There was, however, a danger that Germany might drift into Bolshevism. With starvation and disease rising, mortality figures were damaging to the Allies, Lloyd George told the Conference. Clemenceau in answering "saw that he must needs concede a good deal."
"Must needs" was an expression that now had vanished, I told Rosamund.
But the French still objected to the German proposal to pay for their food in gold. Clemenceau claimed German gold for reparations. One of the French ministers, a Jew named Klotz, declared that the starving Germans should be allowed to pay for rations in any other way, but not in gold. It was impossible for him to go further without compromising his country's interests, "which (puffing himself out and attempting an appearance of dignity) had been placed in his charge."
Lloyd George-why am I drawn back to this again and again? I can't explain why I am so affected by it-now turned on M. Klotz with hatred, Keynes writes. "Do you know Klotz by sight? — a short, plump, heavy moustached Jew, but with an unsteady, roving eye, and his shoulders a little bent in an instinctive deprecation. Lloyd George had always hated and despised him. And now saw in a twinkling that he could kill him. Women and children were starving, he cried, and here was M. Klotz prating and prating of his 'gooold.' He leant forward and with a gesture of his hands indicated to everyone the image of a hideous Jew clutching a money bag. His eyes flashed and the words came out with contempt so violent that he seemed almost to be spitting at him. The anti-Semitism, not far below the surface in such an assemblage as that one, was up in the heart of everyone. Everyone looked at Klotz with a momentary contempt and hatred; the poor man was bent over his seat, visibly cowering…. Then, turning, he [Lloyd George] called on Clemenceau to put a stop to these obstructive tactics; otherwise, he cried, M. Klotz would rank with Lenin and Trotsky among those who had spread Bolshevism in Europe. The Prime Minister ceased. All round the room you could see each one grinning and whispering to his neighbor 'Klotsky.'"
Another Jew, this one in the service of the German government, was Dr. Melchior. He was not so well connected with his delegation as Keynes; Keynes was at the side of Lloyd George and against Herbert Hoover whenever breadstuffs, pork products, or financial arrangements were discussed. Melchior seemed to feel as Keynes did. In Keynes's account Melchior is "staring, heavy lidded, helpless looking… like an honorable animal in pain. Couldn't we break down the empty formalities of this Conference, the three-barred gate of triple interpretations, and talk about the truth and the reality like sane and sensible persons?"
Germany was hungry, France had almost bled to death. The English and the Americans really intended to furnish food. There were tons of pork waiting for Herbert Hoover to order delivery to begin. "I allowed that our recent actions had not been such as to lead him to trust in our sincerity; but I begged him [Melchior] to believe that I, at least, at that moment, was sincere and truthful. He was as much moved as I was, and I think he believed me. We both stood all through the interview. In a sort of way I was in love with him…. He would speak with Weimar on the telephone and would urge them to give him some discretion…. He spoke with the passionate pessimism of a Jew."
The place where I sat reading, where Rosamund and I waited for the ambulance to bring Ravelstein home, was a small courtyard inside the wrought-iron gates. A stone pool, shrubs, grass-there were even shade-flowers. Frogs and toads would have done well here, but you'd have had to import them. Where would they have come from? There were no frogs in the miles of rubble that sur rounded this sanctuary. The courtyard was something like a de compressing chamber. For some of the professor-tenants it may have recalled the grotto-retreats built by English gentlemen in the eighteenth century. You wanted some protection from the brute facts. To be fully aware of both the sanctuary and the slum, you had to be a Ravelstein. "Out there," he would say, laughing, "the cops will tell you not to stop at a red light. In no-man's-land, it could be the end of you to stop." You must not be swallowed up by the history of your own time, Ravelstein often would say. He quoted Schiller to the same effect: "Live with your century but do not be its creature."
The architect who put a little Alhambra arcade here, with water pipes and shade plants had much the same idea: "Live in this city but don't belong to it."
Rosamund, who was sitting beside me on the edge of the stone basin, did not feel shut out when I was reading.
It had taken Ravelstein some time to get used to seeing Rosamund and me as a married pair. There was a kind of oddity about that because he took an unusual interest in his students, and Rosamund was one of them. He would have said, if asked about this, that given the sort of education they were getting, with its un usual emphasis "on the affects"-on love, not to beat around the bush-it would have been irresponsible to pretend that the teach ing could be separated from the binding of souls. That was his old-fashioned way of putting it. Naturally there was a Greek word for it, and I can't be expected to remember every Greek word I heard from him. Eros was a _daimon__, one's genius or demon provided by Zeus as a compensation for the cruel breaking up of the original androgynous human whole. I'm sure I've got that part of the Aristophanic sex-myth straight. With the help of Eros we go on, each of us, looking for his missing half. Ravelstein was in real earnest about this quest, driven by longing. Not everyone feels that longing, or acknowledges it if he does feel it. In literature Antony and Cleopatra had it, Romeo and Juliet had it. Closer to our own time Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary had it, Stendhal's Madame de Renal in her simplicity and innocence had it. And of course others, untaught, untouched by open recognition have it in some obscure form. This was what Ravelstein was continually on the watch for, and with such a preoccupation he was only a step from arranging matches. Doing the best that could be done with these powerful but incomplete needs. A good palliative for the not-always-conscious pain of longing had a significant importance of its own. We have to keep life going, one way or another. Marriages must be made. In adultery men and women hope for a brief reprieve from the lifelong pain of privation. What made adultery a venial sin in Ravelstein's judgment was that the pain of our longings drives us so mercilessly. "Souls Without Longing" had been the working title of his famous book. But for most of mankind the longings have, one way or another, been eliminated.
— How have I gotten so far afield?
I am bound as an honest observer to make plain how Ravelstein operated. If he cared about you it was in this perspective that he would sketch you. You wouldn't have believed how much thought he devoted to each and every case, the closeness with which he ob served the students he had accepted for higher or esoteric training, those willing to break with the orthodox social science majority which dominated the profession. If students followed Ravelstein, they would find jobs hard to get. So you had to think how to provide for the young people who were chosen. Professionally speaking, they had made an erratic choice. Ravelstein often asked my opinion. "What if Smith were to pair up with Sarah? He's got some queer tendencies but he'll never be a queer. Now Sarah is a very serious young woman-disciplined, hard-working, loves her books. No genius but she's got a lot going for her. She may have just the touch of masculinity that would make young Smith happy."
He was so accustomed to thinking up arrangements of this sort that he apparently had had something in mind for me after Vela divorced me. My mistakes were so clear that I couldn't be trusted to do anything right. He had accurately prophesied seven or eight years ago, "Vela will soon be through with you. She's off to conferences all over the world. She's never home for as much as a week. Whereas you've got the uxorious tendency, Chick. And all you've got to live with now are her clothes hanging in the closet. It's only to be respectable that she needs a husband. I don't think men are her top preference. But she's an odd case; she's got the makings of a beauty but she's not a beauty, no matter how she dresses and makes up. Now you as an artist, Chick, spotted her as having something to do with beauty. It's a fact that she has beautiful eyes but, closely looked at, she's got some sort of European military correctness about her. And when she inspects you, you just don't make the grade with her. Mentally speaking, she comes toward you but then walks away as fast as her high heels will carry her. She's an odd one, Chick. But you're pretty odd yourself. Artists fall in love, of course, but love isn't their primary gift. They love their high function, the use of their genius, not actual women. They have their own sort of driving force. Now Goethe of course had his _daimon__, he talked about it to Eckermann all the time. And in old age he fell in love with a very beautiful young thing. But of course this falling in love was _dйrisoire__-a pure absurdity…"