Things Neglected, Never Seen

Symphonies that turn to acid yellow in crumbling boxes, paintings that fade in attic piles, sculptures that bulge and lose their shapes under centuries of lichen -- all of these hidden things are triumphs against the indifference of human perception and the blindness of universal entropy. Despite the odds, they were created; despite the silence, they sang; despite the utter lack of response, they spoke... if only to the needs and hopes of one solitary mind.

Isaac Babel On Revision

We were sitting on the parapet on the cliff. [Isaac] Babel was absent-mindedly throwing pebbles into the sea; they cracked like pistol shots as they hit the rocks.

'It's all right for you other writers,' said Babel, although I was not yet a writer. 'You can wrap things up in the dew of your imagination, as you put it! What an awful expression, by the way! But what would you do if you had no imagination? Like me.'

'Rubbish!' I said angrily.

He seemed not to have heard me.

'Not one drop,' he repeated after a long pause and several pebbles. 'I'm quite serious. I can't make anything up. I have to know everything, down to the last wrinkle, or I can't even begin to write. "Authenticity", that's the motto, and I'm stuck with it! That's why I write so little and so slowly. Because it's terribly hard. So much for Mozart, the joy of creativity, the free flight of imagination! I wrote somewhere, I'm getting old from asthma, a mysterious disease I've had from birth and inherited together with my weak constitution. But that's a lie. What puts years on me is every single short-story I write. I work like a black, like a navvy, as if I had to dig up Everest with my own hands. When I start, I never believe I'll have the strength to finish. Sometimes I could weep, I'm so tired. It stops my circulation. If I get stuck over a sentence, it gives me spasms. And I'm always stuck over a sentence!'

'But your writing is so fluent.' I said. 'How do you do it?'

'That's style.' He gave a senile giggle in imitation of Moskvin. 'Style! It's style that does it, young man, he-he-he! I'll write about the weekly washing if you like, and the prose might sound like Julius Caesar! That I seem to manage. But, you understand, that's not the essence of art, it's the bricks, or the marble or the bronze. Come, I'll show you how I do it. I'm a miser, a skinflint, but just for you!...'

By now, it was dark inside the house. Beyond the garden the sea rumbled more and more quietly with the approach of night. Fresh air poured in from the sea and drove out the sultry wormwood smell of the steppe. Babel lit a small lamp. The light fell on his glasses; behind them his eyes looked inflamed; he was always having trouble with his eyes.

He got a thick wad of typescript out of his desk; there were at least a hundred pages.

'Know what that is?'

I had no idea. Was it possible that Babel had at last written a full length novella and kept it a secret from all of us? I could not believe it. Babel, whose short stories were almost like telegrams! Who packed everything into the smallest possible space. For whom a story of ten pages was much too long and surely padded!

A hundred pages of his concentrated prose? No, it couldn't be!

I looked at the cover page, and saw the title 'Lyubka the Cossack'. This was still more puzzling.

'Didn't I hear that "Lyubka the Cossack" is a very short short-story that hasn't yet been published? Do you really mean you've expanded it into a novella?'

He covered the typescript with his hand and laughed, his eyes crinkling.

'It's "Lyubka" all right,' he said, blushing. 'And it's fifteen pages long. But these are the twenty-two versions -- two hundred pages of it.'

'Twenty-two versions!'

'What's so terrible about that?' he bridled at once. 'Look here, a work of art is not a pot-boiler. You write several versions of the same story -- so what? I'm not even sure the twenty-second is fit to publish. It looks as if it could still be tightened up. It's all this elimination that makes for power of language and style. Of language and style,' he repeated. 'You take anything -- an anecdote, a bit of gossip -- and you turn it into a story you yourself can't bear to put down. It glows like a jewel. It's round like a pebble. It hangs together by the cohesion of its parts. And its cohesion is so powerful that even lightning can't split it up. People will read it. And remember it. And they'll laugh over it, not because it's cheerful but because you always feel like laughing when somebody has brought something off. I have the nerve to talk about bringing it off only because we are alone. And you won't tell anyone about this conversation so long as I live. You must give me your word. It's no credit to me, of course. Goodness knows how someone like me, the son of a small broker, gets possessed by the demon or the angel of art. But whichever it is, I have to obey him like a slave, like a pack-mule. I've sold him my soul, and I have to write as well as I know how. It's my happiness, or my cross. More of a cross, I suppose. But take it away, and every drop of my blood will go with it and I won't be worth a chewed up fag-end. That's the work that makes a human being out of me and not just an Odessa street-corner philosopher.'

He paused, then went on more bitterly.

'I've got no imagination. All I've got is the longing for it. You remember Blok -- "I see the enchanted shore, the enchanted distance." He got there all right, but I won't. I see that shore unbearably far off. I'm too sober. But I thank my lucky stars that at least I long for it. I work till I drop, I do all I can because I want to be at the feast of the gods and I'm afraid they'll throw me out.'

He took off his glasses, and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his patched jacket.

'I didn't choose to be born a Jew,' he said suddenly. 'I think I can understand everything. Only not the reason for that black villainy they call anti-semitism.

'I came safely through a Jewish pogrom as a child, only they tore my pigeon's head off. Why?... I don't want Evgenia to come in,' he said softly. Put the door on the hook, will you? This kind of talk frightens her. She's liable to cry all night. She thinks I'm very lonely. Perhaps I am?'

What could I answer?

'So there it is,' said Babel, stooping short-sightedly over his manuscript. 'I work like a pack mule, but it's my own choice. I'm like a galley-slave who's chained for life to his oar but who loves the oar. Everything about it. Every grain of wood he's polished with his hands. If you use enough elbow grease, even the coarsest wood gets to look like ivory. That's what we have to do with words, and with our Russian language. Warm it and polish it with your hand, and it glows like a jewel.

'But I meant to tell you all I do, in the right order. The first version of a story is terrible. All in bits and pieces tied together with boring "link passages" as dry as old rope. You have the first version of "Lyubka" there -- you can see for yourself. It yaps at you, it's clumsy, helpless, toothless.

'That's where the real work begins. I go over each sentence, time and again. I start by cutting all the words it can do without. You have to keep your eye on the job because words are very sly, the rubbishy ones go into hiding and you have to dig them out -- repetitions, synonyms, things that simply don't mean anything.

'After that, I type the story and I let it lie for two or three days. If I can hold out. Then I check it again, sentence by sentence and word by word. And again I find a lot of rubbish I missed the first time. So I make another copy, and another -- as many as I have to, until I've cleaned it all up and there's not a speck of dirt left.

'But that's not all! When I've done the cleaning up, I go over every image, metaphor, comparison, to see if they are fresh and accurate. If you can't find the right adjective for a noun, leave it alone. Let the noun stand by itself.

'A comparison must be as accurate as a slide rule, and as natural as the smell of fennel. Oh, I forgot -- before I take out the rubbish, I break up the text into shorter sentences. The more full stops the better. I'd like to have that passed as a law. Not more than one idea and one image to one sentence. Never be afraid of full stops. Actually, my own sentences are too short -- that's because of my asthma. I can't talk for long. The longer the sentence the more I get short of breath.

'I take out all the participles and adverbs I can. Participles are heavy, angular, they destroy the rhythm. They grate like tanks going over rubble. Three participles to one sentence, and you kill the language. All that "presenting", "obtaining", "concentrating" and so on.... Adverbs are lighter. They can even lend you wings in a way. But too many of them make the language spineless, it starts mioaling [SIC].... A noun needs only one adjective, the choicest. Only a genius can afford two adjectives to one noun.

'The breaking up into paragraphs and the punctuation have to be done properly but only for the effect on the reader. A set of dead rules is no good. A new paragraph is a wonderful thing. It lets you quietly change the rhythm, and it can be like a flash of lightning that shows the same landscape from a different aspect. There are writers, even good ones, who scatter paragraphs and punctuation marks all over the place. They can write good prose, but it has an air of muddle and carelessness because of this. Even Kuprin used to do that.

'Line is as important in prose as in an engraving. It has to be clear and hard.

'My twenty-two versions of "Lyubka" gave you a shock. They are all part of the weeding, sifting, pulling the story out into a single thread. There can be as much difference between the first and last version of a book as between a greasy bit of packing paper and Boticelli's "Spring".'

'It really is slave labour,' I said. 'A man should think twenty times before he decides to become a writer.'

'But the most important thing of all,' said Babel, 'is not to kill the story by working on it. Or else all your labour has been in vain. It's like walking a tight-rope. Well, there it is.... We ought all to take an oath not to mess up our job.'

From Chapter 16, in
STORY OF A LIFE: YEARS OF HOPE, by Konstantin Paustovsky.

Translated by Manya Harari and Andrew Thomson.

Harvill Press, London, 1968.