Morality Tale Without Mercy

...I am art Willie Spearmint, black man My form is myself" This is foolish bravado, and Willie knows it Where has Lesser gone wrong, this quiet wnter safely insulated, as he so wrongly thought, in his cocoon of words, holding on for dear life to the cracking limb of a tree marked to fall, writing his guts out in pursuit of the phantom ending that refuses to leave the anxious shadows of his mind and set him free9 "The writer wants his pen to turn stone into sunlight, language into fire " But his moral judgments are either useless or nonexistent, for he cannot see or feel anything beyond the rim of his work In Lesser's very absorption in the processes of his mind, Malamud is telling us, the writer has become less than a man, for the only value he denves from his commitment rests on words instead of people In time, such icy concentration will taint the work as well Lesser cannot complete his book because "Once it's done what is there to finish...

...Lesser, agamst all my woes and misenes that I have explained to you...

...A Jew by neither conviction nor practice but by an accident of birth, he is pathetically incapable of taking Willie's black anti-Semitic abuse personally, and he pleads "For God's sake, Willie, we're wnters Let's talk to one anothei like men who write " This is the intellectual's romantic dream of equality and freedom, and Malamud demonstrates with relentless clanty how tragically insensitive a dream it has become Human experience, white and black, has moved man wholly beyond this possibility Civilization is crumbling like Lev-en spiel's tenement, and it can no longer protect us from our atavistic craving to eat each other up alive Precisely because Malamud has now, with breathtaking audacity, moved the nice Jewish novel into the heavily mined battlefield of black racism and white stupidity, where tough blacks as well as sedentary Jews get their throats cut indiscriminately, I wish he had had the self-restraint to let the bare bones of his fable stand as he originally formed them in his gaunt and despondent paradigm Unhappily, he has inseited a long and ineffectual dream sequence toward the end of the book—an irritating quasicomic fantasy about a double wedding in Africa, where black lion and white lamb finally lie down together in wedded peace (Clearly Lesser is not alone m his trouble with endings ) Yet this Chagall-hke sentimentality, though exasperating, cannot seriously mar the taut, nervously spare hair-raisingly intense perfection of The Tenants, it is the finest work Bernard Malamud has done...

...Lesser We do, and we are, and we write different " But not until Lesser takes Willie's white Jewish girl away from him is the battle joined Out of the deepest rage of his black manhood, Willie—writer turned book-burner—demolishes Lesser's apartment and puts a match to both copies of his manuscript, so that Lesser must start reconstructing it again from memory, a wingless phoenix In his turn, and in pathological betrayal of his most sacred principles, Lesser hacks Willie's typewriter to pieces Who is the loser, who the victor9 No one and nothing but death, though The Tenants concludes with Levenspiel wailing for mercy—the word is repeated one hundred and thirteen times, and they are the last words of the book WHAT MALAMUD seems to be saying in this brutal and unflinching tale is not going to please any ot the groups or points of view for whom he has fashioned the symbolic forms of Lesser, Willie, and the Jewish actress Irene Bell From this mortal combat only the sniveling Levenspiel comes out on top, by default Though the bloodthirsty black-activist cry that vengeance comes first is given diabolic and moving force in Willie, he is also fatally confused about his purposes Having discovered books while serving a jail term, he has tried to clear away all the debris of his life, as Lesser has done, to make room for the words he painfully sets down on paper Yet when Lesser attempts to help Willie as writer, he sneers "You want to know what's really art...

...Writers & Writing MORALITY TALE WITHOUT MERCY BY PEARL K BELL LIKE THE BEST of his earlier novels, Bernard Mala-mud's The Tenants (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 230 pp , $6.95) is a morality tale about victims and persecutors, inhumanity and confusion Because he has given it an urban settmg of such workaday and even comic dimension, one can easily mistake this brilliant fable—and fables are what Malamud has been writing throughout his career—for straightforward narrative But where his previous work focused with resilient compassion and courage on the suffering a man must undergo to know what it means to be human, The Tenants is conceived and wrought in a very different mood In Malamud's first novel, The Natural, Ins Lemon remarked "We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live after that Suffering is what brings us toward happiness " In The Assistant, The Fixet and Pictures oj Fidelman, pain also brought Malamud's characters the promise of a new life Yet in The Tenants he brmgs his afflicted creatures not to the sill of renewal and self-realization but only to senseless violence and death For this is a desperately honest and bitter vision of our day, with the loud clash of combat on every social and personal front black against white, Jew agamst Gentile, reason against mindless vengeance, guilt against indifference Above all, The Tenants is a terrifying revelation of the withered and mutilated quality of mercy in our time Like Saul Bellow's Asa Leventhal, Malamud's Harry Lesser has been smgled out for persecution not by anything he has done but by what he has failed to understand Lesser is made a consciously symbolic intellectual Jew whose demonically narrow dedication to the life of the mind—in this case, a novel he has been writing for almost 10 years—has effected a fatal detachment from the world he lives m Unable to strike any kind of pragmatic balance between the pursuit of intellectual excellence and the unruly realities beating out their ugly rhythms a few yards away from his desk, Lesser learns the hard way—by stumbling into discovery—that there is no longer any safety in isolation In an imaginary Manhattan, ripe as only Malamud can render his fabulous places, with their gamy smells, harsh weather, ungivmg chairs, Harry Lesser lives and works on the top floor of a moldenng tenement that has been emptied of every inhabitant but himself Legally safe from eviction, Lesser refuses to be moved, literally or emotionally, by the self-pitying wails of his unhappy landlord Levenspiel, who wants to tear down the old rat-hole and put up profitable modern flats and stores m its place Lesser insists he can finish his book only where it was born, and he will not budge "In New York who needs an atom bomb7 If you walked away fiom a place they tore it down " With the end of his book close but maddeningly elusive—it is about a man who can love neither wisely nor fully nor well, and where can loveless Lesser find the perfect end to that?—the novelist is sometimes uncharacteristically oppressed by the thought of what he has forfeited "He felt sick to death of the endless, uncompleted, beastly task, the discipline of writing, the over-dedicated, ultimately hmited, writer's life What have I done to myself7 So much I no longer see or feel except in language Life once removed " Even he, the obsessive artist who has jetticoned everything for the sake of his work, can sometimes feel like Levenspiel, who whines "What's a make-believe novel...

...Yet it is not Levenspiel who finally breaks the muse's hold but a black writer, the hot-eyed, foulmouthed Willie Spearmint, whom Lesser finds one day typing in an abandoned room of the doomed house As his deliberately outlandish name suggests, Willie is not a realistic porta ait of an enraged black, he is an intransigent force of history (Nonetheless, Malamud handles Willie's black idiom with flawless ease, no small achievement for a white Jewish writer ) Once over his annoyance at Willie's rude intrusion into his aerie ot solitude, Lesser's reaction to the black is predictably white, liberal, guilty, and muddled Somehow, he thinks, despite the malodorous fastness in which they are forced to work, Lesser and Willie can form their own minuscule and improbable Yaddo, reading each other's pages with sympathetic attention, scrupulously respectful of each other's creative privacy Instead, Willie's appearance forces Lesser into a brutal arena of racial and personal confrontation that neither of them can escape In response to Lesser's cautiously well-intentioned criticism of his writing, Willie spits defiantly in his face "No ofay motherfucker can put himself in my place White fiction ain't the same as black It can't be I don't want to turn into a half-ass white wnter or an ass-kissing Neegro who imitates ofays because he is ashamed or afraid to be black I write black because I am black and what I got to say means somethmg different to black people than it does to whites, if you dig We think different than you do...