Malamud's New Life

Bernard Malamud taught at Oregon State College in Corvallis from 1948 to 1961 and took revenge on the university by publishing the novel A New Life, in 1961. It concerns an unhappy-in-love professor, his troubled women, his troubled self, and an east coast mentality plopped down in the Pacific Northwest. Yet the story is full of optimism too, providing a sense of the joyous discovery of place and rebirth. Malamud's third novel, A New Life was also his most conventional both in style and subject matter.

I went through a Malamud phase years ago, but remember only a few of his short stories, which I recall affected me very much for their insight and humor. I thought Malamud was a great writer, and that is generally the assessment of the critics. With the equally talented Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was known as a post-war sage of American Jewishness; his work scrutinized and revealed the inner lives of Jewish Americans struggling to survive in America's ghettos.

Bellow of course won a Nobel Prize and Philip Roth is a much revered living legend, but Malamud seems to have fallen out of favor with the reading public. Perhaps there was never enough Jewishness to go around with these three masters in Christian America. Anyone paying attention knows however that Malamud is a masterful story teller and deserves better than what he has received; a kind of benign neglect from a fickle public.

I remember his novels better. Of all his works, my favorite Malamud is The Tenants, the story of two young writers, one white and the other black, who live uncomfortably as neighbors in a condemned New York tenement apartment building. It works on two levels: as an examination of race relations in the U.S., and as a sort of Polaroid picture of the writing process as it plays out in Malamud's imagination. It's a stunning novel really, one you ought to read if you haven't.

On a fishing trip in the Cascades the summer (1977) I lived in Lebanon with my friend Bob Thomas, Bob and I met a retired Oregon State professor fishing near us one day and got to talking about Malamud. The fisherman knew Malamud well, having been in the OSU English Department with him. It seems Malamud published his novel about college life and left Corvallis about the same time in 1961.

It was probably a good thing, the retired English professor told Bob and I. A number of folks in the community didn't exactly appreciate their loose portraiture in the novel A New Life.

After his examination of a new life in the Northwest, Malamud returned to the East to reclaim his old life as a Jewish intellectual. He died in 1986.



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