Iron in the Heart

“But if all you want is to look in a mirror, why read books?

“Once upon a time, on a nudist beach, I saw a man sitting, naked, delightedly engrossed in an issue of Playboy.

“Just like that man, on the inside, not on the outside, is where the good reader ought to be while reading.”

That’s how Amos Oz concludes The Story Begins, his collection of lectures (translated from the Hebrew by Maggie Bar-Tura) about the beginnings of 10 novels and stories by, among others, Fontane, Gogol, Kafka and Chekhov. What I like about these three sentences, apart from their distinctly Jewish humor, is Oz’s faith in a “real” world behind a story’s artifice. Most of us already inhabit a house of mirrors and spend our lives preening. Superior fiction is one antidote to self-absorption and stunted imagination – a way, at least temporarily, to peer over the mirrors at the human swarm beyond. For so long as I dwell within Effi Briest, Major Kovalyov, the Country Doctor or Yakov Ivanov (the protagonists of the stories Oz cites by the writers above), living their triumphs and trials, foolishness and grace, I am at least tentatively letting go of smug self-importance. For that charmed moment, I am self-less. The moral sense begins in imagination.

Take a story not cited by Oz -- Isaac Babel’s “Guy de Maupassant.” It’s 1916 and the 20-year-old narrator, penniless and with a forged passport, is scraping by in Petersburg. He’s hired by Bendersky, a Jewish banker-lawyer who owns a publishing house, to help his wife translate Maupassant’s stories. Raisa’s French is hideous but her erotic allure is powerful. The narrator takes her “loose and lifeless” version and cuts through “the tangled undergrowth of her prose.” Clearly speaking for Babel, the young man writes:

“A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.”

This stands, at least by implication, as Babel’s artistic credo. He was a master not of the muscular O. Henry twist, or even of Chekhov’s muffled twist, but of the “almost invisible twist,” that subtle pinch of spice thrown in the soup. When the narrator returns his revision of Raisa’s translation, she’s stunned by the deft revitalization he has given her “loose and lifeless” words. Next comes the most famous sentence Babel ever wrote. On my shelves are three translations of the story. The first, by Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Solski, dates from the 1960 Meridian Books edition of The Collected Stories, with Lionel Trilling’s introduction. This is the version I first read, about 40 years ago, and here’s the sentence:

“No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”

Next is David McDuff’s 1994 translation included in the Penguin edition of Collected Stories:

“No iron can enter the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.”

Finally, here is Peter Constantine’s version from The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (2002):

“No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”

Clearly, McDuff’s is the muddiest (“full stop?”), the most blunted and least forceful, but even he makes it clear Babel is audaciously extending his credo by updating the old “pen-mightier-than-sword” chestnut. No spoilers here, but Raisa and the kid embrace, and together work on Maupassant’s “L’Aveu,” another tale of seduction. The narrator, however, later reads a biography of the great French writer and learns he went mad and died, age 42 (Babel, incredibly, made it to 45), of congenital syphilis. Babel’s narrator concludes the story like this:

“My heart contracted as the foreboding of some essential truth touched me with light fingers.”

New Criticism be damned, I can’t read “Guy de Maupassant” outside the shadow of Babel’s life and death. Early on the morning of Jan. 27, 1940, he was the first of 16 innocents shot by a firing squad in Butyrki Prison, Moscow. Had he written only “Guy de Maupassant,” with its trope of a pierced heart and its dense layers of meaning, he would still number among the great writers. Even in translation, his prose verges on poetry without turning rancidly “poetic.” Cynthia Ozick calls the story “a cunning seriocomic sexual fable fixed on the weight and trajectory of language itself.” This is true so far as it goes but Babel’s story goes further, fulfilling fiction’s capacity for magically extending a self into other selves, as described by Oz:

“In every one of these stories we are permitted something that is not allowed `outside’: not just a reflection of our familiar world and not just a journey into the unknown, but also the very fascination with touching the `inconceivable.’ Whereas, inside a story, it becomes conceivable, accessible to our senses and our fears, to our imagination and our passions.”