December 10, 2007
Restoring Bernard Malamud to the pantheon
Writer and critic Lee Siegel had a review of Philip Davis’ “Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life
Siegel applauded Davis’ desire to restore Malamud to the “pantheon of great American writers.” But, he says Davis did not do enough to defend Malamud’s reputation among the Jewish critics and writers who regularly celebrate the works of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow:
Like an embarrasing old uncle, Malamud is barely referred to these days. On those few occasions when he is publicly admired, tribute usually comes in the form of sentimental commentary from younger, self-consciously Jewish writers, whose parochial picture of Malamud ironically confirms the denigrating comments Roth made a generation ago. Far more frequently, however, you find critics celebrating Bellow and Roth, above all, for their intelligence, and never mentioning Malamud. And indeed, instinct, not intelligence, is what is most salient in Malamud’s work. His writing struggles with the permanence of irrational forces and the necessity of arriving at some kind of reckoning with them. For Malamud, the obligation to be moral isn’t rational. It occurs all of a sudden, sprung from within. For Malamud, the rational justification of morality is, on the contrary, often the stuff of moral vanity and outrageous hypocrisy. From feeling, a Malamud character might say, you don’t escape.
Siegel never says exactly how Davis should have done things differently and he does not indicate why Malamud’s reputation faded.
If you were to ask me, I don’t think it’s a matter of people not liking Malamud or liking those other writers better. I think he gets less attention because he’s been dead for more than two decades.
On the other hand, Bellow just died in 2005 and Roth still puts out a book a year while he awaits a Nobel prize.
That may sound simple, but it’s the most obvious reason.
Other than that, Siegel says Davis wrote a good book. He called it a “wise, scrupulous, resolutely admiring biography.” Here’s another excerpt from the review:
For Davis, one of Malamud’s aphorisms sums up the obsession driving his work: “There’s more than morality in a good man.” The sentiment is, in fact, almost identical to Norman Mailer’s belief that the best lies close to the worst in people. Malamud believed that the stuff of goodness lay in the education roughly administered by life’s warps and woofs: the fatality of character, the irony of good intentions, the realization that right versus wrong is often a matter of hurt versus hurt. Davis knows that there’s nothing narrowly virtuous about that.