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PARTISAN REVIEW
which he tried to reveal himself anew. These later stories are the work
of a fatigued and burdened talent-they took a long time to write, and
Babel, unable to obey his own dictates about style, was forced to "turn
the lever" more than once. Nor could he ever be at ease with the milder,
retrospective sentiments; he tricked out his nostalgia in pseudo-ironic
pathos, he recreated his memories and his Jewishness primarily in order
to keep on writing about something. As he learned more about himself
his subject-matter trickled away from him; his special talent did not
thrive on the wisdom that comes with resignation. He had met life a
ferocious young observer, and his best work was volatile, predatory and
imperfect-with all its immoralities
Red Cavalry
is his enduring achieve–
ment. When his passion for "the state of nature" waned, his art, which
in its way was a state of nature too, waned with it.
Before Babel silenced his own voice, however, he wrote one great
story, "Di Grasso," which along with "Gedali" is his finest work.
It
tells
of an Italian troupe of players that stopped at Odessa one year; Di
Grasso, the star performer in a rustic Sicilian melodrama, portrays a
jealous shepherd who avenges himself on Giovanni, the city slicker that
has stolen his love. "The shepherd ... stood there lost in thought; then
he gave a smile, soared into the air, sailed across the stage, plunged down
on Giovanni's shoulders, and having bitten through the latter's throat,
began, growling and squinting, to suck blood from the wound." This
beautiful, savage leap has a profound effect on Babel, and on all the
Odessans who witness it. Somehow it gets at the heart of Babel's greatest
and truest appreciation of violence in a way that
Red Cavalry
never did.
Perhaps the most significant reason for this is the fact that it takes place
through the agency of art: it is art Babel is witnessing here, not life.
And when he says of Di Grasso's performances that they confirm "with
every word and gesture that there is more justice in outbursts of noble
passion than in all the joyless rules that run the world," one wonders if
he does not now have in mind the violence that only art can properly
represent, and that only art, by its peculiar magic, can cause to vitalize
our moral beings. One wonders also if he does not now have a deeper
sense of what constitutes a noble passion, and a noble violence. Certainly
it seems so to me, for his description of the humanizing influence of the
performance upon even the "tricky customer" Nick Schwarz, to whom
Babel had pawned his father's watch, and upon Nick's grenadier-like
wife, is an indication that he senses where the real nobility and justice
in violence lies: in its power to evoke the non-violent affections, to
evoke love, even to evoke guilt, and always to evoke our moral human–
ity. After the play, Madame Schwarz says, "Now you see what love
