Ravelstein by Saul Bellow

Author:Saul Bellow [Bellow, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9780141188850
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 2000-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

I have at any rate, with Rosamund’s help, kept my promise to Ravelstein. He died six years ago, just as the High Holidays were beginning. When I said Kaddish for my parents, I had him in mind, too. And during the memorial service—Yizkor—I began even to give some thought to the memoir I had promised to write and wondered how I would go about it—how to deal with his freaks, quiddities, oddities, his eating, drinking, shaving, dressing, and playfully savaging his students. But that isn’t much more than his natural history. Others saw him as bizarre, perverse—grinning, smoking, lecturing, overbearing, impatient, but to me he was brilliant and charming. Out to undermine the social sciences or other university specialties. He was doomed to die because of his irregular sexual ways. About these he was entirely frank with me, with all his close friends. He was considered, to use a term from the past, an invert. Not a “gay.” He despised campy homosexuality and took a very low view of “gay pride.” There were times when I simply didn’t know what to make of his confidences. But then he had chosen me to do his portrait, and when he spoke to me he spoke intimately but also for the record. To lose your head was the great-souled thing to do. I suppose that even in this age people will understand the term “great-souled,” though it is not the standing challenge it used to be. Ravelstein in any case counted confidently on my ability to describe him. “You can do it easy,” he said to me. I agreed—more or less.

The rule for the dead is that they should be forgotten. After burial there is a universal gradual progress toward oblivion. But with Ravelstein this didn’t altogether work. He claimed and filled a more conspicuous space in Rosamund’s life as well as mine. She remembered a text from her schooldays that went “Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.”

To Ravelstein this would have been the usual high-minded high-school kabibble.

Still, in his own shaggy way, Ravelstein had without question been one of those “noblest people.” But for me the challenge of portraying him (what an olden-days’ word “portraying” has become) by and by turned into a burden. Rosamund, however, believed that I was exactly right for the job. And in fact I went through a rehearsal of my own with death. But at that time we were only considering Ravelstein’s death.

“It’s just a matter of getting started,” she said. “As he said, it’s the premier pas qui coûte.”

“Yes. Some French Ravelstein equivalent of bottled-in-bond or sur papier timbre, in perfect legal order, solemnized by the state.”

“There it is—exactly the joke-tone he hoped you’d take. You can leave it to others to comment on his ideas.”

“Oh, I intend to. I’m going to leave intellectual matters to the experts.”

“All you need is to get yourself in the right position.”

But as the months—years—went by, I couldn’t for the life of me find this starting point.

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