I have wanted to write about Bernard Malamud for at least 25 years. But until now, I never have. The occasion simply never arose. Newspaper work privileges the topical over the timeless, the now over the always.
By definition, the always is not news.
But now an opportunity is presented. The centennial of Malamud’s birth is April 26. Later this month the Library of America is publishing two volumes - Bernard Malamud: Novels and Stories of the 1940s & 50s and Bernard Malamud: Novels and Stories of the 1960s (both are edited by Malamud biographer Philip Davis and due out Feb. 27, list price $35 each) - that collect most of his published work. And so we’re provided with a chance to re-evaluate a writer whose reputation has dwindled since the ’60s, when he won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his novel The Fixer. (Malamud died in 1986 at age 71.)
People of my generation are likely to know Malamud (if they know him at all) as a moralist, a writer who produced fables and folk tales grounded in the experience of immigrants who brought with them to America the Old World ways of the ghetto and the shtetl. Or maybe they know him only as the name on the novel The Natural, which provided the jumping-off point for a Robert Redford movie. In any case, his name appears in the literature anthologies and some will describe him as a writer of short stories that delineate tribal practices and make narrow points about how good and evil contend in the universe. While the boilerplate bio will inevitably call him one of the three great Jewish-American voices (the other two are Saul Bellow and Philip Roth) that came to prominence in the second half of the 20th century, he is generally regarded as the least.
I don’t mean to challenge that assertion, only to suggest that to understand Malamud it might be helpful to unyoke him from the team. It is right to say he was never as “modern” a writer as Bellow or Roth. He did not engage with social issues of his chaotic times in the same manner as they did; his prose lacked their colloquial snap and crackle. It is also right to say that he was never as fashionable as Bellow or Roth and that there is a chance that his elegant fables will age better than Portnoy’s Complaint or The Dean’s December.
Part of the problem is Malamud’s relatively small output - he wrote eight slim novels and 54 short stories. (Consider that there are nine The Library of America volumes dedicated to collecting Roth’s work, and Bellow’s novels alone take up three volumes.) And Malamud’s later novels, The Tenants (1971), Dubin’s Lives (1979) and God’s Grace (1982), were not well received when they were issued. Malamud in the ’70s was a man left behind.
Roth’s seminal 1974 essay in The New York Review of Books, “Imagining Jews,” attacked Malamud’s “moral pathos” and “gentle religious coloration,” comparing it unfavorably to the raucous American nihilism of Norman Mailer.
I remember trying to wrestle with God’s Grace when it was published. It opens with a dialogue between the survivor of a thermonuclear war - a paleontologist who happened to be excavating at the bottom of the sea when the bombs started flying - and God, who defensively assures the man that his survival was nothing more than an inconsequential oversight. Nevertheless, the man attempts to carry on, to rebuild civilization with the help of a talking chimp. On a tropical island, a new Eden, they attempt to begin again. Soon other gorillas and baboons arrive, and the scientist attempts to instruct and perfect them. It all goes wrong, of course.
I remember I didn’t much like the book. It felt like second-rate Vonnegut, a bit too on the nose. The allegory was obvious, and the names given the chimps were freighted with biblical heft. But here I am remembering it, more than 30 years later, and I wonder how many novels that I reviewed favorably in the interim I have forgotten. How many of Roth’s books could I boil down from memory so succinctly? How many of Bellow’s?
That doesn’t make Malamud their superior, but it does suggest there’s more to him than a callow reader might first perceive. His chief virtue is as a stylist, a crafter of sentences that feel deceptively simple but resound with feeling. One of my favorite opening lines of any novel comes from Malamud’s The Assistant (1957): “The early November street was dark though night had ended, but the wind, to the grocer’s surprise, already clawed.”
There is a lot packed into the line, but the key is the sequence “was dark though night had ended” - this is the condition we were in after the end of World War II, and for the Jewish protagonist of The Assistant, the darkness was compounded. The Nazis were defeated but the Holocaust was revealed and the threat of nuclear decimation made manifest. The century was dark, though war was ended.
The Assistant is my favorite of Malamud’s books - it was the one that made Roth crazy. It is the story of Morris Bober, the grocer of the opening line, a 60-year-old man operating his store in a dying Brooklyn neighborhood. He scrapes for pennies and is aware he’s losing the business of his poor customers to other concerns. One night he’s held up and pistol-whipped in his store.
Then a 25-year-old drifter, Frank Alpine, shows up. He is helpful to Morris; he asks if he can apprentice himself to the grocer - no pay necessary - to gain experience to help in his search for a job. Morris reluctantly agrees, and even helps Frank secure lodging in the building. Frank proves industrious and the business picks up. Gradually Morris comes to realize Frank was one of the “holdupniks” who beat him - and that his assistant is trying to atone for his crime. And Morris decides to help him.
Frank is a complicated character. He’s a sensitive thug and he’s fired when Morris mistakes an attempt to make surreptitious reparations as theft. (Frank has been stealing money all along, but he decides to stop and repay the grocer.) He falls in love with Morris’ daughter Helen and saves her from being raped only to rape her himself. Things happen. Morris dies on the cusp of achieving escape. By the end of the novel, Frank has essentially become Morris - an honest man trapped in a prison of his own making. He is paying Helen’s way through college. He devotes his life and savings to the store. Finally, after Passover, he becomes a Jew.
There is a beautiful, simple passage in the book, where Frank approaches Morris in the store to ask: “Why do Jews suffer?”
They suffer, Morris replies, because they are Jews. That doesn’t satisfy Frank:“What do you suffer for?”
“I suffer for you,” Morris says.
I understand why Roth might have cringed at that - in “Imaging Jews,” he points out that Mailer’s The White Negro, published the same year as The Assistant, has a very similar plot. Only Mailer’s heroes are the two robbers who have “dare[d] the unknown,” the ones who’ve broken society’s conventions, who have violated the law that the Morris Bobers of the world hold sacred (whether they are observant to the letter or not). Roth was speaking from an underdog’s perspective, railing against old Jews like Morris who spoke of restraint. The point of The Assistant, Roth wrote, was that “renunciation is Jewish and renunciation is All.”
No, I don’t think so. In the end, The Assistant is just a book about being decent in a vicious world, a book about the inevitability of misery and the cold truth of our condition. All the redemption we can count on is the chance to face the dark another day.
E-mail: pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style, Pages 45 on 02/16/2014