Critical Overviews to Saul Bellow's Novels

Arranged by Publication Date.

Dangling Man | The Victim | The Adventures of Augie March | Seize the Day | Henderson the Rain King | Herzog | Mr. Sammler's Planet | Humboldt's Gift | To Jerusalem and Back | The Dean's December | More Die of Heartbreak | A Theft | The Bellarosa Connection | The Actual | Ravelstein


Dangling Man

Novel Overview

Dangling Man (1944), Bellow’s first novel, is written in the personal voice of a protagonist whose principal domain is his own sensibility, and whose principal audience is himself. The text is striking in its exclusion of the female voice, its enactment of a homosocial male world, and the overt narcissism and misogyny of its protagonist, Joseph, is a would-be writer and intellectual caught waiting for the draft, who believes that intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, that state so sought after by the nineteenth century romantics, is to be attained by isolating himself within the confines of a room in a cheap New York boarding house while he studies the great writers of the Enlightenment. As the months go by Joseph quarrels with nearly all his friends and relatives, lives off the earnings of his faithful wife Eva, succumbs to fits of paranoia and anger, engages in a desultory affair, learns to hate the physical decay of his elderly neighbors, and is haunted by death anxieties. Finally, he admits his experiment has been a failure, that his perspectives have all ended in four walls, and that his search for enhanced being cannot be conducted in this manner. Reduced to the same common physical, social, and historical denominators as everyone else, he is last seen standing in a line of naked military recruits indignant at being prodded and poked by an elderly military physician, prior to entering the Navy. His search for a special fate is temporarily It is a novel which reflects much of Bellow’s early life as a young intellectual, immersed in literature of all kinds, isolated in a cheap, rented apartment, poor, impractical, and also waiting to be drafted. It is also the lament of a young artist who does not know how to join the mainstream of Chicago or American life without losing the spiritual value of his isolation. Significantly, however, Joseph expresses his spiritual ennui as an imprisoning and inadequate whiteness. The tantalizing space of the exotic and the spiritual, is troped as exotically African. Bellow will continue to lace his books with distressingly familiar racial stereotypes from the colonial African archive.

Dangling Man also reflects the 1940s preoccupation of American intellectuals with French existentialism. Modern writers as Joyce, Lawrence, and Eliot, already past their creative peaks, were a fixed orthodoxy in the universities during Bellow’s formative years. Thus, it was these modern writers who shaped his consciousness and directly influenced the form, content, and style of his first two novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, both of which engage existentialist premises and modernist literary techniques in their representations of alienated heroes hostile environments, and apparently absurd worlds. Likewise, their tight, organic forms and highly aesthetic polish also help establish them as modernist novels. However, the more immediate political backdrop for both works was the Nuremburg tribunals and the emotional impact of the Holocaust on the American Jewish community.

The novel drew an amazing critical response for a first novel and was reviewed by nearly every major journal and newspaper in the country. Furthermore, there seemed to be a general agreement that Bellow had written an important novel with style, mastery, brilliance of thought, and sharp, cutting language. Reviewers predicted an auspicious literary career for the young writer. Central to the novel was the theme of search for the value of individual freedom, the meaning of moral responsibility, and the demands of social contract, themes Bellow and other American writers would continue to explore in the decades up to the present. Also of significance is Bellow’s development of a narrative pattern that will govern nearly all of his work for the next forty years.

THE VICTIM

Novel Overview

The Victim (1947) has received scant critical attention over the past half century compared with other works, but explores in an intense manner the ability of twentieth-century man to cope with victimization and paranoia. Asa Leventhal, a Jew who has been emotionally scarred in childhood by his mother’s madness and screaming fits, and who failed to form a relationship with his father, lost both parents, enters the post WW II American workplace minus both parents and carrying with him his personal fears and a keen sense of the prevailing antisemitism. During one long hot summer during which his wife is temporarily absent, Asa wrestles with fears about his job security, and the predations into his private life of his seedy, gentile nemesis, Kirby Allbee. Furthermore, he must deal with his resentment concerning the absence of his brother, Max, the pleas for help of his indigent sister-in-law, the death of his tiny nephew, his own prejudices about the Roman Catholic immigrant family his brother has married into, and his fear that the mad-looking immigrant mother-in-law blames him for the child’s death. We last see Asa accompanied by his wife, somewhat healed from his paranoia, reconciled to his brother, distanced finally from his horror of what the gentile Allbee represents, and awaiting the birth of his first child. But like Joseph, he has had to learn to conquer the anxieties that paranoia, anger, and self-isolation produce in him and admit his dependency on love and friendship, as well as his moral and social responsibility to others.
Behind this novel’s prevailing nightmare cityscape, described in colonialist terms as a chaotic primeval African jungle of terrors, and as a pitiless African lion which does not care about anything human, Bellow explores the case for civilization. Critics of Holocaust literature have also read this novel as Bellow’s psychological treatment of the Holocaust, the Nuremburg tribunals, and the whole phenomenon of anti-semitism. Yet others have detected the influence of Bellow’s fascination with European literature, and with Dostoevsky in particular. In such readings, Asa Leventhal becomes the eternal Jew who must deal with a world not of his making. However, Bellow again poses the central moral question he asked in Dangling Man: To what extent am I my brother’s keeper?

Both of these early novels represent a certain culmination in American literature of over forty years of modernist ideological debate about the philosophical premises of European existentialism versus traditional Judeo-Christian humanism, and the “wasteland” mentality of the Anglo-American cultural tradition. Both reflect Bellow’s profound engagement with such writers as Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hobbes, and Sartre. Both portray the failure of the romantic quest and affirm the necessity for social responsibility. They also represent the moral exhaustion of a generation of young men who came of age in the 1940s, and the moral bankruptcy of a metaphysically derived humanism. As such, they are preoccupied with freedom, goodness, absurdity, death, monastic solitude, and existential anxiety. They portray a malignant, stagnant, and diseased world, albeit one described in tropes of Africanity and masculinism. Significantly, Asa Leventhal’s wife is absent for most of the narrative, thus rendering his world almost completely devoid of any feminine influence. The one woman who does feature in the background of the text, his brother’s wife, Asa believes to be superstitious, ignorant, and possibly mad. In Dangling Man Bellow proved to himself and the literary world that he too could write the modernist alienation formula novel; but, in the very act of mastering it he was already questioning its early modern philosophical assumptions. Looking back at these early works many years later, Bellow distanced himself from them by called Dangling Man his M.A. and The Victim his Ph.D.

THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH

Novel Overview

The Adventures of Augie March, (1953), Bellow’s most exuberant and nostalgic book, is set in Depression era Chicago. Written as a contemporary bildungsroman, and picaresque adventure chronicle, it is the coming-of-age novel of the larky Augie March. Here Bellow has provided a remarkable account of Augie and his brother Simon, and their fatherless family comprised of his rather gentle and witless mother, adopted Grandma Lausch, and her poodle, Winnie. Beyond that is provides a remarkably rich Dreiserian chronicle of neighborhood types. It is essentially the record of Bellow’s own immersion in the immigrant South Side Chicago neighborhoods done in minute realistic detail, and with the passage if time seems somewhat of a social realist period piece. Perhaps in imitation of H. G. Wells, who wrote of London; Joyce, who wrote of Dublin, Arnold Bennet, who wrote about his Five Towns, and Dreiser who earlier had written of Chicago, Bellow used this setting to explore and in part register his objections to modernity and modernist literary culture. Speaking in 1973 to Joyce Illig, Bellow explained the significance of Chicago in his novels:

All of civilized mankind is entering this peculiar condition in which we were pioneers. That’s why Chicago is significant. We experienced it before the others did. We experienced the contemporary condition before others were aware of it. [. . .] Chicago is, I believe, the symbol of it. In Chicago, things were done for the first time, which the rest of the world later learned and imitated. Capitalist production was pioneered in the stockyards, in refrigerator cars, in the creation of the Pullman, in the creation of farm machinery, and with it also certain urban political phenomena which are associated with the new condition of modern democracy. All that happened here. It happened early.

Nevertheless, it is a lively, boisterous comedy about the divergent paths taken by the two brothers as they respond to the CASP legacy of entrepreneurial America. The world had not come to an end as Joyce and Lawrence predicted. The disintegrating self of early modern literature had actually survived two world wars, the Holocaust, the technological revolution, and the effects of mass society. And even though the typically modern phenomenon of the alienated hero, the wasteland, and the absurd world continue to appear in twentieth-century literature right up to the present decade, many writers, of whom Bellow was notably one of the first, began as early as 1940 to question the validity of such modernist estimates. This questioning, begun tentatively in The Dangling Man and The Victim, becomes a major theme in all of the subsequent novels through to Humboldt’s Gift (1975). Bellow, like many American intellectuals, probably became acquainted with the French existentialist fiction of Camus and Sartre when it was described and translated in the Partisan Review during the 1940s. Hence, beginning with The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow for rest of his literary career depicts a series of romantic heroes, men of sensibility and often of learning, who spend their brief fictional lives rejecting philosophical skepticism and courtship of the void. The revisionist view of the world that the respective protagonists emerge with is a deep and, at times, a quasi-mystical affirmation of the transcendent value of self and existence accompanied by a clear sense of the sacredness of the social contract. Not surprisingly Bellow abandons the tight organic structures of the two previous novels and produces a sprawling and seemingly lighthearted novel written in uniquely idiomatic Chicagoan-American English and centered on Augie March as a contemplator, receiver, and opposer of action in the world.

The Adventures of Augie March was written in Paris immediately after Bellow had abandoned work on a 100,000-word manuscript entitled “The Crab and the Butterfly.” Bellow told interviewer Bruce Cook that he worked his way out of his depression over Paris and this failed manuscript by taking “a fantasy holiday,” with the writing of Augie’s story. Into the mixture went Cervantesque chivalric allusion, mock-heroic comparison of ancient and modern-day heroes, wacky humor, personal family history, classical lore, Dreiserian naturalism, Whitmanesque catalogues, Dickensian caricature, Hogarthian character portraits, the vernacular language of street, bar, and poolroom, Chicago immigrant accents, eccentric philosophical essays, Bellovian homily, and Jewish wit. The result is a novel of mixed accomplishments. Central to the moral issues and the case for optimism set up in the novel is the comparison between two brothers—Augie the optimist, and Simon the cynical materialist. This dialectical juxtaposition of pairs of brothers, or alter egos, becomes a hallmark of all of Bellow’s fiction. The fascinating assortment of character portraits evokes a feeling that arises from the middle ground lying exactly halfway between romantic idealism and existentialist nihilism, a middle ground which brings romance, comedy, and classical realism into conjunction. Here are all the lovingly evoked scenes from Chicago, immigrant portraits—the whole racial mix of the depression-period immigrant population of South Side Chicago whom Bellow often calls “the multitudes of the Holy Writ.” With Heraclitus, Augie believes fate to be determined by character, not by biology or environment, and constitutes a flat denial of the idea that twentieth-century men and women live at the “dwarf-end of times."

I have a feeling [. . .] about the axial lines of life, with respect to which you must be straight or else your existence is mere clownery, hiding tragedy. [. . .] lately I have felt these thrilling lines again. When the striving stops, there they are as a gift. [. . .] Truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony! And all noise and grates, distortion and chatter, distraction, effort, and superfluity, passed off like something unreal.

Unlike Joseph and Asa of the first two novels, Augie March is much less trapped in a masculine world, much less racially anxious, more generous in his trust in women, and generally less misanthropic. Neither is the solution for gender impasses the celibate retreat from the feminine erotic as in earlier books. Augie is a new kind of American hero who still demands a certain kind of freedom, but who in late middle age as he finishes his comic heroic account of himself and his age is still in search of his fate.

SEIZE THE DAY

Novel Overview

Seize the Day (1956), Bellow’s most read book, is a sober and deliberate retreat from the exuberance of The Adventures of Augie March. While it has all the surface appearance of a “victim novel,” it has only some of its pessimistic conclusions. The world of this novel is an urban wasteland replete with the sepulchral Hotel Gloriana. Out of work as a salesman, and estranged from his wife and children, Tommy Wilhelm finds himself nearly penniless in early middle age. As a young man he has rejected his father’s profession, medicine, tried out for a career in Hollywood, been tricked by a phony talent scout, ended up in sales and lost his district due to his boss’s nepotism. He is Bellow’s version of the classic schlemiehl of Yiddish folklore. In the dreadful Hotel Glorianna, amidst the aging capitalist fathers of a previous era, Tommy becomes aware that he has failed to fulfill their notions of masculine achievement. However, while he has failure to accomplish the American capitalist dream, he appears to be cultivating alternate values of love, feeling, compassion, and non-competition. Ultimately Tommy is conned not only out of his remaining cash, but also almost out of human hope as well. Some reviewers have called Tommy Wilhelm pathetic, while others called him heroic. Some were dismayed with book’s tight organization and seemingly modern aesthetic. Others praised it for its concentration, intensity, and focused crescendo. Years later, Bellow told interviewer that he was appalled at the philosophical immaturity of Augie March and wrote Seize the Day in an attempt to transcend its effusive and emotional limitations. It was possibly written before The Adventures of Augie March at the same time as the first two “alienation” novels, though Bellow has never more than hinted at this. Despite its alienation formulas, many critics read the novel as counterpointing death and despair with psychic renewal and spiritual survival. They suggest that despite Tommy’s experience of victimage, mass society, absurdism, and modernist metaphysics, Bellow is clearly shaping a fiction of hope. His devilish morality play figure, Dr. Tamkin, who spouts absurdist philosophy, mangled Freudianism, alienation ethics, and cheap nihilism to Tommy, is presented as a charlatan and a physical grotesque. While Tommy longs for accessible, sensible truths, Tamkin assures him there are only crooked lines. When Tommy asks him where he gets his ideas from, Tamkin becomes the butt of one of Bellow’s funniest jokes: “I read the best of literature, science, and philosophy,” he says. In his carpe diem sermon, in which Tamkin tells Tommy to take no thought for tomorrow because the past has no value and the future is an impending nightmare. In spite of his wife’s, his employer’s, his father’s, and Tamkin’s betrayal of him, Tommy, in this reading seems naively determined to “recover the good, things, the happy things, the easy tranquil things of life [. . . ].” Things were too complex, but they might be reduced to simplicity again.” His final emotional climax, such critics argue, is not bitterness at betrayal, but the achievement of love for all the lurid, imperfect people like himself whom he discovers in the underground subway in Chicago and in the funeral parlor. It is also the novel in which the seeming-orphanage of Joseph, Asa, and Augie, develops into an in-depth treatment of the failure of a father-son relationship. Dr. Adler, the highly successful, but narcissistic, arrogant old surgeon, spurns his son’s emotional pleas for nurturance and financial help. Embarrassed by Tommy’s repeated failures, he lies to his friends in the retirement home of his son’s financial prowess. Dr. Adler clearly refuses to validate any other form of masculine achievement other than financial. Into his character Bellow invests hostility and moral reproach.

Though Tommy has failed at marriage, fatherhood, money, and status, Bellow has given him all the right instincts for spiritual survival and social contract as he identifies with the countless unknown others with whom he shares the human plight. It is knowledge, Bellow insists, that resides within the sufficiently humanized soul, and requires no elaborate acquaintance with either philosophy or the world of crass commerce. In this book, Bellow also continues his protest against destructive, American capitalist codes of masculinity which eclipse the contemplative and the poet whose truer achievements will be sensibility and filiation. Significantly, contemplative and poet alike are conceived as male in the Bellow canon.

HENDERSON THE RAIN KING

Novel Overview

Henderson the Rain King (1959), undoubtedly Bellow’s most loved book, offers his most trenchant and comic analysis of literary modernism. Like wise, it enacts all of the colonialist racial ideologies of Western modernism. Through its parody and satire, Bellow renders laughable many of its philosophical banalities. Eugene Henderson, one of his few WASP protagonists, is a burlesque of the absurd, violent, artist-hero of the Stephan Daedalus variety. Violinist and pig farmer, he is a menopausal social outcast. A direct parody of the Hemingway stoic or narcissist, he is metaphysically earnest, introspective, solipsistic, bumbling, and egocentric. He believes with his Eliotic fisher king forbears that there is a curse on the land. He is Bellow’s answer to a generation of modern writers who reacted with exaggerated disappointment to the failed promises of Rousseauistic romanticism. With his initials E. H., his drinking, his .357 magnum rifle, private firing range, fascination with African safaris, and his participation in a foreign war, he is Bellow’s response to the literary giant, Hemingway, whose reputation and literary formulas dominated Bellow’s youth. Eugene Henderson, after he has alienated his wives, children, and friends, and literally shouted his housekeeper to death, uses part of his inherited wealth to finance a spiritual pilgrimage to Africa. Though this is really a mental journey to the heart of Henderson’s contemporary American spiritual darkness, its realistic furnishings are reminiscent of a long tradition of Africanist travel literature. As he journeys deeper and deeper into the wilderness, seeking spiritual enlightenment in the heart of the Africa of myth we see Bellow once again demythologizing much of his protagonist’s transcendental inheritance. But he is also demythologizing the romantic disappointment inherent in the contemporary existentialist preoccupation with death. Through Henderson’s mystical impasses we read Bellow’s comment on the utter failure of nihilistic existentialism to teach us anything humanizing about the nature and meaning of death. Even Henderson’s stoicism fails to produce a worthwhile social ethics. Through the supposedly therapeutic romping sessions with Atti, the lioness, Bellow provides his ultimate comment on the castrating effects of the modernist preoccupation with death. Then there is the ever-present Bellowian attack on Freudian personality theory and various crackpot transcendentalist “isms” represented in the character of Dahfu.

Beneath all the mockery and intellectual sifting, however, Bellow develops the story of a modern sensibility wounded by the world, yet ultimately restored by a vision of calm stars, simplicity, freshness, and mystery. Once Henderson has purged himself of modernist fallacies, all of his subsequent observations assure him of beauty, design, and grandeur in the universe, despite the fact that he remains his aboriginal Henderson-like self. Beneath sterility and despair in the novel lies a modified form of the grail legend and resurrection myth. Henderson finally offers his soul in prayer to an unknown God: “Oh you...Something...you Something because of whom there is not nothing. Help me to do thy will.... O Thou who tookest me from pigs, let me not be killed over lions. And forgive my crimes and nonsense and let me return to Lily and the kids.” It was written during a period in Bellow’s life when, in a series of public lectures, he articulated with remarkable consistency his evolving belief in the primacy of the knowledge of the human heart over the intellect.

Henderson The Rain King is also an inquiry into the conflicting codes of masculinity which afflict the modern Jewish American male. Henderson combines the romantic individualist, wealthy capitalist, rough soldier, schlemiel, philanderer, ugly American, and religious quester. He is an American imago of gigantesque proportions. Significantly, it is not until he has been embraced by African archetypal mother-goddesses, and taken lessons from a lioness, he is able to quell his earlier brutishness to his housekeeper whom he has literally shouted to death, his daughter whom he has ignored, and his wife Lily whom he has humiliated and abused for years. He is last seen rejoicing in his recently acquired spiritual equilibrium, embracing a woolly-haired orphan child on the polar ice cap of Newfoundland. Finally, the “I Want” voice in his heart is still. However, the reader is left wondering whether he can maintain this newfound equilibrium.

HERZOG

Novel Overview

While Henderson the Rain King begins to focus Bellow’s intellectual quarrel with the modernism and the social sciences, Herzog (1964) extends the critique to the entire modern philosophical tradition. Precipitated into thoughtfulness by the failure of his most recent marriage, Herzog explains that he has been “overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends.” He is appalled at what he calls the Protestant-Freudian assessment of himself provided by his analyst. Edvig has labeled his love for Madelaine “hysterical dependency” and his personality type as narcissistic, masochistic, and anachronistic. In self-defense Herzog bursts out in a tirade against the “creeping psychoanalysis of everyday life.” From there he goes on to condemn thinkers like Shapiro and Banowitch who accept psychoanalytical premises and all political power struggles as paranoid personality theory. Their “curious creepy minds,” he complains, always work on the premise that “madness always rules the world” and that mankind “resembles a lot of cannibals running around in packs, gibbering, bewailing its own murders, pressing out the living world as dead excrement.” He complains that Hobbes and Freud have not been our best benefactors and calls for a moratorium of further academic definitions of humanity which reveal “A lousy, cringing, grudging conception of human nature.” Thinkers like Dewey, Nietzsche, and Whitehead he accuses of concluding that we cannot find happiness within ourselves because we distrust our own natures and take recourse in religion or philosophy. Nietzsche is indicted for unleashing the Dionysiac spirit and calling modern cultural history a fall from classical greatness. Nietzsche’s ideas are no freer from perversion, nor closer to enlightenment than those with whom he quarrels, Herzog concludes. He blames Heidegger for the idea that we have all fallen into the “quotidian” and asks scathingly, “When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?” Spengler’s historicism infuriates the middle-aged Jew who remembers reading in his youth in The Decline of the West the anti-semitic idea that all Jews were an archaic race of Magians for whom all heroic and romantic traditions had failed. Modern physics, with its theory of entropy also comes under attack, as do genetics, demography, sociology, statistics, and all the other disciplines which Bellow believes to have contributed to the destructive idea of biological or genetic predestination of the Self through the logical application Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest. Herzog goes from there to an examination of Jean Wahl’s theory of de-transcendence, and a condemnation of Rousseau:
We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another—a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. You have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.

He concludes that “the light of truth is never far away, and no human being is too negligible or corrupt to come into it.”

Herzog is a massive accomplishment that has repeatedly been likened to Joyce’s Ulysses. It remains Bellow’s “biggest” book and was on the New York Times best-seller list for the entire year. At its heart is Bellow’s profound shock at discovering, a year after his separation from Sondra, (Alexandra Tschacbasov, his second wife) her affair with their mutual friend, Jack Ludwig. The last of their circle to know he had been deceived, Bellow lapsed into deep depression and produced an intensely self-justifying hero who was tearful, cuckolded, and utterly humiliated. Moses Herzog, a Jewish intellectual is essentially precipitated into intellectual and spiritual crisis by the failure of his marriage. The plot of the novel is slender. Herzog leaves his home and marriage, fails in the classroom, abandons his academic project, and undertakes a massive spiritual and intellectual housekeeping via the production of dozens of letters to God, the long dead, the recent, dead, and the living. At the end of it he seems to have regained his sense of Jewish identity, purged himself of violent anger, abandoned his latest mistresses, and his repented of his dandyism. He has had a profound education in the realities of human nature, and rediscovered the value of nature and solitude on his Ludeyville estate. No longer the Graf Potocki of the Berkshires, both he and the estate seem to be reverting to some less pretentious earlier natural condition. After being in constant motion physically and mentally for the most part of the novel, he is finally seen at rest in a hammock, contemplating the night sky.

Bellow wrote this novel in Puerto Rico, New York, and Chicago. He had married Susan Glassman, his third wife, in 1961, a marriage which took only three years to collapse. Though he divorced her in 1968 the legal recriminations which followed lasted for fifteen years and surfaced repeatedly in his next three novels. It was also during this period of the 1960s that Bellow lost his friend Delmore Schwartz, and began his most serious deliberations about an American culture which so readily destroys its artists and intellectuals. His major critical essays denouncing intellectual skepticism and American materialism also written during this period produced criticism from his listening audiences. They accused him of being dour, pedantic, old-fashioned, and wearily middle-aged. In October of 1968 at San Francisco State College as he began to address an audience of student radicals they groaned, catcalled, shouted, and whistled , accusing him of being archaic, a voice from another era. When he walked off the stage in disgust and despair, no one stopped him from leaving the building. It was a psychological and political turning point after which Bellow became increasingly adopted neo-conservative reactionary positions on race and gender. His marriage, to Susan Glassman, was over, and it was time to write. He retired to rented rooms in Chicago and began Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Ironically, in this same year, 1968, B’Nai Brith awarded him the Jewish Heritage Award, while the French Government conferred on him its coveted Crois de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres.

MR. SAMMLER’S PLANET

Novel Overview

Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) is set in 1960s New York City at the height of the student radical movements. It presents the misogynous Mr. Sammler, a classic old world “Western Civ” literary thinker and European aristocrat who spans exactly Bellow’s own period of social and philosophical acculturation. Here the elderly Holocaust survivor from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire wanders in the alien world of hippie-era New York, where to his American Jewish relatives he becomes an archaic leftover from another age, a priestly or sacred object, survivor of both a symbolic and a literal holocaust. Presented as a psychologically damaged holocaust survivor, a Swiftian misanthrope, and a chronic misogynist, we learn that Sammler was born the petted son of a Polish aristocrat who has made an Anglophile of himself at an early age. He has received his early intellectual acculturation in London in the era of H.G. Wells and the Bloomsbury intellectuals. Come the eve of WW II he accompanies his wife and daughter to Europe to help his wife settle her father’s estate where the two are cut off by the Nazi invasion. His wife dies, and his Jewish daughter, Shula-Slawa, remains hidden by nuns until after the war. Sammler himself barely escapes death as he first crawls out from under a pile of dead Jewish bodies, and later again shoots a soldier in the Zamosht Forest where he is hiding. He subsequently spends the rest of the war hiding in a dark tomb. After the war when he and his daughter are reunited they are subsequently brought to American by a wealthy American relative, Dr. Elya Gruner, who has found their names on a dispossessed persons list. Bellow presents Sammler as a dysfunctional man whose entire acculturation and education, not to mention near- death experiences during the Holocaust, have rendered him less humanly disengaged. Spiritually and emotionally Sammler, has put himself on ice, and must now in late life he must allow his familial and humane feelings to return, just as he must accept the family which has accepted him, and the by now neurotic daughter he finds it hard to love.

Bellow structures this book as a rather focused archaeology of the psycho-sexual formations of early modern European masculinity, along with its intellectual and cultural values. It contains elaborate accounts of the intellectual age he spans, a host of his likely mentors, an account of his privileged, sexist, upper-class education, and numerous accounts of his pathological fear of women. Like an Old Testament prophet, Sammler equates the wicked sexual mores of the 1960's age and the collapse of modern civilization, as corrupt feminity. For most of the novel he is in retreat from feminity, his daughter and other relatives, preferring to read only his old misogynous male mentors, the Bible and Meister Eckhardt. However, it is Dr. Elya Gruner, Sammler’s kindly cousin and loving financial supporter, whose moral example and imminent death finally drag Sammler from coldness to re-engagement and love. Spurning Dr. Lal’s Faustian and escapist aspirations for colonizing the moon, a humanly uncontaminated space, Sammler opts for remaining on this doomed but human planet. He notes he would rather be a depth man and explore the ocean bottom in a bathysphere. His final prayer over Elya’s dead body sums it all up: “Remember, God, the soul of Elya Gruner,” he intones, while honoring Elya for his willingness to meet his human contract—“terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.”

In Mr. Sammler’s Planet many of Bellow’s old concerns surface again: the attack on Faustian romanticism, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Spengler, Darwin, Burkhardt, Schopenhauer, Freud, and Lawrence. Then there is the general denunciation of a carnival world of turbulent 1960's counterculture people who according to Sammler are anarchistic, unmannerly, and corrupt. Particularly reprehensible to him is the violently racist Israeli, Eisen, as well as the gorgeously-attired American black pick-pocket who, in exposing himself to Sammler, represents in his mind a vulgar contemporary version of Rousseau’s noble savage, or Lawrence’s truly mystical and virile man. Reviewers commented that Bellow was clearly tired at this point and called it a stoic, pessimistic, sour, crotchety old man’s book. Others thought it was beautifully adapted to Bellow’s middle-age, while others were alienated many reviewers with its racism, misogyny, and general dismissal of the young, women, blacks, and the proletarian American masses. Recent critical responses distinguish more clearly between Bellow and his character Mr. Sammler, pointing out how Bellow uses this character to examine certain post-Kantian continental bourgeoisie patriarchal values. More recently postcolonial critics have condemned its seemingly racist stereotypes and evident misogyny.

HUMBOLDT’S GIFT

Novel Overview

Humboldt’s Gift, (1975) represents a distinct change in tone and focus from the previous novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet. It is a comic novel that portrays the spiritual plight of Charlie Citrine, a Chicagoan with a taste for low pursuits, gangland excitement, pneumatic young women, and a poetic gift he has almost lost. This “Chicago condition” which has destroyed his poet friend, Humboldt, engages Charlie in the same kind of dialectal contest fought by Joseph and Tu A Raison Aussi, Tommy and Tamkin, Henderson and the lioness, Herzog and the modern philosophers. In part a serious religious discussion couched in a deflecting comic idiom, this novel also focuses on everything Bellow felt he had lost in life or been accused of. It carefully juxtaposes of two symbolic and mutually exclusive gender constructs—an overweening “hypermasculinity” on the one hand, and an all but culturally eclipsed “poetic feminine” on the other. While the hypermasculine construct is elaborated through a rich taxonomy of destructive American male alter egos instrumental in Charlie’s poetic failure, the “poetic feminine” construct is symbolized almost entirely in Jungian terms. The story becomes in part a parable about a capitalistic American culture in which hypermasculine striving for dominance, power, and self-aggrandizement has all but excluded love, the soul, beauty, and poetic visionary states. The novel suggests that this is what destroys the American artist represented by men of feeling such as Poe, Humboldt, and Charlie. However, Charlie finally does recover that valuable dimension of human experience and vision as he deconstructs his own peculiarly American brand of hypermasculinity. Charlie sets himself up against a naturalist sexual ideology, technological rationalism, and materialistic sloth while meditating furiously on Humboldt’s and American poetry’s spectacular failure. As Charlie attempts to chart a path for survival, he locates the source of the malaise in a variety of places: Kinsey, Masters and Erickson, capitalism, and alienation ethics. Such failed modernist ideas, he decides, have transformed Humboldt, representative modern poet, from the young Orpheus of the Harlequin Ballads, to the manic-depressive pill taker, politician, schemer, paranoiac, and blasted tyrant who has tried to combine subterfuge with lyricism, poetic passion with worldly success—in a word, outer America with inner America.

It is also a novel in which Bellow’s disgust with Freud culminates. Charlie attributes Humboldt’s final explosion of madness and despair to his modernist education and his reading of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Aware that the plight of the twentieth-century artist in America is his plight as well, Charlie resolves to “interpret the good and the evil of Humboldt, understand his ruin, translate the sadness of his life, find out why such gifts produced such negligible results.” His subsequent meditation produces a vision of a modern world steeped in spiritual sloth, materialistic hedonism, and lacking an inner life. In Chicago, he observes, you could truly “examine the spirit under industrialism,” in all its agony and nightmare. He concludes that he must erect a giant buffer zone between himself and Chicago. This planet, he concludes, is “a thrilling but insufficiently humanized imitation of the platonic home-world.” He must prove the equal sovereignty of the imagination with modern science so that its truths become powerful again. Charlie, now a sixty-year-old-writer, must now forgo dreaminess, sexual hubris, false art, and the lure of a media-oriented capitalist society, his erotic obsessions, and his high gratification levels. At the same time he must cope with the mutual betrayals in his relationship with Humboldt, family of childhood, and his business affairs. We last see him contemplating the miracle of the yellow crocus he sees growing through the cracks of the hard city pavement, realizing that it is but a small and beautiful reminder that much of what has eluded him up to this point is still there to be discovered.

TO JERUSALEM AND BACK

Novel Overview

To Jerusalem and Back (1976) was written during 1975, the year in which Humboldt’s Gift drew such mixed responses, Bellow married mathematician Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea. , and the couple spent three months in Israel while Alexandra lectured in mathematics at Hebrew University. Bellow used the time to research and write his chronological documentary of the trip. He read many articles and books on Israel and interviewed numerous Jewish government and cultural leaders. The book reveals his ambivalence about the Jewish state. The book combines firsthand accounts of many of these interviews, a somewhat journalistic chronology of his stay, fictional stories, reported conversations, travelogue, bits of essays, and pieces of public addresses. It earned for Bellow the label of “neoconservative,” and a number of negative reviews. According to some critics, he did not interview enough people involved in the arts, medicine, science, civic projects, or religious groups. Others complained about his political neutrality, and yet others about his apparent lack of understanding of the history of Zionism, Israel, Islam, and world politics. Generally critics thought the book passionate and cerebral, if lacking a unifying vision and political commitment. Bellow for his part complains in the book about how hard he finds it as a Westerner to come to any clear vision of things—about how his own intermittent moral wakefulness is often followed by loss of focus–the very predicament of most of his heroes. It was in 1976, during this spate of mixed reviews on Humboldt’s Gift and on To Jerusalem and Back, that Bellow went to Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and to receive encomiums that ultimately assured him of an international audience of admirers.

THE DEAN’S DECEMBER

Novel Overview

The Dean’s December, (1982) has been called a rather wintry piece which lacking the balancing comedy of Humboldt’s Gift. The task of all previous Bellow heroes has been to crack asunder the false academic formulations of modernist philosophy. For his part the central protagonist, Dean Albert Corde, he tries to effect a Houdini-like escape from what he believes to be false modern descriptions of history and human experience. With Charlie Citrine, Corde tries resist the modernist nightmare, to read the signs of an ultimate reality beyond quotidian experience, to explore the notion of a Platonic home-world, and to build a buffer zone between himself and all outer manifestations of disorder. Through Corde, Bellow is attacking an even larger problem than that faced by Citrine—the sheer human knowability of truth, and the academic and media-driven concoctedness of our views of history. Dean Albert Corde, a resident of Chicago, travels with his Roumanian wife, Minna, back to her home country where the couple attend the dying process of her famous mother, Valeria Raresh. From the vantage point of Roumania Corde is afforded a comparison of Budapest and ‘Chicago as he writes his contemporary tale of two cities. The moral and physical decay of a fascist regine in Budapest shocks him, but so too does the economic and moral decay of late American capitalist democracy in Chicago. As he observes the diminishing of the human factor in both two cities, he enters a great nightmare in which, “although people talked to themselves all the time, never stopped communing with themselves, nobody had a good connection or knew what racket he was in—his real racket.” As he hibernates in Bucharest thinking about the grimness of the Eastern bloc existence, the Lester murder in Chicago, the doomed, black underclass of America, the possible lead poisoning of the planet, the failure of prison reform in Chicago, the distortions of the media, and the failure of the modern university, he is overwhelmed by the nightmare of it all. He puzzles over whether creatures made of variously-evolved human material are capable of perceiving a higher order of existence than that apprehensible to the senses and the logical faculties. His focus is on the Hegelian notion that man can never directly confront the real world because of the innumerable sensory phenomena that intervene as people build within themselves borrowed explanations.

For Dean Albert Corde, it is a matter of penetrating what he calls the “fantasmo imperium”—a state where facts cannot be perceived and provoke only feelings of suffocation. Starting with hibernation in Minna’s room, Corde meditates on the symbolic and actual iron curtains behind which millions have been sealed off. He concludes that scientific minds have only succeeded in producing “blockaded zones” and “zones of incomprehension” about the larger issues of human existence. Irresponsible media people, scientists, university administrators, and totalitarian politicians he believes have perpetuated a gigantic fraud. Only hermetic and quasi-mystical apprehension of reality will break down the barriers of sightlessness between the self and the external universe. The remainder of the novel is an amplification of that spiritual recovery which is only hinted at by the end of the previous novel. Having dismissed such stick figures as Romantic Man, Psychological Man, Existential Man, Sociological Man, and Scientific Man, Corde opts for the antimodernist definition of Man as Seer. Standing in the giant Mount Palomar telescope, Corde finally sees not the real heavens but “white marks, bright vibrations, clouds of sky roe, tokens of the real thing. [. . .] The rest was to be felt. And it wasn’t only that you felt, but that you were drawn to feel and to penetrate further, as if you were being informed that what was spread over you had to do with your existence, down to the very blood and crystal forms inside your bones.”

The machinery of the plot centers on the investigation of the murder of the dubious, white Rick Lester by two supposedly deviant blacks, Luca Ebry and Riggie Hines. What follows are two racialized views of the crime suggestive of the confused racial values of both Dean Corde and his equally dubious nephew, Mason Corde. The disastrous Chicago legal system in which the murderers are tried is described as an Africanized wilderness, the black underclass of Chicago as the denizens of an African village, and the prison system a lost hell hole full of doomed black prisoners of the doomed black underclass. Ultimately the Dean likens the eclipse of white culture in Chicagoan modernity to a violence-ridden Africanized primeval forest of which the political situation in Uganda functions as both analogy and prophecy. It is a horrific updated version of the primeval forest of Conrad’s heart of darkness.

The Dean’s December has received relatively little critical attention, being frequently viewed as a “tired” novel which lacks the linguistic and intellectual fireworks of earlier novels. However, it does contain one of Bellow’s more notably non-sexist portraits of a woman. Valeria Raresh, Corde’s mother-in-law, is a remarkably complex character in whom Bellow vests some of the most spiritually heroic qualities he has invested any character, male or female. As for Dean Corde himself, his world, unlike that of so many of the previous male protagonists, is feminocentric rather than masculine. In many ways it is a transitional novel in which Bellow continues to examine issues of American masculinity and femininity, not to mention race, and culture. It maintains the now familiar Bellow dialectic between male and female, East and West, democracy and totalitarianism, discovery and loss, life and death, blindness and insight. But of even great note is the fact that it focuses so directly on American racial architecture and inner city crime, doing so through a common stock of primitivist tropes of dread-filled blackness and Africanity as metaphor for the collapse of modern culture.

MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK

Novel Overview

More Die of Heartbreak (1987), Bellow’s eleventh novel, recaptures much of the old Bellow energy and comedy, but even though it falls short of both the intellectual scope of Herzog or the metaphysical and cultural explorations of Humboldt’s Gift, it illuminates in great detail the tragicomic manner in which modern heterosexual relationships have failed. It is in fact a Prufrockian lament about failed men and absent mermaids which is . full of misogynous love-lore, comic characters, botched loves, fatal forays into the danger zones of sex and romance, farcical retreats, and serio-crackpot sexual philosophizing. In its narrative construction, it is the misogynous self-ironic report of two men exchanging stories of battle wounds sustained in romantic encounters. They perceive women to have failed their masculine romantic expectations, and sympathetically exonerate misogynist men like themselves. The center of consciousness in the novel is Kenneth Trachtenberg, a self-appointed guardian for his Uncle Benn Crader, eccentric plant morphologist, whom he perceives to be one of the rare, visionary men of the age. As Uncle Benn’s erotic needs assert themselves and he becomes embroiled in modern marriage, family scheming, fraud, legal battles, and betrayal, Kenneth panics and attempts to rescue him. Like the works of Bellow’s middle period, More Die of Heartbreak is another examination of the damage women and modern life inflict on men of sensibility.

Bellow’s schedule of gender complaints in this novel is lengthy: the triple failure of science, religion, and belle lettre to illuminate love, modern distortions in human relations, the meaning of sadomasochism, the interconnection between love and death, the failure of modern marriage, the ironies of biological sexuality, the contemporary failure of poetry in human relations, and the comic incompatibility of heterosexual love with the male quest for higher consciousness. The mode of the novel is very much that of the Gogolian farce, “The Bridegroom,” with its classic misogynous tale of the flight of the bridegroom from entrapment in marriage. The upshot of the marital failures of Kenneth and Benn is that both protagonists turn viciously on women for their collective failure to accept, arouse, anticipate, love, minister, or compensate them perfectly enough. On the plane trip to Tokyo, the occasion of Benn’s second bridegroom flight, Kenneth eagerly advances his project to deconstruct “Woman” for his uncle. He explains that Benn’s superior spiritual nature attracts educated women who are affected by these emanations, and who otherwise live in metaphysical darkness. It is a characterization of women as parasitic, metaphysically deficient, and in need of “fixing.” It is also a deliberate attempt to reconstruct the celibate male enterprise by the familiar Bellow exclusion of the female erotic. Benn is last seen hightailing it for the Arctic wastes and his beloved lichens, while Kenneth settles for a woman who, perceiving his preference for flawless, classical female beauty, has had her lumpy face sanded by a dermatologist. It is a book that is no doubt extremely clever and funny to one set of readers and more than a little disconcerting to another.

Reviewers were mixed in their response to More Die of Heartbreak, and there is, as yet no clear consensus of critical opinion as to where it ranks in the Bellow canon. The final impression left by the novel is its portrayal of men as unfortunate sexual victims of droll and mordant mortality full of contaminating women who are metaphysically devoid of value. Sex and women appear to be cruelly funny jokes played on men who, without such handicaps, would appear in their true colors as noble, chivalric, and spiritually enlightened. Its preferred solutions are celibacy and bachelorhood, preserved if necessary by deception, abandonment, or flight.

A THEFT

Novel Overview

A Theft (1989), is a novella which focuses on the latest permutation in Bellow’s comic opera on the dynamics of the heterosexual human pair. It is the story of Clara Velde, who has been raised on old time countrified mid-western religious values and plunged into the urban world of contemporary marriage and business. Four times divorced and still in love with Ithiel Regler who she knows she cannot have, Clara is still convinced of the necessity if not viability of the heterosexual human pair in a world which looks like “gogmagogsville” to her. It deals with some very old Bellow themes: the Hawthornian theft of the human heart, the lure of the intellect, the classic evasions of the male lover, the social chaos of Gogmagogsville, the seeming impossibility of higher synthesis, the human comedy of sexual desire, the failure of psychiatry, boredom, power politics, the chaotic proliferation of ethnic others, the increasing absence of civilized spaces, and the diminished status of the individual. Not surprisingly, its situations parallel those of earlier novels as Clara and Ithiel, alternately embrace and flee from one another, seek higher consciousness, and become mired in temporal mundanities. Bellow’s demythologization of romantic love in “Gogmagogsville” once again hinges on the ironic portrayal of a male protagonist who can never resolve the dichotomy between desire for ultimate union with the female and the pursuit of the rational. Then there is the continuing Bellow conversation about the failure of marriage, the failure of divorce, and the failure of heterosexual relations generally. Also familiar is the appearance of a protagonist, albeit a female one, who idealizes ultimate union with the exotic, all-powerful member of the opposite sex. Clara just happens to be the female quester who falls for the mythicized all-powerful male, Ithiel Regler, who, as the object of her romantic ideology, cannot bear the weight of her expectations.

Despite Bellow’s enthusiastic endorsement of Clara, her romantic faith and readiness for heterosexual relations, the book failed to convince most readers, many of whom complained that Clara’s female development and achievements are not clear enough, that her life is too fogged over by Ithiel, and the achievement of an authentic sense of self too slenderly and unconvincingly bestowed. Yet others complained that the book lacks mythic or metaphorical power, and that the depiction of lower consciousness in this novel is lacking in typical Bellovian wit and comedy. While some praised the book for its faith in heterosexual romance, others chastised it for its sexist stereotypes. A few praised its language, neatness, and control, while the majority complained of the lack of any genuine large-scale significance.

THE BELLAROSA CONNECTION

Novel Overview

The Bellarosa Connection (1989) is a much better crafted and more complex novella. than A Theft, reveals Bellow examining the net worth of his life as writer, and as an American Jew. The unnamed narrator of this unusual tale is a memory freak, who in his old age is trying through memory to capture a lost relationship with the remarkable and mysterious Sorella Fonstein and her husband Harry. Sorella is an overweight American Jewess who has missed out on early romance and has ultimately married Harry Fonstein, a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Italy. The focus of the story is primarily on the unnamed narrator is overcome with the desire to find the couple and repent of his own American Jewish amnesia with regard to the consequences of the Holocaust. However, he has left it too late, and as he is informed that they have died several months earlier, he knows he must deal with his own identity as a Jew, and the realization that he has lived more through memory than through actual relationships and moral commitments. In so doing he has missed really knowing the more humanly and spiritually sage Sorella. Through the narrative device of Harry Fonstein’s lifelong attempt to locate and thank Billy Rose, who rescued him in Rome where he was imprisoned under the Nazi occupation, Sorella, initially fails to get her husband an audience with the sleazy Billy, until his now alienated colleague, Mrs. Hamet, gives Sorella the secret journal which documents all of Billy’s bribery, sexual escapades, extortion, profiteering, and sabotage. Armed with this document on Billy’s American style moral bankruptcy, she threatens Billy. She comments: “If you want my basic view, here it is: The Jews could survive everything that Europe threw at them. I mean the lucky remnant. But now comes the next test—America.—Can they hold their ground, or will the USA be too much for them.” It has clearly been too much for the corrupt Billy, and for the narrator, ironically the director of the Mnemosyne Institute, who wakes up to find all these dear characters dead. Bellow seems to be commenting on the cruel, ironic loss of one’s significant dead, while one still possesses a perfect and powerful memory which preserves them in their absence as if it were yesterday. It is the wise Sorella, his anima, whose loss he feels most sharply, along with that of his own Jewish soul. He wonders whether he has passed the American test and held his ground, knowing all the while that he really hasn’t. Finally he realizes: “Maybe the power of memory was to blame. Remembering them so well, did I need actually to see them? To keep them in mental suspension was enough. They were part of the permanent cast of characters, in absentia permanently. There wasn’t a thing for them to do.”

THE ACTUAL

Novel Overview

The Actual (1997) unlike The Bellarosa Connection and A Theft, appeared in hardback . It tells the familiar Bellow story of an old adolescent love which is finally admitted to and resumed. The worldly and clever Harry Trellman, a grand noticer of things, and an ambassador of the arts is invited to “notice”on behalf of another grand old noticer, Sigmund Adletsky. Adeltsky welcomes Harry’s intellectual gossip because though he is rich beyond imagining, Adletsky is now like Napoleon on St Helena, somewhat socially exiled and bored. Harry will be his intellectual informer and brains trust, while Adletsky for his part will discern the nature of Harry’s great unrequited adolescent love, Amy Wustrin, and finally bring the two together. Here is one of the most familiar of Bellow’s themes, the true human failure to recognize the beloved or the “actual.” Amy Wustrin, is Harry’s“actual,” a woman in whom he has invested half a century of love, longing, and imaginary interaction. The Actual is told with all the familiar descriptive realism of other Bellow works and incorporates that perennial Bellow theme of the embodied nature of the soul and the strangeness of love. Ironically it is Harry Trellman, who actually “ notices” a whole lot less than Sigmund Adletsky, the man he is supposedly “noticing” for.

Some critics complained that this book, with its upbeat ending proves to be rather thin and featureless, its dialogue poorly done and the general effect unimpressive. Others note that there are only a few flashes of vintage Bellow here and that Bellow is now repetitive. Alfred Kazin, a lifelong Bellow contemporary and admirer, thinks otherwise, noting that in this book Bellow appears to be as sharp as ever. These Chicago Jews, he notes, are much better off than those of the Augie March years, but display just as much soul, and all the old Chicago angst about being “ in the know.” Kazin believes that Bellow has now reached the prophetic stage typical of old American Jewish radicals. He praises the brilliant visual effects, notes the usual lack of story, and the fact that Amy is merely “a wistful attempt to redress the usual [gender] imbalances.” Other critics recall the stern fathers in Bellow’s earlier works, and suggest that in this book there is a mellowing in the depiction of the father-son relationship in the love between Harry and Sigmund Adletsky. Clearly this novel continues Bellow’s lifelong assertion that we are here to seek for our actual.”

RAVELSTEIN

Ravelstein (2000) is an autoethnographic fiction, a memorial to the late Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago in which Bellow ostensibly posing as a Boswell, is writing a Johnsonian tribute to his late friend. Hence Bloom becomes a site upon which Chick, a thinly disguised personna for Bellow, can also imagine himself more fully. Hence the book is a kind of container for an exercise in self-mediation on the part of the supposedly objective historian-biographer -novelist who is chronicling the very special brotherhood of two famous first-generation male Jewish American intellectuals. It also provides an account of Bellow’s personal recovery of understanding about what it means to be the son of Russian Jewish immigrants in America, the origins of his own Jewish voice, Jewish humor, Jewish anxiety, and Jewish life in the twentieth century American academy. Alan Bloom had repeatedly urged Bellow to write his memoir/autobiography for the sake of his own American Jewish memorializing, as well as for the sake of his friend’s need to re-iendtify himself as Jewish. It was also part of Bloom’s ongoing project to rescue Bellow from his excess of “privacy.” A thoroughly-voiced performative text, Ravelstein is full of jokes, one-liners, and Catskill comedian gags, and captures a distinctly first-generation Jewish American voice, wit, and set of neuroses, manners, affectations, cultural collisions, ethical humanism and intellectual passion.

It is by now a critical commonplace that Bellow texts contain steadily mounting numbers of male/male pairings revealing masculine betrayals characterized by competitiveness, paranoia, fear of persecution, betrayal, estrangement, cuckoldry, or financial angst. Such issues staged within the masculine scopic economy of American literature and its traditionally autosufficient male culture, and inevitable male narcissism, reveal a very old story in the history of American literature. However, in Ravelstein the powerful desire for the ultimate male boon companion characteristic of all of Bellow’s texts, is finally completed, the great boon companionship accomplished, and the debt tenderly, elegantly, and uproariously memorialized. Ravelstein transcends all of these previous failures in what is a most perfectly achieved intellectual male love relationship. At once tender, risque, intellectually stimulating, occasionally wicked, and always full of brilliant and often wicked conversation, this friendship encompasses everything from the sublime to the vaudevillian. Chick comments: “it was our sense of what was funny that brought us together, but that would have been a thin, anemic way to put” (118). At the age of 64 and for several years thereafter, Bellow clearly found in Alan Bloom the adoring and approving older Jewish male father figure he always lacked, the Jewish soul mate and brother he never had, and the nearly perfect intellectual boon companion he had searched for most of his adult life. As Harvey Grossinger observes of Chick and Ravelstein: “They [are] such friends because they are each other’s best audience. They listen closely to one another and are not squeamish or ashamed when it comes to talking about their secrets and fears” (16).

Alan Bloom, Platonist that he was, literally believed that the highest purpose and potential of male friendship was the formation of an elite community of potential knowers who seek truth. It is this intellectually elitist Platonic model for male friendship Bloom bequeathed to Bellow. In Plato’s Symposium it will be remembered, humans are originally two people sealed back to back and each in possession of two sets of sexual organs, one male and one female. In some cases both sets were male. The Gods finally punish them for being proud and self-sufficient by splitting them in half. Hence the human romantic and sexual quest in which we have all been driven to find our other half–male or female. Alan Bloom, it would seem, literally believed this, and in fact constantly looked for signs of it in everyone he knew. He had little trouble in convincing Chick,/Bellow who judging from his earlier fiction is also obsessed with doppelgängers and other hypercharged human pairings. What Bellow also received from Ravelstein in the command to write the memoir is the “subject of subjects” (164), death combined with friendship.

Chick knows that Ravelstein himself obeyed the wisdom of two great cultures, Jerusalem and Athens. His erotic teachings come from Aristophanes, Socrates, and the Bible, though Plato is his most powerful prophet. But as he is dying it is the injunctions of Moses, the facts of the near Jewish annihilation in the 20th century, and the wisdom of Jerusalem that preoccupies him. He tells Chick that half of the Jews have been killed and that he and Chick belong to the other half. Encoded in this statement is an injunction to Chick to assume responsibility for the fact that he is a Jew still living, and to cherish and act upon his his Jewish heritage, and to keep talking.

Ravelstein has been called a biographical essay, a eulogy, a memoir, a threnody, a roman a clef, the chronicle of a friendship, a valediction and a Kaddish, a biography conflated inside a barely disguised fiction, and an autoethnography. The book is very much his career endgame and final word on all the major Bellovian philosophical themes. It is evident that Ravelstein is also Bellow’s most recent attempt to make amends for sins of omission in his treatment Jewish themes in previous works. While Ravelstein is not about the Holocaust, it is scattered with numerous accounts of Nazi atrocities, as well many direct emotional responses to the horror. Ravelstein repeatedly chastises Chick for becoming friendly with Grielescu, a Balkan Nazi sympathizer and Rumanian fascist Iron Guardist who represents, “sadists who hung living Jews on meat hooks” (16). Just as Bellow memorialized Demore Schwartz and others like him, so he now memorializes Allan Bloom, and himself. Ravelstein celebrates this friendship. Though Bellow “outs” his homosexual friend, that Bellow loved Allan Bloom is never in doubt. At the end, after almost losing his own life and after struggling for over six years to fulfil his promise to write Bloom’s life, Chick/Bellow finally completes the task. In the final pages, as easily as if he had literally summoned his dead friend back before his eyes, he recalls one final time the energy, wit, clumsiness, largeness of spirit, the eccentricites, the grossnesses, and hilarities of Bloom. The final summary picture he gives of them is an intimate one. They are situated in Ravelstein’s great master bedroom, Ravelstein is dressing and Chick is watching him in the mirror as he magnificently garbs himself before the pier glass, sublime, baroque music recorded with original instruments blaring forth from the hi fi, buttoning up his Jermyn Street “Kisser and Asser” striped shirt, tying a luxurious knot in his tie, sitting down on the bed on his beautifully cured fleeces while putting on his Pulsen and Skone tan Wellington boots—smoking of course, constantly answering the ringing telephone, polishing the top of his head, and finally striding out into the cold Chicago air in his $5,000 dollar Italian wool and silk suit. “You don’t easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death,” laments Chick in one of Bellow’s greater understatements (233).

In this most recent novel, however, the brotherhood and erotics of the intellectual boon companionship play out between a gay man and straight man, at the end of the day in this masculine memorializing act Rosamund, Chicks former graduate student and wife, Rosamund is rendered primarily as a byproduct and enabler of the great male relationship. The machinery of the text is still androcentric and it is she who literally triangulates and supports the important male intellectual bonding in her dual function as adoring mentee to the one, and biblical helpmeet to the aged other. The reader wonderswhether Chick, like Joseph, is still imprisoned in a room of his own sans the desired male friendship, in the pattern of earlier novels, or whether he is now safely esconced in old age in full possession of both prizes: an enduring male friendship, albeit with a departed friend, as well as a devoted wife.

Return to Top