SOURCE: Malamud, Bernard, and Leslie Field and Joyce Field. “An Interview with Bernard Malamud.” In Conversations with Bernard Malamud, edited by Lawrence M. Lasher, pp. 35-46. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.

[In the following interview, conducted through an exchange of letters in 1973 and originally published in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays in 1975, Malamud discusses specific aspects of his writing, divorced from any biographical influence.]

The following commentary and summary from an exchange of letters between Mr. Malamud and the interviewers from May 11, 1973 to August 2, 1973 reveal the nature and scope of this interview.

We wrote Mr. Malamud asking him to agree to an interview because even though his fiction is the important thing, we felt that a full-scale interview could contribute a great deal also. His response to a variety of questions would, we believed, be most helpful to readers, students, critics, and scholars.

Ours was a simple plan. We would spend a few hours with Mr. Malamud taping questions and answers. We would then send him transcripts of the tape and he would modify as he saw fit—to best reflect what he wanted to say at any given point. Our object was simply to get a straightforward series of responses to questions often asked about his fiction. But we left other options open. For example, perhaps he would choose to do all of this by mail rather than through a personal interview.

Mr. Malamud chose the mail interview route. He pointed out that in the past he had avoided most interviews, “especially when tape recorders are relentlessly present,” because he was often unhappy with his own responses. He added that he dislikes explaining his fiction because by describing his “intent” he may in effect “betray” his work. He fears that people may substitute what he says about his writing for their own imaginative reading of his fiction. Thus a certain kind of interview could be self-defeating.

Mr. Malamud went on to say that he doesn't “like to say where stories originated, from what incident, real or imagined, from my life or anyone else's.” He felt strongly that one shouldn't confuse the author's life with his fiction or even devote much effort to relating the two—“That's a critic's pleasure and not mine.”

When the questions were sent to Mr. Malamud, we emphasized that we had tried to follow certain guidelines, some of which he himself had proposed. We would use only those questions which had been asked in one way or another by readers, critics, students. We would try to avoid questions addressed to specific interpretations of his works, his characters. We would also try to avoid belaboring him with queries about sources. And, finally, we would try to eliminate personal matters.

We realized that we hadn't succeeded on all counts. However, we asked him to answer those questions he felt he could answer as completely as possible. He had the choice of answering part of a question rather than the whole. Or he could modify certain questions before he answered. In a word, we wanted him to be comfortable in his approach and to feel free to tailor the whole to suit his needs.

For the most part, the questions appear here as they were originally presented to Mr. Malamud. One question was eliminated. The one on baseball was recast by him, and he revised one of his answers. At his suggestion, a summary of our correspondence was used rather than a verbatim transcript of the letters. Finally, we believe we exercised our best editorial judgment in shortening a few questions when the answers were received.

[The Fields]: It has been reported that you once said: “A Malamud character is someone who fears his fate, is caught up in it, yet manages to outrun it. He's the subject and object of laughter and pity.” Could you elaborate on this statement? Do you still consider that it capsulizes recent important Malamud characters—for example, Fidelman, Yakov Bok, and Harry Lesser?

[Malamud]: I can't work up any great enthusiasm for the statement but what I imagine it means is that my characters often outwit their predictable fates. I'd say that holds for Fidelman, Yakov Bok, and even Harry Lesser.

How did you happen to write a baseball novel?

Baseball players were the “heroes” of my American childhood. I wrote The Natural as a tale of a mythological hero because, between childhood and the beginning of a writing career, I'd been to college. I became interested in myth and tried to use it, among other things, to symbolize and explicate an ethical dilemma of American life. Roy Hobbs is as American as the White House lawyers involved in Watergate.

As you know, the “academic novel” has been a subject of critical commentary. It used to be said, for example, that every professor of English had at least one academic novel within him that was crying to get out. Would it be accurate to say that a novel such as A New Life (although it obviously does much more than depict academic life) could not be written today because the campus is now a composite of a drastically altered set of symbols?

This is an involved query concerning what to me was the simple act of writing a novel out of my experience. The “academic novel,” as such, simply doesn't interest me.

One fairly popular view has it that the schlemiel as metaphor or character in fiction is an uneasy transplant from East European Yiddish fiction to modern American fiction. As a matter of fact, two recent full-length books on the schlemiel conclude that the schlemiel as fictional character was able to work quite effectively for a Malamud and a Bellow up through the sixties. At that point these critics sound the death knell for the schlemiel. They say, for example, that an America which is going through (or has just gone through) Vietnam and civil strife, a country which is no longer considered a “winner,” cannot accept with equanimity a fictional depiction of a “loser.” How do you react to this commentary on the use of theschlemiel in fiction?

With many apologies, I don't much care for the schlemiel treatment of fictional characters. Willy-nilly, it reduces to stereotypes people of complex motivations and fates—not to mention possibilities. The literary critic who wants to measure the quality and depth of a fictional character has better terms to use.

When you received the National Book Award for The Fixer you said the novel was not simply a fictional retelling of the Beilis case of Czarist Russia, that it involved much more, that in some way it also owed much to a later horrible event in history—the Nazi Holocaust. Could you elaborate on this? Moreover, do you believe you could have used the Dreyfus case or the Sacco-Vanzetti case to express equally well what it was you had to say in The Fixer?

My original desire was to write a novel based on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, but when I began to read on the subject I had the feeling that I couldn't invent a more dramatic story than the original. Since I was interested in how some men grow as men in prison I turned to the Beilis case, which my father had told me about when I was a boy. The Fixer is largely an invention. That is, I've tried to bring it as close to a folk tale as I could. However, in it I was able to relate feelingfully to the situation of the Jews in Czarist Russia partly because of what I knew about the fate of the Jews in Hitler's Germany.

I. B. Singer has said he writes about devils, sprites, and evil spirits—about the supernatural in general—because he believes in the supernatural. Much earlier, Hawthorne explained that he wanted to find some “neutral ground” for his fiction. Your use of the supernatural has been compared to that of Singer and Hawthorne. Do you believe in the supernatural? Do you look for a “neutral ground” in your fiction as you order your supernatural or fantastic worlds? Or do some other explanations apply to this world of your fiction?

I don't believe in the supernatural except as I can invent it. Nor do I look for a “neutral ground” for my fiction. I write fantasy because when I do I am imaginative and funny and having a good time.

In one of your early, infrequent interviews, we believe you said that Kafka was one of the modern authors who had influenced you. How?

He writes well. He moves me. He makes me want to write well and move my readers. Other writers have had a similar effect. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I am influenced by literature.

There has been much critical commentary concerning a statement you are alleged to have made: “All men are Jews.” Did you ever actually make this statement? Do you believe it is true? It is, of course, a view one cannot take literally. In any event, would you elaborate on the “All men are Jews” statement?

I think I said “All men are Jews except they don't know it.” I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally. But I think it's an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men.

Some have seen parallels between your work and painting, especially the spiral, mystical works of Chagall. This has been observed, for instance, in your short story “The Magic Barrel.” Elsewhere readers have remarked on your concern with the plastic arts in general—in Pictures of Fidelman, for example. What influence has painting had on your fiction? Have you consciously tried to fuse one art form with another?

It's true that I did make use of what might be called Chagallean imagery in “The Magic Barrel.” I did so intentionally in that story, but I've not done it again in any other piece of fiction, and I feel that some critics make too much of Chagall as an image maker in my work. Chagall, as a painter, doesn't mean as much to me as Matisse, for instance. Painting helps me to see with greater clarity the multifarious world and to depict it simply.

Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bruce J. Friedman, and other contemporary American novelists have rejected the label “Jewish-American Writer.” In one way or another you have also. Nevertheless, you, the other writers mentioned—and one could bring in additional writers such as Chaim Potok and Herbert Gold—are still being classified as Jewish-American writers by many scholars, critics, and readers. It is our impression that the responsible people who place you and others in this category do not intend to reduce your stature or disregard the universalism they see in your work. They have simply categorized or schematicized as scholars are prone to do, much as one labels Faulkner a Southern-American writer because the spirit of place (the South) imbues his work or Graham Greene an Anglo-Catholic writer because a certain spirit of a specific religion permeates much of his significant work. How do you respond to this categorizing of you and your work? Would you reject the term Jewish-American writer categorically?

The term is schematic and reductive. If the scholar needs the term he can have it, but it won't be doing him any good if he limits his interpretation of a writer to fit a label he applies.

Bellow pokes fun at this sort of thing by calling “Bellow-Malamud-Roth” the Hart, Schaffner and Marx of Jewish-American literature.

Whether or not you accept the label of Jewish-American writer, would you not agree that your writing reveals a special sense of a people's destiny that more often than not cannot be fully grasped in all its nuances and vibrations by those who are not fully sensitized to that people or its destiny? On one level, for example, it has been said that one must be a Russian in order to respond completely to the nineteenth-century notion of salvation through suffering that is dramatized so well by Dostoevsky. Or that only blacks can truly appreciate the plight of black America. Could one not also say that only those who understand the Yiddishkeit of the characters or the Yiddish milieu are able to respond fully to the silent communication between a Morris Bober and a Brietbart or between a Yakov Bok and his father-in-law, and so on?

I'm sensitive to Jews and Jewish life but so far as literature is concerned I can't say that I approve of your thesis: that one has to be of a certain nationality or color to “fully grasp” the “nuances and vibrations” of its fiction. I write on the assumption that any one sensitive to fiction can understand my work and feel it.

Much has been made of the prison motif in your work. Do you see the prison metaphor as one that aptly describes the dilemma of modern man? If so, could you elaborate on this?

It's a metaphor for the dilemma of all men throughout history. Necessity is the primary prison, though the bars are not visible to all. Then there are the man-made prisons of social injustice, apathy, ignorance. There are others, tight or loose, visible or invisible, according to one's predilection or vulnerability. Therefore our most extraordinary invention is human freedom.

It has been noted that if one is to interpret your work correctly, one must not weigh Judaic interpretations too heavily. One must rather look to the Christian symbolism or perhaps the Judaic-Christian. How do you respond to this?

I don't know whether there is a “correct” interpretation of my work. I hope not.

You yourself have said that in your fiction you are concerned with humanity, man's humanism. Could you explore this notion somewhat?

I don't think I ought to. People can read; they can read what I say. That's a lot more interesting than reading what I say I say.

Some have remarked that you are not interested in a novel of ideas as such, but in a depiction of human nature. Henry James, for example, was quite vocal in explaining his fictional approach (which he attributed to Turgenev's influence). That is, he would start out with a clearly defined character thrust into a specific situation. How that character responded to the situation became all-important. Do you believe your own fictional approach follows this Jamesian-Turgenev method?

Basically, that's it, but I don't think I would limit my “fictional approach” to the “Jamesian-Turgenev method.” One learns from Shakespeare as well. My novels are close to plays. I had once, as a young writer, wanted to be a playwright.

The tension between life and art seems to be a major concern in your fiction. One could see it in some of your early work. And as recently as The Tenants and Rembrandt's Hat it is obvious that this tension is still a significant part of your fiction. Of course Pictures of Fidelman is introduced by the epigraphs taken from Rilke and Yeats, and is followed by A. Fidelman's terse conclusion. Many would agree that life versus art is central to the Fidelman stories. Do you concur? Can you perhaps now probe in a bit more detail the life versus art theme as you see it?

It isn't life versus art necessarily; it's life and art. On Fidelman's tombstone read: “I kept my finger in art.” The point is I don't have large thoughts of life versus art; I try to deepen any given situation.

As one reads through your work one is tempted to continue pairing concepts, terms such as the life and art mentioned earlier. Another pair—love and redemption—comes to mind. The Frank Alpines and Yakov Boks, for example, apparently do redeem themselves. But terms such as love, humanity, belonging, compassion or rachmones or menschlechkeit (and other terms as well) seem to slip in and out of one's consciousness in this context. In a variety of ways, you seem to demonstrate that love brings redemption to an individual. But both of these terms—love and redemption—are endowed by you with a multiplicity of meanings. Would this be a fair estimation? Or would you prefer one to place love and redemption into a narrower, perhaps more religious context?

Yes, there are various ways. I wouldn't want to place love and redemption in a religious context, although acting out love and redemption may be a religious deed.

Characters in your fiction from time to time wrestle with their Jewishness. In response to a question, Morris Bober defines Jewishness. Bok ultimately feels he must rejoin his people. But these characters and others seem to adapt as minority people to the pluralistic societies they find themselves in—whether it be the United States, Russia, or Italy. One of our students recently noted that the current writers who frequently people their work with Jews—Bellow, Roth, I. B. Singer, etc.—and who explore serious matters concerning Jewishness, probe or suggest a variety of possible identities. These may involve religion, assimilation, acculturation, bundism, social action, etc. But Zionism (specifically seeking one's Jewish identity in Israel) is quite conspicuous by its absence. As a matter of fact, this student further observed that the real (in-depth) American Zionist novel has not only not been written, but probably will never be undertaken by a major American writer. Do you agree? Why has Zionism played such a minor role for the Jewish characters who have populated so much of our fiction during the last two decades?

I agree. Writing about Zionism wouldn't interest me. I'd rather write about Israel if I knew the country. I don't, so I leave it to the Israeli writers.

Not too long ago Robert Alter noted the black-white confrontations in Rabbit Redux, Mr. Sammler's Planet, and The Tenants. In the latter two books, of course, the whites assumed another dimension because they were Jews. It is perhaps no coincidence that these books emerged at a time of great conflict between blacks and whites in this country and in certain pockets of the country between blacks and Jews. Do you yourself see a new relationship developing in the United States between blacks and Jews? If so, how do you define this relationship?

It's impossible to predict—it may go one way; it may go another. A good deal depends on the efficacy of American democracy. If that works as it ought—guaranteeing blacks what they deserve as human beings—a larger share of our national wealth, equal opportunity under the law, their rights as men, the relationship of blacks and Jews and other minorities are bound to improve.

At one time you mentioned that even though a number of years separate your first Fidelman story from the last one, when you initially created Arthur Fidelman you had plans that went beyond “The Last Mohican.” Can you explain why it was that they became a series of separate stories ultimately woven into a novel rather than a novel more in the form of The Assistant or The Tenants? Also, the name Fidelman. Some critics have played around with the name as symbol. Few, however, have noted that it is also your mother's maiden name. Was this choice significant or incidental?

Right after I wrote “The Last Mohican” in Rome in 1957, I worked out an outline of other Fidelman stories, the whole to develop one theme in the form of a picaresque novel. Why do it the same way all the time?

I used my mother's maiden name because I needed a name I liked.

Has your wife's Italian background contributed to your “Italian” stories in the same way that your Jewish background has contributed to your “Jewish” stories? We are talking here more of an Italian and Jewish context, characterization, and rhythm of place rather than simply settings and people that happen to be Italian and Jewish.

Yes. I met Italians in America through my wife before and after we were married, and because she had been to Italy and could speak Italian like a native, we decided to live in Rome with our children in 1956-7. Through her relatives and acquaintances I was almost at once into Italian life and got the feel of their speech, modes of behavior, style. When I go abroad I like to stay in one place as long as possible until I can define its quality.

Do you read much of the criticism of your fiction? How do you respond to literary criticism in general?

I read here and there in criticism about my work when it hits the eye. I don't go looking for it. I like imaginative interpretations of my books, whether I agree with them or not. I enjoy criticism that views the work in ways I haven't anticipated—that surprises me. I dislike crap—criticism, favorable or unfavorable, that really doesn't understand what the books are about. I do take seriously insightful criticism of individual works that affirm judgments, negative or positive, of my own.

Does teaching interfere with your writing of fiction or does it help and complement in some ways?

I devote little time to teaching now—a quarter of a program, one class in the spring. Teaching “interferes” only in cutting down writing time. On a day I teach I can't write. But teaching helps more than it hinders. It gets me out of my study and puts me in touch with people. And I like reading, and talking about books.

I'm not arguing that the academic life is the life for a writer—often it restricts experience and homogenizes it; but I am grateful that when I was earning little or nothing as a writer, because of teaching, when I wrote I wrote only what I wanted to write.

In The Assistant your characters are frequently referred to as the Poilesheh, the Swede, the Italyener, the Norwegian, the Greek, and even the Jew. In one sense it reminds one of Stephen Crane's use of the youthful soldier, the cheerful soldier, the loud soldier, the spectral soldier, etc. Were you attempting an ethnic view of twentieth-century urban America much as Crane may have tried to depict the world of the Civil War Soldier through a set of humors?

No, I don't play those games. That's the way the Bobers talk.

Another reference to Stephen Crane, a variation. Are you very concerned with drawing prototypes and archetypes in your fiction as opposed to depicting realistic human beings? In other words, do you find yourself deliberately flattening out some of your characters much as a Stephen Crane would do or as a Cézanne would do in painting because you are at times much more interested in something beyond the depiction of a recognizable three-dimensional character?

I would never deliberately flatten a character to create a stereotype. Again—I'm not much one for preconceptions, theories—even E. M. Forster's “flats and rounds.” Most of all I'm out to create real and passionate human beings. I do as much as I can with a character. I may not show him in full blast every moment, but before the end of a fiction he has had a chance to dance his dance.

It appears that you rarely develop children or young characters in your fiction, especially in your longer fiction. Children are in the background often in novels such as The Natural and A New Life, but are almost nonexistent in other works. Have you been conscious of this characteristic of your fiction? Do you have any thoughts on this matter?

I've got to leave something for my old age.

Would you agree that yours is basically a comic vision of life?

There is comedy in my vision of life. To live sanely one must discover—or invent it. Consider the lilies of the field; consider the Jewish lily that toils and spins.

Do you see a major shift in the point of view of your recent short stories collected in Rembrandt's Hat as opposed to views you may have held when you wrote The Magic Barrel and Idiots First? There is still, of course, the concern with humanity or menschlechkeit. Is there more stoic acceptance in these stories?

They're the stories of an older man than the one who wrote The Magic Barrel and Idiots First, possibly a man who knows more than he did ten or fifteen years ago.

Do you read more fiction or nonfiction these days? At any rate, could you give us some notion of your current reading?

I read a good deal of biography. I like some of the Latin American novelists I've been reading lately. I read too much half-ass American fiction and not enough good poetry. At the moment I'm rereading Walden. I'm also reading Jane Goodall's study of chimps, In the Shadow of Man. More than half of my reading centers around what I may need to know for my own writing.

Would you say something about your writing habits, the physical setting for your writing, and perhaps along the way give a few clues about your earliest writing experiences, etc.?

I've answered this question in an interview with Israel Shenker in the N. Y. Times. It's not a question that I love to answer more than once. Young writers have a legitimate but exaggerated interest in the way other writers work. To them I'd say the way to work is the way you write best.

You've mentioned another novel you are working on now. Would you care to give us some idea of its direction and scope?

I don't believe, as Hemingway seemed to, that you hex a work-in-progress simply by talking about it. I'm writing another novel—a difficult one, just started, which may not see the light of day. If it does, the opening paragraph may read as follows:

“Although it isn't yet end of summer, William Dubin, at one moment of his walk in the country—rural into pastoral—beats his arms vigorously across chest and shoulders as though he had suddenly encountered cold, the clouds have darkened, and a snowstorm threatens. He had, in a way, been thinking of winter.”

Can you think of other questions which have not been asked or which should be asked or which you would like asked? Perhaps you can supply answers for these unasked questions.

No, I've talked too much.