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birthday present, he gave me a rare item, Thomas Merton's translation of
Guigo the Carthusian's "On the Solitary Life," in a limited edition from
the press of his Bennington colleague Claude Fredericks. During Bern's
presidency of the PEN American Center (1979-81), he arranged for the
ceremony to take place on my birthday. (The citation bears his personal
accent: "For distinctive and continuous service to international letters, to
the dignity and freedom of writers, and to the free transmission of the
printed word across the barriers of poverty, ignorance, censorshi p, and
repression.")
There's a famous joke about a movie producer who was asked if he'd
read
The Wings oj the Dove
and answered, "Not personally." One memo–
rable evening at Bennington College, when Governor Snelling presented
Bern with the Vermont Arts Council Award, it was clear that
he
had read
Malamud personally. The spirits of Bern's departed colleagues Shirley
Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman permeated the proceedings, and the
whole ceremony became a family affair.
Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn on April 26, 1914, the elder
of the two sons of Bertha Fidelman and Max Malamud, immigrants from
Russia. They had worked hard to establish a local late-night grocery store,
a setting destined to become familiar in their son's writing. After changing
locations over the years, they finally settled on McDonald Avenue, where
the family lived in rooms over the store.
In 1929, when Bern was fifteen, his mother died and his father remar–
ried. ("After the death of my mother, [ had a stepmother and a thin family
life," he revealed.) Eugene, his younger brother, was twice hospitalized for
schizophrenia and died at age fifty-five . Bern went to school at PS 181 in
Brooklyn, graduated in 1932 from Erasmus Hall high school, and entered
City College in New York, where he received his B.A. in 1936. "I had
hoped to write short stories after graduation from City College during the
Depression," he explained, "but they were long in coming. [ had ideas and
felt I was on the verge of sustained work. But at that time I had no means
of earning a living, and as the son of a poor man, a poor grocer, [ could
not stand the thought of living off him, a generous and self-denying per–
son . .. [ registered for a teacher's examination and afterwards worked a
year at $4.50 a day as a teacher-in-training in a high school [Lafayette] in
Brooklyn." He recorded how he felt when he took civil service exams for
postal clerk and letter carrier: "This is mad, [ thought, or I am. Yet [ told
myself the kind of work I might get didn't matter so long as I was work–
ing for time to write."
In the spring of 1940 he accepted a civil service job at the census bureau
in Washington,
nc.
"All morning I conscientiously checked estimates of
drainage ditch statistics, as they appeared in various counties in the United
