In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Shallow-flashy Straus was mistaken: Bernard Malamud is indeed well worth a biography, and in Philip Davis, Professor of English at the University of Liverpool, he has been posthumously very lucky to have been granted an ideal biographer, who has more than fulfilled laudable aims: “To place the work above the life to show how the life worked very hard to turn itself into that achievement” and to “show serious readers all that it means to be a serious writer, possessed of an almost religious sense of vocation—in terms of both the uses of and the costs to an ordinary human life.” [p. vii]

  Born in Brooklyn in 1914, of Jewish immigrant parents, Malamud seems to have been obsessively preoccupied with memories of his arduous, impoverished background, as of the stoic example of his grocer-father, through his life. Long after Malamud had ascended to the literary aristocracy of his time—president of American PEN, member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, recipient of countless awards and honorary doctorates, not least the author of an eccentric baseball novel, The Natural, made into a film starring Robert Redford—he gives evidence of being as “time-haunted” as he’d been as a boy whose father had fled Ukraine “amid a rising tide of anti-Semitism and pogroms” and whose mother died in a mental hospital when he was fifteen. (Malamud would one day remark to an interviewer that he had to find in a “second life” what he had lost in his “first life”: “The death of my mother, while she was still young, had an influence on my writing and there is in my fiction a hunger for women that comes out in a conscious way.”) Like many another child of immigrant parents, Malamud was determined to invent himself as an American; he distinguished himself as a student, attended Columbia University on a government loan and received a master’s degree in English in 1942 (his thesis, on Thomas Hardy’s reputation as a poet in American periodicals, seems to have been uninspired and pedestrian); he began writing fiction while teaching high school in Brooklyn, began to be published in the mid-1940s, and achieved his first notable successes in the 1950s when his remarkable short stories, one day to comprise The Magic Barrel, began to be published in such magazines as Partisan Review and Harper’s Bazaar. Subsequent to his marriage to “an Italian beauty”—not without warning her: “Though I love you and shall love you more, most of my strength will be devoted to realizing myself as an artist”—and their move to faraway Oregon in 1949, Malamud began to publish frequently, and well; in Discovery, The New Yorker, the Saturday Evening Post, and Playboy; his early novels The Natural (1952) and The Assistant (1957) were acclaimed, and The Magic Barrel, the most impressive of Malamud’s several story collections, quickly acquired the aura of a Jewish-American classic. (And how aptly titled, this gathering of stories that so brilliantly combine the gritty realism of contemporary urban settings with the fabulist “magic” of the Jewish storytelling tradition.) Malamud’s third novel, A New Life (1961), set in an Oregon academic community very like Corvallis, with an idealistic but schlemiel-like protagonist named Levin, has an idiomatic ease and accessibility that distinguishes it from Malamud’s more characteristic work, and certainly from The Fixer, a grimly compelling fable-like tale of virulent anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia, as if Isaac Bashevis Singer and Franz Kafka had collaborated with Dostoyevsky to come up with the worst possible nightmare for a Jew, the accusation of having committed a ritual murder/sacrifice of a Christian child. (Yakov Bok’s gradual emergence as a tragic hero is the substance of Malamud’s novel, which was enormously difficult and exhausting for him to write over a period of several years: “Something in me has changed. I’m not the same man I was. I fear less and hate more.”—a triumphant if treacherous epiphany for a Jew held captive in a Russian prison on lurid criminal charges.)

  Beyond The Fixer, Malamud seems to have cast about for a comparably worthy subject: though he worked with his characteristic obsessiveness on the semi-autobiographical Dubin’s Lives (1979), and on the fabulist/prophetic God’s Grace (1982), it is Malamud’s short stories that constitute the most memorable work of the last two decades of his life, notably the masterfully executed and compelling “My Son the Murderer,” “Talking Horse,” and the near novella-length “Man in the Drawer” from Rembrandt’s Hat (1973). In 1982 The Collected Stories of Bernard Malamud was published to much critical acclaim and in 1989, three years after his death of a heart attack, Malamud’s final, incomplete novel The Ghosts was published along with his previously uncollected stories.

  In the prime of his career in the 1960s and early 1970s, Bernard Malamud was as highly regarded as his coeval Saul Bellow and his younger contemporary Philip Roth: an accidental triumvirate of terrifically talented Jewish-American writers ruefully described (by Bellow himself) as the “Jewish equivalent of the first-generation rag trade gone upmarket—the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of literature.” (Add to which, as in a Chagall fantasy, the transfigured Isaac Bashevis Singer, the most triumphantly “Jewish” of twentieth-century American writers, floats overhead.) Given the relative narrowness of Malamud’s subject matter, the more subdued range of his writerly voice, and an aesthetic puritanism temperamentally at odds with the flamboyant self-displays of Bellow (Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift) and Roth (Portnoy’s Complaint etc.), it seems inevitable, if unfortunate, that Malamud should come to seem, in time, the least impressive of the four; Bellow’s and Singer’s Nobel Prizes (1976 and 1978 respectively) have given their work the imprimatur of international acclaim, and Roth’s dazzling energies, that continue to this very hour, have given to Roth’s work an air of improvident virtuosity utterly foreign to Malamud’s more journeyman-like career. In the preface to this biography Philip Davis notes that he was invited to undertake the project by the Malamud family out of their concern “that (Malamud’s) name was fading, his readership and literary standing in danger of decline.”

  In the preface, too, Davis quotes the notorious remarks of Sigmund Freud on the futility of the biographical enterprise:

  Anyone turning biographer has committed himself to lies, concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were it couldn’t be useful.

  So irrational an outburst provokes one to wonder what Freud was desperate to conceal from biographers, and whether he succeeded; in the case of Philip Davis’s life of Malamud, it would seem that the subject, Malamud-as-a-writer, was both enigmatic to observers (like Frank Alpine of The Assistant, “he could see outside but no one could see in”) and yet in his letters, drafts, and notes to himself, Malamud is tireless in his self-scrutiny, as if eager to be understood. Unsparing of what he perceives to be his limitations, Malamud yet takes pride in his hard-won accomplishments. Davis speaks of Malamud’s commitment to “the human sentence”—prose that has been shaped through countless revisions: “The sentence as object—treat it like a piece of sculpture.” The biography is a virtual treasure trove of writerly pensées, many of a quality to set beside those of Virginia Woolf gathered by Leonard Woolf in A Writer’s Diary. Here emerges Bernard Malamud as a tireless craftsman trusting not to rushes of inspiration but to “labor”:

  If you think of me at my desk, you can’t be wrong—today, tomorrow, next month, possibly even a year from now. I sometimes wonder when there is time to live although somehow I do.

  When I can’t add or develop, I refine or twist. Can you see that in my work?

  Rewriting tends to be pleasurable, in particular the enjoyment of finding new opportunities in old sentences, twisting, tying, looping structure tighter, finding pegs to tie onto that were apparently not there before, deepening meanings, strengthening logicality in order to infiltrate the apparently illogical the apparently absurd, the absurdly believable.

  Today I worked in mosaics, sentences previously noted, and put together in many hours…Today I invented sunshine; I invented it in the book and the sky of the dark day broke.

  I would start the story, writing each paragraph over and over until I was satisfied, before I went on to the next. Some writers can write a quic
k first draft—I can’t. I can’t stand rereading a first draft, so I had to make each paragraph as good as it could possibly be at the time. Then when I had the whole story down, I found I could revise with ease.

  Work slowly…Don’t push tomorrow in today.

  I love magic and the imagination is magic.

  I have not given up the hero—I simply use heroic qualities in small men.

  I don’t know how not to work.

  Art is a free man’s prison.

  Some are born whole, others must seek this blessed state in a struggle to achieve order.

  I (succeed) in afterthought. I connect revisions with reformation.

  My gift is to create what might be deeply felt.

  One thing about writing, you have to create a rhythm for it…Having a bad time at the beginning is almost necessary, it’s nothing more than the struggle to create and it’s continually a struggle except that if you keep it right the struggle can become a dance. This week I’m dancing; I hope you are.

  [Reading Hemingway as a young man] I was like the body of a cello which Hemingway drew his bow across. Hemingway was vibrating with the thing unsaid, which ultimately became death.

  When you feel a sudden shaft of light in yourself after reading a story, you must ask yourself what did it and then you can do it.

  As you are grooved, so you are grieved. One is conditioned early in family life to an interpretation of the world. And the grieving is that no matter how much happiness or success you collect, you cannot obliterate your early experience—diminished perhaps, it stays with you.

  Most biographies trudge along the surface of a life, amassing and presenting facts, like rubble on a shovel, in which a very few precious gems might be visible; this pioneering biography of Bernard Malamud presents gem-like aphorisms like those quoted above, and insights and observations of the biographer’s, on virtually every page. It is rare that a biographer succeeds in evoking, with a novelist’s skill, such compassion for his (flawed, human) subject; yet more rare, that a biographer succeeds in so drawing the reader into the shimmering world he has constructed out of a small infinity of letters, drafts, notes, manuscripts, printed texts, interview transcripts, etc., that the barrier between reader and subject becomes near-transparent.

  “LARGE AND STARTLING FIGURES”: THE FICTION OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR

  Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor

  by Brad Gooch

  Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable…To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

  —FLANNERY O’CONNOR, “THE FICTION WRITER AND HIS COUNTRY,” MYSTERY AND MANNERS

  Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we can still recognize one.

  —FLANNERY O’CONNOR, “SOME ASPECTS OF THE GROTESQUE IN SOUTHERN FICTION,” MYSTERY AND MANNERS

  Short stories, for all the dazzling diversity of the genre, are of two general types: those that yield their meanings subtly, quietly, nuanced and delicate and without melodrama as the unfolding of miniature blossoms in Japanese chrysanthemum tea, and those that explode like firecrackers in the reader’s face. Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) came of age in a time when subtlety and “atmosphere” in short stories were fashionable—as in the finely wrought, understated stories of such classic predecessors as Anton Chekhov, Henry James, James Joyce and such American contemporaries as Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, and Jean Stafford—but O’Connor’s plain-spoken, blunt, comic-cartoonish and flagrantly melodramatic short stories were anything but fashionable. The novelty of her “acidly comic tales with moral and religious messages”—in Brad Gooch’s aptly chosen words—lay in its frontal assault upon the reader’s sensibility: these were not refined New Yorker stories of the era in which nothing happens except inwardly, but stories in which something happens of irreversible magnitude, often death by violent means. An escaped convict called The Misfit offhandedly slaughters a Southern family in back-country Georgia (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”)—a conniving old woman marries off her retarded daughter to a sinister one-armed tramp named Shiftlet, who immediately abandons the girl and drives off with the old woman’s car (“The Life You Save May Be Your Own”)—an embittered young woman who has changed her name from Joy to Hulga, crippled by the loss of a leg (in a “hunting accident” when she was ten), is seduced by a hypocritical young Bible salesman who steals her wooden leg (“Good Country People”)—boy-arsonists set fire to a wooded property out of pure meanness, like latter-day prophets “dancing in a fiery furnace” (“A Circle in the Fire”)—a widowed property owner who imagines herself superior to her tenant-farmers is gored to death by their runaway bull (“Greenleaf”)—a mentally disturbed girl reading a textbook called Human Development in a doctor’s waiting room suddenly throws the book at the head of a garrulous middle-class woman who imagines herself superior to “poor-white trash” (“Revelation”). In the novella-length Wise Blood (1952), O’Connor’s first book publication, the fanatic Hazel Motes proclaims himself a prophet of the “Church without Christ” and does penance for his sins by gouging out an eye—in O’Connor’s second, kindred novel The Violent Bear It Away (1960), the fanatic young Francis Marion Tarwater drowns an idiot cousin while baptizing him, is drugged and raped by a sexual predator, revives and lurches off, like Yeats’s rough beast awakened, “toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping.”

  In the 1950s, when Flannery O’Connor first began to publish such idiosyncratic and mordantly comic fiction as Wise Blood and the story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), the seemingly reclusive young writer from Milledgeville, Georgia—in Brad Gooch’s description a “sleepy community at the dead center of Georgia” of which O’Connor said dryly, “We have a girls’ college here, but the lacy atmosphere is fortunately destroyed by a reformatory, an insane asylum, and a military school”—was perceived as a younger cousin of such showier, more renowned and best-selling Southern Gothic contemporaries as Carson McCullers and Truman Capote.1 In the wake of the more robust tall-tale Gothicism of William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell, with its encoded social/political significance, and unambiguous heterosexuality, the extreme, effete, self-consciously grotesque and sexually ambiguous fiction of McCullers and Capote attracted a good deal of quasi-literary media attention: recall the simperingly effeminate dust jacket photo of Truman Capote for his debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), and the scandalous quasi-literary life of the precocious McCullers who published her first, widely acclaimed novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) at the age of twenty-three, and by the age of thirty, given to alcoholic excess and a disastrous private life, was a burnt-out case despite the considerable achievement of The Member of the Wedding (1946). How ironic that during their turbulent, highly publicized lifetimes McCullers and Capote were far more famous than Flannery O’Connor, of whose invalided private life little was known, or might be said to be worth knowing; as O’Connor observed to a friend, “As for biographies, there won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.”

  Through her radically truncated career, O’Connor’s outwardly sensational, quirkily “Christian” fiction aroused mixed critical responses and modest sales; yet, though she was to die of lupus at the young age of thirty-nine, leaving behind a relatively small body of work, her reputation has steadily increased in the intervening years, while those of McCullers and Capote have dramatically shrunk. Having long exhausted his talent by the time of his alcohol-and drug-related death in 1984, at the age of sixty, Capote is now most regarded for his “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood, atypical among his work; McCullers may be remembered as a precociously but unevenly gifted writer of fiction for young adults whose work has failed to transcend its time an
d place. In such anthologies as The Best American Short Stories of the Twentieth Century edited by John Updike, Flannery O’Connor is included with one of her most frequently reprinted stories, “Greenleaf,” while McCullers and Capote are missing altogether. Indeed, no postwar/posthumous literary reputation of the twentieth century, with the notable exception of Sylvia Plath, has grown more rapidly and dramatically than that of O’Connor whose relatively small body of work has acquired a canonical status since her death in 1964.2

  All this, in the face of O’Connor’s unfashionable religious sensibility, in a mid-twentieth-century secular/materialist literary culture indifferent if not inhospitable to conservative Christian belief of the kind that seems to have shaped every aspect of the author’s life. It’s instructive to learn, for instance, in Gooch’s meticulously detailed account of O’Connor’s parochial-school background in Savannah, Atlanta, and her similarly circumscribed girlhood in Milledgeville, that O’Connor was born to an “Old Catholic” family with social pretensions on the mother, Regina’s, side: a lifelong tug-of-war seems to have been enacted between the (quietly, slyly) rebellious Flannery and (stubborn, self-righteous and unflagging) Regina whose effort to mold her daughter into “the perfect Southern little girl” were doomed to failure. Instructive, too, to learn that the precociously gifted O’Connor thought of herself as “ancient” while still a child; the great trauma of her girlhood was her father Edward’s death, from lupus, when O’Connor was fifteen, an event perceived by the stricken girl as a sign of God’s grace equivalent to “a bullet in the side.” “I can with one eye squinting take it all as a blessing.” In retrospect, the title Wise Blood acquires a painfully ironic significance: O’Connor was destined to die of the incurable disease inherited from her father as if there were, in a cosmology of an unfathomable and mysterious cruelty condoned by the inscrutable God of the Roman Catholic faith, a “wisdom” in this tainted blood. In O’Connor’s more transparent religious stories, that read like eccentric comic-strip parables—“The Enduring Chill,” “Revelation,” “Parker’s Back,” “The Artificial Nigger”3—meaning is suggested in blunt forceful images, as in the religious sonnets of John Donne or the metaphysical love-poems of the self-doubting Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins; these stories can be read, if not fully grasped, without recourse to Catholic dogma. (In his persuasive essay on O’Connor’s work in Sewanee Review, 1962, “Flannery O’Connor’s Devil,” John Hawkes suggests that despite O’Connor’s professed concern for morality, “the driving force of the immoral creative process transforms the author’s objective Catholic knowledge of the devil into an authorial attitude in itself in some measure diabolical.” [The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor, by Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.] Of course, O’Connor herself denied such an attitude—her devil wasn’t a merely literary devil but the “objective” Devil of Catholic theology.