First, a special treat. My dear friend, the wonderful writer, teacher, editor, and organizer of extraordinary international literary seminars, Mikhail Iossel, author, most recently, of Love Like Water, Love Like Fire, has done us the great favor of recording, in Russian, the opening of Babel’s “Guy de Maupassant.” Babel is the among the most musical of writers in Russian (I’m told), so what a privilege to hear one gifted Russian writer reading another.
Mikhail wrote this to me in an email, about his childhood love for Babel:
“I used to know several of his stories by heart, and happily recited them, to myself, as well as to others, when asked to (which hardly ever happened): yes, "In the Basement," and "Guy de Maupassant," "The Story of My Dovecot," and "How It Was Done in Odessa." It was not on account of any school assignment or on some ambitious bet -- they just kind of memorized themselves for me. It was the sort of thing we did back then, a few of my friends and I -- Zoshchenko stories also: we loved them.
In another lifetime.”
Thank you, Mikhail. (And I highly recommend the International Literary Seminars Mikhail hosts which, this year, will be in Nairobi and on the island of Lamu.)
A story is brought into specificity by its excesses. If I write, “A man got up and drove in his car to work. There he met his fellow workers and they did all their work. Outside, was some weather. At the end of the day he drove home,” it’s going to be hard to finish that story, because it hasn’t given me a way to start it yet. Nothing has happened, in part because, why, in this featureless world, would it matter what happened? To whom, specifically, is the thing that we’re going to make happen going to be happening to?
But as soon as I drape some specifics over that outline, the story starts calling for something to happen. If our man has a certain habit of mind – he always, Eeyore-like, expects the worst, let’s say – then I might be inclined to make something bad happen to him, just because this will set him off. (Or I might make something really good happen to him.) In either case, his fellow workers are going to want to react to his gloominess. What kind of work do they do in there? Already, I bet you can think of something that isn’t entirely random, given his gloominess.
Without that bit of excess (or we might call it, “unignorable specificity”) it’s hard to know what to do; with it, we almost can’t help ourselves from doing something.
Which is why one useful writerly phrase, directed continually at one’s story is: “Tell me more.”
Last time, I asked you all to report back on what you found excessive (unignorably specific) about Isaac Babel’s story “Guy de Maupassant.” What stood out to you, on first read? What struck you?
You responded admirably and I’m not sure I really have to say anything much here – you all did most of the work for me.
But I’d like to use this occasion to do a little thinking about the highly organized system that is a short story, and how a writer might make the most of the excesses she’s managed to introduce into her narrative.
Many of you noticed that there were a lot of breasts in this story (by my count, seven, in a story of some eight pages, including the breasts of the chambermaid, Raisa, the milkmaid in a De Maupassant story, and those of Raisa’s sisters.)
We suspect one of two things: 1) the author, Isaac Babel, had a breast thing, or 2) the character did.
Or, there’s a third possibility: Babel used his breast thing to make this a breast-rich story, BUT/AND he did it to a purpose.
In other words, in artistic terms, we hope that we will find that the numerous references to breasts are part of the intentional design of the story – part of the way it goes about saying something profound.
We hope, that is, that Babel knows he has made an excessive guy, who is in such a state that his eyes are always going to the breasts in the vicinity, for some particular reason, and that this guy is now going to lead us to do some thinking about some larger human tendencies.
Is Babel celebrating this young man’s excess, or condemning it?
Yes, no, both, neither.
I always think that what a writer is doing, ultimately, in making a character, is calling a certain human trait into the light for further examination.
Here, that trait is something like “passion,” or “lust” or “desire” or “hunger” – as embodied in a particular young man, in a particular flavor.
One of the things that makes me sure this is the case here (i.e., that Babel is not a self-celebrating misogynist, using the story form as a sort of masturbatory platform, but a true artist, using, perhaps, an exaggerated memory of how he was when young, somewhat, to say something profound about life) is the presence of a certain highly curated pattern present at the center of the story, a pattern that involves that mysterious chambermaid who keeps coming and going in the Bendersky household.
Let’s track the appearances of this chambermaid:
Mention 1, Page 73: “A chambermaid with a head-dress and high breasts opened the door…” Her function: she lets him into the house.
He observes the incredible, rich (and possibly tasteless) décor of the house. Then, immediately after that (within the same scene):
Mention 2, Page 73: This chambermaid is moving “majestically around the room…shapely, myopic, haughty. In her grey, wide-open eyes there was a hardened licentiousness…I reflected that in love-making she must twist and turn with violent swiftness.”
So, the sequence is: in Mention 1, he simply observes that she has “high breasts.” Then he drinks in the wealth of the house, and, energized, amped-up, perhaps, begins projecting on to her; that is, he starts wanting her, or “considering her” as a possible love interest. They are from the same approximate social class, after all (at least I think so)…
Mention 3, page 74. This occurs after he has read his first translation to Raisa and Raisa has loved it: the chambermaid then turns her “hardened, licentious eyes to the side” and serves them breakfast. (We might notice that the phrase “high breasts” has been dropped from that ritual description of her; now she just has the “hardened, licentious eyes.”) I always read this as an indication of the maid noticing the redirection of his attention/lust, towards Raisa. If she has noted his earlier attentions, and felt at all inclined to reciprocate, here she catches herself and fulfills her role and starts considering him as someone to be served, i.e., by the strength of his translation, he’s been accepted into the world of the Benderskys, and the maid notices this, and slightly defers to him. (This is not really in the text, but it’s what I feel, somehow. We might also argue that all of this, even her perceived turning away from him, happens purely in his mind.) In any event, she has, in a sense, been desexualized; the narrator is now in the process of turning all of his hungry attention toward Raisa.
Mention 4, page 78: Raisa and the narrator are left alone in the house; they’re drunk, flirtatious, they clink glasses, we feel some possible sex forthcoming, and the maid “with the hardened eyes” (and we note that, again, her descriptor has been stripped even further back – she is not even “licentious” anymore) “disappears.” That is, she sees what’s coming and, shorn of all of the narrator’s projected desire, skedaddles.
We note that, narratively, there’s no real need for the chambermaid’s presence.
She could be trimmed right out of the story.
So why is she in there? (A simple way to answer is to read the story again and just skip her parts and see if it’s as good – if your evolving understanding of the story has been as deftly controlled.)
Those of you who have read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain may remember two similar tropes, the first from Tolstoy’s “Master and Man,” involving some clothes out on laundry line, and a second from Chekhov’s “Gooseberries,” involving, also, a beautiful maid.
In the Tolstoy, two characters lost in a snowstorm repeatedly pass the same clothes on a line, and the slightly changing descriptions of these clothes clue us in to the increasing danger the characters are passing into.
In the Chekhov, there’s a startlingly beautiful maid, Pelageya – a gratuitously beautiful maid, we might say – whose presence introduces one more way for the story to be about happiness, and whether, and how, it’s necessary. (I suspect Babel was familiar with this story, and with Pelageya.)
(To read the whole discussion, see A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, pages 228-230 re the Tolstoy, and pages 331-332 re the Chekhov.)
Babel’s chambermaid is in this tradition, I think: a character who fulfills no essential action but is there to help us track a main character’s trajectory or, we might say, to help the reader precisely delineate the story’s metaphorical layout.
Many of you also, sagely, noted that the story is also about “want,” about “hunger,” from its very first lines.
The narrator and his friends are poor; the Benderskys are rich. The narrator has a forged passport and no money and is “given shelter” by a friend. (“We lived in want,” the narrator says of he and his friends.)
This young man, by way of his talent with language, is trying to make a leap, to the other side of the tracks. This is made overt there on page 75, with the mention of the Maupassant story in which “the hungry young carpenter (like our narrator!) sucks the overflowing milk of the fat wet-nurse (like Raisa!).” (And this is followed immediately by the fact that our narrator heads home “with a twenty-five rouble advance.”)
I’ve always seen this as a story about youthful hunger – that free-floating desire to get more and be more and live life to the fullest. It’s also about arrogance – that tendency some of us have, when young, to declare ourselves as different from, and better than, all those dopes who settle (“I declined to become a clerk.” It also always reminds me of my own youthful self, whose ambition was somewhat unhinged from reality.
Once, just before I graduated from the Colorado School of Mines, the receptionist in the Department of Geophysics asked me what I was going to do after graduation, and I said, “Write my first book and win the Nobel Prize.” And I meant, like, that year. Sheesh.
But along with my arrogance was a real love for life, a real desire to do big things, go everywhere, be the master of my fate (to live for “the pleasure of work, fighting, love…and nothing else.”)
So, I think that’s what Babel’s taking on here, and he’s doing it with a good deal of irony and fondness – he sees this character for what he is, but, also, he is, or has been, something like this character.
(Here, that hunger is given a male casing, but could we imagine a story written from the point-of-view of an equally hungry young woman, who, by story’s end, is “brushed by a foreboding of truth?” Hmm. Interesting. What would that story look like? How would it have to be different, given the culture we live in?)
But: we want, don’t we? More love, more sex, more wildness, more wealth, more ease, more fame, more, more, more.
What’s the problem with that, as an ethos?
I think this is that “profound thing” this story is trying to be about.
So, here’s how I see it: the chambermaid serves as a kind of tracking system, to help the reader monitor the trajectory of the narrator’s hunger. First, that hunger is wild and free-ranging; everything is a possible meal, so to speak: the chambermaid, Raisa, even Katya, the washerwoman. Then, as it becomes clear to him that he might actually have a shot at Raisa, and that what he has to offer is his apparently extraordinary ability with language (an ability we are observing in real-time, in the prose of the story) the chambermaid “flickers off” as a possible repository for that hunger.
So, in the chambermaid riff, the two strands of the story (hunger-for-sex and hunger-for-wealth) come together; her presence (as he considers, and then “rejects” her) helps us see that these are parts of the same larger hunger.
In the chambermaid, he might have his sexual hunger addressed; in Raisa, he might get that, plus his hunger for money and the desire to be recognized for his abilities.
Something like that.
And this, I think, in turn, helps light up that crazy, wonderful, mysterious ending – which, having used up my allotment of words in this post, and then some, I’ll talk about next time.
I want to thank you all for your incredible engagement with this story. Someone, among the 500+ comments, mentioned that we somehow managed, with all of our searches re “Babel” and “Maupassant,” to get on Google’s, uh, radar.
For next time, let’s take up this question: did the narrator and Raisa, in the asterisked space below, do it, or not?
“You’re a funny one,” Raisa growled.
**
I left the granite house on the Moyka before midnight…
If you think so – why? If you think not – ditto.
I feel I have just been given a college assignment--an essay on Babel, to be backed up by arguments visible in the text. I'm not sure I have the energy to make my argument properly, but i will attempt. Yes, I do believe that Raisa and our narrator have had sex. If nothing else, this is because of the old "if there is a gun in the first act, it must go off by the final act" maxim. We have seen breasts and sexual dreams in abundance here. We have seen flirtation, drunkenness, abandonment. We have seen Raisa fling her arms out wide against the bookshelf. "Of all the gods ever crucified, she was the most captivating." We have seen these two re-enact a scene from a (Maupassant) story that concludes with sex. We see the narrator leap up, causing 29 volumes of his hero to fall to the floor, "their pages flying wild." (SEX HAPPENING HERE--the passion of Maupassant's pages flying wild!) I'm not sure what it means when Babel writes "the white nag of my fate walked a slow walk," but i'm wondering if it refers to his erection diminishing after their union. (Raisa now growls, "You're so funny," words she "muttered" before the sex act occurred.) We have watched our narrator walk home, no longer drunk, but walking drunkenly anyway--a post coital stupor. He wants to retain the feeling of having just had sex. He sings in a language he had just invented (From Lonely Island's masterpiece: "Sometimes something beautiful happens in this world. You don't know how to express yourself, so you just gotta sing.") The fog rolls "in waves" (orgasmic). Monsters roar (orgasm occurs). And, later, we watch our young narrator read of his possible future: a slow death from a sexually contracted disease due to his passions.
Oh, yes, these two definitely had sex.
PS Lonely Island's song is called I Just Had Sex and it's not for everyone. You've been warned.
It’s funny, the first time I read it I thought, ‘he’s screwed this up, not screwed Raisa’. I mean, how could anyone wield sexual allure after flailing into a bookcase and knocking down 29 volumes?
The second time, prepared for the comedy book flail, I instead noticed the narrator stumbling down the street singing drunkenly in a glorious language all his own. And I thought: this is the joy of someone breast-obsessed who has just touched a breast.
So I’ve decided they both did not have sex as well as did have sex. Or, more likely, they did have sex but he was far more pleased with his performance than she was.