SOURCE: Alter, Iska. “The Natural, The Assistant, and American Materialism.” In The Good Man's Dilemma: Social Criticism in the Fiction of Bernard Malamud, pp. 1-26. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1981.

[In the following essay, Alter examines the “democratic dilemma” in Malamud's fiction.]

In the explosion of Jewish-American fiction that has characterized this country's literary history since the Second World War, Bernard Malamud's work retains a certain singularity in both subject matter and form. Without the exuberant self-promotion of Norman Mailer, the black and bitter humor of Joseph Heller, the increasing self-absorption of Philip Roth, or, more significantly, the moral comedy of Saul Bellow, Malamud has continued to be a humanistic spokesman, albeit a frequently disappointed one in recent years, for responsibility, compassion, and goodness in a world spinning out of control with frightening speed. To embody his concerns as a Jew, an artist, and a moral man, Malamud has evolved a style that is uniquely his. Its fusion of the fabulous and the factual, called “lyrical realism” by the Yiddish critic Mayer Shticker,¹ is the fictive analogue to the Chasidic belief that the mystical connection to God is to be found not in ascetic isolation, but through man's participation in the ordinary activities and mundane events of daily existence.²

Given Malamud's not-quite-fashionable content³ and his paradoxical technique, it should not be surprising that the critical response to his fiction has been varied, and sometimes contradictory. On the one hand, he is condemned by Philip Roth⁴ for his distance from an actual, firmly presented social environment; on the other, he is praised by Tony Tanner⁵ for this very same quality. Within this range of opposites, several distinct orientations are apparent. For example, Alfred Kazin denigrates The Natural because it is rooted in fantasy, preferring those novels and short stories that seem to be a more naturalistic portrayal of the Jew's experiential reality,⁶ while Marcus Klein notes Malamud's variations on the accommodationist spirit that Klein perceives as the major force in post-World War II literature. Like Kazin, Klein is not entirely comfortable with what he believes to be Malamud's intense, parochial exoticism. But he recognizes that the characters in Malamud's fiction are driven “to be out of this world and in a more certainly felt reality. … And their adventure is precisely their frustration; the end of straining and the beginning of heroism, if achieved, is the beginning of acceptance. … His hero's heroism is his hero's loss.”⁷

There are critics such as Leslie Fiedler,⁸ Stanley Edgar Hyman,⁹ and Earl Wasserman,¹⁰ who view Malamud only in his mythic context, counting as most worthy those works with an explicitly archetypal content, esteeming The Natural, in particular, for its lively sense of mythic play. Others belonging to this school are more interested in tracing the continuity of archetypal patterns from novel to novel.¹¹ Of course, and with good reason, there are those who consider Malamud primarily as a Jewish-American writer mindful only of his use of Jewish motifs. Mayer Shticker has noted that with The Assistant Bernard Malamud “has brought into American literature … the emotional sensibility of the heart [herzlekhayt] that reminds us so strongly of the great masters of Jewish writing, Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, and David Bergelson.”¹² Robert Alter, however, believes that all but The Fixer are a vulgarization of that illustrious Yiddish tradition.¹³ For Josephine Zadovsky Knopp, the concept of mentshlekhayt is at the core of Malamud's work and is the source of its strength.¹⁴

It would be foolish to deny or minimize the validity of much that the critics have observed and written about Bernard Malamud; yet there is one whole area of the author's fiction, his social criticism, that has been neglected, ignored, or even declared non-existent.¹⁵ Indeed, the later novels, whose judgments about society are more pronounced, have usually been accorded less value than The Assistant or The Magic Barrel. But Malamud has, in fact, shown a constant awareness of the societies in which his fictions take place. He is not only interested in describing actual social structures, or the human interactions that sustain them; he is also concerned with defining and dramatizing the underlying forces which form the bases upon which a given community is built. This study will attempt to show that from the myth of The Natural to the apocalyptic design of The Tenants, Malamud has fictively presented the decline of the American dream into the nightmare of an entire civilization in decay, a surprising theme, perhaps, from an author supposedly unconcerned with the difficult realities of society and the problems of a disintegrating culture.

It is with The Natural (1952), his first novel, that Malamud begins to suggest and depict the frauds perpetrated on men by an established order, particularly the bogus values and the fakery that seem to be as much a part of the American dream as its hopes and promises. The American dream: a paradox to be sure, one that embodies both the idealism of the nation and the corrosive materialism that appears to be its tangible outgrowth. This democratic dream speaks of a society that welcomes another's exiles; where the barriers against individual fulfillment are absent and the self can flourish, releasing the vitality of future possibilities; where the I can expand to encompass the universe.

However, those very elements that constitute the culture's visionary potential are also the source of its terror: alienation, loneliness, transience, the psychological and geographical movement from roots and tradition. It is also a civilization that defines achievement externally and success acquisitively, making failure a punishment, poverty a sin, and love a purchasable commodity. And it is an increasingly firm axiom of Malamud's fiction that to succeed in such an environment is to lose one's soul; to fail is to preserve one's moral integrity.

Utilizing this series of assumptions to shape his version of the democratic dilemma, Malamud in The Natural offers a variant of the Horatio Alger archetype wherein the hero must choose between two opposing concepts of success. Roy Hobbs can be a true democratic hero, self-created, faithful to his natural talent and individual possibility, believing in and accepting the power of the middle class version of the good life: “a house they had bought, with a redheaded baby on her lap, and himself going fishing in a way that made it satisfying to fish, knowing that everything was all right behind him, and the home-cooked meal would be hot and plentiful, and the kid would carry the name of Roy Hobbs into generations his old man would never know. With this in mind he fished the stream in peace. …”¹⁶

Or Roy Hobbs, succumbing to his status as celebrated cultural product, can betray his true capacities as one of Nature's noblemen in order to obtain the outward signs of socially approved success: money, power, things, which are represented not by the fruitful Iris Lemon, but by the barren Memo Paris, the boss's niece, failed movie starlet of Miss America perfection. Her siren's song is that of a typically American Lorelei, whose chant is the dream turned rapacious:

I am afraid to be poor. … Maybe I am weak or spoiled, but I am the type who has to have somebody who can support her in a decent way. I'm sick of living like a slave. I got to have a house of my own, a maid to help me with the hard work, a decent car to shop with and a fur coat for winter time when it's cold. I don't want to have to worry every time a can of beans jumps a nickel. I suppose it's wrong to want all of that but I can't help it. I've been around too long and seen too much. I saw how my mother lived and I know it killed her. I made up my mind to have certain things. … You're thirty-five now and that don't give you much time left as a ball player. … I'm sorry to say this, Roy, but I have to be practical. Suppose the next one is your last season, or that you will have one more after that? Sure, you'll probably get a good contract till then but it costs money to live, and then what'll we do for the rest of our lives?”

[199-200]

The source of decay in the mythic American landscape of The Natural is money, poisoning even the pure idealism of the country's symbolic national pastime (hence the verbal echoes of the 1919 Black Sox scandal that close the book).¹⁷ Wealth is obviously important in any social system, but in a democratic one such as America, predicated on the premise of human equality, the possession of money as a major external token denoting difference, separation, and inequity becomes a more ambiguous force, perhaps threatening to the fabric of the national community. On the one hand, the acquisition of money is proof that an open society still operates, that money is the just reward for living the letter of the American dream. On the other hand, the possession of money bears witness to the destruction of traditional values, beliefs, and commitments, an indication not of continued vitality but of the nation's flaws, the disintegration of its promise. For Malamud, the need for money, and therefore power, becomes the concrete emblem of popular, superficial notions of success and accomplishment, ultimately corrupting all facets of the national experience—moral, economic, and sensual.

Goodwill Banner (a suitably ironic name for a notoriously bad-tempered individual) is the embodiment of a morally corrupt, exploitative America. He instinctively recognizes that this society not only prefers things to people, but also that its materialistic ethic rationalizes the transformation of people into things, objects to be manipulated. His wealth, obtained illegally, through the exercise of established capitalistic virtues based on the management of human weakness and greed, is put at the service of this awareness, thereby justifying his appetite for control. The crowds who come to his stadium are merely coins, Pop Fisher is an obstruction to be bought out by any means, and Roy Hobbs is a life-sized toy to be used in order to acquire more. Fittingly, the trophy in his tower office is a stuffed shark.

As a judge, Banner also dispenses dark wisdom, parables and aphorisms which punctuate his conversation, making him seem a cynical Poor Richard: “The dog is turned to his vomit again” [96]. “The love of money is the root of all evil” [99]. “He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent” [101]. “Put a knife to thy throat if thou be a man given to appetite” [101]. “Resist all evil” [102]. He is, in fact, enamoured of darkness, planning to write a disquisition on the subject entitled “On the Harmony of Darkness; Can Evil Exist in Harmony?” (echoing, no doubt, Melville's “On the Whiteness of the Whale”): “There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of the self with what the self perceives …” [100]. And like a perverse and pessimistic Ben Franklin or Jay Gatsby, the Judge is, in a very American way, self-invented: “As a youngster I was frightened of the dark—used to wake up sobbing in it, as if it were water and I were drowning—but you will observe that I have so disciplined myself thoroughly against that fear, that I much prefer a dark to a lit room, and water is my favorite beverage” [100].

Goodwill Banner has decided against the vision of a sunny, jovial America; and in his treatment of fellow human beings, he has passed judgment on American innocence and found it suitable for purchase. Working in collusion with Judge Banner is Gus Sands, the one-eyed Supreme Bookie, a representation of economic corruption and the decline of American capitalism.

To be sure, the original impetus of the American economic system had been to insure growth, progress, and the pursuit of happiness. Capitalism is, indeed, the financial analogue to the psychic and political freedoms on which the country was founded. It reinforced the idea of individual ability as the way to true achievement; it exalted the willingness to risk, the capacity to take a chance, and the readiness to seize the moment; it made real the national rags-to-riches mythology; it allowed more people to have a share in society's affluence. But for Malamud these factors no longer work as theorized. The economic system that was once the hope of the shopkeeper, the small farmer, the businessman with little capital and much ability, has become the servant of the rich who use it to drain and profit from those who have less.

Gus Sands, partially blind, seeing the individual only as an expendable commodity, is one such exploiter. Like the Judge, Sands has amassed a fortune by trading in human frailty, in this case the impulse bred into the American to get rich quick, to reach for the fast buck, no matter how. For if money is that necessary icon, the indispensable sign of acceptance, approval, goodness, wisdom, and power, then the means by which it is to be procured is irrelevant. Gus, secure in his knowledge of the secret heart of his countrymen, is, like the serpent in Eden (Roy Hobbs even calls him “wormy”), a masterful tempter.

He is also more than simply the Supreme Bookie. As a gambler, he is the epitome of the risk-taker, the speculative capitalist whose product, in this instance, just happens to be money:

“Didn't know you bet on any special player.”

“On anybody or anything. We bet on strikes, balls, hits, runs, innings, and full games. If a good team plays a lousy team we will bet on the spread of runs. We cover anything anyone wants to bet on. Once in a Series games I bet a hundred grand on three pitched balls.”

“How'd you make out on that?”

“Guess.”

“I guess you didn't.

“Right, I didn't. … But it don't matter. The next week I ruined the guy in a different deal. Sometimes we win, sometimes we don't but the percentage is for us. Today we lost on you, some other time we will clean up double.”

[108]

And though dependent on luck and accident, like a good entrepreneur he controls luck and minimizes accident through bribery (“Say the word, slugger, and you can make yourself a nice pile of dough quick” [174]), seduction, dishonesty, and the chicanery that has become an established part of American business practice.

Memo Paris (whose name—a memory of Paris—may suggest the treacherous Helen of Troy or that sensual, erotic, tempting City of Lights), seductive agent of Judge Banner and Gus Sands, is clearly an exponent of the business of commercial sensuality. That she may be a national symbol of sorts is indicated by Roy's seeing her “as a truly beautiful doll with a form like Miss America” [166]. She is, indeed, a doll, an object, all surface prettiness with little emotional depth or internal integrity. And as a beauty contest winner, value has necessarily been placed on those superficial qualities that guarantee victory. Just as Roy Hobbs attempts to succeed in a particular area of mass entertainment, so too does Memo Paris. But she chooses the Hollywood dream factory, where success is contingent upon appearance far more than it is dependent upon talent. She fails, however, not because she lacks outward beauty, but because she lacks talent. She has no inner resources to draw on; she possesses a limited, closed self that has been determined by her external attractiveness:

“I won a beauty contest where they picked a winner from each state and she was sent to Hollywood to be a starlet. For a few weeks I felt like the Queen of the May, then they took a screen test and though I had the looks and figure my test did not come out so good in acting and they practically told me to go home. … I stayed there for three more years, doing night club work and going to an acting school besides, hoping that I would some day be a good enough actress, but it didn't take. I knew what I was supposed to do but I couldn't make myself, in my thoughts, into somebody else. You're supposed to forget who you are.”

[119-120]¹⁸

As we have already seen, Memo's wants are not only conditioned by her fear of poverty, but also by what society has legitimized as essential for happiness: maids, fur coats, houses, cars. And she has been taught by that society that it is perfectly appropriate to sell herself in order to secure those things. Marketing her sensuality, however, corrupts the buyer as well. Memo Paris is, in fact, negotiable merchandise to be bought at the right price—a man's soul.

Into this knotty web of societal decay comes Roy Hobbs, a natural man, whose notable American innocence has prevented his education through experience; this difficult process has never been a popular American ideal, much to Malamud's disappointment. Roy is to be the authentic American hero whose adventures take place on the field of mass ritual—baseball—not in the realm of elite diversion to please the few. There is no question that he has great talent, the kind of native ability meant to be nurtured in a democracy. But his ambition is narrow and unchanging. It is expressed in the same language at the outset of his career at the age of nineteen—“Sometimes when I walk down the street I bet people will say there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in the game” [33]—and then at its resumption, age thirty-five: “Maybe I might break my back while I am at it, … but I will do my best—the best I am able—to be the greatest there ever was in the game” [114].

And his desires are at the mercy of social and cultural influences that stress money, possessions, acquisitiveness:

It had to be something big or it wouldn't pay back enough. And if it was a big company he could take it a little easy. … He pondered where to get another twenty-five thousand, and it had to be before the start of the next baseball season because as soon as everybody saw he wasn't playing, it wouldn't be easy to cash in on his name. … He thought of other means to earn money fast—selling the story of his life to the papers, barnstorming a bit this fall and winter. … But neither of these things added up to much—not twenty-five grand.

[201]

Because he does not grasp the meaning of the heroic beyond its simplest definition; because his society has deceived him about what is to be truly valued in life; because he accepts the tokens of success rather than actual accomplishment, he chooses fidelity to his genius too late, after he has already betrayed it for cash. Roy is therefore doomed to repeat his suffering without understanding its significance: “I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again” [236].

If The Natural presents a simplified definition of the American experience where villainy is easily identifiable and the pattern of right action obvious, The Assistant offers complex, perhaps perplexing, ambiguities. The world of The Assistant seems closed, rigid, without opportunity or economic progress, where the traditional values of honesty, thrift, and hard work go unrewarded, and may, in fact, even be meaningless. It is an America inhabited by the marginal, the frustrated, the luckless, whom a hungry, active, pushing civilization has discarded as useless: immigrant Jews left behind in the rush toward assimilation and the good life; would-be criminals successful only in their failure; the trapped, who are caught forever in a net of unfulfilled expectations.¹⁹

In this society of the powerless, so unlike that of The Natural, evil is neither predatory, nor sinister, nor particularly threatening. It is, rather, clumsy, slightly comical, and “Karping.” Yet in such a defeatist environment, characters seem nevertheless capable of moral choice; positive human change can occur. Ultimately, however, though choices are undoubtedly made and changes certainly do occur, they are equivocal and claustrophobic, imprisoning rather than liberating. Perhaps this paradox is an indication that such virtues as honor, duty, responsibility, and goodness are a hindrance in an aggressive society addicted to the pursuit of externally determined success, not its internal reality; that morality and ethical behavior are signs marking only the failed, the lost.

Walter Shear has rightly perceived The Assistant to be a dramatization of the never-quite-resolved conflict between two cultures—the Jewish tradition of the Bobers, Pearls, and Karps and the American heritage, the wisdom of the old world versus the utilitarianism of the new.²⁰ This analysis is true as far as it goes. But the encounter as presented in the novel is more subtly ironic. The Jewish tradition, as Malamud depicts it, may be morally admirable; but it is essentially heterodox and secular, divorced from its sources in orthodox Judaism and the European situation that conditioned it, and no longer appropriate in an open, liberal social system.²¹ Morris Bober may have brought with him his own entombment but without sufficient spiritual consolation to sustain him. And the American heritage, vital and promising as it may be, stands not only as a mockery of hopes betrayed, or as a series of poisoned expectations, but as a sardonic tribute to the hypocrisy that is also a part of the American dream. Karp succeeds in the financially approved way, but it is without joy and without love.

We begin with the only Jewish families who inhabit, resentfully, uncomfortably, an impoverished, decaying, non-Jewish neighborhood in New York—the Karps, the Pearls, the Bobers: “She [Ida Bober] had waked that morning resenting the grocer for having dragged her, so many years ago, out of a Jewish neighborhood into this. She missed to this day their old friends and landsleit—lost for parnusseh unrealized.”²² Each represents, in some way, a facet of the Jewish experience in this goldene medinah, this golden land. While these families do have those aspirations common to American imagination, they are Jews who have, for the most part, been unable to enter the mainstream of middle-class life and acceptability. They are reminders of the immigrant past for whom the promise of better has not been kept. Fulfillment is for their children—Louis, Nat, and Helen. They are the generation who will belong. Although the patriarchs are entrepreneurs, self-employed businessmen—ironic exemplars of the classic American prescription for success—the isolated condition of these three Jewish families makes them vulnerable, susceptible to paralyzing memories of their ghetto history. Although these families are still anxious to participate in the flawed American dream, they are viewed by many of the Gentiles in the community as seeming embodiments of the anti-semite's stereotypical Jew, and therefore as legitimate targets for robbery and violence.

Julius Karp is the wealthy exception among the three families. At the end of Prohibition, good businessman that he was, Karp astutely (by society's valuation of such things) acquired the necessary license to transform cheap shoes into expensive bottles. The liquor store, not surprisingly, did well in so poor a neighborhood, and Karp flourished. But for Malamud, Karp's success had been bought at dehumanizing cost. After all, his wealth, like Judge Banner's or Gus Sands's, is based on the exploitation of human frailty. “A business for drunken bums” [9], says Morris Bober, the novel's moral voice, judging with disapproval and contempt. Karp, in an act that signifies the breaking of the human connections that have tied him to his fellow Jews, has also moved out of the neighborhood into “a big house on the Parkway … complete with two-car garage and Mercury” [16], the middle-class American's vision of accomplishment. It is worth noting here how often success, in this country, is measured by the geographical distance one has moved from his origins and roots—the further one goes, the more one has achieved. This fact has allowed Karp to become an absentee exploiter, using the neighborhood for his own, as property, then leaving it to die from his poison, a singular example of the abdication of moral responsibility in favor of personal financial satisfaction.

But Julius Karp's deficiencies as a human being are more extensive. Having become the kind of success society values, he is now free to exercise the power conferred by money: the ability to transform human beings into commodities to be manipulated for gain. Because he has attained position, Julius Karp assumes also that he has been given wisdom. In this culture, the ability to acquire money attests to sagacity; therefore Karp is free to “run down the store and spout unwanted advice” [22]. After all, since Morris Bober is a poor man, a failure by anyone's estimation, what can he possibly know that is worth anything? And Karp, assuming that the world, as he knows, dances only to the tune of cash, even converts love into a business proposition with Helen Bober an object to be traded for financial security:

Karp felt he could ease his son's way to Helen by making Morris a proposition he had had in the back of his head for almost a year. He would describe Louis' prospects after marriage in terms of cold cash and other advantages, and suggest that Morris speak to Helen on the subject of going with him seriously. If they went together a couple of months—Louis would give her an extravagant good time—and the combination worked out, it would benefit not only the daughter, but the grocer as well, for then Karp would take over Morris's sad gesheft and renovate and enlarge it into a self-service market with the latest fixtures and goods. … With himself as the silent partner giving practical advice, it would take a marvelous catastrophe to keep the grocer from earning a decent living. …

[151]

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Karp betrays friendship, loyalty, and his own humanity for a mercenary reward by allowing into the neighborhood another grocery store to compete with the unfortunate Morris for business, since competition is the essence of the American way. Karp does this first at the beginning of the novel when, rejecting Morris's pleas, he sells the empty tailor shop to Schmitz: “Morris ran to Karp. ‘What did you do to me?’ The liquor dealer said with a one-shouldered shrug, ‘You saw how long stayed empty the store. Who will pay my taxes? But don't worry,’ he added, ‘he'll sell more delicatessen but you'll sell more groceries. Wait, you'll see he'll bring you in customers’” [11]. And he resells to Taast and Pederson, knowing full well that such competition will be destructive:

“What happened to Schmitz?”

“He has a bad blood disease and lays now in the hospital.”

“Poor man,” the grocer sighed. … “Will he give the store in auction?”

Karp was devastating, “What do you mean give in auction? It's a good store. He sold it Wednesday to two up-to-date Norwegian partners and they will open next week a modern fancy grocery and delicatessen. You will see where your business will go. … What could I do? I couldn't tell him to go in auction if he had a chance to sell.”

[155]

That Karp chooses, in both instances, to sell to goyim is a further betrayal of Morris, who is portrayed as the essence of Jewishness.

Yet in Karp there exists a vague, ineffable, dissatisfaction, an unconscious recognition that perhaps his kind of achievement is incomplete, a suspicion that something is indeed more vital than dollars. For, like the crooked Charlie Sobeloff, Morris's former partner made rich at the expense of Bober's trusting innocence, Karp finds it necessary to have Morris's approval and acceptance: “For some reason that was not clear to him Karp liked Morris to like him …” [149]. True wisdom makes itself known even to the most hardened.

As for the next generation, Louis Karp is the son of such a father. And it is hardly surprising that his ambitions are narrow, limited to those obtainable by purchase:

“Louis,” she [Helen Bober] said, watching a far-off light on the water, “what do you want out of your life?”

He kept his arm around her. “The same thing I got—plus.”

“Plus what?”

“Plus more, so my wife and family can have also.”

[43]

However, in this version of America, unlike the landscape of The Natural, there is retribution for those who have made their pact with the American serpent, who have been seduced by the force and potency of economic materialism. Karp's liquor store, feeding on itself, is burnt to the ground by Ward Minogue, an ironic avenging angel. Karp himself has a heart attack, and he can no longer continue those activities that have given justification to his existence. And Louis, interested in immediate gain, goes to work as a salesman for a liquor concern, rather than rebuild his father's business. Perhaps punishment is possible because in The Assistant Malamud has chosen to portray a society of the helpless where there is only minimal power to be exercised, rather than the omnipotence of Judge Banner and Gus Sands.

The Pearls are also foils for the values represented by Morris. Sam, in spite of his poor candy store, is an entrepreneurial success after a fashion, although not within the legitimate economic structure employed by Karp. While he “neglected the store … Sam's luck with the nags was exceptional and he had nicely supported Nat in college until the scholarships started rolling in” [15]. Like any good risk-taking capitalist, he spends his days brooding over the dope sheets in much the same way a broker studies stock quotations and Dow Jones averages—and to much the same end. And such an occupation requires a fierce dedication to the study of the main chance in order that every possible money-making opportunity be exploited. However, this commitment, according to Malamud, narrows one's encounters with the world and with humanity, a weakness that once again only Morris recognizes for what it is: “Morris took the Forward from the newsstand and dropped a nickel into the cigar box. Sam Pearl, working over a green racing sheet, gave him a wave of his hammy hand. They never bothered to talk. What did he know about race horses? And what did the other know of the tragic quality of life? Wisdom flew over his hard head” [17-18].

More relevant for the novel's antipathy to America's driving materialism is the character of Nat Pearl, “magna cum laude, Columbia, now in his second year at law school” [14], and, as Helen observes, a soon-to-be professional “with first-rate prospects, also rich friends he had never bothered to introduce her to” [14]. By virtue of his education, his job choice, and those values inherited from his father and the culture at large, Nat ultimately will become part of society's controlling machinery. That Nat has chosen the law is obviously significant, for, as a profession, it provides easy access to real wealth and power, temptation enough for anyone, let alone the son of immigrants: “Nat Pearl wanted to be ‘somebody,’ but to him this meant making money to lead the life of some of his well-to-do friends at law school” [133]. How unlike Morris, for whom the Law (always capitalized in Morris's usage) is seen as a mode of ethical behavior and right conduct.

It is important to understand how Nat's acceptance (and perhaps America's as well) of the law as a tool, simply a pragmatic device whose function is to wheedle, to manipulate, to justify, and to excuse wrong action, shapes his dealings with Helen Bober. First, however, it is necessary to acknowledge how much that relationship has been conditioned by the very fact of Nat's promise rather than his beliefs. This recognition is particularly fitting considering that America has always been the civilization symbolized by a commitment to a better future for all its inhabitants. Helen is acutely aware that the society's respect for Nat's possibilities has allowed her to act against her own personally developed moral sense: “Nat Pearl, handsome, cleft-chinned, gifted, ambitious, had wanted without too much trouble a lay and she, half in love, had obliged and regretted. Not the loving, but that it had taken her so long to realize how little he wanted” [14]. Nat, like Louis Karp, regards Helen as an object to be acquired and used. Louis offers money and fails. Nat, more sophisticated, knowing that he stands, in some way, for entry into that culture that has labelled the Bobers outsiders, offers possibilities and succeeds. But when Helen, recognizing the nature of her seduction, develops scruples, Nat does not hesitate to use a kind of legal chop-logic to defend his behavior and to demean her conscience—that is what being a lawyer means:

“Helen, I honestly want to know how somebody's supposed to defend himself when he hasn't any idea what's in the indictment against him? What kind of crime have I committed? …”

“I'm not a lawyer—I don't make indictments. …”

“You're a funny kid,” Nat was saying. “You've got some old-fashioned values about some things. I always told you you punish yourself too much. Why should anybody have such a hot and heavy conscience in these times? People are freer in the twentieth century. … What,” Nat argued, “would peoples' lives be like if everybody regretted every beautiful minute of all that happened? Where's the poetry of living?”

[109]

When Helen finally rejects Nat and what he represents, she becomes for him only “You bitch.” And Nat, because of an allegiance to a philosophy which turns people into things—a kind of transformational materialism endemic in American society—must suffer the loss of wisdom; hardly much of a loss, he would suspect, if it is to be defined by Morris Bober.

The Bobers are clearly failures, at least as society would judge them. They have neither money, nor power, nor the intense drive to belong that is characteristic of so many immigrants. And they lack that seemingly national trait, crucial if one is to succeed in America, the ability to create their own destiny. They do not control fate; it controls them. The Bobers are, in fact, frightened and disappointed in the country they have escaped to. They take no risks; they do not gamble (except on the grocery store—a losing proposition if there ever was one); they cannot hear opportunity's knock. And they are immobile, stationary, afraid to venture beyond the block. To a large degree, they are responsible for their entombment in that grave of a business, for their attitudes are unsuitable to achievement and accomplishment in American terms. Finally, Ida and Morris have, in the worst betrayal of the American dream, deprived their child of a future in this new golden land. Yet the Bobers, as a family, seem to represent a source of strength, goodness, wisdom, and morality unavailable to the rest of society, and perhaps unattainable if the price be social and economic failure.

Ida Bober, however, is considerably less willing to accept moral virtue if it is unaccompanied by sufficient financial rewards. In fact, Ida is obsessed by her need for monetary security to a degree that often dehumanizes her. She is suspicious of anyone who may attack what little position and self-respect she has acquired. She is therefore hostile to the newcomer Frank Alpine on two counts: as a stranger, he may steal money; and, as a non-Jew, he might steal a more valuable piece of property, a key to the future, her daughter. And because Ida is wise in the ways of the American world, her Cassandra-like prophecies of doom have much accuracy. Unlike Morris, she believes “a business is a business” [9] even if the money is made at the expense of another's weakness. She clearly resents her husband's claims to superior moral sensitivity, “everybody is a stupe but not Morris Bober” [10], especially if it means a loss in dollars. She nags if Morris trusts enough to give credit. Her measurement of human worth is material possessions. And significantly it is only Ida who respects and even admires Julius Karp for his foresight and his success, though it be to her husband's cost:

“Why does he bring me buyers? Why didn't he keep out the German around the corner?”

She sighed. “He tries to help you now because he feels sorry for you.”

“Who needs his sorrow?” Morris said. “Who needs him?”

“So why you didn't have the sense to make out of your grocery a wine and liquor store when came out the licenses?”

“Who had cash for stock?”

“So if you don't have, don't talk.”

“A business for drunken bums.”

“A business is a business. What Julius Karp takes in next door in a day we don't take in in two weeks.”

[9]

Ida is perfectly capable, even anxious, to use the deceptive techniques of the good (in a monetary, if not a moral, sense) businessperson in order to cheat the naive refugee Podolsky if it means ridding herself of the millstone the store has become. That she might be imprisoning Podolsky, who had come to America for the mythical new life as Morris had so many years ago, is not her concern. Nor can she comprehend Frank's willingness to work for nothing in order to pay a symbolic debt to Morris and redeem his own soul.

But the most important factor, for Malamud, in Ida's adherence to this American version of reductive materialism is that it diminishes the value of love. Such an unpredictable emotion threatens the business of marriage, an arrangement, as perceived by Ida, to escape poverty, the only way that a woman can achieve status, wealth, and power. This view of matrimony is her only way of protecting and insuring what future Helen might have: “‘Helen,’ she said, holding back her tears, ‘the only thing I want for you is the best. Don't make my mistake. Don't make worse and spoil your whole life, with a poor man that he is only a grocery clerk which we don't know about him nothing. Marry somebody who can give you a better life, a nice professional boy with a college education. Don't mix up now with a stranger. Helen, I know what I'm talking. Believe me, I know’” [146].

Ida, therefore, measures potential husbands not by their inherent value as human beings, not by their ability to love, but by the money they have or might have: Nat Pearl will be “someday a rich lawyer” [4]; even “the stupe” Louis Karp is acceptable since he can offer financial security. And any quality in Helen, particularly her intelligence—“Some people want their children to read more. I want you to read less.” [115]—that reduces her marketability is to be decried and condemned.

What has so embittered Ida is not simple nagging dissatisfaction but guilt, “her guilt that she had talked him into a grocery store when he was in the first year of evening high school, preparing, he had said, for pharmacy” [8]. She had settled for the immediate gratification of ownership and possession rather than wait for long-range possibilities, withheld fulfillment, and postponed satisfaction. It is only when Morris is dead (living he was a constant reminder of that guilt) and she no longer fears starving because of Frank's rent and Helen's salary and Rubin's job that she softens into humanity.

Helen Bober is a more complex character, a mass of American and old-country contradictions, whose perceptions, ambitions, and desires have been conditioned by the hard American materialism of her mother and the otherworldly, inappropriate wisdom of her father. Helen tends to see herself, as do Ida, the Karps, Nat Pearl, and even Frank Alpine initially, as merchandise upon whom a price has been set. Although she is concerned with abstract goals and impractical notions of morality, preoccupied with philosophy, an idealist believing in the something more beyond the material that gives life its meaning (symbolized by her addiction to literature), she nevertheless thinks of Helen Bober as a commodity to be judged by some sort of externally devised concept of worth. And that standard is a social one contingent on her lack of prospects, “as poor as her name sounded, with little promise of a better future” [14]. Therefore, in spite of her obvious intelligence, sensitivity, and capacity for love, she is constantly worried at being valued under her expectations, certain that she is worthless even to a man like Nat Pearl, whose ambitions she derides and suspects. As she says, she loves before she is loved, perhaps inviting the expected rejection because of her fear she is not worth the loving. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Helen chooses Frank, so clearly less than she, an alien, a wanderer, a non-Jew, without position or stability.

As a true child of her parents, Helen romanticizes the power of education, placing her faith in it as the key to realizing her sense of potential, becoming American in the best sense of the word. She does not wish to use education simply to acquire a marketable skill, because such is not the true function of learning. To be educated according to Helen (and to Malamud, no doubt) is to possess wisdom and understanding of life. Helen desires education so that she may become a better person, hardly a useful talent, much less an appropriate one for the national economy. It is this deprivation that Helen feels most strongly, and Frank Alpine ultimately recognizes that it is the one gift he can offer that Helen cannot return.

At this point, we must examine Helen's curious ambivalence toward the act of gift-giving, a persistent motif throughout the novel. She is able to give things—her salary to her parents, for example—as an expression of her feelings, but she cannot, in the course of the novel, give her body because it is the concrete form taken by the self, the physical essence of the soul. To offer so precious a gift and to have it rejected or misvalued is to destroy the integrity of the person that is Helen Bober. Even Helen, in a subtle fashion, uses the external, the physical, the concrete, as a source and standard of individual worth. However, Helen is most reluctant to accept gifts for a number of reasons. First, to accept a gift is to acknowledge another's judgment on Helen-as-object, whose value is instantly visible by the quality of the gift: “Nat, at his best, had produced a half-dozen small pink roses” [112], while Frank had given her an expensive scarf and a leather-bound copy of Shakespeare. Second, to accept a gift is to incur debt and obligation, is to become a human IOU, a particularly uncomfortable situation for the insecure. Says Helen, “for gifts you pay” [112]. And finally, to accept a gift is to put a price on love, to admit that affection can be bought for things, an idea that Helen instinctively knows to be false in spite of a culture that has made it a truth. Although Helen wants no part of Nat Pearl's materialism, admiring instead the intangible and impractical qualities of sensitivity, perception, and depth, and resents her treatment as a commodity, she nevertheless chooses to treat Frank Alpine as such a vehicle for the realization of a future.

Yet it is only when Helen realizes that gifts are merely an outward sign, an honest expression of true emotion, when she learns to take gracefully as well as to give generously, when she can thank Frank for his unselfish help, that Helen can become truly loving.

Because of the limitations placed on her needs and ambitions by economics and her own psychology, Frank, who has traveled, moved, lived, is transformed into the embodiment of her unfulfilled possibilities. Since she resents her loss—“The world has shrunk for me. … I want a larger and better life. I want the return of my possibilities” [43]—she makes Frank the tabula rasa on which to write her dreams:

And if she married Frank, her first job would be to help him realize his wish to be somebody. … Frank … was struggling to realize himself as a person, a more worthwhile ambition. Though Nat had an excellent formal education, Frank knew more about life and gave the impression of greater potential depth. She wanted him to become what he might, and conceived a plan to support him through college. Maybe she could even see him through a master's degree, once he knew what he wanted to do. She realized this would mean the end of her own vague plans for going to day college, but that was really lost long ago, and she thought she would at last accept the fact once Frank had got what she hadn't.

[133]

When she discovers that Frank is anything but a paragon, a mere man with considerably more than his share of human weaknesses (as thief and rapist), she hates him for being less than her fantasy of him, a deception using her body as a possession; and she hates herself for so radical a misjudgment and for once again being valued under her expectations. Helen can only accept her own flawed humanity when she recognizes the real humanity in Frank, acknowledging that he has in fact changed, that he has become that better person, not through a college education but through suffering. Hardly the American dream, Malamud believes, but it will do.

But it is in the creation of Morris Bober and his encounters with the world that Malamud offers his disapproval of aspects of the American dream: the expectations and promise defined, the defeats and loss explored. Morris's immigrant history may be seen as disappointment. First there is an escape from tyranny and persecution which was life in the old country. “They were poor and there were pogroms. So when he was about to be conscripted into the czar's army his father said, ‘Run to America’” [81]. Then comes a taste of freedom, the opening of possibilities. “After I came here I wanted to be a druggist. … I went for a year in night school. I took algebra, also German and English. ‘Come,’ said the wind to the leaves one day, ‘come over the meadow with me and play.’ This is a poem I learned. But I didn't have the patience to stay in night school, so when I met my wife I gave up my chances” [83]. And finally, immobilizing entrapment in a dying economic venture, “He had escaped out of the Russian Army to the U.S.A., but once in a store he was like a fish fried in deep fat” [83]. Why then did a man who risked the wrath of the czar's sergeant fail when confronted with America's multiple opportunities? What spoiled the hope? And how could such a failure, with so many lost chances in a society that offered so many futures, become the moral center of The Assistant?

Josephine Zadovsky Knopp defines Morris's ethical beliefs as the concept of mentshlekhayt which

has as its fundamental premise the innocence of man, man free of the sins of the Fall. It recognizes that within man run opposing tendencies toward good and evil, and that within this context man is completely free to choose. It rests its ultimate faith in man's basic goodness and the implicit assumption that, in the final analysis, he will always choose what is morally and ethically right. It believes in action as the path toward moral redemption. … It is an ethic concerned with improving man's lot in this world. … To those who accept, perhaps even unconsciously, the ethical code of mentshlekhayt, the concept of an “absurd” universe is foreign; to them the universe has a definite structure and meaning. … At least a part of this meaning resides in the code's implicit faith in the moral significance of man's action, … and that he has the obligation to apply this power in the cause of good.

Mentshlekhayt also encompasses the very strong sense of community that has traditionally been a feature of Jewish life. The paramount characteristic of this community feeling is the moral imperative of man's responsibility to his fellow man. …

The code … is an order, a Law in a world of chaos and suffering, and thereby brings sanity and significance to life.²³

While this clearly describes elements of Morris's credo, Knopp does not appear to appreciate the irony of assigning such an ethical system to a man who inhabits a society that makes adherence to such values a sure sign of failure. Given American culture as it is portrayed in The Assistant, this admirable moral structure appears to be a source of passive endurance, rather than an active commitment for change.

Morris collapses into prisoner and victim because the national community that Morris has chosen as refuge and affirmation no longer uses or finds valuable the virtues of a truly good man. And while it is true that even Karp keeps returning to Morris for approval and spiritual sustenance, it does the liquor store owner no good, for he continues to denigrate, mock, and betray the values Morris subscribes to. In Morris's decline, embodied in his inability and unwillingness to adapt to an increasingly opportunistic culture, we witness the triumph of the dream as nightmare. The memories that haunt Morris throughout the novel are not, ironically, of an American paradise but of an Eastern European one: “No, not for an age had he lived a whole day in the open. As a boy, always running in the muddy, rutted streets of the village, or across the fields, or bathing with the other boys in the river; but as a man, in America, he rarely saw the sky. In the early days when he drove a horse and wagon, yes, but not since his first store. In a store you were entombed” [5-6]. The world of persecution has become a remembered Eden of open spaces, while America, the new land, is a closed box, a coffin.

In an environment where every penny is important and money an icon (notice how carefully Malamud accounts for the store's income before the robbery), Morris trusts and gives trust:

“My mother says … can you trust her till tomorrow for a pound of butter, a loaf of rye bread and a small bottle of cider vinegar?”

He knew the mother. “No more trust.”

The girl burst into tears.

Morris gave her. … The total now came to $2.03, which he never hoped to see. But Ida would nag, … so he reduced the amount. … His peace—the little he lived with—was worth forty-two cents.”

[4]

A Lincolnesque figure, his honesty is only the stuff of legends and eulogies, and about as relevant in this civilization: “Helen, his dear daughter, remembers from when she was a small girl that her father ran two blocks in the snow to give back to a poor Italian lady a nickel that she forgot on the counter” [228]. He is a man of responsibility in a culture of the irresponsible, who wakes early, morning after morning, to insure that the Poilisheh gets her three-cent roll.

In a society that elevates transience and prizes mobility, Morris, especially after the death of his son and future, remains frozen and immobile, actually as well as metaphorically going nowhere. He does not cheat. He will not steal, even in a business situation where such behavior is not only commonplace and justified but also necessary to insure that magic word—profit.

“It's easy to fool people,” said Morris.

“Why don't you try a couple of those tricks yourself, Morris? Your amount of profit is small.”

Morris looked at him in surprise. “Why should I steal from my customers? Do they steal from me?”

“They would if they could.”

“When a man is honest he don't worry when he sleeps. This is more important than a nickel.”

[84]

And in spite of his admiration for the greater efficiency and practicality of the modern, Morris is, not surprisingly, attached to the old ways. He teaches Frank the skills he possesses with a mixture of pride and embarrassment, remembering when it required real ability to be a grocer: “As if ashamed somebody could learn the business so easily, Morris explained to him how different it had been to be a grocer only a few years ago. In those days one was more of a macher, a craftsman. Who was ever called on nowadays to slice up a loaf of bread … or ladle out a quart of milk?” [83-84]. But since “the chain store kills the small man” [33], of what significance are those abilities in a packaged culture valuing speed not technique, convenience not aptitude, and the plastic rather than the authentic: “Now is everything in containers, jars, or packages. Even hard cheeses that they cut them for hundreds of years by hand now come sliced up in cellophane packages. Nobody has to know anything any more” [84].

As that traditional but impossible American paradigm—the small business where “at least you're your own boss” [33]—Morris is a failure. Perhaps the ideal has become mendacious—“To be a boss of nothing is nothing” [33]. Certainly Ida and even Helen, trapped in a civilization that has divorced success from human worth, ethical conduct, and morality, condemn or minimize the quality of Morris's true achievement.

I said Papa was honest but what was the good of such honesty if he couldn't exist in the world? … Poor Papa; being naturally honest, he didn't believe that others come by their dishonesty naturally. And he couldn't hold onto those things he had worked so hard to get. He gave away, in a sense, more than he owned. … He knew, at least, what was good. … People liked him, but who can admire a man passing his life in such a store? He buried himself in it; he didn't have the imagination to know what he was missing. He made himself a victim. He could, with a little more courage, have been more than he was.

[230]

Morris's final judgment is also one of regret, loss, and disappointment: “He thought of his life with sadness. … His mood was one of regret. I gave away my life for nothing. It was the thunderous truth” [226].

Ida, Helen, and Morris are to a limited degree correct in their assessment of Morris's accomplishments or lack of them. Unfortunately, the paradox (according to Malamud) is that, given the kind of man Morris Bober was, his future in America was inevitable. The essential characteristics that one must acknowledge and admire in him are those very characteristics that made financial success in the world impossible.

The America that has diminished and defeated Morris Bober accords respect, admiration, and power to the insensitive Karp who seizes the main chance at the expense of honor, loyalty, and friendship, and rewards with success and wealth the corrupt Charlie Sobeloff, “a cross-eyed but clever conniver” [204] who cheated and defrauded the innocent and trusting Morris.

Arriving at Sobeloff's Self-Service Market, Morris … was amazed at its size. Charlie had tripled the original space. … The result was a huge market with a large number of stalls and shelved sections loaded with groceries. The supermarket was so crowded with people that to Morris … it looked like a department store. He felt a pang, thinking that part of this might now be his if he had taken care of what he had once owned. He would not envy Charlie Sobeloff his dishonest wealth, but when he thought of what he could do for Helen with a little money his regret deepened that he had nothing.

[207]

As Morris joins that “silent knot of men who drifted along Sixth Avenue stopping at the employment agency doors to read impassively the list of jobs chalked up on the blackboard signs” [208], he sees an America that has discarded the poor, the old, the sick, the uneducated, and has rendered them useless, unfit for participation in a society that popularly believes that “God loves the poor people but he helps the rich” [211].

It is an America that has betrayed its symbolic promise and traditional ideals. For Morris, “America had become too complicated. One man counted for nothing. There were too many stores, depressions, anxieties. What had he escaped to here?” [206]. A good man can retain his soul only at the expense of a freedom too easily become opportunism, and an opportunism too easily become deceit, trickery, corruption.

Frank Alpine enters the story like a dingy American Lochinvar “lately come from the West, looking for a better opportunity” [29]. Like Helen, Frank is a divided personality, one who steals yet yearns for goodness, who wanders yet yearns for stability, who rapes yet yearns for love. He wants “money, nightclubs, babes” [92], and at the same time wishes to be like St. Francis, for whom “poverty was a queen” [31]: “Every time I read about somebody like him I get a feeling inside of me I have to fight to keep from crying. He was born good, which is a talent if you have it” [31]. Frank is a man ensnared by the corruption of his culture, as well as by his own inner drives and compulsions; he is looking for a model to provide an alternative mode of being. Not finding St. Francis, he discovers the next best thing in contemporary America—Morris Bober—and becomes his surrogate son, and spiritual heir, giving up the opportunities of the world, the flesh, and the devil for the ascetic discipline of the imprisoning grocery store.

Frank is that not uncommon American phenomenon, the wanderer the mover, the man without roots who leaves when things do not work out or disappears when responsibility weighs too heavily and commitments become too demanding. “I am too restless—six months in any one place is too much for me. Also I grab at everything too quick—too impatient. I don't do what I have to. … The result is I move into a place with nothing, and I move out with nothing” [37]. And like so many of his fellow citizens, he rationalizes this particularly American brand of irresponsibility as the testing of freedom, a trying of opportunities, the correct use of his country's promise. It is hardly surprising that Helen, who longs for such motion and such possibilities, is seduced by Frank's words:

“The way I figure, anything is possible. I always think about the different kinds of chances I have. This has stuck in my mind—don't get yourself trapped in one thing, because maybe you can do something else a whole lot better. That's why I guess I never settled down so far. I've been exploring conditions. I still have some very good ambitions which I would like to see come true. The first step to that, I know for sure now, is to get a good education. I didn't use to think like that, but the more I live the more I do.”

[98]

An excellent statement of the national credo. That he may be using this pronouncement to seduce Helen does not obviate the fact that a portion of Frank's personality believes it.

Frank wants to be better than he is in both the financial and moral spheres of the American experience without perceiving that he cannot achieve both ambitions in the kind of driven, materialistic culture America has in fact become. He is particularly concerned with the acquisition of wealth, power, and importance; he is possessed by the sense that “he was meant for something a whole lot better—to do something big, different” [91-92]. Daniel Bell has indicated in his essay “Crime as an American Way of Life” that for a man with no skills, the American dream may be achieved through crime.²⁴ Thus Frank thinks that:

At crime he would change his luck, make adventure, live like a prince. He shivered with pleasure as he conceived robberies, assaults—murders if it had to be—each violent act helping to satisfy a craving that somebody suffer as his own fortune improved. He felt infinitely relieved, believing that if a person figured for himself something big, something different in his life, he had a better chance to get it than some poor jerk who couldn't think that high up.

[92]

Frank's dream is only partially influenced by its Dostoevskian counterparts. The Russian's protagonists are, in fact, concerned with the metaphysics of power while Frank wants the external accoutrements of success that can be acquired by crime.

But crime is taking, the way Frank takes from Morris by theft, from Helen by rape. It is simply another variant of the culture's dominating materialism that defines people as things for use, manipulation, exploitation, or expropriation. However, it is only when Frank can learn to give unselfishly, without hope for return or need of payment, that he can achieve moral success. And this education begins when he willingly attaches himself to the Bobers and to the enclosing confinement of the grocery store.

Initially Frank brings into the store the values of the American universe outside. Though improvements are made in the best sense of American business, Frank steals, exploits, uses. He robs Morris, defending his actions as the cause of the store's improvement. He (and Ida) are willing to make changes that the conservative Morris has resisted as a sign of integrity—the change from milk bottles to containers. He suggests, to Morris's horror, that they cheat customers. And perhaps most significantly, Frank is a salesman, a “supersalesman” [67] one of the customers calls him, capable of utilizing all the manipulative techniques of salesmanship Morris disdains: “The customers seemed to like him. … He somehow drew in people she had never before seen in the neighborhood. … Frank tried things that Morris and she could never do, such as attempting to sell people more than they asked for, and usually he succeeded” [67]. Even the practical Ida wonders if she and Morris had been “really suited to the grocery business. They had never been salesmen” [67].

We can clearly see that use of exploitation in Frank's treatment of Helen as well. Because he wants something from her and not Helen herself, he tells her what he senses she wants to hear. In fact, all of Frank's actions at the beginning of the novel are for an ulterior purpose, not for the doing of the actions themselves: either to alleviate guilt, or to seduce Helen, or to charm his way past Ida's suspicions. It is only when Frank ceases to act within the manipulative behavioral conventions approved by his society, when he can act unselfishly, with no thought of return or repayment, that the alterations he makes in both the store and his life are valuable and permanent.

But the reader is not meant to forget the ambiguous, uncomfortable price of Frank's commitments—isolation, entombment, and an emblematic castration. By enduring circumcision in order to become a Jew, that final echoing choice in The Assistant,²⁵ Frank Alpine elects to assume what was Morris Bober's inevitable fate, moving out of the materialistic mainstream of his own culture, rejecting the values that had brought him to rob the grocer in the first place. For Malamud in this novel, to be a Jew is to be the moral man, a perpetual alien, an unacceptable phenomenon in a social system that defines success by the extent to which human beings have been devalued and transformed into exploitable toys, and calls the responsible, honest individual a failure.

That Malamud's characters are complex human beings, individuals whose flaws are often the source of their pain and their predicament is obvious enough. What has not been made sufficiently apparent, and therefore is the reason for this study, is the extent to which Malamud portrays and comments upon a culture that exacerbates the difficulties created by personality and ego. In the first novels, published in the quiescent fifties, this concern is implied, the criticism muted and obliquely stated. But as the social situation alters, as dissolution and chaos appear the pre-eminent threats of the nineteen sixties and early seventies, Malamud's ambivalent hostilities toward civilization are presented more overtly and purposefully. What must be emphasized, however, is that Malamud is no Rousseauistic idealist for whom individual and societal perfection are legitimate goals to be desired. Rather, the author believes that though a given society may be self-deceiving and exploitative, or an entire civilization corrupt and decaying, there can be no escape from or evasion of responsibility. These are a child's responses. Imperfect man living in an imperfect world must still attempt goodness, even if the results of his efforts are ambiguous, or incomplete, or futile.

It begins to seem clear then that Malamud's first two novels are more than fable, more than fantasy, more than folklore. The author is making a significant statement about the effects of an aggressive materialism on the principles that purportedly govern the American commonwealth. In The Natural Roy Hobbs chooses money, irresponsibility, and betrayal, and becomes more than simply a failure as a man—he loses that power which might have regenerated and ennobled his civilization, a true hero's function.²⁶ Frank Alpine, in The Assistant, makes the correct moral choice, only to become an imprisoned victim because he has learned goodness. In Malamud's America, the attempt to liberate others is to confine oneself.

Notes

1. “The Blossoming Epoch of Jewish-American Creativity,” trans. Sylvia Protter and Iska Alter, The Forward, 16 January 1977, 6.

2. An excellent, if somewhat dramatized, account of the significance of Chasidism is the subject of Elie Wiesel's Souls on Fire (New York: Random House, 1972).

3. Saul Bellow in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech asks for a return to precisely the kind of fiction Bernard Malamud has always written. The New York Times, 13 December 1976, 9.

4. “Writing American Fiction,” Commentary (March, 1961), 228-231.

5. City of Words (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

6. “Fantasist of the Ordinary,” Commentary (July, 1957), 89-92, and Bright Book of Life (New York: Delta Books, 1973), pp. 138-144.

7. After Alienation (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1964), pp. 251, 253.

8. “In the Interest of Surprise and Delight,” Folio 20 (Summer, 1955), 17-20, and Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Dell Books, 1969), 499-500.

9. Standards (New York: Horizon Press, 1966).

10. Wasserman has written the complete archetypical analysis of The Natural in the brilliant essay, “The Natural: Malamud's World Ceres,” (The Centennial Review of Arts and Science, 9 [1965], 438-460).

11. James Mellard writes such an analysis in “Malamud's Novels: Four Versions of the Pastoral,” (Critique, 9 [1967], ii, 5-19) as does Edwin Eigner in “Malamud's Use of the Quest Romance,” (Genre, 1[1968], 55-75).

12. “The Blossoming Epoch of Jewish-American Creativity,” 6.

13. After the Tradition (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969).

14. The Trial of Judaism in Contemporary Jewish Writing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975).

15. There are exceptions to this observation, but they are few: Max Schulz, Radical Sophistication (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969); John Barsness, “A New Life: The Frontier Myth in Perspective,” Western American Literature, 3 (Winter, 1969), 297-302; Walter Shear, “Culture Conflict in The Assistant,” Midwest Quarterly, 7 (1966), 367-380.

16. Bernard Malamud, The Natural (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1952), p. 179. All citations are from this edition, and further page references will appear in brackets in the text.

17. “Say it ain't true, Roy” does indeed echo “Say it ain't so, Joe,” reportedly asked of Shoeless Joe Jackson after the 1919 Black Sox Scandal exploded. For additional information, see Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Golden Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 294-310, and Eliot Asinof, Eight Men Out (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963). As Asinof's book indicates, a number of parallels can be drawn between the events of The Natural and the actual scandal: the character of Shoeless Joe Jackson who was himself considered the greatest natural hitter of his day; the epic cheapness of Charles Comiskey, owner of the White Sox which echoes that quality in Judge Goodwill Banner; the phenomenal luck of the gambler Arnold Rothstein which resembles Gus Sands's good luck.

18. Italics mine.

19. For an accurate, poignant, and complete account of the various phases of Eastern European Jewish immigration to New York City, see Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976).

20. “Culture Conflict in The Assistant.”

21. Robert Alter considers this version of Judaism both sentimental and a falsification of religious traditionalism in his essay “Sentimentalizing the Jews,” in After the Tradition, pp. 35-45.

22. Bernard Malamud, The Assistant (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957), p. 8. All citations are from this edition, and further page references will appear in brackets in the text.

23. The Trial of Judaism in Contemporary Jewish Writing, pp. 6-7.

24. Daniel Bell, “Crime as an American Way of Life: A Queer Ladder of Social Mobility,” in An End to Ideology: On the Exhaustion of the Political Ideas of the Fifties (New York: Collier Books, 1961), pp. 127-150. Bell clearly perceives that crime is the underside of the American dream, and that criminals represent a dark, violent version of the Horatio Alger myth.

25. This ambiguous imprisonment, at once a sign of moral stature and societal failure, is symbolized by an equally ambiguous gesture, that of circumcision which is both an entry into the community of suffering and a castration, the loss of manhood, as observed by Ihab Hassan in Radical Innocence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 168.

26. This sense of community responsibility is very much a part of the heroic paradigm, according to Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1970).