[In the following essay, Mellard argues that A New Life is both an academic novel and a pastoral.]

Bernard Malamud's A New Life (1961) has been labeled many things—a Western and a “travesty western,” a proletarian and a frontier novel.¹ It may be read as any one of these types. Still, each reading has to be perceived through the frame provided by the book's most dominant generic form—that of the academic novel. Though the Great American Novel will probably never be an academic novel, A New Life, whatever else it may suggest, certainly belongs to that genre. But it may be argued that neither Malamud nor any other novelist sets out merely to write an academic novel.² The novelist has to consider many elements, including his need to provide a detailed context for characters, themes, and plots. If his academic novel is to achieve more than the genre itself can guarantee, he must bring his special qualities to it. Malamud does this in A New Life, as he works into the academic genre those elements of pastoral long identified with his fiction.³ Thus, he expresses here his views of the university and its possibilities, but those views prove to belong within more pervasive concerns associated with pastoral archetypes.

I

The academic or, more strictly, the college novel⁴ displays an author's reactions to the college institution itself, its faculty, and the cycle of events linked to an academic calendar. As he did with the elements of The Natural (1952) and The Assistant (1957), and would do later with those of The Fixer (1967) and The Tenants (1971), Malamud draws these narrative elements through the alembic of pastoral archetypal conventions in A New Life. But here Malamud treats the pastoral conventions somewhat more ironically, for a major feature of this novel is the way an object within a pastoral iconography is likely to yield ambiguous meanings. To begin with, the college community Malamud portrays represents the antithetical possibilities of any landscape in his fiction: it may be a garden or a wasteland, or even both at once, depending upon the individual perspective. The college town is situated in a stunningly beautiful natural setting, between two mountain ranges (the Coastal to the west and the Cascades) and in an extraordinarily fertile valley. Seymour Levin (Malamud's protagonist) is drawn to this wonderland as he settles into his new home:

He tramped for miles along dirt roads, wherever they led, usually from one farm to another. For weeks the blue sky was cloudless but lately huge white masses drifted in from the Pacific, floating toward the east. … A city boy let loose, Levin took in all the sights. … As he walked, he enjoyed surprises of landscape: the variety of green, yellow, brown and black fields, compositions with distant trees, the poetry of perspective.⁵

Beautiful and satisfying as is this landscape, its meanings are not as unequivocal as the conventions of pastoral might suggest. Levin will often momentarily misjudge the seasons, for example, because in the Pacific Northwest any time of year may bring days that resemble spring or autumn or winter. Another character tells Levin that “spring came sometimes in midwinter; autumn in the right mood might hang on till January, and at times spring lingered through summer” (p. 136). Thus, landscape and weather must be read within other contexts. They are not simple pastoral icons or signs. They take on deeper meaning and value within a human purview at each instant. So the newcomer should resist making too much of surface beauty and variableness.

Pauline Gilley tells Levin the day he arrives that “Nature here can be such an esthetic satisfaction that one slights others” (pp. 17-18). At the novel's end he and Pauline reaffirm this point:

“Beautiful country.”

“If beauty isn't all that happens.”

(p. 335)

The purpose of a real education, Levin will realize, is to teach one that something conducive to humane pursuits results from any setting's natural beauty. For in itself a physical setting is merely a given, an accident of circumstance—not the end of one's existence. This idea is particularly evident in Malamud's handling of the college itself. His Cascadia College is located not in the ruggedly named Marathon, where Levin first alights in the state (also named Cascadia) but in the more gently dubbed Easchester. There are, he is told, people in town, “originally from the Plains states or the Midwest, who swear Easchester is paradise” (p. 22). But since what the place is will rest largely on individual perception, and that perception rests on one's values, Malamud's hero soon learns that Easchester and Cascadia College are not paradise or Arcadia. In fact, from the realization derives the novel's theme of et in Arcadia ego. Levin must learn not only that sin already afflicts Cascadia, but also that he must take moral and political action toward its redemption.

Original sin, in terms provided by A New Life, is the separation of the human spirit from the material world, of humane values from our human acts. The Fall, as Malamud represents it in academia, occurs when the liberal arts are separated from the crafts, imaginative vision from practical application. When Levin arrived in Easchester, he did not know that original sin had already befallen the college. Gerald Gilley's capsule history of higher education in the state of Cascadia reveals it to him. Accepting the job offered him by Gilley, Levin had mistakenly assumed he would be teaching at a liberal arts college, where he could truly begin a new life in a setting that would guarantee it. Instead, he finds he is working at “a science and technology college” (p. 28). Cascadia once had taught the liberal arts, but, Gerald recounts, “We lost them shortly after the First World War,” a result of “pitched battles for funds between us and our sister institution, Cascadia University at Gettysburg … our capital city, a hundred miles north of here, where they still rib us as ‘southerners,’ to say nothing of ‘aggies’ and ‘hay palace’” (p. 28).

Levin's perception of Cascadia as an academic wasteland is reinforced by his gradual penetration to the real identities of his employers and friends. Like T. S. Eliot's Wasteland persona, Levin had not thought that death had undone so many. His inevitable disillusionment forces him into conflict with his colleagues, for their primary aim is not to redeem the arts, but to be good team players, cooperating, often enthusiastically, in carrying out the school's illiberal, antihumanistic curriculum. From Malamud's perspective, the faculty at Cascadia are all tragically benighted, however unwitting their subversion of humane values. Symbolizing the difficulty is President Marion Labhart, who has declared that “Plato, Shelley, and Emerson have done more harm than good to society.” Still, according to Gilley, he should not be underrated: “This place has just about doubled in size and scope during his tenure. He's a first-rate organizer. As a student he paid his way through graduate school by founding and running a successful used-car business that his brother still carries on in Boise” (p. 264). Obviously, anyone who can run a successful used-car business can run a college, and if an automotive business ought to have a service division, a good college ought to have one, too. At Cascadia, the service division is called Liberal Arts.

The Liberal Arts Service Division, it happens, has a new dean. Lawrence Seagram, in the words of one professor, is someone “they dug up … from the cornfields of Iowa” (p. 116). Levin comes to hope that Seagram will bring a new humanistic spirit to Cascadia. It is he, indeed, who mandates a democratic election to determine the successor to Orville Fairchild, the head in English, and it is he to whom Levin turns in hopes of accomplishing other reforms. But the new dean refuses to be Levin's hoped-for deus ex machina, for the school transforms the dean more than he it. Ironically, the change serves primarily to accentuate the humanity in Seagram, not the humanities in the college: “When Levin first saw him in September the dean was a clean-shaven youngish type; now he was middle-aged and wore a grizzled Van Dyke but at least looked human” (p. 226), if not to say merely human. Still, Levin finds Dean Seagram more open to the values of the humanities than his predecessor, Dean Feeney, would have been. Seagram does actuate one of Levin's ideas—a “Great Books Program” for all interested faculty members, but the circumstances surrounding his decision to do so are equivocal at best.

The leadership within Cascadia's English department, as Malamud portrays it, reflects the dismal pragmatism of the president and dean at their worst. Orville Fairchild and Gerald Gilley are cheerfully “philosophical” in their capitulation to the college's mandated view of the arts and humanities. “The first duty of a good leader,” Fairchild tells Levin, “is to carry out orders.” His “defense” is reminiscent of the “good” Germans who participated in the extermination of the Jews: “I did as I was ordered” (p. 54). The old man, on the verge of retirement—and death, too, though it catches him unawares—prides himself on having run “about the cheapest department on the Coast” (p. 54). The “main function” of his department, he says, “is to satisfy the needs of the professional schools on the campus with respect to written communication” (p. 41). Much to Levin's dismay, the old man considers literature to be distinctly secondary. Fairchild admits that the new dean may consider initiating an English major and more literature courses, but he does not accept those ideas. “We need foresters, farmers, engineers, agronomists, fish-and-game people, and every sort of extension agent,” he tells Levin. “We need them—let's be frank—more than we need English majors. You can't fell a tree, run a four-lane highway over a mountain, or build a dam with poetry” (p. 41). If Fairchild has his way, the department will continue to offer only what Levin regards as “a glut of composition, bone-head grammar, and remedial reading, over about a dozen skimpy literature courses” (p. 40).

Fairchild's likely successor is Gerald Gilley, director of the composition program. But the professor (actually—and most crucially—only associate professor) who is expected to compete for the chair's job is C. D. Fabrikant, the department's most notable scholar. To some extent the philosophic conflict (more apparent than real) between the composition people and the literature people is reflected in the values of Gilley and Fabrikant. Gilley proves a virtual clone of Orville Fairchild. He has given up literature and its humane values for the more practical rigors of teaching “written communication.” He once published a brief article on Howells in PMLA, but he has lost interest in literature, and the current focus of his “research” is a “picture book of American literature” (p. 33). Otherwise he engages in the many outdoor pleasures offered by the state of Cascadia—fishing (he's “the Fisher King” in the Wasteland myth⁶ after all), hunting, and golf. Fabrikant makes much of his differences from Gilley. CD is known as a scholar, but what his research field is we do not really know. He is very secretive with his colleagues about his work, but he flaunts before them his Harvard education and presumably liberal values. Levin discovers, however, that the values of this scholar are only so much cant; the seedy CD fabricates them to hide his trite ambitions. He is determined to make full professor no matter what—even if it means abandoning Levin (as, two years earlier, he had betrayed Leo Duffy, another liberal idealist) and the liberal arts. Fabrikant will lie down with neither Leo the lion nor Levin the lamb if doing so jeopardizes his promotion. Though Levin gives up on CD later than he does on Gerald, he eventually realizes that one is no more to be relied upon than the other.

Malamud introduces us to a full range of academic types in A New Life, but virtually every single one fits the mold of Labhart, Fairchild, Gilley, or Fabrikant. Two others of some consequence are Avis Fliss—a female colleague—and George Bullock. Avis for awhile offers a romantic possibility for Levin, and Bullock seems to be the one colleague who might assist Levin in improving Cascadia's curriculum. Neither turns out as anticipated, however, and both eventually become Levin's adversaries. But one other consequential figure remains—Joe Bucket. Naturally, since Bucket seems at the outset the least likely to provide Levin with aid or comfort, he proves the only academic character in whom we and Levin have any faith.

Joe Bucket is a type to whom Levin can relate. Despite his long suffering, he is good humored and kindhearted, and he has a humility sufficient for sainthood. He is Malamud's Job. Like Job, he never curses God or others for his sufferings. These include, besides abject poverty, a (perhaps) never-to-be-finished, though many-times-revised dissertation on Sterne's Tristram Shandy; its title is “Disorder and Sorrow in Sterne,” but, “in reality,” says Bucket, it is “a study of his humor” (p. 62). Moreover, Joe Bucket is procreative—he has five children and a sixth on the way, “though they aren't Catholics” (p. 35). He is also productive with his hands. He is building his own house, though it appears as endless a project as the dissertation or the “building” of his family.

Above all, Joe Bucket knows and adheres to humanistic educational—and professional—values. He devotes much of his time to his students, trying to free them from their boundless provincial innocence. He refuses to lie to Levin merely to gain his good will, but instead he protects their mutual self-respect. A turning point for Levin comes when he gives Joe a draft of a scholarly essay to critique. Levin himself thought the essay “useless” (p. 246), but he became confused when C. D. Fabrikant praised it for its “illuminating insight” (p. 246). Joe Bucket, however, refuses to offer false praise; in fact, he says nothing at all. Levin, at first hurt and angry, comes to see that Bucket has done the right thing. Thus does Levin discover that “Humility is its own virtue, sweet, if true. I must be generous, kind, good” (p. 250). Joe Bucket, the college's least promising figure, turns out to be Levin's one cherished colleague. He is a redemptive saint in this academic wasteland. His recognition of the moral values manifest in Joe Bucket's life begins to redirect Levin's personal and professional life. Still, though Joe Bucket offers a fine moral exemplum, he is not sufficiently active to serve Levin as a political model.⁷

II

Seymour Levin's growing disillusionment with his colleagues, crystallized by the episode with Joe Bucket, energizes the political plot line of A New Life. It prompts Levin to decide, however belatedly, that he must compete for the department chairmanship himself if liberal, humanistic values are to be promulgated there. He did not come to Cascadia College to be head of the English department. All he wanted was a college teaching job for a couple of years, several strong recommendations from the experience, and then an opportunity “to move on to a department where he could teach some literature” (p. 31), after beginning work toward his Ph.D. during the summers. True, he wanted to find “a new life” there, but he did not expect to become entangled in so many mysteries that would require solving before he could claim a new identity. He arrived at Cascadia as a thirty-year-old ex-drunkard and naive liberal idealist, who believed that things always are what they appear to be. He has since come to realize that few things at Cascadia are what they seem, least of all his own innocence. Hence his new life brings with it as much of the detective story as of traditional Western, or frontier, or proletarian plots. Levin becomes more shamus than Oedipus, a scruffy, overage Hardy boy solving mysteries of identity and morality in which he himself is somehow deeply implicated.

The mystery of identity is the darkest secret Levin must penetrate. If he is to have his new life, he must discover the most valid role models after whom to pattern himself. Roles and succession emerge as major elements of the novel. Dean Seagram has succeeded Dean Feeney. Gerald Gilley will succeed Orville Fairchild. George Bullock will succeed Gilley. Professor C. D. Fabrikant succeeds Associate Professor Fabrikant. If Joe Bucket is not quite the appropriate role model, whom will Sy Levin succeed? It will not be any of these. Gradually and reluctantly he rejects Gilley and Fabrikant (and with these Bullock). Levin must also reject Orville Fairchild. But Malamud does not depict the rejection primarily through actions Fairchild takes against Levin. Instead, he emphasizes Levin's reactions to a series of emblematic images suggesting the seductiveness of the academic life he seeks. On his first appearance to Levin, Fairchild might well be an angelic spirit. He carries then “a halo of sunlight ensnared in his bushy gray hair” (p. 39). After Fairchild outlines some of those views mentioned previously, however, Levin notices that his halo fades, perhaps just “a trick of some passing cloud” (p. 42). Later, in the same paternal discussion, as Fairchild welcomes Levin to the “beginning of a great career,” Levin notes once more that the “sun flared in his hair and he looked like a saintly old man amid his books” (p. 53). At the discussion's end, Fairchild boasts he would change little in his life if he were able to live it over. Levin leaves with the old man “still talking, the light fading in his hair” (p. 54).

More cruelly ironical is the appearance the old man presents the final time Levin sees him alive. Orville Fairchild takes the paternal role seriously. He regards himself as a father to Gilley and the members of the English department. When he is rejected by one of them, he says, “I had built up some affection for the poor devil, perhaps thinking of him as sort of [a] prodigal son,” except he “never returned to the parental fold” (pp. 48-49). The paternal role is of exaggerated importance to him, perhaps. His own father—a drunkard—had failed miserably in these duties, dying after a wasted life, apart from his family. “Many years later … I set out one summer in search of papa,” Orville tells Levin, only to discover his father's death and, contrarily, “how to use” (pp. 52-53) his own life. Reacting to his father's alcoholism, Fairchild became a strict teetotaler. (He even laments Dean Seagram's name for its appellative associations.) But in the moments before the stroke that kills him, he appears to Levin a drunk out for a walk. “Does he secretly tipple from an office bottle,” Levin wonders, “his father's fate long since caught up with him?” (p. 276). More ironical still, given our knowledge of the old man's love for grammar, are the reported last words Fairchild breathes. Following “The mys—mystery—of the …,” he repeats “infin” three times. When Levin tries to finish the word—he guesses that it is “infinite”—old Orville corrects him: “In-fin-i-tive. Have—you considered—its possibilities? To be—.” His last words before expiring, however, are “Poor papa” (p. 279). Being and paternity are not inconsequential subjects for ultimate wisdom. One's genesis and how to be—and not to be—those are the big questions of life and death. But Fairchild's universe is limited to correcting galley proofs of his book The Elements and musing upon the virtues of grammar. Dying he is—a dying god he is not. He is finally no more a role model for Levin than Gilley or Fabrikant or Bullock.

As he solves the simpler mysteries lying behind the surface appearances of Fairchild, Gilley, Fabrikant, Bullock, Joe Bucket, and others, Levin begins to untangle a mystery behind his own presence at Cascadia. Why was he the one chosen as the new English instructor? Why must he be sacrificed to restore the humanities and arts and thereby revivify the cultural wasteland he has begun to perceive? Joe Bucket has provided him with an element of professional identity. Yet in his efforts to bring new cultural life to Cascadia and Easchester, Levin has become enmeshed in mysteries of identity more primal than those of mere vocation. They focus upon the gradual unfolding of his psychosexual relationships with Pauline Gilley and Leo Duffy.

Leo Duffy represents the archetypal identity Levin seeks (or that seeks Levin). It seems plain Duffy is the double of Levin, the archétrace Levin's life seems destined to follow. Each time he learns something about Duffy, Levin soon realizes it will become a detail in his own life. Levin is being assigned to his departmental office when he first hears the name. “This office used to belong to someone by the name of Leo Duffy,” Gilley says. “He was here for a year in '48-'49, a sort of disagreeable radical who made a lot of trouble. Among his wackinesses was the habit of breaking window panes. … When he first came here, Orville took a shine to him and assigned him this office. He treated him like a son and for all his pains got headaches. I was more than thoughtful to him too” (pp. 36-37). It appears that Duffy's major concern was to betray each confidence placed in him, according to Fairchild, who came to regard Leo as embodying both of academe's worst enemies—“the misfit who sneaks in to escape his inadequacy elsewhere” and “the aggressive pest whose one purpose is to upset other people's apple carts” (p. 42). He flouted the department's grading standards, schedules, textbook decisions, political assumptions, and sexual mores. For his transgressions, Duffy was called before the “entire staff” of the college and publicly denounced “as a fellow-traveling radical” and “a disgrace to the institution.” He was cast out of Paradise, being informed that “his contract would not be renewed” (p. 47).

As his own experiences unfold at Cascadia, Levin learns that at every important turn Leo Duffy has (in Derridean language) “always already been there.” Like Duffy (of East Chicago), Levin is from the East; like Duffy, Levin is a liberal who tries to change Cascadia's technocratic heart. A sexually impulsive man, Levin is also like Duffy in taking advantage of his coeds and in being loved by both Pauline Gilley and Avis Fliss. Again like Duffy, Levin becomes a member of the Freshman Comp Textbook Committee and is later fired from his instructorship ostensibly because of amatory indiscretions. As he sees his life follow in the tracks laid before him by Leo Duffy, Levin becomes aware that in some mysterious way he is Leo. At the same time, however, he must also see that his new life is not new at all. It has been mandated before his time, as if he is, “so to say, the extension of Duffy's ghost” (p. 298). Levin has chosen little. He has been chosen by the archetypal role he must play in this mythic rite of the sacrifice of the scapegoat. That he has accepted Duffy's role becomes clear when, after also being fired, he “put[s] his fist through Duffy's bloody window” (p. 317). Just as Duffy's old place in Humanities Hall had been given to Levin, so Leo's life had been granted Levin as an “office,” too.

But as an office, that life—new or used—entails a source of power, authority, or motivation for the patterns of action Levin himself constantly sees doubled. Though Duffy had filled that literal and figurative office ahead of Levin, he is not the force that frames the fearful symmetry of the two lives. Pauline Gilley is—or at least represents—that force, which is the force of life itself. Typically, Malamud locates the primal force of material and spiritual life in a woman, the right woman. Pauline Gilley's real identity, however, like that of everyone else, is hidden behind a veil of appearances. When Levin first meets her upon his arrival at Marathon, she is merely a “tall, flat-chested woman in a white linen dress” (p. 7). She and Gerald take Levin to Easchester, where they promptly reclothe the new instructor in Gilley's trousers (after more than one accident befalls Sy) and settle him into the same boardinghouse room in which Gilley had lived some eighteen years earlier. The pattern of roles and succession with which we become familiar begins immediately to be asserted. Something has marked Levin's fate where the Gilleys are concerned, just as it has in connection with Duffy. But it is much later in the novel before Levin becomes aware of an attraction to Pauline. His awareness comes only after he has recognized Gerald, not as friend or double, but as his enemy (p. 168). Levin will not succeed Gilley in the departmental chair, then, but he will do so in the freshman director's marriage bed.

Typically (where Malamud's work is concerned), Levin has sought the woman elsewhere first. He has had brief, unsatisfactory interludes with Laverne (the waitress), Avis Fliss, and a student, Nadalee Hammerstad. The interlude with Laverne, one of the most comic in the novel, seems designed mainly to display Levin as a schlemiel of the highest order. For he proves a bumblingly incompetent seducer whose rival (an equally comic, but somewhat more aggressive, Syrian graduate student) steals his clothes at a crucial moment in his bucolic assignation with the waitress in a farmer's barn. Levin's interlude with Avis Fliss suffers its interruptions as well. Gerald Gilley is the culprit this time, popping in on the breathless couple just as they are about to consummate their passion on the floor of Levin's office. They might have resumed successfully after Gilley's departure, but Levin discovers that Avis has just one good breast.⁸ The other is sore from the removal of a fibroma: “He wavered indecisively” at this revelation, “then reached for his pants and drew them on” (p. 126).

The interlude with Nadalee, in a motel on the coast, at least results in Levin's actually getting in bed with the girl. She has become the goal of his parodic “heroic quest,” in his used Hudson, over the mountains to the Pacific. He battles along a “perilous, tortuous road” against a “fiend,” a “monster,” who turns out to be a “pee wee driver with a snip of black mustache, more Chaplin than Hitler, offering a thumbed nose” (p. 137). Levin wanders through “pools of fog” (p. 141) that conceal a monster of another sort (a wayward mule), and the fog confuses him so that he drives miles and miles in the wrong direction. But since at heart Levin is a deeply moral person (as well as a timid worrier), he decides he must give up his relationship with Nadalee. He feels no more affection for her than he felt for Laverne or Avis. But he suffers nonetheless, and falls to the verge of an alcoholic's recidivism—“in iron desperation he concentrated on the sad golden beauty of a fifth of whiskey” (p. 155). He is “saved” by Pauline Gilley, by her “pair of brown eyes” staring at him through the glass of his back door.

Levin senses that something has happened at this moment. Pauline has shown up at his apartment to deliver, unasked, some cold medicine and to return his copy of Hardy's The Woodlanders.⁹ He is not friendly. Yet, almost immediately, “He regretted not having said a kind word to her; but he felt like a man entering a new life and entered” (pp. 156-57). When he finally sees Pauline romantically, it is upon an enchanted evening, and she is across a crowded room. A “small veil floating before her eyes from a wisp of hat” creates for Levin “a mystery where none had been before” (p. 169). The imagery of the veil dances across the length of this momentous occasion, ending only when Levin tries to pluck it from her face much later as the two are alone in Gilley's house. There, Pauline Gilley makes an entreaty and a confession: “Mr. Levin,” she says, “I entreat you to look after my poor babies,” then adds, “I married a man with no seeds at all” (p. 179). When Levin and Pauline finally do make love, they do so in the Forestry School's forest, on a late January day that seems a “reasonable facsimile” (p. 181) of a day in March. In Pauline's primal gesture of sex, Levin sees “the mask unmasked” (p. 185). Ultimately, Levin will redeem Pauline's life, as well as his own, by getting her with child and taking on the responsibility for the two she and Gerald have adopted.

Pauline Gilley represents the force that lies behind Levin's new life. She provides Levin a means of attaining his primary goals: “Order, value, accomplishment, love” (p. 175). Once into the affair with Pauline, Levin begins to work toward other goals. Pauline brings him love, but for Levin to claim accomplishment he must exercise his sense of order and value. At the root of these rests his conviction that “the source of freedom is the human spirit” (p. 188). If the nominal leadership at Cascadia and in the English department will not foster that spirit in the curriculum and in the uses of authority, then Levin himself will try to do so. Giving up on Fairchild, Gilley, and Fabrikant, Levin decides to campaign for the department headship himself. In the meantime, Levin and Pauline weather various threats to their relationship. Initially, Levin pursues love as ardently as an adolescent, but guilt concerning Gilley (the “primal cheating” [p. 190]) and assorted other anxieties eventually cool down the physical passions of the lovers. Their physical dissatisfactions, along with the knowledge that their trysts are no longer secret, prompt Levin to break with Pauline: “Out of love he gave her up” (p. 232), Malamud explains, rather ambiguously. During this break in their relationship, Levin displaces his erotic drive with his campaign to find—or somehow to provide—a leadership for the department commensurate with his liberal, humanistic values.

III

A New Life provides a view of sexual initiation, but it also traces the initiation of an extraordinarily innocent academic into the sad realities of college life. In true pastoral fashion, Seymour Levin is a complete naïf, albeit an urban one, when he arrives at Cascadia. He has a totally idealistic notion of academe. When Gilley tells him that the battle at Cascadia over who teaches the liberal arts is a “bread and butter proposition” (p. 29), Levin replies,

“But that's fantastic …—ah—isn't it? How can we—if you'll excuse my making myself familiar—teach what the human spirit is, or may achieve, if a college limits itself to vocational and professional education? ‘The liberal arts feed our hearts,’ this old professor of mine used to say.”

Levin's feeling is that “Democracy is in trouble” (p. 30) if the liberal arts are not taught in colleges. He is unwilling to accept Gilley's argument that a school like Cascadia must only give students a “‘how to work’ education” (pp. 29-30). Levin's idealism is sorely tested by the rigid pragmatism of the leadership in the college, but he does begin to perceive more clearly the true state of things. He tells Joe Bucket at a later time:

“The way the world is now … I sometimes feel I'm engaged in a great irrelevancy, teaching people how to write who don't know what to write. I can give them subjects but not subject matter. I worry I'm not teaching how to keep civilization from destroying itself. … I have the strongest urge to say they must understand what humanism means or they won't know when freedom no longer exists. And that they must either be the best—masters of ideas and of themselves—or choose the best to lead them; in either case democracy wins.

(p. 109)

Levin finds that his values are truly tested when he must confront Gilley about the censorship of a particular story, Hemingway's “Ten Indians,” to which an angry parent has objected. Though the “cracked glass” of Duffy's window looks like “forked lightning” while Levin debates the principles with Gilley, the latter seems to win the argument—since, again, it is “a question … of our bread and butter.” But, we are later told, “After rereading Hemingway's innocent little story he felt faint, disgusted with himself for the ineffectuality of his protest” (p. 210).

By this point, Levin has begun to realize that Gerald Gilley will never be the champion of truly liberal values, so for a short time he turns to Fabrikant as a possible redeemer. But, as we have seen, Fabrikant falls far short of the necessary virtue. A fine talker about liberal ideas, he is a poor defender—as evidenced by his betrayal of Leo Duffy. Listening to Fabrikant lecture and aware of CD's betrayal of Leo, Levin questions his own commitment. He thinks: “The true liberal, in his moral fervor kept alive the visionary ideal, in the long run perhaps the decisive thing, and fought at every opportunity to translate it into a better life for people; but not Levin” (p. 211). Only after his encounter with Joe Bucket (and Joe's refusal to comment on that miserable essay) does Levin realize he must fight alone for his values against the Realpolitik of the department and college: “A man can find an ideal worth living for in the liberal arts. It might inspire him to work for a better society. It takes only one good man to make the world a little better.” At this moment Levin thinks, “suppose I were head of the department?” (p. 253).

Bernard Malamud appears to focus his basic views of American university life in the final movement of A New Life. From the moment Levin decides to become a candidate for the headship, and Pauline becomes totally committed to regaining the man she calls “Lev,” his personal and academic values coalesce within the still mysterious depths of pastoral archetypes. The havoc Levin's campaign raises within the English department ultimately causes some of his reforms to be initiated. Gerald Gilley, despite Levin's efforts, is elected department head, but in almost his first official act he abolishes Fairchild's textbook, The Elements, and its accompanying mind-numbing grammar workbooks for students. And Dean Seagram creates the Great Books program designed, presumably, as Levin had imagined it: to bring together mixed groups of “liberal arts people, scientists, technologists, and business school people” (p. 286) to read and discuss classics from literature, science, and the social sciences. The program will be credited to the dean and run by C. D. Fabrikant, but that makes no difference to Levin. The crucial matter is the restoration of the liberal arts and interest in and commitment to the humanities. One more of his goals is achieved: instructors without the Ph.D. will teach an occasional literature class. Gilley apparently will adopt this policy Levin had so strongly endorsed.

In his personal life, Levin makes a commitment to Pauline Gilley that similarly displays his values in action. He will assume responsibility for her and her children, even if it means loving Pauline merely “on principle” (p. 319) and despite Gerald's dire catalog of his wife's many limitations. He must also promise Gerald to give up college teaching to have Pauline. Most humbling of all, he learns why he was able to come to Cascadia at all: he was chosen, chosen by Pauline Gilley, not for himself, or even for Leo Duffy, but because he reminded her “of a Jewish-boy [she] knew in college who was very kind” (p. 331) to her during a trying time in her life. “So I was chosen,” Levin says, acknowledging his relationship just this one time to an ethnic heritage.¹⁰ At the same time Malamud seemingly acknowledges his hero's role in a still broader archetypal ambiance. Bringing new life to a wasteland—academic or otherwise—is heavy going, but somebody has to do it. If many are called, few are chosen. Seymour Levin is one of the chosen.

Notes

1. Leslie A. Fiedler speaks of the novel as, among other things, a “Western, or more accurately a neo- or meta-Western, which is to say, a Western written by an author (typically in a university, where such literature is studied) aware of the tradition, the genre, and therefore a book about that genre as well as about life in the West.” See his “Malamud's Travesty Western,” Novel 10 (1977): 212-19. In “Bernard Malamud's Mythic Proletarians,” in Radical Sophistication: Studies in Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969), pp. 56-68, Max F. Schulz applies the term “proletarian” to A New Life. John A. Barsness puts the novel into the framework of frontier fiction in “A New Life: The Frontier Myth in Perspective,” Western American Literature 3 (1969): 297-302.

2. In this context, one should note that Malamud told the Fields that A New Life represented “the simple act of writing a novel out of my experience. The ‘academic novel,’ as such simply doesn't interest me” (“An Interview with Bernard Malamud,” in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Leslie A. Field and Joyce W. Field [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975], p. 10).

3. For example, see James M. Mellard, “Malamud's Novels: Four Versions of Pastoral,” Critique 9, no. 2 (1967): 5-19, an essay reprinted in Bernard Malamud and the Critics, ed. with an introduction by Leslie A. Field and Joyce W. Field (New York: New York University Press, 1970), pp. 67-83.

4. The most useful essay on the academic elements in A New Life is that written by a former professor at Oregon State University, where Malamud taught from 1949 to 1961: Richard Astro, “In the Heart of the Valley: Bernard Malamud's A New Life,” in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 143-55. On the college novel generally, one should see John E. Kramer, Jr., The American College Novel: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1982) and John O. Lyons, The College Novel in America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962); for Lyons' brief comments on A New Life, see pp. 161-62. Astro and Jackson J. Benson have edited a very useful essay collection, The Fiction of Bernard Malamud (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1977), that adds considerably to our understanding of Malamud as an academic.

5. Bernard Malamud, A New Life (New York: Dell, 1970), p. 58. All subsequent quotations from this novel will be cited by page numbers within parentheses in my text.

6. Various critics have commented upon Malamud's use of mythic elements related to grail quests and the restoration of the Wasteland. See, for example, Edwin M. Eigner, “Malamud's Use of the Quest Romance,” Genre 1, no. 1 (January 1968): 55-74, and Mellard's “Malamud's Novels: Four Versions of Pastoral,” cited above. Both essays are reprinted in Bernard Malamud and the Critics.

7. I do not quite agree with Edwin Eigner's suggestion that Levin is too much the saint to revitalize society or that “the more social conception of the hero is better realized in … The Fixer” (Eigner, “Use of the Quest Romance,” in Bernard Malamud and the Critics, p. 100).

8. Malamud's habit is to associate women who are false goddesses with their having damaged or “sick” or tiny breasts, though diseased breasts are more problematic than merely small ones, as the example of Pauline will indicate: a vigorous “hero” can restore life to her. See Mellard's “Malamud's Novels,” in Bernard Malamud and the Critics, p. 74.

9. Edwin Eigner points out that Malamud did a master's thesis on Hardy, and that he highly valorizes Hardy's work: “As we might expect, Pauline has read and reread The Return of the Native, and as nature goddess she tries to live out Under the Greenwood Tree and The Woodlanders. She does not mention Jude the Obscure, but surely, as a woman in a university novel, she is modeled in large part after Sue Bridehead” (“Use of the Quest Romance,” in Bernard Malamud and the Critics, p. 99).

10. Leslie Fiedler, in “Malamud's Travesty Western,” makes much of Levin's calling himself “Sam” at the novel's end, suggesting the likelihood that he is finally to be acknowledged as a Jew, to be associated with “Samuel,” first of the Hebrew Prophets. In this vein, one can play with “Pauline,” nee “Josephson,” and the conciliation of New Testament Christianity and Old Testament Hebrew traditions in the belated couple formed by Levin and Pauline. Pagan elements are also reconciled with these biblical ones, as there is a pointed allusion to “Chief Joseph” (in a “Mt.” Chief Joseph) at the novel's beginning that must be assimilated into the general pattern of emphasis on Joseph, Christ, and St. Paul.