598
JACK LUDWI G
So now, of course, you want to know what a1\ this has to do with
the Bernard I'm going to tell you about. My answer is
everything
-
OK?
I've already suggested the company this Bernard - Malamud - keeps.
1'1\ say more: this Malamud knows man has the Promethean fire in
his streets - not that, in the end, it makes a1\ that much difference.
In Malamud's new novel,
The Tenants,
the steel demolition ball
is swinging. Wall after wall is staved in, roofs collapse, all the uncer–
tainties of urban civilization are reduced to the chaos of dust and
rubble. The hero of this book - to begin with - is a novelist, Harry
Lesser, crazy to finish his novel while, all around him, demolition
triumphs. But Malamud's novel is
not
about a "last man" who heroically
resists the dehumanization of urban developers setting up another Babel
Towers. Lesser's resistance is a side effect of his writer's fix: Lesser is so
busy dragassing his manuscript through a thousand visions and revisions
he hardly has time to take a bagel and tea, let alone become a big
Prometheus hero resisting landlord Irving Levenspiel, the big-shot
developer. Harry has on his mind only how to finish a novel, or, if
not finish it, at least how to end it. And dragassing through his drag–
assing are all kinds of thoughts about art and life.
But
danken Cott,
as Sholom Aleichem taught us to say to cover up
mcntage and transitions, into Harry's dust-and-rubble chaos comes Bill
Spear, Willie Spearmint his real name, a squatter in Levenspiel's build–
ing, a writer like Lesser with Lesser's own kind of urgency about
finishing his book, and this Willie, a black, and a militant, catches
the fire off the streets for Malamud's novel. This Willie does for
The Tenants,
and for American fiction, what Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
has done for professional basketball, and what Willie Mays, Mohammed
Ali, Duane Thomas, Tina Turner, Shirley Chisholm, Wilson Pickett,
and Angela Davis - to mention an obvious few - have done to save
various graysmoke Establishment enterprises from death by infra–
inhalation or instant entropy. The allegorical confrontations of Lesser's
and Spearmint's
styles
is brilliantly dramatized by Malamud, first by
having Lesser's smoketalk indirectly and firelessly analytical, following
it immediately with Spearmint's response, in a human voice, direct, with
the rhythm of street language, fire's remnant. First Lesser:
Part of Bill's trouble was that he was trying to foreshadow a revolu–
tionary mentality, and it didn't always fit. Partly he was attempting
in his fiction to shed an incubus - his former life. This was not
necessarily bad in itself but could be bad if he insisted, and he was
insisting.. . .
To which Willie responds :
