Bernard Malamud: The Writer’s Life By Philip Davis Oxford University Press, London 2007, $34.95, pp. 377

The Human Sentence

Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud was part of the Jewish troika that entered on to the main stage of American literature in the 1950s. Roth, the sole survivor, continues to produce at an astonishing rate and remains the center of critical attention, and Bellow’s place in the literary pantheon is secure, while Malamud’s star has faded. Though he has continued to be admired for his stories (the collection The Magic Barrel is a classic). his novels, with the exception of The Natural, The Assistant and perhaps The Fixer, have not fared so well. The Fixer was based on a case of a Jew arrested in Tsarist Russia in 1911 and accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy, allegedly for using his blood in the baking of matzoh for Passover. The novel won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

In this first full-length biography of Malamud since his death in 1986, Philip Davis is a wholehearted admirer of the novels as well as the stories. Having full access to Malamud’s manuscripts and papers from the archives at the University of Texas, Oregon State University and the Library of Congress, as well as to family and friends intimate with his life and work, Davis provides us with detailed accounts of how the novels, in particular, evolved. Unlike many literary biographies in which a writer’s work gets lost in the attention to the external events of the life, Davis’s biography focuses on Malamud’s life mainly as it illuminates the process by which the plots, the sentences and the paragraphs of the stories and novels come into existence. If at times Davis seems excessive in his undiscriminating enthusiasm for the work, we are more than compensated by what we learn about the creative process.

Born to Russian Jewish immigrants in 1914, Malamud in his life and work made an unremitting effort to come to terms with the “inheritance” of his Brooklyn origins: poverty, the suicide of his mother and the schizophrenia of his brother. For Malamud, fantasy was a source of strength, but it wasn’t enough. An honest facing of reality was also required. According to his daughter, Janna, Malamud “was bothered his whole life that [his] honest grocer-father had once cut the boy short and called him a ‘bluffer’ for lengthily elaborating upon a story which he claimed to be factual.” Fortunately, his father’s rebuke did not have a chilling effect on the storyteller’s gift for invention. On the contrary, it seemed to have provided an anchor of honesty to the products of the imagination.

In his work, Malamud embraced the hard life in which he grew up. “We need some sort of poverty in our lives,” he declared. His characters, the poor and the dispossessed, find themselves in situations that lead to morally perplexing situations, neatly summarized by Davis: “Why shouldn’t a landlord kick out his longtime unsavory tenant? Why should the baker give money to the man who never repaid the last loan, years earlier? How can a poor man not pay another? Why should a scholar forgive the refugee who stole his manuscript? How comes it that a poor young widow won’t take money from a would-be benefactor [without ulterior motives]?” Malamud’s characters struggle to know themselves, to act morally, to preserve their dignity, to show compassion for those who suffer. In Dubin’s Lives, the hero, a biographer, is a surrogate for Malamud in his own struggle to be a mensch. Malamud’s imagination inclines to fantasy (one of his stories is about a Jewbird who speaks Yiddish), but even fantasy is always in the service of moral realism.

Davis writes of Malamud’s “long adolescence,” his personal awkwardness in speech and manner and of his slow development as a writer. Adolescence is less a time of life than a condition of being, and it persisted in Malamud into his adulthood. He and his wife loved each other, but it was a troubled marriage, scarred by infidelity with a young woman 28 years his junior. Hard as he tried to be a good husband and father, he loved writing more. The title of Alfred Kazin’s book Writing Was Everything could have been the title of Davis’s biography. Emerging from a stroke in his 60s, Malamud said he would not want to live if he couldn’t continue writing. It is doubtful that he would have said the same thing if he had lost his wife. Isolated for long hours in his study, obsessed by the words on a page, Malamud is an example of the writer who becomes increasingly alienated from family and the common life. Among the most egocentric activities, writing is, paradoxically, at the same time a source of the moral imagination.

Davis acknowledges the human cost Malamud suffered as a result of the writing life, but he doesn’t allow it to diminish his admiration, indeed love, of the work. He recalls one of the epigraphs of a collection of stories, Pictures of Fidelman, taken from Yeats: “The intellect of man is forced to choose/ Perfection of the life or of the work.” Malamud may have wanted both, but his talent lay in the work. The biography is dedicated to the memory of Malamud and what he called “the human sentence.” A “human sentence” is a scrupulously honest representation of an event in a language that surprises the reader. Davis’s account of Malamud’s struggles with his sentences is the stuff of drama. It inspired me to reread Malamud’s works with an eye to their distinctive achievements.

In the story “The Last Mohican,” Fidelman, artist manqué, chases Suskind, the down-and-out refugee who has stolen his briefcase containing his chapter on Giotto, through the streets of the Jewish Ghetto in Rome, and suddenly the reader comes upon this sentence, remarkable for its vividness and compression: “The ghetto Jews, framed in amazement in their medieval windows, stared at the wild pursuit.” “Framed in medieval windows”: the phrase suggests a work of art, reminding us that we are in Rome, one of the artistic capitals of the world, but it also evokes the sense of ghetto confinement of survivors of an earlier time. The ghetto Jews, fixed in the medieval frame, can only stare in amazement, as Fidelman and Suskind, modern spirits, fly by.

Seymour Levin, the hero of A New Life, travels from New York to the West Coast to take up a position as an instructor of English in a college in Oregon. Malamud, with his wonderful ear for the Yiddish idiom, recalls the Yiddish immigrant tale in the following sentence: “Bearded, fatigued, lonely, Levin set down a valise and suitcase and looked around in a strange land for welcome.” Malamud has encapsulated in a single sentence the double history of the Jewish immigrant and of the American frontier. Levin is a belated Natty Bumppo, the frontier hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels. Malamud’s lively ear (why does one speak of a deadly ear?) for the Yiddish idiom enriches rather than corrupts the English language.

What are we to make of the Jewishness of the fiction? Though he cut out the sentence, “Everybody is a Jew, but they don’t know it,” uttered by grocer’s assistant Frank Alpine, a convert to Judaism, from The Assistant, he never disavowed the sentiment. In deleting the sentence, he may have worried that it could have been construed as an expression of ethnic chauvinism. Malamud could have reversed the sentence: “A Jew is everybody,” for the tendency of his imagination is to find the large in the small, the universal in the particular, the human in the gentile as well as the Jew. For Malamud, ethnicity is not a parochialism, but rather a path to universality.

Eugene Goodheart is the Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Brandeis University and author of many books of literary cultural criticism as well as a memoir, Confessions of a Secular Jew.