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is necessary for it to happen. A straight memoir is
more likely to evade this solitary instant with anecdote,
psychologising or uncomprehending sentiment. Here,
the distance of fiction opens to the uncanny singularity
of experience rather than stuffing it into the requirements
of genre.
In Ravelstein, loving friendship has taken the place
of romance. The six-times married Bellow is confident
enough in his sexuality (and at 85, a father again) to
make it clear he loved Bloom. By fictionalising his
friend we get more than the ‘schmaltz’ of a tribute. It’s
a familiar Bellow theme. His best novel Herzog is also
about an academic seen in unfamiliar light. Bellow’s
son Adam has since written of how it mirrored his
father’s life at the time, and how Adam himself appears
as Herzog’s young daughter. He says he can’t read the
novel without unease as it portrays Herzog’s wife, by
extension Adam’s mother, in a very poor light. Yet the
novel also shows how terrible it must have been to be
married to Herzog. He is manic, paranoid, distracted
and dishevelled. He scrawls mad, half-finished letters
to ‘the famous dead’ instead of writing his supposedly
great academic treatise. Herzog blames his wife’s affair
with his best friend for his condition, but he protests too
much; and he knows it.
Abe Ravelstein is a Herzog with more self-confidence,
but we still take what he says with a pinch of
salt. His best-seller advocates the clarity of ancient
BUY Saul Bellow books online from and
Greek rationality and condemns the Dionysian, valueless
chaos of popular culture. Yet while he blames
blaring Rock music for the degeneration of America,
he plays kitschy Italian operas at the highest possible
volume, annoying his neighbours. And while he knows
Plato like a man holed up in an ivory tower, he is also a
world-class consumer; he spends like there’s no tomorrow.
In fact, he wrote the outline of his book only to get
the small advance in order to placate his debtees.
In the end, he wrote the whole thing and was able to
indulge his Liberace-like taste in clothes, furniture and
hotels. The novel is rich in the textures of $4,000 jackets
and silk dressing gowns. Ravelstein is like Liberace
in another sense too: he is gay; and recklessly so. He
dies of an AIDS-related illness. Yet he pours scorn on
what he calls “faggot behaviour”. Love and its relations
has been a Bellow theme from the start, and his interest
coincides with his friend’s. Ravelstein constantly refers
to the human striving to find his or her other half, as
discussed in Plato’s Symposium. Yet while Ravelstein
shares his life with a young man called Nikki, he also
trawls the Parisian nights for rough trade.
While the narrator of the book, his friend Chick,
recognises a contradiction, he doesn’t set it up as emblematic;
he leaves it as a foible that all great men have.
Chick’s professed innocence maybe a ruse of fiction,
enabling avoidance. There are strong clues that Chick
sees through him. Ravelstein encourages Chick to de-
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