PARTISAN REVIEW
When Deborah's bridegroom approaches her "a hiccough distended her
throat, and she vomited forth all she had eaten at the wedding feast."
Shame overcomes her and her family and she is mocked by her husband.
Then Jesus, pitying her anguish and shame, "placed upon Himself the
bridegroom's apparel and, full of compassion, was joined with Deborah,
who lay in her vomit," and Deborah bears his child. With this account,
Babel has cleverly diverted the drift of his story. Apolek suddenly appears
as a disgusting clod, and his literalistic faith a grotesque vulgarity. What–
ever may have provoked this twist-his anticlericalism, his dislike of the
passive or submissive character-Babel abruptly suspends his original
affection and respect for Apolek; that affection and respect are, pre–
sumably, to be remembered as subsidiary ironies in the newer, more
"complex" pattern of the story.
It
is as if he were on the verge of an
experience very much like that which Kafka describes in "In the Penal
Colony," and then quickly turns and walks away. Like the explorer in
Kafka's tale he is too discomposed by his revulsion to allow it to soften
itself in disillusion, but unlike him, he cannot even allow his revulsion
to act itself out. Nor should
we
mistake Babel's vulgarization of Chris–
tianity for the kind of naivete of taste we find in
The Man Who Died.
The quality of "Pan Apolek" was deliberate and reasoned; it was a vul–
garity itself, albeit an elegant one-an unwillingness to allow certain
sentiments to suggest their own kind of justification.
Associated with this restricting, deflecting irony was Babel's reluc–
tance to extend a story beyond the slightest possible duration ; his finest
effects are hit off with the shortest strokes. Like many first-rate short
story writers he was possessed with the search for the single right word
or phrase. "The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The
lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it
once, not twice." Only the unquestionable trenchancy of his insights
justifies the brevity of his best work. "No iron can stab the heart with
such force as a period put just at the right place," he wrote, alluding
to that paragon of ironists, the writer of
Proverbs:
"Iron sharpeneth
iron: so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." And yet he
frequently applied his ability to compress and foreshorten as he applied
his ironic skill, to deflect and dissipate his passions. To the young Babel,
literature sometimes seemed a deadly serious game which was played
by hiding one's hand, by holding back secrets from one's audience and
probably oneself. He negotiated this sophisticated coyness with the same
facility with which he turned his irony, and his stories were damaged by
it in the same way-it was a genuine embarrassment of riches.
Red Cavalry,
in which all these faults are most obtrusive, is, never-
