Did Babel’s jeremiads mean that he intended to elope permanently to Paris? In letters to his mother and Maria he harps about Zhenya’s playboy brother, Lyova, who was on the verge of becoming an American millionaire. And Babel had to wait until Lyova’s situation became solid. “This is a very important point in planning our future existence.” But Lyova’s situation would never become solid. He was always about to sign some contract with an American mogul. And Babel waits and waits. “No news from Lyova at all.” It seems odd that Babel counted on this phantom brother to deliver him from the bondage of being poor in Paris, like some totem or symbolic wish that would have allowed him to break with the Soviets, be near Maria and his mother, mend his marriage . . .
Zhenya didn’t leave any portraits of Babel in Paris, but his old school chum Lev Nikulin did. Nikulin happened to be in Paris at the same time as Isaac Babel. “On his first visit to Paris, Babel seemed to melt into the background of the city. He soon lost interest in Montparnasse, the Coupole, and the Dôme [Hemingway’s hangout], and would often come to see us on the Avenue de Wagram, or rather on the rue Bréa [Nikulin means the rue Brey], where, in the cheap Hôtel Tilsit[t], all kinds of people lived—Russians and various foreigners of no fixed occupation.”
Babel kept to his mysterious, mandarin ways. He wouldn’t phone in advance. He’d appear at the hotel without warning, capture Nikulin, oblige him to trek across Paris. They stopped in front of a bordello one morning in Montmartre, looked through the windows at the debris inside. Babel wanted to know if the bordello kept its own books. “It would be fascinating to study the entries in the books. They would make a chapter in a good novel,” one that Babel himself might have written, with its own stark geometry—mirrors, money, and lace pants. . . .
And then there was Volodya—a Russian taxi driver who also lived at the Tilsitt. “In autumn, in bad weather, he didn’t have much business and he’d drive us round the city at half price. We would go along slowly, stopping by the Seine, or in the Latin Quarter, or the ancient little square at the back of the Panthéon.” They would observe Paris in the “eerie, phosphorescent glow” of the gaslights. And years later, Babel would recall these “nocturnal trips” and say to Nikulin: “How nice it would be to go for a ride with Volodya again.”
His friends in Moscow mistook the Villa Chauvelot for some luxurious mansion in the middle of Paris, but Babel had to shrink within the walls of his cul-de-sac. “I lead a most simple life,” he explained to one of these friends. “I write. I can’t sit for more than three francs’ worth of coffee. I don’t have much money. There’s nothing to have a good time on. I walk around the streets of Paris and look closely at everything. I avoid old acquaintances and don’t look for new ones. I go to bed at eleven and that turns out to be late.”
“[I]t is clear that settling down in the West would not have suited Babel,” says Lev Nikulin. Babel “could not do without the hectic, helter-skelter life of the country that was dearest to him.” But Nikulin himself had returned to Moscow. Souvarine and Annenkov did not, and they could feel the frustration in Babel. “Here [in Paris] a taxi driver has more freedom than the rector of a Soviet university,” he said to Annenkov.
Babel was waiting for some deliverer. “I can’t sleep nights. I have a terrible cold, my eye is all puffed up and full of matter. All in all, I am decomposing even less aesthetically than the Paris bourgeoisie.”
He loved to send notes to Nikulin via the pneu (or pneumatique ), that French postal service whereby letters whisked across Paris by an underground system of compressed-air tubes, a system that must have seemed perfect for such a subterranean man. He was suffocating within the mask of Kiril Lyutov again. He couldn’t seem to put on the right pose in Paris. Odessan gangster, cavalry officer, Chekist, expatriate, or proud Soviet writer? Kiril was homesick. “Spiritual life is nobler in Russia,” he wrote to his friend Livshits in October 1927. “I am poisoned by Russia, I long for it, I think only of Russia.” Or, as the critic Milton Ehre tells us, trying to make up Babel’s mind for him: “Russia was tiresome and frightening, but it was also the battleground of history. Paris was a holiday.”
And I suppose it was, but I suspect that Babel was already sick of battlefields. He had to go home. He couldn’t support himself or his family in France. It was on his return to Moscow that he started Kolya Topuz, his novel about an Odessa bandit who was as problematic as Babel himself. . . .
3.
BUT SOMETHING HAPPENED during his last weeks in Paris. Zhenya became pregnant, Zhenya would bear him a child. His daughter, Nathalie or Natasha, was born on July 17, 1929. “She [Zhenya] carried the child for eleven months, unless it is the pregnancy of a railroad conductor,” Babel wrote to Maria. He would talk about Natasha as “the foundling girl,” but he was obsessed with her from the moment of her birth. “I have become steadier, calmer, harder, and I am ripe for family life.” He longed to bring his “little (but enlarged) family” back to Russia. Zhenya didn’t share his longing. She was much more prescient about the Soviet Union than her husband, who was too caught up in being Isaac Babel, the ex-cavalier. . . .
The bureaucrats told him he couldn’t travel abroad until his productivity increased like some magnificent diesel, but the productivity they wanted was a full-throated hymn to the Revolution, with an endless ride on Stalin’s propaganda train, and all Babel could produce were oblique songs about his childhood, or about some whore who was as much of an outlaw as Benya Krik. And so he retreated to a horse farm, met Antonina Pirozhkova in Moscow (it was 1932), and told her “how difficult it had been for him to get permission to go abroad and how long the process had dragged on.” But he continued to live in his own little dream of a Soviet hearth. “I’m going there to meet a little three-year-old French miss [Nathalie]. I’d like to bring her back to Russia, as I fear they might turn her into a monkey there.”
And finally, in September 1932, the Soviet “castle” granted Petitioner Babel the privilege of seeing his little daughter in France. It would remain the single most significant event in his life, a kind of mutual seduction that was beyond any of his masks . . . or powers as a mytholept. All his poses were idle with Nathalie. She devoured whatever space he had. “I still haven’t recovered from the shock I received at the sight of my daughter—I never suspected anything of this sort,” he writes to Maria on September 19, a little after his arrival. “It is really quite beyond me where she could have got so much cunning, liveliness and cupidity [from her father, of course]. And it is all full of style and charm. . . . I haven’t been able to find one ounce of meekness or shyness in this tiny tiger cub.”
“I have sired a tiger,” he continues on September 25. But he couldn’t utterly cure his mythomania. A kind of nagging yet playful insecurity would begin over Zhenya’s prolonged pregnancy. “Now, inasmuch as she [Nathalie] was born ten days after the time limit and inasmuch as Makhno resides in Paris, I no longer have any doubt left that it is he who is her father.”
Makhno had a special meaning for Babel. It was Makhno who had destroyed the advantage of an army on horseback, Makhno who was the first real genius of the tachanka. He hid his firepower in little haycarts, and no infantry or cavalry in the world could defeat his mounted machine guns. “Makhno, as Protean as Nature itself” (“Discourse on the Tachanka”). He was a Ukrainian guerrilla who fought against the Reds with his own anarchist band. Babel admired his boldness and his bravery. Makhno was also very cruel—it’s men from his band who rape the Jewish maid in “Makhno’s Boys.” He fled to Paris after the Civil War. And he would occupy Babel’s mind as an unstoppable force, cruel as creativity.
Babel’s daughter was another unstoppable force, and he dubbed her Makhno—“In the last few days, Makhno has quieted down and sometimes displays such meekness and reasonableness that my heart melts.”
He went everywhere with Makhno, was her constant squire. “I have no time to myself because I must escort my daughter: tomorrow she goes to some birthday party; on Saturday, she has a
Christmas party in her kindergarten.”
But pretty soon Babel began to chase his own tail. He was still depending on Lyova for some magical bailout. Meanwhile, he had trouble writing. “It seems quite impossible for me to get down to work here and that depresses me very much.” He became friendly with Ilya Ehrenburg, whom he’d first met in Moscow after Red Cavalry had created such a storm. “Man lives for the pleasure of sleeping with a woman, of eating ices on a hot day,” Babel had told him then. Now he talked of his tiger cub— little Makhno. But it was Ehrenburg who had penetrated Babel’s masks, who saw beneath the swagger: Babel, he said, “was a sad person who was able to laugh.”
He couldn’t be without his daughter, yet he couldn’t keep her with him. He’d received “a strange summons from Moscow.” And his fellow writers had been circulating “[a]ll sorts of absurd but sinister rumors” about him. They were jealous of Babel, meanly jealous, and began telling tales about him to the Cheka, that he intended to “vanish,” live permanently in the West. “I’m glad I’m going to Moscow. All the rest is bitter and uncertain,” Babel wrote to Annenkov.
But how glad could he have been? “My native land greeted me with autumn, poverty and what she alone has for me— poetry.” But he would have to live without the poetry of Makhno. Nothing could hold him for very long, not even his little retreat at Molodenovo, where he could “handle” as many horses as he liked. He moved into a Cossack settlement, going from one isolated place to the next. “I am living in peace and warmth. . . . The only thing is that I can’t get my daughter out of my heart.” Back in Moscow in February 1934, he writes to Maria: “I think of Natasha a thousand times a day and my heart contracts.”
That April he writes to his mother about the “paradoxical thing” of his existence as a Soviet writer—“in our country, which is still so poor, I live in greater comfort and freedom than you and Zhenya. When it comes to apartments, food, services, warmth and peace—I can have it all.” He’s blinded himself enough to believe that his wife, daughter, mother, sister, and her doctor husband, Grisha, would all be better off with him in some stupendous household near his horse farm, and if not, what can he do? The bureaucrats won’t let him out of their little paradise to visit Zhenya and Natasha in Paris. And then fate intervenes in the figure of André Malraux, who has organized his own “International Congress [of anti-Fascist Writers] for the Defense of Culture and Peace,” in 1935. But when Malraux realizes that the two Russian writers he admired most—Babel and Boris Pasternak—are not among the Soviet delegates, he screams to Stalin himself (via the Soviet embassy in Paris). A Soviet air force plane is immediately commandeered, but Pasternak is too sick to fly. He’s hiding at a clinic, in the midst of a physical and mental collapse. And Babel decides to accompany him to the Congress by train.
Pasternak and Babel arrive on the third day. It’s June. Paris is caught in a heat wave. Pasternak sits like a ghost, but Babel is the star of a congress that includes E. M. Forster, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Musil, André Gide, Bertrand Russell, and Virginia Woolf. Red Cavalry has appeared in translation, and the other delegates can appreciate his “plumage”; they greet him with great warmth. He charms them in “masterly French,” speaks for fifteen minutes without a prepared speech, but doesn’t for a moment forget the tightrope he is on. He’s giving a performance, and he has to make the delegates laugh. He talks of the collective farmer who has bread, a house, even a decoration. “But it’s not enough for him. Now he wants poetry to be written about him.”
Can Malraux and the other delegates catch the bitterness underlying Babel’s little joke? They envision Stalin as the wise monk who never travels, who leads the fight against fascism from within the Kremlin’s walls. “For us now the USSR presents a spectacle of incomparable importance and great hope,” says Gide. Only in Russia “are there real readers”—Stalin’s readers. Stalin, Babel understands, was the collective farmer and mad monk who hurled language and laws “like horseshoes at the head.” Stalin was the ultimate poet, who used language to reward and to kill on a “collective farm” that covered two continents. . . .
Babel meets with the delegates. He performs, he dances, he runs home to Zhenya and Makhno, who’s almost six. “I feel great. I find I am the father of an infant who is notorious for her criminal activities within a range of ten kilometers.”
He’s also planning to write. “I’ll spend the short time assigned to me in Paris in roaming around the place in search of material like a hungry wolf.”
But he couldn’t understand that the hungry wolf was feeding on its own flesh, and there was even too little of that. He’d begun to dismiss Red Cavalry as a tale about horses. Like Mark Twain, who would dismiss Huckleberry Finn as a humdrum book for boys, Babel was unconscious of his strengths and sources, had no idea what could ignite him and what could not. The explosion of form would only come when an inner search clung to an outer one, when Mark Twain captured his boyhood on the Mississippi through Huck Finn, and Babel created his own world through the “flesh” of the Moldavanka. He could find no internal music for all his subsequent wanderings in the Ukraine, all his stopovers at a Cossack settlement. Babel’s fire came from certain erotic moments he’d suffered through as a boy (hinted at in “First Love”), suffered like slaps on the face, and Red Cavalry was a wondrous, deepening spiral because Kiril Lyutov wore the mask that a boy might wear—he was a boy’s hollowed-out impression of a man. . . .
Babel continues to scheme. He begins assembling exit visas for his tribe. “The prospects of my family’s settling in the USSR are very bright now and I enriched the Soviet Union with a new citizen when Natasha was entered on Zhenya’s new passport.” But by August he was gone, without his family. And now his whole life would become more and more of a mask. He will travel with Antonina, begin living with her, but can never mention her in his letters, so that what he writes to Maria and his mother becomes a piece of fiction. He visits Odessa with Antonina, gets Maria’s favorite poppy-seed bagels from a shop near Gorky Street, but he can’t declare whom he had the bagels with; Antonina herself is a strange “cutout” in his correspondence, an absent detail that destroys the very message.
He’s mobbed wherever he goes in Odessa. “Completely unknown street cleaners, news vendors and what not, come up to me in the street, say hello and engage me in the most incredible conversations.” And when he comes out of a theater, hordes of young people block the way to his automobile. . . .
Even with all the adulation, he can’t really return to Odessa. The Moldavanka was the land of memory, where his imagination could dwell. But it wasn’t a home. There is no there there, Gertrude Stein once said, and Gertrude wasn’t wrong. When Alexander Blok, Russia’s great symbolist poet, was arrested by the Cheka in 1919, he sat in the same cell with a bunch of monarchists and Mensheviks who argued relentlessly about Russia’s future. And Blok had only this to say: “But where will the artist, with his homeless craft, go to in your future?”
4.
BABEL MAY HAVE walked Paris, but he was no flâneur, like Walter Benjamin or Baudelaire. Benjamin was a pathfinder who could feel the lyrical pull between epochs, fall upon arcades or wounded stones in Paris or Marseilles, discover the design of the nineteenth century embedded in the twentieth. His home was the library he carried from place to place, with the quotations he would cram into every text like some moveable mosaic. Babel wasn’t of the same priesthood.
The two stories he wrote about Paris, “Dante Street” (1934) and “The Trial” (1938), read like bits of a travelogue, or the journal of someone stuck in a place he doesn’t want to be. “There is no solitude more deadly than solitude in Paris,” says the nameless narrator of “Dante Street,” who wears the trappings of Isaac Babel. “For all those who come from afar this town is a form of exile.” In “The Trial,” Ivan Nedachin, a former lieutenant colonel with the Whites, who has wandered from Zagreb to Paris, where he couldn’t pass the taxi driver test, becomes a gigolo and a jewel thief. The daughter-in-law of his last v
ictim goes to the police. Nedachin is arrested in a Montparnasse wine cellar “where Moscow gypsies sang.” At criminal court a gendarme pushes him “out into the light, as a bear is pushed into a circus arena.” He is a bear, but from some unknown circus. “He towered over the crowd—helpless, large, with dangling arms— like an animal from another world.”
Babel was this same animal, and not because of Paris. Paris becomes a macabre stand-in for the feeling of foreignness in his own psyche. . . .
Babel’s best story about Paris takes place in Petersburg. Published in 1932 (like “Argamak”), it has ambiguous antecedents. Babel would have us believe that he composed “Guy de Maupassant” between 1920 and 1922. But I’d swear it couldn’t have been written, or greatly revised, until after his first trip to France. Cynthia Ozick calls the story “a cunning seriocomic sexual fable fixed on the weight and trajectory of language itself.” It’s also Babel’s most disturbing autobiography.
The narrator, whose fortunes are closely linked to Babel’s, finds himself in Petersburg in 1916 with a forged passport and without a penny. He’s twenty years old and he’s taken in by Alexey Kazantsev, a teacher of Russian literature whose real passion is Spain. “Kazantsev had never so much as passed through Spain, but his love for that country filled his whole being.”
Babel has visited upon Kazantsev his own puppy love for France. He appears like a ghostly fragment inside all the main characters—as if they (and we ourselves) were swimming with Isaac Babel in the underbelly of a dream. . . .
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