Just a quick procedural thought - it's totally fine not to like or get a story we work on here. Mostly, I love the stories I send out (and I love this one) but YOU don't have to love them, in order to work with them. (And I will be sending out stories I don't love, from time to time.) Think of these stories as cars, and we are mechanics. Any car will teach us about auto mechanics, since every car works on the same general principles. If we don't like something about a story and (very important) try to be specific about why - that is good work to do. The key is to be specific and couch the criticism in some larger notion - we want to avoid the "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" approach.
So don't feel bad if you don't like a story - accept that and roll up your sleeves to see what benefit there is for you in investigating the "why" of your resistance.
Having said that, when I read a story that has withstood the test of time, and I don't like it, I remember that old story (or maybe it was a cartoon):
Guy in Museum, to Guard: I like this painting. Yeah, it's good.
Guard: Sir, the painting is not the thing being judged here.
Back when I didn't get Chekhov, my view was: "Well, these stories are still around after all these years. So let me be humble and see if I might be missing something."
Turns out, I was.
So, once we work through this, and some of us still don't like it, that is perfectly wonderful. That is, actually, you learning about your deep esthetic values.
Thank you for that, George. I think there are many stories and novels (and, come to think of it, people, and places) that I did not appreciate at first, and later came to love. It often seems that the most challenging works are the ones that ultimately have the most to offer us. (Same with people, at least some of the time!)
I wonder if dislike is more often discomfort. We might feel threatened by something we don't understand, or excluded by our lack of understanding, or made uncomfortable by our lack of control over something that's outside our own experience.
I'm finding that, after doing work on a story of the kind(s) that George suggests, the story I see after my, say, fifth pass of reflective reading the words of the story have not changed but my grasp of what they add up to is quite altered. Of course whatever enhanced sense I may have of the story from personal working is enriched so much by the comparing and sharing that Story Club is enabling.
I feel this comment so much, David. It is such a strangely delightful, humbling feeling to have first impressions overturned (or even be proven completely wrong) by someone/something (and some of the people dearest to me definitely fell into the "challenging at first" category)
It is, literally. a bloodily made point Kate - that grabbing of the goose, that stamping on to break its neck, that bayoneting with a ready to hand sabre - but here's a question: is Isaac Babel serving up discomfort to those who read this short story by way of horror or comedy?
And is 'the whole bloody point' of this piece of prose to make his first and now us, his latest readers, uncomfortable?
I'm feeling confident enough with my growing familiarity with the text to be posing questions but not yet confident that I have answers.
Rosanne, twenty years ago my husband gave me Gina Berriault's collection, "Women in Their Beds," and I read it and forgot it. Now, because of our reading "The Stone Boy" and many years of story writing, I have a whole new world of stories. It's a blessing. Just finished "Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?" Don't miss it!!!! Mortality, identity, a self-satisfied librarian comes up against a homeless guy with poetry all over him.
You don’t have to ‘get’ him. You just have to hear the quiet line of curling smoke of his narrative and poetic genius. In fact that’s the whole point of what he is doing. It can’t quite be ‘got’. And he suggests that imposing a common rigid moral grid work upon human experience may not just be a pointless way of reading. But also a totally pointless way to approach the great and hugely moral job of human understanding…..
On this note, can I drop in how helpful I have found the push to write about the story, even when it is just writing to myself. I have a memory that you exhorted us to do so in Stone Boy, George. I felt a little internal resistance... surely I'm just going to be writing the same thoughts I'd been thinking... why bother?
But then, I have found that doing so has:
a) taken me deeper and deeper into the story
b) taken me deeper into my self as reader
c) enabled me to practise some honesty... is what I am writing coming from a genuine place and from a true response to the story, or is it revisionist: has a false note crept in, have I just started to make things up because they sound plausible or clever or, even worse, because they sound deep, but that weren't there really on first reading and are only there now contingent on this hindsight?
Very similar for me. The push to articulate thoughts enough to write them down has revealed some little surprises--sometimes my thoughts aren't quite what I assumed they were. In addition to your a, b, and c, I experience: d) enables me to practice noticing. This noticing is proving to be a way to "listen" to a quiet, semi-subconscious, creative impulse in me. I'm optimistic this will help in my writing.
Yes! You're right about d. My story reading machinery has been upgraded in this way... it notices more, it is alive to more, even on first non-analytical reading.
The comments from you all are helping me go deeper with these stories. My brain resists going into the technical side of almost everything-- including an aversion to reading instruction booklets... as if I can “intuitively” feel my way through, which doesn’t really work out much. This practice of breaking the story down is good for building up that mental muscle.
I am the same way, Stacya. I’m even that way with cooking. I am good at making things that are intuitive and improvisational: soups, pastas, salads, sandwiches. But I can’t bake to save my life (or, God forgive me, the lives - or at least birthdays - of my own children). And I’m the same with instruction books. I’ve long thought it’s because I don’t like having to follow things so precisely, to have to be so technical feels unforgiving. You can’t taste a cake and then correct it, as you can a sauce or soup. And I think I’ve had the irrational - or superstitious - feeling that being too technical in reading or writing spoils the “mood.” George Saunders is the only writer I would do this with because I so admire his work and can see how the methodology works for him.
You know Robin, reading your post makes me think that an educator like George might even have enabled a much younger me to get interested in English Grammar. Instructors were earnest but dull, and I just couldn’t be doing with getting my head around all those farts of peach.
I hated grammar passionately at thirteen. And now it’s as important as water and air.(See Douglas Glover’s essays on writing, “Attack of the Copula Spiders.”)
Hi Nancy, I know not what that is but it sounds like a great stew in which to simmer!
My reference to Douglas Glover above is because of several passages in Attack of the Copula Spiders in which he recommends fomenting conflict and paradox just just narratively but also within each sentence, each sentence a hall of mirrors reflecting the story’s characters, conflicts and meanings. Drama in the very grammar, I believe he wrote.
Gazpacho exists of course, as a cold soup made with tomato as it's prime ingredient and enjoyed in Andalucia and in other provinces across Southern Spain. I'm know conjuring an image of the rigid rules of grammar having put into a word blender with rich ripe tomatoes . . . then placed in the refrigerator to cool down to well . . . add a beautiful warm sunny summers afternoon . . . and yes I'll go with flow . . . and seek membership of 'The Grammar Gaspacho' 🍅
👍 Thanks muchly David. Never heard tell, no even as much as shy smidgeon, of 'Attack of the Copula Spiders' before your kind mention of it. Now acquired, simply, sitting waiting for download on Kindle (having, naturally, sampled the sample, and found it - like 'The, Unassuming, Nibbling, Hero Mouse in The Gruffalo 'Found it good'.
And, thinking back to my struggle with all those 'Farts of Peach', to this day I'm trying to understand just what a 'slimilie' is 😲
Hi Rob, I’m glad you found it, and like it so far. I think I only found it in December last. Mostly because in this fantastic online class last August one of the things we had to read was Glover’s short story, “How I Decide to Kill Myself and Other Jokes.” That story is very close to perfect, containing pain as well as some of the most hilarious moments ever written. I also discovered around the same time essays by David Jauss on writing that were equally helpful. They both teach, I believe, in the MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. The Jauss book is titled, On Writing Fiction.
Glover, Jauss and George Saunders are a nice combination of rocket fuels.
You nailed it. I also love cooking, but when the chemists arrive on “The British Baking Show” my brain goes on the fritz, all that talk about how yeast does es this or that with the room temperature blaa blaa blaa.
Hahaha! I love this story. I’m a driver who has to feel “one with my car” and have a hard time letting go of cars because I have this “feeling” that I won’t drive as well with a new one.
now I don't feel so bad that I don't want to read the inch thick packet of materials so my husband and I can hike through Ireland (though, I must). At least I am not alone in my distaste for instructions.
Same here, Stacya. I’ve spent decades trying to feel my way through, and kept wondering, why isn’t this working? But, if one could combine the intuition with technical prowess and a knowledge of how stories actually work, limitations might just subside. At least I’m hoping so!
Thanks for this note of encouragement, George, because I really found myself really detesting this story. My Hollywood version description would read: "Insecure outsider finds acceptance amongst group of males by acting cruelly towards an old woman and then killing a goose. Outsider shows some remorse for killing a goose, not so much for attacking old woman." The ending sentence ("I had dreams-dreamt of women-and only my heart, crimson with murder, creaked and bled") frustrated me, because it acknowledged the killing of the goose, but not the cruelty to the old lady (which was cruelty for cruelty's sake, as opposed to cruelty for some understandable purpose-to eat). Then I asked myself, well was that intentional on the part of Isaac Babel? But after reading and re-reading the story, I couldn't come up with anything to suggest that Babel or the narrator was as concerned with the cruelty towards the old woman as they were towards the killing of the goose.
That's all to say that I was deeply frustrated with the misogyny of this story, and with what I felt was a failure to recognize and wrestle with the true cruelty in the story. But is that what Babel intended? If so, I can't seem to find any support for that. Help!
Babel wanted us to look at a woman, specifically, and hear her lament twice, so I think her presence was intentional and also effective. Painful and infuriating to witness as a reader, yes, but that's why it was effective. It seems to me that Babel is concerned for the woman, and his character is doing good work delivering impact. Hunger is a great motivator of terrible cruelty to all life.
I get your disquiet with the misogyny of this story. She's mentioned twice but not attended to further in the story, so we're left with a dead goose and this woman's cry for help - I want to hang myself. For me that sums up war: the inability to listen, have compassion, the need to prove that violence pays, is the only way, the need to be one of the fighting men. Leaving it open, not commented on, makes us the reader feel the brutality.
This is such a good point to bring up! On my first glance I was also like “okay what’s the deal with the lady why is no one responding to the casual suicidal remarks?” (Which is a reaction choice by Babel in and of itself, who is ignored).
Misogyny is social currency in this camp, which we see from the get go (sixth commander calls him a pansy for his glasses, quarter master says a nice young lady’s mistreatment will earn our lawyer brownie points). When the lawful protagonist ignores the hostess, that earns him acceptance. Misogyny. Cruelty. A sad deterioration of morals to find belonging.
But what does Babel feel? Going back through, there are so many feminine ideals. The beautiful sixth commander has legs like a girls. The sixth commander in fact is idolized by the narrator but is more feminine compared to the Cossacks (beautiful colors, signs with a flourish, eyes dancing). He is, in a sense, the ideal. Distant from war’s evil yet powerful, beautiful, stunning.
And after the mistreatment toward the blind hostess, Babel brings in more feminine allusions--moon hung like a cheap earring, motherly palm on his head, Lenin’s speeches are like a hen (not a rooster). Feminine is utopia, a resemblance of a pure ideal. And in that last line, he dreams of women (the pure ideals a man of the law held so close before he came here) but the murderous piece of him breaks that.
Okay I’m going OFF don’t mind me but it’s just exciting to read something so close again, especially when I also was like WTF. But glasses are a huge motif. They make me think of Piggy in Lord of the Flies. They’re the symbol of reason, and their disappearance is huge. The man of the law wears glasses, which marks him as an outsider (and idyllic, reasonable) to the Cossacks. But who else in the entire story wears glasses? Our hostess! She alone stands as the only person who is not degraded by the violence around her, does not take the violence out on the innocent to fit in like the protagonist does. Her violence is only reflected toward herself in threatening to bang herself, yet she resists as the only sage in the spot. Perhaps that’s why she confessed to our protagonist, recognizing he would understand good and evil and reason, but he turns away from her and his own sense of logic to join the group. The woman is actually Babel’s moral compass, so the group’s misogyny is cast as the wrong against her right.
Am I off track idk!!! But that’s how I read it (for now)
Wow Chloe! Thank you for all of your thoughts and associations. Love the cross-reference to Lord of the Flies. I will reread Babel soon with refreshed senses!
What I did like about him not feeling guilty about hitting the lady is that it's not the writer's job to play it safe. To take the PC approach. Of course, we would feel bad. Heck, we wouldn't do that. But the narrator's approach isn't to write reality, it's to write drama. To act above and beyond what a normal human would do in real life. In this situation, I don't think this character, this man, this soldier would feel sympathy for hitting the old lady. Maybe it's the physical act of killing an animal for no good reason that cuts him to the quick. After all, he could've just eaten the 'mess' the others are eating. Forcing him to feel guilty about being gluttonous eating two dinners. And forcing the reader to ask how will this man fare as a soldier.
Norman, re reading your comment, my thought is that the narrator is really doing exactly "what a normal human would do in real life," i.e. someone who is extremely vulnerable decides to protect himself among these baboons (apology to the baboons) by becoming like them.
Hi, Jane. As i thought about it and rereading the story, the soldier is actually taking the advice of the quartermaster. “...ruin a lady, the nicest old lady, and our fighting boys treat you real kind.” Well, that didn’t happen. So he took it one step further. Babel was clever. He knew this ‘educated student’ probably wouldn’t have killed the goose without the old lady stirring him up first.
I felt that Babel demonstrates the narrator's frustration at the unmerciful treatment he's receiving from every other character in the story. He can only lash out at the innocent (the old woman, the goose). Thus, not merely hunger, but far deeper and more emotional wounds are being revealed, and, like a human, the narrator is the author of his own regret.
He is obliged, by the circumstances he is in (riding/travelling with the Cossacks across the flatlands already devasted by 1914-18) to ‘lash out’ against the innocent. Otherwise no food. The complicated question is how does that make him feel? First of all, he starts off - personally - utterly upholding the idea of a communist revolution. ( and - Americans- communism as an idea is not intrinsically ‘evil’ whatever you may have been taught. It’s an idea that simply cannot - perhaps - be put into practice - particularly across a warscape - in a way that avoids evil. Babel himself never denounced it.) And he didn’t have to ride with the Cossacks. He volunteered to.
And it’s quite clear that he came to love the boys that he rode with. And to forgive them. But to question - again and again - his own self: ‘ Lord, forgive them. For they know not what they do.’ And ‘ let this cup pass from me’.
*MY* father’s house has many mansions. And they are all welcome there. Cossacks, ragged weeping old ladies in the midst of war, Babel himself. And any geese he chooses to bring with him.
And So , my kinderlach, I say goodnight to you. While I recite - for your comfort, in your straw - the slow, elegant, blue smokey lines of Lenin’s thought.
Remember how the story begins--brutality of the division commander, portraying the brutal ugliness of Soviet military, the thugs despite the Glorious Revolution--the old woman's food is taken from her by the main character seeking to keep himself alive. Simply put, in the "Hollywood" version, it's about an outsider joining in, but it's a hugely pointed picture of the ugly evil Babel sees.
It’s much more complicated - for him - than that. This is not a work that is simply about the ‘ugliness of evil’. Life is hugely more complicated than that. ( perhaps not in Idaho) What Babel does - in the cycle as a whole - is lay out the complex and various and changing modes of our own, personal, hypocritical but also right feeling relationship to the morality of our own contingent, historical times. And how agonising that can be.
And no. It is not a paradigm for what you may or may not feel about Trump. Or even Russia. It’s about the human soul when it really, truly is in the thick of it. About when you have to kill your first goose ( I’ve always thought I could manage that, if I really, truly had to - but who knows) or how you feel when you culturally/institutionally first have to ignore the first wailing granny you’ve ever seen on the road.
Thank you, Kate, for your fantastic points of view. You always take me deeper into the psychedelic swirl of Isaac Babel. I wish we could go for a hike in the Idaho mountains sometime; the beauty of the landscape makes up for some of the narrow thought processes…or so I hope!
Not your goose Kate! , (though to some ,perhaps) The narrator has cooked his goose, or had it cooked for him. Ya know my eyes smarted thinking of Babel on assignment in that time and place. Yes, and what would I have done? Any of us. Cooked our goose?
That’s so interesting, Tina. I thought he was regretful about all of it, but I could be wrong. It interested me that his regret seems more powerful in his dreams than in waking life. Sleep dissolves the mental blocks?
I felt his disquiet most at this line: "I wiped the sabre down with sand, went out of the gate and came back in again, languishing."
There are a lot of plays on words in this story and words with double meaning - for me, 'languishing' creates a link between a feeling of diminishment (languish) and deep/visceral distress (anguish). The going out of the gate and coming back in seems to represent a line being drawn (between his old self and this new, compromised, dual-natured self)? He is rewarded for his actions (a seat at the table, so to speak) and punished (his bleeding, creaking heart).
I don't think he feels regret, I think the emotion is deeper than that - something like a reluctant/tormented resignation (the guilt of someone caught in a kill or be killed situation?) They would do it again given the chance, but they still wouldn't feel happy about it...
But perhaps we are jumping ahead :) Looking forward to additional discussion on this when we get to the deep analysis of this pulse
Sleep, if and when it came, has always seemed to me to have been the only ‘safe space’ for Jews incarcerated in Hitlers concentration camps or in Stalin’s gulag camps. Isaac Babel, being a Russian Jew, seems to me to have been a writer who literally risked his neck in much of what he wrote. I’m finding that this story morphs with each reading and Pulse 1 has my imagination pulsing overtime, as in doing work, even as it sits resting on some back burner of my mind.
Thanks Tina, Traci and David for sharing your pot stirring thoughts . . . so far.
But well after the 'Tsar of the Time' had all of artists, architects and labouring artisans who had created that most colourful, so richly cupula decorated, church on Red Square blinded.
What, really is the difference between being a Jew targeted in a Tsarist Pogrom, a Jew targeted in a Nazi Genocide and a Jew targeted by Stalin or Putin? .
Well, all I can tell you is that people lived for utter centuries between and among those ghastly experiences. And while they did it, they produced a culture that stands for the ages. You are reading - I assume- one of those artefacts now…
Of course it was intentional. Every single word that Babel writes is deeply intended. And also known. Therein lies the power. You literally could not make it up.
It’s important to know that My First Goose - although it CAN stand alone - is not a stand-alone story. It’s part of a cycle of multiple more or less autobiographical stories about Babel’s experiences (as a Jew from Odessa) riding with the notoriously antisemitic but also - in his eyes - brave, simple, and human Cossack troops fighting in the brutal ‘Polish War’ of 1920.
So the weaving of the ‘pulses’ goes on throughout the series. Nothing has to be resolved in story one. If you read the cycle, you will see the symphony- like elaboration of his symbolism and internal references. For example - the moon. It starts off as an object of comfort. But later down the line it becomes something terrifying. ‘Rolling across the sky with its head in its hands’. Like a decapitated head falling off the guillotine.
The Polish War was an offshoot of the wider (and utterly brutal) civil war that raged for three or four years after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. His job was to be the political commissar. The person sent by the bolsheviks to make sure the Cossacks understood and stuck to the ‘message’. And as a Jew, he would have been, glasses and all, the natural victim of those very men should they have gone on one of their traditional program rampages against the Jews in those western Russian, Ukrainian, and polish flat lands.
It’s important to know that for readers who come from Idaho or wherever. Because Babel - the utterly brilliant Babel - was writing for an audience that would naturally be able to infer those historical points, however ambiguously he referenced them….
I am lucky, because I first studied Babel during my first degree. In Russian literature and Eastern European History. So I knew the background and I read him in Russian. He’s better that way. Like every language, there’s a poetry to Russian (particularly in short form prose) that really does suffer by translation
He remains my favourite ever short-story writer. And in particular because of his form - these separate but interconnect lapidary anecdotes.
And the weaving. The growing sense of the importance of narrative and what it is for
There’s a scene in a later story: some ghastly event has gone on. those beautiful, essentially innocent, brutal, guilty, and utterly exhausted young Cossacks are all going to sleep in the straw of a cattle train, slouching along towards some new horror
And Babel starts to read to them - as they fall asleep - from some work of Bolshevik ideology. ‘Reciting’ as I roughly remember, ‘the thin, blue curling lines of smoke of Lenin’s thought.
It’s a really counterintuitively comforting and imaginative image. What is the Narrator thinking about Lenin’s thought now?
So the real import of what I’m saying is that the development of Babels ‘pulses’ can’t simply be understood by mechanically taking apart one, early element of the cycle. Because he, himself, chose to write a cycle. It’s called Red Cavalry.
And, as such, it is very very apropos of now. So while we feel for and pity and want to help the wretched and horribly attacked population of Ukraine (🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦💪), we must also feel and pity for those young, probably lovely, Russian boys in their tanks, going who know where. Certainly not them
That is what Babel would like us to do. If he could. But he can’t. He was shot in a basement during the earliest stage of Stalins 1930s purge. And writing that has brought me to tears…..
That feels right. Most of the people caught up in wars are not villains. But the ones at the top of the food chain, who make wars possible, usually are. As usual, old men sending young men off to kill and die.
Even that simple and and entirely proper piece of human morality is not what Babel is writing about.
He is trying to recreate a much more complex, distanced, and existential recreation of the experience of the particularities of a certain kind of warfare. He is so very very very careful not to spell out the moral lesson.
He wants us to grapple with those questions in our own private soul. And he does not dictate - ever - the conclusions that we should come to about what he says. And in that way he does indeed raise in front of us the ACTUAL experience of war.
I love him so much that it’s really hard for me to write about his technique. But I think it’s extremely important - vitally important - that he never, ever dictates our moral response. He respects us. And I thank him for that
Thank you for these perspectives, Kate. I just received my copy of Red Cavalry and in reading only the first piece I begin to see something of what you mean. How I wish I could read it in Russian! Maybe someday…
Thank you for that permission. Sometimes I think it's a matter of timing and age, too. I am currently rereading a Pulitzer-winning story collection I shrugged at roughly ten years ago when reading it for a book club, and now I am in utter awe of what Elizabeth Strout pulled off with Olive Kitteridge. I've experienced a lot more loss and heartbreak in the past ten years than I had in the ones prior, and now I have so much more compassion for the characters and gratitude for how exquisitely their quiet losses and heartbreaks are rendered.
There's also, I think David, the simple fact of 'opportunity cost'. Not always but sometimes we have to choose between one read and another (or more likely a number of others) due to the limited availability of time. So all power to Jules elbow in finding that short story collection that was opaque in the part has now become open, accessible, more transparent and a joy to read.
Thanks, Rob. I miss being fourteen and thinking I had all the time in the world to read. Books for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a midnight snack! Now I often wish for a mentor to help me know what to read next. But this group may actually be fulfilling that function, in large measure.
"The road to . . . wherever I'm going . . . is, sure to be, paved with 'must reads' I have acquired but not read . . . which is OK , because "there's always tomorrow " . . . until there isn't!"
"Read on MacDuff (aligning with Wild Bill Shakespeare).
"Read on, read on, read on John Donne (aligning with Van Morrison).
"Read on, and on, and on, right on "To Infinity" (aligning with Buzz Lightyear).
. . . "Just Do It" and then "Swoosh, your self. outta hear, daily!"
Hi George. I might be breaking protocol here so please feel free to ignore my question and I won't make it mean anything. But here goes: I find I need a three or four days off between stories. I write everyday for three hours but when a story is finished and I try starting the next one, it is like I am empty and sad. I often forget that I need the down time and in my forgetting I make it mean that it's over. I am done being a writer. It can get pretty toxic for a few days before I remember I need a little downtime to do unrelated things, you know, like feed my cat. Tell my wife she looks nice. That kind of stuff. Do you often need a break between stories? Do you have a cat?
Wait, are you really saying you're done being a writer? Your post is quite touching and resonant - "feed my cat, tell my wife she looks nice," so that even in saying you won't write, you are indeed writing : )
The first pulse - narrator accepts the assignment - is not a technical point. Babel actually did accept that assignment. This is not a theoretical game. And it wasn’t for him.
The power of Babel’s Kon’ Armiya - Red Cavalry - does not lie in its mechanical ‘technique’. It lies in its power of testimony . And in his own hugely sophisticated and complex understanding of the human condition. And in his inborn power of words.
You can take it apart if you like - in order to teach others basic mechanics. But only Babel could have written it. And he could only have written it in his own particular circumstances.
For Christ’s sake, let’s not turn Babel, or Mozart, or Jimi Hendrix, or Bulgakhov, or Katherine Mansfeild, or whoever, into a shop.
And, for God’s sake, let’s not turn John Donne into a shop.
Really brilliant writing , or music, or dancing are not simply mechanical, technical businesses. They also require something that is transcendental, semi-unconscious, and closely connected to a part of oneself that sentimental and irrational people might refer to as their ‘soul’. Personally, I don’t use that word. Because the outside of me is a cynic - ha!
Remember: nobody ever taught Babel ‘how to’ write. If it was possible to go on Substack and learn the way to write like Babel, everybody would be Babel, no?
Of course, I’d love to be able to write like that. But I have enough humility to know that I never will, no matter how many ‘tips’ I get from the internet.
Not that I’m not enjoying your Substack examination of the short prose form. I absolutely am! I love it. But I disagree with some of your basic premises
'Remember: nobody ever taught Babel ‘how to’ write. If it was possible to go on Substack and learn the way to write like Babel, everybody would be Babel, no?'
Not so, I think, Kate somebody did literally teach Babel to write - unless he was an auto-didact of a most extraordinary kind, as in not only inventing writing but doing so in Russian.
Neither do I find myself sharing, in any degree, your sense that that Story Club is, in any way, either about turning Babel, Mozart, Hendrix, Bulgakov Mansfiedl, Donne, or Uncle Tom Cobley 'N All 'N'All into any kind of shop or about 'tips'. And I just hoping to better appreciate what makes a great short story great and, maybe, down the road find my ability to write original short stories enhanced. I am no Babel, nor was meant to be, as far as I can say I know myself.
I've really enjoyed the provocations your post Kate and remain genial but hope that you will begin to find satisfaction in working, in turn, within the parameters of the text on the page of each Pulse as George has defined them.
Let me be even clearer . . . I remain genial but hopeful that you'll indulge in less spreading of spoilers . . . a we go ahead . . . as indeed I realise that I should also do.
I would, perhaps, be useful given your working knowledge of Russian to read your thoughts on the pros and cons of the translation of Pulse 1 that George has invited us to work on.
Thank you for mentioning K.M. in this, I have read that she went to France during war. She is a distant cousin and my muse. I am housed beside a blue lake in the southern Isle of Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Thank you, Kate, those are pertinent thoughts. I agree that without the Muse, or the soul, or the connection to the universal unconscious, or whatever it is, no amount of technical prowess is going to get you very far. Great art requires a sense of linguistic (or sonic or graphic or kinetic or verbal) mechanics, a degree of technique, and a shit-ton of rocket fuel.
George, I think I liked this story more than I would have because you had us read it after The Stone Boy. In both these gut-wrenching tales, there is a boy / young man who is made to feel powerless in the face of a harsh, scornful world. We encounter these two characters while they are still naive. And ultimately, due to the larger, aggressive opinion around them, they are changed into hard-hearted, cruel souls, with the boy being especially cruel to himself. I felt sad for the change in these characters. I really felt like I was losing someone who was previously human and I was witnessing the death of innocence and kindness. And yet, despite the lingering pessimism, I am buoyed up by the experience of deeper reading and by this community of deep readers that you have fostered. I recently read an article about the power of fiction to increase empathy: “Fiction and stories do a lot of things for us,” says William Chopik, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. “They expose us to uncomfortable ideas ... and provide us with the opportunity to take other peoples’ perspectives in a safe, distanced way. In that way, fiction serves as a playground for exercising empathic skills.” Thank you, George, for the opportunity to help me grow more understanding.
I was thinking about John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" this morning (read ages ago when I still thought I was an Art History major, so apologies to all and especially the late Berger if I'm misremembering the following). There's a page in this book with a Van Gogh painting, a field with crows. Turn the page and there's the same painting, but this time with a short caption: "This was the last thing Van Gogh painted before he killed himself."
It's just such a wonderful example of the power of context, how one small piece of it can completely change the way we look at something, and I mention it here as we engage with Babel's story with so little information (at least for now) about him and his life. I know it's not related to George's comment about liking/disliking the work, but "Guy in Museum" stirred something in me. Just thought I'd share.
Thanks, Manami. Your post invites me to the about how important context is in every paragraph of a story. What else could a writer add (or subtract) to enhance the meaning imparted to the reader as they read along?
You're always so kind, David. I'm glad my musing here reached you.
I meant to say a little more, maybe. When it came to "An Incident" and "The Stone Boy," I found the experience of reading those stories so refreshing in part because I knew nothing of the writers before diving in (such a different experience from "A Cat in the Rain," and Hemingway who might never recover from the opinions I've formed against him, some of them related to the writing and some of them not). Of course, when we later discussed "An Incident" and some historical details came up, that was richly illuminating and deepened my understanding of the story. But what if, before reading "The Stone Boy," we were given a detail such as (and I'm making this up), "in her own life, Berriault killed her brother in a hunting accident?" It would completely change the way each of us approached the story, I think.
I hope I'm making sense. It's late here and I'm writing this on my phone—a terrible combination. When it comes to Babel, I'm already bringing something to the table with me (I think Kate may understand what I'm grasping at) and so it's hard to separate the story from the context and the Babel-of-my-opinion. Wishing I could approach this canvas without the caption and see what that's like.
Well. It’s kind of - or used to be - a point of argument in lit crit. Should we approach a text as a ‘thing in itself’, or should we bring context to the table? My take on it is this: writers are usually speaking to an imagined interlocutor.( even if it’s themselves) And they often employ references that the believe their imagined interlocutor will understand without explication. So in order to understand those references, I personally believe we have to have SOME ‘factual’ understanding of what that imagined interlocutor might actually know. That’s context.
Thank you, Manami, that is so interesting. For whatever reason, and for better or worse, I seem to have a mechanism in my brain that is able to separate the art somewhat from the context. (Sort of like people we may be conflicted about. They drive us crazy, but there are also these wonderful things they bring to the table. A balancing act?) I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here. Maybe that I like a story with or without context? Usually the context deepens the experience, for me; but both ways are instructive. (This post definitely feels like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as I go along.)
With or without I enjoy as well, although they're definitely different experiences. I admire your balancing act :)
(P.S. I have that learning-to-play-the-violin-as-I-go feeling about pretty much everything I say here. Lord this instrument is SQUEAKY. Does anyone even LIKE the violin? Why didn't I pick a cello?)
PS, Manami, during our discussions of “The Stone Boy” Michele (if I remember rightly) mentioned John Gardner’s short story “Redemption,” and provided a link, but you might be able to find it without the link. He actually did in real life run over and kill his younger brother while driving a tractor. It’s a fantastic short story, and was interesting to read, half my mind knowing, half not-knowing, like I was reading with a split-screen brain. Very different and not-different from “The Stone Boy,” simultaneously. And the way it ends is spectacularly unforeseen (and ties in with some other historic events on our minds lately.) I recommend this story to everyone.
I don’t dislike the story! I think it is beautifully written but the part of the woman seems so sad. I’m imagining going for the audition of this part in a play- elderly peasant sits in despair on step. It is about the cruelty of war of course, but more than that, the disposal of an elderly woman superfluous to the story. I understand the mechanics but I feel moved by her.
Kate, I'm struggling with your declarative sentences and the sense that you know 'exactly' what Babel intends for us to feel. This is an area your quite knowledgeable about, but for me, in my experience, it kills the joy of discovering for myself what my burgeoning sense of the truth is in the story.
I believe the ethic George is trying to have us embrace in Story Club is one of not whether we understand the story rightly or wrongly, but to cultivate a willingness to keep reading and to continue to develop our growing skill and ear for getting a story in a way that makes sense to us. Each time we read a story, we read it anew. As this act of rereading is completed we may come away with multifaceted, and even contradictory ideas, about the meaning of a story.
I don’t, at least at this still early stage in our reading, see the elderly peasant woman as superfluous Jacky. Without her where would the story be? No first goose, literal or symbolic, for our narrator?
But, btw, aren’t we getting way ahead of where we are meant to be focusing our close attention? No mention of either an old woman or a gandering goose in Pulse 1.
You've already demonstrated "the stories are still around" maxim for me. After watching the Ken Burns Hemingway documentary, which went out of the way to avoid asking some hard questions and apparently couldn't find anyone under 60 to comment on his work, I was thinking he was passe (but for his writing advice, which is timeless). The cat story showed me otherwise.
The first pulse lets us know that the division commander is a violent, grandiose sociopath (who has eyes that glint with joy after demanding an inferior destroy the enemy and motivating him with threats of personally murdering him if he fails), but also that our narrator is seduced by his brutal power (he marvels at his beautiful huge body, taking in his cool, sweet perfume and describing his legs like girls in shiny jack boots). I learn that the commander gets to order others to do the dirty work while staying clean and fresh himself, and that the narrator doesn't seem to be judging him poorly for that fact, the opposite of my own reaction. The commander uses only his pen to write the violent decrees filled with threats, and slaps around his whip for effect. We learn that the narrator is not repulsed by the commander, but enamored of him. Also, we see that the commander has contempt for the four-eyed "pansy" he takes the narrator to be. His assertion to the commander that he can "get along", despite his glasses and learning, prepares me for his later choice to act violently in a specifically misogynist way, per the suggestion of the quartermaster, in order to be accepted by the guys. This first paragraph, filled with so much feminine imagery in such a hyper-masculine and violent setting, helps link us to the conclusion, when the narrator is literally sleeping with violent men, while dreaming of women, and imagining the evening laying motherly palms on his forehead. And of course there's the pivot moment in the middle, where beating an old lady and drawing blood are the price for receiving manly love of other manly men. I know, George, you said stick to the first pulse, but the first pulse front loads everything that spools out going forward. I guess that's one of the lessons of a great story. Stone Boy did this as well with Pulse 1.
What Susanna said with two further observations. The four-eyed pansy appears to know what he will encounter and know in a general sense what he will have to do to fit in. There is a knowing deliberateness to his statement “I can get along.”
The theme of communism and hero worship (at the beginning and later) appear to provide the context (or justification?) for the narrator’s cruelty - at least by implication. So there is a certain naivety that runs counter to the knowing deliberateness.
So we have a well-educated young man with a Machiavellian ability to manipulate people who hero worships a movement and the strong men in it. That’s terrifying.
Really rich, considered and thought provoking post Susanna. Having said which I shall say just that we are reading the same story but seeing it differently.
For example where you, as you read it, see 'our narrator is seduced by his brutal power' that is not how I see it. What I see is a narrator who, faced with Savitsky, dare not say or show what he is really thinking . . . he's waited until he can dare put words on a page to caricature and satirise the bullying braggart that attempts - in Pulse 1 - to cruelly belittle him. If there is a pansy in the room it is not, in my reading so far, the narrator but the perfumed and cool soaped Commander of the 6th Cavalry Division.
I'm thinking, more strongly than ever, that what makes a classic short story - such as 'My First Goose' is, I'm realising - classic is being capable of being read and interpreted quite differently by different readers.
Rob, I agree with your interpretation as well. I think it's possible for our narrator to tell himself he's exercising his powers of satire against the bully and braggart, and yet, on some level, to * also* feel pulled to accept his version of what it means to be manly, and capitulate to that when worn down far enough. There's a paradox here; it takes real strength and courage to *not* be violent in his world at this time. As a Jew, he was a target, and might have felt his choices were limited. It reminds me of the Tim O'Brien story/essay describing his decision to go to Viet Nam instead of Canada showing his cowardice, because he was afraid of the judgement of his family and townsfolk if he chose to refuse to fight. It also reminds me of MLK Jr on non-violent resistance, and the courage it takes. Thank you, Rob, for your analysis, and sharing another facet of the diamond on this classic story.
I've found this to be a tremendously helpful strategy when suffering from *Writer's Block*(!!!) Take a story I love, break its beats or pulses down into a simple and objective choices/effects, then take those pulses and use them as the framework for a new story with new characters and situations. Essentially stealing the skeleton of another story and then dressing it up in new flesh and clothes. I also think it's an extremely useful way to deeply understand a story you already love, as was pointed out here and in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.
Many of the commenters above have already done a masterful job of dissecting the first pulse and the narrator’s introduction into a society that values brute strength and violence over intellect and learning. There are a couple of things I would like to add that haven’t been mentioned... first, there is quite a bit of humor in this first pulse that creates an almost absurdist tone: Chesnokov (who is being sent off to either slaughter or be slaughtered) is loosely translated as “garlic” and the region he is being sent to is loosely translated as “pot of good vodka.” Second, and most important, there is the subtext of anti-semitism. The narrator isn’t just an intellectual with glasses, he is also a Jew so being accepted into his new surroundings requires a level of brutality that compensates for both “shortcoming”. My kids’ math professor, a Russian Jew, was a boxer at a young age and he would often explain that he had to learn how to box, and box well, for his own survival. He had to prove to the anti-semites and anti-intellectuals that he could take them down. It’s also not a a coincidence that the narrator eats pork at the end of the story. He has to prove that he’s not a real Jew, or at least not “that kind” of Jew.
I had commented elsewhere that I saw the narrator pushing the old woman with glasses as a form of self-rejection, but I completely missed the fact that he had eaten pork. Thank you so much for pointing that out.
And yes that comical tone, mixed with brutality (and such lovely language to describe it) really creates such an unsettling effect... There is cruelty. There are fart jokes. A man just wants to read his paper. It's absurd. I can't help but think, war itself must truly feel absurd at times for those who are there on the ground, fighting them.
Somehow I came across a month ago on YouTube a symposium from the 1990s with Heller, Vonnegut and Styron speaking about writing war. The world stopped while I listened to them.
Forensic addition to this process of opening and widening our eyes to what's going on in the story we have laid on the dissection slab. It's only Pulse 1 but I think that our narrator is going to show us why, for many people, nurturing a chameleon capability has been key to their ability to survive, sometimes to thrive, in an environment that going to enable him to survive - or at least give him a sporting chance of surviving - in the brutalist company of Savitsky and his troops. First priority survive, whatever it takes; secondly, having survived, execute his own orders; thirdly, at a remove in time and distance, take revenge cold with a pen not a sabre. Does this point of view stack up?
It’s not actually in the story itself but the short story collection is based on Babel’s diary and actual experiences with the narrator serving as Babel’s alter-ego. I believe that the narrator is also identified as Jewish in other stories in the collection.
Babel starts off his story by showing us the manner in which the narrator received his assignment. Among his many choices for recounting this moment, Babel could have had his narrator receive papers in the mail. Or, he could have been handed his papers in a quiet office by a kindly, elderly statesman. He could have gone to an office to volunteer. Babel could have skipped this scene altogether and begun with our narrator walking with his trunk. And on and on. But, no. None of those would be indicative of where this story is going—of what its purpose is. And so Babel’s choice is to start his story—which is about an outsider—by establishing immediately the narrator's outsider status. To do this, he presents a Commander who is much larger in physical stature than our narrator, who is highly decorated, who is mad with power, whose eyes dance when signing an order of destruction, who calls our narrator a pansy and a little louse. And all of this points in only one direction, which can be found at the end of Pulse One when the Commander asks, “Think you’ll get along do you?” In this way, Babel says “Jew” without saying “Jew.” For this is a story of a Jewish man being thrown to the wolves and seeing if he can survive.
And that is the crux of it—the story’s purpose. Will the narrator “get along”? And if so, how will he do it? What will he have to sacrifice?
He really does go right to it doesn't he Mary in 'establishing immediately the narrator's outsider status'. Just taking another pass across this Pulse 1, and the online conversation it has sparked, and I'm marvelling at the way in which, in my evolving reading. Isaac Babel does this 'establishing'.
I'm not 'liking' it, because George or anyone else happens to; rather I'm liking it because I thinking, based on the words in Pulse 1 alone, that the writing is sublime (not a word I allow to trip lightly of my tongue); but I will take this opportunity to acknowledge that my realisation of just how good this story is - as a short story and as an exemplar of just what the short fiction can achieve - because of the points of view, insights and practical 'tools' that George has, so far, offered to us ( I was going to write 'me' but have deliberately opted for the more inclusive 'we'; while recognising that the way I'm experiencing Story Club is not, nor should it be, congruent with others' present perspectives.
Here's a question I'd like you to respond to Mary, within the confine and constraint of the words the reader sees and processes in Pulse 1: just how do you come to the view that 'Babel is saying "Jew" without saying "Jew"?
No reason others, coming to the same view shouldn't chip in on this?
Why, in reading Pulse 1, should any of us reading it land on the view that the narrator is a 'Jew' rather than an Afhgan, or an American, or an Armenian, or an Australian, or an Austrian?
Which words, in this short-short story lead readers, inexorably, to the view that the narrator is a a 'Jew'?
Hi Rob. Quick answer here as I am out of town for a long weekend with old friends. But in reference to your question: It's possible to read a story and know absolutely nothing of the context in which it was written or by whom. But often, we read a story knowing the time frame when it was written and the background of the person who authored it. If we don't have this information, an interested reader many times will do a bit of research in order to further understand a story. In the case of Babel, he is famously a Jew. His stories are about being Jewish. He is a Russian Jew, born in the Ukraine region and everything he writes reflects his identity and his politics. In this story, it is clear that the narrator is a Jew, not only because we know Babel, but because he drops hints that help us do this sort of identification. The eyeglasses, his education, his outsider status--these are clues to the narrator's Judaism. There is no other reason for these clues to be in the story. Gotta run but i hope this was helpful.
And that is surely the marvel isn't Mary . . . that readers 'ignorant' of wider context are offered a short story to enjoy, savour and find increasingly thought provoking with each re-reading.
I can offer back where reflecting on why George might have put the words 'Divided Self' into his heading on 'My First Goose' Post 1 took me to: the ideas in R D Laing's eponymous book (from a psychological perspective) and Emile Durkeim's concept of 'Anomie' (from a sociological perspective). Neither may have been in George's mind but reaching back to reading (rather superficially, I should make clear) about both way back in the day seem to help with making sense of this character, who is I think an educated Jew but whose name I do not yet know and won't in the confines of 'My First Goose'.
I think Babel may have chosen to fulfil the purpose of this first “pulse” in the way he did because he wanted to accomplish several things as concisely as possible.
• Put us in a world of brutality – Savitsky’s ordering Chesnokov to destroy the enemy or be destroyed himself, and that his “eyes were dancing with joy” as he makes the order.
• Introduce the question of what kind of person the narrator might be and of how others see him. The narrator marvels at the beauty of Savitsky’s “gigantic body” and envies “the iron and flowers of his youth”, and then, by this very man that he’s marvelling at and is envious of, he is described as a pansy, and that his glasses will result in him getting “cut to pieces”.
• This question of who the narrator might be leads to the possibility of conflict – will he be cut to pieces because of his glasses? Is he a pansy? Babel has raised the question and we want to find out what happens next.
How he does this is with language that inspires me to see what is possible. His description of Savitsky in both how he looks and how he smells is striking, and then this line. “His legs looked like a pair of girls clad in shoulder-length jackboots.” This sentence floored me. I don’t know what it means, but this kind of idiosyncratic description is fascinating and invites me not only to find out what happens next, but how this writer is going to describe it.
“His legs looked like a pair of girls clad in shoulder-length jackboots.”
Leaving meaning aside for the moment the imagery wreaks of kind of corrupting decadence that was Christopher Isherwwod captured and conveyed in the text of the story that was adapted so brilliantly to stage and screen in 'Cabaret'. Herman Goering and Savitsky, brutal but preening military top brass as they were might, conceivably, have 'enjoyed' comparing notes on which perfumes and cool soaps they preferred.
Now Story Clubbers, if there illustrators amongst us, why not turn to your pens, colour sticks and papers draw this Savitsky as you picture him?
Love this duality that you share, so simply, Paul: you are, always and ever, free to create an image that is 'right' in your mind or to 'write' words that express what, is your mind, what you mean to be understood.
I'm thinking that Steve Bell, and his Cartooning Ilk, would - if they haven't already - make hay with crossing outlandishly larger than life Savitsky with one arse shorter than being anywhere near tall Putin.
"Long live the free right to satirise powerful personages without fear of invoking and falling foul of State Persecution, most malign."
"Nah, Man. Too wordy, cut the chase, give me the slogan that will cut through, cut through even to the most closed of aging Russian's minds. Give it me NOW!" said . . .
For what it's worth, my model is structured very differently :) This piece took me longer than usual to get into and I had to work hard for it to open up its secrets to me (so I was grateful for the extra (extra) time I had with it). After all of this reading and reflection, the thing that stood out most to me was the theme of division/duality - it's almost oppressive in that first pulse with Savitsky (introduced with the 'gigantic beauty' and the 'decorations hammered into his chest' (the medals both a nod to pageantry and war) and neatly summed up by the 'iron and flowers of his youth') and continues throughout the story to the very end.
My one-liner summary is: a man becomes one of learning *and* violence
And from this, my model (which centres on this theme/conundrum), asks not 'why does Babel show the narrator getting his assignment in this way?', but 'why does Babel introduce this reflection on division/duality in this way? Why start with Savitsky (and not, for example, the Cossacks)?'
In this model, the pulses look like this:
1. Savitsky
2. Quartermaster
3. Cossacks (close - 'not one of us') - making fun
4. Landlady and Goose
5. Cossacks (at a distance - 'our kind of lad') - sitting around their pot
7. Cossacks (close (reversal of reversal) - 'they join him') - reading Lenin
8. Conclusion - what it means to hold two contradictory realities in one person - legs tangled
I'm really interested to see whether the two different models lead to the same answers, or whether they uncover different but convergent ideas...
I'm also wondering whether approaching this deconstruction from a thematic perspective/starting point is dangerous? What if I've misconstrued the author's theme? Is it better to focus on the facts (as they were)? Or can you slice and dice a story to its component parts however they present themselves to you?
Your question of why start with Savitsky was brilliant. Your point about the medals also sparked a better view. I have been reading Freud recently. His 1919 Uncanny essay seems useful as one layer to The First Goose. From this first pulse the reader is unsettled, uncertain, about the scene. The commander does not seem fully natural, he 'rose', 'cut the sky in half' (to me like a pagan god), those girls as legs. And every scene after that, under a dying pumpkin sun, then a cheap earring moon, seems like another unnatural trigger to unease. Your analysis identifying the manifold duality is the primary work. My niche uncanny pursuit is grateful for this insight.
Hi, Alfred, I am not sure if I actually sent a reply yesterday or not. Just in case, I thank you for the suggested article on Red Cavalry. I do have access to jstor. Also, back to Freud, and I do feel more naturally disposed toward Jung, but Freud is so epic like Game of Thrones. In _Radical Hope_ by philosopher Jonathan Lean who is admired for his discussions about Freud lays out how cultural collapse feels. He profiles Crow Chief Plenty Coups and Plenty Coups' statement about end of history once he moved to a reservation. A form of that can be seen once the narrator joins the Cossacks in My First Goose. How can the narrator value anything that happens next. Freud's framework, for me, convincingly addresses that experience.
Thanks :) I kind of came to it by trying to puzzle out the line where Savitsky 'cut the hut in half' (which is echoed again, not much further along, when he 'cleaved the air with his whip' (which strangely was not included in another translation I read)). And both of those instances, together with the very pronounced duality in the commander, got me wondering about the harsh lines of division within ourselves, where we can paradoxically carry softness and openness in as equal measure as we carry intolerance and cruelty).
My favourite instance of the duality, however, is this line: "...and caught, rejoicing, the mysterious curve of Lenin's straight line" - because in that instance, we see the paradox and conflict and maybe hypocrisy? of this situation where we are two opposite things in one body.
I love the translation George provides here because it is lyrical and there is deeper beauty on a sentence level, but I found this translation much easier for helping me to get a grasp on the story: https://tikvahfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Isaac_Babel-My-First-Goose.pdf. I think the translation that George gives us provides a richer experience once you already get the gist of the story and some of its more obscure elements (which I struggled with for a while!)
Thank you Mikhaeyla for uploading the translation by Peter Constantine. I have that collection as well. Always grateful to read as many translations of a work if possible.
That’s so interesting—as in the way communism was supposed to save everyone, bring us into community once more, but the more they tried to make it work, the worse things got. As in sometimes when we try to be good, our terrible side emerges instead. Much to ponder; thank you!
I enjoy looking at the different translations - it's like watching different actors play out the same scene, each with their own interpretation and unique flourishes. I do, however, wish (and not for the first time) that my grandfather had taught my father to read/write/speak Russian, or that I had taken it upon myself when I was younger to learn and reconnect with that part of my heritage. It would be wonderful to read the original text...
I don't see why not? Particularly if they are, as George says, 'units of meaning'. You could definitely have overlapping pulses (if you dissected the story, in this morgue of ours, along different axes)...
I can understand why George wanted to call it the Story Morgue - I feel like we are treading Da Vinci's footsteps as he did his autopsies to further his art...
Leonardo and All Inquisitive Purely Anatomical and Forensically Applied Pathologists who have joined his Ilk followed along in his Wake have gone where I , nor most of us, would ever go . . . but how we have advanced on the fruits of their scientifically creative endeavour(s)!
It seems apparent, from sampling and reading posts in this and across previous threads, that analytical dissection is not to quite to the taste of everyone, here present. Yet to other others, myself included, creative dissection along the lines that George suggests is - if not THE then - ONE of the very essences of creating creative short fictions.
We've been given, a few Newsletters back now, a fascinating window onto Charles Dickens' writing process Mikhaelya. Do you think that Dickens may, just possibly, have have viewed his writing and revising of 'A Christmas Carol' as as a process of breathing life into a literary cadaver until the point where it, suddenly, becomes 'publishable'?
For me, even the story's title does significant work to set the tone. It is the narrator's FIRST goose. There will be more! And will they all be (gulp) geese?
It was a wonderful limb, and I'm glad Nancy encouraged you to go on. Here I was just about to offer some different titles. "So you like Chekhov's 'Lady With the Little Dog,' huh? Why not try 'First Love?' How about something else (also brutal, but shorter) from Red Cavalry? Here's 'Crossing the River Zbrucz.' That one's given me nightmares." Like a pusher trying to give you a little taste, just to get you through that Babel door :)
Hi Alfred-P, you're very kind. Story Club is such a wonderful place and I sincerely enjoy the variety of perspectives and voices here. I'm just so stinking happy to be able to participate in something like this! I'm here as a reader, and so I know I'll go about things differently from those who are studying these stories as writers, looking under the hood to see how things run. So if my beloved, um, car was taken apart before my eyes . . . I'd probably feel a little distressed too. Glad KB is still gifting us with her insights (and yes, so often wonderfully phrased!). You've gone out on a limb as well. And really, each and every one of us who is putting ourselves out here . . . well, it takes a bit of courage, doesn't it? Someone elsewhere described these comments as sending out a message in a bottle, and it's the perfect description for me: hitting post and not knowing how your words will be received, or even if they will at all. Sorry, it's late here, so I hope I'm making sense. I think my entire point was something like: we should all be gentle with each other.
I like that you're spreading it out for the story's sake but also because I want to better know who is here and what we think and feel.
In this expanding approach, perhaps we can include discussions about the translation's compositions and how that transforms the story? Dralyuk's sentences are such a joy they're visceral.
It feels like that collection's going to be a book for readers to love and a primer for writers fascinated with language and with making the sentence a thing of beauty.
Yes, please - and in what's coming (what I've written of it so far) I am trying to offer alt versions of different sentences and so on. Very valuable to look at this way, I think.
I am interested in the question of translation. I have an older translation (by Walter Morison), and I'm intrigued by the differences between it and Dralyuk's version. If word choice is critical in a work, as written by the author in the original language, then what does that mean for word choice in a translation? No answers here, just questions.
So, George, you mentioned in a recent post this idea of the "load-bearing" moment which is the key to a story's identity. Would you call the one-line "Hollywood Version" the story's identity? Hence we need to look at how each scene not only moves the story along, but how it plays with/reinforces/resonates that identity? Which also would, perhaps, help us to find that load-bearing moment in our own work? This exercise feels very important.
I think so? Maybe w slightly more emphasis on the fine moral nuance. But very possible I used “Hollywood Version” because I didn’t know the word “logline.” 🙄
I think a lot of a story's force comes from how our (the reader's) understanding of this longline/HV develops as they read, perhaps on a sentence to sentence basis. I think of Alice Munro, perhaps in Meneseteung, how so often distorts the reader's perception of the story's frame in order to reach higher and higher orders of meaning. That said, I had trouble distilling this story in that way--
I am so grateful for a chance to learn how to get inside Babel's stories.
This struck me as powerful - the translation works on me much better than an old translation I have in a book I'd dipped into before.
The inner truth of the story rings painfully true: what is at stake here? Survival in a male society.
Specifically the narrator who shows signs of being from outside the brutal norms of male society - glasses implies academic, implies weak - who must therefore work out how to be accepted into the inside of one such system.
The story depicts a horrible perversion of the way social acceptance ought to be won: ought in the moral sense, and ought in the logic of story world. The latter is, I would say, a complete success - the story chooses a more interesting path than: he fights one of the Cossacks and wins their admiration in combat, or through force of personality [hero overcomes adversity through strength]. But this isn’t cheap music.
The moral world - who would argue that this is how we ought to win favour through crushing the weak and defenceless and already defeated? But is this how we win favour? Oh yes. In male society, still now in male friendship groups in comfortable western schools of the 21st century, this is indeed how the rules often work. Not how they ought to work, but how they do.
And… I write this observation as news lands of Russian bombs striking a Maternity and Children’s hospital in Mariupol.
Might I ask (and I really really really do not know the answer or even have a way to think about it I'd feel confident in): is it enough that this story depicts the awful truth and soul-rending of one who gains entry to this brutal world? Or, is there a moral imperative to go further, and to explore the truth for those that remain outside, who are in turn brutalised and suffer unimaginably?
I think we are also challenged by Babel to think about this concept of male society norms in the way that Savitsky is described. Sure, he is an outsized character of physical size and medals of valor and/or accomplishment but Babel also weaves in the narrators observations of how meticulous and clean this man of war appears with long legs equated to a girls. So, while intellectualism within the story is being addressed as weak, I wonder if Babel is not metacognitively playing with the irony of this Character's appearance of show. Maybe this is the moral imperative that we need to address: the men who mete out the orders of violence versus the men who exist in the violence.
Niall, That’s a great question. Consider that maybe I see something of myself in the narrator and that recognition (the easiness of casual cruelty) may do more to change my perspective than any description of the old woman’s pain. Pain is easy to see. The small steps we take that corrupt the soul are much harder to recognise. We can only shine a l focused beam of light on a small slice of life.
Here's a terrible thought that strikes as I read this: could there be Russian Jews serving, forced as conscripts, in the Russian horde that is ravaging Ukraine today? A day when it has, according to reports in what I consider reliably accurate and responsible media, been decreed that any Russian who speaks out or mutely protests against the 'Special Military Operation' being conducted in Ukraine is by definition not a Russian! What strategies will ordinary Russian people have to adopt in order survive and at what mental and moral cost to themselves? What inner conflict to be faced with!
I don't think there is a moral imperative to go further. The story is what it is. We follow the threads to their conclusion. Babel doesn't owe the reader anything more.
The description of Savitsky is fantastically bonkers. “the decorations hammered into his chest,” “cut the hut in half, as a banner cuts the sky,” “His long legs…like a pair of girls clad in shiny shoulder-length jackboots.” It’s apotheosis crossed with the absurd, the ridiculous and the sublime. He’s heroic and erotic and terrifying. Reminded of Plath’s “Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.”
It sets the tone in an amazing way. The tone and pacing of this first pulse are lively and brisk, and read almost like satire or comic opera. Dr. Strangelove maybe. But extreme violence and brutality are also introduced up front. To me, the almost comical tone makes the underlying menace feel even more ominous and unsettling. You feel the terrible vulnerability of the narrator, and that something awful could happen to him at any moment.
This story was my introduction to Babel, knew nothing about him. I too had that reaction to the beginning, the first pulse, fanastically bonkers. The tone, couldn't say where it was going, though if Savitsky wasn't human, the narrator was.
For me, because it's closer to home probably, I saw the Irish in him. The ability to survive in unbearable situations. It reminded me of a story my uncle, the son of western Irish immigrants, told me of WWII. He was captured by the Germans and was put on a death march, months long. He told me the story one night quite late, when I was staying with him for a few weeks while getting settled in LA. How he survived it, his strategy. It was a story like this one in tone. He made no apologies, no shame no guilt no blame. He was just telling what happened. He had pretty acute observations about who, like himself, survived, and who did not.
This story reminds me his story, his telling me this story, it needs to be written down.
So well put Mia. To pick up on your point, the complex attraction, terror and revulsion conveyed by the narrators wonky description reveals the feelings that MAKE him vulnerable to Savitsky’s charms.
That vulnerability sets the foundation for the narrators transformation.
Well, thank you. As to the painting, I had thought of Picassos Harlequins as more gentle trickster/artists than savage. But maybe there is something cubist or surrealist in Babel's portrait? Maybe more Dali than Picasso, with the legs like two entire other people. Interesting thought!
I am loving all this Babel-inspired poetic, artistic, psychological and archetypal musing. One huge reason I love reading Isaac Babel is that I have never read anything else quite like him before now. (Another sign of his greatness, I think, is the intellectual power surge taking place in this group of readers and writers.)
My first reaction to the story content was disgust. And then fear as I tried to think of a war time situation, and how everything changes, and how to preserve yourself above others, and where to align your loyalties. The handsome man, leader, commander, with his clean perfume and sweet smell of soap! Power endears one. The old woman with her strange eyes creeped me out, her presence like conscience. And the poor goose who took the full brunt of everything that was wrong. A small scene in a lawless war, thats all it takes to throw everything that we hold true. Brutal. That coward who narrates it all, could well have been me, had to look at that squarely.
This has totally clarified for me how to do the “elevator pitch” for my historical novel: leave out the history! Get to to the human emotional heart of it. So obvious, now I’ve seen your example!
As far as I know there are enormous groups of people, throughout the world, who each day earnestly commute to a Department of War and clock in and do their job. There also are plenty of war colleges available for those who want to be educated and learn the subject. Books, too, like the The Art of War, ancient as a religious text, in which we acquire with the zeal of testimony the variety of ways in which we can defeat, demoralize, devastate our opponents. But despite all the effort to administrate, teach, and learn the subject, war to me seems an utter mobilization of failure, the point at which humans have quit the often difficult, complicated, frustrating effort to communicate and just said, essentially, Shut up or I effing kill you. Babel's initiation story feels to me one in which communication and language matter. The narrator is some twerp with glasses, the college kid working in the warehouse for the summer, capable of reading, writing, thinking, feeling, and so when at the end of the first pulse Savitsky asks, You think you can live with us, this feels to me a profound and loaded question. In the first pulse, Babel seems to signal both the importance of language and communication and also that a choice will be made. It's striking that in the first passage, it's either the narrator describing Savitsky, or Savitsky himself speaking, which for me created a contrast: when Savitsky talks, he's shown to be a loud, coarse guy with a whip; but as the narrator describes Savitsky to us, the language is big and amped up. "Savitsky rose...a banner splitting the sky." We get what he wears, how he wears it, where he wears it, we even get a good sniff of him, and in all of the language we gain the perspective of how desirable Savitsky is to the narrator.
Yes, history has demonstrated how war is more often a miscalculation. Assumptions are made that don't always ring true leading to devastating consequences. In the first pulse of the story, Babel gives us that unforgettable contrast between Savitsky's speech and actions with his shiny boots and overwhelming scent. This reminded me of a scene from War & Peace, Volume III, Part Two, XXVI: The emperor Napoleon had not yet left his bedroom and was finishing his toilette. Snorting and grunting, he turned now his fat back, now his hairy, fat chest under the brush with which a valet was rubbing his body. Another valet, stopping up the vial with his finger, sprayed eau de cologne over the emperor's pampered body, with a gesture which said that he alone could know how much eau de cologne must be sprayed and where. Napoleon's short hair was wet and tousled on his forehead. But his face, though swollen and yellow, expressed physical pleasure: "Allez, ferme, allez toujours"*...he repeated, cringing and grunting, to the valet rubbing him. An adjutant who came into the bedroom to report to the emperor how many prisoners had been taken in yesterday's action, having said what he had to say, stood by the door waiting for permission to leave. Napoleon, wincing, gave the adjutant a frowning look from under his eyebrows. "Point de prisonniers," he repeated the adjutant's words. "Ils se font démolir. Tant pis pour l'armée russe,"** he said. "Allez toujours, allez ferme," he said, hunching up and presenting his fat shoulders to the brush.
*Do it hard, keep going...
**No prisoners...They're getting themselves annihilated. So much the worse for the Russian Army.
Just a quick procedural thought - it's totally fine not to like or get a story we work on here. Mostly, I love the stories I send out (and I love this one) but YOU don't have to love them, in order to work with them. (And I will be sending out stories I don't love, from time to time.) Think of these stories as cars, and we are mechanics. Any car will teach us about auto mechanics, since every car works on the same general principles. If we don't like something about a story and (very important) try to be specific about why - that is good work to do. The key is to be specific and couch the criticism in some larger notion - we want to avoid the "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" approach.
So don't feel bad if you don't like a story - accept that and roll up your sleeves to see what benefit there is for you in investigating the "why" of your resistance.
Having said that, when I read a story that has withstood the test of time, and I don't like it, I remember that old story (or maybe it was a cartoon):
Guy in Museum, to Guard: I like this painting. Yeah, it's good.
Guard: Sir, the painting is not the thing being judged here.
Back when I didn't get Chekhov, my view was: "Well, these stories are still around after all these years. So let me be humble and see if I might be missing something."
Turns out, I was.
So, once we work through this, and some of us still don't like it, that is perfectly wonderful. That is, actually, you learning about your deep esthetic values.
Onward!
Thank you for that, George. I think there are many stories and novels (and, come to think of it, people, and places) that I did not appreciate at first, and later came to love. It often seems that the most challenging works are the ones that ultimately have the most to offer us. (Same with people, at least some of the time!)
I wonder if dislike is more often discomfort. We might feel threatened by something we don't understand, or excluded by our lack of understanding, or made uncomfortable by our lack of control over something that's outside our own experience.
I'm finding that, after doing work on a story of the kind(s) that George suggests, the story I see after my, say, fifth pass of reflective reading the words of the story have not changed but my grasp of what they add up to is quite altered. Of course whatever enhanced sense I may have of the story from personal working is enriched so much by the comparing and sharing that Story Club is enabling.
I like that.
You expressed this perfectly, Katie.
Thank you Rosanne!
I feel this comment so much, David. It is such a strangely delightful, humbling feeling to have first impressions overturned (or even be proven completely wrong) by someone/something (and some of the people dearest to me definitely fell into the "challenging at first" category)
Babel has NO intention of making you feel comfortable. That’s the whole bloody point
It is, literally. a bloodily made point Kate - that grabbing of the goose, that stamping on to break its neck, that bayoneting with a ready to hand sabre - but here's a question: is Isaac Babel serving up discomfort to those who read this short story by way of horror or comedy?
And is 'the whole bloody point' of this piece of prose to make his first and now us, his latest readers, uncomfortable?
I'm feeling confident enough with my growing familiarity with the text to be posing questions but not yet confident that I have answers.
Well, I think he is invoking our common discomfort. Ours as readers. And his as a live participant
‘This is war. Have a look’
There are young men in the Ukraine right now, on both sides, committing brutal acts they never would have dreamt of before.
I was speaking more generally but that's a good point.
Rosanne, twenty years ago my husband gave me Gina Berriault's collection, "Women in Their Beds," and I read it and forgot it. Now, because of our reading "The Stone Boy" and many years of story writing, I have a whole new world of stories. It's a blessing. Just finished "Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?" Don't miss it!!!! Mortality, identity, a self-satisfied librarian comes up against a homeless guy with poetry all over him.
Just finished The Woman in the Rose Colored Dress--so short, I might try George's pulse exercise.
You don’t have to ‘get’ him. You just have to hear the quiet line of curling smoke of his narrative and poetic genius. In fact that’s the whole point of what he is doing. It can’t quite be ‘got’. And he suggests that imposing a common rigid moral grid work upon human experience may not just be a pointless way of reading. But also a totally pointless way to approach the great and hugely moral job of human understanding…..
I love how much you love him. One of a kind. Also your phrase, “lapidary anecdotes” is burning a joyous hole through my brain.
Thanks for that, Rosanne. You definitely are!
On this note, can I drop in how helpful I have found the push to write about the story, even when it is just writing to myself. I have a memory that you exhorted us to do so in Stone Boy, George. I felt a little internal resistance... surely I'm just going to be writing the same thoughts I'd been thinking... why bother?
But then, I have found that doing so has:
a) taken me deeper and deeper into the story
b) taken me deeper into my self as reader
c) enabled me to practise some honesty... is what I am writing coming from a genuine place and from a true response to the story, or is it revisionist: has a false note crept in, have I just started to make things up because they sound plausible or clever or, even worse, because they sound deep, but that weren't there really on first reading and are only there now contingent on this hindsight?
Yes, writing about a story is a huge thing. Thanks for this, Niall.
Very similar for me. The push to articulate thoughts enough to write them down has revealed some little surprises--sometimes my thoughts aren't quite what I assumed they were. In addition to your a, b, and c, I experience: d) enables me to practice noticing. This noticing is proving to be a way to "listen" to a quiet, semi-subconscious, creative impulse in me. I'm optimistic this will help in my writing.
Yes! You're right about d. My story reading machinery has been upgraded in this way... it notices more, it is alive to more, even on first non-analytical reading.
The comments from you all are helping me go deeper with these stories. My brain resists going into the technical side of almost everything-- including an aversion to reading instruction booklets... as if I can “intuitively” feel my way through, which doesn’t really work out much. This practice of breaking the story down is good for building up that mental muscle.
I am the same way, Stacya. I’m even that way with cooking. I am good at making things that are intuitive and improvisational: soups, pastas, salads, sandwiches. But I can’t bake to save my life (or, God forgive me, the lives - or at least birthdays - of my own children). And I’m the same with instruction books. I’ve long thought it’s because I don’t like having to follow things so precisely, to have to be so technical feels unforgiving. You can’t taste a cake and then correct it, as you can a sauce or soup. And I think I’ve had the irrational - or superstitious - feeling that being too technical in reading or writing spoils the “mood.” George Saunders is the only writer I would do this with because I so admire his work and can see how the methodology works for him.
You know Robin, reading your post makes me think that an educator like George might even have enabled a much younger me to get interested in English Grammar. Instructors were earnest but dull, and I just couldn’t be doing with getting my head around all those farts of peach.
I hated grammar passionately at thirteen. And now it’s as important as water and air.(See Douglas Glover’s essays on writing, “Attack of the Copula Spiders.”)
Are you a fellow member of the Grammar Gazpacho?
Hi Nancy, I know not what that is but it sounds like a great stew in which to simmer!
My reference to Douglas Glover above is because of several passages in Attack of the Copula Spiders in which he recommends fomenting conflict and paradox just just narratively but also within each sentence, each sentence a hall of mirrors reflecting the story’s characters, conflicts and meanings. Drama in the very grammar, I believe he wrote.
Gazpacho exists of course, as a cold soup made with tomato as it's prime ingredient and enjoyed in Andalucia and in other provinces across Southern Spain. I'm know conjuring an image of the rigid rules of grammar having put into a word blender with rich ripe tomatoes . . . then placed in the refrigerator to cool down to well . . . add a beautiful warm sunny summers afternoon . . . and yes I'll go with flow . . . and seek membership of 'The Grammar Gaspacho' 🍅
👍 Thanks muchly David. Never heard tell, no even as much as shy smidgeon, of 'Attack of the Copula Spiders' before your kind mention of it. Now acquired, simply, sitting waiting for download on Kindle (having, naturally, sampled the sample, and found it - like 'The, Unassuming, Nibbling, Hero Mouse in The Gruffalo 'Found it good'.
And, thinking back to my struggle with all those 'Farts of Peach', to this day I'm trying to understand just what a 'slimilie' is 😲
Hi Rob, I’m glad you found it, and like it so far. I think I only found it in December last. Mostly because in this fantastic online class last August one of the things we had to read was Glover’s short story, “How I Decide to Kill Myself and Other Jokes.” That story is very close to perfect, containing pain as well as some of the most hilarious moments ever written. I also discovered around the same time essays by David Jauss on writing that were equally helpful. They both teach, I believe, in the MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. The Jauss book is titled, On Writing Fiction.
Glover, Jauss and George Saunders are a nice combination of rocket fuels.
I hear you!
You nailed it. I also love cooking, but when the chemists arrive on “The British Baking Show” my brain goes on the fritz, all that talk about how yeast does es this or that with the room temperature blaa blaa blaa.
Hahaha! I love this story. I’m a driver who has to feel “one with my car” and have a hard time letting go of cars because I have this “feeling” that I won’t drive as well with a new one.
now I don't feel so bad that I don't want to read the inch thick packet of materials so my husband and I can hike through Ireland (though, I must). At least I am not alone in my distaste for instructions.
Same here, Stacya. I’ve spent decades trying to feel my way through, and kept wondering, why isn’t this working? But, if one could combine the intuition with technical prowess and a knowledge of how stories actually work, limitations might just subside. At least I’m hoping so!
Good to hear, that’s exactly it! We struggle on, changing our brain structure 🤓
Exactly!
I can't tell you how many times I've put something together and have wound up with extra parts!
Thanks for this note of encouragement, George, because I really found myself really detesting this story. My Hollywood version description would read: "Insecure outsider finds acceptance amongst group of males by acting cruelly towards an old woman and then killing a goose. Outsider shows some remorse for killing a goose, not so much for attacking old woman." The ending sentence ("I had dreams-dreamt of women-and only my heart, crimson with murder, creaked and bled") frustrated me, because it acknowledged the killing of the goose, but not the cruelty to the old lady (which was cruelty for cruelty's sake, as opposed to cruelty for some understandable purpose-to eat). Then I asked myself, well was that intentional on the part of Isaac Babel? But after reading and re-reading the story, I couldn't come up with anything to suggest that Babel or the narrator was as concerned with the cruelty towards the old woman as they were towards the killing of the goose.
That's all to say that I was deeply frustrated with the misogyny of this story, and with what I felt was a failure to recognize and wrestle with the true cruelty in the story. But is that what Babel intended? If so, I can't seem to find any support for that. Help!
Babel wanted us to look at a woman, specifically, and hear her lament twice, so I think her presence was intentional and also effective. Painful and infuriating to witness as a reader, yes, but that's why it was effective. It seems to me that Babel is concerned for the woman, and his character is doing good work delivering impact. Hunger is a great motivator of terrible cruelty to all life.
I get your disquiet with the misogyny of this story. She's mentioned twice but not attended to further in the story, so we're left with a dead goose and this woman's cry for help - I want to hang myself. For me that sums up war: the inability to listen, have compassion, the need to prove that violence pays, is the only way, the need to be one of the fighting men. Leaving it open, not commented on, makes us the reader feel the brutality.
This is such a good point to bring up! On my first glance I was also like “okay what’s the deal with the lady why is no one responding to the casual suicidal remarks?” (Which is a reaction choice by Babel in and of itself, who is ignored).
Misogyny is social currency in this camp, which we see from the get go (sixth commander calls him a pansy for his glasses, quarter master says a nice young lady’s mistreatment will earn our lawyer brownie points). When the lawful protagonist ignores the hostess, that earns him acceptance. Misogyny. Cruelty. A sad deterioration of morals to find belonging.
But what does Babel feel? Going back through, there are so many feminine ideals. The beautiful sixth commander has legs like a girls. The sixth commander in fact is idolized by the narrator but is more feminine compared to the Cossacks (beautiful colors, signs with a flourish, eyes dancing). He is, in a sense, the ideal. Distant from war’s evil yet powerful, beautiful, stunning.
And after the mistreatment toward the blind hostess, Babel brings in more feminine allusions--moon hung like a cheap earring, motherly palm on his head, Lenin’s speeches are like a hen (not a rooster). Feminine is utopia, a resemblance of a pure ideal. And in that last line, he dreams of women (the pure ideals a man of the law held so close before he came here) but the murderous piece of him breaks that.
Okay I’m going OFF don’t mind me but it’s just exciting to read something so close again, especially when I also was like WTF. But glasses are a huge motif. They make me think of Piggy in Lord of the Flies. They’re the symbol of reason, and their disappearance is huge. The man of the law wears glasses, which marks him as an outsider (and idyllic, reasonable) to the Cossacks. But who else in the entire story wears glasses? Our hostess! She alone stands as the only person who is not degraded by the violence around her, does not take the violence out on the innocent to fit in like the protagonist does. Her violence is only reflected toward herself in threatening to bang herself, yet she resists as the only sage in the spot. Perhaps that’s why she confessed to our protagonist, recognizing he would understand good and evil and reason, but he turns away from her and his own sense of logic to join the group. The woman is actually Babel’s moral compass, so the group’s misogyny is cast as the wrong against her right.
Am I off track idk!!! But that’s how I read it (for now)
Wow Chloe! Thank you for all of your thoughts and associations. Love the cross-reference to Lord of the Flies. I will reread Babel soon with refreshed senses!
What I did like about him not feeling guilty about hitting the lady is that it's not the writer's job to play it safe. To take the PC approach. Of course, we would feel bad. Heck, we wouldn't do that. But the narrator's approach isn't to write reality, it's to write drama. To act above and beyond what a normal human would do in real life. In this situation, I don't think this character, this man, this soldier would feel sympathy for hitting the old lady. Maybe it's the physical act of killing an animal for no good reason that cuts him to the quick. After all, he could've just eaten the 'mess' the others are eating. Forcing him to feel guilty about being gluttonous eating two dinners. And forcing the reader to ask how will this man fare as a soldier.
Norman, re reading your comment, my thought is that the narrator is really doing exactly "what a normal human would do in real life," i.e. someone who is extremely vulnerable decides to protect himself among these baboons (apology to the baboons) by becoming like them.
Hi, Jane. As i thought about it and rereading the story, the soldier is actually taking the advice of the quartermaster. “...ruin a lady, the nicest old lady, and our fighting boys treat you real kind.” Well, that didn’t happen. So he took it one step further. Babel was clever. He knew this ‘educated student’ probably wouldn’t have killed the goose without the old lady stirring him up first.
Yes, well put. Instead of raping the woman he kills the goose. Perhaps we could say he is protecting the woman.
The nicest purest little lady, is what it says…
You get the idea.
I felt that Babel demonstrates the narrator's frustration at the unmerciful treatment he's receiving from every other character in the story. He can only lash out at the innocent (the old woman, the goose). Thus, not merely hunger, but far deeper and more emotional wounds are being revealed, and, like a human, the narrator is the author of his own regret.
He is obliged, by the circumstances he is in (riding/travelling with the Cossacks across the flatlands already devasted by 1914-18) to ‘lash out’ against the innocent. Otherwise no food. The complicated question is how does that make him feel? First of all, he starts off - personally - utterly upholding the idea of a communist revolution. ( and - Americans- communism as an idea is not intrinsically ‘evil’ whatever you may have been taught. It’s an idea that simply cannot - perhaps - be put into practice - particularly across a warscape - in a way that avoids evil. Babel himself never denounced it.) And he didn’t have to ride with the Cossacks. He volunteered to.
And it’s quite clear that he came to love the boys that he rode with. And to forgive them. But to question - again and again - his own self: ‘ Lord, forgive them. For they know not what they do.’ And ‘ let this cup pass from me’.
*MY* father’s house has many mansions. And they are all welcome there. Cossacks, ragged weeping old ladies in the midst of war, Babel himself. And any geese he chooses to bring with him.
Kate
And So , my kinderlach, I say goodnight to you. While I recite - for your comfort, in your straw - the slow, elegant, blue smokey lines of Lenin’s thought.
Love this, Kate.
Remember how the story begins--brutality of the division commander, portraying the brutal ugliness of Soviet military, the thugs despite the Glorious Revolution--the old woman's food is taken from her by the main character seeking to keep himself alive. Simply put, in the "Hollywood" version, it's about an outsider joining in, but it's a hugely pointed picture of the ugly evil Babel sees.
It’s much more complicated - for him - than that. This is not a work that is simply about the ‘ugliness of evil’. Life is hugely more complicated than that. ( perhaps not in Idaho) What Babel does - in the cycle as a whole - is lay out the complex and various and changing modes of our own, personal, hypocritical but also right feeling relationship to the morality of our own contingent, historical times. And how agonising that can be.
And no. It is not a paradigm for what you may or may not feel about Trump. Or even Russia. It’s about the human soul when it really, truly is in the thick of it. About when you have to kill your first goose ( I’ve always thought I could manage that, if I really, truly had to - but who knows) or how you feel when you culturally/institutionally first have to ignore the first wailing granny you’ve ever seen on the road.
Thank you, Kate, for your fantastic points of view. You always take me deeper into the psychedelic swirl of Isaac Babel. I wish we could go for a hike in the Idaho mountains sometime; the beauty of the landscape makes up for some of the narrow thought processes…or so I hope!
You've cooked ya goose, is that expression of you've really done it this time. There is no turning back.
Ha! I probably have! 🙀🙀🙀
Not your goose Kate! , (though to some ,perhaps) The narrator has cooked his goose, or had it cooked for him. Ya know my eyes smarted thinking of Babel on assignment in that time and place. Yes, and what would I have done? Any of us. Cooked our goose?
Wrong
That’s so interesting, Tina. I thought he was regretful about all of it, but I could be wrong. It interested me that his regret seems more powerful in his dreams than in waking life. Sleep dissolves the mental blocks?
I felt his disquiet most at this line: "I wiped the sabre down with sand, went out of the gate and came back in again, languishing."
There are a lot of plays on words in this story and words with double meaning - for me, 'languishing' creates a link between a feeling of diminishment (languish) and deep/visceral distress (anguish). The going out of the gate and coming back in seems to represent a line being drawn (between his old self and this new, compromised, dual-natured self)? He is rewarded for his actions (a seat at the table, so to speak) and punished (his bleeding, creaking heart).
I don't think he feels regret, I think the emotion is deeper than that - something like a reluctant/tormented resignation (the guilt of someone caught in a kill or be killed situation?) They would do it again given the chance, but they still wouldn't feel happy about it...
But perhaps we are jumping ahead :) Looking forward to additional discussion on this when we get to the deep analysis of this pulse
No. What he feels is something altogether more complicated and meaningful than regret. Or even grief.
Sleep, if and when it came, has always seemed to me to have been the only ‘safe space’ for Jews incarcerated in Hitlers concentration camps or in Stalin’s gulag camps. Isaac Babel, being a Russian Jew, seems to me to have been a writer who literally risked his neck in much of what he wrote. I’m finding that this story morphs with each reading and Pulse 1 has my imagination pulsing overtime, as in doing work, even as it sits resting on some back burner of my mind.
Thanks Tina, Traci and David for sharing your pot stirring thoughts . . . so far.
Babel wrote before the Holocaust was even imagined.
Yes,
But well after the 'Tsar of the Time' had all of artists, architects and labouring artisans who had created that most colourful, so richly cupula decorated, church on Red Square blinded.
What, really is the difference between being a Jew targeted in a Tsarist Pogrom, a Jew targeted in a Nazi Genocide and a Jew targeted by Stalin or Putin? .
Well, all I can tell you is that people lived for utter centuries between and among those ghastly experiences. And while they did it, they produced a culture that stands for the ages. You are reading - I assume- one of those artefacts now…
He is writing about a historical landscape that existed in 1920.
About a landscape yes, for sure Kate, but more about human lives lived, or 'played out' in those particular windows of place and time?
Of course it was intentional. Every single word that Babel writes is deeply intended. And also known. Therein lies the power. You literally could not make it up.
It’s important to know that My First Goose - although it CAN stand alone - is not a stand-alone story. It’s part of a cycle of multiple more or less autobiographical stories about Babel’s experiences (as a Jew from Odessa) riding with the notoriously antisemitic but also - in his eyes - brave, simple, and human Cossack troops fighting in the brutal ‘Polish War’ of 1920.
So the weaving of the ‘pulses’ goes on throughout the series. Nothing has to be resolved in story one. If you read the cycle, you will see the symphony- like elaboration of his symbolism and internal references. For example - the moon. It starts off as an object of comfort. But later down the line it becomes something terrifying. ‘Rolling across the sky with its head in its hands’. Like a decapitated head falling off the guillotine.
The Polish War was an offshoot of the wider (and utterly brutal) civil war that raged for three or four years after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. His job was to be the political commissar. The person sent by the bolsheviks to make sure the Cossacks understood and stuck to the ‘message’. And as a Jew, he would have been, glasses and all, the natural victim of those very men should they have gone on one of their traditional program rampages against the Jews in those western Russian, Ukrainian, and polish flat lands.
It’s important to know that for readers who come from Idaho or wherever. Because Babel - the utterly brilliant Babel - was writing for an audience that would naturally be able to infer those historical points, however ambiguously he referenced them….
I am lucky, because I first studied Babel during my first degree. In Russian literature and Eastern European History. So I knew the background and I read him in Russian. He’s better that way. Like every language, there’s a poetry to Russian (particularly in short form prose) that really does suffer by translation
He remains my favourite ever short-story writer. And in particular because of his form - these separate but interconnect lapidary anecdotes.
And the weaving. The growing sense of the importance of narrative and what it is for
There’s a scene in a later story: some ghastly event has gone on. those beautiful, essentially innocent, brutal, guilty, and utterly exhausted young Cossacks are all going to sleep in the straw of a cattle train, slouching along towards some new horror
And Babel starts to read to them - as they fall asleep - from some work of Bolshevik ideology. ‘Reciting’ as I roughly remember, ‘the thin, blue curling lines of smoke of Lenin’s thought.
It’s a really counterintuitively comforting and imaginative image. What is the Narrator thinking about Lenin’s thought now?
So the real import of what I’m saying is that the development of Babels ‘pulses’ can’t simply be understood by mechanically taking apart one, early element of the cycle. Because he, himself, chose to write a cycle. It’s called Red Cavalry.
And, as such, it is very very apropos of now. So while we feel for and pity and want to help the wretched and horribly attacked population of Ukraine (🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦💪), we must also feel and pity for those young, probably lovely, Russian boys in their tanks, going who know where. Certainly not them
That is what Babel would like us to do. If he could. But he can’t. He was shot in a basement during the earliest stage of Stalins 1930s purge. And writing that has brought me to tears…..
That feels right. Most of the people caught up in wars are not villains. But the ones at the top of the food chain, who make wars possible, usually are. As usual, old men sending young men off to kill and die.
Even that simple and and entirely proper piece of human morality is not what Babel is writing about.
He is trying to recreate a much more complex, distanced, and existential recreation of the experience of the particularities of a certain kind of warfare. He is so very very very careful not to spell out the moral lesson.
He wants us to grapple with those questions in our own private soul. And he does not dictate - ever - the conclusions that we should come to about what he says. And in that way he does indeed raise in front of us the ACTUAL experience of war.
I love him so much that it’s really hard for me to write about his technique. But I think it’s extremely important - vitally important - that he never, ever dictates our moral response. He respects us. And I thank him for that
The format/topography of these comment sections is a little maddening. I just now (March 13th) found all of these posts or yours, Kate. Wow.
Yup. I find the topography quite hard to navigate. On the other hand it’s quite nice to get stuck down a rabbit hole with friends 😀
And with Alice, and Mad Hatter, and Cheshire Cat, and a whole cast of quite amazing characters…
All of them mind-opening.
Thank you for these perspectives, Kate. I just received my copy of Red Cavalry and in reading only the first piece I begin to see something of what you mean. How I wish I could read it in Russian! Maybe someday…
Thank you for that permission. Sometimes I think it's a matter of timing and age, too. I am currently rereading a Pulitzer-winning story collection I shrugged at roughly ten years ago when reading it for a book club, and now I am in utter awe of what Elizabeth Strout pulled off with Olive Kitteridge. I've experienced a lot more loss and heartbreak in the past ten years than I had in the ones prior, and now I have so much more compassion for the characters and gratitude for how exquisitely their quiet losses and heartbreaks are rendered.
Thank you, Jules. It’s crazy how life forces us to take notice of what we weren’t ready to process, once upon a time.
There's also, I think David, the simple fact of 'opportunity cost'. Not always but sometimes we have to choose between one read and another (or more likely a number of others) due to the limited availability of time. So all power to Jules elbow in finding that short story collection that was opaque in the part has now become open, accessible, more transparent and a joy to read.
Thanks, Rob. I miss being fourteen and thinking I had all the time in the world to read. Books for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a midnight snack! Now I often wish for a mentor to help me know what to read next. But this group may actually be fulfilling that function, in large measure.
"The road to . . . wherever I'm going . . . is, sure to be, paved with 'must reads' I have acquired but not read . . . which is OK , because "there's always tomorrow " . . . until there isn't!"
"Read on MacDuff (aligning with Wild Bill Shakespeare).
"Read on, read on, read on John Donne (aligning with Van Morrison).
"Read on, and on, and on, right on "To Infinity" (aligning with Buzz Lightyear).
. . . "Just Do It" and then "Swoosh, your self. outta hear, daily!"
Hi George. I might be breaking protocol here so please feel free to ignore my question and I won't make it mean anything. But here goes: I find I need a three or four days off between stories. I write everyday for three hours but when a story is finished and I try starting the next one, it is like I am empty and sad. I often forget that I need the down time and in my forgetting I make it mean that it's over. I am done being a writer. It can get pretty toxic for a few days before I remember I need a little downtime to do unrelated things, you know, like feed my cat. Tell my wife she looks nice. That kind of stuff. Do you often need a break between stories? Do you have a cat?
Wait, are you really saying you're done being a writer? Your post is quite touching and resonant - "feed my cat, tell my wife she looks nice," so that even in saying you won't write, you are indeed writing : )
The first pulse - narrator accepts the assignment - is not a technical point. Babel actually did accept that assignment. This is not a theoretical game. And it wasn’t for him.
The power of Babel’s Kon’ Armiya - Red Cavalry - does not lie in its mechanical ‘technique’. It lies in its power of testimony . And in his own hugely sophisticated and complex understanding of the human condition. And in his inborn power of words.
You can take it apart if you like - in order to teach others basic mechanics. But only Babel could have written it. And he could only have written it in his own particular circumstances.
For Christ’s sake, let’s not turn Babel, or Mozart, or Jimi Hendrix, or Bulgakhov, or Katherine Mansfeild, or whoever, into a shop.
And, for God’s sake, let’s not turn John Donne into a shop.
Really brilliant writing , or music, or dancing are not simply mechanical, technical businesses. They also require something that is transcendental, semi-unconscious, and closely connected to a part of oneself that sentimental and irrational people might refer to as their ‘soul’. Personally, I don’t use that word. Because the outside of me is a cynic - ha!
Remember: nobody ever taught Babel ‘how to’ write. If it was possible to go on Substack and learn the way to write like Babel, everybody would be Babel, no?
Of course, I’d love to be able to write like that. But I have enough humility to know that I never will, no matter how many ‘tips’ I get from the internet.
Not that I’m not enjoying your Substack examination of the short prose form. I absolutely am! I love it. But I disagree with some of your basic premises
KJB
'Remember: nobody ever taught Babel ‘how to’ write. If it was possible to go on Substack and learn the way to write like Babel, everybody would be Babel, no?'
Not so, I think, Kate somebody did literally teach Babel to write - unless he was an auto-didact of a most extraordinary kind, as in not only inventing writing but doing so in Russian.
Neither do I find myself sharing, in any degree, your sense that that Story Club is, in any way, either about turning Babel, Mozart, Hendrix, Bulgakov Mansfiedl, Donne, or Uncle Tom Cobley 'N All 'N'All into any kind of shop or about 'tips'. And I just hoping to better appreciate what makes a great short story great and, maybe, down the road find my ability to write original short stories enhanced. I am no Babel, nor was meant to be, as far as I can say I know myself.
I've really enjoyed the provocations your post Kate and remain genial but hope that you will begin to find satisfaction in working, in turn, within the parameters of the text on the page of each Pulse as George has defined them.
Let me be even clearer . . . I remain genial but hopeful that you'll indulge in less spreading of spoilers . . . a we go ahead . . . as indeed I realise that I should also do.
I would, perhaps, be useful given your working knowledge of Russian to read your thoughts on the pros and cons of the translation of Pulse 1 that George has invited us to work on.
I was just thinking the same. X
I'll keep 👀 open for your✍ thoughts on this translation Kate.
Thank you for mentioning K.M. in this, I have read that she went to France during war. She is a distant cousin and my muse. I am housed beside a blue lake in the southern Isle of Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Thank you, Kate, those are pertinent thoughts. I agree that without the Muse, or the soul, or the connection to the universal unconscious, or whatever it is, no amount of technical prowess is going to get you very far. Great art requires a sense of linguistic (or sonic or graphic or kinetic or verbal) mechanics, a degree of technique, and a shit-ton of rocket fuel.
George, I think I liked this story more than I would have because you had us read it after The Stone Boy. In both these gut-wrenching tales, there is a boy / young man who is made to feel powerless in the face of a harsh, scornful world. We encounter these two characters while they are still naive. And ultimately, due to the larger, aggressive opinion around them, they are changed into hard-hearted, cruel souls, with the boy being especially cruel to himself. I felt sad for the change in these characters. I really felt like I was losing someone who was previously human and I was witnessing the death of innocence and kindness. And yet, despite the lingering pessimism, I am buoyed up by the experience of deeper reading and by this community of deep readers that you have fostered. I recently read an article about the power of fiction to increase empathy: “Fiction and stories do a lot of things for us,” says William Chopik, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. “They expose us to uncomfortable ideas ... and provide us with the opportunity to take other peoples’ perspectives in a safe, distanced way. In that way, fiction serves as a playground for exercising empathic skills.” Thank you, George, for the opportunity to help me grow more understanding.
Thank you, Lisa. I love the way you linked these two stories that expose the gulf between inner and outer selves…among other gulfs.
Thanks David. Good to hear from you :)
Likewise! And don’t forget to send me that “divided self” story of yours, when it’s ready.
I was thinking about John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" this morning (read ages ago when I still thought I was an Art History major, so apologies to all and especially the late Berger if I'm misremembering the following). There's a page in this book with a Van Gogh painting, a field with crows. Turn the page and there's the same painting, but this time with a short caption: "This was the last thing Van Gogh painted before he killed himself."
It's just such a wonderful example of the power of context, how one small piece of it can completely change the way we look at something, and I mention it here as we engage with Babel's story with so little information (at least for now) about him and his life. I know it's not related to George's comment about liking/disliking the work, but "Guy in Museum" stirred something in me. Just thought I'd share.
Thanks, Manami. Your post invites me to the about how important context is in every paragraph of a story. What else could a writer add (or subtract) to enhance the meaning imparted to the reader as they read along?
You're always so kind, David. I'm glad my musing here reached you.
I meant to say a little more, maybe. When it came to "An Incident" and "The Stone Boy," I found the experience of reading those stories so refreshing in part because I knew nothing of the writers before diving in (such a different experience from "A Cat in the Rain," and Hemingway who might never recover from the opinions I've formed against him, some of them related to the writing and some of them not). Of course, when we later discussed "An Incident" and some historical details came up, that was richly illuminating and deepened my understanding of the story. But what if, before reading "The Stone Boy," we were given a detail such as (and I'm making this up), "in her own life, Berriault killed her brother in a hunting accident?" It would completely change the way each of us approached the story, I think.
I hope I'm making sense. It's late here and I'm writing this on my phone—a terrible combination. When it comes to Babel, I'm already bringing something to the table with me (I think Kate may understand what I'm grasping at) and so it's hard to separate the story from the context and the Babel-of-my-opinion. Wishing I could approach this canvas without the caption and see what that's like.
Well. It’s kind of - or used to be - a point of argument in lit crit. Should we approach a text as a ‘thing in itself’, or should we bring context to the table? My take on it is this: writers are usually speaking to an imagined interlocutor.( even if it’s themselves) And they often employ references that the believe their imagined interlocutor will understand without explication. So in order to understand those references, I personally believe we have to have SOME ‘factual’ understanding of what that imagined interlocutor might actually know. That’s context.
Thank you, that’s definitely clarifying.
Thank you, Manami, that is so interesting. For whatever reason, and for better or worse, I seem to have a mechanism in my brain that is able to separate the art somewhat from the context. (Sort of like people we may be conflicted about. They drive us crazy, but there are also these wonderful things they bring to the table. A balancing act?) I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here. Maybe that I like a story with or without context? Usually the context deepens the experience, for me; but both ways are instructive. (This post definitely feels like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as I go along.)
With or without I enjoy as well, although they're definitely different experiences. I admire your balancing act :)
(P.S. I have that learning-to-play-the-violin-as-I-go feeling about pretty much everything I say here. Lord this instrument is SQUEAKY. Does anyone even LIKE the violin? Why didn't I pick a cello?)
Hey, what makes you think you’re not Paganini?
PS, Manami, during our discussions of “The Stone Boy” Michele (if I remember rightly) mentioned John Gardner’s short story “Redemption,” and provided a link, but you might be able to find it without the link. He actually did in real life run over and kill his younger brother while driving a tractor. It’s a fantastic short story, and was interesting to read, half my mind knowing, half not-knowing, like I was reading with a split-screen brain. Very different and not-different from “The Stone Boy,” simultaneously. And the way it ends is spectacularly unforeseen (and ties in with some other historic events on our minds lately.) I recommend this story to everyone.
Not to distract from our present focus in this thread but just to let you know that I've posted a signpost Comment to poem, hot of the press as I write, that may be of interest to you, my peer passing this way . . . it is located at https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/i-know-this-isnt-poem-club-but/comment/5491250
Was ever Isaac Babel's First Goose more pertinent than today?
I don’t dislike the story! I think it is beautifully written but the part of the woman seems so sad. I’m imagining going for the audition of this part in a play- elderly peasant sits in despair on step. It is about the cruelty of war of course, but more than that, the disposal of an elderly woman superfluous to the story. I understand the mechanics but I feel moved by her.
That’s exactly what Babel intends you to feel about the woman. He intends you to feel the Pity of War
Kate, I'm struggling with your declarative sentences and the sense that you know 'exactly' what Babel intends for us to feel. This is an area your quite knowledgeable about, but for me, in my experience, it kills the joy of discovering for myself what my burgeoning sense of the truth is in the story.
I believe the ethic George is trying to have us embrace in Story Club is one of not whether we understand the story rightly or wrongly, but to cultivate a willingness to keep reading and to continue to develop our growing skill and ear for getting a story in a way that makes sense to us. Each time we read a story, we read it anew. As this act of rereading is completed we may come away with multifaceted, and even contradictory ideas, about the meaning of a story.
Yes. You are right. And you DEFINITELY don’t have to agree with me.
I am really enjoying your enlightening comments, Kate.
Thank you!
Thanks, Kate! Especially for your generosity in accepting the feedback.
I don’t, at least at this still early stage in our reading, see the elderly peasant woman as superfluous Jacky. Without her where would the story be? No first goose, literal or symbolic, for our narrator?
But, btw, aren’t we getting way ahead of where we are meant to be focusing our close attention? No mention of either an old woman or a gandering goose in Pulse 1.
Nice talkin’ Jacky.
You've already demonstrated "the stories are still around" maxim for me. After watching the Ken Burns Hemingway documentary, which went out of the way to avoid asking some hard questions and apparently couldn't find anyone under 60 to comment on his work, I was thinking he was passe (but for his writing advice, which is timeless). The cat story showed me otherwise.
No!
Love all Carly's songs. I've just been listening again!
Ha! He does not. That I recall.
Well. He does. And it’s not just a goose…
All I can think about is we almost got a TV show by George, directed by Hiro Murai.
Damn.
Believe me, I think about that a lot too. :)
Why didn’t we get the TV show?
We did. It was on Amazon Prime, I believe. Quite lovely.
Just the pilot and then they didn't pick it up. There are some clips on YouTube...
Well, I remember enjoying that, at least.
Gut punch
We still get Escape from Spiderhead :)
The first pulse lets us know that the division commander is a violent, grandiose sociopath (who has eyes that glint with joy after demanding an inferior destroy the enemy and motivating him with threats of personally murdering him if he fails), but also that our narrator is seduced by his brutal power (he marvels at his beautiful huge body, taking in his cool, sweet perfume and describing his legs like girls in shiny jack boots). I learn that the commander gets to order others to do the dirty work while staying clean and fresh himself, and that the narrator doesn't seem to be judging him poorly for that fact, the opposite of my own reaction. The commander uses only his pen to write the violent decrees filled with threats, and slaps around his whip for effect. We learn that the narrator is not repulsed by the commander, but enamored of him. Also, we see that the commander has contempt for the four-eyed "pansy" he takes the narrator to be. His assertion to the commander that he can "get along", despite his glasses and learning, prepares me for his later choice to act violently in a specifically misogynist way, per the suggestion of the quartermaster, in order to be accepted by the guys. This first paragraph, filled with so much feminine imagery in such a hyper-masculine and violent setting, helps link us to the conclusion, when the narrator is literally sleeping with violent men, while dreaming of women, and imagining the evening laying motherly palms on his forehead. And of course there's the pivot moment in the middle, where beating an old lady and drawing blood are the price for receiving manly love of other manly men. I know, George, you said stick to the first pulse, but the first pulse front loads everything that spools out going forward. I guess that's one of the lessons of a great story. Stone Boy did this as well with Pulse 1.
What Susanna said with two further observations. The four-eyed pansy appears to know what he will encounter and know in a general sense what he will have to do to fit in. There is a knowing deliberateness to his statement “I can get along.”
The theme of communism and hero worship (at the beginning and later) appear to provide the context (or justification?) for the narrator’s cruelty - at least by implication. So there is a certain naivety that runs counter to the knowing deliberateness.
So we have a well-educated young man with a Machiavellian ability to manipulate people who hero worships a movement and the strong men in it. That’s terrifying.
Really rich, considered and thought provoking post Susanna. Having said which I shall say just that we are reading the same story but seeing it differently.
For example where you, as you read it, see 'our narrator is seduced by his brutal power' that is not how I see it. What I see is a narrator who, faced with Savitsky, dare not say or show what he is really thinking . . . he's waited until he can dare put words on a page to caricature and satirise the bullying braggart that attempts - in Pulse 1 - to cruelly belittle him. If there is a pansy in the room it is not, in my reading so far, the narrator but the perfumed and cool soaped Commander of the 6th Cavalry Division.
I'm thinking, more strongly than ever, that what makes a classic short story - such as 'My First Goose' is, I'm realising - classic is being capable of being read and interpreted quite differently by different readers.
Rob, I agree with your interpretation as well. I think it's possible for our narrator to tell himself he's exercising his powers of satire against the bully and braggart, and yet, on some level, to * also* feel pulled to accept his version of what it means to be manly, and capitulate to that when worn down far enough. There's a paradox here; it takes real strength and courage to *not* be violent in his world at this time. As a Jew, he was a target, and might have felt his choices were limited. It reminds me of the Tim O'Brien story/essay describing his decision to go to Viet Nam instead of Canada showing his cowardice, because he was afraid of the judgement of his family and townsfolk if he chose to refuse to fight. It also reminds me of MLK Jr on non-violent resistance, and the courage it takes. Thank you, Rob, for your analysis, and sharing another facet of the diamond on this classic story.
Wow, Susanna, that is some great in-depth analysis. Thank you!
I've found this to be a tremendously helpful strategy when suffering from *Writer's Block*(!!!) Take a story I love, break its beats or pulses down into a simple and objective choices/effects, then take those pulses and use them as the framework for a new story with new characters and situations. Essentially stealing the skeleton of another story and then dressing it up in new flesh and clothes. I also think it's an extremely useful way to deeply understand a story you already love, as was pointed out here and in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.
Many of the commenters above have already done a masterful job of dissecting the first pulse and the narrator’s introduction into a society that values brute strength and violence over intellect and learning. There are a couple of things I would like to add that haven’t been mentioned... first, there is quite a bit of humor in this first pulse that creates an almost absurdist tone: Chesnokov (who is being sent off to either slaughter or be slaughtered) is loosely translated as “garlic” and the region he is being sent to is loosely translated as “pot of good vodka.” Second, and most important, there is the subtext of anti-semitism. The narrator isn’t just an intellectual with glasses, he is also a Jew so being accepted into his new surroundings requires a level of brutality that compensates for both “shortcoming”. My kids’ math professor, a Russian Jew, was a boxer at a young age and he would often explain that he had to learn how to box, and box well, for his own survival. He had to prove to the anti-semites and anti-intellectuals that he could take them down. It’s also not a a coincidence that the narrator eats pork at the end of the story. He has to prove that he’s not a real Jew, or at least not “that kind” of Jew.
I had commented elsewhere that I saw the narrator pushing the old woman with glasses as a form of self-rejection, but I completely missed the fact that he had eaten pork. Thank you so much for pointing that out.
And yes that comical tone, mixed with brutality (and such lovely language to describe it) really creates such an unsettling effect... There is cruelty. There are fart jokes. A man just wants to read his paper. It's absurd. I can't help but think, war itself must truly feel absurd at times for those who are there on the ground, fighting them.
Yes. Especially when one is dancing at the edge of oblivion. (Shades of Vonnegut and Joseph Heller.)
Ah Vonnegut! An all-time favorite.
Somehow I came across a month ago on YouTube a symposium from the 1990s with Heller, Vonnegut and Styron speaking about writing war. The world stopped while I listened to them.
Oh Lord! I must find this, right away.
Should be easy. Sorry I suck with copying links.
Forensic addition to this process of opening and widening our eyes to what's going on in the story we have laid on the dissection slab. It's only Pulse 1 but I think that our narrator is going to show us why, for many people, nurturing a chameleon capability has been key to their ability to survive, sometimes to thrive, in an environment that going to enable him to survive - or at least give him a sporting chance of surviving - in the brutalist company of Savitsky and his troops. First priority survive, whatever it takes; secondly, having survived, execute his own orders; thirdly, at a remove in time and distance, take revenge cold with a pen not a sabre. Does this point of view stack up?
Thank you for those translations!
Thank you for the translation to reveal even more layers!
I am terrible with details. How did you know he was Jewish?
Because he ate the pork I didn't think he was. Though it now makes sense why he'd ask the old woman to make something else for him.
It’s not actually in the story itself but the short story collection is based on Babel’s diary and actual experiences with the narrator serving as Babel’s alter-ego. I believe that the narrator is also identified as Jewish in other stories in the collection.
Thank you for filling the gaps for me :)
First thoughts on Pulse One:
Babel starts off his story by showing us the manner in which the narrator received his assignment. Among his many choices for recounting this moment, Babel could have had his narrator receive papers in the mail. Or, he could have been handed his papers in a quiet office by a kindly, elderly statesman. He could have gone to an office to volunteer. Babel could have skipped this scene altogether and begun with our narrator walking with his trunk. And on and on. But, no. None of those would be indicative of where this story is going—of what its purpose is. And so Babel’s choice is to start his story—which is about an outsider—by establishing immediately the narrator's outsider status. To do this, he presents a Commander who is much larger in physical stature than our narrator, who is highly decorated, who is mad with power, whose eyes dance when signing an order of destruction, who calls our narrator a pansy and a little louse. And all of this points in only one direction, which can be found at the end of Pulse One when the Commander asks, “Think you’ll get along do you?” In this way, Babel says “Jew” without saying “Jew.” For this is a story of a Jewish man being thrown to the wolves and seeing if he can survive.
And that is the crux of it—the story’s purpose. Will the narrator “get along”? And if so, how will he do it? What will he have to sacrifice?
He really does go right to it doesn't he Mary in 'establishing immediately the narrator's outsider status'. Just taking another pass across this Pulse 1, and the online conversation it has sparked, and I'm marvelling at the way in which, in my evolving reading. Isaac Babel does this 'establishing'.
I'm not 'liking' it, because George or anyone else happens to; rather I'm liking it because I thinking, based on the words in Pulse 1 alone, that the writing is sublime (not a word I allow to trip lightly of my tongue); but I will take this opportunity to acknowledge that my realisation of just how good this story is - as a short story and as an exemplar of just what the short fiction can achieve - because of the points of view, insights and practical 'tools' that George has, so far, offered to us ( I was going to write 'me' but have deliberately opted for the more inclusive 'we'; while recognising that the way I'm experiencing Story Club is not, nor should it be, congruent with others' present perspectives.
Here's a question I'd like you to respond to Mary, within the confine and constraint of the words the reader sees and processes in Pulse 1: just how do you come to the view that 'Babel is saying "Jew" without saying "Jew"?
No reason others, coming to the same view shouldn't chip in on this?
Why, in reading Pulse 1, should any of us reading it land on the view that the narrator is a 'Jew' rather than an Afhgan, or an American, or an Armenian, or an Australian, or an Austrian?
Which words, in this short-short story lead readers, inexorably, to the view that the narrator is a a 'Jew'?
Hi Rob. Quick answer here as I am out of town for a long weekend with old friends. But in reference to your question: It's possible to read a story and know absolutely nothing of the context in which it was written or by whom. But often, we read a story knowing the time frame when it was written and the background of the person who authored it. If we don't have this information, an interested reader many times will do a bit of research in order to further understand a story. In the case of Babel, he is famously a Jew. His stories are about being Jewish. He is a Russian Jew, born in the Ukraine region and everything he writes reflects his identity and his politics. In this story, it is clear that the narrator is a Jew, not only because we know Babel, but because he drops hints that help us do this sort of identification. The eyeglasses, his education, his outsider status--these are clues to the narrator's Judaism. There is no other reason for these clues to be in the story. Gotta run but i hope this was helpful.
Brill response Mary but, so it seems to me, projected onto the story from knowledge and insight extraneous to the words in this, first pulse.
Yes, absolutely. If you knew nothing about Babel or about the sorts of hints he gives, you would not be able to ascertain that the narrator is Jewish.
And that is surely the marvel isn't Mary . . . that readers 'ignorant' of wider context are offered a short story to enjoy, savour and find increasingly thought provoking with each re-reading.
Yes Mary I can go with your crux.
I can offer back where reflecting on why George might have put the words 'Divided Self' into his heading on 'My First Goose' Post 1 took me to: the ideas in R D Laing's eponymous book (from a psychological perspective) and Emile Durkeim's concept of 'Anomie' (from a sociological perspective). Neither may have been in George's mind but reaching back to reading (rather superficially, I should make clear) about both way back in the day seem to help with making sense of this character, who is I think an educated Jew but whose name I do not yet know and won't in the confines of 'My First Goose'.
Once again, thank you for your perceptive cut to the chase.
Thank you, David. Felt weird to re-post, but oh, well... I love that we're analyzing this one pulse by pulse.
Yes. The deeper the better.
oh, my word! I found the thread, but it's gonna take me a bit to get through it. Looks like a few of you were having a very good time!
I think Babel may have chosen to fulfil the purpose of this first “pulse” in the way he did because he wanted to accomplish several things as concisely as possible.
• Put us in a world of brutality – Savitsky’s ordering Chesnokov to destroy the enemy or be destroyed himself, and that his “eyes were dancing with joy” as he makes the order.
• Introduce the question of what kind of person the narrator might be and of how others see him. The narrator marvels at the beauty of Savitsky’s “gigantic body” and envies “the iron and flowers of his youth”, and then, by this very man that he’s marvelling at and is envious of, he is described as a pansy, and that his glasses will result in him getting “cut to pieces”.
• This question of who the narrator might be leads to the possibility of conflict – will he be cut to pieces because of his glasses? Is he a pansy? Babel has raised the question and we want to find out what happens next.
How he does this is with language that inspires me to see what is possible. His description of Savitsky in both how he looks and how he smells is striking, and then this line. “His legs looked like a pair of girls clad in shoulder-length jackboots.” This sentence floored me. I don’t know what it means, but this kind of idiosyncratic description is fascinating and invites me not only to find out what happens next, but how this writer is going to describe it.
“His legs looked like a pair of girls clad in shoulder-length jackboots.”
Leaving meaning aside for the moment the imagery wreaks of kind of corrupting decadence that was Christopher Isherwwod captured and conveyed in the text of the story that was adapted so brilliantly to stage and screen in 'Cabaret'. Herman Goering and Savitsky, brutal but preening military top brass as they were might, conceivably, have 'enjoyed' comparing notes on which perfumes and cool soaps they preferred.
Now Story Clubbers, if there illustrators amongst us, why not turn to your pens, colour sticks and papers draw this Savitsky as you picture him?
Cool idea. It’s goes directly to what the author is trying - draw a picture for us.
Love this duality that you share, so simply, Paul: you are, always and ever, free to create an image that is 'right' in your mind or to 'write' words that express what, is your mind, what you mean to be understood.
I'm thinking that Steve Bell, and his Cartooning Ilk, would - if they haven't already - make hay with crossing outlandishly larger than life Savitsky with one arse shorter than being anywhere near tall Putin.
"Long live the free right to satirise powerful personages without fear of invoking and falling foul of State Persecution, most malign."
"Nah, Man. Too wordy, cut the chase, give me the slogan that will cut through, cut through even to the most closed of aging Russian's minds. Give it me NOW!" said . . .
For what it's worth, my model is structured very differently :) This piece took me longer than usual to get into and I had to work hard for it to open up its secrets to me (so I was grateful for the extra (extra) time I had with it). After all of this reading and reflection, the thing that stood out most to me was the theme of division/duality - it's almost oppressive in that first pulse with Savitsky (introduced with the 'gigantic beauty' and the 'decorations hammered into his chest' (the medals both a nod to pageantry and war) and neatly summed up by the 'iron and flowers of his youth') and continues throughout the story to the very end.
My one-liner summary is: a man becomes one of learning *and* violence
And from this, my model (which centres on this theme/conundrum), asks not 'why does Babel show the narrator getting his assignment in this way?', but 'why does Babel introduce this reflection on division/duality in this way? Why start with Savitsky (and not, for example, the Cossacks)?'
In this model, the pulses look like this:
1. Savitsky
2. Quartermaster
3. Cossacks (close - 'not one of us') - making fun
4. Landlady and Goose
5. Cossacks (at a distance - 'our kind of lad') - sitting around their pot
-- [Break - went out, came back]
6. Cossacks (close (reversal of attitude) - 'join us') - eating
7. Cossacks (close (reversal of reversal) - 'they join him') - reading Lenin
8. Conclusion - what it means to hold two contradictory realities in one person - legs tangled
I'm really interested to see whether the two different models lead to the same answers, or whether they uncover different but convergent ideas...
I'm also wondering whether approaching this deconstruction from a thematic perspective/starting point is dangerous? What if I've misconstrued the author's theme? Is it better to focus on the facts (as they were)? Or can you slice and dice a story to its component parts however they present themselves to you?
Looking forward to the next few weeks!
Your question of why start with Savitsky was brilliant. Your point about the medals also sparked a better view. I have been reading Freud recently. His 1919 Uncanny essay seems useful as one layer to The First Goose. From this first pulse the reader is unsettled, uncertain, about the scene. The commander does not seem fully natural, he 'rose', 'cut the sky in half' (to me like a pagan god), those girls as legs. And every scene after that, under a dying pumpkin sun, then a cheap earring moon, seems like another unnatural trigger to unease. Your analysis identifying the manifold duality is the primary work. My niche uncanny pursuit is grateful for this insight.
Hi, Alfred, I am not sure if I actually sent a reply yesterday or not. Just in case, I thank you for the suggested article on Red Cavalry. I do have access to jstor. Also, back to Freud, and I do feel more naturally disposed toward Jung, but Freud is so epic like Game of Thrones. In _Radical Hope_ by philosopher Jonathan Lean who is admired for his discussions about Freud lays out how cultural collapse feels. He profiles Crow Chief Plenty Coups and Plenty Coups' statement about end of history once he moved to a reservation. A form of that can be seen once the narrator joins the Cossacks in My First Goose. How can the narrator value anything that happens next. Freud's framework, for me, convincingly addresses that experience.
Mikhaeyla, I love the way you are thinking about this!
Thanks :) I kind of came to it by trying to puzzle out the line where Savitsky 'cut the hut in half' (which is echoed again, not much further along, when he 'cleaved the air with his whip' (which strangely was not included in another translation I read)). And both of those instances, together with the very pronounced duality in the commander, got me wondering about the harsh lines of division within ourselves, where we can paradoxically carry softness and openness in as equal measure as we carry intolerance and cruelty).
My favourite instance of the duality, however, is this line: "...and caught, rejoicing, the mysterious curve of Lenin's straight line" - because in that instance, we see the paradox and conflict and maybe hypocrisy? of this situation where we are two opposite things in one body.
Great insights on some lines I didn't understand. Thanks!
I love the translation George provides here because it is lyrical and there is deeper beauty on a sentence level, but I found this translation much easier for helping me to get a grasp on the story: https://tikvahfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Isaac_Babel-My-First-Goose.pdf. I think the translation that George gives us provides a richer experience once you already get the gist of the story and some of its more obscure elements (which I struggled with for a while!)
Thank you Mikhaeyla for uploading the translation by Peter Constantine. I have that collection as well. Always grateful to read as many translations of a work if possible.
Thank you for posting that translation. I found that helpful as well.
That’s so interesting—as in the way communism was supposed to save everyone, bring us into community once more, but the more they tried to make it work, the worse things got. As in sometimes when we try to be good, our terrible side emerges instead. Much to ponder; thank you!
And I too am fascinated with the “curve of Lenin’s straight line.”
I enjoy looking at the different translations - it's like watching different actors play out the same scene, each with their own interpretation and unique flourishes. I do, however, wish (and not for the first time) that my grandfather had taught my father to read/write/speak Russian, or that I had taken it upon myself when I was younger to learn and reconnect with that part of my heritage. It would be wonderful to read the original text...
Are there 'sub-pulses' within 'pulses' . . . or is that going way too granular?
I don't see why not? Particularly if they are, as George says, 'units of meaning'. You could definitely have overlapping pulses (if you dissected the story, in this morgue of ours, along different axes)...
'Let us go then Mikhaeyla, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like our latest story patient etherized upon a table;'
Thank you Mikhaeyla, you reassure me that I am merely barmy, not yet barking mad. So now . . .
'Let us go and make our visit, to be
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.'
What playful fun we are afforded by simply participating in Story Club.
I can understand why George wanted to call it the Story Morgue - I feel like we are treading Da Vinci's footsteps as he did his autopsies to further his art...
Nice. Yes. Imagery to savour Mikhaeyla.
Leonardo and All Inquisitive Purely Anatomical and Forensically Applied Pathologists who have joined his Ilk followed along in his Wake have gone where I , nor most of us, would ever go . . . but how we have advanced on the fruits of their scientifically creative endeavour(s)!
It seems apparent, from sampling and reading posts in this and across previous threads, that analytical dissection is not to quite to the taste of everyone, here present. Yet to other others, myself included, creative dissection along the lines that George suggests is - if not THE then - ONE of the very essences of creating creative short fictions.
We've been given, a few Newsletters back now, a fascinating window onto Charles Dickens' writing process Mikhaelya. Do you think that Dickens may, just possibly, have have viewed his writing and revising of 'A Christmas Carol' as as a process of breathing life into a literary cadaver until the point where it, suddenly, becomes 'publishable'?
For me, even the story's title does significant work to set the tone. It is the narrator's FIRST goose. There will be more! And will they all be (gulp) geese?
It was a wonderful limb, and I'm glad Nancy encouraged you to go on. Here I was just about to offer some different titles. "So you like Chekhov's 'Lady With the Little Dog,' huh? Why not try 'First Love?' How about something else (also brutal, but shorter) from Red Cavalry? Here's 'Crossing the River Zbrucz.' That one's given me nightmares." Like a pusher trying to give you a little taste, just to get you through that Babel door :)
Oh yes, it seems cruel and also necessary that we're reading from Babel's Red Cavalry right now. I feel like I'm holding my book at a distance and looking at it from the side of my eye. Still painful. Maybe this one for you instead, then: https://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/spring-2009/masterpieces/guy-de-maupassant-isaac-babel
"No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place." Sigh.
(I also looked for "At Grandmother's" but came up short. Maybe you'll have better luck than me!)
Hi Alfred-P, you're very kind. Story Club is such a wonderful place and I sincerely enjoy the variety of perspectives and voices here. I'm just so stinking happy to be able to participate in something like this! I'm here as a reader, and so I know I'll go about things differently from those who are studying these stories as writers, looking under the hood to see how things run. So if my beloved, um, car was taken apart before my eyes . . . I'd probably feel a little distressed too. Glad KB is still gifting us with her insights (and yes, so often wonderfully phrased!). You've gone out on a limb as well. And really, each and every one of us who is putting ourselves out here . . . well, it takes a bit of courage, doesn't it? Someone elsewhere described these comments as sending out a message in a bottle, and it's the perfect description for me: hitting post and not knowing how your words will be received, or even if they will at all. Sorry, it's late here, so I hope I'm making sense. I think my entire point was something like: we should all be gentle with each other.
I like that you're spreading it out for the story's sake but also because I want to better know who is here and what we think and feel.
In this expanding approach, perhaps we can include discussions about the translation's compositions and how that transforms the story? Dralyuk's sentences are such a joy they're visceral.
It feels like that collection's going to be a book for readers to love and a primer for writers fascinated with language and with making the sentence a thing of beauty.
Yes, please - and in what's coming (what I've written of it so far) I am trying to offer alt versions of different sentences and so on. Very valuable to look at this way, I think.
I am interested in the question of translation. I have an older translation (by Walter Morison), and I'm intrigued by the differences between it and Dralyuk's version. If word choice is critical in a work, as written by the author in the original language, then what does that mean for word choice in a translation? No answers here, just questions.
So, George, you mentioned in a recent post this idea of the "load-bearing" moment which is the key to a story's identity. Would you call the one-line "Hollywood Version" the story's identity? Hence we need to look at how each scene not only moves the story along, but how it plays with/reinforces/resonates that identity? Which also would, perhaps, help us to find that load-bearing moment in our own work? This exercise feels very important.
Yes, exactly. And maybe the thought that as we revise, we're seeking that identity. (?)
Would you say that this "Hollywood Version" is the same as a logline?
I think so? Maybe w slightly more emphasis on the fine moral nuance. But very possible I used “Hollywood Version” because I didn’t know the word “logline.” 🙄
What an overhaul our vocabularies are, as a by product of simply communicating, being treated to or stretched by.
I think a lot of a story's force comes from how our (the reader's) understanding of this longline/HV develops as they read, perhaps on a sentence to sentence basis. I think of Alice Munro, perhaps in Meneseteung, how so often distorts the reader's perception of the story's frame in order to reach higher and higher orders of meaning. That said, I had trouble distilling this story in that way--
Yes. Thank you—this is exactly what I need for a tory I'm working on right now.
I am so grateful for a chance to learn how to get inside Babel's stories.
This struck me as powerful - the translation works on me much better than an old translation I have in a book I'd dipped into before.
The inner truth of the story rings painfully true: what is at stake here? Survival in a male society.
Specifically the narrator who shows signs of being from outside the brutal norms of male society - glasses implies academic, implies weak - who must therefore work out how to be accepted into the inside of one such system.
The story depicts a horrible perversion of the way social acceptance ought to be won: ought in the moral sense, and ought in the logic of story world. The latter is, I would say, a complete success - the story chooses a more interesting path than: he fights one of the Cossacks and wins their admiration in combat, or through force of personality [hero overcomes adversity through strength]. But this isn’t cheap music.
The moral world - who would argue that this is how we ought to win favour through crushing the weak and defenceless and already defeated? But is this how we win favour? Oh yes. In male society, still now in male friendship groups in comfortable western schools of the 21st century, this is indeed how the rules often work. Not how they ought to work, but how they do.
And… I write this observation as news lands of Russian bombs striking a Maternity and Children’s hospital in Mariupol.
Might I ask (and I really really really do not know the answer or even have a way to think about it I'd feel confident in): is it enough that this story depicts the awful truth and soul-rending of one who gains entry to this brutal world? Or, is there a moral imperative to go further, and to explore the truth for those that remain outside, who are in turn brutalised and suffer unimaginably?
I think we are also challenged by Babel to think about this concept of male society norms in the way that Savitsky is described. Sure, he is an outsized character of physical size and medals of valor and/or accomplishment but Babel also weaves in the narrators observations of how meticulous and clean this man of war appears with long legs equated to a girls. So, while intellectualism within the story is being addressed as weak, I wonder if Babel is not metacognitively playing with the irony of this Character's appearance of show. Maybe this is the moral imperative that we need to address: the men who mete out the orders of violence versus the men who exist in the violence.
Great distinction; thank you!
Niall, That’s a great question. Consider that maybe I see something of myself in the narrator and that recognition (the easiness of casual cruelty) may do more to change my perspective than any description of the old woman’s pain. Pain is easy to see. The small steps we take that corrupt the soul are much harder to recognise. We can only shine a l focused beam of light on a small slice of life.
Here's a terrible thought that strikes as I read this: could there be Russian Jews serving, forced as conscripts, in the Russian horde that is ravaging Ukraine today? A day when it has, according to reports in what I consider reliably accurate and responsible media, been decreed that any Russian who speaks out or mutely protests against the 'Special Military Operation' being conducted in Ukraine is by definition not a Russian! What strategies will ordinary Russian people have to adopt in order survive and at what mental and moral cost to themselves? What inner conflict to be faced with!
I don't think there is a moral imperative to go further. The story is what it is. We follow the threads to their conclusion. Babel doesn't owe the reader anything more.
Great questions; thank you!!
The description of Savitsky is fantastically bonkers. “the decorations hammered into his chest,” “cut the hut in half, as a banner cuts the sky,” “His long legs…like a pair of girls clad in shiny shoulder-length jackboots.” It’s apotheosis crossed with the absurd, the ridiculous and the sublime. He’s heroic and erotic and terrifying. Reminded of Plath’s “Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.”
It sets the tone in an amazing way. The tone and pacing of this first pulse are lively and brisk, and read almost like satire or comic opera. Dr. Strangelove maybe. But extreme violence and brutality are also introduced up front. To me, the almost comical tone makes the underlying menace feel even more ominous and unsettling. You feel the terrible vulnerability of the narrator, and that something awful could happen to him at any moment.
This story was my introduction to Babel, knew nothing about him. I too had that reaction to the beginning, the first pulse, fanastically bonkers. The tone, couldn't say where it was going, though if Savitsky wasn't human, the narrator was.
For me, because it's closer to home probably, I saw the Irish in him. The ability to survive in unbearable situations. It reminded me of a story my uncle, the son of western Irish immigrants, told me of WWII. He was captured by the Germans and was put on a death march, months long. He told me the story one night quite late, when I was staying with him for a few weeks while getting settled in LA. How he survived it, his strategy. It was a story like this one in tone. He made no apologies, no shame no guilt no blame. He was just telling what happened. He had pretty acute observations about who, like himself, survived, and who did not.
This story reminds me his story, his telling me this story, it needs to be written down.
I would love to read it! Thank you, Joyce.
Can’t wait!
So well put Mia. To pick up on your point, the complex attraction, terror and revulsion conveyed by the narrators wonky description reveals the feelings that MAKE him vulnerable to Savitsky’s charms.
That vulnerability sets the foundation for the narrators transformation.
Thank you, Mia, for saying so much; you, and Sylvia.
Well, thank you. As to the painting, I had thought of Picassos Harlequins as more gentle trickster/artists than savage. But maybe there is something cubist or surrealist in Babel's portrait? Maybe more Dali than Picasso, with the legs like two entire other people. Interesting thought!
I am loving all this Babel-inspired poetic, artistic, psychological and archetypal musing. One huge reason I love reading Isaac Babel is that I have never read anything else quite like him before now. (Another sign of his greatness, I think, is the intellectual power surge taking place in this group of readers and writers.)
My first reaction to the story content was disgust. And then fear as I tried to think of a war time situation, and how everything changes, and how to preserve yourself above others, and where to align your loyalties. The handsome man, leader, commander, with his clean perfume and sweet smell of soap! Power endears one. The old woman with her strange eyes creeped me out, her presence like conscience. And the poor goose who took the full brunt of everything that was wrong. A small scene in a lawless war, thats all it takes to throw everything that we hold true. Brutal. That coward who narrates it all, could well have been me, had to look at that squarely.
This has totally clarified for me how to do the “elevator pitch” for my historical novel: leave out the history! Get to to the human emotional heart of it. So obvious, now I’ve seen your example!
As far as I know there are enormous groups of people, throughout the world, who each day earnestly commute to a Department of War and clock in and do their job. There also are plenty of war colleges available for those who want to be educated and learn the subject. Books, too, like the The Art of War, ancient as a religious text, in which we acquire with the zeal of testimony the variety of ways in which we can defeat, demoralize, devastate our opponents. But despite all the effort to administrate, teach, and learn the subject, war to me seems an utter mobilization of failure, the point at which humans have quit the often difficult, complicated, frustrating effort to communicate and just said, essentially, Shut up or I effing kill you. Babel's initiation story feels to me one in which communication and language matter. The narrator is some twerp with glasses, the college kid working in the warehouse for the summer, capable of reading, writing, thinking, feeling, and so when at the end of the first pulse Savitsky asks, You think you can live with us, this feels to me a profound and loaded question. In the first pulse, Babel seems to signal both the importance of language and communication and also that a choice will be made. It's striking that in the first passage, it's either the narrator describing Savitsky, or Savitsky himself speaking, which for me created a contrast: when Savitsky talks, he's shown to be a loud, coarse guy with a whip; but as the narrator describes Savitsky to us, the language is big and amped up. "Savitsky rose...a banner splitting the sky." We get what he wears, how he wears it, where he wears it, we even get a good sniff of him, and in all of the language we gain the perspective of how desirable Savitsky is to the narrator.
Yes, history has demonstrated how war is more often a miscalculation. Assumptions are made that don't always ring true leading to devastating consequences. In the first pulse of the story, Babel gives us that unforgettable contrast between Savitsky's speech and actions with his shiny boots and overwhelming scent. This reminded me of a scene from War & Peace, Volume III, Part Two, XXVI: The emperor Napoleon had not yet left his bedroom and was finishing his toilette. Snorting and grunting, he turned now his fat back, now his hairy, fat chest under the brush with which a valet was rubbing his body. Another valet, stopping up the vial with his finger, sprayed eau de cologne over the emperor's pampered body, with a gesture which said that he alone could know how much eau de cologne must be sprayed and where. Napoleon's short hair was wet and tousled on his forehead. But his face, though swollen and yellow, expressed physical pleasure: "Allez, ferme, allez toujours"*...he repeated, cringing and grunting, to the valet rubbing him. An adjutant who came into the bedroom to report to the emperor how many prisoners had been taken in yesterday's action, having said what he had to say, stood by the door waiting for permission to leave. Napoleon, wincing, gave the adjutant a frowning look from under his eyebrows. "Point de prisonniers," he repeated the adjutant's words. "Ils se font démolir. Tant pis pour l'armée russe,"** he said. "Allez toujours, allez ferme," he said, hunching up and presenting his fat shoulders to the brush.
*Do it hard, keep going...
**No prisoners...They're getting themselves annihilated. So much the worse for the Russian Army.
Bravo for this! Enlightening!