe as “a man of clairvoyant intelligence” (11). Chick may also be using
this discussion to ask the reader to forget about Ravelstein's own particular political positions
and to see him as a whole, as the human soul who so attracted Chick. Again, Chick is aware
that many will criticize his book as mere gossip, and he uses this account of Keynes to show
that gossip may reflect something deeper. In a very real sense it is social history and, Chick
would argue in the case of Ravelstein, a reflection of his desire to know the full range of
human experience and in some sense to tie it all together.
This desire for unity is at the heart of the book. Chick repeatedly returns to Aristophanes'
account of love in Plato's Symposium. “In the beginning men and women were round like the
sun and the moon, they were both male and female and had two sets of sexual organs. In
some cases both the organs were male. So went the myth. These were proud, self-sufficient
beings. They defied the Olympian Gods who punished them by splitting them in half. This is
the mutilation that mankind suffered. So that generation after generation we seek the missing
half, longing to be whole again” (24). According to Chick, this erotic longing for wholeness
is what drove Ravelstein. This longing animated the spirited young men and women who
were attracted to Ravelstein, and it distinguished them from the bourgeois who were
dominated by fears of violent death.
After presenting this account of eros, Chick apologizes for speaking so simplistically of
Ravelstein and even raises the question of whether Ravelstein did “share the view (attributed
by Socrates to Aristophanes) that we are seeking the other that is part of oneself” (25). He
also raises the question of precisely whose account of eros we are considering. A page earlier
he had pointed out that it was not Aristophanes' account but Plato's in a speech attributed to
Aristophanes. But now he complicates the issue further by his parenthetical suggestion that
the speech was attributed to Aristophanes by Socrates. Is Chick engaging in a little esoteric
playfulness? Is he again asking us to think about the relationship between author and subject?
Is Chick Ravelstein's Plato? Is Chick suggesting that it is unnecessary to distinguish between
Plato and Socrates, or is he trying to quietly make readers aware of that distinction? Or does
Chick have more in common with the comic author Aristophanes than with either Plato or
Socrates?
And what of the question Chick asks—does Ravelstein share Aristophanes' view of eros? Are
we left in a world where “the sexual embrace gives temporary self-forgetting but the painful
knowledge of mutilation is permanent” (24)? What of Ravelstein's philosophic enterprise?
Was it not a more satisfying form of erotic quest? Whatever Ravelstein's position on the truth
of Aristophanes' myth, Chick says, “Nothing could move him more than a genuine instance
of this quest” (25). But that quest may be nothing more than a futile romantic illusion, an
illusion itself based on a rather bleak view of human nature. “To be human was to be severed,
mutilated. Man is incomplete. Zeus is a tyrant. Mount Olympus is a tyranny. … And the quest
for your lost half is hopeless” (24). Chick eschews psychobiography, but it is hard not to
think of Ravelstein's past, of his tyrannical father, and perhaps also of his own contradictions.
We must also think about the primary relationship in the novel, the relationship between
Ravelstein and Chick. The book is being written at the request of Ravelstein, but Chick
reports that Ravelstein suggested that the book might be a way for Chick to liberate himself.
From what does Chick need to be liberated? Ravelstein says that it is “some sword of
Damocles hanging over [Chick].” Chick responds that “It's the sword of Dimwitoclese” (13).
Ravelstein's response points to Chick's obvious concerns with death—Ravelstein's death, the
death of his many acquaintances in Chicago, and of course his own death. Chick's joke,
however, points to a lack of knowledge or wisdom that Chick may overcome by coming to
grips with Ravelstein's life.
Chick may also need to come to grips with those things that separate or distinguish him from
Ravelstein. For example, Chick has no set of his own, and he is not so much a part of
Ravelstein's set as an observer of it. With one major exception, Chick does not appear to
develop close personal relationships with any of Ravelstein's students or friends. He points
out that he is not one of Ravelstein's disciples. He is too old for that, and “Jerusalem and
Athens are not [his] dish” (15). Chick also draws out the Lincoln analogy further when he
explains that Ravelstein admired Lincoln because he was willing to take the extraordinary
measure of suspending habeas corpus to successfully prosecute the Civil War. Lincoln
understood that you could not follow due process in a time of national crisis. He did not
shrink from harsh necessities. Ravelstein also sympathized with Lincoln because he had to
endure the mobs of people who wanted to see him on one petty matter or another in the midst
of that horrible crisis.
Chick appears to part company with both Ravelstein and Lincoln with regard to the question
of due process. He argues that because he is a writer, he is not as willing to write people off
as Ravelstein was. Writers, he argues, cannot so easily dispense with due process. They must
“make allowances, taking all sorts of ambiguities into account—to avoid hard-edged
judgments” (43). But Chick also suggests that “hard-edged judgments” may be necessary.
Lincoln could not afford to make subtle legal distinctions regarding innocence, guilt, or due
process. He had to fight a war to preserve the Union. Ravelstein, too, was engaged in a war.
He wrote his warlike book defending “the greatness of humankind” against “bourgeois
well-being” (53). For Ravelstein, the pursuit of love, not self-preservation, was the end of
human life.
Chick, however, like Lincoln, is more than willing to spend time with a range of human
types. He even borrows Lincoln's language of a “humanity bath” to describe his desire to
expose himself to human variety (9). Ravelstein views this only as a waste of time. His
sympathy to Lincoln extends only to Lincoln's occasional frustration; it does not extend to
Lincoln's recognition of the need in a democracy to talk to the people, perhaps even to
recognize a common humanity. But it is difficult to sympathize with people like Ravelstein's
neighbors—“little bourgeois types dominated by secret dreads, each one a shrine of amour
propre” (52). Ravelstein believes that “the great figures of human heroism looming
tremendously over us are very different from the man in the street, our ‘normal’
commonplace contemporary” (52).
Not only does democracy require due process, it may also require a kind of moderation. If
Marc Anthony “valued love above imperial politics,” then it might be said of Ravelstein that
he valued love above democratic politics (53). That is why Chick reminds us that
“Ravelstein's appraisal of the people he dealt with daily had this background of great love or
boundless rage” (52). If Chick is open to Ravelstein's love, he is nonetheless suspicious of his
rage.
Chick actually presents us with little evidence of Ravelstein's rage; it is at most a subtext.
Ravelstein the culture warrior is dwarfed in this portrait by Ravelstein the lover of luxury.
Both Ravelsteins could be seen as aristocratic alternatives to contemporary democratic
politics, but it is possible that Chick makes a judgment as to which is more accessible and
more edifying to a modern democratic audience. Serendipitously, in the central passage of the
novel, Chick makes his one specific reference to the “chapter and verse” of a philosophic
text: “See Plato's Republic, especially Book IV” (117). The reference is offered to explain
what Ravelstein means by “those spirited people” to whom he is attracted (117). It is the
spirited people who can defend the city because of their love of their own. They are the true
patriots who will risk their lives for the city. Glaucon is the Republic's model for such a
spirited young warrior, one who seeks a perfect unity in the city and the soul. It is Glaucon
who is willing to accept communism and a complete deprivation of privacy.
Chick's portrait of Ravelstein, however, reminds us more of Adeimantus than Glaucon.
Adeimantus complains that the guardians will “enjoy nothing good from the city as do others,
who possess lands, and build big fine houses, and possess all the accessories that go along
with these things” (Bloom 97). Adeimantus wants to enjoy the luxuries of life; he wants to
enjoy things that are his own and that distinguish him from others. Why does Chick focus on
the luxury-loving Ravelstein rather than the warrior Ravelstein? The love of luxuries is
something that appeals to some democratic tastes, if not those of Ravelstein's bourgeois
neighbors and colleagues, at least to the southside blacks who admire Ravelstein's wardrobe.
The desire for distinction and refinement may be a poor substitute for philosophic eros or the
search for one's soul mate, but it may for Ravelstein alleviate the mediocrity and blandness of
bourgeois life. At the very least, Chick sees in Ravelstein's love of luxury an accessible
metaphor for his quest for greatness.
In his commentary on the Republic, Bloom describes Adeimantus as “poetically inclined”
(359). In this, if not in his love of luxury, Chick may be closer to Adeimantus than is
Ravelstein. Bloom explains that the poet is not as powerful as he thinks. “Precisely because
he must make his audience join in the world he wishes to present to them, he must appeal to
its dominant passions. … The spectators want to cry or to laugh. If the poet is to please, he
must satisfy that demand” (Bloom 359). Chick wants to please, and he wants to educate. He
knows that the audience is not likely to laugh or cry at Ravelstein's philosophic discussions or
his role in the culture wars. Nonetheless he thinks Ravelstein's story is a compelling one,
certainly one that made Chick laugh and cry.
Early in the book Chick reports that Ravelstein had told him he should be more like the writer
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, whose nihilistic character Robinson refuses to tell a woman that he
loves her. “Robinson the nihilist is high-principled about one thing only, not to lie about the
very, very few things that really matter. He'll try any kind of obscenity but he draws the line
at last, and this tramp woman, deeply insulted, shoots him dead because he won't say I love
you” (13). Ravelstein's critics thought that he was all too willing to draw lines or to take
moral stands, but Chick saw a different man, one who was high-principled only about “a
very, very few things that really matter” (13). When Chick asks Ravelstein the meaning of
Celine's story, Ravelstein replies, “It means that writers are to make you laugh and cry. That
is what mankind is looking for” (13). Ravelstein knows that Chick can give mankind what it
is looking for, and in the process tell Ravelstein's story. That is what Chick can do for
Ravelstein.
The book, however, is more about what Ravelstein did for Chick. Chick might have focused
on Ravelstein's relationship with his students, and he has been criticized for his failure to do
so. We do not see moving portraits of Ravelstein in the classroom, or Ravelstein engaged in
intellectual disputes. We do not see the Ravelstein who attracted generations of students or
legions of academic enemies. Or do we? How would one show the power of Ravelstein's
attraction, the importance of his ideas, and his impact on students and colleagues? The
influence of a man like Milton Friedman might best be seen in terms of his specific ideas and
theories. But Ravelstein's influence was far harder to capture. That is why Chick presents it
not in terms of abstractions but in terms of Ravelstein's influence on his own life.
Chick did not adopt Ravelstein's wardrobe or mannerisms, as did many of his students. If
Ravelstein had ample confidence in his own intellectual superiority to Chick, he also knew
that Chick was more than a student. Chick was not a young man attracted by an older, wiser,
and most passionate teacher. In confronting Chick, Ravelstein was confronting an adult, one
who was too old to become a disciple and one who was old enough to be a friend.
The task for Chick was to show that Ravelstein might have as profound an effect on him as
he did on his students. Chick was attracted to Ravelstein the character, to his childish sense of
humor and sweeping intelligence, but these attributes might have attracted anyone, especially
young and impressionable students. But Chick tells us that Ravelstein made him more aware
of the political dimensions of life, and perhaps more important, he helped Chick to recover
his own erotic longings.
These two themes, eros and politics, come together in the story of Chick's wife Vela. In this
book, we see Ravelstein the warrior primarily in his battle with Vela for Chick's soul.
Whereas Ravelstein defends an older view of eros and politics, Vela represents the epitome of
modern scientific theory. Her study of chaos theory is the culmination of the attempt to
subdue nature through the scientific method. It is based on the belief that the subjugation of
nature is possible because nature itself is indeterminate. Order in nature is merely the product
of our all-encompassing theory. Chick is attracted to Vela for the same reason that he is
attracted to Ravelstein: each promises an intellectually coherent view of the world. Both offer
Chick a picture of a whole into which he fits. Life is a series of pictures for Chick, but in
Ravelstein and Vela he sees the possibility of a more elegant account of the world.
At some level, however, Chick has begun to suspect Vela's vision of the world, or at least to
doubt that he has any place in her world. We are led to believe that part of Chick's initial
attraction to Ravelstein was to fill a void in his life created by Vela. Thus, although Chick's
disenchantment would have existed with or without Ravelstein's influence, Ravelstein
increasingly tries to turn that disenchantment into action on Chick's part. The job is not as
easy as it might appear. Chick's first impulse is to assume responsibility for the problem, to
assume that he is incapable of being satisfied with Vela or with anyone. After all, Vela is
beautiful, or at least she knows how to make herself beautiful. As Chick sees her, she is
dedicated to her work and is highly accomplished in her field. Most important, the goal of
that work is to understand the whole, to crack the deepest mysteries of the universe. Her outer
beauty is a reflection of the inner beauty of her quest to comprehend the world.
What Ravelstein tries to show Chick, however, is the shallowness of Vela's quest and of her
beauty. Vela is fixated on control; she believes that she can make herself beautiful, just as she
believes she can make the world intelligible. Ravelstein knows that she is a failure on both
counts. Her efforts to glamorize her appearance are attempts to camouflage her lack of true
erotic force. Prodded by Ravelstein, Chick increasingly becomes aware of her neurotic efforts
to appear the perfect beauty. Chick also comes to see how little her own work moves her. She
hardly breathes when she sits in her study thinking; she might as well be dead.
Vela fears Ravelstein because on some level she knows that he sees through her. When
Ravelstein barges into her room and sees her in her slip she is furious. Chick points out that
she has revealed very little, but she is not persuaded. Any peek through a crack in the veneer
she presents to the world is a threat. To let down her guard even for a moment is to risk
discovery. Ravelstein knows her, however, not from this glimpse of her in her boudoir; he
knows her instead from her relationship with Chick and perhaps even more from her choice
of friends.
Radu Grielescu was a prominent scholar, “not exactly a follower of Jung—but not exactly not
a Jungian” (105). Vela had hoped to substitute Grielescu for Ravelstein as Chick's friend.
Chick even admits that he enjoyed Grielescu's company, but Ravelstein warned him that
Grielescu's urbanity was a cover for a questionable past. Grielescu had been a member of the
Iron Guard and according to Ravelstein only wanted to use Chick for cover, to rehabilitate his
reputation.
Ravelstein knew the danger of letting Grielescu use this superficial civility as a shield against
the political implications of his ideas and allegiances. The Iron Guard “hung people alive on
meat hooks in the slaughterhouse and butchered them—skinned them alive” (124). Grielescu
himself was a “Jew-hater” who had written of the “Jew-syphilis” that infected the Balkans
(126). Ravelstein showed Chick that one must take people's ideas seriously. Inhuman ideas
lead to inhuman politics. Civility and learning do not give one a free pass, even for crimes
committed by others or in the distant past. Chick was reluctant to accept Ravelstein's
hard-edged judgment, but in the end he admitted that Ravelstein had turned out to be right
about Grielescu.
Why was Vela attracted to Grielescu? No doubt she liked his courtly attentions and his
concern for appearances. But it was his study of mysticism that may have been most
attractive to this woman of science. If the reality of the world is chaos, then order can only be
found in the creation of myth. Mysticism and scientific omnipotence are not, as often
assumed, the major antagonists of the modern world. They are in fact the strange bedfellows
that make totalitarianism possible. Myth was used to demonize the Jews and, combined with
the promise of the science of genetics and the scientific efficiency of the gas chambers, was
the very essence of Nazism.
If it was hard for Ravelstein to convince Chick of Grielescu's connection to the Nazis, it was
even harder for him to convince Chick of Vela's association with the greatest dangers of the
modern project. Vela was explicitly apolitical, but her lifeless world was closely akin to the
deadly spirit of totalitarianism. She was cold and controlling, and she would never recognize
Grielescu's evil because she lacked any integrity of her own that would offer a perspective
from which to judge. Vela would almost remind one of Aristophanes' myth, but she was
driven not by Platonic eros but by something closer to Freud's conception of thanatos.
Ravelstein helps Chick to see the connection between Chick's lack of vitality and his
attraction to Vela. Vela does not complete Chick. She does not satisfy his longing so much as
she threatens to destroy his capacity for longing. She cannot provide a sense of wholeness for
his life because she is incapable of comprehending the full range of human experience. She is
incapable of comprehending either love or friendship. That is why she accuses Chick of
having an affair with Ravelstein. She is like the whore in Celine's story who reduces all
human relationship to physical gratification.
Ravelstein tries to explain this to Chick intellectually, but ultimately it is the revelation of
Vela's infidelity that makes the greatest impression on Chick. It is then that Chick sees that
Vela was never capable of any genuine connection with him or any other human being. Even
so, he is still incapable of action. It is Vela who leaves him.
Although Chick was not able to leave Vela, by coming to understand his dissatisfaction with
her he prepared himself for a new relationship. Vela was replaced not by Ravelstein but by
Rosamund. Rosamund is the key to understanding the relationship between Ravelstein and
Chick. She shows Ravelstein's effect on Chick as well as the fundamental differences
between the two. Rosamund was Ravelstein's student and admirer, but she was not a mere
stand-in for Ravelstein. Rosamund, like Ravelstein, could explain to Chick the debt
Machiavelli owed to Livy, but more important, Chick says, “there was nothing I could say to
this woman that she wouldn't understand” (151). This is much the same way that Ravelstein
describes his friendship with Chick. Chick reports: “[Ravelstein] said he was more than
content that I could follow perfectly well everything that was said” (94).
For Ravelstein, however, love and friendship are fundamentally different. Love is based on a
radical sense of incompleteness, a longing for the other that will complete us but is somehow
alien to us and will always remain so, except perhaps briefly in sex. Friendship is based on a
shared understanding, an appreciation for an intellectual tradition and an ability to engage
that tradition. If this intellectual sharing had its limits, they were less restrictive than those of
love.
Ravelstein loves Nikki, but they do not share in an intellectual friendship. Chick tells us that
Nikki was not a part of the conversations between Ravelstein and his friends or students. The
relationship between Ravelstein and Nikki is a relationship based on inequality. Ravelstein
himself describes it as a father-son relationship. Although Ravelstein may say this to play
down its sexual component, he also reveals that its erotic character is heightened for him by
the incommensurability of the relationship. It is driven by a longing that can never be
satisfied. When Ravelstein buys Nikki an expensive BMW as a token of his love, his action
reminds us of the way a father might show his affection for a son, a son with particularly
demanding standards. To state the argument in terms that would no doubt be most obnoxious
to Ravelstein, Ravelstein feels for Nikki the kind of appreciation and love that his own father
never felt or showed for him. By giving the car to Nikki, Ravelstein creates the kind of
relationship that he himself never enjoyed as a child. But just as Ravelstein can never make
up for his own past, he can never enjoy the kind of relationship with Nikki that Chick enjoys
with Rosamund.
Ravelstein doubts the possibility that such a relationship can exist. First, he believes young
women's “longing for children, and therefore marriage, for the stability requisite for family
life” and “a mass of other things … disabled them for philosophy” (140). Rosamund may be
“earnest and hard-working”; she may even have a “good mind,” but like most women, she
would not be capable of a philosophic friendship (140). Second, there is reason to question
whether Rosamund could be seen by Ravelstein as an object of passion. He admits that she is
attractive, but her desires may appear to be too conventional to Ravelstein. She seems too
comfortable, with bourgeois family life to sweep or to be swept away by passion. She has
neither the detachment necessary for philosophy nor the unquenchable desire that fuels eros.
Rosamund has another quality that distinguishes her from Ravelstein—her kindness. Chick is
more than willing to acknowledge Ravelstein's “great-souled” generosity to his friends and
students, but Chick also shows Ravelstein's capacity for cruelty. As Chick explains, “Abe
took no stock in kindness. When students didn't meet his standards he said, ‘I was wrong
about you. This is no place for you. I won't have you around.’ The feelings of the rejects
didn't concern him” (42). Ravelstein claimed to be acting in the student's interests. “Better for
them if they hate me. It will sharpen their minds” (42). But more important than care for
students was Ravelstein's belief that he should not let himself be used by “idlers” (44).
Just as Chick does not show us Ravelstein in the classroom, he does not tell us the story of
any of Ravelstein's student rejects. Instead he tells us a story of Ravelstein's cruelty to him.
When Ravelstein complained of having no money to buy a decent suit, Chick takes him to his
own tailor to have a suit made for him. Ravelstein recognizes the kindness of the gesture, but
he is moved more by the fact that the suit falls far short of his or Nikki's standards. He wears
the suit only once, makes fun of it with Nikki, and tells Chick, “I didn't think it fit for use”
(33). He even suggests that Chick should have given him the ＄1,500 he had paid the tailor,
“then I would have raised the rest for a decently cut garment” (33).
Chick says, “We were perfectly open with each other. You could speak your mind without
offending” (33). Nonetheless it is difficult to imagine that Chick was not offended that
Ravelstein's concern with fashion seemed to outweigh his concern for his friend's feelings. If
he was not offended, then he was at least disappointed. Ravelstein's cruelty is in stark contrast
to Rosamund's kindness. It is not only that Rosamund shows more concern for a wayward
salamander than Ravelstein does for Chick's feelings; it is that Chick recognized that even “in
having her own way, she put my interests ahead of her own” (182). Chick understands that
such kindness should not be dismissed easily.
Chick is not unaware of the dangerous side of such kindness. Ravelstein might well have
pointed out that it was Rosamund's kindness that led them to the Caribbean vacation that
almost resulted in Chick's death. But as Ravelstein noted, Chick was always willing to take
risks when it came to love. Chick would also point out that it was that same kindness and
concern that motivated Rosamund to take charge of Chick's care and ensure his recovery. All
relationships involve risk, but they are also the source of our vitality. Rosamund saves
Chick's life in more ways than one. Ravelstein had begun to teach a lesson about love to
Chick as he tried to rescue him from Vela. But it is Rosamund who Chick concludes knows
more about love than either he or Ravelstein.
Chick takes pains to point out that he and Rosamund found each other without Ravelstein's
help or prior approval. Chick was well aware of Ravelstein's propensity for matchmaking.
Ravelstein considered it a part of his role as a teacher to bring together the appropriate soul
types. But Chick was not Ravelstein's disciple, and one gets the impression that Rosamund
was not among the inner circle of Ravelstein's students. Furthermore, Chick may have had a
democratic reaction against Ravelstein's aristocratic penchant for arranged marriages.
Surprisingly, Chick may have had more faith in erotic attraction than Ravelstein. At least he
may believe that eros can help to make good matches. Longing and fulfillment do not have to
be irreconcilable alternatives. Nor do we need to rely on philosopher kings to match us with a
mate who provides a pale reflection of mythical happiness.
Ravelstein is also a book about faith, and by the end of the story both Chick and Ravelstein
may be closer to Jerusalem than they were at the beginning. Chick has come to see the
possibility of goodness in the world, first through his friendship with Ravelstein and later
through the love and friendship of Rosamund. But Chick may not have had as far to go as
Ravelstein, because Chick's relationship to his origins was never as problematic as
Ravelstein's. We see this first and foremost in relation to family. Chick is there to comfort his
dying brothers, and there is little in Chick's description of his childhood that reflects the
bitterness that Ravelstein feels toward his family.
Chick claims, “God appeared very early to me” (96). He was aware of God through God's
gift: “[T]his was the world. I had never seen it before. Its first gift was the gift of itself.
Objects gathered you to themselves and held you by a magnetic imperative that was simply
there. It was a privilege to be permitted to see—to see, touch, hear” (96). Chick knows that
Ravelstein would not appreciate his “personal metaphysics” (98). Ravelstein would have
said, “Either you continue to live in epiphanies or you shake them off and take up trades and
tasks, you adopt rational principles and concern yourself with society, or politics. Then the
sense of having come from ‘elsewhere’ vanishes” (97).
Chick, as mentioned earlier, was not one of Ravelstein's students. Ravelstein ordered his
students to “forget about their families” (25), just as he “had hated and shaken off his own
family” (26). This was a necessary first step to the world of philosophy, the world where
Ravelstein had found a home. It was among his students and colleagues that Ravelstein
created a substitute family, the family that gathered around his bed as he lay dying.
Ravelstein also argued that philosophers are necessarily atheists. He was said to have had
great respect for Jerusalem but ultimately to have chosen Athens over Jerusalem. The woman
he worshiped, Nehamah Herbst, not only refused to see the orthodox rabbi her mother had
brought to her deathbed but also refused ever to speak to her mother again. Ravelstein
described her as “pure” and “immovable,” a woman who refused to compromise her rational
principles (144).
It is possible, however, that Ravelstein admired her so much because she set a standard that
he was never able to meet. Ravelstein could never shake off his Jewishness. In part, the
reason was that if Ravelstein could not believe in goodness, he could nevertheless believe in
evil. He understood the hatred of the Jews and the atrocities to which it led. He also
understood that the Jews were a race of teachers. As Chick reminds us, “For millennia, Jews
have taught and been taught. Without teaching, Jewry was an impossibility” (101). Chick
explains that “Ravelstein had been a pupil or, if you prefer, a disciple of Davarr” (101). He
thus implicitly raises the question of the relationship between teaching and faith, a connection
that is not unproblematic, but one that is respected by both Chick and Ravelstein. But if
Ravelstein affirmed his religious heritage through his belief in evil and through the practice
of his vocation, he was nevertheless unable to find much consolation or hope in religion.
Ravelstein, to his death, may have remained a nihilist, a sometimes cheerful nihilist, but a
nihilist nonetheless.
Or did he? Chick finds much meaning in Ravelstein's comment about who will follow whom
into the next world. Although Rosamund cautions him against overinterpretation, he is unable
to let go of the possibility that in the end Ravelstein himself was a believer. There is no doubt
that Ravelstein believed in love and friendship, and that belief in turn was based on the belief
in the mind and in the soul. Do these beliefs require that we believe that we came from
somewhere else and that we will return? Do they not represent a kind of epiphany?
Such belief is not an easy thing. Chick himself is not altogether open to it until he is brought
back from the edge of death. Not only did he have to come face to face with his own death,
but also he had to face the meaning of a world that no longer believes in the dignity of the
human soul. That is why he is obsessed with the cannibals whose rational utilitarianism finds
no basis from which to distinguish between the human and the nonhuman. Through
Rosamund's faith in him, he is saved from this inhuman world, a kind of salvation that is
more important than his physical preservation.
It is the Chick who enjoys such salvation who is able to write the story of Ravelstein, for now
he knows that it is not necessary to “easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death” (233).
He can celebrate the epiphany that was and is his friend Ravelstein, just as he can recognize
that “the simplest of human beings is … esoteric and radically mysterious” (22).
Note
1.​ All page references, unless otherwise noted, are to Saul Bellow's Ravelstein.
Works Cited
Bellow, S. 2000. Ravelstein. New York: Viking.
Bloom, A. 1968. Notes and interpretive essay to The Republic of Plato, trans. New York:
Basic Books.

SOURCE: Davis, Michael. “Unraveling Ravelstein: Saul Bellow's Comic

Tragedy.” Perspectives on Political Science 32, no. 1 (winter 2003): 26-31.
[In the following essay, Davis discusses Ravelstein as a comic tragedy.]
Ravelstein begins with the word “odd”; it introduces a reflection on the amusing character of
the benefactors of mankind. If this beginning is, as advertised, a “clever or wicked footnote”
(2), its clever wickedness surely must consist in making us think of Abe Ravelstein as an
exemplar of this oddity.1 A page later the narrator of the novel, Chick, says of the man he is
memorializing, “Ravelstein was one of those large men—large, not stout” (3). This proves to
be Ravelstein's leitmotif. “He was very tall” (4) (especially compared to his father who was a
“fat neurotic little man” [17]). Ravelstein, a “tall pin- or chalk-striped dude with his bald
head” (19) was “as big as any of [Michael Jackson's] body guards” (28). “This large Jewish
man from Dayton” (94) was “a much larger and graver person” than Rameau's nephew (35).
“Ravelstein's extended body was very large, he was nearly six and a half feet tall and his
gown, which reached to the ankles of ordinary patients, ended just above his knees” (178).
So, Ravelstein is larger than life—and larger than Chick.
Ravelstein was a bigger man than me. He was able to make a striking statement. Because of
his larger size, he could wear clothes with more dramatic effect. I wouldn't have dreamed of
disputing this. To be really handsome a man should be tall. A tragic hero has to be above the
average in height. I hadn't read Aristotle in ages but I remembered this much from
the Poetics.
(30)
Chick, of course, gets it wrong; it is not the tragic hero of the Poetics who must be tall; rather,
the greatness of the great-souled man of the Nicomachean Ethics is explained by way of a
likeness to the bodily greatness of those who are beautiful, “for the small are urbane and well
proportioned, but not beautiful.”2 Yet perhaps Bellow does not get it wrong and means to
suggest not only that Ravelstein will be a tragic figure, but also that his tragedy has
something to do with megalopsuchia—greatness of soul or pride. That Ravelstein is meant to
be a tragic figure is confirmed by another odd detail—“the strange shapes of his mismatched
feet. One was three sizes bigger than the other” (18). This is Ravelstein as
swell-foot—Oidi-pous. Bellow's novel thus begins by calling our attention to the
simultaneously comic and tragic character of Abe Ravelstein. “You don't easily give a
creature like Ravelstein to death” (233) for two reasons. Writing him up is clearly a
celebratory act of love; at the same time, it makes visible a flaw so deep as to be paradigmatic
of our humanity. Ravelstein is a big, attractive man with a big flaw. To understand the novel
would be to unravel his comic tragedy.
Twice we are told by Chick that he will approach Ravelstein piecemeal (16, 37), and at first
glance he seems as good as his word. His sketch seems to be a relatively unstructured series
of loosely related impressions—Ravelstein in pieces. But by calling the last and shortest
(214-33) of the novel's four divisions “one more brief vision,” Chick suggests that each of the
other three (1-93, 94-159, 160-213) is meant to be taken as a unified vision with internal
coherence. Ravelstein is a man of very specific pieces—pieces determined by his dominant
loves—fine things, friends, and wisdom.
The unity of the first section of the novel is thus not surprisingly Ravelstein the “grandee in
the new order of things” (29). He is the proud owner of a ＄20,000 watch and Lalique
crystal; in Paris he stays in the luxury penthouse suite a floor above Michael Jackson at the
Crillon and dines at superb restaurants; he throws pizza parties for his students to admire the
surpassing excellence of Michael Jordan's game, orders a BMW as a gift for his lover, and
possesses an extravagant sound system. Chick is generous with examples; their sum seems
designed to convince us of Ravelstein's devotion to the fine—the kalon. “These days,” says
Chick, alluding to one of Aristotle's virtues, “Ravelstein was a magnificent man” (29). The
remark calls into question Chick's frequent celebration of his own ignorance of the great
books and of the content of Ravelstein's thought. Jerusalem and Athens may not be his dish
(15); nevertheless he makes liberal use of Aristotle and of the Nicomachean Ethics in
particular. Ravelstein's magnificence shows up in his purchase of a ＄4,500 Lanvin jacket.
“What does this Lanvin jacket have that your twenty others haven't?” I wanted to say. But I
knew perfectly well that in Abe's head there were all kinds of distinctions having to do with
prodigality and illiberality, magnanimity and meanness. The attributes of the great-souled
man.
(32)
Chick shrewdly sees that magnificence (megaloprepeia) is simply a preliminary version of
greatness of soul (megalopsuchia). Both have to do with correctness in estimating worth—the
former of things, the latter of oneself. But, as estimating one's own worth requires looking at
oneself, willy-nilly it means looking at oneself from the outside—as an object of
contemplation. Ravelstein's love of fine things is not really separable from his longing to
fashion himself into a fine thing. The first part of the novel is thus devoted to Ravelstein's
greatness of soul, the virtue that Aristotle says consists of being good and knowing it, so as to
be able to take pleasure in one's own goodness. This kosmos or ornament of all the other
virtues manifests itself in autonomy and a contempt for the ordinary. The great-souled man,
says Aristotle, “wonders at nothing, for nothing is great to him” (1125a3). (In passing, one
might wonder how this affects the stature of philosophy, which according to Aristotle must
always originate in wonder.)
The first sentence of the second part of the book seems to point to its unifying principle: “A
certain amount of documentation might be offered at this point to show what I was to
Ravelstein and Ravelstein to me” (94), and a little later, “We were close friends—what else
needs to be added?” (94). Ravelstein is a man devoted to his friends and to the idea of
friendship. This second part of the book is filled with possible models for friendship: Chick
and his wife Vela (“two solitudes” [103]); Chick and Vela's nominee for a replacement for
Ravelstein. Radu Grielescu (“The fact was I enjoyed watching Grielescu. He had so many
tics.”); Ravelstein and his lover Nikki (“in a special sense, family” [140]); Ravelstein and
Morris Herbst (“friends for nearly half a century,” who “have so much to say to each other”
but “had a few dirty jokes to tell each other first” [150-51]); the Battles, an aging married
couple whom Ravelstein talks out of a joint suicide plan; but the friendship between Chick
and Ravelstein looms largest—“he and I had become friends—deeply attached—and
friendship would not have been possible if we hadn't spontaneously understood each other”
(111). This mutual understanding presupposes a certain frankness: “You couldn't, as the
intimate and friend of Ravelstein, avoid knowing a great deal more than you had an appetite
for” (113), but not confidentiality, for “Ravelstein was crazy about gossip and his friends
were given points for the racy items they brought. And it was not a good idea to assume that
he would keep the lid on your confidences” (114). The principle of the friendship then is the
naked truth (115); nothing is to be off limits. Chick characterizes this complete openness in
an odd way:
[I]t was our sense of what was funny that brought us together, but that would have been a thin
anemic way to put it. A joyful noise—immenso giubilo—an outsize joint agreement picked us
up together, and it would get you nowhere to try to formulate it.
(118)
The friendship between Chick and Ravelstein is a sort of marriage (Vela actually accuses
Chick of having an affair with Ravelstein [112], and Chick tacitly compares the two by
indicating that whereas he and Ravelstein share the sense that everything is potentially funny,
Vela finds nothing funny and laughs only when it is conventionally expected [218]). The two
are as one in their sense that nothing is too sacred to be looked at and that most of what is
held sacred is wonderfully absurd. “As a rule [they spoke] plainly to each other” (125).
Ravelstein, for example, is openly critical of Chick's marriage to Vela and of his association
with the Grielescus. Because death means “the pictures will stop,” and so life is the
pictures—the surface of things in which one sees the heart of things (156)—the single thing
to be held sacred is fidelity to the true character of the pictures. What Ravelstein so loved in
Herbst's late wife Nehamah—“that she was pure and she was immovable”—is a version of
what he loves in Chick. That “Nehamah not only refused to see the orthodox rabbi her mother
had brought to her deathbed, but never spoke to her again” was for Ravelstein a sign that she
was one of “the handful of human beings [who] have the imagination and the qualities of
character to live by the true Eros” (144). That Chick does not make convenient concessions to
the conventional in his thought even when it is hard on others and on himself is why
Ravelstein enlists him to write him up after he dies: “I want you to show me as you see me,
without softeners or sweeteners” (133).
Ravelstein's views of love and friendship are hard to distinguish.
The marriage of true minds seldom occurs. Love that bears it out even to the edge of doom is
not a modern project. But there was, for Ravelstein, nothing to compete with this
achievement of the soul.
(120)
[Ravelstein] thought—no, he saw—that every soul was looking for its peculiar other, longing
for its complement. I'm not going to describe Eros, et cetera, as he saw it. I've done too much
of that already: but there is a certain irreducible splendor about it without which we could not
be quite human. Love is the highest function of our species—its vocation. This simply can't
be set aside in considering Ravelstein. He never forgot this conviction. It figures in all his
judgments.
(140)
The underlying principle of love here belongs not to Plato but to Plato's Aristophanes; it is
love of one's own. But if you are to love your own, you must know what really belongs to
you; you must know yourself. Accordingly, you must seek out another who will not spare
you. Ravelstein and Chick share the same sense of what is funny because nothing is in
principle excluded from what is funny. Trying to formulate the principle of their attachment
would get you nowhere because the principle itself would not be in any sense final or sacred.
In principle at least, the two share a fascination with all the pictures—beautiful and ugly.
This is connected to the principle underlying the third part of the novel, a principle at first
glance hard to make out. Death is clearly important—this is the part of the book that is most
specific about the details of Ravelstein's approaching death and contains as well the account
of Chick's near-death experience. It is also the part of the book where their Jewishness is
most prominent and where the central importance of Rosamund, Ravelstein's student and
Chick's new wife, emerges. But what ties these things together?
Close to the beginning, Chick quotes something Rosamund remembers from her school days:
“Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty;
but learn to be happy alone” (161). Chick more than once protests (not altogether
convincingly) that it is his task to describe Ravelstein the person, that is, not his ideas. Now,
to the extent that it is possible to describe a man who, although “he never presented himself
as a philosopher, … had had a philosophical training and had learned how a philosophical life
should be lived” (173) without speaking of his thought, the description would have to be of
the act of thinking rather than its content. But the act of thinking, of being an observer apart
from what is observed and sufficiently neutral to weigh its import, would be, as Aristotle
suggests, autonomous. The contemplative life is essentially a life of isolation. Truly to think
means to avoid wishful thinking—to look even at what is hardest to bear, the naked truth.
Ravelstein accordingly prefers what he calls natural nihilists (Celine, for example) to
intellectual nihilists, because “they don't tell themselves a lot of high-minded lies” but
“accept nihilism as a condition and live in that condition”—they “live with their evils” (175).
The evil of evils that we cannot afford to conceal from ourselves is the attempt in the
twentieth century to exterminate the Jews. Toward the end, Chick reports to Morris Herbst
that Ravelstein talked constantly, mostly of Jewish things: “He talked about religion and the
difficult project of being man in the fullest sense, of becoming man and nothing but man”
(178). Herbst responds, “Well, of course he'll keep talking while there's a breath in his body
left—and for him it's a top priority, because it's connected with the great evil” (178). These
things go together—thinking and the existence of great evil. Chick interprets this to mean that
the war made it clear that almost everyone agreed that the Jews had no right to live. … Other
people have some choice of options—their attention is solicited by this issue or that, and
being besieged by issues they make their choices according to their inclinations. But for “the
chosen” there is no choice. The Jews … were historically witnesses to the absence of
redemption.
(178-9)
Ravelstein reflects on Judaism because to be a Jew at the end of the twentieth century is to
have no choice but to live without the illusions engendered by one's inclinations—to
acknowledge the ugly. The Jews are permanent outsiders—a solitary people; to reflect on
Jewishness, then, is to reflect on solitude, and solitude is what the contemplative life looks
like when it is emptied of ideas. Philosophy as the practice of dying and being dead means
neutralizing one's conventional attachments, so as to be able really to look at the world. And
this means to refuse “to sit on information simply because it's not intellectually respectable
information” (188). One has to refuse to become like those wealthy vacationers—“people
who [like] their reality to follow their thoughts” (189). Thought that follows reality will not
simply recoil from the Holocaust or from cannibalism (193).
The first part of Ravelstein is about moral or political virtue—especially its culmination in
greatness of soul. The second part is about friendship. The third is about philosophy. Chick's
memoir of Abe Ravelstein thus imitates the structure of Aristotle's Nicomachean
Ethics, which provides three successive versions of the exemplary life: the life of moral
virtue, the life devoted to friendship (that good without which no one would choose to live
even having all the others), and the godlike autonomy of the contemplative life. Perhaps this
imitation is intentional; perhaps it is simply the result of Bellow's deep reflection on the fault
lines beneath even the very best of lives that determine the pieces into which they tend to
break apart. In Bellow, as in Aristotle, these three pieces do not easily make a coherent
whole; the best of lives threatens to be either a comic or a tragic impossibility.
Ravelstein's megalopsuchia proves rather comical, for it often borders on megalomania.
When his neighbors from the floors above and below come to his door to complain because
he is playing Rossini CDs at all hours at top volume on his ＄10,000 speakers, Abe says
rather too smugly that “without music you couldn't swallow what life offered, and that it
would do them good to submit and listen” (52). It never seems to occur to him that “these
little bourgeois types” might rather choose on their own what they will listen to. It's hard to
listen to Rossini and Mozart at the same time. And, of course, neither does it occur to him
that one of them might be trying to think through a complicated problem in mathematics or
perhaps even political philosophy. Chicago, it seems, is not big enough for
two megalopsuchoi, who wonder at nothing and for whom nothing is great.
It is not always easy to distinguish Ravelstein's love of the fine from love of fashion. Part of
him holds the idols of the cave in contempt; part of him is an idolater. So, on the one hand, he
demands that his students break free from conventional family ties, and on the other, he
proceeds to fashion them into a family—his “set.”
Ravelstein had produced (indoctrinated) three or four generations of students. Moreover, his
young men were mad for him. They didn't limit themselves to his doctrines, his
interpretations, but imitated his manners and tried to walk and talk as he did. …
(58-59)
And when he is bedridden just before his death, he is comforted when he sees those who have
come to visit, “people with whom he was familiar, with whom he had affinities—something
like relatives—the nearest thing to a family available” (158). He finds the Bloomsbury
intellectuals snobbish and would condemn them as gossips were he himself not so fond of
gossip. “When I do it,” says Ravelstein, referring to his willingness to reveal virtually any
confidence, “it's not gossip, it's social history” (65). If Ravelstein's attachments are serious,
on the basis of his own standards, they are too conventional; if they are ironic, then they are
too self-forgiving. In either case they lack intellectual honesty. Loving life too much to be
sufficiently hard on himself, he does not really approach the world with an open mind. He is
insufficiently philosophic. The megalopsuchos takes pleasure in his own goodness, but, as he
wonders at nothing, he has not sufficiently thought through the ground for his own high
opinion of himself. He is a creature of the very conventionality that he holds in contempt.
On the other hand, neither is Ravelstein a solitary contemplative. Rosamund tells her
husband, “He's far more sociable than you, Chick. He enjoys company” (152), and Ravelstein
himself says, “Nature and solitude are poison” (154). To chide Chick for spending summers
in New Hampshire, his “quiet green retreat where [he] think[s] and work[s]” (110),
Ravelstein quotes Socrates in the Phaedrus on how the trees have nothing to teach him (100).
Later he remarks on Chick's tendency to “check out the externals”: “You can count on nature
doing what nature has been doing forever. Do you think you are going to rush in on Nature
and grab off an insight?” (177). As a “political philosopher” (231), Ravelstein devotes
“himself mainly to the two poles of human life—religion and government” (178); “he [has]
little interest in natural life. Human beings absorbed him entirely” (142). This is certainly of a
piece with philosophy that has been brought “down from the heavens and into the cities to
treat the human things,” but only so long as the human things are understood to be the true
objects of contemplation. That this is not quite what Ravelstein has in mind becomes clear in
his criticism of Chick's attachment to nature: “Can you explain what Nature does for you—a
Jewish city type?” (110). “For miles around you're the only Jew” (116). To be a Jew is to be a
man of the city, and yet “on our own side of the Atlantic … as a Jew you are also an
American, but somehow you are also not” (23).
Jerusalem and Athens are not Chick's dish, but in the end he cannot avoid them if he is to
give an accurate report of Ravelstein. If Ravelstein “had to choose between Jerusalem and
Athens[,] … he chose Athens” (173). Sight—theôria—trumps obedience. Ironically, being a
Jew prepares one for Socratic philosophy; one knows as a birthright what it means to belong
but also somehow not belong. Ironic detachment is the necessary condition for philosophy.
And yet Ravelstein's Jewishness is more than the prolegomena to philosophy: “In his last
days it was the Jews he wanted to talk about, not the Greeks” (173). Similarly, when Chick
struggles to begin the memoir he promised to write, Rosamund tells him that he has been
avoiding the most important problem—the Jewish question (167). In general and in particular
this proves to mean that “it is impossible to get rid of one's origins, it is impossible not to
remain a Jew” (179).
Accordingly, it is impossible to be simply or purely an observer. Ravelstein is a political
philosopher with a certain contempt for the merely natural because mere nature is an illusion.
In this regard he and Chick agree: “The grey net of abstraction covering the world in order to
simplify and explain it in a way that served our cultural ends has become the world in our
eyes”; what is needed is “a gift for reading reality—the impulse to put your loving face to it
and press your hands against it” (203). Putting one's face to nature, then, means looking at
human beings, or perhaps parrots.
Only once in the book does Ravelstein show any interest in nature. Encountering a flock of
parrots—tropical birds that have escaped captivity and having adapted to Chicago winters
live in nests that remind Chick of tenements—he says, “They even have a Jew look to them”
(141-2, 169-70, 233). Only in their movement away from nature do beings become
interesting to him. Of Ravelstein's “peculiar Jewish face,” Chick says, “You couldn't imagine
an odder container for his odd intellect” (173). If it seems impossible to imagine a non-Jewish
Ravelstein, is this not to say that the very thing that initially prepares him for the
contemplative life ultimately guarantees its imperfect realization? Ravelstein loves company,
but not simply for the sake of contemplation. Nikki is his heir.
We are told early on that Ravelstein wrote a “difficult but popular” book and that “it is no
small thing to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think” (4). In his way,
Ravelstein combines political virtue and intellectual virtue; he is at once great-souled and
contemplative. And yet, the two can exist neither separately nor together. The great-souled
man is insufficiently attentive to the artificiality of the content of his love—too quick to
dismiss mud, hair, and dung—to be really great-souled. The contemplative is insufficiently
attentive to the fact of his own love—too quick to accept philosophy—to be really
contemplative. Furthermore, even this pseudodetachment is at odds with the pseudograndeur
of the great-souled. On the one hand, Ravelstein knows this; he never claims to be a
philosopher, and his love of the kalon is deeply ironic. On the other hand, he represents the
profound longing to put together these two halves of our humanity. As in
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the problematic togetherness of these two is somehow
represented by friendship.
If the conventionality of fame, of oneself as a phenomenon available to the world, is
necessarily at odds with the naturalness of genuine thought, of oneself as a thing in itself,
perhaps the limited audience of the friend can bridge the gap between the two. The friend is
the other for whom one can be simply what one is—oneself. Although Chick is a little
doubtful, from Ravelstein's point of view they are friends because “there's nothing I say to
you that you don't immediately understand” (117), and even Chick himself says that
“friendship would not have been possible if we hadn't spontaneously understood each other”
(11). After Ravelstein's death, Chick “began to see that it had become [his] habit to tell him
what had happened since we last met” (188). Yet, although it was their sense of what was
funny that bound them together (118), “the fact that we laughed together didn't mean that we
were laughing for the same reasons” (14). Chick sees that “the simplest of human beings is
… esoteric and radically mysterious” (22), and the two agree that “when you destroy a human
life you destroy an entire world—the world as it existed for that person” (156). The sign that
these two souls are not altogether married is marriage. Twice Chick withholds information
from Ravelstein—once about Vela and once about his intention to marry Rosamund.
I wasn't going to have Ravelstein vet Rosamund for me. I couldn't let him arrange my
marriage as he did for his students. If he lacked all feeling for you, he didn't give a damn
what you did. But if you were one of his friends it was a bad idea, he thought, for you to take
things into your own hands. It troubled him greatly to be kept in the dark on any matter by his
friends—especially by those he saw daily.
(90)
And,
[H]e had been taken by surprise when he learned that in marrying Rosamund I had not
bothered to consult him. I was willing to admit that he might know more about me than I
myself knew, but I was not about to put myself in his custody and rely on him to run my life
for me. It would also be unjust to Rosamund.
(139)
Of Vela, Ravelstein remarks,
You gave in—you tried to sell me a colored cutout of the woman like the cardboard
personalities they used to hang in movie lobbies in the old days. You know, Chick, you
sometimes say there's nothing you can't tell me. But you falsified the image of your ex-wife.
You'll say that it was done for the sake of marriage but what kind of morality is that?
(176)
So the two are not perfectly one. And it is Ravelstein's own understanding of marriage that
accounts for the incompleteness:
People are beaten at last with their solitary longings and intolerable isolation. They
need the right, the missing portion to complete themselves, and since they can't realistically
hope to find that they must accept a companionable substitute. Recognizing that they can't
win, they settle.
(120)
More than he admits, Ravelstein's philosophical friendship with Chick, their “marriage of
true minds,” is of this sort and therefore in tension with the other marriages of Chick, who is
a “serial marrier.”
Out of friendship, Chick agrees to write a biography of Ravelstein. The task ought to be easy
if they are true friends, for Chick should know Ravelstein inside out. But he cannot do it.
When he comes close to dying himself, explicitly likens his disease to Ravelstein's (190,
224), and finally criticizes Ravelstein's understanding of love (the conviction that “figures in
all his judgments” [140]), in coming to self-understanding Chick can finally give an account
of Ravelstein. It is the difference between them that proves to make the difference.
Rosamund, who “loved Ravelstein” and “was one of his great admirers” (41), who according
to Ravelstein was “earnest, hard-working, had a good mind” but was disabled for philosophy
because of a natural female longing for children, marriage, and the stability of family life
(140), and about whom in the early days of their marriage Chick “discovered that, in having
her way, she put [his] interests ahead of her own,” knows “far more about [love] than either
her teacher [Ravelstein] or her husband” (231). Chick's life is saved by his wife, a woman
totally devoted to him, on Thanksgiving—“a family day” (205).
Ravelstein, who “hated his own family and never tired of weaning his gifted students from
their families” (50), for all his talk of Aristophanic eros, never quite acknowledges its hold
over him. “Ravelstein urged his young men to rid themselves of their parents. But in the
community that formed around him his role became, bit by bit, that of a father” (27). There is
a certain self-ignorance about Ravelstein—he once says to his friend. “That's not my style,
Chick, to lay down the law” (154)—that both enables his soul to long for the good in all its
complexity and at the same time places him deeply at odds with himself. Friendship, which
seems at first to offer the possibility of resolving the tension between the political and
philosophical lives, in the end reflects this tension within itself in a dual demand—on the one
hand, tyrannically dissolving another into oneself and on the other, selflessly dissolving
oneself into another. In the end, Chick wants to say that the latter is the deeper, and that Abe
Ravelstein was better for not having lived up to his own self-understanding.
Chick's “personal metaphysics,” to which he several times refers, has to do with
acknowledging the hold that the world has on us despite our attempts to break free.
Ravelstein's great virtue was that when you became set in your ways, seeing “nothing
original, nothing new,” “he turned your face again toward the original. He forced you to
reopen what you had closed” (180). But despite, or perhaps because of, this virtue, something
remains closed in him. What qualifies Chick to write a memoir of Ravelstein is that his
specialty is not “scientific speculation” but “ordinary daily particulars”—the phenomena and
not the noumena or “things in themselves” (195). Ravelstein and Rosamund both chide him
for too often getting lost in the details, but for Chick, God is quite literally in the
details—“You couldn't study a Caribbean evening sky without thinking of God” (197).
What this means is that the phenomena have an unbreakable claim on us. After he has
recovered, Chick has the following conversation with Rosamund:
“Why would it always be the worst things which appear to you so real? Sometimes I wonder
if I'll ever be able to talk you out of being so sadistic to yourself.
“Yes,” I agreed. “It has a specific kind of satisfaction, the bad of it guarantees it as real
experience. This is what we go through, and it's what existence is like. The brain is a mirror
and reflects the world. Of course we see pictures, not the real things, but the pictures are dear
to us, we come to love them even though we are aware of how distorting an organ the
mirror-brain is.”
(218-9)
The painful seems more real, and so more valuable; it gives us the impression that only its
reality could justify our love of this picture. If we mean by death that “the pictures stop,” and
if the very act of picturing involves the love of the pictures, then to be alive is to love life.
This is what Chick means when he says that despite our atheism, apparently the precondition
for philosophy, it is a condition of having the pictures we love that we cannot imagine them
stopping. Chick wonders whether anyone believes that the grave is all that there is since “no
one can give up on the pictures.” When we are in our “atheist-materialist” mode, “we
just talk tough” (122-3). This is the personal metaphysics that Ravelstein repeatedly
attempted to wean him from. In the end, Chick places Rosamund above Ravelstein because
she exemplifies it less grudgingly than their mutual teacher, who for all his talk of eros, in the
end out of a will to have it all, proves to be insufficiently erotic.
A final word. It is by now obvious that I have yet to mention the name Allan Bloom. Of
course, it is beyond question that Saul Bellow used Bloom as a model for Ravelstein. But, as
I recollect, though a moderately big man, Bloom was nowhere near six and a half feet tall.
Bellow seems to have consulted the pieces of the nature of the real Allan Bloom to paint his
picture of Abe Ravelstein, in whom these pieces are exaggerated to tragic proportions. But
even were this portrait meant to represent the admittedly larger-than-life Allan Bloom, it
would be odd to find fault, for Bellow would have done his friend the honor of displaying in
him the highest attributes of our humanity in the complexity of their relations with one
another. Even if the pieces of Allan Bloom were at odds, that the pieces should be greatness
of soul, the love of wisdom, and friendship is praise of a very high order and proof of why
you do not easily give up a creature like Allan Bloom to death.
Notes
1.​ Parenthetical page numbers refer to Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (New York: Viking Press,
2000).
2.​ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1123b6.

SOURCE: Leonard, John. “A Closing of the American Kind.” Nation 270, no. 21 (29
May 2000): 25-30.
[In the following review, Leonard contends that it is the differences—not only the
friendship—between Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom that animate Ravelstein.]
You will recall that when Augie March went to Mexico, he hooked up with an eagle, which
he called Caligula. (He also ran into Leon Trotsky, navigating “by the great stars.” In this,
Augie was luckier than his creator, Saul Bellow, who had an appointment in 1940 to see
Trotsky on the very morning of his murder and ended up in Coyoacán looking at a corpse: “A
cone of bloody bandages was on his head. His cheeks, his nose, his beard, his throat, were
streaked with blood and with dried iridescent trickles of iodine.” But already I digress.)
Suppose that instead of an eagle, Augie had grabbed a parrot, like a bag of Magical Realist
feathers, and sneaked it back to Chicago. This might explain the marvel that knocks three
times at the stained-glass window of Ravelstein.
(1) Abe Ravelstein, a political philosopher just out of intensive care and feeling shaky, is
escorted by his friend Chick, a much-married older novelist, from the University of Chicago
campus back to his apartment, stopping at every other corner to catch his breath. They
happen, remarkably, on a flock of parrots in a clump of trees with red berries. Though not
really interested in nature, Ravelstein needs to know: “What are we looking at?” Chick
explains that the parrots, descendants of an escaped pair of caged birds, first built their long,
sacklike nests in the lakefront park and later colonized the alleys; that “hundreds of green
parrots” live in “bird tenements” hanging from utility poles; that the new “garbage-based
ecology” involves raccoons and even possums, besides your usual rats and squirrels. “You
mean,” says Ravelstein, “the urban jungle is no longer a metaphor.”
(2) Thirty pages later, two years after Abe's death, Chick thinks back to “the morning of the
day when he and I had come upon the parrot-filled holly bushes where the birds were feeding
on red berries and scattering the snow.” He re-experiences his friend's surprise: “You're just
back from the dead, and you run into an entire tribe of green parrots, tropical animals
surviving a midwestern winter.” And this time a grinning Ravelstein is made to say: “They
even have a Jew look to them.”
(3) Finally, at the end of this lambent novel, this prayer for the dead, Chick seems to be
channeling Ravelstein: “He loses himself in sublime music, a music in which ideas are
dissolved, reflecting these ideas in the form of feeling. He carries them down to the street
with him. There's an early snow on the tall shrubs, the same shrubs filled with a huge flock of
parrots—the ones that escaped from cages and now build their long nest sacks in the back
alleys. They are feeding on red berries. Ravelstein looks at me laughing with pleasure and
astonishment, gesturing because he can't be heard in all this bird-noise.”
By now, Bellow's got it down like a scroll painting or a haiku. Indeed, for all
that, Ravelstein is spiced with Western Civ's greatest hits—with long views from Athens and
Jerusalem, as seen through the eyes of the noble dead (Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche), the
compulsive scribblers (Xenophon, Dr. Johnson, Joyce, Céline), the exemplary-prophetic (Job
and Tolstoy) and the merely peculiar (Marie Antoinette and Whittaker Chambers), at whom,
because “death does sharpen the comic sense,” we are even encouraged to laugh “like
Picasso's wounded horse in Guernica, rearing back”—there is something oddly Oriental
about the novel, as if it were told by an odalisque with a folding fan. Or, to be even fancier, as
if it were a series of tai chi exercises, a sequence of strenuous poses. Thus, for Ravelstein's
many eccentricities—a white crane flashing its wings. For Chick's many marriages—a master
strumming his lute. For the price exacted by world history and personal choice—a wild horse
shaking its mane. And, for a teller done with his tale, a hunter holding the tail of a bird. (“As
birds went,” Chick says of Abe, “he was an eagle, while I was something like a flycatcher.”)
I'm about to suggest that Ravelstein is the story of two deaths—of the philosopher and the
novelist—with only one Lazarus, who isn't Socrates. I will argue that as much as Saul Bellow
enjoyed the company of Allan Bloom, they had profound differences on how to live and die,
what happens afterward and the way we best explain each other. These differences, as much
as their friendship, are what animate the novel. They are in fact what make it a novel and not
a tacky roman à clef, shellacked to fix its gaudy colors. But first the tabloid tease.
Humboldt wanted to drape the world in radiance, but he didn't have enough material.
(Humboldt's Gift)
That Ravelstein is Bloom is obvious not only on the basis of internal evidence—the gift for
teaching; the bestselling book; the messy eating habits; the expensive tastes and sexual
secrets; gossipy friends in high places; contempt for relativism, feminism, black power, gay
pride, the social sciences and rock and roll—but also on the basis of Bellow's own remarks at
a memorial service for Bloom in 1992, included in It All Adds Up (1994), which reappear
here almost word for word. (Mercedes will become BMW, and Michael Wu will become
Nikki, and Persian carpets, Chinese chests, Hermes porcelain and Ultimo cashmere coats will
turn into Armani suits, Vuitton luggage, Lalique crystal and Cuban cigars, but the
chain-smoking, the Chicago Bulls and Plato's Symposium remain the same.) That Chick is
Saul is equally obvious from the novels, the marriages and the gnarly grain of the prose, plus
what we know from the news about Bellow's near death from food poisoning in 1994. Chick
even paraphrases a passage in an earlier Bellow novel, More Die of Heartbreak, on how he
imagines death: “I said that the pictures would stop.” Of course, while everybody who ever
met him at the University of Chicago knew Bloom to be a gay diva, there's no closet quite
like the Committee on Social Thought, and so at the memorial they chose to blame his death
on liver failure instead of AIDS.
OK, Abe is Allan, Chick is Saul and we are told in the April Lingua Franca that Rakhmiel
Kogon is Edward Shills and Radu Grielescu is Mircea Eliade. I am already wise to Vela, the
Romanian-born “chaos” physicist who dumps Chick, because I met her before in The Dean's
December, when she was a Romanian-born astronomer named Minna. Thanks be, she will
exit in time to make room for Chick's new wife, Rosamund, about whom there's reason to
worry, because if she really was a student of Bloom's, she should be feeling attenuated, if not
invisible, since he is said to have looked right through even the brightest of his female
students to likelier candidates for his coterie. This still leaves mysterious the secret identities
of Battle, the Sanskrit-speaking ex-paratrooper who looks like “the Quaker on the oatmeal
box,” and of Morris Herbst, who's written a book on Goethe's Elective Affinities in spite of
his weakness for dice and cards. One supposes we must wait for the infinitely receding James
Atlas tell-all bio.
Or maybe not. While sometimes interesting, this piggish snuffling after factoid truffles is
usually distracting, approximately as helpful as being told that García Márquez patterned the
six chapters of The Autumn of the Patriarch on Bartok's six string quartets and Virginia
Woolf's The Waves, and invariably reductive in the cranky manner of Ruth Miller's Saul
Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (1991), in which she insists that all the novels are
autobiographical, cookie-cut to an identical pattern: a family that's a pain. (They may love
him, but they don't understand him; he's a spiritual orphan.) Alter egos who are the same
compulsively talkative, intellectually alienated, wisecracking, soul-stricken and
culture-freaked manic-depressive (Russian-Jewish Chicago street-smarties even when, like
Henderson or Corde, they're not supposed to be). And women who do him wrong: “frumps,”
says Miller, “predators, trollops, cheats, mousies, doxies, harridans, emasculators,
manipulators, betrayers, or rigid unyielding martinets, paranoids, dollies, or chumps.”
(Herzog wonders, “Will I ever understand what women want? … They eat green salad and
drink human blood.”)
But this is to read each novel as though it were a grudge—a settling of private scores on the
reader's time. If you want to know who is (or isn't) Isaac Rosenfeld, Harold Rosenberg,
Meyer Schapiro, Dwight Macdonald, John Berryman or R. P. Blackmur—if it matters to you
that Joe Alsop is taken in vain in The Dean's December—then Miller's where to go. She even
interviewed Owen Barfield on anthroposophy. She will explain away Henderson the Rain
King as a parodic acting-out, in Africa, of the Reichian analysis Bellow submitted to in the
mid-fifties, while keeping an orgone box like an aspidistra in his Queens apartment. And
explain away Herzog as the story of ex-wife Sondra and a perfidious Jack Ludwig. And
explain away Humboldt's Gift as Saul's revenge on crazy Delmore Schwartz, who had
accused him of selling out.
All this says zilch about what Bellow does to everything he notices, the glad coatings he
gives to a terrible world, his Jackson Pollock trickles and streaks and spatters, the ciphers he
finds, like Mr. Sammler, in straws and spiders, those magic acts of levitating language by
which unhappy childhoods, scorched-earth marriages, erotic disasters, intellectual debacles or
debauches, a plenitude of feeling, a hunger for transcendence, the death of a friend, the
murder of a people or the decline of the West, are transmuted into agencies of sublime
awareness. That style—snaky and hot, wrote Cynthia Ozick, “pumping street-smarts into
literary blood-vessels,” a “profane and holy comedy of dazzling, beating, multiform
profusion”; barbed, breezy, disheveled and surreal; salt-savoring and brain-fevered; the
brilliant twitchy patter and the Great Books patois of colloquial and mandarin, sentimental
and neo-baroque, Talmudic mutter and gangster slang; deep chords and stop-action; the long
irony, the low laugh, the short fuse and a three-cushion bank shot into a side pocket where the
anguish they speak is Yiddish—such a style miracle-whips.
Moses Herzog will cry out against “the canned sauerkraut of Spengler's Prussian socialism,
the commonplaces of the Wasteland outlook, the cheap mental stimulants of Alienation, the
cant and rant of pip-squeaks about Inauthenticity and Forlornness,” and “a merely aesthetic
critique of modern history! After the wars and mass killings! You are too intelligent for this.
You inherited rich blood. Your father peddled apples.” And while we are told
in Humboldt that “a heart can be fixed like a shoe. Resoled. Even new uppers,” that's not
what it feels like after we've heard Sorella in The Bellarosa Connection explain “the slapstick
side” of the death camps:
Being a French teacher, she was familiar with Jarry and Ubu Roi, Pataphysics, Absurdism,
Dada, Surrealism. Some camps were run in a burlesque style that forced you to make these
connections. Prisoners were sent naked into a swamp and had to croak and hop like frogs.
Children were hanged while starved, freezing slave laborers lined up on parade in front of the
gallows and a prison band played Viennese light opera waltzes.
Some apples this father peddles.
Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression
“The Fall into the Quotidian.” When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it
happened?
(Herzog)
But so long as we think of Abe as Allan we are distracted. We are still fighting the Culture
Wars, still reviewing The Closing of the American Mind. We can't forget that this is the man
who accused Louis Armstrong of trashing Weimar, who compared Woodstock to Nuremberg,
who fled Ithaca for Hyde Park in the parricidal sixties as if from Pompeii to Atlantis.
Wolfpacks of Dread Relativism on dawn patrol! Student power! Student sex! We underline
what Ravelstein says about Hayek, Bloomsbury, Islam, the Gulf War, the Grateful Dead, Mrs.
Thatcher, the liberal arts and the inner city—“the chaos the life of such people must be,” he
says after a chat with his cleaning lady; and, “Don't they give those people any training?”
after a black nurse mentions in polite company that it's time for his AZT; but what do we
expect from Chicago's dark South Side and its “noisy, pointless, nihilistic turmoil?”—as if we
were writing articles of impeachment. Surely Saul Bellow, of all people, ought to prize
diversity and inclusiveness. In the first twenty-seven pages of Augie March alone, mention
was made of Heraclitus, Tom Brown's School Days, a coat factory, a laundry truck, Anna
Karenina and Nabisco wafers; popcorn and Manon Lescaut, football and Yiddish theater,
pickled fish and The Iliad. Why, in Ravelstein's Chicago, is it all right to love the Bulls but
not the Beatles?
This is a mug's game. As male friendships in American literature go, Chick and Abe may not
be in a league with Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck and Jim or Mason and Dixon, but they
share a “sense of what was funny … A joyful noise—immenso giubilo—an outsize joint
agreement picked us up together.” You and I might have our doubts about a man who sends
his neckties air-express to be laundered by a silk specialist in Paris, who must sleep on Pratesi
linens, “under beautifully cured angora skins,” and perk himself up in the morning with his
very own espresso machine, while listening to eighteenth-century operas on compact disks
through hi-fi speakers that cost ＄10,000 each, before venturing out to spend ＄4,500 on a
Lanvin sports jacket the color of a Labrador retriever, on which he will sprinkle ashes from
his incessant cigarettes, while delivering “little anti-sermons in a wacko style” about “mass
democracy and its characteristic—woeful—product” or maybe the Treaty of Versailles. You
and I might prefer to pledge a vow of Trappist silence than talk so eagerly on our mobile
phones to well-placed inside-dopesters—former students, war criminals with training
wheels—at the State Department, on the staff of the National Security Adviser or
columnizing for the Washington Times. But Bellow has always indulged his taste for the
flamboyant. And better Abe, so full of big ideas that go all the way back, than … well,
in Augie, there was Einhorn, and in Seize the Day, Tamkin, and in Humboldt's Gift, Cantabile.
Bald Abe, with his milky-white legs in his blue-and-white kimono “fit for a shogun,” in the
Hotel Crillon penthouse in Paris, among oil sheiks and Michael Jackson groupies, hating his
father and scattering his food, is a distinct improvement on these charlatan gurus. At least,
like his main man Socrates, he will die without self-pity.
Chick encouraged Abe to write his book, which is why Abe is now rich and no longer has to
pawn his Jensen silver teapot and his Quimper antique plates to his colleagues and admirers
to pay for the Dunhill lighter or the Mont Blanc pen that he suddenly can't live without. Abe
laughs at Chick's jokes. (Example: “Maybe an unexamined life is not worth living. But a
man's examined life can make him wish he was dead.”) On the other hand, he seems to have
an odd investment in Chick's guilelessness, especially about women. Whereas, while Chick
likes to listen to Abe talk about anything—from Maimonides to Mel Brooks—he has his
doubts about Abe's settled certainty on everything he talks about. (“Of course my needs were
different from Ravelstein's. In my trade you have to make allowances, taking all sorts of
ambiguities into account—to avoid hard-edged judgments. … In art, you become familiar
with due process. You can't simply write off people or send them to hell.”) Nor should you
invite them to the country. Abe, for whom “nature and solitude are poison,” is mystified by
Chick's periodic idylls in the woods. (“He said, repeating the opinion of Socrates in
the Phaedrus, that a tree, so beautiful to look at, never spoke a word and that conversation
was possible only in the city, between men.”)
Yet if we refuse to embrace the contradictions of our loved ones, we will be left loveless.
Nobody wants to wind up like Norman Podhoretz, whose only remaining friend is America.
So we are finally won over to these two old men, cranky and horny, discussing Greeks, Jews,
death and sex, in their very own parrot-filled agora. “I was free,” says Chick, “to confess to
Ravelstein what I couldn't tell anyone else, to describe my weaknesses, my corrupt shameful
secrets, and the cover-ups that drain your strength.” And Ravelstein, as though HIV-positive
and dying of its complications and infections, nevertheless “insisted on telling me over and
over again what love was—the neediness, the awareness of incompleteness, the longing for
wholeness, and how the pains of Eros were joined to the most ecstatic pleasures:
He was not one of those people for whom love has been debunked and punctured—for whom
it is a historical, Romantic myth long in dying but today finally dead. He thought—no,
he saw—that every soul was looking for its peculiar other, longing for its complement. …
there is a certain irreducible splendor about it without which we would not be quite human.
Love is the highest function of our species—its vocation.
Thus, for Chick, even after flunking so many previous marriages, another gallant try with
Rosamund. Thus, for Abe, even as the plague takes him, a devotion to Nikki that is
reciprocated even after Nikki has stayed up till 4 in the morning watching kung fu movies
from his native Singapore. But now we come to the distance between these strenuous poses.
For all that Chick tells us about Abe's disapproval “of queer antics and of what he called
‘faggot behavior,’” about how “he couldn't bear the fluttering of effeminate men,” about how
“he despised campy homosexuality and took a very low view of ‘gay pride,’” he also worries
the subject like a sick tooth's socket. Sometimes this nervousness is high-minded:
In matters of sex, I sometimes felt, Ravelstein saw me as a throwback, an anachronism. I was
his close friend. But I was the child of a traditional European Jewish family, with a
vocabulary for inversion going back two millennia or more. The ancestral Jewish terms for it
were, first, Tum-tum, dating perhaps from the Babylon captivity. Sometimes the word
was andreygenes, obviously of Alexandrian, Hellenistic origin—the two sexes merged in one
erotic and perverse darkness.
At least as often, however, we are closer to wincing home. When Vela accuses Chick of
having had corrupt sex with Ravelstein, “I laughed like anything. I told her I didn't even
know how the act was done, and that I wasn't ready to learn, at my age.” He concedes that
“you couldn't, as the intimate and friend of Ravelstein, avoid knowing a great deal more than
you had an appetite for. But at a certain depth there were places in your psyche that still
belonged to the Middle Ages. Or even to the age of the pyramids or Ur of the Chaldees.” Are
we clear? Abe is “doomed to die because of his irregular sexual ways,” to be “destroyed by
his reckless sex habits.” Ravelstein's sinful “taste for sexy mischief,” his relish for
“louche encounters, the fishy and the equivocal,” combined perhaps with his impatience for
hygiene, his “biological patchiness” and his “faulty, darkened heart and lungs”—“When he
coughed you heard the sump at the bottom of a mine shaft echoing”—add up to a shadowing
of “risk, limit, death's blackout” on “every living moment.” To be sure, “to prolong his life
was not one of Ravelstein's aims,” but it is certainly one of Chick's, and has been ever since
he chose, at age 8, not to die of peritonitis: “No one can give up on the pictures.”
So the white crane flashing its wings faces off against the master strumming his lute. Abe is
an “atheist-materialist.” Chick, for all his passionate attachment to the faces of people and
surfaces of things, for all his sense of “privilege” at being “permitted to see—to see, touch,
hear” an “articulated reality” in “the interval of light between the darkness in which you
awaited first birth and then the darkness of death that would receive you,” nonetheless
believes that “the pictures must and will continue.” The dead aren't gone for good. Daily, he
will talk to Ravelstein.
But only after he has gone there himself and then come back, “blindly recovery-bent,” with
“the deep and special greed of the sick when they have decided not to die.” If the philosopher
was teaching us how to go, the novelist, with the heroic help of his wife, will teach us how to
stay. The last fifty extraordinary pages of Ravelstein take us from Abe's memorial service …
to a Caribbean vacation for Chick and Rosamund … to a French restaurant, a toxic fish,
food-poisoning and nerve damage to a bewildered Chick … to an emergency airlift, actually
an angelic skyjacking, prestidigitated by resourceful Rosamund … to oxygen and Boston and
a hospital “end zone” … to a falling passage through circles of hellish
hallucination—nightmares of cannibalism, cryonics, bank vaults and Filene's Basement—to
the light again and the wife who saved him. This may be the same light Saul Bellow once
found in Jerusalem, whose filtering of blood and thought allowed him to imagine “the outer
garment of God.” But the wife is the novelist's own, the mother-to-be of a brand-new child
for an octogenarian adept of due process. About this woman, Lazarus will say: “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.”
[Emphasis added.]
There's a punch line, like the grandest of ideas dissolved by music into a form of feeling, like
the opening of an American mind.

SOURCE: Feldman, Adam. “Soulmate in Bloom.” Gay & Lesbian Review 7, no. 4 (fall
2000): 46-7.
[In the following favorable review of Ravelstein, Feldman examines Bellow's friendship
with Allan Bloom, asserting that evidence presented in the novel could potentially lead
readers to conclude “that Bloom was the love of Bellow's life.”]
In his last book, Love and Friendship, Allan Bloom (better known for his best-selling
opus, The Closing of the American Mind) wrote this about “intimate friendship”:
Although this overwhelming experience seems akin to the love affairs that are so frequent
and so attractive in the various literary genres, it does not lend itself to literary depiction. …
The eros of souls for one another, experienced by two human beings who can share insights
into the nature of man and of all other things, is much less palpable, and hence less
believable, than the eros of bodies.
Bloom knew the difficulties involved in writing about deep, nonsexual attachments. Those
difficulties are front and center in Saul Bellow's Ravelstein, which offers a loose, memoir-like
account of the author's relationship with Bloom himself, the philosophy professor who rose to
national prominence in 1987 with his curmudgeonly bestseller. The Closing of the American
Mind (to which Bellow wrote the foreword). The novel's Bellow figure is an aging writer and
“serial marrier” named Chick, who's been charged by his brilliant, dying friend Abe
Ravelstein (Bloom) with the responsibility of memorializing him in fiction. “I'm laying this
on you as an obligation,” says Ravelstein. “Do it in your after-dinner supper-reminiscence
manner, when you've had a few glasses of wine and you're laid back and making remarks.”
Ravelstein, the book Chick writes, complies with these instructions. Chick eschews
conventional narrative in favor of a “piece-meal method” of getting at Ravelstein—a series of
revealing anecdotes and character sketches, some of which are gently repeated several times.
The narrative lurches back and forth in time, and features few of the conventions than one
would expect from a friendship story: We never learn, for example, how Chick and
Ravelstein met, though we know they met relatively late in life. This impressionistic
approach contrasts with the more direct storytelling that Chick uses in depicting his vain
ex-wife Vela (read “Bellow's exwife Alexandra”) and his lovely new wife Rosamund (read
“Bellow's new wife Janis”). Louis Menand, in the New York Review of Books, points out that
Ravelstein is “the least novelized character in the book … is presented entirely from the
outside, and (although, of course, he dies) nothing happens to him dramatically.”
Yet it is impossible to read Ravelstein and not be struck by the enormous sense of loss that
courses through its pages. Ravelstein and Chick were “close friends—none closer,” and if
Chick resists the impulse to “novelize” Ravelstein, it may be because such work would
necessarily entail a kind of reduction. Ravelstein—and Bloom—are allowed to stand on their
own. “I have known and admired many extraordinary persons in the long life that I have been
granted, but none more extraordinary than Allan Bloom,” said Bellow at Bloom's 1992
funeral. “Allan's is a clear case of greatness.”
Ravelstein dwells on that greatness. Almost every aspect of Ravelstein's physical body is
enormous; his “long, long legs,” his “large face,” his “gross” ears, his “big, unskillful hand”
with its “long fingers,” and above all his “bald, powerful head,” its very baldness mentioned
repetitively, obsessively even, coming up at least a dozen times. His bald head, with its
“white force,” is the repository of a massive intellect: “Ravelstein was a major figure in the
highest intellectual circles.”
The book has received a lot of attention since its publication, much of it centering on
Bellow's revelation that Allan Bloom was gay. Or rather, that he was “an invert,” since
Ravelstein, according to Chick, “took a very low view of ‘gay pride,’” and “disapproved of
queer antics and of what he called ‘faggot behavior.’” Readers looking for bedroom gossip
about Bloom will be disappointed. Of Ravelstein's sex life Chick tells us very little: a vague
allusion to Ravelstein's “sexual friendships”; a sly remark that “for reasons of all sorts” he
was “big on soldiers”; and one brief passage about his “taste for sexy mischief
… louche encounters, the fishy and the equivocal.” And his depiction of Ravelstein's
relationship with his companion Nikki is curiously muted. (Bellow reportedly toned down the
sexual nature of their union just prior to publication.)
The controversy about “outing” Bloom has been most acutely voiced by those on the Right
who adopted The Closing of the American Mind as a weapon in the culture wars. But
Ravelstein's sexuality is a non-issue in the book itself. Chick's reverence for the
“great-souled” Ravelstein, with whom he was in “almost daily” contact, is unsexed. Their
friendship is Platonic in the highest sense. “We were perfectly open with each other,” writes
Chick, “I was free to confess to Ravelstein what I couldn't tell anyone else, to describe my
weaknesses, my corrupt shameful secrets, and the cover-ups that drain your strength.”
Interestingly, however, that is not entirely true. Chick does keep secrets from Ravelstein,
notably when it comes to Chick's marriages. He holds back from Ravelstein while married to
Vela—a slight for which Ravelstein rebukes him—and keeps his relationship with
Ravelstein's student Rosamund a secret for the first year that they're together. These lacunæ
do not mean that Chick places his romantic relationships over his friendship with Ravelstein.
On the contrary, it is precisely because he values Ravelstein's opinion so highly that he cannot
risk subjecting his marriages to his friend's scrutiny.
Chick clearly loves his new wife Rosamund. He speaks very highly of her and is flattered by
her attentions. Yet she pales, in literary terms, next to Ravelstein. Chick's descriptions of
Ravelstein revel in honest detail, excitedly cataloguing “his eccentricities or foibles, his
lavish, screwy purchases, his furnishing, his vanities, his gags, his laugh-paroxysms.” But on
the subject of Rosamund his writing lacks vitality; it cagily adopts the tone of an approving
patron, describing her as “a very pretty, well-brought-up, mannerly, intelligent young
woman.”
Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS—“destroyed by his reckless sex habits”—about two-thirds of
the way through the book, and Chick makes this death seem like a kind of choice: After all,
Ravelstein had always despised “the death-dreading bourgeoisie” and valued the pursuit of
pleasure over the fear of death. Not long afterward, Chick himself nearly dies from a bout
with food poisoning. This, too, is borrowed from Bellow's life, but Bellow has compressed
the timing, so now Chick's brush with mortality follows right on the heels of Ravelstein's exit
instead of three years later, as Bellow's did. Chick credits Rosamund's devotion with his
continued survival, and speaks reverently of her capacity to love. But while he recognizes the
depth of Rosamund's love, he does not seem capable, exactly, of returning it in kind, “I
realized that I owed my life to [Janis],” Bellow recently told the Canadian magazine Saturday
Night. “Now that's not an erotic motive; that's more like gratitude.”
Was there an erotic motive in Bellow's relationship to Bloom? In Love and
Friendship, Bloom offers this account of the friendship between Shakespeare's Prince Hal
and Falstaff: “They are soul mates, and without any touch of solemnity, they prove the
possibility of a purely spiritual association, based upon mutual admiration of intellectual
gifts, without necessary admixture of anything bodily. … It is, really, an erotic relationship,
the attraction based on the potential for shared insights.”
Ravelstein, with his gregarious overflow of body and mind, has more than a touch of Falstaff
in him: a life-breather, feeding others with his energy, passing along his “vital force.” The
lovely, intelligent Rosamund has no such force to give; the most she can do is stave off death.
The book's dedication to Janis calls her “the star without whom I could not navigate,” but the
gesture seems compensatory. On the evidence presented in Ravelstein, it does not seem unfair
to conclude that Allan Bloom was the love of Bellow's life.
SOURCE: Phillips, Adam. “Bellow and Ravelstein.” Raritan 20, no. 2 (fall 2000): 1-10.
[In the following review, Phillips asserts that Ravelstein is not a biography, but rather “a
fiction about biography.”]
In Diana Trilling's memoir The Beginning of the Journey she tells a story about Saul Bellow
to illustrate the effect that Lionel Trilling had on people. Lionel, she writes,
always retained a certain air of unassailability. There were people whom this seemed to
disturb. In middle life, he lectured at the University of Chicago, and Saul Bellow, who taught
there and with whom he had become pleasantly acquainted in the early fifties when the need
to know people by testing them rather than by taking them on their own terms—it is partly
because it stages so neatly the preoccupations, the obsessions, of both Trilling and Bellow.
The heroes of Bellow's fiction—and the Ravelstein of Bellow's title [Ravelstein] is no
exception—are always wholeheartedly assailable, and above all attentive to other people's
airs (and often their graces). And they are always men who live somewhere in themselves, in
a desperate quarter; and are, as everyone is, irreparably damaged by life. But unlike almost
everyone else, they are astonishingly articulate, and learned, and poignantly moving and
amused about their various predicaments. However abject, they luxuriate in words and things
(Humboldt, Bellow wrote, “spoke wonderfully of the wonderful, abominable rich”).
Ravelstein, the great teacher dying of AIDS, is in this tradition of Bellow's grandly destitute,
and is at the center of what is, remarkably, one of Bellow's finest novels.
Trilling is always trying to persuade us (and presumably himself) in his criticism that the
culture he values isn't, and shouldn't be, a retreat from anything. And Bellow's fiction, one
way or another, has always been about, has always dramatized, the romance of culture and
learning. For Bellow the drama hasn't been only about connecting the prose and the passion,
but more about seeing what the deadbeats and the professors make of each other. As both of
them are sticklers for the noble life—and are keen to tell us what we should be doing to
ennoble our lives—they are determinedly stylish about the crude and the vulgar (in this sense
Trilling's composure and the brash eloquence of Bellow's heroes are mirror images of each
other). They are, in their quite different ways, both enthralled by, and at their most fascinating
about, sophistication.
Writing in Sincerity and Authenticity about how the novelists of the nineteenth century were
“anything but confident that the old vision of the noble life could be realized,” Trilling refers
to Bellow's Moses Herzog. “When, for example,” Trilling writes,
a gifted novelist, Saul Bellow, tries through his Moses Herzog to question the prevailing
negation of the old vision and to assert the value of the achieved and successful life, we
respond with discomfort and embarrassment. And the more, no doubt, because we discern
some discomfort and embarrassment on the part of Mr. Bellow himself, arising from his
sufficiently accurate apprehension that in controverting the accepted attitude he lays himself
open to the terrible charge of philistinism, of being a defector from the ranks of the children
of light, a traitor to spirit. We take it as an affront to our sense of reality that a contemporary
should employ that mode of judging the spiritual life which we are willing to accept and even
find entrancing when we encounter it in Shakespeare's romances.
As terrible charges go, one might think, there are probably worse ones. And yet, as ever,
Trilling has located, in his elegant, Freudian way, a conflict. Or at least some kind of
paradoxical tension in Bellow's work. If it is old-fashioned, if not actually regressive, to
assert the value of the achieved and successful life, what else can be asserted in its stead? If
the “reconciliations and redemptions”—in a phrase Allan Bloom, the putative original for
Ravelstein, uses with reference to Shakespeare's romances—of these romances affront our
contemporary sense of reality, then what forms of disarray are we going to put our money on?
Ravelstein, the political philosopher and worshipper of Eros, has devoted his life to teaching
the best that has been thought and done about the ordering of the soul and the ordering of the
polis; and he is now dying of AIDS. And he has asked his older close friend, a writer called
Chick, to write his biography, the final testament to an achieved and successful life. Or rather,
the contemporary genre in which the notions of success and achievement are both assumed
and put into question. More than any of Bellow's other books, Ravelstein seems like a wholly
successful example of an utterly implausible genre: a contemporary, Jewish Platonic
dialogue. Like the tricky romance of taking Trilling to that bar—wondering whether it would
end in tears, or just what it would end in—Bellow stages an impressive double act in this
novel to explore the ways in which people are informed, in the most various senses of this
word, by the people they love and admire. It is “the promise [Chick] had made years ago to
write a short description of Ravelstein and to give an account of his life.” And as a kept
promise of sorts—the book we read is an account of preparing to write this biography—it is
an ironic vindication, against the grain of modern biography, that a short description of
somebody, done with sufficient skill, can be an account of their life. Bellow intimates not
(quite) that all biographers are failed novelists, but that all biographies are failed or ersatz
novels.
The novel Ravelstein is, in other words, not a biography of someone called Ravelstein, nor of
someone called Allan Bloom. It is a fiction about biography. And the much publicized
connections made between Bellow's close friend Bloom and Bellow's (and Chick's) subject
Ravelstein are to the point and beside it. They are, as it were, integral to Bellow's sense of, or
joke about, biography in this book. Ravelstein, we are told on several occasions, loved
listening to classical music played on “original instruments”: and what, we are made to
wonder in a book about someone who wonders about virtually everything, does “original”
mean? What is involved in this fantasy of origins? If Ravelstein is “like” Allan Bloom or
“based on” Allan Bloom, he is also, unsurprisingly, like Moses Herzog, like Humboldt. And
they are all, in their way, originals: original instruments, original voices.
It is one of Ravelstein's projects to divorce his students—who are always his devoted
protégés—from what used to be called their backgrounds. “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.” For Ravelstein, origins and originality are at odds with each other; he
persuades his students to disown, as he has done, their supposed histories. But even though
Ravelstein is, by definition, no Freudian—and, as a committed European, no Emersonian
either (although Thoreau, as we shall see, puts in some interesting appearances)—his
biographer-to-be, Chick, as he is aptly named, has a more familiar, literary-Freudian cast of
mind. So he reads Ravelstein in a way Ravelstein would never read himself; that is, through a
particular canon of literary allusions. “His lot, his crew, his disciples, his clones who dressed
as he did, smoked the same Marlboros, and found in these entertainments a common ground
between the fan clubs of childhood and the Promised Land of the intellect towards which
Ravelstein, their Moses and their Socrates, led them.” Bellow has always been able to pack a
sentence; and at its worst this can give his writing a kind of studied fluency, as though he
wanted to be Flaubert letting his hair down. But here, as everywhere in Ravelstein, there is no
straining for effect in writing about a character who is, for all intents and purposes, doing
virtually nothing but that. “Crew” refers us to Milton's Satan, and “disciples” refers us to
Satan's rival; “the Promised Land of the intellect” seems to marry Jerusalem and Athens.
Ravelstein, we are told, was “Homeric,” a lover of Plato; a Jew who devoted his life to
Athens until he began dying, when he turned back to his forefathers. Chick, though, is not the
kind of person who thinks along Jerusalem and Athens lines. If he is anything, in this debate
that Bellow has so shrewdly staged, he is literary rather than political. And Bellow, of course,
is mindful of what is at stake in such distinctions.
There is, in Ravelstein's view, something childish about the way the literary tend, as it were,
to overpersonalize things. But Bellow is at pains to indicate what biographers are often at
pains to conceal: that writing about someone turns too easily into writing on their behalf. That
biographers can be sly when they use their nominal subjects as novelists use their characters,
as a way of saying something. Ravelstein is Chick's opportunity to voice his misgivings about
the literary life, and the literary life story.
But Ravelstein might have argued that there was a danger of self-indulgence in it. Either you
continue to live in epiphanies or you shake them off and take up trades and tasks, you adopt
rational principles and concern yourself with society and politics. Then the sense of coming
from “elsewhere” vanishes. In my case Ravelstein's opinion was that distinctiveness of
observation had gone much further than it should and was being cultivated for its own strange
sake. Mankind had first claim on our attention and I indulged my “personal metaphysics” too
much, he thought.
As “Ravelstein might have argued …” ends up as “he thought,” Bellow conveys just how
characters, other people, take on a life of their own in our words; that we are always speaking
and writing from other people's points of view, on their behalf. And often speaking in their
voices back to them. That we might be full of other people—engaged in endless mutual
biography—makes a more private sense of self difficult to account for. For Chick the privacy
of the self is the self: “my feeling was that you couldn't be known thoroughly unless you
found a way to communicate certain ‘incommunicables'—your private metaphysics.” For
Chick's Ravelstein, private metaphysics, “intimate metaphysics,” is the pastime of people
intimidated by the publicness of public life. “A man,” Ravelstein believed, “should be able to
hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.” Being assailable is the point and not
the problem. You make yourself out of what the world makes of you, and what you can make
it make of you. It is purity that is danger. “He simply believed that a willingness to let the
self-esteem structure be attacked and burned to the ground was a measure of your
seriousness.” In other words, for Chick's Ravelstein shame is a protection racket.
So, much play is made in this novel by Ravelstein and Chick and Bellow of Chick's New
England retreat in the country. In his “fieldstone house” with its “old maples and hickory
trees” Chick hears very little about what other people think of him. But he has to bear what
Ravelstein thinks and that, in a sense, is what Ravelstein is there for. And why, by the same
token, Ravelstein has chosen Chick as his biographer. Chick always wants to hear what
Ravelstein has to say, and he enjoys bearing it. Ravelstein, who is bored by the country,
comes to see Chick out of curiosity; not curiosity about the country, but curiosity about
Chick's pleasure in it. “He had come to the country to see me, and the visit was a concession
to my unaccountable taste for remoteness and solitude. Why did I want to bury myself in the
woods?” For Ravelstein this is quite literally a kind of death-in-life; and the preoccupation
with death, the worry about it, he considers definitely “bourgeoisie.” The “great-souled” live
in the knowledge of death, but they don't distract themselves with the terrors or the attractions
of it. So for him, “the drama of the season lacked real interest. Not to be compared to the
human drama … to lose yourself in grasses, leaves, winds, birds, or beasts was an evasion of
higher duties.” Thoreau's “woods” that keep turning up in this book—“I was not out of the
woods,” Chick remarks as he begins to recover from his own near-fatal illness towards the
end of the book—are for Ravelstein a false solution to the problem of politics, to hearing and
bearing what other people say about us; and how this informs what we can hear and say and
think about ourselves. To be out of the woods is to be alive, and to be alive is to be in
circulation. And once we are around other people our composure is on the line. “To lose your
head,” Ravelstein believed, “was the great-souled thing to do.” It is only with other people
that the great temptations of discretion and indiscretion are available.
And yet if Ravelstein were more of an allegory than it is—and occasionally it seems like
more of an allegory than it is—there would be a simple schema at its heart. There is the
solitude of Walden, and Ravelstein dying of AIDS: AIDS as the worst consequence of a
certain kind of free association; private intimate metaphysics—burying oneself alive and
working out how to get out and how not to—as the worst (or best) consequence of
withdrawal. Ravelstein, believing what he believes, and dying in the way he is dying—“a
serious person, not comfortable with himself,” as Chick says with Bellow's infallible ear for
the non sequiturs of character—becomes for Bellow at once an ultimate form of
contemporary nobility, and a test of his fastidiousness as a writer. Ravelstein's “tact” about
his own homosexuality, and his contempt for certain contemporary manners—“He despised
campy homosexuality and took a very low view of ‘gay pride'”—is matched by Chick's
curious blandness about the whole subject. And both Ravelstein and Chick conspire in
Bellow's familiar idealization of a certain kind of woman (what analysts refer to as the
wished-for mother of infancy—Chick's young wife, Rosamund, for example, is someone with
whom “there was no subject raised which she didn't immediately understand”). In writing
about Ravelstein's homosexuality, Bellow takes the Greek tragedy approach: the terrible
things happen off stage.
We are led to believe that Ravelstein has got up to all sorts of unmentionable things, but the
main relationship in the book, with a much younger man called Nikki, is rather more of the
loving and caring sort. Nikki is a man of traditionally impressive integrity. And though he is
strongly drawn and, as usual with Bellow, remarkably vivid in his brief appearances, there is
overall something overstylized about what we are allowed to see of Ravelstein's more
passionately fraught life. This is particularly striking given how often Chick refers to and
reiterates Ravelstein's devotion to the god Eros, to a virtual religion of longing and desire.
You get the feeling that Chick (and perhaps Bellow) have Platonized Ravelstein's
homosexuality rather more than Ravelstein would always have wished. It is not that there
isn't enough fist fucking in the novel, but that there's a great deal of theorizing about the
shady concealments people live by, and with: a too refined distrust of refinement. A gay bar,
you imagine, would be a bar that Chick would not be keen to go to.
In generational terms Ravelstein's age would have made a certain kind of discretion the order
of the day. And yet Bellow's sense of propriety, which is invariably accurate, serves another
purpose here I think. Bellow has always written best about the love between men—and
especially the hero-worshiping kind—and the love between the generations. And yet it is one
of the curious effects of his fiction to make it virtually unthinkable that two men could
actually desire each other rather than, or as well as, admire or look after each other. In
Bellow's fictional world homosexuality is not so much invisible as implausible. And this
again is where the putative connection between Ravelstein and Allan Bloom is also a cover
story. Whatever Bloom's attitude was toward homosexuality, or indeed to his dying of AIDS,
Bellow is still making his own decisions as a novelist about Ravelstein. And he keeps
reminding us, throughout the novel, that biographies are rather like novels, and that this
book, Ravelstein, is not a biography, but a story about a man who wants to write one. “I am
bound,” Chick tells us, “as an honest observer to make plain how Ravelstein operates”; and
he is referring both to the inevitable ambiguity of his terms, and to the canny ways this book,
also called Ravelstein, operates. What Chick calls Ravelstein's “endlessly diverting character”
is never observed operating sexually, so to speak; what is observed—and Bellow writes with
astounding tenderness about Ravelstein's ill body—are the terrible results of Ravelstein's
secret (at least to Chick) erotic life, Ravelstein may be diverting, but Chick is diverting us.
The complications that homosexuality throws Ravelstein into—both the character, and the
book itself—are pertinent because Ravelstein is a novel peculiarly troubled by evasiveness.
As a fictional character, Ravelstein, like many of Bellow's heroes, is someone forever
exercised and energized by other people's concealments and duplicities. Bellow's heroes
unmask their fellow men and women by force of character, through a kind of demonic
intuition. They are never programmatically suspicious—they are never Freudians or
Marxists—they have, rather like novelists, idiosyncratic powers of divination. So Ravelstein
is often getting Chick to face various facts—a key word in the novel—about himself and
other people; he idealizes the naiveté of Eros, the primal intelligence of longing, while
exposing the pernicious naiveté of everyday life. Chick, for example, fails to spot the fascists
among his acquaintances, refuses to see that his wife has put a hex on him, and so on.
Ravelstein is an expert on moral cowardice. “Why does the century,” he asks, “… underwrite
so much destruction? There is a lameness that comes over all of us when we consider these
facts.” It is part of Ravelstein's “teaching-vaudeville” to assail and assault Chick with the
plain facts of the time: the fact, say, that Jews have to live with the knowledge that quite
recently a significant number of powerful people wanted to wipe them out entirely, and
nearly succeeded. And yet the great glaring facts, the “world-historical ringside seats” that
these Bellow heroes promote with such amazing eloquence, keep running up against the
centering image of the book, Ravelstein's increasingly dying body. “Poor Ravelstein,” Chick
says in an unguarded, awkward moment, “destroyed by his reckless sex habits.” We shouldn't
evade the big questions, but we shouldn't use the big questions to evade the other questions.
Bellow has always had a truth-comes-in-blows sensibility, but in Ravelstein there is a new
uncertainty about which blows matter and why. And a strong sense that there is a difference
between talking, however grandly and wildly and wisely, about recklessness, and living
recklessly.
If Ravelstein turned out to be his last novel, it would be an extraordinary valediction. But we
should hope that it isn't because Bellow is beginning to say new—and to use one of his
words—serious things about, among many other things, evasion and recklessness. Evasion is
not news, but our evasion of recklessness is.

SOURCE: Jacobs, Rita D. Review of Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow. World Literature

Today 74, no. 4 (autumn 2000): 813.
[In the following review, Jacobs maintains that Ravelstein “is a minor exercise, albeit with
an occasional flourish of mastery.”]

The art of the novel often involves transporting the reader into a hitherto unknown world, no
matter how familiar the terrain may seem. And even when the novel closely mirrors reality,
as graceful a novelist as Saul Bellow has usually been able to transport readers beyond the
known. In fact, although there have long been attempts to identify characters in Bellow's
novels with “real” people such as Delmore Schwartz and the lesser-known Jack Ludwig,
Bellow has most often risen above the clichés of the roman à clef. But in some cases it is just
too difficult to resist the autobiographical, both for the writer and the reader. In the case
of Ravelstein it is very hard work indeed to keep the biographical information about Bellow's
own life and that of his academic colleague and friend Allan Bloom out of one's mind.
The eponymous Ravelstein is a Rabelaisian academic: larger than life, judgmental yet
generous, seemingly gluttonous yet with quirkily refined, if huge, appetites. His much milder
anointed biographer, and the self-effacing first-person narrator, Chick, is an intellectual and
emotional touchstone of sorts for Ravelstein. Although Chick tries to present his subject as
superbly vital and multifaceted, he resorts early on to having to tell us that “he was a very
complex man,” as though his powers of vivid description (and his confidence in the vital
emergence of his character on the page) have deserted him.
The novel is fundamentally about love: Ravelstein's ravenous appetite for philosophy and
gossip about love and Chick's love for his friend Ravelstein and for his much younger
life-saver of a wife, Rosamund. The death of love and the intimate relationship between love
and the death that it can cause in this time of AIDS round out the larger scope of the novel.
Compared to other Bellow novels, and especially given the range and import of its
subject, Ravelstein is an easy read. Of course, there are the literary and historical allusions,
and digressions on the plight of being a Jew in the postwar world, but the prose is pared down
and almost simple, and not deceptively so. Unfortunately, so are the characterizations:
Ravelstein himself, despite all of Bellow's efforts, does not emerge as charming, fascinating,
or, to my mind, even likable. At one point he bursts into a hotel suite where Chick's former
wife, the evil Vela, is not quite dressed. She is unwilling to forgive him, and Chick responds,
“Well, he's impetuous. With a man like Ravelstein it's … it's one of his charms that he acts on
impulse.” It was a charm that eluded this reader.
The minor characters are notably flat, especially Ravelstein's companion Nikki, with the
exceptions of Vela and, in the end, Rosamund. The final portion of the novel is a tribute to
Chick's young wife, who early on appears to be a handmaiden to the brain power of the older
men. In the end, she saves Chick's life. Herein is the story of the true power of love.
In the canon of Bellow's work, Ravelstein is a minor exercise, albeit with an occasional
flourish of mastery.

SOURCE: Webb, Igor. “The Demands of a Soul.” Partisan Review 68, no. 2 (spring
2001): 324-28.
[In the following essay, Webb investigates Bellow's invoking of John Maynard Keynes
in Ravelstein.]

Ravelstein is a celebrated professor [in Ravelstein] of political philosophy—a character

based, so it has been said everywhere, on Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the
American Mind. I'd better say right away that I know precious little about Saul Bellow's
personal life, that I've never met Allan Bloom, and that anyway I do not have the stomach to
believe that you can simply translate any life into fiction. The connections and disconnections
between Bloom and Bellow and the connections and disconnections between Bloom and
Ravelstein may have a certain interest—but not for Virginia Woolf's common reader, with
whom I'm happy to identify: we want to read the book, and expect the road into its thickets to
be mapped by the book itself.
Okay: so, Ravelstein is a celebrated political philosopher. He is dying of AIDS, and wants to
secure his legacy. To this end he asks his friend, an aging writer called Chick—the narrator of
the novel—to write his biography. That's the rhetorical premise of the book, which turns out,
however, to be a kind of Chinese box of motives and meanings.
For one thing, Ravelstein has a precise idea of what the book of his life should be like: it
should be like John Maynard Keynes's memoir of Dr. Melchior, the Jewish head of the
German financial delegation at the famously flawed Peace Conference of 1919 (Keynes
headed the British financial delegation). Why does Ravelstein choose this apparently unlikely
model?
Well, there's the question of the Jews—literally the Jews, meaning the men who headed both
the French and the German financial delegations, the former the villain and the latter the hero
of Keynes's account of the negotiations. Then, the Jews as European scapegoats, available for
parody and vicious assault by the assembled leaders, especially, as Ravelstein likes to point
out, Lloyd George (Eric Partridge traces the expression “He's a real pisser” to this remark of
Clemenceau's about Lloyd George: “Ah, si je pouvais pisser comme il parle.”). And finally
the Jews as modern history's untouchables. All of these things, especially the last, matter a
great deal to Ravelstein and Chick as they cast an assessing eye on the dour end of an
astonishing century, a century that, Ravelstein says, has universally declared that Jews have
no right to live. Athens and Jerusalem are the points of reference for Ravelstein's life, and as
he approaches death Jerusalem grows in importance. Still, I don't think any of this is the main
reason for invoking Keynes.
Keynes's memoir begins by laying out the problem confronting the officials engaged in the
Peace Conference. The Prime Minister, Lloyd George, intended to do all of the actual
negotiations himself, without interference from any of his officials. Consequently, as Keynes
tells it, no one was quite certain what if anything was happening or even when the conference
would begin. But you couldn't wait too long because “the rooms in the Hotel Majestic were
reputed to be of unequal excellence, and he who arrived last might fare worst.”
When I eventually reached Paris early in January 1919, it was as I had expected, and no one
yet knew what the Conference was doing or whether it had started. But the peculiar
atmosphere and routine of the Majestic were already compounded and established, the typists
drank their tea in the lounge, the dining-room diners had distinguished themselves from the
restaurant diners, the security officers from Scotland Yard burnt such of the waste paper as
the French charwomen had no use for, much factitious work circulated in red boxes, and the
feverish, persistent and boring gossip of that hellish place had already developed in full
measure the peculiar flavour of smallness, cynicism, self-importance and bored excitement
that it was never to lose.
This is the model. The main point, I gather, is that there can't be a better example of prose as
the stamp of a certain cultural and world view. It's this kind of writing, intimate, precise,
urbane, serious in a worldly way, resting on a coherent philosophical outlook—this is the
prose Chick is supposed to mimic. Keynes's sensibility has obvious appeal for Ravelstein. We
first meet Ravelstein, for example, when he's occupying the most expensive suite in the most
luxurious hotel in Paris. Both Chick and Ravelstein have a very large soft spot for the best.
Indeed the novel drops the names of the choicest shops for every kind of thing worldwide, as
if the life of the mind aligned to Socrates requires discrimination from bottom to top,
including of course such shops as Turnbull and Asser. To put it kindly, this is stretching a
point, but history shows that readers prefer their novels to contain traces of the life of the
extremely rich rather than of those who are extremely poor (and if we have to have the
extremely poor, they'd better be quirky and poetic, like the people in Denis Johnson's novels).
Ravelstein, in any event, has constructed for himself an ample life whose ton would be
perfectly familiar to Keynes—a life in equal parts devoted to high policy and to gossip; a life,
like Keynes's, comfortably off-center in its sexuality; a life vivid with classy appreciations,
splendid acquisitions of beautiful things taken to have as much value as the great men, great
events, and great ideas of any given moment.
But because of the rise of mass democracy, Ravelstein, Chick tells us, has had to battle a
condition that Bloomsbury, with its achieved even inherited elitism and its exceptionalism
and Fabianism, could not begin to appreciate. Ravelstein asks his students: “With what, in
this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?” Ravelstein's reply is
classically classical—he has an Aristotelian view of politics as the grandest expression of the
passions, and a Socratic view of the passions as wrapped up in Eros, the essential human
quality and faculty, the foundation, enactment, and end of human being.
The test of this latter notion doesn't occur until late in the novel, which for the most part
wanders through Ravelstein's illness to his death. The peripatetic form seems right—for one
thing there's Socrates; and for Ravelstein and Chick, following Socrates, ideas loom large
over events; and then there's Keynes's intimate memoir, spoken to his old friends. In the last
part of the novel, after Ravelstein dies, Chick and his young wife—Rosamund!—travel to the
Caribbean, where he eats spoiled fish and contracts an almost-fatal infection, saved only by
Rosamund's devotion, persistence … love. And so the novel ends.
It's not clear, from fairly early on, that Chick is up to the assignment Ravelstein imposes on
him. In fact the book we get is a novel, not a memoir or a biography. As a novel it
persuasively, gracefully portrays friendship as an imaginative coupling, the unmoored
exhilaration of like minds humming after ideas and ideas-in-things. The fabulous Bellovian
patter and genius for detail once more shows Bellow off as the master of rendering
intelligence on the page. But love is not so happily rendered in Ravelstein. Rosamund is a
student of Ravelstein's; but Ravelstein never catches on to her attachment to Chick before the
wedding day, which means we never get any experience, as readers, of the courtship between
the aging writer and the young student, we never get to see any of the telling details of love.
Although Rosamund comes forward at the close as the loving savior of Chick's life, the
power of love is not much more than a thought in the novel.
The reason for this is that Chick, as writer, harbors a kind of flightiness of sensibility that
keeps him always at a good distance from committing that quintessential Bloomsbury act,
represented by E. M. Forster's “Only connect.” “A man who knew me well,” Chick confides,
“said that I was more innocent than any adult had the right to be.” This sounds like the sort of
thing a character given the slightly absurd, foolish name “Chick” would say. And in fact, if
Keynes weren't being pressed on us, I could swear there's a family resemblance between
Chick and Ford Madox Ford's John Dowell, narrator of The Good Soldier, another book about
the turn of sensibility from one age to another, and also a man more innocent than any adult
has a right to be. Dowell, like Chick, chronicles the lives of people he claims to know
intimately, people he tells us over and over he has been as close to as any human being can be
to another. But Dowell turns out to be incapable of intimacy and not to have understood
anyone very well.
Chick, like Dowell, is a man apparently short of gravitas; he lacks a certain essential weight
to his perceptions and his habits. “I don't suppose,” Chick says after Ravelstein is dead—“I
don't suppose that when he [Ravelstein] directed me to write an account of his life he
expected me to settle for what was characteristic—characteristic of me, is what I mean,
naturally.” But perhaps Ravelstein was shrewder than Chick supposes. “Ravelstein's legacy to
me,” Chick says right at the beginning, “was a subject—he thought he was giving me a
subject, perhaps the best one I ever had, perhaps the only really important one.” We are
misled, and maybe Chick is misled, to think that that subject is Ravelstein, or Ravelstein as a
study of how the philosophical life should be lived. And insofar as that goes, that's just one
example of Ravelstein's trying to get his insubstantial friend grounded. But it emerges that the
subject is only partly Ravelstein; the real subject is Chick's, that is, one's own,
death. That's “the only really important subject.”
By the time Chick is set in contest with his own death, Ravelstein is dead, and can't help his
old friend. Instead, his manner of dying, his ideas, and his student, the rose-of-the-world,
come to Chick's aid. It's Rosamund's love for Chick, and her faith in love, that enable her to
surmount the bureaucracy of the health care system and Chick's virtual indifference to the
outcome of his struggle—and death itself.
Ravelstein is a political philosopher. He exhibits in grand gesture and entertaining
voluptuousness how the philosophical life should be lived. Chick is at pains to make clear
that he's not a philosopher, although he's read the texts. What he is is a writer. The difference
between the two, the difference between Ravelstein and Chick, is subtly, amply illustrated in
the novel, with Keynes as point of reference, through all those parts of the book that show us
Ravelstein and Chick in dialogue. This difference takes on an ambiguous though more
emphatic quality after Ravelstein's death, because whatever his devotion to ideas, Chick's
sensibility, the dynamic of his being, is finally more visceral, more sensuous, more intellect
and less intellectualism, less purposeful than Ravelstein's. It's not that he survives death
because of the force of Eros even as lived idea so much as that he has things to do, that he's
propelled by a distinctly Conradian discipline, at once fanciful and practical. He's a writer.
Even Keynes doesn't bring him closer to a prose Ravelstein would like for himself; he writes
neither biography nor memoir but a novel—an especially suggestive and entertaining one.