BOO KS
42,9
is carried beyond the point of perfection, to a certain guilt and fear. His
people seem to be watching him rather than he them. And then there is
the story ("Blackness
Is
My Favorite Color") in which Mr. Malamud
tries to motivate the love of a Jewish liquor dealer for a Negro woman
by giving him a good deal of wry sensibility. "That was the night she
wore a purple dress and I thought to myself, My God, what colors. Who
paints that picture paints a masterpiece." This strikes my not wholly
unpracticed ear as a mere stereotype of Second Avenue folksiness. Nor
are the author's powers of invention quite equal to the demands of the
metaphysical fantasy which serves this volume as title story. Here an old
man is pursued by Death until he acquires the courage to look Death
squarely in the eye, thus winning the desired extension of his borrowed
time. Meanwhile each has clarified his position to the other in the
artificially racy speech of what seems a kind of bull session. Challenged to
explain his lack of "responsibility," Death says, "I ain't in the anthro–
pomorphic business." And the old man yells, "You bastard, don't you
know what it means human?" Nor does it help that Malamud, humoriz–
ing, calls Death "Ginzburg." He sets out, perhaps, to disinfect Kafka's
universe of its total tragedy and ends up approximating the whimsical
affirmations of Paddy Chayefsky. Such are the occasional failures of
a first rate talent bent upon maintaining his "commitment" to his own
people and trying to be as positive as possible. In these cases, commit–
ment, that necessary stage in the development towards freedom of self
and imagination, seems to have become an end in itself.
Among the many fine stories in
Idiots First,
two are very fine .
One, "The German Refugee," simulates reportage rather than fable–
perhaps it
is
reportage- and is the most profound version of the refugee
theme I know. The other, "The Death of Me," is the epitome of the
author's whole matter and manner-his fabling manner. Marcus, a
former tailor, has risen
to
the level of clothier only to be harassed to
death by the furious quarrels of his present tailor, a thin bitter hysterical
Sicilian, and his presser, a beefy beery sobbing Pole. Their fury flows
from their consciousness of old unhappy far off things in their lives. And
the prose in which Malamud renders their deliberate squalor and pain–
wrung cries makes their troubles sound like all the troubles that ever
were in the world.
To Malamud, Mr. Podhoretz says, "the Jew is humanity seen under
the twin aspects of suffering and moral aspiration. Therefore any man
who suffers greatly and also longs to be better than he is can be called a
Jew." True, and the special appeal of "The Death of Me" comes from its
giving the thumbscrew of this theme a decisive turn. Here are two men
