{"id":133088,"date":"2019-01-29T11:00:53","date_gmt":"2019-01-29T16:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=133088"},"modified":"2019-01-28T16:41:54","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T21:41:54","slug":"mercilessness-clarifies-on-bernard-malamud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/29\/mercilessness-clarifies-on-bernard-malamud\/","title":{"rendered":"Mercilessness Clarifies: On Bernard Malamud"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_133089\" style=\"width: 671px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/malamud_ozick_11-6-72.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-133089\" class=\"size-full wp-image-133089\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/malamud_ozick_11-6-72.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"661\" height=\"751\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/malamud_ozick_11-6-72.jpg 661w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/malamud_ozick_11-6-72-264x300.jpg 264w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-133089\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bernard Malamud and Cynthia Ozick, backstage at the 92nd street Y<\/p><\/div>\n<p><i>\u201c<\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/92yondemand.org\/category\/poetry-center-online\/75-at-75\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" data-saferedirecturl=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/92yondemand.org\/category\/poetry-center-online\/75-at-75&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1547583592716000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGUABoQuEtsEiDuP_AwZMgeSmEy4g\">75 at 75: Writers on Recordings<\/a><i>,\u201d a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center\u2019s seventy-fifth anniversary and beyond, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center\u2019s archive and write a personal response. Here, Chris Bachelder\u00a0reflects on Bernard Malamud\u2019s reading from 1972, which was introduced by\u00a0Cynthia Ozick. You can listen to the recording below.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/566219112&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been talking to students about what a short story is, what it does, for about two decades. I\u2019ve spent a lot of words. It occurred to me, while listening to this recording, that my entire teaching career has primarily been an attempt to say what Cynthia Ozick says\u2014in just two words!\u2014during her introductory remarks for Bernard Malamud. Of Malamud and his work, Ozick says, \u201cMercilessness clarifies.\u201d Subject, verb.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The short story, I have tried to explain, is a very unpleasant business indeed. In this brief form, character is not developed but revealed. And characters, like the humans they represent and like the authors who create them, would much prefer not to be revealed. If a story draft has an escape hatch, a character will almost certainly slither through it. The successful short story, then, is a revelation machine, a ruthlessly efficient technology created to exert truth-inducing pressure on character. The pressure must be especially formulated for the protagonist\u2014the story is a kind of constitutional torture chamber designed for one. The <em>what<\/em> of event must brutally befit the <em>who <\/em>of character. The writer must decide: Under what guise shall the devil appear? What vast trouble should I dispatch to this character on this day? How can the story cut off exit and extract that which character (and perhaps author) would prefer remained concealed? Only under certain circumstances can revelation occur, and story drafts fail when insufficient pressure is applied, or when the pressure does not correspond adequately to character, or when the writer allows the character somehow to evade the pressure.<\/p>\n<p>The short story is a merciless form, and its best practitioners have been merciless. Flannery O\u2019Connor knew the kind of pressure it takes to produce revelation. As the Misfit says, \u201cShe would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.\u201d And Malamud, whom O\u2019Connor admired, was also an artfully cruel narrative architect. Nothing is ever easy for the Malamud protagonist. The ground state is bad\u2014penury, loneliness, desperation, anguish\u2014and the irreversible disturbances that ensue tend to make one wistful for the ground state. Malamud\u2019s scenes are relentlessly dark and shabby: threadbare clothes, battered briefcases, yellowed whites, dim corners, and sour smells. The characters face profound and intractable tests of faith and desire that often reach allegory. (\u201cThe mythological and symbolic excite my imagination,\u201d he once said.) Most of all, they suffer. The short story, Malamud teaches us, is about test and torment. The torment of Malamud\u2019s stories is connected to identity\u2014to Jewishness, certainly\u2014but it is embodied by the literary form.<\/p>\n<p>In this recording, Malamud reads \u201cThe Silver Crown\u201d and \u201cIn Retirement,\u201d two representative tales of obsession and anguish. The stories have a similar dramatic contour\u2014once-upon-a-time exposition followed by then-one-day inciting event. Both begin by introducing a restless man who walks the streets with anxious energy. One is Albert Gans, a high school teacher whose father lies dying of cancer. The other is Dr. Morris, a lonely and bored widower who retired too young from his medical practice. Gans\u2019s spiritual trial commences with a soiled card: \u201cOne afternoon after a long walk alone, as he was about to descend the subway stairs somewhere in the Bronx, still burdened by his worries, uneasy that nothing had changed, he was accosted by a fat girl with bare meaty arms who thrust a soiled card at him that he tried to avoid.\u201d Dr. Morris\u2019s dramatic ordeal begins with an irresistibly lost letter: \u201cOne morning after his rectangular long walk in the rain, he found a letter on the rubber mat under the line of mailboxes in the lobby.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This card and this letter have been sent by the universe\u2014a.k.a. the writer\u2014to these particular characters, in much the same way that a blind man is sent to the narrator\u2019s house in \u201cCathedral,\u201d or that Manley Pointer is sent to Joy\/Hulga in \u201cGood Country People,\u201d or that pistol-packing Miss Dent is sent to Blake in \u201cThe Five-Forty-Eight.\u201d They are all catalysts and irritants, agents of the revelation. The mechanism of encounter is conventional\u2014the age-old visitation\u2014but each agent is custom made to disturb the protagonist. Manley Pointer is just the one for Joy\/Hulga, her fears and desires. He gets inside of her sophisticated defenses in order to expose, clarify.<\/p>\n<p>The soiled card leads Gans, the empirically minded science teacher, to a ragged rabbi who sells silver crowns ($401 for a medium, $986 for a large) that he claims will heal the sick. Gans pays for the large crown but he is convinced he is being swindled and thus becomes even more distraught. He suffers from humiliation, anger, anxiety, hope, skepticism, and desperation. There is no escape for Gans\u2014his father is in dire condition, and he has entered into a transaction, both monetary and spiritual, with a dubious figure. The rabbi, either a mystic or a grifter, is a source of radical irritation, and Gans, so distracted, is finally ambushed by his real feelings for his father. The letter that Dr. Morris finds (and then reads) is a censorious note from father to daughter, disapproving of her sexual waywardness. The woman, Evelyn, lives in Dr. Morris\u2019s building, and the retired doctor becomes consumed with feelings for her, both erotic and paternal. He can\u2019t sleep, he can\u2019t concentrate on his Greek grammar. He is overthrown with desire. He is sixty-six and he has had heart trouble, but suddenly he feels vital again. The story, its elegantly merciless structure, has him trapped and desperate. He, like Gans and like all Malamud heroes, is a prisoner of the story. He steals more of Evelyn\u2019s mail. He lives alone in his mind, where he creates elaborate self-delusions. He imagines a life with the young Evelyn. He is agitated into bold action, the response to which is unambiguous, stark, and final. All has been <em>clarified<\/em>. In the end we see what Dr. Morris is, and so does he.<\/p>\n<p>I feel compelled to add that to be merciless is not to be humorless. Malamud is an exceptionally funny writer\u2014without ever straining to be. There are no punch lines, no ostentatious performances of comedy. On the page you never sense Malamud reaching for the joke, and in the recording his voice is flat, brisk, and restrained. There is none of the comic\u2019s plea to be liked, appreciated. Malamud once said he liked his comedy \u201cspiced in the wine of sadness,\u201d and his humor emerges from despair. Malamud\u2019s narrative voice is rarely funny\u2014the comedy emerges from his vulnerable and captive characters. It is their desperate speech and thought that draw the laughs, as is evident in the recording. The eruption of laughter is the sound of the audience\u2019s deep engagement with plight, its commiseration with helplessness. The humor is spiced, and there is a cathartic intensity to its release.<\/p>\n<p>I may not have achieved Ozick\u2019s succinct cogency with regard to Malamud\u2019s art and to the operations of literary form, but at least I\u2019ve had the good sense to teach (and learn from) Malamud\u2019s stories. He is a distinctive moral artist whose writing helps to demonstrate that the short story is a wicked inquisition, its purpose directly at odds with the comfort of characters, readers, listeners, and writers.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/interviews\/3869\/bernard-malamud-the-art-of-fiction-no-52-bernard-malamud\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Read our Art of Fiction interview with Bernard Malamud in the Spring 1975 issue.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>Chris Bachelder is the author of <em>Bear v. Shark, U.S.!, Abbott Awaits<\/em>, and <em>The Throwback Special.<\/em>\u00a0His writing has appeared in McSweeney\u2019s and <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiv5Z74r5HgAhULVt8KHfExDGcQFjAAegQICBAB&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theparisreview.org%2Ffiction%2F6383%2Fthe-throwback-special-part-1-chris-bachelder&amp;usg=AOvVaw2ko_RbasGP7y39ZtkYexRU\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Paris Review<\/a><\/em>. He lives in Cincinnati, where he teaches at the University of Cincinnati.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The short story is a merciless form, and its best practitioners have been merciless.\u00a0Malamud, whom Flannery O\u2019Connor admired, was an artfully cruel narrative architect.\u00a0Nothing is ever easy for the Malamud protagonist.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":947,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7646],"tags":[4126,3462,1888,47787,47786],"class_list":["post-133088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-look-2","tag-bernard-malamud","tag-cynthia-ozick","tag-flannery-oconnor","tag-in-retirement","tag-the-silver-crown"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ 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