Isaac Babel
Babel’s wife Antonina Pirozhkova who died in 2010
The only story of Babel I had read before I bought this collection (two years ago now) was The Story of my Dovecote. I did however come across a reference to him in a travelogue by Danish writer Carsten Jensen. It prompted me to track down more of Babel’s work. I read the stories, was fascinated by the displacement of emphasis, the tangle and clash of names and details interspersed with visionary flashes. These are some of the tricks in his repertoire: jumping into a dialogue with the context delayed by a few paragraphs or not given at all, scrawny bearded characters who rant for a moment and disappear, elements of grotesque folk tales. It made me question again my own puritanical view, my unwillingness to use artifice.
It is hard for us – me – to imagine the conditions under which Babel lived. Russia has had a thousand year history since the days of his boyhood. The words on the page are in a style that still comes across as edgy, modern, but if you were to go to his native village it is fairly certain there would be no-one to remember his family name, the house where he grew up (though I am sure some university has put up a plaque), the shops and theatre houses Babel describes. The war in Poland in which he fought does not feature highly in folk memory there, being displaced by other sufferings. It is referred to as the 1920 war, to distinguish it from the others.
I rooted out Jensen’s book from my cardboard box. There are three and a half pages on Babel’s work; surely unique for a travel book on the far east.
extract from book …
Babel was one of the seminal writers of the twentieth century and his style – almost reportage in its immediacy, ice-cold, but not without lyrical intensity in its matter-of-fact rendering of detail – was destined to found an entire literary school. Babel gives the impression of being sublimely indifferent to the events that take place under his nose. He makes no judgements, does not interpret these events, seems barely to comprehend them, and it is this distance which in a subtle indirect way accords his writing style its pathos. But it would be wrong to imagine that this pathos springs from the presence of death on the battlefield, the sufferings of men, their recklessness and self-sacrifice. Rather it is the pathos of self-refutation. So writes an intellectual who longs with all his might to free himself of his spiritual baggage, to escape the moral labyrinths of soul-searching and surrender instead to an elemtary man’s world of action and intoxicating freedom. The pathos of this style is not the pathos of the warrior, but the pathos of intellectual suicide, the pathos of self-loathing and spiritual flagellation.
. . .
When an intellectual writes like this, he does so because he is doing violence to his self, his empathy, his right to doubt. He longs to break out into a more simplified reality, into the spring that will release him from the autumn in his heart and the spectacles on his nose. It is a style that would like to be viewed as a salute to a new reality and it is as such that it comes to create a school in the twentieth century, as an expression of the intellectual’s fascination with anti-intellectualism
“You four-eyed lot,” one of the Cossacks says to Babel. There they are again, the glasses, in a version reminiscent of the phrase “to speak with a forked tongue,” to be a liar and a crook. Seeing with two pairs of eyes amounts to the same thing. You can’t trust an intellectual. He is the outsider, able to atone for his position only by removing his glasses and becoming one with the people, that company of noble savages. Which is what Babel does: he atones and becomes one of them, by trading the kingdom of the intellectual for a Cossack horse.
Jensen’s book was a present someone gave me when I lived in Poland. I just noticed the dedication: Let us always stay in touch. I have had no contact with that person for over six years now.
Valancourt The Viaduct reissue
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Irish Times Q+A
