SOURCE: Benson, Jackson J. “An Introduction: Bernard Malamud and the Haunting of America.” In The Fiction of Bernard Malamud, edited by Richard Astro and Jackson J. Benson, pp. 13-41. Corvallis, Oreg.: Oregon State University Press, 1977.

[In the following essay, Benson argues that Malamud is a traditional American writer.]

I. MOO DAY FOR MALAMUD

Oregon in April is a big country of wet, green valleys and snow-laden mountains. As an event, this conference should have been a Western. The participants are all professionals, hired guns brought in from out of the East, Midwest, and California via United Airlines and Hertz, for the shootout at the O.S.U. student union.

When you hit a strange town the night before a showdown, you find a saloon and tell a few lies. But the motel lounge has more people in leisure suits than Levis, and the band is playing soft rock. At two tables in the rear, we peer at each other in the semi-darkness. At the next table I see Leslie Fiedler for the first time. He is squinting over a Mexican cigar, a Jewish Walter Huston. Near me at the other table is Ihab Hassan. Trim, in a continental-cut suit, he is obviously the dude with the derringer. He is puzzled, so I try to explain who I am, but the soft rock is too loud for any intricate bragging. The band leader begins telling jokes and doing impressions: “Round 'em up! Head 'em out!” A bearded man in a denim jacket and cowboy boots stands up on the far side of the room and yells, “Shut up and play some more music!” I find out the next day that he is a graduate student in English at the University of Oregon.

The next morning we nervously pace the motel lobby, fingering our manila folders, waiting for the cars to take us into the Oregon State campus. Corvallis is a small college town that has become a city while still managing to look like a small college town. We ride past a profusion of green lawns, trees, and shrubs. Old, white clapboard houses are mixed with cedar, earth-day modern. The campus streets are crowded with cars, but the campus itself is clean and pretty—ivy-covered dark-brick buildings are surrounded by blooming trees and vast expanses of grass. Sun streams down through broken clouds and is reflected on the puddles from a recent rain. Behind the Memorial Union is the old School of Forestry building, the new quarters of the English Department.

To the right of the main entrance to the Memorial Union, at the bottom of the inside stairs, there is a copy of the U.S. Constitution under glass on a granite pedestal, donated to the university by the head of a lumber company. We assemble in a conference room at the end of a huge baronial hall draped with flags which runs the length of the second floor of the Union. While waiting, it strikes me that this kind of conference on a major author has become a sort of modern art form. There is reckless creation in bringing from all over the country a half-dozen literary critics, mostly unknown to each other except by reputation, to the same room to talk about the same topic. It may be the academic equivalent of setting off colored smoke bombs or draping tall buildings in parachute cloth.

There are about a hundred of us—students, high school teachers, local college faculty and wives, and some faculty from out of state—sitting in folding chairs, sipping coffee out of styrofoam cups, and listening to Richard Astro's welcome. He introduces the President of the University, who gives us greetings. A tall, pleasant looking man, he looks unmarked but is obviously an old survivor. He is a scientist who during his tenure has promoted the humanities at an agricultural and technical school. He seems genuinely pleased that we are honoring Bernard Malamud who, during a previous generation, had served so long (and without much honor) on the Oregon State faculty. (I think of Malamud sitting in the midst of all this lush greenery writing of New York tenements—a strange reversal of Bret Harte sitting in London writing of California forests.) The president is forced to add, with an apologetic smile, that he will be unable to stay for the conference itself, since this is “Moo Day,” a new traditional day of campus celebration. His part in the ceremony is to milk a cow, presumably a yearly fitness test. The situation is complicated, however, by the fact that no one has been able thus far to locate a cow on campus ready for milking.

But our subject is at hand. We will have our Western. Our Moo Day will be for Malamud.

II. MALAMUD AMONG THE MODERNS

Ihab Hassan has taken on the task of trying to place Malamud within the larger picture of contemporary fiction. His discussion moves tentatively, through multiple perspectives. It is a paper of questions, thoughtful musings, and personal doubts. He wonders, “How does Malamud manage to exclude from his fiction a crucial element of the postmodern sensibility? How does he transcend the problematic of fiction, which haunts so many contemporary novelists?” Is Malamud not therefore a “historical” novelist, engaging a human reality and a universe of discourse that are not really of our time?” Hassan reviews three features of postmodernism in American fiction: first, our writers are authors of fantasy; second, they pretend not to create a world, but instead pretend to plagiarize or play; and third, their play, in turn, “leads to parody and reflexiveness; the latter leads to self-unmaking or autodestruction.”

Where does Malamud stand in respect to these features? Hassan suggests that he keeps himself at an ironic distance from all of these “happenings and unmakings” of recent fiction. For Malamud, art still works; it can still “take and give the human measure of things.” His vision lacks the radicalism of more characteristic postmoderns. Instead, Malamud, in such works as The Tenants which examine the viability of art, offers only a “soft impeachment” of it. Yet, although Malamud may be more “modern” than “postmodern,” more “classical” than “radical,” it may be that postmodernism has not taken us very far beyond modernism after all and that with all his limitations, Malamud may prove in the end as “luminary of our exhaustions” as a writer such as Barth.

For Hassan, the impression of Malamud's work:

is of an imagination working through small, quotidian events, through human quirks and the quiddities of history, through the confined places of the spirit, through the entrapments of art or money or sex or guilt or race—pressing always toward liberation into some universal human space.

And it is the liberation of that which is inside, this effort toward human transcendence in Malamud's work, which sets the stage for Hassan's final thoughts. Is it closing time for the West? Is it closing time for the novel? He cannot say, but he does look for change not only in the modes of human expression but in the very nature of human desire itself. The far future, he senses, will not belong to West or East, nor even to the earth as a whole, but to those “immensities still locked within us.”

Hassan's canvas is so large, I find it difficult to react. And who among us has read so widely that he can challenge Hassan's broadest impressions? Yet, limiting myself to what I know, I wonder if Malamud does not better fit Hassan's description of postmodernism than he thinks. When he speaks of a trend “from ‘closed’ to ‘open’ forms, from ‘realism’ to ‘surrealism,’ from ‘myth’ to ‘parody,’ and from ‘ironic tragedy’ to ‘self-ironic comedy,’” I think to myself that this is really a rather good description of Malamud's progress from the earlier The Natural and The Assistant to the later The Tenants and Pictures of Fidelman. I wonder also if the indictment of art in The Tenants is not more severe than Hassan thinks it to be and if this novel is not, indeed, an example of what he calls “autodestruction”?

Yet, leaving aside The Tenants and Pictures of Fidelman, I must agree that the bulk of Malamud's work is an extension of the old, perhaps even old-fashioned. But what tradition does he belong to? As I have read Malamud, I too, along with other readers, have been reminded both of earlier Jewish-American writers and a number of Europeans, particularly Dostoevsky, Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett. But in his interview in The Paris Review, Malamud has said about influences that “as a writer, I've been influenced by Hawthorne, James, Mark Twain, Hemingway, more than I have been by Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz.” This, along with his long experience as a teacher of American fiction, suggests that he may be descended from the American tradition more than any other.

Part of the old-fashioned feeling I get in reading Malamud comes from being reminded of the Romance heritage of American fiction, particularly Hawthorne. Talking this as a clue and looking back over my Hawthorne for confirmation, I find that the two writers do indeed have a number of themes and techniques in common. They both possess the ability to combine, with great skill, reality and the dream, the natural and supernatural. That dream-reality mixture so powerful in Malamud stories such as “Idiots First,” “The Silver Crown,” or “The Magic Barrel” may owe more to Hawthorne stories like “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and “The Birthmark” than to Kafka, who is so frequently cited in this regard as a model. Malamud also shares with Hawthorne certain other modes and subjects, such as the “mysterious stranger,” the “ghostly search,” the “test of faith,” the “peculiar mark or habit,” and perhaps most importantly, that theme of Hawthorne's “Ethan Brand” which could be called “hardness of heart.”

Old Hawthorne, who started us down the road of moral allegory, and there are very few, even among the “Naturalists,” who haven't followed along. That, I suspect, is what bothers Hassan—not that Malamud's fiction “works,” but that his fiction can still attempt to be literature in the old sense, to bring delight in the teaching of the soul to have faith and man to care for man. Malamud's appeal and any claim he may have to greatness appear to rest on this differentness from the others: a steady devotion to what might be called the Old Testament questions—Why should we be good, when there is no reward for goodness? How can we have faith, when there are no signs to confirm our faith? How can we love, if our love is met only with scorn or violence?

If the central image of Crane or the early Dreiser is a man lost in a sea of indifference, subject to the ebb and flow of the tide; if the central image of Hemingway is man's search for a clean, well-lighted place where he can pull himself together and face the omnipresent darkness with some dignity; then perhaps Malamud's central image is of Morris Bober in his prison, his tomb, his store, sitting in his backroom and offering a glass of tea, with lemon to Breitbart, the weary peddler, who carries his light bulbs on his back from place to place through the darkness, calling out, “Lights for sale!” If the conviction rate for robbery is three per cent and the failure for small business is more than thirty per cent, why, in heaven's name, should anyone want to be a Morris Bober? Or, to ask the question again within the more general framework of Malamud's fiction, given the current climate of belief, what's the good of being good?

In these images of Dreiser, Hemingway, and Malamud, there appears to be some kind of progression within the nihilistic context of literary Naturalism toward—what would you call it?—confidence? Possibly it is simply the discovery that knowing the worst, man can still aspire to something beyond physical survival. Obviously, for Malamud life is something more than a joke, literature something more than an empty game. One way of characterizing him within this progression might be to say that he has spent his time looking for the key to the prison described by Dreiser and stoically endured by Hemingway. Perhaps Malamud's work is part of the pendulum that swings from meaning, to non-meaning, back to meaning again, an answer to the nihilism of the late Fifties and Sixties similar to T. S. Eliot's answer to the nihilism and materialism of the late Teens and Twenties. Does this make Malamud old or new?

Malamud's place within, or as moving beyond, American Naturalism brings us into the context of the next conference presentation. In turning from Hassan to Bill Handy, we move from the tentative to the assertive, from the general to the very specific. It is somewhat of a jolt to find ourselves torn from the intergalactic night between stars in Hassan's final image and thrust into George Hurstwood's gas-filled hotel room at the beginning of Handy's address. For Handy begins with a comparison of Malamud to Dreiser and the worlds in which the characters of each writer live. Superficially, the situations appear to be similar: the characters of both writers struggle and suffer within worlds of difficult circumstances. Yet, Dreiser's characters are motivated almost entirely by the need to survive, while Malamud's characters are influenced by the obligations of human relationships. From this comparison as a foundation, Handy suggests a common pattern of development for each of the central characters of Malamud's “major novels”:

Each of Malamud's protagonists in A New Life, The Assistant, and The Fixer experiences … an awakening to the possibility of a fuller existence than the one he has been living and that that awakening begins a quest for existence, one which comprises the dramatic struggle central to each novel.

One would find it hard to argue with this proposition. Each of these protagonists does display a “propensity for reflection” which allows him to grow in awareness as he attempts to extricate himself from “what he discovers is a meaningless existence.” In response, however, the question that comes to my mind is, what about the differences in kind also involved in these transcendencies? Handy speaks of a relationship as the catalyst for change, yet is not the relationship between S. Levin and Pauline Gilley significantly different in kind from that of Frank Alpine and Morris Bober? And what is the relationship that helps Yakov Bok—is it with Shmuel, with the Tsar, or with a combination of characters? And, isn't there a difference both in kind and in intensity of “reflection” in Frank Alpine and Yakov Bok?

Along with Handy, I believe that Malamud's Naturalism is less a philosophy than a background of human circumstance. Yet, I am not sure that his characters can be best explained as being on an “existential quest.” Nor can I think of him merely as some sort of advanced Naturalist, as a writer who has modified his Naturalism with the possibility of humanism. To think so, of course, would certainly make him a “modern” within Hassan's scheme. No, all of this seems too limiting. For one thing, I am not inclined to take Naturalism very seriously. That is, most of our American Naturalists seem to be subversive humanists and disappointed Romantics (compare the Nobel Prize speeches of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck in this regard) who maintain these attitudes in the face of all the evidence they mount to the contrary. What are “The Blue Hotel,” “The Monster,” An American Tragedy, and Sister Carrie after all, but moralistic allegories? What is Hemingway, after all, but a moralist who is sometimes allegorical, while maintaining a Manfred-like pose in the face of forces of darkness aligned against him?

Categories like Naturalism, post-Naturalism, Modernism, and post-Modernism all seem to fade into the background in response to the strength of American Romanticism. It would seem more profitable, when we consider the characteristics of Malamud's writing itself (rather than his time, his peers, or his possible sources), to plug him into the main line.

III. MALAMUD AND THE AMERICAN TRADITION

My argument for Malamud as an American writer, in the traditional sense, would go something like this. (Needless to say, my thinking along these lines has been stimulated by the work of others, particularly, as I recall, essays by Sam Bluefarb, Ben Siegel, and Theodore Solotaroff.) From The Scarlet Letter and Billy Budd, down through The Red Badge of Courage, to Light in August, The Old Man and the Sea, and Henderson the Rain King (to point to a few of the most obvious examples), the central tradition of American fiction, as many of us would agree, has been moralistic and often allegorical. The value system carried within this tradition has usually been broadly humanistic, rather than narrowly religious, emphasizing such concerns as the liberation of the individual human spirit and the need for love, faith, and respect in human relationships. The allegory employed in this tradition is not, of course, the “pure” allegory of systematic personification and metaphor, but a more modern or “realistic” allegory wherein secondary meanings and their interrelationships are developed suggestively in an approach that is often ambiguous and frequently ironic.

As allegory, our fiction has sought to objectify the persistent spiritual conflict within the American psyche. It has done so by creating symbols and metaphors (in the characters and physical environment surrounding the central character) which suggest values and conditions which have a part in the internal struggle. The objectification by allegory may be in terms of landscape, the swamp, for example, that faces Nick Adams in “Big Two-Hearted River” (or Susskind's cave in “The Last Mohican”); of objects, Joe Christmas' shoes in Light in August (or the crown in “The Silver Crown”); or of other characters, Quint in The Turn of the Screw (or Angel Levine in the story of the same name).

Because he is so vitally concerned with matters of conscience, the allegorical use of character is especially important in Malamud's fiction. The use of a character near the protagonist to represent conscience, a device commonly used by Malamud, is nearly as old as literature itself, and there is ample precedent in the American tradition. As examples the relationships of Queequeg, Chingachgook, and Nigger Jim to Ishmael, Natty Bumppo, and Huck Finn come to mind, probably because of the presence of Leslie Fiedler on the conference program. The members of the former group serve as more than companions or confidants to the central characters of the latter group. They become in some degree objectifications of that which is inside the central characters in each case. They provide, literally and figuratively, color. Each leads to and is the physical emblem of a crucial formation of conscience which is at the heart of his white (undifferentiated on the outside) counterpart. The Innocent Adam is given a moral identity as well as dramatic substance.

In Malamud's fiction objectification by character operates on two levels—for the central character by other characters, and for the reader by the central character. In most of his fictions, there is at least one character who provides “the test,” who brings the lingering internal question to the surface, who forces the central character to the question of conscience: bumbling innocence is caught up by the collar and vague, good intentions are not enough—“Who are you?” and “What do you stand for?”

Malamud uses several different patterns in dramatizing this confrontation, each presenting to the reader a slightly different moral. One sort of test is that presented by the “loathly lady,” as Edwin M. Eigner and others have labeled this figure. Many, if not nearly all, the women that Malamud central-character males have romantic encounters with show themselves to have some severe defect. The test, which is among other things a criticism of the “girl-of-my-dreams” syndrome, consists of a challenge to the depth of the protagonist's love—will he reject the woman because she does not match his superficial criteria? (That is, what is the depth of his moral perception?) If he does, then we have a valid indictment of his total value system. A few Malamud characters fail, such as Roy Hobbs in The Natural who—to oversimplify—finds Iris Lemon's beauty marred by her status as a grandmother (while at the same time overlooking her character entirely). Others pass. “Hefty … eyeglassed, and marvelously plain,” middle-aged Olga teaches Mitka in “The Girl of My Dreams” the essence of love and thereby revives his stultifying soul. And the most important aspect of S. Levin's decision to stick with Pauline Gilley is that he no longer lusts after her under the spell of romance.

Although not entirely, these tend to be encounters from the outside. The encounters that interest me the most and which I believe make up the most powerful fictions in the Malamud canon and which most obviously tie him to the tradition are those which allegorize the inside, pitting the central character symbolically against himself. Most especially I am haunted by a group of stories which, because of their striking visual images, have become fixed in my mind—they give me nearly the same nightmares as an adult that I got from the Brothers Grimm as a child. One such story and surely one of Malamud's best is “The Last Mohican,” wherein Susskind performs the functions of Chingachgook to Arthur Fidelman's Pathfinder. Although Fidelman feels himself self-sufficient and does not want to be guided through the Eternal City, he is forced, through Susskind's uncanny ability to track him down, to make an inventory of his soul and come to terms with himself. Fidelman cannot escape the confrontation, for as we see early in the story, Susskind is really a part of Fidelman, a part that he would like to ignore, but cannot.

Getting off the train in Rome (where else would a Jew go to find his soul?), Fidelman “experienced the sensation of suddenly seeing himself as he was, to the pin-point, outside and in.” Then becoming aware “that there was an exterior source to the strange, almost tri-dimensional reflection of himself he had felt as well as seen,” he notices a stranger, “give a skeleton a couple of pounds,” staring at him in such a way as to suggest that he, Fidelman, had been “mirrored (lock, stock, and barrel) in the other's gaze for some time.” Susskind, as the stranger turns out to be, identifies himself subtly in the ensuing conversation as, in effect, the Wandering Jew, that part of Fidelman which represents his heritage and his conscience. Fidelman, proper, is a modern, “semi-assimilated” Jew who finds his counterpart embarrassing in his eccentric appearance, his claim of kinship, and his explicit Jewishness. He thinks of him as a bum, a panhandler, a “schnorrer” (what is the condition of a man's soul when he identifies it as a “schnorrer”?), and Susskind, in turn, demands more than just token attention. He wants, in fact, exactly half of Fidelman's resources—Fidelman has two suits, and Susskind wants, as only seems natural, one of them.

Near the middle of the story, the confrontation of conscience is made explicit:

“Am I responsible for you then, Susskind?”

“Who else?” Susskind loudly replied.

“Lower your voice … Why should I be?”

“You know what responsibility means?”

“I think so.”

“Then you are responsible. Because you are a man. Because you are a Jew, aren't you?”

Fidelman makes the usual plea, “I am a single individual and can't take on everybody's personal burden,” but it won't do. There is no escape possible, no rationalization good enough to release him from his obligation to himself, his heritage, and through that obligation, to others.

Several other stories recreate similar haunting relationships and situations and press home a similar moral. In “Angel Levine” Manaschevitz meets his “Nigger Jim” in a black, Jewish angel whom he must learn to accept as fully “human” and thus Jewish before his wife can be made whole again. In “The Jewbird,” Harry Cohen is confronted by a Jewish version of Poe's raven, an echo of Cohen's own lost soul, and ends up in a furious self-denial, beating and casting out the Jewbird—his heritage and conscience—onto the street to die of assorted concussions and a broken heart. There may be, in the words of Manischevitz, “Jews everywhere,” but there are “anti-Semeets,” in the words of the Jewbird, everywhere also.

Acceptance of the conscience by the central character in such stories requires not only faith, but an expression of mercy, love, charity, or forgiveness to confirm that faith. Manischevitz must not only believe in his Black Angel, but must perform an act of love in his acceptance which, contradicting previous training and belief, wrenches his soul. He musters the courage necessary, however, breaks out of the prison of his prejudices, and extends himself beyond the boundaries of what he was before, thus saving his wife. But Harry Cohen is unable to accept the image of his heritage in unconventional form. His failure (so reminiscent of the Romantic tale) to accept the Jewbird is a rejection of himself and, by extension, of his son. Ironically, it is Cohen's intolerance and American-Dream concern for status (he complains of the bird's dirtiness and his smell and is irritated by the bird's “old country” mannerisms) which allow him to cut short his concern for his son, whom he hopes to get into an Ivy League college.

Similar acts of faith and demonstrations of love are required of Leo Finkle in “The Magic Barrel,” of Albert Gans in “The Silver Crown,” of Howard Harvitz in “Man in the Drawer,” of Gruber in “The Mourners,” and of Mendel in “Idiots First.” The terms of these stories are not entirely parallel, but in each case there is an allegorical representation of part of the protagonist in another character who, in turn, challenges the central character's humanity. Furthermore, Malamud's best novels—The Assistant, The Fixer, and The Tenants—follow roughly the same pattern. As a matter of fact, The Fixer is not only allegorical within the terms described, but goes further in being what could be termed a “morality play” in which a whole cast is brought from the inside, out, and the outside, in.

Most of the central characters in these stories and novels are Jews who are no longer Orthodox and are partly assimilated into non-Jewish society in one way or another. Even Leo Finkle in “The Magic Barrel,” who is shortly to be ordained as a rabbi, originally lacks the faith, the love, and the depth of soul to be truly “Jewish” by Malamud's definition. And because these Jews are partly assimilated or doubtful, they are able to haunt us, just as they are haunted; we are able, by their successes and failures, to assess our own moral strength and spiritual capacity. We, too, are in this sense “assimilated Jews”—metaphorically, that is the modern condition of the American: alienated, doubtful, and self-centered.

“Haunting” is the word that seems to describe best the central effect of Malamud's work and which, in turn, names the quality that most clearly ties him to the writers of our past. Without shame, he has brought to life once again the curious tale as told by Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James. (His novels, in respect to this quality, seem but extensions of his stories.) Lucidly, modestly, he is able to touch the conscience and excite the visual imagination through his odd, twisted tales of fateful small happenings. For a moment, the agonized turnings of the human soul in conflict with itself are laid bare. A sudden shock of insight, often clothed protectively by irony, the story ends, and the world goes on its way.

Seldom profound, infrequently complex, he seems to get much of his power by daring to be old-fashioned, by daring to be almost trite, almost quaint, almost sentimental. Indeed, he plays with us by his deliberate and nearly constant skirting of critical disaster. But, having captured and phrased anew the haunting melodies of our past, why is it that his music often seems so thin? In an age of immensities, he seems determined to irritate the reader with his persistent tinkling in minor scales. Where are the bass tones of the Romantics past, those organ notes of God-like aspiration and thunderous despair? Perhaps Malamud, a post-Modern at least in time, is both weaker and stronger for being ultimately more like Hawthorne than his own contemporaries—stronger in that the strains of allegory and moral conviction are deeper, weaker in that the strains cannot be repeated with a similar force out of the time that originally produced and sustained them. The universe has grown too large, and man has shrunk too small.

IV. THE JEWISH-HYPHENATED-AMERICAN WRITER

Was there ever a discussion of Malamud that did not include an argument about the relevance of his Jewishness? Leslie Field's speech, “Bernard Malamud and the Marginal Jew,” may become the definitive essay on the topic, or at least definitive from a conservative point of view. Field—who startles me by matching almost exactly my mental picture of S. Levin (dark, bearded, and to my Wasp eyes, rather melancholy)—is Orthodox, a devoted supporter of Israel, and, in the past, a Malamud enthusiast. But this is an essay of second thoughts, and they are dark second thoughts.

He suggests that Malamud, and other Jewish-American writers, have been corrupted by “assimilationist tendencies” and the movement toward a universal humanism. These tendencies can only destroy that which is distinctively Jewish in their work:

Malamud's roots are Jewish roots. The original soil nurtures a writer in such a way that in any age his writing is immersed in that which concerns Jews most directly. Transplanted, the writer may become a hybrid. His Jew of the Torah, the Law, the rabbinical teachings may become the Jew of general humanism, of universalism. In fact his Jew may become indistinguishable from the non-Jew as he becomes homogenized in a larger, non-Jewish world. He may emerge as Everyman as his identification with his own peoples' overriding concerns becomes peripheral or marginal.

What are these overriding concerns for the contemporary Jew? The Holocaust and the rebirth of the State of Israel—they constantly affect, in one way or another, the thinking and feeling of Jews today. Are these events at the heart of Malamud's fiction? Of course, Field replies, the answer must be “No.” He accuses Malamud of being timid, of backing off. In effect, Malamud wants to use the Jewish milieu without paying the price of dealing with the reality of modern Jewish experience.

When Field finishes, his argument touches off a spirited series of challenges from the audience. The tender center of discussion, beyond Field's rather harsh indictment of Malamud, appears to be the conflict between the claims of a general humanism (expressed as universalism in literature) and the contemporary movement toward “ethnic identity.” Why does Malamud as a writer have to assume a very special Jewish role as prescribed by Field? Haven't other peoples suffered as much or more than the Jews? Several members of the audience call upon their knowledge of what “Berny” had in mind (is this parallel to changing Seymour to Sy?), which, in A New Life, was not Jewish. (The next day, Leslie Fiedler gets up and in his speech mourns the fact that A New Life is not Jewish enough—a real-life transition that unfortunately I am unable to use here.)

Field's talk and the debate it stirs up raise a number of difficult questions regarding Malamud's Jewish identity (and any obligations that may presume to entail), his use of Jewish materials, and the relationship to those materials by both a Jewish and a non-Jewish audience. These are questions that for the most part Malamud himself would prefer to avoid, understandably, as “reductive” and would apparently prefer that critics avoid them as well. But his special achievement is really in large part based on his use of Jewish characters and settings, as well as our peculiar reactions to them. Avoiding the subject is really impossible, while reaching any consensus of reaction to Malamud's uses of the subject would also seem impossible.

As a non-Jew, I am attracted to Malamud's “universalizing” of the Jew. And, in general, I agree with what I detect in Malamud's work and in his interviews as an antipathy toward narrow religious belief (either Jewish or Christian). Yet, I feel a hesitancy in participating in what almost seems a family argument. I wonder if other non-Jews share my slight edge of discomfort when talking about Malamud. So many of his critics have been Jewish and so much of the criticism has been published in Jewish periodicals. I wait for a raspberry from the back of the room as I mispronounce some Yiddish word I've never heard spoken aloud.

But in the last few decades the Jew has become a special sort of symbol for the rest of us, a cultural symbol upon which Malamud's work depends rather heavily, and I think I can safely comment on that. In recent years there has been wide discussion of this change in attitude, especially as an explanation for the dramatic increase in the popularity of Jewish writers since World War II. The best statement of this change has been made, I think, by Sheldon Norman Grebstein in a recent essay:

In the Western imagination the Jew had always played a special role as wizard, magician, possessor of secret knowledge, but never before, until Auschwitz and Buchenwald, had such moral authority been conferred upon him. From hated, feared, or ridiculed figure, lurking on the fringes of the culture, he was transformed into the Man Who Suffered, Everyman.

At the same time, there has been an increase in the moral awareness of our society. In the postwar years we have had an unprecedented affluence for the majority, while television has brought it home to us as never before how many people both here and abroad are suffering from social and economic oppression. Further, beginning with our awareness of the Holocaust—which for us must include not only Hitler's ovens, but the fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well—and running through the fear and persecution of McCarthyism, the shame and confusion of Viet Nam, and, more recently, the ugly reflection of our own suburban souls in Watergate, we have been brought, time and again, to a terrible confrontation with ourselves.

Through the course of these confrontations, and the resulting anguish of self-examination, we have become more and more aware of the possibility that what we had thought were social and political questions are really moral, even religious questions. Thus, what we have been led to is not only a heightened awareness of suffering, but guilt and anxiety as that awareness impinges on the satisfactions of affluence. Within this context, the Jew has evolved into a symbol of conscience—outwardly, as a function of his persecution which reached its climax in the Holocaust, and inwardly, as a function of his religious character (Jews perceived in this latter aspect as a group having its definition in religion—a religion persistently adhered to regardless of terrible consequences throughout the span of Western history). The Jew as symbol in recent literature is seen, therefore, as both provoking questions of conscience and demonstrating himself the constant spiritual trial of conscience.

It is difficult to believe that Malamud deliberately chose Jewish subjects as a result of the gain in impact that the Jewish figure has had on the American psyche. That impact as manifested in the strength of reactions to The Assistant and The Magic Barrel (as versus reactions to The Natural and A New Life) may even have come to him as a surprise. Previously, writers who had extensively employed Jewish materials, while often respected, did not usually gain a very wide audience. Instead, his choice, as indicated by his early publications, seems to have come, naturally and simply, out of his own background and the need of every writer to exorcise the painful spirits of the past. We don't know as yet the chronology of composition, but the chronology of publication suggests that during the Forties and early Fifties, Malamud developed a basic set of Jewish characterizations which, by accident or design, fit in very well with the change in American attitudes. By the time of the story “The Magic Barrel” (1954), his characters function in such a way as to say, “Take away the outside appearances of a human being, and what you have left as heart and soul is a Jew.” In suggesting this, of course, he has given his Jews a common identity with mankind, a commonality he has expressed directly on several occasions in such words as, “All men are Jews except they don't know it.”

The suggestion that all men underneath are “Jews” can be an appealing idea for Americans. We tend to believe in a moral or spiritual equality even more than we believe in equality under the law or equality of opportunity. Take away the badges of wealth and position—the material thrust of the American dream—and underneath every man has equal access to God and to salvation—the spiritual thrust of the American Dream. Furthermore, the discovery of the “real” person or the real nature of things beyond, behind, and within appearances or the physical exterior is by far the most pervasive theme in our moralistic literature.

For any number of historical and cultural reasons, it is fitting that Malamud has dramatized the Jew as moral doppelgänger to the American. Jews and Americans (as, of course, overlapping groups) have this characterization in common historically: they worry. Both have been thought of as prone to constant self-examination. Both tend to be moralistic and tend to see life, symbolically and allegorically, in Old Testament terms—the struggle in man between good and evil, the struggle to fulfill a prophesized destiny. There is some irony in the fact that much of the prejudice against Jews in this country came not so much from religious hostility (the cries of “You killed our Christ!” which Leslie Fiedler remembers from childhood), as from super-energetic pursuit of the American Dream. The stereotype before World War II was largely one of acquisitiveness—Jews will make a place for themselves, acquire money, goods, and status regardless of the moral cost. They became the archetypal immoral materialists. Now they have become the archetypal moralists.

This pattern becomes even more strange when we stop to consider the underpinnings of the American Dream. Calvinistic doctrine held that the accumulation of worldly wealth was a sign of God's favor (roughly, that material success was a sign of spiritual success, and wealth was a sign, therefore, of a higher status which had spiritual authority). And this doctrine, in turn, was derived from the history of Judaism, the Old Testament. The counter idea that wealth is a source of evil and can destroy character was also carried to this country within Protestantism, having for us essentially New Testament origins, and grew in strength in the Nineteenth Century largely as the result of Pastoral Romanticism (out of Rousseau and others). The most notable direct expression in American letters of this stance was, of course, Thoreau's Walden.

The result of the conflict between these two reactions to wealth in American culture has been an ambivalent reaction to success—in a moment Dream can turn to nightmare. Richard Cory may glitter when he walks, but while we are starving in the darkness and waiting for the night, it is Richard Cory who puts a bullet in his head. Which goes to show that while the true light may flicker, it never glitters. Andrew Carnegie may have become a cultural hero of a certain kind, but he and other “Christian” captains of industry and commerce (pious and moralistic all) were hated as “Jews.”

It is odd that our ambivalence toward our own Dream has been matched by our ambivalence toward the Jew and that the two have been tied together historically—circumstances which I believe Malamud, consciously or unconsciously, has taken advantage of in his work. Our early settlers, the Puritans among others, often saw themselves as latter-day, Old Testament Jews, a chosen people acting out a new Exodus from Pharaoh-like tyrants in Europe to find a new life in the Promised Land, the New Eden. But our question from the beginning—and it is Malamud's as well—has been, what kind of new life? What kind of fresh start? Opportunity to regenerate the spirit or replenish the pocketbook?

Were we Biblical Jews of the Spirit, or historical Jews as shrewd traders and money-lenders? The two sides of the American dream have appeared to work together in our experience, by and large, as a spiritual checks and balances system. In recent decades, however, with the decline of the moral force of American Protestantism, its increasing secularization, the scale has tipped sharply toward materialism. In our search for a moral counterweight, is it any wonder that our cultural imagination has been attracted by the Jew once again? The idea of the Jew appears to us, both by virtue of the Holocaust and the formation and success of Israel, one of the few moral forces that rather than declining, has demonstrated its power and durability. Haven't we been Jews all along? And what is Israel to us but our New Eden, America, once again?

V. YIDDISH KNIGHT AND JEWISH COWBOY?

One thing that seems certain to add durability to Malamud's critical life is his use of a multitude of models and sources. While critics seem intent on approaching him as a Jewish-American writer, he seems intent on baffling their intentions by mixing Christian ideas, sayings, and saints into Jewish situations, and by referring directly and indirectly, to the works of numerous writers out of several traditions. He is, in short, a college professor and he seems determined to broaden the range of his fiction, at least in its reverberations, and to provide work for his colleagues.

As moralist and allegorist, Malamud might almost be expected to show the interest he has shown in medieval literature. But a Yiddish knight? Not quite—so far, his allusions to Arthurian Romance have been for the most part confined to the non-Jewish novel, The Natural. But Peter Hays in his conference presentation “Malamud's Yiddish-Accented Medieval Stories” uses one such tale of knighthood, not to demonstrate a specific source, but to suggest that the medieval has been an important influence in the background of many of Malamud's fictional motifs and methods.

Hays reviews Crétien de Troye's “Lancelot, or The Knight of the Cart” and then effects a broad comparison of situations and movements which are paralleled in Malamud's work. Malamud's protagonists are frequently involved in that mixture of heroic and anti-heroic which characterize the fortunes of Crétien's knight. Often, like this Lancelot, the Malamud character is reviled, reproached, and “cut to ribbons” in his quest for love: “Where the medieval knight went in search of glory, conquest, and approval of a beloved, Malamud's protagonists search for an authentic self and life-style, an identity worthy of commitment.”

What the many similarities of movement and theme show, Hays explains, is not that Malamud has depended on Crétien de Troye, but that both writers are storytellers whose tales are grounded in the “archetypal myths behind most fictions.” As literary critics, we should “pay more attention to genus, as well as species, to storytelling in general, elements, motifs, and methods which are the stock in trade of any storyteller from Homer on.”

If not “a Yiddish knight, with his payess tucked into his beaver,” can we find ourselves a cowboy with a Jewish accent? Montana Les Fiedler expresses a feeling of identity with the circumstances of A New Life. This is a book about that wave of migration from East to West in the early Fifties of which he, himself, was a part, a migration of “certain upwardly mobile, urban, Eastern young academics, chiefly Jews, into remote small-town State Universities, Cow Colleges, and Schools of Education.” The fable in the novel is based on this touching and comic Western movement, “an account of two provincialities meeting head-on in a kind of mutual incomprehension which makes tragedy impossible, since the greatest catastrophe which can eventuate is a pratfall.”

By contrast with Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest which is a real Western, embodying the archetype of idyllic love between two males in the wilderness, Malamud's A New Life is a travesty Western. It is a tale about a failed Westering which typically involves the misadventures of the dude or tenderfoot who can never adjust to the ground rules of the new territory in which he finds himself. As long as S. Levin remains the absurd anti-hero of the travesty Western, Fiedler states, the shlemiel “on whom kids pee and nervous housewives spill tuna-fish casseroles, I love him and believe in him.” But unfortunately the novel gradually changes as self-pity and self-righteousness take over, and the book becomes “what may well be the least rewarding of all American sub-genres, the Academic Novel.” Because of either lack of nerve or excess of ambition—Malamud wanting to write an Art Novel rather than a Travesty—the author fails the original conception of the book and its “potentiality for becoming the first real Jewish anti-Western.”

Fiedler, of course, describes the novel that he would have written or the novel he would have Malamud write. And while such criticism annoys authors mightily, it is probably justified here on the basis of the author's apparent indecisiveness resulting in a failure of form. Writing rather close to his own experience in this novel, Malamud appears to have been guided more by instinct and emotion than by more objective, formal considerations. Of interest within the context of the conference is that once again in Fiedler, Malamud is charged with possible timidity, a charge made earlier by Hassan in regard to Malamud's traditionalism and by Field in response to what he perceives as Malamud's failure to involve himself more deeply in present Jewish concerns. Does Malamud fail to go far enough, to plumb deep enough, to follow through with his commitments often enough, or does he simply go a different path than we would have him follow?

VI. MIRROR IMAGES AND REVERSALS

Ben Siegel's paper, “Through a Glass Darkly: Bernard Malamud's Painful Views of the Self,” serves as a fitting conclusion, since of all the papers it is the most comprehensive in its examination of the fiction itself. Siegel's focus is on Malamud's use of a broad range of related techniques by which his characters can see themselves, sometimes revealing their own inner nature and sometimes obscuring or distorting it. Self-appraisal may come from dreams, visions; or visitations, or it may come from such refractive surfaces as those of “mirrors and windows, spectacles and paintings, photographs and the human eye,” all these serving “to confront man with his inner compulsions, passions, frustrations.”

Malamud's theme is ethical or non-ethical behavior as illustrated by characters, “solitary non-achievers,” who “never cease probing their deepest motives and acts” and who are aided in large part in their search by visual images which expose to them “their most private expectations and guilts.” Self-discovery is, therefore, central to Malamud's fiction. Often, the main character is able to grasp some insight into himself through an encounter with a double. Yet, just as often,

his wanderers are too bemused by inner and external needs to see others clearly. They fail also to comprehend dream warnings issued by their intuitive or subconscious selves. Yet these internal signals prove more reliable guides than do their willed judgments. A Frank Alpine or Seymour Levin who grasps this truth seems eligible for better things. A Roy Hobbs who rejects all inner portents invites more failure and frustration.

Siegel's scrutiny of this pattern runs from early novels and stories to the later The Tenants, Rembrandt's Hat, and Pictures of Fidelman. He concludes that Malamud insists throughout his work that “no matter how pathetic or foolish, the individual can, by suffering, compassion, and self-scrutiny … assert his humanity.” Although long and sometimes difficult to follow as an oral presentation, Siegel's paper may have more success as a written essay than any of the other papers. Certainly, it offers the most to those students interested in the specific workings of Malamud's fictional techniques and their connection to theme.

His essay is the one that perhaps best matches my own thinking about that which characterizes Malamud's central effect—his doublings, his images and visions, his hauntings. Siegel also seems to share my feeling that Malamud's basic metaphor for man's condition is that which was established relatively early in Malamud's career in the situations of the characters in The Assistant and The Magic Barrel:

Mostly beleaguered Jews clinging to dignity and self respect, they shuffle between dark, cramped tenements and bare, depressing shops. … Unhappiness takes a heavy toll. Many are tiresome, self-pitying nudniks or pests unable to forget they are wanderers in a hostile world. Yet they never cease trying to salvage small victories from large defeats. ‘Naturalized’ rather than ‘assimilated,’ overwrought and determined to be heard, they share an inflected, idiomatic Yiddish-English and the melancholy discovery that America, the Golden Land, has not ended their exile.

Entering the New Eden does not end the exile of the spirit; change in outside circumstances alone will not work. Man takes his prisons with him, and the only way out is through “self-discovery,” an expansion of the spirit, becoming more human than before.

As Siegel and many other Malamud critics have noted, the writer's most common motif is imprisonment—usually self-suffocation of the soul. When Fidelman, Harry Cohen, Albert Ganz, or Yakov Bok—or any of the other trapped or tortured characters in Malamud's fiction—is challenged by part of his soul which has been neglected to remember his heritage, it is not a narrow religious orthodoxy that he is being reminded of, but the broader and more fundamental obligation to be fully a mensch. The obstacles to this in Malamud's work are familiar ones to students of American literature—the prisons we build for ourselves through our selfishness and the prisons we build for others through our intolerance. The building blocks for our prison walls come out of a corrupt and perverse reservoir of values, and the mortar that ties those values together is the negative part of that mythic system we loosely refer to as the “American Dream.”

Indeed, Roy Hobbs, in Malamud's first novel, The Natural, is so thoroughly caught up in the myth that he doesn't even see any alternatives to self-gratification, to striving to become “The Best,” that is, gaining the fame, the money, and the girl from the Playboy centerfold that certify success. In this novel Malamud uses the “national pastime,” so often employed by businessmen, Boy Scout leaders, and Little League coaches as a metaphor for American life, as precisely that—a metaphor for American life. So, here you are, kids, along with a picture of one of your heroes on every trading card, is a little dose of greed, pride, and lust to get you started.

More common in Malamud's work, and I think more effective, is a reversal of the American Dream. This reversal provides the real source of power for one of the most impressive novels of the postwar period, The Assistant. Here we find Frank Alpine whose vague ambition to become a glamorous desperado leads him to participate in a stupid and brutal robbery of a pitifully poor neighborhood grocery. The senseless beating of the storekeeper leads him to a crisis of conscience—Morris Bober, the grocer, is in fact his conscience. Bober's influence grows over Frank to such an extent that Frank eventually becomes Bober, while gradually casting out the original Frank who was after American “success” (inspired by dime novels) through robbery. As Bober, Frank ends up with long hours, little pay, and almost no chance for “advancement” while in the service of others (and only a slim chance of getting the girl). While Frank has not gained anything more, he has become something more. The difficult question the novel asks of its readers is, who among you would be willing to take the place of Frank (who has himself taken the place of Morris), letting Frank become your conscience?

Malamud's best work follows in this same direction. In general, it acts somewhat like a negative for a film documentary of the materialistic American Dream. His images are an inverse reflection of almost every major aspect of our media-supported, contemporary value system leading to “success.” According to these values, youth is the ideal, and the rest of life is a struggle to remain as young as possible. In Malamud's world, young people are either callous and ignorant (like Nat Pearl in The Assistant or Albert Gans in “The Silver Crown”) or suffering and ignorant (like Frank Alpine in The Assistant or Leo Finkle in “The Magic Barrel”). Since according to Malamud it is only through experience that one can learn the necessary lessons to give life true substance, his younger characters of worth are all developing characters. Rather than a falling away from youthful glamour, life is for them an upward struggle toward self-knowledge and redemption.

And woe be those Malamud characters who are caught up in the glamour of True Romance. For they shall suffer the betrayal of Memo, as in The Natural, or the rejection of an Isabella, as in “The Lady of the Lake,” or the bursting of an illusion by an Olga, as in “The Girl of My Dreams,” or, as in A New Life, be worn down into a recognition of flat-chested reality by a Pauline Gilley. And what about Leo Finkle in “The Magic Barrel”? Malamud's track record suggests that anyone who falls in love with a picture, who thinks he will redeem a prostitute, and who rushes forward to begin the job with “violins and lit candles” on the brain, is in for a few small surprises.

Our media culture insists that life is a search for the bluebird of happiness (every Silver Cloud has leather upholstery). Malamud's fiction suggests that life is a search to make necessary suffering meaningful. Iris Lemon tells the uncomprehending Roy Hobbs, “Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.” When asked about suffering as a subject in his writing, Malamud sensibly replied, “I'm against it but when it occurs why waste the experience?” This is almost precisely the realization which comes to Yakov Bok during the darkest time of his terrible ordeal, as he nearly gives in to the temptation of suicide: “What do I get by dying, outside of release from pain? What have I earned if a single Jew dies because I did? Suffering I can gladly live without, I hate the taste of it, but if I must suffer, let it be for something. Let it be for Shmuel.”

Our culture holds that happiness and security come from wealth and the acquisition of goods. Malamud's fiction suggests that the struggle to acquire wealth or to keep it makes us insensitive, selfish, and unloving, and that there is no joy except in loving. There are not very many wealthy people in Malamud's fiction. Perhaps one of the most notable is Mr. Fishbein in “Idiots First” whose rigid rules for giving prevent him from being charitable. More often there are ordinary people who try to hoard what little they have at some cost to their humanity. It is Albert Gans's worry over the cost of the crown in “The Silver Crown” and his worry about a possible blow to his pride if he has been bilked of his money that finally hardens his heart against his father completely. And it is Carl Schneider's callous Yankee morality and tightness that causes him to withhold the customary “fee” from the desperate former tenant in “The Key.” And finally, although Harry Lesser in The Tenants is not wealthy, he shows the classical symptoms of the miser in protecting his manuscript and its possible completion. With artistic pride and selfish independence from the fate of others, he hardens his heart to the possible financial ruin of his landlord.

By contrast to such callous rejections of others' needs, there are scenes of deep compassion and communion, as when Breitbart tells Bober the story of his life and the two weep together. Then, there is the by now famous scene at the conclusion of “The Loan.” After Kobotsky tells his story of woe and his need for a little money to finish payment for a headstone for his dead wife, the baker's wife, Bessie, refuses, countering with the story of her own afflictions. Her brother had sacrificed himself to Hitler's ovens to allow her to escape to America where she is able now, after twelve years of back-breaking labor, to make a “little living.” But in her refusal of Kobotsky, she creates her own small horror. Overcome by her own misfortune, a tale she has told often, she forgets the oven in the bakery: “Screeching suddenly, she ran into the rear and with a cry wrenched open the oven door. A cloud of smoke billowed out at her. The loaves in the trays were blackened bricks—charred corpses.” From these loaves come no more loaves and no fishes. The baker who has been weeping for his friend, while his wife has been weeping for herself, finds himself helpless to give the money he would like to give. All he can offer is his love and eternal regard: “Kobotsky and the baker embraced and sighed over their lost youth. They pressed mouths together and parted forever.”

As further reversal of the American Dream, the physical landscape within which these themes are developed is in complete contrast to the world of House Beautiful. In apposition to a penthouse-suburban culture of high style, glamour, and conspicuous consumption, we find ourselves in a gray, timeless void somewhere in the inner-city, where nearly everything is old, shabby, and in need of repair. Malamud's best work shows us the human soul in conflict with itself on a stage stripped bare of cosmetics, media myths, and the junk of affluence. He cuts away, cuts away, down to the bone, through flesh and bone to essence of human need, agony, and joy. Everything is so minimal—so little is needed, and yet so little is given. Just a “little living,” just a little mercy, for Christ's sake. He can tear the reader's heart out for the pity of it.

Within this scene the conflict is nearly always the religious conflict of mortification of the self—of pride, and lust, and greed—in favor of serving others. Malamud's characters, from Roy Hobbs in The Natural to Harry Lesser in The Tenants, are caught up in the prisons of who they are and how, by their passions and failures, they define themselves. While they may be literally trapped in a barren tenement apartment, a worn-out neighborhood bakery or tailor shop, an actual jail cell, or even a whorehouse, their release, which may or may not be accompanied by physical freedom, can come only through an expansion of the spirit. All of this is in direct contrast, of course, to the freedom promised us through the purchase of condominiums, recreational vehicles, or courses in self-defense or meditation.

In this regard, on the surface S. Levin in A New Life seems to have but exchanged one prison for another. From the trap of a stultifying childhood and a youth of drunken futility in the urban East, Levin leaps toward the wide open spaces of the West, but physically finds himself trapped once again with a wife he doesn't love, two adopted kids he doesn't like, and “other assorted headaches.” But the point is that while his circumstances have not really changed that much, he has. When Gilley, his enemy, asks him why he takes on such a load, Levin answers (with one of Malamud's best lines), “Because I can, you son of a bitch.” In the same way Frank Alpine can stay with the store and put Helen through school, and Yakov Bok can turn down a pardon and insist on a trial—because they have found the capacity within themselves to do so.

People can change. This may be the most important thing that Malamud has to say, and it is a profoundly religious thing to offer. And it is this power of the human spirit as demonstrated on such a desolate landscape which is the ultimate source of Malamud's own power as a contemporary American writer. That the spirit can triumph and that change is possible are, after all, the promises of the New World, America. However, there are two conflicting possibilities in the dream of change: the freedom to find one's own spiritual destiny and the freedom to chart one's own financial and social destiny. Our problem, as recorded in our literary tradition, has been that we have more often than not confused one possibility with the other—ownership with self-mastery, physical space with spiritual growth.

However, whether we move from a dank and rat-infested basement in a New York slum to the vast reaches of the Far West, or from a jail cell in Europe to a New World without kings and Cossacks, we take ourselves with us. So that in Malamud's fiction we see that our range is ultimately spiritual and moral; our freedom is expressed in the reach of our commitments to others. Malamud's world is generally a very dark, naturalistic world wherein nearly everything is determined. Such an existence can only be faced with the wry, Yiddish acceptance that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. But there is one thing in such a world that is not totally determined, and that is the human spirit. This is the bright exception to the dark certainty of mortal and material imprisonment.

A new life is possible in the New World, but only on the inside. That is the great qualification of the American Dream, the joker in the fresh deck and the new deal. That we take ourselves with us to the territory ahead is the painful lesson brought home time after time to the Malamud character who tries to better his situation by changing his external circumstances. If we try to pretend to be other than what we are, we wind up like Henry Levin in “The Lady of the Lake,” embracing “only a moonlit stone,” a beautiful dream devoid of human warmth. If we depend on appearances, we will surely lose the spirit, as Manischevitz loses his angel in “Angel Levine.” Susskind follows us all, wherever we may go. Beware the Last Mohican. To his questions we must answer, “Yes, I am a man. Yes, I am a Jew. Yes, I am responsible.”

VII. HAM AND EGGS, HASH BROWNS, AND A SHORT STACK

Since coming to Corvallis I had been waiting for breakfast. I had been dreaming of those big breakfasts that I had had years ago. I used to drive up to Oregon and then at four in the morning stop at a small diner on my way out to stand hip-deep in cold water, under a gray drizzle, steelhead fishing. Heaps of crisp hash browns and stacks of wheatcakes. I couldn't find a diner within walking distance, so on Moo Day Plus One, my wife and I went into the motel dining room and sat down, joining Ben Siegel and Leslie Field. A gray-haired maitre de seated us. The tables were covered with white linen and laid out with silver and crystal. It was a morning-after morning and everyone had his own thoughts. I sat thinking about the “Berny” Malamud people had talked about yesterday and what it must have been like for him at Oregon State. I wondered how he felt when, after years of teaching composition, he received the National Book Award. I wondered how many men and women out there somewhere in the small towns, forests, and farms of Oregon looked back fondly on their freshman English teacher, realizing that he had become famous.

The waitress came, and I ordered the biggest breakfast on the menu. When it arrived a few minutes later, it looked as good as I had hoped. All except the ham. It had a silvery-rainbow glaze on it that made me suspicious, and I turned it over with my fork, to look at the other side. Siegel and Field sat silently for a moment, and then Field said, referring to my dismayed look, “So what's the harm? ‘I put in my mouth once in a while, when my tongue is dry, a piece ham.’ Go ahead—enjoy.” I didn't eat the ham, not because I was embarrassed, or trying to be courteous. It just didn't look good to me.