SOURCE: Abramson, Edward A. “The Tenants.” In Bernard Malamud Revisited, pp. 90-100. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.

[In the following essay, Abramson addresses Malamud's treatment of the tension between Jews and African Americans in The Tenants.]

BLACKS AND WHITES

When Malamud was asked why he wrote The Tenants, he answered, “Jews and blacks, the period of the troubles in New York City, the teachers strike, the rise of black activism, the mix-up of cause and effect. I thought I'd say a word” (Stern, 61). As A New Life discussed aspects of McCarthyism and The Fixer focused on a particular period in the history of Tsarist Russia, so The Tenants treats issue of black anti-Jewish sentiment in the 1960s, despite the long and vigorous Jewish support given to black groups and causes.

Before the novel's appearance, Malamud had published two short stories treating relationships between blacks and Jews: “Angel Levine” (1955) and “Black Is My Favorite Color” (1963). The earlier tale focuses on the Job-like suffering of the protagonist, Manishevitz, and the question of whether his faith can extend to belief in a black, Jewish angel who claims to be a messenger from God. Relief from suffering for Manishevitz and full angelhood for Levine depends on the protagonist's ability to extend his idea of Jewishness to all human beings, and Levine's color makes the task much more difficult. Manishevitz's success leads to spiritual redemption for both, a much more optimistic ending than the more likely one of The Tenants.

“Black Is My Favorite Color” relies on realism rather than fantasy in its first-person, pessimistic rendition of the futility of offering love in a poisoned racial climate. The subtlety of prejudice is such that even a blind black man can detect a white person. Ultimately, Nat Lime cannot overcome the superior position that he, as a white man, holds in society; the black world is closed to him, and each race is going in a different direction.

In The Tenants, Harry Lesser and Willie Spearment reflect each other's prejudices. Even before Willie arrives on the scene, Harry's nightmares contain a black thug that he meets on the stairs. He wonders what it would be like to sleep with a black girl, and Willie's nervousness before asking him to read his manuscript causes Harry to muse: “Has he been seeing old Stepin Fetchit films … ?”¹ Malamud presents Willie at times as a stereotypical black man, one who responds easily to music and actually says: “Don't nobody have to tell me about rhythm” (TT [The Tenants], 87). Harry's reaction to the white, Jewish Irene being Willie's “sweet bitch” is laden with jealousy, not least because a black man is sleeping with her. When Harry and Irene sleep together, he denies it but Irene is aware of the racial implications: “… I have this awful feeling as though you and I are a couple of Charlies giving a nigger a boot in the ass” (TT, 148).

Perhaps even more than Harry, who tries early on to compensate for his prejudice by helping Willie with his writing, Willie is full of bigotry, as he is both antiwhite and anti-Jewish. Upon first meeting Harry, Willie refuses to shake his hand. His loss of Irene to Harry hurts Willie's pride, but it is doubtful that he loves her. She is more of a status symbol to him than anything else, because Willie refers to her when first introducing her to Harry as “his white chick, not giving her name” (TT, 42). As the prestige of a black man having a white woman wanes politically, so Willie begins to end his relationship with Irene, refusing to hold her hand in public or to take her to Harlem.

The “half-dozens” bring out both characters' latent racism: Harry calls Willie a “filthy nigger prick” because “I know you want to hear it” (TT, 134), and Willie calls Harry a “Kike apeshit thieven Jew” (TT, 134). Each character is aware of what words will most hurt the other's racial or ethnic pride, and this reaches its peak in Willie's violent anti-Semitic stories which equate all that he hates in whites with the Jews. “The way to black freedom is against them,” he says (TT, 220). The ending that this will lead to unless love or compassion intervenes is Willie's epithet, “Bloodsuckin Jew Niggerhater,” followed by Harry's “Anti-Semitic Ape” (TT, 229).

There is some sense of hope implied by Malamud's references to smells. Upon first meeting Willie, Harry detects a “sulphurous smell …” (TT, 29-30) arising from his manuscript. This hellish aroma, which parallels Harry's negative attitude toward blacks, persists when he later begins to read Willie's stories. However, when he rereads the stories, the suffering, rage, and, possibly, tears that went into the writing cause him to detect “no smell at all” (TT, 66). Through being able to see Willie as a suffering human being, Harry's original prejudices disappear. When hatred later returns, so does the smell. While blacks and whites can detect a unique odor in the other—shades of the blind man in “Black Is My Favorite Color”—this aroma disappears when each is perceived by the other as human and not as black or white. Also, when truth, suffering, or compassion is perceived in the writing of each, an odor, or bigotry, disappears.

Willie's central concern in his own writing is to express the sufferings of blacks at the hands of whites. He feels that whites are incapable of understanding black experience or black feelings, and so cannot tell blacks anything of use about themselves. Indeed, he feels it is offensive when whites presume to try to write about blacks. Harry's attitude is that of an artist, a believer in the universality of which art is capable. He tells Willie, “If you're an artist you can't be a nigger …” (TT, 51) and “if the experience is about being human and moves me then you've made it my experience” (TT, 75). His stress is on the importance of form, which Willie resists as being part of white, not black, writing. Malamud was very much aware of the existence of this attitude: “‘I expected trouble, but I didn't get it,’ [he said] although some black writers complained that Malamud had no business portraying a violent black character's search for identity” (Suplee, F8). It should be noted that “Willie's own thoughts are rarely presented in the novel. Malamud seems to be sensitive to precisely that opprobrium which accrues to a white man who purports to be in Willie's words, ‘an expert of black experience.’”²

Willie and Harry frequently see aspects of themselves in each other. Both are struggling as writers to put into order on paper elements of their experiences either that they do not fully understand—love, for Harry—or that require purgation so that they can live with themselves—the black situation in America for Willie. Harry lacks Willie's orientation to life, to real experience; Willie needs more of Harry's understanding of form, as when Harry tells him, “You can't turn black experience into literature just be writing it down” (TT, 74). Each writer becomes the other's victim because neither is capable of a sufficient depth of sympathy for the struggles and limitations of the other. Despite virtually taking on each other's persona—Willie becoming the obsessive writer and Harry sleeping with Irene—their relationship comes to revolve around selfishness: what use each can make of the other. Willie uses Harry for instruction in the writer's craft; Harry comes to rely on Willie to provide elements of life outside writing: women, parties, social consciousness. Their prejudices and lack of compassion will lead, most likely, to mutual destruction.

ART AND LIFE

As in Pictures of Fidelman, there is a symbiotic relationship expressed in The Tenants between art and reality. In thinking about his difficulties in completing his novel, entitled The Promised End, Harry muses: “It was as though the book had asked him to say more than he knew …” (TT, 106). He hopes that writing it will teach him about love, something he admits to knowing little about. He cannot complete it because it is about love, and he must bring knowledge of the subject to the book rather than hoping that his protagonist can provide this understanding for him. Lesser, his name having symbolic importance because of his inability to love, neglects his aged father and Irene, much as Fidelman ignored his sister Bessie and never said Kaddish for his dead mother. Both protagonists hope that if they can complete their work of art they will complete themselves. Since for Malamud, “love—the total union with another person—is the primary means toward redemption and salvation” (Rubin, 22), Harry's ability or inability to achieve a loving relationship is crucially important to both his life and his writing.

Lesser is related in The Tenants to the painter Lazar Kohn. The model for Kohn's “abstract and fragmented ‘Woman’” (TT, 109) was Kohn's mistress, just as Irene is Lesser's mistress. Kohn never was able to finish the painting (a success nonetheless), just as Lesser is unable to complete his novel—about his protagonist, Lazar Cohen. Given the nature of the art form, however, Lesser's novel will be a failure unless it is completed. Irene also possesses traits that directly relate her to Kohn's ‘Woman,’ who is described as “trying to complete herself through her own will, as willed by the painter. Otherwise she was an appearance of a face and body trying to make it through a forest of binding brush strokes” (TT, 110). Irene's attempts to complete herself, partly through psychoanalysis, have given way to the will of others—Willie and Harry. Her attempts to act on her own have been hampered by a lack of confidence and what appears to be a set of values based on the upbringing of a nice, Jewish girl, placing marriage and family first. She rebelled by becoming an actress and a mistress to a black man (though she had wanted to marry Willie), but she returns to conventionality in taking up with Harry, a white, Jewish writer. In the end she says, “I'm not career-oriented; I'd rather be married and have a family. … What a bourgeois shit I've become” (TT, 188). When she leaves Harry to go to San Francisco alone, she breaks out of the “binding brush strokes,” the wills of her art-obsessed lovers that have imprisoned her, and leaves the two writers to their own self-imposed prisons.

As Willie and Harry are both involved with Irene, so are they involved with the landlord Irving Levenspiel. Like Irene, the landlord serves as a touchstone for the writers' attitudes. To Willie, Levenspiel is never more than an exploiting landlord, a stereotype in much the same vein as Levenspiel's view of Willie as a “nigger.” In relation to Harry, however, Levenspiel illustrates further his divorce from reality and compassion, because of art. Like Manishevitz, protagonist of “Angel Levine,” Levenspiel has experienced an inundation of woes, which he relates to Harry no doubt in part to get him to move out through moving him emotionally. Nonetheless, that Harry can resist his pleas, in the name of art, only further reveals his own limitations: “But Lesser ignores Levenspiel's Job-like plight, just as Fidelman ignored Susskind. And Lesser ignores Levenspiel for the same ironic reason: to make a significant statement about humanity” (Cohen, 108). Harry tells him, “Something essential is missing that it takes time to find” (TT, 21). What is missing from his book is sympathy, mercy, and love, and his talking to the landlord about the pressures of form only justify Levenspiel's comment, “What's a make-believe novel, Lesser, against all my woes and miseries that I have explained to you?” (TT, 21). In “A Pimp's Revenge,” Esmeralda shouts at Fidelman as she returns to prostitution to support his painting, “Art my ass” (TT, 138). Levenspiel echoes this bitter remark when he says, “Art my ass, in this world it's heart that counts” (TT, 22). Later, at the end of his rope, the desperate landlord tells Harry that he has “steady biting pains around my heart” (TT, 193). Harry does not feel these pains and sees some of the limitations he has imposed upon himself: “So much I no longer see or feel except in language. Life once removed” (TT, 107). It should be noted that the landlord's name is close to the Yiddish Lebin shpiel, playing life, something from which Harry keeps his distance.

Malamud's description of the writers finding out that their craft has taken over their lives and feelings is most effective: “Whereas Willie tries to create art out of life, Lesser tries to discover life through his art. Neither is successful” (Mesher, 62). Willie gives up Irene to concentrate on his book. When Irene tells Harry that her relationship with Willie is fading, Harry's excitement takes an odd turn: “He feels in himself a flow of language, a surge of words toward an epiphany. … He rises craving to write” (TT, 119-20). When Harry feels what he thinks is love for Irene, he worries that it “might complicate his life and slow down his work, it did not. … But mostly what happened was that he was often high on reverie and felt renewed energy for work” (TT, 150). Having an emotion attached to real life instead of to words alone makes him feel free, and optimistic, and his writing improves. His reaction disproves his earlier idea that he might learn about love only through writing. Unfortunately, because of his rigidity and egotism, he cannot put real love first, cannot put into practice his realization that “I've got to write but I've got to more than write” (TT, 140).

This obsession with writing instead of real life eventually takes over Willie too, who finds himself moving from a comparatively easygoing approach to writing to one where he resists going to Harry's party because he wants to stay with his work. As he becomes more absorbed in words, Harry's influence is such that he tells him: “The worst about it is I don't want to do anything else but sit there and write. It's getting me scared” (TT, 87). Part of the reason for Willie's being so easily drawn into Harry's orbit lies in the fact that like Harry, Willie is in the process of creating himself through his book, taking the tragedies of black powerlessness in America and transforming them. It is as though if he can, through fiction and later through imagined action, turn blacks into chosen people, history will be nullified and Willie will gain stature as a human being. Willie dislikes Harry's insistence on form because he sees it as the white man's way. Unfortunately, Willie cannot create literature through an avoidance of form, through a reliance on anarchy and emotions as the opposite to “white” order and the mind. Above all, Willie wants power for his people and himself, and he hopes to create action through his words. His pseudonym, Bill Spear, combines overtones of literature, violence, and the physical (the phallic), in contrast to Harry Lesser's name, which exudes self-control and passionlessness. Through his new name, Willie wishes to obliterate his past and become a new person. David Mesher observes that “Willie, in many ways, is a ‘nigger’: the stereotyped ghetto black. Bill, the devoted artist, is not. … Willie, unable to be Bill, reverts to the stereotype of the ghetto black …” (Mesher, 67).

The issue of self-creation is highlighted in the “autobiographical” sections of Willie's book. Harry assumes that the first 148 pages are autobiography; the favored of three titles is Missing Life. Willie tells him, and Irene confirms it, that this apparently realistic part is made up, whereas four of the five stories that follow are true but not about Willie himself, though there are parallels (Harlem, prison) with his own life. Irene says that “he changes his birthplace every time he talks about it. I think he hates to remember it” (TT, 116). Since Willie cannot write with any objectivity, one can assume that though it is not autobiography, Missing Life contains much that has its roots in Willie's attempting to come to terms with his own deprived past.

In trying to imbue his character Herbert Smith's experiences with a “revolutionary mentality,” Harry believes (and he seems likely to be correct) that Willie “was attempting in his fiction to shed an incubus—his former life. This was not necessarily bad in itself but could be bad if he insisted, and he was insisting. As a result nobody in this long section came halfway to life” (TT, 162).

Willie's writing fails because he cannot distance himself sufficiently from feeling passionately about black struggle and oppression; he does not understand the uses of form. Harry's writing fails because he is bogged down in form and is too distant from real life. A subtle balance must exist for the creation of successful art. Ultimately Willie uses his writing for the purpose of purgation, confession, and politics, which guarantees his failure. He realizes this and decides to give up writing, despite Harry's remark that “art is action”; his rejoinder: “Action is my action” (TT, 166).

FORM AND CONTENT

In The Tenants there is a continuation of the prison motif that occurs in various guises in all of Malamud's novels. Characters have been trapped by their pasts, goals, mistakes, or personality flaws. In some instances a literal structure has symbolized this entrapment, such as the store in The Assistant, the cell in The Fixer, and the tenement in The Tenants. The tenement in which Harry and Willie entomb themselves effectively blocks out much of the real world. When the world does enter demanding concern and compassion, as with a whimpering dog with a bleeding eye, Harry immediately removes it from the building, ignoring sounds of “muted cries, distant wailing …” (TT, 24) that seem to float in from the city outside. Harry resists Levenspiel's pleas and will not even open his door to him; Willie simply hides or flees. The isolation of Harry and Willie in the tenement permits Malamud to focus on them in great detail. There is also a symbolic parallel between the disintegrating building and the state of race relations in the United States. The building may be seen to verge on becoming an objective correlative for the emotions roused by the claustrophobic nature of the protagonists' obsessions with writing and the junglelike ferocity of their eventual confrontations, in which racial issues are central.

The Tenants is an essentially gloomy and pessimistic novel, not possessing even the limited and qualified optimism that exists at the end of The Fixer. Given what has happened in the story, the likelihood of the interracial wedding taking place in the future between Harry and Mary and Willie and Irene is remote. The tone and tenor of the characterizations and plot stress hopelessness, and the violence that erupts is not at all surprising. With the possible exception of Irene, none of the characters is particularly amenable to sympathy from the reader. Cynthia Ozick thinks the characterizations are flawed, but not completely so: “The balance was unequal, the protagonists unfairly matched, the Jew too hesitant and disciplined, the black too spontaneous and unschooled.”³ She wonders why Malamud did not present an Ellison rather than an Eldridge Cleaver and concludes that it was for the purpose of “novelistic bite and drama. …” However, Harry eventually realizes that Willie is both a “goy” and “a ferocious, a mythic, anti-Semite” (Ozick, 92). She sees Malamud as reflecting the times, stating that he “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” (Ozick, 95).

Writing in 1967, Leslie Fiedler observes that Jews are the only white Americans who might feel no guilt toward blacks since they neither owned slaves nor had any part in lynchings. Moreover Jews can see in blacks a people who are treated as they themselves once were, a people who in America have taken on the role of pariah that, but for them, Jews might have. Yet largely because of the Jews' former roles as landlords, shopkeepers, teachers, and social workers in the black ghettos, “just as society must have a scapegoat, so hatred must have a symbol. Georgia has the Negro. Harlem has the Jew.”⁴ Both Ozick and Fiedler view a character like Willie in terms of the extremes of the times. As the novel is set in the midst of these extremes, Malamud's characterization of Willie is appropriate. Harry's attempts to cope with his own subtle prejudices and his feelings of guilt because of them, his positive feelings toward a fellow writer, and the flaws that exist in his own personality and character combine to create the tension that comes out when he confronts & Willie.

While the novel mixes reality and fantasy, the reader perceives “all action filtered through Lesser's fanciful thoughts and nightmares. Willie's internalizings remain shrouded” (Siegel, 138). Blending fantasy with reality is not a new technique for Malamud, as its use can be seen in The Natural, in The Fixer, in “Pictures of the Artist” in Pictures of Fidelman, and in a number of his short stories. Fantasy in The Tenants includes Harry's turning the building into a jungle located in the middle of Manhattan—an island on an island: “… this sceptered isle on a silver sea, this Thirty-first Street and Third Avenue. This forsaken house” (TT, 5). Willie's arrival adds an allusion to Daniel Defoe, with Harry as Robinson Crusoe and Willie as a frustrated Friday full of rage.

This use of fantasy takes the reader into Harry's subconscious. We learn of his fears and hopes through his reveries, visions, and dreams. One critic sees Malamud's use of these states of mind as expressing “the inevitable interrelationships of characters, … where they record the progressive and tragic interlocking of Harry and Willie's destinies.”⁵ The interlocking of destinies can be seen in Harry's dream of Willie's poem concerning Willie's sex life with Irene, followed by Willie eating a large bone that may be Harry's leg. This nightmare occurs while Harry is in bed with Irene, when Willie has not yet been told of their relationship. The ending containing descriptions of the interracial marriages also illustrates an aspect of the two writers' relationship, in this instance leading to a positive, highly optimistic, conclusion. There are numerous examples of this use of reverie and dreams as a plot device.

Malamud presents mirrors within mirrors in what the reader must decipher to cope with the plot: “Often, the reader will follow along in an event in Lesser's life, only to learn that the event is in Lesser's fiction. The reader is irritated, but he knows how Lesser feels: the boundaries of art and life are not so easily determined” (Helterman 1985, 90-91). Malamud uses Willie's writing the same way, blurring the distinction between fiction and reality. The cumulative effect of this is that the reader frequently must decide which book he is reading: “The one Malamud has written? The one each of us reads? The one that the character called Lesser is writing? Or the one that the nameless writer, in the novel that Lesser is writing, is also trying to write?” (Hassan 1977, 56). The reader is forced into the writers' dilemma of the overlapping nature of art and life. Interestingly it is the art, the artificial, that is frequently more gripping than reality, largely because of Malamud's skill in presenting the obduracy and fanaticism with which both writers, lacking a full understanding of reality, attempt to transmute partially understood feelings into fiction. As in “A Pimp's Revenge,” Malamud explores the anguish of a creator who is incapable of completing his most important creation, perhaps only in part because the unfinished masterpiece is “the only existence that the artist has. Lesser feels that he has only one masterpiece in him, and at the moment he finishes The Promised End, he will cease to be an artist” (Helterman 1985, 91). Willie's destruction of Harry's manuscript is tantamount to murder, in that he prevents him from discovering those aspects of himself—love in particular—that would make him a complete human being. However, because Harry is unlikely to learn what he must from his writing, the destruction is a mercy killing, a piece of dramatic irony, in that it has freed Harry from a quest that he would never complete.

Malamud “thinks of The Tenants as a sort of Prophetic warning against fanaticism. ‘The book,’ he says, ‘argues for the invention of choices to outwit tragedy.’”⁶ When asked why he needed three endings, Malamud replied, “Because one wouldn't do” (Stern, 61). It could be argued, in fact, that two more endings precede the three. The first is a reverie wherein Harry imagines Levenspiel setting fire to the building, thus providing an end both to himself and his novel. There may be implied here some sense of guilt on Harry's part for his deafness to Levenspiel's pleas, but if there is guilt, it does not affect his actions. A second possible ending occurs when Willie burns Harry's manuscript, which has been ten years in the writing.

The three major endings take place in the final 24 pages of the novel and reflect the possible outcomes of black-white relations in America. The first is apparently hopeful: black and white/Jew will intermarry and solve the problem of racial conflict. However, there are many caveats and hesitancies expressed. The chief says: “When our black daughter marry the white mens we do not rejoice …” (TT, 210). Shortly afterward he adds: “The ceremony of reconciliation is useless. Men say the words of peace but they do not forgive the other” (TT, 211-12). The rabbi is nervous and “stares in amazement at the assemblage” (TT, 209), later saying: “My rabbinical colleagues will criticize me strongly for performing this ceremony …” (TT, 216). Harry and Irene's fathers clearly disapprove, and David Belinsky “smiles striken” (TT, 214). Harry imagines this ending “like an act of love, the end of my book, if I dared.” Irene's response within the fantasy is “You're not so smart …” (TT, 217).

The second ending concludes a period in which Harry has destroyed Willie's typewriter, having found that his own paper gave off an unpleasant odor, that of hate. He has had a reverie of being destroyed in another fire, this time set by Willie. He now no longer writes; that is, he no longer attempts to find out about love. The building has become a jungle and each strikes the other in the place where his own group is most prone to being stereotyped, thus showing how much like the other each has become. So, Harry sinks an ax in Willie's brain, and Willie cuts off Harry's balls. Like the previous ending, this one is fantasy; it does not occur. The only hope is seen in the final phrase: “Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other” (TT, 230). Of course, it is too late for this feeling to have an effect.

The final ending of the novel is Levenspiel's cry for mercy. Since the first ending is unlikely, the only way to avoid the second may be through Levenspiel's plea that black and white have mercy for each other as struggling fellow human beings. While some critics think this triple ending is inadequate, actually an avoidance of an ending, Malamud's provision of choice here mirrors reality. He admitted in an interview four years after the novel's publication: “It's impossible to predict—it may go one way; it may go another” (Field 1975, 14). As Saul Bellow's Dean Corde points out in The Dean's December (1982), the black underclass is growing and whites may well have given up on attempts to integrate its members into society: “Those that can be advanced into the middle class, let them be advanced. The rest? Well, we do our best by them. We don't have to do any more. They kill some of us. Mostly they kill themselves …”⁷ Not much room for mercy here.

Notes

1. The Tenants (London: Eyre Methuen, 1971), 55; hereafter cited in text as TT. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

2. David R. Mesher, “Names and Stereotypes in Malamud's The Tenants,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 4 (Spring 1978): 62; hereafter cited in text.

3. Cynthia Ozick, “Literary Blacks and Jews,” in Malamud: Critical Essays, ed. Field and Field, 90; hereafter cited in text.

4. Leslie Fiedler, “Negro and Jew: Encounter in America,” in No! in Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1963), 241.

5. Herbert Mann, “The Malamudian World: Method and Meaning,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 4 (Spring 1978): 7.

6. Israel Shenker, “For Malamud It's Story,” New York Times Book Review, 3 October 1971, 22.

7. Saul Bellow, The Dean's December (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 205.