“I have never met anyone who looked with such intensity. He remained utterly calm; the expression of his eyes changed incessantly because of the play of muscles around them. He rejected nothing when seeing, for he felt equally serious about everything; the most usual as well as the most unusual things were important to him.”
Imagine a help-wanted ad in the newspaper. Someone seeks a writer, one with a nose for details, driven by curiosity. Hold
the résumé. Couple the character sketch above with a love of language and you
have the essential formula for a good writer of any sort, journalist or
novelist.
Elias
Canetti met Isaac Babel in Berlin in 1928, and knew him only briefly. In the third
volume of his autobiography, The Torch in
My Ear (trans. Joachim Neugroschel, 1982), Canetti, a mere twenty-three at
the time, devotes eight pages to a writer he knew casually, as a dinner and
tavern companion.
The passage
above reminds me of an anecdote in Antonina Pirozhkova’s memoir of her husband,
At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac
Babel (trans. Anne Frydman and Robert L. Busch, Steerforth Press, 1996). On
their first meeting, he asked to examine the contents of her purse, including
personal letters. He offered to pay her a ruble for each letter she let him
read. She laughed and agreed.
Major and
minor writers alike are snoops, undercover busybodies, spies in the lives of
others, voyeurs not exhibitionists, devoted to the trivial and private.
Systematically examining the contents of a woman’s purse – a woman you have just
met – seems as intimate as sex. Even minor writers, not just major ones like
Babel, know the little things in life are important. Babel, like Nabokov and
other Russian writers, is a master of detail. Canetti goes on:
“He took
literature so seriously that he must have hated anything vague and approximate.
However, my timidity was no weaker than his; I couldn’t get myself to say
anything to him about Red Cavalry or The Odessa Stories.”
Canetti died
on this date, August 14, in 1994 at age eighty-nine. I was working as a
newspaper copy editor at the time, and remember editing the wire-service story
reporting his death. I read it for deeper accuracy, fixing some of the fudged
details, wanting the readers to know Canetti, highlighting Auto-da-Fé and Crowds and Power.
Canetti concludes his sketch of Babel:
“Knowing what literature was, he never felt superior to others. He was obsessed with literature, not with its honors or with what it brought in.”
1 comment:
Patrick, your comment that writers are "snoops" reminded me of a story that Raymond Carver told at the memorial service for John Gardner I attended at SUNY Binghamton in 1982. Carver said when he was a student at Chico State College, Gardner allowed him the use of his office so Carver would have a place to write. Carver confessed that he used to go through Gardner's desk drawers and manuscripts, and took some of the names of Gardner's characters in unpublished works and used them in his own short stories. Perhaps a future literary parlor game to match the names in Carver's and Gardner's work!
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