456
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Whore, bastard, bitch," he shouted at her. "Go 'way from
here. Go home to your children ."
Davidov made no move to hinder him as Rosen rammed
down the window shade.
Strictness of conscience has proven to be a moral
cul-de-~ac
for both.
Malamud's Jewish characters, one often feels, are automatons of
conscience and fanatics. It is a commonplace of criticism that they are
ruined by circumstance, but it is less often observed that those cir–
cumstances are helped along by their own narrowness and rigidity .
So deeply ingrained is this woe that it seems virtually biologi–
cal- a mourning bound in helixes within every cell . But in the first
postwar decade, it had the full sanction of the times and was well–
nigh universal among Jewish writers and intellectuals. The sorrow
that penetrates to the bone in Malamud was the mood of a genera–
tion of Jewish writers who had been raised on immigrant poverty
and worldwide depression and brought abruptly to adulthood by the
holocaust. Low spirits came as naturally to them as hunger or ambi–
tion or breath.
But for some of those writers sorrow was a transient mood and
a burden, and they were glad to be relieved of it in the 1950s when the
prevailing conditions of life would no longer sustain their Dostoev–
skian migraines. As a character in an unfinished novel by Saul
Bellow announced in 1950, "You heard me tell myoId aunt a while
back when she asked me what I wanted, that I didn't want to be sad
any more ." Bellow, his stethoscope pressed to the bosom of the
zeitgeist,
had uttered that sentence on behalf of a new mood which
held that "being sad is being disfigured," and while in 1950 he was
still tentative enough to put those sentiments in the mouth of a men–
tal patient in a novel he could not complete, three years later he
would confirm them in a full-blown festival of high spirits,
The
Adventures of Augie March .
Throughout the fifties and the sixties, Malamud stood aside
from the cavalcade of cheerfulness and let it pass unapplauded.
Though he
would
take detours into sunnier climes and endeavor to
compose in a more robust key, most notably in
Pictures
of
Fidelman,
he never strayed far from his sorrow. Throughout the fifties, while
other writers in the
Partisan Review
orbit were spreading the good
news about "Our Country and Our Culture," Malamud was prowl–
ing the tenements of the imagination for vistas of misfortune, scenes
of Old World pathos in New World ghettos. His major novel of that
