42
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
legion of small novels which would recoil from the Promethean
extremes of modernism and naturalism to take refuge in craft,
psychology, and moral allegory.
One ingredient of these new novels of sensibility would be
the abandonment of the public world that had provided much of
the terrain of the great novels -- to say nothing of the terrain of
Jewish millennial aspirations -- politics, class, manners and
mores, even the very feel of the streets. In a shrewd and ambiva–
lent review of Bernard Malamud's extraordinary collection of
stories,
The Magic Barrel
(1958), Alfred Kazin commented that
"his world is all too much an inner world -- one in which the
city streets, the houses, the stores, seem, along with the people
who broodingly stand about like skeletons, some with flesh,
always just about to fold up, to disappear into the sky.... People
flit in and out of each other's lives like bad dreams."
How different from this or from any other Jewish fiction of
the forties and fifties is a book like Daniel Fuchs's
Summer in
Williamsburg,
first published in 1934, ten years before
Dangling
Man.
When Fuchs's novels were reissued in the early sixties much
was made of the fabulistic, "poetic" side, as if they could only be
appreciated in the wake of a moral allegorist like Malamud. Actu–
ally, the great strength of the books is their feeling for the life of
the streets, the Runyonesque "low company" of youthful gangs in
Williamsburg and Jewish mobsters in the Catskills, a chapter of
social history quickly forgotten when the Jews became more re–
spectable and the Jewish novel more morally austere. In Fuchs the
moral temperature is low -- he is notably ham-handed in portray–
ing the religious life of his Jews, a more inward subject. He is a
folklorist, an anthropologist of street life rather than a purveyor of
moral parables. For all his freedom from the cant of proletarian
writing he remains in essence a 1930s realist; for him life is with
the people.
Well, Daniel Fuchs folded up shop after three novels and
went off to make his fortune in the great world -- Hollywood.
Delmore Schwartz's characters need have no truck with the world
because they are Artists, too pure to be responsible, or responsive.
Bellow never allows his characters that exit. His Joseph is explicity
not
an artist, despite his diary writing; he claims nO"higher moral
