Dear Chris,
It’s interesting to read your criticisms of Ravelstein because I agree with so many, if not all, of them, and yet in the end they didn’t subtract from the impact the book as a whole had on me.
The endless repetitions–of money being thrown from the back of a train, not to mention about a half-dozen references to Ravelstein’s telephone as a “command center,” did not merely get on my nerves; they depressed me at first because they were so clearly errors. I was continually marking passages where I felt the phrasing was not suitable to the speaker, and I also did not find the conversations with Rosamund aesthetically persuasive. I did not see these errors as intentional. When I said Bellow had consciously dispensed with certain requirements of the form, I meant he seems to have decided that his present inability to write a certain kind of novel wasn’t going to hold him back and that the book would ultimately work because it was organized by deep feelings that would make the whole, for all its errors, seem in some vague way consistent. This worked for me, though I can see how it wouldn’t for others.
Frankly, all the hallucinations at the end, some of them enormously suggestive, seemed almost transcribed. They hadn’t really been beaten into artistic shape. But I followed them anyway because I felt Bellow was hugging the shore of some personal experience and even if he was doing it at the expense of formal novelistic achievement I felt he’d take me someplace worth traveling to. Where I wound up was the last paragraph of the book, which is a simple description of Ravelstein–now dead but remembered–putting on his tie. And what I felt Bellow was saying is that there isn’t a larger meaning he is able to understand and explain, even after 84 years. All he can do is render a physical description. And yet this physical description, coming after Ravelstein’s death and the near-death of Chick, is loaded with a kind of mysticism for me–an earthbound mysticism. I would even say a Jewish mysticism that keeps its feet on the ground without negating the possibility of something more. Why this should be contained for me in an image of a man putting on his tie is hard to articulate but I feel it is one of Bellow’s great achievements.
I did love the passage about the “personal metaphysics,” but for me the novel was full of examples of those metaphysics in motion, the individual descriptive moments when you feel Bellow’s soul–and part of Bellow’s greatness is that he still uses that word–marveling at the material world. That’s what moved me so much. Recovered from his illness and contemplating the nearness of death, Chick writes, “You do get tired of performing the tricks, kneading the ball of putty and fitting jigsaw puzzles together only to see, when you examined yourself, the long wrinkles of your desiccated inner arms.” A sad passage, perhaps, and yet those “long wrinkles” give me so much pleasure, capturing as they do a physical essence of old age. And since Chick keeps describing death as the time when “the pictures stop,” the persistence of the pictures take on a special significance. The way Chick notices stubble on Ravelstein’s shaved head, the asymmetry of Ravelstein’s feet, may put Ravelstein on the dissecting table, but they give him life–physical life–too.
For me, this is a simple and yet remarkably subtle fiction writer’s faith–to keep the pictures going. And that is a credo Bellow managed to maintain surrounded by intellectuals who felt ideas could replace the world. Ravelstein hates visiting Chick in the country, after all.
I should probably admit at this point that although I do think of Bellow as the great American writer of the last century, the only novel of his I ever re-read in its entirety is The Victim, because I like the way it hangs together as a whole (ironically, it’s the one Bellow denigrates as being written to conform to strict novelistic conventions). As for the others, I don’t so much re-read them as read in them. For me there is basically “the big book of Bellow” to which Ravelstein has now been added. I will have a hankering to visit certain scenes in Herzog, say, or Augie March or Humboldt’s Gift, but never the whole thing. And it doesn’t matter to me that I just read a part–I’ve renewed my contact with something that I love. And Ravelstein gives me permission to do that, in a way, because instead of feeling guilty that I was plundering Bellow’s fiction for his metaphors, I realize that his metaphors and his physical depictions constitute his philosophy, which is that surface reality contains larger meaning. If you describe something right, then you capture some mysterious truth. Even if it is only an image of a man putting on his tie, you are participating, as the Jewish mystics would say, in the creation of the world.
And maybe that’s why I liked the book, and why I like Bellow so much. For all the irony and all the artistry, he is a deeply religious writer who comforts me not by promising a different world–though he hints he believes in one–but by rendering the one I live in more concrete and simultaneously more mysterious.
Thanks for prompting me to articulate what I’m afraid might remain an elusive feeling about writing itself. Now, let’s hear what you think about AIDS, Leo Strauss, and the uses and abuses of biography-disguised-as-fiction.
Best,
Jonathan
