Ravelstein

Ravelstein

Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 and it became, against all expectation, a bestseller: a professor of political philosophy from the University of Chicago arguing that American higher education had destroyed its students’ capacity for serious thought. The money this made him was enormous and he spent it immediately, lavishly, and with great pleasure—on clothes, restaurants, trips to Paris, on the apartment in Chicago and the one in Paris, on wine and friends and students. Bloom was openly gay at a time when this was not the default academic position, died of AIDS in 1992, and asked Bellow to write his life.

Bellow’s Ravelstein is both faithful portrait and literary creation. The University of Chicago professor, the Socratic teacher who produced devoted students, the man whose asceticism (of intellectual standards, of philosophical demands) coexisted paradoxically with wild material extravagance—all of these are recognizably Bloom. What Bellow adds is the perspective of Chick, the narrator who is unmistakably Bellow himself, an elderly novelist watching his younger friend with a mixture of admiration, incomprehension, and love.

Ravelstein’s intellectual world—the political philosophy of Leo Strauss, the reading of Plato and Aristotle as a guide to life, the conviction that Eros is inseparable from education—is rendered by Bellow with the warmth of a non-philosopher who has absorbed it by proximity. He does not endorse Ravelstein’s positions but he takes them seriously, which is itself a form of respect that the novel’s subject would have recognized and appreciated.

The Friendship

The novel’s center is not Ravelstein’s ideas or even his death, but the friendship between the two men. Chick and Ravelstein have been friends for decades: they argue about everything, they laugh at each other’s foibles, they share a Chicago that is the backdrop to both their lives, and they love each other in the specific way that long intellectual friendships between men of different characters can produce—a love that is clear-eyed about its object’s limitations and all the more affectionate for that clarity.

Ravelstein asks Chick to write his memoir for a specific reason: he knows that the people who love him most clearly are his students, and he knows that his students will produce hagiography. He wants Chick, who is not a philosopher, who does not share his political convictions, who occasionally finds him ridiculous, to write the true version—the version that includes the extravagance and the comedy and the humanity alongside the philosophical greatness.

Bellow’s response to this commission is the novel itself, and the act of writing it is represented within it: Chick figures out how to write about Ravelstein, fails, tries again, discovers that what he most wants to say about his friend is also the most difficult to say, and eventually writes what we are reading. This reflexive structure—the portrait being painted as its own subject—is one of the things that makes Ravelstein more than a roman à clef.

Bellow’s Final Word

Bellow published Ravelstein in 2000, when he was 85. It was his last novel, though he did not know that when he wrote it, and it has the quality of a late work: relaxed in its prose, confident in its digressive intelligence, unworried about whether it is succeeding by conventional standards. The near-death episode—Chick nearly dies of food poisoning in the Caribbean, and his recovery involves a sustained meditation on what it is to come back from the edge—may be structurally loose, but it has the integrity of autobiography: it happened (something similar happened to Bellow), and it is part of what the novel is about.

What the novel is about, at its deepest level, is how we look at death. Ravelstein looked at his own death—from AIDS—with a philosophical courage that Chick admires and cannot entirely match. Chick’s own near-death gives him a different perspective, one that is less philosophical and more personal. Together, the two deaths—one completed, one survived—constitute a meditation on mortality that is the most honest thing Bellow ever wrote about the subject. The Nobel Prize came in 1976; Ravelstein, twenty-four years later, is where the laureate settled his accounts.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Bellow’s most intimate novel, and one of the finest portraits of intellectual friendship in American literature. Essential late Bellow.

Mortality and the Commission

Bellow’s treatment of mortality in Ravelstein operates on two tracks simultaneously. The first is Ravelstein’s own death, which the novel approaches with the directness of a man who has watched a close friend die and understood that the death was not separate from the life. Ravelstein died the way he lived: in Paris, in good clothes, surrounded by students who loved him, receiving visitors, arguing about Plato. The extravagance that his critics found contemptible was inseparable from the philosophical seriousness they admired. Bellow understood this paradox and refused to resolve it: Ravelstein was both a philosopher of great seriousness and a man who spent money on Lanvin jackets with the same enthusiasm he brought to the Republic.

The second track is Chick’s own near-death — the episode from contaminated fish in the Caribbean that sent him into a coma from which he nearly did not return. This episode has been criticized as structurally loose, but it serves an important function: it gives Chick a death of his own to survive, which changes the quality of his attention to Ravelstein’s. He is not writing about death from the position of the living. He is writing from the position of someone who has been to the edge and returned. The difference shows in the prose — warmer, less managed, more willing to admit what it does not know.

What Bellow was working toward in his final novel was an honest account of what it costs to watch a friend die, and what it means to be asked by the dying to tell the story of their life. Ravelstein is his answer: not a biography but a meditation on the obligations of friendship, and on the specific kind of love that makes one person the only possible author of another person’s truth.