The professor we all wish we had

Ravelstein
By Saul Bellow
Penguin Books, 232 pages
Available at Powerbooks

Saul Bellow may be the most-respected, multi-awarded novelist (he won both the Nobel and Pulitzer for literature) to go virtually ignored by Generation X. Ask most kids today to name a Saul Bellow book, and you’re likely to get a blank look, or a sullen shrug. But Bellow was big news in the ‘60s and ‘70s: he was one of the literary lions of those decades, writing about the American Jewish experience with more depth, say, than Norman Mailer or Philip Roth. While his contemporaries (John Updike, John Fowles, John Barth) embraced stylistic leaps that led to metafiction, Bellow was content to hang tough with characters and good old-fashioned story. Still, the 80-something writer’s output has gradually slowed to a trickle as his health went into decline.

So the appearance of last year’s Ravelstein comes as a welcome surprise: a full-length novel from this master of character and detail, full of humor and thoughtful insight. The title character is a brilliant but ailing humanities scholar at a Midwestern U.S. university who has written a best-selling book about why liberal education has failed in America. With his considerable book royalties, Ravelstein lives like a king: buying $5,000 suits, the best stereo equipment in the world, the finest wines. His extravagance matches his intellectual breadth: he has written a critical book that other academics hate, precisely because they can’t refute its claims.

But Ravelstein, as we learn from his friend and memoirist, Chick, is also dying – of AIDS. So the book becomes an elegy, as well as a celebration of a burning intellectual light, and how its brilliance crosses from one world to the next.

Is Bellow actually writing about his friend Allan Bloom, the University of Chicago professor who wrote The Closing of the American Mind, and who died several years back? Most likely. Bloom’s conservative bestseller took to task the softmindedness of liberal arts education these days, emphasizing the hard-core classics instead. In Bellow’s hands, Abe Ravelstein is a complex character, an irascible scholar as likely to tell a vaudevillian joke as discuss the metaphysics of Plato’s Symposium. Above all, he does not suffer fools gladly:

He did not court students by put-ting on bull-session airs or try to scandalize them – entertain them, actually, as histrionic lecturers do – by shouting "Shit!" or "F**k!" There was nothing at all of the campus wildman about him. His frailties were visible. He obsessively knew what it was to be sunk by his faults or his errors. But before he went under he would describe Plato’s Cave to you. He would tell you about your soul, already thin, and sinking fast – faster and faster.

The task for Chick, the narrator, is to write a biographical sketch of his mentor, one which will form the basis of a memoir. Chick stalls and stalls until the task seems impossible; meanwhile, he recounts the failure of his own marriage, insecurities about his own place in the intellectual firmament, and a near-fatal encounter with a baked fish at a Caribbean restaurant. This may not seem the ingredients for a spell-binding novel, but a spell is actually what Ravelstein weaves: at its center is a boisterous character for whom life is a series of philosophical questions, even challenges.

While Chick comes off as a bit of a schmuck (Is this Bellow’s view of himself?), Ravelstein is presented with all warts grandly visible: he is the sort who will dribble espresso on a new silk tie and never notice or care about the cost. Morally, perhaps, one could argue that AIDS is the dues being paid for such a careless libertine lifestyle as Ravelstein’s. But Bellow, a large-minded and large-hearted writer, does not dwell in a simplistic moral universe. Ravelstein is a life-force, and death itself is to be embraced head-on. The only regret, and an interesting metaphysical question as both biographer and subject face mortality, is this: What happens to the mental life when we die?

He had, however, asked me what I imagined death would be like – and when I said the pictures would stop he reflected very seriously on my answer, came to a full stop, and considered what I might mean by this. No one can give up on the pictures – the pictures might, yes, they might continue. I wonder if anyone believes that the grave is all there is. The pictures must continue.

Along the way, we are treated to a series of dialogues that may not be as warm and fuzzy as Tuesdays with Morrie, but could rank next to the philosophical inquiries of Socrates written down by Plato. One central question for Ravelstein, looking back on the last 100 years, is this: "Why does the 20th century underwrite such destruction?" Not only the near elimination of Jews, but millions of others through wars and ethnic cleansings: How could humanity survive so many lapses? How could it push on, or hope to progress, in the face of such mounting atrocities? Bellow makes it clear this is not simply a "Jewish" question, but a question every person should consider. (In fact, it is the main question that a liberal arts education should try to address.)

Throughout his "false-start" memoir, Chick does manage his biographical sketch: we get enough of Ravelstein – his mannerisms, his vocal tics, his physical presence – to claim we know him. What comes through is a character who radiates intellectual heat, the kind of professor we all wish we had had, and perhaps feared a little in real life: the kind who could look into your soul, and instantly size up your grip on those eternal questions about life. We were lucky if we could save up a little of that heat for later, to light our own way. With Ravelstein, Bellows answers his own character’s question: Yes, the pictures do continue, long after one has closed the pages of the book.