When I am old and gay and full of sleep
Penelope Fitzgerald
RAVELSTEIN by Saul Bellow Viking £16.99, pp. 254 Old age, on the whole, is not a time to be recommended, but very old novelists are allowed to write about what they like and at the age of 85 Saul Bellow is interested in illnesses and their recent treatment and patients who are 'blindly recovery-bent, who have the deep and special greed of the sick when they have decided not to die'. If they have things left to do, that will be a way of keeping themselves alive. His Mid-Western narrator is Chick, Old Chick, an unassuming scribbler with Bel- low's own familiar, puzzled, confiding, deeply beguiling voice, talking half to us, half to himself. He has undertaken to write a memoir of his younger friend, Professor Abe Ravelstein, a scholarly but grossly suc- cessful teacher and writer. Unlike Chick, Ravelstein is a human being on a giant scale. Even his hands tremble, 'not with weakness but with a tremendous eager energy that shook him when it was dis- charged'. All his life he had wanted — in fact, needed — the best of everything: Vuitton luggage, Cuban cigars, solid gold Mont Blanc pens, Lalique wine-glasses. Naturally this had got him into financial trouble. Chick had suggested that he might try a book based on his lecture notes. Abe did so, and became tremendously rich. It is rather difficult to envisage this book, which is said to have sold millions in both hemi- spheres, but Ravelstein belongs, like Bel- low's Henderson the Rain King, to a mythical world which seems to await dis- covery behind the real one, or is perhaps the more real of the two.
Bellow once wrote that
it's obvious to everyone that the stature of characters in modern novels is smaller than it once was and this diminution powerfully con- cerns those who value existence. I do not believe that the human capacity to feel or do can really have dwindled or that the quality of humanity has degenerated. I rather think that people appear smaller because society has become so immense.
One of his responses has been to create fig- ures of legend. Abe is only truly himself in Paris, and in Paris at the Crillon and in the Crillon in the penthouse suite. He is bald, he spills his food on the floor, one of his feet is three sizes larger than the other. In a sense, he is treated as a figure of fun, although his success ensures respect for him, and access to high places. Three gen- erations of his students have done well in life, having taken his advice to forget about their families and listen to what he has to tell them about Plato, Maimonides, Machi- avelli, Shakespeare, Rousseau and Niet- zsche. It sounds a strangely old-fashioned 'Let's see who dawdles in the bathroom now.' course, but we're told it wasn't an academic programme. It was more free-wheeling than that.
Chick wanders in and out of time, but finally makes it clear that this book about writing a book is dated five years after Ray- elstein's death. 'When I said Kaddish for my parents I had him in mind too.' During Abe's lifetime he has often appealed to their common Russian Jewish background — 'we had nothing of greater value than this legacy, which was the vastest and most terrible of legacies', but Abe has been adamant in believing in this world only. He has studied Jewish history seriously, but what more can he do?
This does not mean that he is a material- ist. 'You know that he goes for people who have basic passions — who make the tears come into his eyes.' This interpretation is from Nikki, Ravelstein's handsome youngish lover from Singapore. Whereas Chick has had two marriages, one wretched, one ideally happy, Abe is homo- sexual, maintaining that 'a human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death'.
Eventually his friends are reduced to sit- ting with him or guiding his wheelchair as they watch him die of Aids.
You would have thought that [he] would want a solemn 'last days of Socrates' atmo- sphere. He had taught the Apology and the Crito so many times. But this was not the time to be somebody else — not even Socrates.
Chick is left with a kind of waking vision of his friend in his university apartment, lis- tening to music, putting on his wondrous custom-made boots, then going outside and laughing with pleasure and astonishment because the birds are making too much noise for him to be heard. I started by say- ing that this book was about illness, but I see that in fact it is about friendship.
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