New Voices of Isaac Babel
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING New Voices of Isaac Babel By Stanley Edgar Hyman Whoever may be the foremost major writer of our century, Isaac Babel is surely its foremost minor writer. In his lifetime he...
...Ivan's reaction is to kill his horse with an axe and to wreck his machinery, meanwhile shouting to the bystanders: "I'm a man, a peasant—Haven't you ever seen one before...
...It includes three stories not in Walter Morison's The Collected Stories, two of them rather trivial, and a third, "The Road There," the brilliant shocker that appeared in Blake and Hayward's Dissonant Voices...
...Nathalie Babel has made available some new misfits: implacable Froim, crazed Ivan, drunk and dissolute Gapa...
...It is Babel's last letter...
...It's a delight that isn't comparable with any other...
...This complex and ironic man had the most unsophisticated pastoral feeling about countrymen...
...He keeps the Passover, the years he remembers to, by buying matzos and attending the seders of relatives...
...The letters are immensely important, the first real look that the English-speaking world has had at Babel himself...
...Mama, Rimma and Alia" and "Ilya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofievna" were Babel's first publications in 1916...
...These letters are not themselves works of art...
...Inexplicably, MacAndrew has put the stories "in an order that reflects the chronological sequence of Babel's life...
...In his lifetime he published 60-odd stories and sketches, the best of them of matchless mastery...
...There is quite an autobiography in the comic pseudonyms with which Babel signs letters: "Worker for Enlightenment no...
...This is seen despondently in the story "The Rabbi's Son" in Red Cavalry, more optimistically in the later story "Karl-Yankel...
...There are touches that announce Babel's genius in all three, but he had not yet found his wry personal form...
...Gapa's reaction is to confront the official in charge of collectivization with a desperate question: "Will they be left in peace, the whores, or not...
...Babel has been called "the greatest Russian stylist since Pushkin": I am in no position to judge that, but Babel is certainly (if one classifies Nabokov, his only peer, as an American) the greatest Russian fiction writer since Chekhov...
...At the same time Babel is full of nostalgia for the Jewish religion and for "that old crook the Jewish God...
...Two sketches in the book, "Kolyvushka" and "Gapa Guzhva...
...Their most frequent tone is hysteria...
...For example, there is a perfect sentence in the first version: "In a small glass bowl filled with a milky liquid flies were dying—each in its own way...
...Diogenov...
...As for those anachronisms the Jews, Jewish memories are the subject of every one of Babel's best stories...
...Babel refers in a letter to "one of Papa's rules—to stay clear of nature...
...My First Fee" is a later and much less successful rewriting of the story at twice the length...
...Instead they are a look behind the works of art into the desperate conditions of their manufacture, like the letters of Fitzgerald...
...Babel's greatest ambivalence, however, is a dichotomy within culture: the rival appeals of Communism and Judaism...
...writing from abroad in 1933, he wastes no words on forward-streaking...
...There is no doubt, however, that he really was pulled in both directions...
...were to be parts of a "novel" (that is, a series of related stories and sketches like Red Cavalry) called Velikaya Krinitsa, about a village being reorganized as a collective farm...
...In it, Froim, the legendary one-eyed leader of the Moldevanka gang, goes to the Cheka to complain that they are ruthlessly executing his men (so unlike the comic-opera Tsarist police in the earlier story, "The King...
...In the second this becomes four sentences, with descriptions of the death throes...
...At times in the letters Babel seems quite firm in the Soviet faith...
...MacAndrew leaves out five of the 35 pieces in Red Cavalry (while assuring the reader that "all of them are included"), along with four others in the Morison book...
...The letters speak of the glories of "total collectivization," of "unforgettable Velikaya Staritsa" and the "limitless vistas" opening up—but we know Babel's true feelings about collectivization from the stories of Ivan and Gapa in his fictitious Velikaya Krinitsa...
...Stalin's Russia had decided that four-eyed Babel was as useless an element in the Socialist future as one-eyed Froim...
...As a result of his cavalry experience, Babel was mad for horses: he lived in the village of Molodenovo because of a stud farm nearby...
...when he was 22...
...The stories are of considerable interest...
...It is called Lyubka the Cossack and Other Stories (Signet Classic, 285 pp., $.75...
...There is an incredibly rapid rise in the general welfare and the world has really never seen such an outburst of energy and cheerfulness...
...in 1937 he sends his mother and sister Rosh Hashanah greetings, and he promises to go to the synagogue on Yom Kippur...
...The Tale of a Woman" was published somewhat later...
...who translated most of The Lonely Years...
...and Borovoi, after a moment of doubt, spiritedly telling the Moscow Chekists stories of Froim and the bandits, "all those extraordinary stories that are now a thing of the past...
...While Borovoi, an Odessa interrogator for the Cheka, is rounding up other officials to show them the remarkable Froim...
...At another time: "At Molodenovo they still use sickles for reaping...
...The praise for the Soviet Union is certainly written for the censorship: in 1925, when censors were not a problem, Babel writes of Moscow as "an environment devoid of art or creative freedom...
...In 1939 he writes that he is finally settled in the fancy dacha built for him as an honored writer, at work on a film about his dead friend and protector Gorky, resolved to make this his final filmscript and get back "to my true work...
...I have learnt the knack and handle one with infinite delight...
...For style, I still prefer Avrahm Yarmolinsky's translation in Benya Krik to either...
...The three remaining stories are early slice-of-life realism...
...He writes: "I'll meet the New Year at the stud farm as is fitting, in the company of simple and therefore good people...
...Both deal with types unsuitable for collectivization: Ivan Kolyvushka is a peasant evicted by the collective, and Gapa is a lusty widow...
...The best of them, "Froim Grach," is a melancholy conclusion to Babel's earlier stories of Benya Krik and the colorful Odessa Jewish gangsters...
...The great interest in the letters is as a record of the same ambivalence we find in the fiction...
...My life is easy, happy and privileged," Babel writes to his mother in 1935, and indeed it was, in some respects...
...Two other stories demonstrate Babel's mastery of economy, in the second case by a negative example...
...As a writer during the first two decades of the Russian Revolution, Babel is primarily the chronicler of its misfits, of those eggs that are broken but then not used in the omelette...
...After the hysterical tone of the letters, it is a relief to get back to the iron control of the stories...
...Babel steadfastly refused to emigrate when he could, or to stay abroad the few times that he was allowed out to visit his wife and daughter in Paris and his mother and sister in Brussels...
...Babel was part of that astounding wave of Jewish creativity in Europe that included Freud and Einstein, Proust and Kafka...
...in Moscow he could only regain "peace of mind" by visiting a stable...
...He was denounced, arrested, and never seen again...
...Under the direction of a stableman," Babel boasts, "I am learning a new profession—the handling of ho rses...
...Babel was an atheist...
...One of the great ambivalences in Babel, the subject of that beautiful story "The Awakening," is between culture and nature, his culture-centered Jewish heritage and the world of Russian nature that it rejected...
...Simen, the 22-year-old Moscow-bred head of the Odessa Cheka, has Froim summarily taken out and shot...
...The most charitable guess is that "My First Fee" is one of the pieces about which Babel wrote to his mother and sister in 1931: "The scribblings are rather trivial—they've been padded in order to cover the advances...
...Now Babel's daughter Nathalie Babel has edited The Lonely Years 1925-1939 (Farrar, Straus, 402 pp., $6.75), consisting of eight new stories, several hundred of Babel's letters to his mother and sister, and an appendix of relevant documents...
...like those of Keats (perhaps only a very young writer can write such letters...
...His translation appears to be more accurate than Morison's: at least it is earthier (where Morison's barin, for example, says "I've tickled all your maternal parents," MacAndrew's says "I've tumbled your ma and the mothers of the likes of you...
...A new collection of Babel's stories was published in paperback last November, translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew...
...Babel did his best to become one...
...But the attraction of nature is equally powerful...
...he hung around racetracks and jockeys...
...Babel is in the position of his character Borovoi, knowing that they are useless elements for the Socialist future, but also knowing how much the Socialist future is thereby diminished...
...3929," "Hermit Crab," "Isaac Spinoza," "Ivan Karpovich Babel" (Ivan Karpovich was a stableman), "I...
...The Russian countryside had a comparable appeal for him: he writes endlessly to his mother and sister in Brussels of "the beauty of the Russian winter," of a landscape "lovely, cool, reassuring, so Russian," of "the amazing beauty spread out around me" at Molodenovo...
...The tiny perfect story ends with Simen justifying himself to Borovoi ("What good was this man for the society of the future...
...Culture is represented in the letters by a ceaseless preoccupation with reading and writing...
...Similarly, the seders and synagogues, if not jokes, are put in to please his mother...
...In part, both these stands are deceptions...
...The first, "Answer to an Inquiry," is a brilliant fourpage account of the narrator's going to bed with a Tiflis whore, improvising a story of having been a male concubine for Armenians, and getting his 10 rubles refunded out of professional courtesy—"This was my first author's fee...
...He writes in 1934, for example, of "this boundless, forward-streaking, never-before-seen land called the USSR," and announces: "Real miracles are taking place in our country...
Vol. 47 • July 1964 • No. 64
