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Allan Bloom

by SAUL BELLOW

The chapel is as full as I expected it to be. It would take a much larger hall than this -- something like Grand Central Station -- to hold all of Allan's students, friends, and admirers, for he attracted gifted people.

The reasons for this attraction would make a fascinating study, if a man able enough to undertake it were to turn up. Allan Bloom loved company. I lured him several times to Vermont, where the trees were impressive, but when he came he never failed to quote the Phaedrus at me: Socrates seldom left Athens, he would say, because trees, even the most distinguished of them, couldn't talk to you.

He had a great many compelling needs that could be met only in the city -- in his beautiful apartment full of books and CDs, in a seminar room, or in a cafe on the boulevard Saint-Germain, among keen, worldly, talkative friends. At home, as if at a command post, he had intelligence coming in continually. Friends phoned from London, from Paris, from Washington, with advance information about important
decisions in the making and political news soon to hit the papers. It was hard to be the first to give Allan any piece of information.

And what were the campaigns that he was running from the twelfth floor of the Cloisters -- dressed in his Japanese robe, drinking powerful coffee, and smoking something like five or six packs of cigarettes daily?

They were the wars of a frail civilization on the point of being shattered. In the early years of our friendship, I would kid him about this -- "You're holding the whole thing together" -- but it presently became clear to me that it was all most serious and most real: That he actually did have what it took to put it all together. He had also the moral courage to declare himself, to take positions, to fight. He had the nerve to show American society to itself nakedly, and for this he was denounced, he was blasted, he provoked the deadly hostility and became the enemy, the bete noire of armies of kindly, gentle, liberal people here and abroad who held all the most desirable, advanced views on every public question: people who did good works but, through some queer inexplicable shift of psychic currents, were converted into a killer mob. You can lie and be rewarded, you can fake and be elected president, but telling people what is obviously true will not be tolerated.

His detractors made Allan out to be a rigid conservative bound to a traditional canon. In his famous (or notorious) address at Harvard in 1988, he said he was not a conservative, adding that he was not trying to curry favor in a university setting where conservatism is anything but popular.

"Any superficial reading of my book will show how I differ from both theoretical and practical conservative positions. My teachers: Socrates, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche -- could hardly be called conservatives. All foundings are radical, and conservatism, has to be judged by the radical thought or events it intends to conserve."

He went on to say that he was not in any current sense a liberal either, although the preservation of a liberal society was a central concern to him. There was an observable tendency, he went on, to suspect that every theoretical stance was covertly attached to some party or other, and, he said, it seems we have been brought to a point where the mind itself must be dominated by the spirit of party. Here Allan touched on of the most repulsive aspects of modern life. All theoretical speculation is made to look dishonest, a mask for secret connivance and a camouflage for partisanship.

Fully grounded in his Plato, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, Allan was an academic, but he was a literary man, too -- he had too much intelligence and versatility, too much humanity, to be confined to a single category. The publication of The Closing of the American Mind had made a public man of him, a celebrity; he had money, he was admired, he acquired enemies and detractors, and he learned what it was to cut a figure and to be attacked for it.

Watching him narrowly, I saw with pleasure that he became more and more characteristic. Let me give you an example. When he was paralyzed by Guillain-Barre syndrome and sent down to the intensive care unit, he was not expected to survive. I was in his hospital room when he was brought upstairs and returned to his bed. He was no sooner in it than the phone rang -- a saleswoman from Loeber Motors was calling. He indicated that he wanted to talk to her and held the phone in his strongly trembling right hand. He then began to discuss the upholstery of the Mercedes he had ordered, trying to decide between grey leather and black. Hardly able to speak, he went from the upholstery to the CD player. When all this was settled, he asked my wife to buy cigarettes for him.

Some time later, when he had sufficiently recovered to go home, he wanted to be taken in the new Mercedes, by his friend Michael Wu. His doctor said that he couldn't yet sit up and would have to go in an ambulance, and he agreed in the end, very reluctant to submit.

He was provided at home with a high-tech sickbed. When he was able at last to sit, he was lifted into a chair by a hydraulic rig -- the base of a metal triangle was set under him: something like bosun's seat -- and he was swung out and lowered in a wheelchair. The essential Bloom was still there, intact -- with never a sign of inner weakness. The therapist came to teach him to walk again. He shuffled around the room speaking of Jane Austen or Flaubert, of the Sviatoslav Richter Schubert recordings he had ordered, of the season's prospects for the Chicago Bulls. He gossiped and bantered. He was sometimes strained but never grim.

I observed that he was bearing up like a philosopher. He didn't like these helpful-to-the-sick cliches or conventional get well encouragements, and I was rather ashamed of myself, to tell the truth. What I was seeing, as I well knew, was the avidity for life particularly keen in him and clearly manifest in relations to his friends -- people exceptionally close to him like Nathan Tarcov, Wener Dannhauser, Michael Wu, and a great many others (there was room for many more). On a lesser level, this avidity was apparent also in his consumption of coffee and cigarettes, and in the delight he took in acquiring Persian carpets, Chinese chests, Hermes porcelain, Ultimo cashmere coats and Mercedes Benzes.

With the same keenness, he was presently to resume his tutorials on Xenophon or on Aristotle's Politics. Teaching was something he could never bring himself to give up.

And then, still partially paralyzed and unable even to sign his own name, he wrote a book. He dictated it over many months to Tim Spiekerman; the early chapters were devoted to Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice, The Red and the Black. He wrote also on a group of Shakespeare's plays and on Montaigne and finally on Plato's Symposium.

I mention this because it was a remarkable thing for a sick man and a convalescent to do and because it was equally remarkable that a political theorist should choose at such a moment in his life to write about literature. I come of a generation, now largely vanished, that was passionate about literature, believing it to be an indispensable source of illumination of the present, of reflective power. Alan's friend Marc Fumaroli, in recent number of the Times Literary Supplement, puts it as it should be put: "Nothing has come to replace this delicate, living, reflective organ, not the different technological media, nor the various disciplines which are described as Human Science."

bellowThis new book, to be brief about it, was Allan's sequel to The Closing of the American Mind. I like to think that his free and powerful intelligence, responding to great inner impulse under the stimulus of life-threatening sickness, turned to the nineteenth-century novel, to Shakespeare's love plays, and to the Platonic Eros, summoning us to the great poetry of affects and asking us to see what has happened to our own deepest feelings in this age of artificial euphorias forced upon us by managers and manipulators.

For Allan was a deeply feeling, a powerfully feeling man -- a superior man. What did the people who reproached him for his elitism want him to do about his evident and -- I might add -- benevolent superiority? He was not a sentimental person; he was hard on many of us, hard and even cruel, but no less cruel to himself when intellectual probity demanded it.

I have known and admired many extraordinary persons in the long life I have been granted, but none more extraordinary than Allan Bloom. And I answered spontaneously when I was asked not long ago whether I had known any great men in my time. Yes, to be sure, I had indeed known some -- had even loved some of them. I do believe that Allan's is a clear case of greatness. And the truth is, about those who were taught by him or who grew to be close to him, that he changed us. Nobody was ever the same again. We are here today to testify to that.

October 9, 1992

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Comments

[steven augustine]

Bellow, sensing civilization-antipathetical minorities on the train, struggled to mask his fear