With Friends Like Saul Bellow
There is a videotape of Saul Bellow's 75th birthday party, held in 1990. The festivities took place at the Art Institute of Chicago. Mayor Richard M. Daley and his wife, Maggie, were the hosts. Bellow's close friend Allan Bloom was the toastmaster. Chicago was entering a renaissance under a new mayor; this official party was a symbol of progress, so a local television station covered it. The results are unremarkable. You see a provincial celebration of a hometown boy -- ''Chicago's greatest writer'' -- made good. An opera singer comes out (Bellow and Bloom both loved opera) and performs ''Che gelida manina'' from ''La Boheme,'' rattling the microphone in its stand. Bellow looks more frightened than pleased.
Once you have read Saul Bellow's new novel, ''Ravelstein,'' the tape becomes more interesting. ''Ravelstein'' is a memoirlike account of Bellow's friendship with Bloom, the political philosopher who achieved fame with his 1987 jeremiad, ''The Closing of the American Mind,'' and died in 1992. The two men had become close during their years teaching together at the University of Chicago's Committee for Social Thought, an interdisciplinary graduate program known for its conservative ideological focus. Within that community and beyond, ''Ravelstein'' has created a furor, because in it the 84-year-old Bellow discloses that Bloom (the Ravelstein of the title) was homosexual and writes that his death at age 62, ascribed in his obituaries to internal bleeding and liver failure, was actually from AIDS. Some of Bloom's other friends dispute the cause of death and wonder at Bellow's intentions in ''outing'' his colleague.
''The Closing of the American Mind'' was a No. 1 best seller for 10 weeks. It shaped the culture wars, the battle over what to teach in universities, for years afterward. President Reagan invited Bloom to the White House; Margaret Thatcher discussed philosophy with him at Chequers. Now, eight years after his death, the icon of cultural conservatism -- someone you automatically hated or liked depending on your politics -- turns out to be someone different.
Why did Bellow write ''Ravelstein''? Is it an act of friendship or betrayal? Did he mean to enhance Bloom's reputation or discredit it? Or is this just what authors do -- tell their friends' secrets? Part way through writing ''Ravelstein,'' Bellow made an effort to confront this question. He sent Werner Dannhauser, a political scientist who had been a close friend and ideological soul mate of Bloom's, a draft of his novel in progress. Dannhauser told him he had included too many details about Bloom's private life. ''Did my objections register?'' Dannhauser remembered with an unhappy laugh. ''Yes, but he decided to do it anyway.''
As for Bellow, he heard the conversation differently. To his ear, Dannhauser's objections were unremarkable. Hard-core conservatives weren't likely to appreciate the book anyway. ''They see themselves as having a special pious duty to protect Bloom,'' Bellow told me last month. ''I can understand that, because for them it's not just a friend, it's a movement.'' Bellow, ignoring Dannhauser, went back to work on what he called his ''testimony to my feeling for Bloom.''
ADVERTISEMENT
The party figures in the novel. It is transformed into an event in honor of Ravelstein, shortly after which he collapses with his first severe symptoms of H.I.V. infection. It is the moment before he goes from cultural ''rock star'' to prisoner under sentence of death. When I asked Bellow last month about the party, he insisted he had nothing special on his mind that night 10 years ago. ''Creating fiction is a very strange thing,'' he said. ''Very few people understand it. They may think they do. They try to line it up with certain knowable facts, but it doesn't always work that way.'' What Bellow mostly remembered about his party was worrying that a speaker would say something to embarrass him. Nothing like that happened. But now, facing criticisms of his thinly disguised portrait of Bloom, he wondered if he himself had done something in bad taste. In publishing ''Ravelstein,'' Bellow confessed, he was afraid he had ''crossed the line.''
Allan Bloom was only famous at the end of his life. When he came to the University of Chicago in 1979, he had been a little-known professor of philosophy for 25 years -- at Yale, then Cornell, then the University of Toronto. Among scholars, he had a reputation. He had been trained by the conservative philosopher Leo Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany, and inherited Strauss's preoccupation with the question of what kind of individual can best protect a democracy. Bloom had encouraged generations of students to ask themselves this question, to clear their minds of cant and faddishness and to try to understand freedom at the deepest level. He saw it as a struggle for their souls. The approach, with its emphasis on classical texts, was widely taken as conservative, though Bloom always insisted it was radically democratic. It specifically excluded the politics of identity. Bloom had no use for feminism, minority studies or gay studies. Like Socrates, his hero, he made many enemies because of his teachings.
That was Bloom the teacher. Bloom the man was something else. He was born in Indianapolis, the son of Jewish social workers. He had a difficult, unsympathetic father. When he visited the University of Chicago at the age of 15, a new world opened up. ''I had discovered my life,'' he wrote in ''The Closing of the American Mind.'' He enrolled at Chicago three years later and soon settled on an academic career. He encouraged his students to see the university as a self-invention center. If it could remake Bloom into a donnish conservative, why should his students settle for less?
Bloom had a scary intensity. He loved jokes and devoured information, about both high and low culture. He stuttered. He bought outrageously expensive French suits. He was unmarried, his sexuality a bit of a mystery among his students. ''It was sort of, Don't ask, don't tell,'' said his protege, Paul Wolfowitz, the former assistant secretary of state who is an inspiration in ''Ravelstein'' for Philip Gorman, a Defense Department official who delights Ravelstein with phone briefings about the gulf war.
Bloom bonded closely with his male students and infrequently with female ones. But he didn't fit into contemporary categories of ''closeted'' or ''out,'' because in some sense he didn't live in the present at all. ''Allan saw himself as an ancient Greek,'' said a friend. (Bellow writes the same of Ravelstein.) Whatever relationships he had were the fruit of the connection between sex and instruction that is so key to one of his favorite books, Plato's ''Symposium.'' He was Agathon, propped on his elbow, debating the nature of love with the other free born of Athens -- and keeping an eye on the cupbearers. Where that led, as in Plato's text, was his business.
When Bellow met Bloom in 1979, the novelist was the central figure of American letters. He had recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was on his fourth marriage, to the beautiful Romanian-born mathematician Alexandra Tulcea. He had been cheated on and cheated. He had had Reichian analysis. He was a brilliant raconteur with a cruel wit. His credo was that America was a tough country for those who lived by their imaginations -- and that for a poet to survive, he had to know how to fight. When he was asked if Norman Mailer would be the next American writer to win the Nobel Prize, Bellow responded that he would be happy to give him his if he had anything to trade in return. If you crossed him, he didn't forget. After Philip Roth caricatured him in his novel ''The Ghost Writer'' as Felix Abravanel, a nattily dressed superstar writer who lived ''in the egosphere,'' Bellow got back at him on the Dick Cavett show in 1981: ''What hath Roth got?'' he said.
Famous, clever and quotable, Bellow did not lack company. ''There were always a certain number of people making up to him in the hopes of being written about,'' his son Adam said. ''They would save up their best Jewish jokes and clown around for him.'' Yet Bellow needed Bloom at least as much as Bloom needed Bellow. He missed conversation at his own level. Most of his intellectual peers -- men like the art critic Harold Rosenberg and the poet Delmore Schwartz -- had died. These were people who, as Adam Bellow remembered, ''could tell him something was no good and not to publish it.'' Moreover, Bellow was aware that even in his triumph, time was running out for writers like him. The midcentury domination of culture and literature by American Jewish immigrants' descendants like Bloom, Bellow, Roth and Mailer was on its way out. Much like his characters, he lived in a kind of land of the dead. He was lonely.
When I spoke with Bellow, he recalled his first extended encounter with Bloom: a discussion of ''Madame Bovary'' in his office. They bonded quickly. ''We understood each other immediately,'' Bellow said. They both loved to talk, but they were both used to being listened to, so they compromised. Bellow laughed at Bloom's jokes and Bloom at Bellow's. They decided to teach a course on the political and philosophical aspects of classic texts. The class was limited to the Western canon -- Rousseau, Montesquieu, Flaubert -- and left literary theory out. This focus felt unremarkable within the conservative confines of the University of Chicago in the 80's. Bellow liked to joke that he chose to live in Chicago because by the time any fashionable idea got there, it was no longer in fashion.
The two men grew close, speaking almost daily. Bellow devoured their conversations with a hunger that sometimes proved exhausting. Bloom once called their mutual agent, Harriet Wasserman, and complained that he had to rest up before going to Bellow's summer house in Vermont: ''I want to go and relax, and he wants to talk about Nietzsche, Rousseau, et cetera. I've got to be on my toes the whole time.''
In Chicago, Bellow eventually moved into the apartment building next to Bloom's. From his window, he could see if his friend's lights were on. They spent so much time together that Bellow's wife, Alexandra, with whom he was fighting, accused them of being lovers. This conflict is highlighted in ''Ravelstein.'' Chickie, the narrator who stands in for Bellow, tells his wife that when it comes to homosexuality, he wouldn't even know ''how the act was done.'' When I asked Bellow about this, he had a similar answer. ''Alexandra's was sort of a low blow,'' he said. ''I didn't take it seriously. I had never been queer and I never expected to become queer.'' After his marriage to Alexandra ended in 1985, Bellow and Bloom for a time had dinner together several times a week. Once, to a friend, Bloom jokingly referred to this period as ''the time Saul and I were married.''
What was Bellow after? His relationships had always fueled his fiction. Dramatized ideas carried his novels, but they needed vehicles. Bloom fit the bill perfectly. He was tall, verbal and Jewish, like nearly all Bellow's characters. He was a man of large gestures. Every day he thought through his life from the beginning. What made a good man? What was virtue in a democracy? These were the kinds of questions that Bellow's protagonists -- Moses Herzog, Charlie Citrine -- had been asking for years. Perhaps if Allan Bloom hadn't existed, Bellow would have had to invent him.
Werner Dannhauser said that Bloom at first was wary of being written about. He knew that Bellow had a way of satirizing his friends in his fiction. He needed only the 1984 story ''What Kind of Day Did You Have?'' -- with its beautiful but unflinching portrait of Harold Rosenberg as a needy, aging man -- to remind him. But Bloom was by his nature effusive and gossipy. (In the novel, Ravelstein jokes, ''It's not gossip, it's social history.'') Over time, Bloom gave up his secrets. ''When Allan liked someone, he wasn't very calculating,'' Dannhauser remembered.
In the early 80's, Bellow began to encourage Bloom to put his thoughts into book form. He could make some money and pay for his extravagant tastes, his love for fine clothes and good food. Bloom began work on a book with the title ''American Nihilism,'' which became ''The Closing of the American Mind.'' Bellow wrote the book's foreword and got his agent, Wasserman, to take on Bloom. The advance from Simon & Schuster was $10,000. In his 1982 novel, ''The Dean's December,'' Bellow had already created an academic who writes a controversial essay about the moral decay of the country. Now life would imitate his art.
Bloom got a lot out of the friendship, too. He got acceptance. He also became a millionaire, and took great pleasure in spending his riches. (In the novel, Ravelstein's coffee table is covered with ''his effects -- the solid-gold Mont Blanc fountain pen, the $20,000 wristwatch, the golden gadget that cut his smuggled Havanas.'') Although his writing style had previously been fussy and academic, contact with Bellow improved it. By the time ''The Closing of the American Mind'' was published, he had begun to write the way he spoke, in the Midwestern Jewish patois that is so expertly captured in ''Ravelstein.'' Bellow did for Bloom what ''The Adventures of Augie March'' did for American literature -- he freed him from pretension.
In 1990, Bloom grew sick. First came a flare-up of shingles. Then, some time after Bellow's birthday party, Bloom came down with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological ailment causing temporary paralysis. When he died, in October 1992, the official cause on his death certificate was bleeding from peptic ulcers compounded by liver failure. Bellow was devastated. He had married wife No. 5, Janis Freedman, a former graduate student of Bloom's who had become Bellow's assistant. He was debating moving to Boston University and had wanted Bloom to come too.
After Bloom's death, for several years Bellow temporized about writing about his friend. He had health problems of his own. Besides, he couldn't find the angle. Encomia were not, as he would say, his racket. He worked on other things; in 1993 he and Janis moved to Boston. Two years later, the couple went to St. Martin on a vacation. Bellow almost died from a toxin he ingested in some red snapper. ''I was nine-tenths gone,'' he told me. When he regained his strength, he got to work on ''Ravelstein.'' By 1998, he completed a draft of the manuscript.
'Ravelstein'' is the chronicle of a late-life friendship told from the point of view of the surviving friend. It begins just after Ravelstein has published an unnamed best-selling book of ideas and takes the reader through the last few years of his life. We marvel with the narrator, Chickie, at the unique phenomenon that is Abe Ravelstein, an academic whose ''intellect had made a millionaire of him.'' In the midst of his boon, Ravelstein, reaching for the truth about himself, gets Chickie to promise to write about him, ''without softeners or sweeteners.'' Then we learn of his disease and follow him through the series of medical crises that end with his death.
This story is pretty true to Bloom's life. There are the confidences, the banter, the enormous espresso machine that dominated Bloom's kitchen. There is the trip Bloom took to Paris at the height of his fame, when he was delighted to find himself in the Htel Crillon at the same time as Michael Jackson. Bloom's younger companion and heir, Michael Wu, figures in the novel, too, renamed Nikki. A chef in real life, in ''Ravelstein'' he is a largely sensual presence, a ''graceful, boyish man'' with ''round arms'' and ''long shifting layers of black hair reaching his glossy shoulders.''
After Ravelstein dies, the novel shifts from biography to memoir. The narrator experiences severe health problems of his own. He flies to St. Martin with his wife, Rosamund, and nearly dies after eating tainted fish. (This was Bellow's ''nine-tenths gone'' moment.) Recovering slowly, he wrestles with the obligation to write about his dead friend. The story ends, in a sense, at its beginning, with the narrator settling down to paper. ''You don't easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death'' is the last sentence of the book.
''Ravelstein'' feels more a novella than a novel. It doesn't have the frenetic, confessional style of masterpieces like ''Herzog'' and ''Humboldt's Gift.'' Here, Bellow is primarily intent on recapturing experience -- not from some urgent therapeutic need to sort things out but from the larger, more languid obligation to remember. The novel's biggest departure from real life is in its portrait of Chickie, who is far less a personage than Bellow. He is an academic hanger-on, a biographer with ''a book on the low end of the best-seller list.'' This allows him to get out of the way. He becomes the Marlowe-like figure, the classic onlooker, watcher and recorder.
Bloom, though, is unmistakably Bloom. Some chestnuts that Bellow repeated at Bloom's memorial service are in the book, including the fact that upon leaving the intensive-care unit at the hospital, Bloom was on the phone fine-tuning his order of a Mercedes. (In ''Ravelstein,'' it becomes a BMW.) Yet for all its fidelity to detail, the portrait is transformative. In real life, Bloom was stooped, brash, odd. He was Milton Berle with too much caffeine in him. But in his love, Chickie sees the clumsy Bloom differently. He discovers his mythopoeic dimension. ''A tragic hero has to be above the average in height,'' he says, loosely paraphrasing Aristotle. He captures Ravelstein's ''bald powerful head'' and ''finely made'' hands. Ravelstein's stammering comes ''not from weakness but from overflow,'' from his penchant for ''large statements, big issues and famous men, with decades, eras, centuries.'' The most controversial passages in the book -- those about Bloom's private life -- are surprisingly vague. Ravelstein, we learn, ''relished louche encounters, the fishy and the equivocal,'' but that is all we learn. There are no liaisons described. Ravelstein's urges are only articulated in a brief passage in which he confesses that he still thinks ''a lot about those pretty boys in Paris.'' Considering that the link between the libido and the intellect is Bellow's signature focus, one doesn't expect to be left at the bedroom door. The reticence -- perhaps even discomfort -- is palpable.
Instead, ''Ravelstein'' offers a richly imagined portrait of Bloom as intellectual, as teacher, as friend. Is this not in itself a great favor? There is little in ''The Closing of the American Mind'' to remind us that behind all that learning was a first-class personality. It took Bellow to unearth the human being, to bring out Bloom's inner glory. No matter what critics may say, isn't this the ultimate gift to a friend?
After the story that he had ''outed'' Bloom broke in February, Bellow appeared to shut himself off. His 43-year-old son, Adam, became his de facto intermediary. Adam has his father's soft eyes and ecclesiastically domed head, but there is a different intensity to his posture. This is the result of an ideological commitment -- for a time, he was editorial director of the conservative Free Press -- that the elder Bellow finds hard to take seriously. Adam has personal experience of the dangers of the roman clef. In ''Herzog,'' his mother was portrayed as the cruel, adulterous Madeleine. ''Every time I open one of his books,'' Adam said during a conversation in his SoHo loft, ''I feel this trepidation I might be in it.'' Still, as Bellow's son, he was able to present the brief for the defense. ''You should not forget that there are compensations for people who get caught by my father's genius,'' he said. ''You get a true portrait of yourself and the knowledge you've been taken seriously by a great artist.''
But is the portrait by a great artist a true portrait? To be sure, the novelist's truth is certainly not the same as the journalist's truth. Werner Dannhauser, fictionalized in ''Ravelstein'' as Abe's great friend Morris Herbst, admires the way Bellow caught his own ''benevolent, silent clock of a face with its clean, curly white border of beard.'' As a self-described ''erotic, horny'' person, he doesn't mind being characterized as a womanizer, either. But he is unforgiving about the mentions of Bloom's sexuality. ''I don't believe everything is justified for art,'' he said.
Nathan Tarcov, a University of Chicago professor who is the son of Bellow's old friend Oscar Tarcov, doesn't believe Bloom died of AIDS. Nathan was Bloom's medical executor and present during his final days. ''The word AIDS was never mentioned when Allan died,'' he said. ''I think I would have known.'' The doctor who signed Bloom's death certificate, Nicholas Davidson, considers the cause of death ''pretty much irrelevant.'' Bloom was a man who ''was in heart failure, kidney failure,'' he said. ''The body was winding down.'' Michael Wu, he remembered, was constantly at Bloom's bedside, but Wu did not want to revisit Bloom's death with a reporter. ''It's fiction, not a biography,'' is all he would say of the matter.
''Be as hard on me as you like,'' Ravelstein goads Chickie in the novel. ''You aren't the darling doll you seem to be.'' Nine times in ''Ravelstein,'' Chickie points out that his friend insisted on a warts-and-all treatment. Adam, though, was the only person I spoke to who thought this captured the whole truth. His belief is grounded in his politics. ''I'll tell you what's going on, and it doesn't have very much to do with literature,'' he said. ''It's my guess that Bloom knew that his homosexuality and death from AIDS would come out. That they would be used to discredit him, so he asked my father to write about him.'' Perhaps, but another person who knew the pair well believes Bellow's motive was unarticulated jealousy. Bellow put Bloom on the map -- so much so that one reviewer wrote that ''The Closing of the American Mind'' was Bellow's booklong prank -- and then Bloom got away from him. He got famous. So Bellow had to kill him. It's the Frankenstein myth.
In ''Ravelstein,'' the instinct to use fiction for revenge gets free play. The late sociologist Edward Shils, a former friend of Bellow's, becomes Rakhmiel Kogon. ''Kogon,'' Bellow writes in the novel, ''was a nonbenevolent Santa Claus, a dangerous person, ruddy, with a red-eyed scowl and a face in which the anger muscles were highly developed.'' At one point, Ravelstein insinuates that Kogon was homosexual. (Shils was married with a son.) Bellow also takes off after his ex-wife, Alexandra. She is turned into an adulterer whose ''lip stung you when you kissed her.'' When I called her to get her opinion of the portrayal, she e-mailed back, ''Honi soit qui mal y pense.'' He who thinks evil is evil.
''My father sees no problem with writing in order to show people they're bastards,'' Adam Bellow said. This impulse has deep roots. Bellow was the youngest child in a tough-minded commercial family. His mother died when he was 17. ''Saul once told me,'' said a friend, ''that his mother didn't leave him. He left his mother.'' Early on, he felt overmatched as an artist in America. ''The country is proud of its dead poets,'' he wrote in ''Humboldt's Gift.'' ''It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets' testimony that the U.S.A. is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering.'' The poet could expect no sympathy, and he got none. Bellow's talent contributed to his mistrust of others. From the beginning, he was among people who both admired and felt jealous of him. One of Bellow's oldest (now former) friends, David Peltz, told me the following story that seemed to the point: ''One day the three of us -- Saul and I and Louie Lasco, another friend -- hitched out to his girlfriend's house in Michigan. When we got there, Louie and I slept on the beach. Saul slept in the house. We were never even invited in for a cup of coffee. And then when he and his girlfriend left, Louie did a dreadful thing. We were so angry at him that he went in and vandalized the bedroom where he thought Saul had slept. It was something that I can't ever forgive myself for and I've never been able to discuss it with Saul. There's something about the guy . . . . He's on such high, rarefied ground. He just spits on you from the heights.''
This seemed to be the end of it. ''Ravelstein'' was a Rorschach test. How you saw it depended on who you were. Then, in mid-March, I got a call from Saul Bellow's assistant at Boston University. He would sit for an interview about ''Ravelstein'' and its sources. This was a surprise. ''Biography is a specter viewed by a specter,'' he once told a potential biographer, Mark Harris. ''The less I see about my life the better.'' America might want to kill its poets, but the poet didn't have to help.
This resistance also has to do with the kind of books Bellow writes. The roman clef, the novel with real people in it, is a suspect literary form. Critics delight in denigrating it as a poor substitute for invention. Typical is a comment by the late critic Robert M. Crunden in his new study of modernism, ''Body and Soul,'' that F. Scott Fitzgerald's dependence on real-life prototypes was one of his weaknesses: ''He seemed unable ever to write effectively about anyone but himself and those whom he knew firsthand.'' The critical reception of Bellow's peer Mary McCarthy, who also wrote unflinchingly about friends, is telling as well. She wickedly satirized her Vassar classmates in ''The Group'' and caricatured her ex-husband Edmund Wilson in ''A Charmed Life.'' But because the sources of her fiction were transparent, McCarthy was dismissed as more journalist than novelist. Even with Bellow, those works that closely conform to the events in his life, like the 1997 novella ''The Actual,'' tend to be seen as less artful.
Bellow's office on the Boston University campus is a small, dark study lined with editions of his books in many languages. He surprised me by being dressed in a boating jacket, collarless shirt and unpressed khakis with mud boots, with a bright blue ascot wrapped around his neck like a scarf. There were the melting, playfully sad eyes. The last sprigs of his white hair were combed across his small round head. He had the parchmenty skin of the very old, and his liver-spotted hands moved for his tea slowly.
Bellow did not want our subject that day to be fiction. This business of Bloom had gotten out of hand, and he wanted to talk about it. He explained the high ambition of the book, its goal. He said, ''There are few people who are trained in their souls, so to speak, to do something extraordinary, and I think Bloom was such a person.'' Such models present themselves only rarely in a writer's life, and he couldn't resist the challenge. ''Bloom was in some sense a great man,'' he said, ''and I wanted to get him down on paper.'' Where he had erred, he told me, was in misjudging people's sensitivities about homosexuality and AIDS. ''You know, I've discovered that this is a very itchy subject, and the people carry over attitudes more appropriate to the Middle Ages.''
But he didn't stop there. He said he now felt sorry about having exposed Bloom. ''I don't like the feeling it brought with it and the sense of neglected responsibility and even recklessness on my part, because I didn't mean any harm to Allan,'' he said. ''He was so open about himself that you never thought of it as being harmful. Perhaps I should have held on to the book for a while and not published it so quickly.''
Disclosing Bloom's cause of death was not, as his son Adam suggested, a plot to foil Bloom's enemies. ''I don't think the political left has any trouble finding what it wants to find out without me,'' Bellow said dryly. ''For a long time, I thought I knew what Allan died of, and then I discovered other things that didn't jibe with that, so I really can't say now.'' Bloom had been oblique about his illness, as he was oblique about many things. He had never spoken to Bellow about his having H.I.V. or AIDS. ''I don't know that he died of AIDS, really,'' Bellow said. ''It was just my impression that he may have.'' Bellow had given him the disease, finally, because it was the right one for Ravelstein, who was in so many ways Bloom.
When I got home, there was a finished copy of the book sent by the publisher waiting for me. I knew, since the appearance of the advanced galleys in January, that Bellow had been working steadily with a copy editor to perfect ''Ravelstein.'' But as I read through it, I found that he had been up to something else too. He had tinkered with the mentions of homosexuality and AIDS. Ravelstein and Nikki's sexual connection was now just implied. The phrase ''He was H.I.V.-positive, he was dying from it'' had been changed to ''He was H.I.V.-positive, he was dying of complications from it.'' The words ''from H.I.V.'' had been excised from the sentence ''And not only his death from H.I.V. but a good many other deaths as well.'' The phrase ''Abe was taking the common drug prescribed for AIDS'' had become ''Abe was taking the common drug prescribed for his condition.'' Rakhmiel Kogon, the closeted homosexual based on Edward Shils, was no longer a closeted ''homosexual.'' He was ''attracted to men.'' He no longer wanted to get them in bed. He only wanted to ''kiss them.'' Bellow had made the changes in an attempt to back himself out of a corner. He had bowdlerized his own book. But his artistic impulses had stymied him. What disease has the metaphoric power of AIDS? He could censor here and there, but he couldn't abandon the conceit altogether.
This country, so powerful it could kill poets, had not killed Bellow, but it had gotten him to rewrite. It had said reality was stronger than fiction. If he wanted to mess with it, he had to play by the rules. I hoped one day some future biographer would undo the changes, if only as a matter of principle.
'Ravelstein'' may yet prove Bellow's gift to Bloom. At the very least, it will raise interesting questions about the relationship between authors and their writing. Allan Bloom became famous not just because of what he wrote but also because of who people assumed him to be: antidrug, antisex, wildly patriotic. How many members of the right will want their money back now? Bloom followed ''The Closing of the American Mind'' with a book called ''Love and Friendship'' for which he received $750,000 from Simon & Schuster. (He never lived to see publication.) The book documents how, in Western culture, sexually heated unions get diluted into bourgeois ''relationships.'' Bloom knew it was a different kind of book; he once joked that having offended liberals with his first book, he would offend conservatives with this one. The book never mentions that Bloom was, in effect, an interested party. Without an author to promote it and with no clear point of view, the book soon went out of print. Now a portion of the book is being reissued by the University of Chicago Press as ''Shakespeare on Love and Friendship.'' Thanks to ''Ravelstein,'' it is expected to attract a lot of attention. It may even find its way into gay studies, a situation that half of Bloom's friends think he would find outrageous and the other half hilarious.
What of Saul Bellow's own work? What does ''Ravelstein'' leave us with that we didn't have before? It points out the extent to which men lie at the heart of Bellow's fiction. For so much of Bellow's career, critics have focused on the flashy sexuality in his work -- all those willing women -- not noticing the intense male relationships in the background. Augie March has an older, successful brother. Charlie Citrine has Von Humboldt Fleisher and George Swiebel (based on David Peltz). Herzog has the duplicitous Valentine Gersbach. Bellow's portraits of promiscuous Mama's boys and his love and friendship for Bloom turn out to come out of the same part of himself. Every major character in a Bellow novel is, in some way, Bellow.
Looked at this way, ''Ravelstein'' is not a portrait in questionable taste of a dead friend but a dialogue between two aspects of Bellow's self. The book's narrator, Chickie, has many of Bellow's attributes. He has his childhood, his sexless marriage to a Romanian mathematician, his near-death experience with tainted food. But Ravelstein speaks the great Bellovian lines. Ravelstein gets to confront American nihilism by telling people what they don't want to hear: that they have a soul that matters. ''Ravelstein'' is a meditation on mortality, and it is in Ravelstein's body that the mortality Bellow feels is manifested.
I asked Bellow why he had given Bloom AIDS in ''Ravelstein'' without knowing that he had it. ''The point of the disease was that here was a man who had everything in life but also had the knife to the throat,'' Bellow said. He made a cutting gesture across his neck. ''It's the tragic inevitability of the whole thing.'' I pointed out that he had just drawn the imaginary knife across his own throat. He laughed. ''It may not have been accurate for him,'' he said. ''It may just be accurate for me.'' In the end, Bellow cannot say with any more certainty than anyone else that ''Ravelstein'' is Bloom. He can only say, ''Ravelstein, c'est moi.''
No comments:
Post a Comment