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Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom and 'Ravelstein'
I would just like to add, if I may, a small leveller to Tom McBrides comments on the sadly late Saul Bellow and his friend Allan Bloom on whom Ravelstein is based.
I merely wanted to mention the fact that Ravelstein is not as Mr McBride portrays it a portrait of a sybaritic homosexual whose life is shown up in all its garish materialism. Such an ungenerous synopsis fails to even nod to the books genius (for once the word is not inappropriate). For Ravelstein is, as Martin Amis wrote, numinous. It constitutes an act of resuscitation, and in its pages Bloom lives [Experience, p.226].
Bloom survives there, in all his contradictions and complexity, primarily as a man of greatness. Bellow writes:
He didnt ask, Where will you spend eternity? as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul? [p.19]
In depicting Bloom to the life Bellow incurred the wrath of some of Blooms friends (not all of whom, incidentally, are or were neoconservatives). What all of us owe Bellow for, though, is an incomparable depiction of a man who, as Schiller would have it, lived with his century, but was not its creature. It is a book by a giant on a giant. That is why this loving act of resuscitation wrested from Bellow his last novels great last line.
You dont easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death.
Submitted on Thu, 2005-04-07 16:11
Re: world diary
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Re: world diary
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Re: Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom and 'Ravelstein'
Although this posting is not directed at this particular aspect of Saul Bellow, his life and work, I would like to add the following as a sort of belated eulogy. It has been more than a year since the last posting in this thread, so my prose-poem below might serve to close this thread on an appropriate note.
___________________________
WITHOUT GENITALIA
In 1959, the year I joined the Bah' Faith, American novelist Saul Bellows novel Henderson The Rain King was published. Like most novels there are many lines of interpretation to describe the meaning of this work. One explanatory line is that the novel seeks to explain the fate of the self in modern life, to describe the journey to find the self. Bellows hero, Eugene Henderson, lives actively inside his own mind. His inner voice is ceaselessly crying: I want; I want. He has lots of money but he seeks wisdom; he seeks the answer to who he is; he seeks psychological and spiritual health and freedom from lifes endless distractions, from his temper and from his wants. Henderson is seeking, in what may well be Bellows most loved book, something I had found in that same year 1959. Without any effort I had attained the goal Henderson sought; I had attained the object of my quest, although the beauty of my Beloved I still had not really beheld. I was wrapt, at the age of fifteen, in the veil of self,1 viewing life, as most children and adolescents do, as one long indulgence.-Ron Price with appreciation to Bah'u'llh, Hidden Words. #22 Arabic.
It was a bi-polar culture back then,1
back in the fifties, back when my
bi-polarism first emerged with a
chemical efficiency far beyond
any social determinism. Culture
has always been bi-polar for me
and every atom in existence was
quintessentially a mystery, far
beyond any empirical analysis
and prediction. Although, I..
must say that the mask of the fifties
was drawn aside about 1959/60
and a changing face, regretful,
doubting and looking for a type
of rebirth in rock-n-roll was
waking us up from Doris Day,
Mr. Clean, Ike Eisenhower,
luxury without stress, life
without negroes and certainly
without the unspoken genitalia.2
1 M.A. Quayam, Bellows: Henderson and The Rain King as An Allegory for The Fifties, American Studies International, Vol.33, No.1, 1995, pp.65-74.
2 D.T. Miller and M. Nowak, the Fifties: The Way We Really Were, Doubleday and Co. Inc., N.Y., 1977, p.18.
Ron Price
May 25th 2006
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