Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Michael Wu told me he had “no problem” with SB’s “caricature of me,” adding, “it’s true I stay up late, I’m a night person, I have insomnia…and he was hallucinating, I had to stay up with him….It’s true I come out as rather superficial….I really don’t care what he did to my character.” In Tarcov’s view, the novel depicts Nikki “as a useless, lazy parasite, sycophant, which is nothing like Michael, who took care of Allan, nursed him, helped him, worked hard as a student, as a chef; it just seemed gratuitous, and partly also the structure of the book is such that it leads the reader to compare Rosamund/Chick to Nikki/Ravelstein with the implication—maybe I’m being too harsh—that Rosamund is much better than Nikki; you almost get the sense that Ravelstein dies because he doesn’t have someone like Rosamund to look after him the way Chick does, and this is the thing I found really offensive….What bothered me was the portrayal of their relationship in a way that hurt Michael, hurt his feelings; in the way Sammler’s Planet hurt my mother.”

  10. Ravelstein objects to Chick’s depiction of Vela in the same way that SB says Bloom objected to his depiction of Alexandra in The Dean’s December: “He said about Vela, ‘You gave in—you tried to sell me a colored cutout of the woman like the cardboard personalities they used to hang in movie lobbies in the old days. You know, Chick, you sometimes say there’s nothing you can’t tell me. But you falsified the image of your ex-wife. You’ll say that it was done for the sake of marriage but what kind of morality is that?’ ” (P. 176.)

  11. On the matter of secrecy, see SB, Ravelstein, p. 160: “He was doomed to die because of his irregular sexual ways. About these he was entirely frank with me, with all his close friends”; p. 59: “There were two people in Paris who knew him intimately and three on this side of the Atlantic. I was one of them”; and, finally, p. 142: “Abe was taking the common drug prescribed for his condition but he didn’t want it to be known. I remember how much it shocked him when the nurse walked in—the room was full of friends. She said, ‘It’s time for your AZT.’ He said to me the next day, ‘I could have killed the woman.’ ”

  12. After reading this chapter in draft, Nathan Tarcov, email to the author, 4 July 2017, offered the following response: “I don’t recall my exact words to either Max or you, but I believe that I tried to stick to the facts rather than beliefs. And as you properly report…the doctors never said that Allan died of AIDS and there is probably no way of knowing whether the internal bleeding and liver failure that killed Allan were related to HIV as they can be caused by all sorts of things. I recall one doctor earlier worrying that the steroids Allan was prescribed for Guillain-Barré may have damaged his liver. Bellow himself is quoted by Max as admitting ‘I don’t know if he died of AIDS, really,’ in which case I think it was irresponsible to say he did by saying so of Ravelstein and then through interviews in Janis’s words ‘demolishing the wall separating novel from memoir.’ The issue is clouded somewhat…by conflating the questions of whether Allan had HIV/AIDS and whether he died of it….Actually I don’t think it should matter (though it did and perhaps still does to some people) what Allan died of. I just didn’t and still don’t think something should be reported as fact that isn’t supported by the facts.”

  13. Harry V. Jaffa, “Humanizing Certitudes and Impoverishing Doubts: A Critique of The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 16, no. 1 (Fall 1988), p. 112.

  14. Ibid., pp. 113–14.

  15. See Jeffrey Rosen, “Sodom and Demurrer,” New Republic, 29 November 1993.

  16. Nowhere in The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987) does Bloom discuss homosexuality or gay liberation. The closest he comes to doing so is in a passage about Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice: “There is no place in Freud for the satisfaction of the kinds of desires to which Mann gives voice in Death in Venice. They are explained and cured by Freud but not accepted on their own terms. In Mann they are somehow premonitory and like cries of the damned plunging into nothingness….These desires are certainly not satisfied with the transfer of their cases from the tribunal of the judge and the priest to that of the doctor. Or with being explained away…Neither bourgeois society nor natural science has a place for the nonreproductive aspect of sex. With the slackening of bourgeois austerity and the concomitant emancipation of the harmless pleasures, a certain tolerance of harmless sex came into fashion. But this was not enough, because nobody really wants his dearest desires to be put in the same category as itching and scratching” (p. 234). The “dearest desires” in Mann’s Aschenbach’s case are for a young boy, and though doom hangs over them, they are more elevated than “itching and scratching,” a phrase from Plato’s Gorgias. David Mikics, Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Made Life into Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), p. 213, draws attention to the way this passage is written: “Bloom’s paragraph on Mann, like his description of Nietzsche, has a taut personal intensity lacking from his mentions of Plato….Mann hymns eros: its glory, its piercing independence from all social use and responsibility.” As Mikics sees it, Bloom, too, “championed erotic and spiritual torment” (though Mikics doesn’t say where, whether in The Closing of the American Mind or elsewhere), and he believes that in Ravelstein Bellow omitted that dimension of his character, transforming Bloom “into a shadchen or matchmaker, an apostle of love and friendship. Gone was the severe Nietzschean Bloom of his bestselling book. In his place was Ravelstein with his intense sociability” (p. 213). Bloom talks more directly about homosexuality (though impersonally, without “taut personal intensity”) in part III of the posthumously published Love & Friendship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), in discussion of Plato, pp. 436–37 and 468–69.

  17. Janis Freedman Bellow, “Rosamund and Ravelstein: The Discandying of a Creator’s Confection,” in On Life-Writing, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 113; henceforth cited within the text by page number.

  18. Christopher Hitchens, “Bloom’s Way,” The Nation, 15 May 2005, unearthed a more substantive excision, from the same page as the last example Max cites:

  Even towards the end Ravelstein was still cruising. It turned out that he went to gay bars.

  One day he said to me, “Chick, I need a check drawn. It’s not a lot. Five hundred bucks.”

  “Why can’t you write it yourself?”

  “I want to avoid trouble with Nikki. He’d see it on the check-stub.”

  “All right. How do you want it drawn?”

  “Make it out to Eulace Harms.”

  “Eulace?”

  “That’s how the kid spells it. Pronounced Ulysee.”

  There was no need to ask Ravelstein to explain. Harms was a boy he had brought home one night….Eulace was the handsome little boy who had wandered about his apartment in the nude…physically so elegant. “No older than sixteen. Very well built…”

  I wanted to ask, what did the kid do or offer that was worth five hundred dollars….

  19. Helen Small, The Long Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 106. Among the most notable of the novel’s repetitions is that of Ravelstein’s baldness. In “Throwing Away the Clef,” New Republic, 22 May 2000, Cynthia Ozick gathers the instances: “ ‘On his bald head you felt that what you were looking at were the finger marks of its shaper.’ ‘This tall pin- or chalk-striped dude with his bald head (you always felt there was something dangerous about its whiteness, its white force, its dents).’ ‘He liked to raise his long arms over the light gathered on his bald head and give a comic cry.’ ‘There are bald heads that concentrated in that bald, cranial watchtower of his.’ ‘You couldn’t imagine an odder container for his odd intellect. Somehow his singular, total, almost geological baldness implied that there was nothing hidden about him.’ ‘The famous light of Paris was conc
entrated on his bald head.’ And so on, image upon image. Ravelstein’s is not so much a man’s head as it is a lit dome: the dome of some high-ceilinged cathedral or broad-corridored library. Ravelstein’s ideas—also his gossip, his extravagant wants—are solidly housed.”

  20. Cynthia Ozick, in “Throwing Away the Clef,” shared Janis’s view. For her, the whole poisoned-fish-and-Rosamund episode “seems out of kilter with the rich thick Ravelstein stew that precedes it. Chick’s preoccupations veer off the Ravelsteinian tracks into the demands of his own circumstances, much as Bellow, in his foreword to Bloom’s blockbuster, ran off the Bloomian rails to grapple with his own spirit.”

  21. In the end, Janis admits in her essay, she had undervalued Rosamund’s strengths. She singles out a passage she had “completely overlooked” (p. 120): “Rosamund, normally flexible, ladylike, deferential, and genteel now revealed (no question about it) an underlying hardness and the will that showed how prepared she was” (Ravelstein, p. 199). In the ICU, as Janis puts it, Rosamund is determined to keep Chick alive. The weeks he spent unconscious and near death “had also to be endured by Rosamund, who was fully awake” (p. 121).

  22. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp” (composed 1795, published 1796). The lines quoted below (lines 26–33) were added in a revised version of 1817:

  O! The one Life within us and abroad.

  Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,

  A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,

  Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere—

  Methinks, it should have been impossible

  Not to love all things in a world so filled;

  Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air

  Is music slumbering on her instrument.

  23. For Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (1923–2008), the American physician, medical researcher, and SB’s fellow Nobel Prize winner, see chapter 11, which also discusses his journals.

  24. SB may have been thinking of Ioan Couliano (1950–91), a Romanian historian of religion who taught at the University of Chicago from 1980 until his death in 1991, and who was murdered in a men’s room at the university’s divinity school. The murder was thought to be politically motivated, a consequence of Couliano’s attacks on the Romanian government.

  25. T. S. Eliot, “Ben Jonson,” in The Sacred Wood (1920; London: Methuen, 1928), p. 115: “If we look at the works of Jonson’s great contemporaries, Shakespeare, and also Donne and Webster and Tourneur (and sometimes Middleton) have a depth, a third dimension, as Mr. Gregory Smith rightly calls it, which Jonson’s work has not. Their words often have a network of tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires.”

  26. Leah Garrett, “The Late Bellow: Ravelstein and the Novel of Ideas,” in The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow, ed. Victoria Aarons (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 175.

  27. This description was uttered affectionately as well as with impatience. Daniel liked Bloom, “spent hours and hours talking with him. He was just endlessly patient. He was fascinating.” He admits that initially he’d had no sense that Bloom was gay, which amazed his brother Adam (“You’ve led a very sheltered life,” Adam told him). Norman Podhoretz, who also remembers Bloom affectionately, described him in an interview in 2008 as a “flamer,” a word he told me he’d only just learned.

  28. This phrase from SB (quoted in chapter 2 of To Fame and Fortune, p. 69) comes from a speech he gave to the Anti-Defamation League on 14 November 1976, published as “I Said I Was an American, a Jew, a Writer by Trade,” New York Times, 14 December 1976.

  29. See SB, Dangling Man (1944), in Saul Bellow Novels: 1944–1953 (New York: Library of America, 2003), pp. 86–87, where Joseph describes a “bare and ominous” dream he has had “in which the dead of a massacre were lying.” He thinks the dream might have been set in Bucharest, where “those slain by the Iron Guard were slung from hooks in a slaughterhouse.”

  30. SB, Humboldt’s Gift (1975; Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1977), pp. 62, 109.

  31. It is clear that Ravelstein’s book is a fictional equivalent of The Closing of the American Mind, its argument being “that while you could get an excellent technical training in the U.S., liberal education had shrunk to the vanishing point” (p. 47).

  32. Ravelstein is comparably clear-eyed about French thought and manners: “Very few French intellectuals got high marks from Abe Ravelstein. He did not care for foolish anti-Americanism. He had no need to be loved or pampered by Parisians. On the whole, he liked their wickedness more than their civility” (p. 103).

  33. On p. 138 of Ravelstein, SB talks of the deterioration of his nonagenarian mother and stepfather: “I’ll beat them both, though. At this rate, I’ll reach the finish line before my mom. Maybe I’ll be waiting for her.” “That’s aimed at me, isn’t it?” “Well, Chick, you’ve often talked about the life to come.” “And you’re a self-described atheist, since no philosopher can believe in God. But this is no belief with me.”

  34. “I didn’t like Grielescu but I did find him a funny man, and to Ravelstein this was a cop-out, and it was also characteristic of me. To say he was amusing was to give him a pass” (Ravelstein, p. 202).

  35. Small, Long Life, pp. 108, 116.

  36. When I taught Ravelstein to students at the Committee on Social Thought, not all my students approved either of its author or of the friend the novel memorialized. One pointed out the deleterious impact of such parrots on the Illinois farming industry. But in Eric Brodie, “Hyde Park Parrots Continue to Thrive,” Chicago Maroon, 26 September 1990, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture threatened to eradicate the Hyde Park nests, the local community rose up in protest, demanding evidence that the parrots posed a danger to grain fields or orchard fruits or that there had been local complaint. No action was taken by the USDA.

  13. LOVE AND STRIFE

  1. James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000), p. 596.

  2. James Atlas, The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale (New York: Pantheon, 2017), p. 315.

  3. Ibid., p. 307.

  4. Ibid., pp. 314–15.

  5. Ibid., pp. 301, 302.

  6. Ibid., p. 212.

  7. Ibid., p. 333.

  8. Richard Stern, “On Atlas on Bellow,” reprinted in Richard Stern, What Is What Was: Essays, Stories, Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 132.

  9. Atlas, Shadow in the Garden, p. 313.

  10. Philip Roth, “ ‘I Got a Scheme!’: The Words of Saul Bellow,” The New Yorker, 25 April 2005.

  11. Claudia Roth Pierpont, “The Book of Laughter: Philip Roth and His Friends,” The New Yorker, 30 September 2013, the source also of subsequent quotes from Pierpont or recounted by her. The New Yorker article was excerpted from Pierpont’s Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books (London: Jonathan Cape, 2014).

  12. There is an oddity in the 20 March 1997 letter to Glotzer. Bellow writes to report that “Daniel’s mother (aged 62) died suddenly of an aneuryism a few weeks ago.” In fact, she died twenty-one weeks earlier, a discrepancy that recalls the unfairness of having Vela kick Chick out in Ravelstein within a week of his brother’s death (rather than six months, as was the case when Alexandra kicked SB out after Maury’s and Sam’s deaths).

  13. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 587.

  14. SB to Michael Millgate, 31 August 1998. Millgate taught English at the University of Toronto.

  15. Walsh’s thesis title was “Craven Images: Cowardice in American Literature from the Revolutionary War to the Nuclear Era.” A revised version of the thesis, Cowardice: A Brief History, was published in 2014 by Princeton University Press.

  16. Martin Amis, email to the author, 26 April 2017. Quotes from Thomas Barber come from an interview with the author and emails of 30 and
31 May 2017.

  17. Will Lautzenheiser, email to the author, 31 May 2017.

  18. Janis Bellow, email to the author, 8 June 2017.

  19. Papers for the course were marked in detail by Wood and then briefly by SB. Among SB’s typical handwritten comments: “Obviously Joyce wants more than a ‘story.’ He aims to create a work of art”; “ ‘interpersonal’ is a term used by psychologists or sociologists, not by writers”; “I agree” [with Wood’s comments or marks]; “I too approve of your paper and esp. of your analytic skill”; “Joyce’s prose in The Dead is markedly poetic. His language is poetic and musical. The language of the [Victorians?] advances the narrative, and little else”; “You are close to Hamsun’s aim here”; “Absolutely—the core of the story.”

  20. Juliet thinks that there were problems with Rosie, who was two and a half, and that Janis was reluctant to leave her: “My personal feeling is that…it was right at the time that they were leaving that [Rosie] had a severe problem, and I think it was just too much for Janis. That seems to me to be the timing, but I may not be right on that.”

  21. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 204.

  22. In an email to the author of 30 May 2017, after reviewing his notes for the meeting of 4 September 2002, Dr. Barber wrote that the meeting was “a routine follow-up…not for any urgent issue. Janis was present with Saul. We reviewed his level of functioning in detail. The focus was mainly on his memory and insight, which were both declining. He was having episodes of agitation and anger, especially when Janis was not present. I made note that he was always warm and kind and interested in his two-year-old daughter, but that he was not sustaining interest in much else at that time. He was not writing….I have no notes about a specific conversation about the wedding, but it is clear to me that we were concerned about his progressively limited function in settings in which he was not very familiar and without structure and support. I would have supported any plan to modify social arrangements ‘for medical reasons’ if Saul were not up to it. And his functional status did vary from day to day during this time, with very good days, and others when he functioned poorly. This is a common pattern in people with vascular dementia….I remember no instance in which Saul or Janis expressed any negative statements about going to the wedding or not going.”