Steven Marcus
THE STORIE S OF ISAAC BABEL
The publication of
The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel*
should be welcome to everyone interested in the progress of literature. It
brings before us the work of a unique and accomplished talent and re–
vives the possibilities of a great but apparently senescent genre. In an
admirable, informative introduction, Lionel Trilling has appraised Babel's
achievement with compassion, educing from his life and writing the
particular moral bias that informs them.
Babel's writing is most refreshing in its quality of directness-the
style in which he addressed himself to experience and to his readers was
calculated to be blunt in its effect of reality. Babel made only perfunc–
tory gestures toward the contrivances of fiction; his stories are simply
about himself-his experiences and his response to the experiences of
others. Whenever he did write a conventional story the familiar, invented
devices of the form plainly distracted him from exploiting his skill and
intelligence. It was his great good fortune to discover at the outset of
his career that his powers of observation accommodated all his other fac–
ulties to them; the brilliance of his registering eye made his use of any
of the simpler literary means seem opaque, pallid and superimposed.
Indeed, he was vexed by a self-consciousness of his superb aptitude
as a witness, and he suffered Reb Arye-Leib's chastening without
reply: "'You have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart' "
-not until his art reached an autumnal maturity could he bring himself
to acknowledge with any satisfaction the handicaps of being an observer.
His stories emanate a rare salubrity, the influence of a cultivated, self–
possessed talent coming directly to holds with the trials of its experience.
The canon of Babel's work is the story of his life, and because he could
look at his life without being embarrassed by the very fact of his looking
at it we are not embarrassed either, as we so often are by other contem–
porary writers who dissimulate their passions about themselves in the
transparent formalities of "literature."
In another way, however, Babel is one of the most indirect and
elusive of writers-no recent writer, not even Joyce, has managed a more
*
The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel.
Introduction
by
Lionel Trilling. Criterion
Books. $5.00.
