Bernard Malamud

by JOSEPH FEATHERSTONE

BERNARD MALAMUD belongs to the generation of metropolitan Jewish writers that has done so much good American writing in the last twenty years. With the exception of his first novel, The Natural, and a spate of thinnish short stories set in Italy, souvenirs of a fellowship year abroad, he has worked a distinctive and at first sight narrowly Jewish vein. Collections of stories like The Magic Barrel and Idiots First have the warmth and charm of Chagall paintings, with some of the painter’s occasional weakness for the cutely Jewish. The stories display a great lyrical talent for dealing with the little disturbances of daily life, particularly city life before the Second World War. The prose is spare and sweet; he has fabricated a remarkable English version of Yiddish talk, a quick, pungent comic idiom which, like Irish speech, always seems aimed at an audience, even when the speaker is alone.

Like the great Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, Malamud is fascinated by the intersection of the commonplace and the comic grotesque, the grotesque being a metaphor for a particular sense of dislocation that pervades his work. In “Angel Levine,” the guardian angel of a New York Jew turns out to be a Negro who wears a purple suit and hangs out in Harlem bars; and in one of his saddest stories, the improbable talking jewbird, on its bedraggled wings, represents a whole people and the world’s cruel response to humility.

This sense of dislocation suggests a truth about Malamud: he, like his characters, is in a troubled relationship to his Jewishness. Folk artists like Mark Twain and Sholem Aleichem stand easily in front of us, taking pleasure in a national type; they speak of the crotchets and difficulties of their people with a kind of affectionate family pride. But in his Jewish stories, Malamud strikes you as a teller of folktales without a folk.

His audience is not a people, and his characters arc not a community. He was born in 1914 and raised in Brooklyn, and his second and third generation Jews are mostly poor and lonely, on the edge of urban disintegration. They no longer share in the feast of a common experience, though some treasure old memories and all are nagged by a conviction that they still, in some way, remain Jews. They are involved in a movement of history that gives a characteristic melancholy to their lives, part of the sadness and loss in the American immigrant’s discovery that the new home will continue to be an exile. Malamud sometimes does American variations of a figure familiar to Yiddish literature, the little common man, looking in from the outside, the ironic sufferer who clings to an ecstatic hope of collective redemption as he sinks lower.

These sufferers with a touch of the divine fool claim his sympathy to the extent that they sorrow, though there is a certain slyness in his presentation of their plight, and the irony is often at their expense. Significantly, Malamud’s heroes do not hope for the redemption of a whole people. What caps their isolation is something very American: they are romantic individualists, like their creator, and their tattered hope of redemption — the source of their wry comic energy — rests on a profound, though shaken, belief in the invincibility of the self. Ultimately their loneliness and suffering characterize them, not their Jewishness, which is perhaps what Malamud means when he says, sentimentally, that all men are Jews.

Malamud’s work celebrates not a people, but the individual, less than he could be, more than he seems, who endures his encounters with life. Anybody who endures is a Jew. The rabbi at grocer Morris Bober’s funeral in Malamud’s finest novel so far, The Assistant (1957), says: “He suffered, he endu-red, but with hope. Who told me this? I know. He asked for himself little — nothing, but he wanted for his child a better existence than he had. For such reasons he was a Jew. What more does our sweet God ask of his poor people?” The message is pointed, because the hero of the novel is an Italian, Frank Alpine, who holds up Bober’s grocery and then returns, repentant, to work out his forgiveness as the man’s assistant. Sharing the lot of the grocer’s family and falling in love with his daughter, he becomes a Jew, an awkward and inconclusive rebirth, which is the best that Malamud’s heroes can hope for. Thus the gentile turns into the ironic Yiddish sufferer with a good heart, a broken self, seeking wholeness: “With me one wrong thing leads to another and it ends in a trap. I want the moon so all I get is cheese.” The characters in The Assistant are full and deep; in the end you know their dreams, the sound of their voices, and the enigmatic quality of their fate.

The fate of a sufferer also figures in A New Life (1961), which seems far removed from Malamud’s distinctive fictional world, even though it is partly autobiographical, based on a stint of teaching at Oregon State. The hero, Levin, is a Jew, but this fact is of no particular importance in the novel. He goes West in the fifties to teach and piece together a sorry existence. The result is a little man’s odyssey, an Easterner’s venture at Westering. Malamud plays with light humor on the American legends of the frontier and the pastoral; Levin discovers, with a New Yorker’s lyrical delight, the cycle of seasons in the state of Cascadia, and falls in love with a faculty wife, certainly the most completely imagined woman in Malamud’s repertoire. It is a satisfying and often beautiful book, executed with unerring modesty.

Both these novels and the short stories mix pure illusion and refracted reality in a characteristic way. The people all bear some relation to actual history: one of the minor triumphs of The Assistant is the way it refracts onto a small area the drab colors of a decade of failure, when many dreams, except the dream of fulfillment, seemed to end. The setting is a kind of frozen, perpetual Depression in which the neighborhood grocery eternally loses its fight for survival. A New Life also displays Malamud’s sensitivity to history. As Levin toils to alter the downward curve of his private life, he tangles with the squalid public intrigues of the universities in the fifties. Thus history is always present; the grainy textures are always those of ordinary life at a specific time. But at its heart, Malamud’s enterprise is fabulous. He writes parables of possible regenerations of the self, and in various illusory contexts he explores the possibilities of the common life. The goodness of his heroes — not innocence, but goodness — is timeless; their patient virtues, their sufferings, their attempts to touch could shine in any limbo, any dim suspended state of existence on the far side of heaven toward hell.

The possibilities of the common life: it is plain that Malamud has always aimed at a fiction with universal significance. All along he has tried in his novels to transcend the Jewish world of his best short stories. He says all men are Jews because he would like to write about all men, an uneasy, grandiose, and perhaps ultimately frustrating ambition. This excess of aim, this search for the literary Everyman, is most clear in his first novel, The Natural (1952), which isn’t about Jews at all. It’s a beautiful, terribly self-conscious mythologizing of American baseball: the story of the natural, Roy Hobbs, is an effort to work through the fantasies of popular culture toward myth. For true myths don’t escape reality, they project it, and The Natural is an anguished exploration of heroism: the hero is an outsider with dangerous dreams, whom people both need and need to destroy. There is a straining after significance, as there is in so many modern attempts at myth, but even this is revealing, because in the end you see the contrast between the basic human drama Malamud seeks to impose on the present and the actual shapelessness of contemporary life. The book mixes epic with Ring Lardner slang, fantasy, humor, and horror; it is Malamud’s richest, though not his most accomplished, work. And for all its ragged ends, The Natural does leave you hungry for a fiction in which you feel something beyond individual characters and events, some sense of the human mass out of which life comes: a common celebration.

Malamud’s new novel, The Fixer, is a startling return to Jewish preoccupations, at the same time that it takes up the myth-making efforts of The Natural; for its central figure, who is Jew, Everyman, and even Christ, is a carpenter and handyman in prerevolutionary Russia accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy. Although it is a work of the imagination and by no means one of Truman Capote’s journalistic novels, The Fixer closely follows the outlines of the notorious Beiliss case, which Maurice Samuel has written about in a fascinating, informative study, Blood Accusation.

The blood accusation was the belief that the Jewish religion calls for ritual consumption of Christian blood. It flickers in and out of European history; and in an atmosphere darkened by the pogroms of 1903-1906, the activities of fanatic rightist groups like the Black Hundreds, the spread of hate literature such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the anti-Semitic policies of the Czarist government, it reappeared in Russia in 1911. In March of that year the mutilated body of a Russian boy was found in some caves not far from Kiev. Mendel Beiliss, a Jew working in a nearby brickworks, was accused of ritual murder, and the government spared no pains to make the charge stick, to the wonder and astonishment of a world opinion that hadn’t yet emerged from the fool’s paradise of the nineteenth century.

Although all the evidence pointed to the guilt of a gang of Kiev criminals, Beiliss was brought to trial after twenty-six months of imprisonment. The proceedings laid bare the web of lies, superstition, and corruption holding together reactionary Russia; the foreign press was treated to the spectacle of state’s experts gravely discussing Black Magic, Moloch, and whether the Jews drink Christian blood for medicinal or religious reasons. Unlike twentieth-century regimes, however, the old order was incompetent as well as vicious, and it failed to manufacture a convincing case. The jury decided that Beiliss was not guilty, but with prompting agreed that ritual murder had been committed. Beiliss was innocent; the Jews, as ever, were guilty. According to Samuel, Beiliss finally settled in America, where he wrote an account of his ordeal in Yiddish (which Malamud has probably read) and died, obscure, in the twenties.

This is the bizarre factual basis, then, for Malamud’s novel, which in other respects mirrors familiar aspects of his art. As so often with him, the surface is realistic, while the actual stuff of the book is fable. Russia itself is not evoked with any specificity; Malamud is really concerned with the geography of the soul. (Kiev is barely etched in, a stage set.) Like The Natural, The Fixer strains toward myth, a statement of every Jew’s — every man’s — vulnerability to history. As in the short stories, the oral idiom is supple and expressive, which is fortunate, for The Fixer is very talky. Yakov Bok, the fixer, recalls his courtship:

“Why don’t you say love,” she said. “Who talks about love in the shtetl?” I asked her. “What are we, millionaires?” I didn’t say so, but it’s a word that makes me nervous. . . . But by then the father had his nose in my ear. “She’s a doll, a marvelous girl, you can’t go wrong. She’ll work hard and both together you’ll make a living.” So I said love and she said yes.

Once again, this novel mixes the grotesque and the commonplace together, although in the roachinfested Czarist prisons, the grotesque takes on a special quality of terror: in solitary, Bok has fantasies of the ritual crime be is accused of, an expressionist chamber of mental horrors worthy of Gogol. At another point he reads the New Testament out loud to a guard who listens through the Judas-hole; the guard weeps at Christ’s passion, then refuses the prisoner’s request for paper.

Malamud has altered few of the externals of the Beiliss case, mostly compressing many real characters into a few fictional ones, in order to keep the stage uncluttered. The prunings are necessary because the whole focus is on the private drama in the mind of Yakov Bok. The nightmare of twenty-six months of prison fills the book, and it is significant that it ends with the prisoner on his way to trial. The supreme ordeal isn’t public at all: it takes place in the silences of Bok’s despair.

At its best The Fixer is a portrait of a man alone, stripped of the last shred, unsupported by the comfort of false hopes, left to beat his head against the wall. In Bok you recognize the archetypical Malamud hero, the ironic victim who grows in compassion as he suffers. He is a memorable figure, with the painful powers of concentration of the selfeducated; his creator understands him, and sees him with pity, impatience, and growing admiration. He is sharply drawn, but Malamud has piled too big a load of significance onto his aching back. As with some of Saul Bellow’s heroes, you sense a pumping, wheezing attempt to inflate the stature of a character. Most of the time Bok is simply puzzled; even on his way to trial he wonders if the lesson to be learned from all his pain is like the grim discovery of a drowning man that the sea is salty. But Malamud is not content to rest with this, and his busy hands are constantly shaping intrusive morals; he insists on portentous meanings. Thus in a tendentious finale, Bok affirms his solidarity with history and revolution, the lesson of all this being, it seems, that no man is unpolitical.

This is the seam along which the novel splits and falls apart. Bok is simply not up to the demands for public significance that Malamud makes on him. For all his links to the Beiliss case, Bok is truly a fictional character of our times, for in our dayit has been much easier to portray the private consciousness in fiction than to render public events. In the thirties some writers dealing with a victim like Bok would have concentrated on the system oppressing him or the hail of naturalistic facts beating him down. Our fiction tends to focus on the man’s consciousness of his experience. There is a gain in comprehending the individual; there is a loss in understanding how his fate is shaped by his society. Malamud never does establish the connections with history and revolution which he claims to have established; connections (it is perhaps unfair to point out) that many intellectual Jews of Bok’s generation would have made very easily. Maybe it is symptomatic of our times that The Fixer struggles toward a statement of everybody’s complicity in politics. If so, the fact that the novel takes place in an imaginary Russia and the fact that its real triumph is a portrait of an individual suggest that Malamud still shares the traditional inability of American writers to imagine society intelligently. In his Jewish stories, Malamud has shown himself to be a gifted, expressive writer, working small. And his best novels have been in something of a minor key, too. The Assistant, his masterpiece so far, is surely one of the finest novels of the decade, yet it achieves its greatness through indirection. In The Assistant and A New Life he has raided on the borders of the sentimental to produce a fiction dense with human meanings; his compassionate vision of life as it is lived from day to day compares well with the thinner efforts of colder literary craftsmen who focus on the random moment, the shifting weather of states of consciousness, or the private testimony of the senses. But it is also plain that he chafes at the limits within which he succeeds so well. The Natural and the weaker new novel, The Fixer, reveal an excess of intent, a desire to do things on a grand scale that has not been altogether fruitful. Still, as one of the country’s most accomplished writers, he has earned the right to gamble on his ambitions.