0426
F. W.
DUPEE
curiosity so candid as scarcely to deserve the fancy term "voyeurism."
In no other author, surely, are so many pretty girls so sweetly obliging
about getting undressed in front of their boy friends. "Would you mind if
I peeled and went in for a dip?" the girl student asks her teacher in
"A Choice of Profession," a story in
Idiots First.
"Go ahead," the teacher
says happily, and she does. But "A Choice of Profession" is not one of
those steamy romances with a campus setting. The student turns out
to have been a call girl
in
her past life; and the teacher, on her telling
him this, recoils from her in fear and disgust even though he himself is so
far from being a lily himself that he has been entertaining furtive designs
on her. But he is only a prig, not a creep; and the point as finally voiced
by him is that "It's hard
to
be mora1."
In Mr. Malamud's novel,
The Assistant,
to be sure, we have in the
Italian youth, Frank Alpine, a bad case of distorted sexuality. He is a
thief, a peeping Tom and, just once, a rapist. But Frank is by definition
an outsider, especially in the Jewish family that shelters him. Even so,
he finally atones for everything. He settles down, marries the girl he
raped, has himself circumcized and becomes a Jew. The lesson is as clear
as the lesson is in
The Golden Bowl,
where James's Anglo-Saxon girl
succeeds in reforming
her
beloved Italian, the adulterous American. Es–
sentially the lesson is the same in both authors. Mature sexuality culminat–
ing in marriage is the norm. And so potent a force is the norm that it
accomplishes not only the regeneration of the erring ones but their actual
or virtual assimilation to another culture. Indeed "assimilation," but with
the Jew seeking the moral assimilation of the non-Jew, is a basic principle
of Malamud's work. And as concerns sex, the power of the Jew is
reinforced by his or her relative normality.
If
Mr. Fiedler fails to credit Malamud with his own sexual values it
is because he has other values which Malamud's work fails to meet. Fiedler
is carrying a second torch: for the "Gothic" strain in American fiction.
Gothic fantasy, he believes, "provides a way into not only the magic
world of the baseball fan . .. but also into certain areas of our social
life where nightmare violence and guilt actually exist." The reference here
is to Malamud's first novel,
The Natural,
which is about the heroics arid
horrors of professional baseball. Influenced, apparently, by Nathanael
West's mordant dealings with American folklore,
The Natural,
true to its
Westian prototypes, explodes at one point into bloody fantasy. This is
what Mr. Fiedler means by "Gothic" and it is what he likes about
The Natural.
And so, while praising that book for its "lovely, absurd
madness" he reproaches its author for the""denial of the marvellous"
implicit in much of his later work, where, says Fiedler, "he turns back
