Notes on Malamud 7/25/2021

I read Bernard Malamud's The Fixer before I left Fort Dix. What follows is what was I able to research thanks to the Volunteers of America giving me access to its and  computer lab. I do like knowing more about what I read, to see if my understanding is too far off base. What follows I found back in July of this year and are my raw finds without any commentary otherthan to say I hope they encourage your reading,

From The Otherworldly Malamud by Mark Athitakis, HUMANITIES, March/April 2014, Volume 35, Number 2:

There’s a tendency, if not a formula, in Malamud’s fiction to invest humanity with a spiritual melancholy. Malamud protagonists are forever being held back, locked out, or stifled. Consider the graduate student whose efforts to research art in Rome are stymied by his inability to find a suitable apartment in “Behold the Key,” or the young man trapped in his room by his promise to consume a stack of books in “A Summer’s Reading,” or the ballplayer shot and disabled on the cusp of fame in The Natural, or the man exasperated by a faith healer’s evasions in “The Silver Crown.” 

The conclusions of Malamud stories are often spiritual but rarely redemptive. They remind us of life’s strangeness and the inexplicability of God’s will. The arrival of a talking black bird in “The Jewbird” conveys both a sense of wonderment and a caution that reality is about to come crashing down.

“That’s how it goes,” he writes early in the story. “It’s open, you’re in. Closed, you’re out and that’s your fate.”

Who writes stories like this anymore? Who aspires to? In the fifties and sixties, Malamud’s talent for giving workaday sufferings and shortcomings the cast of a fable made him the quintessential postwar American writer; his work was a reminder that the degradations of the past, particularly for Jews, were not long past. For this, Malamud received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award (twice), and was installed in a triumvirate with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, what Bellow called the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of literature.

About The Fixer:

Unlike much of his cohort, Malamud was reluctant to discuss his work, or to weigh in more generally on the affairs of the day. Only late in his career, in 1971, with The Tenants, did he engage with contemporary race relations; his deepest exploration of anti-Semitism, his 1966 novel, The Fixer, was inspired by events in prerevolutionary Russia.

“I wanted the historical tie-up so I could invent it into a myth,” he wrote in an essay about the book. Eschewing relevance, Malamud emphasized work, letting the modern world dissolve as he wrote, rewrote—and rewrote the rewrites. In this regard he resembled E. I. Lonoff, the novelist at the center of Roth’s 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer. “I turn sentences around,” Lonoff says. “I write a sentence and then I turn it round. Then I look at it and turn it around again.”

***

To put it another way: What Malamud wrote about was magic. Not in the sense of magical realism or the postmodern absurdities that marked much of the fiction that arrived with the next generation. Rather it was magic as an acknowledgment of an abiding religious presence. The Fixer tracks the years-long agony of a Russian Jew wrongly imprisoned for murder. As a study of persistent anti-Semitism, it’s harrowing and racked with sorrow, yet Malamud finds a way to clear room for the possibility of grace.

***

Let’s be clear, though: Malamud hasn’t disappeared. All of his books remain in print, and writers like Cheuse and Stern continue to teach them. So does Joyce Carol Oates, who is a particular fan of his 1968 story “My Son the Murderer,” which she selected for The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. The story, which smoothly alternates between the perspectives of a wayward college graduate and his anxious father, is “a brilliant story of the 1960s division between the generations,” she says by email. “Though it is thoroughly of its time and place, contemporary young people sympathize with it immediately. The style, the language, the structure—all are masterful. That there is a ‘shared’ narrative voice to suggest the father-son dilemma makes the story especially powerful.”

***

Malamud’s fiction suggested that it’s through stories that we can confront difficulty in ourselves. In “A Summer’s Reading,” a high school dropout tells a neighbor that he is about to read one hundred books, then allows a lie to circulate that he’s actually consumed them. Guilt stalks him: When he walks onto the street he is “a shadow of himself.” The story ends with the young man literally running to a library and sitting down to read—literature becoming as much a moral life buoy as a way to gain knowledge. 

Art tends to be moral, Malamud once said, specifically in its awareness of “the sheer privilege of being, in this miraculous cosmos, and trying to figure out why. Art, in essence, celebrates life and gives us our measure.” No art could truly be art without a sense of the cosmic. That urge to explain the ineffable may account for why he was so dedicated to rewriting his sentences. As Cheuse points out, the revisions didn’t stop once a work was published. “He’d clip out the pages from the magazine, make changes in the published pages and when it was part of a story collection, he’d get proofs and make changes there, then changes in the second proofs.

Trial by Interview May 3, 2019 and Updated: May 3, 2019 11:30 a.m. by Leah Garchik

Finally, Malamud did get around to what was most on his mind: his illness. Without naming it exactly, he implied that he had suffered some kind of stroke after his heart surgery. His speech and memory, which had been somewhat jolted, were coming back. This was the first interview he had done since recovering.

Malamud had wanted facts and dates checked because he was afraid that his mind would fail him. He hadn't been really testing me; he had been testing himself. A dignified man, he couldn't bear the thought of appearing imprecise, of making a misstatement.

"Yakov endures": On Bernard Malamud's The Fixer; Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times, August 29, 1966

• “Through all of his books – four novels and two collections of stories – Bernard Malamud has dealt with the great theme of redemption in this world. The world is grotesque, horrifying and unjust; yet redemption, individual by individual, is possible, is indeed the reason and the glory of life. The redemption of ugliness is in humor, of cruelty in charity, of suffering in consciousness and compassion. The movement of redemption is always from the mass, of fate or the way things unspeakably are, to the person, to individual acts of courage or conscience, to some individual realization that this, too – these tiny but volatile sparks of hope – is part of the way things are, part of what is given. And, by necessity, it makes the rest worth undergoing. This might be called the Judaic factor in the Judeo-Christian outlook, the extra-dogmatic source of the rejection of suicide as a reasonable and ethically viable political act.

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One cannot hold a novelist too closely to history – and Mr. Malamud correctly wards off identification of The Fixer with the Bellis case, citing Dreyfus and Vanzetti as nearly equal inspirations. Yet a Yakov-Bellis identification is unavoidable. Moreover, it is a pertinent fact of history that while the crime of ritual murder was confirmed at the Bellis trial, Mendel Bellis was himself acquitted. The fact acts as a disturbing and undermining counterpoint to the novel, and it robs Yakov’s lengthy and sometime slightly preachy wrestle with life’s meaning of much of its power.

 This must of course be taken in its proper context. Mr. Malamud is a superb writer and The Fixer is one of the year’s richest novels, a literary event in any season. It’s just that, like the fixer, one wishes that it functioned not almost perfectly, but perfectly.”

Sch