Bernard Malamud (1914-1986). Biography and Creativity

Among the most important American fiction writers of the second half of the 20th century, Bernard Malamud distinguished himself as both a novelist and short story writer. Though he did not write exclusively about the Jewish experience, he is considered one of the foremost Jewish novelists of his time, often viewed alongside Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

As many of his fictional characters are, Bernard Malamud was a child of immigrant Jews. His father, Max (or Mendel), and his mother, Bertha (whose maiden name, Fidelman, he would later assign to one of his best-known characters), were both Russian-born, immigrating to the United States in the early part of the 20th century. They married, settled in Brooklyn, and made a precarious living running a grocery store. Bernard was born in 1914.

He attended public grammar school and then went on to Erasmus High School, one of New York’s best public high schools, yet he described his home as modest: “There were no books that I remember in the house, no records, music, pictures on the wall” (Stern 43). When Bernard was ill as a child, his father bought 20 volumes of The Book of Knowledge, and he had access to the radio and the Yiddish theater. Already he had contributed short stories to the Erasmus High literary magazine, and even in grammar school, Malamud stated, “I lived in a state of selfenhancing discovery. I turned school assignments into stories” (“Reflections” 15). After high school he enrolled at the City College of New York, where he received a B.A. in 1936. His formal education was completed by an M.A. in literature awarded by Columbia University in 1942.

Malamud had already begun to face the need to earn his living, while still striving to become a writer. His mother had died, his father was poor, and the young man felt unwilling to rely on him for support. Thus, he began teaching, first, at Lafayette High School, then—after a move to Washington, D.C., where he worked at an undemanding and well-remunerated job as a Census Bureau clerk and (as Walt Whitman had) wrote his own work at his government desk—again in New York, teaching in Brooklyn at night, then for a year in Harlem.

In 1949 he accepted an offer to teach English at Oregon State College, in Corvallis; he was surprised to learn on arrival that it was a land-grant college, and his lack of a Ph.D. kept him teaching exclusively composition for years. Though his time at Corvallis obviously supplies some of the inspiration for his 1961 novel A New Life, readers who identify him too closely with the miserable S. Levin of that novel overlook the 12 years Malamud spent in Oregon (Levin flees at the end of a year) and the books and stories he was able to write and publish in those years, including The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), and A New Life (1961); moreover, his first book of short fiction, The Magic Barrel, including some stories he had been writing since the 1940s, appeared in 1958 and won the National Book Award in 1959. With The Assistant, Malamud had turned to what would become his acknowledged subject, the lives of Jews. “I thought of him”—his father, who had mourned Bernard’s marriage to a gentile but later softened—“as I began The Assistant and felt I would often be writing about Jews, in celebration and expiation, though perhaps that was having it both ways” (Stories ix).

The Assistant does indeed attend to the poverty and suffering many Jewish immigrants experienced The title refers to Frank Alpine, the assistant to a Jewish grocer, Morris Bober, whose life may reflect some of the realities of Max Malamud’s life as a hard- pressed grocer. The plot includes Jewish-gentile conflict, crime, violence, surprising redemption, and an ambiguous ending. A New Life is Malamud’s contribution to the flourishing college novel genre. It places an eastern Jew of radical opinions, S. Levin, in an alien setting, the English Department of Cascadia College, which has sometimes been seen as a sinister burlesque of Oregon State. Levin’s humanistic aspirations are thwarted by the mechanistic and deadening ideas about teaching that constrain him. Likewise, his erotic life, including an ultimately disastrous affair with a student, is a continuing arena of strife. Though he ends by seducing the wife of his chief academic tormentor, it is hardly a happy conclusion, since he is not entirely sure he wants her and the cost of his “success” is the loss of his teaching career. As his reputation grew, the English Department relieved him from exclusive assignment to composition and permitted him to teach some literature classes.

In 1961 the Malamuds (the family now included his wife, the former Ann de Chiara, and children Paul and Janna) returned to the East, where Bernard was appointed to the faculty at Bennington College in Vermont; the appointment continued until his death in 1986. At Bennington, he said, his teachers were his colleagues Howard Nemerov, the poet; Stanley Edgar Hyman, a leading critic; and the poet Ben Belitt, along with his “other teachers . . . my students, whom I taught to teach me” (“Reflections” 18). He taught courses in imaginative writing, despite his doubts about their value. He explained, “Talent is always in short supply, although I had a handful of good writing students whom I enjoyed teaching and learning from. In essence one doesn’t teach writing; he encourages talented people whom he may be able to do something for. I feel that writing courses are of limited value although they do induce some students to read fiction with care” (Stories xi). On the other hand, Malamud noted that teaching never interfered with his writing.

During the Bennington years, Malamud published four additional novels: The Fixer (1966), The Tenants (1971), Dubin’s Lives (1979), and God’s Grace (1982). Set in czarist Russia, The Fixer is a more straightforward look at anti-Semitism than Malamud had presented in his earlier fictions and, as Joel Salzberg emphasizes, a more politicized book than its predecessors. His protagonist, Yakov Bok, suffers a series of torments, including, at one point, a version of the blood libel, the historic accusation of Jews as child killers. The Fixer won Malamud his second National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize and for many critics is his greatest achievement; in a 1966 interview Malamud said that he considered it his strongest book thus far. As was always his practice, he alternated between publishing novels and short stories, which appeared in the collections Idiots First (1963), Rembrandt’s Hat (1973), and The Stories of Bernard Malamud, with his introduction (1983). Other collections appeared after his death. Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (1969), though its chapters had been published separately as stories, has a novelesque unity in being composed of scenes in the life, artistic and erotic, of Arthur Fidelman, a painter and schlemiel.

The Tenants juxtaposes a Jewish writer, Harry Lesser, with an African-American writer, Willie Spearmint. They are the only tenants of a slum, and their rivalry includes differing ideas about writing, competition over a woman, growing political tensions along the black-Jewish fault line, and eventually horrific violence. As in a number of his short stories, here Malamud reflects his own urban experience and his time teaching in Harlem, exploring issues dividing blacks and Jews, both historical victims of racism, without offering any easy answers.

Malamud received a number of honors for his work. In 1972 he was appointed to a three-year term as honorary consultant in American letters to the Library of Congress. He won an O. Henry Memorial Award for his story “Man in the Drawer,” and a Notable Book citation from the American Library Association for Dubin’s Lives. In the early 1980s he received Brandeis University’s Creative Arts Award in fiction, a Gold Medal for fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for fiction, the Mon- dello Prize from Italy, and an honorary degree from his alma mater, City College of the City University of New York. Several grants assisted his work, perhaps the most important being a Partisan Review- Rockefeller Foundation Grant that coincided with a sabbatical from Oregon State in 1956 and permitted a stay in Italy. He wrote stories including “The Magic Barrel” in Rome, and the Italian experience both contributed to later fiction and gave him a fresh approach when he returned to Corvallis.

Toward the end of his life, as he grew increasingly celebrated for his life’s work, Malamud’s new fiction met with a less positive critical response. When Dubin’s Lives appeared in 1979, reviews were very mixed. This account of a writer (the biographer William Dubin) and his affair with a much younger woman was uneasily tagged as possible selfrevelation or self-projection, and Janna Malamud Smith’s biography of her father correlates it with an affair between Malamud and a student at Bennington in the early 1960s, a relationship renewed while he was writing Dubin’s Lives. God’s Grace (1982) is unlike any of his other novels, a fable of a world swept by nuclear war and depopulated by another flood sent by a disappointed God.

Calvin Cohn, however, has survived underwater at the time of the catastrophe, and he forms a postapocalyptic community with three apes on an island. With two chimpanzees and a gorilla he tries to remake a humane life, and with one of them, Mary Madelyn, he fathers a daughter. Perhaps because it differs so noticeably from his usual fictional approach (though Malamud has never shied away from fantasy, and elements of allegory are present as far back as The Natural), perhaps because of weakness in Mala- mud’s realization of his ambitious idea, it puzzled and disappointed many reviewers. Some deplored the “chimp humor”; others admired the audacity of the fable, taking in as it does Jewish-Christian relations, a new Robinson Crusoe, U.S.-Soviet politics, and a new fall. At the time of his death Malamud had completed about three-quarters of a novel called “The People,” in which a Russian Jew has adventures in the 19th-century American West. It was published in its unfinished state in 1989, as part of The People, and Uncollected Stories.

Bernard Malamud was, in important ways, a pure artist. His life was mostly a private one, despite his awards and his work with American PEN, of which he was president from 1979 to 1981. He taught, but his idea of the writer’s life was of devotion to the craft. He mostly avoided publicity and was seldom quoted on matters of public controversy. His relatively quiet life and dedication to the artistic vocation help explain his lowered visibility in the decades since his death. For some years there was no authorized biography, owing partly to the objections of his survivors, led by his daughter Janna. She later reversed her position and wrote a book of her own, My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud (2006), a sort of joint memoir of her and her father. She acknowledges her father’s “complex sense of privacy” (ix). This sense of privacy probably stems from Malamud’s conviction that the work is what matters most.

In 1984 he explained his calling, in part, by saying: In writing I had to say what had happened to me, yet present it as though it had been magically revealed. I began to write seriously when I had taught myself the discipline necessary to achieve what I wanted. When I touched that time, my words announced themselves to me.

I have given my life to writing without regret, except when I consider what in my work I might have done better. I wanted my writing to be as good as it must be, and on the whole I think it is. (“Reflections” 18)