SOURCE: Furman, Andrew. “Did Malamud's Jewish Vision Wane?” Yiddish 10, no. 4 (1997): 34-46.

[In the following essay, Furman reviews the apparent disparities between Malamud's early and later fiction.]

There are few writers more accommodating to both teacher and student than Bernard Malamud. This is not to say that Malamud's work lacks moral complexity or stylistic sophistication, but merely that Malamud scholars discerned, early on in the writer's career, what the essential Malamud was all about and were able to package this insight for students in a few pithy, easily digestible sentences. Malamud was the writer who touted regenerative suffering, the writer for whom suffering for one's family and fellow human beings was a commandment, a mitzvah. As Mark Shechner contends,

In all of contemporary literature, there is scarcely a compact, nay, covenant, between an author and critics more binding than that between Malamud and his. The latter have agreed in the main not to ask questions about Malamud's work that fall outside the domain of humanist morality and Jewish suffering that he has staked out as his territory.

(180)

Now, to the credit of these critics whom Shechner gently chides, Malamud's early work bears out their traditional approach to his fiction readily enough. However, the Malamud of the 1970s was not the same writer of the 1950s and critics have been curiously reluctant to reckon the seemingly disparate voices. Irving Saposnik accurately observes, “… when changes have occurred in [Malamud's] fiction, they are often dismissed with a passing nod or a slight touch of annoyance” (325). It should come as no surprise that the critics most “annoyed” by the 70s Malamud were the ones writing in the pages of Commentary and Midstream, not the ones writing for, say, The Progressive, New Leader, National Review, Mademoiselle, or Playboy. That is, the critics with the greatest intellectual investment in Jewish-American fiction and Malamud's, by then, established role in its tradition were more likely to resist the “new” Malamud who problematized a perfectly good critical framework—one that made for such good copy in Jewish-American literature's boom period of the 50s and 60s. One can understand such an inclination. After all, Faulkner scholars have pretty much seen to it that the Faulkner most of us know is essentially the writer of the late 20s and 30s, not of the 40s and 50s; the same argument applies to innumerable others, from Wordsworth to Wharton. But, in Malamud's case, such neglect of his later work seems more a knee-jerk reaction to individual trees than careful criticism of the fictional forest. For, if we compare an early Malamud work, The Assistant (1957), to one of his last novels, Dubin's Lives (1979), we see that the latter novel complements the vision of the first and does not threaten to shatter the Malamudian universe.

I will not linger for too long over The Assistant since most readers are familiar with the work and competent explications abound (see especially Alter, Baumbach, Guttmann, Hassan, and Shear). The novel, which revolves around a struggling Jewish grocer and his gentile assistant, embodies the essential Malamudian vision of regenerative, redemptive suffering. The Assistant appears, no doubt, on countless syllabi across the country and may be the only Malamud work which undergraduate students ever encounter. Rife with eminently quotable scenes, The Assistant teaches well. Details of Morris Bober's “good” suffering manifest themselves often and obviously. The novel opens as the grocer awakens at an ungodly hour to sell a measly three-penny roll to an insistent Polish woman; he shleps milk bottles into the store; he extends credit to a dead-beat customer whom he knows will never pay; he shovels his sidewalk clear of snow for pedestrians long before any of the neighboring business-people do the same. Malamud describes the store itself as a tomb. So, why does Bober patiently endure? To a great extent, he does so because he embraces suffering as a Jewish commandment. While he does not interpret Jewish law literally (e.g. he eats ham), he follows what he perceives to be the spirit of the law by suffering for fellow human beings, as he explains to his assistant, Frank Alpine, in one of the most oft-quoted passages:

Our life is hard enough. Why should we hurt somebody else? For everybody should be the best, not only for you or me. We ain't animals. This is why we need the Law. This is what a Jew believes. … 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.

(TA [The Assistant] 150)

Bober, ultimately, dies as an indirect result of his resolve to suffer for the Law (he exacerbates his pneumonia after shoveling snow off his sidewalk) and a rabbi eulogizes the grocer by affirming Bober's code of Jewish suffering: “He followed the Law which God gave to Moses on Sinai and told him to bring to the people. He suffered, he endu-red [sic], but with hope. … What more does our sweet God ask his poor people? (277).

Though too little attention has been given to the perspective of Bober's wife, Ida, and daughter, Helen—that, perhaps, suffering isn't all it's cracked up to be—Malamud does reaffirm his grocer's precepts to close the novel as Alpine embraces Bober's role. By taking on a second job, he manages to provide for Ida and Helen. He also converts to Judaism and undergoes circumcision, a pain which inspires him. Thus, after stealing repeatedly from the grocer and raping Helen, he redeems himself through suffering. As Helen herself reflects, “[Frank] had been one thing, low, dirty, but because of something in himself—something she couldn't define, a memory perhaps, an ideal he might have forgotten and then remembered—he had changed into somebody else, no longer what he had been” (294). He has changed, Malamud implies, into a mentsh.

Now, how does one begin to compare The Assistant to Dubin's Lives? On the surface, the two novels could not appear more different. Other than the fact that William Dubin is nominally Jewish, he seems to have little in common with Morris Bober. For starters, Dubin has achieved notable critical and material success as a professional biographer. A medal from President Lyndon B. Johnson and the funds he evidently has at the ready to finance trips to Venice, Stockholm and New York attest to this success. Dubin, then, need not suffer from the immediate, tangible problems which beset Bober. A grocery store does not entomb Dubin (nor does a prison-cell or a squalid tenement for that matter, if I might allude to two other central Malamudian characters). However, as Bober cannily predicts above, to be human is to suffer from one thing or another and Dubin suffers from a mid-life crisis. Weary of his dull, if stable, marriage to his gentile wife, Kitty, and his own fastidiousness (he irons his socks), he pursues his twenty-something cleaning girl, Fanny. Not unaware of his folly, he reflects early on in the novel, “Ah, Dubin, you meet a pretty girl on the road and are braced to hop on a horse in pursuit of youth” (DL [Dubin's Lives] 11). Through the rest of this lengthy book, Malamud dramatizes Dubin's tumultuous affair with Fanny and the more subdued, though no less emotionally charged, domestic warfare at the Dubin home.

As I have already implied, Dubin's Lives was received fairly well by those without an intellectual stake in the “old” Malamud. Isa Kapp of the New Leader, for example, calls the novel “one of the most patient and inexhaustible documentaries on marriage and adultery in modern fiction” (3), while Christian Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times describes the novel as Malamud's best, perhaps, and marvels at the “lustrous canvas” (C23). One, then, can hardly call Dubin's Lives a critical failure. That said, several critics who had followed Malamud's career from the beginning took the writer to task for his apparent eschewal of his central artistic vision. The Commentary reviewer can only guess that Malamud is “sick of all that festering sadness and suffering, and would much rather concentrate on more interesting matters, like sex” (Bell 73). The reviewer laments the “self-absorbed narrowness” of the new Malamud (Bell 75). Harriet Polt, the Midstream reviewer, also does not seem to know what to do with the Malamud of Dubin's Lives and can only wonder, “What does it all add up to?” (58). The deeply personal tone of these reviews should not go unnoticed. Malamud had let down these faithful readers and they were visibly shaken. In Joseph Epstein's “Malamud in Decline,” published in Commentary without so much as a question mark after its title, he starts with a rhetorical question which can only be read in half-sigh: “When do we give up on a novelist?” (49). It seems as if Epstein has decided that he and Malamud have been on the rocks long enough and wants, finally, a divorce. In his essay, he predictably lauds the old Malamud who wrote The Assistant, a novel “saturated with pain and filled with the dignity of suffering,” and excoriates the Malamud of Dubin's Lives, a book about—cliché of clichés—a “bloody mid-life crisis” (50). Epstein bemoans Malamud's insistence upon change and innovation in his work and wonders, “Did Tolstoy feel this? Did Dickens? Is this a contemporary phenomenon?” (52). Daniel Fuchs, in an article published in Studies in American Jewish Literature, also contends that the “new” Malamud disappoints: “Something has gone wrong in [Dubin's Lives] and that something points as well to why the work he, so to speak, outgrew—The Assistant, The Magic Barrel—is superior to it” (206). Fuchs, like his cohorts writing in the pages of Commentary and Midstream, clearly prefers the early Malamud who engages a more identifiably Jewish milieu.

But does Dubin's Lives mark a change at all in Malamud's essential, Jewish vision? On the contrary, I contend that the novel reaffirms the ethical framework which Malamud insists upon in his earlier work—that each individual is inextricably bound to a human community of family, friends, neighbors, strangers even, and that one must acknowledge this burden and bear it with dignity and, above all, hope. To account for the obvious contrasts between The Assistant and Dubin's Lives one might begin by noting that the Malamud teaching freshman composition for bobkes at Oregon State University probably felt a great affinity for the Morris Bobers of the world, while the established American writer of the 70s could naturally identify with the tsores of a successful, middle-aged biographer. That is to say, writers often depict protagonists whose circumstances parallel their own in significant ways (mark the leap between Bellow's dangling man and Professor Herzog). But more to the point, the autobiographical element of Dubin's Lives does not cause Malamud to stray from his central artistic concerns; rather, Dubin's life allows Malamud to challenge his credo of individual responsibility (along with its concomitant suffering) against more hostile circumstances. For it is easy, indeed, for a character like Morris Bober, who must endure such palpable suffering, to embrace suffering as ineluctable—to incorporate suffering, moreover, into a religious vision which lends meaning to his existence. However, does this religious vision stand up when one's responsibilities suddenly do not seem so inescapable, and one can afford the luxury of brooding over and exploring a prosaic matter like sexual gratification? This is the essential question, I believe, which Malamud explores in Dubin's Lives.

In Dubin's parents, Malamud offers his familiar model of the suffering Jewish family. Dubin's brother drowns, his mother consequently succumbs to insanity and dies, and his father, a waiter, merely trudges on passively. Dubin reflects that his father “had waited all his years for life to catch up with him. He was waiting when he died. He died waiting” (DL 77). Interestingly, Dubin's father resembles Morris Bober; they both lose sons and live a mean, workaday life of suffering. Having, in a sense, already written about Dubin's father, Malamud focuses in Dubin's Lives upon Dubin's self-conscious efforts to break free from his father's life via extra-curricular sexual activity, an option Bober (and Dubin's father we can assume) could never fathom. The novel's epigrams, culled from Thoreau and Augustine, reveal Dubin's sexual angst straight away. They read, respectively, “What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?” and “Give me continence and chastity, but not yet.” Dubin's current work on D. H. Lawrence's biography also reflects and, likely, provokes his angst. The following formula may prove helpful: Just as Dubin's biography on Thoreau inspires him to take long walks in the woods, his work on Lawrence inspires him to … well, one can fill in the blank.

To be sure, most critics recognize that Dubin's sexual exploits signify his renunciation of pious suffering. Saposnik, for example, notes that Dubin is “tired of waiting, of living other men's lives and not his own. … Dubin denies his father's life as appropriate for him” (326). That Dubin thus brazenly defies the honorable code by which the traditional Malamud hero lives most rankles the dissenters of the novel; but these critics, I believe, fail to recognize the ironic distance between Malamud and his protagonist. Indeed, Dubin's exploits do not emerge as a viable avenue through which to achieve fulfillment. They, instead, fester at Dubin's conscience and further alienate him from those he truly loves; herein lies the clue to the authorial perspective.

Dubin's initial forays with Fanny, in fact, are miserable in and of themselves. After Dubin's first failed rendezvous with Fanny in New York (she forgets the name of the hotel he designates and never shows), he flies off with her to Venice. We know that the affair cannot live up to Dubin's romantic fantasies. At their first Venetian dinner, he muses, “a sense of trumpets blaring in the woody distance. Here's William the Bold, with upraised sword on a black charger, galloping onward under the bright blue sky” (DL 73). The trip predictably ends in disaster. Fanny eats brains at dinner (which gives us some indication of what she wants out of the relationship), falls ill and cannot make love. Malamud delivers all of the sordid details of her sickness which reflect the sordidness of the whole affair. One can hardly picture Fanny throughout the rest of the novel without that “blob of diarrhea dribbling down her leg” (77). What is more, she betrays Dubin by sleeping with the gondolier.

The novel might have ended here as a novella if Dubin had learned his lesson. To his credit, however, Malamud takes his protagonist's mid-life anxieties seriously. Thus, during the miserable winter which greets him at home, Dubin sleeps with his best friend's wife, Flora, and alienates himself further from his own wife, Kitty (he tellingly moves his study to the barn and spends most of his time there). Fanny returns once the cruel winter ends and Dubin finally carries on an affair with her. True enough, then, Dubin embraces the amoral, libidinous world usually off-limits to the Malamudian hero and this problematizes our reading. For, indeed, he does seem to thrive in the arms of his nubile lover, Fanny. After they first make love, Dubin reflects that “Ponce de León had galloped in the wrong direction: the fountain of youth is the presence of youth. In her company he enjoyed the sense of fountain within, experienced flowers of splashing water” (232). Later, after a more experimental sexual interlude with Fanny, “he felt like a god” (242). Still, one should not be so easily taken in by Dubin's happiness, presented in all its fatuousness by Malamud. Several details in the text indicate (to the reader and to Dubin himself) that Dubin's glandular joy, so to speak, must, in the end, be subordinated so that he can maintain his filial commitments. Rita Gollin's assessment of The Assistant's Frank Alpine—that he learns to “subordinate obsessive desire within a controlling moral framework”—applies interestingly to Dubin by novel's end as well (201).

Dubin might be able to escape with Fanny to her New York apartment, but he cannot elude the not so subtle reminders of his moral weakness which dog him wherever he goes. Dubin, for example, cannot help noticing the Jews who pray in the synagogue across the street from Fanny's apartment. When he awakens from his first night in the apartment, he peers out the window at the synagogue and sees “a small candlelit room where a black-bearded black-hatted Jew, his white shawl glowing on his shoulders, bent back and forth in prayer” (DL 243). Weeks later, after Fanny temporarily breaks off their relationship and moves to San Francisco, he goes to her New York apartment only to find it vacated. Out the window, of course, he sees an old Jew praying in the synagogue (306). In addition to the conveniently located synagogue, the Watergate scandal looms throughout the novel to remind Dubin of his own deceitfulness. The scandal demands Dubin's attention throughout the novel and he follows the impeachment proceedings at Fanny's apartment: “Fanny and he looked through the papers every night and talked about the case before going to bed. … The man made him uncomfortable” (239). It is significant that Dubin's discomfort, here, accompanies his stay at Fanny's apartment in New York. He surely realizes that he has strayed far from the moral piety embodied by the praying Jews across the street to adopt, instead, Nixon's unscrupulous model of deception.

An incest motif also pervades Dubin's extra-marital affair with Fanny to illustrate the deep-seeded moral complications of such adventures. His daughter, Maud, just three years younger than Fanny, understandably invades his thoughts while he pursues Fanny. While in Venice, Dubin even believes that he might have seen Maud with a man his own age. Dubin, Malamud suggests, increasingly confuses the wife, daughter, and lover in his life. During one of Maud's visits subsequent to his Venice trip, he tells her “‘I love you more than anyone,’” at which point Maud reminds him, “‘I'm not your wife’” (192). He then unadvisedly asks Maud if she had been in Venice with a man his age. The question disturbs Maud who asks her father not to ask her questions like that. Dubin puts his daughter on edge later, as well, when he reminds her of the time when, as a child, she asked him to marry her (308). Just as Dubin confuses daughter as wife and lover, he cannot help viewing Fanny as his daughter. In one scene, he calls Fanny his child, at which point she must remind him, “‘I'm not your child’” (368). To reinforce the incest theme, Maud ultimately has a child with a man older than Dubin and marries him (so her new last name, Perrera, suggests on the novel's last page).

Granted, one can make great psychoanalytical hay out of the incest motif which Malamud belabors (see Mellard). What Malamud seems to be saying, however, is simply that such Dubin-like attempts to recapture youth enmeshes one in an array of emotional entanglements, given short-shrift by D. H. Lawrence's religion of sexuality—Lawrence's “belief in the blood, the flesh, as wiser than the intellect” (243). Dubin triumphs precisely because he cannot subordinate his intellect to his Lawrentian blood-consciousness, and too few critics seem to recognize this. Still, the cursory impressions of one sensitive reviewer strike me as squarely on target. “For me,” he begins, “the major issue is Dubin's agonized yet comic determination to maintain his humanity by striving for a balance of control and susceptibility, recognizing the power of his feelings, circumstances, and the claims of others but insisting too on the legitimacy of his reasoning mind, his ethical will” (Levin 165). Dubin's ethical will tells him that he has failed his wife and his best friend, Oscar Greenfeld. By ignoring Kitty's emotional needs, he alienates her and forces her into the arms of her psychoanalyst; by sleeping with Greenfeld's wife, he sunders that relationship, as well.

Dubin's lustful actions ripple out to injure others besides his family and friends and he, importantly, recognizes this once he forces a farmer to shoot his beloved dog (the novel, in fact, becomes something of an animal lover's nightmare as Dubin later unintentionally kills his napping cat by backing over it with the car). Obsessing over Fanny and, literally, fleeing from Kitty in the middle of the night, Dubin trespasses onto the farmer's property. In this eerie scene—heretofore unexplored by critics—the farmer shoots at Dubin and kills the dog instead. Malamud depicts the moment as a tragedy:

The farmer sank to his knees before his dead dog, its head and neck dark with blood. He lay with his cheek on the dog's flank his shoulders shaking … the farmer reappeared with a quilted blanket and tenderly covered his dead dog. Lifting the animal as if it were a child, he carried it into the wood.

(DL 356)

Dubin accepts his culpability and muses, “At midnight I was in bed unable to sleep, and a few hours later am up somebody's tree after causing him to kill his dog. He regretted there wasn't time to live more than once and maybe do things better another time” (356). Here, like several memorable characters in American literature (one thinks of Faulkner's Judith Sutpen, Robert Penn Warren's Jack Burden, and Saul Bellow's Asa Leventhal), Dubin recognizes that one's actions can be far-reaching and that one must bear the responsibility for those actions which hurt others, however indirectly. His obsession with Fanny has led circuitously, but irrefutably, to the death of a farmer's dog.

We cannot call this scene a true epiphany, perhaps, since Dubin continues to sleep with Fanny. However, by the end of the novel he at least manages to strike some balance between lust and Law. His adherence to his ethical will facilitates his reconcilement with his friend. He also can now remember his father fondly, and a list of his subsequent biographies indicates that he co-writes a study on Anna Freud with Maud. Moreover, he refuses to abandon Kitty, explaining to Fanny, “‘I'm a family man. We had kids we loved. I had my work to do. Conditions were good. There are other things’” (399). When Fanny rebuts, “‘But do you love her?’” Dubin responds, “‘I love her life’” (400). Though the intense passion may never return to his marriage, Dubin acknowledges here his responsibility for his wife and his inviolable commitment toward her. He accepts that “he was not only for himself” (294). We last see Dubin as he flees from Fanny's home with a semi-erection to offer Kitty, with love.

Mark Shechner asserts that the affirmative ending “violates the logic of the entire book” and he goes so far as to advise readers to skip the last page (183). Fuchs, for his part, puts it a bit more colorfully, characterizing the final scene as a “half-cocked ending if there ever was one” (210). Though Shechner and Fuchs insist that the novel does not support Dubin's final expression of love toward his wife, I wish to suggest that Dubin's gradual recognition of his ethical decline validates his final avowal of responsibility and love for Kitty (it is important to stress that Malamud does not mean to suggest that Dubin will necessarily honor his commitments to the letter). Throughout the entire novel, Dubin struggles to extricate himself from the filial bond, only to be convinced repeatedly of his duty to preserve his marriage. Consider, for example, the odd scene early in the novel when a stranger, apparently crazy, comes upon Dubin along the road and begins walking closely by his side. Dubin wonders,

Suppose a man like him clings to you forever? You try to shake him and he follows you home. You have him arrested and he convinces the judge he's your uncle and moves in. Suppose, by one means or another, he stays forever? Who is he to you then?

(DL 159)

This passage, perhaps more so than any other passage in the novel, affirms James Beyers' assertion that “one must recognize [Malamud's] work as fundamentally repetitious” (189). For the above scene could appear in any number of Malamud novels, early and late. It is Malamud's central question: are we responsible only for ourselves, or must we bear responsibility for our family, our friends, even strangers like the one here? Through such careful introspection, Dubin recognizes his responsibility toward his family and the larger human community—a responsibility Morris Bober never questions. That Dubin does question this responsibility, even shirks it momentarily (and, perhaps, will continue to shirk it in the future, against his better judgment) makes him one of Malamud's more human characters and renders his affirmation of the Malamudian code all the more heroic.

Works Cited

Alter, Iska. “The Good Man's Dilemma: The Natural, The Assistant and American Materialism.” Critical Essays on Bernard Malamud. Ed. Joel Salzberg. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1987. 75-98.

Baumbach, Jonathan. “The Economy of Love.” Bernard Malamud. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 21-36.

Bell, Pearl K. “Heller and Malamud, Then and Now.” Commentary June 1979: 71-75.

Beyer, James. “‘A Repetition He Was Part Of’: Bernard Malamud, A New Life, and Dubin's Lives.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 7.2 (Fall 1988): 189-204.

Epstein, Joseph. “Malamud in Decline.” Commentary Oct. 1982: 49-53.

Fuchs, Daniel. “Malamud's Dubin's Lives: A Jewish Writer and the Sexual Ethic.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 7.2 (Fall 1988): 205-12.

Gollin, Rita K. “Malamud's Dubin and the Morality of Desire.” Papers on Language and Literature 18.2 (1982): 198-207.

Guttmann, Allen. “‘All Men Are Jews.’” Bernard Malamud. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 151-58.

Hassan, Ihab. “The Qualified Encounter.” Bernard Malamud. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 5-10.

Kapp, Isa. “Malamud's Cantata for Middle Age.” New Leader 4 Dec. 1978: 3-5.

Lehmann-Haupt, Christian. Rev. of Dubin's Lives, by Bernard Malamud. New York Times 2 Feb. 1979: C23.

Levin, David. “The Lives of Bernard Malamud.” Virginia Quarterly Review 56.1 (1980): 162-66.

Malamud, Bernard. The Assistant. 1957. New York: Avon, 1980.

———. Dubin's Lives. New York: Penguin, 1979.

Mellard, James M. “The ‘Perverse Economy’ of Malamud's Art: A Lacanian Reading of Dubin's Lives.” Critical Essays on Bernard Malamud. Ed. Joel Salzberg. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1987. 186-202

Polt, Harriet. “Malamud's Lives.” Midstream Jan. 1980: 57-58.

Saposnik, Irving S. “Bellow, Malamud, Roth … and Styron?” Judaism 31.3 (1982): 322-332.

Shear, Walter. “Culture Conflict in The Assistant.” Midwest Quarterly (Summer 1966): 367-80.

Shechner, Mark. “The Return of the Repressed.” Bernard Malamud. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 179-185.