Heroism Without Sentiment

By Paul Gray

THE STORIES OF BERNARD MALAMUD

by Bernard Malamud; Farrar Straus Giroux; 350 pages; $17.95

Sprinters do not ordinarily sign up for marathons, nor do lonely long-distance runners enter the crush of 100-yard dashes. But some authors perform an analogous feat by writing both short stories and novels. Instead of being complimented on their versatility, though, they frequently encounter a peculiar problem: facing themselves as competitors. Choices, so the assumption goes, must be made. Which Hemingway is the ultimate winner, the one who broke so many tapes in In Our Time or the one who strode with such manly endurance through The Sun Also Rises? Which O'Hara, which Welty, which Cheever, which Updike? Admirers of a given writer will usually extol the novels; praising short stories can be a subtle form of denigration.

Under such difficult conditions, Author Bernard Malamud, 69, has been racing himself for a long time. In 31 years he has published seven novels, including The Natural (1952) and The Fixer (1966), interspersed with four volumes of short fiction. The Stories of Bernard Malamud includes 23 pieces selected by the author from these past assemblages, plus two previously uncollected stories. The book not only offers substantial evidence that Malamud's stories are better than his novels; it makes the distinction seem irrelevant. In sufficient concentration, small objects achieve critical mass, enough fast victories add up to a triumphant long haul.

Malamud's world reveals itself bit by bit: a place of stony certainties and infrangible laws, brightened occasionally by enclaves of unexpected magic. Those who live here are predominantly poor, oppressed by hard work. Most are men without women. More than half the heroes in these stories are bachelors or widowers. There are also a few male characters for whom marital status hardly matters: a talking horse named Abramowitz, a bedraggled black bird who claims he is Jewish and calls himself Schwartz. The main character in a story called The Model speaks for most of Malamud's men: "Is there nothing more to my life than it is now? Is this all that is left to me?"

These people must bear Old Testament burdens, punished not just by life but by the suspicion that they somehow deserve all the troubles heaped upon them. In The Mourners, a sick old man faces eviction from his fifth-floor tenement room. He sits huddled on his floor: "How, in so short a life, could a man do so much wrong?" Advancing years do not bring with them the comforts and support of progeny; there are enough ungrateful daughters here to stock several road companies of King Lear, and sons are equally unfeeling.

The only children who do not ignore or turn on their fathers are retarded. In The Silver Crown, a rabbi explains his obese, mentally handicapped daughter: "She's not perfect, though God, who made her in His image, is Himself perfection. What this means I don't have to tell you." In Idiots First, Mendel has been approached by Ginzburg, a messenger of death, and warned that his life expires at midnight. Mendel must somehow raise the train fare to send his son Isaac, who is 39 and unable to care for himself, to an uncle in California. He succeeds, and the fierceness of his determination frightens even death himself. The father delivers his son: "He waited on the platform until the train began slowly to move. Isaac sat at the edge of his seat, his face strained in the direction of his journey. When the train was gone, Mendel ascended the stairs to see what had become of Ginzburg."

This is one of the handful of happy endings in Malamud's stories. Yet all the tales radiate a joy that has nothing to do with consequences, The author consistently portrays a kind of heroism devoid of self-consciousness or sentimentality. Convinced that their fates have already been determined, characters go on stubbornly behaving as if their actions mattered. The grocer in The Cost of Living knows that the supermarket moving in next door will destroy the 27 years that he has put into his business. He tries to compete and is wiped out within seven months. Although he takes no consolation from the fact, he has, at least, not gone gently into that bad night.

Suicide? "Don't ever think of it," says a character in The German Refugee, "it's total defeat." The person who receives this warning eventually does take his own life. Malamud is probably the most severe writer of his generation, a trait that may explain why his work has been extensively admired but less widely loved. Still, the gathering of these stories reveals a gentleness in Malamud's art that was not always clear before. He admires the sheer cussedness of his characters, their backs to the wall, squabbling in the maw of annihilation. He relishes the cranks and eccentrics who, destined to suffer and die, still insist on making noise in a vast, indifferent universe. Mendel, grappling with his fate, screams, "You bastard, don't you understand what it means human?" This book offers 25 vivid and unforgettable answers. --By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"Manischevitz was profoundly disappointed at the return of his active pain and suffering. He had hoped for a longer interval of easement, long enough to have a thought other than of him self and his troubles. Day by day, minute after minute, he lived in pain, pain his only memory, questioning the necessity of it, inveighing, though with affection, against God. Why so much, Gottenyu? If He wanted to teach His servant a lesson for some reason, some cause -- the nature of His nature -- to teach him, say, for reasons of his weakness, his pride, perhaps, during his years of prosperity, his frequent neglect of God -- to give him a little lesson, why then any of the tragedies that had happened to him, any one would have sufficed to chasten him. But all together -- the loss of both his children, his means of livelihood, Fanny's health and his -- that was too much to ask one frail-boned man to endure. Who, after all, was Manischevitz that he had been given so much to suffer?" This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.