Kamlani’s visits during the composition of Ravelstein were frequent. “Every two weeks I was on a train,” usually for a stay of four days, though one Vermont visit lasted eight weeks. Janis was never present during work sessions. In Boston, before Rosie was born, she was often out of the house, “at a whole lot of different things.” Kamlani would arrive at nine or nine-thirty, and she and Bellow would work until lunchtime. Sometimes work sessions would continue into the afternoon, even into the evening. After they’d worked out a passage or problem to Bellow’s satisfaction, Janis would read it. “We were incredibly knit, and there were times when, over dinner, I would say to Janis, I’m a little concerned about this, and she’d say, Well, why don’t you try this way or see if that will work. And so we’d go back to it the next day and look at it fairly differently.” At several dinners, the question of Ravelstein’s sexuality came up. “I don’t think it came up at a legal level,” Kamlani remembers. “I think he was caught between a need to describe this person truthfully, to describe him as he saw him, and I think there was something horrible to Saul about losing this man to such a horrible disease, and I don’t know how one can make AIDS into smallpox or measles.” The question was “to what extent should this be changed…and I know he considered it very, very carefully….It kept him up at night. I know he thought long and hard. I know this.”
The problems Kamlani remembers most vividly from their sessions on Ravelstein were formal or structural, a matter of plot strands rather than character drawing. The novel has an unconventional, nonlinear narrative: its story of a life and a friendship is told through what Helen Small calls “meaningful repetitions, variations on themes, deepening meditations on certain problems,”19 an approach recommended by Ravelstein himself: “Do it in your after-supper-reminiscence manner, when you’ve had a few glasses of wine and you’re laid back and you’re making remarks. I love listening when you are freewheeling” (p. 129). As Kamlani saw it, the novel’s freewheeling contents needed to “mesh,” in particular the scenes involving Rosamund, based on Janis, on the one hand, and the main portrait of Ravelstein and his friendship with Chick, on the other. “At first the Janis bit was there but much smaller,” Kamlani recalls, then “he expanded it a lot” (she recalls a similar expansion of minor plot strands in A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection). How “the Janis bit” (i.e., the Rosamund bit) fit the Ravelstein bit bothered Janis as well. For Janis, the novel was “about the friendship between two men. A once-in-a-lifetime friendship. Two men who laugh, and argue, and disagree about almost everything” (p. 112). In early drafts, when Rosamund was still a minor character, Janis asked Bellow to remove her: “Pull one thread and be rid of the prissy girl. Nothing would unravel. No scar would be visible in the fabric. What could so slight a character add to a story already teeming with vibrant human types?” Janis claims “largely” to have kept her feelings about Rosamund to herself, even though the experience of “being seen or not seen” through the character was “excruciating.” “Don’t do this to me,” she remembers thinking. “I’m not that woman: servile, prim, obedient. Is that the way you see me? Wounded vanity might be endured. But to be invisible to the person you love” (p. 114).20
Bellow refused to budge. When she complained, “the rejoinder was brief: Rosamund is a character. A minor character. The book is about the friendship between two men” (p. 114). Then he expanded Rosamund’s role, so that in the final draft she could hardly be called minor. On St. Martin, when Chick collapses, “obedient” Rosamund shows “an underlying hardness” (p. 199). In the ICU, “I was tempted to drop out,” Chick admits, “but she had concentrated her soul wholly on my survival” (p. 227). Janis quotes Chick: “Rosamund was determined that I should go on living. It was she, of course, who had saved me—flew me back from the Caribbean just in time, saw me through intensive care, sleeping in a chair beside my bed” (p. 225).21 Although tenderhearted (as when lifting to safety the salamanders she and Chick come across in the road, out of a surfeit of “humane impulses” [p. 184]), Rosamund is hardly weak. Nor is she always prim or proper. Chick recalls her surreptitiously scooping after-dinner truffles into her purse at Lucas-Carton, the fanciest of French restaurants. “Don’t give me that well-bred-young-lady, lace-paper-doily routine,” Ravelstein says, “I saw you swiping those chocolates.” Ravelstein is teasing here, for “he liked minor crimes and misdemeanors,” disapproved of “uniform good conduct.” He also liked that Rosamund had fallen for Chick. “ ‘There’s a class of women who naturally go for old men,’ he said….He was drawn to irregular behavior. Especially where love was the motive” (pp. 23–24).
It is love—“the highest function of our species—its vocation”—that connects the Rosamund sections of the novel to the Ravelstein sections. The topic of love “simply can’t be set aside in considering Ravelstein. He never forgot this conviction. It figures in all his judgments” (p. 140). In addition to being the central subject of his teaching and writing, it determines his friendships. The Floods, for example, “to whom Ravelstein and Nikki were greatly attached” (who are thinly fictionalized versions of the Kleinbards), “very simply loved each other. More than any other human connection this naïve (but indispensable) one was valued by Ravelstein” (p. 158). It is what he approves also in the Battles, an elderly couple who come to him for advice about suicide: he told them “they had a great love affair.” “Among millions or hundreds of millions of people they alone lucked out. They had a great love affair and decades of effortless happiness. Each amused the other with his or her eccentricities. How could they bear to cheapen it with a suicide” (p. 155). Rosamund had been Ravelstein’s student for five years, studying “Rousseauian romantic love and the Platonic Eros” (p. 231)—just as Janis studied love for five years with Bloom. In her essay on Ravelstein, Janis quotes Chick on Rosamund, who “knew far more about [love] than either her teacher or her husband” (p. 121; Ravelstein, p. 231). After the quote, in a passage hard not to read as autobiographical, Janis disagrees: “Rosamund did not know more about love than her husband or her teacher. It wasn’t about knowing. She was in love, and had limitless expectations about its endlessness—more oceanic, certainly, than her fine education ought to have allowed” (p. 122).
Kamlani points to paired moments of tenderness in the Ravelstein and Rosamund plot strands. When Chick visits Ravelstein in the hospital, “now and then I put my hand to my friend’s bald head. I could see that he wanted to be touched. I was surprised to find that there was an invisible stubble on his scalp. He seemed to have decided that total baldness suited him better than thinning hair, and shaved his head as well as his cheeks. Anyway, this head was rolling toward the grave” (p. 177). The poignancy of Ravelstein’s wanting to be touched and of the invisible stubble on his head have their equivalents a few pages later in the scene in St. Martin when Rosamund (referred to as “Janis” by Kamlani) “towed or carried me in water just shoulder-high. She put her arms under me and walked back and forth….The music she sang as she sailed my body through the water was from Handel’s Solomon. We had heard it in Budapest a few months earlier. ‘Live forever,’ she sang, ‘Happy-happy Solomon’ ” (pp. 185–86). Chick, in his seventies, is Ravelstein’s senior “by a good many years” (p. 15); the scene takes place after Ravelstein’s death. As Chick lies in Rosamund’s arms, he thinks of the form his book should take. Then he and Rosamund change places, and he carries her through the water. As he does so, he feels “the sand underfoot ridged as the surface of the sea was rippled, and inside the mouth the hard palate had its ridges too” (p. 186). It is love, as well as Chick’s habitual alertness to surface particulars, his “childish” (p. 97) way of seeing (with the wonder of “first epistemological impressions” [p. 96]), which allows him a glimpse of the “one Life within us and abroad.”22
A much darker point of connection between the two plot strands offers a way of understanding Bellow’s decision to use AIDS as the cause of Ravelstein’s death. On St. Ma
rtin, as the ciguatoxin works its way through his body, ordinary cooking smells repulse Chick, as do the “strange stinks of jungle plant-life and rotting animal matter” (p. 195). As he and Rosamund pass the market stalls on the main street, grinning touts hold up live lobsters, “swinging them by the antennae or the tail. If some part of the creature fetched loose and fell to the ground, that was part of the fun” (p. 184). Elsewhere, “through the smoke and fire of curbside grills…the skinny local hens seemed to be growing hair, not feathers” (p. 194). Chick’s revulsion at such sights and at the island’s stinks is intensified by his reading: the Gajdusek journals he has brought from Boston, with their accounts of cannibalism, the savory smell of roasted human thigh, the ground “rich in red blood,” “black headless bodies in a jungle where crimson orchids stream downward for hundreds of feet” (p. 193).23 Gajdusek defends native practices by invoking the Siege of Leningrad, and Japanese soldiers, cut off in the Philippine jungles, who ate their dead. (He also, as we’ve seen, defends native sexual practices, including sex between adult males and young boys, though these practices are unmentioned in the novel.) On the plane to Boston, Chick recalls a young friend of Radu Grielescu (a character based on Mircea Eliade, Bellow’s Romanian colleague at the Committee on Social Thought), “who was murdered in a stall of the men’s room….He died in the middle of the act—easing himself. They shot him at close range” (p. 202).24 Once back in Boston, beached in intensive care, Chick suffers bodily indignities—the catheter, the ventilator, the drip. In recovery, he is “held upright in the shower and felt humiliated as I was soaped and rinsed by kindly nurses who had seen everything and were not shocked by my body” (p. 227). That Ravelstein dies from AIDS connects to the horrors of St. Martin and the ICU in a way smallpox or measles or TB could not. In the popular imagination of the day, AIDS, too, involved taboos, forbidden practices, infection, impurity. In the Tuileries, a setting as beautiful in its way as a tropical or jungle paradise, Ravelstein meets the pretty boys of Paris. In his letter of October 6, 1999, to Werner Dannhauser, Bellow dismisses alternative causes of Ravelstein’s death as “lacking the elasticity provided by sin.” By “elasticity” I take him to mean associative power, what T. S. Eliot calls “tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires.”25
A final parallel between the Ravelstein and Rosamund sections concerns Chick’s intellectual needs. Rosamund is smart as well as loving and “unlike most other observant persons…also thought clearly” (p. 41). One of the things she thought clearly about was Chick, so that, like Ravelstein, she is able to tell Chick things about himself that make him think. When he claims he has learned how foolish he was in his early years never to admit he was wrong, Rosamund’s reply, more applicable to Bellow than to Chick (about whose early years we know very little), is “You needed to be right and you couldn’t get by and be right, also” (p. 166). As Ravelstein’s devoted pupil, Rosamund shares his intellectual interests, so that, as Chick puts it, “if I needed to know what Machiavelli owed to Livy I had only to ask.” More important, “there was nothing I could say to this woman that she wouldn’t understand” (p. 151). Often what Chick has to say to Rosamund concerns the Holocaust, as much his obsession as Bellow’s. “In my original take on the Rosamund character,” Janis admits, “I missed the role she played as sparring partner to Chick when he turns his face towards what he elsewhere calls the central event of our time: the destruction of European Jewry” (p. 117). In the Ravelstein essay, Janis recalls that, “in the twenty years I lived with him, only once did the books on the Holocaust disappear from the bedside. I remember this time because I enforced the ban. I told him that we would not have Hitler in bed with us while I was pregnant. That did not stop us from talking in the middle of the night, or over breakfast, or after a morning’s work. That ban would have been too large to enforce” (p. 119).
For some, the problem with the Rosamund sections of the novel is not their failure to connect with the Ravelstein sections, it is Rosamund herself. Although Rosamund is heroic, she lacks complexity as a character, being perfect. She also lacks size, certainly in comparison with “great-souled” Ravelstein (though Ravelstein dwarfs all characters in the novel). Bellow’s love for Janis, Leah Garrett conjectures, “overtakes his capacity to render her character, Rosamund, in anything less than an idealized light”26 (as does Chick’s love for Rosamund, one might add). In a fax of May 4, 1999, Bette Howland urged Bellow to “take the Rosamund character out. Let it go. You don’t really need a woman until the ending—the last things—Chick’s harrowing of hell,” by which she means the fish poisoning and the weeks in ICU. She suggests that Chick should travel to St. Martin alone, where he runs into “an elderly Jewish widow (of course—probably more than once); around 70 I’d say….Still, she’s fishing; she’s hoping; she’s not giving up….Chick sees what’s up, it doesn’t take binoculars, and besides it happens all the time. It’s too late in the day for subtlety. But not only is he not interested—he’s sick. He’s been poisoned….He develops an actual aversion to the poor woman—that is, to life, to the sensuous facts. The smell of her perfume or powder or hair spray, or more personal scents; the oiliness of her lipstick; her accent, her voice. Her urgency, her hanging on…But it is this woman who sees he’s in danger; it’s this woman, in his crisis, who does what needs to be done. She gets him out.” One thinks of Dita Schwartz, the Bette Howland figure in More Die of Heartbreak.
Daniel Bellow also disapproved of the Rosamund character. “I thought the portrait of Janis was the most idealized bullshit.” In addition, he was shocked to see Bellow distressed by criticism from “all those neocons [who] took us into Iraq.” “I’d never seen him do that before,” he says of Bellow’s equivocations and expressions of regret. Bloom was half in the closet, a “fifties-style” homosexual; like Ravelstein, he “couldn’t bear the fluttering of effeminate men” (p. 99); but he was also, as Daniel puts it, “gay as a party hat.”27 In Daniel’s eyes, those who criticized Ravelstein for “outing” Bloom were weak or hypocritical. “Inability to hear the truth is a sign of weakness,” he declares, a lesson he learned from his father, along with the importance of being true to one’s nature. “I was faithful to what I was,” Bellow declared; “I lived that way and I tried to write that way.”28 As criticism of the “outing” of Bloom grew, Daniel “was filled with rage that they were doing this to Pop.” When Bellow told Daniel, “Nathan Tarcov’s really angry with me,” Daniel replied: “Pop, get a hold of yourself. This is what you told me, write what you see….This is their problem….They’re frightened that they’re going to be thrown out of the Republican Party.”
Bellow’s idealizing of Rosamund is paired with his demonizing of Vela, Chick’s ex-wife, a character clearly based on Alexandra. “Why would he do that?” Alexandra asked Joseph Epstein after she had read the novel. “It was a shock for me, a shock for my friends,” she remembers. “I reeled in terror at the picture of this wife.” Some reassurance was offered by the reaction of her “younger feminist friends” who “thought it was downright hilarious that I should be described as a femme fatale, that in the space of a few years this wife, or ex-wife, should go from translucent Minna gazing at the stars, to ferocious, chaos-dispensing Vela….They thought it was absolutely hilarious.” For Philip Roth, the character of Vela is “a mistake,” a view shared by Bette Howland. “He went overboard with Vela,” she said in an interview, “and the result was somehow that she didn’t come alive” (unlike, presumably, the comparably overboard fictionalizing of Sasha in Herzog or Susan in Humboldt’s Gift). Both Adam and Daniel were shocked by the violence of the portrait, which Daniel calls “very unfair, really unfair.” Beena Kamlani, acknowledging the unfairness, admits that the same “point” could have been made “without necessarily being so violent.” In partial mitigation, she cites narrative context: “What is being described in Vela is a certain anger in [Chick], which then manifests itself in his conversations with Ravelstein. Now, how are we to ap
preciate the level at which these two men are talking about a marriage which is crumbling without seeing first his anger? One can’t just separate things and say, Be kind to this person, without there being a consideration of the larger work.”
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