The Wall Street Journal-20080115-Remembering a Forgotten Master
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Remembering a Forgotten Master
Bernard Malamud:
A Writer's Life
By Philip Davis
(Oxford University Press, 377 pages, $34.95)
Writing last year, Janna Malamud Smith, Bernard Malamud's daughter, explained her decision to cooperate with her father's biographer: "One day I realized that my father's life had shifted from something overshadowing into something disappearing from view. . . . What once was a trio -- Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth -- has become a dyad."
And indeed Malamud's short stories about immigrant Jews in America, such as "The Magic Barrel" and "Angel Levine," no longer enjoy the status they once did. His novel "The Natural" (1952) had a brief revival when Robert Redford made a movie of it in 1984, but "The Fixer" (1966), which won the Pulitzer Prize, is hardly heard of anymore. Malamud's daughter is right: It is time for a rescue. Peter Davis's "Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life," for all its earnestness, doesn't quite accomplish it.
The facts are certainly there. In Mr. Davis's book, we learn of Malamud's birth in 1914 to an impoverished Brooklyn grocer and his schizophrenic wife; the arrival of a brother, four years later, who would inherit the mother's illness; the awkward romance and eventual marriage to Ann de Chiara, an Italian-American Catholic; the years in the academic wilderness, first at Oregon State and then at Bennington, where Malamud helped himself, extramaritally speaking, to the all- female student body; and the later, more placid years, during which his marriage recovered and his legacy began to seem more assured.
What's missing from Mr. Davis's biography is what we most need: a convincing argument for the pleasures of Malamud's fiction and for its importance. Mr. Davis is frequently insightful, but he spends far too long on the novels, almost neglecting the early short stories -- the work that rightly made Malamud's reputation.
Published in 1958, the story collection "The Magic Barrel" won the National Book Award in 1959 and established Malamud as a writer of the first rank. The stories are filled with unsentimental portraits of the kind of immigrants that most American Jews already considered part of a forgettable past: cobblers and egg candlers and scholarly paupers trying to wring a dignified existence from an America that they scarcely understood. The plots often turn on some theophany, an appearance of the divine spark in the grim world. And yet the tone is neither sentimental nor naively optimistic. Malamud's characters were neither Portnoys nor Augie Marches; they may not have been successful strivers, but, Malamud insisted, attention must be paid.
Part of the greatness of the stories is their deft handling of language. The title story in "The Magic Barrel," about a rabbinical student who hires a shadchen, or matchmaker, to find him a nice girl, feels very modern in its compression, but its diction is from another time, as when Salzman the matchmaker asks for something to eat: "A sliced tomato you have maybe?" Similarly, here is the evocative beginning of "Angel Levine": "Manischevitz, a tailor, in his fifty- first year suffered many reverses and indignities." And, later, the Old World syntax continues to bear the sadness: "His Fanny, a good wife and mother, who had taken in washing and sewing, began before his eyes to waste away." The story turns hopeful only when a black Jewish angel appears -- an authorial move as ambitious and startling as the story's diction is nostalgic and simple.
There's no accounting for taste, and Mr. Davis's preference for the novels shouldn't be an insurmountable problem. But one gets the sense that he shied away from the short stories because of his unfamiliarity with the world they inhabit. An Englishman, he is evidently uneasy in the prewar years of Malamud's Brooklyn youth. There is almost no physical description of Flatbush, Malamud's neighborhood, no sense of its street life or culture. And Mr. Davis does little to help readers understand the cultural forces that, over time, worked against Malamud's literary reputation, including the attenuation of Yiddish culture and a preference, among some critics, for narratives with "stronger" Jews.
Malamud was never the intellectual that Bellow was or the prolific genius that Roth is. He knew it, too, and Mr. Davis is at his best describing the heartbreaking insecurity that he never overcame. In 1985, the year before he died at age 71, Malamud published a chapbook based on a lecture called "Long Work, Short Life." It's hard not to wish that the adjectives could be reversed and still hold true, but as we approach the 50th anniversary of "The Magic Barrel," Bernard Malamud's short work is fighting for the long life it deserves.
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Mr. Oppenheimer is coordinator of the Yale Journalism Initiative and editor of The New Haven Review.
