American Mind, Still Closed

Bellow’s Ravelstein is a thinly fictionalized Allan Bloom, caught at the peak of life, and rendered, so I’m told by Bloom’s friends and students, with uncanny precision and ingenuity. We first see him dressed in a blue-and-white kimono, sashaying around the penthouse he’s rented at the Hotel Crillon in the heart of Paris. His lover, a young man from Singapore named Nikki, lies asleep in bed. Bellow wants to impress upon the reader his subject’s physicality. Abe Ravelstein’s frame is long and angled and ungainly, but it’s usually draped in $5,000 suits. When he eats, you sense the pleasure with which he undertakes the task: “he was stoking his system,” Bellow says, “and nourishing his ideas”; at dinner parties, hostesses are advised to place newspapers under his chair to gather the debris from his enthusiastic feeding. His baldness is “geological.” He smokes constantly, twin spouts of tobacco smoke flowing dragon-like from his impressive nostrils. Bellow stresses the physicality at the beginning of the novel because it lends poignancy to the wasting at the end, when Ravelstein endures a tortured death from AIDS, as did Bloom. He was carried off in 1992, only eight years before Bellow sketched him as Ravelstein and five after he published the book that made him the most famous professor in the Western world.