July 19, 2012--Summer Reading: Bernard Malamud

Thirty years ago was the last time I read anything by novelist Bernard Malamud. It was his last novel, God's Grace, not one of his best, but by then I was committed to him, devouring his books as soon as they were published.

The Natural, The Fixer, The Assistant, and his wonderful, fabulist stories collected in The Magic Barrel and Idiots First.

He was among the triumvirate of gifted Jewish-American writers--Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow and, frequently Nobel-nominated, Philip Roth. As the most overtly Jewish of the three, Malamud had to settle for a couple of National Book Awards and a Pulitzer. He won both for The Fixer, about anti-semitism in Tsarist Russia.

So when I heard that Richard Ford was reading Malamud, obsessed as I currently am with anything having to do with Ford, I dug out my copy of Malamud's third novel, the 1961 A New Life, the story of S. Levin, a dark, bearded man (though not otherwise noted to be Jewish) with a budensome past--whose father was an imprisoned thief, whose mother committed suicide when he was 15, and who at 30, with a new masters in literature, leaves New York City and heads west to "Cascadia," in reality Oregon, to start a new life teaching freshman composition at a backwater state college. (Readers of Richard Ford's Canada, does any of this sound familiar?)

Mayhem ensues. As does profound, at times humerous insight about what constitutes a life made up of of loss, love, yet more loss, and the possibility of redemption. From the despairing, if humorous Bellow, Roth, and Malamud, the hope of redemption is about all there is to look forward to.

As a Malamud sampler, here is a passage from A New Life in which S. Levin lyrically reflects on the quality and meaning of his affair and love for the wife of one of his Cascadia State College colleagues, who happens, wouldn't you expect, to be his departmental chairman--

But if he loved her why loved he her? You are comely, my love. Your self is loveliness. You make me rich in feeling. You have grace, character. I trust you. He loved because she had one unforgettable day given herself to a city boy in a forest. And for the continuance of her generosity in bed (was he less generous?) abating desire as she made it grow, taking serious chances (did he not chance as much?). Or was he moved to love because her eyes mirrored Levin when he looked? Or to drag truth closer, he was compelled by his being to be in love with her open, honest, intelligent, clearly not very happy self? (Why do I feel I have chosen her because I am her choice?) The catechism made little difference for he knew fait accompli when accomplished. Who was he kidding, or what pretending to delay or dress in camouflage? "The truth is I love Pauline Gilley." His confession deeply moved him. What an extraordinary only human thing to be in love. What human-woven mystery. As Levin walked the streets under a pale moon he felt he had recovered everything he had ever lost. If life it not so, at least he feels it is. The world changed as he looked. He thought of his unhappy years as though they had endured only minutes, black birds long ago dissolved in the night. Gone for all time. He had made too much of past experience, not enough of possibility's new forms forever. In heaven's eye he beheld a seeing rose.  

. . .  But Levin had long ago warned himself when when he arrived at this intensity of feeling--better stop, whoa. Beware the forms of fantasy. He had been, as a youth, a luftmensch, sop of feeling, too easy to hurt because after treading on air he hit the pavement head first. Afterwards, pain-blinded, he groped for pieces of reality. "I've got to keep control of myself. I must always know where I am." He had times without number warned himself to harden, toughen, put on armor against love. 

It snowed heavily.

But yet he loved and suffered, found meaning, and a measure of happiness. But you should read it all. A New Life. Bernard Malamud.