Isaac Babel, Irving Howe, New York Review of Books,

I read the essay on Isaac Babel by Irving Howe, published this week in the New York Review of Books, written in the late 1980s and left in a drawer. All the contextuals rumble under the page as I read. I have tried Isaac Babel a few times, but can't quite get there. Irving Howe, writing in the 1980s, can get there, I can sieve out my own reading from his. Affectionate irony and embarrassed nostalgia. Half-rhythms of Yiddish. Rueful inversion, like, 'Resting I did at school.' 

I recognise the narrator with his spectacles on his nose and autumn in his soul, watching the Cossack's grace, in fear and reverence. Like Pierre in War and Peace, out at the Battle of Borodino, I think, watching the battle from a nearby hillock and taking notes. Someone needs to take notes.

Isaac Babel wrote about Odessa in 1920s. Someone I met in Paris recognised me as 'one of the Odessa crowd', and I was happy to go along with that. The pit of northeastern europe, the ferment of old-style crossroads and staging-posts, a mess of language, many futile journeys in one direction or another. All this I respond to as to the manner born, which I was, we all are. In a manner, born.

After that we went to bed in the hay-loft. There were six of us sleeping there, keeping each other warm, with our legs entangled, under a roof full of holes that let in the starlight. I dreamt, and there were women in my dreams, but my heart, my scarlet murderer's heart, creaked and bled.

I have a childhood book called The Twenty-Four Ivans in which twenty-four ivans make their way to St Petersburg to buy a new bell for their village church. They try to make porridge in a river, and they sleep, as chez Babel, with their legs entangled so that in the morning they do not know who they are, Ivan, Ivan, Ivan, Ivan or Ivan.