"Ravelstein” by Saul Bellow

A writer who experienced spectacular success towards the end of his life was the Chicago-based philosophy academic Allan Bloom (1930-1992), not to be confused with the literature professor and critic Harold Bloom (1930–2019), another influential public intellectual who gained a reactionary reputation. In 1987 after decades of teaching in relative obscurity, Allan Bloom published a book entitled ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ which criticised the direction that universities had been heading in since the 1960s. Few would agree with all of its arguments, but much of what he says about the curricula of study and the purpose of universities very much resonates today. He made sound and thoughtful points.

Bloom was a close friend of the Nobel prizewinning novelist Saul Bellow (1915 – 2005) who also taught at the University of Chicago, and it was Bellow who encouraged him to write ‘The Closing of the American Mind’. It brought him pretty immediate worldwide fame, invitations to dine with the great and the good, and considerable personal wealth. It also brought with it controversy and a lot of hate from his fellow academics. In his eulogy at the funeral service held for Bloom, Saul Bellow made the following raw comments – so very relevant three decades on:

“He also had the moral courage to declare himself, to take positions, to fight. He had the nerve to show American society to itself nakedly, and for this he was denounced – he was blasted, he provoked deadly hostility and became the enemy, the bete noir of armies of kindly, gentle, liberal people here and abroad who held all the most desirable, advanced views on every public question: people who did good works but, through some queer inexplicable shift of psychic currents, were converted into a killer mob. You can lie and be rewarded, you can fake and be elected president, but telling people what is obviously true will not be tolerated.”

Soon after the publication of ‘The closing of the American Mind’, Allan Bloom contracted a terminal illness, and he asked Saul Bellow if he would consider writing his biography for publication after his death. Bellow started working on the project under his guidance, but never really got going on a full biography. Instead he chose to write a novel in which the central character, Abe Ravelstein, is a very thinly disguised portrait of Bloom. It turned out to be his last published work and it is a fantastic achievement. Given the choice I would far rather be memorialised in a great work of fiction that will be read for generations than in a biography that will, in all likelihood, head out of print pretty soon after publication.

‘Ravelstein’, which was published twenty-five years ago this week, contains only a very limited, passing analysis of Bloom’s work, or indeed of his life. Instead, it is a beautifully written portrait of a brilliant man in middle age, when having reached the peak of his career he was struck down by sickness. It is also a touching account of the long friendship between Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow. By writing, in effect, a personal memoir in the form of fiction, an author is freed from the need to stick resolutely to facts and can instead paint an impressionist portrait that seeks to convey the essence of the relationship. I found that t wilted a touch towards the end when Bellow writes at a touch too great a length about his own brush with death in the Caribbean after eating a dodgy red snapper. The book takes flight again one Bloom (I mean Ravelstein) regains his central position the narrative. Overall though it works splendidly. Many of Bloom’s friends were unhappy at the openness with which Bellow discussed his homosexuality, also insinuating that he died of AIDS. But this a novel - superior auto-fiction rather than straight biography - and Bellow made no claim for its authenticity as a portrait of his friend. It is instead an impression, and should be read as such.

‘Ravelstein’ is terrific. It is not so often that a long-standing friendship between two older men is the subject of a novel, and that, along with the extraordinary character portrait that lies at its centre, the quality of the writing, as well as the book’s musings on mortality, antisemitism and Twentieth Century history, make this novel an intensely memorable and satisfying read.