More Memories of Bernard Malamud

February 11, 2010 By 2 Comments

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.

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Growing Beyond, From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman

January 14, 2010 By 3 Comments

After Mr. Benson, my 9th grade Marine writing teacher, I had no writing teacher for the rest of high school—there simply were no creative writing classes at Pittsfield High School from 1970-1973. Rather, in English class, we read Dickens and Twain and Hawthorne and wrote ten page papers about their significance—I don’t even think I knew what adultery was when I read the “Scarlet Letter“. At any rate, as I was lectured, I tried to deconstruct symbolism, foreshadowing, characterization, plot structure, point-of-view, my crude sense of archetype, my unformed sense of character-is-destiny, but the effort felt flimsy and wrong-headed, where a nascent critic but not a novelist might begin. And yet I would have been unable to write an essay on what a book truly and personally meant to me since as yet I didn’t have enough core of self to express meaning.

Growing up without much ‘life friction’ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts gave me an attenuated sense of self. I was, truth be told, a bundle of unexpressed and conflicted desires, an amalgam of yearning for degradation and transcendence all at once. And so my freshman and sophomore years at the University of Vermont were experience-seeking years, a restless quest for the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, years of trying to figure out how to think, how to read, how to enjoy, the limits and delineations of my mind, personality, an attempt to create stability and yet excitement, a search for how to live, the greater quest for self. Which included hours and hours of ping pong playing with Ellis Burwick (believe it or not, I was eventually the Vermont state ping pong champion), wandering cafes in Burlington, shooting pool, chasing girls, reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald again and again, listening to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, even Sun Ra, growing my hair, hitchhiking up and down Route 7, constantly rearranging the furniture in my small dormitory room.

And then amidst this chaos of a life, I met a writing teacher and a friend who was a girl. David Huddle was a southern gentleman, tall and good-looking, with a charming drawl and a gorgeous swirl of auburn hair. He’d been an intelligence officer in Viet Nam and then gotten an MFA at Columbia. He’d written with Peter Taylor, among others, and he would read Flannery O’Connor and Edna O’Brian out loud in class. He liked my writing and spent time talking books with me in his office. Wendy P. was from Concord, just outside Boston, and she had attended private schools. She was blond and pretty and well-educated and despite having a boyfriend, spent many hours educating me about college life, city life, art and art history, the pleasures of perfume, tea, dressing well, eating out, how relationships worked, even lectured me about what women want. We spent a lot of time together, her boyfriend didn’t seem to mind, and she pushed me to write and to read. She was an art history major with ambition and she applied to transfer to Vassar and was accepted.

This was a bombshell to me, losing this good friend, and it gave me the eerie feeling of being left behind, as if Nazis were chasing me and Wendy was racing away in the escape car while I was left on foot. This certainty of becoming once more friendless by losing my sole contact with what felt like higher life, of being consigned once again to what seemed a faceless lower middle class of northern Vermont, kindled within me the urgency to change, grow, escape, to have real ambition for once in my life. It was an urgency which made me imagine writing as something which could be sustaining, as a means for constituting self.

And so I reached further than I ever had, what felt like the edge of risk for me, and I decided that I would try and write for Bernard Malamud. To transfer to Bennington College was then my first real act of will, a first real act of individuation and I applied and, thankfully, was accepted. And it was at Bennington that I began to read and write seriously, to work really hard, where I first asked myself honestly what I thought about things. And it was where I met my future brother-in-law who would make my match with my wife, and where I began to to see through the fog of my too-benevolent upbringing and successive aimless existence to a certain heart of conflict, difficulty, disappointment, and possibility for joy, where I first glimpsed my way into life.

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Reminiscing about Mr. Malamud

November 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

(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.

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Inbetween, Then on to Bennington College

October 26, 2009 By 2 Comments

(by Joseph Kaufman)

And so in 1975, after two years at the University of Vermont, my close friend transferred to Vassar and I took a year off and flew to Israel. I lived on two kibbutzim, Ein Charod M’euchad and Gevulot, where I drove tractors in orange groves and stamped sun-warmed cotton in big steel-mesh containers in Jordan valley dusks.
I remember warm gin-and tonics at a dusty truck stop, remarkable peanuts-in-the-shell at the Afula bus station, the blue, car-mechanic-like uniforms of the kibbutz volunteers, the simple, starchy food, the freezing winter nights, the Israelis’ barking hospitality, and how one person mooned the entire ulpan class as he spoke to the unawares Hebrew teacher.

Post-kibbutz, I traveled to Greece and then Spain and flew home and spent the summer working as a cook at the now-defunct Grossinger’s. I recall the short Jewish maitre d’ with the grim visage of an executioner, the unflappable Chinese cooks who knew the laws of kashrut, the elegant black waiter, Tony G., who drove a Thunderbird and could carry forty mains stacked on a tray on his fingertips, the late-night, cigarette-and-scotch deluged, high-stakes Puerto Rican poker games, the college waiters and waitresses, the French sou-chefs, the seersucker suit that I wore in my off hours that made me look, in retrospect, like a popsicle salesman. And I can picture the scads of overweight guests—for what did one do in the Borscht Belt in those days except eat?—the bad comedians (the only thing sadder than a bad comedian is two of them), the over-cheerful entertainment aides, the kitschy entertainment director himself who was ‘world famous’ for his comedic rendition of ‘Simon Says.’ As well, there was an every-other-day diving show at the main pool where a girl and boy from the University of Michigan diving team did fancy aerial twists and somersaults. It was impressive to see such athleticism so close-up and I got a crush on the girl, naturally, and in order to meet her I asked the pair of them to teach me how to dive. Which ended up being the scariest thing I’d ever done up until that time.

In the fall of 1976, my brother-in-law of the time and sister drove me to Bennington College, a campus of white clapboard houses set in rural Vermont. The college had gone co-ed only seven years before and there were 450 women and approximately 150 men. There was a strong air of women’s lib washing through the performance halls and dining rooms and louche morals and intense, self-absorbed creativity. The girls were pretty, studiously unimpressed by men, affairs between student and faculty members were encouraged, the food, as they say in Pittsfield, was good enough for government work, and there was a decent pool table in the student café. It was disconcerting at first to share a bathroom with three women, but after so much traveling and working, the prospect of writing with Bernard Malamud in the college’s tranquil but charged atmosphere, not to mention the other fascinating courses and array of talented people, seemed perfect to me. I’d not been around such a community of people, where hard creative work was the air that one breathed. And it was this seriousness about one’s development as an artist which was so enticing, something which I’d never encountered before.

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Early Literary Influences

October 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

(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.

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Joseph Kaufman “Roots”

October 7, 2009 By 3 Comments

My sisters would wear their best dress coats and I would brush my hair and wear a tie when my mother’s parents, wealthy Jews from the City, neighbors of Marlene Dietrich on east 52nd street, sent a limousine to Pittsfield to gather us up. We were the country bumpkins of the family, exiled to the Berkshires after my mother married the son of a toy salesman who was, in this stern grandfather’s pronouncement, “swarthy, with a prominent nose.” These grandparents’ apartment smelled like baked potatoes, the Little Rascals were on black-and-white TV, and there was a forbidding height down to the street where, when no was looking, I spit. We were taken to museums, parks, Broadway shows, other places of betterment, expected to dress for dinner – no elbows allowed on tabletops – and often taken to the best restaurants of New York and expected to remember what the French or Spanish on the menus meant.

Such sophistication only reinforced my sense of us as a segment of family exiled from “True Life”, relegated to the hillocks, lakes, woods, insects, and other infestations of rural Massachusetts. It took many years to appreciate the emotional health that was bestowed by being raised in what felt like a blue collar isolation tank and the simple activities of rural life: shimmying up trees, trout fishing, good country hardball, sandlot tackle football, skiing, sledding down the hermit’s driveway, ice skating in the city square, country fairs, spaghetti dinners at The Busy Bee, steak sandwiches at The Rainbow. But, of course, there were the learned pleasures of country living, too: Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony and, one time, Duke Ellington, Melville’s Arrowhead, Hawthorne’s house in Lenox, the Berkshire Museum, the greater oddities of Alice’s Restaurant, Mundy’s bar, Officer Obie, Bonnie Raitt and Leo Kotke concerts at the Music Inn.

Like my father before me, I was born and raised in in this GE town of 40,000 where Jack Welch started out, located one hour west of Springfield and one hour east of Albany. I attended the same summer camp and high school as my father. My grandparents raised their children in Pittsfield and my great grandparents lived there as well. All of us so far – great-grandparents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins – are buried in the Pittsfield Cemetery. We have been living in the Berkshires for over 100 years, a rare statement for any Jew to be able to make. Pittsfield remains an amalgam of Irish, Polish, Italian, WASP, and Jew. There remain the Elks, the Masons, the war veterans, and Pittsfield people are still very nice.

My father’s mother, who lived near us in Pittsfield, was a Yankee, a short woman of great stature who would not allow liquor into her house and refused to listen to a bad word about anyone, while my father, the son of this Jewish woman, is a retired, Calvinist-work-ethic businessman. I inherited this work ethic if not that ban on alcohol, both of which served me well during the many-year writing of “The Legend of Cosmo and the Archangel”. The hours, the revisions, the heartache of rejections, the attempt to develop a style that could speak about many things in a deeper way – it all came partly from the experience of Bennington College and the tutelage of Bernard Malamud, the Peace Corps in Africa, yeshiva in Israel, the years working for my father at Kay Bee Toys. But even more than my post-Pittsfield life, the development of style is, in large part, the temperament that was forged from the pine and elm and barbecues of long-ago childhood, the lifelong sense of trying to punch my way out of Paradise.

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