Saul Bellow's Ravelstein: The Master's Final Novel

In a footnote to essay on Saul Bellow in The War Against Cliché, Martin Amis writes: "'View from Intensive Care' became part of Ravelstein. Ravelstein is a full length-novel. It is also, in my view, a masterpiece with no analogues. The world has never heard this prose before: prose of such tremulous and crystallized beauty."

Saul Bellow's final novel is indeed an odd beast. A hybrid of the anti-novel (there is simply no ravaging external conflict), a biographical account of Abe Ravelstein, and a memoir of Chick, the novel's narrator who dominates the remainder of the novel after the title character dies of AIDS. It's also something of a real-life portrait - a tribute to Alan Bloom, former Leo Strauss protégé, Chicago University professor, author of the radical - and surprising bestseller - The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Domocracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. Many critics of Bellow's and Bloomophiles have called it a betrayal, a public outing: Though Bloom was openly homosexual and hedonistic amongst those in his inner circle (Bellow one of them), his orientation had been kept under-covers; as well as his cause of death, announced in 1992 as liver failure, was in fact the result of the AIDS virus. But reading into the Ravelstein character strictly as Bloom, and for that matter Chick the narrator as Bellow himself, (and if we get right down to it: Chick's wife Rosamund, a former Ravelstein student, thirty years his junior, as Bellow's own wife, a former Bloom student, thirty years his junior, et cetera, ad nauseam, yawn, yawn) - as if the novel itself were a kind of locked secret, a hocus-pocus of physic doubles and smoke-and-mirrors reenactments - this kind of prying and spying severely limits the novel's compactness, its freshness, its perspectives on life and death, humor and sorrow - sometimes refined to a single sentence: "What we were laughing about was death, and of course death does sharpen the comic sense."

(As a footnote, while reading the novel, I certainly had no idea of the Alan Bloom controversy, or for that matter, who the guy was in the first place; this kind of ignorance was strangely beneficial to the novel's qualities of art. Does anyone still use this term anymore? It is this quality that I want to concentrate.)

Ravelstein may be Bellow's best novel. Its stature and innovation in language and structure make it less a swansong as Bellow's last novel (written at the age of 85!), and more of a breathtaking challenge to younger writers in the method of structure (pick an age, really; 25, 45, 65, not even Nabokov got off his exhaustive puff to reinvent himself, or even edit his own procedures; see the almost painful Look at the Harlequins!). Ravelstein is a novel of vaudevillian humor, jokey asides on history, miniaturized debates on philosophy and love, encounters with Michael Jackson, and deckhouse argle-bargle on Michael Jordan's athleticism. On the latter, an example of the "crystallized" prose:

"Inevitably Ravelstein was seen by the young men he was training as the intellectual counterpart to Jordan. The man who introduced them to the powers and subtleties of Thucydides and analyzed the role of Alcibiades in the Sicilian campaign as no one else could - a man who expounded the Gorgias to his seminar, literally in sight of the steel mills and the ash heaps and street filth of Gary, its ore boats coming and going across the water - could also hand in the air, levitating just like Jordan. A man of idiosyncrasies and kinks, of gobbling greed for penny candies or illegal Havana cigars, was himself a Homeric prodigy."

It is not a novel of E.M. Forster's …and then… and then… and then… machinations. Really: Nothing happens, there are no happy coincidences and manipulations to devalue its merits; there are no agendas, no -isms to offset the aesthetic ends. "You don't easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death," Chick tells us (Indeed the present action is minimal: We meet Abe Ravelstein in Paris, a millionaire, a man of luxury and a hunger for haute couture, buying suits and overpriced ties, and spilling espresso on them without a thought. We meet him, and then we are told that he is dying of AIDS. In the middle, Ravelstein dies. Chick considers the biography of Ravelstein, takes a vacation to Saint Martin with his wife, gets a nasty stomach virus, returns home, gets better, the end. Fascinating stuff!) Instead, what Bellow gives us is the map to the sidestreets and alleys of Ravelstein, and by no means in a conventional linear route - conversations in the present trigger conversations from the past, friendly faces recall friendlier times. Chick declares: "He ordered me to write this memoir, yes, but he didn't think it was necessary for me to grind away at the classics of Western thought." (This may be the novel's saving grace; whereas Herzog, a parody of pedantry fails and succumbs to its own grinding away at the classics.)

We're allowed intricate details of knowing, of character: "Those students who knew him best tactfully withdrew when he signaled with the fingers below his cigarette." It's this kind of authorial knowledge that makes Bellow a master. He's compact and quick. (In an interview Bellow quotes Chekhov: "'Odd how I have now a mania for shortness. Whenever I read my own or other people's works it all seems to me not short enough.' I find myself emphatically agreeing with this.") Every line a piece of information - and information executed with a playful twist on language, writing prose-poetry like it's nobody's business; every bit of dialogue a coloring of character, a note of self-referential despair and shortcomings. And more importantly, a new way at reading and writing novels.

"'People who are self-glamorized invent their peculiar significance as they go along,' Ravelstein said, 'Until they knit together a dazzling fantasy. They turn themselves into something like glorious dragonflies and whiz through an atmosphere of perfect unreality. Then they write essays, poems, whole books about each other…'
'Crude Jewish behavior at a lunch for a nob - a superimportant visitor,' I said.
'And what will T.S. [Eliot] think of us!'"