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Making Amends
Sam Apple
 DISCHARGING HIS DUTY?: Bellow makes good on his promise to a friend |
(July 31, 2000) Saul Bellow has taken it on the chin from some friends of Allan Bloom outing his old friend in his new roman � clef. But �Ravelstein� is very much a tribute to Bloom. Not only that, it�s Bellow�s way of finally coming to terms with his Jewishness.
At the age of 8, Saul Bellow spent nearly six months in Montreal�s Royal Victoria Hospital with tuberculosis. The doctors were not sure if he�d make it. Recalling his illness in a 1990 interview, Bellow, by then a celebrated novelist and the 1976 Nobel Literature laureate, said that when he was finally well enough to return home, he felt as though �he owed something to some entity for the privilege of surviving.� This feeling of obligation gave Bellow a powerful sense of purpose at a young age. He wanted to make his life �worth the while of whoever it was that authorized� his recovery.
In 1995, the 80-year-old Bellow had another brush with death, this time from eating a contaminated red snapper. He told an interviewer that he was �nine-tenths gone.� After months in the hospital, Bellow again arose from his deathbed with a sense of duty. The result is his 13th novel, �Ravelstein.�
Bellow�s duty in �Ravelstein� is first and foremost to his late friend Allan Bloom, the philosopher and conservative guru. But Bellow is also seemingly attempting to make amends for sins of omission in his treatment of Jewish themes in previous works � like ignoring the Holocaust � and to make what is perhaps his first explicit statement about the significance of being Jewish.
Bellow doesn�t hesitate to admit that the eponymous Abe Ravelstein is his attempt to capture Bloom on paper. A former colleague of Bellow�s at the University of Chicago, Bloom remained one of Bellow�s closest friends until his death in 1992. Though long known in academic circles, Bloom only became famous among the public at large in 1987 with the publication of �The Closing of the American Mind.� An indictment of the state of liberal arts education at American universities, the book became a prescribed text of the political right and was a surprise bestseller.
Bloom, aware of Bellow�s habit of finding protagonists in his intellectual buddies, had apparently asked Bellow to write about him. But for three years after Bloom�s death, Bellow struggled to find an appropriate way to do so. Nothing worked. Only after Bellow�s illness did his sense of obligation propel him to sit down and write.
�Ravelstein� often feels more like an extended character sketch than a novel. As is often the case with Bellow�s novels, the plot takes a backseat to details and ideas, making it difficult to tell where � if anywhere � the story is moving. But the descriptions of the title character are so rich, Bellow�s accounts of his absurdly expensive tastes and love of gossip so comic, the reader hardly notices the missing story line.
Anyone taking up the book now, three months after its publication, will be familiar with the controversy surrounding it and Bellow�s �outing� of his departed friend. Although Bloom never publicly admitted to being homosexual, Ravelstein has a male lover and dies of AIDS because of his �reckless sex habits.� In a New York Times Magazine feature this spring, D.T. Max reported that former friends of Bloom are crying betrayal, and suggested that Bellow�s motive for writing �Ravelstein� may have been �unarticulated jealousy� of Bloom�s sudden fame.
This is absurd. The tone of the novel is not one of �unarticulated jealousy� but rather of articulated love and admiration. Bellow wrote the novel not from a desire to attack but from a desire to pay homage to his friend.
Yet the sense of duty discharged that one feels in �Ravelstein� is not to Bloom alone. Bellow, I suspect, also felt obligated to redress the treatment of Jewish themes in his previous novels. Although Jewish characters appear in almost all of Bellow�s creations, he nevertheless has a long history of resisting the label of �Jewish writer.� Again and again he has told interviewers that he finds the label false and constricting, even �intellectually vulgar.� In 1973 Bellow declared, �This whole Jewish writer business is sheer invention ... I�m well aware of being Jewish and also of being an American and being a writer. But I�m also a hockey fan, a fact which nobody ever mentions.�
Despite his objection to being viewed through a singular Jewish lens, Bellow seemingly could not escape a sense of guilt over the general absence of the Holocaust in his work. In the 1990 interview, with Bostonia magazine, Bellow talked about the strangeness of having written �The Adventures of Augie March� in 1953 without �a shadow� of the Holocaust in the almost 600 pages:
�I never considered it a duty to write about the fate of the Jews ... It is nevertheless quite extraordinary that I was still so absorbed by my American life that I couldn�t turn away from it. I wasn�t ready to think about Jewish history. I don�t know why. ... I can�t interpret it creditably to myself. I�m still wondering about it. I lost close relatives.�
In 1970 Bellow wrote �Mr. Sammler�s Planet,� the story of a Holocaust survivor�s mystical search for meaning, even as he is haunted by his past. But the novel reveals more about Jewish life on the Upper West Side of New York than it does about World War II. �The Bellarosa Connection,� a novella written 19 years later, confronts the past more directly. Whereas Sammler ultimately looks to the future, Fonstein, the survivor in �The Bellarosa Connection,� is fixed on his escape from the Nazis. But the book, a mere 100 pages, is not about the war, so much as the American Jewish response to it � or lack thereof. Bellow still had not written his Holocaust novel.
"Ravelstein" is not about the Holocaust. It is the story of a friendship between two men: Ravelstein and Chick, the narrator, who is as closely modeled on Bellow as Ravelstein is on Bloom. But the novel is scattered with discussion of Nazi atrocities � not only typically Bellovian abstract theories of nihilism, but also direct emotional responses to the horror. When Chick mentions to a mutual friend that Ravelstein continued lecturing throughout his last days, the friend explains that for Ravelstein the very act of talking was a response to the war, a response to the world�s conviction that Jews had no right to live.
More than attempting to make amends for the absence of the Holocaust in Bellow�s fiction, �Ravelstein,� like �The Bellarosa Connection,� provides Bellow space for self-flagellation. The title character, who is presented as a man of unequaled wisdom, a modern-day Socrates, repeatedly chastises Chick for becoming friendly with Grielescu, a Balkan Nazi sympathizer. Chick eventually sees his mistake and admits that he has �missed the boat,� and that he has the dangerous capacity �not to see what there is to be seen.� As Chick scolds himself, it�s hard not to hear Bellow�s own remorse for the things he�s left unsaid over the years.
Yet more surprising than Bellow�s doubts about what is absent from his earlier novels is his seeming reversal of what is in them. In �Ravelstein,� Bellow calls into question his long-held stance that one can be both Jewish and fully American. �Augie March,� with its famous first line, �I am an American � Chicago born...� demonstrated to an entire generation of Jewish American writers that they could write as Americans, and not just as Jews. But in �Ravelstein,� Chick � not the Bloom character, but the author�s alter ego � reflects that �As a Jew you are also an American, but somehow you are also not.� The assimilationist ethic of �Augie March,� so powerfully felt that it allowed Bellow to skip over the atrocities that had occurred in Europe just a few years earlier, has been replaced with a notion of the inescapability of one�s Jewishness. When a minor Jewish character receives a heart transplant from a non-Jew, Chick has to restrain himself from asking him how a gentile heart �with its shadow energies and its rhythms,� could �adapt itself to Jewish needs or peculiarities, pains and ideas.�
Ravelstein is himself the embodiment of this indelible Jewish stain. His great comic appeal is that, for all his efforts to transform himself into an Ancient Greek aristocrat, he remains a very Jewish character, complete with a �peculiar Jewish face,� a love of vaudeville Jewish humor, and a relentless hatred of the Nazis. Ravelstein sees no irony in his position. �It is impossible to get rid of one�s origins,� he tells Chick. �It is impossible not to remain a Jew.�
Sam Apple is a writer based in New York City.
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