ROBERT GIROUX
411
States. Although the work hardly thrilled me, I worked diligently and was
promoted after three months ... After lunch I kept my head bent low while
I was writing stories at my desk."
It
was a lonely rooming-house existence
in the capital. That summer he wrote a non-fiction piece for
The Washington
Post,
about the fall of France after the German Army was "obscenely jubi–
lant in conquered Paris." He recalled, "1 felt unhappy, as though mourning
the death of a civilization I loved, yet somehow I managed to celebrate
ongoing life and related acts. Though I was often lonely, I stayed in the
rooming house night after night trying to invent stories I needn't be
asham.ed of." One such story, "Armistice," is about the fall of France as it
affects an American grocer and his son.
Bern earned his master's degree in English literature at Columbia
University in
1942,
with a thesis on Thomas Hardy's poetry, and by
1945
his first stories had begun to appear in little magazines like
Assembly,
Thres/wld, American Prifaces,
and
New Threshold.
In
1945
he married Ann de
Chiara; their son, Paul, was born in
1947
and their daughter, Janna, in
1952.
He received an offer in
1949
to teach at Oregon State College. A severe
critic of his own work, he destroyed the manuscript of his first complet–
ed novel,
The Light Sleeper,
"one night in Oregon because I thought I could
do better." His first book, then, was
The Natural,
a novel about the reality
and fantasy of baseball, published in
1952.
He dedicated it to his father,
who died shortly thereafter. ("What does a writer need most? When I ask
this question, I think of my father.") He wrote "The Magic Barrel" in a
carrel in the basement of the college library;
Partisan Review
published it in
1954.
In
1956-57,
on sabbatical leave, he traveled in Europe and lived in
Rome on a Rockefeller grant sponsored by
Partisan Review,
a period from
which his stories with Italian settings are drawn.
The Assistant,
published in
1957,
won the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters.
The Magic Barrel
was published in
1958,
followed by six
novels:
A New Life
(1961),
The Fixer
(1966),
The Tenants
(1971),
Dubin's
Lives
(1979),
Cod's Crace
(1982),
and the unfinished
The People (1989),
which appeared posthumously. The other collections of stories were
Idiots
First
(1965);
Pictures of Fidelman
(1969),
a book of related stories set in Italy,
and
Rembralldt's Hat
(1975).
In September
1961
he joined the faculty of
Bennington College, where he taught for the rest of his life.
He won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for
The
Fixer.
New York University honored him with the Elmer H. Bobst Award
and the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him their presti–
gious Gold Medal for Fiction in
1985.
(This is given only at five-year
intervals, and it was presented by his friend Ralph Ellison.) In
1985
he
received a major Italian award, the Mondello Prize, at an annual literary
festival in Sicily. One night in March
1986,
when the Malamuds were
