Page Two: Die Another Day
On the joys of creating, despite the hostile storms and vicious seas
By Louis Black, Fri., Jan. 4, 2008
It is ironic, perhaps, that two of my all-time favorite short story writers were two of the most careful wordsmiths in all literature. But perhaps not. I am given to gushing torrents of words, tumbling one upon another, rushing forward. Any attempt at nuance usually involves stacking adjectives rather than any kind of paring down. There is no implied or insisted-upon connection between artists one admires and one's own work. Still, the minimalist abundance found in the writing of Russian short story writer Isaac Babel and American hard-boiled-detective innovator Dashiell Hammett, in which more is achieved through less, is completely absent in my work.
Outside of literary circles, Hammett is undoubtedly the better known of the two, both because his novels The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon are still so widely read and because his works have been adapted into other forms of popular culture. The many screen adaptations of The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon, not to mention radio and TV variants, are well known. Still, it is fair to say that Hammett's first novel, Red Harvest, is the literary patriarch of the Yojimbo – A Fistful of Dollars – Last Man Standing cinematic bloodline. The Glass Key is not only one of the best American political novels but was filmed twice, as well as being the unacknowledged blueprint for the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing. All of this does not even begin to discuss his literary influence on both detective and mainstream fiction.
"Then I began to speak of style, of the army of words, an army in which all kinds of weapons are on the move. No iron can enter the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time." – Isaac Babel, "Guy de Maupassant," translated by David McDuff
In some ways, Isaac Babel is perhaps one of the very small handful of the greatest masters of the short story. Best known for Red Cavalry, a collection of stories about riding with the Red Cavalry during the bloody Russian Civil War. A bookish, literary Odessa Jew riding with the notoriously violent and ruthless Cossacks would have resulted in interesting prose in any case; Babel's poetic yet oddly objective sensitivity and his determination to offer evocative reports rather than moralistic essays result in the collection being one of the great works of world literature. Babel also wrote short stories about his life, about Jews in Odessa, and about the Jewish underworld, as well as plays and screenplays.
Stalin came to power in about 1924, although what we think of as Stalinist oppression didn't kick into high gear until the end of that decade. As his art form in an oppressive and repressive era, with Stalin very much controlling Soviet culture by the Thirties, Babel chose silence. This was a quite conscious choice, as he made clear at the first congress of the Union of Soviet Writers (1934), stating that he was becoming "the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence."
Incredibly, he managed to survive almost through the 1930s. In the first part of the decade, his close relationship with writer and editor Maxim Gorky protected him. According to many sources, after Gorky died under very questionable circumstances in 1936, this protection continued because of his affair with the wife of the brutal and infamous NKVD boss, Nikolai Yezhov. Eventually, Yezhov was thrown out. In 1939, Babel was arrested, tried, and found guilty; he was executed in 1940. There are official Soviet sources that state he was alive until mid-1941, but those are questionable.
"There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so." – Isaac Babel, "Guy de Maupassant," translated by David McDuff
So where is this all going? Why, in this first issue of 2008, am I writing about these two great writers? The whole relationship between publication and reader is at best quite complicated and almost impossible to figure out. Some of the interactions are obvious, some intentionally planned, and others absolutely predictable, but many are unspoken and often unconscious. Hostile and condescending responses are often preordained, regardless of what we publish. Readers' reactions to the words printed and ideas expressed are not only to what is really there, as well as what is implied, but also often simply use them as a catalyst to react with long-formed opinions/ideas. There is not a straight line between readers and printed words, nor is there even one between a single reader and unique groups of words. The relationship is always complex, always multileveled, always as much subjective as objective, as much if not more about the disconnection between one's perception and the other's intention.
The truth, or maybe it should be a truth, or even only my perception, is that there are secrets to this relationship. Easily the greatest ones have to do with the pleasures and joys of creating, despite the hostile storms and vicious seas. In this web, where motion and growth continue, hidden by the density of assumed strands by those who consume these works, there is no guide greater than Isaac Babel. Being who I am, how I think, and how I move when the motion is with words, I couldn't write about Babel without bringing up Hammett, but here the unspoken riddles of the oracle are best answered by the Russian.
There is little question that the Red Cavalry collection is Babel's enduring masterpiece, but many of his other collected stories are no lower in stature. There is none that comes without recommendation, but a few stand out. I really doubt that a full week has gone by since we first started publishing The Austin Chronicle that I have not thought of Babel's story "Guy de Maupassant." I first read it quite feverishly during rides while hitchhiking from Putney, Vt., to Boston, Mass. Drivers who picked me up must have found it more than a bit rude that I barely said hello before plunging back into the trade paperback I was reading, trying to get through as much of the story as I could during each ride.
The story was a blessing and a hymn; it welcomed me into a certain plane of maturity, while clearly indicating how ill-formed so many of my aesthetic conceits were. During these rides, on a cool spring day, I was gifted with those experiences that come from great art, especially when the moment of the encounter finds it in near-perfect tone, resonating with one's life.
"In November I was offered the post of clerk at the Obukhov steelworks, not a bad job, which carried with it exemption from military service.
"I declined to become a clerk.
"Even at that time – twenty years old – I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and for nothing else." – Isaac Babel, "Guy de Maupassant," translated by David McDuff
The secret is joy! The truth is creative productivity and reasonable optimism. The lie is hopeless despair and cheap, petty existentialism – the kind that comes candy-bar-wrapped at less than a dollar each. The darkness is laziness; the anguish is lack of imagination; those darkest feelings are the silliest of dreams and not the reality all too many pretend they are. It is not all sunshine and light; progressivism doesn't spring up from the soil like Technicolor flowers. In the best of times there is great difficulty, and in the worst of times nothing is more difficult than belief. But who ever promised it would be different? What adolescent, self-serving view of the historical past is so magnificently, willfully naive as to argue not only that it was different once but that it was better then? Oh foolishness, oh wanton fantasy, oh lazy, lazy disengaged despair – you are welcome to these, though expressed they are used to cripple all and not just their owners.
In the face of the end-of-days soothsayers; the 9/11 truth-tellers; the one-world-order conspiracy enthusiasts; the end-of-democracy declarers; the Democratic and Republican loyalists; the partisan champions of the Constitution, who seem unaware that, as a document, its greatest enemy is the partisan; the my-religion-is-the-only-truth, my deity-the-only-one believers; the ones without culture who wail at the death of our culture because of illegal immigrants; the UFO believers; the from-magnificent-to-decadent popular culture proclaimers; the nuns of preserved and praised despair; the monks of hopelessness who treasure the dark – let us all instead welcome the new day, the next dawn!
Too often, all of us are taken in by the illusion. False humility is the perfect context for magic, as is real humility. What is created, by being created, stands in opposition to despair. Welcome to 2008 – may it be a great and challenging year for us all.
