COMMENTARY: A Sense of Humor, A Sense of Life

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.) (UNDATED) It is hard even to imagine what could be scandalous in a culture that gives a […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) It is hard even to imagine what could be scandalous in a culture that gives a pass to a president famous for making passes at young interns and who still maintains lies under oath are “technically correct” statements.


In the ensuing morality vacuum, some people resort to a fix of false scandal to get their high of moral superiority. In Roman Catholic tradition that is known as pharisaic scandal, named after the hypocritical religious leaders who pretended to be upset because Jesus mixed with prostitutes, tax collectors and other sinners.

They’re back, as they say, having surfaced recently in at least two places, each group displaying differing symptoms of their impoverished souls. These groups overlap, but you can easily tell them apart. One lacks a sense of humor, while the other lacks a sense of life itself.

The first group criticizes radio luminary Don Imus for allegedly allowing irreverent and prejudiced remarks to be made during his morning program. The only antidote for the plague of political correctness, of which such criticism is an example, is a sense of humor, the capacity to observe ourselves and our culture with an ironic appreciation for its fractured and uneven nature.

An hour of Imus remains arguably better for the soul of America than a month of taking pharisaic scandal at anything that may make us smile and, as a result, look more forgivingly at each other.

Worse than this is the artificial storm blown up by the special effects department of the Pharisaic Scandal Company about Saul Bellow’s latest novel, “Ravelstein,” which is undeniably about the late Allan Bloom, who taught with Bellow at the University of Chicago.

Nobel laureate Bellow is accused of “outing” Bloom by allowing Ravelstein, the Bloom surrogate, to die of AIDS. One had thought the culture had become mature in being able to accept AIDS as an illness and that people die from it regularly. To hold it scandalous that we can name the agent of a friend’s mortality without blushing illustrates the perverted heart of political correctness.

These contemporary Pharisees have not been as interested in protecting Bloom as they are in slamming Bellow, a novelist whose works are suffused with a sympathy and support for all that is human.


I write under a handicap here because, unlike the critics, I know something about this. I am a friend to Bellow and was to Bloom through years of good times together. It is hard to take seriously a New York Times Magazine article by D.T. Max, in which his confidence in misinterpreting Bellow leads to a grotesque distortion of the man and the work. He concludes, for example, that Bellow is really writing about himself, that the great novelist can only say, “Ravelstein, c’est moi.”

As to the idea that Bellow was jealous of Bloom, the latter once told me of how moved he was when, after the success of “The Closing of The American Mind,” Bellow had embraced him and said that, with his new fame, “We are now equal in everything,” and gently told him of the “sleepless ecstasy” it would bring to him.

Max should have followed up on the clue Bellow offered about the art of fiction: “(V)ery few people understand it. … They try to line it up with certain knowable facts, but it doesn’t always work that way.”

Bloom knew that what he described as Bellow’s “great dark observing eyes” saw him deeply and saw him whole. Perhaps he was anticipating the result when he told me, “I’m a schlemiel. I spend money, get spots on my tie, and am the recipient of some of Saul’s best wit, but there is always a tenderness to it.”

Thomas Mann’s grasp of the novelist’s duty was once summarized as “… to observe and to name exactly, wounding, even possibly killing. For what a writer must name in describing are inevitably imperfections. … Perfection lacks personality. … What is lovable about any human being is precisely his imperfections. The writer is to find the right word for these and to send them like arrows to their mark _ but with a balm, the balm of love on every point. For the mark, the imperfection, is exactly what is personal, human, natural, in the object, and the umbilical point of its life.”

Saul Bellow has delivered the gloriously alive and spectacularly imperfect Bloom just as he was. Bloom died of life; he lived recklessly but fully. The point is not that everyone may now know of his last illness but that they may know him exactly as he was and, to his friends, still is.


DEA END KENNEDY

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