Arts and Letters

Some thirty-five years ago I gave a talk in Oregon, and Bernard and Ann Malamud came down from Corvallis, where he was teaching, to hear me. I don't remember what I said—from time to time one has to talk—but I do remember our meeting. I was struck by his expressive eyes. I didn't of course know what it was that they were expressing. I couldn't know that until, in the course of years, I had read his novels and stories.

Inland Oregon seemed an odd place for a man from New York, and I can recall thinking that it did Corvallis great credit to have imported such an exotic. He was not an exotic to me. We were cats of the same breed. The sons of Eastern European immigrant Jews, we had gone early into the streets of our respective cities, were Americanized by schools, newspapers, subways, streetcars, sandlots. Melting Pot children, we had assumed the American program to be the real thing: no barriers to the freest and fullest individual choices. Of course we understood that it was no simple Civics-Course matter. We knew too much about the slums, we had assimilated too much dark history in our mothers' kitchens to be radiant optimists. Our prospects were sufficiently bright if we set out to become shopkeepers, druggists, accountants, lawyers. Even doctors, if we were able to vault over the quota system. There were, to be sure, higher ambitions. There were Jewish philosophers like Morris R. Cohen, scholars like Wolfson at Harvard. At a more heady level there were Berenson types who entered the cosmopolitan art world and associated as equals, or near-equals, with Brahmins and English aristocrats. But if you had no social ambitions of this kind, and no special desire to be rich, to shuffle off immigrant vulgarity and live in an Italian villa, if you set out instead to find a small place for yourself as a writer, you were looking for trouble in uncharted waters, you were asking for it. Of course it was admiration, it was love that drew us to the dazzling company of the great masters, all of them belonging to the Protestant Majority—some of them explicitly anti-Semitic. You had only to think of Henry Adams, or to remember certain pages in Henry James's The American Scene, the anguish of his recoil from East Side Jews. But one could not submit to control by such prejudices. My own view was that in religion the Christians had lived with us, had lived in the Bible of the Jews, but when the Jews wished to live Western history with them they were refused. As if that history were not, by now, also ours. Have the Jews no place in the German past?

Well, we were here, first-generation Americans, our language was English and a language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us. Malamud in his novels and stories discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York. He was a myth maker, a fabulist, a writer of exquisite parables. The English novelist Anthony Burgess said of him that he "never forgets that he is an American Jew, and he is at his best when posing the situation of a Jew in urban American society." "A remarkably consistent writer," he goes on, "who has never produced a mediocre novel… he is devoid of either conventional piety or sentimentality… always profoundly convincing." Let me add on my own behalf that the accent of a hard-won and individual emotional truth is always heard in Malamud's words. He is a rich original of the first rank.