Philip Davis
BERNARD MALAMUD
A writer’s life
377pp. Oxford University Press. £18.99.
978 0 19 927009 5
When Bernard Malamud was in his late fifties, a Pulitzer Prizewinner (for The
Fixer, 1966) and National Book Award winner twice over (for the story
collection The Magic Barrel, 1959, and The Fixer), at the height of his
acclaim and yet, as always, assailed by self-doubt, he once remarked to a
friend “completely out of the blue” that he regretted not having known the
love of several beautiful women. The story is told in this wonderfully
readable, illuminating and entertaining biography, the first full-length
Life of Malamud to appear. Malamud remained married to Ann de Chiara from
1945 until his death in 1986, though the two were not consistently faithful
to each other: their marriage was, by Malamud’s description, a “nervous”
one; indeed the sharply opinionated Mrs Malamud was in the habit of assuring
her insecure writer-husband that “though a good writer, he was not a great
writer such as Faulkner or Joyce”. Knowing of Malamud’s lifelong
preoccupation with routines, schedules, and devoting every possible hour to
his work, his companion replied that such love affairs would have taken up a
good deal of Malamud’s time: “Which of your books would you have given up
for these loves?”. Malamud was silent for a moment and then said, “None”.
The Yeatsian conundrum – “perfection of the life or of the art?” – carries
with it an overtone of (unconscious?) megalomania: for who, counting even
William Butler Yeats, is likely to achieve “perfection” in either life or
art? Rather more, the writer might hope to perform as brilliantly in both as
he is able, or simply to perform at all, with a modicum of success in both
quarters. Yet, to the desperately ambitious Malamud, as he emerges in Philip
Davis’s sympathetic yet persuasively “objective” portrait of the artist,
such paradoxical questions were of the utmost importance. For to Malamud,
writing was not merely “writing” but carried with it an element of the
visionary and the magical:
“'The more I see of artists the more I think of the great talent in the frail
self.' How many 'nebbishes' – weak, spineless people – look good, because of
'this marvelous book of magic in them.' What Malamud wanted . . . was to
'look good as a man', to use some of his magical talent as an artist to
'improve as a person'. It 'goes with the theory I have of the person as "stuff"':
'stuff' was the raw material of one’s life, and self-will could be deployed
to shape that stuff and form it creatively not just in writing but in living
. . . 'I think that art would be richer if the self were.'"
The writer Jay Cantor, a former student in Malamud’s writing class at Harvard
in the mid-1960s, vividly recalls:
"Malamud was a short man, with a close-clipped greying mustache, wearing
often a grey cloth cap and a somewhat grey and restrained manner. He was
surrounded then, and always, by an air that was both melancholy and
decisive, as if he were weighed down by the guidance of a special Talmud
only he knew about that said he must move, speak, act, in a certain way,
whether it gave him pleasure or not."
More comically, Malamud’s daughter Janna Malamud Smith, in her unsparing and
oddly tone-deaf memoir My Father is a Book (2006) – surely the most chilling
of titles! – recalls how, when the Malamuds were living in Oregon and her
father was teaching at Oregon State University at Corvallis, then as now not
the most distinguished of American universities, she would overhear him
talking to himself while shaving: “Someday I’m going to win”. There is a
Woody Allen-esque irony to the fact that, when Malamud received the National
Book Award for The Magic Barrel, he was at last “allowed” to teach
literature, as well as creative writing, at this university best known for
its agricultural school. (He soon quit Oregon and returned to the East,
where he would teach intermittently at the more prestigious Bennington
College.) And even Malamud’s publisher, the gratingly corrosive Roger Straus
(of Farrar, Straus and Giroux), would one day sneer at the possibility of a
biography of Malamud: “I think it’s ridiculous. There was nothing there; as
a life it was unexciting. Saul Bellow was filet mignon, Malamud was
hamburger.” (In droll Yiddish it would sound better: with such friends, who
needs enemies?)
Shallow, flashy Straus was mistaken: Malamud is indeed well worth a biography,
and in Davis, Professor of English at the University of Liverpool, he is
posthumously very lucky to have been granted an ideal biographer, who has
more than fulfilled laudable aims: “To place the work above the life – to
show how the life worked very hard to turn itself into that achievement” and
to “show serious readers all that it means to be a serious writer, possessed
of an almost religious sense of vocation – in terms of both the uses of and
the costs to an ordinary human life”.
Born in Brooklyn in 1914, of Jewish immigrant parents, Malamud seems to have
been obsessively preoccupied with memories of his arduous, impoverished
background, as of the stoic example of his grocer-father, through his life.
Long after Malamud had ascended to the literary aristocracy of his time –
president of American PEN, member of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, recipient of countless awards and honorary doctorates, not least
the author of an eccentric baseball novel, The Natural, made into a film
starring Robert Redford – he gives evidence of being as “time-haunted” as
he’d been as a boy whose father had fled Ukraine “amid a rising tide of
anti-Semitism and pogroms” and whose had mother died in a mental hospital
when he was fifteen. (Malamud would one day remark to an interviewer that he
had to find in a “second life” what he had lost in the first: “The death of
my mother, while she was still young, had an influence on my writing and
there is in my fiction a hunger for women that comes out in a conscious
way”.)
Like many another child of immigrant parents, Malamud was determined to invent
himself as an American; he distinguished himself as a student, attended
Columbia on a government loan and received a Master’s Degree in English in
1942 (his thesis, on Thomas Hardy’s reputation as a poet in American
periodicals, seems to have been uninspired and pedestrian); he began writing
fiction while teaching at a high school in Brooklyn, began to be published
in the mid-1940s, and achieved his first notable successes in the 1950s when
his remarkable short stories, one day to comprise The Magic Barrel, began to
be published in such magazines as Partisan Review and Harper’s Bazaar. After
his marriage to “an Italian beauty” – not without warning her: “Though I
love you and shall love you more, most of my strength will be devoted to
realizing myself as an artist” – and their move to far-away Oregon in 1949,
Malamud began to publish frequently; his early novels The Natural (1952) and
The Assistant (1957) were acclaimed, and The Magic Barrel, the most
impressive of Malamud’s several story collections, quickly acquired the aura
of a Jewish-American classic. (And how aptly titled, this gathering of
stories that so brilliantly combine the gritty realism of contemporary urban
settings with the fabulist “magic” of the Jewish storytelling tradition.)
Malamud's third novel, A New Life (1961), set in an Oregon academic
community very like Corvallis, with an idealistic but schlemiel-like
protagonist named Levin, has an idiomatic ease and accessibility that
distinguishes it from Malamud’s more characteristic work, and certainly from
The Fixer, a grimly compelling fable-like tale of virulent anti-Semitism in
tsarist Russia, as if Isaac Bashevis Singer and Franz Kafka had collaborated
with Dostoyevsky to come up with the worst possible nightmare for a Jew –
the accusation of having committed a ritual murder/ sacrifice of a Christian
child. Yakov Bok’s gradual emergence as a tragic hero is the substance of
Malamud’s novel, which was enormously difficult and exhausting for him to
write over a period of several years: “Something in me has changed. I’m not
the same man I was. I fear less and hate more” (The Fixer) – a triumphant if
treacherous epiphany for a Jew held captive in a Russian prison on lurid
criminal charges. Beyond The Fixer, Malamud seems to have cast about for a
comparably worthy subject: though he worked with his characteristic
obsessiveness on the semi-autobiographical Dubin’s Lives (1979), and on the
fabulist/prophetic God’s Grace (1982), it is the short stories that
constitute the most memorable work of the last two decades of his life,
notably the masterfully executed and compelling “My Son the Murderer”,
“Talking Horse”, and the near novella-length “Man in the Drawer” from
Rembrandt’s Hat (1973). In 1983, The Collected Stories of Bernard Malamud
was published, to much critical acclaim, and in 1989, three years after his
death from a heart attack, his final, incomplete novel, The Ghosts, was
published along with his previously uncollected stories.
At the pinnacle of his career in the 1960s and early 70s, Malamud was as
highly regarded as his coeval Saul Bellow and his younger contemporary
Philip Roth: an accidental triumvirate of hugely talented Jewish-American
writers ruefully described (by Bellow himself) as the “Jewish equivalent of
the first-generation rag trade gone upmarket – the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx
of literature”. (Add to which, as in a Chagall fantasy, the transfigured
Isaac Bashevis Singer, the most triumphantly “Jewish” of twentieth-century
American writers, floating overhead.) Given the relative narrowness of
Malamud’s subject matter, the more subdued range of his writerly voice, and
an aesthetic puritanism temperamentally at odds with the flamboyant
self-displays of Bellow (Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift) and Roth (Portnoy’s
Complaint, etc), it seems inevitable, if unfortunate, that he should come to
seem, in time, the least impressive of the four; Bellow’s and Singer’s Nobel
Prizes (1976 and 1978 respectively) have given their work the imprimatur of
international acclaim, and Roth’s dazzling energies, that continue to this
very day, have given to his work an air of improvident virtuosity utterly
foreign to Malamud’s more journeyman-like career. In the preface to this
biography, Davis notes that he was invited to undertake the project by the
Malamud family out of their concern “that [Malamud's] name was fading, his
readership and literary standing in danger of decline”. In the preface, too,
Davis quotes the notorious remarks of Sigmund Freud on the futility of the
biographical enterprise: “Anyone turning biographer has committed himself to
lies, concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, and even to hiding his own
lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had, and even if
it were it couldn’t be useful”. Such an irrational outburst leads one to
wonder what Freud was desperate to conceal from biographers, and whether he
succeeded; in the case of Davis’s Life of Malamud, it seems to be that the
subject, Malamud-as-writer, was both enigmatic to observers (like Frank
Alpine of The Assistant, “he could see out but nobody could see in”) and
yet, in his letters, drafts and notes to himself, collected in the Harry
Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Malamud is tireless in
his self-scrutiny, eager to be understood, and unsparing of what he
perceived to be his limitations even as he takes deserved pride in his
considerable accomplishments. Davis speaks of Malamud’s commitment to “the
human sentence” – prose that is not so much written as meticulously shaped
through numerous revisions: “The sentence as object – treat it like a piece
of sculpture.” One of the surprises of this biography is a virtual treasure
trove of writerly pensées, scattered through 570-plus pages, that might one
day be gathered and reissued as a writer’s diary of sorts, to set beside
such a gem of the sub-genre as Leonard Woolf’s Virginia Woolf: A writer’s
diary. Here Bernard Malamud emerges as a tireless craftsman, trusting not to
rushes of inspiration but to “so much labor”:
"If you think of me at my desk, you can’t be wrong – today, tomorrow,
next month, possibly even a year from now. I sometimes wonder when there is
time to live although somehow I do."
"When I can’t add or develop, I refine or twist. Can you see that in my
work?"
"Rewriting tends to be pleasurable, in particular the enjoyment of
finding new opportunities in old sentences, twisting, tying, looping
structure tighter, finding pegs to tie onto that were apparently not there
before, deepening meanings, strengthening logicality in order to infiltrate
the apparently illogical, the apparently absurd, the absurdly believable."
"Today I worked in mosaics, sentences previously noted, and put together
in many hours . . . . Today I invented sunshine; I invented it in the book
and the sky of the dark day broke."
"I would start the story, writing each paragraph over and over until I
was satisfied, before I went on to the next. Some writers can write a quick
first draft – I can’t. I can’t stand rereading a first draft, so I had to
make each paragraph as good as it could possibly be at the time. Then when I
had the whole story down, I found I could revise with ease."
"I must experiment. I must express myself – my belief in life. I must
work to handle material originally – original form. I must try symbolism. I
must work for art. I must try harder. I must hit my highest possible level."
"I do a good bit of writing and that same night bits of it crumple apart
. . . . I think of each page as a wet painting. Tomorrow when it’s dry, we
change here and there."
Most biographies trudge along the surface of a life, amassing and presenting
facts, like rubble on a shovel, in which a very few precious gems might be
visible; this pioneering biography of Malamud presents gem-like aphorisms
like those quoted above, and insights and observations of the biographer’s,
on virtually every page. It is rare that a biographer succeeds in evoking,
with a novelist’s skill, such compassion for his (flawed, human) subject;
yet more rare, that a biographer succeeds in so drawing the reader into the
shimmering world he has constructed out of a small infinity of letters,
drafts, notes, manuscripts, printed texts, interview transcripts etc, that
the barrier between reader and subject becomes near-transparent.
Joyce Carol Oates is Professor of Humanities at Princeton University
and author, most recently, of the novel The Gravedigger's Daughter. She was
the 2006 recipient of the Prix Femina for her novel The Falls
