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Chapters ON THE MAGIC BARREL Nicholas Delbanco I first met Bernard Malamud in 1966. I was an ambitious boy of twentythree , with a debut novel about to appear and the self-confident conviction that I could and should replace him while he took a leave of absence from his teaching job. He was leaving Bennington College for what turned out to be a two-year stint in Cambridge, Massachusetts; I drifted into town and was hired-astonishingly, I still believe-by elders who saw something in this junior they might shape. By the time the Malamuds returned, I was happily ensconced as their near neighbor in Vermont; over the years we grew close. The relation was avuncular; though Bennington's faculty is unranked, Malamud was much my senior colleague. It was and is a small school and town, and the Language and Literature Division seemed very small indeed . We attended committee meetings and movies and concerts and readings and poker games together; we shared meals and walks. When I married, in 1970, the Malamuds came to the wedding; when they gave a party we helped to cut the cake. With no hint of condescension he described me as his protege; I asked for and took his advice. My wife's daybook bulks large with collective occasions: cocktails, picnics, weddings, and funerals shared. In times of celebration or trouble-when our daughters were born or had birthdays, during the years I served as Director of the Bennington Writing Workshops, at ceremonies in his honor, or when in 35 36 THEAUTHOR failing health Bern needed a hand with a suitcase or car-we saw each other often. At his death on March 18, 1986, it seemed to me and to my wife and children that we had lost a relative. The loss endures. So I can't and won't pretend to critical distance; this is an author I loved and admire. At his best he strikes me as an enduring master of this ending century, and his best consists of the early novels (The Natural, The Assistant, A New Life) and a baker's dozen of short stories. Though lumped-to his disgruntlement-with that of other "Jewish" writers from Singer to Bellow to Roth, the prose was nonpareil. And the terms of appreciation feel oxymoronic as soon as applied: his is a magical realism, a simple complexity, a practiced naturalness. My guess is that, when the dust settles and those critics to whom we look forward look back, the work will loom large within our art's terrain-in the forest a tall tree. For his concerns are timeless not timebound, his preoccupations lasting and diction not likely to date. At Bennington, in 1984, Bernard Malamud delivered a lecture titled "Long Work, Short Life." Its closing assertions are characteristic in diction and stance: self-assured yet modest, a high priest of aesthetics who's wearing a business suit. I have written almost all my life. My writing has drawn, out of a reluctant soul, a measure of astonishment at the nature of life. And the more I wrote well, the better I felt I had to write. In writing I had to say what had happened to me, yet present it as though it had been magically revealed. I began to write seriously when I had taught myself the discipline necessary to achieve what I wanted. When I touched that time, my words announced themselves to me. I have given my life to writing without regret, except when I consider what in my work I might have done better . I wanted my writing to be as good as it must be, and on the whole I think it is. I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times--once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one's fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing : "The men and things of today are wont to lie fairer and truer in tomorrow's meadow," Henry Thoreau said. THEMAGIC BARREL I don't regret the years I put into my work. Perhaps I regret the fact that I was not two men, one who could live a full life apart...

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