`The Most Interesting Five Minutes'

Last year, novelist Jerome Charyn published Savage Shorthand, a book that reveals its purpose in its first sentence: “It’s the one book I have two copies of.” Charyn refers to The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, the one with the Milton Glaser cover of three Cossacks on horseback, an obvious reference to Babel’s most famous work, Red Cavalry. It sits on my shelf, too, and it’s the first Babel I read, sometime in the late 60s. I still hold a memory of reading it on a city bus in Cleveland, crossing the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge westbound, going home, seated on the right side with the winter sun low in the sky. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Babel’s work is filled with images of the sun likened to everything from an orange to a lopped-off head.

We need certain writers, especially their energy, at unexpected times. I was sick last week and missed two days of work, an unusual event that always makes me feel guilty. One of the advantages of deep reading is having a writer housed somewhere in consciousness that can answer almost every shift in mood – a sort of well-stocked literary pharmacy. For almost two days I wanted to read Babel and nothing else – “Di Grasso,” “Guy de Maupassant,” “The Sin of Jesus,” “The Story of My Dovecot,” and other familiar stories.

Charyn’s book is not scholarly or definitive, neither academic-style criticism nor conventional biography, nor does it claim to be. It’s a heartfelt homage, a love letter, and it’s easy to see Babel’s raffish energy in Charyn’s own fiction. He says each of Babel’s best stories “is like a land mine and a lesson in writing; it explodes page after page with a wonder that’s hard to pin down. The structure of the stories is a very strange glass: we learn from Babel but cannot copy him.”

We forget his best stories are literature and enjoy them like a cunningly elaborate fireworks display. First, astonishment. Only then do we ask, “How did he do that?” The accomplishment seems almost impossible when we recall we are reading a translation from the Russian. Babel’s prose is more exciting and precise than that composed my most writers of English.

Tolstoy, Babel wrote, “was able to describe what happened to him minute by minute, he remembered it all, whereas I, evidently, only have it in me to describe the most interesting five minutes I’ve experienced in twenty-four hours. Hence the short-story form.”

This helps us understand Babel’s devotion to the small in scale, to miniature epics, to prose in which not only adjectives but commas have been weighed. He read French (and Yiddish) and visited France, and his masters were Flaubert and Maupassant. There was no way he could have survived Stalin’s reign. Charyn writes:

“Babel’s `plumage’ – absolute belief in the cunning twists of language – was almost an attack on Stalin himself. He could have polished and polished with the purity of a Spinoza, be was still in some kind of fugue state…His existence had become a kind of Red Cavalry – a series of short takes with several narrators….”