Remembering Allan Bloom
By Andrew Sullivan

朝圣山之思

Originally published in The New Republic, April 17, 2000.

"HE WAS IMPATIENT with hygiene," Saul Bellow says of his protagonist, Abe
Ravelstein. "There was no counting the cigarettes he lit in a day. Most of them he
forgot or broke. ... But to prolong his life was not one of Ravelstein's aims. Risk, limit, death's blackout were present in every living moment." This tall, big-handed, almost perfectly bald man — flamboyantly erudite, instinctually elitist, viscerally Jewish — strides and then falters in Bellow's new novel, Ravelstein. He dies of AIDS, another corpse in a plague his political allies largely ignored or belittled.
But victimology never tempted him. He almost seemed to embrace the role of outsider, to burnish it and touch it at regular intervals, like a talisman. He had what Bellow describes as "powerful unforgiving enemies" in the academic world and beyond. But "he didn't care a damn about any of them."

I believe it. In fact, I believe most of what's in this book. A roman à clef,
Ravelstein doesn't require a very intricate clef to figure out. It's a rumination on
Allan Bloom, the late professor of philosophy and conservative eminence. It is
written by a friend and imbued with the honest distance that true friendship
uniquely confers.

And, although it is not a book about ideas, it is about a man who lived through
ideas, even if he also longed to live beyond them. I still remember reading Bloom's
The Closing of the American Mind as a graduate student in political philosophy. I
remember its crude but irresistible critique of modern culture and its breakneck
tour through Western philosophy in 150-odd pages. With chapters like "From Socrates'
Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede," it was priceless preparation for my general
exams, if a little abstruse for the legions who bought and never read it.

But, with the publication of Ravelstein, we are presented with two facts that Bloom
kept to himself and his friends. Bloom was gay, and he died of AIDS. The salience of
these facts is strengthened, not weakened, by Bloom's public silence about them. He
knew they mattered. Of all people, he knew the centrality of the things about which
we remain silent. So it bears repeating: One of the most influential conservative
intellectuals of the last 50 years was gay and died of AIDS. For all our justified
concern about privacy and a person's right to rise above his sexual or ethnic
identity, we also know this matters. How could it not?

It matters not simply because so many of Bloom's defenders endorse a politics
brutally dismissive of homosexual dignity. It matters because this knowledge helps
us understand the work Bloom left behind. The core of Bloom's teaching was his
insistence on the importance of eros. This "longing" was, for Bloom — following
Plato — the essence of philosophy and, in some ways, the essence of living.
Retaining the purity of that longing was his life's work. The reason he disliked the modern cult of easy sex was not because he scorned or feared the erotic life but because he revered it. He saw sexual longing as supremely expressed in individual love, and he wanted his students to experience both to the fullest. The writers he investigated most deeply — Rousseau and Plato — were philosophers of eros. "It's very important," Bellow writes, "to understand that he [Ravelstein] was not one of those people for whom love has been debunked and punctured — for whom it is a historical, Romantic myth long in dying but today finally dead. He thought — no, he saw — that every soul was looking for its peculiar other, longing for its complement. ... Love is the highest function of our species — its vocation. ... He never forgot this conviction. It figures in all his judgments."

This love was not a Christian love. Bloom was an atheist and a Jew. There are times, reading him, when one feels he has not merely understood Nietzsche; he has imbibed him. But this awareness of the abyss moved Bloom, unlike Nietzsche, toward love and political conservatism. Love, whether for the truth or for another, because it can raise us out of the abyss. Political conservatism because it best restrains the chaos that modernity threatens. And here Bellow reveals something absent from Bloom's public writing. He was deeply aware of the darkness of modern enlightenment, of the countless monsters from the heart of Goethe's and Nietzsche's civilization who hanged Jews alive — "the meat-hook people," as he describes them in the book. He kept track of them. He knew who they were. And his sober, unillusioned politics was framed to foil them.

Is it too much to think that Bloom's appreciation of love cannot also be extricated from his own experience? If there is a sense of true love's promise in Bloom's work, there is also a deep, deep sense of its difficulty. The book tells us matter-of- factly of Ravelstein's husband. "Nobody questioned the strength of Nikki's attachment to Abe," Bellow writes. "Nikki was perfectly direct — direct, by nature, a handsome, smooth-skinned, black-haired, Oriental, graceful boyish man." Bellow doesn't tell us much about the substance of this relationship. It is relegated in the book — as in our culture — to the shadows, where it nevertheless stands with clarity. It is Nikki who rushes to Ravelstein's bedside, Nikki who is "Ravelstein's heir and his chief mourner." Is it Nikki who appears in the dedication of Bloom's last, and finest, book, Love and Friendship: "To Michael Z. Wu"?

Perhaps Bloom's finest achievement was to write about human love from the
perspective of homosexual love and have no one notice the seam. You cannot read him on Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra without seeing those works in a new light. You cannot read his account of Rousseau's La nouvelle Heloise without wanting to go back and read it — more closely — again. Bellow tells us how fascinated Bloom was by others' loves, their mishaps and misunderstandings. It is because he knew so well the deep, natural distinctions between men and women that his literary criticism is so sharp and his advice, according to Bellow, so good. Here is a homosexual who not only appreciates the heterosexual experience but marvels at it.

There will be those, of course, who see in this either hypocrisy or shame. They are wrong. I am unaware of any disparagement of homosexual love in Bloom's writing, although he was rightly revolted by much of what passes today for gay "culture." And he seems at ease with his sexuality in Bellow's book. Nikki is not hidden. Abe regales Bellow with every detail of his sexual escapades. In some ways, I think, Bloom's homosexuality may even have reinforced his conservatism. It helped inform him of the power of love and the lure of danger and the wisdom of a civilization that keeps both in some restraint. The resilience of sexual orientation is also, for many homosexuals, a testament to the awesome power of nature, of what simply is. In Bellow's words, Bloom had "a gift for reading reality — the impulse to put your loving face to it and press your hands against it." Part of that reality was Bloom's need for and witness to the love of one man for another. One day, there will be a conservatism civilized enough to deserve him.