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friendship as an imaginative coupling, the unmoored exhilaration of like
minds humming after ideas and ideas-in-things. The fabulous Bellovian
patter and genius for detail once more shows Bellow off as the master
of rendering intelligence on the page. But love is not so happily rendered
in
Ravelstein.
Rosamund is a student of Ravelstein's; but Ravelstein
never catches on to her attachment to Chick before the wedding day,
which means we never get any experience, as readers, of the courtship
between the aging writer and the young student, we never get to see any
of the telling details of love. Although Rosamund comes forward at the
close as the loving savior of Chick's life, the power of love is not much
more than a thought in the novel.
The reason for this is that Chick, as writer, harbors a kind of flighti–
ness of sensibility that keeps him always at a good distance from com–
mitting that quintessential Bloomsbury act, represented by E. M.
Forster's "Only connect." "A man who knew me well," Chick confides,
"said that I was more innocent than any adult had the right to be." This
sounds like the sort of thing a character given the slightly absurd, fool–
ish name "Chick" would say. And in fact, if Keynes weren't being
pressed on us, I could swear there's a family resemblance between Chick
and Ford Madox Ford's John Dowell, narrator of
The Good Soldier,
another book about the turn of sensibility from one age to another, and
also a man more innocent than any adult has a right to be. Dowell, like
Chick, chronicles the lives of people he claims to know intimately, peo–
ple he tells us over and over he has been as close to as any human being
can be to another. But Dowell turns out
to
be incapable of intimacy and
not
to
have understood anyone very well.
Chick, like Dowell, is a man apparently short of gravitas; he lacks a
certain essential weight to his perceptions and his habits. "I don't sup–
pose," Chick says after Ravelstein is dead-"I don't suppose that when
he [Ravelstein] directed me
to
write an account of his life he expected
me to settle for what was characteristic--characteristic of me, is what I
mean, naturally." But perhaps Ravelstein was shrewder than Chick sup–
poses. "Ravelstein's legacy to me," Chick says right at the beginning,
"was a subject-he thought he was giving me a subject, perhaps the best
one I ever had, perhaps the only really important one." We are misled,
and maybe Chick is misled, to think that that subject is Ravelstein, or
Ravelstein as a study of how the philosophical life should be lived. And
insofar as that goes, that's just one example of Ravelstein's trying
to
get
his insubstantial friend grounded. But it emerges that the subject is only
partly Ravelstein; the real subject is Chick's, that is, one's own, death.
That's
"the only really important subject."
