"My First Goose," #8

Pulse 3, Part 1.

Today let’s discuss Pulse 3: The Cossacks torment him, i.e., don’t accept him.

This pulse starts on page 52 of the Dralyuk translation, after, “I raised my hand to my cap and saluted the Cossacks” and ends at “…down a thorny path and couldn’t reach me.”    

This part of the story reminds me of a similar testing I got when I worked (briefly) at the Iowa Beef slaughterhouse in Amarillo, Texas, just after I came back from working in the oilfields in Asia.  I was working at Iowa Beef to put together enough money to get out of town.  I was what was called a “knuckle-puller.” These big old cow legs would come by on moving hooks and, like piranhas, we’d fall on them with our knives and hooks, extracting a certain cut of meat which we would then heave across the floor on to a moving conveyor belt.  Very glam!  Also strenuous – I was maybe 24, in decent shape, and yet would wake up the next morning completely sore, as if I’d been beaten up, and would have to run hot water over my hands to get them to open up so I could go back and start another glorious day.  It was freezing cold in there (so the meat would keep longer) and smelled like blood and we went around in chainmail, and the powers-that-were always sped the line up just before breaks and at the very end of the day.

Here, I was going to insert the obligatory slaughterhouse and then thought: WHY?

I got a lot of teasing along the “Hey, college boy!” line, and then, one day, one of the bigger guys asked me, there in front of the others, if I wanted to perform oral sex on him.  I replied that, no, no sir, thank you, I didn’t, no.  That was about all I could come up with at the time.  He was big, bare-armed, had his super-sharpened butcher knife in one hand (so sharp it would explode the skin if one accidentally brushed against it).  He’d been working there since he’d impregnated his girlfriend in high school, didn’t seem to have much to lose, was performing for the benefit of his fellow long-haul knuckle-pullers.  Later, of course, I thought of all sorts of brave, witty things I might have said but, in the moment, I mostly just didn’t want to get stabbed.  I could feel that very real fear in my body, along with – you know – the rest of my future life, calling alluringly out to me (“George, live to fight another day!  You want to someday get published, right?”).  But also – I knew I had to keep working there a bit longer, to get the needed money together.  So, in the event, I did all I could, in my tone of voice and my posture, to communicate that I found what he was asking to be kind of weird and that I wasn’t much fazed by it.  This seemed to be enough – I didn’t start crying, after all.  And after that, he pretty much left me alone. 

But I remember that incident every time I read “My First Goose.” The narrator has got to respond to the trunk-throwing and the farting or things are going to get worse for him.  And he’s going off to war with these guys, after all.  The test exists as a sort of first thrust, to explore how far the abuse will go; this may be the best chance our narrator ever has to get himself on a somewhat equal footing with these guys and, no slaughterhouse pun intended, save his hide.

So, here, at the bottom of page 51, we meet the promised, dreaded, Cossacks, “sitting on hay in there, shaving one another.”  As predicted, they…aren’t welcoming.  The trunk (the introduction of which was one of the things enabled by Pulse 2) now gets used: the “young lad with lank, flaxen hair” picks it up and flings it over the gate (i.e., out of the courtyard).   Then he farts in the general direction of the narrator.  An older Cossack joins the fun, by way of some energetic farting-narration, like some kind of revved-up sports announcer.  The narrator is reduced to crawling around the ground, collecting up his stuff.  We learn that some pork is cooking across the yard.  This makes the narrator hungry and homesick.  He lies down to do some reading and the Cossacks continue to bait and abuse him, stepping on his legs and making fun of him.  It seems they’re bent on denying him even this most private of pleasures. 

What can we learn from the way Babel handles this pulse?

One way I use the stories of the great writers is to compare the way I might have done something with the way it was actually done by the great writer.  I find that just letting those two versions (mine vs. the great writer’s) resonate side-by-side does a lot of useful work.  Somehow, the comparison enters the artistic body, informing my future attempts.  Or, you know: instructing me on the level of specificity and complexity and non-linearity that marks the writing of the greats.

So: if someone assigned you to write this pulse (“The Cossacks torment a guy”), and you’d never seen the Babel, what might your first attempt have looked like?

I read recently that the brain works like this: it makes a first draft of the situation at-hand (“We seem to be in a restaurant”) and, on that basis, assumes certain things (“Therefore, there’s probably a kitchen and a seating area and some restrooms”) and then begins to collect real-world data to hone these impressions (“Ah, there’s a mural of a pig in a baker’s hat – this may be a barbecue place?”). 

Apparently, and intriguingly, this process takes place from the back of the brain to the front. 

That is: the brain is just like a writer, revising.  Which may be one reason that stories are so dear to us and affect us so much and seem so deeply resonant – we are literally storytelling in every instant we’re alive.

Our first drafts can tend to be a bit simple – a bit too directly responsive to what we perceive to be the purpose of the scene (to the intention of the pulse, as we are currently understanding it).  We know too well where we are if we’ve been thinking conceptually and reductively about our story.  When I think about a story from outside of it (when not actively writing it, or before I’ve started it), this tendency is especially pronounced.  When, for example, I try to decide in advance how a scene should go, or how a story should end, or “what my story’s about” or “what I’m trying to say” with the story. 

The way we rough things up, and correct this over-simplification is, of course, by revising.

But, just for fun, here are some of my first-order thoughts on how I might have approached this pulse conceptually.

First, I bet my instinct would have been to frontload the menace and make it more on-the-nose.  (“Hey, four eyes!” a young Cossack yelled, and pushed me roughly to the ground.”)

I also might have been inclined to delay the abuse, in order to make it come in response to something the narrator does – maybe he right away sits down and tries to do some reading, and then the Cossacks respond to that.

But in the Babel, the Cossacks just leap right in.  They’re told, by the quartermaster, that he’s “suffered on the fields of learning” and that’s enough for them.  Also, charmingly (to me, anyway) there’s something a little, well, almost sweet about that initial abuse, compared with what I might have come up with – they don’t push him down or punch him or overtly threaten him, after all.  The young lad just tosses his trunk over the gate and farts at him.  The bad version might have been, you know – someone knocks him down, pulls a gun on him, punches out his teeth, crushes his glasses.  It’s almost as if they don’t take him seriously enough to beat him up; to fart at the likes of him is sufficient – at least as a first move.

Let’s brainstorm a bit here: why might this “lite” taunting be a better choice than something more overt and violent?  What possible faults does it sidestep?  What does it enable? 

We might also notice how rich this depiction of the narrator is.  His main quality is “menaced intellectual” but that’s not all he is.  He’s also a bit annoyed.  (Ever since that curt “I’ll get along,” he’s been nicely complicated in this way.)  It’s a lesser pulse, somehow, if only centered on the threat posed by the Cossacks (even though, yes, that’s the main energy of the pulse).  But that’s not all this narrator has going on.  He’s a menaced intellectual, yes, but he’s also a homesick menaced intellectual.  (A homesick, annoyed, menaced intellectual.)  That’s deep.  It’s interesting to me that a character who contains multiple motivations is a character we can’t look away from – we’re not sure how to read him, which is interesting.  This is a quality I find a lot of movie stars have.  From one angle they look attractive/handsome/beautiful and, a few seconds later, from another angle…not so much.  So I think our brain keeps wanting an additional glance, for clarification, which is, of course, exactly equal to “being interested in, or even fascinated, by.”  But, of course (as in all things artistic, faugh) we can’t go on AutoPilot here – simply cramming a character full of contradictory traits doesn’t quite do it.  As with this narrator, there’s a way in which those contradictions are additive; they make sense in the same package, we might say, and rather than feeling like a bunch of sentences, they create a viable human personality.  And, in this case, as mentioned above re the slaughterhouse anecdote, I can find a corollary of the character in myself – and so I am in, all the way in, the story.

When the narrator snaps, it’s not just to protect himself; it also communicates a human being taxed to the breaking point.  It seems he couldn’t have done otherwise.  His loneliness and exhaustion, combined with his fear, help push him over the edge – but isn’t that always the case, or often the case, when people resort to violence? 

What I really want us to notice is how three-dimensional this character is, even inf this very brisk and almost cartoonish (and I use that phrase in a praising way) piece.

So, the question (the eternal question) is: how did Babel do it?  Did he write and rewrite this scene over many weeks?  Just blurt it out? 

I don’t know.  In her memoir “At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel,” Babel’s wife, the engineer A.N Pirozhkova, described his working habits, although briefly and, for my tastes, a bit obliquely.  (I haven’t read the book in a while and don’t have it here with me, so this is from memory.)  But I remember a description of how Babel would pace around and around their dacha, every so often darting into a room where several piles of paper were spread out on a large table.  There he would quickly jot something down, then start pacing again.  She didn’t say whether these piles represented different stories, or different sections within a given story – but it seemed that a lot of his “revising” took place in his head, as he paced.  That’s the only clue to his process I’ve ever found, except the anecdote that friends would bring him their unpublishable manuscripts and he would spend a few minutes with a red pen, radically trimming the stories up, after which many would go on to be published.

Antonina Pirozhkova (who, in her work as an engineer, helped design the Moscow Metro) with Isaac Babel..

There’s also a wonderful anecdote in the book about how Babel hated talking about his work in public and, whenever they were at a party and he would get cornered by some fan, he would slip his wife a secret signal and she would rush over and change the subject.

The point here, maybe, is to underscore the distance between that sort of pre-writing conceptualization we all do (by which we hope to get around the problem of actually writing) and…the actual writing, which tends to produce bumpier surfaces, pleasingly less-linear plots, more width and breadth and life-likeness, by way of a method that it is entirely ours to determine, for ourselves, damn it. 

And also to underscore, one more time, that the real job is the doing of this sort of surprisingly nuanced writing, not the discussion of how we did it, or think it might, or must, be done. 

Next time, one more thought on this pulse.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Antonina Pirozhkova, who begins her book on Babel by saying, “I wish to restore to public memory certain features of a man endowed with great goodness of spirit, a passionate interest in people, and a miraculous gift for depicting them."