Biography of Bernard Malamud

Name: Bernard Malamud
Bith Date: April 28, 1914
Death Date: March 18, 1986
Place of Birth: Brooklyn, New York, United States
Nationality: American
Gender: Male
Occupations: author

Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) is considered one of the most prominent figures in Jewish-American literature, a movement that originated in the 1930s and is known for its tragicomic elements.

Malamud's stories and novels, in which reality and fantasy are frequently interlaced, have been compared to parables, myths, and allegories and often illustrate the importance of moral obligation. Although he draws upon his Jewish heritage to address the themes of sin, suffering, and redemption, Malamud emphasizes human contact and compassion over orthodox religious dogma. Malamud's characters, while often awkward and isolated from society, evoke both pity and humor through their attempts at survival and salvation. Sheldon J. Hershinow observed: "Out of the everyday defeats and indignities of ordinary people, Malamud creates beautiful parables that capture the joy as well as the pain of life; he expresses the dignity of the human spirit searching for freedom and moral growth in the face of hardship, injustice, and the existential anguish of life.

Malamud was born April 28, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants. His parents, whom he described as "gentle, honest, kindly people," were not highly educated and knew very little about literature or the arts: "There were no books that I remember in the house, no records, music, pictures on the wall." Malamud attended high school in Brooklyn and received his Bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1936. After graduation, he worked in a factory and as a clerk at the Census Bureau in Washington, D. C. Although he wrote in his spare time, Malamud did not begin writing seriously until the advent of World War II and the subsequent horrors of the Holocaust. He questioned his religious identity and started reading about Jewish tradition and history. He explained: "I was concerned with what Jews stood for, with their getting down to the bare bones of things. I was concerned with their ethnicality--how Jews felt they had to live in order to go on living." In 1949, he began teaching at Oregon State University; he left this post in 1961 to teach creative writing at Bennington College in Vermont. He remained there until shortly before his death in 1986.

Malamud's first novel, The Natural (1952), is considered one of his most symbolic works. While the novel ostensibly traces the life of Roy Hobbs, an American baseball player, the work has underlying mythic elements and explores such themes as initiation and isolation. For instance, some reviewers cited evidence of the Arthurian legend of the Holy Grail; others applied T. S. Eliot's "wasteland" myth in their analyses. The Natural also foreshadows what would become Malamud's predominant narrative focus: a suffering protagonist struggling to reconcile moral dilemmas, to act according to what is right, and to accept the complexities and hardships of existence. Malamud's second novel, The Assistant (1957), portrays the life of Morris Bober, a Jewish immigrant who owns a grocery store in Brooklyn. Although he is struggling to survive financially, Bober hires a cynical anti-Semitic youth, Frank Alpine, after learning that the man is homeless and on the verge of starvation. Through this contact Frank learns to find grace and dignity in his own identity. Described as a naturalistic fable, this novel affirms the redemptive value of maintaining faith in the goodness of the human soul. Malamud's first collection of short stories, The Magic Barrel (1958), was awarded the National Book award in 1959. Like The Assistant, most of the stories in this collection depict the search for hope and meaning within the grim entrapment of poor urban settings and were influenced by Yiddish folktales and Hasidic traditions. Many of Malamud's best-known short stories, including "The Last Mohican," "Angel Levine," and "Idiots First," were republished in The Stories of Bernard Malamud in 1983.

A New Life (1961), considered one of Malamud's most realistic novels, is based in part on Malamud's teaching career at Oregon State University. This work focuses on an ex-alcoholic Jew from New York City who, in order to escape his reputation as a drunkard, becomes a professor at an agricultural and technical college in the Pacific Northwest. Interweaving the protagonist's quest for significance and self-respect with a satiric mockery of academia, Malamud explores the destructive nature of idealism, how love can lead to deception, and the pain of loneliness. Malamud's next novel, The Fixer (1966), is considered one of his most powerful works. The winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this book is derived from the historical account of Mendel Beiliss, a Russian Jew who was accused of murdering a Christian child. Drawing upon Eastern European Jewish mysticism, The Fixer turns this terrifying story of torture and humiliation into a parable of human triumph. With The Tenants (1971), Malamud returns to a New York City setting, where the theme of self-exploration is developed through the contrast between two writers, one Jewish and the other black, struggling to survive in an urban ghetto. Within the context of their confrontations about artistic standards, Malamud also explores how race informs cultural identity, the purpose of literature, and the conflict between art and life. Alvin B. Kernan commented: "[ The Tenants] is extraordinarily powerful and compelling in its realization of the view that is central to the conception of literature as a social institution: that literature and the arts are an inescapable part of society."

Malamud further addresses the nature of literature and the role of the artist in Dubin's Lives (1979). In this work, the protagonist, William Dubin, attempts to create a sense of worth for himself, both as a man and as a writer. A biographer who escapes into his work to avoid the reality of his life, Dubin bumbles through comically disastrous attempts at love and passion in an effort to find self-fulfillment. Malamud's next novel, God's Grace (1982), differs from his earlier works in scope and presentation of subject matter. Set in the near future immediately after a nuclear disaster which leaves only one human being alive, God's Grace explores the darkness of human morality, the nature of God, and the vanity and destruction associated with contemporary life. Critical reception to this work varied greatly. Some critics felt that the contrast between the serious moral fable and the protagonist's penchant for alternately conversing with God and a group of apes unique and challenging; others believed the structure of the novel did not support the seriousness and ambition of its themes. However, God's Grace, like all of his works, reveals Malamud's motivations as a writer and expresses his profound humanistic concerns. Malamud explained: "It seems to me that the writer's most important task, no matter what the current theory of man, or his prevailing mood, is to recapture his image as human being as each of us in his secret heart knows it to be."

Novelist and short story writer Bernard Malamud grew up on New York's East Side where his Russian-Jewish immigrant parents worked in their grocery store sixteen hours a day. Malamud attended high school and college during the height of the Depression. His own and his family's experience is clearly echoed in his fiction, much of which chronicles, as Mervyn Rothstein declares in the New York Times, "simple people struggling to make their lives better in a world of bad luck." His writings also are strongly influenced by classic nineteenth- century American writers: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Henry James. In addition his works reflect a post-Holocaust consciousness in addressing Jewish concerns and employing literary conventions drawn from earlier Jewish literature.

The first major period of Malamud's work extended from 1949 to 1961 when he was teaching composition at Oregon State College. Producing three novels and a collection of short stories during this period, he won several fiction prizes, including the National Book Award. Each of the first three novels feature a schlemiel figure who tries to restore a Wasteland to a Paradise against a Jewish background. The setting varies in the novels, but in the short fiction is most often the East Side of New York. "The Prison" portrays a small New York grocery store based on that of Malamud's parents, in which a young Italian, Tommy Castelli, is trapped. Similarly "The Cost of Living"--a predecessor of The Assistant--and "The Bill" both present the grocery store as a sort of prison. As Leslie and Joyce Field observe in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, "In Malamud's fictional world, there is always a prison," and in a 1973 interview with the Fields, Malamud said: "Necessity is the primary prison, though the bars are not visible to all." Beneath most Malamudian surfaces lie similar moral and allegorical meanings.

Malamud's first novel, The Natural, is, as Earl R. Wasserman declares in Bernard Malamud and the Critics, "the necessary reference text for a reading of his subsequent fiction." The work is a mythic novel, based on the Arthurian legends, in which the Parsifal figure, Roy (King) Hobbs, restores fertility to the Fisher King, Pop Fisher, the manager of a baseball team called The Knights. Pitcher Roy appears as an Arthurian Knight modeled in part on Babe Ruth, but his character also probably is drawn from Chretien de Troye's medieval tale, Lancelot of the Cart, featuring a Lancelot who is most often unhorsed and frequently humiliated. As Peter L. Hays has said in The Fiction of Bernard Malamud, "Like Lancelot, Malamud's heroes are cut to ribbons in their quests for love and fortune."

The novel's title is baseball slang for a player with natural talent, but it can also mean, as it did in the Middle Ages, an innocent fool. As Philip Roth has said in Reading Myself and Others, this is "not baseball as it is played in Yankee Stadium, but a wild, wacky game." Roy thinks of himself as "Sir Percy lancing Sir Maldemer, or the first son (with a rock in his paw) ranged against the primitive papa." Even more Freudian is Roy's lancelike bat, Wonderboy, which droops when its phallic hero goes into a slump and finally splits at the novel's conclusion.

In an echo of the Black Sox scandal of 1919, Roy is bribed to throw the pennant game by evil-eyed Gus Sands, whose Pot of Fire nightclub and chorus girls wielding pitchforks suggest hell itself. Though there are few obvious Jewish traces in The Natural, the prank Roy plays on Gus is a retelling of a Yiddish prankster tale, with the challenge by the prankster, the foil or victim's reaction, and the retort or prank--here Roy's pulling silver dollars out of Gus's ears and nose. Yet Roy's success is only temporary. As Glenn Meeter notes in Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth: A Critical Essay, "From the grail legend also we know that Roy will fail; for the true grail seeker must understand the supernatural character of his quest, and Roy does not." In the end Roy, defeated, throws his bribe money in the face of Judge Banner, who is a dispenser of "dark wisdom, parables and aphorisms which punctuate his conversation, making him seem a cynical Poor Richard," as Iska Alter remarks in The Good Man's Dilemma: Social Criticism in the Fiction of Bernard Malamud. This dramatic scene, and others in Malamud's work, accord with his statement in a 1973 interview: "My novels are close to plays."

Other influences are also clearly at work in Malamud's first novel. The Natural has significant references to birds and flowers and steady reminders of the passage of the seasons. The simplicity of this pastoral style at its best allows the presentation of complex ideas in a natural way. A second influence, as Malamud acknowledged, is film technique. For example, there are quick movie-like changes of scene, called jump cuts, when Roy and Memo Paris are tricked into sleeping with each other. In addition, the portrayal of Roy has a Chaplinesque quality of humor to it. Though Malamud would never again write non-Jewish fiction, The Natural was a treasure house of reusable motifs and methods for all his subsequent work.

In 1954 Malamud published one of his greatest short stories, "The Magic Barrel," which Sanford Pinsker, in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, calls "a nearly perfect blend of form and content." In this story the matchmaker Pinye Salzman, using cards listing eligible women and drawn from his magic barrel, tricks student rabbi Leo Finkle into a love match with Salzman's daughter, Stella, a streetwalker. In Judaism, Marcia Booher Gealy describes the structural essence of such Hasidic-influenced stories: (1) the inward journey; (2) the older man tutoring the younger; (3) the triumph of love; (4) the reality of evil; and (5) transformation through the tale itself. This structure merges with another influence, that of nineteenth-century American romanticism, for Malamud often joins the Hasidic and Hawthornian in his fables. As Renee Winegarten comments in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, "His magic barrels and silver crowns, whatever their seal, firmly belong in the moral, allegorical realm of scarlet letters, white whales and golden bowls."

Concerning Salzman, as Irving Howe has said in World of Our Fathers, "The matchmaker, or shadkhn, is a stereotypical Yiddish figure: slightly comic, slightly sad, at the edge of destitution." Such confidence men reappear in Malamud's fiction, in "The Silver Crown," for example. And Salzman shows Malamud's early perfection of a Jewish-American speech, which is neither pure Yiddish dialect nor mere literary chat, but an imaginative combination of both. Kathryn Hellerstein observes in The State of the Language that Yiddish speakers in Malamud's works are "elderly, static, or declining" and concludes that for Malamud, Yiddish figures are "a spectral presence of the constraining, delimited, stultified past."

What many critics have referred to as Malamud's finest novel, The Assistant, appeared in 1957. As Ihab Hassan has said in The Fiction of Bernard Malamud, "The Assistant, I believe, will prove a classic not only of Jewish but of American literature." Frank Alpine, "the assistant," suggests St. Francis of Assisi, whose biography, The Little Flowers, is Alpine's favorite book and whose stigmata he at one point seems to emulate. Like Roy in The Natural, Frank is the Parsifal figure who must bring fertility, or at least new life, to the Fisher King, here the grocery store owner Morris Bober. Some critics have contended that Bober may parallel philosopher Martin Buber, whose I-THOU philosophy of human relations Bober seems, however instinctively, to share, though Malamud himself denied any use of Buber in this novel.

When he stands under a "No Trust" sign, Bober also recalls Melville's novel, The Confidence Man. Giving food to a drunk woman who will never pay, Morris teaches Frank to have compassion for others. Yet Frank cannot control his passion for Morris's daughter, Helen. Thus when Frank saves Helen from an attempted rape, he fails the trial of the Perilous Bed, rapes her just as she is about to admit her love for him, and loses her.

Frank and Morris represent a familiar motif in Malamud's works, that of the father-son pair, the schlemiel-schlimazel twins. Malamud likes these doublings and there are three other father/son pairs in the novel. A favorite definition of these types is that the schlemiel spills his teacup, and the schlimazel is the one he spills it on. Norman Leer, thinking perhaps of Russian novelist Feodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, speaks in Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas of "the notion of the divided self, and the attraction of two characters who mirror a part of each other, and are thereby drawn together as doubles."

Another recurrent feature of Malamudian narrative, the Holocaust, is never far from the surface, though it appears almost always in an oblique way. Morris, in despair over his luckless grocery store/prison, turns on the gas to commit suicide, a reminder of the gas chambers of the Holocaust. And here Malamud introduces from the world of fantasy a professional arsonist who is like a figure from hell--recalling the night club women and their pitchforks in The Natural. In The Assistant, at Morris's funeral, Frank halts the ceremony by falling into the open grave while trying to see the rose Helen had thrown into it. The characters in Malamud's fiction frequently dream, and in Frank's dream, St. Francis successfully gives Frank's rose to Helen. Rachel Ertel declares in Le Roman juif americain: Une Ecriture minoritaire, "By going constantly from the real to the supernatural, Bernard Malamud deadens, nullifies the disbelief of the reader and gives himself elbow room to narrate the fables, the parables that make up his novels and short stories."

In 1958, with the publication of his first volume of short stories, The Magic Barrel, Malamud received national recognition and in 1959 won the National Book Award for the collection. All the stories in the volume display Malamud's continuing debt to Hawthorne; as Jackson J. Benson says in The Fiction of Bernard Malamud, the two writers "possess the ability to combine, with great skill, reality and the dream, the natural and supernatural." Thus there is a kinship between Malamud's "Idiots First," "The Silver Crown," and "The Magic Barrel" and Hawthorne's short stories "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," "Young Goodman Brown," and "The Birthmark." Moreover, "The First Seven Years"--featuring Feld, a Polish immigrant shoemaker who refuses to speak Yiddish and who wants his daughter Miriam to marry a rising young suitor, Max, rather than his middle-aged but devoted helper, Sobel--is reminiscent of Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand," with its warning about "hardness of the heart." However, "The First Seven Years" is Hawthorne plus Holocaust, for Sobel had barely escaped Hitler's incinerators.

In the years from 1949 to 1961 Malamud slowly became "one of the foremost writers of moral fiction in America," as Jeffrey Helterman comments in Understanding Bernard Malamud. Of his last work in this first period, Sheldon J. Hershinow remarks in Bernard Malamud: "A New Life is Malamud's first attempt at social satire, and much of the novel is given over to it." Its hero, marginal Jew Sy Levin, shows the complexity behind the names of practically all major characters in Malamud. In City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970, Tony Tanner explains that the name Levin means the east, or light; it is also associated with lightning. Tanner writes: "I have it direct from Mr. Malamud that by a pun on `leaven' he is suggesting what the marginal Jew may bring in attitude to the American scene." Levin, whose fictional career resembles that of Malamud, is a former high school teacher who joins the faculty at Cascadia University in Easchester, Oregon, a name that suggests a castle of ease. According to Mark Goldman, in a Critique review, "Early in the novel, Levin is the tenderfoot Easterner, the academic sad sack, or schlimazel of Yiddish literature, invoking nature like a tenement Rousseau." Levin, then is the schlemiel as lecturer, who teaches his first class with his fly open, then bumbles his way into an affair with a coed, Nadalee, a lady of the lake who has written an essay on nude bathing. As Sandy Cohen says in Bernard Malamud and the Trial by Love, "Malamud's favorite method of portraying a protagonist's struggle to overcome his vanity is to symbolize it in terms of the Grail myth. Thus Levin's journey to meet Nadalee takes on certain aspects of the grail quest." Indeed, Levin journeys "in his trusty Hudson, his lance at his side."

Later Levin makes love in the woods to Pauline Gilley; in an echo of English novelist D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Pauline also has an impotent husband, Gerald Gilley, future chairman of the English Department. Against this pastoral background, complete with the passage of the seasons, Levin is also the American Adam: as Hershinow observes, "Immersed in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, Levin believes wholeheartedly the metaphors about America as a New-World Garden of Eden. By going west he feels he can recapture his lost innocence and escape the past--become the New-World Adam."

This major love affair is also Hawthornian: as Paul Witherington notes in Western American Literature, "Levin's affair with Pauline matures in Hawthorne fashion to an inner drama of the ambiguities of paradise." In fact, Levin sees himself as "Arthur Dimmesdale Levin, locked in stocks on a platform in the town square, a red A stapled on his chest." From Levin's point of view, Pauline, whose love earned him his scarlet letter A, is also the tantalizing shiksa, the Gentile temptress of so many Jewish-American novels, not only those of Malamud but also of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth among others. As Frederick Cople Jaher points out in the American Quarterly, to Jewish men, such women seem to be "exotic insiders" and so represent "tickets of admission into American society."

At the conclusion of the novel, Gilley asks Levin why he wants to take on two adopted children and Gilley's apparently barren wife. Levin replies, "Because I can, you son of a bitch." And Levin, defeated in academe, but having impregnated the barren Pauline, whose flat breasts are beginning to swell, drives away with his new family, having agreed with Gilley never again to teach in a university. This ending, as so often in Malamud, is ambiguous, for Levin is no longer in romantic love with Pauline. Here is what Critique contributor Ruth B. Mandel calls "ironic affirmation"--"The affirmation itself is ironic in that the state of grace is unaccompanied by paradise."

After Malamud's move back east to Bennington College, his second period (roughly 1961-1970) began, and both his stories and his next two novels took a more cosmopolitan and international direction. In Bernard Malamud, Sidney Richman perceptively observes that the title story in Idiots First is "a morality [play] a la Everyman in which the sense of a real world (if only the sense of it) is utterly absorbed by a dream-landscape, a never-never-land New York City through which an elderly Jew named Mendel wanders in search of comfort and aid." Mendel is indeed a Jewish Everyman, who tries to dodge the Angel of Death (here named Ginzburg) to arrange for the future of his handicapped son, Isaac.

Another short story, "The Maid's Shoes," reveals the new subject matter and style. Professor Orlando Krantz, who plays the part of the comparatively wealthy American as Everyman, tries to give a small gift to his poor Italian maid, Rosa, but it is a gift without the understanding that the impoverished European needs: "But though they shared the same roof, and even the same hot water bottle and bathtub, they almost never shared speech." Here, failures of the heart, common to the fiction of the first period, are extended to complete failures of empathy. Furthermore, the story is no longer fantastic, as in Malamud's first period, but realistic. Of Rosa, Malamud writes: "She was forty-five and looked older. Her face was worn but her hair was black, and her eyes and lips were pretty. She had few good teeth. When she laughed she was embarrassed around the mouth." Finally, the story has a single consistent point of view instead of the omniscient point of view of the earlier stories. Yet since that omniscient narration contained Malamud's often compassionate comments that are a part of his first period manner, these newer stories have a bleaker cast to them.

Next to The Assistant in critical reputation comes The Fixer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1967. In a search for a suffering Everyman plot, Malamud had thought of several subjects--the trial of Alfred Dreyfus and the Sacco-Vanzetti case, among others--before deciding on a story he had heard from his father as a boy, that of the trial of Mendel Beiliss for ritual bloodletting and murder in 1913 in Russia. Through this story, Malamud also tries to answer the question of how the death camps in Germany had been possible. Hero Yakov Bok's last name suggests a scapegoat, and also the goat mentioned in the song chanted for the end of the Passover Seder as a symbol of Jewish survival. As Malamud said in an interview with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times Book Review, it was necessary "to mythologize--that is, to make metaphors and symbols of the major events and characters."

The novel itself covers two years, spring 1911 to winter 1913, during which Bok is imprisoned after being falsely accused of the ritual murder of a Gentile boy. Without legal counsel Bok suffers betrayal, gangrene, poison, and freezing cold, and finally turns inward to develop a sense of freedom. In prison this Everyman fixer learns through suffering to overcome, at least in part, his initial agnosticism, and his doubts of what is meant by the Chosen People. He rejects both suicide and a pardon, and accepts his Jewishness. Finally, in a dream encounter with Tsar Nicholas II, Bok shoots the Tsar. As John F. Desmond writes in Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, "Yakov has come to understand that no man is apolitical, especially a Jew; consequently, if his chance came, as it does in the imaginary meeting with the Tsar, he would not hesitate to kill the ruler as a beginning step towards purging that society of its agents of repression and injustice, and thus strike a blow for freedom and humanity." Bok, at least in his dream, is no longer the passive suffering servant of Isaiah, portrayed in many of Malamud's first period fictions, but one who seeks revenge. Has Bok lost more important values? The dream setting leaves the ending ambiguous, but Malamud's real subject is not so much Bok himself, as those, like the Germans, other Europeans, and Americans during the Holocaust, who either participate in, or passively observe, the treatment of Everyman as victim. As the Fields remark, Malamud repeatedly tried to make clear, especially in this second period, that Jewish victims are Everyman as victim, for history, sooner or later, treats all men as Jews.

The final major work of this second period was Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition. As Leslie A. Field has written in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, "Of all the Malamud characters, early and late, one must return to Arthur Fidelman as the Malamud schlemiel par excellence." The Fidelman stories appeared both separately in magazines and in two story collections from 1958 to 1969, and they were not originally thought of as a unit. But the last three stories are tightly linked, and as Robert Ducharme asserts in Art and Idea in the Novels of Bernard Malamud: Toward "The Fixer," Malamud deliberately saved the last story for the book because he didn't want to let readers know the ending. Three genres merge in Pictures of Fidelman, that of the Kunstlerroman or artist novel, the Bildungsroman or education novel, and the Huckleberry Finn-like picaresque novel, in which the main character wanders through a series of adventures. Fidelman (faith man) encounters Susskind (sweet child) in the first story or chapter, "Last Mohican." Susskind is a Jewish folktale type, a chnorrer, or as Goldman terms him, "a beggar with style," who wants the second of Fidelman's two suits. Rebuffed, Susskind steals the first chapter of Fidelman's book on Italian artist Giotto di Bondone. Hershinow suggests that "Susskind becomes for Fidelman a kind of dybbuk (demon) who inhabits his conscience, destroying his peace of mind." As Cohen remarks, "So Fidelman begins an active search for Susskind who begins to take on the roles of alter-ego, superego, and symbol for Fidelman's true heritage and past." Here again is the familiar Malamud motif of the journey that changes a life.

In pursuit, Fidelman visits a synagogue, a Jewish ghetto, and a graveyard that contains victims of the Holocaust. Both at the cemetery and in his crazy pursuit of Susskind, Schlemiel Fidelman recalls Frank Alpine in The Assistant, for Fidelman too is linked to St. Francis. In a dream Fidelman sees Susskind, who shows him a Giotto fresco in which St. Francis gives his clothing to a poor knight. As Sidney Richman affirms in Bernard Malamud and the Critics, "In the same fashion as Frankie Alpine, Fidelman must discover that the way to the self is paradoxically through another; and the answer is heralded by a sudden alteration of the pursuit." At the end of this artistic pilgrim's progress, "against his will, Fidelman learns what the ancient rabbis taught and what Susskind has always known: Jews--that is, human beings, menschen, in Malamud's terms--are responsible for each other. That is the essence of being human," Michael Brown relates in Judaism.

Fidelman must learn in the next stories what makes a great artist. For example, in the fourth story, "A Pimp's Revenge," Fidelman returns his mistress, Esmeralda, to prostitution to pay for his constantly repainted masterwork, a portrait of her, first as Mother and Son, then as Brother and Sister, and finally as Prostitute and Procurer. "The truth is I am afraid to paint, like I might find out something about myself," Fidelman says. Esmeralda knows the secret: "If I have my choice, I'll take life. If there's not that there's no art." Barbara Lefcowitz justly argues in Literature and Psychology, "Where Malamud excels is in his subtle and nearly always comical juxtaposition of a neurotic character against a deeper and wider moral and historical context." Fidelman finally produces a masterpiece, but, second-rate artist that he is, can't let it alone, and mars it. The genius knows when to stop, but Everyman does not, and Esmeralda calls him a murderer.

In the final story, "Glass Blower of Venice," Fidelman tries to play artist once more, under the reluctant teaching of his homosexual lover Beppo, but at last gives up art for craftsmanship and returns to America. Fidelman, the craftsman, no longer the inadequate artist, has finally achieved the goals toward which Susskind--and later Esmeralda--pointed him. Samuel I. Bellman argues in Critique that "more than any other Malamudian character Fidelman is constantly growing, realizing himself, transforming his unsatisfactory old life into a more satisfactory new one." In Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, Sheldon N. Grebstein praises the juxtaposition of "the coarsely sexual and the sublimely aesthetic." Indeed, no other work of Malamud shows so much appetite for life; as Helterman has argued: "[Fidelman] also seeks, and occasionally participates in, a richness of passion not typical of Malamud's urban heroes." The epigraph for Pictures of Fidelman is from Yeats: "The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life or of the work." However, the new Fidelman chooses "both."

The Tenants inaugurated Malamud's third and final period. In the works of this period the heroic structuring of the first period is gone, as are the Wandering Jews and the Everyman motifs of the second. Beneath differing surface plots, though, a new structural likeness appears. Before 1971 Malamud's typical Jewish characters tend to move towards responsibility rather than towards achievement; but from 1971 on, they become extraordinary achievers, or machers.

In The Tenants Harry Lesser, a minor Jewish novelist, is writing a novel about being unable to finish a novel, in a kind of infinite regression. He keeps on living in the apartment building that landlord Levenspiel (leaven game) wants to tear down; then a squatter, black writer Willie Spearmint (Willie Shakespeare), moves into the building. Willie and Harry are the kind of doubled pair (drawn from Edgar Allan Poe and Dostoevsky) that Malamud is fond of, for Harry's writing is all form, and Willie's is all vitality. Harry takes over Irene, Willie's Jewish girl; Willie burns Harry's manuscript; Harry axes Willie's typewriter; and in a final burst of overachievement, Willie brains Harry and Harry castrates Willie. The Tenants "ends in a scream of language," reports Malcolm Bradbury in Encounter. Though the novel hints at two other possible endings--by fire, or by Harry's marriage to Irene--Levenspiel has the last word, which is Rachmones, or mercy.

Though The Tenants did little for Malamud's reputation, he continued to place stories in top American magazines. Mervyn Rothstein reported in the New York Times that Malamud said at the end of his life, "With me, it's story, story, story." In Malamud's next-to-last collection, Rembrandt's Hat, only one story, "The Silver Crown," is predominantly Jewish, in sharp contrast to his first collection, while other stories are more reminiscent of Chekhov. There is even a visit to the Chekhov Museum in "Man in the Drawer," a story that shows the fascination with achievement so dominant in Malamud's final period. Howard Harvitz, an intellectual tourist in Russia and a marginal Jew, has changed his name from Harris back to Harvitz. Hardly a creative writer himself, he is doing a piece on museums. A Russian writer, Levitansky--also a marginal Jew, but a determined achiever in spite of official opposition--intends to smuggle his stories out of Russia. Harvitz at first doesn't want this charge, but discovers that four of the stories show heroes not taking responsibility. After reading them, Harvitz timorously takes the stories out of Russia.

Dubin's Lives took Malamud over five years to write, twice as long as any previous novel. Ralph Tyler in the New York Times Book Review reports that Malamud said Dubin's Lives was "his attempt at bigness, at summing up what he ... learned over the long haul." In the novel, the biographer Dubin is an isolated achiever, no mere recorder of biographical facts but a creative, even fictionalizing biographer: "One must transcend autobiographical detail by inventing it after it is remembered." Dubin is trying to write a biography of D. H. Lawrence, a writer who made passion his religion, yet was impotent. There had been a glancing counterpointing of Lawrence's career in A New Life, but here this motif is much enlarged; as David Levin observes in Virginia Quarterly Review, "The complexities of Dubin's subsequent adventures often run parallel to events in Lawrence's life."

In the kind of psychomachia, or inner struggle, which some critics see as the essence of American fiction, Dubin, as Helterman notes, "loses his memory, his sexual powers, his ability to work, even his ability to relate to his family. At first, the only compensation for these losses is a kind of high-grade nostalgia brought about by a process called reverie." These reveries lead Dubin to a liaison with young Fanny Bick, whose first name comes from English novelist Jane Austen's heroine in Mansfield Park, Fanny Price; Fanny Bick is an Austen heroine with glands. Like a number of heroines in Malamud's fiction, she is significantly associated with wildflowers, fruit, and bird flights. Chiara Briganti remarks in Studies in American Jewish Literature that "all the female characters in Malamud's fiction share a common shallowness and common values: they all respect marriage and family life, and, whatever their past, they all seek fulfillment through a permanent relationship with a man." But Fanny breaks this stereotypical pattern, for at the end of Dubin's Lives she ambitiously intends to become a lawyer.

Dubin's affair in Venice, where the youthful Fanny almost immediately betrays him with their gondolier, is that of the schlemiel lover seen before in Frank Alpine and Sy Levin. Barbara Quart, in Studies in American Jewish Literature, has seen a further problem: "While Malamud's central characters try to break out of their solitude, they appear to fear love and women as much as they long for them." But dominant among familiar motifs is the character of Dubin as the isolated overachiever, who moves his study from his country house into the barn to devote all possible energy and space to his biography. Dubin even begrudges time wasted thinking about Fanny, with whom he is genuinely in love.

Malamud's last finished novel, God's Grace, treats both the original Holocaust and a new, imagined Holocaust of the future. In Immigrant-Survivors: Post-Holocaust Consciousness in Recent Jewish- American Literature, Dorothy Seldman Bilik has pointed out that the question of why God permitted the Holocaust has been an issue in Malamud's fiction for thirty years; indeed, for Malamud the Holocaust has been the ultimate mark of inhumanity, and God's Grace treats the Holocaust not only as man's inhumanity to man, but as God's inhumanity to man. The novel is a wild, at times brilliant, at times confusing description of a second Noah's Flood. Calvin Cohn, a paleologist and the son of a rabbi-cantor, had been doing underseas research when the Djanks and the Druzhkies (Yanks and Russians) launched an atomic Holocaust and destroyed every other human. Calvin recalls many Biblical and literary figures: Parsifal, Romeo, Prospero, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, and Ahab. His Eve and Juliet is Mary Madelyn, a chimpanzee. An albino ape appears (possibly an oblique reference to Moby Dick) with other apes as Yahoos from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and the chimpanzee Buz serves as Cohn's Isaac, Caliban, and man Friday. There is even an Arthurian spear used to harpoon the albino ape.

On Cohn's Island Calvin turns into an overachiever, and even an un- Job-like defier of God, in spite of God's pillars of fire, showers of lemons, and occasional warning rocks. The foundation of God's Grace is Biblical in part, but also characteristically American, for it is the story of the Americanized--and reversed--Fortunate Fall. The idea conveyed by the Fortunate Fall is that Adam and Eve, driven from Paradise by eating of the tree of Knowledge, in fact obtained benefits from their fall, notably free will and a consciousness of good and evil. Cohn has treated the chimpanzees as his inferiors; as a schlemiel lecturer he has imposed his admonitions and teachings on them, rather than encouraging them to learn for themselves. He has promised but never given Mary Madelyn the marriage she has wanted, and he has prevented the marriage or mating of Buz and Mary Madelyn, which could have been just as desirable for the future gene stock as Cohn's half-chimpanzee child Rebekah. In short, over-achieving Calvin Cohn has eaten from the tree of hubris, or sinful pride, rather than knowledge.

This complex novel baffled its first reviewers; for example, Joseph Epstein wrote in Commentary: "Much of the humor in the novel is of the kind known as faintly amusing, but the chimp humor, on the scale of wit, is roughly three full rungs down from transvestite jokes." Part of the difficulty in the novel is that God's Grace does not fall into a clear genre category; in a 1982 Christian Science Monitor article, Victor Howes called it "somewhat east of sci-fi, somewhat west of allegory." However, like much of Malamud's work, God's Grace not only reflects the Jewish Old Testament but also partakes of an American colonial genre, the Jeremiad, or warning of future disaster.

Malamud's final, but unfinished work, "The Tribe," concerns the adventures of a Russian Jewish peddlar, Yozip, among the western Indians. As Nan Robertson recounts in the New York Times, the schlemiel hero Yozip becomes a marshal, is kidnapped by a tribe of Indians, and has a dialogue with an Indian chief about obtaining his freedom.

Malamud gave few interviews, but those he did grant provided the best commentary on his work, as when he told Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times: "People say I write so much about misery, but you write about what you write best. As you are grooved, so you are grieved. And the grieving is that no matter how much happiness or success you collect, you cannot obliterate your early experience." Yet perhaps Malamud's contribution is clearest in his greatest invention, his Jewish-American dialect, comic even at the height of tragedy. For example, Calvin Cohn, sacrificed by the chimpanzee Buz in a wild inversion of the story of Abraham and Isaac, reflects that God after all has let him live out his life; Cohn then asks himself--forgetting his educated speech and reverting to the Yiddish rhythms of his youth--"Maybe tomorrow the world to come?" In such comic-serious questioning, Malamud captures the voice of the past and gives it relevance to the present.

Associated Works

The Natural (Novel)

Historical Context

The Life and Times of Bernard Malamud (1914-1986)
At the time of Malamud's birth:
Woodrow Wilson was president of the United States
First national Mothers' Day was established
Russia's capital city of Petersburg was renamed Petrograd to sound less German
First red and green traffic light was rigged up in Cleveland, Ohio
At the time of Malamud's death:
Ronald Reagan was president of the United States
The United States supplied covert aid to Iran to support its efforts in the war against Iraq
World's worst nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl power station in the U.S.S.R.
Desmond Tutu was elected the first black Archbishop of South Africa
The times:
1900-1930: Naturalist and Symbolist period in American literature
1914-1918: World War I
1914-1965: Modernist period of American literature
1939-1945: World War II
1950-1953: Korean War
1951-1955: Winston Churchill was prime minister of Britain
1957-1975: Vietnam War
1967: Israel-Arab War
1973: Israeli-Arab War
1982: Falkland War
Malamud's contemporaries:
David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) Prime minister of Israel
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) American-born British poet, critic
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) German chancellor
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) American president
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) British novelist, critic
William Faulkner (1897-1962) American novelist
John Steinbeck (1902-1968) American writer
Lillian Hellman (1906-1984) American playwright
Francis Bacon (1909-1992) British artist
Arthur Miller (1915-) American writer, playwright
Selected world events:
1933: United States court ruling allowed Ulysses, by James Joyce, into the country after finding that the sexually explicit language was not gratuitous
1936: Penguin Books Ltd began a paperback revolution
1943: D-Day--Allied troops landed at Normandy beaches
1955: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was published
1960: United States paperback book sales reached a rate of more than 300 million annually
1966: Truman Capote published In Cold Blood, the first docu- drama novel
1969: The Saturday Evening Post ended publication after 148 years
1976: United States copyright laws were revised after 67 years