324
PARTISAN REVIEW
published, but as late as
1943,
months after the Vel d'Hiv roundups of
the summer of
1942,
she was trying to place them in
The Atlantic
Monthly.
Her preface insisted that in Petain's France "everyone" was
"gradually recovering their liberty and their activity."
It
is a devastating
story, and one can imagine it as a stunning Ozick essay- better suited,
perhaps, to
Art
&
Ardor
than
Quarrel
&
Quandary .
All of which
should be read less as a nostalgia for the specific ardor of the earlier vol–
ume than as this reviewer's confession that he has never finished a vol–
ume of Ozick essays without finding himself longing for more.
Jeffrey Mehlman
The Demands of a Soul
RAVELSTEIN.
By Saul Bellow. Viking.
$24.95.
RAVELSTEIN IS A CELEBRATED PROFESSOR
of political philosophy-a
character based, so it has been said everywhere, on Allan Bloom, author
of
The Closing of the American Mind.
I'd better say right away that I
know precious little about Saul Bellow's personal life, that I've never
met Allan Bloom, and that anyway I do not have the stomach to believe
that you can simply translate any life into fiction. The connections and
disconnections between Bloom and Bellow and the connections and dis–
connections between Bloom and Ravelstein may have a certain inter–
est-but not for Virginia Woolf's common reader, with whom I'm happy
to identify: we want to read the book, and expect the road into its thick–
ets to be mapped by the book itself.
Okay: so, Ravelstein is a celebrated political philosopher. He is dying
of AIDS, and wants to secure his legacy. To this end he asks his friend,
an aging writer called Chick-the narrator of the novel-to write his
biography. That's the rhetorical premise of the book, which turns out,
however, to be a kind of Chinese box of motives and meanings.
For one thing, Ravelstein has a precise idea of what the book of his
life should be like: it should be like John Maynard Keynes's memoir of
Dr. Melchior, the Jewish head of the German financia l delegation at the
famously flawed Peace Conference of
1919
(Keynes headed the British
