Literary Blacks and Jews
In 1958, in his celebrated collection The Magic Barrel, Malamud published a short story about a Negro and a Jew. It was called "Angel Levine," and it contrived for Manischevitz, a Job-like figure who has "suffered many reverses and indignities," the promise of redemption through a magical black man [the angel, Levine]. (p. 80)
[The] narrative is altogether offhand about the question of the angel's identity: Levine is perfectly matter-of-fact about it, there is nothing at all miraculous in the idea that a black man can also be a Jew. In a tale about the supernatural, this is what emerges as the "natural" element—as natural-feeling as Manischevitz's misfortunes and his poverty. Black misfortune and poverty have a different resonance—Manischevitz's wanderings through Harlem explain the differences—but, like the Jews' lot, the blacks' has an everyday closeness, for Manischevitz the smell of a familiar fate. To him—and to Malamud at the end of the fifties—that Black and Jew are one is no miracle.
A little more than a decade later, with the publication of The Tenants, the proposition seems hollow. Again Malamud offers a parable of black and Jew culminating in fantasy, but now the fantasy has Jew slashing with ax, black with saber, destroying one another in a passionate bloodletting. The novel's last paragraph is eerily liturgical—the word "mercy" repeated one hundred and fifty times, and once in Hebrew. Nevertheless The Tenants is a merciless book. (p. 81)
How was the transmutation from magical brotherhood to ax-murder wrought? Is it merely that society has changed so much since the late 1950's, or is it that the author of "Angel Levine" was, even then, obtuse? If the difference in Malamud's imaginative perception lies only in our own commonplace perception that the social atmosphere has since altered in the extreme—from Selma to Forest Hills—then "Angel Levine," far from being a mythically representative tale about suffering brothers, is now no more than a dated magazine story. One test of the durability of fiction is whether it still tells even a partial truth ten years after publication. The conclusion of The Tenants seems "true" now—i.e., it fits the current moment outside fiction. But a change in social atmosphere is not enough to account for the evanescence or lastingness of a piece of fiction. There are other kinds of truth than sociological truth. There is the truth that matches real events in the world—in The Tenants, it is the black man and the Jew turning on one another—and there is the truth which accurately describes what can only be called aspiration. Even in the world of aspiration, it is a question whether "Angel Levine" remains true. And on the last page of The Tenants, when Jew and black cut sex and brains from each other, Malamud writes: "Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other." This is the truth of invisible faith, and it is a question whether this too can survive.
"The anguish of the other" is a Malamudic assumption, endemic in his fiction. The interior of many of Malamud's fables resounds with the injunction that for the sake of moral aspiration one must undergo…. Malamud's world often proposes a kind of hard-won, eked-out saintliness: suffering and spiritual goodness are somehow linked. The real world of humanity—which means also the real world of the Jews—is not like this. "Bad" Jews went up in smoke at Auschwitz too—surely embezzlers as well as babies, not only tsadikim but misers too, poets as well as kleptomaniacs. Not one single Jew ever deserved his martyrdom, but not every martyr is a holy man. For Malamud all good men are Job.
Nevertheless there remains a thin strand of connection between Malamud's visionary "Angel Levine" and a commonplace of Jewish temperament, between the messianic insistence on the anguish of the other and the common sense of ordinary, "bad," Jews. The sociological—the "real"—counterpart of Malamud's holy fables is almost always taken for granted by Jews: it is, simply put, that Jews have always known hard times, and are therefore naturally sympathetic to others who are having, or once had, hard times. The "naturally" is what is important. It is a feeling so normal as to be unrelated to spiritual striving, self-purification, moral accountability, prophecy, Waskowian "witness," anything at all theoretical or lofty. This plain observation about particularized suffering requires no special sensitiveness; naturally there are Jews everywhere, and some of them are black.
But what has surprised some Jews, perhaps many, is that this Jewish assumption—this quiet tenet, to use a firmer word, that wounds recognize wounds—is not only not taken for granted by everyone else, especially by blacks, but is given no credibility whatever. Worse, to articulate the assumption is to earn the accusation of impudence…. To its critics, accusers, "Angel Levine" must seem not just dated, obsolete, a sentimental excrescence of that remote era when Jews were as concerned with CORE as they were with UJA—but wrong. And many young blacks writing today would regard its premise not only as not a moral hope, but as a hurtful lie. Or else would see Manischevitz's salvation as simply another instance of Jewish exploitation, this time of black benevolence. (pp. 81-3)
[What] was radiant, if illusioned, hope at the time "Angel Levine" was conceived has disintegrated into a kind of surrealism, an arbitrary act of art, set apart from any sources of life. Literature (even in the form of fantasy) cannot survive on illusion.
This is perhaps why Malamud went forward from the failed dream of "Angel Levine" to the warlike actualities of The Tenants. (p. 89)
[In] my first reading of The Tenants, I was, like many readers, rabidly discontent with Malamud's conception of his black character, Willie Spearmint, later called Spear. Willie Spear is a black writer who has the flavor of an Eldridge Cleaver rather than an Ellison; and this seemed to matter. Malamud, it appeared, had deliberately chosen—for novelistic bite and drama—an unruly spear-carrier, when he might have chosen a poised aristocrat of prose. And up against Spear he set the Jewish writer Harry Lesser, a man almost too fastidious in his craft. The balance was unequal, the protagonists unfairly matched, the Jew too hesitant and disciplined, the black too spontaneous and unschooled.
That the protagonists have to be a match for each other at first strikes one as important, because The Tenants is partly, despite its directness of language and gesture, a theater-piece designed as stately discourse. Though I admit the comparison is inflated, nevertheless one is put in mind of the eye-to-eye feud of Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots in Schiller's Maria Stuart; or of Shaw's Joan at her trial, another example of an elevated contest of societal interpretation. The Tenants is obviously barer and coarser than these—airless and arid, a flat plain pitting philosopher-king against philosopher-king. Except, for these two figures—the Jew and the black—the book is, by and large, unpeopled. (pp. 89-90)
Willie is a straw man. Why not a black writer who is not only fully literate, but accomplished? Suppose Malamud had given us Ellison instead of Willie—then what? Lesser, like Ellison, believes first of all in the primacy, the loveliness, of the sentence; for him literature is the personal courage by which the language is seized. Beyond that lies propaganda. Granted that two-literary-intellectuals-talking-to-each-other does not make a novel (Mann and the Russians excepted), or, at least, would not make this novel, Malamud seems to be asking for the sort of resentment that would soon come to surround his formulation: Jewish Intellectual vs. Tough Black Militant. Unequal warfare in the Republic of Letters. Could it not—for fairness—somehow have been contrived as Jewish Intellectual vs. Black Intellectual?
There were, of course, good novelistic reasons why it could not. For instance, the conflict that eventually interposes itself between Lesser and Willie is not intellectual but rawly sexual. Willie has a Jewish girl friend, Irene, whom Lesser covets and ultimately wins. Irene is unfortunately a fiction-device and lives only intermittently. Her narrative task is to convert the two writers into enemies through sexual jealousy. Lesser's importuning landlord, Levenspiel, is also a fiction-device—he is there to give us the novel's pivotal "problem," to put time-pressure on a stubborn Lesser—but Levenspiel, by contrast, manages to live vividly…. Levenspiel and Irene and Willie's black friends who slide in and out from the wings are all interruptions in the dialogue between Lesser and Willie; they are pretexts for necessary "action," for novelistic progress. They are not what the book fundamentally intends.
If The Tenants progresses, it is not through plot but through revelation. The revelation is one-sided: it happens inside Lesser. We do not really know what happens inside Willie. And what happens inside Lesser is this: the clear realization that the black writer who shares his quarters and also his literary hopes is, more than he is writer, more than he is lover, more even than he is fleshly human being, a ferocious, a mythic, anti-Semite. (pp. 91-2)
As for "being human," not only does Willie reject the term "universal," but he sees himself as almost physiologically different ("Our feelin chemistry is different than yours"), and he goes further yet—he freezes himself into the image of a totem, a "black man." The statement "My form is myself" is beyond humanity, beyond even art. It stands for something more abstract than either: a political position taken at its most absolute. For a totem is an absolute politics: an object, an artifact, a form representing an entire people, together with its interests, its cult, its power, its history and fate. The totem has no fluidity, its being is its meaning. Willie has turned the politics of a group into an object—himself, black man. In Willie Art is Politics, Politics is Art.
This is why it would not have served Malamud's deepest intention if he had chosen not Willie, but a more "realistic," pragmatic, literate, humane, relatively political, less symbolic black for the novel. In not choosing an Ellison, of course, Malamud took on himself both a risk and a certainty. The certainty was the charge of "stereotype" and "blacklash," to which The Tenants has already been preëminently subject. The risk—a "stereotype" having indeed been chosen—was the failure of the novel as art. To a degree this has happened—to the very degree Willie's stereotyped expectations lead to banalities masking as passions. Something was necessary to stimulate Willie's active vengeance, so we are given a plot-fulcrum, Willie's girl Irene. In return for Lesser's stealing his girl, Willie destroys Lesser's work of ten years; the war is on. But Irene exists to accommodate neither Willie nor Lesser, but the exigencies of a made fiction. All this is too obviously and distractingly schematic—even the lineaments of "parable" cannot contain it—and if I seem to be bringing it up again now, it is only to contrast it with the novel's authentic passions. These are in the mimicry of Willie's writing. (p. 93)
Willie is unabashedly "prefabricated."
But the real question is: who cast this die, who prefabricated Willie? Not Malamud. The source of a stereotype is everything. (p. 94)
Malamud did not make Willie. He borrowed him—he mimicked him—from the literature and the politics of the black movement. Willie is the black dream that is current in our world. Blacks made him. Few blacks disavow him. The black middle class, which is ambivalent about Willie, nevertheless does not disavow him—not simply out of loyalty to the underclass (the loyalty is what is in doubt), but out of covert gratitude. Almost no black writer has disavowed Willie…. Surely Baldwin does not disavow Willie; he has become him.
In short, Willie is what he intends himself to be (which is also what he is intended to be by those blacks who do not deny him): a totem, emblem of a community unified in and through Willie's spirit, what he calls his "form"—not man, as Ellison would have it, but black man.
What is the meaning of Willie in his self-declared "form"? Willie's form takes up not freedom and fluidity, but unmovable hatred and slavish vengeance…. For him literature serves politics—not as propaganda consciously does, as an "arm" or partner or extension or tool of politics—but intrinsically, below the level of rational motivation. Willie's only politics is co-extensive with nearly the whole of his literary imagination; it is the politics and the imagination of anti-Semitism. (pp. 95-6)
"Angel Levine" is not merely out of date, it is illusion; at the close of The Tenants Malamud explicitly acknowledges that it is illusion. Lesser's ax—it is the final vision of the novel—sinks into Willie…. It is curious, horrible, and terrifying to take in what Malamud in The Tenants openly posits: that the Jew in America, beginning … with a cry of identification with black suffering, is self-astonished to find himself responding now in the almost-forgotten mood of zelbshuts—the shtetl's term for weaponry stored against the fear of pogroms. Lesser, a hesitant intellectual, is driven to hauling an ax. But The Tenants insists on more than this. Like much of Malamud's work, and specifically like The Assistant and The Fixer, it offers the metaphoric incarnation of a Malamudic text: whoever wants to kill the Jew has already killed the human being in himself. It is not only no failing, it is the best achievement of the novel that Willie, its black militant, is a stereotype devoid of any easy humanity. The clichés appropriate for a political strategy are unsuitable for describing the soul of a living person. Given the extra-literary truth that black militancy, in and out of print, has now come to define itself if not largely then centrally through classical anti-Semitism, to bestow on a fictional Willie a life beyond his bloody fantasies would have been a savagery akin to Willie's own. To put it another way: to have ascribed to Willie the full and continuing aspects of a decent breathing human being but for his hatred of Jews would have been to subvert the meaning of human.
The Tenants is a claustrophobic fable: its theme is pogrom. It remarks the minutiae of a single-handed pogrom so closely that the outer world is shut out. There is almost no city beyond Lesser's tenement, and there are no white Gentiles in the novel…. In The Tenants the Jew has no allies. Jew and black fight alone in an indifferent world.
There is no means, at this juncture, of determining whether its current worldly truths will one day seep out of The Tenants, as the moral radiance of "Angel Levine" had ultimately, through subversion by history, to ebb into falsehood. But—for the moment—Malamud has abandoned the hopefulness of "Angel Levine" and drawn a parable of political anxiety. "Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other" is the last flicker of that hopefulness but does not convince. Willie is Lesser's doom—Lesser, dreaming of love, rigorously apolitical, isolated in his esthetics, becomes the inescapable victim of an artist whose art is inseparable from butchery. (p. 97)
Malamud, in plucking Willie out of the black writing that made him, has not invented the politicization of fiction. And in inventing The Tenants, Malamud ironically follows Willie—he has written a tragic fiction soaked in the still mainly unshed blood of the urban body politic. (p. 98)
Cynthia Ozick, "Literary Blacks and Jews," in Midstream (copyright © 1972 by The Theodor Herzl Foundation, Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author and her agents, Raines and Raines, and the publisher), June/July, 1972 (and reprinted in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Leslie and Joyce Field, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975, pp. 80-98).
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