Bernard Malamud Close Up

...but it worked for Malamud...

...First of all, he has taken his mandate to create “a literary life” too literally and crossed the fine line between biography and literary scholarship too often...

...Though my heart wants you with a single purpose, I must repeat again what marriage will mean for you...

...Too bad, because as Davis tells us, one of the reasons Malamud’s family sought out a biographer was the feeling they had that his readership and reputation were in decline...

...True enough...

...the work, the years, my God, and where is my life now...

...His mother Bertha was a schizophrenic and died, probably a suicide, in a mental hospital when the future author was 15...

...these were the people who moved him...

...The empathetic Bernard suffered with his father in spite of his impatience, imagining his inner monologue: “The backbreaking 16-hour day like a heavy hand slapping, upon awaking, the skull, pushing the head down to bend the body’s bones...

...He himself warned Ann de Chiara before they married in 1945, “Writing is an intense experience...

...As his friends noted, Malamud possessed an almost religious sense of vocation...

...He had a vision of the person he wanted to be...

...Bern needed a success and wanted a theme which would be successful,” Giroux said...

...and of all the 19th-century novelists, the one whose moral vision he most closely approaches is George Eliot, neither a man nor a Jew...

...Lawrence, who urged the artist to live as richly as he writes...

...Hence the more than usually acute midlife crisis, which occurred in the 1970s while he was teaching at Bennington, then an all-female college...

...but few so close to an ordinary sense, in an extraordinary man, of the uses of and costs to a life in the service of a serious vocation...

...When he wished to portray the heroic, he would use the heroic qualities of “small men” like his father...

...It wasn’t something genuine, that came from the heart...

...In many ways his was the classic second-generation immigrant assimilation story, albeit in unusually grim form...

...When he died in 1986 he was still trying to work, to reconcile “that failed, uneven compromise between his life and his art...

...Saul Bellow was filet mignon, Malamud was hamburger...

...Like his hero William Dubin, he specifically chafed at the challenge presented by D.H...

...Nevertheless a biography was required, for there is so much of Malamud’s personal experience in his best work...

...He buried himself in it...

...and that it would not be an authorized biography as such, but one written with the full cooperation of the family and estate, without censorship...

...ONECANSENSEDavis’ painstaking care and genuine passion for Malamud’s work throughout the book—but he may not have been the ideal choice as biographer...

...The protagonist of Dubin’s Lives (1979) so mirrors Malamud that it is hard to differentiate author from character...

...There were no books in the Malamud home, nor any magazines or daily newspapers aside from the Yiddish Forward...

...Baseball was the great American sport...

...Though I love you and shall love you more, most of my strength will be devoted to realizing myself as an artist...

...Dubin’s Lives, one of Malamud’s best works, was the fruit of this unhappy period...

...If beauty is there, it is in the realization of the character, in the fulfillment of his truth...

...All this business takes up an inordinate amount of space and belongs in a scholarly study rather than a trade biography...

...He made himself a victim...

...All kinds of gifts that he had, he put into that book, but the baseball setting was artificial...

...you don’t live it,” one of them complained...

...Still, friends and family recognized the angry, deprived kid beneath the successful middle-aged exterior...

...He had a vision of the kind of writer he wanted to be, too, but that required almost unbearable sacrifices of time, love and friendship...

...Yo u do it 24 hours a day, no matter what...

...There was nothing there...

...Ye t for 20 years after his death no one attempted a biography, although Malamud was one of the major authors of his era and was even considered Nobel material...

...MALAMUD’S LAST NOVEL, God’s Grace, was published in 1982...

...I’m not interested in ‘the beautiful people,’” he said, “I’m interested in the human being, and his fullest representation in art...

...It is easy to see why Malamud so identified with the heroes of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and D.H...

...This is especially true of Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), whose best fiction is close to the events and people of his own existence...

...I would be surprised if Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life attracts a younger generation of readers to his fiction, for Davis makes it seem far more ponderous and depressing than it really is...

...My ideas,” Malamud insisted—and Davis’ book fully bears him out—“are the ideas that persist in Western Literature—they express the Western aesthetic and morality...

...Even Roger Straus, Malamud’s editor at Farrar Straus Giroux, thought the idea of a biography was “ridiculous...

...You work life...

...The “text” should stand on its own, the New Critics maintain...

...Granted, obsessive attention to the “real-life” sources of fiction can impede a reader’s understanding of a writer’s work, but with some authors the biographical background is impossible to ignore...

...He could, with a little more courage, have been more than he was...

...Now Philip Davis, a professor of English at Liverpool University who has commented on the author before, has given us Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life (Oxford, 402 pp., $34.95...

...he didn’t have the imagination to know what he was missing...

...Indeed, a whole school of thought that reached its height during the 1940s and ’50s and still has adherents—the so-called “New Criticism”—considers biography not only irrelevant but detrimental to the study of an author’s work...

...the hours...

...Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers when he came to read those books...

...That same year he suffered a stroke while undergoing bypass surgery and became too aphasic to write, though he struggled with a final, never-to-becompleted novel...

...Like Hardy and Lawrence, he remained artistically fixated upon the world of his youth no matter how far beyond it he moved...

...as a life it was unexciting...

...The “Fidelman” stories are, in Philip Roth’s formulation, “a weirdly exhilarating sort of masochistic relief from the weight of sobriety and dignified inhibition that was plainly the cornerstone of [Malamud’s] staid comportment...

...The old saw “write about what you know” is of very dubious value, denying, as it does, the importance of fantasy...

...The early short stories like “The Lost Bar-Mitzvah,” “The Grocery Store” and “The Cost of Living,” as well as his novel The Assistant (1957), are redolent with the depressing atmosphere of his father’s struggling little grocery store and the claustrophobic existence within its walls...

...The couple stayed married, but Ann often felt lonely and neglected, falling into what she wryly called a “kind of Madame Bovary illusion” made worse by her not having a corresponding vocation or career of her own...

...Often discussed as a Jewish writer (and grouped with his Jewish near-contemporaries Bellow and Roth), Malamud is sometimes attacked for being “too Jewish”—with both masochism and self-pity cited as specifically Jewish literary qualities...

...his younger brother Eugene inherited the illness and suffered emotional torment...

...They understood that he had a hard time reconciling this emotional reality with the high moral values he examined in books like The Fixer (1967...

...how hard it was to live up to...

...In fact, when he departed too far from his own experience the work suffered, as Robert Giroux observed in the case of The Natural (1952), Malamud’s first novel...

...Their father Max (born Mendel) remarried, and Bernard was never at ease with his stepmother...

...Most general readers who admire Malamud’s writing and wish to know more about him will not share Davis’ close interest in Malamud’s writing technique, the number of drafts he worked with, etc...

...Though Malamud was of course a deeply serious writer, he was by no means earnest: Absurdity, irony, drollery, and bitter laughter resonate throughout his stories and novels, but a reader who picks up the biography without having read any of them would never figure that out...

...During a series of meetings with his subject’s family it was decided, he says in the Preface, “that it would be . . . a literary life, as the life of Malamud indeed was...

...But he can as clearly be seen as heir to the tradition of the 19th-century European novel...

...What did come from the heart was the book that followed, The Assistant, the grocery-store novel Malamud had been waiting to write all along, in Giroux’ opinion...

...the Malamuds had no friends, no social life...

...The struggle to rise above this into the realm of art and intellect was a daunting one...

...Perhaps that is because his life was outwardly dull: He simply did not do much except sit at his desk and write...

...He was being utterly honest...

...However many prizes and honors Malamud accrued in the course of his career as a writer, it was his early life that made him and haunted him and underlaid all his work...

...In his 40s and 50s Malamud yearned for the youth he never had...

...He had limited his life for art, but now believed that the limitations he had placed on living would harm his work...

...Moreover, he was appalled not only by his father’s misfortune but by the way he gave in to it: “People liked him, but who can admire a man passing his life in such a store...

...A second problem is Davis’ lack of humor, or perhaps more correctly his lack of professional interest in humor...

...I wish I knew the secret of being in art and in life at the same time,” he mused...

...Among the lives of the artists,” Davis says, “there are dramas of greater heroism and greater turpitude and simply greater interest than Malamud’s...