"My First Goose," #3

A rather long post re Pulse #1

One of the unexpected pleasures of Story Club has been finding out how gifted and intrepid you are as a group.  Anything I’ve put in front of you, you’ve risen to the occasion.  So, with “My First Goose” – a story I’ve loved for a long time – I want to swing for the fences a bit, so that, by the time we’re done, we’ll have gone as deep with it as I tried to do with the stories in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

“War is over/if you want it!”

For the next few weeks, I’m going to try to alternate longer posts (in which we’ll work through the story pulse by pulse) and lighter posts - exercises related to that pulse, or to…things yet to be determined.  The idea is to give people who are interested enough time to read and digest the longer post.  If, for whatever reason, you’re not up for that level of intensity, no worries – the shorter posts will be there to occupy you while the rest of us go riding off into Poland, in excruciating detail, with Babel and the Cossacks.

So, let’s start working through “My First Goose” using, as our basis, the list of (alleged) pulses I identified last time, which went like this:

1)      Narrator gets an assignment (page 50 to middle of 51).

2)      He travels to the site, in the company of the billeting officer (51-top of 52).

3)      The Cossacks torment him, i.e., don’t accept him (rest of page 52).

4)      He meets, then abuses, the old woman and her goose (last few lines on 52, first eight grafs on 53).

5)      The Cossacks, reversing themselves, accept him (last three grafs on 53 to middle of 54).

6)      Conclusion (last three grafs on 54).

I want to first stress that I don’t think Babel would necessarily have thought of his story in this way and I doubt very much he composed it with this type of outline in mind. I don’t know how he wrote it (although more about this later).  For now, we’re just noting that the story can be broken down structurally like this, and then using that breakdown as a basis for discussion.

For your reference, here’s the picture of the text I posted last time, with my pulses indicated:

Mfg W Pulses

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In my last post, I mentioned Hollywood “tone” meetings  During these we would collectively ask, basically, “OK, we know that the purpose of the scene is this; now, how should we do it?” There’s the why of a scene and the how of it.  I sometimes think of the how part as the fun, decorative part; the thing I get to do, once I have settled on or discovered some meaningful advance in the story. (Although, of course, mostly, the why and the how are usually getting sorted through simultaneously.)

With this idea in mind, let’s do the first pulse: Narrator gets an assignment (page 50 to middle of 51).

So, the narrator, getting an assignment, must be getting it from someone – in this case, from a commanding officer.  So, we might ask:  Why this commanding officer?  (Babel was free to create literally any commanding officer.)  Now, we see from a footnote to the (Boris Dralyuk) translation we’re working with, that Savitsky is based on a real person, one Semyon Timoshenko.  But Babel still has to make this fictional representation, out of phrases and sentences and images and action, and these have to be apropos to the larger purposes of the story.  We might say he “gets no points” for (merely) accurately describing Timoshenko.  He gets points for the ways in which he exaggerates/distorts/uses whatever Timoshenko’s real-life qualities were, in order to make the character come alive on the page.

In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, I talked about the “Things I Couldn’t Help Noticing” (TICHN) cart.  The idea is that, as we read a story, certain things will stand out to us as excessive or non-normative – these are the excesses out of which the story makes its special meaning.  We “notice” these and, because a story is supposed to be an efficient little machine, we hope the story will end up using/responding to/accommodating these.

Here's what I notice in this first pulse, re: Savitsky: He’s big, exotic, powerful, scented (where did he get that scent and that soap, out here in the middle of nowhere?)  And then this: “His long legs looked like a pair of girls clad in shiny shoulder-length jackboots.” When reading a story in translation, I sometimes like to look at alternate versions, just for comparison’s sake. Reading these helps me get a feeling for the choices the translator has made, and a better sense of the root text. So, in another translation, by David McDuff: “His long legs were like girls clad to the shoulders in shining jackboots.”  In the version by Val Vinokur: “His long legs were like girls sheathed to the shoulders in shining riding boots.” (These are small differences - mostly differences in voicing — and more about this in a later post.)

What’s weird about this is that Babel is not saying that Savitsky’s legs look like a girl’s legs, but that they look like girls: his legs look like a pair of girls, each of whom is wearing boots.

So…we notice this. We notice this offbeat way of feminizing this powerful, masculine figure.  It’s not that he has girlish legs; he has legs that…are girls, sort of.  And this is a different Savitsky than one wearing loafers, or barefoot, or whose footwear was not described. We also notice that this description is….well, to me, it’s fun. There’s joy and verve and energy in the language. It’s a little freaky. Babel/the narrator is celebratory in that description. It’s not a first-order, realist, description, like, say, “The man behind the desk was wearing boots” (and there’s nothing wrong with that sentence; it’s just not what Babel did).

Anyway, we notice (at some level) the difference between that first-order, merely factual, version and Babel’s version. We might not, on first read, notice that we’re noticing this, but, again, at some level, I’d claim, we are, well…we’re treasuring it up in our hearts, putting it aside, adding it to our TICHN cart – it has become part of our evolving experience of the story and, if this turns out to be a good story, this description will, later, be felt as non-random and additive.  It will make the story’s meaning more complex and nuanced and specific. It will, actually, help it find its meaning.

A story is made up of these excessive moments of particularity; these are what make it distinctive.

We also notice that Savitsky is, let’s say, gleefully brutal (that smiling, that whip-slapping of the table).  He seems hyper, driven, intense: he adds a note to an order, in which he tells some guy named Chesnokov to destroy the enemy or, basically, he’ll be executed.  Some things he is not: mellow, doleful, patient, sad. (He could have been any of these, but isn’t.)

He is a very particular guy, made of excesses - excesses in his behavior, along with excesses in Babel’s way of describing these.

His eyes, as he turns them to our narrator, are dancing with “joy” (or “merriment,” in some translations) and we are told that he again “cleaved the air with his whip.”  In a story this short and finely written, we are always making connections.  We are relating one turn of language, or image, or action, or color choice, to others elsewhere in the story; these elements are cross-talking.  I’ll later connect these whip-thrashes with the narrator’s killing of the goose, somehow.  And I’ll feel that this action with the whip, spontaneous and violent, is done with joy, and that the killing of the goose…is not.

But if Babel hadn’t thought up and included that wild bit with the whip, there’d be nothing hanging in the air, that might then resonate with something still to come.

We celebrate in language to make more; to plow up elements and flavors that we will later use.

Many stories that fizzle out or can’t be finished are not detailed enough (not exuberant enough, or definitive enough) in their beginnings and middles.

We move on to page 51.  Our narrator is assigned to the divisional staff.  In the Dralyuk translation, Savitsky says, “Make it an order and issue him a soldier’s provisions – but he’ll take care of his own privates.” In McDuff, he is to be enrolled for “any delight except service at the front.”  In Vinokur, the orderly is told to “see to his every refreshment, except full frontal.” There’s quite a bit of variety here and, of course, we are necessarily missing the music of the original. And Babel is known as an exquisite stylist, so this is a real loss.

Here, it occurs to me to say (ask): If anyone out there can read Russian and has the Russian version, please consider recording a paragraph or two of you reading it in Russian, then send to me at storyclubwithgeorge@substack.com, and I’ll include in a future post, just so we can get some idea of what Babel sounds like in the original.

The narrator is then asked if he can read and write, and we note, in Savitsky’s response, this aversion to the narrator’s glasses.  He is “one of those pansies! And with glasses on your nose.  What a little louse!” (In the other translations, he’s a “milksop”/a “mangy little fellow” who stinks “of baby powder.”)

Wherever he’s headed, wearing glasses (being perceived as an intellectual) can get a person killed.  So, the stakes are high for this narrator, and suddenly I’m interested. 

And let’s never underestimate how important that phrase (“I’m interested”) is. Nothing happens in a story unless we keep reading, and we keep reading for the simplest of reasons.

This story, and all the stories in Red Cavalry come out of Babel’s experience of being a journalist embedded with a group of Cossacks during the Polish-Soviet war of 1918-1919, during which the Bolsheviks attempted to spread the revolution into Poland.  Babel, a Jew, like one of the recurring narrators of the book (the one we are with in this story), disguised his Jewish identity to “pass” as a Russian (i.e., a non-Jewish Russian) and serve as a correspondent. 

One of the big tensions of the book is that both the Polish nobility and this ostensibly egalitarian Revolutionary force that Babel is part of keep committing pogroms against the Jewish civilian population, as the fight surges back and forth across the countryside.  So, this puts Babel’s counterpart (who starts out as a true believer in the Revolution), in a terrible fix; he sees all of this terrible violence being committed against his people, people who remind him of his home and family back in Odessa. 

But we wouldn’t know this from this stand-alone story, and we don’t need to know it, really – we can just read him as “an intellectual” and, you know, a non-tough guy, who wears glasses.

But we might also note that he’s not, you know, a wilting intellectual. He’s interested in all of this war stuff. The highly stylized language enables a high level of detail in his descriptions of things, which, in turn, reads to me something like “youthful fascination in the things of the world.” He’s an energetic young guy, with an artistic, slightly high-strung mind - and this shows in the language he uses. Also, as some of you have pointed out, this aggressive, macho display by Savitsky, doesn’t faze the narrator: “I’ll get along,” he says.

We also note that he is both an intellectual, and aware that he is an intellectual, and doesn’t repent of it, even as he envies “the iron and flowers” of Savitsky’s youth. We can imagine, here, two less interesting narrators: the nerd who desperately wishes he wasn’t one, and the nerd who doesn’t realize how nerdy he is.

So, this narrator, already, is complicated; he’s presenting multiply, we might say.

This has the effect of slightly confusing our judgement-making mechanism. This, in turn, makes us watch him more closely. (“What sort of intellectual is this, anyway?”) Trying to figure him out, interested by the mixed signals he’s giving off, we lean in a bit.

So, here, in the middle of page 51, we’ve completed what I’ve called our first pulse, which we’ve said is: Narrator gets an assignment.

Comparing this pulse to the simplest possible version, the most stripped-down and literal (“I came into the main office and Savitsky, the commander, gave me my assignment”) we can see what else we’ve gotten.

We’ve got the stuff out of which the rest of the story is going to be made; the stuff that will, had we been Babel, writing it, would have helped us know how to finish it.

Approximately, we take away: those boots (that masculine/feminine conjoining); the happy violence of Savitsky; the fact of the narrator’s glasses; the knowledge that he is going into a potentially dangerous situation; his assertion that, yes, he can manage it. 

There are thousands of stories that might have started with the pulse Narrator gets an assignment but this has now become a very specific one.

The first pulse of “A Christmas Carol” is basically to establish the fact that Scrooge is stingy.  We learn, that he is cheap with the firewood at the office; he refuses the request of the men from the charity league; he chews out his good-hearted nephew (“Humbug!”).  His stinginess now having been established, this gives the rest of the story something to do.  Namely: try to change him. 

So, here I’ll return to our good old bowling pin analogy: in the early part of a story, the writer throws some pins in the air, and we hang around to watch her catch them.  These can be bowling pins of plot (here, the idea that the narrator is going somewhere dangerous, where he is going to have a target on his head) and they can also be bowling pins of flavoring – those little excesses of language and description and image and so on that serve to particularize the world.

Sorry for the long post here. I’ll have a short(er) one for you next time, with a little more discussion of this idea of a tone meeting. Then, in the next post after that, we’ll pick up with Pulse #2: He travels to the site, in the company of the billeting officer (51-top of 52).

A special shout-out to this guy, Evan Dunsky, our brilliant show-runner on Sea Oak, who first introduced me to this idea of tone meetings, and explained it to me in a way that got it into my artistic mind in a very powerful way. Thanks, Evan, for everything.

Evan Dunsky, pal, fellow Chicagoan, powerful writer and teacher.

Thanks for being here. This is a very good thing in my life and I hope it is in yours, too.