Early Literary Influences

(by Joseph Kaufman)

The Pittsfield, Massachusetts of the sixties that I grew up in was a blue-collar enclave of Catholics and Protestants. It was hardly a literary hotbed though Normal Mailer lived for a while in Stockbridge and William Shirer in Lenox. Historically, in the late nineteenth century, Hawthorne and Melville resided collegially in the Berkshires, though Melville, as he was composing Moby Dick about ten minutes from the house where I grew up, scared Mrs. Hawthorne with his wild appearance and energies. Henry James would visit Edith Wharton at her estate, which was called “The Mount”, and Emerson and Thoreau were also known to pass through.

And though Pittsfield in the Woodstock era was hardly anyone’s idea of Brook Farm, I was raised in a literary household—my mother remains well-read and my father had gone for a PhD in literature at the University of Michigan. My mother gave me my first book of Malamud stories, “The Magic Barrel”, when I was about fourteen. I remember reading them as I lay on a short divan in our living room, Verdi on the turntable, my father at the desk behind me paying bills. I read the stories again and again. And then, “The Assistant”. “The Fixer”. “The Natural”. “Idiot’s First”. I branched out into Bellow and Singer and Roth but always came back to Malamud. Bellow’s style was richer, his authorial voice far more urbane.

Singer was more fanciful and exotic; Roth more provocatively sexual; and though Malamud stories were, objectively, grim, they resonated with me as presenting a greater, more transcendent reality than these other writers, texts which were both more deeply felt and morally engaged. For despite these stories’ limited venues—a tenement room, a jail cell, a grocery—there was always present the hint and whiff of Biblical grandeur. And so from early on, I wanted to meet this morally stern and ascetic, monkish Vermont writer.

He taught at Bennington College, a girl’s school gone recently coed, a course in short story reading and writing in the spring. My chance presented itself when a close friend at the University of Vermont transferred to Vassar and the prospect of remaining alone in Burlington, Vermont seized me in chilled alarm. Thus I decided to transfer to Bennington College where I imagined bowing down at Mr. Malamud’s feet and begging him to rework my rock ‘n roll-infected mind into the sensibility of a serious artist’s. Bennington College accepted me for the spring semester, I ended up taking the year off and living in Israel, and began school the following fall. I was to meet the great man for the first time in March, 1976.

I’ll speak about all that next week as well as the existential issues that meeting and befriending such a serious writer raised and continues to raise in my own life.