452
PARTISAN REVIEW
deed, not only does the typical Malamud story end with death, but
the keynote story in this collection, "Take Pity ," begins with death,
one that releases the character into a chamber of heaven that looks
remarkably like a furnished room. Even death, it seems, brings no
elevation.
This makes for anything but happy reading, and we might well
ask why anyone would bother with a writer so insistently depressive ,
who peoples his stories with characters who exist for most of us only
in memory and nightmare . That is not a simple question to answer ,
but we might begin with Malamud's own words. In one of the stories
in this collection, "Man in the Drawer," Levitansky, a Russian-Jewish
writer whose work cannot be published in the Soviet Union, entices
an American journalist, Howard Harvitz, who is touring Russia , to
read some of his stories. Harvitz, after much shilly-shallying, reads
them and renders an approving judgment: "I like the primary, close–
to-the-bone quality of the writing. The stories impress me as strong
if simply wrought; I appreciate your feeling for the people and at the
same time the objectivity with which you render them. It's sort of
Chekhovian in quality, but more compressed, sinewy , direct, if you
know what I mean ." Levitansky, it appears, is a portrait of what
Malamud himself might have been and have suffered had fate seen
fit to send his grandparents east to Russia rather than west to Amer–
ica, and these terms of praise are Malamud's own terms for what is
strong in his art.
Sinewy, direct , simply wrought, close to the bone - Malamud's
writing is all that, but an appreciation of his simplicity takes us only
so far toward a definition of his appeal, which has, I think, two other
sources: an apprehension that touches some core of panic in all of us
and his music . "Man in the Drawer" exhibits a dimension of the
Malamud world that powerfully draws us in . Levitansky is the
nightmare Jew, but he is also Harvitz's sembIable , his alter ego ,
the victim who , but for an accident of fortune , might be himself.
Plainly , he is
our
other self. Malamud's tenement Jews, his Russian–
Jewish writers, his lonely pensioners , his forsaken fathers and embit–
tered children are all stained by that tincture of possibility. Even in
the midst of plenty, in this best of all possible diasporas, a portion
of every Jew stands poised for flight and expecting the worst. It is
Malamud , more than any other Jewish writer, who retains that
imagination of disaster and speaks the old dialects of loneliness , con–
finement, and exile .
The music of Malamud's writing is a curious one - dark and
