Saul Bellow - Ravelstein

On the rue St. Honorй, Ravelstein was perfectly happy. We went from one shop display to the next.

The French term for window shopping is _lиche-vitrines__-licking the plate glass. This requires perfect leisure, and our breakfast had used up most of the morning. Still we did linger over the displays of socks and neckties and made-to-order shirts. Then we walked a little faster. I said to Abe that these luxurious displays made me feel tense. Too many attractions. I couldn't bear to be pulled from all sides.

"I've noticed," said Ravelstein, "that since your marriage your dress standards have dropped. You once were something of a dude."

He said this with regret. From time to time he would buy me a necktie-never one that I would have chosen for myself. These gift-ties were something of a put-down, to remind me that I was becoming dowdy. But there was more in it than that. Ravelstein was a bigger man than me. He was able to make a striking statement. Because of his larger size, he could wear clothes with more dramatic effect. I wouldn't have dreamed of disputing this. To be really handsome a man should be tall. A tragic hero has to be above the average in height. I hadn't read Aristotle in ages but I remembered this much from the _Poetics__.

In the rue St. Honorй, loaded with all the glamour of French history and politics-with all the special claims made for French civilization-what came back to me was that old music-hall number called "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo." There is a _flвneur__ who strolls in the Bois de Boulogne with an independent air. And he is debonair. And of course the people stare.

Things don't happen at all if they don't happen in Paris, or are brought to the attention of Paris. That bursting old furnace, Balzac, established this as a first principle. What Paris hadn't vetted didn't even exist.

Of course Ravelstein knew too much about the modern world to agree with this. Ravelstein was, remember, the man at the private command post of telephones with complex keyboards and flashing lights and state-of-the-art stereo playing Palestrina on the original instruments. France, alas, was no longer the center of judgment, enlightenment. It was not the home of cyberspace. It no longer attracted the world's great intellects and all the rest of that cultural _schtuss__. The French had _had__ it. De Gaulle the human giraffe sniffing down his nostrils. Churchill saying about him that England's offense had been to help _la France__. The lofty military creature gazing on the treetops of the late-modern world could not suffer the thought that his country needed help.

Abe's mind was never short of items to fill out or document the times. '"France without an army is not France'-Churchill again. " My taste in conversation was similar. I couldn't do it but I loved to hear it done. Ravelstein did it infinitely better. He took a special interest in Great Politics. In that line, of course, France today was bankrupt. Only the manner was left, and they made the most of the manner but they were bluffing, they knew they were talking twaddle. What they were still good at were the arts of intimacy. Eats still rated high-e. g., last night's banquet at Lucas-Carton. In every _quartier__, the fresh-produce markets, the good bakeries, the charcuterie with its cold cuts. Also the great displays of intimate garments. The shameless love of fine bedding. "_Viens, viens dans mes bras, je te donne du chocolat. __" It was wonderful to be so public about the private, about the living creature and its needs. Slick magazines in New York imitated this but never got it right…. Yes, and then there was the French street life. "American residential streets are humanly nine-tenths barren. Here humankind is still acting up," said Ravelstein.

Ravelstein the sinner did have a taste for sexy mischief. He relished _louche__ encounters, the fishy and the equivocal. For certain kinds of conduct, or misconduct, Paris was still the best place. If Ravelstein walking, smiling, expounding, stammered, it was not from weakness but from overflow. The famous light of Paris was concentrated on his bald head.

"How far is the joint we're going to?"

"Don't be impatient, Chick. You make me feel you always have something more important to do than what you're doing now."

I didn't defend myself-didn't even try. Our destination, Lanvin, was close by but we were detained en route by various shops. Optometrists always held Ravelstein up. He was familiar with every sort of frame. There he wasn't alone. According to a survey, the average American woman has three pairs of sunglasses. "O, reason not the need!" — poor Lear's defense of superfluities. Abe loved specs; he bought them also as gifts. He gave me the folding kind that go into a small case made for an outer pocket. He swore off contact lenses after he lost one in a spaghetti sauce he was cooking. Rosamund and I had been his dinner guests that evening, and jokes were made about a new kind of hindsight.-Or was a contact lens humanly digestible? As hard iron was said to be, for ostriches.

"What does this Lanvin jacket have that your twenty others haven't?" I wanted to say. But I knew perfectly well that in Abe's head there were all kinds of distinctions having to do with prodigality and illiberality, magnanimity and meanness. The attributes of the great-souled man. I didn't want to get him started. Neither did he want to get started, this morning.

Back in the Middle West, not so long ago, when he was still hard up and complained about his wardrobe, I took him downtown to Gesualdo, my tailor, to get him measured for a suit. In Gesualdo's loft he picked a bold-looking flannel from a good Scotch mill. We had three or four fittings and in my opinion the final product was very handsome. I spent a good piece of change on it. Just then I had a book on the low end of the best-seller list; it never rose past the middle but I was more than satisfied. A child of the Great Depression, I was happy with middling returns. My standards had been set in the meager thirties. Fifteen hundred bucks should have bought us a top-of-the-line suit. Even in my dude days (I had a very short fashion-plate phase) I had never gone beyond five hundred bucks for a suit. This, at the time, was what students who had just passed the bar exam were paying. When they later became partners, they stopped going to Gesualdo's. They found themselves classier tailors, the kind used by surgeons, professional athletes, and racketeers.

Ravelstein and I had it out about Gesualdo's suit. "Listen, Chick," Ravelstein said. "The real value of that suit was not in the cut of it-not the workmanship…"

"You and Nikki made fun of it when you put it on at home. You never wore it but once, to please me…."

"I can't deny that I didn't think it fit for use."

"Use isn't the word. You two wouldn't have dressed a dummy in it."

Ravelstein, a chain smoker lighting another cigarette, twisted his trunk backward, perhaps to avoid the lighter flame, perhaps because he was laughing so hard. When he could speak, he said, "Well, it wasn't Lanvin. You wanted to do something for me. It was generous, Chick, and Nikki was the first to say it. But Gesualdo is way behind the times. He makes mafiosi-type clothes, not for the dons but for the soldiers, the lower-rank gangsters."

"So much for the way _I__ dress."

"You have no interest in fashion. You don't care about name brands. You should have given me the dough you paid Gesualdo and then I would have raised the rest for a decently cut garment."

We were perfectly open with each other. You could speak your mind without offending. On either side there was nothing too personal, too shameful to be said, nothing too nasty or criminal. I did feel at times that he was sparing me his most severe judgments if I wasn't just then ready to stand up under them. I used to spare him, too. But it gave me tremendous relief to be as plain and clear with him as I would be with myself about weak or vicious things. In self-understanding he was well ahead of me. But every personal discussion turned finally into good, clean, nihilistic fun.