God's Schlemiels

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the name of Bernard Malamud (link). My sister Sally that she has been reading a memoir by M’s daughter (link) and what did I think of M? Turns out I owe Sally for that one. I hadn’t read M for quite a while. But I did lay my hands on a copy of the complete short stories, where I found some happy memories and some interesting (to me) surprises. The Magic Barrel, perhaps his most famous story, is perhaps not quite as wonderful as I remember it. But I still like The Jewbird –not everyone does, I gather; perhaps it takes a long memory. And The Silver Crown, which I had never read before, though a familiar plot, is memorably well accomplished.

The short story is Malamud’s natural métier, the same way the novella belongs to Henry James, or the big, sprawling novel to Dickens. In form, they are almost as stylized as Law & Order on TV. “Manischevitz, a tailor, in his fifty-first year suffered many reverses and indignities” (Angel Levine). “Kessler, formerly an egg candler, lived alone on social security” (The Mourners). “Fidelman pissing in muddy water discovers water over his head” (Picture of an Artist). The locations are often specific, particularly in downtown Manhattan: West Tenth Street, Second Avenue and Sixth Street, First Avenue near the lower East River, those last two, both “top floor”—althouge, oddly enough, Pinye Salzman lives “at the far end of the Bronx,” and Rabbi Lifschitz, “somewhere in the Bronx.” They have trades—at least two tailors, one census taker (Malamud once worked for the Census Bureau) and a baker whose bread sells well because it is salted with his tears.

Comparisons come easily, perhaps too easily. In his own time, the inevitable choices were Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, real enough but beside the point. Isaac Bashevis Singer is closer: Malamud’s New York is to a large extent the New York of Singer’s Shadows on the Hudson, although Malamud’s characters are mostly more marginal, with fewer resources. Perhaps a closer comparison would be the cartoonist Will Eisner, whose Contract with God Trilogy does for the Bronx more or less what Malamud does for Second Avenue.

But there is also just a hint of the uncanny about Malamud that carries one back to the great city-novelists of the 19^th Century: think of Balzac, particularly in The Wild Ass’s Skin, or Dostoevski’s organ-grinder in St. Petersburg. And inevitably, one remembers the rich tradition of Jewish mysticism.

Many have said that Malamud writes about “the schlemiel.” It’s a curious word, a bit dated I suspect, a word that speaks for its time the way “cuckold” or “bounder” each by turns speaks for its time. Answers.com defines “schlemiel” as “A habitual bungler; a dolt” (link), but this is insufficiently nuanced. “Schlemiel” derives (again, per Answers.com) from

Yiddish shlemíl, perhaps from Hebrew šəlūmî’ēl, my well-being is God, Shelumiel (a character in the Bible, Numbers 7:36) : šəlūmî, my well-being (šālôm, well-being + -î, my) + ’ēl, God.

This is helpful. In The Silver Crown, Rabbi Lifschitz explains his damaged daughter:

She’s not perfect, though God, who made her in His image, is Himself perfection. … In her way she is also perfect.

That is better. Ironically the Biblical Shelumiel is not himself a schlemiel: for sacrifice, he has wealth enough to spread over (in the KJV) four verses. Malamud’s schlemiels make do with what they can. One thinks of Victor Hugo’s Jongleur de Notre Dame, or Samuel Johnson, praying to God not to take his mind because it was all he had to worship him with. If Malamud’s creatures are schlemiels, they are God’s schlemiels, incandescent in a particular time and place, and I am grateful to Sally for bringing me back to them.

"A Slice Tomato You Have, Maybe?"

I posted a few weeks back about Bernard Malamud. I didn't excerpt him because the stories seemed so self-contained, it was a shame to break any on up. But here is a passage that has been haunting me. Salzman the marraige broker (and perhaps magician) makes one last push to catch the attention of Leo, the rabbinical student:

Almost at once there came a knock on the door. Before Leo could say enter, Salzman, commercial Cupid, was standing in the room. His face was gray and meager, his expression hungry, and he looked as if he would expire on his feet. Yet the marriage broker managed by some trick of the muscles, to display a broad smile.

“So good evening, I am invited?”

Leo nodded, disturbed to see him again, yet unwilling to ask the man to leave.

Beaming still, Salzman laid his portfolio on the table. “Rabbi, I got for you tonight good news.”

“I’ve asked you not to call me rabbi. I’m still a student.”

“Your worries are finished. I have for you a first-class bride.”

“Leave me in peace concerning this subject.” Leo pretended lack of interest.

“The world will dance at your wedding.”

“Please, Mr. Salzman, no more.

“But first must come back my strength,” Salzman said weakly. He fumbled with the portfolio straps and took out of the leather case an oil paper bag, from which he extracted a hard, seeded roll and a small smoked whitefish. With a qwuick motion of his hand he stripped the fish out of its skin and began ravenously to chew. “All day in a rush,” he stuttered.

Leo watched him eat.

“A sliced tomato you have maybe?” Salzman hesitantly inquired.

“No.”

The marriage broker shut his eyes and ate. When he had finished he carefully cleaned up the crumbs and rolled up the remains of the fish in the paper bag. His spectacled eyes roamed the room until he discfovered, amid some piles of books, a one-burner gas stove. Lifting his hat he humbly asked, “A glass of tea you got, rabbi?”

Conscience-stricken, Leo rose and brewed the tea…

--Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel,
in Bernard Malamud: The Complete Stories 134-149, 139 (1997)

Oh, That Guy!

I first ran across Will Eisner in a bookstore in Greenwich Village a couple of years ago, and it was love at first sight. I've long been fascinated by mid-20th Century "history" (if you can call it that), and here is Eisner (link) laying out a vision that is as compelling as, say, the short stories of Bernard Malamud, or Shadow on the Hudson by Isaac Bashevis Singer. How come I'd never heard of this guy before?

Turns out I had. At Fort Leonard Wood, MO, in 1958. My, those were the days...

[For clarification--no, I was never a mechanic. If anyone ever handed me a wrench, you'd be reading about it in the agony section of your local newspaper under "mayhem." But I had a lot of time to kill around the headquarters of the infantry battalion where I beguiled away the hours as an underemployed and desperately bored clerk.]

Speech After Long Silence: Marilynne Robinson

I remarked a few weeks ago that we had read and enjoyed Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (cf. link). I held off commenting in detail, anticipating the completion of its companion volume, Home. We're done with Home now and I only hope I can justice. That is: I don't read enough current fiction to speak with authority on the topic, but if there is anything much better out there than this extraordinary pair, I would be very, very surprised. As an account of family life, it's the best thing I've read since Amos Tale of Love and Darkness. As a model of engagement and inquiry, I'd bracket it with the likes of Flannery O'Connor and Cynthia Ozick.

In structure and provenance, this pair defies comparison. Provenance: Robinson is an Idaho girl, who wrote one incomparable novel--Housekeeping--set in Idaho,but that was 29 years ago (link). After that, mostly silence (punctuated by some essays). Then Gilead in 2004 and at last Home in 2008.

But it is more compicated than that. After her long silence, the Idaho girl recreates herself in Iowa, of all places--the sere, daunting landscape of the farm belt, the heartland (so it would seem) of a kind of Calvinist theology. And apparently this is no idle experiment: rather, she wrote Gilead and Home simultaneously, and they are all of a piece, just as integrated as the multiple stories in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.

And structure: I can't think of any other story told quite this way. Gilead is a book-length meditation by an old pastor on his life and the world in which he lives it. Home is said to be the same story, told from the standpoint of another pastor, his lifelong friend. But it's not, exactly. It is, rather, the story of that other pastor and the life he leads interwoven with the lives of his two of his children, duck eggs in a nest of swans. These various lives overlap, they refract on and inform each other, but each is its own life, and one of Robinson's many achievements is that she drives home this variousness: there isn't a single "center" to this pairing (except possibly God). Rather, we see an array of lives, each a puzzle to itself in its own way, each (well: most of them) a puzzle to be solved, or not solved as the case may be.

We read Gilead first and then Home. I'm not at all sure this is the best order. Gilead is, as perhaps I have suggested, not quite a novel, so much as an extended discursive essay, built around a character who seems to belong in the category of the "truly good," along with Pickwick or Prince Myshkin or, I suppose Don Quixote. As an essay, it is arresting and provocative as you could want. There's story there also but the story doesn't quite jell, and we are often left aching to know more about what is happening offstage.

In this light, Home is a startling departure. It's much more a piece of fiction: indeed far and away the best parts of it are those recurrent encounters between Jack and his sister Glory, brother and sister, baffled seekers after the thread of their own lives as they try to find places for themselves in a family (and a world) which seems never quite suited to them. It's wonderful stuff in its own right, but it is vastly improved by the texture and resonance of the extended essay which can be understood as the background against which these mysteries are setoff. Time and again, I found myself recognizing something unspoken from Gilead as essential to the story of Home. In this respect, I'm glad I read Gilead first. Yet I'll never know the shock that would come had I read Home first, and then read Gilead as as a (partial) key to the great puzzle.

I mentioned Flannery O'Connor and Cynthia Ozick (I could have added Bernard Malamud and J. F. Powers, although they are a bit further removed). The common theme is that they are all "religious" writers (if that term is capable of carrying any serviceable meaning). Like Ozick, Robinson has ventured beyond fiction to try to expand her own understanding: her essays in The Death of Adam--particularly her extended defense of Puritanism--add further dimension to the world of the novels. Just this morning in the Sunday Times, I read that O'Connor "read a lot of theology because she believed it made her writing bolder." An interesting choice of words; likely true for O'Connor but I suspect it might apply equally well to any of the three.

I wouldn't go so far as to say these Robinson novels are perfect: I guess I've already said that the hero of Gilead is a bit too perfect, and that his story is not quite a novel. With Jack and Gloria in Home--by the end, you want to pick them up and just shake fhem and say: that is just the way the world is, pull up your socks and get moving. In each case, I'd say we have a structural problem that the author hasn't quite solved. But there is so much to take hold of here, so much to hold onto, that for the moment I can't think of any way I am likely to enjoy reading more than simply to read them again.

Afterthought: Dare one to hope that these two are not the end? Is there any chance that she has others in the safe deposit fact that explore other characters and refract upon this same situation in a different way?

Booklist

Thanks (again) to Patrick Kurp (link), this time for putting me onto D.G. Myers, and in particular this remarkable new "best fiction" list (link). I like it because it includes stuff that I (a) actually read; or (b) think I might actually want to read. I'm not nearly as well schooled on this topic as Myers (or Kurp), but I've read with great pleasure and profit, e.g., Bernard Malamud, J.F. Powers, Flannery O'Conner, Raymond Carver, Stanley Elkin and Saul Bellow. I enjoyed the Cheever stories when I was young, and Portnoy (snigger snigger). And what a pleasure to find that I don't need to apologize for reading Christopher Buckley. The only choice that seems to me to misfire is Eudora Welty: I've tried, but she just leaves me cold. But in general, his judgment is so good that I am emboldened to go back and try people that I thought I could safely overlook (Paul Auster), or even those I had been actively evading (Philip K. Dick). And I must say I do think he is wrong to exclude Marilynne Robinson.

There's an interesting followup post here, in which Myers responds to Kurp (with a fully justified salute to Cynthia Ozick). Indeed, I think the whole blog belongs in the aggregator.

Afterthought: Unless I missed it Myers nor Kurp nominated this woman. But cf. link. [And: okay, Canadian, right.]

The Long and Short of It

Marginal Revolution has been puzzling over short books v. long books. Let me weigh in with a personal observation.

I wasn’t much of a reader as a kid. Given the choice, I always voted for short stories because they were, well, short.

Imagine my surprise, the summer I was 14 when I fell into W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and more or less sank—conquered, for the first time, with the sense of what it was to be totally enveloped by a book, as an alternate life, so fully realized that I didn’t want it to end. I had the experience a few times more in my adolescence—I remember reading one by Thomas B. Costain, though at this point I can’t remember much of anything except the sense of being committed to it (it might have been this one). I remember reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden, (and being struck, inter alia, by the Chinese body-servant who reads Marcus Aurelius in his cupboard-bed (and never made it to the movie at all)).

But the real breakthrough for me was, and remains, War and Peace, one novel which I have always insisted is too short. It’s a same-only-different world, as convincing as one’s own, but more luminous and intense. I did not, and do not, want it to end.

I’ve come to feel the same way about a few other novels in life, mostly the usual suspects: Middlemarch, Remembrance of Things Past, that sort of thing, you get the drift. But my immediate point is: a long novel is not just a short story made longer. A long novel can achieve a kind of richness and texture a short story (alone) can never do.

There are complications. Some short-story novels can give the complete-world feel through extended exposure: I think of Bernard Malamud’s “parables of New York immigrant life,” as they are called, or Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories. And as if to complicate matters War and Peace itself is not so much a novel as a series of intensely articulated episodes, almost any one of which would be enough on its own to make the reputation of almost any lesser writer. On the other hand, a few novelists—Faulkner, Balzac—carry the “fully realized world” over their entire corpus. Indeed, I haven’t any idea where to put Proust: did he write one big book, or a series of interlocked novellae?

I don’t mean to knock the idea of the individual short story; plenty of them are little jewels. Indeed, some of the most arresting achieve the novelistic trick of capturing a whole world (Faulkner’s That Evening Sun is a favorite example). It’s wonderful. But it’s not the same thing. The relationship is not linear. A novel is not just a short story writ long.

One Good Turgenev

In the sweepstakes of Russian literature where he is up against Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I have always thought Turgenev a distinct runner-up. Well: "Bezhin Lea" is a gem of a story, but his signature Fathers and Sons has always struck me as little more than a political pamphlet. And Virgin Soil seems to me little more than a somewhat lumpish extension of the same. I therefore have tended to ally myself with those who think that Turgenev is overpraised because he is the housebroken and westernized alternative to his more unsettling contemporaries.

But I just stumbled on a Turgenev that seems to be worth the trouble. That would be First Love, as presented in a Librivox download which I carried with me lately for a couple of long drives. Here, at least, we have a framework that seems to fit T's talents: it is a "country-house novel" just as much as so much of Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse. But it it is neither Christie nor Wodehouse: it is understated and compassionate, and it has the restrained dignity of a formal dance. I figured out the plot about half way--rare for me, I am abysmal on plot and often have to have them explained to me after it is all over. But this time I said ooh noo! and then stood by to watch in horrified fascination as the collision came to pass. The last novel that worked for me in quite this way was Malamud's The Fixer: in each case, you know what is going to happen, you don't want it to happen, you don't want to watch, but you find yourself locked in anyway.

Country-house novel: I suppose you could sniff that this still leaves him as a minor talent. Fine, but a really first-class second-rate is still first class, even if in its own way. Or if nothing else, at least go read "Bezhyn Lea." Here's a free version on line.

Afterthought: Is this the first time I've hyped Librivox? I think maybe. Too bad. They're a great resource and I should do whatever I can to help keep them strong.

The Funniest Line in American Lit

Sometimes I think it is in this bit from Bernard Malamud's Magic Barrel.  Salzman the marriage broker has come to call on Finkel, aspiring rabbi perhaps in need of a wife:

"So good evening, I am invited?"
Leo nodded, disturbed to see him again, yet unwilling to ask the man to leave.
Beaming still, Salzman laid his portfolio on the table. "Rabbi, I got for you tonight good news."
"I've asked you not to call me rabbi.  I'm still a student."
"Your worries are finished.  I have for you a first-class bride."
"Leave me in peace concerning the subject."  Leo pretended lack of interest.
"The world will dance at your wedding."
"Please, Mr. Salzman, no more."
 "But first must come back my strength.," Salzman said weakly.  He fumbled with the portfolio straps and took out of the leather case an oily paper bag, from which he extracted a hard seeded roll and a small smoked whitefish.  With a quick motion of his hand he stripped the fish out of its skin  and began ravenously to chew.  "All day in a rush," he muttered.
Leo watched him eat.
"A sliced tomato you have maybe?  Salzman hesitantly inquired.

Well, I guess you had to have been there.   Anyway, Finkel answers "no."

Sober Second Thoughts on Manon

Reviewing some earlier posts, I see that I’ve been beating up on Manon Lescaut (or Manon Lescaut) lately. A few days ago I called her a loser (link). Earlier I called the book “a great soppy soap opera of a novel” (link).

Hm. Well, I won’t quite take back what I’ve said here, but I think I want to revise and extend my remarks. Set aside the operas for a moment, focus on the novel, written by the Abbé Prévost in 1731. It seems to have stayed in print continuously since its first publication, which is enough to give it a bad rap; my French paperback edition lists six other French editions currently available as of 1990. Napoleon called it a novel for door-keepers,[1] which probably didn’t help.

Yet broad popularity alone shouldn’t be an objection. Handel’s Messiah is broadly popular, and I remember reading somewhere that there were 50 productions of Shakespeare’s Tempest in the United States last summer. The fact is, Manon Lescaut is compulsively readable. Strictly speaking, it’s better classed as a novella, not a novel. At 155 pages (in the Penguin paperback) you could almost read it in a night, and if you are prepared not to be any use at work the next day, you may be tempted to do just that. For me, Manon Lescaut the kind of book that sucks you in on the first page and keeps its hold on you with a steady hypnotic gaze. Bernard Malamud's The Fixer had the same effect on me (link) --a much different novel, but the same linear intensity. Here's a bit from the first page of Manon Lescaut:

[J]ust then there appeared in the doorway a soldier, complete with bandolier and musket, and I beckoned him and asked him what all the excitement was about. ‘Oh, it’s nothing, Sir,’ he said, ‘just a dozen streetwalkers that my friends and I are taking to Havre to be shipped off to America. Some of them aren’t bad looking, either, and I suppose that’s what these yokels want to see.’ I might have left it at that and gone on my way if I had not been pulled up by the cries of an old woman who emerged from the inn wringing her hands and shouting that it was a wicked shame and enough to give anyone the horrors. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘Oh, come and see, Sir! I tell you, it’s enough to break your heart!’ My curiosity was now thoroughly aroused…

Mine, too. Match that, Bridget Jones. Ha, didn’t think you could.[2]

---

[1] “Pour des portieres,” he wrote, in his Memoirs from Saint Helena. The Lire et Voir editor helpfully modernizes: “[= des concierges]. " Note that “portieres” (porters?) is in the feminine here; The New Cassell’s French Dictionary gives as an alternate definition “of an age to bear (of cows),” which probably captures the right nuance.

[2] For a more thorough account of why it is worth the bother, see the instructive introduction (by Jean Sgard) to the Penguin Paperback edition (link).