BOOKS
137
TO FIND THE WESTWARD PATH
A NEW LIFE. By Bernard Malamud. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. $4.95.
Easterners have used up many versions of the American Far
West. Fact, historians' hypothesis, entrepreneurial dream; repository of
Kitsch mythologies; a coast, mostly; a vast ideological blur, ranging
from Southern California, an allegory of Inauthenticity, through San
Francisco, a Real City, to the vaguer reaches of the healthy North: the
whole expanse seemingly christened after the author of
Miss Lonely–
hearts.
But now jets have tied it to New York, academic empires have
spawned, San Francisco has invented avant-garde literature and Galigula
Hollywood died and has been deified as a cherished dream. Sociological,
moral and sexual frontiers have long since bleached out the significance
of the historical one, and for some time the West has seemed to be
unusable for the American imagination, having become so, perhaps,
while the South was siezing its title to The Other Place.
But in Mr. Malamud's latest novel we are given a new vision.
"My God, the West!" exclaims his hero at the beginning of the book;
it is a Pacific North-west, a world of geniality and frankness at which
Levin has arrived to start teaching at the agricultural and engineering
branch of a state university (not, as he had innocently supposed before
getting there, at the central campus itself). It is the gradual decay of
that world which the book unfolds. A garden of promise where simpli–
city seems to have been purchased only at the expense of crowding
and desperation falls to an American reality where local political battles
can seem to be mental fight and where sexual fulfillment passes as the
only morally authentic enterprise. In the opening sentence we see "S.
Levin, formerly a drunkard, after a long and tiring transcontinental
journey" getting off a train to confront a disarming hospitality, nice
people with funny name's, and an almost emblematically hopeful land..:
scape. By the end of the book, after the fable-like anonymity of "S.
Levin" has become the "Sy" that his academic colleagues call him and
the "Lev" of his girl, experience ejects him into a real world cleared
of any visionary gleam. And the garden of paradise has become a
National Park. As he sets off for a real new life at last, with a newly
acquired family and no concrete plans for a future, he is able to read
correctly the allegory of the landscape:
Levin drove to the edge of town for a last look at the mountains.
The clouds were a clash of horses and volcanoes.
"Beautiful country."
"If
beauty isn't all that happens."
