How the Curd Was Clotted: Accounting for Isaac Babel… and a Life of Literature

How the Curd Was Clotted: Accounting for Isaac Babel... and a Life of Literature*"[Babel's style] shows what can be done. Even when you've got all the water out of them, you can still clot the curds a little more."Ernest Hemingway"All went as I wished, and all went badly," declares the narrator of Isaac Babel's "Story of My Dovecote." Babel fans know how he feels. The closer we get to the author whom many consider the greatest prose stylist of the twentieth century, the slower Zeno' s arrow. More than a decade has passed since the publication of a serious scholarly monograph on Isaac Babel, fifteen years itching in vain for promising volumes by Patricia Blake and Gregory Freidin and by younger scholars like Janneke van de Stadt and Rebecca Stanton. This on top of the frustration that those of us who teach Babel to undergraduates have endured on account of the often uneven and absurd qualities of Peter Constantine' s translations, which have pushed Walter Morrison and Max Hay ward' s more elegant versions out of print. (Let us pass over McDuff s Babel in polite silence.) And yet, despite all this, it is an exciting time for Babel scholars, as his work continues to attract and perplex smart readers in Russian Studies and beyond. In 2004, Freidin and the Hoover Institution at Stanford held an exhibition, workshop, and international conference, chronicled in Elif Batuman's long essay "Babel in California" (n+1 [2005]), now included as the first chapter in her brilliant work of memoir and literary nonfiction, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. It is telling that n+1 and FSG published Batuman's trade paperback account of the conference years before an academic press released the actual conference volume (don't be fooled by the misleading publication dates), masterfully curated by Freidin; and, for someone who did not attend the conference, The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context reads like the documentary record upon which Batuman's illuminating and hilarious roman-a-clef "was based. Here, for example, it is revealed that the "famous professor of comparative literature [who gave] an incredibly lame paper comparing a passage m Madame Bovary, in which flies are dying at the bottom of a glass of cider, to Babel's description of the death of Squadron Commander Truno v," was the justly famous Robert Alter, whose essay in the edited volume is actually not too lame at all (p. 62). It is revealing to correlate, as Alter does, Flaubert' s highly composed aestheticization of the ugly and banal to Babel's - even though this effect is one of the pillars of modernist art.Although the Freidin volume is neither a definitive (impossible), comprehensive (also impossible), nor introductory (possible, but not the goal) treatment of Babel, most of its chapters break new ground in their originality and depth of focus. Freidin' s and Blake's essays comprise the first ?? Enigma'' § three parts - "Attempting a Biography." Blake's hair-raising account of her 1962 KGBplagued research trip to Moscow is more of an attempt at autobiography than biography, but that seems like a churlish quibble about such a wonderful piece of writing. And in a real sense, Blake's cat-and-mouse with a KGB agent in Harris tweed evokes the essential pathos of Babel's life and death as a writer: both Blake and Babel flirt with the mystery of power, as good writers will. But when Blake realizes that Babel's widow Antonina Pirozhkova's apartment was bugged because of her, she understands that "the KGB has won its contest" with her (p. 11). Of Babel, Blake concludes that he was "marked by the arrogance of his own genius. He was in the grip of desire to penetrate the purviews of absolute power and - failing that - to pass as an insider, privy to the happenings in an increasingly murderous secret world [...] and this would be his undoing" (p. 14). Freidin' s attempt at biography takes to heart Babel's adage in "My First Fee" that fiction need not resemble life: "Real life is only too eager to resemble a well -devised story. …