A Perfection of Phrases

In the 70 or 80 years since they were written, the stories of Isaac Babel have kept their timeless radiance. Born in 1894 in Odessa, he became instantly famous when his first book of stories, “Red Cavalry,” came out in 1926. He wrote for another decade and at last we have, in one volume, his complete works. There are 48 stories apart from the “Red Cavalry” series, including at least a dozen masterpieces--”Guy de Maupassant,” “First Love,” “The King,” “The Road,” “In the Basement” among others--set in St. Petersburg and in Odessa, with a brief glimpse of Paris.

Odessa is Babel’s true city. He makes it as vivid and bawdy as New Orleans or Shanghai long ago. Odessa shimmers and rocks like a ship. It becomes a marvelous stage on which he has placed cemeteries, docks and incorrigible neighborhoods. Like William Kennedy’s Albany or Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria, it usurps whatever really existed. Babel lived beyond his early belief in revolution and the new state. He was fortunate to be able to travel on a number of occasions to France, where his wife had gone, fearful and suspicious of the Bolsheviks, in 1925 and where his daughter by her, Nathalie, was conceived and born. He had a considerable reputation in France, but in the end he returned, always alone, to Russia, to his own language and the source of his stories.

“The Collected Works of Isaac Babel,” a full presentation with useful footnotes and accompanying material, is the fulfillment of a lifetime’s ambition on the part of Nathalie Babel. Surrounded by much notice, it may bring to this exceptional writer the wider readership he so greatly deserves. There is no other writer in his class so overlooked. He had written some 90 stories over the course of his life--at least this is the number that have been collected, though there doubtless were others, many others, that were confiscated by the secret police in 1939, when he was arrested and later executed.

Ninety stories, most only a few pages long, plus some film scripts and a couple of plays may seem a sketchy amount on which to base a major reputation--Chekhov wrote four times as many stories and half a dozen plays, confirmed masterpieces among them--but as Babel commented when he learned that Tolstoy weighed a mere 31/2 poods, they were 31/2 poods of pure literature. Babel’s stories are that.

Vladimir Nabokov, Babel’s great contemporary who fled the Bolshevik Revolution and lived out his life in an exile he denied, gave as the absolute formula: style and structure. Babel has both, of course, but in structure he tends toward the unremarkable. The stories are often derived from an incident or several incidents, and they are entered into at a gallop. Babel speaks to the reader in confidence, with a wonderful familiarity. One wants to cling to all he says, to remember it exactly. It is unlikely you will ever hear anything like it again.

Babel revealed his method openly. Alternate short and long sentences. Choose words that are significant, simple and matchless. Aim at a reader who is intelligent and has exacting taste, preferably a very intelligent woman. Avoid the temptation to show off. Mercilessly tear out all the parts you like but that are not needed. Beware the adjective--it must be fresh and perfect, rarely should there be two. Lastly, his famous dictum: No iron spike can pierce the heart as deeply as a period in exactly the right place.

All of it is straightforward, but to do it is another matter. It’s like a magician’s trick: Explanation will not enable you to perform it. Even if somehow you were able to, it would be only an imitation. Babel forged a style that cannot be appropriated. Like Celine’s three dots, it is entirely his own.

During a period of some 31/2 months, from June through mid-September of 1920, Babel rode as a correspondent with a Cossack army as it moved into eastern Poland in an offensive that was meant to spearhead the spread of world revolution into central Europe and eventually the world. The Polish campaign was a failure, but it became Babel’s Trojan War. The “Collected Works” includes Babel’s diary of the campaign, and it is riveting though not as amazing as what was to come from it.

From the very first story, “Red Cavalry” opens like a cannon shot. In glorious, expressionist description, a cavalry division has forded the Zbrucz River at night. The narrator is billeted in a filthy house that seems torn apart, where a pregnant woman and two scrawny-necked Jews are living. A third Jew is sleeping with his face to the wall and a blanket over his head. They spread a ripped eiderdown on the floor and the narrator lies down exhausted beside the sleeping Jew. He is awakened from a nightmare by the pregnant woman’s hand moving on his face. He is shouting in his sleep, she says, tossing and turning. She’ll put his bed in another corner as he is kicking her father.

She pulls the blanket off the sleeping Jew as she rises. An old man is lying there dead, his throat torn out and his face cleft in two. Dark blood clings to his beard like a clump of lead. As she shakes out the eiderdown, the woman explains meekly that the Poles had cut his throat, with him begging them to kill him in the backyard so his daughter would not have to see it, but they didn’t and he died in that very room, thinking of her.

“And now,” she suddenly cries with great force, “I want you to tell me, I want you to tell me where one could find another father like my father in all the world!”

In this story is the paradigm of all the others. Amid beauty, amid courage and even warmth that are often overwhelming, there are butchery and murder, acts that can never be forgiven, only forgotten, and Babel does not let you forget. There is the complaint that it is all too terrible, that he does not take a position or care. But it is clear he cares. The evidence is everywhere. It is not that a reckoning is suggested. It is all beyond reckoning. Babel submits his ravishing and cruel accounts to something higher--all that his Jews could hope for as they were killed, though they are not the only ones to die--to the great altar of memory.

The “Red Cavalry” stories are more or less in sequence with a single narrator. Babel originally set out to write them as history but then immeasurably enriched them. “He scarcely changed any names,” said Ilya Ehrenburg, his close friend and a fellow Jewish writer who survived. “The events are all practically the same, but everything is illuminated with a kind of wisdom.” The Cossack force’s organizer, Budyonny, who is portrayed without flattery, wrote an article fiercely criticizing Babel after the stories began to appear.

But though Babel privately mourned the fate of the revolution and was disillusioned by the looting, raping Cossacks, he nevertheless showed them in all their fierce anti-Semitic dignity and into their mouths put words that are almost poems. This Shakespearean generosity shows in many straightforward descriptions as well. “Are the Slavs the manure of history?” he asks himself despondently, and at the same time he clothes them in immortal raiment.

Timoshenko, who, like Budyonny, was to become a marshal of the Soviet Union, was a young division commander in 1920 and appears as Savitsky in one of the most well-known stories, “My First Goose,” with its gorgeous opening: “Savitsky, Commander of the VI Division, rose when he saw me, and I wondered at the beauty of his giant’s body. He rose, the purple of his riding breeches and the crimson of his little tilted cap and the decorations stuck on his chest cleaving the hut as a standard cleaves the sky. A smell of scent and the sickly sweet freshness of soap emanated from him. His long legs were like girls sheathed to the neck in shining riding boots.”

This translation is taken from the 1955 Walter Morison collection. There has been some criticism of Peter Constantine’s translation as not being worthy of a definitive text and, in particular, as failing to find graceful English for sentences that had been so carefully composed--Babel rewrote endlessly and the perfection of phrases was part of his essential method--but Constantine is sometimes clumsy and sometimes better than earlier versions.

In “The Story of a Horse,” in which Savitsky, relieved now of his duties, again appears, Constantine eloquently has him: “Drenched in perfume, looking like Peter the Great, he had fallen out of favor. He lived with a Cossack woman by the name of Pavla, whom he had snatched away from a Jewish quartermaster, and twenty thoroughbreds which, word had it, were his own.”

Babel is unafraid to be lyrical about men, women, horses, dawns, stable boys, weather, the Earth itself. He had striking powers of observation and an impulse to always go deeper, past the obvious, past the expected. Bespectacled, civilized, a more or less helpless witness to all that occurred, he could describe it matter-of-factly, as in a story called “Berestechko”: “Right outside the house a couple of Cossacks were getting ready to shoot an old silver-bearded Jew for espionage. The old man was screeching, and tried to break free. Kudrya from the machine gun detachment grabbed his head and held it wedged under his arm. The Jew fell silent and spread his legs. Kudrya pulled out his dagger with his right hand and carefully slit the old man’s throat without spattering himself. Then he knocked on one of the closed windows.

“‘If anyone’s interested,’ he said, ‘they can come get him. It’s no problem.’” And following this, coolly, to escape the stink of the town and its unendurable misfortunes, the narrator goes to the outskirts and climbs to the abandoned castle of the once-reigning counts where the silence of sunset has turned the grass blue, and the moon has risen “green as a lizard above the pond.”

At the same time, remarkably, in other stories Babel writes from the other side, as it were, from his own heritage, making you want to be a Jew, even if you are not sure what one is. There is the elegy of the shtetls, Verba, Rovno, Brody, Demidovka. In “The Rabbi’s Son” there are lines like Jacques Brel’s except it is Brel and even Jean Genet who sound like Babel.

“Do you remember Zhitomir, Vasily? Do you remember the River Teterev, Vasily, and that night in which the Sabbath, the young Sabbath, crept along the sunset crushing the stars with the heel of her red slipper?... The candles’ predatory pupils twinkled in the rabbi’s room. Broad-shouldered Jews crouched moaning over prayer books....You remember that night, Vasily? ... the curtains of the cabinet fell open, and in the funerary shine of the candles we saw the Torah scrolls wrapped in coverings of purple velvet and blue silk, and above the Torah scrolls hovered the humble, beautiful, lifeless face of Ilya, the rabbi’s son, the last prince of the dynasty.” On a train during a retreat, the narrator recognizes among the entreating crowds and pulls aboard the train this very prince, lanky and dying, the emaciated rabbi’s son who had been in command of a patched-together regiment.

“‘I took over ... but it was too late. I didn’t have enough artillery.’

“He died before we reached Rovno. He died, the last prince, amid poems, phylacteries, and foot bindings. We buried him at a desolate train station. And I, who can hardly harness the storms of fantasy raging through my ancient body, I received my brother’s last breath.”

A large volume of the complete works has certain disadvantages. It includes, besides one astonishing play, writing of less interest, in this case dutiful journalism, film scripts and parts of projected novels. All of it, however, points to Babel’s own conclusion that his talent was best suited to shorter things. In St. Petersburg, in the abandoned library of the Anichkov Palace, there were, Babel wrote in an early story “An Evening with the Empress,” “Long shelves of small plump books with blackened gilt edges, children’s Bibles speckled with timid ink splotches, clumsy little prayers written to Lord Jesus, morocco-leather volumes of Lamartine and Chenier containing dead flowers crumbling to dust. I leaf through the gossamer pages that have survived oblivion...”

He was describing the palace of the dowager empress where, frozen and hungry, he managed to find shelter one cold, early Soviet night. Luck kissed him on the lips that night, he wrote, and perhaps she will do it again. His own pages will be here when most of the rest has vanished.

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James Salter is the author of several books, including, most recently, “Cassada: A Novel” and “Burning the Days: Recollection.”