Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(5)
We had lunch in March, Frank and Maggie, my wife and I, in the comfortable, light-filled house that had been bought with the money from the novel. He looked the same, though a little weak. Behind the glasses his eyes were alert. The lick of boyish hair hung over his forehead. He wondered, he said, how it was going to be, whether the pain would be too great, whether he would be able to be himself until the end. He had been hoping to go to Nantucket, where they always spent the summer, but it didn’t look as if he would be able to. Maggie and Tim, their son, would be going without him.
That was more or less the end. He went upstairs for the weeks that followed and died on April 6. He was sixty-nine. Maggie had lain down beside him for the final hours. There are not many people you would do that with.
The New York Times Sunday Book Review
March 8, 2005
Odessa, Mon Amour
Isaac Babel was stocky with a broad, kindly face and a forehead creased with horizontal lines. He wore steel-rimmed glasses, like a bookworm or an accountant, and had a soft, high-pitched voice with a slight lisp. For a time, in the 1920s, following the publication of his Red Cavalry stories, he was the most famous writer in Russia, and anything of his that appeared in print attracted great attention. Knopf published the translation of Red Cavalry in 1929, and its combination of startling beauty and great violence, delivered with an unsettling resignation, disturbed readers, including Lionel Trilling, who wrote about the exceptional talent, even genius, that it represented. Babel was a writer of the Revolution, a child of it, in fact, caught up in its idealism and equality, but over time he became disillusioned and less ardent.
For Babel, writing was an agony. He wrote and rewrote endlessly, often completing only a quarter of a page in a day, and he sometimes rose at night to reread pages. He was constantly searching for the right word or expression, significant, simple, and beautiful, as he said. He believed, among other things, in punctuation, the period, principally. No steel could pierce the human heart, he wrote, as deeply as a period in exactly the right place. The strength came not when you could no longer add a sentence but when you could no longer take one away. He loved Expressionist colors, green stars, blue palms, blood red clay, sunsets thick as jam, and his images explode from the page, as in the celebrated opening lines of “My First Goose”:
Savitsky, Commander of the VI Division, rose when he saw me, and I wondered at the beauty of his giant’s body. He rose, the purple of his riding breeches and the crimson of his little tilted cap and the decorations on his chest cleaving the hut as a standard cleaves the sky. A smell of scent and the sickly sweet freshness of soap emanated from him. His long legs were like girls sheathed to the neck in shining riding boots.
Savitsky, the theatrical, bold commander, flower and iron, Babel writes admiringly, is based on a real figure, Semyon Timoshenko, who rose to become a marshal of the Red Army and to appear on the cover of Time. Other actual figures, Budyonny and Voroshilov, under their own names, are there as well. In his 1920 diary, on which the Red Cavalry stories were based, Babel jotted:
Divisional Commander Timoshenko at HQ. A colorful figure. A colossus in red half-leather trousers, red cap, well-built, former platoon commander, was at one time a machine gunner, an artillery ensign.
He had no imagination and couldn’t invent, he had to know everything, down to the last detail, he said, and Ilya Ehrenburg, who was his friend, agreed that Babel hardly changed anything but illuminated it with a kind of wisdom. It was more than that, it was with a unique talent. Beauty, scent, and the sickly sweet freshness of soap were added, and the half-leather trousers were transformed into an erotic image that sends electricity in both directions. He aimed, Babel said, at an intelligent reader with taste, more exactly a very intelligent woman who had absolute taste, just as certain people have absolute pitch.
Despite his ordinary appearance, women were attracted to him. He had love affairs, a son with a beautiful actress, Tamara Kashirina, a daughter with his wife, who had left Russia in 1925 and was living in Paris, studying art, and a second daughter with a “second wife,” Antonina Pirozhkova, fifteen years younger than Babel and with whom he lived the last four years of his life. There is a rich element of sensuality in Babel’s writing, sometimes implicit, glimpsed, sometimes clear. Prostitutes figure in stories, most notably in “My First Fee,” a masterpiece published only in 1963, long after his death. The story takes a familiar subject, the first introduction to sex, and makes it both comedic and gorgeous. The narrator impulsively lies his way into the affection of a worn, savvy streetwalker, who ends up teaching him the tricks of the trade and calling him “sister.” “Chink,” “The Bathroom Window,” and “An Evening with the Empress” have prostitutes in them, and “Dante Street” has all the aroma of a brothel, or something close to it. In Paris once, Babel stopped in front of a well-known brothel in Montmartre and, looking through the open windows—it was daytime—remarked to his companion that he wondered if they kept books in such a place. It would be fascinating to see them, he said, they could be a wonderful chapter in a novel. His curiosity was endless and intense. He wanted women to show him the contents of their handbags for what they might reveal, and he liked people to tell him the story of their first love. Everything is in terms of people in his writing, and his real interests were love and death. Like Maupassant and Flaubert, whom he revered, he was a realist. The Red Cavalry stories are stark and disturbing, completely out of step with modern sensibilities, and yet they are shot through with a strange kindness. No writer is more realistic and at the same time, even in the same sentence, romantic.