Vela is criticized by Ravelstein as well as Chick, in ways not always flattering to Chick. At first, for the sake of his friendship with Chick, Ravelstein is “extremely careful not to offend Vela,” is “warm, markedly attentive when she spoke,” “deferred to her,” suspending “deeper judgment” (p. 111). After Vela turns on him—“she began to say that you and I were carrying on together” (p. 112), Chick tells him—Ravelstein becomes openly hostile. “Vela will soon be through with you,” he predicts, citing her frequent absences from home, “off to conferences all over the world” (p. 84). For Chick, Vela is “a beauty impossible to rival” (p. 123); for Ravelstein, “she’s got the makings of a beauty but she’s not a beauty” (p. 84). Chick ungallantly describes Vela’s morning makeup preparations as “at a West Point or Hapsburg hussar level” (p. 107), picking up on Ravelstein’s reference to her having “some sort of European military correctness about her. And when she inspects you, you just don’t make the grade with her” (p. 84). When Chick complains about Vela’s domestic failings—“What we had was a loose arrangement—a household, not the locus of married love or even affection” (p. 85)—Ravelstein takes him to task just as Janis says she took Bellow to task over Alexandra: “She’s a high-grade scientist, they tell me, and she may not feel like cooking your dinner—clocking in at five o’clock to peel the potatoes….The idea of leading a warm family life is her number one antipremise” (pp. 87–88).
What also counts against Vela, Ravelstein claims, is her association with Radu and Nanette Grielescu, thinly disguised portraits of Eliade and his wife, Christinel. Grielescu, in Vela’s eyes, “sets the standards for male conduct,” what Ravelstein calls “the courtly gentleman bullshit” (p. 106). “Yes, that’s more or less it,” says Chick. “The considerate man, the only right kind, remembers birthdays, honeymoons, and other tender anniversaries. You have to kiss the ladies’ hands, send them roses; you cringe, move back the chairs, you rush to open doors and make arrangements with the maître d’ ” (p. 106). Grielescu, like Eliade, is “a famous scholar, not exactly a follower of Jung—but not exactly not a Jungian.” Glamorous Nanette had once been “one of those jeunes filles en fleur you read about long ago” (p. 105). That Grielescu had also been a strong supporter, if not a member, of the Romanian Iron Guard, a prewar fascist movement (referred to by Chick as “the meat-hook people” [p. 202]), again like Eliade, Vela overlooks.29 Ravelstein chides Chick for socializing with the Grielescus; he is as keen to free him from Vela and her circle as Vela is to free Chick from Ravelstein (putting Grielescu in his place, Ravelstein suspects). “They use you as their cover,” Ravelstein tells Chick. “You wouldn’t have become chummy with those Jew-haters. But these were Vela’s friends, and you put yourself out for them, and you gave Grielescu exactly what he was looking for. As a Romanian nationalist back in the thirties he was violent toward the Jews” (p. 125). In real life, it was Philip Roth, through his friend Norman Manea, who warned Bellow off the Eliades.
In Chick’s eyes, Vela’s chief failing is her incapacity to love. Hence her attitude to sex, which she treats as performance or weapon. As Chick puts it, “There’s a hint of artificiality about it. Like a stratagem. Like a lack of affect” (p. 121). “She had a sex-hex on you,” Ravelstein tells Chick (p. 128). “Lucky for you…you have a vocation. So this is just a side thing. It’s not a genuine case of sex-slavery or psychopathology” (p. 112). Still, the “sex-hex” has its effect: witness Chick’s hallucinations in ICU (taken directly from Bellow’s “View from Intensive Care,” quoted in the previous chapter), which combine suspicions about Vela’s infidelities with performance anxiety (her complaining of all the “glamorous sex…I was deprived of with you” [p. 214], her bragging about the “lewd things” she does with her Spanish boyfriend [p. 218]). Earlier, in a vivid scene, Chick describes Vela wandering into his bedroom in the nude. As he lies reading, she “came to my bedside and rubbed her pubic hair on my cheekbone. When I responded as she must have known that I would, she turned and left me with an air of having made her point. She had won hands down without having to speak a word. Her body spoke for her, and very effectively too, saying that the end was near” (p. 86).
This end, Vela’s kicking Chick out of the apartment and filing for divorce, occurs at what Ravelstein calls “the worst moment possible” (p. 128), within a week of his burying his brothers. Vela engineers the breakup just as Alexandra engineered the breakup with Bellow, according to the account Bellow gave to Eugene Kennedy (Sam Pargiter in the novel). “I found the house filled with large, colored stickum circles—the green identified my possessions, the salmon-colored were glued to hers….They produced a snowstorm effect—‘a meum-tuem blizzard,’ as I said to Ravelstein” (p. 122). Here truth to life is sacrificed to anger or hurt—Bellow’s, that is. Six months separated the deaths of Bellow’s brothers and Alexandra’s kicking him out and filing for divorce. In the novel, the interval is less than a week, which makes Vela’s actions especially heartless. The heartlessness is accentuated by having the “meum-tuem” scene recounted immediately after a scene in which Chick visits his dying brother, Shimon, Bellow’s last fictional depiction of his brother Maury. Shimon is dying of cancer, and Chick comes to Tallahassee to say goodbye to him (as Bellow went to Georgia to say goodbye to Maury, and Charlie Citrine goes to Florida to say goodbye to Julius in Humboldt’s Gift, and Herschel Shawmut goes to Texas to say goodbye to Philip in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth”). Shimon, with death in his face, compliments Chick on his shirt: “That’s got class, the red-and-gray stripe.” Then he warns Chick against buying a diesel Mercedes: “It’ll be nothing but trouble” (p. 121). “After a long exchange of silent looks,” Shimon is exhausted and tells Chick he wants to climb back into bed.
He was too far gone to do this. He had been a ball player once with strong legs, but the muscle now was all gone….And then his head twisted toward me and his eyeballs turned up—nothing but blind whites. The nurse cried out, “He’s leaving us.”
Shimon raised his voice and said, “Don’t get excited.”
This was what he said often to his wife and to his children when they differed or began to quarrel….He was unaware that his eyeballs had rolled back into his head. But I had seen this in the dying and knew that he was leaving us—the nurse was right [pp. 121–22].
No such moment occurs in Bellow’s accounts of Maury’s death or in the fictional deaths of Julius Citrine or Philip Shawmut. But the feel of the moment, its mix of pathos and comedy (the inability to climb into bed, “Don’t get excited”), matches the feel of earlier accounts and is comparably affecting.
Vela is not the only character in Ravelstein born of anger or strife. Edward Shils, who is fictionalized as Rakhmiel Kogon, is also given a kicking. Just as suffering Minna gives way to heartless Vela, so Richard Durnwald, the Shils character in Humboldt’s Gift, whom Charlie Citrine “admired and even adored,” gives way to “wicked” Rakhmiel Kogon in Ravelstein. Both Durnwald and Kogon share Shils’s appearance, professorial expertise, and personal history. Durnwald is “reddish, elderly but powerful, thickset and bald, a bachelor of cranky habits but a kind man”;30 Kogon is “a non-benevolent Santa Claus, a dangerous person, ruddy, with a red-eyed scowl and a face in which the anger muscles were highly developed” (p. 36) (elsewhere Chick calls him “a tyrant, with the tyranny baked into his face” [p. 133]). Chick tells us about Kogon, who is recently deceased, in order to avoid thinking about Ravelstein’s death: “I would much rather think of Rakhmiel’s death” (p. 131). Although Kogon’s ideas of decency “went back to the novels of Dickens,” “not even a genius like Rakhmiel was able to conceal the storminess or, if you prefer, the wickedness of his nature” (p. 132). In his letter to Atlas, Shils granted Bellow a single virtue, “consecration to his art.” In Ravelstein, Bellow grants Kogon two virtues, though only one unequivocally. “My belief is that on the side he grew a little herb garden of good, generous feelings. He hoped, especially
when he was wooing a new friend, that he could pass for a very decent man. He was also very learned” (p. 133). When Ravelstein heard this description, he “shouted with laughter,” telling Chick, “That’s how I want to be treated, too. That’s it. I want you to show me as you see me, without softeners or sweeteners” (p. 133). All that Chick has missed in his account of Kogon, Ravelstein tells him, is “his sex life—a major omission, he believed. He told me authoritatively, ‘You’ve missed it—Kogon is attracted to men’ ” (p. 134).
* * *
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THE NOVEL’S DRAMATIS PERSONAE can be divided into camps. On the one hand, Ravelstein, Rosamund, and the lovebird Floods and Battles, characters born of love; on the other hand, Vela, Kogon, Grielescu, and graceless M. Bédier, the proprietor of Le Forgeron, the restaurant on St. Martin where Chick is poisoned. These are the characters created out of a desire to wound or punish. Chick describes M. Bédier as “a pig who was taught manners, but they didn’t take” (p. 191). If the love camp prevails, it does so through the portrait of Ravelstein, the last of Bellow’s larger-than-life protagonists. We meet him first in Paris, ensconced in a penthouse suite in the Hotel Crillon. A year earlier, he had been a hundred thousand dollars in debt. Then “the vast hydraulic forces of the country” (p. 15) picked him up, catapulting him to worldwide fame and fortune (“his Japanese royalties alone were, he said with wild pleasure and no modesty, ‘ferocious’ ” [p. 61]). Thanks to the most improbable of best-sellers, described by Chick as “a spirited, intelligent, warlike book” (p. 4),31 he could at last finance his need for luxury goods: “for Armani suits or Vuitton luggage, for Cuban cigars, unobtainable in the U.S., for the Dunhill accessories, for solid-gold Montblanc pens or Baccarat or Lalique crystal to serve wine in—or to have it served” (p. 3). Other luxury cravings scattered through the narrative include high-end audio systems, custom-made Sulka shirts, expensive sofas, a full-length fur-lined leather coat, a giant wall-screened television, a new eighty-thousand-dollar BMW (for Nikki), Jensen teapots, Quimper antique plates, Pratisi linens, fancy formal wear (“cummerbund, diamond studs, patent leather shoes” [p. 15]), neckties flown air-express from Chicago to Paris, to be dry-cleaned. After dinner at Lucas-Carton, Ravelstein signs the enormous bill “in an ecstasy” (p. 23).
Ravelstein invites Chick and Rosamund to breakfast in his suite. “He had every right to look as he looked now, while the waiter set up our breakfast. His intellect had made a millionaire of him. It’s no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think—to say it in your own words without compromise” (p. 4). In addition to present success, a five-million-dollar book offer is on the table. “And he was a learned man after all. Nobody disputed that. You have to be learned to capture modernity in its full complexity and assess its human cost” (p. 14). You also have to be “as familiar with entertainers like Mel Brooks as with the classics” (p. 11), to value the artistry of Michael Jordan, to know who Michael Jackson is and appreciate the weight of his celebrity. Jackson and his entourage are also staying at the Crillon, occupying a whole floor of the hotel. “Terrific, isn’t it,” asks Ravelstein, “having this pop circus?” (p. 2).
Ravelstein’s appearance, like that of all Bellow characters, provides clues to his personality. The blue-and-white kimono he wears at breakfast—presented to him in Japan, where he lectured the previous year—is “loosely belted and more than half open,” showing his underpants, which “were not securely pulled up” (p. 4). Beneath the kimono, his legs are “paler than milk. He had the calves of a sedentary man—the shinbone long and the calf muscle abrupt, without roundness” (p. 10). Indifferent to fitness (“to prolong his life was not one of Ravelstein’s aims” [p. 54]), “he treated his body like a vehicle—a motorbike that he raced at top speed along the rim of the Grand Canyon” (p. 10), an image that parallels his attitude to money, “something you threw from the rear platform of speeding trains” (p. 15). He was “one of those large men—large, not stout—whose hands shake when there are small chores to perform. The cause was not weakness but a tremendous eager energy that shook him when it was discharged” (p. 3). This energy—“the excitement, the wringing, the tension of his pleasures, of his mental life” (p. 18)—was a key to Ravelstein’s success as a teacher: “a vital force was transmitted. Whatever the oddities were, they fed his energy, and this energy was spread, disseminated, bestowed” (p. 53). It was also what kept him awake at night, led to disorder in his personal life and his physical awkwardness. Hence his barging in on Vela, the occasion of their first falling-out: “Impatient, in high spirits, keen to see me, Ravelstein called out from the anteroom and without waiting for an answer he rushed in. He intended to hug me—or Vela, if she should happen to be first. But she was in her slip and she wheeled round and ran, slamming the bathroom door” (p. 104). A memorable scene involves Ravelstein’s purchase of a forty-five-hundred-dollar Lanvin jacket, “golden, with rich lights among the folds” (p. 34). As soon as he puts it on, he spills coffee (“his third espresso serré” [p. 41]) on its lapels, an episode that reminds Chick of Ravelstein’s Hermès and Ermenegildo Zegna neckties, “dotted with cigarette burns” (p. 41). While lecturing, “he coughed, stammered, he smoked, bawled, laughed, he brought his students to their feet and debated, provoked them to single combat, examined, hammered them” (p. 19). Lighting up “with his Dunhill flame” in front of “a large No Smoking sign,” Ravelstein tells his audience: “If you leave because you hate tobacco more than you love ideas, you won’t be missed” (p. 156).
Paris matters to Ravelstein not only for its “sexy mischief” but for all the “arts of intimacy”: “In every quartier, the fresh-produce markets, the goods bakeries, the charcuterie with its cold cuts. Also the great displays of intimate garments. The shameless love of fine bedding. ‘Viens, viens dans mes bras, je te donne du chocolat’ ” (p. 31). All this in addition to architecture, history, French literature. “For a civilized man there was no background, no atmosphere like the Parisian” (p. 45). Chick’s feelings about Paris are more mixed. He “looked down on Paris, rather,” citing the Jewish freethinker’s saying “wie Gott in Frankreich. Meaning that even God took his holidays in France. Why? Because the French are atheists [like Ravelstein] and among them God himself could be carefree, a flâneur, like any tourist” (p. 171). Paris is the perfect place to meditate modernity and the nihilism that shapes it, source ultimately of “a general willingness to live with the destruction of millions. It was like the mood of the century to accept it” (p. 169). In prewar years, “to many in France, it was Jewry that was the enemy, not Germany” (p. 203). Much of the serious talk between Ravelstein and Chick concerns Jews and Jewishness, with Chick pressing the point of French anti-Semitism. Not that Ravelstein needed to be told of the prejudices of the French. When illness prevents him from returning to Paris, he fears losing a ten-thousand-dollar dépôt de garanti on his apartment, “because the tenant is a Jew, and there’s a Gobineau in the landlord’s family tree. These Gobineaus were famous Jew-haters. And I’m no mere Jew but, even worse, an American one” (p. 70).32
Chick is as open with Ravelstein as Ravelstein is with him, “free to confess what I couldn’t tell anyone else, to describe my weaknesses, my corrupt shameful secrets, and the cover-ups that drain your strength. As often as not he thought my confessions were wildly funny. Funniest of all were the thought-murders” (p. 95), the sort that produce characters like Vela and Kogon. Chick also feels bound to communicate what he calls his “incommunicables” or “private metaphysics” (p. 95), including his belief in an afterlife, which Ravelstein mocks.33 In the end, Chick is forced “to surrender my wish to make myself fully known to him by describing my intimate metaphysics,” Ravelstein being “too close to death to be spoken to in such terms” (p. 97). This is not to say that Ravelstein himself has no metaphysics. His metaphysics comes directly from Plato’s dialogues. As Chick soon realizes, “there wasn’t the slightest hope of following
Ravelstein’s thoughts if you were ignorant of them entirely….By now I am as much at home with Plato as with Elmore Leonard” (p. 117).
Although a follower of Plato, Ravelstein recognizes the value as well as the sensuous appeal of appearances. He “had come to agree that it was important to note how people looked. Their ideas are not enough—their theoretical convictions and political views. If you don’t take into account their haircuts, the hang of their pants, their taste in skirts and blouses, their style of driving a car or eating a dinner, your knowledge is incomplete” (p. 136). Chick, however, carries noticing too far, according to Ravelstein. He is too fixated on “ordinary daily particulars…not the noumena, or ‘things in themselves’ ” (p. 193), convinced that they lead to deeper truths. In the process, knowing for Chick replaces action.
Either you continue to live in epiphanies or you shake them off and take up trades and tasks, you adopt rational principles and concern yourself with society, or politics. Then the sense of having come from “elsewhere” vanishes. In Platonic theory all you know is recollected from an earlier existence elsewhere. In my case, Ravelstein’s opinion was that distinctiveness of observation had gone much further than it should and was being cultivated for its own strange sake. Mankind had first claim on our attention and I indulged my “personal metaphysics” too much, he thought. His severity did me good. I didn’t have it in me at my time of life to change, but it was an excellent thing, I thought, to have my faults and failings pointed out by someone who cared about me. I had no intention, however, of removing, by critical surgery, the metaphysical lenses I was born with [pp. 97–98].
Love and Strife (1965-2005) Page 79
