Like all the stories in Isaac Babel’s masterpiece, Red Cavalry, “My First Goose” is set among the horse soldiers of General Budyonny’s Red Army during the bloody Polish-Soviet War of 1920. Its narrator is an idealistic young intellectual who finds himself riding with the Cossacks—thugs who have nothing but contempt for a bespectacled law graduate from St. Petersburg. A sympathetic quartermaster suggests that the way to win his comrades’ respect is to “ruin a good lady.”
But as it turns out, any living creature will do. Hungry, tormented by cooking aromas, our hero kills his landlady’s goose by cracking its skull under his boot—and orders the old woman to cook it. This impulsive brutality convinces the Cossacks that the narrator might, after all, be a worthwhile human being. They invite him to share their pork-and-cabbage soup, and allow him to read to them Lenin’s speech from Pravda. Later, “we slept, all six of us, beneath a wooden roof that let in the stars, warming one another, our legs intermingled. I dreamed: and in my dreams saw women. But my heart, stained with bloodshed, grated and brimmed over.”
Naturally, this brief summary omits much of what makes the story great: details such as the landlady’s magnificently despondent line “I want to go and hang myself,” repeated twice in the narrative, and, more important, the story’s subtext, which is sex—an erotic charge ignited by the first paragraph’s description of the division commander, Savitsky (“His long legs were like girls sheathed to the neck in riding boots”), and exploded in the final lines, in that tangle of sleeping male bodies.
I was eighteen, a college sophomore, when our writing instructor read us the whole of “My First Goose.” This was at Harvard, in 1966, and we—aspiring novelists all—were great admirers of Hemingway, with whom Babel shared much in common: a similar interest in storytelling, in themes of warfare, courage, and violence, an obsession with style, extreme compression, and economy, and a commitment to revitalize the written language through a precise, elegant fidelity to the spoken vernacular.
Hearing “My First Goose,” we intuitively understood that we were listening to something resembling Hemingway—but stripped of his romance and sentiment, and without that failure of nerve caused by the longing (so damaging to a writer) for the reader’s admiration and affection. If Hemingway told us that wars happened and brave men fought them, Babel suggested that violence was sexy, that something in human nature liked it—even required it. No Hemingway hero would pray for what the soldier in Babel’s “After the Battle” asks from fate: “the simplest of proficiencies—the ability to kill my fellow men.” And if Hemingway wrote about “men without women,” Babel matter-of-factly, with neither titillation nor alarm, zeroed in on the homoerotic nature of army life.
Our instructor told us a few facts about Babel, culled from Lionel Trilling’s introduction to the 1955 edition of The Collected Stories. Born in Odessa in 1894, Babel moved to St. Petersburg to become a writer and published a story in a magazine edited by his mentor, Maxim Gorky, who advised him to go out and experience life and work on his prose style. He joined the czar’s army, then the Soviet army, and, like the hero of “My First Goose,” rode with the Cossacks in the Budyonny campaign—an odd choice, since Babel was Jewish and the Cossacks were known for their murderous anti-Semitic rampages.
After his stories began to appear in the 1920s, he became an international success. Red Cavalry was published in this country in 1929. His personal life was complex; he fathered three children by three different women, and habitually obfuscated and mythologized his past.
After his wife and daughter emigrated to Paris, Babel lived with Antonina Pirozhkova, an engineer whose touching memoir, At His Side, describes his final years. Under pressure from the government to voice the current party ideology (in an address to the 1934 Soviet Writers Congress, he praised Stalin’s literary style), he wrote less and less. In 1939 he was arrested by the secret police, and, it was said, he died in a labor camp two or three years later.
Now we know that Babel was never sent to a labor camp but was shot in prison eight months after his arrest—a fact that the government chose to hide from his family until decades later. Some of the mysteries surrounding Babel’s life and death have been cleared up. But questions remain, among them the riddle of why, exactly, he was killed.
Despite his relatively modest output, he is considered by many to be one of the most important writers of this century. Maxim Gorky called him “the great hope of Russian literature.” Harold Bloom has edited a book of essays about his work. According to Cynthia Ozick, “If we wish to complete, and transmit, the literary configuration of the twentieth century—the image that will enduringly stain history’s retina—now is the time (it is past time) to set Babel beside Kafka.” Novelists, poets, and serious readers speak of his work with an intense—and almost cultlike—respect and devotion. So why is Babel’s work not more widely read by the general public?
The above summary of “My First Goose” suggests some probable causes. Babel is one of the least reassuring or politically correct of writers—which is not to say that his work is unrelievedly grim, or that it isn’t frequently lively, charming, and funny. He is, however, unrelenting in his refusal to editorialize, to moralize, to interpret. As Lionel Trilling wrote, “One could not at once know just how the author was responding to the brutality he recorded, whether he thought it good or bad, justified or not justified. Nor was this the only thing to be in doubt about. It was not really clear how the author felt about, say, Jews; or about religion; or about the goodness of man.” Babel’s heroes are gangsters, whores, and soldiers, as well as boys and young men in the process of finding out that the world is populated by gangsters, whores, and soldiers.
Countless writers have linked sex and death, violence and art, but few have made that linkage seem so raw and unromantic. Sex, in Babel’s stories, is raucous, juicy, compelling, and dirty; he accomplishes in a few allusive sentences what Henry Miller required a trilogy of novels to convey. “Guy de Maupassant,” a tale about an aspiring writer who trades on his literary abilities to get laid, ends with the hero returning from a night of drunken passion with his voluptuous, married translation student and reading the biography of his hero, Maupassant, who, in the final stages of syphilis, cut his throat and was confined to a madhouse, where he crawled about on all fours, devouring his own excrement. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a writer of equal genius whose work runs so directly counter to the prevailing popular taste for sympathetic characters and an affirmative worldview. If our culture prefers (or demands) sincerity and transparency, Babel’s work, to quote Trilling again, is “heavily charged with . . . intensity, irony, and ambiguousness.”
For a while I stopped teaching Babel. This was the result of a class in which I used the instructive and remarkably different two versions (“My First Fee” and “Answer to an Inquiry”) of the same narrative. The plot concerns a young man who is infatuated with a prostitute who takes him home, where he realizes that he has no money to pay her. Inspired by ardor, he invents a sad tale about having been the kept lover of a homosexual Armenian, a lie that convinces the whore that she and the kid are colleagues, and that moves her to offer him a night of love for free. Several of my graduate students were offended by what they considered the damaging stereotype of the whore with a heart of gold, as well as by an author who tacitly condoned a hero who would deceive an oppressed female sex worker. But their horror was nothing compared with that of my class of University of Utah undergraduates, most of them Mormon, whom I assigned to read Babel’s “The Sin of Jesus.”
Cast as deceptively lighthearted folktale, the story concerns a hotel servant, Arina, who keeps getting pregnant by a succession of men. After she prays for help, the Lord sends her an angel named Alfred to be her husband and protector, with strict instructions to remove Alfred’s fragile wings before going to bed at night. But one evening Arina gets drunk, and in a fit of lust she rolls over on the angel’s wings and crushes him. Of course, Arina is soon pregnant again, and at the story’s conclusion she berates Jesus for having pushed her beyond her limits. When the Savior, suitably chastened, falls to his knees and begs her pardon, Arina replies, “There’s no forgiveness for you, Jesus Christ . . . No forgiveness, and never will be.” My students were appalled, I think, not merely by the blasphemy but by the vision behind it: that is, by Babel’s view of a universe without sense or order, a world in which, if we are to love one another at all, we must first admit that we often behave no better than animals—and, in fact, often worse.