A week before the Tanenhaus article, The New York Times published an interview in which Bellow admitted to mixed feelings about the revelations in Ravelstein. On the one hand, he told the interviewer, Dinitia Smith, he confessed to “a feeling he [Bloom] would mind” the exposure of his homosexuality. On the other hand, Bloom had “asked him to write a memoir of him that was, in the words of the novel, ‘without softeners or sweeteners,’ ” and, despite his public silence about his sexuality, “he didn’t have anything to hide.”7 The Smith interview was not the fullest and most influential of prepublication “outings” of Bellow’s novel. On April 16, The New York Times Magazine published an article entitled “With Friends Like Saul Bellow,” accompanied by a photographic montage: the left half of Bloom’s face, the right half of Bellow’s face, and between them a typewriter with a sheet of paper bearing a drawing of a dagger.
The author of the article, D. T. Max, later the biographer of David Foster Wallace, sketches Bloom’s history, the story of the Bloom-Bellow friendship, and the genesis of the controversy surrounding The Closing of the American Mind. The disclosures in Ravelstein, Max claims, have “created a furor,” in particular over the suggestion that Bloom’s death, “ascribed in his obituaries to internal bleeding and liver failure,” was attributable to AIDS. Is Ravelstein, Max asks, “an act of friendship or of betrayal?” To answer this question, Max interviewed a number of Bloom’s close friends and ex-pupils, including Bellow, Nathan Tarcov, and Werner Dannhauser, a student of Bloom’s and a fellow Straussian and political philosopher. Bellow had sent Dannhauser a partial draft of the novel, and Dannhauser (the model in part for Ravelstein’s friend Morris Herbst) had objected to its inclusion of “too many details about Bloom’s private life: ‘Did my objections register?’ Dannhauser remembered with an unhappy laugh. ‘Yes, but he decided to do it anyway.’ ” Dannhauser told Max that Bloom had been “wary of being written about” but that “over time, [he] gave up his secrets. ‘When Allan liked someone, he wasn’t very calculating.’ ” Among the secrets Bloom gave up to Bellow, the novel suggests, was that, like Abe Ravelstein, he “relished louche encounters, the fishy and the equivocal” (p. 31), also thought “a lot about those pretty boys in Paris” (p. 138).
Nathan Tarcov told Max, as he told me, that he “doesn’t believe Bloom died of AIDS. Nathan was Bloom’s medical executor and present during his final days. ‘The word AIDS was never mentioned when Alan died….I think I would have known.’ ” Max also spoke to Bloom’s doctor, Nicholas Davidson, who signed Bloom’s death certificate, which makes no mention of AIDS or HIV. When asked about the cause of death by Max, Dr. Davidson answered that it was “pretty much irrelevant”; Bloom was a man who “was in heart failure, kidney failure….The body was winding down.”8 All Michael Wu said to Max of Ravelstein’s death was “It’s fiction, not a biography.” In Nathan Tarcov’s interview with me in 2008, he called the suggestion that Bloom died of AIDS “a factual error,” but he admitted that Bloom had been HIV-positive. He “does not know” whether there was any connection between Bloom’s HIV and his liver failure. He also offered a “correction” to his statements at the time of Bloom’s death. “I will admit now, sixteen years later, that my publicly contradicting that [the suggestion that Bloom was HIV-positive]…was in a way my substitution for expressing my disgust at the portrayal of Nikki, which I did not want to talk publicly about….There was at least one article in The New York Times [Max’s article] that said it was obviously based on Michael Wu.”9
The question of whether Bloom died of AIDS, which is of importance to accounts of Bellow’s life if not to Ravelstein the novel, is further complicated by the correspondence between Bellow and Dannhauser, correspondence not available to Max. According to a letter Bellow wrote to Dannhauser on October 6, 1999, after Dannhauser had read a Ravelstein draft and registered his objections, Bellow “promised to eliminate what you thought to be objectionable material and I wrote a revised version.” The fate of this version he goes on to describe:
It took quite a lot of doing and the doing went against the grain. When I was done the results were highly unsatisfactory; what was lacking was the elasticity provided by sin. In the midst of this lengthy, time-consuming and ultimately sterile procedure I remembered how displeased Bloom had been with The Dean’s December. He objected to the false characterization of Alexandra and he didn’t spare me one bit. But now the shoe is on the other foot and I saw no reason why I should do in Ravelstein what Allan had so strongly objected to in the earlier novel. After all, I was trying to satisfy Allan’s wishes, and I couldn’t have it both ways—I couldn’t be both truthful and camouflaged. So I did as I think he would have wished me to do. And I know I am going to alienate a lot of my Straussian friends. Some of these old friends I can well afford to lose, but you are not in that number….Believe me, none of this is literary frivolity. I have taken the whole matter with great—the greatest—seriousness.10
Bellow’s letter to Dannhauser began: “It’s about time I heard from you.” In his undated reply, Dannhauser, too, laments the silence between them. His problem had not been with the revelation of Bloom’s homosexuality, but with the suggestion that Bloom died of AIDS. Given “how hard he [Bloom] tried to keep the AIDS details secret,” Dannhauser writes, it is difficult to credit Bellow’s claim that revealing them in Ravelstein is “what he would have wanted me to do.” The letter ends with the hope that they can soon meet up, perhaps when Dannhauser comes to Boston College to lecture on Strauss and Bloom.11
Several questions are raised by Dannhauser’s letter. It is possible that “the AIDS details” were kept from Nathan Tarcov, his medical executor, not only by Bloom but by the physicians, acting on Bloom’s orders. Another possibility is that Tarcov was himself honoring Bloom’s wishes by denying the story about AIDS. If Dannhauser is correct about Bellow’s knowing “how hard [Bloom] tried to keep the AIDS details secret,” then Bellow, for all the love and admiration he felt for Bloom, could be accused of “betraying” him. In his interview with Max, Bellow admitted, as Max puts it, that “Bloom had been oblique about his illness, as he was oblique about many things. He had never spoken to Bellow about his having H.I.V. or AIDS. ‘I don’t know if he died of AIDS, really,’ Bellow admitted. ‘It was just my impression that he may have.’ ”12 This was also the impression of other close friends. According to Jonathan Kleinbard, “Near the end he [Bloom] would kiss Joan [Kleinbard’s wife] on the lips.” Kleinbard asked the doctor if this was okay, and the doctor told him not to worry—an answer open to interpretation. That fear of AIDS lay behind the question is clear.
It was this fear that Bellow had underestimated, along with religious and other objections to homosexuality. “Where he had erred,” he told Max, “was in misjudging people’s sensitivities about homosexuality and AIDS. ‘You know, I’ve discovered that this is a very itchy subject, and the people carry over attitudes more appropriate to the Middle Ages.’ ” Among those who carried over such attitudes were influential Straussians, the most controversial of whom was Harry V. Jaffa, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, where Strauss taught briefly after leaving the University of Chicago. Jaffa and Bloom had co-authored a book, Shakespeare’s Politics (1964), dedicated “to Leo Strauss our teacher,” but they grew apart in the 1970s. Jaffa was a prolific scholar, best known for an acclaimed account of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the author also of studies of natural law, Aristotle and Aquinas, the American Revolution, and the Declaration of Independence. He had been a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater and was the author of the slogan: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” A friend of William F. Buckley, Jr., and a frequent contributor to Buckley’s magazine, the National Review, he was a key figure in forging links between secular intellectual conservatives and Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists.
One such link concerned attitudes to
homosexuality, consistently referred to by Jaffa as “sodomy.” In the fall of 1988, Jaffa published a lengthy review of The Closing of the American Mind in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, a Straussian journal numbering among its general and consulting editors, including deceased editors, Strauss himself, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott, Arnaldo Momigliano, and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., of Harvard, a friend of the Bellows in Boston. After applauding Bloom for his stance on the evils of relativism, feminism, and sexual promiscuity, Jaffa laments the absence of any mention of “the so-called ‘gay rights’ movement,” which he calls “the most radical and sinister challenge, not merely to sexual morality, but to all morality.”13 For Jaffa, “Nature is the ground of all morality, but maleness and femaleness is the ground of nature….The so-called ‘gay rights’ movement is then the ultimate repudiation of nature, and therewith the ground of morality….This has constituted the great moral crisis of the eighties on American campuses, and Bloom is almost entirely silent about it.” Jaffa then turns to AIDS, which he sees as a boon to opponents of sodomy:
The chronology of the AIDS epidemic corresponds precisely with this public movement to establish sodomy and lesbianism as a recommended lifestyle. In nothing has the power of relativism—and the disgrace of American higher education—manifested itself more than in its endorsement of homosexuality. But whatever the attitude of the educational authorities, God and nature have exacted terrible retribution. This lifestyle has proved to be a deathstyle….Thanks to AIDS then, we have a little breathing time to assert the true arguments—the “enriching certitudes” (as in the Nicomachean Ethics), not merely Bloom’s “humanizing doubts.” Morality must be seen, as Aristotle sees it, as a means to implement the desire for happiness, and not merely as a restraint upon the desire for pleasure. The arguments must be made not only as to how one may avoid a bad death, but how one can pursue a good life. But one will not find those arguments in The Closing of the American Mind.14
Jaffa was the most combative Straussian to hold these views, but he was not alone in doing so (for Harvey Mansfield, testifying in 1993 against gay-rights statutes in Colorado, homosexual sex is “shameful,” and homosexuality, if unchecked, is likely to “undermine human civilization”15). For whatever reason, Bloom was not prepared to defend his sexual proclivities against the views of men like Jaffa and Mansfield.16 He showed little public interest in forming, or opposing, political alliances with the Christian right, preferring to influence politics by placing his students in government (which is true also of Ravelstein, who loved “to have the men he had trained appointed to important positions” [pp. 57–58]). When Bellow expressed regret at having “exposed” Bloom in Ravelstein and admitted to feeling a “sense of neglected responsibility and even recklessness on my part,” he was admitting that he had underestimated the homophobia not merely of a general or exoteric audience but of a Straussian or esoteric one. “I didn’t mean any harm to Allan,” he told Max. “He was so open about himself that you never thought of it as being harmful.”
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JANIS BELLOW SIDED WITH Dannhauser and Tarcov about disclosing details of Bloom’s sexuality. In abandoning his revised version, Bellow was overriding her reservations as well as theirs. In retrospect, in “Rosamund and Ravelstein: The Discandying of a Creator’s Confection,” an essay of 2015, what bothers Janis more than the use of “details about Bloom’s private life” is Bellow’s openness with Max about their truth to life. “Rather than wait for critics to out the writer who had scandalously outed a dear friend, Saul agreed to speak to a reporter.” She quotes the passage in Max’s article in which Bellow calls Bloom “in some sense a great man” and admits that he “wanted to get him down on paper.”
A handful of words, and instead of protecting himself, his friend, and his book, the author demolished the wall separating novel from memoir. Saul threw his own dynamite stick at the roman à clef. How delicious: these weren’t characters, they were people, and more to the point, famous people with dirty secrets and compromising illnesses. No one felt obliged to wear kid gloves when mining the wreckage for juicy bits.17
Bellow himself came to accept this view of where he had been mistaken, expressing regret for the New York Times interview in a letter to Martin Amis of February 7, 2000. In Ravelstein, he admits, “the mixture of fact and fiction has gotten out of hand.”
There are other elements besides, because the facts are so impure. There’s fact and then there is journalistic fact with its usual accents. You can even see the journalists transforming fact into scandal and, towards the top, scandal lapsing over into myth, moving into the medieval territory reserved for plague. I was not prepared to hear a leper’s bell ring at the crossroads of affection and eccentric charm.
It seems that many people knew the truth about Allan. If not the pure truth then the bendable, versatile kind that academic politics is familiar with. So I found myself challenged by fanatical people. I discovered very soon that Allan had enemies who were preparing to reveal that he had died of AIDS. At this point I lost my head: when the New York Times telephoned to have it out with me I fell apart—I was unable to outsmart the journalists. So here I am, the author of a tribute which has been transformed into one of those civilized disasters no one can be prepared for.
Bellow did make some slight changes in deference to Dannhauser’s and Janis’s reservations. These were listed by Max in his article: “Ravelstein and Nikki’s sexual connection was now just implied. The phrase ‘He was H.I.V.-positive, he was dying from it’ had been changed to ‘He was H.I.V.-positive, he was dying of complications from it.’ The words ‘from H.I.V.’ had been excised from the sentence ‘And not only his death from H.I.V., but a good many other deaths as well.’ The phrase ‘Abe was taking the common drug prescribed for AIDS’ had become ‘Abe was taking the common drug prescribed for his condition.’ ” None of these changes obscures the fact that Ravelstein dies of AIDS.18
By the time of the book’s publication on April 24, 2000, Bellow was only marginally more consistent in explaining its character than he had been to D. T. Max, or so an interview of April 24 in Time magazine suggests. Back in place, at least at the start, was the wall between novel and memoir. The interviewer, Paul Gray, asks Bellow about the notion “that his new novel is principally an outing or an exposé”:
This is a problem that writers of fiction always have to face in this country. People are literal minded, and they say, “Is this true? If it is true, is it factually accurate? If it isn’t factually accurate, why isn’t it factually accurate?” Then you tie yourself into knots, because writing a novel in some ways resembles writing a biography, but it really isn’t. It is full of invention. If there were no invention, it wouldn’t be readable. Invention, freedom. If you need circumstances, you create them in your own mind. But it is obviously not a project for literal-minded people. Habitual readers of fiction have an inkling of that, but so many people do not. I get impatient.
This impatience surfaces in the interview. Gray raises the subject of Bloom and AIDS: “I’m sorry to see you getting me on this particular track because I don’t want to be on it.” All Bellow offers by way of an answer is that Bloom said: “I trust you to write this. I know it’s going to be fiction….I’d like you to do this.”
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IN THE LATER STAGES of writing Ravelstein, Bellow worked closely with his editor from Viking, Beena Kamlani. Kamlani had been at Harper & Row when Bellow was there, but only got to know him after he moved to Viking from William Morrow in the spring of 1988. Kamlani was friends with Bellow’s regular copyeditor, Marjorie Horvitz, whom he insisted on retaining at Viking. On A Theft, though Horvitz did the copyediting, Kamlani “did the editing, such as it was, very cautiously.” Kamlani and Horvitz had worked together in the same way on The Bellarosa Connection. Kamlani remembers querying sentences “which might have been deliberately
repeated—and Marje would ask and come back and tell me that Bellow very much appreciated this.” It wasn’t until It All Adds Up that Kamlani met Bellow. She and Horvitz drove up to Vermont, where they stayed in a bed and breakfast, “and after that our relationship [Kamlani’s and Bellow’s] developed.” After Horvitz’s death in 1988, Kamlani took on both roles, editor and copyeditor.
With Ravelstein, Kamlani received sections of manuscript, suggested revisions, then received radically revised versions of the same sections. Sometimes she received radically revised versions before she could suggest revisions. The book “kept changing,” and the whole thing “didn’t really come together until that very last manuscript,” itself revised in production. “He rewrote proofs, he rewrote galleys, he even rewrote blues [the printer’s photocopy, costly to emend], for God’s sake.” A pattern was established early on, one that would last until Bellow’s death. Kamlani would travel from New York to Boston or Vermont to discuss the latest manuscript material. She would sit down across a table from Bellow and “query something but in a very mild way, and he’d come around and say, ‘You don’t like this, huh?’ Then he’d come across something and he’d stumble over it and he’d say, ‘So this is what is bothering you. I see what’s bothering you.’ And he’d sit back and rewrite the whole page, perhaps another page and a half….Then he’d cut out this yellow sheet and throw it in the bin and start again….If I said ‘hmmm’ he’d ask, ‘You like that, kiddo?’ or ‘You like that, kid?’ ” Kamlani calls the experience of working with Bellow “truly astounding….He was so engaged in the process, so alive when working it out….The veils of aging were pushed to one side and he came through almost like the sun. He was there. If I sensed that, I would mine that for everything….I would bring up all [my concerns]. I’d say, ‘I think you can do better than that,’ and he’d say, ‘You’re right, I can do much better than that,’ and he’d be writing, and then he’d finally nail it. And then he was so pleased. You’d just see his face light up.” Even when Bellow was not on form, it was useful for Kamlani to hear him read out versions, “because it gave me the opportunity to intuit where he was with something. So he’d read it out and, depending on how he read it out, I could tell [how engaged or committed he was].” What Kamlani especially remembers is that “he was razor-sharp when he was fully on. There was nothing in the world that could compete with him. No. It’s there in the book. The images, the sharpness with which he saw things. It was incredible.”
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