Fame & Folly

by Cynthia Ozick

  It burst from her, flaring up in a queer quaver that ended in something queerer still—in her abrupt collapse, on the spot, into the nearest chair, where she choked with a torrent of tears. Her buried face could only after a moment give way to the flood, and she sobbed in a passion as sharp and brief as the flurry of a wild thing for an instant uncaged; her old friend meantime keeping his place in the silence broken by her sound and distantly—across the room—closing his eyes to his helplessness and her shame. Thus they sat together while their trouble both conjoined and divided them.

  Here James, in suddenly “going behind,” momentarily abandons his “few grave, rigid laws” of dramatic restraint. It is as if, in this outburst of bereavement, the idea of helplessness and shame cannot be prevented from pressing forward, willy-nilly, from the cobwebbed backstage dark. The sacred terror is at last flung straight in the face of the tale. Not only helplessness and shame, but corruption; callousness; revenge; sexual displacement. Nanda displaces (or replaces) Lady Julia; beyond the novel’s enclosure she may displace—or mask—James’s endearing young men who come and go. There are, besides, incestuous hints: the young woman who might have been her protector’s grandchild is intimately absorbed into the days and nights of his house. Her parents have abdicated. Her mother has sold her. The man she hoped to marry will not have her, even for a fortune. The man who takes her in, troubled by secret fevers and unthreshed motives, is sunk in a web of confusion; the young woman represents for him half a dozen identities, relations, unwholesome resolutions. And she, in joining him, has gone to bed, in effect, for life—as a penalty, or perhaps in penance, for knowing too much.

  A panicked scenario. How much of it did James know? Did the teller penetrate to the bowels of the tale? The tale, in any case, penetrates—or decodes—the teller. The mosaic fly-eye of the narrative assembles all the shards and particles of James’s chronicle of crisis, glimpse after glimpse, and sweeps them up, and compiles and conflates them into one horrendous seeing—James in his aging forlornness, in a house devoid of companionship and echoing with his sister’s “Alone!”; Fenimore’s wild crash; Alice’s burial-in-life; the return of his father’s “damnèd shape” and its fatal influences. And what was that shape if not James himself, at the crest of a life delivered over wholly to art, helpless on the stage on the evening of January 5, 1895, the crown of his genius thrown brutally down? “Thus they sat together while their trouble both conjoined and divided them.” Divided, because James in his domicile, unlike Mr. Longdon, is alone, and will always be alone. Conjoined, because James is at once both Mr. Longdon and Nanda. But surely more than either or both. These two have been dropped into a pit. James is the pit’s master, its builder and evoker.

  After the cataclysmic turning point of Guy Domville, hidden knowings are everywhere in James—notably in What Maisie Knew (1897) and “The Turn of the Screw,” and culminating in the last great pair of conspiratorial works, The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904). The recurrence, in his own sensibility, of the paternal vastation, the recognition of an immutable deprivation (“the essential loneliness of my life”), the nearby explosions of suicide and self-immolation, the “horrible hours” themselves—all these pitchforked James out of the Victorian and into the modern novel. He broke down both social and narrative forms and plummeted, sans the old fastidiousness (and optimism), into the smoldering detritus of exhausted ways. It is probable that The Awkward Age is a novel that knows far more than its author knew, and holds more secrets of panic, shame, helplessness, and chaos than James could candidly face. But it was this work that crucially and decisively pried open the inmost door to the void. After which, released from glimpse into gaze, James could dare as Conrad dared, and as Kafka dared.

  At the climax of his powers Henry James looked freely into the Medusan truth, he snared the unconsciousness. “Make him think the evil,” he said, soliciting the unprepared nineteenth-century reader as the twentieth came near (a century that was to supply unthinkable evil), “make him think it for himself.” And in the end—anarchy loosed upon the world, and pitilessness slouching toward him—James thought it for himself.

  ISAAC BABEL AND THE IDENTITY QUESTION

  Identity, at least, is prepared to ask questions.

  —Leon Wieseltier

  A YEAR OR SO before the Soviet Union imploded, S.’s mother, my first cousin—whose existence until then had been no more than a distant legend—telephoned from Moscow. “Save my child!” she cried, in immemorial tones. So when S. arrived in New York, I expected a terrified refugee on the run from the intolerable exactions of popular antisemitism; at that time the press was filled with such dire reports. For months, preparing for her rescue, I had been hurtling from one agency to another, in search of official information on political asylum.

  But when S. finally turned up, in black tights, a miniskirt, and the reddest lipstick, it was clear she was indifferent to all that. She didn’t want to be saved; what she wanted was an American holiday, a fresh set of boyfriends, and a leather coat. She had brought with her a sizable cosmetics case, amply stocked, and a vast, rattling plastic bag stuffed with hundreds of cheap tin Komsomol medals depicting Lenin as a boy. She was scornful of these; they were worthless, she said; she had paid pennies for the lot. Within two weeks S., a natural entrepreneur, had established romantic relations with the handsome young manager of the local sports store and had got him to set up a table at Christmas in his heaviest traffic location. She sold the tin Lenin medals for three dollars each, made three hundred dollars in a day, and bought the leather coat.

  Of course she was a great curiosity. Her English was acutely original, her green eyes gave out ravishing ironic lightnings, her voice was as dark as Garbo’s in Ninotchka, and none of us had ever seen an actual Soviet citizen up close before. She thought the telephone was bugged. She thought the supermarket was a public exhibition. Any show of household shoddiness—a lamp, say, that came apart—would elicit from her a comical crow: “Like in Soviet!” She was, emphatically, no atheist: she had an affinity for the occult, believed that God could speak in dreams (she owned a dream book, through which Jesus often walked), adored the churches of old Russia, and lamented their destruction by the Bolsheviks. On the subject of current antisemitism she was mute; that was her mother’s territory. Back in Moscow, her boyfriend, Gennadi, had picked her up in the subway because she was Jewish. He was in a hurry to marry her. “He want get out of Soviet,” she explained.

  At home she was a Sportsdoktor: she traveled with the Soviet teams, roughneck country boys, and daily tested their urine for steroids. (Was this to make sure her athletes were properly dosed?) She announced that everybody hated Gorbachev, only the gullible Americans liked him, he was a joke like all the others. A historically-minded friend approached S. with the earnest inquiry of an old-fashioned liberal idealist: “We all know, obviously, about the excesses of Stalinism,” she said, “but what of the beginning? Wasn’t Communism a truly beautiful hope at the start?” S. laughed her cynical laugh; she judged my friend profoundly stupid. “Communism,” she scoffed, “what Communism? Naive! Fairy tale, always! No Communism, never! Naive!”

  And leaving behind five devastated American-as-apple-pie boyfriends (and wearing her leather coat), S. returned to Moscow. She did not marry Gennadi. Her mother emigrated to Israel. The last I heard of S., she was in business in Sakhalin, buying and selling—and passing off as the real thing—ersatz paleolithic mammoth tusks.

  WELL, IT IS ALL over now—the Great Experiment, as the old brave voices used to call it—and S. is both symptom and proof of how thoroughly it is over. She represents the Soviet Union’s final heave, its last generation. S. is the consummate New Soviet Man: the unfurled future of its seed. If there is an axiom here, it is that idealism squeezed into utopian channels will generate a cynicism so profound that no inch of human life—not youth, not art, not work, not romance, not introspection—is left untainted. The S. I briefly knew trusted nothing; in her world ther
e was nothing to trust. The primal Communist fairy tale had cast its spell: a baba yaga’s birth-curse.

  In college I read the Communist Manifesto, a rapture-bringing psalm. I ought to have read Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry stories—if only as a corrective companion-text. Or antidote. “But what of the beginning?” my friend had asked. S. answered better than any historian, but no one will answer more terrifyingly than Isaac Babel. If S. is the last generation of New Soviet Man, he is the first—the Manifesto’s primordial manifestation.

  That Babel favored the fall of the Czarist regime is no anomaly. He was a Jew from Odessa, the child of an enlightened family, hungry for a European education; he was subject to the numerus clausus, the Czarist quota that kept Jews as a class out of the universities, and Babel in particular out of the University of Odessa. As a very young writer, he put himself at risk when—to be near Maxim Gorky, his literary hero—he went to live illegally in St. Petersburg, a city outside the Pale of Settlement (the area to which Jews were restricted). What Jew would not have welcomed the demise of a hostile and obscurantist polity that, as late as 1911, tried Mendel Beiliss in a Russian court on a fantastic blood libel charge, and what Jew in a time of government-sanctioned pogroms would not have turned with relief to forces promising to topple the oppressors? In attaching himself to the Bolshevik cause, Babel may have been more zealous than many, but far from aberrant. If the choice were either Czar or Bolshevism, what Jew could choose Czar? (A third possibility, which scores of thousands sought, was escape to America.) But even if one were determined to throw one’s lot in with the Revolution, what Jew would go riding with Cossacks?

  In 1920 Isaac Babel went riding with Cossacks. It was the third year of the Civil War—Revolutionary Reds versus Czarist Whites; he was twenty-six. Babel was not new to the military. Two years earlier, during the First World War, he had been a volunteer—in the Czar’s army—on the Romanian front, where he contracted malaria. In 1919 he fought with the Red Army to secure St. Petersburg against advancing government troops. And in 1920 he joined ROSTA, the Soviet wire service, as a war correspondent for the newspaper Red Cavalryman. Poland, newly independent, was pressing eastward, hoping to recover its eighteenth-century borders, while the Bolsheviks, moving west, were furiously promoting the Communist salvation of Polish peasants and workers. The Polish-Soviet War appeared to pit territory against ideology; in reality territory—or, more precisely, the conquest of impoverished villages and towns and their wretched inhabitants—was all that was at stake for either side. Though the Great War was over, the Allies, motivated by fear of the spread of Communism, went to the aid of Poland with equipment and volunteers. (Ultimately the Poles prevailed and the Bolsheviks retreated, between them despoiling whole populations.)

  In an era of air battles, Babel was assigned to the First Cavalry Army, a Cossack division led by General Semyon Budyonny. The Cossack image—glinting sabers, pounding hooves—is indelibly fused with Czarist power, but the First Cavalry Army was, perversely, Bolshevik. Stalin was in command of the southern front—the region abutting Poland—and Budyonny was in league with Stalin. Ostensibly, then, Babel found himself among men sympathetic to Marxist doctrine; yet Red Cossacks were no different from White Cossacks: untamed riders, generally illiterate, boorish and brutish, suspicious of ideas of any kind, attracted only to horseflesh, rabid looting, and the quick satisfaction of hunger and lust. “This isn’t a Marxist revolution,” Babel privately noted; “it’s a rebellion of Cossack wild men.” Polish and Russian cavalrymen clashing in ditches while warplanes streaked overhead was no more incongruous than the raw sight of Isaac Babel—a writer who had already published short stories praised by Gorky—sleeping in mud with Cossacks.

  Lionel Trilling, in a highly nuanced (though partially misinformed) landmark introduction to a 1955 edition of The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel—which included the Red Cavalry stories—speaks of “the joke of a Jew who is a member of a Cossack regiment.” A joke, Trilling explains, because

  traditionally the Cossack was the feared and hated enemy of the Jew.… The principle of his existence stood in total antithesis to the principle of the Jew’s existence. The Jew conceived of his own ideal character as being intellectual, pacific, humane. The Cossack was physical, violent, without mind or manners … the natural and appropriate instrument of ruthless oppression.

  Yet Trilling supplies another, more glamorous, portrait of the Cossack, which he terms Tolstoyan: “He was the man as yet untrammeled by civilization, direct, immediate, fierce. He was the man of enviable simplicity, the man of the body—the man who moved with speed and grace.” In short, “our fantasy of the noble savage.” And he attributes this view to Babel.

  As it turns out, Babel’s tenure with Budyonny’s men was more tangled, and more intricately psychological, than Trilling—for whom the problem was tangled and psychological enough—could have known or surmised. For one thing, Trilling mistakenly believed that Babel’s job was that of a supply officer—i.e., that he was actually a member of the regiment. But as a correspondent for a news agency (which meant grinding out propaganda), Babel’s position among the troops was from the start defined as an outsider’s, Jew or no. He was there as a writer. Worse, in the absence of other sources, Trilling fell into a crucial—and surprisingly naive—second error: he supposed that the “autobiographical” tales were, in fact, autobiographical.

  Babel, Trilling inferred from Babel’s stories, “was a Jew of the ghetto” who “when he was nine years old had seen his father kneeling before a Cossack captain.” He compares this (fictitious) event to Freud’s contemplation of his father’s “having accepted in a pacific way the insult of having his new fur cap knocked into the mud by a Gentile who shouted at him, ‘Jew, get off the pavement.’ ” “We might put it,” Trilling concludes, that Babel rode with Budyonny’s troops because he had witnessed his father’s humiliation by “a Cossack on a horse, who said, ‘At your service,’ and touched his fur cap with his yellow-gloved hand and politely paid no heed to the mob looting the Babel store.”

  There was no Babel store. This scene—the captain with the yellow glove, the Jew pleading on his knees while the pogrom rages—is culled from Babel’s story “First Love.” But it was reinforced for Trilling by a fragmentary memoir, published in 1924, wherein Babel calls himself “the son of a Jewish shopkeeper.” The truth was that Babel was the son of the class enemy: a well-off family. His father sold agricultural machinery and owned a warehouse in a business section of Odessa where numerous import-export firms were located. In the same memoir Babel records that because he had no permit allowing him residence in St. Petersburg, he hid out “in a cellar on Pushkin Street which was the home of a tormented, drunken waiter.” This was pure fabrication: in actuality Babel was taken in by a highly respectable engineer and his wife, with whom he was in correspondence. The first invention was to disavow a bourgeois background in order to satisfy Communist dogma. The second was a romantic imposture.

  It did happen, nevertheless, that the young Babel was witness to a pogrom. He was in no way estranged from Jewish suffering or sensibility, or, conversely, from the seductive winds of contemporary Europe. Odessa was modern, bustling, diverse, cosmopolitan; its very capaciousness stimulated a certain worldliness and freedom of outlook. Jewish children were required to study the traditional texts and commentaries, but they were also sent to learn the violin. Babel was early on infatuated with Maupassant and Flaubert, and wrote his first stories in fluent literary French. In his native Russian he lashed himself mercilessly to the discipline of an original style, the credo of which was burnished brevity. At the time of his arrest by the NKVD in 1939—he had failed to conform to Socialist Realism—he was said to be at work on a Russian translation of Sholem Aleichem.

  Given these manifold intertwinings, it remains odd that Trilling’s phrase for Babel was “a Jew of the ghetto.” Trilling himself had characterized Babel’s Odessa as “an eastern Marseilles or Naples,” observing that “in such citie
s the transient, heterogeneous population dilutes the force of law and tradition, for good as well as for bad.” One may suspect that Trilling’s cultural imagination (and perhaps his psyche as well) was circumscribed by a kind of either/or: either worldly sophistication or the ghetto; and that, in linking Jewish learning solely to the ghetto, he could not conceive of its association with a broad and complex civilization. This partial darkening of mind, it seems to me, limits Trilling’s understanding of Babel. An intellectual who had mastered the essentials of rabbinic literature, Babel was an educated Jew not “of the ghetto,” but of the world. And not “of both worlds,” as the divisive expression has it, but of the great and variegated map of human thought and experience.

  Trilling, after all, in his own youth had judged the world to be rigorously divided. In 1933, coming upon one of Hemingway’s letters, he wrote in his notebook:

  [A] crazy letter, written when he was drunk—self-revealing, arrogant, scared, trivial, absurd; yet [I] felt from reading it how right such a man is compared to the ‘good minds’ of my university life—how he will produce and mean something to the world … how his life which he could expose without dignity and which is anarchic and ‘childish’ is a better life than anyone I know could live, and right for his job. And how far—far—far—I am going from being a writer.

  Trilling envied but could not so much as dream himself into becoming a version of Hemingway—rifle in one hand and pen in the other, intellectual Jew taking on the strenuous life; how much less, then, could he fathom Babel as Cossack. Looking only to Jewish constriction, what Trilling vitally missed was this: coiled in the bottommost pit of every driven writer is an impersonator—protean, volatile, restless and relentless. Trilling saw only stasis, or, rather, an unalterable consistency of identity: either lucubrations or daring, never both. But Babel imagined for himself an identity so fluid that, having lodged with his civilized friend, the St. Petersburg engineer, it pleased him to invent a tougher Babel consorting underground with a “tormented, drunken waiter.” A drunken waiter would have been adventure enough—but ah, that Dostoyevskian “tormented”!