The Otherworldly Malamud

The master of the short story infused his work with myth and magic, but not fairytale endings.

Mark Athitakis
HUMANITIES, March/April 2014, Volume 35, Number 2

“A small miracle has come to pass,” Bernard Malamud said in 1959, accepting the National Book Award for his short story collection The Magic Barrel. The miracle was that the short story was being so honored—the form, in many ways, Malamud was best at, but which, during awards season, tends to be neglected in favor of the novel. It was Malamud’s first moment in the spotlight, but the evening was a clumsy one. He forgot his $1,000 award check at the podium and, arriving late at the dinner in his honor, was told that there was no place for him to sit.

“Not for the first time I was seeing a Malamud story unfold,” the critic Alfred Kazin observed.

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.” 

Bernard Malamud / The Fixer-Upper

The Fixer-Upper

By Lee Siegel
Dec. 9, 2007

A curious passage occurs in “My Father Is a Book,” Janna Malamud Smith’s tender, touching 2006 memoir of her father, Bernard Malamud. In the spring of 1978, when the novelist was in his mid-60s, he and his wife, Ann, had dinner with Philip Roth and Claire Bloom in the latter couple’s London apartment. In a letter to his daughter describing the visit, Malamud affectionately characterizes Claire Bloom — “absolutely unpretentious” — and then, in parentheses, adds this detail about greeting Roth: “We kissed on the lips when I came in. He couldn’t have done that two years ago.” Now wait a minute.

Bernard Malamud / The Human Remains

 

Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud

The Human Remains

Tony McKibben

January 8, 2018

Bernard Malamud is a hard writer. This is not the same thing as saying he is cold or aloof. His writing can be cruel but never dismissive, harsh but with compassion. He rarely describes a character as they would wish to be described, seeing them in all their physical decay, yet is sympathetic to their mental anguish. “My novels are more moral than philosophical” Malamud says. “I am a novelist, a moralist. Not a philosopher. The notions of hope, of redemption are essential to my characters.” (‘Studies in American Jewish Literature’) His resistance to the philosophical but acceptance of the moral might seem unusual for a post-war writer, and Malamud in this sense is the absolute antithesis of the important French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet insists, while “I have no training in philosophy proper”, that he sees his novel The Voyeur and Camus’ The Outsider as “phenomenological novels, insofar as they present a perception of human consciousness that is of a phenomenological order” (Paris Review), as he admits the importance of Hegel and Heidegger on his work. He would clearly prefer the philosophical to the moral. “When a novelist has “something to say,” they mean a message. It has political connotations, or a religious message, or a moral prescription. It means “commitment,” as used by Sartre and other fellow-travelers. They are saying that the writer has a world view, a sort of truth that he wishes to communicate, and that his writing has an ulterior significance.” “I am against this”, he says, “Flaubert described a whole world, but he had nothing to say, in the sense that he had no message to transmit, no remedy to offer for the human condition.” (Paris Review)