454
PARTISAN REVIEW
novels in particular cast long, didactic shadows and ask us to judge
some of their characters as deserving of their trials. Moreover,
The
Natural
and
The Assistant,
as well as stories like "The Lady of the
Lake," "Girl of My Dreams," and "The Magic Barrel," broadcast
suggestions of a sexual moralism as well, though its exact nature is
never spelled out. The sexual moralist in Malamud has been largely
excluded from this collection, and where sex turns up in a moral
equation, as it does in "God's Wrath" and "The Magic Barrel," it
posits mysteries rather than precepts.
And yet Malamud
is
a moralist and an insistent one, though
the law to which he binds his characters has little in it of noticeably
Jewish content. It is the law of simple charity and compassion. Most
of his characters either earn their misery through hardheartedness or
are the victims of others'. Kessler, the former egg candler of "The
Mourners," is quarrelsome and a troublemaker and is self-isolated in
his tenement apartment. Rosen, the ex-coffee salesman in "Take
Pity," has been driven to the grave by a widow who, out of misplaced
pride, rejects his charity. Glasser, the retired shamus in "God's
Wrath," has had poor luck with his children, and we may guess with–
out being told that they had had no better luck with him. In story
after story coldness is returned for love, a warm heart is battered by
a cold one. The word "no" is the most powerful and bitter word in all
of Malamud.
Malamud is quintessentially a Jewish writer, though there is
nothing of religious belief and only the shards of ritual to be found in
his writing and only
shmatas
of Jewish culture or history. Yet, for all
that, his writing is so impregnated with J ewishness - as distinct from
Judaism-that there can be no mistaking it. Sometimes it is the spec–
tral J ewishness of Singer and Chagall, but more commonly it is the
melancholy Jewishness of Roman Vishniac's photos of the old coun–
try in its last hours. In his modest and laconic style of narrative,
Malamud has found the exact prose equivalent of the dull light and
gray tones of Vishniac's world, a world exhausted by siege and con–
scious of its defeat.
Perhaps Malamud's J ewishness is best understood in terms of
Matthew Arnold's definition of Hebraism, "strictness of conscience."
By such a definition, Malamud is our leading Hebraist of letters, for
strictness of conscience is as much his abiding theme as sorrow is his
abiding disposition. But though Malamud treats it as a requirement
of civilized existence, he often renders it as a curse, a habit of
withholding that interdicts the normal flow of human feelings. Many