Shop Talk (15 page)

5. "Forgive me if all this is disagreeable to you." I would have had to forgive you if you had been "agreeable."

Yours,
Philip

"Mourning is a hard business," Cesare said. "If people knew, there'd be less death."

—From Malamud's "Life Is Better Than Death"

[1986]

In February 1961 I traveled west from Iowa City, where I was teaching in the Writers' Workshop of the university and finishing a second book, to give a lecture at a small community college in Monmouth, Oregon. A buddy from my graduate school days was teaching there and had arranged the invitation. I accepted not only because of the opportunity the trip afforded me to see, for the first time in five years, my friends the Bakers, but because Bob Baker promised that if I came he'd arrange for me to meet Bernard Malamud.

Bern taught nearby at the state university in Corvallis. He'd been in Corvallis, Oregon (pop. 15,000), since leaving New York (pop. 8,000,000) and a night-school teaching job there in 1949—twelve years in the Far West instructing
freshmen in the fundamentals of English composition and writing the unorthodox baseball novel
The Natural;
his masterpiece set in darkest Brooklyn,
The Assistant;
as well as four or five of the best American short stories I'd ever read (or I ever will). The other stories weren't bad either.

In the early fifties I was reading Malamud's stories, later collected in
The Magic Barrel,
as they appeared—the day they appeared—in
Partisan Review
and the old
Commentary.
He seemed to me to be doing no less for his lonely Jews and their peculiarly immigrant, Jewish forms of failure—for those Malamudians "who never stopped hurting"—than was Samuel Beckett, in his longer fiction, for misery-ridden Molloy and Malone. Both writers, while bound imaginatively (though not communally) to the common life of the clan, severed racial memories from the larger social and historical setting and then, focusing as narrowly as they could on the dismal daily round of resistance borne by the most helpless of their landsmen, created parables of frustration steeped in the gravity of the grimmest philosophers.

Not unlike Beckett, Malamud wrote of a meager world of pain in a language all his own, an English that appeared, even apart from the idiosyncratic dialogue, to have been pulled out of what one might have thought would be the most unmagical barrel around—the locutions, inversions, and diction of Jewish immigrant speech, a heap of broken verbal bones that looked, until he came along and made them dance to his sad tune, to be of use no longer to anyone other than a Borscht Belt comic or a professional nostalgist. Even when he pushed his parable prose to its limits, Malamud's metaphors retained a proverbial ring. At his most consciously original, when he sensed in his grimly
told, impassioned tales the moment to sound his deepest note, he remained fixed to what seemed old and homely, emitting the most unadorned poetry to make matters even sadder than they already were: "He tried to say some sweet thing but his tongue hung in his mouth like dead fruit on a tree, and his heart was a black-painted window."

The forty-six-year-old man whom I met at the Bakers' little house in Monmouth, Oregon, in 1961 never let on that he could have written that or any such line. At first glance Bern looked to someone who'd grown up among such people like nothing so much as an insurance agent—he could have passed for one of my father's colleagues at the district office of Metropolitan Life. When Malamud entered the Bakers' hallway after having attended my lecture, when he stood there on the welcome mat removing his wet overshoes, I saw a conscientious, courteous workingman of the kind whose kibitzing and conversation had been the background music of my childhood, a stubborn, seasoned life insurance salesman who does not flee the snarling dog or alarm the children when he appears after dark at the top of the tenement stairwell. He doesn't frighten anyone but he doesn't make the place light up with laughter either: he is, after all, the insurance man, whom you can only beat by dying.

That was the other surprise about Malamud. So little laughter. No display at all of the playfulness that flickered on and off in those underheated, poorly furnished flats wherein were enacted the needs of his entombed. No sign from him of the eerie clowning that distinguishes
The Natural.
There were Malamud stories like "Angel Levine"—and later "The Jewbird" and "Talking Horse"—where the joke seemed only an inch away from the art, where the charm of
the art was how it humorously hovered at the edge of the joke, and yet, over twenty-five years, I remember him telling me two jokes. Jewish dialect jokes, expertly recounted, but that was it. For twenty-five years two jokes were enough.

There was no need to overdo anything other than the responsibility to his art. Bern didn't exhibit himself and didn't consider it necessary to exhibit his themes, certainly not casually to a stranger. He couldn't have exhibited himself had he even been foolish enough to try, and never being foolish was a small part of his larger burden. S. Levin, the Chaplinesque professor of
A New Life,
teaching his first college class with a wide-open fly, is hilariously foolish time and again, but not Bern. No more could Kafka have become a cockroach than could Malamud have metamorphosed into a Levin, comically outfoxed by an erotic mishap on the dark back roads of mountainous Oregon and sneaking homeward, half naked, at 3
A.M.
, beside him a sexually disgruntled barroom waitress dressed in only one shoe and a bra. Seymour Levin the ex-drunkard and Gregor Samsa the bug embody acts of colossal self-travesty, affording both authors a weirdly exhilarating sort of masochistic relief from the weight of sobriety and dignified inhibition that formed the cornerstone of their staid comportment. With Malamud, exuberant showmanship, like searing self-mockery, was to be revealed through what Heine called
Maskenfreiheit,
the freedom conferred by masks.

The sorrowing chronicler of need clashing with need, of need mercilessly resisted and abated only glancingly if at all, of blockaded lives racked with a need for the light, the lift, of a little hope—"A child throwing a ball straight up saw a bit of pale sky"—preferred to present himself as someone
whose own need was nobody else's business. Yet his was a need so harsh that it makes one ache to imagine it. It was the need to consider long and seriously every last demand of a conscience torturously exacerbated by the pathos of need unabated. That was a theme of his that he couldn't hide entirely from anyone who thought at all about where the man who could have passed himself off as your insurance agent was joined to the parabolical moralist of the claustrophobic stories about "things you can't get past." In
The Assistant,
the petty criminal and drifter Frank Alpine, while doing penance behind the counter of a failing grocery store that he'd once helped to rob, has a "terrifying insight" about himself: "that all the while he was acting like he wasn't, he was a man of stern morality." I wonder if early in adult life Bern didn't have an insight about himself still more terrifying: that he was a man of stern morality who could act
only
like what he was.

Between our first meeting in Oregon in February 1961 and our last meeting in the summer of 1985 at his home in Bennington, Vermont, I rarely saw him more than a couple times a year, and for several years, after I'd published an essay about American Jewish writers in the
New York Review of Books
that examined
Pictures of Fidelman
and
The Fixer
from a perspective he didn't like—and couldn't have been expected to—we didn't see each other at all. In the mid-sixties, when I was a guest for long periods at the Yaddo artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, a short drive from Bennington, he and his wife, Ann, would have me over when I felt like escaping for a few hours from the Yaddo solitude. In the seventies, when we were both members of the Yaddo corporation board, we'd see each other at the biannual meetings. When the Malamuds began to take
refuge in Manhattan from the Vermont winters and I was still living in New York, we'd meet occasionally near their Gramercy Park apartment for dinner. And when Bern and Ann visited London, where I'd begun spending my time, they'd come to have dinner with Claire Bloom and me.

Though Bern and I ended up most evenings talking together about books and writing, we hardly ever alluded to each other's fiction and never seriously discussed it, observing an unwritten rule of propriety that exists among novelists, as among rival teammates in sports, who understand just how little candor can be sustained however deep the respect may run. Blake says, "Opposition is true friendship," and though that sounds admirably bracing, particularly to the argumentative, and subscribing to its wisdom probably works out well in the best of all possible worlds, among the writers in this world, where touchiness and pride can make for a potent explosive, one learns to settle for something a bit more amicable than outright opposition if one wants to have any true writer friends at all. Even those writers who adore opposition usually get about as much as they can stand from their daily work.

It was in London that we arranged to meet again after my 1974
New York Review
essay and the exchange of letters about it that was to be the last communication between us for a couple of years. His letter had been characteristically terse and colloquial, a single sentence, sounding perhaps a little less fractious than it looked alone on that white sheet of typing paper inscribed above the tiny, measured signature. What I'd written about
Fidelman
and
The Fixer,
he informed me, "is your problem, not mine." I wrote right back to tell him that I'd probably done him a favor of precisely the kind William Blake advocated. I didn't have quite the
gall to mention Blake, but that was more or less my tack: what I'd written would help him out. Not too awful as these exchanges go, but not one to ennoble either of us in the canon of literary correspondence.

The London reconciliation didn't take long for Bern and me to pull off. At 7:30
P.M.
the doorbell rang and there, on the dot as always, were the Malamuds. Under the porch light I gave Ann a kiss and then, with my hand extended, plunged past her, advancing upon Bern, who with his own outstretched hand was briskly coming up the steps toward me. In our eagerness each to be the first to forgive—or perhaps to be forgiven—we wound up overshooting the handshake and kissing on the lips, rather like the poor baker Lieb and the even less fortunate Kobotsky at the conclusion of "The Loan." The two Jews in that Malamud tale, once immigrants together out of steerage, meet after many years of broken friendship and, at the back of Lieb's shop, listen to the stories of the afflictions in each other's lives, stories so affecting that Lieb forgets all about the bread in his oven, which goes up in smoke. "The loaves in the trays," the story ends, "were blackened bricks—charred corpses. Kobotsky and the baker embraced and sighed over their lost youth. They pressed mouths together and parted forever." We, on the other hand, remained friends for good.

In July 1985, just back from England, Claire and I drove north from Connecticut to have lunch and spend the afternoon with the Malamuds in Bennington. The summer before, they had made the two-and-a-half-hour trip down to us and then spent the night, but Bern wasn't equal to the journey now. The debilitating aftereffects of a stroke three years earlier were sapping his strength, and the effort not to submit without a fight to all the disabling physical problems had begun to beat even him down. I saw how weak he'd got as soon as we drove up. Bern, who always managed, regardless of the weather, to be waiting in the driveway to greet you and see you off, was out there all right in his poplin jacket, but as he nodded a rather grim welcome, he looked to be listing slightly to one side at the same time that he seemed to be holding himself, by dint of willpower alone, absolutely still, as though the least movement would send him crashing to the ground. The forty-six-year-old transplanted Brooklynite whom I'd met in the Far West, that undiscourageable round-the-clock worker with the serious, attentive face and the balding crown and the pitiless Corvallis haircut, whose serviceable surface mildness could have misled anyone about the molten obstinacy at the core—and probably was intended to—was now a frail and very sick old man, his tenacity about used up.

It was bypass surgery and the stroke and the medication that had done the job, but to a longtime reader of the man and his fiction it couldn't help but appear as if the pursuit of that unremitting aspiration that he shared with so many of his characters—to break through the iron limits of self and circumstance in order to live a better life—had finally taken its toll. Though he'd never said much to me about his childhood, from the little I knew about his mother's death when he was still a boy, about the father's poverty and the handicapped brother, I imagined that he'd had no choice but to forgo youth and accept adulthood at an early age. And now he looked it—like a man who'd had to be a man for just too long a time. I thought of his story "Take Pity," the most excruciating parable he ever wrote about life's unyieldingness even to—especially to—the most unyielding longings. When quizzed by Davidov, a heavenly census taker, about how a poor Jewish refugee died, Rosen, himself newly arrived among the dead, replies: "Broke in him something. That's how." "Broke what?" "Broke what breaks."

It was a sad afternoon. We tried talking in the living room before lunch, but concentration was a struggle for him, and though his was a will powerless to back away from any difficult task, it was disheartening to realize how imposing a challenge merely pursuing a friendly conversation had become.

As we were leaving the living room to have lunch outdoors on the back porch, Bern asked if he might read aloud to me later the opening chapters of a first draft of a novel. He'd never before asked my opinion of a work in progress, and I was surprised by the request. I was also perturbed and wondered throughout lunch what sort of book it could be, conceived and begun in the midst of all this hardship by a writer whose memory of even the multiplication tables had been clouded now for several years and whose vision, also impaired by the stroke, made shaving every morning what he'd wryly described to me as "an adventure."