Monthly Archives: February 2021

Saul Bellow – Ravelstein

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For as long as I’ve had this blog, I have been itching to write about Saul Bellow. No writer has influenced me more. At least, no writer has influenced my reading more. After three years studying the English canon, I finished my literature degree feeling rather canon-ed out and went through a period where I didn’t read very much. Bellow got me going again. Exactly why my parents had a copy of Humboldt’s Gift I (and they) don’t know. Nor do I know what moved me to read it. What I do know is that my folks aren’t getting their book back anytime soon. For me, that novel was so brimming with life, so electrically charged, that it completely re-energised my reading and set me off on a whole odyssey of American literature that I am still on. Naturally, there have been many more Bellows along the way, but I am only now getting around to his last novel, Ravelstein. It was worth the wait.

Image credit: Penguin

Published in 2000, when Bellow was eighty-four, Ravelstein is inevitably mellower than Herzog and Humboldt, less rambunctious. At 230-odd pages, it is also significantly shorter. Neither fact should surprise. Shorter and mellower was the direction in which Bellow’s fiction had been heading for a while, with stories that dwelt increasingly on the past, that weren’t always barrelling forward. Though it rarely receives attention, some great writing emerged from this period: the 1989 novella The Bellarosa Connection is up there with his best novels for me, and short stories like ‘Something to Remember Me By’ and ‘A Silver Dish’ are wonderfully moving. At 230-odd pages, then, Ravelstein is actually a lot longer than you might expect, and a whole lot more vigorous.

This late-career burst of energy is indebted to the novel’s subject, Abe Ravelstein, in whom Bellow found the perfect outlet for his talents. As with Humboldt’s eponymous poet, this maverick philosopher is seen through the eyes of another, Chick. Though Chick is considerably older than Ravelstein, the two are “close friends, none closer”: the former in awe of the latter’s dazzling intellect; the latter indebted to the former for convincing him to put his ideas down in a book. That book, remarkably, has become a bestseller, and when we meet our two characters in Paris at the beginning of the novel, Ravelstein is putting his newly acquired millions to good use, whirlwinding his friend around cafés, restaurants and boutiques. Ravelstein is in his element here and seems to practically crackle with energy:

Ravelstein scribbled his name wildly on the check while bringing a bun to his mouth. I was the neater eater. Ravelstein when he was feeding and speaking made you feel that something biological was going on, that he was stoking his system and nourishing his ideas.

This rapaciousness predates Ravelstein’s wealth; he has always been excessive, his engine-like body fizzing with so many ideas, so much talk, that his hands literally tremble with the stimulation.

People are understandably drawn to this force of nature. At the unnamed university where Ravelstein teaches (clearly Chicago), he is worshipped by his students,

who dressed as he did, smoked the same Marlboros, and found in [Ravelstein’s pizza-and-basketball parties] a common ground between the fan clubs of childhood and the Promised Land of the intellect toward which Ravelstein, their Moses and their Socrates, led them.

I share their fascination. Indeed, I would almost go so far as to say that Ravelstein is one of Bellow’s greatest creations, except that he is not Bellow’s creation. So clearly is the character modelled on Bellow’s close friend Allan Bloom that Ravelstein can sometimes read as straight biography. He has the same bald head as Bloom, wonderfully likened to a “honeydew melon”; he has the same gangly frame; and, of course, Bloom too was the author of an unlikely bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. And the Bloom connection means another thing: that Ravelstein cannot possibly end well. A homosexual, Bloom died of AIDS at the age of 62, and the same happens to his fictional self.

Knowing that he will die before his friend, Ravelstein canvasses Chick to write his biography:

Ravelstein’s legacy to me was a subject – he thought he was giving me a subject, perhaps the best one I ever had, perhaps the only really important one.

In a rather meta kind of way, Bloom gave Bellow a great subject, too, and were Philip Roth the author of this book, no doubt he would have had all sorts of postmodern fun with that. But this is Bellow writing, the least postmodern of authors, and what interests him is the human cost of this legacy: how Chick “may have nothing more to do in this life than commemorate [Ravelstein]”; how this “unfinished work” might be the only thing keeping him alive. These concerns become very real when, a few years after Ravelstein’s death and with the biography still not written, Chick eats a diseased fish while on holiday and almost dies. Having almost died of the same thing himself, Bellow is clearly writing from experience here and the last fifty or so pages of the novel give a breathless and convincing account of illness, from the first twinges of fatigue to the intervention of the life support machine.

Even so, I missed Ravelstein in these pages; he is barely mentioned, only reappearing in the last few. Bellow has written too strong a character to leave out. So let’s return to him for a moment. For me, Ravelstein’s appeal is Bellow’s appeal. “[J]ust as familiar with entertainers like Mel Brooks as with the classics,” Ravelstein too moves between the high and the low, pop culture and high culture, street talk and Socratic dialogue. For both Ravelstein and Bellow these things are one and the same, are all part of the human comedy, so that, even in a book full of death, there is more than enough life to keep you laughing.

by George Cochrane

Ravelstein is published by Penguin and is available here.

Margaret Drabble – The Millstone

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In a recent piece for the TLS about unfashionable literary genres, D. J. Taylor cited “the unwanted-pregnancy novel of the 1960s” as just such a dinosaur and singled out this book among its major fossils. He has a point: The Millstone is definitely dated. Yet, as a warts-and-all celebration of the National Health Service, it also feels strangely contemporary, and, if you are looking for another way to celebrate our wonderful health workers at this time of Covid, you could definitely do worse than read this.

Image credit: Penguin

Don’t let the tagline put you off. “Rosamund is clever, very independent – and pregnant” is how my cheap eighties’ paperback tries to sell it. What that tagline crucially leaves out is that Rosamund is pregnant after just one sexual encounter. Yes, in a rather amusing subversion of sixties’ counterculture, Rosamund Stacey is actually afraid of sex and not very countercultural at all. Living rent-free in a lovely flat belonging to her parents, she spends most of her days in the British Museum, working towards a doctorate on Elizabethan sonnet sequences. Hardly the Swinging Sixties!

Her only real quirk is that she has two boyfriends. Each convinced that Rosamund is sleeping with the other, Joe and Roger refrain from stepping on each other’s toes, and so Rosamund evades the stigma of virginity without having to worry about sex. That is until she meets George. A one-night stand with this radio newsreader leaves her pregnant and with her own sexual revolution on her hands. After an incredibly grim attempt at self-induced abortion, Rosamund defies expectations by deciding to keep the baby (though she doesn’t tell George any of this), thus beginning the innumerable trips to doctors and hospitals that pregnancy entails. All of a sudden, then, this incredibly independent, self-reliant woman, who has almost never been to the doctor’s in her life, finds herself having to put trust in others and accept help.

It is a cute moral and it does feel forced at times. Late on, I was astonished to find a sentence as bad as this one: “as I grow older, I find myself changing a little.” Has character development ever been so obviously signposted? For the most part, though, Drabble is a very good writer of sentences. Take this one:

George was at first sight rather unnoticeable, being unaggressive and indeed unassertive in manner, a quality rare enough in my acquaintance, but he had a kind of unobtrusive gentle attention that made its point in time.

That last part bears repeating, I think: “an unobtrusive gentle attention that made its point in time.” Brilliant. The way those ‘t’ sounds gradually accumulate as the sentence goes on, then snap to our attention in “point in time”; the delaying of this last phrase so that the sentence literally does make its point in time. I wish Drabble always showed such consideration for the full stop. As if unable to leave her sentences alone, she is constantly elongating them via colons and semicolons. It’s very annoying, and doesn’t look very good on the page, either. If and when I read her later fiction, I will be interested to see if she grew out of this habit.

As I say, though, the chief pleasure of this book for me was its portrayal of the NHS: the waiting rooms, the waiting times, the incomprehensible buildings, the always-educational nature of a hospital visit. When Rosamund goes for her first checkup, she is astonished by what she finds in the waiting room:

[H]ere, gathered in this room, were representatives of a population whose existence I had hardly noticed. There were a few foreigners; a West Indian, a Pakistani, two Greeks. There were several old people […] Then there were a couple of young secretaries or waitresses […]

Modern Britain is in full swing and Rosamund hadn’t even noticed. Doctors and nurses, so often relegated to walk-on parts in novels, are given page space, too. In one particular comic set piece, Rosamund is lying on her hospital bed, about to give birth, and tries to distract herself from the pain by listening to the gossip of the nurses outside her door. We only get a couple of pages of their conversation before the baby comes, but in that time we get a wonderful glimpse into these nurses’ lives – their rich, empty, damaged, ordinary lives. A timely reminder that those who care for us are people too.

by George Cochrane

The Millstone is published by Penguin and is available here.

Peter Brooks – Balzac’s Lives

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I am very new to Honoré de Balzac. Last year, without really knowing anything about The Human Comedy (La Comédie humaine), I read its most famous instalment, Père Goriot, and loved it. Keen to read more, I naturally hopped on the internet for recommendations and there my enthusiasm died; I hadn’t realised the Comedy was so formidable. Comprising ninety-one completed works (and countless more uncompleted ones), Balzac’s magnum opus runs the gamut from very short stories to very long novels and features more than two-thousand characters, many recurring. Where was I supposed to go next? What I really needed was a good introduction to point me in the right direction. How fortuitous, then, that one has just been published; Peter Brooks’ Balzac’s Lives is the perfect companion for Balzac newcomers.

Image credit: Katy Homans

Brooks begins by saying what the book is not: it is not a biography of Balzac, and those looking for one ought to go elsewhere. Rather, Balzac’s Lives is “an antibiography or maybe more accurately an oblique biography” that tells the novelist’s story through his fictional creations. The titular “lives,” then, are those of the characters, as living and breathing to Brooks as they so obviously were for Balzac. For a reader like me, who is more interested in the work than the life, this format is ideal.

With 2,472 characters available to him, Brooks clearly has to narrow his focus: he chooses nine. A rather meagre sample, you might say, but these nine, who include Eugène de Rastignac, Jean-Esther van Gobseck and Jacques Collin, are among the most important and regularly-occurring in the whole project and their stories intersect with hundreds of others’. So, in reality, we get far more than just nine. These connections are often coded by Brooks in filmic terms (“The last part of Père Goriot plays out on a split screen”), and, call me a millennial, but the scale and scope of the Comedy, as described here, did put me in mind of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Given the size of his subject, Brooks deserves credit for making it so comprehensible; I, for one, would not like to have to summarise those labyrinthine plots.

Brooks does far more than just summarise, though. After explaining where each character fits narratively into the Comedy, he then goes on to explain their thematic significance. This is where Brooks’ choice of characters begins to make sense: each somehow embodies one or more of Balzac’s major themes. So Rastignac, that penniless student desperate to enter the upper echelons of society, represents “unbridled and possibly unscrupulous ambition”; the moneylender Gobseck “greed”; and Collin, that criminal mastermind, the role of “the novelist” himself.

If these seem rather broad, then consider the context in which Balzac was writing: France of the 1830s and 40s. Though the monarchy had been restored in 1815, the Revolution had set in motion changes that no monarch could halt. No longer was a good name the only ticket to power; money could get you there, too. Hence the emergence of an upwardly mobile middle class who, with the backing of moneylenders like Gobseck, could end up in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. That is the trajectory Rastignac’s life takes. But now that social roles are no longer fixed, now that lawyers and moneylenders hobnob with aristocrats on equal terms, “how do you know the distinctions between them?” That, according to Brooks, is the question that The Human Comedy seeks to answer, and if Balzac’s characters seem broad, then remember: his subject is nothing less than the whole of society.

Brooks is at his best in these moments: when he’s writing about the conditions of the Comedy’s production. I particularly enjoyed his section on Lost Illusions, in which he considers the changing nature of print culture in post-Revolutionary France and how Balzac shaped, and was shaped by, that. He is less convincing when he makes broad, sweeping statements about his subject’s legacy. For instance, where is the evidence to support his claim that Balzac is “the first writer truly to seize the meaning of the emergent modern world”? He is also a little too insistent on the writer’s proto-Freudianism. These conjectures are few and far between, though, and for the most part Brooks is a servant of the facts. It pays off. Balzac’s Lives did for me what any good introduction should do: make me want to delve deeper.

by George Cochrane

Balzac’s Lives is published by New York Review of Books and is available here.

Elizabeth Taylor – Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

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It is a rare book that can make me laugh out loud, but Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont managed it – many, many times. A testament to Elizabeth Taylor’s skill as a humourist: her novel turns fifty this year and yet nearly all of its jokes still land. Just as well, too, because the book is also desperately sad and would have been quite unbearable had it not been so funny.

Image credit: Virago/Sarah Maycock

The title sums up the plot nicely. It’s about an elderly widow, Mrs Laura Palfrey, who goes to live at a faded hotel in Kensington, the Claremont. Within a few pages of her arrival, it becomes clear that Mrs Palfrey’s status is not unique among the hotel’s clientele: they are all elderly widows. For these people, the most valuable currency is company, and they cling to those few occasions when dutiful family members pay them a visit or take them out for the day – as much for the social cachet these confer as for the company itself. Mrs Palfrey, however, is a little short on family; her only relation in London is her grandson Desmond, with whom she is not particularly close. All the same, she expects Desmond will at least be decent enough to pay her a visit and, when pressed by the other guests at the Claremont, tells them as much. Desmond is not decent enough, however, and when he doesn’t show, Mrs Palfrey’s loneliness becomes highly conspicuous.

An opportunity to save face arises, though, when Mrs Palfrey falls down on the street and is helped up by a young man called Ludovic Myers. Ludo is a young, out of work writer in desperate need of a hot meal and, to thank him for helping her, Mrs Palfrey invites him to dine at the Claremont. Boasting to her fellow residents that she is expecting company that evening, one of them asks if it is Desmond she is expecting and, for whatever reason, she doesn’t deny it. Thus begins an elaborate deception whereby Ludo pretends to be Desmond, out of which a genuine friendship develops between the young man and the old lady.

At least, the friendship seems genuine; yet there is always that transactional element to it. Both, after all, are gaining something from each other’s company: Ludo is getting money, meals and material for his novel; Mrs Palfrey is gaining social esteem. At other times, though, their friendship seems a little too genuine: during one of their meals, Ludo coyly pops a biscuit into Mrs Palfrey’s mouth and the pair lean towards each other “like lovers.” Interestingly, this book came out in the same year as that great film Harold & Maude (1971), also about a relationship between a very young man and a very old woman. Taylor does not take things quite as far as that film does, however, and Mrs Palfrey wisely retreats from any latent sexual feelings she may have for Ludo:

He was almost beautiful, she thought, and the idea so alarmed her that her glance flew away from his face and fastened on one of his shoes, as it swung back and forth, the thin sole flapping.

You could say that Taylor’s glance flies from such thoughts, too, though that is not a criticism. By avoiding the characters’ true feelings for one another, she cleverly keeps this central relationship murky and ambiguous, and stops it straying into the saccharine territory it could so easily have entered.

I love the fact that Ludo is “almost beautiful” as well, as if Taylor can’t quite bring herself to fully beautify any of her creations. She is far more interested in ugliness; like Ludo’s shoes, nearly everything in the book is broken or disfigured in some way, including the people. Therein lies much of the novel’s humour. For instance: “[Mrs Burton’s] face had really gone to pieces – with pouches and dewlaps and deep ravines, as if a landslide had happened.” Or Mrs Palfrey herself:

She was a tall woman with big bones and a noble face, dark eyebrows and a neatly folded jowl. She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.

The environment, too, is consistently grey and depressed, the novel’s young characters permanently poor and hungry. It’s a pretty bleak portrait of late sixties/early seventies Britain, and were it not for a few very passing mentions of long-haired youths and the Beatles, you would be forgiven for thinking the sexual revolution had never happened at all.

The Britain that Taylor presents instead is one that is clearly feeling the loss of its empire. Thus Mrs Palfrey’s comparison to a general is no accident; the book is replete with old military men, on the verge of extinction now there are no colonies to govern. Mrs Palfrey herself, we learn, was the husband of a British governor to Burma and she still reminisces fondly about those days when “nearly all the world was pink on her school atlas – ‘ours’, in fact.” As well as being a fantastically entertaining novel, then, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is also a fascinating historical document: of Britain’s wilderness years after empire and why, in 1975, the country tried to anchor itself again by joining the European Union. For my money, it also offers one of the most astute explanations as to why that anchor never really took and why, in 2016, it came loose altogether:

When she was young, [Mrs Palfrey] had had an image of herself to present to her new husband, whom she admired; then to herself, thirdly to the natives (I am an Englishwoman). Now, no one reflected the image of herself, and it seemed diminished: it had lost two-thirds of its erstwhile value (no husband, no natives).

The British obviously never got over that last devaluation, did they?

by George Cochrane

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is published by Virago and is available here.