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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.