Of course, her Jewish giant wasn’t born a giant. He didn’t get his colossal jaw until adolescence. But his trauma is still as sad as a fairy tale.
“It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize,” Arbus once said, and we can imagine Babel coming to the same conclusion as he wandered through the debris of Poland and began to frame things like a photographer would, and seize whatever he saw with words.
Babel had Diane Arbus’ inquisitiveness, that sense of familiarity with the unfamiliar, a desire to seek out what was strange or new . . . and translate it into a series of images that were like snapshots in continual motion. He would have adored the giant, felt right at home in his parents’ Bronx apartment, he who could have turned the entire planet into a fairy tale filled with gargoyles— that’s how his eye “sat” on things. Even Viktor Shklovsky, one of Babel’s best readers, oversimplified the dynamics of his art: “Babel’s Cossacks are all insufferably and ineffably handsome.” They’re only handsome when Babel decides to see them as handsome. They can also be syphilitic and grim, like the platoon commander Afonka after he loses an eye—“a pink swelling gaped repulsively in his charred face” (“Afonka Bida”).
The Cossacks are monsters in a fairy tale of war.
The Red Cavalry was defeated in Poland, and the sick man who returned to Odessa at the end of 1920 with lice all over him, who’d already been reported dead, didn’t start writing about tachankas. His first published story after the Polish campaign was about Benya Krik, and Benya had nothing to do with revolutions. Babel had gone back to that period right after the pogrom, into the mythical turf of his own childhood, to the Moldavanka where he’d been born, and not to Nikolaev, where he could ice-skate in his own yard and endure the pogrom like some perverse hallucination.
Babel was running from Kiril Lyutov—Kiril could evaporate in front of your eyes. Kiril wasn’t safe. Babel went into the blackness of the Moldavanka and found his fairy tale.
2.
THE CRITIC AND translator Raymond Rosenthal calls Benya Krik “a Jewish Cossack,” says the stories about Benya “are based to a large extent on fact. Odessa provided fertile material,” as if it were overrun with bandits from whom Babel could choose at will. But there was only one Benya Krik. He’s as mysterious as Magwitch or Melville’s Bartleby, those other great gargoyles who delight and disturb because they exist outside any human inventory—they’re monsters of the imagination.
In his orange pants, Benya is king of a ghetto, the exact opposite of what Rosenthal claims him to be. If anything, he’s an anti-Cossack. He doesn’t shoot to maim or kill. Out on a raid, he orders his bandits to fire into the air. “If you don’t fire in the air you may kill someone,” Babel’s omniscient narrator tells us, like a wily Talmudist commenting on his own tale.
“The King” arrived like a thunderclap in 1921. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. Babel had compressed all his childhood, all his travels, all the piebald colors of the Polish campaign, and that marvelous shorthand he’d discovered in the dreamlike sound and silence of war—“the great noiselessness of a cavalry charge”—into one story. “The King” is a war story in the slums of Odessa, a fable, a fairy tale. He would never duplicate such a melodic line again. The narrative sings to us, and we’re trapped within its music as we watch tables with their velvet cloths slither across a yard, “and they sang full-throatedly, those patches of velvet, orange and red.” If we talk about the wonders of the Odessa cycle, we’re really talking about “The King.” It’s the story that introduces Benya to us . . . and Isaac Babel.
We start at a wedding in the Moldavanka. Benya is marrying off his forty-year-old sister, who suffers from a goiter, another disease of the glands, like acromegaly. He’s found a “feeble youth” for her. And all the families of the Moldavanka begin with Benya. He’s the one who gives the bride away, not Papa Krik, Benya’s old man. The whole of Odessa’s bandit aristocracy have come to pay their respects to Benya, who’s their king and their father, too.
But there’s an interruption. A messenger warns the King that Odessa’s new police chief intends to raid the wedding and capture all these Jewish aristocrats. It’s a parody of a pogrom—a pogrom that will never happen. Benya sets the chief’s own “house” and headquarters on fire, and it’s like a Keystone comedy: cops with “their buttocks wiggling” rush up and down the stairs while prisoners get away. And we’ve entered the secret heart of the narrative, where Babel’s own boyhood wish is fulfilled—that moment when he imagined himself to be a member of the Jewish Defense Corps, coalmen and horse carters like the Kriks, who fought the pogromniks but were outnumbered and couldn’t win. The police had taken off their uniforms and joined the pogrom, with the tsar’s consent. But it’s in Odessa where the idea of a Jewish Defense Corps began. Fifty-five of these corps-men were killed. As the American consul stationed there said after the pogrom of 1905: “Odessa presents an appearance more dead than alive.”
—more dead than alive.
And Benya Krik (krik in Russian means a shout or cry), the Crier, was like the phantom voice that rose out of the carnage with its own full throat, a fairy tale king who could avenge all the killing without having to kill. We fall in love with Benya, yet we have so little of him, and like greedy children we want much more. But he escapes our grasp. And like in a dream, the narrator removes us from the wedding for a little while to tell us how Benya found his own bride—how the King fell in love with Tsilya, who appeared in her “V-necked shift” during one of his raids, when he was preparing to destroy her father, the rich man, Zender Eichbaum. Tsilya ruins his taste for plunder. He returns all the money Eichbaum has given him and asks for Tsilya’s hand. “The old man had a slight stroke, but he recovered.” And Benya takes his bride on a long honeymoon in Bessarabia. It’s only then that he returns to marry off his sister, “a virgin of forty summers.” And the story ends, as a fairy tale should, with a virgin princess entering her bridal chamber with the groom, “glaring at him carnivorously.”
We meet Benya again and again in the other tales, but with each appearance he diminishes, until he’s more clown than king, a comic figure in his chocolate jacket, cream pants, and raspberry boots, like some Russian candyman who drives a red car with a horn that plays Pagliacci. Benya is fleshed out in all his foolishness, no longer part of a fairy tale. . . .
3.
“THE POLICE END where Benya begins,” sing the denizens of the Moldavanka, and that sounded fine for most of Babel’s readers, seduced by that first shock of “The King.” Babel was an instant hero in Odessa, where he told listeners like Paustovsky that he’d lived among the gangsters to find some coloring for his king. And Paustovsky believed how Babel had moved into a bandit’s lair and had been rescued by the head of Odessa’s criminal investigation division, a young man in dark-blue riding breeches who dreamt of becoming a writer, like Isaac Babel.
The mytholept was already on his way. Writing about Benya must have soothed Babel, given him a curious kind of strength. He’d created his first compelling universe, had summoned up his own magic to offer us the magic of the Moldavanka. The more famous he grew, the more the Moldavanka began to multiply with bandits until it became a Black Sea Casbah. But . . .
In 1916, before there ever was a Benya, Babel himself described the Moldavanka as “a very poor, crowded, and much suffering Jewish ghetto” without the least bit of magic (“Odessa”). And Lev Nikulin, his boyhood friend, wandered through the Moldavanka many times without meeting a king in orange pants, yet couldn’t help notice the bindyuzhniki— those horse carters who were the only genuine counterpart to Benya. The bindyuzhniki were famous in Odessa, a rough lawless breed that did fight against the pogromniks and the police, but they weren’t cockatoos like the Kriks. And they couldn’t have organized a wedding with tablecloths that danced. Babel, Nikulin said, had created in his Odessa stories “an imaginary town, which only he could see.”
And so he was lionized, first in Odessa, then in Moscow and throughout
the Soviet Union. It was during NEP (1921–1928), which Lenin himself had called the “breather”—peredyshka— when, in spite of the battle against intellectuals, art could still flourish in a kind of boomtown atmosphere. The country had to recover from the ruins of civil war; Lenin pinched his nose like a little priest and sanctified a piecemeal return to capitalism; some farmers grew rich; black markets began to abound; gamblers, gangsters, and high-priced whores reappeared. “Moscow plunged into a life of feverish enjoyment. Foodstuffs surfaced from underground. New restaurants opened.”
Babel had become the hero of this breathing period, and formalist critics like Viktor Shklovsky could talk openly in 1923 about a “geometrical style” in art and the decorative aspects of literature; and instead of brutal propaganda, a line of poetry or prose could appear in a poet’s mind as an independent “patch of sound.”
Shklovsky was seeking much more than the mundane, literal landscape of words. He wanted an infinity of sounds and shapes. “We live in a poor and enclosed world [ . . . ] We speak a pitiful language of incompletely uttered words. We look one another in the face but do not see one another.”
He saw Babel as a rescuer of the Russian language. He’d known him since the days of Letopis, when Babel had arrived in Gorky’s office like a cowboy from Odessa with a “high forehead, huge head, a face unlike a writer’s,” as Shklovsky wrote in Lef in 1924, while the Odessa Tales were being republished and the first stories from Red Cavalry began to appear.
Shklovsky reminisced about meeting him again in 1919, when Babel lived on 25th of October Street in Petersburg. “The city was beginning to be grown over, like an abandoned military camp.” And Babel declared to Shklovsky “that ‘nowadays’ women could be had only before six since the streetcars stopped running after that.”
But Babel soon disappeared, leaving behind a sweater and a satchel for Viktor Shklovsky, who later heard that Babel had been killed while he was with the Kavalerists. The dead man resurfaced in 1924 and announced to Shklovsky with all the flavor of a mytholept that he hadn’t been killed, but “[had] been beaten at great length.”
No matter. Shklovsky had fallen under the sway of Benya Krik and Red Cavalry: “The shiniest jackboots, handsome as young girls, the whitest riding breeches, [ . . . ] even a fire blazing as bright as Sunday, cannot be compared to Babel’s style.”
Russian literature, he said, was gray as a siskin until Babel came along: Babel could speak about the stars and the clap in the same tone of voice.
But it was 1924, and the commissars had no “official” policy about literature. Even Stalin was quiet; the man with the “cockroach whiskers” was too busy consolidating his position to worry about any battle over words. But Babel had another adversary, from his days with the Cossacks. The Red Cavalry had all but disappeared, but not General Budenny, its commander-in-chief, a semiliterate anti-Semite who loved to play with language. In a letter that was published in Oktyabr under the title “Babizm Babelya” [“Babel’s Womanly Ways”], he accused Babel of being some kind of scrub who was never even close to a battlefield, who had slandered the Cossacks, filled his writing with all sorts of erotic exercises. . . .
It was Babel’s moment: he’d captivated Moscow and could do no wrong. Budenny was laughed at, but he wasn’t such a bad critic. Of course, his subtext was simple: how could a zhid know anything about battle? Yet Budenny understood Kiril Lyutov better than a lot of Babel’s more literate readers did: Babel had slandered the Cossacks, pieced them into his own geometric design, let Lyutov make them less than an old commander like Budenny would have liked.
But the Revolution was in dire need of a masterpiece to articulate its own music. It had one candidate: Isaac Babel. His Red Cavalry was as original as anything in the West, and no one in the West had been with Budenny, no one could duplicate a cavalry retreat from the point of view of a tachanka. No one in the West even knew what a tachanka was.
And so the commissars who would have loved to forget the disaster of the Polish campaign, who were deeply ambiguous about a zhid as their very own literary lion, were obliged to celebrate Babel. Pravda did chide him for writing about nurses who were whores and Cossacks who went on a rampage, but it still saluted him as Russia’s rising star. . . .
Call it 1925. Babel enlists Gorky to help him get a visa for his wife. His blond beauty, Tamara Kashirina, has captured him, she a bombshell “with a pleasant husband, a small daughter, and a full social calendar.” Tamara was bored, but Babel beguiled her and “her boredom vanished.” He was chasing his own tail as usual, and Tamara hardly ever saw him. “In 1925 alone, Babel wrote to Tamara from seven different cities.” “He would dissimulate, not only with her but with everyone, rearranging reality to fit his needs, organizing his conflicting feelings and obligations into some credible pattern,” which had become his modus operandi and way of survival: Babel was everywhere and nowhere, rein-venting his masks and his mindscape until his life and his fiction fed on the same reserves, and Isaac Babel was as much of a masque as Benya Krik. . . .
He publishes “The Story of My Dovecot,” dedicates it to Maxim Gorky. It will begin his last major cycle of stories. He’s mobbed wherever he goes.
Comes 1926. Tamara decides to have a child with Babel; their son is born in July, and Babel promptly names him Emmanuel after his own dead father. . . .
Thirty-four of his Kavalerist stories are published as a book, Konarmia. The West is even more unprepared for Red Cavalry than the Russians were—to find a voice out of the Revolution that is like a fickle whirlwind. Here was Isaac Babel offering us lyrical snapshots that were unrehearsed, as Diane Arbus would later do. It was like a revolution unto itself.
But Babel went on spinning myths. Another of Gorky’s protégés, S. J. Grigorev, wrote to the grand old man in March 1926: “[Babel] has asthma. He says it’s from a concussion. He plans his life on the assumption that he has five years to live.” The fates would give him more than five years, and this had nothing to do with any fictional concussion. Babel’s own life had already become an elaborate fiction. He’d gone back to the land of Kiril Lyutov. But he hadn’t totally abandoned Benya Krik. In 1926 he would write a film script based on his Odessa Tales, in which he brings Benya right up to the Revolution. It was the closest thing to a novel Babel would ever write. It had, according to Cynthia Ozick, “all the surreal splendor of Babel’s most plumaged prose.” Eisenstein was supposed to direct Benya Krik. It’s a pity he never did. Eisen would have given it his own kind of daring, his own kind of visual shock. In spite of all its “plumage,” Benya Krik is a fanciful skeleton, as all good screenplays ought to be.
Written after the publication of Red Cavalry had made him the Revolution’s most singular voice, it also reveals that he couldn’t manufacture heroes who wore a Red star on their heads and danced in time to Stalin’s own tune. Babel became an active screenwriter during this period. Why not? Producers ran after him, film companies courted him, directors were dying to work with him. He could secure lucrative contracts, earn money with the magic of his name—“I. Babel.” His signature was like golden noise on a page. And it wasn’t as if he were profligate. He had a formidable list of dependents—a mother and sister in Brussels, a wife and mother-in-law in Paris, a mistress in Moscow, assorted spongers from his Odessa days, broken-down jockeys, ex-Kavalerists. And he could wander back and forth between film studios in Moscow and the Ukraine, luxuriate in health spas for writers, occupy himself with everything but the swift cunning of his prose.
Benya Krik is a form of suicide, not because Benya dies, trapped within a Revolution that is worlds away from his cosmology, but because Babel ravaged his own fairy tale, sacrificed the King, surrendered him to the Revolution’s song of the common man. Benya was a peacock; Benya doesn’t belong in a worker’s homespun paradise or in some revolutionary riddle. He’s a bandit from a much more primitive period, whose only “politics” is the pogrom. The Odessa Robin Hood may extort from rich Jews, but his very presence is a warning t
o pogromniks—police chiefs had better stay out of the Moldavanka if they want to preserve their own buildings. All Jews, rich and poor, could flourish while Benya was around. . . .
But the Benya of Babel’s screenplay is like Arbus’ Jewish giant—a creature lost in the New World of the Russian Revolution. The Old World is Odessa itself, with its elegant cafés, like the Fankoni, one of Benya’s hangouts. Benya looks like Benya— he plays the mandolin and wears “slick, lacquered shoes” in the screenplay—but he no longer fires in the air. The killer has learned to kill. He’s not with Tsilya, the daughter of Zender Eichbaum. We never hear him speak the language of love. He’s all business. And suddenly the scene shifts from 1913, when he had his own little domain, to 1919, when the Fankoni is all boarded up and a pair of bakers, Sobkov and Kochetkov, eat “ration-issue herring” and toil for the Revolution. Sobkov is a political commissar and Kochetkov is his hatchet man. Benya has also joined the Revolution. He’s a chief of his own “revolutionary” regiment. But he marauds as usual, while Odessa sits in a state of paralysis, surrounded by different warring parties: the Reds, the Whites, who are still loyal to the dead tsar, the Greens (anarchists who keep switching sides), the Ukrainian Nationalists, who want a country of their own, and the foreign intervention forces, who love to meddle in Soviet affairs—the British in Archangel, the French in the Ukraine. But the French are completely baffled by all the dueling sides, and they disappear from Odessa. . . .
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians hope to bribe Benya, stuffing tsarist money inside a Torah that looks like an incredible fatted calf. And Sobkov receives a cryptic message: he’s to lure the King out of Odessa and disarm his regiment. Sobkov tricks the King, tells him that the Soviets have decided to turn his regiment into a provisions unit that can plunder for the Revolution. We catch the King riding out of Odessa on a blooded stallion, while Sobkov travels next to him on a “sleepy Siberian pony.”
Savage Shorthand Page 8
