Tabletalk

Ever since the publication of the “Inferno,” in which Dante betrayed his beloved teacher Brunetto Latini to an unsuspecting public by casting him among the Sodomites, outing your dead friends (especially those with tenure) has become a literary genre unto itself.

Saul Bellow (whose current colleagues include Dante translator Robert Pinsky) is the latest practitioner with the appearance of his twelfth novel, “Ravelstein,” a roman-a-clef about his friendship with the late Allan Bloom (a former colleague), who wrote the bestselling, conservative masterwork “The Closing of the American Mind,” before joining Ser Brunetto in the afterlife.

And yet the drama of “Ravelstein” is no more of the tabloid variety than is Canto XV of the “Inferno.” The schadenfreude certain bored insiders might feel at revelations about a Bloom, whose unenlightened ideas they can now deride as hypocrisy, is tepid at best. The most dramatic revelations are of the poet, the fiction-making memoirist himself. Bellow’s “Ravelstein” is a Frankenstein monster created, as is all great literature, from pieces of the dead. And its power originates in its creator and his complex affection, born of not quite un-jealous admiration--memories digested and re-digested, never bilious and often energized by a love that dares speak its name--friendship.

The novel opens in Paris, in a luxury suite in the Hotel de Crillon with two old men at breakfast-time in June. Chick is 10 years the senior, a writer with a young wife sleeping in a bedroom a floor below. Ravelstein, the political philosopher, reclines on the sofa, his Oriental protege sleeps following a night of watching kung fu movies on TV.

Paris, the suite, the protege are all the fruit of Ravelstein’s recent windfall. Prodded by Chick, Ravelstein has set his lecture notes up in print and, mirabile dictu, they have spawned a best-seller. “After the first surge of the feelings, the strong tickle at the heart of a life vindicated by an incomplete victory over many absurdities, everything had come together to place Abe Ravelstein, an academic, a lousy professor of political philosophy, at the very peak of Paris among the oil sheiks at the Crillon, or among CEOs at the Ritz, or playboys at the Hotel Meurice.”

But to call Ravelstein “lousy” is to miss the oversized quality of a worthy successor to the Hendersons and Herzogs of Bellow’s past. Ravelstein is one of the last of the big time slobberers, a man of ravenous appetite, in food, in clothes, in proteges. “Ravelstein was one of those large men--large, not stout--whose hands shake when there are small chores to perform. The cause was not weakness but a tremendous eager energy that shook him when it was discharged.”

In Paris, Ravelstein talks, Ravelstein dresses, Ravelstein cruises the Rue St. Honore for Lanvin, all in the company of his Boswell--for Ravelstein has suggested that Chick take up the chronicle of Ravelstein’s life. Neither man is prone to bons mots. Although they are both in love with the beetier of the Borscht Belt comics, neither is particularly good at reenacting those vaudeville routines. What they revel in is the life of ideas, the sharing of the breath and the brain of the Rousseaus, Platos and Diderots long dead.

But there is more to the peripatetic ruminations of the pair than ideas. There are other characters--the sleeping wife and the sleeping protege, as well as the remembrance of wives and proteges past. More than ideas, what drives the lives of both men is a deep, abiding belief in the power of love. Ravelstein, according to Chick, “rated longing very highly. Looking for love, falling in love, you were pining for the other half you had lost, as Aristophanes had said. Only it wasn’t Aristophanes at all, but Plato in a speech attributed to Aristophanes. . . . Without its longings your soul was a used inner tube maybe good for one summer at the beach, nothing more.”

For Chick, the “serial marrier,” there is the memory of a past longing, of his recently divorced third wife, Vela, a Eastern European chaos physicist of considerable beauty. There is also the memory of other Eastern Europeans who surrounded Vela and Chick, including a shadowy Romanian named Grielescu, whose European manners hide a fascist youth.

Summer in Paris is short. The sybaritic pleasures enabled by the intellect inevitably are betrayed by the body. Returning home to receive an award, Ravelstein collapses with Guillain-Barre syndrome--an attack on his nervous system brought on by HIV. And lo and behold, the intellectual pleasures of the Greeks give way to the nostalgic memories of the Jews. For that, after all, as they approach the short end of their lives, is what Ravelstein and Chick are: nothing more than a pair of alter kockers. Even as he grows increasingly weaker, Ravelstein continues to prod Chick on his Jewishness. Slowly Ravelstein wakens Chick to the horror of his friendship with Grielescu, his marriage to Vela. Slowly Ravelstein outs the Jew within Chick, as surely as Bellow--the gossip mongers will say--has outed Bloom.

Another chronicler, James Boswell, also turned to the Jews, in the form of the medieval Rabbi David Kimchi, to defend the role of gossip. Kimchi interpreted the passage in Psalm 1--”His leaf also shall not wither”--”to mean that even the idle talk of a good man ought to be regarded.” What fun Dr. Johnson, Brunetto Latini and perhaps even Allan Bloom might be having, even as we read, in some warm, well-lighted place, roasting leaves and engaging in idle talk about the men left behind. As Chick concludes, “You don’t easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death.”