THE STORIES OF ISAAC BABEL
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there awaited me the flare of innumerable lights, the magical brilliance
of the wireless station, the stubborn coursing of the printing presses, and
my unfinished article for the
Red Trooper."
No irony is intended here.
In the crucifixion of the Polish Jews Babel sought the humiliation and
subjugation of the past.
Babel respected the Jews only when they answered the violence
done to them with violence of their own-a Polish woman cries out
"with sudden and terrible violence" over the body of her murdered
father, or the Jews of Volhynia and Galicia who "moved perkily, in an
uncontrolled and uncouth way, but their capacity for suffering was full
of a somber greatness, and their unvoiced contempt for the Polish gentry
unbounded." Benya Krik, the hero of
Tales of Odessa,
was the kind of
Jew Babel could admire unreservedly. "Gangster and kind of gangsters"
in the Odessa ghetto, Benya "could spend the night with a Russian
woman, and satisfy her," was able together with his brother Lyovka to
cripple his father, received a proposal of marriage while he was in bed
with a prostitute, and was a man whom nothing could dismay or de–
ceive. He was, in other words, a kind of Cossack. These stories of Odessa
seem to me unpalatable. Aside from their moral dubiousness, they affect
a folksy amiability and relaxation which are not appropriate to their
intense violence and chicanery. Unlike the stories of
Red Cavalry
they
seem to have been "gotten up" into literature, but Babel's deliberation
over them was unproductive of finer or more humane judgments.
The trouble lies, I think, in the fact that the young Babel made a
too sizable investment in violence. Mr. Trilling vindicates this invest–
ment by emphasizing the qualities of native grace and address that may
accompany violence, and in doing so discriminates against Babel's prin–
cipal interest and fascination, its terrific actuality-its "brain-spattering,
wind-pipe slitting" turbulence touched him more vitally than the del–
icacy and coolness of its commissioners.
Red Cavalry
is a discussion of
the multifarious ways of destruction, and it is not even so much a dis–
cussion as it is an exposition, for, unfortunately, nearly all of Babel's
reservations about violence were
merely
ironic. In "Berestechko" the
Cossacks commit one of their senseless murders. "Kudrya of the machine
gun section took hold of his head and tucked it under his arm. The Jew
stopped screaming and straddled his legs. Kudrya drew out his dagger
with his right hand and carefully, without splashing himself, cut the old
man's throat." Later the Commissar makes a speech, " 'You are in power.
Everything here is yours. . . . I now proceed to the election of the
Revolutionary Committee. . . .''' In another story he writes, unfor–
givably, and without a shred of irony, "Then I stamped on my master
