As a senior at Bennington College, I fumbled around for a post-graduation plan which would allow me to write. I observed Mr. Malamud closely then, as if to construct some tableau of sustaining memory of what a real writer looked and acted like before being condemned to real-life writing wilderness: his narrow, almost Arab moustache, his tad-too-large hard-framed glasses that he constantly adjusted on his nose, the way he twirled his hands only halfway in expressing thoughts, a reticent gesture, as if he censured himself in mid-excitement. Yes, the fastidious way he handled sheaves of homework and his comments written in an elegant and exacting hand, like some German scribe in medieval times, the slight, sloughing way he cleared his throat, his baldness, his soft voice mellifluous as a forbearing clarinet teacher. He wore a small hat and plain overcoat in the wintertime, carried a narrow black briefcase. He resembled an insurance salesman, an explainer of survivors’ benefits, who’d worked his way up to a desk job at the home office. All this masked a fierce determination borne of a most humble upbringing in Brooklyn: his father was a grocer, his mother had gone mad. He hardly missed an hour of writing, it was said, never a day.

We strolled the college’s grounds together. He admired trees, clouds, the quality of air, he admired the beauty of various coeds. He lamented the cost of writing as a hermetic closing off from romantic possibility and I could see this bothered him: read his last book, Dubin’s Lives, to find out just how much. Once, he came to my college apartment with an obscure homosexual poet and my parents to eat the lasagna and ratatouille that my roommate and I cooked for them. He took me out to dinner. He asked me if people at the restaurant were looking at him. I glanced around and indeed they were. He’d won the National Book Award; he’d won a Pulitzer; he was a famous man in this small-ish town in southern Vermont. Another time, I drove him from Bennington to his apartment on West End Avenue in the beautiful, trash-strewn City. We spoke about his privation to become a writer, spoke about his kids who were older than me. Many years later, after I’d begun my first book, he wrote me a letter that, “if you work hard enough you might make it.” And a year after the letter, he came to my wedding. He wore the plaid suit jacket of a fashionable golfer and at the celebration dinner he leaned close for a private toast and said that my wife and I were a wonderful pair.
Back at college, our writing class convened at his house for our last session, a group critique of short stories we wrote. And I remember—my romantic memory—how the house shone with light, like a spectrum of his creativity and hard work, and how his mother-in-law, an Italian woman named Mrs. Fidelman who’d become a movie star late in life, sucked on a cigarette with a long ash in his living room. That night, he criticized a girl’s story and made her cry and praised another student’s work who later became a famous seller of books and who decried in The New York Times the writer’s life as a miserable one.

“If you work hard enough you might make it.” —Words which haunt me still.

Am I working hard enough? Do I really have what it takes? —Existential worries. Worries which will never cease. But the great abiding gift he gave me was his personal example of a truly serious artist, my first and, so far, my last. He was a teacher who never spoke about technique but rather, as a secular rabbi, asked questions like, “Who are you and what do you have to say? What is your voice? How deep in yourself can you dig?” Questions which I didn’t understand then but became the very bedrock of my mind. Inchoate questions which nagged at me as I applied to the Peace Corps in Africa—a job where I could legitimately drop out of society and try to write and understand these ciphers of questions Mr. Malamud spit out like mantras. Togo had no writing teachers, no writing seminars, no writing friends. It was Writing Diaspora, a country of lousy agriculture and worse politics where the arts were not part of anyone’s curriculum and never would be. Africa was more than distant and philosophically dark as Canaan before the Israelites, physically unhealthy, a purposeful exile and arid savannah of competing life claims where I’d have to choose, as both aspiring novelist and callow young man, how best to grow up.