Reminiscing about Mr. Malamud

(by Joseph Kaufman)

From sleeting March rain to the humid, late-May sun, Mr. Malamud taught his one class a year, ten sessions in all. Some years he taught a course in the short story, replete with reading list and papers to write; other years he taught a writing seminar, the semester’s goal of which was to compose one short story of less than twelve double-spaced pages and then to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite it. Like his character Fidelman, Mr. Malamud’s late-in-life, ne’er-do-well painter-turned-glassblower named after his mother-in-law, a large Italian woman and featured Italian movie actress who, at the time that I knew her, had just completed a role of the older wife of a young Mafiosi where she elbows her young husband out of bed in the opening scene and tells him to get to work—like Fidelman, Mr. Malamud seemed intense and academic and fussy. He reminded me of my mother’s brother, an anthropologist, a self-scorched product of searing self-discipline, as if he’d remaindered himself to his own conception of a labor camp. But, that is getting ahead of myself. To be admitted to class, you had to submit a piece of writing—there was only room for ten students. Everyone, of course, applied. The list of who was accepted was pinned to the English department door. I don’t remember what story I submitted but I do remember that I rewrote it and rewrote it—-the fear of literary imperfection, born then, has stayed with me.

We apprentice writers who survived that gauntlet assembled in an old farm building, in a classroom of panel and roof beam. There were six women and four men. It was to be a short story year. The great man walked into class wearing a rain coat over brown khakis, a striped collared shirt, and dark sweater. He was bald on top with still-brown hair clipped short about the sides and graying sideburns, a man in his sixties. A moustache, precisely cut, spread over his generous and slightly quivering lip. He opened his briefcase and handed out copies of a syllabus—Chekhov, Hemingway, among others, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Sherwood Anderson (I think), even one collection of his own. His hands were delicate and mottled with age, the fingers of a man who might play Chopin or paint watercolors. He put on square, blocky glasses, accountant glasses. He read off names from a class list in a calm and measured voice, a raspy tenor’s, a stern grandfather’s voice. We raised our hands. He spoke about the book list, the papers to be written. He was a bit stiff and all business, a formal, elegant man, a man who would tolerate fools, nonsense, and late papers poorly. As Philip Roth once described him, this aging Pulitzer prize winner was a combination of pitilessness and somewhat distant, avuncular concern. And though he seemed to be strictly about business in one form or another—the business of writing, the business of being responsible to job and schedule, the business of dealing equitably with others—I sensed that he was more than the perhaps-interesting sum of his peeves and formalities. For just as his writing projected the awkward and halting and painful attempts toward an unknown and undefined transcendence, the writer, too, seemed full of a high moral seriousness that I’d never encountered.

I realized that what I beheld, charmed already, was a sage of sorts, a secular rabbi, an artist of the most rarefied kind.