On Lifting: Isaac Babel’s “My First Fee” V. S. Pritchett’s “The Diver”

Brad Leithauser talks about there being, out on the shelves of the world, a “book of your life.” This strikes me as a reworking of the way Melville thought about writing: that there exist certain books in whose “rainbow” we “oscillate.” That is to say, some books send out a message you receive perfectly, as if it were aiming at you alone.

It’s true. If you’re a serious reader, you’ll find something (or a few somethings) that will activate in you some feeling of kinship—some frisson of recognition—letting you know who you are, or want to be. And this personal voice that talks just to you will make you love the book of your life more than other books—better books, even. Because you may know—as close to empirically as such things can be known—that there are better books than your chosen sweetheart. It doesn’t matter. You admire and maybe love those. But it’s not the same.

The Brothers Karamazov is a better book than anything Isaac Babel ever wrote. Ditto—for the work of V. S. Pritchett. But Babel and Pritchett are part of me in a way Dostoyevsky is not—Pritchett, particularly.

Part of it is my own writing habits. I’ve fallen into reading Babel and Pritchett before work as a morning brain-callisthenic. Tolstoy or Nabokov—two other favorites—not so much. When I’m about to face my own attempts at writing, their sort of gleaming-skyscraper excellence is too imposing. (I avoid David Foster Wallace in the same way, but he hits me from the other side: I end up after a Wallace session over-loose. I show up at the desk with shirt untucked and fly undone, and expect it to make me somehow lovable.) Nabokov and Tolstoy and Wallace are favorites of mine for after, during those pure reading days—when I’m free to learn from and really admire them. But I take sips from Pritchett and Babel at the same time that I’m firing up the computer. Because they are the writers of my life.

This is not to say these two men weren’t geniuses, too; they were. But they were small-scale geniuses. They wrote miniature masterpieces; Babel himself once said something to the effect of: Tolstoy built mansions and he (Babel) built little villas. Don’t just take his word for it. Irving Howe said of him,

The talent displayed in the later stories …is one of the most brilliant in our century. But finally Babel’s talent also seems a limited one, for if the later work shows a deepening of theme and an even more gorgeous coloring of language, there is no sign that Babel could have reached the cultural breadth one associates with the twentieth-century masters …a new and brilliant note is struck, and then struck with greater force and clarity, and then struck again.

While we’re quoting Howe, this is what he wrote about Pritchett: “No one working in English writes a better sentence,” and Pritchett was respected enough to have been knighted for his work. And yet he too excelled only at the miniature: his novels were, by his own admission (and by general acknowledgment) not nearly the equal of his short fiction.

Now, the supposed narrowness of these geniuses’ genius is not why I chose to put these two wonderful stories together, of course.

Today writers often have a fear of being influenced (or at least of admitting they have been influenced). That is stupid. How do you learn if you don’t glean what you can from the books you read? Zadie Smith teaches at NYU (as do I), and I’ve heard she advises her students to approach a library as they would a buffet table, taking a little of this, a little of that. That’s what all writers do, and at the end of the meal, you hope your plate has enough samplings to make some blend that’s unique to you, some new flavor...