‘Di Grasso’ by Isaac Babel

Di Grasso by Isaac Babel, 1937

The magic trick:

Realism with a tidy, poetic ending

It’s interesting to think of Isaac Babel’s short stories as the connective tissue between Guy de Maupassant and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway emulates Babel’s ruthless efficiency with a sentence and a story. Babel emulates de Maupassant’s knack for enclosing a story in a tidy loop with a poignant ending. I’d argue that Babel is, in fact, better at both magic tricks than either writer comp, but that’s not really the point.

“Di Grasso” is an excellent example of these skills at work. It has that Hemingway-esque reportage feel. It’s so realistic. Or seems so anyway. Our teenaged narrator describes everything so matter-of-factly so quickly. But that Maupassant ending is there too. Essentially – and this is a plot spoiler – our young narrator is in the theater ticket scalping game. But business isn’t good. He’s forced to sell his family pocket watch to his scoundrel boss. Then an amazing actor named Di Grasso comes to town and saves the theater season with his wonderful talents. Our narrator is moved to tears by one performance, which in turn moves his boss’ wife to sympathy, resulting in the return of his family’s pocket watch.

That plot summary surely must sound so tidy as to be trite. Reality, we know, doesn’t work in such tight little circles. Lessons learned don’t arrive in such obvious, poetic ways.

Yet somehow – and this always is true of Babel – the contrived plot doesn’t distract from the story. It doesn’t even diminish the story’s realism. He bends our realitiy to his poetry.

And that’s quite a trick on Babel’s part.

The selection:

I was fourteen years old. I belonged to the fearless battalion of the theater ticket scalpers. My boss was a shark with an eye that always squinted and a large, silky mustache. His name was Kolya Shvarts. I fell in with him that dark year when the Italian Opera went bust.

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