| A
few weeks after I invited Clark Blaise to speak to a group
of my students--this was in Montreal, on a snowy Monday
morning early in the spring of 1986--he walked into our
seminar room wearing a jacket and necktie belonging to
a writer who had recently died. After naming the writer,
he told us that his inherited outfit had been given to
him by the dead man's widow. But hearing the writer's
name had already put me into such a reverent trance that
all through Blaise's subsequent talk I kept having trouble
paying |
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attention,
I was so much under the spell of a tiny voice chanting
up in my head: I am sitting beside Bernard Malamud's jacket,
I am sitting beside Bernard Malamud's necktie...
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For the late owner of the tie and jacket had, by that
time, long been one of my favourite writers. I admired
the neurotic vitality of his characters and all the
ways even quite petty emotions were not beneath them.
And I was powerfully affected by the intensity with
which they lived their lives--reproaching or praising
each other while undressing or surveying time's damage
in full-length mirrors or picking armloads of wild flowers
in fields clearly marked PRIVATE PROPERTY. But the ways
in which they betrayed each other intrigued me most
of all, since they seldom did so without guilt (or without
all of the bases being morally loaded).
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Three years after that snowy spring morning--I was by
this time living in Toronto--I glimpsed one of my favourite
Malamud novels (Dubin's Lives) on a FOR SALE table at
my local library. But although the prospect of owning
yet another copy of the novel made me happy, the red stamp
inside its front cover (SINCE THIS BOOK IS NO LONGER IN
DEMAND, TORONTO PUBLIC LIBRARY IS OFFERING IT FOR SALE) |
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made me sad. Certainly I felt (and still feel) that Dubin's
Lives deserved a much finer fate, even if it's a book
that is, in some ways, quite noticeably flawed. But it's
partly for its willingness to risk being flawed that I
love it, for the nervy grandeur of what it attempts, for
the vast but intimate rural sprawl of it, for all the
ways in which the fabulous meets up with the domestic
in a post-Hawthorne America that's a spill of trees and
flowers
in bloom (and with almost all of the flowers named)--for
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seductive mix of the informed and the lyrical, the botanical
and the sublime. The novel is also an expose of a defeated
but curiously enduring middle-aged marriage, and running
counter to the story of this dying marriage it's the story
of an illicit love affair--a prolonged and difficult erotic
interlude of the May-December variety--one in which intellectual
instruction is exchanged for sexual redemption. It's also
a book whose humour is Jewish, fatalistic. Consider this
scene in which Dubin talks to his wife Kitty about their
son, a deserter from the American Army hiding out in Stockholm
during the final years of the Vietnam war: |
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I doubt he thinks of happiness. I don't think it's on
his agenda.
What
does he think of?
He
does his tightrope.
Where
to?
To the next tightrope. From the one over rocks to the
one over water.
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We can assume from this exchange that happiness is on the son's
agenda and that his gloom is the consequence of his not having
found very much of it yet. But then so much of Malamud's work
concerns itself with the battle between ethical behaviour and
joy, between principled misery and contentment. Even the language
in which spring is described uses nouns and verbs that suggest
whole worlds of chance and aggression: Spring defined itself:
present against odds. April rained in May, the early days poured.
On the twelfth of May snow fell on white tulips.....A flock
of glistening crows, each a foot long, jabbed at the wet grass......"
How
vividly chilly and fresh this also is, being both metaphor
and weather--the emotional temperature of Dubin's marriage
conveyed by rain and crows and wet grass and snow while spring
defines itself by Malamud's pitting formal language against
that racetrack word "odds" while at the same time
working to establish the almost Alice-in-Wonderland oddness
of "April rained in May, the early days poured..."
And
a description of an evening in early autumn begins this way:
Dubin ate a plate of soup and a roast beef sandwich at a restaurant
counter, and since light still glowed in the evening sky--early
fall had run a cool hand through the air--walked home. The
stars appeared in misty swarms, Dipper brilliant.
When
he's passing his local movie house and catches sight of Fanny
Bick, he offers to walk her home, then stands at his darkened
bedroom window and looks up at the wash of stars in the night
sky. In the universe even the dark is light. "Why should
I feel lonely?" Thoreau had asked. "Is not our planet
in the Milky Way?"
After
Dubin and Fanny have become lovers, Dubin goes to visit her
at an old farmhouse she has recently bought, and here again
Malamud plays with darkness and light:
The flickering red candle Fanny had left on the bookcase gave
forth a darkish private light. She had put on Bach: Ein feste
Burg ist unser Gott....
They were now in her bedroom, deceptively small in the shadowy
light. Fanny, in her see-through caftan, wearing white bra
and black underpants, pattered in bare feet from bathroom
to bedroom, watering her potted plants out of a drinking glass.
Fanny
and Dubin have, by this time, let each other down in all the
usual ways, and after he's been sexually betrayed by her (in
Venice, with a gondolier) Dubin tries to console himself with
the thought that promiscuity is just another form of narcissism.
But while they are still happy and are having dinner together
in a hotel on one of the dark canals, Fanny plays footsie
with Dubin, and after initially worrying that the waiters
will notice, Dubin decides to give in and enjoy the experience.
("This was Venice, this was Italy. This, according to
the arts and humanities, was what it was all about.")
*
* *
I
still remember the euphoria I felt on first reading the words
"early fall had run a cool hand through the air..."
They appeared in 1977, in the New Yorker, where two segments
of Dubin's Lives were printed in sequence. But several months
later, when the book at last came out, I discovered that the
excerpts that had been so amazing in isolation had been woven
into a meandering and untidy whole. After two or three readings
I did come to love the book though, but then Malamud is one
of those rare writers who achieve their effects not with elan,
and not with a stylish melancholy, but with difficulty, with
clutziness, with an anxious crawl towards the light through
the thicket of too many facts.
Too
many facts also weigh down parts of his "Notes From a
Lady at a Dinner Party", an ultimately enthralling story
whose opening sections are ungainly, information-heavy:
It
was during dinner that Karla let Adler know about the note
in his pocket. They were six at the table in the large wood-paneled
dining room, with a bay window containing a pebbled bed of
chrysanthemums and begonias. Besides the hosts there was a
middle-aged couple, the Ralph Lewins--he was a colleague of
Harris's at the Columbia School of Architecture; and maybe
to balance off Adler, Harris's secretary, Shirley Fisher,
had been invited, a thin-ankled wet-eyed divorcee in a long
bright-blue skirt, who talked and drank liberally. Harris,
pouring wine liberally from a bottle in a basket...
Although
the description of the "thin-ankled wet-eyed divorcee"
makes her totally present to us, and the news that she talks
and drinks liberally also clearly evokes her, the fact that
Harris, in the very next sentence, is pouring wine, also liberally,
from a bottle in a basket, will make most writers ask, Couldn't
Malamud have come up with a replacement for "liberally"
in the second sentence? But while other writers might approach
(and achieve) the transcendent via economy and elegance, Malamud
seems to achieve it by making us pity him just a little bit
first, and only then does he unpack his bag of marvels and
his heartfelt tricks.
He
also eases us into a plot ignited by the first note Karla
slips to Adler ("Why do we all think we should be happy,
that it's one of the necessary conditions of life?")
A Malamudian question that receives from Adler (once he's
had the opportunity to write his own note) a Malamudian answer:
"Why not? It's a short hard life if you don't outfox
it." And in this way both question and answer lead us--reader,
rider, horse and writer--in a lopsided gallop into Malamud
country. Which, after all, was the country across which Malamud,
in book after book, did his tightrope.
Where
to? To the next tightrope. From the one over rocks to the
one over water.
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