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PARTISAN lliVIEW
dinner guests of Roger and Dorothea Straus, Bern stated that he was four
chapters from the end of his first draft of
The People
and believed it would
be finished by the fall. The next afternoon, March 18, he died of a heart
attack after working at his desk.
The Complete Stories
if
Bernard Malamlld
includes fifty-five stories starting
in 1940 with "Armistice" and closing with the last two stories he wrote in
the 1980s, while experimenting with new forms. (In his 1985 notes he calls
them "fictive biographies" and "biographed stories." "In Kew Gardens,"
about Virginia Woolf, and "Alma Redeemed;' about Alma Mahler, were
both published in 1984; the odd biographical details of the lives of these
fanlous women sound fantastic but are literally true-that is his point.)
The fifty-five stories are arranged as accurately as possible in the order
of composition rather than publication. They reveal an astonishing devel–
opment over forty years, from the realism of the grocery-store and
Brooklyn background stories to the fantasy and freedom of stories like
"The Jewbird," "Talking Horse," "Angel Levine," and "The Magic Barrel."
Only one story, "Suppose a Wedding," about the family of an unmar–
ried daughter, is in dramatic form. As far as anyone knows, Bern made no
other attempt to write a play, though he was always interested in the the–
ater. He told me his uncle Charles Fidelman had been a prompter at the
Yiddish Theater on Second Avenue and had toured with a repertory com–
pany in Buenos Aires. "Suppose a Wedding" was first published in 1965 in
London in the
New Statesman.
(In 1996 it was set to music as an opera by
Dr. Leonard Lehrman.) Another early story, "A Confession of Murder,"
was in fact written as the first chapter of a novel,
The Man Nobody Could
Lift,
which he abandoned. Since it is a self-contained narrative with a sur–
prise ending which he preserved, his executors decided to include it as an
uncollected story. "Steady Customer," written in 1945, was recently dis–
covered in
New Threshold.
Flannery O'Connor, a great story writer herself (whose work Bern
admired), quietly revealed what she thought of his genius in a letter to her
friend "A" onJune 14,1958: "I have discovered a short-story writer who
is better than any of them, including myself. Go to the library and get a
book called
The Magic Barrel
by Bernard Malamud." Richard Gilman in his
excellent
New Republic
memorial piece, "Malamud's Grace," called him "a
story-teller in an era when most of our best writers have been suspicious
of straightforward narrative. He was both [a realist and a fantasist]. I don't
mean he alternated between reality and fantasy, but that at his best the line
between the two was obliterated. Observation gave way to imagining."
Gilman added that "a story like 'The Jewbird' (to my mind perhaps his
finest), a piece that appears all whimsy and allegorical effort, is anchored in
pebbly actuality." In her moving tribute to Malamud at the memorial
