All great books are in conversation with one another, often asking many of the same fundamental questions, sometimes suggesting roughly similar answers, and occasionally doing so with knowing winks across the centuries. Plato’s Republic and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile are two such books, and since the latter was written with the former firmly in view, it is not surprising that both grapple with the same daunting challenge: how to educate free human beings, particularly in the crucial business of discerning between appearances and reality.
In the twentieth century, as it happened, both of these works were translated by Allan Bloom, a spirited, inspiring, and somewhat controversial scholar who became something of a legend in his own day at the University of Chicago. Given his reputation, however, it may seem surprising that his authoritative renderings of Plato’s subtle Greek and Rousseau’s extravagant French were remarkably, even ploddingly, literal. Bloom apparently wanted them that way. In the preface to his Republic translation, he described his work as “slavish” and “cumbersome,” made so, he claimed, to liberate students from “tyranny of the translator,” especially the one who is advancing an agenda. Discussing his version of Emile, Bloom reasoned that a translator cannot make the effort of understanding the book for the reader; instead, he can only get out of the way in order to make making the effort possible. He considered the resulting strangeness of his work a pedagogical stratagem aimed at challenging the modern mass reader—a type that Bloom both mocked and sought to uplift in his best-selling 1987 jeremiad, The Closing of the American Mind. In translation, Bloom as much as said, it takes a lot of work to help us see the real thing.
Fittingly, perhaps, the “translation” of Allan Bloom into the eponymous protagonist of Saul Bellow’s 2000 novel Ravelstein struck many of its readers as literal—far too literal. Book critics and scholars alike took it to be a straightforward roman à clef, even a sort of memoir, with Bloom as the protagonist Ravelstein and Bellow himself as the narrator Chick. The University of Chicago Magazine, with a certain cleverness one might associate with that institution, called it a “work of fact.” Critic D.T. Max’s review in the New York Times expressed the widely held sentiment that Bellow had betrayed his friend Bloom by publishing a salacious, gossipy book that aired too much dirty laundry. Ravelstein suggested that the culture-warring Bloom—feted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show, deriding relativism and defending the great books—was gay and died of complications from HIV. As Garry Wills put it, the book was a series of “cruel violations,” and “shockingly bad” to boot—“a fetid enclosure” worse than any closed minds that Bloom had railed against. Not to be outdone, Christopher Hitchens reached for Platonic metaphor to denounce Bellow’s fictional hatchet job: “Ravelstein, and Ravelstein, are shadows on the wall of Augie March’s cave.” More generous than Wills or Hitchens, Max concluded his review by adding that “Ravelstein may yet prove Bellow’s gift to Bloom. At the very least, it will raise interesting questions about the relationship between authors and their writing.”
Indeed. But for the past twenty-five years, these “interesting questions” have gone largely unasked, much less answered. While it is indisputable that specific details about Bloom and Bellow find their way into the book, the reduction of the novel to a memoir fails to address what it is really about: the story of a writer named Chick struggling to write a “Life of Ravelstein.” Chick is not one of the few American winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He never admits to teaching with Ravelstein, as Bellow did with Bloom, if indeed he regularly teaches at “the University” at all, which is left unclear. Chick is not even very familiar with Ravelstein’s ideas. He tellingly conflates Aristotle’s great-souled man with Aristotle’s tragic hero, and, before catching himself, he attributes the ideas of Plato’s Aristophanes to Aristophanes himself. And beyond such schoolboy errors, does anyone truly think that Bellow himself thought “Jerusalem and Athens are not my dish”? Chick, a minor novelist, is a Bellow diminuendus, comically debased. Ravelstein is Bloom blown up to epic, perhaps tragic, proportions. Ravelstein, like Aristotle’s great-souled man, is large, “nearly six and a half feet tall” and, like Oedipus (“swollen foot”), has one foot “three sizes bigger” than the other.
Abe Ravelstein, then, is not Bloom but a vehicle, in concert with Chick, for pursuing many of the concerns that animated Bloom’s life and work. If our model for reading Ravelstein is (somewhat understandably) more Augie March than Gulliver’s Travels, or even Plato’s Republic, we are failing to see the real thing.
The irony is that this very failure may well be one that comes from not spending enough time with the Republic or Emile and learning—perhaps guided by the Bloom translations—to think through the relationship of images to originals. And surely it is more than a little bit funny that Ravelstein has been misread in the way that Bloom believed (following his teacher Leo Strauss) we misread Plato: through a failure to attend to the literary form of the dialogue. Plato’s dialogues featured famous Athenians—Socrates, of course, but even his own brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus—but we don’t begin to interpret Plato without understanding that the dialogues are not transcriptions of conversations or proto-romans à clef but prose dramas with characters created by a skilled literary craftsman.
Funnily enough, Ravelstein offers a fairly clear explanation of why its own readers might miss the point. Chick and Ravelstein agree that “under the debris of modern ideas the world was still there to be rediscovered.” The “gray net of abstraction” covering the world, which simplifies and flattens like a bad translation, needs to be cut away before the “deep human need” to know can begin to be satisfied. Our age is not anti-intellectual, precisely, but overly abstract, even in its putative materialism. We do not live in the allegorical cave of the Republic but in what Strauss called the “cave beneath the Platonic cave.” The regular contradictions of human existence do not present themselves to us, because we hold beliefs that keep us from even seeking them out—the belief, for instance, that books, even “great” ones, are motivated by local concerns, are products of their age, rather than attempts to speak to certain timeless human fundamentals. So if we are not open to the possibility that some books might be great—a possibility we are repeatedly asked to consider in Ravelstein—we will be tempted to see Bellow’s novel as nothing other than an old-timer’s vindictive betrayal of a friend.
The meandering format of the book, its way of telling us more about Chick than Ravelstein, its mixing of anecdote with snippets of conversation and remarkable Bellow-esque portraiture, appears undisciplined. Chick, for example, shares Ravelstein’s preference for listening to “classical” music on “the original instruments” no fewer than four times. It begins with an “extended footnote” about Abraham Lincoln, H.L. Mencken, and William Jennings Bryan before getting around to Ravelstein—portraying him, triumphant, at Paris’s Hôtel de Crillon, celebrating his newfound fame and success in the rarefied company of Michael Jackson. One of the conversations eventually gets around to the question of how Chick might go about writing a biography of Ravelstein. Various models are considered—Plutarch, Aubrey, Macaulay, Boswell, and Chick’s own “after-supper-reminiscence manner”—before Chick advances a tentative thesis: “In approaching a man like Ravelstein, a piecemeal method is perhaps best.”
And, indeed, Ravelstein seems duly breezy or haphazard. On one level, the book tells the story of Abe’s last days, punctuated with vignettes and reminiscences, his death, and then Chick’s own brush with death and his attempt to write The Life. The book is broken into four uneven divisions, each marked by large, enigmatic tildes. Michael Davis, himself a distinguished student of Plato and Rousseau who studied with Bloom as an undergraduate, has observed that the first three sections follow the structure of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, first considering Ravelstein’s virtues—magnificence, a lover of fine things (Lanvin and Lalique) and magnanimity (“There was nothing of the average in Ravelstein’s life”)—before moving on to an account of the nature of the friendship between Chick and Ravelstein, and finally investigating Ravelstein’s love of wisdom, or philosophy. Davis might have added that these three sections also reflect the concerns of Bloom’s three major books: Closing, a deathbed composition, Love and Friendship, and the fully posthumous Giants and Dwarfs. In the fourth and final section, Ravelstein is dead, and the story centers on Chick and his new wife Rosamund, chronicling his near-death experience and wading away from—or beyond—the Greeks toward Judaism.
In other words, the apparently “piecemeal” approach inflates or exaggerates different facets of the human quest for the good life as seen through the exemplary life of Ravelstein. If Chick is perfectly honest in admitting he will “leave it to others” to comment on Ravelstein’s ideas, Bellow seems much more comfortable exploring Bloom’s. If the problem with the modern world is that moral virtue, friendship, philosophy, and faith no longer appear as live options to us, Ravelstein presents readers with a radical alternative: They are all still there if you know how to look. In learning to read this novel, we might inherit “a gift for reading reality—the impulse to put your loving face to it and press your hands against it.”
But Ravelstein is not simply a reactionary call to return to characteristically premodern ways of life. Ravelstein himself is not an uncomplicated model presented for edification and imitation—although we find out that his students do fall victim to just this temptation. He is a study in self-contradiction. Ravelstein “hated his own family” and encourages his students to abandon filial piety in order to learn how to think, but Ravelstein himself becomes a surrogate father to these same students. He pretends to be above the distractions of his day, but he loves the latest gadgets and is a slave to fashion. He is concerned with “Great Politics,” but this concern is expressed through the study of the great books and mediated through his gossipy, very personal relationships with his former students, some of whom just so happen to work in the White House. The magnification of these contradictions reveals that self-aggrandizement, the pursuit of “greatness,” runs the risk of disregarding the natural limitations of human beings.
Chick serves as a somewhat clumsy foil to Ravelstein. The latter represents poetry, the former philosophy; Chick Jerusalem, Ravelstein Athens; Chick loves the particulars, Ravelstein the universals; Chick is a modern, a liberal; Ravelstein is attuned to the ancients and, as a new generation of students might say, sort of “based.” While Ravelstein is a terror to his neighbors, blaring classical music at all hours and then berating them when they complain, Chick goes out of his way to acknowledge the dignity of his building superintendent by lugging his own trash to the dumpster. Ravelstein teaches that all the great texts have “esoteric significance,” but for Chick “[t]he simplest of human beings is…esoteric and radically mysterious.” And so while Ravelstein sometimes “writes people off,” Chick practices a novelistic “due process.” In all, Ravelstein has a “large-scale mental life,” while Chick is attentive to particularity, to the details. But Ravelstein also resists simply equating Chick with any sort of “answer.” One of the minor-scale dramas of the book involves Chick’s failure to recognize both that he is being cheated on by his then-wife Vela and also that he refuses to see beyond the details of daily life. It is only with Ravelstein’s help that Chick is eventually able to see that his friend Radu Grielescu is using their friendship to distract from his nefarious wartime association with the fascist Romanian Iron Guard. Not only does Chick rely on Ravelstein for a “vocabulary” but also on Ravelstein’s wider perspective and moral clarity on the issue of Chick’s own relationship to his Judaism.
Nevertheless, Chick is not theoretically helpless. When we become too familiar with the data of experience, he says, “[o]ur way of organizing the data which rush by in gestalt style—that is, in increasingly abstract forms—speeds up experiences into a dangerously topsy-turvy fast-forward comedy.” Art presents us with a means of slowing down the “chaotic acceleration” of our experience of the world. Chick therefore preserves the phenomena as “pictures,” and the goal is to express the world with fidelity, even if you know they’re only images. Chick’s love of these “pictures,” which might even offer us a glimpse of immortality, his attempt to grasp the “occult mystery” of the world, is what keeps him, in Ravelstein’s estimation, “too inward.” He has an aesthetic appreciation of the interesting, but the particulars risk crowding out what truly matters. If the novel has a “perspective,” it is that a sort of “friendship” between these approaches is required to encounter the things themselves, to become aware of our deepest conflicts and contradictions, and to therefore become capable of seeing the world as it really exists. Through the friendship of Chick and Ravelstein, the novel resists producing another “gray net of abstraction,” and shows that judgment cannot be reduced to a formula.
If Chick is suspicious about Ravelstein’s reliance on the “correct words” to reappropriate the world, Bellow takes a different tack. The book (I’m sorry) blooms with coinages and strangely novel descriptions. The private vocabulary that Chick and Ravelstein develop—and which Chick and Rosamund then use in their marriage—sheds new light on the phenomena of everyday life that might otherwise fade away. The originality of its descriptions helps bring us back to a world that might otherwise be slipping away.
The greatness of Ravelstein is thus not the source of the greatness of Ravelstein. Rather, its greatness might come from the ambition of its goal, a goal at once radical and conservative, to help us read the “occult gift” of the world, to “reopen” what we thought was closed. At one point, Chick, quoting Strauss without attribution, notes that the heart of things is on the surface of things. Ravelstein wants us to see that this surface is worthy of our attention. This, I think, it does through its abundant oddness. Odd is indeed the first word of the book. Ravelstein is self-evidently odd—odd enough to make us aware of our own peculiarity, like the Jackson Park parrots to which he is compared. Oddities, the little snags in the smooth fabric of daily life, make us pay attention, and by paying attention we can learn that the world, and the people in it, the books they write, are worthy of our love.
Our world, even more than the one Bellow left behind, calls on us constantly to judge, evaluate, weigh, and discern. This becomes tiring. When we are required to make judgments all the time, we tend to see things as always the same. There is simply too much to take in. What’s the alternative? The real problem with social media—too much information, too many calls for judgment, too often—is its frenzied, real-time extension of the problem Kierkegaard saw with the growing historical consciousness of the nineteenth century: Overwhelmed by the momentousness of human affairs, we think of ourselves simply as spectators rather than human beings. Today, we are always succumbing to the demand to connect everything, everything, everything that happens to this history in real time, to update our personal historical ledgers, being sure to register our approval or disapproval in piecemeal fashion. In this way, even human life becomes more about ideas than it is about living. Ravelstein gently shows us that learning to see the real thing is the opposite of being a spectator of your own life. As Bloom said of his translations, it makes making the effort possible.
At twenty-five, Ravelstein is too old to be a contemporary book and maybe too new to be judged a great one. But its goal of helping us learn to see, to attend, puts it in conversation with Plato and Rousseau, both of whom were not only philosophers but also writers preoccupied with literary form. Ravelstein seems to speak to a problem that its author could not have known would be so acute a quarter century later. Reading a novel can’t solve the problem of the loss of the world to abstraction and distraction, but insofar as the problem is intellectual, an intellectual response is required. “You don’t easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death,” reads the last line of the novel. Using the same odd syntax, I would say that we cannot easily give up a novel like Ravelstein to obscurity.