The Book Club

Yin and Yang

Dear Chris,

As before, I agree with a lot of what you say, including that perhaps Ravelstein isn’t quite a novel–and yet it is not only fiction for me, it is an argument for what fiction can do.

Ravelstein and Chick are characters in the same way that Marcel, the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past, is a character, even though he has the same name as the author of the book, lived in the same places, knew the same people and ultimately grows up to be a writer. Why he is a character and not an autobiographical study is for me bound up with the mystery of art–and not just modern art. A cave painting of a buffalo has horns and a tail and yet it is a painting and not a buffalo.

For me, Bellow is speaking through Ravelstein as well as through Chick. Allan Bloom is no doubt in there somewhere, too, but I didn’t know Bloom, and if I am honest I suppose I consider him a sort of unseen casualty of art. His friends no doubt have every right to be upset, as did the Mona Lisa’s boyfriend. But I didn’t know him either.

I like the way you break down the Athens\Jerusalem dichotomy. You say, rightly I think, that “there is a historical (Athenian, if you will) component missing from Chick’s view” and that it is for Ravelstein to remind him of the horrors of the Holocaust. But is there a historical component missing from Bellow’s view? I would say no, because he wrote the book and he is as responsible for voicing Ravelstein’s accusations as he is for depicting Chick’s innocence.

I interviewed Bellow once and asked him if he had any regrets about his career. He told me that he felt ashamed at having ignored the Holocaust while he was writing The Adventures of Augie March. He was in Paris, it was the late ‘40s, survivors of the war were everywhere, but Bellow told me he wanted “his American seven-layer cake,” which is to say his innocence. I felt an echo of that in Ravelstein’s accusations of Chick’s naiveté and in Bellow’s own depiction of Chick–who is, after all, given a neonatal name suggesting innocence.

For me, the novel, or the fiction, is what takes place between these two characters. It is Ravelstein and Chick together, completing each other, as you yourself say. But that is what fiction does. Which is why Plato told a story to illustrate his theory of Eros, even though he was a philosopher. Once upon a time we used to be whole …

It’s fiction that restores wholeness. It lets Ravelstein be Athenian, as you say, and yet contain aspects of his opposite, a scriptural, Hebraic inclination after all. And it lets Chick, an unpolitical storyteller married to a young wife, explore the Ravelstein in himself. (He’s even accused of being Ravelstein’s lover at one point.) He is innocent and worldly, an assimilated Chick and a boychik too.

I remember reading an interview with Bellow once where he admiringly noted a passage in Dostoyevsky’s Writer’s Diary where, having just created the pure goodness of Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky noted that he was now going to have to answer that image of goodness with the negating evil of the Grand Inquisitor. Bellow cited that passage as proof of what can happen in a novel. And it seems to me, in a less dramatic fashion, what Bellow has in fact done. The tension that exists between the two poles–between Chick and Ravelstein–makes the novel. The way they change places, the way the one contains aspects of the other, the way they make each other whole is what gives the book its novelistic aspect for me.

And also its Jewish aspect. If Dostoyevsky had allowed ambiguity in his faith as in his fiction he might not have been such an anti-Semite. Bellow has a Talmudic capacity to allow two contrary elements to live side by side in argument. It isn’t Ravelstein or Chick who is the true Jew. It’s both together, participating in a conversation, a dialogue about the world. In the same way that I said I felt that Bellow’s physical descriptions are both concrete and suggestive of something higher, I feel this larger dialogue is inconclusive without being vague. Which is perhaps just another way of saying it is a novel for me, after all.

It’s been a real pleasure corresponding with you. I hope we keep talking.

Best,
Jonathan