THE NEW NIHILISM
589
his eyes, have besmirched the reputation of a married woman with whom
he was in love, despite the fact that nothing had ever happened between
them). Even a very great novelist would have been hard put to give
meaning and dignity to this heroism. All Silone-a very good and very
intelligent writer-can do is impress us with the pathos of Luca, and it is
a tribute to his humane artistry that only once, when Luca weeps with
unabated passion while reading the diary of the lady he had loved at
a distance for forty years, do we feel unequivocally that this man is
too ridiculous to bother with.
It
turns out, then, that even Silone, who
is
second only to Malraux as a distinguished writer with an honorable
career of
engagement,
is now having difficulty in proclaiming the pos–
sibility of absolute dedication to a moral code. Surely it is significant
that in order to assert the supreme value of passionate inner conviction
he should have had to wander off into a wholly foreign area of feeling
and assumptions, and that he should precisely have hit upon a code
that can no longer command any respect--quite as though he were in–
advertently confessing that the "secret" of Luca is of precious little
relevance today.
Only, I think, against some such background as the one I have
been trying to sketch can the wonder that has greeted Bernard Mala–
mud's last two books, his novel
The Assistant
and his collection of
stories
The Magic Barrel,S
be
fully understood. Many reviewers have
made a stab at describing the unique flavor of his work, but what they
have said in specific matters less than their agreement that a highly
special-and highly elusive--quality exists that very nearly beggars
definition. Since he writes so well about Jews, and poor ones at that,
and since he has succeeded in catching the very life of Yiddish speech
better than any of the countless American writers who have tried before
him, the natural thing to do has been to look for a handle in "Jewish–
ness" or Sholem Aleichem or even the Bible. None of this seems to me
of much help; in fact, I would argue that Malamud's conception of
Jewishness and his idea of what Jews are really like come out of his
own head and cannot be supported, except in a vague general way, by
precedent in Yiddish or Hebrew literature. To Malamud, the Jew is
humanity seen under the twin aspects of suffering and moral aspiration.
Therefore nny man who suffers greatly and who also longs to be better
than he
is
can be called a Jew. (Frankie Alpine's formal conversion to
Judaism at the end of
The Assistant
is almost gratuitous, since he be–
came a Jew, in the only sense that Malamud understands the word,
8. Farrar. Straus and Cudahy. $3.75.
