Ravelstein by Saul Bellow

There is a passing comment that comes late in Saul Bellow’s last novel, Ravelstein. It is said by Rosamund, the wife of the narrator, who is only ever referred to by his nickname Chick.

But this is how you do things, Chick: the observations you make crowd out the main point.

Yeah, I wrote in the margin when I stumbled across this. Chick and Saul Bellow both.

The first eighty or so pages are a long slog.

I try at times to put myself into the shoes of a gifted young man from Oklahoma or Utah or Manitoba invited to join a private study group in Ravelstein’s apartment, coming up in the elevator, arriving to find the door wide open and getting his first impressions of Ravelstein’s habitat -- the big antique (sometimes threadbare) Oriental carpets, the wall hangings, classical figurines, mirrors, glass cabinets, French antique sideboards, the Lalique chandeliers and wall fixtures. The living-room sofa of black leather was deep, wide, low. The glass top of the coffee table in front of it was about four inches thick. On it, Ravelstein sometimes spread his effects -- the solid-gold Mont Blanc fountain pen, his $20,000 wrist watch, the golden gadget that cut his smuggled Havanas, the extra-large cigarette box filled with Marlboros, his Dunhill lighters, the heavy square glass ashtrays -- the long butts neurotically puffed at once or twice and then broken. A great amount of ashes. Near the wall on a stand, sloping, an elaborate many-keyed piece of telephone apparatus -- Abe’s command post, expertly operated by himself. It saw heavy use. Paris and London called almost as often as Washington. Some of his very close friends in Paris phoned to talk about intimate matters -- sex scandals. Those students who knew him best tactfully withdrew when he signaled with the fingers below his cigarette. He asked keen, low questions, and when he was listening his bald head was often drawn back on leather cushions, his eyes sometimes upcast, glazed with absorption, mouth falling slightly open -- his feet in the loafers coming together sole to sole. At all hours he was playing Rossini CDs at top volume. He had an extraordinary fondness for Rossini and for eighteenth-century opera as well. Baroque Italian music had to be performed on the original ancient instruments. He paid top prices for his hi-fi equipment. Speakers at $10,000 apiece he did not consider too expensive.

This and more of this for those first eighty pages -- prose; good prose, I suppose, but most of it character sketch instead of plot and cryptically little character sketch at that. It’s almost as if Bellow wants to tell us as little about Ravelstein as he can, and he decided to do that by telling us everything about the things that surrounded him.

Eventually, I think, I discovered a grand theme to it all. Abe Ravelstein is a famous professor of philosophy -- modeled, evidently, on someone Bellow knew in real life -- and he has one all-consuming quest.

It had taken Ravelstein some time to get used to seeing Rosamund and me as a married pair. There was a kind of oddity about that because he took an unusual interest in his students, and Rosamund was one of them. He would have said, if asked about this, that given the sort of education they were getting, with its unusual emphasis “on the affects” -- on love, not to beat around the bush -- it would have been irresponsible to pretend that the teaching could be separated from the binding of souls. That was his old-fashioned way of putting it. Naturally there was a Greek word for it, and I can’t be expected to remember every Greek word I heard from him. Eros was a daimon, one’s genius or demon provided by Zeus as a compensation for the cruel breaking up of the original androgynous human whole. I’m sure I’ve got that part of the Aristophanic sex-myth straight. With the help of Eros we go on, each of us, looking for his missing half. Ravelstein was in real earnest about his quest, driven by longing. Not everyone feels that longing, or acknowledges it if he does feel it. In literature Antony and Cleopatra had it, Romeo and Juliet had it. Closer to our own time Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary had it, Stendhal’s Madame de Rênal in her simplicity and innocence had it. And of course others, untaught, untouched by open recognition have it in some obscure form. This was what Ravelstein was continually on the watch for, and with such a preoccupation he was only a step from arranging matches. Doing the best that could be done with these powerful but incomplete needs. A good palliative for the not-always-conscious pain of longing had a significant importance of its own. We have to keep life going, one way or another. Marriages must be made. In adultery men and women hope for a brief reprieve from the lifelong pain of privation. What made adultery a venial sin in Ravelstein’s judgment was that the pain of our longings drives us so mercilessly. “Souls Without Longing” had been the working title of his famous book. But for most of mankind the longings have, one way or another, been eliminated.

Longing for the thing that fulfills us. Dangling such a quest in front of the reader -- and having the character obsess about that fulfillment for others -- is going to make the reader ask the obvious question. What is the thing that Ravelstein longs for? What is the thing that will fulfill him, especially in the closing chapters of his life?

Ravelstein is a semi-closeted homosexual -- open about it with his friends and confidants, but closed as required by the professional and academic circles of his day. With that knowledge, Ravelstein’s hidden object can’t help but take on that dimension in the reader’s mind, but I think Bellow is a good enough writer to be attempting something else here, too.

I was familiar now with Ravelstein’s ideas on marriage. People are beaten at last with their solitary longings and intolerable isolation. They need the right, the missing portion to complete themselves, and since they can’t realistically hope to find that they must accept a companionable substitute. Recognizing that they can’t win, they settle. The marriage of true minds seldom occurs. Love that bears it out even to the edge of doom is not a modern project. But there was, for Ravelstein, nothing to compete with this achievement of the soul. Scholars deny that Sonnet 116 is about the love of men and women but insist that Shakespeare is writing about friendship. The best we can hope for in modernity is not love but a sexual attachment -- a bourgeois solution, in bohemian dress. I mention bohemianism because we need to feel that we are liberated. Ravelstein taught that in the modern condition we are in a weak state. The strong state -- and this was what he learned from Socrates -- comes to us through nature. At the core of the soul is Eros. Eros is overwhelmingly attracted to the sun. I’ve probably spoken of this before. If I speak of it again it’s because I am never done with Ravelstein and he was never done with Socrates, for whom Eros was at the center of the soul, where the sun nourishes and expands it.

This is about the mind, not the heart, nor even the libido. We have come to call it Eros, as the ancient Greeks had done, but for Ravelstein it is something more than that. Not just erotic love and passion, but the longing, the deep and terrible longing for the thing that completes us and which we will never know.

It is something that even our narrator, Chick, struggles to explain…

He thought -- no, he saw -- that every soul was looking for its peculiar other, longing for its complement. I’m not going to describe Eros, et cetera, as he saw it. I’ve done too much of that already: but there is a certain irreducible splendor about it without which we would not be quite human. Love is the highest function of our species -- its vocation. This simply can’t be set aside in considering Ravelstein. He never forgot this conviction. It figures in all his judgments.

…and that may be why Ravelstein is such a frustrating read. Like the thing itself, the novel makes the thing difficult to see -- and maybe that’s the point. But you know me. I like theme and plot interwoven. When it comes to novels, that is where brilliance lives. And in Ravelstein, the plot can barely see the theme through the dark glass Bellow has placed around it.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.