This tall pin-or chalk-striped dude with his bald head (you always felt there was something dangerous about its whiteness, its white force, its dents) did not step up to the platform to bore you silly with the correct order of the epochs (the Age of Faith, the Age of Reason, the Romantic Revolution), nor did he present himself as an academic, or as a campus rebel encouraging revolutionary behavior. The strikes and campus takeovers of the sixties had set the country back significantly, he said. He did not court students by putting on bull-session airs or try to scandalize them-entertain them actually, as histrionic lecturers do-by shouting "Shit!" or "Fuck!" There was nothing at all of the campus wildman about him. His frailties were visible. He obsessively knew what it was to be sunk by his faults or his errors. But before he went under he would describe Plato's Cave to you. He would tell you about your soul, already thin, and shrinking fast-faster and faster.
He attracted gifted students. His classes were always full up. So it presently occurred to me that he had only to put on the page what he was doing viva voce. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Ravelstein to write a popular book.
Furthermore, to be perfectly frank, I was tired of hearing about his unsatisfactory salary, his Byzantine borrowing habits, and the deals and arrangements he made putting his treasures in hock, his Jensen teapot or his Quimper antique plates. After following with more exasperation than interest the story of his beautiful Jensen teapot five years in the hands of Cecil Moers, one of his own Ph.D.'s, given as security for a $5,000 loan (and finally sold by this Ph.D. for ten thousand to some dealer), I said, "How long can you expect me to put up with this boring dispute, this boring teapot, and all your other boring luxury articles? Look, Abe, if you're living beyond your means, a struggling aristocrat victimized by his need for beautiful objects, why don't you increase those means?"
At this, I recall, Ravelstein brought both hands to both his ears. The hands were finely made, the ears were gross. "What-should I register with an escort service?"
"Well, you're not much of a dancer. You might hire out as a dinner-table conversationalist. Like a thousand bucks a night… No, what I have in mind for you is a book. You could base a popular book on your actual class notes."
"Yah," he said. "Like Fielding's poor Parson Adams who goes to London to have his sermons printed. The parson needed money, and he had nothing to sell except his sermons. He had written them out. I don't even have notes. The advice you're giving me, Chick, is the advice of a much-published author. You remind me of Dwight Macdonald. He said to Venetsky, one of his friends, who was dead broke-absolutely at wit's end for money-'If you're in such a bind, Venetsky, why don't you sell one of your bonds. One can always do that.' It never would have occurred to him that Venetsky _had__ no bonds. The Macdonalds had them. The Venetskys didn't."
"This is Macdonald as Marie Antoinette."
"Yes!" Ravelstein shouted, laughing. "Thee-ah old depression joke about the hobo who pitches a rich old lady and says, 'Ma'am, I haven't swallowed a bite of food in three days.'
'O you poor man, you must force yourself,' she says."
"I don't see how you can miss on this," I told Ravelstein. "All you have to do is prepare a proposal. At the very least you can get a small advance. It couldn't be less than twenty-five hundred dollars. My guess would be nearer to five thousand. Even if you never write a word of this proposed book, you'll pay off some of the debts and re vive your borrowing power. How can you lose?"
He jumped at this. To bilk a publisher out of a few thousand bucks and at the same time free himself to wheel and deal was tremendously appealing. In outlook, he was anything but petty. But he did not expect my Utopian brainstorm to come to anything. He had gotten used to the theater of small-time intrigue where he could ironically, satirically dramatize and assert his exceptional stature and scope. So the outline was prepared and sent, a contract was signed, the advance was paid. The priceless Jensen silver teapot was gone for good, but Ravelstein's credit line was reopened. He wired money to Nikki in Geneva, who bought a new outfit from Gianfranco Ferre. Nikki had the instincts of a prince, he dressed like one-in Nikki, Ravelstein saw a brilliant young man who had every right to assert himself. This was not a matter of style or self-presentation. We are speaking here of a young man's nature and not of his strategies.
To his own surprise, Abe Ravelstein then found himself writing the book he had signed up to do. The surprise was general among his friends and the three or four generations of students he had trained. Some of these disapproved. They opposed what they saw as the popularization, or cheapening, of his ideas. But teaching, even if you are teaching Plato or Lucretius or Machiavelli or Bacon or Hobbes, is a kind of popularization. The products of their great minds have been in print for centuries and accessible to a general public blind to their esoteric significance. For all the great texts had esoteric significance, he believed and taught. This, I think, has to be mentioned, but no more than mentioned. The simplest of human beings is, for that matter, esoteric and radically mysterious.
One more odd bit from that evening at Lucas-Carton. It ended with an after-dinner wine. We had come to the estuary of the feast and were once more facing the gulf of common fare. Ravelstein pulled out his French checkbook. He had never before had a Paris account. For long years he had been a tourist or midlevel worship per of French civilization-but under a budgetary cloud-wanting to be a high-stepper, but broke. On our own side of the Atlantic there was a shadow parallel to this. As a Jew you are also an American, but somehow you are also not. Imagine, however, reaching into your pocket to leave a grand seigneur tip and finding little more than lint along the seam. But Ravelstein, with his shaking hand, wrote tonight's check in an ecstasy. Now the waiter had brought a dish of chocolate truffles with the bill and it broke Ravel stein up to see Rosamund opening her purse and wrapping up the small peaked chocolates covered with cocoa dust. "Take em! Take every last one," said Ravelstein the Jewish comedian. He raised his cracked nightclub voice. "Those are edible souvenirs. Every one you eat will bring this feast back to you. You can write it down in your diary and remember how bold and forward you were, dumping these truffles into your bag."
Ravelstein thought all the better of you for stepping out of line. Later, he would occasionally say to Rosamund, "Don't give me that well-bred-young-lady, lace-paper-doily routine. I saw you swiping those chocolates at Lucas-Carton." The fact is that he liked minor crimes and misdemeanors. Just under the surfaces of his preferences there were always ideas to be found. In this instance the idea was that uniform good conduct was a very bad sign. Ravelstein himself, moreover, had a weakness for goodies-what he called _friandise__. On his way home from the office he often stopped at the grocery store to buy a bag of kid candy. He'd stuff himself with sugared fruit-jellies, preferably lime-flavored half-moons.
What made Rosamund's scooping up of the truffles particularly appealing was that she was a very pretty, well-brought-up, mannerly, intelligent young woman. It pleased him that she had fallen in love with an old guy like me. "There's a class of women who naturally go for old men," he said. As I've already indicated, he was drawn to irregular behavior. Especially where love was the motive. He rated longing very highly. Looking for love, falling in love, you were pining for the other half you had lost, as Aristophanes had said. Only it wasn't Aristophanes at all, but Plato in a speech attributed to Aristophanes. In the beginning men and women were round like the sun and the moon, they were both male and female and had two sets of sexual organs. In some cases both the organs were male. So the myth went. These were proud, self-sufficient beings. They defied the Olympian Gods who punished them by split ting them in half. This is the mutilation that mankind suffered. So that generation after generation we seek the missing half, longing to be whole again.