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Nikitinsky, trampled on him for an hour or maybe more. And in that
time I got to know life through and through. With shooting . . . you
only get rid of a chap. Shooting's letting him off, and too damn easy
for yourself. With shooting you'll never get at the soul. ... But I don't
spare myself, and I've more than once trampled an enemy for over an
hour. You see, I want to get to know what life really is, what life's like
down our way." Here at its worst Babel's style was bloated with gore,
"horribly stuff'd with epithets of war."
Babel's overinvestment in violence led him into active personal bru–
tality. "My First Goose" records how he gruesomely slaughtered a bird
and upbraided a harmless old peasant woman in order to feel potent
and mature and accepted by the Cossacks. Nor should we neglect the
fact that Babel later became a member of the Cheka-though no in–
formation is available about what he did for it-and that he went along
on the infamous grain-collecting expeditions of 1917-1918: on three
separate occasions he was somehow associated with the dirtiest work of
the Revolution. Mr. Trilling would persuade us that Babel entertained
a dialectic which poised the spirituality of the Jews against the carnality,
the bodily beauty, of the Cossacks, and in which one criticized and qual–
ified the other. Again this seems to me an error of generosity. Babel's
frequent and ingenious juxtapositions seem deliberate and contrived
enough, I think, to warrant the supposition that he sensed his overcom–
mitment to the way of violence; and so he called upon objects and senti–
ments which would have the appearance of compromising his rancor
and destructiveness-he sought a dialectic, but this search was essen–
tially strategic. The young Babel was inspired by the negating passions;
his one powerful benign impulse was the will to record and understand
and convey. This impulse fortified his sense of the need for a dialectic,
but it could not alone supply him with one. I do not mean to imply that
Babel had no strong affections-indeed he did; nor do I wish to main–
tain that his use of irony is altogether spurious. But what may appear to
be a dialectic in this respect, is, I think, more accurately a duality, in
which the spiritual and the fleshly find it politic to appear together in
print-like two enemies compelled to associate in public. Actually, I
find, Babel's ironies and contradictions often tend to destroy, rather than
create, each other.
Babel's affinity for destruction and cruelty may be understood
though not condoned through his early life. In two sketches of 1925,
"The Story of My Dovecot" and "First Love," he describes the most
important day of his life-on October 20, 1905 there was a pogrom in
Odessa. Babel's grandfather was killed, his father, "his soft red hair
