Did Saul Bellow Do a Literary Injustice to His Friend Allan Bloom?

The roman à clef Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s last novel, is a portrait of an ill and aging, but brilliant and charismatic, philosophy professor told through the eyes of his close friend Chick. As Bellow frankly admitted, the former—the title character—is of course a fictionalized version of the great political theorist Allan Bloom and Chick a fictionalized version of the author. At the remove of 26 years since the book’s publication, Jonathan Marks revisits the question of whether Bellow did his friend a disservice by exposing his homosexuality and the indignities of his final years. The question, Marks argues, hangs on the extent to which the novel also exposes Chick’s weaknesses and failings: