Ravelstein
Bellow, Saul
i : l , l o i , ' 4 1 ~ n : :u:mauma:'Eros on 59th Street Ravelstein Saul Bdlou~ Viking / 233 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas p hilosophy and poetry have a long and distinguished...
...For Ravelstein, Eros means rent-boys as well 84 July~August 20 o o _9 The American Spectator as the noblest longings...
...Instruction in philosophy weans one from the foolishness of one's upbringing...
...When he gets hot enough, anyone will do...
...In every quartier, the fresh-produce markets, the good bakeries, the charcuterie with its cold cuts...
...there is no mention of such a book in RaveIstein...
...in Plato's Apology, Socrates declares that Aristophanes' depiction of him has nothing to do with the truth: % certain Socrates was carried around [on stage], claiming that he was tteading on air and spouting much other drivel about which I have no expertise, either much or little...
...But it also might have given the reader a fuller appreciation for the stature of the man Chick loves...
...In the oration that Bellow delivered at Bloom's funeral service (and that is included in the collection of essays, speeches, and interviews ItAlIAdds Up), he spoke of his friend's fighting his way back from a devastating disease of the nervous system that nearly killed him...
...Devotion to reason is hard, but it brings the ultimate liberation: One sees its triumph in the heroic fearlessness with which Ravelstein faces death...
...courses rejected after one bite and pawed to the floor...
...The question this novel raises is whether philosophy or poetry renders the human essentials more fully: What exactly do you need to know about a man--in particular, a thinking man whose thought has made him a public figure--in order truly to understand him...
...The opening sentence of Bloom's Love and Friendship reads, "This book is an attempt to recover the power, the danger, and the beauty of eros under the tutelage of its proper teachers and knowers, the poetic writers...
...The imprint that private passion makes on public life has been one of the great themes of modern art, from the operas of Verdi to the novels of Conrad, Forster, Hemingway...
...Rosamund kept me from dying...
...He helps Morris Herbst, a widowed friend with a gambling problem and a wide-ranging taste in women, bring two children up...
...Here are powerful men conducting themselves in ways they would prefer never see the light of day, and to Chick and Ravelstein such knowledge is not merely titillating but morally indispensable...
...I discovered Recorded Books audiobooks a few months ago, and s i n c e t h e n l i s t e n i n g t o audiobooks has been a wonderful new experience for me...
...Philosophy evidently has its limitations, and to Chick's mind the dying Ravelstein shows himself to be something more than a philosopher...
...Morris Herbst tells Chick that Ravelstein is doing what he can to comprehend "the great evil"--the Holocaust-and Chick writes that "what persons like Herbst and Ravelstein concluded was that it is impossible to get rid of one's origins, it is impossible not to remain a Jew...
...astonishingly, Ravelstein in his final days appears to concur: "It was unusual for him these days, in any conversation, to mention even Plato or Thucydides...
...Inviting Ravelstein to dinner is a dangerous proposition: Faculty wives knew that when Ravelstein came to dinner they would face a big cleaning job afterward--the spilling, splashing, crumb]ing, the ~astiness of his napkin after he had used it, the pieces of cooked meat scattered under the table, the wine sprayed out when he laughed at a wisecrack...
...But I don't believe she was at all deaf, his bewildered mama...
...the comic pla}~vright Aristophanes portrayed the philosopher Socrates as a pernicious huckster, who teaches how the unjust argument can overcome the just, that the gods do not exist, and that children have the right to give their parents a thrashing...
...Call 1-800-638-1304 today...
...I tried other audiobooks, but they just d i d n ' t c a p t i v a t e me l i k e Recorded Books TM...
...He relished Iouche encounters, the fishy and the equivocal...
...A columnist on the Daily News said that to Ravelstein money was something you threw from the rear platform of speeding trains...
...So it was entirely natural that he should be a second father to her children...
...Although sufficiently philosophical to kick free of conventional morality, he is not philosophical enough to disentangle himself from his more sordid desires...
...Poetry 1, Philosophy o. Now the most eminent living American writer, Saul Bellow, has written a novel based on the life and death of Allan Bloom, whose book The Closing of the American Mind (1987)--an attack on the soullessness of modern intellectual life, particularly in the universities, and a call for the revival of classical Greek political philosophy, after the example of Bloom's own great teacher, Leo Strauss--made him the AmcIs VAC~trNaS has a Ph.D...
...I badly needed to be in touch with politics--not local or machine politics, nor even national politics, but politics as Aristotle or Plato understood the term, rooted in our nature...
...This sentence could well have served as the epigraph to Ravelstein, which offers a poet's understanding of a not quite philosophical friend--brilliant, noble, but fatally flawed-and of a wife who makes up for all his previous ill luck in love...
...If they were lucky, if they were bright and willing, Ravelstein would give them the greatest gift they could hope to receive and lead them through Plato, introduce them to the esoteric secrets of Maimonides, teach them the correct interpretation of Machiavelli, acquaint them with the higher humanity of Shakespeare--up to and beyond Nietzsche...
...D espite his weakness for sexual adventures that hardly qualify even as simulacra of love, Ravelstein is an adept in the real thing, and his erotic nature sometimes takes forms that may come as a surprise...
...Rosamund is Eros perfected...
...You s h o u l d hear what you've been missing...
...You can't turn your back on your nature" Ravelstein wants Chick to write his biography, and to get Chick in shape for the task Ravelstein sets him an exercise in Great Politics: a study of John Maynard Keynes's private memoranda to his Bloomsbury friends about the Versailles Peace Conference...
...They call Bellow cruel...
...Rakhmiel was highly educated, but to what end...
...How can this trembling, stammering, ungainly, spendthrift, voluptuary, sexually breakneck Ravelstein still be a great man...
...Caretakers of the Bloom legacy insist that what Bellow says is not so, and that even what is so ought not be said...
...He spends weeks in the hospital, ravaged by neuropathy, pneumonia, heart failure, internal bleeding...
...Also the great displays of intimate garments...
...in his eyes there is a terrible moral symmetry to a life of heedless sexuality and a death by grim inches...
...In The Clouds (423 B.C...
...I I 1. Please write your new address in I ! the space provided...
...I I I Just be sure to allow six weeks for your I | change to take effect...
...The philosophical life that is Athens' foremost achievement is perpetually at odds with the Biblical poetry that venerates the One True God and that is the hallmark of Jerusalem...
...One of the most distressing sexual moments in the Bellow oeuvre, which has plenty of them, comes when Vela walks naked into the bedroom where Chick is reading and rubs her pubic hair against his face...
...More father and son.'" And then there are his feelings for his students: "Ravelstein urged his young men to rid themselves of their parents...
...Rosamund had studied love--Rousseauan romantic love and the Platonic Eros as well, with Ravelstein-but she knew far more about it than either her teacher or her husband...
...The story almost does not get written at all, because Chick comes close to dying himself when, on a Caribbean vacation, he eats a piece of fish tainted with cigua-toxin...
...silently taunting him for his unresponsiveness, she turns and walks away...
...Until the tape finished, that is...
...The story does not end with Ravelstein's death...
...Philosophy entails cutting oneself loose from the conventional and following reason wherever it leads...
...Some creatures have more imperious needs than others, and in Paris Ravelstein finds the necessities in irresistible abundance: "Ravelstein the sinner did have a The American Spectator _9 July/Augus t The question is whether philosophy or poetry renders the human essentials more fully...
...Morris, IL | | 61054-8084 I I I I 1-800-524-3469 I I I II IMPORTANT: I Allow six weeks for address change...
...They resent that a paragon of conservative virtue should be caught with his pants down, for all to see...
...voice in speaking of Nikki, to say' that there was no intimacy between them...
...Unfortunately for Socrates, Aristophanes' charges--not all of which were untrue--had a way of sticking in the public mind...
...In Bellow's book, the life of the heart has it over ideas, even the best ideas, every day of the week...
...He would shout at her without mercy and then he would say, "She's deaf...
...Once he asks Chick to loan him $500...
...I couldn't even picture him kissing his old mother...
...Chick tires of settling for the meager leavings...
...Yet the novel also shows Ravelstein to be something less than a philosopher...
...Eats still rated high--e.g., last night's banquet at Lucas-Carton...
...However, it is Chick's understanding that there are certain realities you cannot think your way out of, and being born a Jew is one of them...
...He was full of Scripture now...
...Love is the highest function of our species- its vocation...
...A thinking engine, she locks herself in her room for fourteen hours a day with "her great abstractions...
...For certain kinds of conduct, or misconduct, Paris was the best place...
...groomed for love by Ravelstein, who in a sense lives on in her, she surpasses her master, and gives Chick the greatest gift he could hope to receive...
...i : l , l o i , ' 4 1 ~ n : :u:mauma:'Eros on 59th Street Ravelstein Saul Bdlou~ Viking / 233 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas p hilosophy and poetry have a long and distinguished rivalry, in which the stakes are high and the dispute can get fiercely heated...
...The tremendous historians like Thucydides...
...It wasn't an academic program that he offered-- it was more freewheeling than that...
...The life among higher things is supposed to bring relief from the lower impulses, but it does not work that way for Ravelstein...
...Eros, whether it be spiritual or physical desire, can take misshapen, creepy forms, and in Chick's view the deformity of the mental life fatally afflicts one's erotic nature...
...When Socrates went on trial for his life in 399 B.C., accused of promoting impiety and corrupting the Athenian young, he spoke of Aristophanes as among his earliest slanderers...
...when his prostate is removed, he says 2000 Listening to If You Survive by George W]lsoa, narrated by Brian Keeler I was in another world, enraptured, unable to move...
...This simply can't be set aside in considering Ravelstein...
...Recorded Bookd M has thousands o f titles to choose from...
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...He preferred Athens but he respected Jerusalem greatly...
...The shameless love of fine bedding...
...from the Committee on Social Thought in the University of Chicago, where he studied with Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom...
...unaware at first how ill he was, he would not have made it to the hospital at all but for the attentiveness of his wife-his new, young wife, Rosamund, who had been a student of Ravelstein's...
...During the first ten days Rosamund didn't go home...
...Perhaps Bellow thought that Ravelstein's writing a book like that would make an untoward bulge in the novel's elegant line, or that it might seem like a plea for canonization...
...Strong paternal stirrings animate him...
...It is quite possible that Bloom did not die of AIDS, but it is essential that Ravelstein should...
...She refused to go to the cafeteria lest I should die while she was eating...
...This morning he was again urg- i ing me to go more public, to get away from the private life, to take an interest in 'pub_9 _9 , . , 7 o lic life, in pohtms, to use his own words, o "'Too many years of inwardness!' he used o 82 July~August 2000 . The American Spectator to say...
...He wouldn't have minded...
...Ravelstein went for classical antiquity...
...The most intelligent and learned of American novelists has things he values more highly than the mental life...
...Such pleasures can carry an extortionate price...
...Chick admits to being affected by the deep-rooted Jewish condemnation of homosexuality, so that Ravelstein's sickness and death are the most severe trial of Chick's love...
...For Kogon, there is no erotic sublime and little erotic life of any sort...
...He wanted them above all to appreciate the best men, to know the grandeur of which human beings are capable: The greatest heroes of all, the philosophers, had been and always would be atheists...
...for the poet-the novelist included--attention must be paid precisely to such things, without which no portrayal of a man is complete...
...I I 3. Return this form to us at the I I address listed below...
...Far from Keynes and Lloyd George but not so far from Versailles, in Paris, where Ravelstein has treated Chick and his young lady friend to a sybaritic holiday, Chick reflects on the demise of French cultural and political glory, but happily allows that there are some things the French continue to do gloriously: What they were still good at were the arts of intimacy...
...Chick and Ravelstein find especially pungent Keynes's description of Lloyd George, the British prime minister, losing his temper with one of the German negotiators, a Jew, on the question of reparations: In Chick's words, Lloyd George "did an astonishing kike number on him, crouching, hunching, limping, spitting, zizzing his esses, sticking out his backside, doing a splayfoot parody of a Jew-walk...
...Bellow's narrator, Chick, who is Ravetstein's best friend and a writer rather less celebrated thai1 Ravelstein or Bellow himself, has spent his days rapt in intimate i concerns, and Ravelstein takes it upon himself to connect Chick to the great world...
...She is not only a beauty but also a woman of regal intellect, a physicist specializing in chaos theory, which she puts into practice in her marriage...
...N r - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I , ' Ainerican ' i I , ' Spedat0r ' ! I I i I I I M O V I N G ? ! ! ! | TASAddress Changes Made Easy...
...The supreme manifestation of Eros is the life lived in the love of truth, and this is the principal delight that Ravelstein offers a taste of: He was going to direct [his students] to a higher life, full of variety and diversity, governed by rationality- anything but the arid kind...
...of Chicago-their sub)ects included Shakespeare, Rousseau, Goethe, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dickens, Dostoevsky, C~line, Joyceand the?, became the best of friends...
...world's most famous lMng philosopher, and the most hated...
...Viens, viens clans rues bras, je te donne du chocolat...
...It was wonderful to be so public about the private, about the living creature and its needs...
...Ravelstein even professes a fatherly love for his handsome young Oriental mate of long standing, Nikki: "He would sometimes lower his Ravelstein's erotic nature sometimes takes forms that may come as a surprise...
...To think without a guiding sense of the purposes thought is meant to serve is to waste your life, and the immensely learned but personally toxic Rakhmiel Kogon is a foil for Ravelstein's wise eroticism...
...In Ravelstein's case, the higher life survives even the most destructive encounters with low life...
...Box 655, Mt...
...Chick does not go so far as that, but he does acknowledge that Ravelstein was "destroyed by his reckless sex habits...
...taste for sex T mischief...
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...Reagan imited him to dinner, and Ravelstein spent a fortune on formal attire, cumnrerbund, diamond studs, patent leather shoes...
...She ate the scraps of food she found on trays...
...Although some might say that Ravelstein's promiscuity costs him even more than his life--nothing less than his soulChick believes that Ravelstein's extraordinary soul is too potent to be in danger, that Ravelstein keeps the highest things ever in his sights: He thought--no, he saw--that every soul was looking for its peculiar other, longing for its complement...
...Plato and Aristotle teach that the life of thought is the best life a man can live...
...The military" geniuses like Caesar-"the greatest man who ever lived within the tides oftime"--and, next to Caesar, Marc Antony, briefly his successor, "the triple pillar of the earth" who valued love above imperial politics...
...For Abe Ravelstein is not simply a hero of luminous mind, but a man of numerous unseemly quirks, twitches, tremors, appetites, and kinks...
...One might wish that there were more of Bloom's heroism in the portrait of Ravelstein...
...The book was Love and Friendship...
...Thatcher and President Reagan...
...Not everyone is so handsomely endowed with philosophical-erotic sinew...
...Ravelstein does not want to write a check because he is afraid Nikki will see the stub and come to the obvious conclusion...
...Mostly he masturbates, but sometimes he goes prowling for easy pickings...
...for a modern American, that usually means abandoning the Jewish or the Christian or even the kind-hearted nihilist pieties one grew up on...
...Chick's wife Vela--he admits to being a serial marrier, and she becomes his exwife in due course-bears a certain resemblance to Kogon in her brainy monstrosity...
...www.recordedbooks.com 83 he never had much use for it anyway...
...And then, still partially paralyzed and unable even to sign his name, he wrote a book...
...Without these keyhole glimpses of the whole story, the public selves of great men are but phantoms of their own devising...
...Chick seeks Ravelstein's counsel, and his friend tells him, "People can't be expected to live without love or the simulacrum of love...
...Knowing the worst about his dearest friend, Chick loves him all the sameindeed, reveres him for the nobility of heart that his failings do not extinguish...
...This is the best thing I've done for myself in a long time...
...He wanted [his students I to be singular...
...When his book makes him a millionaire and an international celebrity,, he revels in his wealth and status, buying up lots of the best everything-Persian rugs, crystal, paintings, a Szo,ooo watch, a $45o0 Parisian sport coat (on which he proceeds almost immediately to spill coffee)--and hobnobbing with Mrs...
...Doing so, they forget what a novel is, and overlook what a fine novel Ravelstein happens to be...
...But in the community that formed around him his role became, bit by bit, that of a father...
...He never forgot this conviction...
...I ! - - That's all there is to it...
...He dictated it over many months...
...The hero of Bellow's novel More Die of Heartbreak thinks that AIDS might be a condign punishment...
...They protest that Bloom did not have AIDS, that it was a bleeding stomach ulcer complicated by liver failure that killed him...
...Ravelstein was, somehow, in love with their late mother, and spoke of her with singular respect and admiration...
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...There is a good deal in these writings of Keynes's that is unfamiliar even to persons who know the public record well...
...I I I I Mail to: I I I I Subscriber Service I I P.O...
...It's like going to the theater...
...For the philosopher, a certain indifference applies to matters of the body and the social graces...
...After the philosophers, in Ravelstein's procession, came poets and statesmen...
...For as much as Bellow owes to the facts of Bloom's life, and of his own, he is after some larger truth...
...As death approaches, he confides to Chick, his sexual passions burn hotter than ever before...
...Ravelstein's exposition of the higher life wins him access to the merely high life...
...He didn't pay much attention to such things...
...Ravelstein with shouts of laughter showed me the clipping...
...From 1979 to i99a Bellow and Bloom presided together over graduate seminars in the Committee on Social Thought at the Universit...
...Ravelstein stuns Chick by insisting that Kogon is attracted to men, citing a graduate student's story that the tipsy Kogon once tried to steal a kiss: Nothing in this line was too improbable for [Ravelstein], but I failed in every attempt to visualize Rakhmiel kissing anyone...
...To have inspired such a book is almost as much a triumph as to have written it...
...I I I I Name: I I (Please Print) I ] Address: I I I ! I 1 City: I I I State: I I Zip: I I I Date of change: I I I I ! I VCAFRM i L, . . . . . . . . . . . . . ,J The American Spectator " July~August 2000 85...
...An experienced hostess would have spread newspapers under his chair...
...The novel Ravelstein, other friends and devotees of B]oom say bitterly, betrays that friendship...
...S o one can certainly see why some friends and admirers of Allan Bloom consider Bellow's novel to be a betrayal...
...Ravelstein is homosexual, and he pays a high rate indeed for the satisfaction of his creaturely needs: He gets MDS...
Vol. 33 • July 2000 • No. 6
