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PARTISAN REVIEW
many chapters before.)
It
is not so much that this idea is wrong–
whatever that would mean-as that Malamud holds to it with an un·
qualified intensity and directness that actual observation of the East
European immigrant Jews he is portraying would not appear to war·
rant. And here lies the source of that strangeness we are puzzled to ac·
count for in his Jewish characters-they are so beautifully drawn in
their physical beings (their speech, their gestures, their ordinary social
attitudes, their milieux) that we never think to question their authen–
ticity as East European immigrant Jews, when all the while their spiritual
lineaments have been quietly copied not from any models on earth but
from an idea in the mind of Bernard Malamud.
The point is that Malamud's unique and marvellous ability to write
without embarrassment or falsity of the simplest and most basic emo–
tions, his power to say "And there were days when he was sick to death
of everything," or "They pressed mouths together and parted forever"
(the last line of "The Loan," one of the three stories in this collection
that deserve to live forever, the other two being "The Bill" and, of
course, "The Magic Barrel") depends on a certain blindness to the full
realities of the world around him. The trick he has turned is not
unlike what Yeats did with magic: in the absence of a culture that
could supply him with a secure basis for the things he needs to
be–
lieve, he has created a folk, partly out of what actually exists and partly
out of what his spirit demands. You would not go to Bernard Malamud
for a balanced and reliable picture of the East European immigrant
Jew, but you would go to him for profounder truths about human beings
than mere observation can yield.
Malamud has elicited wonder and astonishment from the most
heterogeneous body of readers because he has managed to escape both
the corrosions of modern life and the deepenings of insight that have
accompanied these corrosions. He is a genuine "sport" who has travelled
his own idiosyncratic' road, almost as untouched by literary influences
as by the historical currents in which the rest of us are being swept
away. And his work, when it is good-which sufficiently often it is–
seems a kind of miracle, an act of spiritual autonomy perfect enough
to persuade us that the possibility of freedom from the determinings
of history and sociology still exists. That wacky, wonderful voice we
hear
in
a Malamud story is one of the few sounds remaining in our
world that cannot be accounted for in terms of anything but itself. For
it is a voice that speaks of people who belong to no period in particular,
and in a language that belongs not to history but to nature.
