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Unraveling Bellow 's Ravelstein

© Diana Adams

Before we can write about Saul Bellow's Ravelstein, we must trundle across some necessary academic and philosophical terrain. We have to get our gloves out and do some digging. Perhaps we have to look back to 1595 to Sir Phillip Sydney's 'To teach ,and to delight' to partially explain the role of fiction in society. Ravelstein is a novel, but it is also a fictional biography, a friendly testament to Bellow's great friend, the great thinker, teacher and philosopher Allan Bloom, who passed away in 1992.

The academic terrain we must cross has to do with Bloom's 1987 smash-hit, best seller'The Closing of the American Mind.' The book was a polemic aimed at what he viewed as valueless mess and the empty entertainment of what we call popular culture. It turns out that Bellow urged Bloom to write the book, and graced it with an introduction. Bellow and Bloom were great friends, and Bellow endorsed him every chance he could get.

What makes this all very interesting is that in the novel Ravelstein, the character Abe Ravelstein (very much like Bloom) asks the character Chip (a lot like Bellow) to write his biography. Ravelstein the novel, is in fact the biography. So why did Bellow write a novel instead of straight biography? I think we have to look at the distance fiction provides for the answer. We might also want to question how much fiction is actually in most biography. It is a very blurry line, indeed.

The book begins in Paris at the Hotel Crillion, the narrator Chip comments on the fact that Michael Jackson and his 'entourage' have booked the entire floor below him. We follow the learned conversation of Abe Ravelstein (a professor that really knows his Plato), who is endearing and recklessly gay. He spends exorbitant amounts of money on clothing, hotels, and the good life. The novel follows the decline in health of Abe Ravelstein, from an AIDS related illness, to his eventual death. After his death, Chip starts and stops his biography. Ravelstein has left him a puzzle or contradiction that stalls him. Chip divorces his wife, marries one of Ravelstein's best pupils, and is only able to write the biography after a near-death experience due to a tropical illness. Saul Bellow himself had a bad bout with illness while he was writing Ravelstein, he said publicly that at some point he was 'nine-tenths gone' while trying to write the novel.

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