Ravelstein

A meditation on friendship

I just read Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein for the first time. My re-listening to KYE’s episode with Matt Dinan prompted me to do it. If you’re familiar with the book, you know it’s a fictional portrayal of Bellow’s real-life friendship with Allan Bloom, the University of Chicago political philosopher who wrote the best-selling but controversial The Closing of the American Mind in 1987. I was never attracted to read Ravelstein because I was never attracted to Allan Bloom as a thinker.

I read Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in the 90s, and there was much in his cultural critique that I agreed with. But there was something “off” with him that I find off with most conservative intellectuals. All our troubles trace back to some mistake made by intellectuals, by Freud and Weber. They never talk about Henry Ford’s Fordism and Frederick Taylor’s Taylorism that were far more consequential. I’m simplifying and probably being unfair to Bloom, but he just struck me as another conservative who thought that what university intellectuals thought was more consequential for cultural development than how capitalism was holllowing culture out.

Another thing that did not endear me to Bloom is learning later that he was a student of Leo Strauss. I’m not a Strauss fan. I understand his seductiveness, but I thought his ideas about how everybody misreads Plato was a fundamental misreading of Plato. And he’s just another guy who has done more damage than good, especially insofar as he was the philosopher embraced by the Neocon Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and the Neocons who pushed for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Strauss is also the inspirer of the West Coast Straussians behind the crackpot Claremont Institute. Paul Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of PNAC, was a student and friend of Bloom. So, you know, by their fruits you will know them. These guys were just wrong about everything. I dismissed them hubristic asses. And so that’s the picture I had of Allan Bloom—just another one of these hubristic asses.

And the portrait of him that emerges in Ravelstein in many ways confirms that picture. I do not think that if I were a student at the University of Chicago at the time he taught there that I would have been attracted to him—or he to me. I would have been attracted to Bellow, though. And so it’s interesting for me to see Bloom through Bellow’s eyes because Bellow loved and revered him, and if Bellow loved and revered him, there must be something there to be loved and revered. And that’s what’s so great about Ravelstein—it’s not about what Bloom thought but about who Bloom was—his thisness, his haecceitas, his uniqueness. And when you see that in anyone, really see it, you cannot help but love them. All else is forgiven.

Listen to how Bellow’s prose captures the concreteness of a particular moment with his friend:

Ravelstein, dressing to go out, is talking to me, and I go back and forth with him while trying to hear what he is saying. The music is pouring from his hi-fi—the many planes of his bare, bald head go before me in the corridor between his living room and his monumental master bedroom. He stops before his pier-glass—no wall mirrors here—and puts in the heavy gold cufflinks, buttons up the Jermyn Street Kisser & Asser striped shirt—American Trustworthy laundry-and-cleaners deliver his shirts puffed out with tissue paper. He winds up his tie, lifting the collar that crackles with starch. He makes a luxurious knot. The unsteady fingers, long, ill-coordinated, nervous to the point of decadence, make a double lap. Ravelstein likes a big tie-knot—after all, he is a large man. Then he sits down on the beautifully cured fleeces of his bed and puts on the Poulsen and Skone tan Wellington boots. His left foot is several sizes smaller than the right but there is no limp. He smokes, of course, he is always smoking, and tilts the head away from the smoke while he knots and pulls the knot into place. The cast and orchestra are pouring out the Italian Maiden in Algiers. This is dressing music, accessory or mood music, but Ravelstein takes a Nietzschean view, favorable to comedy and bandstands. Better Bizet and Carmen than Wagner and the Ring. He likes the volume of his powerful set turned up to the maximum. The ringing phone is left to the answering machine. He puts on his $5,000 suit, an Italian wool mixed with silk. He pulls down the coat cuff with his fingertips and polishes the top of his head. And perhaps he relishes having so many instruments serenading him, so many musicians in attendance. He corresponds with compact disc companies behind the Iron Curtain. He has helpers going to the post office to pay customs duties for him.

“What do you think of this recording, Chick?” he says. “They’re playing authentic period instruments.”

He loses himself in sublime music, a music in which ideas are dissolved, reflecting these ideas in the form of feeling. He carries them down into the street with him. There’s an early snow on the tall shrubs, the same shrubs filled with a huge flock of parrots—the ones that escaped from cages and now build their long nest sacks in the back alleys. They are feeding on the red berries. Ravelstein looks at me, laughing with pleasure and astonishment, gesturing because he can’t be heard in all this bird-noise.

You don’t easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death.

It’s a beautiful remembered moment that presents the Bloom/Ravelstein “image” (see below). But there’s a part of me that wonders if this could not also have been a portrait of Hermann Goering. It’s not; it’s a portrait of another unique, particular human, an American Jew and not a Bavarian Nazi, and that makes all the difference. But still. There’s something that bothers me about the overall portrait of Ravelstein/Bloom. It’s similar to the problem that I have with Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jung, and Hillman. And maybe it’s a criticism, too, of Bellow. I’m not sure. There’s something real and deeply human there to be grappled with, but there’s also something essential missing.

Ravelstein is the kind of soul that James Hillman would describe as fully daemonic in this grand, Nietzschean, amoral sense. He’s fully himself. (But is he?) So, yes, this “great soul” who occupies this place beyond good and evil points to something important and rare, and so for that reason is understandably worthy of our admiration. Bellow wants to celebrate it, and he’s right to do so. Indeed it must be celebrated because Bloom’s particularity is so deeply human in a world that seeks on every front to dehumanize and homogenize us. But it’s not enough. Not in the long run.

But it’s enough for now. Bellow is not making a statement about what constitutes true human greatness. He’s simply giving us a loving portrait of the greatness of a particular human being who was his friend. This is Hillman’s point about Platonic democracy—each of us has a greatness that cannot be measured by some abstract, socially constructed standard, but only by the degree to which we have realized our own unique particularity, what Hillman calls the “image”. When we truly love someone we have at some level seen the other’s “image”. It comes as a kind of revelation. It can’t be fabricated by the image-bearer, it can only be spontaneously, unselfconsciously lived, and if you’re lucky there will be someone in your life who sees it in you and you in him or her. Once it is seen, you are bonded forever.

Bellow saw it in Bloom, and he does his best to report what he saw. In that sense Ravelstein is a ‘work of fact’ even if at the same time it’s a work of fiction. That’s what a great work of art does, right? It makes visible the invisible. That’s not quite right—it brings into focus what’s there but usually unseen, something essential that’s in hiding and that will only disclose itself to eyes inspired by Eros. This is Plato’s doctrine and Ficino’s, and it’s Bloom’s and Bellow’s. Nothing is more important than to see the world with eyes opened by Eros.

So here’s the thing. Nietzsche and Bloom and Bellow were all big souls, the kind of people that the Techno-Capitalist Matrix (TCM) doesn’t produce anymore. To have such a soul, you need to have at least one foot in a pre-modern world and one in the modern. For Bellow and Bloom they had one foot in their old-world Jewishness, and they were moderns in every other sense. That old world (mostly) doesn’t exist anymore—not in any vital way. There are just (mostly) zombie forms of it. And that’s really what Bloom was describing regarding his students in the first chapter of Closing—they don’t make souls like his and Bellow’s anymore. The cultures that produced such souls were all hollowed out and destroyed in the fifties and sixties. The universities simply adapted to the soullessness that ensued. It’s not Freud’s or Weber’s or Marcuse’s fault, but post-WWII capitalism’s.

Bellow born in 1915 and Bloom in 1930 were among the last of the Romantic modernists. As such they are incomprehensible to people like Musk and Thiel and Bezos. These oligarchs—these postmodern prodigies of the post-WWII TCM—might think of themselves as uebermenschen, but they are not—at least not in any way that Nietzsche would recognize. They are soulless creatures of the post WWII capitalist machine.

So yes, any partisan of Soul, no matter how big-souled or small, is part of the coalition that must arise to resist the soullessness that is otherwise our future. But it will be men and women of both spirit and soul who must arise to lead it. That’s the part—the spirit part— that’s missing (perhaps ‘underdeveloped’ is the better word) with the Romantics. The big souls of the Romantic prodigies too often—not always—crowd spirit out. But unlike the nihilistic materialists, they at least have souls. But it’s not enough.

See also “Dying Traditions”.