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Chapter 10 THE LIVES OF DUBIN Walter Shear It's an old American ethical dilemma: Are you as good as you could be? And if you could be, would that be good? For Bernard Malamud the impulse toward goodness in his characters provides a central impetus in many of his novels, but always with big complications. William Dubin, the central intelligence of Dubin's Lives, has several predecessors-Frank Alpine in The Assistant, S. Levin in A New Life, Harry Lesser in The Tenants, Yakov Bok in The Fixer, each burdened with a conscience, each involved in a forbidden love, each attempting to live according to certain principles, each working on a code of ethics that will enable them to come to terms with their present situation. Thus, while an extramarital affair supplies a skeletal structure for Dubin's Lives, the text is heavy with ethics-two sets, one of which reminds Dubin that in chasing after a woman thirty-plus years younger he is betraying a wife, living a lie, and the other, inspired by D. H. Lawrence, the subject of the biography Dubin is writing, commends the passionate life as the highest form of living, hectoring the conscious self, "let life invade you." Like Alpine and Levin, Dubin, faced with the intensity of new possibilities, feels his past life as a drifting lack of inspired commitment, but how Lawrentian audacities blend with his liberal humanism is less clear. 101 102 INDIVIDUAL WORKS In tracking the conscientious Dubin we see a man feeling his way though that unknown territory that is life, trying to balance love and marriage , work and family life, but one who also often gives off the discomforting and relentless feeling of a man in pursuit of himself. He disciplines himself, with diet, exercise, walking/running, and cold showers, but invariably these seem desperate attempts to control his mind rather than simple acts of will. For all its descriptions of nature, the book is at its essence subjective. Even when Dubin is lost in a snowstorm he is unwilling to accept the purely objective: "He had changed his black inner world for the white, outer, equally perilous-man's fate in varying degrees; though some were more fated than others. Those who were concerned with fate were fated" (149). However, his liberal impulse-"I'd regret it beyond bearability if I were not involved in the lives of others" (34)-and his writing of biographies where he imaginatively tries to identify with his subjects prevent him from being too self-absorbed. His summing himself up, "I'm an odd inward man held together by an ordered life" (326), is accurate enough, but what we as readers bear witness to is the enormous effort necessary to order his life. Though Dubin has many guises in the novel, his dreams and difficulties throughout are structured by his struggles as the aging male. He describes himself as middle aged, but since he is fifty-six, one might more accurately say he is on the far side of middle age. Besides the trials and tribulations of writing his Lawrence biography, he is constantly afflicted by what he refers to as "the age of aging," where he fears "illness, immobility ; the disgrace of death" (318). He is a man suffering from his time of life. Not only is he is stricken with impotence in his sexual relations with his wife, at one time, fearful of forgetting, he is plagued by an inability to remember what he reads and in his writing, he cannot seem to grasp the words and images his mind searches for. Physical reminders of aging crowd upon him: A shocking multitude of single hairs appeared in his comb. His chest hair was turning gray. A rotting tooth had to be pulled. He held a book two feet from his face to focus the words. His handwriting grew in size: he'd been avoiding glasses. His haggard face was slack, faded eyes furtively hiding. (317) One of his early visions involves seeing himself in his grave. The book, in fact, develops a motif of death through both his thoughts and the repeated visits he and Kitty make to various graves. Even the discovery of his vocation is tied to this distant dread: "In biographies the dead become alive, or seem to" (98). THE LIVES OF DUBIN 103 As the voice of death sings in his soul, Fanny Blick with her youth becomes to him a symbolic as well as...

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