What’s Paul McKeague Reading?
I’m re-reading Red Calvary by Isaac Babel. This book of more than 30 loosely linked stories was rooted in Babel’s experiences serving with the First Calvary of the Soviet Red Army, as it invaded and then retreated from Poland in 1920. Written a century before Russia’s invasion and ongoing occupation of eastern Ukraine, these stories’ vivid depictions of the brutality of war don’t seem a bit dated, despite the advances in weaponry between Babel’s time and ours.
It wasn’t simply an interest in the world of war, however, that drew me back to Babel. His writing–with its hallucinatory intensity, extreme compression and electrifying verbal inventiveness–is an inspiration. I can’t read him without issuing orders to myself to try harder in my fiction writing – to take risks, bend language more forcefully, pack more power into every word. “Very simple . . . no superfluous descriptions . . . Pay no attention to continuity in the story,” Babel wrote in his notes for Red Calvary. Many stories are only a thousand words (Babel wrote flash fiction before the term existed). Some stories seem more like jagged fragments than deftly shaped narratives – which may be why they wedge so deeply in my mind. Babel seems to have been terrified of writing a bland phrase. In the opening story, after a lyrical description of flowering fields, he writes that “the orange sun rolled down the sky like a lopped-off head.” (This is the Walter Morison translation). The beauty of nature becomes infused with the stench of war: “Into the cool of evening dripped the smell of yesterday’s blood, of slaughtered horses.” Later, as the narrator beds down in a pillaged house, we read that “the moon, clasping in her blue hands her bright carefree face, wandered like a vagrant outside the window.”
But it’s not only the extravagant verve of the writing that brought me back to Red Calvary. I’m re-reading it because parts of it baffled me the first time. Although all the stories
are written in the first person, who is this person? In the first story, the unnamed narrator treats the traumatized Jews who billet him with harsh contempt. Several stories later the
narrator nostalgically recalls the Talmuds of his childhood and Sabbath evenings “when my child’s heart was rocked like a little ship upon enchanted waves.” It’s evident that the first-
person character of many of the stories is an intellectual Jew named Lyutov, who must, as did Babel (a Jew from Odessa), find a way to live with the anti-Semitic Cossack soldiers who
surround him. Sometimes, however, the narrator is a Cossack soldier. And sometimes, as in the first story, I’m still not sure who the narrator is. Is it Lyutov, hiding his Jewishness?
The book upends simple perspectives. We see the lofty ideals of the Russian Revolution and the looting and butchery that result from the military attempt to spread these ideals; the courage of soldiers and their casual acts of rape and murder. Babel gives us comedy and horror. I’d recommend the book to readers fascinated by the many forms a short story can take, writers interested in pushing their verbal boundaries, and anyone interested in literary depictions of war. The book also provides a haunting picture of Jewish shtetls ravaged by both
the Soviet and Polish armies, two decades before the Holocaust erased them forever.
I’m sure I’ll read Red Calvary again – but not soon. I’m ready for something more heartwarming. My wife is strongly suggesting The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.
Paul McKeague lives in Ottawa, where he writes fiction and folk songs. He is working on a collection of linked short stories. One of these, “Downtown,” appears in Issue 178 of The New Quarterly.