Lesser finds another of Willie’s notes:
It isn’t that I hate the Jews. But if I do any, it’s not because I invented it myself but I was born in the good old U. S. of A. and there’s a lot of that going on that gets under your skin. And it’s also from knowing the Jews, which I do. The way to black freedom is against them.
Now that Willie has stopped seeing Lesser as a more experienced writer and can think of him only as a Jew, Lesser too alters. He is rewriting his lost manuscript in fear and anguish, but the vision slips from him, he is in terror of Willie. “I treated you like any other man,” he tells Willie. Willie replies, “No Jew can treat me like a man,” and Lesser, afraid for his life, turns as savage as Willie, with this difference: “. . . it sickened him deeply”; he remains self-conscious. Nevertheless he gets an ax and chops up Willie’s typewriter. On that typewriter Willie had written pages of anti-Semitic (some of it “anti-Zionist”) poetry and prose, fantasying the murder of Jews. The work of the two writers is contrasted. Lesser’s destroyed book is about a writer’s struggle to love. The writer is named Lazar Cohen; he is much like Malamud’s Fidelman, an artist with a Jewish name who conceives of himself only as artist, almost never as Jew. Willie’s stories are about blacks torturing Jews. In one of them, “a Jew slumlord in a fur-collar coat, come to collect his blood-money rents,” is stabbed and killed by three blacks, who strip his corpse naked and propose to eat it, but change their minds. “He tastes Jewtaste, that don’t taste like nothin good.” The story, as Lesser finds it in Willie’s notes, ends:
Then they [the murderers] go to a synagogue late at night, put on yarmulkas and make Yid noises, praying.
In an alternate ending the synagogue is taken over and turned into a mosque. The blacks dance hasidically.
With the apparition once again of a black synagogue, with the word “hasidically,” Malamud suddenly and astonishingly blows in a whiff of “Angel Levine”—are his blacks becoming Jews again? Lesser has a fantasy: in a mythical Africa there is a double tribal wedding. A rabbi presides. The chief’s son, who turns out to be Willie, is marrying a Jewish girl, who is Irene. Lesser is marrying a black woman. The rabbi exhorts the couples, “Someday God will bring together Ishmael and Israel to live as one people. It won’t be the first miracle.” Inside his dream Lesser says critically of it, “It’s something I imagined, like an act of love, the end of my book, if I dared.”
But Malamud himself does not dare. “Angel Levine” is not merely out of date, it is illusion; at the close of The Tenants Malamud explicitly acknowledges that it is illusion. Lesser’s ax—it is the final vision of the novel—sinks into Willie “as the groaning black’s razor-sharp saber, in a single boiling stabbing slash, cut[s] the white’s balls from the rest of him.” It is curious, horrible, and terrifying to take in what Malamud in The Tenants openly posits: that the Jew in America, beginning as Howe did with a cry of identification with black suffering, is self-astonished to find himself responding now in the almost forgotten mood of zelbshuts—the shtetl’s term for weaponry stored against the fear of pogroms. Lesser, a hesitant intellectual, is driven to hauling an ax. But The Tenants insists on more than this. Like much of Malamud’s work, and specifically like The Assistant and The Fixer, it offers the metaphoric incarnation of a Malamudic text: whoever wants to kill the Jew has already killed the human being in himself.
It is not only no failing, it is the best achievement of the novel that Willie, its black militant, is a stereotype devoid of any easy humanity. The clichés appropriate for a political strategy are unsuitable for describing the soul of a living person. Given the extraliterary truth that black militancy, in and out of print, has now come to define itself if not largely then centrally through classical anti-Semitism, to bestow on a fictional Willie a life beyond his bloody fantasies would have been a savagery akin to Willie’s own. To put it another way: to have ascribed to Willie the full and continuing aspects of a decent breathing human being but for his hatred of Jews would have been to subvert the meaning of human.
The Tenants is a claustrophobic fable: its theme is pogrom. It remarks the minutiae of a single-handed pogrom so closely that the outer world is shut out. There is almost no city beyond Lesser’s tenement, and there are no white Gentiles in the novel, no faint indication of that identification with the Gentile power structure Ellison claimed Jewish intellectuals were seeking. In The Tenants the Jew has no allies. Jew and black fight alone in an indifferent world.
There is no means, at this juncture, of determining whether its current worldly truths will one day seep out of The Tenants, as the moral radiance of “Angel Levine” had ultimately, through subversion by history, to ebb into falsehood. But—for the moment—Malamud has abandoned the hopefulness of “Angel Levine” and drawn a parable of political anxiety. “Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other” is the last flicker of that hopefulness but does not convince. Willie is Lesser’s doom—Lesser, dreaming of love, rigorously apolitical, isolated in his aesthetics, becomes the inescapable victim of an artist whose art is inseparable from butchery.
Yevtushenko, declaiming at the Felt Forum that bombs and balalaikas are in essence always separate,5 nevertheless speaks not for Lesser but for Willie. Yevtushenko’s poem condemning the bombing of Hurok’s office, and the death of a secretary there, moved everyone, who could disagree? But the poem is a cheat. To be horrified at the bombing is not automatically to assent to the purity of art. Mozart was played at Auschwitz, and it is a ruse to pretend that any natural “separation” of art keeps it unblemished by political use. Malamud, in plucking Willie out of the black writing that made him, has not invented the politicization of fiction. And in inventing The Tenants, Malamud ironically follows Willie—he has written a tragic fiction soaked in the still mainly unshed blood of the urban body politic.
_____________
Essay published in Midstream, June/July 1972.
1 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.
2 Howe has written elsewhere that he became a socialist through realization of what poverty was. And it was the poverty of the rural South that brought it home to him, though at the very moment he was reading about it he was himself an impoverished youth living wretchedly in a Bronx tenement in the middle of the Depression. (That the connection was made through reading is perhaps also to the point.)
3 Orde Coombs wrote some years back in Harper’s (January 1972), “The thirty-to-forty-year-old black who holds down a good job in the North must know that his present success is a direct result of past tumult. All his talent, all his effort would not have otherwise given him a toehold in television, in consulting firms, in brokerage firms, in advertising, and in publishing. . . . Many of these black men know they owe their livelihoods to their poorer, more militant brethren. . . . In fact, only one group has really benefited from the turbulence; and that is the middle class.” (Coombs’s emphasis.)
4 Malamud has mastered the idiom typical of this fiction. For anyone doubtful about Malamud’s ear—or, rather, literary eye—an anthology called What We Must Be: Young Black Storytellers (Dodd, Mead, 1971) is instructive.
5 Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Soviet poet, gave a reading in New York City the day after a New York group had bombed the offices of Sol Hurok, the agent responsible for booking Soviet cultural events in the United States. A young Jewish woman, a secretary in Hurok’s office, was killed. Yevtushenko overnight wrote a poem of commemoration; it compared the girl’s death to the gassing of Jews in Auschwitz, and declared that art and politics must be kept separate. The poem noticeably subverted its own thesis.
Cultural Impersonation
NOTE
Mark Harris’s The Goy and John Updike’s Bech: A Book appear to arrange themselves under a common yoke: each touches on cultural impersonation, on “ethnicity,” while neglecting, in a setting where it would surely be pertinent, the sacral imagination.
In The Goy, Harris invents a secretly brutal and oppressive mid-western American anti-Semite who
impersonates a liberal philo-Semitic intellectual. In Bech: A Book, Updike’s hero emerges as the type of fully secularized Jewish writer who is himself an impersonator of a fully secularized (if one could credit this) John Updike. Just below the skin of the best Gentiles, Harris’s narrative implies, lies a heart cold to Jews. And Updike, next to Frederick Buechner our most theological writer, portrays Bech, his Jew, as theologically hollow.
Both novels rest on sociology as raw source. In spite of which, both, it seems to me, make their curious contribution (if only through the provocation of contradiction) to the liturgical language I have described elsewhere in this volume: New Yiddish.
1. Bech, Passing
I love John Updike.1 When some time ago in Commentary Alfred Chester (my old classmate, who vanished into Algiers and then died in Jerusalem) flicked Updike off as a magician of surfaces, I wrote in my head the imaginary counter-review: Updike as Late Church Father. For years I sniffed after an opportunity to think in print about the sacral Updike, and now that the chance is palpably here, it turns out to be not Pigeon Feathers, or Rabbit, Run, or The Centaur, or Of the Farm, not even Couples: those fictions of salvationism and eucharistic radiance. Instead, oif tsulokhes (the phrase of regret Bech’s Williamsburg uncles would use and toward which Bech is amnesiac), here is Henry Bech, Jew, rising, like Shylock and Bloom, out of a Christian brain.
Updike, whose small-town stories in particular have suggested him as our most “American” writer, is considerably less American, it seems to me, than, say, George P. Elliott or R. V. Cassill, secularists in a post-Christian neuterland. It is not especially American to be possessed by theology, and Updike is above all the Origen of the novel. The epigraph for The Poorhouse Fair is from Luke, Couples is emblazoned with Tillich, Rabbit, Run quotes Pascal concerning “the motions of Grace.” In Couples, as in Saint Theresa, love’s arrows and Christ’s thorns fuse: “He thinks we’ve made a church of each other,” someone says of one of the couples at the start, and in the last chapter fellatio becomes the Sacrament of the Eucharist: “. . . when the mouth condescends, mind and body marry. To eat another is sacred.” Further rich proofs and allusions will contribute nothing: it is already well-known that John Updike is a crypto-Christian, a reverse Marrano celebrating the Body of Jesus while hidden inside a bathing suit. (Vide “Lifeguard,” Pigeon Feathers.) Even Bech, a character, as they say, “pre-processed”—even Bech, who doesn’t know much, knows that. In a letter that constitutes the Foreword to Bech: A Book (this letter, by the way, wants me to call it “sly,” but I am too sly for that), Bech tells Updike: “Withal, something Waspish, theological, scared, and insulatingly ironical . . . derives, my wild surmise is, from you.” The original Marranos, in Spain, were probably the first group in history to attempt large-scale passing. As everyone knows (except possibly Bech), they ended at the stake. So much for Jews posing. What, then, of Christian posing as Jew? What would he have to take on, much less shuck off?
In the case of Updike’s habitation of Bech, nothing. Bech-as-Jew has no existence, is not there, because he has not been imagined. Bech-as-Jew is a switch on a library computer. What passes for Bech-as-Jew is an Appropriate Reference Machine, cranked on whenever Updike reminds himself that he is obligated to produce a sociological symptom: crank, gnash, and out flies an inverted sentence. Not from Bech’s impeccably acculturated lips, of course, but out of the vulgar mouth (“Mother, don’t be vulgar,” Bech says in boyhood) of a tough Jewish mother lifted, still in her original wrap, straight out of A Mother’s Kisses. The Foreword—which, like all Forewords, is afterthought and alibi—tries to account for this failure of invention by a theory of the Comic: it is, you see, all a parody: ironically humorous novelist Bech addresses ironically humorous novelist Updike and coolly kids him about putting Bech together out of Mailer, Bellow, Singer, Malamud, Fuchs, Salinger, the two Roths. The Appropriate Reference Machine is thereby acknowledged as the very center of the joke; the laugh is at the expense of the citation. In search of a Jewish sociology, Updike has very properly gone to the, as Bech would say, soi-distant Jewish novel. And found:
Category: Vocabulary
1. Adjective: zoftig
2. Nouns
a. shikse
b. putz
3. Ejaculation: ai
Category: Family
1. Beloved uncles in Williamsburg
a. back rooms
b. potatoes boiling, “swaddled body heat”
2. Father (mentioned twice in passing)
a. uxorious, a laugher
b. no occupation given
3. Mother
a. buys Bech English children’s books at Fifth Avenue Scribner’s
b. takes young Bech to awards meeting of facsimile of Academy of Arts and Letters
Category: Historical References
1. “the peasant Jews of stagnant Slavic Europe”
2. Russian “quality of life” “reminiscent of his neglected Jewish past”
3. “Hanukkah”
Category: Nose
Bech’s: Jewish big
(Forgive this. An in-joke. Updike’s, goyish big, earns him the right.)
Category: Hair
Bech’s: Jewish dark curly
Category: Sex
1. Sleeps willingly with Gentile women; like Mailer (though a bachelor) tries out whole spectrum of possible shikse types
2. But invited to sleep with zoftig Ruth Eisenbraun, is less willing; unclear if he does or doesn’t
All right. No quarrel with most of these attributes. If the only Yiddish Bech knows is shikse, putz, and zoftig, he is about even with most indifferent disaffected de-Judaized Jewish novelists of his generation. And I suppose there are Jewish novelists who, despite the variety in the gene pool, have both big noses and kinky hair: one (affectionate) stereotype doesn’t make an anti-Dreyfusard. And if, on a State Department-sponsored visit, Bech associates the more comfortable tones of Russia—“impoverished yet ceremonial, shabby yet ornate, sentimental, embattled, and avuncular”—with his “neglected Jewish past,” his is, like that of other indifferent disaffected de-Judaized Jewish novelists, a case not so much of neglect as of autolobotomy. Emancipated Jewish writers like Bech (I know one myself) have gone through Russia without once suspecting the landscape of old pogroms, without once smoking out another Jew. But because Bech has no Jewish memory, he emerges with less than a fourth-grade grasp of where he is. His phrase “peasant Jews” among the Slavs is an imbecilic contradiction—peasants work the land, Jews were kept from working it; but again Bech, a man who is witty in French, who in youth gave himself over to Eliot, Valéry, Joyce, who has invented a comic theory of the intelligence of groups, who thinks of himself as an Aristotelian rather than a Platonist—this same Bech is a historical cretin. If there had been “peasant Jews” there might have been no Zionism, no State of Israel, no worrisome Russians in the Middle East . . . ah Bech! In your uncles’ back rooms in Williamsburg you learned zero: despite your Jewish nose and hair, you are—as Jew—an imbecile to the core. Pardon: I see, thanks to the power of Yuletide, you’ve heard of Hanukkah.
So much for the American Jewish novelist as sociological source. As a subject for social parody, it is fairly on a par with a comic novel about how slavery cretinized the black man. All those illiterate darkies! Bech as cretin is even funnier: they didn’t bring him in chains, he did it to himself under the illusion of getting civilized.
Nevertheless a few strokes seem not to be derivative and may be Updike’s alone: one, the whimsical notion that a woman who speaks sentences like “Mister Touch-Me-Not, so ashamed of his mother he wants all his blue-eyed shikses to think he came out from under a rock” would venture past Gimbels to any Fifth Avenue store, much less to Scribner’s for English (English!) children’s books. Having adequately researched P.S. 87, Updike might have inquired at the neighborhood branch library for Bech’s sweaty-fingered, much-stamped ancient card (“Do Not Turn Down the Leaves”). Updike’s second wholly original misappre
hension is a descent into inane imagination. Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible. That this same woman would by some means, some “pull,” gain entry to a ceremony in a hall of WASP Depression Hochkultur is less mad than the supposition that she would ever have gotten wind of such doings. What rotogravure section carried them? Bech’s mother’s culture drive stops at the public-library door; Bech goes in without her, and if he ends up reading Hawthorne in Bulgaria, the credit belongs to P.S. 87. Bech’s grandfather’s mind came equally unfurnished: what produces a Bech is a grandfather just like him, with no conscious freight of history, no scholarliness, and the sort of ignorant piety of rote that just sustains against poverty. Remove the poverty, slip in P.S. 87, and you have Bech.
What Updike leaves out (and what Roth puts in) is the contempt of the new Bech for the old Bechs: the contempt of just appreciation. Updike writes, “. . . all the furniture they had brought with them from Europe, the footstools and phylacteries, the copies of Tolstoy and Heine, the ambitiousness and defensiveness and love, belonged to this stuffy back room.” (For love’s duration in close family quarters, see Roth, supra.) Footstools in steerage? From out of the cemeteries on Staten Island, ten thousand guffaws fly up. The beds left in Minsk still harbored the next wave to come. The phylacteries they threw away at the first sight of a paycheck for pants-pressing. And those who read Tolstoy or Heine alighted not in New York but in Berlin. Or stayed behind to make the Revolution. A Jew who came to New York with some Gemara in his brain was absolved from spawning Bech. Bech is a stupid Jewish intellectual. I know him well.
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