600
JACK LUDWI G
to class with his fly open and - yawn widely - has this girl student
offer him a first-person fornicative if only he'll up her grade ). Yet
this same Seymour Levin is a reforming drunk who literally pulled
himself back to life from out of a deep dark cellar. He, like most of
Malamud's loser-heroes, lives in hope that somewhere, somehow, some–
body will be his way up or his way out, that the veil' next thing that
happens may well be his
t'shuvah.
In
The Tenants
Willie Spearmint
is, indeed, Harry Lesser's existential turning, but the
t'shu vah
comes too
late in a world that turned into sidelines while hate and ugliness
captured the existential arena. Mailer in his dingy days may have
thought a joust in Central Park under modified medieval rules would
drain the excesses of youthful id and send warriors home to their rats
and roaches and sty-shit healthier and happier. We of the middle classes
have always been big on happy endings. The
t'shuvah
of Malamud's
fiction
is on quite another level, and terrifying :
The Assistant
ends in
a tie - Jews 0, Goyim
O.
A New Life
ends with S[isyphus]. Levin try–
ing to push up once more that well-worn boulder. But the real connec–
tion to
The T enants
is to be found in
The Fixer,
Malamud's relentless
look at the
shtetl,
hatred of Jews, powe r, and pogroms.
The Fixer
ends
starkly with no way out for the falsely accused Yakov Bok, though he
is allowed the fantasy of shooting the criminally defi cient Czar. Before
he does so he says what Malamud characters say throughout Malamud's
fiction: that nothing is
made
by a man suffering. "Excuse me, Your
Majesty," Yakov imagines himself telling the Czar, "but what suffer–
ing has taught me is the uselessness of suffering." Just before his own
death Yakov allows himself one unconsoling thought, that "there's no
such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew.... You can't sit
still and see yourself destroyed." As for the Czar, Yakov says before
pulling the trigger, "you've made out of this country a valley of bones.
You had your chances and pissed them away."
This archetype confrontation recurs in
The Tenants,
but it is Willie
Spearmint and his black experience that takes the place of Yakov Bok.
And being a J ew no longer exempts Harry Lesser,
in
Willie's eyes, from
being totally identified with the "white MF's" who pissed away their
chances and made America "a
valley
of bones." And just as there is no
resolution in the deaths of Yakov and the Czar so there's none in the
imaginary apocalypse that terminates
The Tenants.
That apocalypse is
not any gentler for the jungle movie backdrop Malamud prO\'ides Lesser
and Spearmint; nor is it modified by their existential bang being fol–
lowed by Levenspiel's anticlimactic whimper.
One night Willie and Lesser met in a grassy clearing in the bush.
The night was moonless above the moss-dripping, rope-entwined
