Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
(Penguin Books: 2001)
Saul Bellow’s latest novel is
a work haunted by mortality. This is not surprising. It addresses both
the death of his friend Allan Bloom and Bellow’s own brush with death
in the Caribbean a few years ago. What the reader finds, however, is that
despite death’s spectre there is still the affirmation of the individual
life that has been Bellow’s trademark throughout his long and distinguished
writing career. Now aged eighty-six, his work is still driven by the refusal
to concede that we are born to die unnoticed by the world.
The novel is narrated by Chick, a
writer who accepts the dying Abe Ravelstein’s commission to produce
a memoir of him. Chick is an old man himself, and musing on his friend’s
demise entails a contemplation of mortality in which he is necessarily
implicated. "There are gaps," he muses, "and these gaps
tend to fill up with your dead". This assumes a greater importance
as Chick himself comes close to death during an ill-fated holiday. This
sense of the void could produce a sombre tone, but what is celebrated
here is the effect that Ravelstein has had on those around him, people
whose lives are better for his presence. As Chick
says, "He turned your face again toward the original. He forced you
to reopen what you had closed."
Towards the end of his life, Ravelstein
has taken his teachings and published them in book form. Surprisingly,
this has made him a rich man, able to indulge the tastes that had previously
left his finances in a ruinous state. When we first come across him he
is talking with Chick in a suite at the Hotel Crillon in Paris prior to
a shopping trip and a trawl through the cafes and restaurants of the city.
As Chick notes, "his attitude towards money was that it was something
to be thrown away, scattered from the rear platform of luxury trains".
Now Ravelstein has the means to match his extravagance. Significantly,
the accumulation of goods is not an end in itself, but rather a concession
of sorts to the general cultural drift towards satisfaction through material
ends. Money is spent, but the reader always senses a deeper force at work.
In the course of a debate with Chick Ravelstein carelessly spills coffee
down a $4500 jacket he has just bought -- an action that encapsulates
his attitude to material goods. There is comfort in the possession of
wealth, but only if we acknowledge the possibility of something other
than wealth.
What Chick admires in his friend is
that he has attained success on his terms, not by pandering to any fashionable
ideas. Indeed, Ravelstein’s ideas on art and culture look all the
way back to Athens and the Greek texts he frequently cites. His teachings
throw a spotlight on the paucity of modern life, the denigration of culture
and the gradual diminishing of the individual intellect or, as he implies,
the part of us that could be called a soul.
The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination
of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up.
The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely
human creature. [p.132]
Those readers who have followed Bellow’s
career will recognise in Ravelstein a portrait of his friend Allan Bloom,
whose book The Closing of the American Mind, with its scathing
attack on the decline of the liberal arts in American education, was a
best-seller in the mid-eighties. As Bellow said in his speech at Bloom’s
funeral service in 1992, "He had money, he was admired, he acquired
enemies and detractors, and he learned what it was to cut a figure and
be attacked for it" [1]. With Ravelstein’s
new- found wealth, there has come an awareness of his status as a point
of view to be supported or attacked. His views, like Bellow’s own,
are not fashionable as they draw our attention back toward the shortcomings
of our modern life, and the failure of the intelligentsia to address our
concerns. Bellow often cites George Orwell’s dictum that "Restatement
of the obvious is the first duty of civilised men", but his own history
shows is that the world may not necessarily appreciate this act.
What Ravelstein/Bloom and Chick/Bellow
share is a belief in something greater than our everyday existence, and
a refusal to accept the palliative culture that tries to temper this belief
into a resigned acceptance of our lot. As in his earlier novel Herzog,
there is a belief that Great Art and Thought enlarge our world. The chaos
around us will not be fully explained, but we can accept a place within
it and still retain those momentary glimpses of something that holds out
the possibility of transcendence. "The light of truth is never far
away, and no human being is too negligible or corrupt to come into it"
as Moses Herzog says [2]. Ravelstein’s life has
been an attempt to bring people closer to this light, to think for themselves
and locate their own place within this world. Many of his past pupils
now occupy positions of influence and his achievement, as he tells Chick,
lies in the knowledge that he has pushed their minds a bit further open
than might otherwise have happened. As a writer, Bellow has attempted
this himself. Literature, he has commented, is "something on which
you form your life […] your path to liberation and full freedom"
[3]. There is something vaguely archaic about this approach
when one considers the plethora of theories and ideologies brought to
bear on literature these days, labelled by Professor Harold Bloom (no
relation) as "the school of resentment", and Bellow has been
attacked by more fashionable quarters for an outdated view of his profession.
What he has affirmed throughout his work is that Great Art can improve
our lives, if we admit that they need its influence. Moses Herzog makes
the point:
We must get it out of our heads that this is
a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it,
mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without
these shivery games. People frightening one another -- a poor sort of
moral exercise. [4]
Ravelstein affirms the role in society
of that most maligned of species – the intellectual. In his recourse
to Ancient Greece for illustration he may be accused of pushing thought
too far back, but the contrast with the confusion of the present is clear.
In his essay "The Distracted Public" Bellow set out the problems
facing a writer in the modern society, with the constant barrage of information
from all corners demanding the attention of the potential audience. When
aesthetic bliss is available in modern form, he notes, "we have reason
to be profoundly grateful to its creators." [5]
Art, the argument runs, can make us better people. It isn’t something
to distract us from reality but something that helps us to come to terms
with that reality and see the possibilities contained within. What must
come first, Bellow argues, is a renewed focus on the individual as an
individual, and not as part of a social group. To do this is to hold out
"the notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing"
as T. S. Eliot wrote, or, with or without its religious connotations,
a soul.
As his memoir of Ravelstein’s
life draws to a close, and as he recovers from his own experience of mortality,
Chick finds himself thinking of the description of death he gave his friend.
He had asked me what I imagined death would be
like – and when I said that the pictures would stop he reflected
seriously on my answer, came to a full stop, and considered what I might
mean by this. No one can give up on the pictures – the pictures
might, yes they might continue. I wonder if anyone believes that
the grave is all there is. […] The flesh would shrink and go, the
blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of
hearts that the pictures do stop. [pp.222-3]
Throughout his career, Bellow has
traced the state of man’s inner being in the midst of the modern
world. Ravelstien and Chick take their place in a long and distinguished
line that includes Moses Herzog, Artur Sammler, and Charlie Citrine -
people trying to ascertain what it means to be in a world that offers
variety without fixity. He stops just short of affirming the afterlife
but refuses to admit that we have no soul here on earth. There is something
of the transcendent in us all and anyone who can bring that to our attention,
as Ravelstein did for Chick and as Bellow continues to do, deserves our
praise.
Footnotes:
[1] "Allan Bloom"(1992) in It All Adds Up
(London: Penguin, 1995), p.277.
[2] Herzog (London: Penguin, 1965), p.314.
[3] "A Second Half Life" (1991) in It All
Adds Up, p.324.
[4] Herzog, p.317.
[5] "The Distracted Public" in It All Adds
Up, p.162.
