The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (6 page)

“ ‘Get out’?” she echoed, as if referring to the exotic custom of an unknown people. “Ah, I do not know.”

“Oh,” I said. “But how are
you
going to get out?”

“Me? Well, it is . . .” She glanced away, evasively. “But I show you something.” She got up from her desk, took a flashlight from a drawer, and went back into the hallway, motioning me to follow. We came to an emergency door with a big sign:
ALARM WILL SOUND.

“It is not locked,” she said. “But behind you, it will lock.”

The alarm did not sound. I went down several flights of steps and out another fire door, and found myself in the yellow late-afternoon sunlight, standing in a concrete well below ground level. At the main entrance to Hoover Tower, just around the corner, two Chinese women wearing enormous
straw hats were rapping on the door. I unlocked my bicycle and slowly rode home. I had no idea why Babel wanted his family to come back to the Soviet Union in 1935.

That month, Freidin began organizing an international Babel conference, to be held at Stanford, and I started working on an accompanying exhibit of literary materials from the Hoover archive.

The contents of the hundred-plus boxes on Babel turned out to be extremely diverse, a bit like one of those looted Polish manors: copies of
Red Cavalry
in Spanish and Hebrew; “original watercolors” of the Polish conflict, executed circa 1970; a
Big Book of Jewish Humor
, circa 1990; an issue of the avant-garde journal
LEF
, edited by Mayakovsky;
The Way They Were
, a book of childhood photographs of famous people, in alphabetical order, with a bookmark to the page where fourteen-year-old Babel in a sailor suit was facing a teenage Joan Baez. There was a book on the Cavalry Army designed by Alexander Rodchenko, with a photograph of Commander Budyonny’s mother, Melaniya Nikitichna, standing outside a hut, squinting at the camera, bearing in her arms a baby goose. (“Budyonny’s first goose,” observed Freidin, “and Budyonny’s trousers.” The trousers were hanging on a clothesline in the background.)

I had also been instructed to choose two propaganda posters from 1920, one Polish and one Soviet. The exhibit coordinator took me into a labyrinthine basement, where a new collection was being indexed. On top of a bank of filing cabinets lay various posters from 1920 representing Russia as the Whore of Babylon, or as the four horsemen of the apocalypse, on horses with Lenin and Trotsky heads; one showed Christ’s body lying in the postapocalyptic rubble—“This Is How All
of Poland Will Look, Once Conquered by the Bolsheviks”—bringing to mind Babel’s diary entry about “the looting of an old church”: “how many counts and serfs, magnificent Italian art, rosy Paters rocking the infant Jesus, Rembrandt . . . It’s very clear, the old gods are being destroyed.”

“I’m sorry we don’t have any Russian propaganda posters,” the coordinator said. “I’m afraid it’s a bit one-sided.”

“But look,” I said, noticing some Cyrillic script in the stack. “Here is one in Russian.” I drew out an enormous poster showing a slavering bulldog wearing a king’s crown: “Majestic Poland: Last Dog of the Entente.”

“Oh, sure,” said the coordinator, “there are posters
in
Russian, but they aren’t pro-Bolshevik. These are all Polish posters.”

I stared at the poster, wondering why Polish people had chosen that terrifying, wild-eyed dog as a representation of “Majestic Poland.” Then I spotted a second poster in Russian, with a picture of a round little capitalist with a mustache and a derby hat—like the Monopoly man, but holding a whip.

“ ‘The Polish masters want to turn the Russian peasants into slaves,’ ” I read aloud. I suggested it was difficult to interpret this as a pro-Polish poster.

The coordinator nodded enthusiastically: “Yes, these posters are full of ambiguous imagery.”

Back upstairs in the reading room, I put on my gloves—everyone in the archive had to wear white cotton gloves, like at Alice’s mad tea party—and turned to a box of 1920 Polish war memorabilia. My eye was caught by a single yellowed sheet of paper with a printed Polish text signed by Commander in Chief Józef Piłsudski, July 3, 1920, beginning with the phrase “
Obywatele Rzeczpospolitej!
” I recognized the phrase from Babel’s diary entry of July 15. He had found
a copy of this very proclamation on the ground in Belyov: “ ‘We will remember you, everything will be for you, Soldiers of the
Rzceczpospolita
!’ Touching, sad, without the steel of Bolshevik slogans . . . no words like
order
,
ideals
, and
living in freedom
.”

In
Red Cavalry
, the narrator discovers this same proclamation while accidentally urinating on a corpse in the dark:

I switched on my flashlight . . . and saw lying on the ground the body of a Pole, drenched in my urine. A notebook and scraps of Piłsudski’s proclamation lay next to the corpse. In the . . . notebook, his expenses, a list of performances at the Krakow Dramatic Theater, and the birthday of a woman by the name of Maria-Louisa. I used the proclamation of Piłsudski, marshal and commander-in-chief, to wipe the stinking liquid from my unknown brother’s skull, and then I walked on, bent under the weight of my saddle.

To think this was the very document I was holding in my hands! I wondered whether it was really such an unlikely coincidence. Probably thousands of copies had been printed, so why shouldn’t one of them have ended up in the archive—it’s not as if the Hoover had received the exact copy with Babel’s urine on it, although Freidin did start making jokes to the effect that we should exhibit the proclamation “side by side with a bottle of urine.” The joke was directed at the Hoover staff, who kept hinting that the exhibit would be more accessible to the general community if all those books and papers were offset by “more three-dimensional objects.” Somebody suggested we construct a diorama based on the ending of “The Rabbi’s Son,” with pictures of Maimonides and Lenin, and a phylactery. Freidin maintained that if we
included the phylactery, we would have to have “the withered genitalia of an aging Semite,” which also appear at the end of the story. The diorama idea was abandoned.

Finding the Piłsudski proclamation made me realize that, even if the withered genitalia were lost to posterity, textual objects related to Babel’s writings might still be uncovered. I decided to look for materials related to my favorite character in the 1920 diary, Frank Mosher, the captured American pilot whom Babel interrogates on July 14:

A shot-down American pilot, barefoot but elegant, neck like a column, dazzlingly white teeth, his uniform covered with oil and dirt. He asks me worriedly: Did I maybe commit a crime by fighting against Soviet Russia? Our position is strong. O the scent of Europe, coffee, civilization, strength, ancient culture, many thoughts. I watch him, can’t let him go. A letter from Major Fauntleroy: things in Poland are bad, there’s no constitution, the Bolsheviks are strong . . . An endless conversation with Mosher, I sink into the past, they’ll shake you up, Mosher, ekh, Conan Doyle, letters to New York. Is Mosher fooling—he keeps asking frantically what Bolshevism is. A sad, heartwarming impression.

I loved this passage because of the mention of Conan Doyle, coffee, someone called Major Fauntleroy, and the “sad, heartwarming impression.” Furthermore, “Frank Mosher” was the alias of Captain Merian Caldwell Cooper, future creator and producer of the motion picture
King Kong
. This really happened: in Galicia in July 1920, the future creator of
King Kong
was interrogated by the future creator of
Red Cavalry
. And when I looked up Merian Cooper in the library
catalogue, it was like magic: Hoover turned out to hold the bulk of his papers.

Merian Cooper, I learned, was born in 1894, the same year as Babel. He served as a pilot in the First World War, commanded a squadron in the battle of St.-Mihiel, was shot down in flames in the Argonne, and spent the last months of the war in a German prison, where he “was thrown with Russians a good deal” and developed a lifelong aversion to Bolshevism. In 1918 he was awarded a Purple Heart. In 1919 he joined nine other American pilots in the Kosciuszko Air Squadron, an official unit of the Polish Air Force, to combat the Red menace under the command of Major Cedric Fauntleroy. Cooper took his pseudonym, Corporal Frank R. Mosher, from the waistband of the secondhand underwear he had received from the Red Cross.

On July 13, 1920, the Associated Press reported that Cooper had been “brought down by Cossacks” behind enemy lines in Galicia. According to local peasants, Cooper had been “rushed by horsemen of Budyonny’s cavalry,” and would have been killed on the spot, had not an
unnamed English-speaking Bolshevik
interfered on his behalf. The next day, July 14, the Frank Mosher entry appears in Babel’s diary.

Although Cooper left a “sad, heartwarming impression” on Babel, Babel seems to have left no particular impression on Cooper, who recorded nothing of their “endless conversation.” Of his time in the Red Cavalry, he has written only of his interrogation by Budyonny, who invited him “to join the Bolshevist army as an aviation instructor.” (Babel was right, by the way; Mosher
was
fooling when he pretended to wonder whether he had committed “a crime by fighting against Soviet Russia.”) Refusing to become a flight instructor, Cooper found himself “the ‘guest’ of a Bolshevist flying
squadron for five days. I escaped, but was recaptured after two days, and taken under heavy guard to Moscow.” He spent the winter shoveling snow from the Moscow railway line. In the spring, he escaped Vladykino Prison in the company of two Polish lieutenants, and hopped freight trains up to the Latvian frontier (“We adapted the American hobo methods to our circumstances”). At the border, they were obliged to bribe the guards. Cooper handed over his boots, and made another barefoot entrance in Riga.

One of Cooper’s fellow pilots, Kenneth Shrewsbury, had kept a scrapbook—and, by a marvelous stroke of luck, it had also ended up at Stanford. Using a dry-plate camera, Shrewsbury had documented the entire Polish campaign, as well as an initial stopover in Paris. (There was a group portrait of the entire Kosciuszko squadron standing outside the Ritz; a long shot of the Champs-Élysées, eerily deserted except for a single horse-drawn carriage and two automobiles; and a close-up of a swan in what looked like the Tuileries.) For weeks I had been looking at 1920s photographs of Galicia and Volhynia, but these were the first that looked like the same place Babel was describing. Everything was there: a village clumped at the foot of a medieval castle, a church “destroyed by the Bolsheviks,” airplanes, the handsome Major Fauntleroy, “Jews leveling a field,” “Polish mechanics,” mounted troops riding past a pharmacy in Podolia—and Cooper himself, looking just like Babel described him, big, American, with a neck like a column. In one photograph he was smiling slightly and holding a pipe, like Arthur Conan Doyle.

Cooper turned to filmmaking in 1923, in collaboration with fellow Russo-Polish veteran Captain Ernest B. Schoedsack. Looking for “danger, adventure, and natural beauty,”
they went to Turkey and filmed the annual migration of the Bakhtiari tribe to Persia (
Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life
); next, in Thailand, they filmed
Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness
(1927), about a resourceful Lao family who dig a pit outside their house to catch wild animals. All kinds of animals turn up in the pit: leopards, tigers, a white gibbon, and finally a mysterious creature called a
chang
, eventually revealed to be a baby elephant. Cooper claimed that, while filming
Chang
, he was able to predict the cast’s behavior based on phases of the moon. A passionate aeronaut, Cooper often looked to the sky for answers: among his papers I found a letter from the 1950s outlining his plan to colonize the solar system, in order to both stymie the Soviets and solve California’s impending crises of human and automobile overpopulation.

In 1931, the year Babel published “The Awakening,” Cooper devised the premise for
King Kong
: on a remote island, a documentary filmmaker and his team discover the “highest representative of prehistoric animal life.” The documentary filmmaker would be a composite of Cooper and Schoedsack: “Put us in it,” Cooper instructed the scriptwriters. “Give it the spirit of a real Cooper-Schoedsack expedition.” The team would bring the prehistoric monster to New York City to “confront our materialistic, mechanistic civilization.”

I borrowed
King Kong
from the library that week. Watching the gigantic ape hanging off the Empire State Building, swiping at the biplanes, I realized that Babel had painted an analogous scene in “Squadron Commander Trunov.” At the end of the story, Trunov stands on a hill with a machine gun to take on four bombers from the Kosciuszko Squadron—“machines from the air squadron of Major Fauntleroy, large, armored machines . . . The airplanes came flying over the station in tighter circles, rattled fussily high in the air, plunged,
drew arcs . . .” Like King Kong, Trunov has no plane. Like King Kong, he goes down. From the DVD notes, I learned that the pilots in the close-up shots of the Empire State Building scene were none other than Schoedsack and Cooper themselves, acting on Cooper’s suggestion that “We should kill the sonofabitch ourselves.” In other words, King Kong and Commander Trunov were both shot down by members of the Kosciuszko Squadron.

The other fascinating detail of
King Kong
’s production is that the set for Skull Island was used at night to represent Ship-Trap Island in Cooper and Schoedsack’s
The Most Dangerous Game
, an adaptation of Richard Connell’s 1924 short story.
The Most Dangerous Game
finds the two stars of
King Kong
, Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray, again marooned on a tropical island, where they must again contend with a primitive monster: a mad Cossack cavalry general who hunts shipwrecked sailors for sport, attended by his mute sidekick, Ivan. (“A gigantic creature, solidly made and black bearded to the waist,” Ivan “once had the honor of serving as official knouter to the Great White Tsar.”)