SOURCE: Quart, Barbara Koenig. “Women in Bernard Malamud's Fiction.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 3 (1983): 138-50.

[In the following essay, Quart discusses Malamud's technique of keeping his female characters at a distance—both physically and emotionally—from his male characters.]

Bernard Malamud's central characters are deeply isolated men. From Morris Bober and Frank Alpine incarcerated in the grocery in Malamud's early and best novel The Assistant, through S. Levin, eastern Jew confronting the West, and Yakov Bok among the gentiles, to the elderly Dubin in the snowy Vermont of Malamud's most recent novel, they suffer intensely and alone. You could say that Malamud's parables of regeneration are about nothing so much as learning a new relation to oneself through relation to others, but equally pervasive in his work is the fear of love and human involvement.

Women are set at a curious distance in Malamud's fiction, despite the intense passion, lust, yearning, directed at them. Malamud's ironies of style and moral-fable abstractions are themselves often distancers from the social and psychological textures of living in the world with a lover, a friend, even with oneself. But beyond this, a peculiar obliqueness characterizes the way his heroes relate to women.

Consider Fidelman, fallen among pimps and procurers in Italy, at work forging a painting:

While Scarpio is out talking to the guard, the copyist hastily sketches the Venus of Titian, and with a Leica Angelo has given him for the purpose, takes several new color shots. Afterwards, he approaches the picture and kisses the lady's hands, thighs, breasts, but as he murmurs, “I love you,” a guard strikes him hard on the head with both fists.¹

The intensity of passion at a hopeless distance, here further removed still by the guarded and forbidden woman's not even being flesh but paint, is a characteristic Malamud love drama. In his last novel, Dubin's Lives, William Dubin sounds like a spokesman for all the Frank Alpines, Levins, Fidelmans, and perhaps for Malamud himself, when, envying the young girl Fanny's sexual freedom, he characterizes his own youth: “I was a satisfied romantic—loved longing. It made an occasional poem for me.”² Not to mention novels.

In Malamud's work there is an immense expenditure of lust and fantasy on unknown or unattainable women.³ Romantic delirium exists in exact proportion to inaccessibility: for someone else's wife, for an Italian peintrice who scorns the hero, for a student when such an attachment threatens a job—and all of this covered with a gloss of self-mocking humor. The innumerable instances of voyeurism, often sexual, merely take the excitement of what is stealthy and withheld to the full length.⁴ That this excitement has a subtext of fear, perhaps even dislike for real women really experienced, is suggested by the repeated use of whores in Malamud's work, women who are discredited in one way or another by their relations with other men, often a means by which physical love itself is made to seem distasteful.⁵

At any rate, Alfred Kazin's description of Malamud's characters as “so poor that they live on air, in the air, and are certainly not rooted in the earth,”⁶ applies also to those of his lovers who, like Frank Alpine, live on the air of their longings. Much of the beauty of The Assistant derives from the “poem” of Frank's longing for Helen Bober. The whole novel is permeated with hunger, and an inability to get the “better” for which each character yearns. With the voyeurism of Malamud's indirect males, Frank watches Helen naked in the shower, as well as coming and going, from the hopeless distance of one who has had intimate access to her once but never again, his passion that of an alien, love for him infused with remorse and mourning.

Frank's sexual feeling for Helen is equated with robbery, he steals from Morris in that way as well as monetarily. Shame, guilt, self-disgust, self-loathing surround his sexual and loving feelings. In the eyes of Morris and Helen too, compassionate people though they are, Frank carries some profound blight, and though he, like Bober, works mercilessly, he can not right himself. There is deep masochism in Alpine's courting of Helen.⁷ However redeemed he may be in the end, the lover's final state is conveyed to us through images of castration, entombment, self-chosen crucifixion.

Helen on the other hand is never faulted for her intransigence; her own dreams are rendered sympathetically, and her rejection of the vulgar materiality of moneyed suitors is the more laudable given this 50s novel's sense of the desperate straits of a woman without a marriage proposal. Still, even Helen is subjected to continual references to her small breasts and bowed legs, just as Malamud's other women characters undergo finicky appraisal. Legs are found to be too skinny, hairy, stumpy; chests are like boards, and breasts oddly “hard” and “piercing”; and any sign of aging in a woman is treated as hideous. Mary Ellman, speaking of this revulsion from women's bodies in Malamud, finds “the faint initial desire effortlessly supplanted by the objections of a superior taste or superior principle.”⁸

This meticulous criticism of female surfaces may be seen as another form of Malamud's equally meticulous attention to every word and detail of his art, to getting it just right, sometimes producing an uncomfortable quality of strain, overcontrol, willed effect in his writing. In the end, though, what his heroes are truly married to is their work. Academics, scholars, painters, even glass blowers, and finally writers of fiction and biography, they take us story after story through the anguishing demands of their work situation, excruciating expenditures of time and effort, chagrin at the limitations of their talents, intense ambitions, pains-taking struggles for mastery against the deeply felt pressures of time.

Much of the brilliance of The Assistant, after all, derives from its portrait of a first generation Jewish shopkeeper struggling to survive at work, and the painful daily details of running a small neighborhood grocery. Even Yakov Bok in The Fixer, despite his enforced passivity and extreme confinement, is identified repeatedly with his tools, and not merely metaphorically. The power of The Tenants has to do almost entirely with the hero's labor toward art. Willie Spearmint tells Lesser, “you act like some priest or fuckin' rabbi. Why do you take writing so serious?”⁹

In comparison, women, human relationships generally, are peripheral concerns. Malamud's heroes usually live alone and are usually bachelors, although occasionally a man's wife is temporarily away, or recently divorced from him. The old Jews have mournful, faceless help mates: the younger men occasionally make a special living arrangement with a woman, but Malamud rarely shows us a man and a woman genuinely sharing a place and a life, not to mention a family.¹⁰ The few exceptions, like Dubin's Lives, make even more clear that Malamud's men are by and large alone.

Their persistent sense of female flaws seems geared to keep them that way. Women who offer themselves to Malamud's protagonists for love or sex are frequently maimed: Avis in A New Life has a “sick breast”; Zina in The Fixer, daughter of the man Yakov Bok rescues, has a crippled leg which fills Bok with “a strange momentary revulsion,”¹¹ as does the sight of her menstrual blood. The revulsion again suggests fear or hostility toward women's physicality, or sexuality, especially evident in the earlier work. Complaints about flaws of behavior and temperament also figure prominently in the two extended pictures of wives in Malamud's fiction, Pauline Gilly in A New Life and Kitty in Dubin's Lives.

One might conclude from A New Life that to commit oneself to a woman in itself is to pile layer after layer of dismay upon one's life—from the faded morbid breastless person herself, to the destruction of all one's work life and work hopes that she entails. Levin is to be saddled with a married woman, two children who are not even biologically hers much less his, a surprise pregnancy thrown in, and not only the loss of his teaching job but of the possibility of teaching in the future. The book makes argument after argument against the union of man and woman, then pushes Levin into that union anyway, and only on the last half page turns about into half ambiguity, half affirmation. The domestic situation is the prison here, with every window bricked over. So despite the final image of Pauline smelling like fresh baked bread and the final leap of faith, the fact is that Levin screams no, runs for dear life, and collapses into dead feelinglessness until the very last moment.

The personal case against Pauline is largely made by her present husband towards the book's end, in a long speech that reminds one of medieval clerical diatribes against women. The principal charge against her is that she is dissatisfied, always wants to perform better than she does, feels things are never as good as they should be, which sounds—as do a number of related charges about her “instability”—like Malamud's male characters in general and like Levin himself in particular. Her age is a problem, though merely one or two years separate Levin and Pauline. Her domestic inadequacies come in for lengthy itemization:

If you happen to want someone who is a good housekeeper and will keep the house as neat and orderly as I've seen your office—I'm not talking about those fireballs who do canning, baking, gardening, civic activities, refinishing furniture, bean picking in summer, and play tennis besides … you'd better forget it. … That's why we don't entertain as much as I would like. She doesn't care for housework—it bores her, and even on days she is concentrating on getting it done, her resistance to it cuts down on her accomplishment.

(p. 354)

Although she has wanted to go to work, Gilley says, “I'd rather have her at home because that's what needs the most attention.” His conclusion: “that she is dislocated by nature” (p. 356). Malamud allows Gilley to present these arguments not as though they revealed a distortion of values or blindness but rather in a tone which totally wraps up the case of Levin's hideous fate.

Why under these circumstances Levin commits himself to Pauline is not made fully clear. The book uses the language of moral principle, though it also provides constant suggestions of multiple motives. What strikes one most at crucial moments of decision is not what is explicitly offered as explanation but rather the dramatization of Levin's passivity and its underside of anger. He sees himself, and the novelist sees him, as in the woman's control, and in a condition of will-essness. When Pauline makes some simple suggestions about how they might manage: “She's got it all planned. He wrestled a rage against her, answered nothing.” (p. 340) The final blow is his discovery that Pauline was responsible for Gilley's hiring him, for reasons of her own: “his destiny had been decided apart from him, by chance, her, not him. She called the signals.” (p. 335)

On the other hand, Levin's story seems that of a man terrified of human closeness, and feeling he will lose himself through it. Levin's other encounters with women all end in hasty ignominious withdrawal and flight, incidentally earning him the contempt and anger of the women involved: the waitress Laverne, the student Nadalee, and his colleague Avis. His sudden indifference to Nadalee after spending a weekend with her (having long lusted for her), is one more instance of a recurrent motif. Levin thinks early in the novel the thought of many a Malamud male: “Lord … how beautiful women are, and how hungry my heart is,” (p. 237) but that heart is surprisingly cold toward a known woman, and wild with passion for a stranger or one who is withheld, as circumstances force Pauline to be through the height of their affair.

Levin himself reads the pain of his physical ailment as a symptom of “love ungiven,” of “withholding what he had to give.” (p. 215) “Think of love,” Beppo tells Fidelman while he makes love to him in a later story, “You've run from it all your life.” (p. 199) Levin is simply appalled, even before the question of children or work loss is raised, by the disruption to himself of living with another person:

the miserable mess of divorce, having to fit himself to her, all her habituations and impedimenta, to suit to her clutter his quiet bachelor's life, needs, aspirations, plans. …

(p. 335)

One is reminded of a number of Malamud's stories in which writers or painters try to stave off human involvements,¹² as in the memorable “The Last Mohican,” where the demands on the writer are presented as endless and so overwhelming that they would easily swallow him up as a person.

On the other hand, the love and caring that Pauline Gilley brings to Levin is motherly, healing. When he is physically sick, despairing, full of “crawling self-hatred,” drowning in “each disgusting defeat from boyhood,” (p. 163) and about to slide back into alcoholism, no sooner does he raise the fatal bottle to his lips than she enters, with “something like pity in her eyes,” and ministers with “nose drops, antihistamine, vitamin C, a lemon for your tea, and some oranges and cookies” (p. 164). The incident not only marks the real beginning of their love affair but also gives Levin the strength to truly start his new life. Still, the repeated complaint of Pauline's being without breasts indicates the ambivalence he feels, as does the image in the book's final paragraph of the destruction of a leafy tree to make room for a heated tunnel. Despite the desire for rebirth through love and woman, even warmth and security—still something vital and beautiful, phallic if you like, is being cut down.

Beyond these vision of women, marriage, close human ties as oppressive, of course the general theme of the immensely burdened person, the victim, is Malamud's most characteristic. That it is Bellow's as well relates to its going beyond personality to culture, to Jewish history, for obvious reasons. Malamud says of Yakov Bok, trying to leave the shtetl for a wider life:

for a Jew it was the same wherever he went—he carried a remembered pack on his back—a condition of servitude, diminished opportunity, vulnerability.

(p. 255)

Malamud brilliantly memorializes immigrant pain in The Assistant, and pays equally ambitious if less successful witness to Jewish suffering in Czarist Russia in The Fixer, clearly writing out of an historical past that is touchingly deep within him, his imagination stamped with the starved dignified austerity of past Jewish lives.

Still, although Yakov Bok is defamed and victimized by people on every side, it is surely significant that all three important women characters are deadly toward him, while a few male characters are permitted sympathetic and generous roles, like a Russian guard killed for his compassionate intervention on Bok's behalf, or like Bok's father-in-law. When parental figures enter Malamud's fiction, the fathers are usually the ones who count, with the mothers absent or faceless figures of fear like Bober's wife in The Assistant. Yakov Bok, one of the loneliest of Malamud's men alone, an orphan, locked in solitary confinement through much of the book, feels warmth for Shmuel his father-in-law and cries at his death, even though Shmuel had saddled Yakov with his undowered “false” daughter and a hopeless horse and cart.

Toward the daughter Raisl, on the other hand, to whom he has been married for six years, Yakov feels only anger and bitterness, repeatedly calling her a whore for leaving him for another man. She appears to be an intelligent well-meaning woman, whose restless impatience with the confinement of the ghetto and ambition to get out are rendered understandable, although too driving and threatening to a man fearful of trying something new. The couple's growing estrangement, his hostility to her for not producing a child, sufficiently account for the franticness that leads her to flee, and yet Bok sees her as no more than a whore who deserted him. The book never quite reverses this vision. When Raisl comes to prison to see Bok, it is to bring him the final humiliation of her having had another man's child. Malamud makes her look unattractive: “small breasted, worn and sad,” (p. 234). Still, Yakov, with the largesse of Levin before him and Dubin after, gives the child his name—though it is a gesture a good deal less than loving here as with others. Yakov suffers not only through Raisl but through Zina, the crippled woman who offers herself to Yakov and is rejected by him. Whether he rejects her because she is dangerously Christian or because she is dangerously female or because she menstruates, she turns out to be anti-semitic and vengeful, later viciously accusing him of the sexual assault he withheld.

If Yakov fares badly with wife and passing lover, the third important woman character, the woman identified with motherhood in The Fixer, Marfa Golov, is the most destructive of all. She is herself clearly responsible for the hideous torture death of her son, whom Yakov is accused of having ritually murdered. Marfa has, in addition, blinded her lover for life with acid. Malamud calls her “a wicked woman, stupid yet cunning, with the morals of a hardened prostitute,” (p. 140) and in the marvellous hallucinatory passages toward the end of Bok's prison stay, Marfa and Raisl merge into a single phantom, enticing Bok sexually to his destruction.

The cumulative sadness, even distress, of experience with love and women in Malamud's work seems to enter the subject matter of his next novel, The Tenant. Harry Lesser, an unmarried novelist, seemingly without family, living alone, sees himself as “short of love” in his nature and is writing a book about “a writer's deficiencies in compassion and love.” Filled with “yearning, longing for life,” (p. 124) he is troubled by how much of his life he hasn't lived and by his difficulty in giving love, generously and in a sustained way, though it has always concerned him. He says, “I write about love because I know so little about it,” (p. 124) and hopes that by imagining love on the page, he can extend it to his life and spring a miraculous transformation.

However, his true love is again writing. “Home is where my book is,” (p. 6) Lesser says. Lesser's life is his work: the daily struggles and victories over the typewriter; the horror of losing a manuscript; the poignant sympathy felt for another man engaged in the act of writing; the sense always of having an exalted, a holy, calling; and always the merciless demands a book makes on a life:

Dedicated totally to his craft, he has withdrawn into a prison of his own making while yearning for contacts of the spirit and flesh. As a result, the outer world has been shut out as totally as in The Fixer.¹³

He attempts to open the door of his cell: “Two women walk into my house and in a minute flat I'm standing on my hands. He greeted an old self.” (p. 44) But it's a peculiar old self, that looks up women's skirts, that tries to get into bed with them in the most inappropriate contexts—with their friends present, with their men (who may also be his friends) right there. The women respond with laughter or irritation, the enthusiasm and lust seeming to have little to do with them.

While Lesser does establish a relationship with one of the women, in the end he will not make sufficient room for her next to his art. Lesser's love for Irene—like many Malamud loves—is triangular, Lesser having taken her from Willie Spearmint, the Black writer—so love here creates guilt, just as the melancholy Kitty does in Malamud's next novel. Lesser has been working at one book for nine and a half years, a slow writer (like Malamud himself), and love for Irene brings a quickening to his life and his writing, linked to spring. But ultimately Irene complains of how little he has left of himself for her and angrily suggests that he “fuck your book and save time all around” (p. 186). So although he says he wants love, he seems to retreat from it, subvert it as well.

The protagonist of Dubin's Lives sees himself as living vicariously through the lives of the writers he writes about. He is anguished by his sense of age and approaching death, of life unlived. His marriage seems to lack all vitality for him. The young girl, horrendously named Fanny, with whom he has an affair, becomes identified with Life, with a carpe diem sexual freedom that Dubin envies, product that he is of a more repressed age. He describes himself in youth as “living in reverie, trafficking in heartache; worn out by what didn't happen: what he could not, or dared not, make happen” (p. 88). Fanny, though never convincing as a character, is celebrated for exciting Dubin's physical desire and revitalizing his life. Also, early on, reminding one of Malamud's early Italian stories, she is promiscuous and whore-like, torturing and humiliating Dubin by affairs with young gondoliers while remaining inaccessible to him.

But even when the relationship becomes solid and deep, she remains unclear, remote, “a nice young woman” seen through avuncular eyes that never really see her, despite taking a joy in her which is clear and believable. Dubin also, in good Jewish patriarchal style, continually lectures to her like a teacher and helps her with decisions which she is said to be unable to make for herself. The paternal-filial core of the relationship is an explicit theme of the novel, a structuring device, paralleling Dubin's vaguely incestuous feelings for his daughter Maude with her relation of an elderly lover. At the same time, Dubin's children are his mirrors, especially the son, full of muddled intense emotion, who tells his parents: “I've blocked my exits. All my life I've been walking in a tunnel believing I was out in the open,” (p. 354) and sounds like Dubin himself. The two floundering children elicit poignant parental emotions, unfamiliar subject material for Malamud.

Dubin's Lives is itself unusual in Malamud's oeuvre for the prominence it gives the domestic and the familial. The novel conveys an unusually full sense, despite the brevity of the actual passages, of Dubin's feelings for his parents, long dead, and their unhappy legacies to him. Of his father, a man in the Morris Bober mold, who “made do and lived a meagre life”:

He gave me all he could, more than I wanted of his; an inclination to a confined lonely life. It was mine before I knew it; for years I held it against him.

(p. 68)

Dubin, on his ritual visits to their graves, touchingly makes his peace with his father, and his mother too, she whose “everlasting hunger” and madness took the form of terrors and attempted suicide. It is surely not unrelated that Malamud dedicates this novel to his parents.

Relatedly, though the novel is non-ethnic in setting and subject matter, Dubin retains a deep connection to Jewishness. At his father's grave he imagines nine others joining him in Kaddish, an ancient ceremony. And when Dubin is later immersed in madness and despair, his self-loathing takes the shocking form of someone assaulting him—not as Dubin but as a “rat-faced Jew,” whose

Jew mind is antagonistic to the active Male principle. Sex, to you, is functional, equivalent to passing excrement. You fear primal impulses. Work which should be an extension of human consciousness you distort to the end-all of existence.

(p. 319)

The depth of Dubin's self-definition as a Jew is again revealed as, during his love affair with Fanny in New York, he shares one sleepless night through the window with a “blackbearded black-hatted Jew” (p. 219) in a synagogue below, that other part of his identity always remaining close: the mystery of that ancient, tenacious, ineradicable affiliation. Even his (non-Jewish) wife relates a dream in which she first finds Dubin: “a man with earlocks … dark lonely eyes … a yarmulke … studying a book in Hebrew … a rabbi” (p. 335)

Kitty, with a past heavy with trauma and death, also very self-critical, shares these traits with Dubin himself (and indeed with most of Malamud's protagonists). But what originally attracted Dubin to her, now oppresses him. Dubin also feels—another familiar Malamud theme—that Kitty has come to him used. He repeatedly recalls their marriage's having originated in a mutual arrangement, an act of will (like the one in A New Life, eighteen years earlier) and hence perhaps insufficiently grounded in a necessary soil of love. Kitty too bears the physical flaws of Malamud's defective women—a blemish on her inner thigh, and what Dubin regards as the terrible signs of her aging. Kitty suggests to Dubin, even at the start of their marriage, “damaged goods—if not impaired passion. He accepted the given” (p. 90). But clearly this intensely critical vision is hardly an acceptance.

On the other hand, a complex lifetime shared can be felt to lie between Kitty and Dubin. She conveys intimate and caring knowledge of him, though also horrendous watchfulness for any sign of infidelity, and fearsome neediness, without any world of her own. On his side, Dubin communicates loyalty, pity, and sorrow over his growing distance from her. But whatever was once alive between them seems worn out by the ritual acts and battles of long years of a marriage. The book's last minute affirmation on Kitty's behalf is an uncomfortable as the final contrivances relating to Fanny. Only the truths of Dubin's ups and downs, the way he experiences both women, and the richness with which that is expressed, keep the book compelling.

Despite the unusual prominence here of familial ties, and of love and sexuality, the strongest reality in Dubin's life is yet again his aloneness—not Bellow's grand metaphysical solitariness but the unamplified pain of feeling cut off from other people. What stays in the mind most is Dubin on his long runs, his severe solitary regimen, through cold Vermont fields, metaphor for the icy winter of his life state. Occasionally one wonders whether it is his dreary marriage he wants release from, or any tie, the shackles that all Malamud's heroes feel and that they appear to carry with them. Dubin seems a man who has always kept a solitary aloofness, despite a few intimate encounters with his one friend Oscar Greenfield, a flutist. Flora, Greenfield's wife, comes together with Dubin for an affecting sexual moment, but she too seems all at odds (like most of the characters in the book), entering the last part of her life without a husband's love and with pitifully little else to keep her warm, seen through Malamud's and Dubin's compassionate eyes. Dubin's own isolation builds to the climactic nightmare of a blizzard, imaging his growing sense of inner “lostness,” though he is rescued by Kitty, and another time by Fanny.

Like most of Malamud's work, Dubin's Lives is filled with despair, breakdown, eventually something like actual madness—and despite the love ties that this novel is unusually rich in, the pain clearly has its roots in a deeper place than adult love would seem likely to get at. So when Dubin's friend Oscar plays a Shubert piece and

In the growing dark Dubin listened to the fluting melody of unfulfilled wanting.

(p. 326)

and then protests, “Not me. … I've had it with loneliness,” the moment is beautifully realized but the issue hardly resolved.

Finally, the love of work is again the most enduring and believable love in the book, the love of words, of beautiful thoughts, of the lives of writers. Malamud shares with Bellow and Roth an immense respect for artists and high thinkers, and even for critics, scholars, academics—traditional objects of writers' contempt. Their Herzogs, Professors of Desire, Dubins, derive from their love for the varied (especially literary) uses of the mind. Dubin “loved sentences” (p. 216) and “savored the joys of … laboring and constructing order: appreciate of the self who served him best” (p. 35). The working self has a sacredness—though no fluency, a hard-won, ever tenuous hold. Dubin may call his book “dead life,” (p. 318) but it is the mainspring of his life. Malamud himself appears to have this same embattled total engagement in his own art.

But however great the rewards of work, the lonely act of art is not nearly enough: a yearning to live and love. While Malamud's central characters try to break out of their solitude, they appear to fear love and women as much as they long for them. Malamud is also generally weak at characterizing women, and at the dynamics of relationship. But if women characters remain peripheral to the power of Malamud's work, they are certainly not peripheral to his characters' dreams, fantasies, longings. Finally, though Malamud's men are often cut off from human ties, the wonderful voice in his work, at its wry ironic feelingful best, continually renews one's sense of the human as mattering, as valuable, as having dignity and depth, even if Malamud cannot embody this affirmation in his treatment of women.

Notes

1. Bernard Malamud, Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1969), p.52. All subsequent references are to this edition.

2. Bernard Malamud, Dubin's Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977), p.36. All subsequent references are to this edition.

3. Examples are numerous. Fidelman stalks the streets of Venice desperately for the woman he touched once in “The Glass Blower,” and in yet another story in Pictures of Fidelman is mad for Annamaria Oliovino, clearly because as soon as he meets her, he sees her utter lack of interest in him, in fact her scorn. As the masochistic lover is beautifully caricatured in “Still Life,” so too is physical inaccessibility. Fidelman's lengthy labors to bring Annamaria to bed lead to a comic series of interruptions, until Fidelman is unable to effectively receive the offered bounty—a kind of parody of Levin's relation to Pauline Gilley in A New Life.

4. Fantasied sex at a distance, the sexual kicks of the impotent or the deprived, takes the form of Fidelman watching Annamaria and Augusto through a peephole, or remembering his sister bathing naked; Gilley's secret photo of Duffy and Pailine embracing in other rooms; not to speak of offices entered stealthily and somehow pruriently, files and diaries searched, letters copied, secret tapes examined.

5. Apart from the professional whores with which the Italian stories abound, the student who gives herself to Levin in A New Life turns up, under another name, in the story “Choice of a Profession,” as a call girl—“A whore, if you want me to say it”(75)—the confession of which fact totally cools her professor's lust for her, and has other grim results. The discovery of Pauline Gilley's brief affair with Duffy before his arrival shatters Pauline's value in Levin's eyes. The painter in “A Pimp's Revenge,” speaks of an old photo of himself as a boy with his mother, a photo that he has been trying to get on canvas for five years. He says, “I always go back to ‘Mother and Son,’ and as he redoes that subject endlessly, he finds it had changed from ‘Mother and Son’ to ‘Brother and Sister’—to let's face it, ‘Prostitute and Procurer.’”(142) That odd declension of male-female love, incestuous, degrading, is part of Malamud's vision right up to Dubin's Lives.

6. Alfred Kazin, Bright Book of Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), p. 140.

7. In comic variation on this theme, Fidelman, in the face of Annamaria's refusal to give anything, masochistically gives more and more, pays even higher rent and gets less for it, does Annamaria's cleaning, and permits her to peremptorily summon him as “Fatso.” For all the humor of the exaggeration, he becomes the degraded woman of the household. The ultimate image of a man bent humiliatingly in the service of women occurs in “Naked Nude” when, as a prisoner, Fidelman is forced to wash latrines for whores.

8. Mary Ellman, Thinking About Women (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968), pp. 19-20.

9. Malamud, The Tenants (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1971), p.88.

10. Also see Philip Roth's description of E. I. Lonoff, widely regarded as modelled on Malamud (and Singer as well) in The Ghost Writer (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979), p.46.

11. Malamud, The Fixer (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1966), p.34.

12. See also “The Maid's Shoes” and “Portrait of the Artist” in Pictures of Fidelman.

13. Ben Siegel, “Through a Glass Darkly: Bernard Malamud's Painful Views of the Self,” from The Fiction of Bernard Malamud, ed. Richard Astro and Jackson J. Benson (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1977), p.12.