Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(8)

Early in the morning of May 15, 1939, Babel was arrested and charged with espionage. The stories he had been working on, his notebooks and diaries, were all confiscated. Like other prisoners he was allowed no visitors. Stalin worked late and sometimes made telephone calls from his offices in the Kremlin, one night to Ilya Ehrenburg. Was Babel a good writer? Stalin asked.

“A wonderful writer,” Ehrenburg replied.

“Zhalko [pity],” Stalin said and hung up.

The verdict had already been decided. Babel remained in prison, without communication of any kind, for eight months. He made a forced confession that he tried unsuccessfully to retract. The police photograph of him shows a swollen face and dark, bruised eyes—his eyeglasses, without which he could barely see, had been taken from him. An indictment was handed to him on January 25, 1940, and the next day there was a twenty-minute agony called a trial with no lawyer or witnesses. The sentence was death, to be carried out immediately. His final words were a plea: “Let me finish my work . . .”

What he felt as he walked to the chamber or courtyard in which he would be executed, shaken and alone, we cannot know. It may have been memories, his wife, daughter, even the fate of the folders of manuscripts that had been taken from him. Then, standing or kneeling near a wall, like countless others, he was shot. His wife and daughter were told that he had been convicted but sentenced by the military tribunal to “ten years without the right to correspond.” Despite rumors that he was alive in the camps and purportedly seen there by witnesses, his true fate remained unknown until 1954, after Stalin’s death, when Babel was officially rehabilitated, the facts made public, and the verdict set aside. Despite searches in the KGB archives, his manuscripts have never been found. It was claimed that they had been burned.

There are writers one always goes back to, the pages never lose their power. For me, Babel is one such.

Narrative Magazine

Spring 2009





Like a Retired Confidential Agent, Graham Greene Hides Quietly in Paris


The greatest living English writer resides in a large and somewhat sparsely furnished apartment on the second floor of a bourgeois building in Paris on the Boulevard Malesherbes. Though he has owned it for years, his name is missing from the inked list of tenants in the concierge’s window downstairs. On his telephone, in place of a number, is a blank disk. Like a retired informer or spy or the principal figure in a notorious criminal case, Graham Greene lives in anonymity and quiet.

He was seventy-one last October and is extremely guarded about his personal life. Still, most facts about so famous a man are well-known. He is the son of a schoolmaster and has two grown children, a son and a daughter. He has been separated from his wife for more than twenty-five years.

Through the large windows one can see the bare branches of trees and the celebrated blue of the Paris sky. Greene wears an old cardigan sweater and gray trousers. His eyes, behind horn-rimmed glasses, are a pale, watery blue. Thin hair, the faded color of an old coat, is gray on the sides. From his photographs one recognizes him instantly; he looks like a prisoner long confined.

Greene’s speech is soft and reserved with a vague scholarly impediment. There is a certain sense of loneliness, especially when he is talking of domestic life: “very desirable, but marriage is a bit tricky,” he says. “Yes, one is always looking for a happy couple. It’s hard to find a man and woman one likes equally, but marvelous when you do.”

This season the Royal Shakespeare Company in London put on his new play, The Return of A. J. Raffles. It’s a comedy about the famous gentleman thief created by E. W. Hornung, brother-in-law of the man who wrote Sherlock Holmes. Holmes had Dr. Watson, and Raffles also had a devoted chronicler and accomplice with the more appealing name of Bunny. The Raffles stories were enormously popular, in which Hornung wrote a classic line that will probably live as long as his dashing criminal. Of Conan Doyle’s master detective, he punned, “Though he might be more humble, there is no police like Holmes.”

This is Greene’s fifth play and was not well received by most of the critics. Among its predecessors are The Living Room, The Potting Shed, and The Complaisant Lover. He has had partial success in the theater. Like another great Catholic writer, Fran?ois Mauriac, he came to it late. He was forty-nine when The Living Room was first produced in London. It was a sensation, though it failed in New York the following year, 1954. “A dreadful flop,” he admits. “It was very miscast. I’ve never had much success in America with plays.”

With everything else, his serious novels, his thrillers or “entertainments” as he once preferred to call them, his films, he has had enormous success. Almost alone among important writers, Greene has had a long and close connection with the movies. It’s a kind of love-hate relationship, he confesses. Many of his books (The Third Man, Our Man in Havana, The Comedians, Orient Express) have been turned into films, not all of them satisfactorily as far as he is concerned, though he has scripted a number of them and collaborated on the making of others.

In addition, there were three years during which he reviewed films for British journals and the famous suit brought against him by Shirley Temple when she was the moppet darling of Hollywood. He wrote, in effect, that she had an erotic appeal to a nation of dirty old men. He had to hide out in Mexico because of it.

Nevertheless, he still finds films interesting. “I go to them much more than to the theater. I liked Chinatown and The Last Detail. I like Nicholson, Polanski . . . I like Milos Forman. I’ve never been enthusiastic for Hitchcock. His plots don’t stand up. When you leave the theater you’re always saying, but why didn’t he ring the police? Some old films do stand up. Casablanca. And I saw on TV last year Murnau’s Dracula and I thought it was terrific.”