The Din in the Head

by Cynthia Ozick

  In scary-kitschy old movies, an ambition-crazed scientist constructs in his laboratory two ominously identical boxes, in the shape of telephone booths, side by side. He enters one, the door shuts, a fearful electrical buzz follows, lights flash and darken, and suddenly the first box is empty and the scientist stands, intact, in the other: a triumph of molecular disintegration and reintegration; instant transportation sans trolley or rocket. If you are ready to believe this, you will accept the notion of román á clef—that a life is transferable from flesh to print; that since the resemblances line up ever so nicely, Ravelstein "is" Bloom. Under this persuasion, fiction is hijacked by gossip, the vapor of transience. Under this persuasion, Bellow's own admission (he has confirmed that his model was Bloom) invites the scandal of outing: Ravelstein dies of AIDS; then did Bloom, who never intimated having the disease, die of it? Under this persuasion, Andrew Sullivan, noted gay journalist and pundit, observes how salutary it is that even a conservative like Bloom can be openly gay. Bloom's politics, enemies, sexual habits, even his dying, are all freshly rehearsed—because Ravelstein is Bloom.

  Ravelstein is not Bloom. To insist on it is hardly to allow Bloom to speak for himself in what is left of him. Bloom, dead, is (as a doctor once described to me the condition of a newly deceased relative) a pile of electrons. Bloom, still lively, continues his worthy arguments in teacherly discourses that, far from staling, have intensified at a time when dot-com merges with New Age. Say of Bloom what Bloom said of Leo Strauss, his venerated philosophy professor: that he "left his own memorial in the body of works in which what he understood to be his essence lives on." Say this; but not that Bellow has written Bloom. That Bellow acknowledges Bloom as his subject—acknowledges it with all the authority of the mighty New York Times behind him—means nothing, or almost nothing, in the kingdom of the novel. An author's extraliterary utterance (blunt information), prenovel or postnovel, may infiltrate journalism; it cannot touch the novel itself. Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea. The art of the novel (worn yet opulent phrase) is in the mix of idiosyncratic language—language imprinted in the writer, like the whorl of the fingertip—and an unduplicable design inscribed on the mind by character and image. Invention has little capacity for the true-to-life snapshot. It is true to its own stirrings. The real-life Bloom, steeped in a congeries of arresting social propositions, lacked language and metaphor—which is why the legacy of his books can replicate his thought, but not the mysterious crucible of his breath.

  Bellow, in going after his friend's mystery, leaves Bloom behind—just as in past novels and stories he ultimately deserts Rosenberg, Rosenfeld, and Schwartz, those latter-day piles of electrons, who, like Bloom, are obliged to live on, impressively enough, in the ink of their own fingerprints. Bellow's is an independent art. The souls who thrive or shrivel in his fiction ("soul" being his most polemical term) are not replicas; they are primal coinages, unbounded by flesh and likely to be faithless to fact. Literary verisimilitude is a chimera. Look to the "stein" in Ravelstein for a suggestive clue: the philosopher's stone that turns base metal into gold. Allan Bloom, Bellow's supremely intelligent Chicago compatriot, had the university professor's usual tin ear for prose (his own). But the philosopher's stone does not mimic or reproduce; it transmutes. Bloom's tin is Ravelstein's gold.

  "Lifestyle" raised to a right equal to other human rights was what Bloom particularly excoriated; such relativism, he believed, led to "nihilism as moralism." Andrew Sullivan sizes up Bloom acutely when he remarks that "victimology never tempted him." Sullivan speculates that Bloom's homosexuality "may even have reinforced his conservatism," a striking aside—but what is it doing in the context of Bellow's novel? An essay on Bloom ought to be an essay on Bloom. It is important to repudiate the tag of roman a clef not only because it is careless and rampant, but because it reduces and despoils the afflatus—and the freedom—of the literary imagination. The clef gets stuck in the lock, and the lock attaches to fetters.

  ***

  And so to the real Ravelstein of the novel. I am reluctant to speak of Bellow's "voice," a writerly term overgrown with academic fungus, and by now nearly useless. (Consider also the ruination by English departments of "gaze," that magical syllable, fully and foully theorized into ash.) Better to return to Bellow's mother, who hoped for a fiddling son; better to think of him as a sentence-and-paragraph fiddler, or a rabbi presiding over an unruly congregation of words. The words are unruly because they refuse to be herded into categories of style: they are high, low, shtick, soft-shoe, pensive, mystical, sermonic, eudaemonic—but never catatonic; always on the move, in the swim, bathed in some electricity-conducting effluvium. Bellow's incremental sound—or noise—rejects imitation the way the human immune system will reject foreign tissue. There are no part-Bellows or next-generation Bellows; there are no literary descendants. As for precursors, Bellow's jumpy motor has more in common (while not so fancy) with the engine that ratchets Gerard Manley Hopkins's lines—that run-run-turn-stop!—than with any prose ancestor. In Ravelstein he puts these racing weight-bearing energies to use in something that ought not to be called a "portrait." ("What an olden-days' word 'portraying' has become," says Chick, the novel's narrator.) Verbal sculpture is more like it—think of those Roman busts with strong noses and naked heads, round heavy stone on square heavy plinths. Ravelstein's head is central, tactile, dominant, and it is examined with a sculptor's or architect's eye. "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 proclaim their strength. Ravelstein's head had been like that." "His big eyes were 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 concentrated 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 (or Renaissance duomo) of some high-ceilinged cathedral or broad-corridored library. Ravelstein's ideas—also his gossip, his extravagant wants—are solidly housed. This head is no hotel for brief mental sojourns.

  A hotel is where we first meet Abe Ravelstein—the lavish penthouse of the Hotel Crillon, in Paris, where the luxury-intoxicated humanities professor, "who only last year had been a hundred thousand dollars in debt," is reveling in the millions piled up by his cultural bestseller. Ravelstein is a sybarite. He is also a man who would know the Greek origin of that word. His appetite for five-thousand-dollar designer suits, silk ties, gold pens, mink quilts, French crystal, smuggled Cuban cigars, Oriental carpets, antique sideboards, and all the other paraphernalia of the dedicated voluptuary, is accompanied by a philosopher's scrupulous worship of civic virtue. Ravelstein is a principled atheist, a homosexual (but quietly, privately), a bit of a matchmaker, a thinker "driven by longing"—a longing understood as Aristophanes meant it, the haunted desire for human completion. He likes puns and gags, he likes meddling in the lives of his brightest students, he likes being ahead of the news (thanks to former students now in high places); his cell phone is at the ready. Socrates is his ideal and Thucydides his immediacy, but he is as alert to current anti-Semitic subtleties and historic anti-Jewish depredations as he is to the problems of Alcibiades in the Sicilian campaign of the Peloponnesian War. Chick—the not-so-famous midlist writer who is Ravelstein's catch-as-catch-can biographer—seizes his subject at the crux: "He preferred Athens, but he respected Jerusalem greatly."

  Commenting and kibitzing in the first person, Chick (a self-described "serial marrier") mostly keeps a low profile, except in the ma
tter of his wives: Vela, the vengeful Romanian physicist who walks out on him, and Rosamund, the loyal, intelligent, empathic young woman who was once Ravelstein's student. Other characters pass, or hurtle, through Chick's recording cascades: Nikki, Ravelstein's presumed lover, "a handsome, smooth-skinned, black-haired, Oriental, graceful, boyish man," for whom Ravelstein buys a chestnut-colored BMW with kid-leather upholstery; Rachmiel Kogon, "tyrannically fixated, opinionated," a genuine ex-Oxonian don but a fake Brit, owner of complete sets of Dickens, James, Hume, and Gibbon; Morris Herbst, an observant Jew with a heart transplant obtained from the deadly crash of a goyish motorcyclist in Missouri; Radu Grielescu, a renowned Jungian mythologist and Nazi-tainted former Iron Guardist, who play-acts blameless politesse; Battle, paratrooper, pilot, ballroom dancer, Sanskrit scholar, with "the mouth of a Celtic king." They represent, in Chick's phrase, "penetrations of the external world." Accounting for them to the impatient Ravelstein—who recommends a larger concern for society and politics—Chick argues, "I had no intention ... of removing, by critical surgery, the metaphysical lenses I was born with."

  It is these powerful lenses that finally raise questions about how a novel—generically, the novel—is to be fathomed. Ravelstein is busy with revelatory incident but is mainly plotless: Ravelstein becomes ill, rallies, retains his acerbic nobility, declines further, and begins the slide into death. At Ravelstein's hospital bedside Chick uncovers the mundane secret of the philosopher's eloquent cranial dome. "Now and then I put my hand to my friend's bald head," he confides. "...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," Chick concludes, "this head was rolling toward the grave." A mightiness theatricalized by the razor's artifice; a mightiness at last undone. Following which, Rosamund and Chick vacation in the Caribbean ("one huge tropical slum," Chick characterizes these islands), where he eats spoiled fish and nearly perishes from the effects of poisoning; Rosamund's intrepid devotion through an extended medical ordeal saves him. This final occurrence, the novel's climactic scene, 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. But by now Ravelstein is dead; and a novel is not a biography. Biographies are innately saddled with structure. When the biographer's subject dies, the biography comes to a close—what else can it choose to do? A novel need make no such obeisance to graph or sine curve, or to the deeper curve of death's scythe. Only the lower orders of fiction—case solved, romance consummated—abide by ordained rigidities and patterns. The literary novel (call it the artist's novel) engenders freedom, flexibility, exemption from determined outcomes; waywardness and surprise. What falls out then is not story (or not only story), but certain obstinacies and distillations, which can be inspected solely through Chick's metaphysical lenses. It can even be argued that it is only through this supra-optical equipment that fiction's necessary enactments can be prodded into lustiness.

  What "metaphysical" intends is not left unspecified: it is the earthly shock of Creation's plenitude. "Ordinary daily particulars were my specialty," Chick explains. "The heart of things is shown in the surface of those things." Elsewhere he illustrates: "I carried [Rosamund] through the water, the sand underfoot ridged as the surface of the sea was rippled, and inside the mouth the hard palate had its ridges too." Out of the blue, the ridges of the hard palate! A planetary connectedness, a Darwinian propensity for minute perceiving—which Ravelstein, whose thought runs vertically through history, both marvels at and chides. Here Rosamund sides with her old teacher: "But this is how you do things, Chick: the observations you make crowd out the main point." They are discussing Grielescu, the concealed Iron Guardist. "How could such a person be politically dangerous?" Chick counters. "His jacket cuffs come down over his knuckles." An instant of comic toughness, reminiscent of the famous crack in Augie March: "He had rich blood. His father peddled apples." But Grielescu, a minor character, barely a walk-on, is the novel's suboceanic mover: he is like the ridges of the hard palate inside the mouth. Once you become conscious of these shallow bumps, you cannot leave off exploring them—they lead you mentally to the treacherous floor of the deepest sea. In Ravelstein's exuberant mind-roving prime, his memoirist recalls, he had been absorbed in nasty speculations about Grielescu's Nazi past: how Grielescu had been summoned to lecture in Jerusalem, and how the invitation was soon withdrawn. Weakening now, under death's lintel, Ravelstein appears to be enveloped in Jewish fate, in the twentieth century's "great evil." What was once a flicker in a crepuscular background, veiled by a Greek passion for polis and eros, invades and illumines his still pulsing intellect. "It was unusual for him these days, in any conversation, to mention Plato or even Thucydides. He was full of Scripture now," Chick records. "In his last days it was the Jews he wanted to talk about, not the Greeks."

  Athens gives way to Jerusalem—but it is understood, anyhow, that Socrates had always been Ravelstein's rebbe, and Periclean Athens his yeshiva. Ravelstein's final dictum: in the wake of "such a volume of hatred and the denial of the right to live," Jews are "historically witness to the absence of redemption." For the reader looking back on Ravelstein's musings as preserved by Chick, a great totting-up looms. Of a French landlord's ancestry: "Those Gabineaus were famous Jew-haters." Of Grielescu's myth expertise: "The Jews had better understand their status with respect to myth. Why should they have any truck with myth? It was myth that demonized them." Of Jews and teaching: "We are a people of teachers. For millennia, Jews have taught and been taught. Without teaching, Jewry was an impossibility." Of a luncheon for T. S. Eliot, where the snooty hostess complains of Ravelstein's manners: "She wasn't going to let any kike behave badly at her table." And again: "And what will T. S. Eliot think of us!"

  That last gibe is to the point. How would T. S. Eliot assess an American novelist (one of those "freethinking Jews" he deplored) so confident of writer's sovereignty that he can fiddle with the English language with all the freewheeling relish of an Elizabethan inventing new inflections—and in such a way as to make The Waste Land (and, God knows, those solemnified essays and plays) seem lethargic? "I had a Jewish life to lead in the American language," Chick announces, "and that's not a language that's helpful with dark thoughts." But it is through Chick's dark thoughts—and not only Ravelstein's—that we are apprised, or reminded, of Lloyd George's, Kipling's, and Voltaire's hot anti-Semitism, and of "the Wehrmacht way of getting around responsibility for their crimes," and of German militarism as "the bloodiest and craziest kind of revanchist murderous zeal." This is a long way from Rachel née Rabinovitch's murderous paws, and it is also a substantial distance from the mannerly fear of nomenclature that paradoxically turned Nathan Weinstein into the ferocious Nathanael West. Sovereignty for a novelist means unleashing the language of one's marrow and—this especially—tunneling into any subject matter, however transgressive it may be of the current societal glyph. (Think of that other Bloom as echt Dubliner. And note that Ravelstein's snooty hostess is named Mrs. Glyph.) Hence Chick's reflections on leading a Jewish life in the American language are light-years from the rivalrous group-tenets of multiculturalism, and ought not to be mistaken for them. The reviewer who called Ravelstein "Bellow's most Jewish novel" is only partly right; on second thought, if he means it as essence or circumscription, he is all wrong. It is not the nature of subject matter that defines a novel. It is the freedom to be at home in any subject matter; and this holds for Louis Auchincloss as much as it holds for Saul Bellow. All subject matter is equal under the law (or democratic lawlessness) of the novel. What is a novel? A persuasion toward dramatic interiority. A word-hoard that permits its inventor to stand undefined, unprescribed, liberated from direction or coercion. Freedom makes sovereignty; it is only when th
e writer is unfettered by external expectations that clarity of character—Ravelstein, for instance, bald and baldly opinionated, intellectually quarrelsome, a comic epicurean, a hospitable thinker with trembling hands, a Jew tormented by evil and pedagogically fixed on virtue—can be imagined into being. When, apropos of Bloom's 1987 credo, Bellow insisted that "I would not allow myself to become the product of an environment," he had a canny interest in those italics. As for the idea of roman a clef: what is it if not the product, and the imprisoning imposition, of an environment?

  Washington Square: So Many Absent Things

  HENRY JAMES CAME TO PARIS in the bright autumn of 1879, intending to enjoy a visit with Turgenev and then go on to Florence. But early in December a ferocious blizzard assaulted northern Europe; the roads to Italy were closed off, and Paris lay encased in alpine snow drifts. Confined to the snug fireside of his hotel room, James wrote—in one sitting, almost fifteen thousand words!—the slyly comical little "international" tale "A Bundle of Letters," which scrambled Americans abroad in a mix of bewildered Europeans. Though James was by now permanently settled in London, traveling intermittently in France and Italy, America was never far from his reflections. During the previous September he had completed his long study of Hawthorne, with its notorious condemnation of his native land: