REMEMBRANCES
BERNARD MALAMUD
In 1976 I answered the telephone and' heard privately an
instantly recognizable public voice. I knew this voice with the in–
timacy of passionate reverence. I had listened to it in the auditorium
of the 92nd Street Y reading an as yet unpublished tale called "The
Silver Crown ," a story so electrifying that I wished with all my heart
it was mine . Since it was not, I stole it . In my version , I described
the author of the stolen story as "very famous, so famous that it was
startling to see he was a real man. He wore a conventional suit and
tie, a conventional haircut and conventional eyeglasses. His whiten–
ing mustache made him look conventionally distinguished . He was
not at all as I had expected him to be - small and astonished, like his
heroes ."
His voice on the telephone was also not what I had expected .
Instead of bawling me out for usurping his story, he was calling with
something else in mind. He had noticed that the dedication to a col–
lection containing the stolen story was to my daughter, who was then
ten years old. "Joy of my life ," I had written . "I have to tell you," he
said, "that I understand just how you feel." And he spoke of his own
joy in being the father of his own children - but in such a way that it
was clear he understood love as something both particularized and
capacious, belonging to everyone. The more you have it yourself,
the more you see it elsewhere. A magic barrel. When after a while
we hung up, I recognized that I had been visited through this awk–
ward instrument by an angel. I had been blessed, anointed, by an il–
lumination of generosity fetched up out of the marrow of human
continuity. Malamudian annunciations are not overly fussy , and are
sometimes willing to materialize as birds or talking horses or even on
the telephone.
After that, it became possible to say hello on occasion, face to
face. But I always found this difficult . His largeness afflicted my
courage . This, after all , was the very writer who had brought into
being a new American idiom of his own idiosyncratic invention; this
was the writer who had introduced the idea of blessing- virtue as in–
sight, virtue as crucible - into the literature of a generation mainly
sunk in aestheticism or nihilism or solipsism. The last time I saw
