Ravelstein 
by 

Saul Bellow

 

Ways of Dying

This is a novel about ageing; more specifically about that stage in life when death has become a persistently conscious prospect. But about whose ageing and whose death is debatable - that of the eponymous Ravelstein; or of the narrator, Chick, who is preparing to write Ravelstein’s biography; or, perhaps, of the reader who may have yet to reach that point of maturity? So I don’t concur with the conventional wisdom that Ravelstein is merely or primarily a tribute to the friendship between Allan Bloom and Bellow. For me the key is the very different way in which each of Bellow’s literary characters confront the ending of his life.

Ravelstein, the man, is a biographical treasure trove: charming, eccentric, urbane, connected, clever and rich. Chick, although somewhat older, is a type Yiddish has the perfect word for - a nebbish, defined functionally as a person who upon entering a room makes it feel as if someone has just left. Compared to Ravelstein, Chick is not merely normal, he is biographically boring in his hapless normality.

Nevertheless, unlike Ravelstein, Chick develops. He has an intellectual and emotional history. Ravelstein has apparently never varied in his tastes, behaviour or attitudes since childhood. In fact his entire being seems set ab ovo. Ravelstein is mentor to the older man but his advice never varies: Be more like me, how I have always been.

So, while there is a great deal of admiring description by Chick of Ravelstein, the real ageing process is happening in Chick. It is he who, contemplating the facts of Ravelstein’s life, suddenly finds himself maturing and therefore questioning his own standards. “For seventy-odd years I had seen reality under these same signs,” he discovers to his dismay. In other words, he is learning and therefore changing through thoughts of death.

This is the kind of breakthrough (or agony) Ravelstein will never experience. Rather he has, despite his eccentricity, insisted on a fundamental type of conformity and single-minded consistency. Hence his criticism of Chick, “Mankind had first claim on our attention and I [Chick] indulged my “personal metaphysics” too much, Ravelstein thought.” Ravelstein was not one for speculation but for practical action. He could learn only about the how not the why of existence.

The result is that Ravelstein’s flamboyance, influence and wit simply fade with his declining physical state. He is quite literally less and less of what he has always been. Never experiencing self-doubt, he has no need to question this trajectory. Isn’t death the same terminus for us all? One must succumb but with valorous disregard not changes of character; or so he clearly believes.

Chick on the contrary is a man with ‘issues’. He is a mediocre writer, with immigrant parents, of unresolved Jewishness, divorced, married now to a much younger woman, and , above all, subject to the “charismatic order” exuded by Ravelstein. He too is on a trajectory into old age, but a rather more uncertain one than Ravelstein. Ravelstein, among other things, didn’t have to get over Ravelstein’s death. 

It is this uncertainty and Chick’s reaction to it which is the real action of the book. He paradoxically grows or expands towards death (or near-death anyway since he’s around to write about it). Bellow handles that reaction with graceful subtlety - Bloom was his friend after all - but nonetheless decisively. His will be a different kind of death than Ravelstein’s.

The central question that Bellow is raising, therefore, is ‘how does one best go about dying?’ Ravelstein was his last work, and he was ill when he was writing it. So how could the subject of death not been on his mind? His friendship and admiration for Bloom provides just the right context for an otherwise potentially dull philosophical analysis, or, worse, a literally deadly lapse into terminal solipsism. I think his artistic problem was not the subject itself but the way to present it palatably to those of us who haven’t quite reached the same stage of old age. In this I believe he has succeeded completely.

Postscript 10Jan19 some interesting background on Ravelstein: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n02/james-w...