326
PARTISAN REVIEW
view. It's this kind of writing, intimate, precise, urbane, serious in a
worldly way, resting on a coherent philosophical outlook-this is the
prose Chick is supposed to mimic. Keynes's sensibility has obvious
appeal for Ravelstein. We first meet Ravelstein, for example, when he's
occupying the most expensive suite in the most luxurious hotel in Paris.
Both Chick and Ravelstein have a very large soft spot for the best.
Indeed the novel drops the names of the choicest shops for every kind
of thing worldwide, as if the life of the mind aligned to Socrates requires
discrimination from bottom to top, including of course such shops as
Turnbull and Asser. To put it kindly, this is stretching a point, but his–
tory shows that readers prefer their novels to contain traces of the life
of the extremely rich rather than of those who are extremely poor (and
if we have to have the extremely poor, they'd better be quirky and
poetic, like the people in Denis Johnson'S novels). Ravelstein, in any
event, has constructed for himself an ample life whose
ton
would be per–
fectly familiar to Keynes-a life in equal parts devoted to high policy
and to gossip; a life, like Keynes's, comfortably off-center in its sexual–
ity; a life vivid with classy appreciations, splendid acquisitions of beau–
tiful things taken to have as much value as the great men, great events, .
and great ideas of any given moment.
But because of the rise of mass democracy, Ravelstein, Chick tells us,
has had to battle a condition that Bloomsbury, with its achieved even
inherited elitism and its exceptionalism and Fabianism, could not begin
to appreciate. Ravelstein asks his students: "With what, in this modern
democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?" Ravelstein's reply
is classically classical-he has an Aristotelian view of politics as the
grandest expression of the passions, and a Socratic view of the passions
as wrapped up in Eros, the essential human quality and faculty, the
foundation, enactment, and end of human being.
The test of this latter notion doesn't occur until late in the novel,
which for the most part wanders through Ravelstein's illness to his
death. The peripatetic form seems right-for one thing there's Socrates;
and for Ravelstein and Chick, following Socrates, ideas loom large over
events; and then there's Keynes's intimate memoir, spoken to his old
friends. In the last part of the novel, after Ravelstein dies, Chick and his
young wife-Rosamund!-travel to the Caribbean, where he eats
spoiled fish and contracts an almost-fatal infection, saved only by
Rosamund's devotion, persistence.. .love. And so the novel ends.
It's not clear, from fairly early on, that Chick is up to the assignment
Ravelstein imposes on him. In fact the book we get is a novel, not a
memoir or a biography. As a novel it persuasively, gracefully portrays
