Biography:The life of Bernard Malamud - like the lives of all great writers - is a good reason not to become a writer oneself. It's all there, in Philip Davis's magnificent biography: the early family tragedy, the periods of unemployment, and the odd jobs in factories and department stores, the poorly paid tutoring and temporary teaching positions in out of the way colleges, and then, finally, after years of struggle, the first few short stories published, and then the novel, and the second novel, and the inevitable affair with a student, and the strained and difficult family relations, and the eventual acclaim and wealth.
And then? Nothing. Neglect. I happened to mention to a colleague - a scholar, a lecturer, a person of extremely broad reading and undoubted good taste - that I was reviewing Malamud's biography and they said, without even a pause, "Who?". There you have it: a writer's life in summary.
Malamud was born to Jewish immigrant parents in 1914 and grew up in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn. His father, Max, ran a small grocery store; Davis describes it as a "German-type deli, selling cheap canned goods, bread, vegetables, cheese, and cooked meats". Max was a hard-working and free-thinking socialist, but there were no books in the house, no music, no culture; life was about making a living. In other words, Malamud grew up in a world familiar to anyone who has ever read any mid-century Jewish American fiction: the world of everyday hardship, and The Daily Forward, and Yiddish. Malamud used this background, and the family store, as the basis for his masterpiece, his great second novel, The Assistant (1957). Asked in an interview what was the source of the book, and the terrible struggles of its protagonists, he replied, "Source questions are piddling but you're my friend, so I'll tell you. Mostly my father's life as a grocer, though not necessarily my father".
"Nobody starved," recalled Malamud of his childhood, but "my hungers were already deep and endless". His mother, Bertha, died in a mental hospital (his brother Eugene, a schizophrenic, was later committed to the same hospital). "She died, I think," wrote Malamud, haltingly, "in 1929, when I was just 15. On Mother's Day. May, 1929." The day after his brother's death, in 1973, Malamud himself suffered a heart attack: he lived for another 13 years, heartbroken.
THE WORD "MELAMED" in Hebrew means "teacher", but as Davis notes, "a melamed was of low status, teaching basic Hebrew to an unwilling youth". Malamud remained a determined teacher throughout his working life as a writer, first at Oregon State College, and then at Bennington in Vermont (where, aged 47, he engaged in an affair with a 19-year-old student), and then at Harvard. What Malamud sought to teach, according to Davis, was the value of what he called "the human sentence", a language which was honest, and self-searching, and directed towards life. Davis quotes Malamud attempting to summarise his own themes: "My work is in defence of the human"; "Hidden strength"; "That the human, conscious of the best in itself, is precious". Such concerns can indeed be seen running through his fiction from the earliest of his short stories, published in 1943, right through to The Fixer (1966), his Pulitzer Prize-winning fourth novel, and on to Dubin's Lives (1979). But by the 1970s, of course, simple, profound concerns such as Malamud's seemed hopelessly outdated. Camille Paglia, a colleague at Bennington, describes Malamud's life- affirming pronouncements on literature to be "wearisome and reactionary to the point of nausea".
Paglia's own wearisome distaste aside, there is perhaps no easy explanation for why Malamud's work seems to have fallen out of favour among readers and academics. Partly, he's just been unlucky. Davis publishes one of the rejection letters from the publisher Harcourt to Malamud's agent: "We have come to the reluctant conclusion, after a number of readings and a great deal of discussion, that we are not prepared to publish Bernard Malamud's The Assistant. There is much that is excellent in this new novel of his, but on the whole we find it more unsatisfying than satisfying". One could say that, surely, about any book. Humboldt's Gift? The Human Stain? When The Assistant was eventually published, its reception, according to Davis, showed Malamud to be "too Jewish for some Americans or too Christian for some Jews". Unlucky again.
Or it may just have been that Malamud was doing the right thing, in the right place, at the wrong time. Davis quotes a friend of the writer: "If he had been born at another time, without Bellow there before him and Roth a little after him, he would have stood alone and been great". Davis's biography, at least, and at last, allows us to see Malamud, alone.
Ian Sansom teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast. His book, The Enthusiast Field Guide to Poetry (Quercus) is out this month
Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life By Philip Davis Oxford University Press, 377pp. £18.99