In fact, as readers, we can know only what the novel tells us to make of the assorted bits and pieces of “fact.” We understand that Chick has a weakness for Radu, for his encyclopedic conversation, and even for his high society comic slips into vaudeville routines. When Ravelstein wants “to know just what Grielescu’s line was like,” Chick tells him “that at dinner he lectured about archaic history, he stuffed his pipe, and lit lots of matches.” Does this settle anything about his purported relations with the Iron Guard or his sentiments toward Jews? Obviously the account is not intended to settle such matters, and our understanding of the character Radu may be most powerfully shaped by the image of him gripping his pipe “to keep it from shaking, and then the fingers with the match [trembling] twice as hard. He kept stuffing the pipe with the rebellious tobacco. When it didn’t stay stuffed, he didn’t have enough thumb-power to pack it down. How could such a person be politically dangerous?”
That concluding question is by no means conclusive, but it does perfectly indicate the kinds of “information” that readers of novels must process. When Chick sarcastically evokes the courtly manners of Grielescu, who remembers every birthday, wedding date, and other tender anniversary, we must note that these “facts,” and the sarcasm with which they are delivered, have something to do with Yela, Chick’s former wife, who was sensitive, he tells us, to these trifles. But we also understand that an American like Chick would be typically suspicious of such European acts of gallantry and it is not surprising to hear him reflect, “I suppose I said to myself that this was some Frenchy-Balkan absurdity. Somehow I couldn’t take Balkan fascists seriously.” The reflection does not, to be sure, prevent a reader from taking this fascist, or fascism in general, seriously, but the novelistic treatment of things demands that we do not read Ravelstein as a one-dimensional indictment written for a simple purpose. Bellow has Chick reflect on the fact that the Jews were “Hitler’s ticket to power,” but he goes on to say, “I don’t think he [Grielescu] was a malevolent Jew-hater.” In some novels, perhaps, that might serve to close the issue and move on to something else, but Bellow wants at least so suggest that there is more to be said. Perhaps, Chick goes on, Grielescu was not malevolent in his Jewhatred, “ but when he was called upon to declare himself, he declared himself. He had a vote and he voted.”
To think of Mircea Eliade in all of this is to think of someone whose activities, however much they inspired the depiction of Grielescu, cannot be adequately assessed on the basis of Bellow’s account. Debates that swirled around Ravelstein in Romania were so often fruitless and misleading because they were based upon a futile effort to establish one-to-one correspondences between the novel and the so-called historical record, a part of which I wrote about myself years ago in a long essay, “Happy Guilt,” included here (pp. 92–118 above). But even without offering a portrait of the actual Eliade, Bellow’s novel invites us to think about a phenomenon all too familiar. The image of the intellectual who in decisive moments “voices” for evil isn’t, as well we know, limited to Eliade or Nae Ionescu, or Romania, or the right’s extremism. Here is a better reason for meditation than the simple confrontation between biographical and historical facts and the “reality” the novel offers us. And, just as we would expect from a writer like Bellow, the very idea of thinking about the intellectual who votes for evil is made to seem both irresistible and difficult. As Ravelstein sees it, “thinking it all through” is “unpleasant work,” and a man like Chick has “a Jewish life to lead in the American language, and that’s not a language that’s helpful with dark thoughts …. But then, from left field, or do I mean right field, Ravelstein urges everyone to read Céline. Well, by all means. Céline was widely gifted, but he was also a wild lunatic, and before the war he published his Bagatelles pour un massacre. In this pamphlet Céline cried out against and denounced the Jews who had occupied and raped France … Un Iupanar Juif — Bordel de Dieu. The Dreyfus Case was brought back again … I agreed with Ravelstein that Céline wouldn’t pretend that he took no part in Hitler’s Final Solution.” As for the Romanian scholar: “Nor would I trade the short-stop Grielescu for the right-fielder Céline. When you put it in baseball lingo you can see how insane it was.”
Unable quite to let go of Grielescu, who, as a sort of generic Romanian (and Eastern European) intellectual, slides frequently into caricature, Bellow nimbly contrasts him and Céline and thereby opens up further questions, as for example the perhaps irrelevant consideration about a writer’s honesty in acknowledging guilt and responsibility. Does it matter really that Grielescu, or for that matter Eliade, pretended, when Céline did not? Surely it is a question worth considering in the moral universe constructed by Bellow’s novel, if not elsewhere.
II
I first met Saul Bellow in the late 1970s in Bucharest at a small official gathering at the Romanian Writers’ Union. Our socialist democracy needed a few Romanian-Jewish writers to greet the famous American Jewish writer.
I already knew Saul Bellow’s books in their Romanian and French translations, and I had even written on the forceful originality of his urban world, in which the Jewish spirit finds its new, free, American voice, its new serenity and its new restlessness, a new humor, and a new sadness, and finally, an unprecedented way of posing life’s unanswerable questions. The gloom of that Romanian period, acutely described by Saul Bellow in The Dean’s December, quickly became apparent in the large, elegant official meeting room. The Romanian publisher, who had published the translation of Humboldt’s Gift, rose with the joyous energy of a man half his age to resurrect the ancient topic: “Who is behind you, Mr. Bellow?” The sunny lightness of the spring day was all at once overwhelmed by that “darkness at noon” which we all knew so well. Nobody in the audience had any difficulty in grasping the implication of the not overly subtle question about the invisible but ubiquitous conspiracy of the chosen (and inevitably Jewish) demons. And yet our guest, with his skeptical, gentle smile and his elegant courtesy, appeared not to have noticed the interrogator’s aggression. “Who gave you the Big Prize, Mr Bellow? Who is behind you, Saul Bellow?” the Romanian intellectual repeated. But Bellow maintained the smile and courtesy and, in his own sweet time, told us two little stories about the personal consequences of winning the Nobel Prize.
The first was about a Chicago policeman who, for many years, had greeted Bellow daily at the corner of his street and who, unaware of the Nobel Prize Universal Literary Event that had already taken place, offered the same simple, friendly, and conventional greeting that he always had. “Good morning.” “Good morning.”