Making an Elephant

by Graham Swift

  I certainly knew then, in a secretive, submerged way, that I wanted to be a writer. I knew it as a schoolboy, which is what I still essentially was. When people ask me when did I first want to write, I usually say it was in my teens, it happened with adolescence, but I think it may really have begun a lot earlier, and my first and perhaps most significant ‘influences’ would have been the first real books I read. I’m not thinking of great literature, just of regular kids’ books, boys’ adventure stories, with a leaning perhaps to anything historical. They were the books that first made me thrill to what writers could put between the covers, and first implanted the idea that I might do something similar myself.

  By the time I left school I’d read a fair amount of serious classic literature, and I would be going to Cambridge to do more of the same. My own literary ambitions remained in tacit suspension, virtually unacted upon, and this was to remain the case for several years yet. It was one thing—not a difficult thing—to want to be a writer; another to become one, though I genuinely felt I was gripped by something more than a mere fancy.

  Looking back, I think the truth was that I was scared of my ambition, scared of discovering that I didn’t have what it took to fulfil it. It’s very easy when you’re young to place yourself in a postponing, self-deceiving cocoon. If you never put your possible delusion to the test, you’ll never suffer the pain of knowing it was a delusion. On the other hand, I think the fact that I was scared of my ambition was a measure of its being real. I knew that eventually I’d have to confront it, and I knew, since it was an entirely solitary, unfostered ambition, that I might need some external catalyst to push me to the task.

  But I don’t think I set off with my rucksack in some Kerouacish way, looking for experience I might ‘use’. I think I just wanted to have an interesting time and, in a general, unliterary way, to discover what initiative I had. The cliché would be that I wasn’t being so independent: I was simply joining the hippy trail. This was true to the extent that, though I travelled mostly alone, I quite often bumped into others doing something similar, following an east-bound, vagabond urge. But if I ever actually thought of reaching Kathmandu, the reality was I scarcely penetrated the Middle East. I don’t think I really had any distant goal in mind. The aim was to wander. I followed my nose, my instinct, my whim, but I kept a fairly shrewd eye on how far you could stretch fifty pounds.

  I do remember, when I set off, wanting very much to turn my back on everything I’d known so far: school, the suburbs, the Home Counties, a pretty sheltered domestic family life, even some of the real attractions, if you were seventeen, of England in the Sixties. That turning-the-back principle—certainly more instinct than whim—was very strong.

  At any rate, that five-month journey was a very unbookish affair. I hardly read a single thing all the time, and perhaps books and literature were among the things I wanted temporarily to ignore. By the time I reached Thessaloniki I was a fairly hardened traveller and a more educated person than I’d been when I’d walked out through those school gates. When you travel rough there are extraordinarily intense changes not just of scene but of mood and luck, and I’d learnt to relax into the unpredictability as you gradually learn to ride the swaying of a ship. I’d even become a little addicted to the ups and downs. If it was good, you made sure you moved on before it paled—the memory bright and safe in your rucksack. If it was bad, then there was always the next place. The turning-the-back principle worked in that local and immediate way too.

  I’m still rather amazed I survived the journey at all. Fifty pounds was worth more then, but it was a paltry sum to spread over five months. I eked it out partly by sometimes ‘working my way’, partly through some astonishing hospitality, but partly also by occasionally half starving and by sleeping in the open: on beaches, in ditches, under forest trees, or, when I was in the Turkish interior, in ‘dosshouse’ conditions. But I never suffered any major mishap, any physical injury or act of violence—though I witnessed a few and I actually took (this now seems absurd but it felt like a good idea at the time) to sleeping with a knife under whatever formed my pillow at night. Everything I had was on my person or in my rucksack and, though I frequently left that rucksack in insecure places for whole days at a stretch, neither it nor anything it contained was ever stolen. Perhaps there was nothing in it, really, to attract a thief.

  To cap it all, when I reached Thessaloniki and picked up my return rail ticket I even had some money left. I checked into a fleapit hotel in the rough part of town near the station, though it was luxury compared to some places I’d known. I then proposed to myself that for the remaining thirty-six hours or so I would lead a life of relative style, mooching round the more salubrious parts of the city, patronizing the ritzy waterfront cafes (complete scruff though I was) and pleasantly using up my cash.

  I don’t recall whether I saw this period as a conscious process of decompression, a return to ‘civilization’, or whether I’d suddenly become aware again of things that lay ahead of me, or inside me, but one thing I thought it would be good to do was read a book. I had the money to buy one. I went into a bookshop, something I hadn’t done for five months, found the fairly small English-language section and picked out the Penguin translation of Isaac Babel’s Collected Stories. It cost me twenty-five drachmas and I have it still.

  When I’d left school I had barely heard of Isaac Babel. I didn’t know that even then, in Russia, it was scarcely possible to read him. His work was only just emerging from its long official freeze following his death under Stalin, and a Russian reprint of his collected stories was yet to appear. The single volume of short fiction I held in my hand in Thessaloniki was really all that was left of a brutally short but courageous life—shortened, in a sense, by Babel’s own remarkable self-curtailment.

  In the 1930s, when Babel was not yet forty and the forces of repression had gathered round his still burgeoning career, he had opted for a virtual and defiant silence. In a barbed speech in 1932 he’d lamented that the writers of his time had been deprived of an essential right, the right to write badly—that is, to write well but not in a way deemed correct by the powers that be. By becoming ‘silent’, Babel was not submitting, but choosing to preserve in suspension, and to advertise provocatively, his right to ‘write well’.

  This only made him subject to increasing menace. By the late Thirties Babel was not only ‘silent’, but had ‘disappeared’. He died in circumstances that have never been fully clarified, though it was in one of Stalin’s concentration camps in 1939 or 1940, and his literary reputation remained extinguished by the authorities for years to come.

  Babel had already been brave in another way. He was a writer who always made much play of his intellectualism, his ‘writerliness’. A photograph taken in his thirties shows a chubby-faced man with a high forehead, thin-rimmed glasses and a hesitant, humorous expression—an amiable schoolmaster. But this self-fostered image had not prevented him from serving between 1918 and 1920 in the post-revolutionary wars, in particular with General Budyonny’s Cossack cavalry in Poland in 1920. And it was this experience that had produced the collection of short stories called Red Cavalry that I began to read, after reading Lionel Trilling’s introduction, in the hot September sunshine in Thessaloniki.

  That a bespectacled Jewish intellectual should have attached himself to a regiment of Cossack cavalry was extraordinary in itself. As an exercise in outsiderdom it could hardly have been more extreme; as an experiment in literary discovery it might have been doomed. But the stories I began to read are electric in their intensity and in their fearsome yet rapturous physicality. It was clear—though I hardly thought of such things on that first reading—that in his still forming ‘writerliness’ Babel had sought some raw and uncompromising collision of mind and matter, something rather different, as Lionel Trilling observes, from Hemingway’s quest (it wasn’t so long since I’d first read In Our Time), which can be more or less reduced to a moralizable seeking of courage or stoic virtue. Babe
l’s desire seemed to be for an ego-obliterating connection with the very springs of action and emotion.

  The Red Cavalry stories are at once lyrical and violent, ecstatic and amoral, affirmative and cruel: primitive stuff, yet great, exquisitely crafted literature. It’s not difficult to see—though, again, I scarcely had these reflections on that first encounter —how, despite their declarative title and despite Babel’s loyalty to Bolshevism, they would have fallen foul of any paranoid-authoritarian regime. They simply penetrate areas of human nature that lie beyond political programming, even revolutionary agendas. They sit uneasily with today’s prim notions of political correctness; they certainly offended the political correctness of his time.

  But Babel didn’t just write about war and violence. He wrote in his painfully short writing life about many of life’s joys: about his native Odessa, about France, where he travelled in the late 1920s. Along with his skill for compact and galvanized narrative, he has an incomparable gift for simultaneously condensing and celebrating all manner of physical sensation, which makes the regular term ‘description’ seem limp. He also wrote about literature, part of him remaining true to that essential writerly self which he could both mock and cast into the cauldron of human strife.

  I can’t really explain, beyond the obvious power of his words on the page, the instant rapport I felt for Babel. The very idea of a rapport is presumptuous and absurd. We were light years apart in experience and circumstance. My ancestry on my mother’s side happens to include a Russian-Jewish or Polish-Jewish element and some of my forebears came from those margins of Poland and Russia over which Budyonny’s cavalry fought. But that connection is far-fetched.

  And, needless to say, though I was eventually to become a writer, I’ve never written anything that’s remotely like Babel.

  Yet the fact remains that I wasn’t just ignited by reading him. I’ve admired and been excited by many writers, but very few indeed have given me the feeling, which isn’t really to do with literature at all but more like some strange personal intuition, that not only would I have liked to meet them, but, had we met, we would almost certainly have got on.

  Later, when I’d found out more about Babel, I could go some way to analysing, if never fully explaining, the rapport. Babel, in his ‘writerly’ way, constantly stressed that he was not a ‘natural’. Writing was a struggle for him; words had to be wrested out of him. He admired writers whom he believed were natural. Of Tolstoy he said that the world seems to ‘write through him’. I wonder, now, if the notion of the natural writer isn’t entirely mythical. The natural writers are just the ones who make it look natural—even Tolstoy didn’t work in an oracular trance, he just worked. But when I was seventeen, turning eighteen, I certainly believed in natural writers. I thought they were the real writers. And this was perhaps the nub of my fear about my ambition: I knew I wasn’t a natural writer. If I were, I’d already be a writer; there’d be no question of becoming one. The only way I could be a writer would be by making myself one, by squeezing the writer out of me. By work. And I was afraid of that work and of perhaps discovering there was no writer there.

  Reading Babel didn’t quicken the process. I wouldn’t truly become a writer for another six or seven years; and, oddly enough, Greece would again be involved. But Babel certainly quickened me. And from then on I felt he was ‘at my side’: this wonderful, vanished storyteller whom I yet felt, very foolishly no doubt, I could have met, liked and talked with long into the night.

  One of those natural writers Babel admired was Maupassant and there is a story by Babel called, itself, simply ‘Guy de Maupassant’. It tells how the Russian narrator, a writer and a thinly disguised version of the younger Babel, comes under the spell of Maupassant’s stories through an affair with a woman who is translating them (badly) into Russian. The Babel character improves her translations, thus becoming more entangled with her, but meanwhile becoming increasingly smitten by the French author. It’s in this story that Babel penned his perhaps most quoted sentence, that ‘no iron can pierce the heart with such force as a full stop in the right place’. A heart-piercing statement itself. The story ends with the Babel-narrator reading, late at night, a life of Maupassant, in particular about his final years (Maupassant died at forty-two), when although he became ill, almost blind, sometimes suicidal and eventually mad, he carried on writing to the last.

  Babel’s story concludes: ‘I read the book to the end and got out of bed. The fog came close to the window, the world was hidden from me. My heart contracted as the foreboding of some essential truth touched me with light fingers.’

  In Greece, in Thessaloniki in September, I didn’t have that St Petersburg fog, but I had Babel’s book and I had the palpable thrill of literary transmission. What Babel was describing in relation to Maupassant was exactly what I was feeling in relation to Babel.

  I don’t think I saw my five months with a rucksack as a Babelian apprenticeship—it came a laughably poor second, after all, to riding with the Cossack cavalry. But perhaps I did ask myself, conversely and rather shamingly: what might Babel have made of many of the sights, impressions, incidents, moments of vivid human contact and minor adventure that I’d experienced in those few months? The stabbing, for example, that I’d witnessed in central Turkey, a white shirt turning red; or that family in Izmir who simply let me stay in their little house as long as I wished and who when I left—for no other reason than the itch to be moving on—all wept to see me go and made me feel like the lowest creature on earth. Or that time in Bulgaria when I walked out of the forest and along a rutted track into a village where, I learned, no foreigner had ever appeared before and where the mayor, or elder, or whatever he was called, assembled the entire population to have its photograph taken round me, this historic phenomenon. And that village, with its wooden houses and carts and women in peasant headscarves, was like something out of Babel’s Polish fringes.

  Yet, by a strange twist, one of the most memorable adventures of my five-month journey, when I thought it was all over, was still to happen. My train home, which came from Athens, was due in at Thessaloniki in the early hours of the morning. The morning before this, I’d turned a corner of a busy square in the centre of the city to see, walking towards me, two school friends of mine. They weren’t, of course, as I’d last seen them, in school uniform. They were dressed rather as I was and they were in the middle, as it proved, of a much shorter version of what I’d been doing since the spring. They’d left school at the regular time that July and they’d been travelling for less than a month. I admit to having felt an instant superiority: they were novices, not even travelling solo. And I admit, even before this, to a strong, immediate instinct, as soon as I spotted them, to turn the other way. I didn’t want this ‘intrusion’. It would, in fact, have been fortunate if I’d eluded them, but they spotted me and it was too late. The end of my reading of Babel.

  We drank a lot of wine, and, as they were overnighting in Thessaloniki—I think they were heading for Istanbul—they insisted on coming to the station with me to see me onto my train. The upshot of their insistence was that by the time we were on the platform in the middle of the night we were behaving like—three schoolboys. I could feel all I’d learnt in five months‘ travelling seeping foolishly out of me.

  A Greek army officer, with a particularly arrogant air, was striding up and down the platform, taking a dim view of our long hair, laughter and horsing around. He rightly took some of the laughter to be aimed at him. This went on for a precarious while, then one of my friends, who I remember had been quite big in the school dramatic society, took a knife from my rucksack and waved it at the officer, as if he might have been auditioning, badly, for one of the murderers in Macbeth. An utterly stupid thing to have done.

  This was Greece under a newly imposed military regime. We were duly arrested by the station police, then carted off in a squad car by the town police. The fact that I’d had a train to catch and I hadn’t been the one to wave the knife cut
no ice. It was my knife. There was much shouting and thumping of desktops with fists. My train left without me. Then things had got a little worse. The car that took us to the police station, with two policemen in front, had travelled slowly and, it seemed, by a roundabout route. We’d all felt we might end up being beaten up in some deserted spot.

  Any number of unpleasant fates might have awaited us. As it happened, though we spent the night in a police station, we weren’t even thrown in jail, but it felt like touch-and-go. The fact that I’d bought the incriminating knife in Bulgaria and that it had a brand name in Cyrillic lettering didn’t help. I could see the crude equation being made: I was a communist. I’d used the knife for little more than cutting bread and watermelons. I’d bought it to replace another I’d lost, and, like its predecessor, it had sometimes gone under my head when I slept to protect me from trouble. Now it had got me into trouble.

  In the end I think the army officer, who’d also missed his train and had been required to come separately to the police station as a witness, began to resent the bother his indignation was costing him and backed down from pressing charges. We were released with our passports in the morning. This was fine for my two friends, who could continue their travels freely, with a good story to tell. I was left with the task of attempting to get back to London on an invalid rail ticket—a journey of nearly two thousand miles.

  Somehow I managed to do it, all the way to Victoria. It was a somewhat hallucinatory journey, not least because it involved four nights, counting the night in the police station, without sleep. In those days the trans-European trains to and from Greece used to have whole carriages reserved by student travel companies, with couchettes and meals thrown in—but only once a week. I had to travel, with my rucksack and dud ticket, as a common passenger. In practice, this meant standing in the corridor, all the way from Greece to Germany (over thirty-six hours), as the north-bound trains were regularly packed with Greeks, then Yugoslavs heading for the then-booming German economy—heading there too, it seemed, with most of their possessions. The lack of personal space in the corridor can’t really be described—it was impossible to sit—but I was a seasoned traveller, used to all kinds of privations, and might have breezed through it all, if I hadn’t also been afraid of being at any moment chucked off. Officials periodically came, or rather clambered and squeezed, along. They were not generally in good moods. There were lengthy border stops. I invented several stories to excuse my incorrect tickets. None, of course, involved arrest by the Greek police.