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Chapter4 MALAMUD Seen and Unseen Daniel Stern There was something of a chasm between experiencing Bern Malamud as a friend and as a writer. I have rarely seen a clearer proof of Proust's remark , "The person you see is not the person who writes the books./I And yet, and yet ... I remember thinking, after we met, after we became close, that he was mysterious as a human being as well as an artist. There was much given and much held in reserve. He was available, helpful, richly involved in a friend's life. And yet there was always some held back, private -something perhaps he was not even aware of. I think he felt, with his somewhat austere vision of life that friends had somehow to earn each other. I think, except as an artist, he was not entirely available to himself. Quite late in his life, Malamud began receiving even more honors than he had as a young writer. Typically he received these with a certain irony mixed with pleasure. He confided to my wife that they were "like rocks falling on my head./I One of the more mysterious remarks from a mysterious man and writer. His special concerns were suffering, pity, redemption and the magical possibilities of joy. Once, when we played chamber music at our home, performing the great Schubert C Major Quintet with two cellos, Malamud 29 30 TfIEA UTHOR walked up to me when we'd finished and said, "Danny-you don't know what we felt sitting there, listening to the music, tormented by joy." A perfect Malamud contradiction. I was reminded of this when, in the first hours after his death I turned, as I usually do in times of pain, to poetry-remembering the lines Auden wrote which he could have written as a description of Malamud's whole creative enterprise: Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress. The reverse of Malamud's remark, "tormented by joy." It cuts both ways. His special territory is also the comic distance between our yearnings, our ideals and the comic disappointments we endure in their pursuit-as well as the presence of the magical in everyday life. To this end he often uses the mythic, the legendary, as tools to take measure of that distance. He also uses his uncanny gift for the condensed poetics of deceptively plain language. Consider the opening lines from his story "Idiot's First": The thick ticking of the tin clock stopped. Mendel dozing in the dark, awoke in fright. The pain returned as he listened. He drew on his cold embittered clothing, and wasted minutes sitting on the edge of the bed. The iambic accents of that first sentence, the clarity of the image, the daring choice of the word embittered to describe a man's clothing-and in passing in a word, his life-this is a master at work. By the time I met Malamud he'd already published The Natural, The Assistant, "The Magic Barrel," and A New Life-and was known in the smaller literary circles as an important artist. The Magic Barrel had won the National Book Award in 1957. (Bern told me privately that he'd received exactly thirty-five dollars for the title story from the Partisan Review, a sum, he added, that was quite welcome to a struggling writer. He was not complaining .) By the time he published The Fixer, a few years later, he was more widely known. It was, for a short while, a best-seller-Malamud's first and only best-seIler-it won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film starring the British actor Alan Bates. The screenwriter, a formerly blacklisted writer named Dalton Trumbo, sent him a copy of the screenplay . When Bern asked why there wasn't more of the humor of the book in the movie, Trumbo replied, "We didn't want it to be too Jewish." The Fixer, as many know, was based on a famous case of the nineteenth century-the Mendel Beiliss case. The accusation of ritual murder made against the poor Jewish peddler turned it into a case that became famous SEEN AND UNSEEN 31 all over Europe. Malamud had heard about it as a child and it haunted him. Interestingly enough, when my wife and I would make one of our visits to the Malamuds' house in Bennington, Vermont, where he lived and taught for many years, the guest bedroom had bookcases...

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