Bernard Malamud's Moral Fables

...The title story, "Idiots First," as boldly blasphemous as the end of "Still Life," images the Old Testament God as Ginzburg, "a bulky, bearded man with hairy nostrils and a fishy smell...

...The Jewbird" suffers from impurity of form...

...She first confesses her sins to him, then climbs into bed with him as penance...

...Malamud's prose is often very careless...

...The triumph of the story is the way it humanizes the unimaginable...

...a subtle thought put through refugee English "comes out like a piece of broken bottle...

...But these Christian themes are thoroughly secularized...

...Explaining that her lover cannot give her money because he has to pay for his wife's teeth ("She has very bad teeth, poor thing"), Rosa accepts humanity as Krantz never can...

...In it a young American Jewish narrator tells of the plight of Oskar Gassner, a middle-aged refugee Jewish critic and journalist from Berlin...

...At other times Malamud writes very well indeed...

...At the end of the story we see Cronin leaving the teaching profession —as though it were the ministry, and his charity had proved inadequate to it—and Mary Lou about to enter it...

...This story tells of a college teacher named Cronin who rejects and betrays a student named Mary Lou when she tells him of her lurid past...

...Rosa has a son who beats her up, a married lover, a bad liver, an irregular menstruation...

...that herring barrel will feed multitudes...

...When Nat in "Black Is My Favorite Color" helps a blind Negro man on the street and the man says "I can tell you're white," Nat is neither white nor black, Jew nor Gentile, merely a rejected fellow man...

...Schwartz the Jewbird tells of a relative, freed from a dybbuk, "now the mother of two wonderful children...

...redemption may take the form of suicide...

...Other stories in the book succeed in very different fashions...

...A scene in which the two of them are caught by Negro hoodlums on a Harlem street and beaten up is heartbreaking because we understand the hoodlums too...

...a man crying looks "as though he had been sprayed with something to kill flies...

...The murder of millions by the Nazis, as catalogued in the Eichmann trial, is meaningless to the imagination...

...They differ from American life only in that their nightmares are ordered and controlled, and thus meaningful and ethical...

...Black Is My Favorite Color" is about a Jewish liquor dealer in Harlem who likes Negroes, and is rejected by them for racial reasons...

...Oskar finishes his lecture, delivers it with great success, and kills himself two days later...

...His fables are universal...

...Malamud's themes are the typical themes of the New Testament: charity, compassion, sacrifice, redemption...

...From Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" to Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People," they are not civilized and serene, but wild, garish, frantic, nightmarish...

...The Maid's Shoes" is another examination of a cold heart, this one belonging to Orlando Krantz, an American professor in Rome...

...The daughter's fiancé in "Suppose a Wedding" arrives to take her out to "eat Chinese...

...compassion is herring for a bird...

...It too is hilariously funny, with Fidelman a prisoner in a fine improbable brothel, until events turn into absurd melodrama at the end...

...Watching Mary Lou swim naked, "her flesh lit in the sunlight," Cronin comes closest to accepting the body and its innocence...

...In an odd negative way Malamud preaches a pagan acceptance of life...

...As I have had occasion to say in these pages, many of the new young novelists succeed with impure forms and varied tones...

...at his best, in "The Magic Barrel" or "Black Is My Favorite Color," he blends comedy, pathos and melodrama, and perfectly sustains that mixture throughout...

...seen through the eyes of a heavyset refugee in a hot hotel room on the upper West side, it overwhelms us as it overpowered him...

...Not,' he said.' Suddenly the heat breaks, Oskar's block ends, the Nazis invade Poland, and the narrator feels "some sense of release...

...Even the faulty English that Malamud writes for Oskar blends effectively and beautifully into the story, when Oskar explains his separation from his wife: "Though I asked no questions, Oskar said, I offered her to come with me here but she refused this.' 'For what reason?' 'She did not think I wished her to come.' 'Did you?' I asked...

...Krantz fires his maid Rosa for making a fool of him, takes her back when he can get no one else satisfactory, then fires her for good when her messy life begins to intrude into his ordered life...

...The latter shows a neighborhood grocer driven out of business by supermarket competition...

...First courting Ornita, Nat gives her a discount at the liquor store, "a dollar off...

...The story that seems to me the best in his book, "The German Refugee,' is a masterpiece of frenzy and desperation, all perfectly ordered...

...focussed in one ditch in Poland, it begins to take on imaginative meaning...

...At the end, Fidelman wins the pious and superstitious Annamaria by appearing in a cassock and biretta...

...Still Life" is about Arthur Fidelman, the untalented American painter in Rome who was the hero, or villain, of "The Last Mohican" in The Magic Barrel...

...However, Mary Lou has been redeemed by understanding and accepting her life, as Cronin has not...

...In stories that do not come off, "The Jewbird" and "Naked Nude," Malamud shifts from comedy to pathos or melodrama...

...Two early stories, "The Death of Me" and "The Cost of Living," are naturalistic documentaries about, respectively, a tailor shop and a grocery store...

...but then a more restrained writer couldn't have written the story...

...Idiots First is full of local color, the observed texture of Jewish life...

...This unpatriotic reflection is inspired by a new book of stories from Bernard Malamud, Idiots First (Farrar, Strauss, 212 pp., $4.50...

...Naked Nude," another Fidelman story, displays the same flaw...

...But I think that the short story requires a consistency of tone that the novel does not...

...A more restrained writer would have ended the story a few lines before its pat ending...

...Malamud is as wild as they come...

...Fidelman's pursuit of Annamaria Oliovino, the Italian artist with whom he shares a studio, is uproarious comedy...

...at the end it turns pathetic with Schwartz's death...

...It is this, finally, that gives Bernard Malamud his importance...

...In Fidelman's slavish devotion (he ends up shopping, cooking, and cleaning for Annamaria) we have a parody of Malamud's serious themes: sacrifice and redemption...

...All of this makes Krantz "sick with nervousness,' and he sends the maid off as a scapegoat heaped with all the embarrassments and frailties that being alive implies...

...Part of Oskar's misery is that he has left his Gentile wife in Germany...

...The fount of charity is the college teacher, not the priest...

...When a failed shoemaker in "The Cost of Living" is seen "wearing a summer hat in wintertime," he is not Italian Mr...

...His love affair with a Negro widow named Ornita, who deserts him because she is afraid to marry him and bear his children, is moving and beautiful...

...The narrator thinks it is because of the fall of Poland, but Oskar has had a letter telling him that his wife hysterically converted to Judaism, was shot by the Nazis in Poland, and was thrown "into an open tank ditch, with the naked Jewish men, their wives and children, some Polish soldiers, and a handful of gypsies.' This is, of course, another of Malamud's fables of frenzied redemptive sacrifice, like The Assistant and "The Magic Barrel...

...Pellegrino in an old Panama hat, he is an out-ofseason, obsolescent human being...

...The story's final line—"Pumping slowly he nailed her to her cross"— is a triumph of bold blasphemy, an outrageous culmination to an outrageous story...

...He rejects old Ginzburg and his old "law...

...The time is the summer of 1939, the heat is terrible, and Oskar, who is studying English with the narrator in order to lecture in New York, is unable to learn, to think, or to write...

...sacrifice is generally indistinguishable from lust...

...Life Is Better than Death" is sad but no story, in that the guilt feelings of a widow and a widower ("We mourn because we hate them,' he tells her) do not have any organic connection with the story's events, his getting her pregnant and deserting her...

...As the Poles mobilize in August, the heat becomes relentless, and Oskar sits "with sick eyes, breathing like a wounded animal...

...It is a terribly funny story about an elderly Jewish bird named Schwartz, who lives on herring...

...Suppose a Wedding," a fragment of a play, teeters on the edge of soap opera...

...But at high points these specificities are transcended...

...I am afraid that this is ultimately unconvincing, and that the compassion we feel for Mendel, whose love for his idiot son Isaac overcomes even Ginzburg, is compassion for an emotion rather than a person...

...With impressive craft, Malamud weaves together Oskar's troubles, the heat, and the international news...

...I find the other stories less successful, for various reasons...

...The answer to that question would make a book, but we can point toward an answer by noting that the best American stories curiously resemble American life...

...The narrator buys Oskar a second-hand fan, but after the Nazi-Soviet Pact its motor gives out, and Oskar, unable to sleep, sits up at night with a wet towel around his head, trying to write his lecture...

...Sentences outrage syntax ("Edie bowed her head though not Cohen") and even tense ("He would watch Rosa working, then went in and wrote...

...Annamaria smells "like salted flowers" to Fidelman...

...Redemption is treated seriously in "A Choice of Profession...

...it is like The Assistant stripped of everything that makes it interesting, the counterpointed story of sacrificial and redemptive love...