It is often said that biography is a conservative genre. It is basically chronological, with little room for the kind of play that pervades the modernist novel. Imagine a biography beginning as “The Sound and the Fury” does – a tale the biographer decides to tell first through the mind of an idiot, then through the febrile consciousness of his suicidal brother, only to be cut off by the sarcasms of another brother, before a third-person narrator steps in to provide yet a fourth ambiguous testament.

Whatever uncertainties biographers have to acknowledge, their narratives, at the very least, must explicate events and characters. To be sure, biographers have tried to novelize. In his biography of Henry James, Leon Edel used flashbacks, and many biographers begin their books in medias res, or even at the end before returning to the chronological, as Justin Kaplan does in his biography of Walt Whitman. But, biographers commonly back away from such experiments and rely, instead, on traditional narrative.

Enter Jerome Charyn, whose new biography of Isaac Babel (Random House, 213 pages, $24.95) ought to take its place among the genre’s more innovative works. Mr. Charyn has an advantage over many other biographers because he is a novelist, and therefore is equipped to begin by describing what it is in Babel that gripped his imagination.

An editor whom Mr. Charyn was counting on to promote his work insisted that he read Babel, the poet of the pogrom, who wrote about Cossacks in the early days of the Russian Revolution with a fervor and finesse that won him readers worldwide. “I read on and on,” Mr. Charyn reports. “Babel was involving me in merciless fairy tales that evoked the first books I’d ever read. With each dip into Babel I discovered and rediscovered reading itself.”

Babel was a Jew who adopted a Russian sounding pseudonym and, disguising himself as a war correspondent, rode out with the Cossacks who attacked Polish villages, raping and pillaging and murdering the populace. He remained, however, in Mr. Charyn’s words, a “tin Cossack,” an intellectual whom the illiterate Cossacks ridiculed even as they depended on him to read the newspapers to them.

The symbiosis between the writer and these marauders was remarkable:

It was no simple baptism under fire, with Babel studying the cruelty of war and catching the colors of war; rather, it was the diary of a writer forced to live in the present and finding his own savage shorthand that could seize the moment, render its maddening simultaneity, the ugliness and beauty that whirled in front of his eyes.

Babel’s riveting “Red Cavalry” tales came out of the diary he kept. Mr. Charyn quotes and comments on this diary in passages that form the biographer’s own journal – a record of his reading and the writing that binds him to the writer he is exploring:

“The sturdy huts glitter in the sun, roof tiles, iron, stones, apples, the stone schoolhouse” – objects dances around him with their own lyric pull, as if he’s about to rediscover the world. And he offers the multiplicity of a universe in the shards of a sentence: “A Pole was caught in the rye, they hunted him down like an animal, wide fields, scarlet sun, golden fog, swaying grain.”

While reading the last sentence I suddenly recalled a film, “Days of Heaven,” the finest pastoral in American cinema. I can see from Babel’s terse image-drenched diary why he liked to write screenplays, and why he has found his match in a biographer who can evoke in a short vivid paragraph the transmogrification of life into literature.

In “Savage Shorthand,” Mr. Charyn has a simple, if paradoxical, point to make: A writer like Babel creates himself through literature, and he is a creation of literature. He sees what he imagines, and what he imagines he sees. What is just violence to someone else becomes, in Babel’s book “Red Cavalry,” a depiction of “melodic slaughter.” Thus his tales are like “musical compositions that one could never tire of.”

Stalin loved to read Babel, although that affection did not prevent him from having the writer shot – probably in 1939 or 1940. It is hard to know exactly when Babel died because the KGB put out so many false stories about his disappearance, and Babel himself left behind a trail of misinformation that Mr. Charyn believes no one can entirely sort out. Before a life like Babel’s, the forensics of biography falter. Or as Mr. Charyn puts it, “Babel may have fallen into some historical crack where biography blends with myth.”

Mr. Charyn believes that Babel suffered from “mytholepsy (the maddening need to narratize oneself),” an affliction that would probably stymie a more conventional biographer. Biography is a claustrophobic genre; the biographer is not to speak in his own voice, since after all it is the subject, not the biographer, who is of importance. Aside from a few exceptions, who remembers biographers’ names?

With crucial evidence missing, a biographer must fall back upon his own devices. Here again the unorthodox biographer has an advantage. Mr. Charyn, the author of more than 30 books, writes of Babel almost as a family member, a familiar who is yet an enigma. As novelist Frederick Busch puts in his blurb for this biography: “Charyn writes as a citizen of that Russian suburb the Jewish East Bronx of the 1940s and 1950s – scene of so much of his tough, moving fiction.”

But there is more to “Savage Shorthand” than that. I was mesmerized, for example, by Mr. Charyn’s discussion of Lionel Trilling, whom he calls Babel’s “secret sharer,” because like Babel, Trilling wore a mask: the persona of a Columbia literature professor who wrote learned and earnest essays when in fact he wanted to cut loose as a novelist. Trilling wrote about Babel without ever coming clean about what exactly it was in Babel that drew Trilling to him.

And this is Mr. Charyn’s great gift to biography: He shows how biographers are their subjects’ secret sharers. Indeed, he has brought much of Isaac Babel’s own bravura to the cloistered world of biography.

crollyson@nysun.com