b02
G. S. F R A S E
R
How many light-years has Malamud seen fall between
Pictures
of Fidelman
and
The Tenants?
That brilliant comic
Pictures of Fide/·
man
seems to come from another planet, and to be addressed to still
another, much more hopeful and indulgent universe. Fidelman belongs
in the magic barrel, where one can dream of women with big tits and
warming soulful embraces, but settle for, alas, women with pigeonchest
and hobbling gait; or, on yet another pitch, try to' be an artist in Rome,
and end up a prisoner of not artists but art forgers, and finally learn
the craft of glassblowing from a man who really
knows
blowing, Beppo,
whose wife stoically accepts the extremes of human ambiguity. "Beppo
may be a homo," she tells ex-lover Fidelman, "but he's a good provider
and not a bad father. ... Occasionally he will throw me a lay if I
suck him up good beforehand.
It
isn't a perfect life but I've learned
to be satisfied." Which is no more and no less than Fidelman himself
can claim in the last words of the novel: "In America he worked as a
craftsman in glass and loved men and women ."
The Tenants
ends like the ultimate Beckett play, with the stage
bare, and only the voice of Levenspiel crying "mercy." Not only has
suffering made nothing, but understanding, compassion, are similarly
pointless. The
t'shuvah
has
~eaning
only when the new way has a
tomorrow. The King of Nineveh changed his life at the very last instant.
Lesser's and Spearmint's realization is just that second too late to
spring hope or fire off the now muted streets. Reality, Malamud is say–
ing, may be even grimmer than art has up to this time imagined.
Jack Ludwig
AMERICA 'S
LOWELL
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MYTH OF ROBERT LOWELL. By Philip
Cooper. University of North Caroli na Press. $7.50.
THE PUBLIC POETRY OF ROBERT LOWELL. By Patrid Cosgrave. Gol–
lanel, London.
£
I.
THE REVI EW, Numbers 27-28. Ed ited by Ian Hamilton , from II Greek
Street, London, W.1. 75 p.
All great American literary reputations are
contested
reputa–
tions, both during and after the writer's lifetime. The contesters are often
equally great and equally contested American reputations: one thinks,
for instance, of the young Henry James's splendidly \'igorous death dance
over what he thought was the corpse of Whitman. English reputations,
on the other hand, once early established, continue to "exist" in the
ironical sense which J.
L.
Austin thought that many people uncritically
