The Style of Babel
Benya Krik, The Gangster and other stories.
By Isaak Babel.
Edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. Schocken Books.122 pp. $1.50.
Critics of Babel’s work—European critics, that is, for in this country he is imperfectly available and little known—have not found it very easy to describe. Its strength is obvious. It is physical, nervous, intense, short, in degrees almost unrivalled. But what are we to say of its mode that it will not itself at once contradict?
He is romantic and impassioned, we decide, recalling the violent emotions that rock in his pages, the inveterate lonely “I,” the fierce childhoods, pogroms, insatiable desires; very well; then there throng to us passages where passion is suspended in an emotion-of-attention as pure as any that 19th- and 20th century art has exacted from us. Under the narrator’s window in “Entry into Berestetchko” the Cossacks are employed in “shooting an old, silvery-bearded Jew for spying.” He utters piercing screams, and struggles. “Then Kudria, of the machine-gun section, took hold of his head and tucked it under his arm. The Jew stopped screaming and set his legs apart. Kudria drew out his dagger with his right hand and carefully, without splashing himself, cut the old man’s throat.” That is all there is, and it must not be imagined that the context suggests any comment; the Cossacks go off, and “I went along after them, roaming through Berestetchko. . . .” The muscles of the description barely ripple: “The Jew stopped screaming and set his legs apart.” Chekhov would have recognized a peer, perhaps, as well as colleague, in the author of this sentence.
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At First glance not unlike Chekhov also is Babel’s lyricism. “Thus sang Afonka and fell a-drowsing. The song floated away like smoke. And then we neared the heroic dusk whose foaming rivers flowered along the embroidered cloth of the peasant fields. The stillness grew roseate. Like a cat’s back the earth lay overgrown with the gleaming fur of corn.” But this is not Chekhov or Gogol, and neither is this: “The brigades were in action in the broad-flat plains. The sun was traveling through a purple haze. In a ditch some wounded were taking a bite; while lying about on the grass were nurses, singing softly.” These oddly more resemble the prose of an American of the previous generation, Stephen Crane, and Babel resembles Crane, dispassionate and lyrical, rather than any Russian author.
In their animism, too, their fantastic animation generally, they show a startling accidental congruity. “The peaceful Volhyen leaves us in sinuous curves and is lost in the pearly haze of the birches; crawling between flowery slopes it winds weary arms about a wilderness of hops. The orange sun rolls down the sky like a decapitated head. . . .”; and again “the garden path shimmers beneath a black, passionate sky. Thirsty roses sway in the darkness. Green lightning blazes upon the domes . . .”; or “I sat apart slumbering, dreams leaping about me like kittens.” Babel is only warm, Crane (whom in my space I cannot illustrate) cold. But their economy, in which both evidently learnt from and went beyond Maupassant, is less accidental; it is what they have blazing in common, what makes them forerunners and models of modem intensity. It is the international fertilization that is striking—a phenomenon now familiar in recent as in earlier poetry, and not less important, though often unregistered, in the prose of a dwindling, interlinking culture.
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Isaak Babel’s status as an Odessa Jew, discovered by Gorki at twenty-one, in 1915, and then a soldier with Budenny’s Cossacks in Poland, is itself international. In exploration of his material he reverses Crane’s order (the slums, then war), treating the ghetto after he had written of the revolution. But the tensions in Babel forbade concern with the war as military. Only two or three times in his collection Red Cavalry (in English, 1929)—from which my quotations have been taken—does he touch actual fighting. His subject is the terror and suffering of a military occupation (Poland as ghetto), and himself, in spectacles, “haloed with ingenuousness,” ambiguously allied with the occupying Cossacks—“But my heart stained with bloodshed, jarred and brimmed over.”
The pride and shame issue clearly enough in transferences such as that wherein the Red General, Matvey Pavlitchenko, revisits his former master. “Jackal’s conscience,” the master calls him. The remarkable passage that closes the story is also a sort of aesthetic: “Then I stamped on my barin Nikitinsky, and trampled him for an hour or more. And in that time I got to know life through and through. With shooting—I’ll put it that way—with shooting you only get rid of a chap. Shooting’s letting him off and too damned easy for yourself. With shooting you’ll never get to the soul, to where it is in a fellow and how it goes and shows itself. But I don’t spare myself, and I’ve more than once trampled an enemy for over an hour. You see, I want to get to know what life really is and how it is inside us—”
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The later stories—most of these in the handsome and welcome small volume under review are of this period—return the subject to its origin, studying the Odessa ghetto under the aspects, first of his childhood, second of the figure of the Powerful (lawless) Jew as Hero. I think no relaxation is perceptible. The rapidity and energy that shocked British and American reviewers twenty years ago are present still, welded with Jewish folk-idiom into a density of brilliance hardly equalled in the earlier stories except by “Sashka, the Christ” and one or two others.
Babel is one of the most interesting figures in the European prose of this last half-century. But the limitation of subject is absolute. It must remain doubtful for the present how far Babel’s long, depressing silences—in the latest, he has published nothing since the early 30’s, and his present situation is unknown—are due to the regime, and how far to the nature of his talent.
Mr. Raymond Rosenthal in a valuable account (COMMENTARY, February 1947) follows Max Eastman and others in attributing them largely to the regime, though he speaks also of a mingling, in Babel’s thought, of art with eroticism which may have produced inhibition.
Conceivably, however, Babel, facing his subject at last directly, exhausted it. The wonderful humor of the hero-stories is a form of acceptance, as is the humor of another obsessive story-teller (and another deeply physical, and Jewish one) who fell silent, Kafka. If he had wished to write on, one would have expected him to move after Essenin and Mayakovsky into the final opposition.
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Babel’s work displays uncertainty of general form, if we compare it with Dubliners; his story-sequences are neither really single nor altogether disparate, and he seems to be incapable of narrative development even as we see it in The Duel or Maggie. Probably the limitation is a concomitant of his dazzling mastery of detail form (style) and his extraordinary sense for the form of the single small piece.
As Stendhal, when we are under his spell, makes other authors seem stupid, Babel as we read him makes other authors seem diffuse and fat. A study of his form-sense might begin with the piercing story “First Love” (COMMENTARY, September 1947),which should be compared with Joyce’s “Araby.” This sense is anti-psychological and anti-logical, and beyond this I shall not attempt to say what it was.
Let us first have the stories collected, all of them, in their order. For the truth is, that grateful as we must be for this small book Schocken has put together, it is not quite what was wanted. Every reader with ears should buy it. But “First Love” is not here, a story mentioned by Mr. Rosenthal is not, and there must be others, and the Knopf Red Cavalry has long been unobtainable. More serious still, Mr. Yarmolinsky’s translations are a little fat (the two stories done by others here are better). They compare very unfavorably with Nadia Helstein’s, who did Red Cavalry with dignity and feeling (but her “blighter” and “jolly fine” will not do, nor indeed any of her renderings of the slang stories), and with the nervous, good versions in COMMENTARY by Esther and Joseph Riwkin (but they appear to leave things out sometimes). This exemplary style of Babel’s is plainly, is notoriously, hard; and it has got to be exactly done.
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