A New Life for a Good Man
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING A New Life for a Good Man By Stanley Edgar Hyman Bernard Malamud's A New Life (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 367 pp., $4.95) is the first new novel of consistent excellence...
...his mother insane and a suicide...
...their life together will be responsible, hard-working and devoted...
...Levin's past, when it is finally confessed to Pauline, seems unnecessarily melodramatic: his father a thief, "Harry the Goniff...
...At the height of his affair with Pauline Gilley, she says, "Oh, my darling, we must do something with our lives...
...then went into heat, her raucous cries sounding through the house...
...at another point she is temporarily frigid, and he thinks bitterly, "Now we have truly come to adultery...
...Finally determined, she tells Levin: "I want a better life...
...It begins in lust, and after his first adventure with Pauline in the forest, Levin thinks vulgarly: "his first married woman, sex uncomplicated in a bed of leaves, short hours, good pay...
...Malamud's work has some of the bitter comedy of Yiddish literature, some of the preoccupation with sin and redemption of Russian literature...
...He asked the landlady to keep the cat out of the house but pussy in love was faithful, finding more ways in than he could block off, depositing another bloody-breasted bird...
...When the chairman of the department warns Levin against dating students or prowling among faculty wives, the weekend with Nadalee and the affair with Pauline are implicit in his warning, as though created by it ("Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law," says St...
...Levin's future, as we can picture it at the end of the novel, is less extreme: Pauline will develop breasts in pregnancy...
...Beaty's white cat fell in love with him, laying a broken-feathered bird at his door, fat headless robin...
...A New Life, as a fable of redemption or rebirth, is accurately titled...
...In progressing from The Natural to The Assistant to A New Life, Malamud has achieved a new mature acceptance...
...Yet this novel, like Malamud's work generally, remains unique, in its totality unlike the work of anyone else...
...Malamud's expressionist device, which he shares with several of the best writers of our time, is writing dreams, fantasies and even similes as though they were literal realities...
...When Levin arrives in Cascadia, the Gilleys take him to their house for dinner, and Pauline spills the tuna fish casserole in his lap...
...If this is not joy, the top-gallant delight Father Mapple's sermon promises the righteous in Moby Dick, it is a happy ending nevertheless, and perhaps as much as our shabby modern world can promise anyone...
...When Levin goes to confront the wronged husband in his hotel room, Gerald greets him earnestly with: "Pardon the small room...
...There are infelicities of style and syntax, although fewer than in the earlier books, and occasional weaknesses of diction, as when Malamud gets fancy and writes "dew" for "tears...
...himself a gutter alcoholic...
...Some of the plot, in which Levin becomes a candidate for chairman of the department and meets espionage with counter-espionage, is absurd, although Malamud saves himself at the worst point by writing a human and moving confrontation scene between Levin and the woman colleague who has just gone through his files...
...Funny, awful, it nevertheless is love, and beauty, and value...
...MALAMUD'S TECHNICAL MASTERY is impressive...
...It is the story of S. Levin, a 30-year-old failure, who leaves New York to be an English instructor at Cascadia College on the West Coast...
...A New Life is too slowgetting started, and the book is half over before its action really begins...
...To the outward eye, he is a typical schlemiel: He steps into cow pies, teaches with his fly open, makes the ruinous remark every time...
...Eat my heart,' he cried and kicked the beast down the stairs...
...At the height of his emotional disturbance, Levin walks into a bar, orders "Love," and when the bartender goes in search of the bottle, madly flees...
...At the novel's end, in one of the most wonderfully embarrassing scenes in modern fiction, Gerald warns Levin of Pauline's constipation and menstrual irregularities...
...It is an uproarious scene, and announces Levin as the book's schlemiel, but it is also the annunciation of his future role as husband and father, victim and protector, of the woman and child who pour their love in his lap...
...at one point in the affair he has excruciating muscle spasms in bed with her...
...His apparently episodic novel is tightly woven, mostly by means of foreshadowing...
...Malamud's vision of life in the novel redeems its ugliness and nastiness with humor, and redeems the humor with charity...
...Gerald Gilley is a repulsive careerist, a golf-mad professor who is compiling a picture-book of American literature, but he is a comic masterpiece of a careerist, and Levin's ultimate understanding is that he too is a suffering fellow human, and he feels compassion for him...
...Pauline is the Iris of The Natural, no longer scorned...
...The affair progresses, and Levin suddenly realizes: "The truth is I love Pauline Gilley...
...Levin first meets the dean carrying a bag of grapefruit, and, as in an old silent movie, while they talk they scramble for the grapefruit after the dean has walked into a telephone pole, then scramble again when Levin walks into a tree...
...In a sense...
...The novel covers one year of rich experience, and at its end we see Levin, fired and disgraced, setting off for San Francisco with his booty: a second-hand Hudson, the wife of the chairman of his department, her two adopted children, and Levin's own child inside ber...
...Levin rakes leaves with die frenzy of Frank Alpine, but he has an insight into his nature and destiny that Frank never achieves...
...Cascadia College is a dreadful place, narrow and mean, but it is also a terribly funny place where "there are no geniuses around to make you uncomfortable," fly-casting is taught for credit, and a textbook containing Hemingway's story "Ten Indians" is banned on the pretext that it might offend, "as degrading the American Indians...
...Levin attains to sanctity (and I think that this represents a considerable advance for Malamud) not through denying and mortifying the flesh, like the anchorite Frank Alpine in The Assistant, but through indulging the flesh, and his adultery is a holy adultery...
...One always hopes that a new place will inspire change—in one's life," Levin says tentatively when he arrives in Cascadia...
...I want it with you...
...Malamud has moved from the story of Samson, punished for the misuse of his powers, to Job, suffering because chosen to suffer, to Jesus, suffering voluntarily to redeem...
...If Malamud continues to be able to find modern plots to embody his powerful redemptive themes, I know no limit to what he can accomplish...
...Before becoming involved with Pauline, Levin has had: an encounter with a waitress in a barn, ruined at the dramatic moment when a disappointed rival steals their clothes;, a wrestle with an unmarried colleague on the floor of his office, broken off by Levin out of an obscure compassion...
...It particularly resembles the work of that remarkable Soviet-Jewish writer, Isaac Babel, who combines both traditions, and combines them within the current of modern European literature...
...A New Life, in its progress from affair to bondage, may remind readers of A Farewell to Arms, but Malamud faces up to problems that Hemingway kills Catherine to evade...
...But in truth he is a holy schlemiel, God's innocent, a Fool in Christ...
...It has some of the grubby comedy of the British Angries, the compassion of Salinger, the moral earnestness of George P. Elliott...
...WRITERS & WRITING A New Life for a Good Man By Stanley Edgar Hyman Bernard Malamud's A New Life (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 367 pp., $4.95) is the first new novel of consistent excellence that I have found since beginning this column in May, a lovely oasis after an interminable crawl through the hot sands...
...When he despairs of her, he thinks of her as "the small town lady who talked of a new life but had been consistently afraid of it...
...Some of A New Life is scandalously funny...
...Pauline's husband Gerald challenges, itemizing the disadvantages, and Levin answers, in the true voice of a Malamud saint: "Because I can, you son of a bitch...
...and a gay weekend with Nadalee, a student, resulting in her efforts to get her class grade raised from a C to a B. His involvement with Pauline is hardly more glamorous: he is disturbed by her flat chest...
...Certainly there are flaws...
...It then goes beyond love, or beyond what Levin understands as love, to the sacrificial acceptance of responsibility...
...Ascending on three legs she delivered a mangled rat...
...The action of the novel is Levin's development into a kind of saint...
...The cold bare trip back to town with the waitress cursing Levin is nightmarish comedy...
...C. D. Fabrikant, the department's scholar, is rarely seen except on horseback, and gallops off by way of punctuating his remarks...
...Feeling his love gone, he nevertheless accepts the burden of Pauline and her children...
...In the terrible period when Levin has bravely given up Pauline, and is tormented by erotic dreams, Malamud writes: "Amid such pleasures Mrs...
...When he reads a theme of Nadalee's about swimming naked, "Though Levin's legs cramped after a too hasty immersion in cold water, he jumped in after her and spent most of the night swimming with Nadalee...
...Like that of Malamud's best stories in The Magic Barrel, the humor is wild and surrealistic...
...Paul, "for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet...
...Levin, with a new identity, will again have a first name...
...It is a classic progress from eros, fleshly love, to agape, the spiritual love of one of God's creatures for another...
...Where the sex scenes in Malamud's earlier books were always interrupted at their climax, constituting a prolonged tease of the reader, or else were consummated under the aegis of death, producing an unlovely liebestod effect, here (although traces of the old bad habits remain) sex is funny, earthy and sometimes beautiful...
...Later, "he felt like a man entering a new life and entered...
...when he has changed into a fresh pair of pants, the little boy wets on them...
...Why take that load on yourself...
Vol. 44 • October 1961 • No. 34
