Twilight Triumphs
ALLEN, BROOKE
On Fiction Twilight Triumphs By Brooke Allen That at the age of 68, and with 25 books behind him, Philip Roth still has so much to say and still says it as well as he does in his new...
...Roth's protagonist is Zuckerman's neighbor Coleman Silk, a 71 -year-old classicist, longtime Athena professor and, in the last 16 years of his career, its high-powered dean of faculty...
...Many liberals might find these activities sinister by definition, but Bellow simply offers them as examples of the understandable pleasure Ravelstein takes in finding himself at the very focus of power...
...The book closes with Ravelstein's death, Chick's gropings with the idea of his own mortality, and his acceptance of the thought as he finally shoulders the task of writi ng about his departed friend...
...The absent students, it turns out, are black, and Coleman's use of the word "spooks" is taken as a racist slur...
...Nor was depression tolerated...
...His brother Walt— who as a community leader and a pioneer in black education would go on to have the very career Coleman renounced—forbade him to come near the family again...
...The educator Ravelstein, unlike the artist Chick, is a social being...
...He was like that—the pleasure of a moment consumed him,' observes Chick...
...If that is so, it went way over my head...
...The fictionalized Bloom is named Abe Ravelstein, while Bellow, the Boswell, is a Chicago novelist some 15 years older, called Chick...
...Coleman has two principal foes: the insane Les Farley and the confused, enraged Delphine Roux...
...Readers who pick up The Human Stain because of a prurient interest in Anatole Broyard will soon develop another, and perhaps greater, interest in Coleman Silk...
...As the novel opens Chick has met up with Ravelstein in Paris, where he is thoroughly enjoying his new wealth: lording it at the Crillon instead of his usual f leabag on the rue du Dragon, dining in impossibly expensive restaurants, shopping on the rue St...
...The Human Stain is set against the background of the outrage and titillation that spread across the country in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal...
...There was nothing of the average in Ravelstein's life...
...This is Bloom in his final years, after the succès fou of his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind...
...Roth succeeds surprisingly well with Les, considering what a hackneyed figure the crazed Vietnam vet has become over the last three decades...
...Now this was where Ravelstein had come in...
...The novel completes a trilogy that began with American Pastoral and continued with I Married a Communist...
...you are, in the end, no longer moved by any face, or any person...
...He did not accept dullness and boredom...
...Appropriate...
...The Human Stain is as fresh, as angry and as bitterly amused as his early fiction...
...And whom is he to use as a model...
...Roth goes through the motions of making Delphine human...
...Taken as a group, the three volumes provide a rough picture of American social and political history during the course of Roth's adult life...
...Ravelstein loves luxury, but doesn't really rate it higher than it deserves...
...The campus, like the larger culture, is in fact reactionary, no matter what self-flattering guise it chooses to dress up its reaction...
...It vibrates with mockery, disapproval, poetry, and a healthy dose of personal vindictiveness that one would be tempted to dismiss as unworthy if it weren't so funny...
...Instead, the morality police, led by the trendy young Parisian Chair of the Languages and Literature Department...
...He is even rather comical...
...He had no tolerance of 'this insight bullshit' and preferred wit or even downright cruelty to friendly, well-meant interpretations of the conventional, liberal kind...
...It is mid-1998, "in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism—which had replaced Communism as the prevailing threat to the country's security—was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged President and a brash, smitten 21 -year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America's oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony...
...One scene that has Les visiting a Chinese restaurant along with his veterans' support group, all of whom nearly go ballistic at the sight of the gook waiters and cooks, is on the level of Roth's very funniest...
...no cheap concessions, no popularizing...
...ZUCKERMAN befriends Coleman two years after his ouster from Athena, which was quickly followed by the stress-induced death of his wife Iris...
...He realized he could "pass" and began a new life as a white student at NYU...
...Honoré, always bursting with enthusiasm...
...I Married a Communist takes on the McCarthyism of the early '50s, American Pastoral the radicalism 15 years later...
...At Howard he'd discovered that he wasn't just a nigger...
...It may be said, without ruining the story, that the novel does not end happily...
...rejuvenated by Viagra, he is having an affair with an illiterate, tragic young woman half his age, whose children died in a fire and whose estranged husband, a deranged Vietnam veteran, constantly threatens her...
...Both books are tales of old age set in an academic milieu...
...The luxury of these lives disquieted so by the inappropriate comportment of Clinton and Silk...
...It's as though Babbitt had never been written...
...She is lonely, confused, sexually frustrated, intimidated by her mother's high-powered career—but in the end she is little more than a cartoon version of a pretentious French intellectual...
...The thing had been done quickly but in real earnest...
...Each describes a moment of national hysteria...
...This was an ambitious, highly educated family, and Coleman received all of its advantages and suffered all of its expectations...
...He forced you to reopen what you had closed...
...All he'd ever wanted, from earliest childhood on, was to be free: not black, not even white—just on his own and free...
...He presents himself as a Jew, and is a professor of the whitest subject in the curriculum on the whitest campus in America, but he was born into a black family in East Orange, New Jersey...
...But in its deviation from the norms of propriety—71-year-old grandfathers aren't supposed to sleep around, for God's sake, much less with menials who can't read—it outrages the campus social arbiters, radical as they may think themselves...
...He turned your face again toward the original...
...Who would begrudge him his fun, after a lifetime on an academic salary...
...He lived by his ideas...
...His initial downfall occurs when, taking attendance in one of his classes, he asks about two students who have never shown up...
...Overnight the raw I was part of a we with all of the we's overbearing solidity, and he didn't want anything to do with it or with the next oppressive we that came along either...
...with the American individualist's resistance to the coercions of a censorious community—Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau come to mind...
...Here in America either it's Faunia Farley or it's Monica Lewinsky...
...Delphine is funny too, but even as we laugh at her we are aware that Roth is laying it on too thick...
...You finally leave home, the Ur of we, and you find another we...
...Ravelstein, in middle age, is for the first time in his life "very rich...
...He had gone public with his ideas...
...His company is bracing, challenging...
...It is a fear he does not give in to in sickness anymore than he did in health, when he treated his body "like a vehicle—a motorbike that he raced at top speed along the rim of the Grand Canyon...
...he was a Negro as well...
...He is truly terrifying, yet sympathetic—a big dumb friendly guy who was ruined, emotionally and morally, by his experiences...
...Back in Chicago, Ravelstein falls prey to a series of debilitating illnesses...
...Then of course you see nothing original, nothing new...
...As Chick puts it, "Since we are so often called upon for judgments, we naturally coarsen them by constant use...
...Coleman Silk is a tougher, smarter and worthier tragic hero than either of them, but even he is not quite smart enough to keep from being destroyed by the ironies of his historical moment...
...It's not as though Marx or Freud or Darwin or Stalin or Hitler or Mao had never happened...
...The affair between Coleman Silk and Faunia Farley is, despite appearances to the contrary, a match between equals...
...Do they exist or are they spooks...
...There is something of Samuel Johnson, indeed, in the didactic, eccentric, awkward Ravelstein, a similarity Bellow plays on rather consciously...
...Aubrey...
...Does anyone know these people...
...With cruel dispatch, he is hounded out of his job in a crusade spearheaded by the very element—the young, the hip and the radical—he had been responsible for bringing to Athena...
...Some of Allan Bloom's admirers have complained that Ravelstein is actually an attack on Bloom, a barbed deprecation masquerading as affectionate homage...
...Roth sets his novel at a smallish liberal arts institution called Athena (think Amherst or Skidmore), situated in a picturesque town near Nathan Zuckerman's place of self-imposed exile in the Berkshires...
...She is a type that the author and those who enjoy him find just a little too easy to make fun of...
...To his mother, "her younger son was wrapped like a gift in every ameliorating dream...
...He is a powerfully imagined and deeply appealing character, a man "who decides to forge a distinct historical destiny, who sets out to spring the historical lock, and who does so, brilliantly succeeds at altering his personal lot, only to be ensnared by the history he hasn't quite counted on: the history that isn't yet history, the history that the clock is now ticking off, the history proliferating as I write, accruing a minute at a time and grasped better by the future than it ever will be by us...
...It's no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think—to say it in your own words, without compromising...
...Bellow describes Bloom's cachet among conservative politicians, his meals at the Reagan White House and at Chequers with Margaret Thatcher, his top secret political gossip with former students who have risen to high office in journalism, at the State Department or the National Security Agency...
...The very thought of this task torments Chick, bringing home, as it does, the imminence of Ravelstein's demise...
...Boswell...
...That has been a recurrent theme of the trilogy...
...His father's death during Coleman's first year at Howard was the catalyst...
...As a force, propriety is protean, a dominatrix in a thousand disguises, infiltrating, if need be, as civic responsibility, WASP dignity, women's rights, black pride, ethnic allegiance, or emotion-laden Jewish ethical sensitivity...
...IN Ravelstein, Saul Bellow gives us an account of his long friendship with Allan Bloom, the famous and controversial University of Chicago professor...
...Through the narrating voice of Nathan Zuckerman (as unsatisfactory a device as it was in Roth's two previous novels, for how can Zuckerman know all he claims...
...During that time Coleman cut a formidable figure on campus, both respected and feared...
...Coleman, however, hated the university and all it stood for...
...To me the book appears to be exactly what it is presented as: a charming farewell to a much-missed friend...
...Fear of death is unworthy, the fatal limitation of the bourgeois soul...
...it is evident that he has AIDS...
...It is a spot, comments Zuckerman, Roth's longtime literary alter ego, about "as harmless and pretty as any on earth...
...Since Coleman is no longer associated with the college, one might think he can do as he likes with another consenting adult...
...we are shown, in a long flashback...
...Indeed, it might appear something of a miracle, except that Saul Bellow, who is 84, has just issued Ravelstein (Viking, 234 pp., $24.95), his most engaging work in years...
...but it is a witty, humane and loving book from one of our greatest contemporary writers...
...It is not without its own share of pertinent cultural baggage, though, as the region once "most identified...
...Silk's former existence...
...Telling his mother was "the most brutal thing he'd ever done...
...Plutarch...
...A Howard Negro at that...
...Here she is, for example, reflecting on her wardrobe and accessories, carefully chosen for effect: "Even her one piece of jewelry, the large ring she'd placed that morning on the middle finger of her left hand, her sole decorative ornament, had been selected for the sidelight it provided on the intellectual she was, one for whom enjoying the esthetic surface of life openly, nondefensively, with her appetite and connoisseurship undisguised, was nonetheless subsumed by a lifelong devotion to scholarly endeavor...
...He saw the fate awaiting him andhe wasn't having it...
...He despises the institution of the family and requires his chosen students, his "set," to forget whatever ideas and preconceptions their families have furnished them with...
...The current code word for reining in most any deviation from the wholesome guidelines and thereby making everybody 'comfortable...
...Even as a child his brilliance was evident...
...both feature, to a greater or lesser extent, characters based on recently deceased intellectual stars...
...Coleman is, in short, that classic American figure, the convinced individualist who reinvents himself and escapes the prison of his past...
...The irony is that Coleman Silk, unbeknown to anyone including his wife and children, is himself black...
...On Fiction Twilight Triumphs By Brooke Allen That at the age of 68, and with 25 books behind him, Philip Roth still has so much to say and still says it as well as he does in his new novel, The Human Stain (Houghton Mifflin, 368 pp., $26.00), is astonishing...
...But shedding the shackles required a ruthlessness that nearly negated the benefits...
...Delphine Roux, are out to get him...
...After he graduated as class valedictorian, it was planned that he would go on to Howard "to become a doctor, to meet a light-skinned girl there from a good Negro family, to marry and settle down and have children who would in turn go to Howard...
...American Pastoral's Swede Lvov was kind and intelligent, but had an innocence that left him fatally exposed...
...Roth is clearly enjoying himself...
...There is something of Muriel Spark's Miss Jean Brodie, too, and while one might describe Ravelstein as the portrait of a friendship—Bellow himself might even describe it that way— it strikes me as more the portrait of a gifted teacher...
...I Married a Communist's Ira Ringold was ambitious and thrusting, but too stupid to protect himself...
...The retired dean will not be allowed to enjoy his Aschenbachian madness, his entirely inappropriate reconnection with the remnants of the sexual brute he once was, temporarily happy though it makes him...
...His youngest son Mark sees him, without really understanding why, as a destroyer, and spends his life in a futile search for meaning—primarily, ironically enough, in Judaism...
...he had made it his business to drag the college into the contemporary world by ruthlessly hacking out the dead wood, hiring Young Turks from Yale and Princeton, and turning Athena into one of the country's more prestigious institutions...
...Assuming he will precede Chick to the grave, Ravelstein has long been urging his friend to write a memoir of him after his death...
...Even his own children have been blighted by the lie they sense yet don't know...
...Is Ravelstein's enthusiastic wallow in luxury supposed to be a character flaw...
...He had written a book—difficult but popular—a spirited, intelligent, warlike book, and it had sold and was still selling in both hemispheres and on both sides of the equator...
...When Coleman decided to marry as a white it meant severing ties with his family...
...Having spilled espresso over the front of a brand-new $4,500 cream-colored Lanvin jacket, he is not unduly put out, and merely amused by Chick's evident distress...
...Coleman's biggest secret is still a secret, but his smaller one is becoming common knowledge...
...Ravelstein is a little slight, a little disjointed...
...He declines physically but not mentally, and in a series of flashbacks we watch him exercise his gift for friendship as he guides Chick out of a bad marriage and prods him, with more hope than confidence, into a fuller engagement with society...
...What place in America is more sanctimonious these days than a college campus...
...The Human Stain is, in part, an imagined life of the late Anatole Broyard...
...The Human Stain is the tale of another determined individualist who finds himself up against the tyranny of decorum...
...Coleman is a specialist in Greek tragedy after all, and enough references are dropped to Agamemnon and Menelaus, among others, to make the reader thoroughly conscious of Coleman's status as a tragic hero, with all his requisite great gifts balanced by his great flaw...
...Ravelstein possesses not only the charisma but the ruthlessness the job demands...
Vol. 83 • May 2000 • No. 2
