'He Was Obsessed with Literature'

“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.”