Saul Bellow - Ravelstein

Anyway, it was just after midnight when we got up to go. Across the way there was a brilliant display of orchids. We were drawn by the lights and colors of the flower shop and we crossed the empty street. There was a vertical opening in the plate glass-two lines of brass edging-to let the flower odors into the carbon monoxide of the place de la Madeleine. More French seduction. The hookers used to congregate in front of the great church, where all state funerals are held. Ravelstein reminded me of this.

There was Ravelstein for you. If you didn't know this about him, you couldn't know him at all. Without its longings your soul was a used inner tube maybe good for one summer at the beach, nothing more. Spirited men and women, the young above all, were devoted to the pursuit of love. By contrast the bourgeois was dominated by fears of violent death. There, in the briefest form possible, you have a sketch of Ravelstein's most important preoccupations.

I feel that I do him an injustice by speaking so simplistically. He was a very complex man. Did he really share the view (attributed by Socrates to Aristophanes) that we were seeking the other that is a part of oneself? Nothing could move him more than a genuine in stance of this quest. Moreover, he was forever looking for signs of it in everyone he knew. Naturally his students were included. Odd, for a professor to be thinking of the kids in his seminars as actors in this staggering eternal drama. His first move when they arrived was to order them to forget about their families. Their fathers were shopkeepers in Crawfordsville, Indiana, or Pontiac, Illinois. The sons thought long and hard about _The Peloponnesian Wars__, about the _Symposium__, and the _Phaedrus__ and didn't consider it at all singular that they were soon more familiar with Nicias and Alcibiades than with the milk train or the ten-cent store. Bit by bit, Ravelstein also got them to confide in him. They told him their stories. They held nothing back. It was amazing how much Ravelstein learned about them. It was partly his passion for gossip that brought in the information he wanted. He not only trained them, he formed them, he distributed them into groups and subgroups and placed them in sexual categories, as he thought appropriate. Some were going to be husbands and fathers, some would be queer-the regular, the irregular, the deep, the entertaining, the gamblers, plungers; the born scholars, those with a gift for philosophy; lovers, plodders, bureaucrats, narcissists, chasers. He gave a good deal of thought to all of this. He had hated and shaken off his own family. He told students that they had come to the university to learn something, and this meant that they must rid themselves of the opinions of their parents. He was going to direct them to a higher life, full of variety and diversity, governed by rationality-anything but the arid kind. If they were lucky, if they were bright and willing, Ravelstein would give them the greatest gift they could hope to receive and lead them through Plato, introduce them to the esoteric secrets of Maimonides, teach them the correct interpretation of Machiavelli, acquaint them with the higher humanity of Shakespeare-up to and beyond Nietzsche. It wasn't an academic program that he offered-it was more freewheeling than that. And on the whole his program was effective. Not one of his students became a Ravelstein in scope. But most of them were highly intelligent and very satisfactorily singular. He wanted them to be singular. He loved the kinkier students-they could never be kinky enough to suit him. But of course they had to know the fundamentals and know them diabolically well. "Isn't _he__ the twisted one?" he'd say about one or another of them. "Were you sent an offprint of his latest article-'Historicism and Philosophy'? I told him to put it in your box."

I had looked at it. It left me feeling like an ant who sets out to cross the Andes.

Ravelstein urged his young men to rid themselves of their parents. But in the community that formed around him his role be came, bit by bit, that of a father. Of course, if they weren't going to make it he didn't hesitate to throw them out. But once they became his intimates he planned their futures. He'd say to me, "Ali is as smart as they come. Do you approve of the Irish girl he's living with?"

"Well, I haven't seen much of her. She does seem bright."

"Bright is only part one. She gave up a career in law to study with me. She's got a very superior set of knockers, also. She and Ali have lived together about five years."

"Then she has a legitimate investment in him."

"I see what you mean. Though you make him sound like a piece of property. And remember he's a Muslim. He's got a regular human pyramid of an Egyptian family… I mean." He wondered whether it was uncommon for Muslims to fall in love. Passionate love was his perennial interest. But in the Middle East, arranged marriages remained the custom. "Still, Edna, in her own right, beats any pyramid." He had studied Edna, too. He gave much thought to student matches. "She's a deep one, obviously, and quite a beauty, too."

As I have said, we had planned today to discuss the memoir I was going to write, but this wasn't a good day for biographical details. "Come to think of it," Abe said, "I don't want to go over early times again-my effective mother educated at Johns Hopkins, top of her class. And my dumbhead father held it against me that I didn't make Phi Beta Kappa. In what mattered I had top grades. For the required courses B's and C's were good enough. Still, no matter how well I did-invited to Yale or Harvard to lecture-my dad to the end threw it in my face that I hadn't made Phi Beta K. His mind was a sort of Georgia swamp-Okefenokee with neurotic lights playing over it. A failure, of course he was, but with some hidden merit-so well buried it could never be found again."

Then Ravelstein stopped and said, "I think I'd rather go along the rue St. Honorй this morning…."

"Or what's left of the morning."

"Rosamund will sleep in. We wore her out with last night's glam our-a beautiful lady at dinner with three desirable men. You'd only be a bother to your wife before one o'clock. I'd like your advice about a sports coat at Lanvin. I told the salesman I'd stop by in the a. m. I'm a little dopey this morning-I was nodding just now. Being torpid is a condition I especially dislike…."

We left the penthouse. The moment was well chosen because several floors below the elevator stopped and Michael Jackson and his people got in. There he was in one of his spangled costumes, gold on black-a tight fit. His curls were fresh and his slim smile was chaste. In spite of yourself you studied him for signs of facial surgery. His air I thought was wistfully transitional. Golden boys coming to dust, like chimney sweepers.

Ravelstein, who was as big as any of the bodyguards-even bigger but certainly not so strong-loved this brief moment of contact. He was like that-the pleasure of a moment consumed him.

On the main floor, the guards cleared a way for Jackson as if they were swimming, doing the breaststroke. There were lots of people in the lobby. The big crowd was outside, in the street beyond the police barrier. But we were pressed together and held back behind braided gilt cords. The star walked out delicately waving to the hundreds of shouting groupies. Abe Ravelstein didn't at all mind being behind the ropes. Paris today was Paris as it should be. The kings who had laid out Versailles directed the architects to build the magnificent public spaces of the capital. These, today, were Ravelstein's setting. He was the grandee in the new order of things, carrying his credit cards and checks, willing to spend his dollars-if there had been a better hotel than the Crillon, Abe would have gone there. These days, Ravelstein was a magnificent man. The bills were paid by credit card and charged to his account at Merrill Lynch. Ravel stein seldom checked his statements. From time to time, Nikki, who wasn't supposed to do it, looked them over. His only aim was to protect Abe. It was thanks to Nikki that a major swindler in Singapore was discovered. Someone there had used Abe's Visa card to run up a $30,000 tab. "The signature was an obvious forgery," said Abe, not too upset. "Visa took care of it. International electronic swindles are the order of the day. The crooks learn to get ahead of high technology like inventive bacteria that outwit the pharmaceuticals, while the brainy researchers in the labs figure out how to stay ahead. Little campus geniuses outsmarting the Pentagon."