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to remember that as Bloom/Ravelstein published his
book, thousands of men, women and children were
being killed and maimed by US-funded terrorists as
they undermined or overturned elected governments
uncongenial to US business interests. And the extreme
Right-wing charitable foundations who paid Bloom/
Ravelstein extravagant salaries were among the
most active supporters of these mercenaries and their
Washington paymasters. There is no mention of such
minutiae in the novel, except for talk of America’s
“higher need” in the world. Such are the real echoes
from Heidegger’s time.
My impatience with this omission could be dismissed
as unfairly motivated. But I think it reveals
the failure of the book to stand back enough. Essentially,
Ravelstein’s philosophy emerges out of a need
to deny one’s parents – that is, to repress whatever
stands behind the façade of desire, intellect, money
and status. The man exhibits such lust for life because
he was always on the edge of an abyss created by an
inherent contradiction in his life and politics. Chick
often wonders about Abe’s working class past but,
like his sexuality, it is taboo and is dropped each time.
He is perhaps too in thrall to the rumbling tank of denial
to see the victims buried in the tracks. As a result,
Abe remains a two-dimensional figure and the novel
doesn’t have any tension until he is dead.
What redeems the book, for me, is the brief re-
BUY Saul Bellow books online from and
emergence of Bellow’s lyrical intellectualism. There is
a remarkable passage in the novel in which Chick talks
of finding the way to “communicate certain ‘incommunicables’
– your private metaphysics”; something
Ravelstein refused to do. Chick explains:
“To grasp this mystery, the world, was the occult
challenge. You came into a fully developed and articulated
reality from nowhere, from nonbeing or primal
oblivion. You had never seen life before. In the interval
of light between the darkness in which you awaited first
birth and the darkness of death that would receive you,
you must make what you could of reality, which was in
a state of highly advanced development. I had waited
millennia to see this.”
He believes it can be done by returning to one’s earliest
memories, untainted by ideology or habit. He recalls
when, soon after he learned to walk, he went down onto
the street and saw “huge utility-pole timbers that lined
the street. They were beaver-coloured, soft and rotted.”
Maybe it is because this appears in relative isolation,
like the “limp silk fresh lilac drowning water” on page 73
of Humboldt’s Gift, that these poles develop a presence
like Amy’s face. The mystery is grasped, not dispersed.
Early in the novel Chick mentions reading of the “poor
convulsive” Samuel Johnson touching each lamppost
on a street, and is fascinated, perhaps because it reminds
him of his own experience. Ravelstein perhaps wanted
Chick to be his Boswell, but it is Chick, Saul Bellow,
074
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