Saul Bellow Blooms Again

By Paul Gray

At 84, Nobel laureate Saul Bellow seems, as one of his comically understating fictional characters might put it, to be doing O.K. He is, for openers, the proud father of a baby daughter, Naomi-Rose, born Dec. 23 last year to Janis Freedman, 41, the author's fifth wife. Seated in his office at Boston University and sporting a jaunty blue paisley ascot and rumpled suit, Bellow talks animatedly about the new arrival: "I think that she's much keener on entering into some connection with her parents than the boys were. [Bellow has three grown sons, the eldest 56, from previous marriages.] She picks up everything--you can watch her face while she's examining you silently, grinning a little bit. She imitates you."

Bellow understands that being a new parent at his age raises an inevitable if unstated concern, which he proceeds to address: "Well, my wife won't be lonely when I die. She'll have somebody." He also knows that fathering a child in his 80s has spurred considerable amazement among strangers and even his friends: "They try to kid me, but I say, 'Practice makes perfect.'"

Another reason for Bellow to celebrate is the appearance next week of his 13th novel, Ravelstein (Viking; 233 pages; $24.95). His pleasure in this new arrival, though, has been tinged with an annoyance. Most of the prepublication chatter about Ravelstein has pegged the book as a barely fictionalized account of Bellow's close friendship with Allan Bloom, his colleague at the University of Chicago and the author of the phenomenally best-selling The Closing of the American Mind (1987). When Bloom, whose writings made him a hero among conservatives, died in 1992, the cause was officially announced as liver failure. But Ravelstein, the alleged Bloom figure in Bellow's novel, appears as a largely closeted homosexual who contracts HIV and ultimately dies of AIDS-related illness. Needless to say, given this tabloid age, Ravelstein has already produced a lot of gossip.

The notion that his new novel is principally an outing or an expose of his dear friend upsets and frustrates Bellow: "This is a problem that writers of fiction always have to face in this country. People are literal minded, and they say, 'Is it 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."

So impatient that when the subject of Bloom and AIDS is raised, Bellow responds, "I'm sorry to see you getting me on this particular track because I don't want to be on it." All that he will say, without mentioning Bloom by name, is, "He said, 'I trust you to write this. I know it's going to be fiction.' He said, 'I'd like you to do this.'"

Bellow's novels have prompted this sort of what's-the-real-story queries before, most notably his Pulitzer prizewinning Humboldt's Gift (1975). In that book, the brilliant but mentally deteriorating poet Von Humboldt Fleisher was widely regarded as a fictional copy of Delmore Schwartz, a friend and onetime mentor to the young Bellow. The author never denied an imaginative connection between Humboldt and Schwartz, but neither did he think it a topic much worth discussing. And he was right. For a quarter-century, untold thousands of people who never heard of Delmore Schwartz have read Humboldt's Gift and been beguiled by its stand-alone fictional power. That is what thousands more, knowing nothing of Allan Bloom, will eventually find in Ravelstein.

The new novel, like Humboldt's Gift, portrays the effects of a powerful personality on an impressionable observer, in this case Chick, the narrator. Abe Ravelstein, his friend and academic colleague at a university in Chicago, has recently astounded everyone, including himself, by writing a book that has made him enormously rich. "That Ravelstein's most serious ideas, put into his book, should have made him a millionaire was certainly funny," Chick notes. "It took the genius of capitalism to make a valuable commodity out of thoughts, opinions, teachings."

Ravelstein owes his good, big fortune to Chick, who suggested that his friend write a book in the hope of bringing his expensive tastes and his professorial income into closer alignment. But Chick does not consider himself Ravelstein's benefactor or mentor: "Though I was his senior by some years he saw himself as my teacher." Chick sees things the same way and willingly obeys Ravelstein's instructions: "He wanted me to write his biography and at the same time he wanted to rescue me from my pernicious habits. He thought I was stuck in privacy and should be restored to community. 'Too many years of inwardness!' he used to say." Chick finds it odd that Ravelstein, the younger man, should ask him for a memorial tribute, but he obediently begins taking notes.

When Ravelstein becomes ill and starts declining toward death, Chick realizes that the biographical task he had taken on as sport, never believing he would outlive his subject, has turned earnest indeed. Ravelstein is what he finally, after the passage of some duly noted years and difficulties, produces. This is a book, in some sense, about the writing of a book.

That news may produce a few groans in the audience, but any protesters should just settle down for a minute. Plot has never been the sharpest arrow in Bellow's quiver, and Ravelstein holds true to form. It might, like the author's earlier works, be called a novel of ideas, but that is too bloodless a description of Bellow's signature accomplishment. Again, as always before, he portrays people with ideas--sometimes good, sometimes wacky--bumping into one another and sparking unpredictable reactions. Seasoned Bellow readers do not look forward to what will happen next but rather to what his vivid characters will think and then, invariably, say the next time they meet and argue.

For all the love and admiration that Chick lavishes on Ravelstein, he also notes some of their deep disagreements on fundamental matters. Ravelstein, the brilliant teacher of classical philosophy and political theory, thinks Chick's artistic temperament as a writer of fiction represents a refusal to grow up and grapple with the real world of public affairs: "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." Chick responds, "His severity did me good," but adds, "I had no intention, however, of removing, by critical surgery, the metaphysical lenses I was born with."

The exchanges between Chick and Ravelstein cover a broad array of eternal questions, including, inevitably, death and the possibility of an afterlife. But the novel reads like the antithesis of abstractions. Ravelstein brims with life thanks to Chick's, that is, Bellow's, comic observations on the passing scene. Here are French waiters "working like acrobats" at a dinner Ravelstein throws for Chick at an exclusive Paris restaurant. Here is Chick on Ravelstein's notoriously messy eating habits: "An experienced hostess would have spread newspapers under his chair." Here is Ravelstein amused, laughing "like Picasso's wounded horse in Guernica, rearing back." Such indelible impressions are the stuff of art, not gossip.

Late in the novel, after Ravelstein's death, Chick himself nearly dies after eating a bad red snapper during a Caribbean vacation with his new wife Rosamund. Bellow readily acknowledges that this part of the novel was lifted pretty directly from his own life in 1994. "I was in St. Martin, and I went to a little French restaurant. I said, 'Do you have any local catch?' thinking that I'd outsmart the frozen-fish scene. But it didn't work, because it is the inland fish, the reef feeders, who get these poisons." Thanks to Freedman's quick thinking in an emergency, Bellow was flown back to Boston and landed in intensive care. Rumors at the time had him near death. "It took me a couple of years to come back from that," he says. Any lingering effects? "Yes, I sometimes trip while walking, and I may fall down. My coordination is not what it used to be. Whether it's my age by this time or whether it's the toxin, I can't tell."

Death is on Bellow's mind often, he acknowledges, but not simply because he is 84. "I started thinking seriously about death when my mother died, when I was 17 years old." He left Chicago in 1993 "because so many of my friends had died, and wherever I went, I was reminded of them. So I thought, Well, I'll go to a place where I had no dead acquaintances or friends."

That turned out to be Boston and B.U., where he still teaches and still enjoys students. "Some don't know anything," he says. "They don't know how to write at all. Some, however, almost the same percentage as earlier, speak well, write well, are intelligent, read closely, are sympathetic." He adds, "I was curious as to whether TV had driven literature into some hole in the ground. I don't think so."

The author has nothing against the computer but resists using one. "Philip Roth pushes me more than anybody else. He says I'd find that I had a lot more free time." Bellow still works the old way, writing in longhand, typing that version, making corrections and then typing everything again. At the moment, he says, "I haven't got a subject. Writers who don't write are really very difficult creatures. I may not have to write anymore, you know," he adds with a smile. "I'm going to be 85."

Bellow has somehow sailed past the rocks on which so many American writers have foundered: burnout, alcoholism, depression, suicide. The only sign of inner turbulence in his life is the fact of his having been married five times. He jokes, "If at first you don't succeed, try again," and then offers a more serious account: "The times were so disorderly, and everything was up in the air. As part of that, you tried to anchor yourself. You're looking for an anchor, and a very attractive woman is to be preferred, if available. But they're not always so capable of being married, having a husband who is just another wandering soul in the night." He pays Freedman the ultimate Bellow compliment: "I can never say anything to her that she doesn't understand. And not only understand, but often she's been there in anticipation before."

Bellow is pleased by all the awards and recognition his work has received, but is not overly impressed with himself: "People used to kid me when I was a boy, and they would say, 'Ah, yes, you're going to have a Nobel Prize one day. You'll also be covered like a tree with bark.'" He refuses to romanticize his work: "I'm not a tortured writer. I had my days in my youth when I was a tortured writer. I decided that if torture is part of the job, I was going to quit."

What kept him going, in part, was something he read in his youth by the early 20th century Russian author Vasily Rozanov: "What he remains in my mind for is a piece in which he said, 'I opened my eyes and here was the world. Here was this great human and divine enterprise.' And it was as though I had just opened my eyes on what human existence was, really. It was my turn." Bellow takes that turn again, childlike wonder and all, in Ravelstein, when Chick says, "In the interval of light between the darkness in which you awaited first birth and then the darkness of death that would receive you, you must make what you could of reality, which was in a state of highly advanced development. I had waited for millennia to see this."

--Reported by Andrea Sachs/Boston

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/Boston