Malamud Partly Revealed

Abstract

Malamud Partly Revealed Floyd Skloot (bio) Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life by Philip Davis (Oxford University Press, 2007. 388 pages. Illustrated. $34.95) When Bernard Malamud died in 1986, he was considered an important American fiction writer, admired both for his eight novels and his four collections of short stories. He was one voice in a familiar trio that included Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and that defined the ultimate [End Page xviii] achievement of twentieth-century Jewish-American literature. Malamud earned the National Book Award in 1959 for his short-story collection The Magic Barrel and again in 1967 for his fourth novel, The Fixer, which also won that year's Pulitzer Prize. Movies were made of his novels and stories: The Natural, The Fixer, The Angel Levine. But two decades later, as his family and his biographer, the British writer Philip Davis, maintain, "his name [is] fading, his readership and literary standing in danger of decline." To thwart that decline and bring Malamud's vital work back into focus, Davis offers readers a dry scholarly account of the man and his work. Any biographer approaching Malamud faces serious challenges. First, Malamud's daughter, the writer Janna Malamud Smith, published a detailed memoir of her father in 2006. Readers of the Davis biography will find extensive passages from Malamud Smith's memoir quoted or paraphrased, and the basic materials of the story already known. Second, Malamud himself was a deeply private person, withdrawn from most of the public settings in which writers become known, eager to keep his personal story hidden—unlike Roth, who has been engaged openly with his autobiographical self; or Bellow, who spoke out on many social, political, cultural, and personal issues. Bernard Malamud kept himself apart. He published no autobiography or book of personal essays; even when in his fiction he made use of autobiography, he did so under a carefully wrought cloak of distracting shape and pattern. What he loved most as a writer, according to Davis, was "revisions and transmutations of the elements of his experience." What he sought was "autobiographical essence . . . not autobiographical detail." Third, and perhaps most problematic for the narrative, Malamud did little besides write. And revise. He was a fanatic of routine, disliked travel, disliked the disruptions of daily life. He taught—at what is now Oregon State University in Corvallis and at Bennington—and he walked a lot. Otherwise he wrote as often as he could, typically at his school office or, later in life, in a room off-limits to others, and he read for at least three hours each night. Despite these obstacles Davis has compiled a satisfactorily complete picture, having talked to enough people and having read the correspondence and the published work closely enough to give a sense of what the private Malamud might have been like. This picture is not flattering. Malamud's marriage, the focus of much of Davis's book, was—to spin things as generously as possible—old-fashioned and traditional. His wife's life was subsumed into his, geared toward facilitating the writer's career. Much of his life as the father of two children was also merely an adjunct to his writing life. Malamud comes across as a grumbling, selfish, preoccupied, tightly controlled man for whom the work was everything. His background offers some clues to the forces that shaped him: immigrant parents in Brooklyn, long financial struggle, grave illnesses, deep disappointments, an extended artistic apprenticeship marked by failure. Malamud's father eventually [End Page xix] owned a small, struggling grocery; his suicidal mother was institutionalized; and his brother was also afflicted with mental illness. Malamud, emotionally fraught, worked hard to succeed as a student, a school teacher, a fledgling writer; but nothing seemed to come easily. All of which seems astonishing in light of the great flourishing, which began with the publication of his first novel, The Natural, when Malamud was almost forty. Reading Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life is both painful and inspiring. The writer forged in pain, rigorous in his determination and craft, willing himself to become an important artist—it's a familiar but nonetheless impressive story, though there are serious casualties...