Art and Idea in the Novels of Bernard Malamud: Toward the Fixer [Reprint 2018 ed.] 9783110904963, 9789027932129

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STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE Volume XIII

ART AND IDEA IN THE NOVELS OF BERNARD MALAMUD Toward The Fixer by

ROBERT DUCHARME

1974 MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1974 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 73-83429

Printed in The Netherlands

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The material on pp. 30,31 is from The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. by Dr. A. A. Brill, copyright 1938 by Random House, Inc. Copyright renewed 1965 by Gloia Bernheim and Edmund R. Brill. Reprinted by permission. Quotations in the text from the following works are reprinted here by permission of the publishers: Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (trans. Katherine Jones), 1939, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc; Norman 0 . Brown, Love's Body, 1966, Random House, Inc; Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (trans. Charles Atkinson), 1962, Random House Inc.; Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, 1932, Random House Inc; Stanley Edgar Hyman, Standards: A Chronicle of our Time, 1966, Horizon Press; Sydney Richman,Bernard Malamud, 1966 Twayne Publishers; Colin Wilson, The Outsider, 1956, Houghton Mifflin Company; James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, copyright 1922 by the Macmillan Company, renewed 1950 by Barclays Bank Ltd. (Reprinted in Europe by permission St. Martin's Press); Alfred Kazin, Contemporaries, 1962, Little, Brown, and Company; Karl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 1957, Little, Brown and Company; Herbert Mzrcuse, One Dimensional Man, 1964, Beacon Press; Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Gvilization, 1961, Beacon Press. Permission to quote from their works is gratefully acknowledged to the following writers: Robert Alter, "Malamud as Jewish Writer", Commentary, 1966, reprinted in After the Tradition (E. P. Dutton), copyright 1969 by Robert Alter; Theodore Solotaroff, "BernardMalamud's Fiction: The Old Life and the New", Commentary, 1966; Marcus Klein, After Alienation (World Publ., 1965); John W. Aldridge, After The Lost Generation (McGraw-Hill, 1951); and Robert Scholes, "Portrait of the Artist as 'Escape-Goat'", Saturday Review, 1969. Special acknowledgement is gratefully made to Farrar, Straus, and

VI

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Giroux for permission to quote from Karl Stern, The Flight from Woman (1965) and to reprint extensive quotations from the following works of Bernard Malamud: The Natural, 1952, paperback edition published by Dell, 1965; The Assistant, 1957, paperback edition published by New American Library, 1958; A New Life, 1961, paperback edition published by Dell, 1963; The Fixer, 1966, paperback edition published by Dell, 1967; Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition, 1969; The Magic Barrel, 1958, paperback edition published by Dell, 1966; Idiots First, 1963, paperback edition published by Dell, 1966. Acknowledgement is also made to Bertram Sarason, editor of Connecticut Review for permission to include as an appendix to this book an article entitled "Form and Content in Malamud's Pictures of Fidelman" which appeared in Connecticut Review, October 1971; and to Stephen Good for permission to include portions of an article on The Fixer, to be published in Interdisciplinary Essays, spring, 1973. Robert Ducharme

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

V

Introduction

1

I.

The Mythic Method

5

II.

The Ironic Perspective

30

III.

Fathers and Sons

53

IV.

The Theme of Suffering

76

V.

History and Responsibility

98

Conclusion

123

Appendix: The Artist in Hell

127

Bibliography

142

Index

150

INTRODUCTION

The work of any imaginative writer reflects, to some extent, his own experience. The short stories of Bernard Malamud, and his second novel The Assistant, draw upon Malamud's earliest experience of New York where he grew up in a Jewish neighborhood on the lower east side of the city. The years of teaching at a small state college in Oregon provided Malamud with the background to his third novel A New Life\ and his summer travels through Italy in recent years seem to have inspired the setting of the Fidelman stories. The Natural, a baseball story, and The Fixer, set in late nineteenth century Russia, arose by contrast from Malamud's reading, from vicarious rather than direct experience. Malamud's earliest stories — published in journals as widely divergent as the conservative American Mercury and the liberal Partisan Review — did not attract notable critical attention; his first novel, The Natural (1952), received mixed reviews. After his second book —.a collection of short stories entitled The Magic Barrel (1954) — received the National Book Award for fiction, literary critics began to give Malamud's work more serious attention. The Natural was generally dismissed as a largely unsuccessful attempt to invest a trivial subject with a theme more serious than it could support. Only a few critics — notably Leslie Fiedler and Norman Podhoretz — were willing to consider The Natural anything like a literary achievement, though a respectable number of critics were willing to grant the saga of Roy Hobbs the dubious distinction of being a promising, if unsuccessful, first novel. When Malamud's second novel was published in 1957, the critical world was prepared to receive it with generous praise; The Assistant has already achieved the status of a minor post-war American classic. There were, however, a few voices of discontent, Alfred Kazin's among them. The complaint was made that Malamud was writing

2

INTRODUCTION

parables, that his social canvas was too narrow, that he indulged in symbolism at the expense of the lovely and inexpressible materiality of actual life. Malamud's third novel A New Life (1961), seemed to be a response to such criticism. Instead of the urban Jewish setting of The Assistant and the early stories, A New Life was set in a far Western state at a service-oriented liberal arts college. Furthermore, with the appearance of Malamud's second collection of stories, Idiots First (1964), there was a noticeable broadening of subject and setting; two of the stories included racial themes and four others were set in Italy. For the critics of Malamud's political insensitivity, there was "The German Refugee", with Nazi atrocities as dramatic backdrop. Finally, with the publication of The Fixer (1966), this particular criticism of Malamud's work seemed to be laid to rest. Set in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, The Fixer is a political tale with moral themes of social and personal significance. Malamud's most recent* work, Pictures of Fidelman; An Exhibition (1969) - a sequence of six related stories with an Italian setting - may be considered a kind of retrenchment) to earlier interests and materials. The only book-length critical study of Malamud's work is Sidney Richman's Bernard Malamud in the United States Authors Series published by Twayne. This book serves as a good introduction to Malamud's work, though it has the limitation of having been published before The Fixer and Pictures of Fidelman appeared, and, therefore, does not take them into consideration. This is a serious limitation, inasmuch as The Fixer won Malamud both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and must be considered an important fictional achievement. Three major studies of post-war American fiction have included important chapters on Malamud's work; they are Ihab Hassan's Radical Innocence, Marcus Klein's After Alienation, and Jonathan Baumbach's The Landscape of Nightmare. All three of these books, however, share the limitation of Richman's; they appeared before the publication of Malamud's two most recent works. Numerous scholarly articles, treating Malamud's work in whole or in part, contain critical discussions of varying interest and importance. Among the best are James Mellard's study of the wasteland symbolism and nature imagery in the novels1 and Tony Tanner's discussion of the * Since this study has been in preparation, Malamud has published The Tenants (1971), a novel, and Rembrandt's Hat (1973), a collection of stories, l James M. Mellard, "Malamud's Novels: Four Versions of Pastoral", Critique, IX (Spring, 1967), ii: 5-19.

INTRODUCTION

-3

principal motifs and themes in Malamud's fiction in general. 2 Although there is evidence in most of the criticism that Malamud's thematic materials have been consistent throughout his work, no critic has found that Malamud's attitude toward his familiar themes has undergone any significant change. One of the purposes of my study is to trace such a shift in attitude toward the theme of suffering, beginning with The Natural and culminating in The Fixer. Though some critics have recognized the theme of responsibility in Malamud's novels, no one to my knowledge considers that this theme eventually comes into conflict with the theme of suffering. It is my contention that the change in Malamud's view of suffering is revealed in the gradual emergence in his novels of the theme of responsibility as a conflicting idea. From an easy companionship with responsibility in The Natural, suffering achieves an ambiguous balance with it-in The Assistant, and an uneasy truce with it in A New Life until, finally in The Fixer, the previously latent thematic conflict emerges openly. In The Fixer a significantly altered attitude toward suffering eventually is reconciled with a broader idea of responsibility in human life. The major portion of this study is limited to a consideration of Malamud's first four novels for two main reasons: first, because this limitation facilitates the tracing of the shift in thematic relationships; second, because these four works have a similar artistic shape in being extended prose narratives. Pictures of Fidelman, quite a different kind of book with a unique artistic shape, is treated in a separate chapter at the end of this study. Although Malamud's attitude toward his consistent thematic materials seems to have changed within the group of novels under consideration in the first five chapters, his artistic devices have been essentially the same. James Mellard has persuasively argued that Malamud employs some form of mythic structure in his novels; only The Natural, however, has received a detailed analysis with this critical approach. I have undertaken in the first chapter of this study to show what the controlling archetypes are in The Assistant, a New Life, and The Fixer. Almost all critics have recognized Malamud's pervasive use of the ironic perspective; my second chapter is devoted to a discussion• of this technique and its relationship to the mythic method. A third! chapter, on the thematic motif of fathers-and-sons, attempts to show 1 2

Tony Tanner, "Bernard Malamud and the New Life", Critical

X(1968), 151-168. .

Quarterly,

4

INTRODUCTION

where Malamud's techniques intersect with his themes o f suffering and responsibility. Chapters f o u r and five then discuss each o f these themes in turn. Though it has seemed useful f r o m time to time to refer to Malamud's stories, I have confined myself in the first five chapters to a detailed discussion only o f the first four novels. Within each of the chapters, there is an introductory section treating the general nature o f the topic; this is followed b y f o u r separate sections which discuss in turn the application o f the chapter's topic to The Natural,

The Assistant,

devoted to Pictures

A New Life, and The Fixer. The sixth chapter,

of Fidelman,

is divided into t w o parts, the first

dealing with the problem o f the b o o k ' s f o r m , the second treating its major themes and central character. It is probably best at the outset to state that, in approaching this study of Malamud's themes and techniques, I have tried to bring to bear

a knowledge

— necessarily limited — o f anthropology

and

psychology to supplement the ordinary tools of literary criticism. I have relied on the writings o f Freud, principally, and of Jung, to some extent, in psychology; in anthropology I have drawn on the researches of Frazer and Roheim. The w o r k o f Joseph Campbell and O t t o Rank on the subjects of m y t h and the hero have also been invaluable t o me. My reliance on these authors has probably created a bias in m y approach, but some bias, arising from any critic's limitations, is no doubt inevitable. Nevertheless, the references I have used have the advantage o f providing a unified, and I think helpful, approach to understanding the relationship between Malamud's art and ideas.

I THE MYTHIC METHOD

It will be the burden of this chapter to show that Bernard Malamud employs in his novels the mythic archetype of the wasteland as a structural device and that he has selected for each novel a mythic hero whose experiences parallel the experiences of the realistic figure who is the center of each novel's interest. The use of the wasteland archetype as a structural or thematic element in American fiction is probably most significant in the major writers whose work first appeared in the twenties. William Faulkner employed the wasteland motif in The Sound and the Fury. Ernest Hemingway used it in The Sun Also Rises, and F. Scott Fitzgerald created a celebrated image of it in The Great Gatsby with his valley of ashes under the blank stare of the billboard eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.1 The wasteland archetype can likewise be found in more contemporary novels, notably in Nathanael West's Miss Lonely hearts, Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, and J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Before treating Malamud's novels in detail, some discussion of myth and the mythic method seems appropriate. It may be useful to begin by noting a distinction between myth and symbol made (using slightly different terms) by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West: "All art", says Spengler, "is expression language. This expression is either ornament or imitation."2 Spengler goes on to explain that imitation, "which in its most devoted moments is wholly religious",3 is a structural element, and he makes clear that this includes what are now called archetypal patterns. Individual symbols, on the other hand, are 1 John M. Howell, "The Wasteland Tradition in the American Novel", Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Tulane University, 1963. 2 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Atkinson (New York, 1962), 102. 3 Spengler, 103.

6

THE MYTHIC M E T H O D

ornaments in Spengler's sense; they are attached to the pattern of imitation and, in certain highly charged narrative situations, may suggest a large part of this pattern. But, like ornaments in other contexts, any one of them may be eliminated or replaced by another. The imitative element of a work of art may be dispensed with only at the risk of devitalizing the whole. The narrative events may remain intelligible on a realistic level if the archetypal pattern is scrapped, but the impact of the work is considerably diminished, in my view. Ulysses might very well have been entitled Bloomsday and the events slightly re-arranged so as not to parallel the wanderings of Odysseus. This, with other alterations, would have still made for a good novel. But the novel we have has a unique impact because we can measure Bloom, Daedalus, and Molly against the mythic figures whose experiences the author has carefully placed parallel to the events of the novel as we have it. The irony that frequently results from measuring the hero of a modern novel against his mythic prototype will be dealt with in chapter two of this study. T. S. Eliot, in an essay originally printed in Dial magazine, termed Joyce's technique in Ulysses the "mythical method". 4 Perhaps no two authors have influenced twentieth century writers as much as Joyce and Eliot. Yet, the decision to use myth arises from a distinctive frame of mind. Ernst Cassirer calls the tendency to think and express in terms of myth a conservative tendency, one that seeks to preserve traditional thought. "For myth has no means of understanding, explaining, and interpreting the present form of human life other than to reduce it to remote past." 5 Cassirer finds that in both myth and religion "the tendency toward stabilization is so strong that it entirely outweighs the opposite pole", 6 the tendency toward evolution. Writers who employ the mythic method, while probably not bereft of other means for explaining the present forms of human life, find this device apt for emphasizing the necessity of preserving traditional values. Eliot contended that the mythic method was "simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history". 7 Walter Shear finds this conservative tendency characteristic 4 T. S. Eliot, "Ulysses, Order and Myth", Dial (1923), 483. s Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to A Philosophy Human Culture (New Haven, 1944), 224. 6 Cassirer, 224. 7 Eliot, "Ulysses, Order and Myth", 493.

of

THE MYTHIC M E T H O D

7

of Malamud's work. He argues that in The Assistant the tawdry values of a new world commercial optimism (embodied chiefly in Karp) are being judged by a wise, old world, realistic fatalism (embodied chiefly in Morris Bober). The decision comes down, moreover, in favor of the old world values. 8 Malamud declared that in his opinion it was the job of the writer in contemporary society "to keep civilization from destroying itself'. 9 Malamud's novels use the mythic method to carry out this purpose. Myth is originally the product of human imagination, the child of fantasy and dream. The anthropologist Geza Roheim says that myth is an attempt to "link up fantasy and reality". 10 But myth exists on a level above the personal. Joseph Campbell calls myth the shared dream of a culture: "Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbols, in the same general way, of the dynamics of the psyche." 1 1 Though the word fantasy may carry a pejorative connotation, what is born in fantasy is often the highest moral ideal. Marcuse complains that in modern rational society the element of fantasy and imagination is being destroyed and that, as a result, there has also taken place a death of the critical spirit, the "dimension of ought" that can show us that "what is" is not good enough for those who can still dream and remember. 1 2 The myths of a culture live in fantasy and memory; they are peopled by heroes who embody both the culture's wisdom gained from experience (the past) and its hopes and fears about the unknown (the future). Prometheus, Ulysses, Gilgamesh, Buddah, Jesus are such mythic heroes. Perhaps no book of cultural anthropology has had so far-reaching an effect on modern literature as James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough. It has become a basic resource tool for author and critic alike. The large discovery of Frazer's researches is the pattern of death and rebirth of king-god-hero-priest figure corresponding to the cycle of the seasonal year. This pattern seems to have originated with primitive vegetation cults and was subsequently adapted to mystic cults and

8

Walter Shear, "Culture Conflict in The Assistant", Midwest Quarterly, VII (1966), 370. 9 Joseph Wershba,"Not Horror but 'Sadness' " , N e w Y o r k P o s t (September 14, 1958). 10 Geza Roheim, "Myth and Folktale", American Imago, II (1941), 273. 11 Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Princeton, 1949), 19. 12 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, 1964).

8

THE MYTHIC M E T H O D

ethical religions. All these cults have in common a mythic hero whose suffering and death are commemorated with the waning of the year and whose ritual resurrection corresponds to and causes the coming of the crops in spring. 13 Jessie Weston has argued that these primitive pagan fertility rites furnished symbols and ritual details for the medieval Christian tale of the quest for the holy grail. 14 Of course, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land used Frazer and Weston, as well as Dante and the classics, in themselves and for parallels with Christianity. The modern Christian may be puzzled by this kind of adaptation. What appeal can a vegetative deity have for a medieval Christian? Carl G. Jung has explained the enduring attraction that these archetypal figures retain even for modern man: The archaic vestiges or archetypal forms, grounded on the instincts and giving expression to them, have a numinous quality that sometimes arouses fear. They are ineradicable, for they represent the ultimate foundations of the psyche itself. 15 These heroes and their mythic experiences give expression to cultural fantasies and personal dreams, and thus the modern narratives that use such mythic figures as a structural undergirding gain in psychic power — provided that the writer can handle this artistic device with assurance and subtlety. Maud Bodkin, in a remarkably candid book, testifies to the power of these archetypal figures and locates vestiges of them in a collective memory: I would propose the psychological hypothesis that this power is the common nature lived and experienced by the members of a group or community it is termed by Jung the Collective Unconscious — the life energy that in its spontaneous movement toward expression generates alike the hero figures of myth and legend and the similar figures that, appearing in individual fantasy, may overwhelm the personal consciousness. 16 I think it is clear that the use of archetypes has potential for lending a fictional narrative great psychological and moral force by 13 James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged ed. (New York, 1922). Frazer's work first began appearing before the turn of the century. 14 Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (London, 1920). is Carl G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (Boston, 1957), 49. 16 Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Imagination (London, 1934), 20.

Studies of the

THE MYTHIC M E T H O D

9

giving it a mythic referent against which to measure the experiences of its hero. Bernard Malamud, the author under consideration here, has apparently found the method congenial to his own purposes, for he has employed the mythic archetype in the novels he has written to date. 17

I Malamud's first novel, The Natural, is a baseball story: the bizarre account of Roy Hobb's brief career in the major leagues with the New York Knights under the management of Pop Fisher. Relying on the writing of Frazer, Weston, and T. S. Eliot, Malamud has made the mythic parallels numerous and obvious. Roy is a modern Sir Percival in quest of the major league pennant — a latter day grail. Otto Zipp, the fan in the bleachers who continually honks a derisive horn at Roy is the Arthurian dwarf who taunts and scourges the questing hero. Merlin the Magician appears as Gus, the Supreme Bookie, and Morgan LeFay as Memo Paris; the latter tempts Roy into selling out his team for a gambling payoff from Gus. The Lady of the Lake, through whom lies the path of salvation which Roy neglects to take, is the dark-haired Iris Lemon. Her presence during a batting slump restores the power of Roy's phallic bat Wonderboy, his Excalibur. Roy is first discovered by the baseball scout Sam Simpson when he strikes out a thirty-three-year-old batting champion Walter "the Whammer" Whambold — three time winner of baseball's Most Valuable Player Award, and in the mythic context the aging fertility hero. Years later, after recovering from a near fatal groin wound inflicted by a gun-toting neurotic named Harriet Bird ("certainly a snappy goddess"), Roy is hired as an outfielder by Pop Fisher, the coach who yearns to be a farmer and is here cast in the role of the Wasteland King, an old man in a dry season. Roy's rival on the team is the league's leading hitter Bump Bailey, who has transmitted none of his potency to his fellow Knights. Bump is killed when he crashes into the centerfield wall, vying with Roy to prevent a long hit by their oppo17 Malamud's story collection Pictures of Fidelman (New York, 1969), poses a problem. It is a sequence of six stories which some argue may be considered as a novel. I prefer to deal with this problem and other Questions related to it all together in a single chapter at the end of the study.

10

THE MYTHIC METHOD

nents. The king is dead; Memo Paris is inconsolable. But long live the new king, declare the fans and sportswriters who quickly forget Bump. Roy's charismatic power cures Pop Fisher's dry and itching skin, raises the team out of last place putting them into contention for the pennant, and even brings a fertile rain to make green again the brittle brown grass of the Knights' home stadium. But Roy betrays Fisher, the Knights, and himself by taking money from Gus to lose the tiebreaking game of the season. Roy does this in hopes of securing enough money to persuade Memo to marry him. Though Roy changes his intentions during the crucial game, his earlier betrayal is decisive. His bat, Wonderboy, splits in half (symbol of his diminished fertility and potency), and he is struck out by a young pitcher whose yearning, like Pop Fisher's, is to be a farmer. Roy, the old king now, has been fatally hobbled by his lust for Memo. Like the Grail quester who fails because of impurity, Roy neglects the genuine love of Iris Lemon — the woman of redemptive powers — and succumbs to a selfish passion for the morganatic Memo Paris. 18 Malamud made the Arthurian parallel obvious early in The Natural with some rather heavy-handed, though humorous, clue-dropping: Harriet's face was flushed, her eyes gleaming with new insights. Occasionally she stopped and giggled at herself for the breathless volume of words that flowed forth, to his growing astonishment, but after a pause was on her galloping way again — a girl on horseback — reviewing the inspiring sight (she said it was) of David jawboning the Goliath—Whammer, or was it Sir Percy lancing Sir Maldemer, or the first son (with a rock in his paw) ranged against the primitive papa? (p. 26) 1 9 But the Arthurian mythic parallel is overlaid with another from Homeric legend. To be sure we don't miss this one either, Malamud has Harriet ask Roy "Had he ever read Homer?" on the same page as the one cited above where the other mythic clues are dropped. Norman Podhoretz has pointed out some resemblances between Roy and the Homeric hero Achilles. Roy's bat comes from a tree struck by lightning, just as Achilles' armor was forged by Hephaestus, god of fire. 18 For a more detailed discussion of the mythic parallels and their Jungian symbolism, see Earl Wasserman, "The Natural: Malamud's World Ceres", Centennial Review of Arts and Sciences, IX (1965), 4 3 8 ^ 6 0 . 19 Bernard Malamud, The Natural, Dell paperback edition (New York, 1965). All subsequent references are to this edition.

THE M Y T H I C METHOD

11

When in a slump Roy broods in the dugout like Achilles sulking in his tent over his inability to get the fair Briséis away from Agamemnon. The pitcher who faints when he has to face the redoubtable Roy ("He . . . saw Roy in full armor, mounted on a black charger." [p. 185]) reminds us of Hector fleeing from Achilles. Otto Zipp, in the context of this myth, is like Thersites taunting Achilles during the battle. 2 0 But Malamud makes even more allusions to questers who have attained a kind of mythic status. At the height of Roy's fame and power, "He was like a hunter stalking a bear, a whale, or maybe the sight of a single fleeing star the way he went after that ball" (p. 134). Thus Roy is put in the tradition of American questers: Daniel Boone or even Ike McCaslin stalking a legendary bear, Captain Ahab pursuing Moby-Dick. But more closely, Roy resembles the modern quester who failed, Jay Gatsby. It was Gatsby's belief in the power of wealth to secure for him the woman for whom he yearned and to whom he had wed his immense capacity for wonder,that led him to the morally shabby life of an underworld figure. Similarly Roy is snared by belief in money and desire for Memo, "his mind skipped from money to Memo" (p. 158). Memo herself strikes the reader as remarkably like Daisy Fay when she confesses, "I'm afraid to be poor" (p. 159). There is an even more significant similarity between Fitzgerald's hero and Malamud's in an episode following the "Roy Hobbs Day" celebration at the Knights' home stadium. On this occasion Roy is presented with a Mercedes-Benz, and he takes Memo for a ride on Long Island; she drives. As they speed down "the lifeless moonlit road", Roy recalls the period of innocent youth now lost. "He wished he could have lived longer in his boyhood" (p. 93). After they stop and make an abortive attempt at love-making (Memo begs off because of a "sick" breast), they continue driving and Roy continues his nostalgic recollections: He found himself wishing he could go back somewhere, go home wherever that was. As he was thinking this, he looked up and saw in the moonlight a boy coming out of the woods followed by his dog. Squinting through the windshield, he was unable to tell if the kid was an illusion thrown forth by the trees or someone really alive, (p. 98) 20

Norman Podhoretz, "Achilles in Left Field", Commentary,

1953), 321-326.

XVII (March,

12

THE MYTHIC METHOD

Driving without lights, Memo has been relying solely on the moonlight to see the road; suddenly clouds throw them into darkness. Roy hears a thud and feels sure they have hit a boy. Memo refuses to stop, insisting that the boy is a figment of Roy's imagination. "I heard somebody groan", Roy insists. "That was yourself', Memo replies (p. 98). The meaning is clear; Roy's involvement with Memo has destroyed the last vestige of his moral innocence symbolized by the image of the boy and his dog. The incident of the fatal accident on Long Island is central to the climax of The Great Gatsby. In that book too the fatal woman hits someone crossing the road and does not stop. Both Gatsby and Hobbs yearn for some precious lost quality or value located in the past; both have an irresistible attraction for a woman whom both vastly over-estimate; and both rely on money, dishonestly obtained, to secure that woman for them. This parallelism between the novels points up a theme they have in common: the corruption of love and idealism through reliance on wealth fraudulently obtained. The elaborate (and frequently laborious) parallels between the figures and events of The Natural and those in Arthurian and Homeric legend — together with allusions to American questers, real and literary — serve as mythic referents against which we can measure the embodiment of the modern American mythic hero in the person of Roy Hobbs. Roy could have been king, as a nameless woman remarks at the end of the novel; but lust for Memo Paris and a fatal confidence in his own powers to succeed ("I bet some day I'll break every record in the book for throwing and hitting." [p. 26]) conspire to lead him to compromise the ideals of honesty and fair play that his role as baseball hero requires of him. Roy aspires to the status of the mythic hero, but he is oblivious of the obligation to virtue such status requires of him. Achilles betrayed his fellow Greeks through lust and pride. Percival failed to gain the grail because he compromised his chastity and honesty. Jay Gatsby succumbed to the meretricious lure of a tinsel sweetheart with a voice that sounded like money. Roy Hobbs was like all of them and failed as they did to preserve the virtues demanded by his heroic role. There is a certain appropriateness in measuring a modern baseball hero with the archetypes of Achilles, Percival, and Gatsby. Whether or not Malamud succeeds in this novel is a question that involves not only his use of myth but the balance he maintains between allusions to mythic referents and the realistic details of the narrative. Because this is essentially a matter of tone in

THE MYTHIC M E T H O D

13

the novel (though not unrelated to the mythic technique), and therefore more directly related to Malamud's characteristic kind of irony, I have chosen to deal with it in the next chapter.

2 Discussing Malamud's work in "Generation of the Fifties", 2 1 Granville Hicks remarks that the method of The Assistant is "not at all that of The Natural". Kingsley Widmer makes the same observation in an article in Partisan Review; he calls The Assistant a "neo-naturalistic genre-study of an . . . ordinary Jewish family in the depression who are victims of their socio-economic milieu". 22 Despite these two assertions, it has become generally accepted among critics of his work that Malamud is employing the same vegetation myth in The Assistant that is at the heart of the grail motif found in The Natural. The clue to this motif and to the theme of the novel is announced by Helen Bober, daughter of the old Jewish grocer Morris Bober. She capsulizes the message of the mythic archetype when she says to Frank Alpine, her father's assistant, "Life renews itself' (p. 81). 2 3 The Assistant opens on an urban wasteland; it is the month of November. Morris Bober, an old man in a dry month, clawed by the cold wind of economic depression, is experiencing in his grocery business a desolation that is reflected in the urban terrain as the year dies and bleak winter approaches. Helen too "mourned the long age before spring and feared loneliness in winter" (p. 16). Then Frank Alpine appears on the scene, an orphan come out of the West; perhaps his arrival signals a turn of fortune for the Bobers. Frank too longs for the spring of a new life. "As the seasons change, it becomes clear that Frank's role is to replace the 'scarecrow' father and to bring to fruition the 'flowerlike' daughter if the human wasteland is to be revitalized along with nature." 2 4 Two important scenes in the novel take place 21 Granville Hicks, "Generation of the Fifties", Nona Balakian and Charles Simmons, eds., The Creative Present: Notes on Contemporary American Fiction (New York, 1963), 220. 22 Kingsley Widmer, "Poetic Naturalism in the Contemporary Novel", Partisan Review, XXVI (Summer, 1959), 468. 23 Bernard Malamud, The Assistant, Signet paperback edition (New York, 1958). All subsequent references are to this edition. 24 James M. Mellard, "Malamud's The Assistant: The City Novel as Pastoral", Studies in Short Fiction, V (Fall, 1967), i:4.

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THE MYTHIC METHOD

on days that curiously mix the seasons. It is on a warm day in February that Frank rapes Helen in the park; it is a snowy day in April when Morris goes out to shovel the walk and contracts the cold that leads to his death. When Frank first enters Morris's grocery store, he comes as a robber, an enemy. His companion, Ward Minogue, attacks the old Jew and strikes him. Through Morris's injury and subsequent illness, Frank has created a situation into which he can move as a revivifying force. The robbery comes just when Morris's business is at a low ebb and Ida is dreaming of the "shelves as barren as the picked bones of dead birds" (p. 45). But things take a turn for the better when Frank is hired, and Morris "attributed their good fortune mostly to the clerk" (p. 83). Gradually Frank reveals to Morris his petty thievery from the till, his part in the initial robbery and assault, and his secret courtship of Helen. Though Morris would like to find a replacement for his dead son Ephraim, he turns Frank out. Nevertheless, Frank's selfrevelation constitutes a kind of union with the surrogate father for whom the orphaned assistant has himself been searching. Finally Morris's death comes in the spring of the year through an illness brought on by shovelling snow in an unseasonable April storm. After figuratively dancing on Morris's grave following the funeral, Frank almost by default assumes Morris's apron and his role in the family. Because he is younger and stronger, Frank has more energy to devote to the almost hopeless enterprise of the neighborhood grocery. Though the task is gigantic, Frank manages to make a living for Ida and Helen, yet significantly, not from the store itself but only through the supplementary wages he earns from his night job. In the romantic thread of the novel's plot (the relationship between the grocer's daughter and the assistant), Frank represents the exuberant possibilities of life; his natural terrain is the park. Helen represents the claims of the mind and the restraint of reason; the library is her ascetic refuge. Or, as Mellard has it, Helen is Apollonian, a restraining force; Frank is Dionysian, a spontaneous burst of passionate life. 2 5 Frank's need of a disciplinary influence is most painfully obvious in the scene where his voyeuristic lust drives him up an air shaft to spy on Helen in her bath. It culminates in his impulsive rape of Helen in the park after he has rescued her from the assault of Ward Minogue, his partner in the robbery. Helen represents the element of 25

Mellard, 7.

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mind and discipline which Frank needs to temper his lust into tender affection but Frank's sexual passion must assault and melt Helen's wintery fear of and disdain for the flesh (p. 111). Frank's circumcision at the end of the novel (besides its other important implications) constitutes the removal of that "lascivious cap" which Helen saw him fondle in her dream (p. 183). It is a cutting back of the offensive member, a tempering of the insistent love-root. More important in the novel than the change in Helen, however, is the transformation of Frank. This is accomplished under the moral tutelage of Morris Bober. Though Morris himself is on the threshold of the grave, like Christ he has the power to raise others from the tomb. After discovering Frank in the basement of the store, Morris brings him out of the tomb of his cellar and gives him food and a job. Perhaps Frank is acknowledging the Christ-role when he says as he munches on a seeded hard roll Morris has given him: "Jesus, this is good bread" (p. 29). Morris's function in the neighborhood is to live for others, like Christ who has been called by modern theologians "the man for others". 26 Morris rises an hour early to sell the "Polisheh" a three-penny roll; he befriends and assists the lonely Breitbart, a virtual leper in his community. He refuses to take advantage of the local drunks by selling them the liquor they will buy anyway (a compromise that would probably effect his financial solvency); and he extends credit over Ida's protests. Morris bears the oppressive weight of financial distress as he goes about the daily ritual connected with operating the store. He drags himself around under the burden of his personal cross, stumbling under it several times until it finally takes his life on a snowy day in April. The burden and the ritual are both then shifted to Frank who puts on Morris's apron and undertakes his tasks. Though Morris is a Jew (as indeed Christ was), his actions and his words embody what has come to be known as the Christian- or love-ethic. When Frank asks Morris what it means to be a Jew, the grocer answers in words that would also be an apt response to the question of what it means to be a Christian. "This means to do what is right, to be honest, to be good. This means to other people. Our life is hard enough. Why should we hurt somebody else? For everybody should be the best they can, not only for 26 This phrase has been used by John Dunne, C. S. C., of the University of Notre Dame.

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you or me. We ain't animals. This is why we need the Law. This is what a Jew believes." (p. 99) After pointing out that "other religions have those ideas t o o " (p. 99), Frank asks Morris why Jews suffer so much. Morris answers simply that they cannot avoid suffering. Frank then asks why Morris himself suffers. "I suffer for y o u " , Morris replies. But Frank is puzzled by this; and, when he asks Morris what he means, the old grocer only baffles his assistant by reversing his assertion: "I mean you suffer for m e " (p. 100). Morris's words reveal a belief in the vicarious value of suffering and may be considered a classic statement both of the Christian concept of the communion of saints and St. Paul's doctrine of the mystical body. Toward the end of the novel, when his fortunes are at their lowest because he has fired Frank, Morris is tempted to set fire to his store for the insurance money. Just as Morris had earlier saved Frank by raising him out of the grave of the grocery's cellar, Morris is here saved from a dishonest act by Frank, who also prevents the grocer himself from burning accidently in the flames. Thus each character is the instrument of the other's salvation. He sobbed for God's mercy, and was at once roughly seized from behind and flung to the ground. Frank Alpine smothered the grocer's burning clothes with his overcoat. He banged out the fire in the dumb-waiter with his shoe. Morris moaned. "For Christ sake", Frank pleaded, "take me back here." (p. 168) When Morris dies, Helen says of him after the eulogy, "He made himself a victim" (p. 181). Though she means it as a charge of inadequacy and waste, it translates the burden of Morris's life in accurate Christian terms. He went about doing good; he gave his life that others might live. If Morris embodies the moral qualities of Christ, Frank is cast in the role of one of his most celebrated imitators, St. Francis of Assisi. When he first arrives in the neighborhood, Frank stops in Sam Pearl's candy store and sees there a picture of a "thin-faced, dark-bearded monk in a coarse brown garment, standing barefooted on a sunny country road. His skinny, hairy arms were raised to a flock of birds that dipped over his head" (p. 27). This image of the saint with a flock of birds appears later in the novel when Helen comes upon Frank in the park.

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17

Coming up the block, Helen saw a man squatting by one of the benches, feeding the birds. Otherwise the island was deserted. When the man rose, the pigeons fluttered up with him, a few landing on his arms and shoulders, one perched on his fingers, pecking peanuts from his cupped palm. (p. 94) The image of Frank alone on an island is an authentic Franciscan echo, for it was the custom of the poor man of Assisi to retreat to an island to fast and pray. 2 7 At the same scene in the park, Frank presents Helen with gifts (a scarf and a volume of Shakespeare) and declares "My nature is to give and I couldn't change it if I wanted t o " (p. 95). Even when Frank is acting out of lust, he sees the naked Helen, spied through the air-shaft, in images appropriate to the archetype after which he is shaped: "Her body was young, soft, lovely, the breasts like small birds in flight, her ass like a flower" (p. 61). When he tries to make up with Helen after he has raped her in the park, Frank appropriately fashions out of wood "a rose starting to bloom" delicate and firm as a real flower (p. 152). Frank's sense of relief after he has confessed to Morris his part in the burglary is described in this striking image: " — a treeful of birds broke into song" (p. 156). Frank is consistently associated with the images of birds, flowers, and trees that were explicitly linked by him to his Italian namesake, stories of whose legendary life still remain in his memory from the days of his youth in an orphanage. As G. K. Chesterton states in his biography of St. Francis: . . . it is perfectly true and it is virtually important that Christ was the pattern on which St. Francis sought to fashion himself; and that at many points their human and historical lives were even curiously coincident; and above all, that compared to most of us at least St. Francis is a most sublime approximation of his Master, and is a splendid yet merciful Mirror of Christ. 28 As Francis was the mirror of Christ, 29 Frank Alpine becomes the moral image of Morris Bober. Frank's conversion to the Jewish religion has a symbolic significance far beyond the social act of joining a church, for by it Frank has "confirmed his investiture with a set of 27 28

Felix Timmermans, The Perfect Joy of St. Francis (New York, 1957).

G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi (New York, 1924), 171. 29 Note also that Frank is associated with mirror images: "A cracked mirror hung behind him on the wall above the sink and every so often he turned to stare into it" (p. 24).

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moral attitudes". 30 By accepting Morris's ethic, Frank puts his own suffering (undeniably real even before he met Morris) into a context that gives it value. His response to pain and loneliness is converted from rage into Christian gentleness. The rage he felt disappeared like a windstorm that q u i e t l y p o o p e d o u t , and he felt a gentleness creeping in. He felt gentle to t h e people w h o came i n t o the store, especially the kids w h o m he gave p e n n y crackers for n o t h i n g . He was gentle to Morris, and the Jew was gentle t o h i m . And he was filled w i t h a quiet gentleness for Helen and n o longer climbed the air shaft to spy on her, naked in the b a t h r o o m . (P. 6 9 )

Though for a long while after her father's death Helen resists Frank's gestures of reconciliation, the novel closes with an optimistic dream-image in which St. Francis transforms the wooden flower (the rejected token of repentant love) into a real rose and presents it to Helen "with the love and best wishes of Frank Alpine" (p. 192). In this fantasy of Frank's, St. Francis is dancing; this image recalls the ritual dance performed by Frank when he fell into Morris's grave after the funeral. The final paragraph of the book tells of Frank's circumcision, the gesture of his acceptance of Morris's role as a man suffering for others and of his ethic of love that is willing to sacrifice itself that others may live. Though this Christ/St. Francis parallel seems to me to be the central one in the novel and most closely related to its theme and character development, there is also an interesting parallel, discernible in Morris's and Frank's old-man/young-boy relationship, to a similar relationship between Philoctetes and Neoptolemus in Sophocles' play Philoctetes.31 Like Neoptolemus who comes to Philoctetes' cave as a hostile conspirator of Odysseus, Frank Alpine comes to Bober's grocery store with Ward Minogue, with whom he has conspired to commit burglary. Both young men deceive the elder figure in order to gain his good graces, and both use their favor to accomplish a kind of theft. Neoptolemus takes Philoctetes' coveted bow; Frank would steal Morris's daughter and in fact does pilfer from the cash register. 30 Theodore Solotaroff, "Bernard Malamud's Fiction: The Old Life and the New", Commentary, XXXIII (1961), 193. 31 I am indebted for the suggestion of this paralled to Mr. Joseph Duffy, Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

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Both old men are moved with pity at the suffering of others. When Philoctetes learns of the death of Neoptolemus's father, he associates the boy's loss with his own dreadful pain: "your half of sorrow matches that of mine". 32 Morris is moved by Frank's starved face and the story of his wanderings to give him a job as his assistant. Furthermore, the communion of suffering is recognized in both Philoctetes and The Assistant. After witnessing the excruciating torture endured by Philoctetes from the running sore in his foot, Neoptolemus observes solemnly: "I have been in pain for you; I have been / in sorrow for your pain." 33 In The Assistant when Frank asks why Jews suffer so much, Morris replies, "I suffer for you" (p. 99). When Frank asks what that means, Morris turns it around. "You suffer for me" (p. 100). Finally, the young men who have learned pity and respect for suffering from association with the older men, save the elder from a rash act. Neoptolemus intervenes when Philoctetes would shoot Odysseus with his bow, thereby preventing the displeasure of the gods and leaving the way open to the resolution effected by Herakles at the end of the play. Frank prevents Morris from burning down his store and thereby compromising his own moral instruction-example to the neophyte assistant. Though these two works arise from moral traditions that would seem antagonistic, their themes are remarkably similar. As David Grene remarks, through Philoctetes Sophocles seems to be saying that "only at the cost of suffering does life itself exist". 3 4 The vegetative and Christian archetypes operating in The Assistant underline Frank's discovery in the novel that only through sacrificing oneself for others (even, as in Morris's case, should that include suffering and death) can life renew itself. 3 A New Life, Malamud's third novel, tells of the fortunes and misfortunes of a New York Jew, S. Levin, who has come West to teach English in a small state college. He becomes involved sexually with Pauline, the wife of his colleague Gerald Gilley and stands for election to replace the retiring department chairman Fairchild. His opponent 32 David Grene, trans., The Complete (Chicago, 1959), 416. 33 Grene, Sophocles, 432. 34 Grene, Sophocles, 398.

Greek Tragedies:

Vol. II

Sophocles

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in the election is Gilley, who uses evidence of Pauline's adultery with Levin to turn departmental sentiment against him. Gilley wins the election but loses Pauline to Levin. When Malamud wrote this novel, he did not alter his basic method of approach. A New Life, indeed, employs the mythic method, but the novel is filled with so many allusions, historical and literary, that the controlling mythic parallel is frequently neglected or obscured. James Mellard has discussed Malamud's use of seasonal imagery, the cycle of nature, and the replacement of the sterile father-figure Gilley ("a man with no seeds at all" [p. 179]) 35 by a more potent man Levin (who teaches his first class with his fly open). 36 When Levin first saw Pauline Gilley,"She was like a lily on a long stalk" (p. 7) and flat as the American prairie. Near the close of the novel, when Pauline conceives Levin's child, her breasts become noticeably fuller, like blossoming flowers. Levin himself feels transformed when he first begins to escape from the fear that made him seek sanctuary in college teaching in the West. For the first time since he had parted from Pauline the world seemed home, welcome. He had, as men must, given birth to it; he was himself reborn. Proof: leafy trees stippling green of earth and sky. Flowers casting bright colors everywhere. Vast fires in cosmic space — all nature flowing in Levin's veins, (p. 251) By finally marrying Pauline, Levin accomplishes the replacement of Gilley that was prefigured in the novel's opening sequence when Pauline literally forced the newcomer to put on her husband's trousers. The wasteland in the novel is the intellectual desert of Cascadia College. In a sense, Levin fails to bring a fresh breeze to this place; after losing the election to Gilley, he must leave the sterile wasteland of the English department under the rule of a king as impotent as the previous ruler, Fairchild. The motif of Sir Percival seeking the grail, which played so large a role in The Natural, appears again briefly and ironically in one episode of A New Life. Levin has two abortive sexual trysts early in the novel, one with Laverne, a waitress, and one with Avis Fliss, an unmarried member of the English faculty. At last it seems Levin will 'make it' 35 Bernard Malamud, A New Life, Dell paperback edition (New York, 1963). All subsequent references are to this edition. 36 James M. Mellard, "Malamud's Novels: Four Versions of Pastoral", Critique, IX (1967), ii: 5 - 1 9 .

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with Nadalee, a student who is obviously willing to involve herself sexually with Levin in order to insure a B in his course. Levin sets off to meet the girl in San Francisco. Before leaving, he pictures himself "speeding up hill and down in his trusty Hudson, his lance at his side, driving through a series of amorous and philanthropic adventures" (p. 128). The episodes of his journey, pursuit by a fiendish road hog, the passage through the mountains, the breakdown of Levin's steed, all take on the attributes of a trip to the medieval Chapel Perilcus. Log trucks are described as giants; he is pulled out of a ditch by a wizened elfin farmer; his journey is blocked by a nightmare white mule that he passes by means of the magic charm of a lifesaver. 37 After this "purgatorial journey" that seemed to extend "for years on an abandoned road" (p. 141), Levin sees the ocean and feels like "stout Cortez — Balboa that is — gazing down at the water in wild surmise, both eyes moist" (p. 143). But after sex with Nadalee (the first two syllables of her name aptly describe her character), Levin discovers that "he had felt no true affection for the girl" (p. 146). Later, when Levin is in the throes of depression over his affair with Pauline, his reflections are cast in the grail metaphor: "How often have I told myself happiness is not something you flush out in a planned expedition, a hidden complicated grail all at once the beholder's; that it's rather grace settled on the spirit in desire of life " (p. 181-182). Here Levin offers the best critique of his own approach to life and a clue (in the term "grace") to the archetype most closely related to the theme of the novel. Like Roy Hobbs, who is ensnared by the prospect of wealth and immortality achieved through success on the baseball field, S. Levin is ensnared by a form of the American myth appropriate to the groves of academe. Levin is well acquainted with the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman; he has taken the Edenic metaphors on Nature and America quite seriously. This unfortunate ex-drunkard believes that he can recapture his lost innocence and escape the past — the old world of his old life — by following the passage of Lewis and Clark to the West where pioneer virtues are still cultivated and esteemed. So et in Arcadia ego. But the paradise that Levin discovers in Eastchester is located in the state of Cascadia. The 37 Marc L. Ratner, "Style and Humanity in Malamud's Fiction", Massachusetts Review, V (Summer, 1964), 673.

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first syllable —cas— belongs to the root cad/cas, meaning fall or die (Latin: cadere). The paradise of the West is a fallen Arcadia, an Eden after the sin of Adam. Levin may well need "grace settled on the spirit" but he will not find it simply by entering Cascadia. Nevertheless, with unsurpassable naivete, Levin comes west and enters his disappointing love affairs declaring "Who could resist E d e n ? " (P- 134). In this motif Leo Duffy plays an important and curious role. He is the archetype of the fallen man, the Adam of the English department who lost his chance for salvation. But that salvation is spurious by the authentic standards of freedom, responsibility, and love that are the measure in the novel. In order to be saved on the faculty of Cascadia College, a man must teach writing out of Fairchild's textbook, support Gilley's freshman testing program, accept the second class status of the liberal arts, and not 'lay' any faculty wives. Leo Duffy violates all these prohibitions and thereby falls from a spurious to a genuine state of grace. As the novel opens, Levin has arrived in Eastchester, seeking a sanctuary in the West, conceived as a place of freedom without responsibility (p. 91). But in order to find salvation in this bogus Eden, Levin will have to sin against the bourgeois respectability and intellectual mediocrity that prevail within it. When Levin makes love to Pauline Gilly in the setting of nature, he is succumbing to the seductions of the departmental Eve. He sees this sexual union beneath the trees with Laurentian naivete — though later he will taste ashes as Milton's Satan did. But we realize that it is an important offense against the decalogue composed by Fairchild and Gilley. Though Levin has been warned not to taste of the forbidden fruit, the woman tempted him and he did eat. Like God who sees sinners in their secret shame, Gilley has a photograph of Duffy and Pauline running naked out of the water during a love-tryst on the beach. They cannot hide their nakedness from Gilley anymore than Adam and Eve could hide theirs from God. Though Duffy as an archetypal figure has only local status in the novel, this image of him and Pauline, eternalized by Gilley's camera ("A memory fixed forever on shiney paper" [p. 88]), exerts a great power over Levin's imagination. He finds himself irresistibly drawn to the legendary Duffy and compulsively questions almost everyone to discover the details of Duffy's disastrous personal history. If Levin is to succeed in his new life, Duffy is absolutely not the man for him to emulate, yet Levin is attracted despite himself to the

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mysterious circumstances of Duffy's failed career. . . . Levin uncovers the secret of Duffy's past by reliving it. 38 The secret of Duffy's past is his sin against the Cascadian commandment enjoining noninvolvement; and promising freedom. Duffy, therefore, becomes the touchstone of moral stature in the novel. Joe Bucket, the prolific father and perennial writer of a dissertation on Lawrence Sterne, confesses his humanity when he admits to Levin, "I personally like him, though I can't say I liked everything he did" (p. 112). Bucket is the only identifiable figure in the department sympathetic to the progressive aims of both Duffy and Levin. Duffy represents not only the unmasking of the American myth of the West as a new Eden, but he embodies the past from which no man can escape. Adam is the past of the human race, the symbol of human fallibility and limitation. Duffy is the symbolic past of S. Levin, and he is also a figure prophetic of a future that must be embraced — a future freighted with the burden of the past. When Levin leaves Eastchester, he departs with a second-hand car, a second-hand wife, and a second-hand family. Loaded not only with his own past, but with Pauline's as well, he is photographed by Gerald Gilley who eternalizes the moment like the God of Eden banishing the sinful parents of our race and cherishing the recollection of their offense in his divinely elephantine memory. But as I indicated earlier, the banishment is a liberation from a false paradise into a life of involvement and responsibility in the larger world of men and affairs. 4 The critical attention accorded The Fixer, Malamud's fourth novel, has been scant. Aside from the numerous reviews which greeted the novel's publication — not all of them favorable — only six critical articles have discussed the novel, none of them devoted exclusively to it. The most extensive treatments of The Fixer have been by Tony Tanner and James Mellard. Tanner's remarks chiefly concern the themes in Malamud's work and will be discussed elsewhere in this study. Mellard considers The Fixer the fourth in a Malamudian series of narratives in the pastoral 38

Jonathan Baumbach, The Landscape

of Nightmare

( N e w York, 1965), 103.

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mode. He sees Yakov Bok's ordeal as redemptive for the whole land; thus Bok's shooting of the Tsar in the dream sequence at the end of the novel constitutes the killing and displacement of the old and impotent king of the wasteland (Russia is called a "nation of bones" by the new king). This dream sequence takes place in Bok's mind as he is going to his trial. It is the spring of the year, an appropriate time for death and resurrection. 39 The events of The Fixer closely parallel the real life experiences of a Russian Jew named Mendel Beiliss. At the turn of the century, Beiliss was imprisoned for over two years and then tried for the alleged ritual murder of a young boy. 4 0 But Malamud has enriched the skeleton of historical events by letting us into the developing moral consciousness of his central figure, Yakov Bok. Reversing the Hugh of Lincoln legend (adapted by Chaucer for his Prioress's Tale and cited in Malamud's epigraphs to the novel), Malamud shows us the plight of the Jew accused of ritual murder by fanatical priests, unconscionable government officials, and the mother of the boy herself, who proves to be a kind of mad-witch murderess. Yakov Bok is a man barely able to make a living as a repairman and carpenter, a man disappointed in his marriage by an unfaithful and barren wife, a man generally dissatisfied with the quality of his life. Seeking to escape the limitations of his circumscribed existence, Bok breaks out of the prison of the shtetl and in a kind of night journey crosses the Dnieper, ferried by a Charon-like boatman 4 1 "wearing a shaggy grizzled beard . . . The white of his right eye streaked with blood" (p. 27). 42 Here for the first time Bok hears of the murder of Christian boys by Jews. Terrified by the hatred of his Jew-baiting pilot, Bok denies his identity. At the beginning of Chapter II, the controlling archetypal motif appears for the first time. Like Jesus who must go up to Jerusalem to suffer, Yakov Bok enters Kiev "the Jerusalem of Russia" situated on three hills (p. 30). He is greeted by a 39 James M. Mellard, "Malamud's Novels: Four Versions of Pastoral", Critique, IX (1967), ii: 6 - 8 . 40 Cf. Samuel Maurice, Blood Accusation: The Strange History of the Beiliss Case (New York, 1966). (Beiliss was subsequently acquitted). 41 Exactly as Vergil describes Charon: "Terribili squalore Charon . . . stant lumina flamma." Publius Vergilius Maro, Aeneid, Loeb edition (Cambridge, 1960), 526. 42 Bernard Malamud, The Fixer, Dell paperback edition (New York, 1967). All subsequent references are to this edition.

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crowd of beggars, cripples, and the blind just as Christ frequently was. Bok has trouble finding work, but "when he thought of returning to the shtetl he thought of death" (p. 32). Then Bok finds himself involved in an episode that closely resembles Christ's parable of the Good Samaritan. Yakov sees a man, Nicholai Lebedev, lying with his face in the snow, drunk and freezing; he wears the insignia of the Black Hundreds, a militant anti-Semitical organization. Like the Samaritan whose human pity overcomes the traditional enmity between his people and the Jews, Bok helps the anti-Semite Lebedev to his home and saves his life. When asked by the recovered man what his name is, Bok denies his Jewishness again. "Yakov Ivanovitch Dologushev", he replies. A carpenter like Jesus, Bok passes through a series of experiences of a Christian character while at the same time denying the identity that gives him his status as a kind of Jewish Everyman. Nicholai Lebedev becomes Bok's benefactor and hires him to oversee his brick works and to prevent stealing by the other employees. Bok catches three of the drivers stealing and thereby becomes their enemy. Bok is cursed by the thieving employees Richter, Serdiuk, and Proshko whenever they pass him in the yard; this is the beginning of his similarity to the man of sorrows who was cursed by thieves on the cross, "despised and the most abject of men". At the end of Chapter II, the mythic parallel focuses on the events of Christ's passion. Shortly after the murder of the young boy is discovered, officers of the government accompanied by police and soldiers armed "with drawn pistols and swords", arrest Yakov. This time he admits that he is a Jew. He is taken through the streets followed by a hooting crowd. The similarity of this arrest to the one recounted in the Gospel of Holy Thursday is striking. Christ was arrested by a crowd of officials from the government and a mob armed with swords and clubs, and upon his imprisonment he was mocked by Roman soldiers. Like Christ who was dragged back and forth between temple priests and civil magistrates (He was questioned by Caiphas the high priest, Annas the high priest's father, by Pilate and by Herod and then by Pilate again), Bok undergoes upon his arrest a series of interrogations and interviews by the investigating magistrate and the prosecuting attorney and later by the prison warden, the assistant warden, and finally by a representative of Tsar Nicholas himself. When Christ answered a

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question of the high priest in a manner considered impertinent, he was struck across the face by one of the temple servants. Similarly Bok, while questioned by the prosecuting attorney, is struck for what is considered an insulting remark (p. 119). Bok is "unjustly accused, helpless, unable to offer proof or be believed" (p. 89). His only advocate is the investigating magistrate Bibikov; everyone else turns against him. He is jailed and subsequently reviled and beaten by two fellow prisoners (the second instance of the innocent man reviled by criminals). At the arraignment, Proshko offers false testimony against Bok. The high priests who feared and hated Christ also found many who were willing to bear false witness against him before his temple arraigners. "The ritual murder is meant to re-enact i the crucifixion of our dear Lord", declares Father Anastasy, a half-mad priest, in order to inflame the people (p. 110). Though the similarity of the death of the boy Zhenia Golov (who died in a cave outside the city) to Christ's death easily suggests itself to the Jew-hating priest, he fails to see the similarity between the passion of the Jew Christ and the ordeal of the Jew Yakov Bok. The Christians, who ceremonially drink Christ's blood at the Eucharist, are moreover, horrified by the charge that after the ritual murder the Jews drain off the victim's blood and drink it. Unlike Christ who was especially chosen by his Father for the redemptive sacrifice of his life, Bok was "an accidental choice for the sacrifice" (p. 128). Gronfein, one of the prisoners (who, like Judas, will shortly betray him), informs Bok that "he's a martyr for us all" (p. 130). But Bok does not see himself as a martyr and finds no meaning in his suffering. "To me it stinks." The only person who stands between Bok and the hostile forces that surround him and eventually consign him to a solitary prison cell is Bibikov. But Bibikov fears that his efforts may prove inadequate or even that he may lose courage and abandon Bok. "My worry is not to fail you," he declares. "I dare not fail you, and that is what causes me anxiety . . . " (p. 145.) When, shortly thereafter, Bibikov is discovered by Bok in the next cell hanging by his neck from a leather belt fastened to the window, his failure is accomplished. It is not clear whether or not Bibikov has been murdered, but a probable explanation is that Bibikov hanged himself out of despair over his conviction that he had failed to save Bok — a conclusion forced upon him by his own imprisonment. Bibikov's failure is a kind of betrayal (though, of course, without intention and without the malice ofJudas's), and so

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his death by hanging draws attention to the similarity of the role he has unwillingly played to that of the man who delivered Christ to his enemies for thirty pieces of silver and then, in remorse, hanged himself. After the death of Bibikov, Yakov's physical suffering begins in earnest and bears similarities to the details of the passion of Jesus reported in the Gospels. Bok must undergo the humiliation of being stripped of his garments, not once as Christ did, but twice daily. Futhermore, Bok suffers excruciating pain in his feet, pierced by the nails in his shoes (p. 152). Bok's Via Dolorosa is a painful journey he must make from his cell to the prison infirmary. The swollen, condition of his feet, infected from the nails in his shoes, make it impossible for him to walk, and so he must make the painful journey on his knees. Later Bok is given a copy of the Bible, and out of the Old Testament Psalms he composes his own composite hymn of mourning (p. 171). This lament by Bok contains several extracts from Psalms that appear in the Good Friday liturgy and which the Church applies to Christ on the cross. Later Bok reads from the New Testament and discovers the irony of his situation: "How can anyone love Christ and keep an innocent man suffering in prison?" He astonishes the guard Kogin by asking in his own person what Christ asked his accusers: " 'Which of you convicts me of sin?' . . . 'If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me?' " (p. 191). The chaining of Bok's feet and outstretched hands to the wall of his cell can be seen as a symbolic crucifixion, completing the parallels between his suffering and Christ's passion. It was a favorite instructional device of the Church Fathers to draw parallels between the experience of the Jewish people and the life of Christ (e.g. The Jews wandered forty years in the desert; Christ fasted forty days in the desert, etc.). Shortly after discovering how his own plight is similar to Christ's, Bok is struck by the parallel between the history of the Jews and his own recent experience. The Babylonians were Yahweh's instrument for punishing the religious lapses of the chosen people. Yakov reflects: The rod of God's anger against the fixer is Nicholas II, the Russian Tsar. He punishes the suffering servant for being godless, (p. 197) The critic Robert Alter has noted this similarity in a sense slightly different from Bok's sardonic reflection: "Bok'in his cell recapitulates

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the darkest, most heroic aspects of Jewish existence in the Diaspora. 4 3 Bok undergoes his own mental suffering, though it is during his imprisonment whereas Christ's interior agony took place in the garden of Mt. Olivet before his arrest as well as on the cross. Bok's agony consists of a series of fantastic dreams in which he is accused of cruelty and murder of a child singing with his throat slit (cf. Chaucer), by his father-in-law Shmuel's nag ("a bloody horse with frantic eyes" [p. 204]), and by the image of Little Zhenia Golov himself. Bok fantasizes a pogrom in which he sees in flight childhood friends from the orphan home where he lived; he imagines that Tsar Nicolas comes to his cell and recapitulates the Zionist plots against the Russian crown. Following this series of feverish nightmares, Bok is fastened to the wall of his cell and his suffering becomes more acute. Kogin, one of the two guards who have kept watch outside Bok's cell, is moved at the sight of the Jew's pain. Like the good thief on the cross, Kogin speaks words that he hopes will comfort Yakov (p. 221). Later, when Bok is in danger of being shot by the other guard during an altercation in the cell caused by the attempt of the deputy warden to prevent Bok's departure for his trial, Kogin intervenes and is killed by the deputy warden. He becomes a kind of martyr to Bok's cause, which gives him a peculiar kinship to the good thief Dismas, who is often called the first Christian martyr. It is during this final period of his imprisonment that Bok begins to hope that his suffering will not have been useless: " 'Suffering I can gladly live without, I hate the taste of it, but if I must suffer let it be for something. Let it be for Shmuel' " (p. 222). To this unwilling Christ who thinks there is no bottom to his bitterness and perhaps no purpose, his lawyer declares, "You suffer for us all" (p. 247). Finally Bok is to be tried. He is carried to the law court in a "massive black armored carriage" (p. 265) that, like a tomb, is dark and musty inside. Guards surround it, but a bomb is thrown at it, wounding some of them. This last section of the novel is filled with Bok's fantasies, in one of which he kills the Tsar and liberates the people of Russia. We are not told whether Bok will emerge from the tomb of his carriage, eventually from the tomb of his prison, triumphant. Whether he or the Russian people will be resurrected and saved is left inconclusive. But a change has taken place in Yakov, who declares on the last page 43

Robert Alter, "Malamud as Jewish Writer", Commentary, XVII (1966), 75.

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"there is no such thing as an unpolitical m a n " (p. 271). Perhaps a change has taken place in some of the people — Jews and Gentiles — who densely crowd the streets as Yakov passes by. No one jeered him. "Some shouted his name." There has been a real interior rebirth in Bok, a new awareness of his role > vis-a-vis his fellow man. His experience has been a re-living of the Christ-experience that is fundamentally of the spirit. Bok was like the grain of wheat that had to undergo a kind of death before he could bring forth, either for himself or anyone else, a new life. Looking back over the four novels, one is struck by the divergency of subject matter on their realistic levels. Though Malamud has consistently used the archetype of the wasteland as a structural device, he has been able to find connections between it and such wide-ranging subjects as baseball, New York during the depression, a small state college in the West, arid an incident in Russian history. Furthermore, it seems to me that Malamud's use of the mythic method has become more sure and more subtle. From the painfully obtrusive parallels in The Natural, Malamud makes a significant qualitative leap in his art in The Assistant. It is the moral quality of Morris Bober's life that makes him a Christ figure rather than any similarity in specific acts; the parallel between Frank Alpine and St. Francis is suggested by a pattern of images, symbols, and allusions associated with both of them. In A New Life the principal mythic parallel is no less subtle; it is perhaps obscured by the multiple literary allusions that abound in the novel; these will be discussed for their ironic properties in the next chapter. Finally, Malamud's mythic technique finds its most natural and restrained expression in The Fixer. In this novel the parallels are as frequent and detailed as any in The Natural without the obtrusiveness found in that first novel. The sufferings of Bok spontaneously suggest a similarity to the passion of Christ. But the materials of Bok's experience are handled with such restraint, the similarity to Christ's passion is so indirectly suggested, and never insisted upon, that at times my explication of the parallels must have seemed a bit forced. But the mythic archetype is undeniable in The Fixer, and it is handled by Malamud with an allusive grace and an admirable subtlety that gives it a superiority in this respect over his earlier work.

II THE IRONIC PERSPECTIVE

Irony is a device of contrasts and reversals, of oppositions and the unexpected. Before distinguishing the types of irony and discussing their use in fiction, it might be well to set forth the advantages this device affords the writer. James Joyce considered irony a device whereby the author achieved a certain distance from his materials. As Harold Kaplan remarks, " . . . Joyce, in his portrait of the archetypal artist, described how emotions are transcended in the Olympian spirit of irony, based on a lucidly detached omniscience which purges anger, fear, and desire". 1 Thus irony enables an author to deal with his imaginative materials objectively. Through the distance it affords him, he can approach the craft of writing fiction with a more detached perspective. It has the same advantages for the reader. According to Kaplan, "Irony provides a means of intelligibly contemplating disproportions and disunities, as those between meaning and events, actions and values, motives and results". 2 There are, of course, several kinds of irony. One of these, irony of word, has been described by Freud in his Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious: The essence of irony consists in imparting the very opposite of what one intended to express, but it precludes the anticipated contradiction by indicating through inflections, concomitant gestures, and through slight changes in style — if done in writing — that the speaker himself means to convey the opposite of what he says. Irony is applicable only to cases where the other person is prepared to hear the reverse of the statement actually made, so that he cannot fail to be inclined

1 Harold Kaplan, The Passive Voice: An Approach (Athens, Ohio, 1966), 27. 2 Kaplan, 198.

to Modem

Fiction

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to contradict. As a consequence of this condition, ironic expressions are particularly subject to the danger of being misunderstood. 3 The perils of misunderstanding that Freud refers to were encountered by prose satirists in eighteenth century England. Wayne Booth discusses the problems encountered by these writers in his The Rhetoric of Fiction. Booth shows that irony can be missed by readers of a political persuasion opposite to the writer's if the point of view under attack is represented by an ironic narrative voice that is "too perfect or too reasonable". DeFoe's "The Shortest Way with Dissenters" suffered from this defect of perfection and was totally misread by the Tory readers whose views it was intended to attack. Swift's "A Modest Proposal", on the other hand — though filled with monstrous exaggerations in content and occasional lapses of consistency in the voice of the narrative persona — succeeded admirably, by reason of these very imperfections, in conveying the author's point of view.4 A less perilous, yet equally effective, form of irony is irony of deed or action. This form includes the context within which actions take place as well as frequently inviting comparisons between two different characters' responses to similar experiences. In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner gets an ironic effect out of the contrasting responses of Addie Bundren and her daughter Dewey Dell to sexual experience. Addie makes clear that her sexual impulses were so overpowering as to make her beat the childeren she taught in school. They led her not only to an overhasty marriage with Anse Bundren, but to a passionate adultery with the local preacher. Contrasting with Addie's monologue, in which the blood and the land, sin and the flesh are all associated with her towering passion, is the account given by Dewey Dell of the casual affair through which she was impregnated by her boyfriend while working in the fields. Dewey Dell's mindless account of her sexual experience ironically contrasts with the melodramatic and inflated rhetoric of her mother's monologue in which a similar experience is given in wholly different terms. Another kind of irony, which Sophocles used in his tragedies and which Aristotle has called irony by reversal of intention, may be illustrated from one of Bernard Malamud's own short stories. In "The

3 Sigmund Freud, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. A. A. Brill, Modern Library (New York, 1938), 757. " Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), 316-320.

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Lady of the Lake" (from The Magic Barrel) an American Jew living in Italy changes his name from Henry Levin to Henry R. Freeman in order to conceal his identity which he feels will be an obstacle to the romantic love affair he hopes for. Levin/Freeman entertains romantic speculations about the castle on an island near the hotel in Stresa where he rents a room. On a tourist excursion he sees a beautiful girl in the castle garden and concludes that she is the daughter of nobility. His efforts to arrange a meeting with her are comically thwarted by grotesque turns of events until finally in a romantic setting he proclaims his passion to the lovely girl only to learn that she will not marry him because he apparently is not a Jew. The girl does not inhabit the castle, but is the daughter of the custodian; she and her father are Jews escaped from Buchenwald where her family suffered under the Nazis. The irony here not only works to provide an unexpected ending, but underscores and indeed reveals the theme of the story. Henry Levin's attempt to escape his identity has proved the obstacle to the happiness he could have acquired only through admitting his Jewishness. There is irony also in the tremendous gap that exists between Levin's fantasies and the realities of the situation. If, as Geza Roheim says, myth is an attempt to "link up fantasy and reality" 5 it is not surprising that an author who has used myth as a basic structural device, should find congenial to his purpose the type of irony achieved by showing the gap between dream and reality. In his study of the contemporary Jewish novel, Max Schultz maintains that the heroes of all Malamud's novels are conceived of as maimed kings. He emphasizes the limited rebirth achieved at the end of The Assistant, A New Life, and The Fixer, and he points to the wide gap between this rebirth and the vegetative rebirth in the seasonal cycle. 6 If myth functions in Malamud's novels as a yardstick to measure the gap between the complete rebirth in the nature cycle and the limited rebirth in the social world, the effect of exposing this gap would be ironic. But Schulz in his discussion refers only to the archetypal myth of the king of the wasteland, whereas I have argued that specific mythical parallels are also operating in the novels. It remains to be shown whether the specific mythic figures (Adam, Christ, Sir Percival, etc.), with whom the Malamud heroes are compared, have an ironic func5 Geza Roheim, "Myth and Folktale", American Imago, II (1941), 273. 6 Max Schulz, Radical Sophistication: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish Novel (Athens, Ohio, 1969), 61.

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tion in the novels. The approach here, as in .the preceding chapter, will be to discuss each novel in the chronology of its publication and to ascertain how Malamud employs irony as a literary technique.

1

In The Natural the mythic hero Percival, with whom Roy Hobbs is compared through the structural parallels, failed to achieve his quest for the grail because he failed to preserve the virtues demanded of the successful quester. Achilles, a second mythic hero with whom Hobbs is compared, was guilty of the weaknesses of pride and lust. Gatsby, who also bears some similarities to Roy Hobbs, made the mistake of setting his hopes on an unworthy girl and trying to get her through money. Roy failed to secure the pennant because, like Percival, he neglected to preserve the virtue that would insure the integrity of his quest. Like Achilles his mistake arose out of pride and lust. His kinship to Gatsby lay in his mistaken attitude toward wealth and women. It is clear, then, that these parallels have been adduced to underscore the similarity between Hobbs's failure and that of his mythic prototypes. Yet one can't escape the unmistakable irony in comparing Roy Hobbs to these mythic figures, and one wonders whether this ironic effect was intended by Malamud and whether it strengthens or weakens the novel's theme and purpose. These and other problems have plagued most critics who come away from The Natural with misgivings about it. There are a few who accord it unqualified praise. Jonathan Baumbach describes it, without further explanations, as a "lovely novel" 7 ; and Earl Wasserman believes that the thoroughness with which Malamud has employed a whole network of Jungian symbols in connection with his basic theme confers on the novel an undeniable integrity of craft. These are minority opinions. Yet the doubters are not unanimous in locating the cause of what they feel is the novel's failure. Several critics, like Sidney Richman, find that the novel's weakness lies in the "imbalance between the claims of symbolism and the claims of realism" 8 — a failure essentially in use of the mythic method. Others, like Steven 7 Jonathan Baumbach, "Malamud's Heroes", Commonweal, L X X X V , 98. 8 Sidney Richman, Bernard Malamud, United States Authors Series ( N e w York, 1966), 4 8 - 4 9 .

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Marcus, find that "the allusions are in no way obtrusive and that the novel reads freshly and directly, though something at its center remains obscurely unrealized". 9 But what that "something" is remains elusive. Though Marcus Klein 10 and Giles Gunn 11 both feel that The Natural fails because it doesn't answer the question it raises (why does a good man sell out?), they seem to overlook the way in which the mythic method functions in the novel to answer that question unmistakably. Roy fails for the same reasons that Percival, Achilles, and Gatsby failed. Alan Friedman thinks that The Natural fails because the "baseball formula is too frail to bear the weight of imposed meaning". 1 2 Does this mean that baseball is simply not a serious enough subject to carry a serious theme, or that we simply cannot take baseball as seriously as it takes itself — perhaps because of what Hollywood has done to it in the movie versions of its heroic exploits? I do not think this is the answer, but it points us in the right direction. Readers of The Natural frequently have exactly the impression that I have described above: that baseball is simply a trivial concern that has insisted on casting itself in heroic and legendary terms; and this seems absurd. But it is no more absurd or deceitful to look at baseball in these terms than it is to look upon war in these terms, as men habitually have done. It is decidedly less dangerous in the case of baseball. Nevertheless, after reading The Natural there is this feeling described by Mr. Friedman. Malamud himself, therefore, must be responsible for creating it whether wittingly or not. It is my contention that the book fails because of Malamud's inability to take baseball seriously in the kind of legendary terms in which many Americans insist on viewing it. The Natural suffers from an inconsistency of tone. One does not know whether he is reading a ; seriocomic novel (for, despite its humor, the book's theme and many of its events are quite serious in nature) or a mock-epic in prose. Malamud attempts to show Roy as a victim of pride and circumstance, but Roy t 9 Steven Marcus, "The Novel Again", Partisan Review, XXIX (Spring, 1962), 184. 10 Marcus Klein, After Alienation (New York, 1965), 258. 11 Giles Gunn, "Bernard Malamud and the High Cost of Living", Nathan Scott, ed., Adversity and Grace: Studies in Recent American Literature (Chicago, 1968), 66. 12 Alan Friedman, "Bernard Malamud: The Hero as Schnook", Southern Review, IV (1968), 928.

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fails to achieve the status of hero because the view we are given of him by Malamud is so ironic that it undercuts his potentially tragic stature. The entire mythic undergirding becomes a toy in Malamud's hands. He plays with it, makes it so obvious that it becomes obtrusive; at times the mythic parallels are downright ridiculous. When Roy hits his first long ball for the Knights, there is thunder in the heavens, rain in the outfield, and a cure for Pop Fisher's dry, itchy skin. The people who contrive the circumstances that conspire with Roy's weaknesses to destroy his heroic stature are all shabbily motivated. But Memo Paris, Judge Goodwill Banner, Harriet Bird, and Gus the Supreme Bookie are portrayed with such comic broadness that it is difficult to believe in them. How can the reader take seriously the evil in a man uttering the gnomic pomposities heard from Judge Banner? These figures are parodies of stock types, rather than credibly conceived individuals. Even Roy himself is something of a parody of a composite legendary baseball figure. The mock-epic perspective that dominates The Natural drops away when Malamud chooses to develop a scene seriously, but it frequently reappears again at the end of the scene to undermine its serious impact. For example, when Roy and Iris Lemon, the lady of the lake, are out for an evening swim, they have a very serious talk about heroism and suffering. Roy explains that through his baseball career he hopes to achieve a kind of immortality ("if you leave all those records that nobody else can beat — they'll always remember you. You sorta never die." [p. 125]). Iris explains that she wants to help Roy succeed "Because I hate to see a hero fail. There are so few of them" (p. 123). Shortly after this and their exchange on the serious topic of suffering, Iris reveals — as Roy begins to make love to her — that she is a mother, then that she is a grandmother. The entire scene ends in such hilarity that the preceding conversation can hardly be taken seriously. The same thing must be said of Roy himself. He behaves so naively, comically, foolishly, that it is difficult to view his failure in serious terms. When the novel ends on a serious note, it seems inappropriate to the pervasively comic tone. Malamud's view of Roy is so ironic as to prevent the reader from making the personal identification with him that is necessary for a serious (if not tragic) response to the novel. Therefore, though the mythic parallels are not ironic when considering the novel's theme, they are extremely ironic when considering its characters and events. To draw parallels between Roy, a virtual buffoon, and Sir Percival or Achilles is absurd if done seriously. If done ironic-

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ally, the effect is to diminish the image of Roy as hero to the level of mockery. However, I do not think it is the intent of the author to consciously mock his hero: I do not think the mythic parallels are intended to be destructively ironic. Their presence, along with the sequences on heroism and suffering, reveal an ambiguity in Malamud himself. Though he may have wished us in the final outcome to take Roy Hobbs's failure seriously, Malamud is unable to view Roy himself seriously. This failure appears as a comic excess in the novel, an intrusive and nearly-pervasive irony that destroys the occasional pretensions toward the tragic and fatally undercuts the novel's theme. There are numerous examples of minor sorts of irony in The Natural. The name of the femme fatale Memo Paris warns every man (though Roy misses the warning and he needs most to heed it) to remember the fatal weakness of Paris, who abducted Helen and precipitated the Trojan War and his own death. There are the vatic pronouncements of Judge Banner who warns Roy in Franklinian apothegms against gambling and then conspires with Gus to involve him in bribery. "Resist all evil", he says and then, like the snake in the garden, he hands Roy the forbidden fruit. Roy Hobbs is called a bumpkin; he is kin to Bump (Bailey) symbolically in that he is the new king who must destroy the aging king in order to take his place. Ironies of this type can easily be found throughout the book; but, since the ironic perspective damages the whole work, it hardly seems worthwhile to enumerate the minor ironies further.

2 My strictures against The Natural may have left the impression that I think mixing of comic and serious modes is fatal to the novel. While it is true that the mixing of modes has been unfortunate in some novels — as, for instance, the clash of the romantic with the satiric in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited13 — there have been, nevertheless, modern novels remarkable for the success with which they combine the comic with tragic. Keith Waterhouse's Jubb is a brilliant example. But we do not have to go any further than Malamud's The Assistant 13 Cf. John Edward Hardy's discussion in his Man in the Modern (Seattle, 1964).

Novel

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to find a novel that successfully combines the realistic with the symbolic, the serious with the comic. If, as Harold Kaplan suggests, irony is a device by which "an omniscience entertains itself, but also it is the way in which it proves itself', 1 4 Malamud entertained himself with The Natural and proved himself with The Assistant. The materials and themes of this novel have been used in earlier stories of Malamud collected in The Magic Barrel. In "Take Pity" Eva, a poor widow, refuses the pity and help of Rosen because to accept it is to accept her own defeat. This is analogous to the resistance Helen offers to the repentant love of Frank Alpine in The Assistant because to accept it means to give up her dreams of escaping from the tedium of a life like fda's and Morris's. In "The Mourners" we have in Kessler a repentant reprobate like Frank Alpine, while in "The Prison" the setting of a neighbourhood store becomes a symbolic and real prison for the proprietor Tommy Catelli just as the grocery operates for Morris Bober as a confining cell. The Assistant's old lightbulb salesman Breitbart appeared in the earlier, uncollected story "An Apology" where he was an equally pitiable figure. Finally "The High Cost of Living" and "The Bill" worked with the theme of economic depression in the Thirties and the suffering it caused Jewish shopkeepers; Malamud uses the same social materials for The Assistant. The irony in The Assistant begins with the title. It initially refers to Frank Alpine as the helper in Morris Bober's grocery store, but Frank also assists Helen to move away from her selfish ambition for success in the world. Ironically, Frank also assists Morris to his grave at the same time that Morris is assisting Frank to discover a set of principles that will give his suffering value. There is a great deal of irony too in the situation of the novel. The three Jewish families (Karp, Pearl, and Bober) live isolated within a gentile neighbourhood, a kind of microcosm of the ghetto within a modern urban setting. Yet it is to these isolated Jewish families that the Italian Frank Alpine, who was brought up in a Catholic orphanage, comes in search not only of economic survival but of a home as well. Furthermore, as Ben Siegel has remarked, Frank's conversion to Judaism reverses "the familiar assimilation story". 1 5 Morris and Frank, however, reverse not only a • 4 Harold. Kaplan, The Passive Voice: An Approach to Modern Fiction (Athens, 1966), 82. l s Ben Siegel, "Victims in Motion: Bernard Malamud's Sad and Bitter Clowns", Northwestern Review, V (Spring, 1962), 71.

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cultural pattern, but a religious one as well. Nairn Kattan, a French Canadian critic, has noted that Frank Alpine, as an ironically wandering Christian "reverse les roles assignés habituellement aux Juifs et aux Chrétiens". Thus, the Jew Morris Bober is the apologist for the Christian virtues of charity and compassion. This role reversal then issues in the reversal of the American cultural pattern of assimilation of foreigners, for "c'est le Chrétien qui se convertit, c'est le Judaisme qui est assimilateur". 16 Like Leopold Bloom, Morris "dotes on the memory of a dead son in infancy, and Frank, his heir, is Stephen Deadalus". 1 7 But ironically, because Morris does not see Frank as a replacement for the dead son Ephraim, he never really accepts Frank once he has discovered his petty thievery and his role in the initial robbery of the store. Just as Morris yearns for a son but turns out the son who comes to him, Frank is also in quest of a father; but here, too, there is irony in the displacement pattern, for Frank finds a father in Morris only to replace him through death, and he finds a girl to love in Helen only to assume a selfless, essentially paternal, role toward her as provider for her education. Morris refuses to forgive Frank's thievery, but Julius Karp overlooks his son Louis' pilfering from the cash register, though he occasionally complains loudly about it. Karp's forbearance, however, ironically issues from no attitude of forgiveness; rather, he looks upon Louis' pilfering as inevitable, a sign of his shrewdness, a mark of the same business acumen that has been largely responsible for his own financial success. One central event on which much of The Assistant's plot turns is Frank's unfortunate rape of Helen in the park. Just before this, Morris has discovered Frank's petty thievery from the till and fired him. Ironically Morris discovers Frank removing one of six dollars he has just put into the cash register to pay back part of what he has been pilfering. While Helen awaits Frank in the park, she admits to herself for the first time, and she is ready to admit to Frank, that she is in love with him. Frank's fortunes with Morris are low at this point, though not irreparable; his prospects for winning Helen, however, could not be better. Frank's rescue of Helen from the lascivious arms of Ward Minogue can only enhance his position in her eyes. Though 16 Nairn Kattan, "Deux écrivains américains", Ecrits du Canada Français, XVII (1964), 103, 106. 17 Marcus Klein, After Alienation (New York, 1965), 273.

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just a little while earlier Helen's idea of discipline had seized him with an unexpected attraction, Frank is nevertheless, overwhelmed by his own passion and he takes Helen by force, ironically destroying thereby his best chance for winning her permanently. There is irony too in the language in which Morris Bober describes his own plight; it arises from a bleakly comic perspective that is dark, but not bitter, in the tradition of Yiddish humorists. Morris interposes this wry point of view between himself and his difficult life in order to wrench, if possible, a smile from his circumstance, a guffaw to forestall a terrible howl of grief. This is consistent with Malamud's attempt to show us men who are good, though highly flawed, men who manage, as Frank says, to be "better than they are". "The affectionate insult and the wry self-deprecation are parts of the same ironic vision which values one's self and mankind as both less and more than they seem to be worth, at one and the same time." 1 8 Helen Bober expects Frank to become better than he is when she meets him, so she gives him books to read. But, as Frank remarks, "Those books you once gave me to read, did you understand them yourself?" (p. 183). It is clear that Helen has learned no life-lessons from her reading. She gave Frank Crime and Punishment to read; but she herself learned from Dostoyevky's novel neither compassion nor forgiveness, and she apparently missed entirely its theme of redemption through suffering endured out of love. Her own dreams are the tawdry dreams of success cast in the cliched mold of the Jew who seeks status and wealth through education. Frank, on the other hand, is extremely limited in his own self-knowledge. When he read Crime and Punishment, Frank "had this crazy sensation that he was reading about h i m s e l f ' (p. 86). But the discovery is not illuminating; it only depresses him. Finally, when Frank's transformation is radically effected, he does not realize either what has happened to him or why. "Then one day, for no reason he could give, though the reason felt familiar, he stopped climbing up the air shaft to peek at Helen, and he was honest in the store" (p. 190). Though a dramatic change has taken place within Frank, he has no understanding of it except that he is a better man now than he was. Frank could no more explain the Jewish religion he assumes (outside of repeating Morris's very unorthodox catechism) than he was able to read a book of Jewish history. The ironic nature of the location of Morris within a gentile neigh18

Earl Rovit, "The Jewish Literary Tradition", Critique, III (1961), ii:5.

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bourhood (which I referred to earlier) has a thematic function in the novel. Morris Bober is "representative of the traditions of the older Jewish community" within the "more competitive and fluid urban community". 1 9 His poverty is a symbol of a larger moral and economic trap, for he represents an ethic of honesty and intense responsibility, a feeling that is an ironic anachronism in modern competitive society. Frank's assumption of these values, though it is the mark of his moral redemption, severely limits his chances of economic success. Though Frank may have envisioned his future in the cliched terms of the American dream, the irony of the novel is that his displacement of Morris is an acceptance of old world values and a rejection of tawdry values of the American dream of success. These new values prevent Frank from achieving the success he envisioned when he came to New York looking for a better life. Frank's only triumph will be the moral victory of the loving man Morris Bober — a failure in the eyes of the world. What Frank has learned from Morris is a regimen of pain; the pain of circumcision is the ritual acceptance of Morris's views and values and it seals Frank's doom to a life of privation and frustration as a suffering Jew in love with humanity. Just as Morris's life has been a "holding operation on the edge of dissolution" 2 0 so we cannot expect that Frank's will be much different. The irony of Frank's climbing out of one grave (Morris's grave in the cemetery) only to accept life in another (the tomb of Morris's store) is summed up in Frank's circumcision which both enrages and inspires him, which liberates him from selfishness and commits him to service. The ambiguity of the novel's ending arises from the juxtaposition of Frank's dream of St. Francis, transforming his wooden rose into a real one and giving it to Helen, with the reporting of the fact of Frank's painful circumcision. This ambiguity has troubled several critics. Sanford Pinsker finds the irony here monstrous. That Frankie misinterprets the significance of Bober's life [Pinsker feels it is a tragedy and a waste]; that he converts to a Judaism he does not understand; that he will (presumably) marry Helen and keep the grocery store running in Morris's memory — all these strike me as

19 Norman Leer, "Three American Novels and Contemporary Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, III (1962), iii: 72. 20 Marcus Klein, After Alienation, p. 275.

Society",

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monstrous ironies resulting from Frankie's attempt to achieve a moral transformation. 21 This is certainly an extreme and minority view that depends on seeing Frank's and Morris's lives in terms other than those indicated by the archetypes of Christ and St. Francis. Measured by the moral standard of the love ethic, Frank and Morris approximate the ethical quality of their prototypes to an amazing and admirable degree. I do not wish, however, to deny the ambiguity of the novel's ending, though I think it obvious that the Christ/St. Francis parallel to Morris/Frank Alpine is not functioning ironically in the novel. The juxtaposition of Frank's fantasy of St. Francis and the painful reality of circumcision is, however, characteristic of Malamud's ironic technique. Marc Ratner has argued that Malamud's peculiar brand of irony "is often achieved by juxtaposing realistic description with fantastic incidents, or poetic imagery with ordinary occurrences". 22 The ambiguity involved in such an ironic technique reveals a simultaneous optimism and pessimism in the author, his balance of hope and despair. Ruth Mandel has called this Malamud's distinctive brand of ironic affirmation in The Assistant: It is the disparity between hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the characters in the novel and the horrible reality that is insisted upon over and over again as it denies the fulfillment of their dreams that produces the overwhelming pathos. This shocking and repeated juxtaposition of hope and reality is an essential part of the ironic technique in The Assistant. 23 Certainly there is pathos in the novel, though I think Miss Mandel overstates the case a bit; certainly the reality of Frank's life — like all lives — will be much less than what he dreams and hopes for. Though Frank's quest for a better life has landed him in a kind of prison, a man can be free anywhere. It is Malamud's object to show "how an imprisoned man can forge a new self in his reaction to the imprisoning forces". 2 4 21 Sanford Pinsker, "The Achievement of Bernard Malamud", Midwest Quarterly, X (Summer, 1969), 386. 22 Marc Ratner, "Style and Humanity in Malamud's Fiction", Massachusetts Review, V (1964). 23 Ruth Mandel, "Bernard Malamud's The Assistant and A New Life-, Ironic Affirmation", Critique, VII (1965), ii: 114. 24 Tony Tanner, "Bernard Malamud and the New Life", Critical Quarterly (1968), 152.

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Charles Hoyt has characterized Malamud's vision as a new kind of romanticism, one that consists in his creation of characters whose approach to their own suffering transcends logic, who endure past all sense, who look beyond the absurdity and wrest a meaning from it. 2 5 Such a romanticism, though embodying an attitude toward suffering that may be construed as mystical, is grounded on a realistic acceptance of the inescapable pain of life. Combining the mystical with the realistic, Malamud's moral romanticism is aptly conveyed in his ironic technique that juxtaposes the fantastic and the real to achieve a balance between hope and despair.

3 The decade of the sixties had not progressed much more than a year when an article by Philip Roth appeared in Commentary lamenting the lack of writers either able or willing to deal with "our cultural predicament" seriously. "The society and the community have ceased to be as suitable or as manageable as subjects for the novelist as they once may have been". 2 6 Roth specifically charged that Malamud did not find the "contemporary scene a proper or sufficient background for his tales of heartlessness and heartache, of suffering and regeneration". 27 Reviewing The Magic Barrel, Alfred Kazin similarly complained that Malamud "falls into the same abstractness that is the bane of so many new writers in America". 2 8 Though one suspects that Kazin's remarks are symptomatic of the critic who judges the symbolic writer by norms he is used to applying to naturalistic writers, still Malamud's consciousness of the remoteness of his tales from the contemporary scene may have prompted him to attempt to balance this tendency by the setting and details of his next novel A New Life. Kazin's longing for a representation of life in "its beautiful and inexpressible materiality" 29 may not have been satisfied by A New Life] the novel disappointed several other critics. 25 Charles Hoyt, "Bernard Malamud and the New Romanticism", Harry T. Moore, ed., Contemporary American Novelists (Carbondale, 1964), 70. 26 Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction", Commentary, XXXI (March, 1961), 227. 27 Roth, 229. 28 Alfred Kazin, Contemporaries (Boston, 1962), 206. 29 Kazin, 207.

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Reviewing A New Life for Commonweal, Richard Ellmann dismissed both the book, as "another of those adultery-on-campus stories", and its hero, as a "latter day schlemiel with Thoreau on the brain". 3 0 Marvin Mudrick was offended by the very kind of realistic detail for which Kazin and Roth were longing. Describing the plot as "stupefyingly predictable" and the characterization as "cliched", Mudrick summed up the novel as degenerating from "an often amusing travelogue" into "one more allegory of self-crucifixion". 31 On the other side of the critical ledger, Malamud received praise for achieving in A New Life a sense of place, a social thickness, and effective social satire in the manner of Sinclair Lewis. 32 Ben Siegel called the book Malamud's "best effort", and Samuel Weiss lavished unstinted praise on it. Malamud's art reaches its fullest maturity and emerges from the private world of fantasy and folk color into the larger social world of the academy . . . [The novel contains] a brilliantly realized portrait of one kind of American college . . . [and] Levin [is] the richest and most seductive embodiment of all that is characteristic in Malamud. 33 A New Life is rich in ironic literary echoes and allusions. The journey of S. Levin from the city to the provinces (at the beginning of the novel) reverses the experience of the literary prototype of the modern Bildungsroman Julien Sorel. Unlike Stendahl's romantic hero in The Red and the Black, who comes from a rural French province to lose his innocence in the corrupt drawing rooms of the haute monde in Paris, Levin, ironically, comes from New York City bearing an incredible naivete in the vessel of his maimed personality. 34 Blinded by his romantic delusions, Levin becomes involved in several comic sexual escapades and undertakes single-handedly to reform the monumental mediocrity of Cascadia College's English Depart30

Richard Ellmann, "Malamud on Campus", Commonweal, DXXV (1961), 115. 31 Marvin Mudrick, "Who Killed Herzog?", University of Denver Quarterly, I (1966), i: 8 7 , 9 0 . 32 Marcus Klein, After Alienation (New York,1965), 283. 33 Samuel Weiss, "Passion and Purgation in Bernard Malamud", University of Windsor Review, II (1966), i: 98. 34 The influence of Stendahl on A New Life was acknowledged by Malamud in an interview in 1966. Cf. Haskel Frankel, "Interview with Bernard Malamud", Saturday Review (Sept. 10, 1966), 39.

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m e n t . The c o m e d y and p a t h o s of A New Life derive f r o m the blasting of Levin's illusory views of love and the university(the latter standing for the larger socio-political world). At the height of his passionate relationship with Pauline Gilley, Levin makes love to her one a f t e r n o o n in the woods. The scene reminds one b o t h of the o u t d o o r scenes of love-making between R o b e r t Jordan and Maria in For Whom The Bell Tolls and of the central situation in Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover. In Lawrence's novel, the gamewarden of the Chatterly forest preserve satisfies the physical needs of Lady Chatterly whose i m p o t e n t husband is confined t o a wheel chair. The t w o frequently make love o u t of doors and the lady is exhilarated b y the experience. Levin is similarly exhilarated when he makes love t o Pauline (a w o m a n also b u r d e n e d with a sterile h u s b a n d ) in the forest preserve of the college ( " — in the open forest, nothing less, what a triumph! " [p. 185]). Levin's Thoreauvian imagination finds the setting delightfully appropriate. The fact that at the end of the novel Levin gets the girl when he n o longer feels any passion for her, but accepts her out of d u t y and pity, becomes a curious emblem in the story of the u n r o m a n t i c nature of real experience, the essentially unpleasant element in a u t h e n t i c love. Instead of Lawrence's rhapsodic romanticism, we have the sympathetic irony of Bernard Malamud. Instead of the new life Levin had expected, he gets a totally different kind, a new " n e w life". It is n o t until the last page of the novel that the ironic thrust of the title is fully felt b y the reader. Although S. Levin derives his name apparently f r o m James Joyce's pun on the word (as indicated in the novel's epigraph), one c a n n o t help noticing the ironic parallels between the Levin of A New Life a n d T o l s t o y ' s Levin in Anna Karenina. Tolstoy's Levin is a remarkably self-possessed man of admirable restraint w h o views life f r o m the dispassionate perspective of duty and moral obligation. Yet he is eminently capable of authentic love. He derives his strength f r o m his closeness t o n a t u r e ; he is exhilarated and transformed in its presence. Bearing the same name, Malamud's Levin has all the opposite qualities. T h e drunkenness of his previous urban existence is a token b o t h of his irresponsible approach to life and his inability to come to t e r m s with it. S. Levin's initial exhilaration in the presence of the gorgeous landscape of Cascadia is dampened by the f r e q u e n t showers that fall almost daily there six m o n t h s o u t of the year. Though he s o m e h o w feels t h a t he could find peace by getting out in a b o a t and fishing, Levin is

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comically haunted by fears of drowning. He is the quintessential schlemiel who manages to botch just about everything from his hilarious tryst with the waitress Laverne to his calamitous campaign for the post of department chairman. His initial attitude toward love is bereft of a sense of duty and responsibility ; he is, in short, the very opposite of everything Tolstoy's Levin is and represents. The Levin (whose name means 'light'), of A New Life, nevertheless manages to lighten the "westward welkin" 35 of Cascadia, though the glow is dim and flickering. Levin, as Malamud's schlemiel, is a man "poised between a hopeless past and a possibly redemptive future". 36 He is in the American tradition of the simple and genuine self against the world.37 An essentially innocent protagonist of mysterious and questionable origin (much like the heroes of all Malamud's novels), Levin seeks to begin a new life when the old one has become nothing to him. "[Deracinated, insecure, friendless and powerless to an extent which makes him a very remote echo to Tolstoy's powerful and authoritative figure", 38 Levin was an outsider in his old life and remains one in his new life. Colin Wilson, in his study of the outsider, describes the alienated figure in terms that fit not only Levin but all Malamud's heroes. For the Outsider, the world into which he has been born is always a world without values. Compared to his own appetite for a purpose and direction, the way most men live is not living at all; it is drifting. This is the Outsider's wretchedness, for all men have a herd instinct that leads them to believe that what the majority does must be right. Unless he can evolve a set of values that will correspond to his own higher intensity of purpose, he may as well throw himself under a bus, for he will always be an outcast and a misfit. 39 Levin does finally develop an intensity of purpose and a set of values that can give his life purpose and direction. But he must do so at the expense of failure. As a variation of the modern anti-hero, Levin must be shorn of the romantic primitivism that drove him west 35 From the novel's epigiah, "Lo, levin leaping lightens in eyeblink Ireland's westward welkin! Ulysses". 36 Giles Gunn, "Bernard Malamud and the High Cost of Living", Nathan Scott, ed., Adversity and Grace: Studies in Recent American Literature (Chicago, 1968), 62. 37 Cf. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago, 1955), 111. 38 Tony Tanner, "Bernard Malamud and the New Life", Critical Quarterly, X (1968), 1957. 39 Colin Wilson, The Outsider (Boston, 1956), 143.

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seeking to escape the miseries of life by blaming them on the advance of civilization.40 Malamud's technique for revealing Levin's romanticism to the reader is the ironic vision that informs the book. Levin's discovery of the illusory nature of his romantic misconceptions comes about through painfully comic experience. The Garden of Eden motif that I have suggested provides the main mythic structure of the novel, also operates comically and ironically. In order to be saved from the spurious Eden of an irresponsible arcadia, Levin must fall from the favor of the false god Gilley; only by such a fall can he gain the authentic "grace settled on the spirit in desire of life" (p. 182). Seeing himself as perhaps all that stands between civilization and its own destruction, like the defenders at Marathon (a town named Marathon is located ironically at the edge of Cascadia), Levin develops the ideal of the liberal arts teacher as a man who must try to keep civilization from destroying itself. But the awkward enthusiasm with which he plunges into this enterprise must be tempered by the cold reality of fact. We can see the ironic triumph of fact over idealism symbolized near the end of the novel as workmen cut down trees near the humanities building to make room for a heating tunnel for the engineering school. This symbolic act stands for a larger reality, for what was happening to Cascadia College is a microcosm of what was going on generally in America in the decade of the fifties. There was a decline in respect for liberal studies prompted by the hysteria touched off by sputnik. There was an attitude of political distrust. Added to the alarms and flight of the military panic was a suspicion of the liberal stance, reinforced by the red-baiting senator from Wisconsin Joseph McCarthy and the investigative witch-hunts he conducted for communists and fellow travellers who had infiltrated the government. Passivity and conformity were the hallmarks of both students and colleges in that sad and shameful time. Modern civilization gave evidence of drifting toward its own destruction in the massive retaliations of atomic war, in the grim saber-rattling of both Russia and America. Malamud's representation of the attitudes that fostered these tendencies is given in A New Life on a small scale; the contemporaneity of the novel is a quality his earlier works lack. The failure of S. Levin's efforts at reform ironically underscores the sense 40

Cf. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York, 1961), 33.

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of futility that must confront anyone who would save the world from itself, all by himself. Nevertheless, as the sound of Levin's name suggests, perhaps Malamud is suggesting that the marginal figure, the Jew as alienated man, can be a leaven in the redirecting of the dangerous drift in American society. At the end of A New Life, Levin learns that he had been chosen by Pauline from a stack of pictures because she was attracted by his Jewish face; this motif is repeated from the earlier short story "The Magic Barrel". This is the first mention in the story of Levin's Jewishness, though we may well have suspected it earlier in the novel. Like the chosen people, Levin has been selected by chance, operating through Pauline, for his rare experience with Gerald Gilley, his wife, and the English department of Cascadia College. As Levin drives away from Cascadia — on the novel's last page — encumbered by Gilley's wife and their two adopted children, the fantasies of Levin's imagination fade away in the face of inescapable, bleak fact. Burton Raffel has called this ending a "Literary perversion", 41 and finds in Malamud no mercy or love for his failed heroes. On the contrary, this ending appears bleak, perhaps even cruelly comic in the click of Gilley's camera, only in the context of Levin's earlier romantic foolishness, his bungling idealism. It is an ironic undercutting, to be sure, but one necessary to cure the hero of his unrealistic approach to experience. 4

The ironies of The Fixer begin with its title. Everything associated with Yakov Bok doesn't work (including his wife who bears him no children) or breaks (like the wagon wheel that shatters on his journey to Kiev). But Yakov Bok seems unable to fix or repair what doesn't work or is broken in his life. At the end of the novel, the title takes on symbolic resonance. The destiny thrust upon the unwilling fixer is to right what is wrong in the attitude of Christian toward Jew by refusing to break under his prison experience. Yet Bok must be numbered among literature's more reluctant heroes. Despite his protestation that he is not a political man, Bok ironically becomes the center of a huge political controversy. The Dreyfus-role is not congenial 41

Burton Raffel, "Bernard Malamud", The Literary Review, XIII (Winter,

1970), ii: 155.

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to him, however; he is uncomfortable with it, embarrassed by it. Yakov's destiny is foreshadowed by his name: Shepsovitch (son of sheep) Bok (goat). Both terms point to his victim status, his role as scapegoat to absorb the hatred of gentiles for Jews. But the names are ironic too. Sheep are submissive, and the mythic hero is defined by Joseph Campbell as "a man of self-achieved submission". 42 But Bok's distinction is his refusal to submit. Stubborn as a goat in resisting the role of victim, Bok gradually becomes the unruly, unsubmissive, and defiant man of his later imprisonment; and ironically he becomes at the same time a political man. In this context, then, the Christ parallel, that I have argued provides the mythic undergirding of the novel, contains significant irony. If the "Morris Bobers and the S. Levins in Malamud's fiction succeed as men only by virtue of their failures in society", 43 Bok is unwilling to accept his status as born loser. The shtetl out of which Bok journeys at the beginning of the novel, like the prison from which he emerges at the end, is a concrete emblem of the moral fact of human limitation. Bok's desire to break out of whatever prison confines him corresponds to his refusal to accept limitations. Bok's Jewishness is an imprisoning factor in his life, so he tries to escape that too. The denial of identity appears elsewhere in Malamud's work. First in "The Lady of the Lake" (in The Magic Barrel) where Henry Levin seeks freedom from the limitations of his Jewishness by taking on the name Henry R. Freeman. Again, in that bizarre fantasy "Jewbird" (in Idiots First) where the assimilationist Cohen, by wishing to escape his Jewishness, becomes a kind of anti-Semite persecuting the fantastic talking bird Schwartz, who represents the immigrant experience Cohen wishes to forget. In a more somber story, "The German Refugee" (in Idiots First), an escaped Jew feels guilt for the sufferings endured by his friends and relatives left behind imprisoned in Nazi Germany. The news of his wife's death in the gas chambers destroys him. Yakov Bok also wants to escape the limitations which his Jewishness imposes on him, and his attempts to do so ironically involve him in the kind of political situation he abhors. He denies his identity when asked his name by Lebedev, the drunken anti-Semite whose life he has saved; this leads to his job at the brick works, but it also 42

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with A Thousand Faces (Princeton, 1949), 16. Sidney Richman, Bernard Malamud, United States Authors Series (New York, 1966), 22-23.

4 i

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exposes him to the very kind of involvement he wants to avoid. Though Bok desires to conceal his Jewishness, he cannot escape his own Jewish conscience. At the last moment he refuses to have sexual intercourse with Lebedev's daughter because she is in the "unclean" period of her menstrual cycle. His Jewish fetish leads him to reject this woman, and this transforms her into an enemy who will accuse him of rape when he is later indicted for the crime of murder. Ironically, too, Bok's reverence for the old rabbi, who stumbles exhausted with fasting into his life at the brick works, prevents him from turning the old man away. But the rabbi remains in Bok's room long enough to leave clues (matzos and a bloody rag) that the prosecuting attorney will later discover and use to incriminate Bok in the ritual killing of Zhenia Golov. Bok's desire to escape his identity by changing his name is thus thwarted by the best qualities that derive from his Jewish heritage (compassion and reverence) and that survive beyond word changes. By denying his Jewishness Bok is, in a sense, denying his humanity. Malamud has said that all men are Jews though few of them know it. 4 4 In rejecting the God of Abraham, Isaac, and his own namesake the Old Testament shepherd Jacob, Bok also rejects the God of Job, the deity who imposes suffering for inscrutable reasons and insists that it be borne without explanation. Yet, ironically the world deprived of such a God renders suffering, particularly the kind Bok will undergo, absurd and meaningless. Bok relies, instead, on the vague pantheism of Spinoza. The philosphy of Spinoza perhaps has something of the ironic function of Emerson's creed ("nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of your own mind") in A New Life. Philosophy alone cannot free a man from the literal imposition of history, cannot keep the brute facts at bay . . . .[Still] Spinoza does perhaps help Bok to tackle the burdens of history — not with applicable precepts, but by the example of resistant mental activity. 45 The example of Spinoza's "resistant mental activity" is, then, an ironic counter note to Bok's role as Christ-like victim. Bok makes a covenant with himself to resist his captors for the sake of those they hate (the Jews). But by resisting Bok ironically increases the suffering he 44

Milton Stein, "All Men Are Jews", The Nation (Oct. 19, 1963), 243. Tony Tanner, "Bernard Malamud and the New Life", Critical Quarterly (1968), 164. 45

X

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wants to avoid. This resistance is accompanied by a curious renewal of Bok's interest in his cast-off Jewish religion. But at the same time that he reads in the Bible about the experience of the Hebrew nation, "he refuses to take refuge in religious quietism and pious passivity". 46 As I have indicated, it is this resistance, this characteristic stubbornness in Bok that jars with the whole mythic parallel between his sufferings and the passion of Christ. Jesus accepted the role his father assigned to him and underwent torture and death willingly. Bok resists to the end. Jesus advised his disciples not to resist the evildoer, to turn the other cheek to the enemy that had struck them. This peculiar quality of Christianity Oswald Spengler calls "magian". It consists in a will-less resignation, to which the spiritual "I" is unknown, and which feels the spiritual "We" that has entered into the quickened body as simply a reflection of the divine Light. The Arab word for this is "Islam" (submission), but this Islam was equally Jesus' normal mode of feeling . . . . 47 Nothing could be further from the behavior of Yakov Bok. Through his imprisonment, Bok's changed attitude toward his Jewishness is revealed in his changed attitude toward his father-in-law Shmuel and toward his wife Raisl. His acceptance of his Jewishness and symbolically of his limiting humanity does not, however, > constitute submission to the tyranny of circumstance. One of the large and intelligent ironies of The Fixer is that Bok learns what freedom is by undergoing a nearly intolerable incarceration. "Obviously freedom is not simply being allowed to do what you like; it is intensity of will, and it appears under any circumstances that limit man and arouse his will to more life." 48 Bok does not learn only about freedom from his imprisonment; he learns about loneliness too. Like the other Malamud heroes, Bok is an outsider looking for a better life, but his isolation is largely willed by his denial of the identity that attaches him to others.This loneliness of the Malamud character has been described by Earl Rovit. Caught in a ghetto isolation without either the liberating fellowship of a ghetto sense of community, or a sustaining spiritual security 46 Tanner, 164. 47 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Atkinson (New York, 1962), 302-303. 48 Colin Wilson, The Outsider (Boston, 1956), 30.

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derived from direct religious commitment, his characters are defined in burdensome images of loneliness . . . . Thus the succession of dark cramped places in which Malamud's characters live takes on symbolic resonance.49 Though Rovit's description applies to many of the figures in Malamud's short stories, it seems appropriate to none of the heroes of his novels except Yakov Bok. The irony of this lesson is that the literal confinement impresses Bok with the impossibility of actual disengagement from the rest of his fellowmen. There is an incident in the novel with a Dostoyevskian echo: that is Bok's beating of Shmuel's broken down horse. This incident bears a curious similarity to the nightmarish scene in Crime and Punishment in which a drunken mob beats a horse to death in the street. An image of the absurdity of unexplained and unnecessary suffering, the beating of the horse is also a protest against the absurd world in which the drunken mob of humanity finds itself. Bok's protest, though rendered in muted comic perspective, is equally futile as that of Dostoyevsky's figures. Another scene in Dostoyevsky's fiction, this one from The Brothers Karamazov, is related to The Fixer's theme of freedom; that is Ivan's parable of "The Grand Inquisitor". The discovery of the Spanish inquisitor, who is willing to put Christ to death again in order to prevent him from exposing men to the peril of truth, is that men do not really want to be free; they want bread. Freedom as burden is something each of us tries to escape "in his own prison / Turning the key" (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land). Bok, however, develops through his prison experience the intensity of will that enables him to resist his captors, to refuse submission to alterable circumstance, and to take up the burden of freedom for the first time. Unlike Christ, with whom he is compared through the mythic parallels, Bok resists the evildoers and refuses to become the hero of "self-achieved submission". Unlike Job, whose sufferings resemble his so closely, Bok refuses to accept the words of the voice out of the whirlwind that asserts that the Lord's ways are inscrutable and man must accept the divine will because he cannot finally understand it. The answer given to Job may have been satisfactory for Bok's father-in-law Shmuel, and Christ's counsel and example may operate effectively for Frank Alpine (because he sees them embodied in Morris Bober), but neither of these approaches to experience is 49

Earl Rovit, "The Jewish Literary Tradition", Critique, III (1961), ii: 8.

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acceptable to Yakov Bok. The comparison of Christ to the Jewish sufferer, while appropriate in the case of Morris Bober in The Assistant, is ironic (though no less effective) in the case of Yakov Bok. The similarity between Bok and Job is also ironic in the final analysis. Bok is not another Job archetype, as Manischevitz was, for example, in Malamud's story "Angel Levine" (in The Magic Barret). "The same ordeal which was meant to teach Malamud's earlier heroes to accept their fate is now intended to instruct [Bok] to resist it". 5 0 This statement by Giles Gunn neatly contrasts Bok with Roy Hobbs, Frank Alpine, and S. Levin. This change in the attitude of the Malamud hero points to an important alteration of the author's attitude toward his familiar materials and obsessive themes. The full implications of this change will be discussed in the chapter on history and responsibility. Malamud's use of irony, as is clear from the foregoing discussion, is consistent throughout his novels. After his failure to control the ironic perspective in The Natural, Malamud achieves a consistently high quality of ironic effect in the three novels that follow. The ironies of The Assistant lend that novel an ambiguity that is not destructive of its serious theme; they serve instead to set the elements of myth and fantasy in realistic perspective and give the novel its delicate balance. In A New Life the pervasive-comic irony is an appropriate device to undercut the exuberant romanticism of S. Levin, one of Malamud's funniest characters. The irony of The Fixer is chiefly structural, though other forms of irony abound in the novel. The ironic distance between the attitudes of Bok and Christ toward suffering, presented in remarkably similar patterns of experience, gives The Fixer a uniqueness of thematic statement that distinguishes it from the rest of Malamud's fiction.

so Giles Gunn, "Bernard Malamud and the High Cost of Living", Nathan Scott, ed., Adversity and Grace: Studies in Recent American Literature (Chicago, 1968), 81.

Ill FATHERS AND SONS

The relationship between the heroes of Malamud's novels and their physical or potential spiritual fathers is an important element in both the technique of the books and the thinking behind them. It appears, in fact, that it is precisely in this thematic motif that the art and idea of Malamud's novels interact. The findings of anthropologists, the hypotheses offered by psychologists, and the evidence gathered by psychoanalysts, can enhance appreciation of the father-son relationship in literature and in life. As a kind of support for my interpretation of Malamud's use of the father-son motif, I should like to draw principally on the writings of Freud and Roheim. The importance of the father-son relationship was virtually the starting point of psychoanalytic theory. In Totem and Taboo, Freud postulates that the primal father-son relationship was the origin of human morality and religion: • According to the Darwinian concept of the primal horde: There is a "violent, jealous father who keeps for himself all the females and drives away the growing sons". The primal state of society has nowhere been observed. [But] by basing our argument upon the celebration of the totem we can arrive at this hypothesis: One day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde. Together they dared and accomplished what would have remained impossible for them singly. Perhaps some advance in culture, like the use of a new weapon, had given them the feeling of superiority. Of course these cannibalistic savages ate their victim. This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast, which is perhaps mankind's first celebration, would be the repetition and commemoration of this memorable, criminal act (the totem animal is associated with the primal father, later god, and with the brothers themselves) with which so many things began: social organizations, moral restrictions and religion.1 i

Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York, 1946), 182.

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Next to Freud's speculations can be placed the anthropological discovery of Frazer and others that it was the frequent practice among primitive peoples to ascribe to their rulers power over rain and shine, wind and weather, and then to dethrone and kill them because nature disappointed their expectations of a good harvest. Finally, historians attest that deification and murder of kings was common among the ancient peoples of classical times and has been recorded among the Romans even after the birth of Christ. It is only a small step now to see that the killing of the king, the death of a fertility god, and the primal sin of murdering the father are all closely related phenomena in the psychic experience of the human race. It is clear that the origin of man and the beginning of civilization are closely connected to the father-son relationship. The anthropologist Geza Roheim has explained the peculiar nature of civilization's protective function in terms of delayed infancy. [Civilization originates in delayed infancy and its function is security. It is a huge network of more or less successful attempts to protect mankind against the danger of object-loss, the colossal efforts made by a baby who is afraid of being left alone in the dark. 2 Civilization would not have much to recommend it if men did not progress beyond the stage of delayed infancy. Elsewhere, Roheim explains the importance of fatherhood and connects it to man's delayed infancy. "Fatherhood is a great cultural (i.e. human) achievement. This means that it is replete with conflict and due only to theidelayed infancy of mankind." 3 "The father appears on the scene as i d e a l . . . . Without forming an ideal we would never grow up." 4 The role of the father as the embodiment of mature moral ideals is a recurrent motif in all the novels of Malamud. That this figure should also be the center of conflict between two generations is amply accounted for by Freud's familiar theory of the Oedipus rivalry. Norman 0 . Brown has affirmed that, even if Freud's speculations cannot be historically verified, his account of man's origins contains symbolic truth:

2 3 t

Geza Roheim, The Origin and Function of Culture (New York, 1943), 100. Geza Roheim, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology (New York, 1950), 462. Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, 427.

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Freud's myth of the rebellion of the sons against the father in the primal, prehistoric horde is not a historical explanation of origins, but a supra-historical archetype; eternally recurrent; a myth; an old, old story. 5 In the ensuing discussion of Malamud's handling of the father-son relationship, it will become clear how appropriate, perhaps inevitable, the presence of this motif is, given the mythic structure recurring in each of the novels. The Malamud hero is invariably offered a choice among several fathers. His selection becomes subsequently the basis of his own moral success or failure. Furthermore, the hero's willingness to become a father himself and assume the burdens of adult reponsibility is closely connected with his selection of the right spiritual father. It is usually a sign (for the reader) that the hero has made the correct choice, and for the hero himself it is the result of that choice.

1 Critics agree that Roy Hobbs was a moral failure in The Natural. It remains to be explained, however, what choice of father he had and what moral alternatives each represented. Jonathan Baumbach has noted that the initial short section of The Natural ("Pre-Game") closely parallels the larger second section ("Batter Up!"). Whammer Whambold, like Bump Bailey, is the aging hero that Roy Hobbs defeats and displaces — in the first part by pitching, in the second by batting and fielding. Harriet Bird, like Memo Paris, plays the role of the femme fatale\ Harriet's attempt to murder Roy with a silver bullet is an image of the moral destruction that Memo works on him. Finally, both Sam Simpson and Pop Fisher are benevolent father figures in whose cause (the quest for the pennant) Roy enlists. 6 In terms of the mythic formula Malamud is using as structural undergirding in The Natural, Roy is a"bumpkin" - little Bump — whom sports writers can barely distinguish from his heroic predecessor; in slaying the aging hero Bailey, Roy is also (like Oedipus) slaying his father. In the Oedipus myth, destruction of the father becomes the cause and prophecy of self-destruction. Thus Roy is replaced by Youngberry at the end of the novel. It is hinted that perhaps Youngberry will be s 6

Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (New York, 1966), 3. Jonathan Baumbach, The Landscape of Nightmare (New York, 1965), 108.

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a more propitious son for Pop Fisher since he possesses in common with the manager a yearning to be a farmer. Though Roy never reflects on such matters, the reader must notice that Bailey's athletic prowess is selfish, that his success and vitality do not extend beyond himself to the rest of the team, and that he is the lover of Memo Paris, the woman of fatal lusts. Bump, then, as father-figure represents one set of moral attitudes open to Roy but fatal to him. In usurping Bailey's place on the team and playing an instrumental role in his death, Roy also seeks to assume his place as Memo's lover. At the beginning, however, Roy's presence on the team is regenerative for the Knights because, unlike Bump, Roy, though interested in his own personal success, has also espoused the cause of Pop Fisher. Pop Fisher represents the moral idealism that alone can assure Roy the kind of immortality that will enable him to survive his own death as a hero in the minds of future generations of baseball fans. Though Pop wants desperately to win the pennant, he refuses to cooperate with Judge Goodwill Banner or Gus the Supreme Bookie in order to get it. His honesty may seem an obstacle to securing the longed-for grail but Pop knows that it is also the condition sine qua non for obtaining it. Roy is faced with two choices in The Natural. He must either espouse the ideals of Pop Fisher or betray his manager and himself by cooperating with the bookie and the corrupt judge. This decision hinges on another: Roy's choice of women. In the novel's thematic context, Memo Paris represents the allure of the flesh, sex without love, a lustful and irresponsible relationship. Iris Lemon, the lady of the lake, as both mother and grandmother, represents love with responsibility. By marrying Iris, Roy would become instantly a father and a grandfather and he would be obliged to undertake the duties of those roles. But it is precisely this, in his relationship with Iris, that puts him off. He rejects her, though it was she who restored his confidence and his prowess at the nadir of his batting slump. As prolific bearer of offspring, Iris is the nurturing mother, the fosterer of life; Memo Paris is in love with a dead man and never ceases to mourn him. By prefering her, Roy enlists himself in the service of death. At the end of the novel, Roy strikes and destroys his fertility goddess, Iris Lemon, with a fly ball. The choice of Memo over Iris leads, in turn, to Roy's betrayal of Pop Fisher, his true spiritual father, and to his surrender to Gus and Judge Banner, a composite ogre-father. Roy's ultimate surrender to

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Gus is presaged when Roy is first introduced to the bookie by Memo at the Pot of Fire nightclub. The satanic role of Judge Banner is indicated by Pop Fisher who refers to him as "that snake". That the "wormy" Gus is on the same moral plateau is revealed by the underworld atmosphere of the setting in which Roy meets him. Inside the club the audience was in uproar. The show was on and some screaming, half-naked girls were being chased by masked devils with tin pitchforks. Then the lights went out and the devils ran around poking at the customers. Roy was jabbed in the rear end. He grabbed at the devil but missed, then he heard a giggle and realized it was a girl. He grabbed for her again but the devil jabbed him and ran. When the lights went on all the girls and devils were gone. The customers guffawed and applauded, (p. 83) Roy's entrance into the Pot of Fire constitutes a kind of symbolic night journey and a testing of his moral fiber. Roy's social success in this setting becomes his failure to pass the moral test. He deceives the small party where he is a guest by sleight-of-hand magic tricks. But the trickery is an emblem of the dishonesty by which Gus thrives, and significantly the magic involves the appearance of silver coins. Roy's easy assumption of the magician's role points to his subsequent choice of moral deceit. He will appropriate Gus's dishonesty and Judge Banner's hypocrisy by masquerading as hero while he is cheating and deceiving Pop Fisher, the Knights, and their fans. Louis K. Greiff has explained how Roy's choices between the true and false father, the woman of life and the woman of death are reflected in the line and circle imagery of the novel. The line (the train tracks, the trajectory of the home-run ball, the bat) is associated with Roy's progress toward death; the circle (the baseball itself, the circling of the bases) is associated with rebirth, the completed cycle of life, death, and resurrection. Juxtaposition of the line and circle is a "near duplication of the Jungian Mandala, the expression for wholeness". 7 As such it is a symbolic reconciliation of life and death principles. Roy's ability to hit a homerun (because this involves both the line and the circle; the ball and the bat, the circling of the bases and the path of the hit ball) becomes a sign of the integrated quality of his life. Roy's problem is that he wants immortality without death and thus ignores the Jungian wholeness. In rejecting Iris, he rejects the 7 Louis K. Greiff, "Quest and Defeat in The Natural", 1967), 24.

Thoth, VIII (Winter,

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aging process which she, as grandmother, represents; but he also fatally dissociates himself from the life principle, of which Iris as fertile mother is also the emblem. By enabling Roy to break his batting slump, Iris helps him save the life of a crippled child (image of his own maimed moral innocence); Memo on the contrary destroys that innocence, symbolized in the episode of running down a child in Roy's new Mercedes. Roy's failure to integrate the principles of Eros and Thanatos lead to his moral corruption, the choice of the satanic father and the rejection of the authentic spiritual father, Pop Fisher. Iris Lemon, as grandmother, is a variation of the motif of the beauty disguised as a hag whom the hero must accept to be saved (cf. Chaucer, "The Wife of Bath's Tale"). But Roy cannot accept the potentially old woman in Iris because it reminds him of the death which he wants to escape. Instead, Roy becomes enthralled to the fatal beauty of Memo Paris, who sets a sumptuous banquet for him the night before the crucial game and encourages his eating binge; this contrasts with the obligatory, fasting of the grail knight as he keeps vigil before his hour of trial. The sins of Roy's past, his implication in the death of Bump Bailey, should be confessed publicly before he sets out on his quest for the pennant. But "unlike the grail knight who bore the evidence of his perfidy for all to see, Roy hides the secrets of his past from all eyes". 8 Sidney Richman has described Roy's failure in terms of the father-son motif: "The successful resolution of the myth which controls The Natural demands that there be a deeply resisted moment when father and son, king and hero, end their separation; and the self, in torment, becomes its other. It is a 'turning' rounded by further torment; to submit willingly to the loss of freedom and to resist the ego which divides man from his community." 9 Roy's refusal to resist his ego, to submit to his true spiritual father constitutes his moral failure and issues in his failure as baseball hero. The father-son motif serves to connect the archetypal search of Roy Hobbs, a modern counterpart of the mythic quester, to the novel's thematic account of the sufferings which arise from selfish resistance to responsible maturity.

8 9

Sidney Richman, Bernard Malamud (New York, 1966), 35. Richman, 41.

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2 In The Natural it is Roy's unwillingness to assume the father role himself that issues in his rejection of the authentic father for whom he is searching. Just the reverse is true in The Assistant. Frank Alpine's acceptance of the moral values of his authentic spiritual father Morris Bober leads him to assume a father role vis-a-vis Morris's daughter Helen. Although Frank does not seem to be confronted with another choice of a father, he is confronted with alternative value systems than the one Morris represents. These values are embodied in men who themselves are fathers to sons who bear resemblances to Frank. Ward Minogue, Frank's companion in the robbery of Morris's grocery store, is the son of a police detective; and Ward is desperately in search of his father's attentions. His relationship with Detective Minogue has been one of unwilling submission to authoritative violence. Ward knows no other way to seek his father, attract his attention, than to perpetrate crimes in the area which Detective Minogue patrols — the neighborhood where the stores of Morris Bober, Sam Pearl, and Julius Karp are located. Ward Minogue's whole life — his petty burglary, attempted rape, and spiteful arson — is a gesture of defiance against the authority of his father and the larger authority of the system of which his father is the protective arm. It is also a violent strategy to gain the attention of a man who apparently will only look his way in order to reprimand and punish. The last time Ward sees him, Detective Minogue threatens to kill Ward. After stealing a bottle of whisky from Karp's store, Ward is chased by his father who fires a shot into the shed where his son is hiding. "Ward, thinking he would be killed, crawled o u t . . . and ran into his father's arms" (p. 169). After inflicting a merciless beating, the detective leaves his son with this threat, "If I ever see you again, I'll murder y o u " ( p . 170). Later, trapped inside of Karp's store which he has spitefully |set on fire, Ward burns to death. The juxtaposition of his father's threat of murder and Ward's fiery death suggests that Detective Minogue bears some responsibility for his son's demise as well as for his twisted life; this is the logical, yet extreme, climax to their antagonistic relationship. Ward has, unwittingly perhaps, assured his own immortality in the nagging conscience of his father, who will surely suffer from the memory of his threat; Ward has also escaped a tortuous life obviously bereft of paternal love and attention. Nat Pearl seems assured of the financial success to which both

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Helen Bober and Frank Alpine aspire. He is able, because of his father's earnings and sacrifices, to attend college, and a better life seems within his grasp. Yet his character is selfish and shallow; attending college will not result in a significant education for Nat. He is a 'masher' to whom Helen has unfortunately sacrificed her virginity before Frank's appearance on the scene. After rejecting Frank, she returns to Nat only to find that he is still interested merely in the possession of her body. Nat lacks the one quality that Frank learns from Morris: love. Helen must discover that everything else she wants will not make her happy without this. The reader is encouraged to hope, as the novel draws to a close, that Helen may even learn that, if she has love, the lack of the other things for which she has longed will not stand in the way of the possibilities for happiness. The relationship between Louis Karp and his father is one of master salesmen to apprentice. In that respect it parallels the relationship between Morris and Frank, though Morris is hardly masterful or conspicuously successful. Young Louis is his father's assistant in the family store, and like Frank he is suspected of pilfering from the cash register. Louis' father Julius, though he protests against his son's petty thievery, expects it and is not really put out by it. By paying his son a meagre salary, Karp contrives to offset the expected thievery; his son, on the other hand, is pilfering ostensibly to compensate for what he considers a meagre salary. It is capitalism in small: buy cheap and sell dear; overcharge to compensate for shoplifting, steal because prices are too high; loaf on the job because you are underpaid, pay out low wages because the help will probably loaf on the job. Louis' dishonesty is expected and compensated for in advance; it is thus encouraged and tacitly approved. These three father-son relationships illustrate exactly the opposite qualities listed by Morris Bober when Frank asked him what it meant to be a Jew. "This means to do what is right, to be honest, to be good. This means to other people" (p. 99). Louis Karp is not honest, Nat Pearl is not good, and Ward Minogue is far from doing what is right to other people. But Morris Bober himself has all these qualities. He is also in search of a son to take the place of his dead boy Ephraim. Frank, the orphan, the drifter, thief and rapist, is in search of and desperately in need of a father like Morris. Frank's attachment to Helen (like Roy's attachment to Memo) helps to determine the choice of Morris as spiritual father. I have indicated above that Frank's choice of Morris constituted an appropriation of the ethic embodied in the old Jewish grocer, but I

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have also suggested that the circumcision which is the ritual of that appropriation is an act filled with ambiguity. Several critics (some quoted earlier) have been impressed with the oppressive burden of suffering and frustration that Frank assumes when he accepts Morris's role; two have associated this with the rite of circumcision. Ihab Hassan wonders whether Frank's circumcision might not constitute a self repudiation and symbolic castration, as well as an act of purification and initiation. 10 Kingsly Widmer inserts an unequivocal adverb in his rather flippant summary of the novel: "To the stylized nostalgic genre of an ordinary Jewish family in the Depression is added the fantasy of the gentile American bum who castratingly [italics added] abases himself to find piety, community, and the moralisms of daily life in a neighbourhood grocery store". 11 But most critics, even those who note the ambiguity in the circumcision rite, find that Malamud's irony issues in a final muted affirmation, that it is not ultimately destructive. The readers of Freud and the anthropologist Roheim are not surprised at the use of circumcision as a rite of accepting the moral values and authority of the father. Roheim described the importance of circumcision and genital mutilation in the initiation rite of primitive peoples in his book Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. He offers evidence that circumcision is indeed a symbolic and muted form of castration. Among Australian aborigines, Roheim reports, the sons who wish to be accepted by the tribal elders as equals must submit to the authority of their elders and accept the tribal gods. They indicate their willingness to do so by having their penises (symbol and locus of their youthful vitality and virility) not only circumcised but mutilated by being cut along the underside; this painful rite — resulting in profuse bleeding, fainting, often permanent injury, and occasionally even death — is obviously only a step away from outright castration. 12 The rite of circumcision/castration is the ultimate affront to the male ego; it is an appropriate act to confirm the submission of the individual ego to the moral restraints of the collective superego. Freud has explained that it is pre-eminently the father who represents the io Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence (Princeton, 1961), 162. 1' Kingsley Widmer, "The American Road: the Contemporary Novel", University of Kansas City Review, XXVI (Summer, 1960), 311. 12 Geza Roheim, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology (New York, 1950), 93-97, 247-248.

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moral restrictions of the larger society and that through him these restrictions are appropriated by the son as his conscience and personal superego. 1 3 When we consider that the primal endeavor of the son was to put himself in the place of his father as lover of the women in the primal horde and that the punishment for this offense was castration, we are not surprised to learn that, when subsequent guilt for the killing of the father led the sons to honor him as a deity, they confirmed the reassertion of his authority over their lives in the institution of religions, and the rite of initiation for males in such religions — especially among Semitic peoples — was circumcision. Circumcision (muted castration) of the son — often self-inflicted (like Oedipus's symbolic self-castration in blinding himself) — is prompted by guilt over the killing of the father and thus becomes the outward sign of the acceptance of that guilt: The endeavor of the son to put himself in the place of the father god, appeared with greater and great distinctness. With the introduction of agriculture (and of fertility myths) the importance of the son in the patriarchal family increased. He was emboldened to give new expression to his incestuous libido which found symbolic satisfaction in laboring over mother earth. There came into existence figures of gods like Attis, Adonis, Tammuz and others (all fertility deities), spirits of vegetation as well as youthful divinities who enjoyed the favors of maternal deities and committed incest with the mother in defiance of the father. But the sense of guilt which was not allayed through these creations, was expressed in myths which visited these y o u t h f u l lovers of the maternal goddesses with short life and punishment through castration and through the Wrath of the father god. 14 Because, through the mythic structure of The Assistant, Frank Alpine is symbolically a youthful fertility god, like those Freud mentions who suffered castration, the circumcision that Frank undergoes becomes unavoidably ambiguous. It symbolically marks not only Frank's acceptance of the values of his surrogate father but seals as well his two-fold guilt. First of all, Frank feels a conscious remorse for his crime of burglary; secondly, he must also subconsciously realize that his own ascendancy to the father-role has depended on 13 Sigmund Freud, The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, XIX, trans, and ed., James Strachey (London, 1961), 28-39. See also Roheim, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, 86. 14

Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York, 1946), 196.

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Morris's death. If it is recalled that the primal affront to the father is theft, the stealing of one of his women, it becomes possible to see in the burglary a symbolical connection with Frank's desire to have Helen. Frank has been able to find a permanent and secure place in the world where Helen lives (it is she, after all, whom he really wishes to steal) only after Morris leaves it. When Frank "dances on Morris's grave", he symbolically acts out the joy of the son who has accomplished what Freud says every son subconsciously wishes to do: replace his father. Subconscious remorse, however, inevitably follows, and the circumcision rite symbolically seals Frank's sense of guilt. Furthermore, Frank's circumcision is an initiation into the religion of the Hebrews, one of those Semitic peoples Freud referred to; it was the sign of the Hebrew covenant with the god/father-figure. It was also an implicit admission of guilt for the primal sin, which Freud has suggested in Moses and Monotheism was the murder of their paternal leader Moses. When we hear that Moses "sanctified" his people by introducing the custom of circumcision, we now understand the deep-lying meaning of this pretension. Circumcision is the symbolical substitute of castration, a punishment which the primeval father dealt his sons long ago out of the fullness of his power; and whosoever accepted this symbol showed by so doing that he was ready to submit to the father's will, although it was at the cost of a painful sacrifice. 15 With this background, Frank Alpine's circumcision in The Assistant gains added significance, and those critics who sense the ambiguity in the act are right. The act, however, must be seen in the context of the novel where it arises from a double motivation: Frank's desire to become a Jew so he can marry Helen, and his willingness to ritually seal his acceptance of the admirable values of Morris Bober. But it should also be remembered that this rite indicates as well Frank's acceptance of Morris's victim status. Morris is victimized by the society that does not share his ethic; Frank has also suffered from this larger society. By accepting Morris's ethic, Frank puts his suffering in a moral system that gives it value. But this raises the question of the ultimate effect of a value system that sanctifies the acceptance of suffering, that exalts victimhood, and makes failure into success. Frank Alpine, a rootless wanderer, without values aside from self-interest, is is

Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism

(New York, 1939), 156.

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also a son in search of a father, but an alienated man too, searching for a set of values to which he can commit himself. The rite of acceptance of Morris's value system is ambiguous by the nature of its origin (a rite to seal guilt after the victory of the son in his primal struggle with the father), and because the values themselves rest upon a fundamental paradox. In the Judaeo—Christian dispensation, life (and afterlife) is promised to those who will transform the present life into a living death. Only to those who shoulder the cross of suffering is the resurrection promised, only for those who accept the victim status are the joys of paradise assured. The consequences of such a view of life (though coupled with an admirable ethic) may account for a tendency, discernible in the political tradition of Western civilization, to submit to an exploitative authority structure. That these consequences seem problematical to an ever-larger sector of Western men cannot be denied. I do not wish to suggest here that Malamud is associating himself in The Assistant with the critics of Western institutional Christianity, but I think it is clear to the readers of The Fixer that the ambiguity of the ending of The Assistant points to a problem with which the later novel concerns itself. Perhaps it is only in the larger context of The Fixer that the ambiguous ending of The Assistant is problematical at all. Nevertheless, the death (and castration) of fertility gods suggested by the wasteland motif, along with the identification of Frank — through the mirror figure of St. Francis — with the Christian redeemer Jesus in the novel's mythic structure, make the rite of circumcision reverberate with interesting ambiguities. The father-son motif, linking the mythic structure to the themes of suffering and responsibility, tends to reinforce these ambiguities when considered in the light of anthropological evidence and psychoanalytic theory. The ambiguity, however, does not contain destructive irony; standing by itself and on its own terms, The Assistant is probably the balanced statement of ironic affirmation that most critics have said it is. 3 S. Levin, in A New Life, has reversed the direction of Frank Alpine in The Assistant; instead of journeying from west (San Francisco) to east (New York) in search of a better life, Levin goes from the east coast to the far western state of Cascadia to begin a new life. Unlike Frank, Levin has already discovered values in the writings of Emerson and

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Thoreau, but his values are only half formed and are in desperate need of deromanticizing. Levin has in effect repudiated his dead and dissolute father by abandoning his own derelict past; he has developed the admirable ideal that the role of a liberal arts instructor is to keep civilization from destroying itself. However, in his desperate quest for freedom and security Levin has not yet discovered exactly how to translate that ideal into concrete terms. When he begins his employment at Cascadia College, almost every teacher in the English Department with whom he comes into significant contact offers him an alternative direction for his new life; in a sense each of them is a kind of father-figure representing different values and life alternatives. George Bullock, the friend of the athletes, represents a course of easy popularity and enduring security in the college community. C.D. Fabricant is a false father with immense appeal for Levin. Fabricant, as the resident scholar, has acquired a reputation for learning and has earned the right to privacy and the privilege of teaching literature instead of composition. But his life is one of total noninvolvement; he is not married and plays no policy-making role in the affairs of the English Department. It is to him that Levin first turns when seeking an alternative to Gilley as a replacement for the retiring department chairman Fairchild. Joseph Bucket is a conscientious fellow—instructor with Levin; he is honest and intelligent, but his involvement with an unfinished Ph.D. dissertation prevents him from taking an active and creative role in departmental affairs at the college. His potential for involvement is wryly symbolized by his prolific paternity, but unfortunately the need to keep his job and feed his brood of children prevents him from risking open opposition to Gilley by becoming a candidate himself for the post of department chairman. Professor Fairchild and Gerald Gilley, his ultimate successor as head of the English Department, both are pre-eminent father figures. They represent the system of surrender by the liberal arts to the demands for scientific superiority in the university. Committed to intellectual mediocrity and ultimate utilitarian values (e.g. the position of importance of the "service oriented" composition course), both Fairchild and Gilley uphold the standards of bourgeois respectability in the college community. Each in turn recites for the newlyarrived Levin the code of behavior he is expected to adhere to; assuming a god/father-like role, they read out the list of do's and don't's to Levin warning him that failure to comply will result in

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virtual banishment from their arcadian paradise ("Eastchester is paradise" [p. 90]). Leo Duffy, the last and only viable alternative model for Levin, is cited by both Gilley and Fairchild as the example not to follow. He sinned against their commandments and suffered expulsion from the new Eden of the West. All of these men are potential father-figures for Levin. The election of a new departmental chairman to replace Fairchild is the occasion which precipitates his choice among them. Bullock is out of the question. Levin has discovered early that he is both an intellectual nonentity and a hypocrite; besides, he has already become an eager Gilley booster. Levin turns to Fabricant only to discover that, as his name indicates, his journal publications are either irrelevant or preposterous and that he is, at best, a reluctant candidate who will probably prove to be a do-nothing chairman. The infertility of Fabricant's personal life, moreover, becomes symbolic of a fundamental sterility in his professional and intellectual life. Joe Bucket, as I have already indicated, declines an active role in the election because of his family obligations and the uncertainty of his professional status. That leaves only Leo Duffy. Levin's decision to become a candidate himself amounts to a personal election of Leo Duffy as his spiritual father. This choice has been fostered (as in the two previous novels) by a woman. It is Pauline, Gerald Gilley's wife and Levin's lover, who has offset the image of Leo Duffy given by Fairchild and Gilley with her own account of him. Unlike the intellectually and sexually sterile Gerald, Leo Duffy was a man of vitality in mind and body. Pauline describes him thus to Levin: "Leo was different and not the slightest bit fake under any circumstances. He was serious about ideas and should have been given a fair chance to defend his. People were irritated with him because he challenged their premises" (p. 177). Next to the popular myth of Duffy as wild-eyed departmental anarchist is Pauline Gilley's positive image of him. She quotes his words with obvious approval ("Leo Duffy used to say, 'A good cause is the highest excitement' ". [p. 176]), and Levin finds them significant enough to copy on a piece of paper and slip into his pocket for later entry into his journal. Levin's rejection of his generative father and his search for a replacement, if it remains only that, is indicative of immaturity, an inability to accept 'what is' and an attempt to escape the past. Otto Rank has explained this in his book The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: "The entire endeavor to replace the real father by a more

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distinguished one is merely the expression of the child's longing for the vanished happy time when his father appeared to be the strongest, greatest man . . . " . 1 6 But Levin's flight from the east, besides being an implicit rejection of his father according to the flesh, is also a flight from the flesh itself. Levin's quest for a new Eden results from his own inability to manage the impulses of the flesh; his alcoholic problem may stand as a symbol for this larger failure. Joseph Campbell has explained that woman has come to be associated in our minds with the flesh and matter. The association of spirit with the male principle (father) and flesh and matter (materia) with female (mother = mater) is widespread. Repression of emotion and feelings related to the mother have been expressed in Judaeo-Christian monotheism in contempt of the body and material reality and a corresponding exaltation of spirit (the father: God). 1 7 It is essential for Levin to find the right woman to help him reconcile himself to the reality principle involved in the dimension of the flesh, in order to achieve complete maturity. "Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known." 1 8 The kindly mother, in Jungian terms, represents the benign aspects of reality, the life force (Iris Lemon in The Natural, Pauline Gilleyin A New Life)', the terrible mother represents the malignant aspects, the death impulse (Memo Paris in The Natural, Avis Fliss, Gilley's spy in A New Life). Marcus Klein has noticed that breast symbolism is used by Malamud to indicate the relative position of his female characters between the polarities of the kindly and terrible mothers. Avis Fliss, with her diseased breast, and Memo Paris, with her "sick breast", are extreme cases on the negative side. Helen Bober's sensitive breast indicates the inadequacy of her view of love, whereas Pauline Gilley's flat breasts (which will finally bloom when she becomes pregnant) are a token of her failure in love with Gerald and with Levin until he changes. 19 Fused with the woman (earth, nature) is the reality principle which a man must submit to, and to which he must sublimate the pleasure principle in order to become fully mature and burst the fetters of infantilism. Part of Levin's education, then, is not only the discovery 16 Otto Rank, The Myth of The Birth of the Hero (New York, 1932), 71. 17 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, 1949), 113, ftnt. 31. 18 Campbell, 116. 19 Marcus Klein, After Alienation (New York, 1964), 289.

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of the proper father to emulate but the acceptance of woman and the complex life of matter which she represents. "The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world." 20 Although association with Pauline enables Levin to discover his authentic spiritual father in the figure of Leo Duffy, as woman Pauline also represents the temptation to hide from the very reality she represents and to shirk the trial of facing the ogre-father (Gilley) in his own arena, the English Department. Fear of facing the dragon in the initiation trial causes the quester to rely on the female intermediary and her magic. 21 A rather unconvincing crisis in his sexual relationship with Pauline enables Levin to disengage himself from her long enough to plunge into the departmental election with all his bumbling energies. In so doing he assumes the role of Leo Duffy, and by choosing Duffy's mode of behavior — which really amounts to relying on himself amd his own beliefs — Levin achieves a liberating degree of maturity. It does not matter particularly that Levin loses the election to Gilley, this should be expected by the reader from his acquaintance with the other voting members of the department. Levin's real triumph is personal: the displacement of Gerald from the father position in his own family. Levin's eventual paternal ascendancy over Gerald Gilley was comically foreshadowed early in A New Life when Levin first visited the Gilley household upon his arrival in Cascadia. At Pauline's behest, Levin innocently assumed a quasi-father role by reading little Erik Gilley a bed-time story; he was warmly surprised by the upshot. Levin snickered at his easy success, and as he did, felt something hot on his thigh. He rose in haste, holding the still wildly laughing child at arm's length as a jet of water shot out of the little penis that had slipped through his pajama fly. (p. 16) This incident symbolically reveals Erik's unconscious perception of Levin as a father figure; his gesture may even be interpreted as incipient Oedipal rivalry. According to Geza Roheim, "The father's urine stands for his semen and we know that. . . urinating is an infantile form of rivalry with the father's sexual activity." "The father conflict 20 21

Campbell, 116. Campbell, 1 3 0 - 1 3 1 .

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is. . . fought out on the urethal level." 22 By his symbolic act of challenge to Levin, Erik indicates for the reader that Levin has already begun a course that will eventuate in his displacement of Gilley, the ineffectual father-figure. Though Levin is defeated in the public sector of life in Cascadia, he gains a significant victory on the personal level. As in The Natural, the willingness both to accept another's child(ren) and to assume the responsibilities of the father role is connected with the questing hero's discovery of his true father and his rejection of a false father. Roy Hobbs rejected the father role and his authentic spiritual father. S. Levin accepted the father role by deciding to marry Pauline; he displaced the false father Gerald Gilley and thereby — in the novel's mythic structure — rejected the dominance of an authoritative deity symbol. At the same time, Levin took on the perilous values represented in the 'exemplary' career of Leo Duffy, the legendary fallen Adam of the paradise of Eastchester; he thereby accepted the suffering and moral responsibility inherent in this choice.

4 Among the Semites of Western Asia the king, in time of national danger, sometimes gave his own son to die as a sacrifice for the people. Thus Philo of Byblus, in his work on the Jews, says: "It was an ancient custom in a crisis of great danger that the ruler of a city or nation should give his beloved son to die for the whole people, as a ransom offered to the avenging demons; and the child thus offered was slain with mystic rites."23 Something of the same mentality described by Frazer that prompted Semitic kings to sacrifice their sons to the avenging demons is operating in Tsar Nicholas II in The Fixer when he sends a special emissary to the cell of Yakov Bok to persuade him to accept (and thereby win his pardon and release) the role of sacrificial victim demanded by the demonic hatred of the Tsar's blindly vengeful subjects. The Christ parallels operating as a mythic structure in The Fixer also make this comparison appropriate, for Christ was offered as a sacrifice by his 22 Geza R o h e i m , " M y t h and Folktale", American Imago, II (1941), 272. 2 3 James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged edition (New Y o r k , 1923), 293.

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father for the sins of the people. But Bok is faced with more than one father in The Fixer. Like the other Malamud protagonists, Bok has been orphaned early in life, and at the beginning of the book we find him on a journey in quest of a better existence. The only father-figure in Bok's past is his wife's father Shmuel. Because of his Hebrew piety Shmuel is readily associated with the Father he worships, and Bok's scorn of the old man's long suffering acceptance of his impoverished life may be seen as an implicit rejection by Bok of the God of the Jewish religion. Freud has explained with his customary lucidity the association of the father figure with God: " . . . psychoanalytic investigation of the individual teaches with especial emphasis that god is in every case modelled after the father and that our personal relation to god is dependent upon our relation to o u r . . . father, fluctuating and changing with him . . . . The identification of the father with God and the emperor is also supported by psychoanalytic theory. According to Otto Rank, "fa] similar identification of the father with God . , . occurs. . . with the same regularity in the fantasies of normal and pathological psychic activity as the identification of the emperor with the father". 2 5 Thus Tsar Nicholas stands in somewhat the same relation to Bok as Shmuel does, with a significant difference. Shmuel, because he is personally known to Bok, has more than a symbolic status for him, whereas the Tsar, as a remote and elevated personage, has almost no other status in Bok's consciousness beyond what he symbolizes. In the introductory remarks to this chapter, I explained how, in the Freudian hypothesis, the primal act of rebellion toward the father issued in an ambivalent attitude toward him after his murder by the sons. They felt guilty for their deed and thus made a god of the slain father, ritually accepting his reascendent authority over them by voluntarily undergoing in circumcision a muted form of the castration punishment he had once inflicted on members of the horde who incestuously violated his women. But with guilt and submission, there also existed renewed feelings of hatred and rebellion. In ritual form this resentment is appeased by a repetition of the primal sin in sacrificing the totem animal with whom the father is associated. By symbolically repeating the crime, the resentment of the sons is allay24 Sigmund Fieud, Totem and Taboo (New York, 1946), 190. 25 Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of The Hero (New York, 1932), 81, ftnt 5. See also Freud, Totem and Taboo, 67-68.

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ed, their rebellion forestalled, and most important their guilt is periodically renewed and the power of the deified father reaffirmed. 2 6 It is my contention that something of the same psychology is operating in The Fixer. Yakov Shepsovitch Bok, as his name indicates, has been chosen to be a scapegoat. He is symbolically a totem standing for the Tsar himself. The Tsar's willingness to have Bok be the object of national fears and hatred shows that he needs an object to draw off popular resentment from the royal authority figure. Bok is symbolically both totem and son; in one dream sequence he calls the Tsar "little father" (p. 205). The parallels with the sacrificial death of Christ (who was led like a lamb to the slaughter) are appropriate since Christ too was a scapegoat, a totem (and God's only son) to be killed by the Jews who resented the ethical burden imposed upon them in the covenant made with Yahweh, renewed by Moses in the desert, and sealed significantly by the rite of circumcision. 27 Otto Rank maintains that the mythic hero must rebel against the paternal authority of his origins in order to achieve his destiny of liberating the people for whom he is a hero. "The hero must himself, as shown by his detachment from the parents, begin his career in opposition to the older generation; he is at once a rebel, a renovator, and a revolutionary. However, every revolutionary is originally a disobedient son, a rebel against the father." 2 8 Bok eventually rebels against both God and Tsar. His earlier attitude of respect sours into anger against the Tsar in the final dream sequence which shall be examined presently. About God, Bok concludes that he is "inexorable necessity" (p. 254), an abstraction and not a person. God cannot intervene out of pity to ameliorate human suffering: " . . . either God is our invention and can't do anything about it, or he's a force in Nature but not in history. A force is not a father" (p. 211). As in The Assistant, there are other father-son relationships of importance in The Fixer. The prison guard Kogin, like Detective Minogue, has a rebellious and law-breaking son. The attitude of Kogin is not vindictive, however, as Minogue's was, for he expresses genuine sorrow for the punishment his son has to suffer for his crimes. When bereft because of his son's imprisonment in Siberia, Kogin adopts Bok as a foster son, discloses concern and compassion for him, and finally is 26 27 28

Freud, Totem and Taboo, 18. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York, 1939). Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, 95.

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shot trying to defend him. Tony Tanner sees this as an extension of the same motif that is exemplified in Bok's adoption of Raisl's illegitimate son Chaim. "(The rebellion of the guard [Kogin] extends the motif of adopted paternity — Kogin has lost his son in Siberia and in effect 'adopts' Yakov, just as Yakov 'adopts' Chaim. The found father himself finds a 'father'.)" 2 9 Perhaps the most significant single example to Bok of what a father can be, in a positive sense, is found in the person of the investigating magistrate Bibikov. Contrasting with Lebedev, the false father who also 'adopts' Bok by giving him employment and who displays a bogus compassion for suffering in the abstract (like Chaucer's prioress Lebedev weeps over dead animals but not over suffering people), Bibikov expresses real concern for Bok and adopts him in a true sense by espousing his cause. The paternal compassion that he shows for Bok flows from the genuine love he expresses for his own ailing son. From Bibikov, Bok learns that a man can be a father and still be good, honest, and kind. It is this example that enables him to espouse the values to which Bibikov has obviously devoted his life. This devotion significantly finds expression in the public sector of life. It is not only from his prison experience but from the example of Bibikov that Bok learns that there is "no such thing as an unpolitical man". Bok's willingness to accept involvement in the lives of others is indicated by his voluntary assumption of a legal (and symbolic) fatherhood when he testifies that his wife Raisl's bastard child Chaim (whose name means 'life') is his own son. Raisl affirms the superiority of spiritual fatherhood when she says of the Jewish musician who fathered Chaim: "He fathered the child but he's not his father. Whoever acts the father is the father" (pp. 235-236). Bok, like Morris Bober and Leopold Bloom, has been in search for a son, as much as for a father. As a Jew in a Christian society, he is a childless father as much as he is a fatherless child. 30 Bok eventually learns that even in Shmuel there is a father-like quality he can emulate. Though he has rejected his father-in-law's submissive piety, Bok comes to value the old man's paternal charity, expressed for the fixer himself in the father-like concern Shmuel showed him during his imprisonment.

29 Tony Tanner, "Bernard Malamud and the New Life", Critical Quarterly , X (1968), 164. 30 Cf. R. P. Blackmur's remarks in "The Jew in Search of a Son: Joyce's Ulysses", Eleven Essays in the European Novel (New York, 1964), 47.

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But it is not enough for Bok to adopt a son after finding his true spiritual father in Bibikov and partly even in Shmuel. He must destroy the false father (Tsar Nicholas) not only because he has, through his agents, caused the death of Bibikov and made Shmuel and the other Jews suffer, but because he stands in the way of the liberation of all the oppressed Russian people. "The work of the hero", Joseph Campbell says, "is to slay the tenacious aspect of the father (dragon, tester, ogre-king) and release from its ban the vital energies that will feed the universe". 31 Though V. S. Pritchett in his review of The Fixer has criticized the killing of the Tsar sequence as "frivolously convenient", 3 2 I find it absolutely essential to the working out of the novel's principal themes and motifs. Bok's act, though it takes place in a dream sequence, is important because it indicates that his "spirit is now that of a grown man who will no longer humbly defer to the ailing and declining power of the Authority which is impeding his right to a full human life". 33 In Bok's fantasy, the Tsar appears naked, his penis limp and shrunken. He speaks of his own affliction in being unable to bear a healthy son to succeed him; he has fathered four daughters and a hemophiliac son. The Tsar protests that he has not wanted to assume the royal authority ("To rule is to bear a heavy cross" [p. 269]), and he self-regardingly laments his own suffering. In appealing to Bok for pity; the Tsar says with cruel irony: "After all, it isn't as though you yourself are unaware of what suffering is. Surely it has taught you the meaning of m e r c y ? " (p. 270). When Bok replies by pointing out to the Tsar the oppression and misery which all Russians have suffered under his rule, Nicholas rises in anger, denies his responsibility for "our whole history", and ends by claiming for himself the role he has thrust upon Bok: "I am the victim, the sufferer for my poor people" (p. 271). In the name of Bibikov and Kogin, "and for a lot more that [he] won't even mention" (p. 271), Bok shoots the Tsar in the heart. Coming to himself out of the fantasy, Bok affirms the lightness of what he has just imagined. "What the Tsar deserves is a bullet in the gut. Better him than us" (p. 271) — all the oppressed sons of Russia. Bok's gradually increasing resentment, during his imprisonment, against the role thrust upon him, his final rebellion at the indignities 31 32

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, 1949), 352. V. S. Pritchett, "A Pariah", New York Review of Books (Sept. 2 2 , 1 9 6 6 ) , 10. 33 Tony Tanner, "Bernard Malamud and the New Life", Critical Quarterly, (1968), 166.

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heaped upon him by his imprisoners, his refusal to accept pardon because it implies admission to the crime and acceptance of the guilt as well, all culminate in his throwing off the scapegoat role, his rejection of a sacrificial Christ status, and in the ultimate rebellion of the final dream sequence. Killing the Tsar, killing the king, amounts to a repetition of the primal sin of killing the father and symbolically may also stand for a rejection of the oppressive God-concept with which the Christian ruler Nicholas may be associated. It is an appropriate climax to a novel that is a drama centered on the "crisis of moral consciousness in a pariah who has been forced to think for himself'. 34 By making the heroes of all four of his novels orphans, Malamud has created an initial situation out of which the father-son motif can logically flow. Roy Hobbs, in The Natural, longs for "a friend, a father, a home to return to . . . " (p. I l l ) , and this longing betrays a basic moral adolescence that leads to Roy's failure both to choose the right man as his spiritual father and to become a father himself. In their willingness to assume paternal responsibility, Malamud's three other questing heroes (Alpine, Levin, and Bok) achieve moral success and appropriate the values of their genuine spiritual father (Bober, Duffy, and Bibikov). Malamud's success with the father-son motif is more pronounced in The Assistant and in The Fixer, although the device functions well in all four novels to link the mythic structure to the thematic content. However, in The Assistant and in The Fixer, the central father-son situation is enriched by well-developed parallels among contrasting pairs of minor characters. The moral inadequacies, in The Assistant, of the fathers Minogue, Karp, and Pearl are reflected in their sons Ward, Louis, and Nat; the quality of these three sets of relationships is characterized respectively by moral hostility, financial rivalry, and plain stupidity. The many fathers of The Fixer are all beset with afflicted sons: there is the Tsar's hemophiliac son, Bibikov's asthmatic son, Kogin's wayard son, Lebedev's dead son, and Bok's bastard son. Bok is himself an orphaned son accused of killing the son of Marfa Golov. Adding complexity to this motif is the pattern of people dying or suffering for others. Zhenia Golov must die to conceal his mother's crimes, the surrogate father Bibikov dies to help Bok (Bibikov's sick son has

34

V. S. Pritchett, "A Pariah", 10.

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already died from an asthma attack), Kogin dies defending Bok, and Bok finally suffers for his father-in-law Shmuel, who has earlier died from diabetes. 3S By enriching the basic father-son motif with the overlay of this complex pattern that arises naturally out of the novel's events, Malamud has repeated the success he achieved in The Assistant, where the character motif of fathers and sons was effectively integrated with the novel's mythic struture and thematic content.

35 James MeUard, "Malamud's Novels: Four Versions of Pastoral", Critique, IX (1967), ii: 8.

IV T H E THEME O F S U F F E R I N G

The theme of suffering meshes naturally with Malamud's predilection for the m y t h i c m e t h o d ; as I tried to show in the preceding chapter, the father-son motif serves in a general way as a connecting device between theme and technique. The ordeal which the m y t h i c hero must undergo inevitably involves suffering, pain, and frequently real or symbolic death. Part of the hero's quest is the search for an authentic spiritual father. The lesson this father, once discovered, teaches the hero is the necessity of denying the ego and assuming a responsible role in a larger (familial or political) c o m m u n i t y . The large structural irony that is open to the practitioner of the mythic m e t h o d is provided by the gap between the achievement of the modern protagonist and his m y t h i c p r o t o t y p e . Malamud's own special brand of irony issues f r o m the combination in his narrative style of elements b o t h realistic and symbolic. The ego denial that the Malamud hero undergoes and the need for responsible activity that he learns f r o m his spiritual father b o t h involve a good deal of suffering of various kinds. For the sake of discussion, these kinds of suffering may be dealt with in terms of three more or less distinct ethical traditions. 1 The first tradition m a y be called the Hebrew view of suffering, and it is embodied in the figure of Job. In the Bible's account of his experience, there was n o adequate meaning assigned t o his afflictions; but a voice o u t of the whirlwind asserted that the Lord's ways were inscrutable, and man had to accept the divine will though he could never u n d e r s t a n d it. In Malamud's story "Angel Levine" there is exactly such a figure in Manischevitz the tailor who "in his fifty-first year suffered m a n y l Samuel Weiss has used a parallel set of categories in his article "Passion and Purgation in Bernard Malamud", University of Windsor Review, II

(1966), 93-99.

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reverses and indignities. Previously a man of comfortable means, he overnight lost all he had . . . . " 2 As Manischevitz's sufferings increase, he is visited by a 'disincamated' Negro angel who tells him that, should he require any assistance, God has provided Levine as his angelic representative; Manischevitz needs only to seek out the black angel in Harlem. After losing both store and children in a disastrous fire, Manischevitz seeks Levine and finds him in a Harlem bar. After a struggle to summon up sufficient faith, he proclaims Levine an angel and returns home to find his wife cured of an illness that had brought her near death. What distinguishes Manischevitz is his willingness to believe not only despite all suffering but even in the absurdity of a black angel in a Harlem bar. This willingness, in Malamud's story, functions as a symbol for the kind of Job-like faith that transcends the paradoxes and absurdities of modern circumstance. Of the characters in Malamud's novels, Shmuel, Yakov Bok's father-in-law in The Fixer, is the character who most nearly approximates this Job-like attitude toward suffering. A second view of suffering arises from the ethical tradition of the ancient Greeks and is found chiefly in the works of the classical dramatists Aeschylus and Sophocles. In the Greek view, suffering is the visitation by a god upon a proud and sinful man that is meant to teach him humility and other virtues. I find this view most nearly represented in Malamud's works by The Natural. Roy Hobbs must suffer the defeat of his dreams of immortality so that he can learn the virtues of unselfishness and love. A third and final view of suffering discoverable in Malamud's fiction arises from the ethical tradition of Christianity. This view is based on a belief in the value of vicarious suffering implicit in the Christian doctrine of the mystical body. Morris Bober in The Assistant is a classic embodiment of this view. A New Life contains something of both the Greek and the Christian views. S. Levin does lack the virtues of responsibility and unselfishness which his comic, yet frustrating, experiences in the novel help to teach him; he also shoulders the burden of family life cast off by Gerald Gilley, convinced that what he has to endure will benefit Pauline and the children. Malamud's fourth novel, The Fixer, while it falls into the third category, does not necessarily affirm the mystical value attached by Christianity to suffering. My position may seem to fly in the face of 2 Bernard Malamud, "Angel Levine", The Magic Barrel, Dell edition (New York, 1966), 42.

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general critical opinion, for it has become a critical commonplace to say of Malamud that his conception of experience includes the value of suffering.3 Marc Ratner affirms that the general theme of all Malamud's fiction is the "humanistic value of suffering as a way toward man's ennoblement and enlightenment". 4 Suffering seems to be the form of Malamud's realism, according to Jonathan Baumbach: "A romantic, Malamud writes of heroes; a realist, he writes of their defeats." 5 I think it is true that for Malamud suffering is the emblem of man's frustrating experience in a world of confusion and doubt, but I think that a close examination of the novels in succession will reveal that a changed attitude toward suffering emerges in The Fixer and that this change has been at least partly foreshadowed by the ambiguities in The Assistant and A New Life.

1

Reviewers of Malamud's short story collections and critics of his fiction in general invariably state that in his work the Jew is the symbol of suffering humanity. 6 Marc Ratner may be quoted as typical in his generalizations: Malamud "uses the alienated Jew as a metaphor for all suffering humanity". 7 Roy Hobbs is not such a metaphorical Jew in The Natural, and his case illustrates the dangers of sweeping critical maxims about Malamud or any other author. The Natural, in fact, does not seem to be concerned very much with suffering at all, yet Malamud has made a special effort to include the subject in the novel. Iris Lemon may be said to embody the possibilities of pain and frustration, just as she also represents the values of love and commitment. It is with Iris that Roy experiences the nearest thing to unselfish fulfillment: this is symbolized in his underwater kissing of Iris.

3 Philip Rhav, "Introduction",/! Malamud Reader (New York, 1967), x. 4 Marc Ratner, "Style and Humanity in Malamud's Fiction", Massachusetts Review, V (1964), 663-664. s Jonathan Baumbach, "The Economy of Love; The Novels of Bernard Malamud", Kenyon Review, XXV (1963), 439. 6 Charles A. Hoyt, "Bernard Malamud and the New Romanticism", Harry T. Moore, ed., Contemporary American Novelists (Carbondale, 1964), 66. 1 Marc Ratner, 665.

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Roy's submersion in and subsequent rising out of the water constitutes a kind of baptism into Iris's religion of suffering and love. While Roy is submerged, Iris remembers "standing up in the crowd that night, and said to herself that she had really stood up because he was a mail whose life she had wanted to share . . . a man who had suffered" (p. 128). Iris's reflection brings to mind something the comic exuberance of the novel can make the reader easily forget: Roy's efforts at becoming a major league baseball star have included pain and frustration. His career was nearly destroyed at its inception by the guntoting witch Harriet Bird and her bloody silver bullet. It was as least postponed almost indefinitely. Furthermore, Roy is beset in his quest for fame by the morganatic Memo Paris; he cannot shake his lust for her. Here appears, most unexpectedly in a Gentile hero, the motif of 'chosenness' frequently associated with Malamud's Jews. Reflection on Memo's irresistible appeal, Roy tells himself, "with Memo, flaming above and dark below, there was no choice — he was chosen so why not admit it though it brought pain?" (p. 69). Though Roy sees his attraction for Memo involving him in a certain kind of pain — the frustration consequent upon delayed physical possession — he is faced with a different kind of suffering in his involvement with Iris Lemon. As Louis Greiff has pointed out, 8 Iris as mother and grandmother represents the inevitability of age and death. Roy is unwilling to face these inevitabilities because they are a threat to the immortality for which he yearns. Roy's rejection of the suffering and bitterness that Iris's name (Lemon) symbolizes and that her life represents is also a rejection of her sacrificial love. It aborts the new life gained through the symbolic baptism in Lake Michigan and cuts Roy off from his best chance for redemptive grace. "Love is the redemptive grace in Malamud's fiction, its highest good. The defeat of love is its tragedy. Love rejected, love misplaced, love betrayed, loveless lust: these are the main evils in Malamud's fictional world." 9 In that pivotal scene in The Natural where Roy and Iris picnic and swim on the beach at Lake Michigan (where Roy undergoes the symbolic baptism I have referred to), Iris asks Roy a series of questions about his heroic ambitions and his attitudes toward life. Roy shows himself willing to confess the secrets of his past to her, though he hides them fiercely from the prying sportswriter Max Mercy. This 8 9

Louis K. Grieff, "Quest and Defeat in The Natural", Thoth, VIII (1967), 28. Jonathan Baumbach, The Landscape of Nightmare (New York, 1965), 102.

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bodes well for Roy; as with the Dostoyevsky hero, "the dawn of love in many of Malamud's works is often accompanied by a willingness to confess". 1 0 But Roy's answers reveal his persistent selfishness. It will be remembered how important it is, in the wasteland motif for the questing hero, when faced with a series of questions, to supply the correct set of replies. 11 The inadequacy of Roy's motivation revealed in this scene foreshadows his ultimate failure in his pursuit of heroic immortality. The reasons for Roy's failure are important and are revealed through the life and words of Iris Lemon. Iris confesses to Roy her own shabby past: how she was raped in her early teens and became an unwed mother, and how her life seemed ruined and over. But Iris explains that she devoted herself to the raising of her daughter "and the tender feelings I had in my heart for her made up for a lot I had suffered" (p. 168). It is this concern for others that Roy lacks and that is the root cause of his failed heroism. As Iris explains to him, "I don't think you can do anything for anyone else without giving up something of your own" (p. 123). This is precisely the function of the hero, according to Joseph Campbell: to return after his trials and his quest, "tranfigured, and [to] teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed" to the community for whom he functions as heroic exemplar. 1 2 The hero must subordinate his selfish concerns ("give up something of his own") to the needs of others, and he must do this out of love. Roy's conversation with Iris Lemon, in that scene on the beach at Lake Michigan, is instructive. Throughout the scene, Roy is haunted by the sound of a train whistle. It will be remembered that the novel begins with Roy's train ride out of the back country; the mandalian association of the train with death, suggested by Louis Greiff, should also be kept in mind: " . . . his fate, somehow, had always been the same (on the train going nowhere) — defeat in sight of his goal" (p. 125). When Roy recalls the silver bullet shot into his groin by Harriet Bird, he wonders aloud of his misfortunes, "why did it always have to happen to me? What did I do to deserve it?" Iris replies, "Experience makes good people better." Roy is puzzled. 10 Sidney Richman, Bernard Malamud, United States Authors Series (New York, 1965), 37. 11 Jessie L.Weston, From Ritual to Romance, Anchor edition (New York, 1957), 12. 12 Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Princeton, 1949), 20.

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"How does it do t h a t ? " "Through their suffering." "I had enough of that," he said in disgust. "We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness." "I had it up to here." He ran a finger across his windpipe. "Had what?" "What I suffered — and I don't want any more." "All it taught me is to stay away from it. I am sick of all I have suffered." (p. 126) In this exchange the underlying attitude that accounts for Roy's failure is clearly revealed. Roy lacks values outside the myth of himself as baseball hero. His delimiting egotism becomes the source of his larger failure in life. His failure to see beyond the tawdry rewards in his own version of the American Dream (financial success, public acclaim, sexual pleasure) constitutes what Malamud, in thematic terms, has tried to make Roy's moral tragedy. I have already set forth, in Chapter Two above, what I consider to be the reasons for the novel's failure: the ambivalence of Malamud's attitude toward his hero and his materials, betrayed in an inconsistency of tone and in an ultimately corrosive ironic undercutting. At the end of The Natural, when Roy repudiates his betrayal of the Knights and returns, Judas-like, to throw the bribe money at the wormy head of Judge Banner, he discovers Memo Paris in the Judge's tower office with Gus the bookie, and he sees her as she really is for the first time. Roy's problem all along has been that he was always too selfish and too blind to learn from the mistakes of his past. He has repeated with Memo Paris in this part of the novel the same pattern of experience he had already gone through earlier with Harriet Bird. But now, for the first time, Roy sees not only the true nature of Memo but the quality of his whole previous life. "Going down the tower stairs he fought his overwhelming self-hatred. In each stinking wave of it he remembered some disgusting happening of his life" (p. 190). Roy finally realizes that because he has refused to learn from the sufferings of his past, he must inevitably face more. "He thought, I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again" (p. 190). The novel ends there, but there is the implication that Roy will not make these same mistakes a third time.

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2 It is not until the end of The Natural that Roy Hobbs discovers the inevitability and instructive value of painful experience; this is principally because he is unreflective and never thinks on the subject. In The Assistant, though Frank Alpine is not particularly intelligent, he does repeatedly reflect on the problem of suffering. He is puzzled at the masochistic ease with which Morris Bober, and other Jews, can accept so much of it. Thinking of Morris waiting on the same lousy customers day after day throughout the years, as they pick out with dirty fingers the same cheap items they ate every day of their flea-bitten lives, then when they were gone, waiting for them to come back again, he felt like leaning over the banister and throwing up. What kind of a man did you have to be born to shut yourself up in an overgrown coffin and never once during the day so help you, outside of going out for your Yiddish newspaper, poke your beak out of the door for a snootful of air? The answer wasn't hard to say — you had to be a Jew. They were born prisoners, (p. 70) But this patient and long-suffering Jew with the appetite for pain does not prompt respect in Frank; he is repulsed by Morris's enclosed and shabby life. When Morris tells him of the sufferings of his previous life, Frank weeps and then later bitterly reflects: "That'swhat they live for . . . to suffer. And the one that has got the biggest pain in the gut and can hold onto it the longest without running to the toilet is the best Jew. No wonder they got on his nerves" (p. 71). Nevertheless, because of Morris's kindness toward him (giving him a job, feeding him when he was on the edge of starvation), Frank feels grateful to him and is visited periodically by an urge to confess his part in the hold-up with Ward Minogue. "Someday he would confess it all — he promised himself' (p. 73). As with Roy Hobbs, the willingness in Frank to make a total revelation of his past crimes is an important step toward a kind of Dostoyevskian redemption. 13 But Frank's confession is aborted by Morris's discovery of his petty thievery and his suspicion that Frank was indeed one of the "holdupniks". At the same point in the novel, Frank's lust for Helen impels him to take her by force in the park after rescuing her from the 13 Letizia Ciotti Miller, "L'arte di Bernard Malamud", Studi Americani, VII (1961), 277.

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lascivious embrace of Ward Minogue. Immediately after these two disastrous events, Frank regards himself with the same kind of selfloathing that Roy Hobbs arrived at only on the last page of The Natural. "If you had experience", Frank reflects, "You knew at least when to start and where to quit; all he knew was how to mangle himself more. The self he had secretly considered valuable was, for all he could make of it, a dead rat. He stank" (p. 139). Having finally reached the point where the lusting ego is exposed in all its loathsomeness to his own horrified gaze, Frank is at last in a position to make some moral progress. Frank will find a way of sustaining hope in the face of pain, and he will develop a knack for wresting a "kind of nobility, a form of aspiration" out of "the daily aehes and indignities" which he, as Morris Bober's successor, will have to undergo. 1 4 But, in order to achieve this position, Frank has a good deal to learn of patience and discipline. He is schooled in both these qualities through his painfully frustrating love for Morris's daughter Helen. Frank's initial attraction for Helen is simply animal. He satisfies his voyeuristic lust by gazing at her from the air-shaft as she takes her bath; at the same time, he tortures himself by repeatedly forcing himself to contemplate a desired object that seems hopelessly out of reach. 1 5 "He felt greedy as he gazed, all eyes at a banquet, hungry so long as he must look. But in looking he was forcing her out of his reach, making her into a thing only of his seeing, her eyes reflecting his sins, rotten past, spoiled ideals, his passion poisoned by his shame" (p. 62). Eventually Frank's lust is abated by affection and concern. He becomes as eager to have Helen achieve her dream of completing college as she herself is. Gradually, under the tutelage and example of Morris, Frank learns a radically new way of loving. The lust is purified out of his feeling for Helen, and he accepts a supportive and protective role toward her that seems to postpone — perhaps indefinitely — any more intimate relationship. Malamud has repeated this waiting motif from the story "The First Seven Years" (in The Magic Barrel), in which Sobel, a refugee, works for a shoemaker in hopes of marrying his daughter. At the end, disappointed in his hope, Sobel resigns himself to continue to wait. In accepting the selfless paternal role and the interminable period of waiting, Frank reaches "the luminous moment" toward which Marcus M is

Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence (Princeton, 1961), 162. Jonathan Baumbach, The Landscape of Nightmare (New York, 1965), 188.

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Klein says all of Malamud's fiction rushes: the point of discovery of the relation between suffering and love. "Love is suffering . . . . It is t o that recognition that most of Malamud's fiction proceeds . . . . It is the lesson learned in all his novels." 16 It is i m p o r t a n t for Frank to learn this lesson because it seems that only through him will Helen overcome her own selfishness and be able to transcend her purely materialistic aspirations for success. Malamud reveals that Helen, at her father's funeral, is unable to see anything admirable in Morris's very ordinary existence: " . . . w h o can admire a man passing his life in such a store? He buried himself in it; he didn't have the imagination t o k n o w what he was missing. He made himself a victim. He could, with a little more courage have been more than he was" (p. 181). Though one may be t e m p t e d to agree in part with what Helen says, in terms of the moral f r a m e w o r k of the novel, she is all wrong. It is n o t true that Morris made himself a victim; he simply accepted w h a t seemed to him his unavoidable destiny. As J o n a t h a n Baumbach puts it, Morris's "victimization is n o t limited t o m a n ' s i n h u m a n i t y to man but is c o m p o u n d e d by the fates; he is predestined, inexorable s u f f e r e r " . 1 7 Far f r o m being w i t h o u t courage, it is precisely this virtue, in combination with his love for other sufferers, that sustained Morris through the daily t e m p t a t i o n t o compromise his moral standards — this w i t h o u t c o m f o r t f r o m either the nagging Ida or Helen herself, and with the additional burden of the m e m o r y of his dead son Ephraim. Helen is afraid to love Frank because she sees in him the potentiality to become a n o t h e r Morris Bober, and she sees herself, married to such a man, d o o m e d to a repetition of the existence she c a n n o t admire in her father and that n o t even we can admire in her m o t h e r . But when Helen realizes the e x t e n t of the personal sacrifices Frank is making t o keep her in college and that he has u n d e r t a k e n it "in [her] father's n a m e " , she is moved in spite of herself. "She had h a t e d h i m , she t h o u g h t , to divert hatred f r o m h e r s e l f ' (p. 187). But with her materialistic orientation, Helen c a n n o t u n d e r s t a n d F r a n k ' s motivation: "What would y o u expect t o get f r o m this — v i r t u e ? " (p. 188). Despite this, however, Helen humbles herself enough t o t h a n k Frank for the help he is giving b o t h Ida and herself. This perhaps is a notation of h o p e that Helen will eventually learn f r o m F r a n k w h a t R o b e r t Shulman says every Malamud h e r o has t o learn for himself, so that he 16 11

Marcus Klein, After Alienation (New York, 1965), 265. Jonathan Baumbach, Landscape, 113.

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can instructively celebrate it for others: the value of ordinary life and the cost of selfishness and greed. "Malamud accordingly uses the fate of his mythic protagonist to celebrate the value of the ordinary made heroic and to dramatize the cost of false materialism, ungiving selfcenteredness, and the inevitability of sin and suffering in a universe in which saving self-knowledge is painfully hard to achieve." 1 8 Frank himself has learned this from Morris Bober. From the old Jewish grocer Frank discovers the Heraclitan way of privation that "the way up and the way down are the same" (Cf. T. S. Eliot, Four Quarters).19 What this amounts to is seeing what the world calls failure as ultimate success. Marcus Klein, in keeping with the thesis of his book After Alienation, maintains that "the informing motive" of Malamud's fiction is "the necessity of accomodation to this world". 2 0 Malamud's hero, doomed to struggle for a discipline which will help *him accept the reality of a radically imperfect world, is also doomed to failure by that world. 2 1 He accommodates himself t o that failure by placing it in an ethic that transforms it into success. The terms of the failure imposed by the world are translated, in Morris Bober's life, into raw suffering. It is precisely his attitude toward suffering that Frank finds so puzzling in the Jewish grocer. The exchange between Morris and Frank on this subject has already been quoted in part in earlier chapters, but it bears repeating in full here. "I think other religions have those ideas t o o " , Frank said. "But tell me why is it that Jews suffer so damn much, Morris? It seems to me that they like to suffer, don't t h e y ? " "Do you like to suffer? They suffer because they are Jews." "That's what I mean, they suffer more than they have t o . " "If you live, you suffer. Some people suffer more, but not because they want. But I think if a Jew don't suffer for the Law, he will suffer for nothing." "What do you suffer for, Morris?" Frank said. "I suffer for y o u " , Morris said calmly. Frank laid his knife down on the table. His m o u t h ached. "What do you mean?" "I mean you suffer for me." (pp. 99—100) 18 Robert Shulman, "Myth, Mr. Eliot, and the Comic Novel", Modern Fiction Studies, XII (1966), 403. 19 James Mellard has also noted this allusion in "Malamud's The Assistant: The City Novel as Pastoral", Studies in Short Fiction, V ( i 9 6 7 ) , 11. 20 Marcus Klein, After Alienation, 250. 21 Klein, 251.

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What Morris explicitly states here and what Frank has yet to learn experientially is the Christian doctrine of the value of vicarious suffering. Frank, though he finds the doctrine baffling and Morris's life "stinking" and oppressive, will eventually assume Morris's place in life and the value system that this implies. Frank's acceptance of what Morris called the heartache that the store has to offer him will be ritually sealed by the pain of Frank's circumcision. Helen Weinberg, in a recent book on the modern American novel, describes this as a "Catholic m o t i f ' in The Assistant: "This assumption of Bober's role is for the assistant a continued penitence through suffering, a Catholic m o t i f . . . . This joining of the imprisonment and rebirth themes makes a final irony, heightened by the fact that the rebirth is suggested in the spiritual terms of the Catholic Church although it is presented as an actual conversion to Judaism." 22 I suppose this opinion is not surprising inasmuch as Miss Weinberg also sees Frank as a "victim of his own spiritual wish to become St. Francis". 2 3 I find no evidence for such a position in the novel, and I think it is inaccurate to describe penitence as a Catholic motif. Frank's Catholicism is, at most, nominal, and, as he himself points out to Morris, other religions (besides the Jewish or the Catholic) have ideas similar to Morris's love ethic (or Frank's notion of penitence). These other religions are generally Christian and belong, with Catholicism, to the JudaeoChristian tradition, out of which the love ethic has developed in Western civilization. The rebirth is suggested, not in Catholic terms necessarily, but in generally Christian terms using distinctly pagan imagery (wasteland motif). I have taken the trouble to rebut Weinberg's views because they run counter to the terms in which the novel has been described by other critics and because they tend to muddle the view I have tried to give of the novel here. The achievement of The Assistant is that Malamud is able to present an attitude toward suffering that is rather difficult to accept, in a character as admirable, yet as real as Morris Bober, and that he is able to make the transferal of that attitude to Frank Alpine seem not only credible but inevitable.

22 Helen Weinberg, The New Novel in America: porary Fiction, (Ithaca, 1970), 171. 23 Weinberg, 171.

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3 Like so many failed heroes in contemporary fictions, S. Levin in Malamud's A New Life is a man in search of love. Levin makes all the wrong gestures in trying to find it, and his gestures are either pathetically comic or foolishly romantic. In his review of Malamud's third novel, "A New Life for a Good Man", Stanley Edgar Hyman makes this startling comment: "Levin attains sanctity... not through denying and mortifying the flesh, as does the anchorite Frank Alpine in The Assistant, but through indulging the flesh, and his adultery is a holy adultery." 24 It is difficult to take the last part of that remark seriously, but Hyman's observation is right in emphasizing the absence in A New Life of the masochistic implications present in the resolution of Frank Alpine's story in The Assistant. Hyman goes on to say that A New Life "is a classic progress from eros, fleshly love, to agape, the spiritual love of one of God's creatures for another". 25 While again overstating the case, Hyman's remark emphasizes the fact that, like all Malamud's heroes, Levin must learn to transcend the fleshly aspect of love because it usually involves a mutually destructive selfishness. There is no evidence in the novel that Levin marries Pauline out of agape because she is one of God's creatures; but there is evidence that he marries her out of a combination of pity and a feeling of duty and that this commitment to her involves a mortification of the ego very much like what Frank Alpine imposed upon himself. Consequent upon his denial of the self that would use other people as objects of pleasure, Levin suffers. In addition, there is much in his life, as presented in the events of the novel, that calls simply for Levin to grit his teeth and endure. He must put up with the pompous silliness of Fairchild, the hostility of Bullock, and the intellectual drabness of his own teaching career, which he had anticipated would fulfill the promise of his liberal romantic dreams. In this context A New Life "repeats Malamud's belief that the human struggle is one of few successes and many failures but that the important thing is to endure". 26 24 Stanley Edgar Hyman, Standard: York, 1966), 33. 25 Hyman, 34.

A Chronicle of Books for Our Time (New

26 Bed Siegel, "Victims in Motion: Bernard Malamud's Sad and Bitter Clowns", Northwest Review, V (1962), 78.

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Unlike Frank Alpine whose condition in the present of The Assistant is but a slight improvement over the dereliction and homelessness of his past, Levin's status in the present of A New Life is a considerable improvement, at least in terms of physical i well-being, over his past — though "it would seem that every dissatisfaction a humanist could experience teaching in a technical college burdens . . . [his] first few m o n t h s " . 2 7 Levin's worst sufferings seem to me to be behind him, even at the end of the novel, whereas it is possible to believe that, for Frank Alpine at the end of The Assistant, things may become considerably worse. The reader of A New Life does not think of Levin particularly as a "sufferer" simply because most of his acutely painful experiences are already behind him when the novel begins. Since they are reported rather than dramatized (in the Jamesian sense), Levin's worst sufferings do not impress us much and are easily forgotten. It will be helpful, therefore, to quote Levin's recollections of his past, especially to note the sources of his pain. His escape to the West had thus far come to nothing, space corrupted by time, the past-contaminated self. Mold memories, bad habit, worse luck. He recalled in dirty detail each disgusting defeat from boyhood, his weaknesses, impoverishment, undiscipline — the limp self entangled in the fabric of will-ness life. A white-eyed hound bayed at him from the window — his classic fear, failure after grimy years to master himself. He lay in silence, solitude, and darkness. More than once he experienced crawling self-hatred. It left him frightened because he thought he had outdistanced it by three thousand miles. The future as new life was no longer predictable. That caused the floor to move under his bed. (p. 155) Despite the over-riding comic quality of this book and its hero, this quotation makes it clear that Levin suffers from the same lack of self-discipline that Roy Hobbs and Frank Alpine labored under. The tyranny of the ego and the impulsive desires of the flesh have put Levin in the thrall of the white-eyed hound of fear. Though Levin has travelled three thousand miles to escape the poverty and defeat of his past, the specter of repeated defeat rises up, even in Cascadia, to haunt him. Levin's feelings of self-loathing, though undoubtedly excessive, seem to be the preliminary condition for the Malamud hero to deny the demands of his ego. Giles Gunn emphasizes the importance of both inner-discipline and endurance in his discussion of A 27 John O. Lyons, The College Novel in America (Carbondale, 1962), 161.

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New Life: Levin's "only real possibility for enduring the present depends upon his ability to achieve through suffering that inner discipline over his own desires and expectations which alone can provide him with the capacity to endure" both for himself and those who suffer with him. "To achieve such discipline is to achieve the power to love." 2 8 Levin's discipline over his desires is achieved gradually and only through great effort, and, indeed, after considerable disappointment. Levin's sexual escapades, up until the time when he beds down with Pauline, are in one way or another disappointing. The abortive affair with the waitress Laverne does not get past partial nakedness in a barn. Levin's encounter with Avis Fliss on the floor of his English office is likewise interrupted by an intruder. Though Levin does finally succeed in consummating his intercourse with Nadalee, a sexy student on the make for a B in English, still he is left with a feeling of emptiness and disappointment after it is over. Levin's relationship with Pauline begins on the level of the flesh but quickly becomes a fully-blossomed romantic (and adulterous) passion. Though this is an improvement over his other affairs, it is, nevertheless, symptomatic of Levin's generally unrealistic approach to his whole life. Levin's fear of failure leads him to cherish expectations in excess of what real life can reasonably be expected to deliver. Thus, Levin's love experience in the novel is largely disappointing; that is the form his dramatized sufferings take. Levin suffers disappointment not only in his personal life but in his professional life as well. "I've dreamed for years of being a college professor", Levin tells Gilley at the beginning of the novel (p. 36). Yet, before the book is finished, Levin promises Gilley that he will give up that dream. But by that time, Levin — the man earlier tortured by the fear of another loathsome failure — will have accepted this setback as part of the price he must pay in order to assume the totally new life to which he has committed himself with Pauline. This acceptance of failure becomes in A New Life the measure of Levin's moral growth. "The experience of failure in Malamud's fiction is simply the testing-ground of character; its purpose is to explore the possibilities for moral development and spiritual regeneration which follow 28 Giles Gunn, "Bernard Malamud and the High Cost of Living", Nathan B. Scott, ed., Adversity and Grace: Studies in Recent American Literature (Chicago, 1968), 62-63.

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from a recognition of the fact of failure." 2 9 What stands between Levin and this realization, which finally comes at the end of the novel, are his own romantic preconceptions about love and experience. In this defect Levin is representative of a peculiarly human capacity for self-deception. For Americans this capacity for delusion in the face of evidence to the contrary has a quixotic quality. Levin suffers from largely romantic notions about the West and about nature. Here are his reflections when he first arrives in Cascadia: My God, the West, Levin thought. He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time, and found it a moving thought. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him. He shuddered at his good fortune, (p. 8) With a throb in his throat Levin gazes at the moon hanging above the mountains, and he can barely suppress a cry when he smells the virgin forest of the West for the first time. He seriously considers taking up hunting and fishing under Gilley's tutelage, and for a moment, he "thought of himself as a latter-day Thoreau . . . " (p. 55). But even in physical terms, Levin's rapture is premature and misconceived; in the paradise of Eastchester rain falls six months out of the year. The rain becomes a kind of symbol of the reality that beats on Levin's head until he finally recognizes its existence. John Barsness, discussing the frontier m y t h in A New Life, makes this observation on Levin's self-deception and the delusions cheerfully perpetuated by the Western community in which he lives: The ultimate human perversity, even in the West, is to cling firmly to belief in spite of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. If any moral must be drawn about the universe of A New Life it is that believing what one wants inevitably forces the ironic tragedy of getting what one deserves. 30 The painful process of initiation into the rainy realism of life is relieved for the reader by the laughter evoked through the bumbling efforts of the schlemiel Levin as he comes to terms with the frustrations of his new life. But, as Sidney Richman has observed, "laughter 29

G u n n , 65.

30 John A. Barsness, "A New Life: The Frontier Myth in Perspective", Western American Literature, III (Winter, 1969), 300.

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serves in the capacity of redemptive emotion; it is a reminder that the way of transcendence lies only through the ability to endure privation". 31 Alan Friedman likewise sees no incompatibility between the comic figure and the theme of suffering; he views Malamud's schlemiel as a variation of the modern anti-hero, defeated from the start and reduced by the hostile pressure of his environment to a "Cartesian minimum: 'I suffer, therefore lam.' " 3 2 Friedman's statement, though it seems to me correct in the connection it makes between the comic anti-hero and the adversity of experience, emphasizes to an extreme degree the importance of suffering in Malamud's novels. Suffering is an important, perhaps even obsessive, thematic concern of Malamud, but his heroes do not affirm their existence merely through their endurance of suffering. This is even more true of S. Levin than Frank Alpine. What Friedman has overemphasized is the passivity of the Malamud hero. David Stevenson, in an essay on the activist hero in modern fiction, singles out Levin as typical of the Malamud hero in most respects but atypical in his activism. He calls Levin, among other non-Malamud heroes, ontologists all, and investigators into the essential qualities of the events and the human relationships that chance their way. Unlike Hemingway's Robert Jordan or Faulkner's Joe Christmas, who finally surrender to fates imposed by the conditions of society, the new activist hero remains to the end an intrepid opportunist of the self. He is an eager, insatiable explorer of his own private experience, always on the alert, in Augie March's phrase, for "a fate good enough" to vindicate the energy spent on the exploration. 33 Although this puts Levin in rather heady company, he is not entirely out of place there. This emphasis on activism, if true of Levin, would seem to negate the general critical view of him as a man who must learn to endure — a distinctly passive quality. But it seems to me that the essential Malamudian note w. A New Life is what Friedman describes as the combination in Levin of "simultaneous passivity and seemingly senseless action, intimations of bitterness and defeat, a vague but

31 Sidney Richman, Bernard Malamud (New York, 1965), 68. 32 Alan W. Friedman, "Bernard Malamud: The Hero as Schnook", Southern Review, IV (1968), 930. 33 David L. Stevenson, "The Activists", Daedalus, XCII (Spring, 1953), 238.

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certain sense of impending doom". 3 4 But the threat of defeat and the sense of doom that must haunt any life in our century does not keep the zesty, but chastened, Levin from continuing his quest for something better than what has become at the end of the novel his past in Eastchester, Cascadia.

4 In his article "Bernard Malamud: The Hero as Schnook", Alan Friedman finds Frank Alpine and Yakov Bok largely similar figures who come to know "that suffering is the Jew's lot. All Malamud asks of us here is that we accept as given an existentially absurd universe . . . . " 3 5 The easy identification of the lesson learned by Frank Alpine and that learned by Yakov Bok is a common critical simplification. I think it is an error, and I will try to explain why in the remainder of this chapter. There is less critical unanimity on the use of the Jew as a metaphor for suffering humanity than on the singleness of, the lesson Malamud's heroes learn. Marvin Mudrick in a rather testy article on Malamud, Roth, and Bellow, expressed the opinion that, whether an apt metaphor or not, the subject of the suffering Jew has been overworked in the modern American novel. 36 Milton Stern objects to the validity of the metaphor altogether on the grounds that "the monopoly on pain is a broadly human and perennial matter, rather than an ethnic or sociological speciality".37 In his review of The Fixer, George Elliot agrees, calling the metaphor "no better than nonsense", 38 Elliot goes on to analyze "Jewishness" in the same review, calling it "neither a definable religion nor an historical people, but a vague quality, pretending to mystical virtue but delivering little more than sentimental smugness . . . ". 3 9 John Aldridge, in After The Lost Generation, discussed the plight

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Friedman, 927. Friedman, 930. 36 Marvin Mudrick, "Who Killed Herzog? or Three American Novelists", University of Denver Quarterly, I (1967), i:97. 37 Milton R. Stern, "All Men Are Jews", The Nation (Oct. 19, 1963), 243. 38 George P. Elliott, "Yakov's Ordeal", New York Times Book Review (Sept. 4, 1966), 1. 39 Elliott, 25.

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of the "post modern" novelist and his search for subjects and themes that would capture the interest of contemporary readers and provide viable materials for the creative energies of writers. In that discussion Aldridge observes t h a t " . . . the Negro or the Jew . . . is usable to the novelist in so far as he is allowed to preserve his humanity; his uniqueness as an individual must not be sacrificed to his universality as a type". 40 Philip Roth asserts that Malamud's Jews are not real but inventions, metaphors "to stand for certain human possibilities and human promises. . .". 41 In this I think Mr. Roth is mistaken, and I think Malamud satisfies John Aldridge's reservation that the Jew in modern fiction must be more than a metaphor. Morris, Ida, and Helen Bober, as well as Yakov Bok, are, in my view, fully realized fictional characters whose experiences have meaning and impact on a direct personal level as well as on the universal or metaphorical level. Despite his criticism of the concept of Jewishness in fiction, George Elliott finds that the Jews in The Fixer have none of that sentimental smugness he finds so distasteful. I think Norman Podhoretz has described Malamud's attitude toward the Jew most accurately. "To Malamud the Jew is humanity under the twin aspects of suffering and moral aspiration. Therefore any man who suffers greatly and also longs to be better than he is, can be called a Jew." 42 Podhoretz's remarks are valuable because they suggest a distinction between 'the Jew' — considered as a type — and particular Jewish characters who turn up in Malamud's fiction — who are more than merely types. In addition, Podhoretz emphasizes the dual thematic interest in Malamud's novels. The importance of this will become clear upon examination of The Fixer. Like Malamud's other heroes, Yakov Bok is an orphan with an unhappy past which he is trying to escape, as the novel opens, by leaving the circumstances of that past and seeking a new life in a distant locale. Bok views his wife's barrenness, the futility and poverty of his life in the shtetl as a cursed gift without meaning in a meaningless world. "I don't want people pitying me or wondering what I did to be so cursed", he tells his father-in-law Shmuel. "I did nothing. It 40 John Aldridge, After The Lost Generation (New York, 1958), 102. 41 Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction", Commentary, XXXII (1961), 2 2 8 - 2 2 9 . 42 Quoted in F. W. Dupee, "The Power of Positive Sex", Partisan Review, XXXI (Summer, 1964), 428.

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was a gift" (p. 7). Bok rejects the easy promise of religion ("Today I want my piece of bread, not in Paradise"), but he nevertheless lacks the charity that a religious ethic has taught Shmuel ("please don't mention charity because I have no charity to give" [p. 7]). Even after what seems to be good fortune in securing a job in the brick works, Bok as overseer must endure the surly insults and hostile innuendoes of the men whom he discovers trying to cheat Lebedev, their employer. But Yakov Bok does not begin to suffer in earnest until his arrest and imprisonment for his alleged murder of Zhenia Golov. In his early imprisonment, when he is jailed in communal cells, Bok is beaten by the other prisoners because he is a Jew or on the suspicion that he is an informer. When finally confined in a solitary cell, Bok suffers from the excesses of the weather, he is forced to sleep on a vermin-infested mattress, and he must eat food that is foul and frequently garnished with roaches or dead rats. At one point his jailors try to poison him; later he suffers from sores in his feet pierced by the nails in his shoes. He is subjected to the tedium of repeated questionings and humiliated in the daily inspections of his body. He is finally chained to his cell wall. Besides these physical tortures, Bok is also subject to the mental anxieties of imprisonment, particularly the uncertainty of his fate. In Bok's total loneliness, particularly after the death of his advocate Bibikov, time itself becomes a burden. At the nadir of his plight, Bok can look back at the earlier stages of his imprisonment almost with nostalgia. Yakov thought how it used to be before he was chained to the wall. He remembered sweeping the floor with a birch broom. He remembered reading Zhitnyak's gospels, and the Old Testament pages. He had saved and counted the wood splinters and kept track of the days and months when it seemed a sort of reward to add up time . . . . He thought of being free to walk back and forth in the cell, or in circles, until he was too tired to think . . . . Yakov thought he would be glad if things went back to how they had once been. (p. 267) All Malamud's heroes, it seems, are afflicted with guilt. 43 Roy Hobbs suffered from the knowledge of his part in the death of Bump Bailey. Frank Alpine suffered remorse for his part in the robbery of Morris 43 Joseph Wershba, "Not Horror but 'Sadness' ", New (Sept. 14, 1958), M 2.

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Bober's store. S. Levin felt guilty for impregnating Pauline without giving a thought to the consequences. However, Yakov Bok seems free from any sense of guilt for the ruin of his marriage; this he blames on Raisl without considering that it might be his own sterility that has caused her to be childless. Actually Bok's sexual sterility is a metaphor for his affective isolation, the lack of charity he himself proclaimed early in the novel. Lois Lewin.in her dissertation on the theme of suffering in the fiction of Bellow and Malamud, says that it is out of the "reservoir of guilt [that] Bok's unconscious yields up terrifying dreams in which Raisl is running from him as though he were threatening her with a meat cleaver, dreams in which he is Zhenia Golov's murderer". 4 4 The juxtaposition of these two dreams is not haphazard. If there is any child over whom Bok should feel guilty, it is the child he has not given life to in his marriage with Raisl; their fruitless union has suffered from Bok's failure to love unselfishly. It was only after Bok's protracted refusal to sleep with Raisl that she began seeking sexual satisfaction outside of marriage. It is the lesson of unselfishness that Bok, like Malamud's other heroes, must learn from his suffering. That Bok has learned this is revealed in a dream in which he sees Shmuel, his father-in-law, lying dead in a coffin,"with a prayer shawl covering his head, a purple hole in his forehead and one eye still wet with blood". Bok awakens crying "Live, S h m u e l , . . . live. Let me die for y o u " (p. 222). Bok's desire to see Shmuel live is the first selfless wish he has, but his own desire to die is not, I think, a Christ-like willingness to give his life for another, as Lewin suggests, but the resurfacing of his own desire to be finished with his suffering one way or another. Later Bok rejects this escape because it may result in a pogrom in which many other innocent people will suffer and die needlessly. So he is resigned to continue to live with his stinking suffering, not because he sees any value in it, but because the alternatives are worse. It is at this point that the theme of suffering connects with the theme of responsibility which will be more fully discussed in the next chapter. In failing to see this connection and especially the ramifications of the theme of responsibility, Lois Lewin has misunderstood, in my view, the full implications of The Fixer. In her intelligent and interesting discussion of Malamud's novels, 44 Lois S. Lewin, "Themes of Suffering in the Work of Malamud and Bellow", Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1968, 118.

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Lewin balks at the fixer's political conversion because she considers it inadequately prepared for. She finds that in killing the Tsar, in the final dream sequence, Bok "repudiates the suffering which has so profoundly changed him". 4 5 She is right in stating that suffering has changed Bok, but she has failed to note that his attitude toward suffering has been defiant and resistant from the beginning. So when Bok says at the end "what suffering has taught 1 me is the uselessness of suffering" (p. 333), he is making a statement perfectly consistent with the view he has taken all along. Bok has never been the compliant and resigned sufferer that Morris Bober was or that Frank Alpine learned to be. He resisted his misfortunes with a stubbornness far beyond anything S. Levin was capable of. What Lewin overlooks is that, though Malamud is using familiar materials and themes in The Fixer, his attitude toward them, in the context of this novel, is somewhat altered. The experience that taught earlier Malamud heroes to submit has taught Yakov Bok to resist. The other Malamud heroes were satisfied with rejecting or displacing their ogre-fathers. Bok is driven to destroy his symbolic false father, the Tsar, because of his increased sense of responsibility for others who suffer as he has. What suffering has taught him is not the value of suffering in itself, but his brotherhood with all men because all suffer from ogre-fathers like the Tsar. But this sense of brotherhood, this broad human sympathy and love for others who suffer a similar plight, would be meaningless sentimentality if it did not include not only the desire to alleviate their plight but concrete actions to abolish the suffering for as many as possible. In these terms Bok's repudiation of suffering is admirable, and his revolutionary political exclamations, as he goes to his trial, are logical and desirable. In this The Fixer represents the culmination of a gradual shift in attitude on Malamud's part and, in my view, an advance over the previous three novels in the treatment of this theme. However, this shift has not been wholly without harbinger. The ambiguity of the final paragraph of The Assistant can now be seen in retrospect as suggesting an inadequacy Malamud may have subconsciously felt in Frank Alpine's acceptance of Morris Bober's victim status. In S. Levin, Malamud created a more nervously demanding hero who would accept failure with much more reluctance than Frank Alpine, and probably never accept total failure. In Yakov Bok we have an initially 45

Lewin, 126.

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selfish and loveless man who finally learns to love as a father (when in Bok's dream the Tsar asks him if he is a father, the fixer replies "with all my heart"), and as a brother. Bok is the first of Malamud's heroes to combine compassion with political purpose, instead of resting in passive resignation to the nightmare of existence. It is the distinction of The Fixer that, more clearly than Malamud's other works, it affirms human brotherhood and the possibilities of life by confronting and transcending the demonic underside "of what is grotesque and absurd and dehumanizing in contemporary experience". 46 It is a pious commonplace that suffering ennobles; but it is frequently forgotten that, in the extreme, suffering can also make men either into pathetic and submissive animals or into fiery revolutionaries. The latter alternative is distinctly preferable. Malamud's affirmation is expressed most admirably in The Fixer because the novel's hero is distinguished by his sympathy for all that is human and which suffers.

46

Gunn, 60.

V HISTORY AND RESPONSIBILITY

History to the ancients was meant to be entertaining and instructive. Adherence to actual fact, in writing about the past, was not to them an important consideration. Since then, however, history has become a search for the truth about man's past, the authentic and detailed facts of humanity's prior experience. The modern phenomenon of society's loss of a sense of the past disturbed writers of the first half of this century; evidence of this can be found in almost everything written by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Herbert Marcuse, the social philosopher, has traced much of what he finds irrational in current society to the modern facility of forgetting the "disturbing elements of time and memory". If the progressing rationality of advanced industrial society tends to liquidate as an "irrational rest" the disturbing elements of Time and Memory, it also tends to liquidate the disturbing rationality contained in the irrational rest. Recognition and relation to the past as present counteracts the functionalization of thought by and in the established reality. It militates against the closing of the universe of discourse and behavior; it renders possible the development of concepts which de-stabilize and transcend the closed universe by comprehending it as historical universe. 1 What is surprising in Marcuse's insistence upon reverence for time and memory is that it comes from a person considered to be a spokesman for the liberal-radical sector of society, whereas historical consciousness is usually associated with writers of conservative impulse. Marcuse maintains that awareness of the past can free men from bondage to its vestiges in the present. "Time loses its power when remembrance redeems the past." 2 What this redemption gains man is 1 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, 1964), 99. 2 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York, 1961), 213.

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freedom for creative change. "The past remains present; it is the very life of the spirit; what has been decides on what is. Freedom implies reconciliation — redemption of the past. If the past is just left behind and forgotten, there will be no end to destructive transgression."3 If there is a political bias beneath Malamud's writings, I think that it would have to be considered liberal, especially in view of the opinions on contemporary politics expressed in A New Life. Yet this liberal bias exists with a reverence for time and memory; the very choice of mythic reference indicates, as Chapter One demonstrated, a conserving, stabilizing tendency. Malamud includes within his third and fourth novels in particular an emphasis upon the significance of the past even beyond the level of the protagonists' personal histories, although that element, too, is very important. Malamud's modern questers always begin by trying to escape their own pasts, the limiting and imprisoning forces of their old lives. But this quest for freedom is frustrated, as Marcuse has explained, by trying to escape from the ever-present past. The search for a new and better life by the Malamud hero involves an attempt to escape responsibility for the larger social life of other men in the present. Thus, the desire to escape the past serves as a metaphor for the flight from responsibility in the present. What Malamud's questers must learn is that they need to deny the tyrannical demands of the ego and submit themselves to a personally delimiting involvement with other lives; this necessity is frequently, though not exclusively, learned through a love experience. The Malamud hero usually discovers from his involvement in the social world that he shares with others the responsibility of creating a better life for someone besides himself. Joseph Waldmeir compares the modern quester with his medieval counterpart (a comparison implied in the mythic structure of The Natural) on the basis of love and responsibility."For the medieval quester, love of God was the issue and responsibility to a prescribed code, for the modern, it is love of man and responsibility to the self and to all the other selves in a brief and narrow arc which impinges upon it." 4 This description of the secular morality of the modern quester is applicable to Roy Hobbs and S. Levin — especially the limiting phrase "and to all the other selves in a brief and narrow arc which impinges [upon the hero] . . . ".

3 Eros and Civilization, 106. 4 Joseph Waldmeir, "Only An Occasional Rutabaga: American Fiction Since 1945", Modern Fiction Studies, XV (Winter, 1969-70), 476.

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Yakov Bok, the hero of The Fixer, discovers that the arc of human responsibility is not brief and narrow at all. The importance of the hero's breaking the attachment to his ego is insisted upon by Joseph Campbell; he considers it essential to the process of atonement which he takes in its etymological sense of becoming a unified, integrated person. "Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster — the dragon thought to be God (Superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed Id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself. . . ," s This kind of heroic task is compassed, among Malamud's protagonists, only by Yakov Bok. The success at "at—one—ment" achieved by Frank Alpine and S. Levin is a severely qualified one; Roy Hobbs has no success at all beyond his eleventh hour recognition of the reasons for his total failure. The heroes of Malamud's stories and novels are commonly Jews. Malamud himself considered Jews the "very stuff of drama". The psychologist Karl Stern goes a step further and states that the Jew is the perennial witness to the drama of history. "No matter how many philosophical systems may come and go — the Jews bear witness to something which defies all systems: the drama of history."6 In the opinion of Tony Tanner, Malamud views the Jews as an instance of "all men's inevitable exposure to the caprice of circumstance and the insidious snare of history: all people are in this way 'chosen', Jews only more transparently than others". 7 No Jew, no man indeed, can escape his involvement with history ; even a man's refusal to become involved has inevitable repercussions on others. A realization of the pastness of the present is the mode of discovery used by Malamud to bring his protagonists to the knowledge that they cannot escape responsibility for other lives. Oskar Gassner, the protagonist of Malamud's story "The German Refugee", can serve as an exemplar for the impulse, shared by the heroes of Malamud's novels, to flee the past in order to find a new life. The story is narrated by an unnamed student who gives English lessons to refugees recently arrived in New York. Oskar Gassner at age fifty is an accomplished journalist and critic; he has fled Berlin in order to escape the 5 Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Princeton, 1949), 130. « Kail Stern, The Flight From Woman (New York, 1965), 120. 7 Tony Tanner, "Bernard Malamud and the New Life", Critical Quarterly X (1968), 76.

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persecution of Adolph Hitler. Despite the fact that he had studied English at one time, Gassner finds it extremely difficult to learn the language well enough to continue his professional activity in America. The narrator observes that the loss of language is a particular burden for the refugee because it deprives him of the ability to communicate, with the result that what he knows and what he is becomes a burden. 8 Gassner secures a job as lecturer, but when he tries to write his ideas in English he is stymied: later when he tries to deliver the lectures, he becomes frustrated by the failure of the words to communicate what he has in his mind. But Gassner persists, little by little, and finally delivers a particularly successful lecture. The morning after this modest success, Gassner is unexpectedly discovered dead in his room. "He had taken his life — gas . . ,." 9 The refugee had told the tutor/narrator that, when he left Germany, he had separated from his wife; he explained that she was a Gentile and her mother an "appalling anti-Semite". After Gassner's death, the narrator discovers in the refugee's room a letter from his mother-in-law; it relates how, "after Oskar abandoned] her", his wife converted to Judaism. She was subsequently arrested and shot. This discovery had apparently destroyed Oskar Gassner because it revealed to him, in a shocking fashion, the impossibility of escape from the past; a sense of his complicitly in the death of his wife was apparently what drove him to suicide. In retrospect, Gassner's difficulty in learning English becomes a metaphor for the futility of his attempts to escape the past. As a Jewish refugee, Gassner is everyman in flight from his involvement in history, his life as it affects others. He learned the pastness of the present in a painful and compelling manner.

1 "The German Refugee" illustrates Tony Tanner's generalization on Malamud's stories. After a discussion of "The Lady of the Lake" (a story that also involves a Jew's attempt to escape his past), Tanner concludes that "one of the lessons of Malamud's tales is that the man who attempts to deny the past . . . may find himself imprisoned and 8 Bernard Malamud, "A German Refugee", Idiots First, Dell edition (New York, 1966), 180. 9 "A German Refugee", 192.

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trapped in ways which are worse than the physical impositions of history". 10 Though Roy Hobbs is not a Jew, he is an everyman figure who also tries to escape from the past, and The Natural is, in large part, an account of his failure to do so. Roy's flight from the past is expressed in part by his attempt to conceal his past from Max Mercy, a journalist of irrepressible curiosity. Roy's refusal to reveal his personal history stems not only from his desire to escape its limitations but from his fear that the discovery of certain incidents may cripple his chances for the kind of success he is seeking as a major-league baseball player. Although there is no direct connection revealed between Roy and the death of Sam Simpson, the scout who discovers Roy, the juxtaposition of Roy's rise and Sam's decline becomes disturbing later in the novel when Roy is involved in the freakish accident that claims the life of his rival Bump Bailey. But what Roy is really afraid that Max will discover is that Roy was shot in the groin by Harriet Bird. This near-fatal experience can be seen as an emblem of Roy's vulnerability to the caprice of circumstances; it is this kind of revelation that superstitious baseball players feel can jinx them. As a man with aspirations to the heroic status of being "the best there ever was in the game", Roy is naturally apprehensive of what a discovery of this type might do to his chances of success. His desire to escape the past, his fear of public scrutiny of his personal history, prevents Roy from learning the important lessons his own experience has to teach him. In the structure of the novel, the early section "Batter Up!" is part of the history from which Roy seeks to escape and which he is condemned to repeat because he refuses to learn the lessons it has to teach. Roy's discovery that his failure to learn anything from his past dooms him to further suffering is the climax to the psychological drama dimly indicated in The Natural. But everyone has a past, not only heroes. In The Natural, the personal histories of Pop Fisher and Iris Lemon reinforce the thematic statement underlying Roy Hobbs's experience. Pop Fisher, coach of the Knights and the man I have argued is Roy's authentic spiritual father, is a man, like Roy, with a hard-luck history of disappointment. Pop's history of failures began forty years earlier when, in a World Series game, as he was running for home, "his legs got tangled under him and he fell flat on his stomach, the living bejesus knocked out of 10

Tanner, 158.

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him" (p. 48). "Fisher's Flop" became a nationally recognized synonym for failure, and Pop Fisher has had the feeling that "he has been jinxed since the time of his flop" (p. 49). Roy becomes the object of Pop's paternal solicitude when it appears that he will enable the Knights to win the pennant and break Pop's forty-year jinx. Roy's failure amounts to a betrayal by a long-awaited messiah-figure who Pop had hoped would accomplish his professional redemption. Pop Fisher's refusal to cooperate with the dishonest policies of Judge Banner has, in part, stood between him and the chance for financial success. But this refusal has constituted a moral success which Roy fails to achieve because he has valued sexual success with Memo Paris and ignored Judge Banner's ironic advice: "He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent" (p. 80). Iris Lemon has a personal history as damaging in its implications as Roy's. Her easy sexual surrender to an assailant when she was fifteen does not merely point to her symbolic role as fertility goddess; on the naturalistic level it reveals her physical vulnerability as a woman and her moral peril as a human being. But Iris transcends these elements by accepting the consequences of the incident that revealed and exploited her weakness. The symbol of her past and her vulnerability is the issue of her sexual encounter. By assuming the responsibility for her daughter's life and upbringing, Iris accepts the past and transcends it at the same time. She illustrates what Marcus Klein says is Malamud's total morality: "the necessity in this world of accepting moral obligation." 11 Iris demonstrates a sense of responsibility for others that Roy denies by his betrayal of Pop Fisher, the Knights, and their fans. Whether he realizes it or not, Roy's quest is not only for personal success and erotic fulfillment, he is in search "above all, for some lost unity with the. self', 1 2 the moral integrity that is associated with his boyhood innocence and that survives in him as adolescent naivete. But that innocence, as well as Roy's vulnerability to failure, is located in the past and is represented by the image of the boy and his dog in a pastoral setting. When Roy, in his Mercedes, watches Memo Paris run into a hallucinatory representation of that image, he groans at the death of his innocence, but he is too naive to see that the agent of his destruction is the fatal woman he has set his heart on possessing. Blinded by a selfish passion for a woman who hates him, Roy fails to see 11 12

Marcus Klein, After Alienation (New York, 1965), 252. Louis Grieff, "Quest and Defeat in The Natural", Thoth, VIII (1967), 23.

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the similarity between Memo Paris and Harriet Bird. His refusal to learn from his own personal history condemns him to repeat the past in disastrous fashion. It also accounts for his selfish and irresponsible attitude toward others in the larger circle of his life.

2 While it is true that The Assistant affirms the "possibility of human salvation and identity through a consciously constructed personal ethic", 1 3 the values of that ethic include not only suffering for others (as was abundantly indicated in the preceding chapter) but responsibility for others as well. In a sense a man undertakes suffering for others only because he feels a responsibility for their lives; or, to put it another way, assuming a responsible share in the lives of others includes suffering (as well as rejoicing) with them. The themes of suffering and responsibility are connected to the mythic method in the father-son motif. The young mythic protagonist, in quest of his heroic destiny, must find an authentic spiritual father to teach him that only by submitting to an ego-limiting and painful ordeal, can he attain the mature responsibility that constitutes true heroism. Though, in the matter of the hero's attitude toward suffering, The Fixer significantly modifies this generalization, The Assistant exemplifies it perfectly. Frank Alpine and Morris Bober, both men with suffering in their pasts, achieve a kind of immediate kinship on the basis of a mutual pity they feel for each other's painful experience. Frank is the first to relate his sad tale of loneliness and failure. "The week after I was born my mother was dead and buried. I never saw her face, not even a picture. When I was five years old, one day my old man leaves this furnished room where we were staying, to get a pack of butts. He takes off and that was the last I ever saw of him. They traced him years later but by then he was dead. I was raised in an orphans' home and when I was eight they farmed me out to a tough family. I ran away ten times, also from the next people I lived with'. I think about my life a lot. I say to myself, 'what do you expect to happen after all that? ' . . . usually I end up like I started out, with nothing". The Grocer was moved. Poor boy. (p. 32) 13 Ruth Mandel, "Bernard Malamud's The Assistant and A New Life-, Ironic Affirmation", Critique, VII (1965), ii: 110.

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Unlike Roy Hobbs, Frank Alpine has a sense of the past; he thinks about his life, and he labors under the feeling that his early misfortunes have set him on an unchangeable course. How can a man with a past like Frank's succeed? Frank's only possibility of success, in the novel's moral framework, is to repeat the failure of Morris Bober and turn it into moral triumph by adopting Morris's ethic of suffering and responsibility for others. As part of Frank's moral apprenticeship, Morris recounts to his assistant his own life in the old country. Speaking of his family, Morris says simply "They were poor and there were pogroms" (p. 66). Morris recounts his lucky escape to America where his initial ambition to study and become a druggist was sacrificed to his marriage with Ida and the grocery store. Morris's life has been a sacrifice of his personal desires for the needs of the wife and daughter who are his responsibility. But his sense of obligation has extended beyond his family to the little community in which he lives. The service Morris extends to the "Polisheh", his tea and talk with the light-bulb peddlar Breitbart, his compassion for the cancerous A1 Marcus, and especially his kindness toward the goy Frank Alpine are all manifestations of Morris's sense of responsibility for the lives of others around him. It is true that what Morris does for his pitiable friends and customers does not radically improve their lot; his personal values do not "effect a change in society and [do] not offer material comfort for the ethical m a n " . 1 4 It is this, however, that constitutes the drab realism which is part of The Assistant's distinction. In subscribing to Morris's ethic and assuming his daily acts of kindness as grocer, Frank has little reason to hope for the better life he had once envisioned. He seems content to repeat Morris's past, to make it his own present, so long as there is a chance that he can be near Helen. Yet, he must soon realize that the role he has assumed toward her is parental and that he will probably have to give up his romantic hopes altogether. Besides repeating Morris's life, however, Frank is under the compulsion of expiating his own guilty past, the offense against his spiritual father Morris Bober. His desire to pay back the money he has stolen in the past represents his acceptance in part of responsibility in the present. In contrast, Ida's daily harping on the losses and failures of the past constitutes her failure to accept the present that has issued from it

Mandel, 111.

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the past's disappointments; it also expresses a failure in marital love. Ida warns her daughter not to repeat her own mistake and marry a failure like Morris. Helen, for her part, has assumed a self-serving attitude toward the family. Her egotistical wishes for success lead her to allow Morris to sacrifice his life so that she can have the education she wants. Furthermore, her selfishness prevents her from seeing the moral quality of Morris's life, the pathetic beauty of his soul. She can dismiss him as a lamentable failure who lacked the courage to be more than the victim of his own compassion for the distress of others. Helen's fear of failure impels her to resist the feelings of love she has for Frank; his pitiable lust, that gradually becomes love, is for her a pretext for rejecting him as an "uncircumcised dog". There is little hope that Frank's assumption of Morris's role will endear him to Helen, though she cannot escape the obligation of gratitude. Thus Frank's dream at the end of the novel of St. Francis' presenting Helen with a living rose — the traditional emblem of perfect spiritual love — teeters in precarious balance with the last paragraph that reports his circumcision. But, though the affirmation in The Assistant is severely qualified, Frank Alpine, nevertheless, remains a strangely unforgettable figure, ritually donning a dingy apron and carrying on the responsibilities bequeathed him by his spiritual father.

3 Unlike Frank Alpine who tries to expiate his past mistakes, S. Levin of A New Life is a man trying to fashion a better self by hiding from and forgetting about the weaknesses and failures of his past. Frank thinks about his past life in order to discover from it a direction for the present. Levin, however, is afraid of the past when it intrudes upon his thoughts. "He began to think about the past and had to press himself not to" (p. 14). When Levin learns about Leo Duffy and begins to see himself falling into the same fatal pattern of behavior, he is reminded simultaneously of all his own fatal past. "For a second he thought he would remember everything in his life and braced himself not to" (p. 117). Duffy becomes symbolic of the good and bad in Levin's past — his generous impulses and his selfish lust. As Levin's career parallels Duffy's failed career more and more closely, "[e]ach day his past weighted more" (p. 118). Explaining to Pauline Gilley why he has come to the West (a place

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without a past: no monuments " t o commemorate word or deed of any meaningful past event "[p. 72]), Levin says, "in the past I cheated myself and killed my choices" (p. 20). That is why Levin has grown a beard, to hide the old self from which he is trying to escape. When the waitress Laverne asks why he has a beard, Levin replies that he is wearing it "[o]ut of respect for the dead" (p. 77), the old self he wishes to stay buried in the past. Yet, despite his fear of the past, Levin cannot escape it. It not only intrudes upon his thoughts but is the subject of his nightmarish dreams. No matter his efforts to escape it, "it often amazed Levin how past-drenched the present time was " (p. 27). Levin is aware that even when he is looking forward to spring, "the image of autumn was in his mind" and what "moved him most was memory" (p. 59). Gerald Gilley as ogre-father even in this conspires with Levin's memory to thwart his present desires, for Gerald's hobby is to preserve the past; his photographs preserve a memory "fixed forever on shiny paper" (p. 88). As his new life begins to take on the shape of the old, it is borne in upon Levin that his escape to the West was futile, that space was corrupted by time, that he still carried with him into the paradise of Eastchester, "a past-contaminated self' (p. 155). His efforts to escape his own past are thwarted not only by his own memories but are frustrated by everyone he meets. Fabricant, Gilley, Pauline — they all burden Levin with their pasts and the past of Leo Duffy, a symbol of his own. Levin finally spills out the story of his past, in shabby and remorseless detail, to Pauline: his father dead in prison, his mother a mad suicide, himself rejected by an embittered woman and become a hopeless drunk. But when his sexual relationship with Pauline blossoms into love, Levin thinks he is at last liberated. "He thought of his unhappy years as though they had endured only m i n u t e s . . . . He had made too much of his past experience" (p. 201). But Levin's passion turns sour; he cannot long support a furtive, adulterous affair. His guilt takes the form of a "shooting pain in the ass" and Pauline is no longer mistress of the quick and easy climax. What is wrong with Levin's love is that it is selfish and exclusive; it lacks the element of commitment and responsibility as long as it remains just an adulterous passion. It is at this point that most critics fail to see the connection between Levin's personal life and his public life. Ruth Mandel speaks for almost every critic when she declares that the two halves of A New Life are not thematically related: "The comic and satiric elements do not function thematically in relation to the

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novel's serious theme. Levin's ultimate sacrifice and affirmation really have nothing to do with his experience as an English instructor at the College. The whole controversy over the new chairman simply fizzles out when Malamud picks up the Levin-Pauline plot." 15 To account for the change that takes place in Levin, Mandel, Baumbach, Klein, and others maintain that it is the love of a woman that transforms the hero in Malamud's novel. 1 6 This is true in The Natural in so far as Roy's chances for moral growth are offered to him through Iris Lemon. But in The Assistant, Frank's love for Helen is not returned by her in kind and it is eventually stifled. What accounts for the real change in Frank is his association with Morris Bober. Similarly, it is not Pauline's love for Levin that motivates him to take an active and responsible role in his professional life. It is only after Levin has learned a sense of responsibility through his efforts to improve the English Department of Cascadia College that he can agree to marry Pauline and assume the duties of a father to her adopted children, even though he no longer feels the emotional attachment for her that he enjoyed earlier. What had tainted Levin's love for Pauline was his reluctance to get permanently involved in her life. Motivated by his fear of repeating in his affair with Pauline the failure in love of his past life, Levin felt certain that "[h]e wanted no tying down with ropes" (p. 200). But the departmental fracas over parental objections to the teaching of "Indian Camp" (Hemingway's story with its scene of love-making in the woods) provides the occasion for the beginning of change in Levin. At first he acquiesced in the general agreement to omit the offensive story from the departmental syllabus. But then Levin realized that it is the task of the humanist to fight against this kind of reactionary puritanism, to translate the "visionary ideal" into a "better life for people" (p. 211); people in this case are his students. But Levin had done nothing to resist the reactionary forces and the pressure to conform. When he hears Fabricant reading to his students Emerson's words — "Whoever would be a man must be a non-conformist" — Levin feels at last the real nature of his present failure to commit himself to a responsible professional position. This accompanies a conscious sense of guilt at his betrayal of Gilley by making love to his wife; it was a 15 Mandel, 118. 16 Jonathan Baumbach, 1965), 105.

The

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subconscious sense of guilt for this that had kept Levin from opposing Gilley's policy of mediocrity. Now that he has broken with Pauline, Levin is free to take up the humanist's task. Levin's awkward attempts to play a critical and creative role in the English department are not conspicuously successful, but he, nevertheless, discovers something important through them: that "the main source of conscious morality was love of life, anybody's life" (p. 237). Levin's fearful obsession with the past had kept him from real life in the present. The expansion of his love and sense of responsibility to include a broad social range of people liberates Levin to opposeGilley, when all other candidates show themselves unwilling or unfit, for the post of department chairman left vacant by the retirement of Fairchild. In this respect, the man Levin had hoped would be Gilley's opponent — Fabricant — is the greatest disappointment. As Tony Tanner has observed, "[I]t is one thing to have theories of freedom and quite another to enact them. (The limitations involved in a purely cerebral solution to the problem of self and freedom are shown up in the figure of Fabricant.)" 17 No longer afraid of failure, Levin is willing to risk it for the sake of the benefit that might result for the larger college community, teachers and students. As a symbol that fear of the past no longer tyrannizes him, Levin shaves his beard. He undertakes to act out the role of Leo Duffy, and in a dream he imagines witnessing "on a small round grassy island amid three intersecting streets" the death of the old chairman Professor Fairchild, who has just given him some chastening advice "as a father to a son" (p. 278). In the Oedipal situation imagined in this dream, Levin sees foreshadowed his role of opposition to the ogre-father's, successor Gilley. When Gilley earlier quoted from Santayana about the obsessive morality of Americans, Levin replied by reminding him that Santayana also said that "if you don't remember the past you were condemned to relive it" (p. 267). Levin's own discovery is a variation of this axiom. He has had to learn that fear of repeating the failures of the past can paralyze a man in the present. This fear can imprison him in selfishness and prevent him from assuming the risky role of responsible involvement in creating a better life for others. Levin's liberation from the fetters of this fear issues, however, in another failure. He loses the election. At 17 T o n y Tanner, "Bernard Malamud and t h e New Life'.', Critical Quarterly, (1968), 159.

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first, Levin turns with animosity against Pauline. She had involved him in the adultery whose revelation accounted for his ignominious defeat. He blamed her for encouraging him to follow the lead of Duffy, his "fabricated prototype" (p. 299). But "[w]hat most enraged him was clear evidence of the continued weakness of his old self' (p. 298). Even at the end of the novel, Levin views his past as a kind of nemesis. "What else could I expect, Levin thought, given who I am? " (p. 329). Once again he is bricked into a prison of doubt. "The prison was really himself, flawed edifice of failures" (p. 331). Despite these doubts, Levin decides that he will marry Pauline, since it is what she wants. Having learned the necessity of responsibility in the public sector of his life, Levin is now willing to bear the duties of the private sector. This, in spite of the fact that the prospect of "the responsibility was terrifying" to him earlier (p. 307). He is chastened by the knowledge that he can never escape his own history, that he was "still roaming, after so many years, the stone streets of the past" (p. 332). What Levin has learned is that "the possibility of a future always depends upon one's willingness to accept the burdens of the past". 1 8 But at the end of the novel those possibilities are still in doubt. Levin still wonders whether he might not one day abandon Pauline. David Stevenson finds the unresolved quality of A New Life's ending quite appropriate: " . . . [T]he possibilities for his nightmare dreams of autonomy in the happenings of the ever present, which keep rushing to meet him in wild abandon, are left properly unresolved at the novel's end." 19 This lack of resolution extends to Levin himself and is part of the ambiguity of the novel's conclusion. In this respect A New Life has something in common with The Assistant; whatever affirmation of the possibilities for life there is as Levin drives off in his second-hand Hudson, freighted not only with his own past but Gerald's and Pauline's as well, this affirmation has been severely qualified. Though Levin has emerged from the refining fire of passion and frustration, he has chosen "the encumbrances of marriage to Pauline and the destruction of his former conception of a new life of personal satisfactions and freedom". 2 0 In return he has received the 18 Giles B. Gunn, "Bernard Malamud and the High Cost of Living", Nathan B. Scott, ed., Adversity and Grace: Studies in Recent American Literature (Chicago, 1968), 76. 19 David L. Stevenson, "The Activists",Daedalus, XCII (Spring, 1953), 245. 20 Theodore Solotaroff, "Bernard Malamud's Fiction: The Old Life and the New", Commentary, XXXII (1961), 202.

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possibilities of love from Pauline. His success, however, is qualified to the bone. "Just as we leave the newly circumcised grocer [Frank Alpine] limping about in Bober's tomb, so we last see Levin going down the highway with a woman who has already fallen out of love with him." 2 1 The failure to see just how severely qualified Levin's affirmation is has led Sidney Richman to see the ending of A New Life as a kind of moral apotheosis. "In accepting Pauline, no matter her own destructiveness, Levin has in essence accepted himself with all the freight of anxiety that goes with i t . . . ," 2 2 Richman approves the abandonment of Levin's liberal romantic dreams (his promise to Gilley never to teach college again) because, in virtue of this renunciation, Levin "confronts manhood in the most painful of acts: the freedom to choose the absence of freedom". 2 3 Richman sees Levin choosing "responsibility and defeat", 2 4 as though they were inseparable. It is true that, in taking up the burden of Pauline's life, Levin is accepting the kind of victim status that Morris Bober accepted and that Frank Alpine inherited from him. But, whereas Morris accepted his role of redemptive suffering because, given his moral code, he had no other choice, Levin from the first resisted becoming Pauline's savior and anybody's victim (p. 332). Granted that Levin needs to have the romanticism purged out of his humanistic ideals, ought he to abandon those ideals, at Gerald's request, for the sake of Pauline or anyone else? The contingency of Gerald's agreeing to a divorce only if Levin will promise never to teach college again is not, in my view, sufficiently motivated or convincing. It is not inevitable and Levin's acquiescence to it seems to me destructive of the sense of broad human responsibility he has learned. If humanistic admiration for suffering requires Levin to become the victim of Pauline's love for him, in the process the sense of social responsibility that humanism also enjoins ought not to have to be abandoned by Levin. Otherwise, the moral purpose of Levin's whole professional experience is compromised. It was Levin's involvement with the social issues of America in the 1950's as they touched

21 Solotaroff, 202. 22 Sidney Richman, Bernard Malamud, York, 1965), 91. 23 Richman, 92. 24 Richman, 93.

United States Authors Series (New

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Cascadia College that marked his acceptance of responsibility for what affects everyone in the world of history past and present. When Levin shaved his beard he symbolically indicated his willingness to expose himself to the shifting winds of time. By accepting Pauline, Levin fills his new life with old things, and this, in a circumstantial way, shows Levin's acquiescence to his insight very early in the novel; the present is drenched in past time. But Levin's surrender to Gilley's demand that he never teach college again is a condition that I find destructive of belief in the usefulness of any affirmation the novel makes. Eugene Goodheart has also complained that this one fact "destroys our belief in the affirmative possibilities held out to us". 2 5 Levin's fate is only slightly less unfortunate than the suicidal Duffy's life, and the hope that it holds still remains for Levin. If the humanistic ideal is what Levin says it is ("to keep civilization from destroying itself'[p. 109]) 26 , then Levin has apparently abdicated that responsibility because it has been made exclusive of his responsibility to Pauline. A New Life, in this problematic and ambiguous ending, contains implicitly the critique of a certain kind of humanism more completely developed in The Fixer. If suffering has the redemptive value that some humanists seem to think it has, suffering also seems to necessitate the kind of passivity that acquiesces in the dominance of essentially vicious people like Gerald Gilley. If this is to be the result of a man's assuming the victim's role, of becoming a Christ-figure who suffers for others out of responsibility, it is difficult to say that such a man is worthy of imitation. This brand of humanism is highly suspect because the passivity it canonizes leads to an abdication of the larger social responsibilities no man should avoid. Malamud, as a liberal humanist with a conservative's reverence for history, has made suffering a value in his fiction; but he has qualified the affirmation of this value in the gnawing ambiguity underlying the endings of both The Assistant and A New Life. These ambiguous conclusions, which question at the same time that they affirm, point toward the significantly modified position, that emerges in The Fixer, as to the relative value of suffering and responsibility.

25 Eugene Goodheart, "Fantasy and Reality", Midstream, VII (1961), 105. 26 Malamud has also described this as the task of the writer. Cf. Joseph Wershba, "Not Horror but 'Sadness' ", New York Post Magazine (Sept. 14, 1958).

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4 Though "[t]he lesson that Bok learns [in The Fixer]... is Malamud's familiar lesson of the necessity for moral involvement", 27 "unlike the earlier novels, The Fixer ends with a learning that moves beyond ironic affirmation". 28 The theme of responsibility, that closely depended on the theme of suffering in The Natural and The Assistant and that achieved a precarious balance with the theme of suffering in A New Life, has, in The Fixer, become the focal point of conflict in the mind of Yakov Bok. Of the earlier novels Sidney Finkelstein had remarked: "The meagre inner life which Malamud gives his creations is the counterpart to his own failure to bring to bear any social-minded perspective upon the phenomenon of alienation. He surrenders to it as eternal, all-embracing truth". 29 Though this criticism seems inappropriate for A New Life, it is in no way applicable to The Fixer. Malamud has endowed Yakov Bok with a lively consciousness and a rich inner life. Furthermore, the novel addresses itself quite seriously to the social perspective of alienation. At the beginning of The Fixer, Yakov Bok rejects his Jewishness as an imprisoning element in his life and leaves the shtetl where his family and all his impoverished acquaintances live. Though he changes his name and shaves his beard in order to hide his past, Bok will find it necessary to explicitly deny his identity. In the process of rejecting his Jewishness, Bok also rejects the God of the Jews and eventually comes to espouse a concept very much like Spinoza's idea of God. In addition Bok also initially rejects the value of suffering and the necessity for political involvement. The experience of his imprisonment, especially as it occasions his association with Bibikov, his legal advocate and spiritual father, teaches him that there is no such thing as an unpolitical man. However, Bok does not change his attitude toward the Jewish God, and his view of suffering is only slightly modified. Institutional religion does not fare well in The Fixer. The established Church of Russia is rife with anti-Semitism. A Russian Orthodox 27 Robert Alter, "Malamud as Jewish Writer", Commentary, XLII (1966), iii: 76. 28 Sanford Pinsker, "The Achievement of Bernard Malamud", Midwest Quarterly, X (Summer, 1969), 388. 29 Sidney Finkelstein, Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature (New York, 1965), 269.

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priest calls for Yakov's execution to expiate the ritual death of Zhenia Golov, and the official investigation of the murder amounts to little more than contriving evidence to justify the blaming on a Jew of a crime that will confirm the general public's worst religious prejudices. Nikolai Lebedev, the man whose life Bok saves, belongs to the Black Hundreds, an anti-Semitic fraternity; but Lebedev "always cries when he reads the Sermon on the Mount" (p. 37). There coexists within the generality of professed Christians in The Fixer the worst kind of hatred and blood lust against Jews. Freud has accounted for antiSemitism within Christianity by the fact that the Jews are blamed for killing God (Freud's primeval sin against the later deified father of the primal horde) but still refuse to admit their guilt. Christians have admitted their guilt and have been purified, but they are enraged by the Jews' refusal to share the blame and so shift it all onto them. 30 The historical refusal of the Jews to confess to the murder of God parallels Bok's refusal to confess even when offered the inducements of pardon and freedom in the bargain. Bok's refusal can be seen as a kind of heroic rejection of the burden of guilt under which so large a segment of mankind seems to labor. The confession of guilt gives men a sense of sinfulness that re-establishes their dependence on a fatherfigure. In return for the expiatory suffering they must accept for their sins, the self-confessed guilty ones are relieved of the responsibility not only over their personal lives (which the Father is charged with watching over in his "all wise providence"), but over their collective life in the political realm as well. Thus it is God's business to correct, in this life or not until the next if he chooses, the injustices that flourish on the earth. This seems, indeed, to be the prevailing attitude of rich and poor folk alike in The Fixer. The Russian Orthodox Church, to which the Christians in The Fixer belong, comes off in the novel as a dogma-ridden institution; its pious worshippers seem motivated by fear of hell and labor under guilt for sin. They are willing to let God and the Tsar manage things, however poorly for themselves, in return for forgiveness and the promise of an afterlife of ease. Even Carl Jung, who ordinarily defends the importance of religious values and belief, deplores the tendency of institutional religions "to rope the individual into a social organization and reduce him to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising him out of the torpid, mindless mass and making clear to him that he is the one 30

Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism

(New York, 1939), 111-117.

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important factor [in] the salvation of the world . . . ". 3 1 It is precisely this that Bok learns from his experience in Kiev after leaving the ghetto-existence of the shtetl. He can no longer refuse to share the responsibility for his fellow human beings, Jews and Gentiles alike. To admit his guilt for a murder he did not commit 32 would be for Bok a surrender to the Tsar, his false father, and a "painless slipping back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care, into . . . irresponsibility". 33 As Bok reads the New Testament in his cell, he readily sees the contradiction between the cruel behavior of his Christian captors and the revolutionary love ethic of their Lord, Jesus. The Orthodox Christian Russians in The Fixer illustrate the historical tendency of Christian nations toward colonial barbarity, internecine strife, and religious intolerance. There is no "practical display of the unconditioned love, synonymous with the effective conquest of ego, ego's world, and ego's tribal god, which was taught by their professed supreme Lord". 3 4 In learning the necessity of conquest of the ego, Bok does not, however, "get religion". He does not accept a traditional concept of God, but comes to see God as a symbol of historical necessity. The belief Bok fashions in his prison cell eschews the wish-fulfillment that Freud says is a "prominent factor in its motivation" and which therefore frequently issues in illusion. 35 Bok's belief is not the faith that constitutes a slipping back into the world of childish dependence on a protective father figure. Instead, at the end of The Fixer Bok's belief in man's responsibility for the shape and quality of communal life constitutes what an historian of Eastern religions has called a second birth, "a passing beyond the infantile dependence on protective mythical beliefs — an indispensible step to maturation". 36 This stand against the father that Bok symbolically enacts in the dream sequence in which he shoots the Tsar is a necessary step for the hero in mythic literature. Furthermore, it is a necessary prelude to social progress, which Otto Rank believes "is essentially based 31 Carl G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (Boston, 1957), 56-57. 32 This murder can be seen as a symbol of the primeval crime (original sin) for which we all, according to Freud, feel some spontaneous guilt. 33 Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 59. 34 Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Princeton, 1949), 157. 35 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York, 1957), 49. 36 Anand K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism. Quoted in Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Princeton, 1949), 337.

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upon . . . opposition between generations". 37 In this respect, Bok is strikingly different from Frank Alpine and S. Levin. I note in Chapter Three above that Frank Alpine really had no ogre-father to reject. Frank's acceptance of Morris Bober's victim status is a display of that submission Sidney Richman maintains is, for Malamud's heroes, "the only avenue of redemption". 38 In part three of this chapter I indicated that Levin's agreement not to teach college again was a submission to Gerald Gilley, his false father, and constituted a betrayal of his newly discovered obligation to the public sector of life. Otto Rank has found that such submissive behavior is not redemptive but rather characteristic of the paranoic: "[W]hereas the paranoic, in conformity to his passive character, has to suffer persecutions and wrongs which ultimately proceed from the f a t h e r , . . . the anarchist complies more faithfully with the heroic character by promptly himself becoming the persecutor of kings, and finally killing the king, precisely like the hero." 39 In Rank's terms, then, Frank Alpine and S. Levin are passive paranoiacs with persecution complexes and Yakov Bok is a political anarchist, and true hero, who wants to kill the king. Some would say that this is what happens to a good novel like The Assistant when you turn it over to a Freudian analyst; such an observation is not without some validity. Yet The Fixer does seem to call into question the moral framework of The Assistant, the humanistic belief that makes Frank Alpine and Morris Bober admirable, perhaps even tragic, figures because they suffer for others. At the end of The Fixer, Yakov Bok calls for revolution not submission. The development of Yakov Bok's political consciousness necessarily excludes his return or conversion to an institutional religion, for these have traditionally supported the kind of authoritarian political structure that has imprisoned Bok. In addition, the revolt against the Tsar, a tyrannical father, naturally arises out of brotherhood and the shared social responsibility of democratic government. Freud has explained the shift from monarchy to democracy, in Darwinian terms, as a change in society from "the father horde to [the] brother clan". 40 This kind of political change usually is accomplished 37 Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (New York, 1932), 68. 38 Sidney Richman, Bernard Malamud, United States Authors Series (New York, 1965), 42. 39 Rank, 95. 40 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York, 1946), 200.

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through violent revolution and results in the killing of the king (symbolic father/god-authority figure). Perhaps Western institutional Christianity has resisted the democratic (or brother-clan) concept because it implicitly challenges its own hierarchical organization. In any case, the revolt that Bok calls for at the end of The Fixer, though it is essentially a political one, has inescapable religious implications because of the persecution that has victimized Bok. Though Bok may suffer like other Malamud heroes, he never submits as they do. The comparison between Bok and Christ as suffering heroes that is suggested by the mythic structure of The Fixer ironically emphasizes the challenge the novel implicitly offers to the Christian concept of suffering. Thematically the novel says that passive submission to suffering necessarily involves acquiescence to the injustices of the social and political system from which the suffering arises, as well as the religious institutions associated with and supporting that system. Bok belongs to the tradition of heroes who, together with their brothers, revolt against a tyrannical father-figure from an "idea of shared responsibility". 4 1 But before Bok — the unpolitical man, the selfish fixer in flight from the past, the thrall of all kinds of fears and anxieties — can undertake so heroic a role, he must be driven almost to the edge of madness. The ordeal in loneliness is necessary to accomplish the heroic transformation. Joseph Campbell describes the preparation of the hero this way: he must "retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there . . . clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i.e. give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C.G. Jung [in Psychology and Religion] has called 'the archetypal images' ". 4 2 This is indeed the importance of Bok's prison experience. He has nothing to do there but suffer and think. Bok reads Spinoza and thinks about Freedom and Necessity. He rejects the God of the shtetl, who "goes running around with the Law in both hands" (p. 67), and accepts Spinoza's God, who is synonymous with Nature. But Bok is also aware of "something called necessity" which seems to make freedom impossible, though Bibikov tells Bok that Spinoza was determined "to make a free man out of him41 42

Geza Roheim, "Myth and Folktale",American Imago, II (1941), 279. Campbell, 17-18.

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self' (p. 67). Early in Bok's imprisonment Bibikov had explained to him that Spinoza "also thought a man was freer when he participated in the life of society than when he lived in solitude as he [Spinoza] himself did. He thought that a free man in society had a positive interest in promoting the happiness and . . . emancipation of his neighbors" (p. 68). 43 Bok's disclaimer of responsibility ("let those who can worry about the ins and outs of politics") elicits this question from Bibikov: "Have you ever heard the expression 'Historical Necessity'?" (p. 68). This idea, planted earlier in Bok's mind, is the very one he choses, though in a slightly altered phrase, to explain to himself what the religious idea of destiny might mean. "Was that the word for God, inexorable Necessity?" (p. 254). Bibikov also asked Bok how "life could be better than it is . . . if not in politics or through it?" (p. 69). 44 Bok has no ready answer. His imprisonment, however, leads him into becoming "— who would have thought it — a public person" (p. 254). Eventually Bok realizes that, once he left the womblike shelter of the shtetl, he was out in the open where it rains and "snows history which means what happens to somebody starts in a web of events outside the personal" (p. 255). Once history ("the world's bad memory"[p. 255]) snowed on a man, he was no longer the same person. The new Bok still resists his suffering, but no longer for selfish reasons. He will suffer, since he cannot avoid it anyway, for his fellow Jews who are victims of religious persecution and for his fellow Russians who labor under political oppression; but he will not accept suffering as having some vicarious mystical value, and he resolves to resist those who unjustly impose it. When the public prosecutor tries to persuade Bok to confess in order to prevent a pogrom (though it is likely that Bok's confession would have just the opposite effect), he is exasperated by Bok's stubborn refusal and finally shouts, "I appeal to your humanitarian impulses" (p. 245). With that appeal Grubeshov ironically unmasks not only his own inhuman behavior but calls into question the kind of humanism that believes suffering has a redemptive value that can be transferred from the sufferer to others. 43 Cf. Malamud's own remark that if The know what it is about". Haskel Fiankel, Saturday Review (Sept. 10, 1966), 39. 44 Remarking in the same interview cited the importance of politics: "Every man freedom?"

Fixer "is not about freedom, I don't "Interview with Bernard Malamud", in note 43 above, Malamud affirmed must be political or where is your

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Bok's newly-acquired political consciousness has shown him that it is necessary to shift resistance from suffering itself to those who impose it. In the final dream sequence, as Bok rides to his trial and imagines that he is in the presence of Tsar Nicholas, it is the Tsar who becomes the spokesman for the value of suffering. "Surely it [suffering] has taught you the meaning of mercy?" Bok's reply: "[W]hat suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering" (p. 270). Bok then proceeds to reproach the Tsar for "with all good intentions" presiding over "the poorest and most reactionary state in Europe. In other words, you've made out of this country a valley of bones. You had your chances and pissed them away" (p. 270). Then Bok shoots and kills the Tsar with this reflection on man's collective past: "As for history . . . there are ways to reverse it " (p. 271). Historical necessity is not so necessary perhaps as Bibikov and Spinoza thought it was. The past necessarily determines the present to some extent, but the present situation can be significantly altered for the sake of the future. The process of alteration necessarily involves assuming responsibility for making life better than it is not just for oneself but for everyone. Bok's discovery that "there's no such thing as an unpolitical man", includes the realization that passivity is no good: "where there's no fight for it there's no freedom . . . . If the state acts in ways that are abhorrent to human nature it's the lesser evil to destroy it. Death to the anti-Semites! Long live revolution! Long live liberty! " (p. 271). The lesson of The Fixer is simple and obvious; it demonstrates that the "process of moral and spiritual regeneration inevitably entails the transmutation of the private personality into political s e l f ' . 4 5 Such an inevitability underscores the limited nature of the spiritual regeneration of Frank Alpine and S. Levin, and it makes the endings of The Assistant and A New Life reverberate, in retrospect, with much greater ambiguity than they had when viewed in their own terms. Critics have generally admired The Fixer because its hero, Yakov Bok, is a man "willingly creating his own responsibilities". 4 6 Granville Hicks sees Bok as representing "not only the martyrs of Belsen and

45 Giles B. Gunn, "Bernard Malamud and the High Cost Of Living", Nathan B. Scott, ed„ Adversity and Grace (Chicago, 1968), 79. 46 Tony Tanner, "Bernard Malamud and the New Life", Critical Quarterly, X ( 1 9 6 8 ) , 165.

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Auschwitz but all victims of man's inhumanity", 47 because "Yakov has learned not only to endure . . . but to resist". 48 Reviewers, however, especially in the liberal journals, were not as kind. George Elliott was critical of The Fixer because "the note of hope" on which it ends is based on politics rather than metaphysics. "If our only hope for redemption in this world is through political means, we have no hope . . . ,"4i> V.S. Pritchett, for his part, found much to admire in the novel, but concluded that its discovery that "meekness is a corrupting virtue" was nothing more than "self-regarding" philosophy. 50 Stephen Farber complained that the philosophical monologues were The Fixer's worst passages because they did not belong to "the consciousness of an ignorant handyman". 51 These opinions only revealed the prejudices of the reviewers and none of them were supported by arguments cogent enough to deserve refutation. V.S. Pritchett has expressed his liking for the uncertainty of The Fixer's ending. "We long for Bok to win [his acquittal in court], but we also hope he will not, for his strength lies in his tragedy." 52 This remark is like Sidney Richman's coupling of responsibility and defeat as inevitably and admirably joined together. There is something perverse in all of that; it arises from the unhappy ending syndrome that, in the name of realism I suppose, has replaced the happy ending syndrome that Hollywood has made so distasteful. It is self-indulgent, I think, to prefer tragedy because it furnishes the reader with a Promethean hero who is magnificent in defeat and who satisfies a desire to experience "tragic feeling". Malamud's refusal to reveal the actual outcome of Bok's trial saves the novel from becoming a political tract and elevates The Fixer from history to fable. The reader's attention is shifted away from the social fact (though he never forgets it) to the important change that has taken place in the individual attitude of Yakov Bok. Tony Tanner holds that "the inconclusiveness of the

47 Granville Hicks, "One Man to Stand for Six Million", Saturday Review (Sept. 10, 1966), 37. 48 Hicks, 39. 49 George P. Elliott, "Yakov's Ordeal", New York Times Book Review (Sept. 4, 1966), 26. so V. S. Pritchett, "A Pariah", New York Review of Books (Sept. 22, 1966), 8. 51 Stephen Farber, "The Fixer", The Hudson Review, XXII (Spring, 1969), 137. 52 V.S. Pritchett, "A Pariah", 10.

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fable is surely the most important assertion of superiority over the conclusiveness of history". 53 The Fixer,therefore, succeeds in combining realism and symbolism in a remarkable historical fable. "Malamud straddles Marxian and Jungian archetypes: the proletarian hero winning justice for society, with the mythic hero renewing life for the community." 54 But the mythic hero wins life for the community only by the ultimate ego-denial of his own death. Whereas in myth we confess that only death can end the tragic ambivalence of human nature, in fable eros triumphs. 55 As Maud Bodkin has explained, the archetypal pattern of the life of the mythic hero (like Christ with whom Bok is compared) "depends on a certain organization of the tendencies of self-assertion and submission". 56 The mythic hero asserts himself, undergoes his ordeal which teaches him to deny his ego, submits to death, and then returns (resurrected) to the community bringing them the promise of an after-life if they will imitate his submission to suffering and death. Such mythic figures ritually confirm the values of the community for which they serve as heroes. 57 Yakov Bok, as a revolutionary, does not follow this pattern and thereby denies to the liberal reviewer, with his peculiarly masochistic brand of humanism, the tragic hero whom he longs to admire. I do not wish to imply here that there is no room for a tragic view of life. Indeed, great artists have had such a view. 58 What I am criticizing is the self-indulgent desire to experience tragic feelings that can lead a reviewer, who finds defeat admirable and suffering noble, either to make every hero a tragic one or to complain when the author has not 53 Tony Tanner, "Bernard Malamud and the New Life", 167. 54 Max F. Schulz, "Bernard Malamud's Mythic Proletarians", Radical Sophistication (Athens, 1969), 57. Schulz maintains that this is true of all Malamud's novels, but I find it a convincing description only of The Fixer. 55 Geza Roheim, "Myth and Folktale", American Imago, II (1941), 279. 56 Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (London, 1934), 23. 57 Marcuse has explained how the West's adoption of heroes like Prometheus and Christ has perpetuated the values of suffering and defeat and how this arises from a fear of death (see also in this respect Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death). He suggests that, had erotic heroes like Orpheus and Narcissus been adopted instead, Western culture would have been totally different - nonrepressive and free from the dominance of Thanatos. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York, 1961), 130-156. 58 Cf. Yeats's remark that a man does not begin to understand life until he sees it as tragic. This view has been admirably explained in Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life.

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seen fit to do so. But more is as stake in literature than pleasing the prejudices of reviewers and critics. A novel that is as concerned with history as The Fixer cannot afford to indulge humanistic pieties about the value of suffering while millions of people in the real world are starving. Religious pieties are not much better; prayers will not stave off world famine. As Herbert Muller says in The Uses of the Past, "our only hope lies not in prayer but in more thought, and in more earnest, responsible endeavor". 59 To such endeavor the example and experience of Yakov Bok is a compelling summons.

59

Heibert J. Muller, The Uses of the Past (New York, 1952), 26.

CONCLUSION

This study has not tried to arrive at a final judgment of the stature of Bernard Malamud. He is still a vital writer who will no doubt publish more fiction. My purpose has been to show, within the sufficiently broad focus of four novels, that Malamud consistently employs the same set of techniques in a variety of ways that lend an unfailing interest to what he writes. In addition I have argued that his attitude toward his interrelated themes has undergone a subtle but important alteration. To make the shift from art to idea, I have found it useful to discuss a distinctive thematic motif employed by Malamud to give his themes and techniques a cohesiveness arising naturaliy from an interdependent relationship. Malamud's heroes have had to stand comparison with mythic figures from the long tradition of Western culture. Roy Hobbs showed himself an ironically inappropriate companion to such archetypal heroes as Sir Percival and Achilles; Hobbs even lacked the pathetic or tragic quality of Jay Gatsby. However, the comparison of Morris Bober to Christ and of Frank Alpine to St. Francis suggested by the archetypal pattern discernible in The Assistant, seemed workable and appropriate. As for S. Levin, he bore the most general relationship to his distant prototype Adam. It was the quality of his plight and the details of his situation that prompted the Edenic analogue. Levin more closely resembled Leo Duffy, a mythic hero with only local status in A New Life; and he could not escape repeating Duffy's "failure", though it constituted whatever partial success Levin did achieve. Finally, the parallels drawn between Yakov Bok's suffering in The Fixer and those of Christ as reported in the New Testament was apt and effective. But Bok showed himself an unsubmissive redeemer and, in that respect, presented an ironic contrast with the meek image of Jesus the Gospels give. Though irony is a technique with particular applications in almost

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every part of Malamud's novels, it became a destructive element in The Natural. The comparison of Roy Hobbs to mythic prototypes only drew attention to his incapacity to sustain serious comparison with them. The result was to deprive The Natural of the viability of its serious themes and to undercut the tragic stature which the author seemed to be trying to give Hobbs especially toward the end of the book. Though the particular application of the ironic technique to situations and events abound in The Assistant, the broad comparison between Morris and Christ and Frank and Saint Francis holds up rather well. Of course there is a real gap between Malamud's realistic characters and Christ and Saint Francis with their legendary aura. Thus, all comparisons of this type are ironic to a degree, but not glaringly so in the case of The Assistant. The suggestion, through mythic parallels, that S. Levin, in A New Life, is a latter-day Adam does, however, operate with considerable ironic effect because salvation, in Levin's case, can only come by a reversal of the Edenic motif, by a fall from bogus innocence into a state of grace that can only be gained through transgression of the prohibitions imposed by local deities. By comparing the unsubmissive Yakov Bok with the gentle figure of Christ, Malamud implied in The Fixer an ironic critique of one of the central values implied by his archetypal experience. Throughout the four novels, Malamud's various heroes have been virtual orphans in flight from the limitations of their past and in quest of a new life. Each of them, whether wittingly or not, has been in search of an authentic spiritual father after whom they might model themselves. Each of these spiritual fathers has exemplified for the respective Malamud protagonist the need for denying the ego, transcending selfishness, and accepting responsibility for contributing to a better life for others as well as for themselves. In so far as each Malamud protagonist learns this lesson, he achieves viable status as a modern anti-hero — his 'success' proclaiming the value of ordinary life. Roy Hobbs failed to discover his true father in Pop Fisher, followed the advice of an ogre-figure and betrayed his heroic status by succumbing to the meretricious lure of false success. Frank Alpine, in choosing to repeat the failure of Morris Bober, achieved a form of success by transcending his egotistical longing for a new life for himself and by devoting himself to the life of service to family and community exemplified by his Christ-like spiritual father. For S. Levin, to succeed was somehow to pattern his life after the failed career of Leo Duffy, a character who served a double role in A New Life, as both

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symbolic father to and local mythic prototype for the romantic and hapless English instructor of Cascadia College. From the example of Duffy, Levin learned to extend himself in order to better conditions in a local socio-political context; his failure consisted not in his loss of a departmental election to Gerald Gilley but in his acceding to Gilley's demand that he abandon college teaching and thereby compromise the role of broader responsibility he had lately learned to shoulder. This surrender Yakov Bok refused to make in The Fixer. The words and example of Bibikov, Bok's spiritual father, were not lost on the imprisoned Jewish handyman. Bok risked becoming a revolutionary rather than acquiesce to the sufferings caused by the political system in czarist Russia at the turn of the century; he thereby exemplified the broadest kind of human responsibility. Like Frank Alpine and S. Levin, Yakov Bok discovered a true father who led him to assume the paternal role by adopting someone else's child. This was an emblem in the novels not only of ego-denial but of compassionate maturity. Thus far, the thematic positions of the four novels would appear to be relatively the same. Part of the purpose of this study, however, has been to show that, in the theme of suffering, the novels display a gradually changing attitude that does not fully emerge until The Fixer. In the context of The Natural, Roy Hobbs is a moral failure because he refuses to learn from his suffering that submission of the ego is necessary for mature heroic status. Frank Alpine and S. Levin achieve moral success by accepting material failure. Passivity is seen, in The Assistant and A New Life, as an admirable quality because it leads to loving self-sacrifice. Yet there is at the end of these novels a lingering ambiguity. Frank's circumcision has a masochistic quality; perhaps he is denying himself too much. S. Levin, in submitting to Gilley's demand that he abandon his college teaching career, seems to be denying the responsibility he had earlier assumed. In the conclusion to A New Life the values of passive suffering and mature responsibility seem, in one sense at least, to be implicitly opposed. In The Fixer they are in open conflict. Yakov Bok learns that acquiescing to the conditions that inflict suffering is no way to exercise compassionate concern for others. Suffering is not something Bok is willing to accept; suffering in his experience has a political and social dimension that demands that it be resisted or removed. Throughout this study I have paused in each chapter to indicate how its topic was related to the previous one; in the latter three

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chapters I tried to indicate from time to time, how the themes of Malamud were related to his characteristic techniques through a central symbolic motif. This connection between art and idea bears restating. The use of the mythic method, with its generally ironic effect, has been an appropriate technique, in Malamud's novels, measuring the relative success of protagonists who search for spiritual fathers to teach them the way to a new life. Malamud's heroes, like all their mythic prototypes, have found that, in following the paternal example and assuming the paternal role themselves, suffering of one kind or another is usually involved. Though the final attitude toward suffering has not been uniform among them, the element of pain has been constant for all. Thus, the novelistic expression in each of the four novels examined in detail above has been characterized by a unity between approach and statement, a congeniality between themes and the artistic techniques employed to embody them in credible characters and situations. The father-son motif that made up so much of each novel's texture has threaded art to idea and contributed significantly to the unity of The Natural, The Assistant, A New Life, and The Fixer. Malamud has said, "Life is not totally comprehensible. Imagination is required." 1 To the task of novelistic composition, Malamud has brought a generous gift of imagination. Through his art he has shown that certain moral attitudes can make life, if not comprehensible, at least not totally meaningless, and perhaps even rewarding.

i Joseph Wershba, "Not Horror, but 'Sadness' ", New York Post Magazine (Sept. 14, 1958).

APPENDIX: THE ARTIST IN HELL

Critical response to the Fidelman stories when they appeared in Malamud's earlier collections1 was not notably favorable. Sidney Richman has singled out "Still Life" and "Naked Nude" as among Malamud's worst stories.2 The Italian setting was thought by some critics to be uncongenial to Malamud, who, as an urban Jew, was supposed to stick to his familiar terrain — the lower east side of New York City. When the five Fidelman stories (with a previously unpublished sixth) were issued as one book in 1969 under the title Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition, critical opinion clearly had not changed much. ¡Catherine Jackson, reviewing for Harper's, found that Fidelman invited comparison with Gully Jimson of The Horse's Mouth, but she thought Fidelman less interesting and less credible than Joyce Cary's picaro-artist. "His [Fidelman's] insatiable dedication to his art, his inability to say No to life, are interesting and no doubt in some sense admirable, but devoid as they are of any common sense judgment one tires of the endless troubles they get him into." 3 Anatole Broyard's review in New York Times Book Review4 and the 1 Of the six parts of Pictures of Fidelman, five appeared first in journals: "Last Mohican" in Partisan Review, Spring, 1958; "Still Life" in Partisan Review, Winter, 1962; "Naked Nude" in Playboy, August, 1963; "A Pimp's Revenge" in Playboy, February, 1968; and "Pictures of the Artist" in Atlantic, December, 1968. The first three parts were also published in Malamud's short story collections: "Last Mohican" was included in The Magic Barrel (1958); "Still Life" and "Naked Nude" were both included in Idiots First (1963). All six parts ("Glass Blower of Venice" the only one previously unpublished) were issued in 1969 under the title Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition. 2 Sidney Richman, Bernard Malamud (New York, 1965), 141. 3 Katherine Gauss Jackson, untitled review of Pictures of Fidelman, Harpers Magazine (June, 1969), 92. 4 Anatole Broyard, "Pictures of Fidelman", New York Times Book Review (May 4, 1969), 4.

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reviews in Time5 and Newsweek6 were also largely negative. Only Robert Scholes' review-criticism7 in Saturday Review offered unqualified praise with a persuasive analysis to support it. The following discussion of the book will be undertaken in two sections: the first devoted to an analysis of its form, the second to its central character and dominant themes.

1

The form of Pictures of Fidelman is a departure for Malamud, although it is by no means a literary innovation. Books of interrelated short stories have been published by several authors within the last half-century or so. Yet Pictures of Fidelman seems to be more than a collection of loosely related fragments like Joyce's Dubliners, for example, or Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples. It bears a remarkable resemblance in form to John Updike's recent collection of related stories, Bech: A Book,8 One might describe Pictures of Fidelman as a picaresque chronicle of the misadventures of an American artist manqué 9 who comes to Italy in quest of his vocation and in search of love. In my opinion Pictures of Fidelman may be considered a novel in the broad sense that Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or William Faulkner's The Unvanquished have been called novels. The parts of these books may stand as independent short stories, but there is a definite sense in which they belong together, between the covers of the same book, to form "a self-contained narrative". 1 0 Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition is an apt title for the book and offers a clue to determining its form. The book is like an exhibition of pictures, each story an image of Arthur Fidelman, "frozen in some crucial posture, on his way to an esthetic Calvary. The stories are, in a sense, six comic Stations of the Cross." 11 — another set of s Time (May 9, 1969), 108. 6 Newsweek (May 5, 1969), 110. 7 Robert Scholes, "Portrait of the Artist as 'Escape-Goat' Saturday Review (May 10, 1969), 32-34. 8 John Updike, Bech: A Book (New York, 1969). 9 Jonathan Baumbach, "Malamud's Heroes", Commonweal, LXXXV (1966), 99, 10 Jackson, 93. 11 Scholes, 32.

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graphic illustrations of a hero's defeat. Malamud himself considered the book to be a novel in a loosely picaresque fashion: "a loose novel, a novel of episodes, like a picaresque piece". 1 2 Malamud specifically approved of Robert Scholes' review of Pictures 13 (though Scholes never calls it a novel) in which Scholes describes the book as a "panel of pictures reminiscent of Hogarth" which sets forth Fidelman's progress "down and out — to salvation". 14 Nevertheless, Pictures of Fidelman is a unique kind of novel. Its loosely episodic structure, the variety of its narrative styles, the "set piece" quality of the first two stories especially — all serve to set it apart from Malamud's four other single-unit prose narrative books. I have it from Malamud himself that the Fidelman stories were not originally conceived of as novelistic whole (as, for example, Faulkner's The Unvanquished surely was). After "Last Mohican" was first written, Malamud considered extending the saga of Fidelman "writing stories from time to time". He roughly sketched in outline form Fidelman's further adventures, complete with resolution and denouement. Sometime early, probably while he was composing "Naked Nude", Malamud began thinking of publishing additional stories (as yet uncomposed), along with the earlier Fidelman pieces, as a single work. With this purpose in mind, he did not issue the last story, "Glass Blower of Venice", first in a journal publication because he did not want to reveal the book's ending. 1 5 This description of the origin and growth of the Fidelman stories accounts in part for the fragmentary nature of the early stories. "Last Mohican" has a finality about it that detracts from the cohesiveness of the entire sequence. The story ends in a kind of tableau on which Fidelman, while chasing Susskind, has "a triumphant insight" (p. 37). 1 6 Whatever that triumphant insight was is not explicitly stated; but there is the suggestion of a reversal of attitude in Fidelman. When "Last Mohican" stood apart as a separate story, it was possible to conclude that Fidelman's insight was that he was in some sense responsible for Susskind (the schnorrer being Malamud's

12 Letter of Bernard Malamud to Robert Ducharme, April 21, 1970. 13 Ibid. 14 Robert Scholes, 33. 15 Letter of Bernard Malamud to Robert Ducharme, April 21, 1970. 16 Bernard Malamud, Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969). All subsequent references are to this edition.

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familiar Jew-as-Everyman figure), that Fidelman would abandon his selfishness and approach life with a different attitude. The appearance of "Still Life" a few years later need not have altered such a conclusion toward the first story. "Still Life" seemed to be a wholly different story about the same character, but there was no reason to conclude that it somehow 'grew out' of the earlier story. Yet when the two stories are read as parts of a related sequence, one discovers in retrospect that Fidelman's triumphant insight had more to do with art than with life and that it was no triumph but a mistake. It becomes clear that Fidelman had apparently learned that being an art critic was all wrong for him; but, instead of taking up a profession for which he was suited, Fidelman returned, in "Still Life", to his previously abandoned attempt to be a painter. The total futility of this enterprise does not emerge unmistakably, however, until "A Pimp's Revenge", although Fidelman's comically lustful pursuit of his landlady in "Still Life" showed that he had not learned the lesson of unselfishness that one might have concluded was his triumphant insight at the end of "Last Mohican". Whatever confusion may have arisen from reading "Last Mohican" when it first appeared can be attributed to its publication as a selfcontained piece. If it still retains some ambiguity within the present sequence, this probably arises as much from the nature of the conception as from a reader's earlier experience of it. Variety in style does not necessarily fragment a work; after all, one section of Ulysses is written in a spectrum of styles that covers most of the changes in narrative diction in the history of the English language. Yet style is one element of unity in a long prose narrative; it lends cohesiveness to a book. A novel seems to demand a consistent style. An interrelated sequence of stories should forgo consistency of diction only for indispensible artistic effect; otherwise, the unity of the work is imperiled and its claims to the status of a novel are compromised. The first two stories of Pictures of Fidelman are written in the past tense, in the narrative manner of Malamud's other short stories — a combination of lyric symbolism and a slangy realism of diction. "Naked Nude", however, shifts into the present tense, 1 7 and the diction becomes terse, more sinewy. "A Pimp's Revenge" 17 This is a change from the original casting of the story in the past tense. "Naked Nude" contains numerous other stylistic additions and deletions of text; but these do not alter the basic conception of the story.

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returns to the past tense, and Fidelman is referred to, throughout the story, as merely " F " . In this story, for the first time in the sequence, there is a sense of place. Fidelman goes to the marketplace, he accompanies his whore to the public square, he visits a woodcraft shop and picture galleries; all these scenes are reported with some vividness of detail. Though the book is called an exhibition of pictures, visual elements have been barely detectable in the first three stories. Voice has been the really distinguishing element of character; there has been little attempt to create a recognizably Italian setting. Though Fidelman has responded to the historical panorama of Rome, the reader has not been given much help in visualizing just what Fidelman is responding to. Toward the end of " A Pimp's Revenge", the narrative switches from the past to the present tense, for no discernible reason and returns to the past tense once more after three and a half pages (pp. 138-141). "Pictures of the Artist", the fifth part of the book, is Fidelman's journey through the underworld. The style is surrealistic and highly comic. Past and present tenses mix freely. A mock Biblical diction is employed to narrate a Hawthorne-like exemplary parable: Fidelman as fabled earth-sculptor. Disconnected sections present wildly improbable scenes of Susskind as Savior and Fidelman as Judas; dream-like evocations of Fidelman's subconscious hopes and fears, all grotesquely twisted, are juxtaposed to ridiculous images of outlandish paintings: "Oil on wood. Bottle fucking guitar? Bull impaled on pole? One-eyed carp stuffed in staring green bottle? Clown spooning dog dung out of sawdust? Staircase ascending a nude?" (p. 167). This story climaxes in Fidelman's hearing Susskind's voice speak to him from a lightbulb as Fidelman in a loincloth (a latter-day Michaelangelo) paints geometrical designs on the ceiling and walls of a subterranean cave. The distinct style of this fifth story — reminiscent of the night-town section of Ulysses — effectively communicates the quality of Fidelman's nightmare journey through his subconscious. The comic surrealism is liberating and appropriate; the stylistic pecularities in "Naked Nude" and "A Pimp's Revenge", however, do not seem to serve as obviously useful a purpose and are, therefore, open to the charge of being idiosyncratic. The sixth story, "Glass Blower of Venice", returns to a straight narrative approach, the past tense used throughout. As this story moves to a climax, a warm lyricism — that occasionally relieved the stark realism of The Assistant — returns to Malamud's style.

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To summarize, Pictures of Fidelman gets off to a jerky start with "Last Mohican". The fragmentary quality diminishes in the next story and virtually disappears in the third. The last three stories, which were composed closely together, have an unmistakable cohesiveness of tone and a smooth narrative line that flows naturally from story to story. 18 Though an inconsistency of style among the six stories detracts somewhat from the unity of Pictures of Fidelman, the book is held together by its focus on the same main character, Arthur Fidelman, by the Italian setting, and the recurrent appearance of Susskind both as a real character and as a moral image in Fidelman's imagination. The book's unity of theme will be discussed below. The elements of character, setting, and theme that serve to unify Pictures of Fidelman may be used as arguments to support the position that the book is indeed a novel. It is clear, however, that Pictures of Fidelman is not the same kind of novel as The Assistant is, for example. It does not have the mythic undergirding employed by Malamud as a characteristic element of form in his four previous novels. Pictures of Fidelman may represent only a single departure in technique for Malamud; future publications must decide that question. All novels, of course, are made up, more or less, of episodic parts. But in the conventional, extended prose narrative verbal devices and structural strategies are used to weld those parts together; in the best novels the literary glue does not show. When a writer chooses not to unify the parts of a book with connectives, to leave them as it were sitting together side by side but not touching, he must rely on theme, character, style, and setting to make his work cohesive. As I have shown, Malamud does not use style to any great extent as a unifying device; he seems purposely to avoid doing so, prefering to employ an unfettered mixture of styles for local effects. It has also been remarked by critics of Malamud's short fiction that the Fidelman stories lack a sense of place, have no vivid quality in their Italian setting. Perhaps necessarily because of the way Pictures of Fidelman grew from one or two stories with a common hero to a related sequence with novelistic aspirations, the mythic method did not suggest itself as an appropriate unifying structural device. All this leaves only theme and character as

is "I can say without reservation that the last three stories were written in a short time of each other because I saw the book as a picaresque novelistic whole and wanted to complete it". Letter of Bernard Malamud to Robert Ducharme, April 21, 1970.

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possibly strong unifying elements; in the ensuing discussion of the individual stories in Pictures of Fidelman, I hope to show that these two elements do have a strong unifying effect.

2 The themes of Pictures of Fidelman are Malamud's familiar themes of suffering and responsibility; related to both of these are the quest for a meaningful life and the search for love. Fidelman19 is a quintessential Malamud hero, the irrepressible schlemiel. "There is in him something of both Alpine and Bober, but he is in his vulnerable good will and poverty closer perhaps to Bober." 20 If his vulnerable good will suggests Morris Bober, his experiertce closely parallels Frank Alpine's: "The curve of Frank's experience is paralleled by that of Arthur Fidelman — from the frustrations of a bungler ("The Last Mohican") through the captivity of sexual bewitchment ("Still Life") to the iron jaws of imprisonment ("Naked Nude") where Fidelman is held prisoner by gangsters in a whorehouse . . . ." 2 1 As "Last Mohican" 22 begins, Fidelman has just arrived in Rome with the announced purpose of beginning a year of research and writing for a work of art criticism devoted to the paintings of Giotto. The reader soon suspects that Fidelman's change of locale has other motivations. Like so many of Malamud's heroes, Fidelman's search for a meaningful life is symbolized in a journey motif; this journey will be continued figuratively and literally as Fidelman wanders from town to town in Italy, from story to story in the book. Fidelman is met upon his arrival in Rome by one Shimon Susskind, a schnorrer (artful beggar) who pesters the art critic for a suit. Susskind is the title

Malamud's use of the name Fidelman, undoubtedly stems in part from the fact that it was his mother's maiden name. (Marjorie Dent Candee, editor, Current Biography, (1958, 271). It may also refer ironically to the fact that its bearer in his stories has an inordinant amount of faith in his artistic ability and displays fidelity to his pursuit of perfection in his work and his life that sustains him throughout his comic adventures. 20 Charles A. Hoyt, "Bernard Malamud and the New Romanticism", Contemporary American Novelists, Harry T. Moore, ed. (Carbondale, 1964), 72. 21 Robert Alter, "Malamud as Jewish Writer", Commentary, XLII (1966), 73. 22 The story was originally entitled "The Last Mohican", but the "The" was Fidelman. dropped when the story was incorporated into Pictures of

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character of this story, "the last honest man, honest to art and to conscience". 23 When Fidelman refuses to give Susskind a suit, the schnorrer steals the art critic's brief case which contains the first chapter of his book on Giotto. Now the pursuer becomes the pursued, and in a curious reversal of roles Fidelman seeks an elusive Susskind. The schnorrer had earlier followed "the pedantic art critic through Rome like the shadow of a history Fidelman has forgotten in pursuit of a history he hardly understands". 2 4 But when he cannot find Susskind, Fidelman's earlier sense of history ("It was an inspiring business, he, Arthur Fidelman, after all, born a Bronx boy, wallowing around in all this history." [p. 12]) undergoes an important change. As he wanders through the Jewish ghetto, in and out of synagogues, through a cemetery (with stones commemorating the deaths of Jews killed by the Nazi's), Fidelman is no longer exhilarated but "oppressed by history" (p. 29). He finally discovers Susskind selling rosaries on the steps of St. Peter's, an ironic parallel to Fidelman's earlier activity as an art critic searching into an alien past; in his pursuit of Susskind (the European Jew, refugee even from Israel), Fidelman is seeking the "real missing chapter of his own past s e l f ' . 2 5 Earlier in the story when Susskind was importuning him for some capital to start a small business, Fidelman had refused with this question: "Am I responsible for you then, Susskind?" "Who else?" Susskind loudly replied. "Lower your voice please, people are sleeping around here," said Fidelman, beginning to perspire. "Why should I be?" "You know what responsibility means?" "I think so." "Then you are responsible. Because you are a man. Because you are a Jew, aren't you?" (p. 16) 23 Samuel I. Bellman, "Woman, Children, and Idiots First: The Transformational Psychology of Bernard Malamud", Critique, VII (1965), ii: 130. Bellman points out the similarity of this story to one by Samuel Yellen entitled "Reginald Pomfret Skelton", which appeared in the Spring, 1955 issue of Antioch Review. Skelton is described in the story as a man who "belonged to the Last Tribe, those scholars cut off, alien, adrift, growing fewer month by month, a vanished race like the early American Indians" (quoted in Bellman, 130). Susskind is described in "Last Mohican" as "standing motionless, like a cigar store Indian about to burst into flight" (pp. 8-9). 24 Mark Goldman, "Bernard Malamud's Comic Vision and the Theme of Identity", Critique, VII (1965), ii: 101. 25 Ibid.

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This exchange comes immediately to the reader's mind at the end of the story when Fidelman spontaneously gives his suit to Susskind with no request for his missing chapter, declaring "all is forgiven". When Malamud declares in the final paragraph that Fidelman "moved by all he had lately learned, had a triumphant insight" (p. 37), the reader is prepared to conclude that Fidelman has at last understood his responsibility for Susskind as a representative figure of suffering mankind. Marc Ratner points out that, while studying Giotto's painting, Fidelman had overlooked its meaning; but, after a search for Susskind has resulted in an apparent change in attitude toward the historical catalogue of human suffering, Fidelman thinks of Giotto's painting of St. Francis giving his clothes to a poor man (p. 36) and immediately stuffs his suit into a bag and runs out to find Susskind. 26 From all this the critic Samuel Bluefarb concludes that "Susskind the poor schnorrer proves to be the means by which Fidelman finds his own awakening; from Esthete . . . , Fidelman finally comes to see in the suffering of a Susskind Beggar, the root of all suffering, including his own perhaps." 2 7 But that does not prove to be the case in the ensuing two stories. In "Still Life" Fidelman, abandoning the role of critic, has undertaken again the profession of painter. He is lodging with Annamaria Oliovino, also a painter, after whom he lusts mightily. But Fidelman is an ineffectual Prufrock figure for the most part; he approaches his old career with "many indecisions, enunciations and renunciations" (p. 39). 2 8 He is capable of a kind of love, "but his tragedy is that he bestows it on an unworthy object". 2 9 But Fidelman's love is selfish 26 Ratner takes Susskind's question "Why is art?" as an allusion to Tolstoy's essay "What is art?" In this essay Tolstoy explains that real ait transmits a moral message to the beholder through the quality of "infectiousness"; this quality enables the beholder to experience the state of mind of the artist. Ratner maintains that Giotto's painting of St. Francis had this kind of an effect on Fidelman, assisted by the catalytic question of Susskind. Marc Ratner, "Style and Humanity in Malamud's F i c t i o n M a s s a c h u s e t t s Review, V (1964), 668. 27 Samuel Bluefarb, "BernardMalamud: The Scope of Caricature", English Journal, LIII (1964), 325-6. 28 Lois Lewin has noted another Eliotic echo in "Naked Nude". Fidelman asks himself as he contemplates the audacious ploy of stealing his own painting, "Can I do i t . . . . Do I dare?" Lois Lewin, "Themes of suffering in the Novels of Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow", Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1967, 56. 29 Lewin, 57.

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too, a gnawing lust that "blocks his creative energy as an artist". 3 0 When it occurs to Fidelman to paint Annamaria as Virgin with Child, her sentimental vanity is so touched that she agrees to go to bed with him; but the scene ends in a comic premature emission of Fidelman's seed and with the pittrice's enraged cry "Pig, beast, onanist!" (p. 58). "In the final scene, dressed as a priest, [Fidelman], . . gives the guilt-ridden Annamaria [She had once drowned a bastard child; thence arises one of the title's ironies] absolution, penance, and expiation" through sexual intercourse. 31 Though the comic quality of this final tableau (with Fidelman in priestly biretta pumping the ecstatic penitent) is undeniable, it is clear that the moral curve of Fidelman's progress in these fictional pictures is downward.. Susskind — whose recurrent image functions symbolically to remind Fidelman of his moral responsibility — appears but briefly in "Still Life": "Almost in panic he [Fidelman] sketched in charcoal a coattailed 'Figure of a Jew Fleeing' and quickly hid it away" (p. 48). Again in the next story, Susskind is briefly glimpsed as a "long-coated figure loosely dangling from a gallows rope amid Fidelman's other doodles. Who but Susskind, surely. A dim figure out of the past" (p. 70). In "Naked Nude", the third story of the sequence, Fidelman is held captive by the keepers of a brothel. When it is discovered that he is an artist, the padrone and his male lover persuade Fidelman to fake a painting of the Venus Urbino, to be left in a nearby gallery in place of the authentic painting which they plan to steal. Though Fidelman has misgivings because he considers the enterprise artistically dishonest, he is persuaded to cooperate when promised his freedom if he succeeds in producing a good likeness. To help him in this undertaking, Fidelman is allowed to visit the gallery where the original hangs. He falls in love with the image of the Venus and returns to his prison to make a copy of the Urbino painting. The painting is a success and Fidelman falls in love with it. He pursuades his captors to allow him to be one of the two persons sent on the expedition to steal the original; he contrives to have his own copy confused with it and carried off as the authentic Venus. Fidelman then eludes his accomplice and rows off in the night stopping periodically to adore his handiwork by the light of numerous matches (p. 94). Fidelman's refusal to steal may be seen as an implicit rejection of 30

Ratner, 6 8 0 .

31

Ratnei, 6 8 1 .

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the shoddy morality of the brothel keeper, who casuistically argued that "Art steals and so does everybody" (p. 78). Marc Ratner sees Fidelman's painting of the Venus as "representative of his spirit, which heroically survives the brutal oppression of the two gangsters.. . [and] also, perhaps the ultimate symbol of Fidelman's spiritual progress through these stories". 32 Ratner made this remark without benefit of the latter three stories, and his conclusion, because premature, is inaccurate. It should be remembered that Fidelman's theft of his own work has been motivated by self-love as much as anything; and it is selflessness that Fidelman — like Roy Hobbs, Frank Alpine, S. Levin and Yakov Bok before him — needs most to learn. "A Pimp's Revenge" finds Fidelman in Florence, nearly starving in a garret and trying to paint a picture of his mother from an old photograph. By chance one day, Fidelman meets a young whore named Esmeralda on his way to the market, and he is attracted to her. She comes to live with him, mainly to escape Ludovico her pimp, and becomes a virtual servant in Fidelman's shabby apartment. Explaining to Esmeralda why he feels obsessed with painting a picture of his mother, Fidelman says, "I sometimes think that if I could paint such a picture much that was wrong in my life would rearrange itself and add up to more, if you know what I mean" (p. 123). Esmeralda observes that Fidelman's efforts look as though he is trying to paint himself into his mother's arms. To a large extent this is true. Besides the Oedipal implications in this enterprise, Fidelman is trying to recapture an idealized past, perhaps one that never existed. Like Roy Hobbs he is attracted to an image of past innocence, but, also like Roy, Fidelman has failed to learn from his experience. In his efforts to paint his mother's likeness, Fidelman produces images that sometimes resemble Susskind (p. 114); he has failed to learn that he is neither critic nor painter. In "Still Life" Fidelman's fear of painting Susskind leads him to paint abstractions until he reaches the ultimate, a blank canvas. In "A Pimp's Revenge", his obsession with an idyllic image of his innocent past drives him to paint his mother with himself, as "Madonna and Child". Then Fidelman paints Esmeralda and himself, first as "Brother and Sister", then honestly as "Prostitute and Procurer". This last painting proves successful; Fidelman proclaims it his "most honest piece of work" (p. 142). But Ludovico, Esmeralda's former pimp, has 32

Ratner, 6 8 1 .

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his revenge on Fidelman for subverting his source of income by depriving him of his whore; he tricks the artist into touching up the picture a bit. But in his attempt to make the picture "truer to life", Fidelman ruins it. Esmeralda, enraged, runs at Ludovico with a bread knife. Fidelman twists it out of her hand "and in anguish lifted the blade into his gut" (p. 147). In the fifth story, "Pictures of the Artist", it is obvious that Fidelman's moral descent has now led him to the underworld of his own subconscious. Like Prufrock, Fidelman intones, "If we wake we drown" (p. 149) and plunges into the nightmare world of an outlandish artist's hell. Part of this story is devoted to a quaintly indirect recounting of Fidelman's legendary progress through various Italian towns digging holes in the ground — symbolic graves of his failure as an artist — and passing them off as modern sculpture. From artist as panderer in the previous story, Fidelman has descended to the role of artist as huckster of graveplots. In one dream-like sequence Susskind appears as Christ preaching from a mountaintop, exhorting the practice of love, mercy, and charity. He advises Fidelman "to give up your paints and your brushes and follow me where I go, and we will see what we will see" (p. 163). In a mock sequence of the Last Supper, Fidelman plays the role of Judas and blushes red when Christ/Susskind predicts that one of those seated at table will betray him. A subsequent paragraph bears out the prediction as Fidelman kisses Susskind to identify him for a crowd that has come to take him prisoner. With the pieces of silver that are his reward, Fidelman rushes out to buy paints, brushes, canvas. This betrayal is Fidelman's betrayal of himself. His obsession with being a painter, a role for which he has little talent, has not only led him through a personal hell of degradation but has impelled him to treat people as objects, to exploit the guilt feelings of Annamaria in order to satisfy his lust, to take advantage of the generosity of Esmeralda so that his selfindulgent efforts at painting will not be distracted by the petty concerns of everyday life. The father-son motif, a favorite device of Malamud's, also appears in this story. In an imaginary sequence, a voice (Susskind's) from a lightbulb is heard (an ironic parallel to the divine voice from a cloud) and it urges Fidelman to abandon his obsessive painting in a subterranean cave and go upstairs to say hello to his sister Bessie before she dies. Fidelman remarks, "It's no fault of mine if people die". The lightbulb replies with a warning to remember the pride of the Greeks.

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When Fidelman asks which Greek, this answer is heard: "the one that he tore out his eyes" (p. 173). It seems evident now that Susskind is a kind of spiritual father who had instructed Fidelman earlier on the nature of moral responsibility. Fidelman's spurning of Susskind's advice and his blindly willful resumption of the artist's role amount to a rejection of his spiritual father, a symbolic Oedipal murder (cf. the doodle images in "Naked Nude" of Susskind hanging from a gallows). Likewise, Fidelman's desire to paint himself into his mother's arms reveals an oedipally-oriented flight from life. Susskind is not rejected now as he speaks to Fidelman from the lightbulb. Fidelman's declaration "Be my Virgil" (p. 174) indicates his acceptance of Susskind's spiritual guidance and his willingness to be led, like Dante, out of hell, this one a hell of his own creating. As Fidelman goes upstairs to say hello to his dying sister, he earns by his act of self-denial, the curious redemption that comes to him in the book's final story. "Glass Blower of Venice" finds Fidelman in Venice, "floating city of green and gold canals" (p. 177). Though emerged from the underworld of the tortured self, Fidelman carries on a Charon-like profession as he ferries passengers across the Grand Canal in this symbolic city of the dead. When the floods in January cover the campos adjacent to the canals, Fidelman — in a symbolic St. Christopher role — does his ferrying piggyback. While carrying one "attractive, longnosed, almost oriental-eyed young Venetian woman", (p. 179) Fidelman finds himself with a throbbing groin and an erect penis. Sure that he is in love, he begins a search for the elusive lady in the shops and streets of Venice (echoing his search for Susskind in the first story). One day they meet by chance in a glass trinket shop; both are impassioned, eager for bed. She, Margherita Fassoli, is nevertheless anxious to have Fidelman meet her husband, Beppo, a glass blower, who is very "wise about life" (p. 184). Margherita and Fidelman make love during the daytime when her husband is away at work. Fidelman usually stays on for supper with Beppo with whom he soon becomes fast friends. Fidelman invites the glass blower to his room to see some of his paintings; he had "destroyed most but kept a dozen perhaps justificatory pictures, and a few pieces of sculpture" (p. 193). After thoughtful observation of Fidelman's art, Beppo says "Your work lacks authority and originality . . . . Burn them all" (p. 197). At first angry, Fidelman eventually helps Beppo slash the canvases and dump them in the trash. With Beppo's advice still ringing in his ears ("Don't waste your life

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doing what you can't do." [p. 198]), Fidelman, after a few days, goes to Margherita's bed for comfort. While they are engaged in "violent intercourse", Beppo enters the room naked and aroused; he assaults Fidelman from behind as Margherita slips out from under them and flees. Though salvation through sodomy is an unlikely dénouement to the progress of the artist, that is exactly what Malamud asks the reader to accept here. Even in this wildly improbable scene, the glass blower utters wise words as he impales the terrified Fidelman: "Think of love . . . . You've run from it all your life" (p. 199). Robert Scholes remarks that in his willingness to accept love even from this queer glass blower of Venice, Fidelman accepts the entire flawed universe of his past and of himself. "In the iconography of these pictures, Fidelman's submission to Beppo symbolizes his acceptance of imperfection in existence." 33 Beppo's advice to Fidelman is simply, "If you can't invent art, invent life" (p. 199). At this point the book's epigraphs leap into the mind. Yeats is quoted as affirming that "The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the w o r k . . . " Fidelman contradicts with a curt "Both". But Fidelman ultimately discovers that he can have neither as long as he persist in a profession for which he has little talent. He manages to get both by learning the crafts of love and glass blowing from Beppo, to whom he quickly apprentices himself.

3 The sufferings of most Malamud characters seem like a combination of fate and their own mistakes. Roy Hobbs and S. Levin increase the pain of their misfortunes by failing to learn from past experience and by resisting a responsible form of unselfish love. Morris Bober seems to suffer for no reason other than because he cannot avoid doing so. But he accepts the inevitable and struggles to wrest a meaning from it, passing both the role of sufferer and his own hard-won meaning on to his assistant Frank Alpine. Yakov Bok's suffering is largely imposed from without and the fixer resists it with all his soul. Fidelman's fate, however, seems largely self-created; all his suffering appears to derive 33 Robert Scholes, "Portrait of the Artist as 'Escape-Goat'", Review (May 10, 1969), 34.

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from his wrong choices and his blind and selfish behavior. Thus the amelioration of his fate, though it comes in the form of another's love, is likewise the result of Fidelman's own decision. "Fidelman had never in his life said 'I love you' without reservation to anyone. He said it to Beppo . . . . Better love than no love" (p. 199). This surrender to love leads Fidelman to a totally unselfish act. When Margherita comes to Fidelman begging him not to destroy her marriage with Beppo, the apprentice glass blower agrees to leave his lover and the country; he returns to America and works as a craftsman in glass. Fidelman's denial of self can be seen as an act of higher love that flows out of a broad sense of responsibility for others — although there is no indication in Fidelman of the kind of political consciousness Yakov Bok develops in The Fixer. Like Frank Alpine, Fidelman is an assistant, "assisting for love's sake" (p. 203), and he learns both wisdom and craft from Beppo. Having discovered the limits of his own capabilities, Fidelman now finds perfection both of the life and the work. "In America he worked as a craftsman in glass and loved men and women" (p. 208). The ideas of suffering and responsibility have played a subtle and important thematic counterpoint, throughout Pictures of Fidelwan, to the central character's overriding quest for success in life and art. These themes and the character of Fidelman himself have drawn these stories together into a loose novelistic unity they would not otherwise have. When the Fidelman stories first began to appear, Samuel Bellman recognized the dynamic possibilities of the bumbling artist when he called him a character "constantly growing, realizing himself, transforming his unsatisfactory old life into a more satisfactory new one". 3 4 By finally "abandoning the pretenses of art for the honesty of craftsmanship" 3 5 , and transcending his own selfishness by accepting love, Fidelman manages to reconcile the claims of the head and the heart which were so sorely at variance in "Last Mohican". If some degree of suffering is inescapable in every man's fate, Fidelman has at least learned that it need not be aggravated by foolish behavior and selfish choices. He has also shown that the denial of destructive lust, for the sake of a selfless and responsible love, can in the end lead to a new and better life. 34

Samuel I. Bellman, "Women, Children, and Idiots First: The Transformation Psychology of Bernard Malamud", Critique, VII (1965), ii: 137. 35 Scholes, 34.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES

1. novels Malamud, Bernard, The Natural (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1952). Paperback issued by Dell Publishing Company (New York, 1965). 1 —. The Assistant (New York: Straus and Company, 1957). Paperback issued by New American Library, Signet Edition (New York, 1958). —, A New Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, andCudahy, 1961). Paperback issued by Dell Publishing Company (New York, 1963). —, The Fixer (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966). Paperback issued by Dell Publishing Company (New York, 1967). —, Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969). Paperback issued by Dell Publishing Company (New York, 1970).

2. short story

collections

Malamud, Bernard, The Magic Barrel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1958). Paperback issued by Dell Publishing Company (New York, 1966). , Idiots First (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963). Paperback issued by Dell Publishing Company (New York, 1966).

3. uncollected short stories Malamud, Bernard, "Benefit Performance", Threshold, III (February, 1943), 20-22. , "The Way is Different Now", American Prefaces, VIII (Spring, 1943), 230-242. , "The Man in the Drawer", Atlantic (April, 1968), 70-93.

i Except for Pictures of Fidelman, the paperback editions have been used in this study.

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essays

Malamud, Bernard. "Theme, Content and the 'New Novel' ", New York Times Book Review (March 26, 1967), 2.

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Thompson, Alan Reynolds, The Dry Mock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948). Timmermans, Felix, The Perfect Joy of Saint Francis (New York: Doubleday, 1957). Turner, Frederick W., "Myth Inside and Out: Malamud's The Natural", Novel, I (1968), 133-139. Vickery, John B., Myth and Literature: Contemporary Theory and Practice (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966). Waldmeir, Joseph J., "Quest Without Faith", Nation (Nov. 18, 1961), 390-396. —, ed., Recent American Fiction: Some Critical Views (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1963). , "Only An Occasional Rutabaga: American Fiction Since 1945", Modern Fiction Studies, XV (Winter, 1969-70), iv: 467-481. Wasserman, Earl, "The Natural: Malamud's World Ceres", Centennial Review of Arts and Sciences, IX (1965), 438-460. Weinberg, Helen, The New Novel in America: The Kafkan Mode in Contemporary Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970). Weiss, Samuel A., "Notes on Bernard Malamud", Chicago Jewish Forum, XXI (1966), 155-158. — , "Passion and Purgation in Bernard Malamud", University of Windsor Review, II (1966), i: 93-99. Wershba, Joseph, "Not Horror but 'Sadness' ", New York Post Magazine (Sept. 14, 1958). Widmer, Kingsly, "Poetic Naturalism in the Contemporary Novel", Partisan Review, XXVI (1959), 467-472. —, "The American Road: The Contemporary Novel", University of Kansas City Review, XXVI (1960), 309-317. Williams, Raymond, "Realism and the Contemporary Novel", Partisan Review, XXVI (Spring, 1959), 200-213. Wilson, Colin, The Outsider (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1956). Worcester, David, The Art of Satire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950). 0verland, Orm, "Fengsel og Frihet: Noen Kommentarer til Bernard Malamuds Diktning", Minerva, XIII (1969), i: 113-125.

INDEX

Aldridge, John 92, 93 Alter, Robert 27 Anderson, Sherwood 128 Barsness, John 90 Baumbach, Jonathan 2, 33, 78, 84, 108 Beliss, Mendel 24 Bellman, Samuel 141 Bellow, Saul 5 Bodkin, Maud 8, 121 Booth, Wayne 31 Brown, Norman O. 54 Broyard, Anatole 127 Campbell, Joseph 4, 7, 48, 67, 73, 80, 100 Cassirer, Ernst 6 Chaucer, Geoffrey 24, 58 Chesterton, G. K. 17

Fitzgerald, F. Scott Frazer, Sir James 4, Freud, Sigmund 4, 6 1 , 6 2 , 6 3 , 114, Friedman, Alan 91,

5 7, 8, 9, 54, 69 30, 31, 53, 54, 116 92

Gatsby, Jay 5, 11, 12, 33, 34 Goodheart, Eugene 112 Grene, David 19 Grieff, Louis B. 57, 79, 80 grail motif 9, 10, 20 Hassan, Ihab 2, 61 Hemingway, Ernest 5, 44 Hicks, Granville 13, 119 history & responsibility 98-122 Hyman, Stanly Edgar 87 irony 30-52

Dostoyevsky, F. 39, 51, 80 D u f f y , Joseph 18 Dunne, John 15

Jackson, Katherine Gauss 127 Joyce, James 6, 30, 128 Jung, C . G . 4, 8, 33, 57, 114, 117, 121

Eliot, T. S. 6, 8 , 9 , 5 1 , 8 5 , 9 8 Elliott, George P. 92, 93, 120 Ellmann, Richard 4 3 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 21, 64, 108

Kaplan, Harold 30, 37 Kattan, Nairn 38 Kazin, Alfred 1, 42, 43 Klein, Marcus 2, 34, 67, 84, 85, 103,

108 fathers and sons 53-75 Farber, Stephen 120 Faulkner, Wm. 5, 31, 128 Finkelstein, Sidney 113

Lawrence, D. H. 44 Lewin, Lois 95, 96, 135

INDEX Malamud, Bernard novels: The Natural 9-13, 33-36, 55-58, 78-81, 101-104 The Assistant 13-19, 36-42, 59-64, 81-86, 104-106 A New Life 19-23,42-47,64-69, 87-92, 106-112 The Fixer 23-29, 47-52, 69-75, 92-97, 113-122 Pictures of Fidelman 127-141 form 128-133 ideas 134-141 stories: "Angel Levine" 52, 76-77 "An Apology" 37 "The Bill" 37 "The First Seven Years" 83 "The German Refugee" 48, 100, 101 "Glassblower of Venice" 127, 129, 139-140 "High Cost of Living" 37 "The Lady of the Lake" 32, 48, 101 "Last Mohican" 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 139 "The Mourners" 37 "Naked Nude" 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 139 "Pictures of the Artist" 127, 131, 133, 139 "A Pimp's Revenge" 127, 130, 131, 137 "The Prison" 37 "Still Life" 127, 130,135136,137 "Take Pity" 37 Mandel, Ruth 40, 107, 108 Marcus, Steven 34 Marcuse, Herbert 7, 98, 99, 121 Marx, Karl 121 Mellard, James M. 2, 3, 20, 23, 85 Mudrick, Marvin 43, 92 Muller, Herbert 122 mythic method 5-29

oedipal motif 55, 62, 68, 109, passim Philoctetes 18, 19 Pinsker, Sanford 40 Podhoretz, Norman 1, 10, 93 Pound, Ezra 98 Pritchett, V. S. 73, 120 Rank, Otto 4, 66, 70, 71, 115, 116 Ratner, Marc 41, 78, 135 Richman, Sidney 2, 33, 58, 111, 116, 120,127 Roheim, Geza 4, 7, 32, 53, 54, 61, 6 2 , 6 3 , 6 8 , 117 Roth, Philip 42, 93 Rovit, Earl 5 0 , 5 1 Salinger, J. D. 5 Santayana 109 Scholes, Robert 129, 140 Schultz, Mas 32 Shear, Walter 6 Siegel, Ben 37 Sophocles 9, 31, 77 Sorel, Julian 43 Spengler, Oswald 5, 6, 50 Spinoza 49, 117, 118, 119 Stem, Karl 100 Stem, Milton 92 Stevenson, David 91, 110 suffering 76-97 Tolstoy, Leo 44, 45 Updike, John 128 Wasserman, Earl 33 Waterhouse, Keith 36 Waugh, Evelyn 36 Weinberg, Helen 86 Welty, Eudora 128 West, Nathaniel 5 Weston, Jessie L. 8, 9 Whitman, Walt 21 Widmer, Kingsley 13, 61 Wilson, Colin 45