-- By Tom Phillips
Originally published in
ANQ: A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SHORT ARTICLES, NOTES, AND REVIEWS 1/18/2020
Originally published in
ANQ: A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SHORT ARTICLES, NOTES, AND REVIEWS 1/18/2020
A New Life, Bernard Malamud’s 1961 epic of a down-and-out New Yorker in the Pacific Northwest, is unique among his novels. The story takes place far from the urban Jewish milieu that was the author’s usual setting, and not coincidentally, it is the only work in which he fully develops a critique of American culture. Malamud studiously avoids mentioning religion until very late in the book, and then only obliquely. However a close reading, beginning with the significance of the main characters’ names, suggests an inter-religious dynamic.
Relations between Judaism and Christianity, Jews and Christians, and Jewish and gentile cultures are front and center in much of Malamud’s fiction – notably in The Assistant, the 1957 novel that immediately precedes A New Life. In A New Life these themes are concealed, or implied – probably because it was written while the author was sojourning in gentile territory, where his values came into sharp conflict with those of the dominant culture. A New Life can be read as a satire on American Philistia from a Jewish point of view, but in the end it goes beyond satire. The coupling of Seymour Levin with Pauline Josephson, the wife of his boss and enemy, and their absconding with her children, suggests a prophecy of a new age in which Jew and gentile combine in a generational assault on American values.
In short, the Sixties.
The life in question belongs to Seymour Levin, a newly-appointed Instructor in English Composition at Cascadia College, a state institution in a state much like Oregon. Here, the powers-that-be have sacrificed literature and the liberal arts to focus on efficiency, economy, and above all, athletics.
Seymour Levin: See More, Leaven. He alights in Cascadia from a transcontinental train ride, to be met by Director of English Composition Gerald Gilley and his flat-chested wife, Pauline. They’re late to the station, having been delayed at the golf course. Seymour introduces himself, awkwardly, as “S. Levin … From the East” (Malamud 4).
Seymour is immediately rechristened “Sy” by the gregarious Gilley, who is campaigning to be the next chairman of the English Department. Declining Gilley’s suggestion that he shave off his beard, he settles into a room in town, learns to drive, marvels at the natural beauty around him, and sets to work at his first-ever college appointment – teaching forestry and engineering students how to write.
Levin hopes to resurrect the liberal arts in a school that has written them off. But he’s also resurrecting himself. After years of alcoholic despair, his life turned on a vision he saw in a filthy basement – a shaft of sunlight on his rotting shoes convinced him that life is holy, that the source of freedom is the human spirit. His quest is “to get back what belongs to me … order, value, accomplishment, love” (189).
Values and love quickly get him into trouble. Levin’s moral code has nothing to do with the sexual prudery that is the college’s definition of “morals.” He is a stickler for fairness and equal treatment – the very opposite of Gilley, a pragmatist whose highest value is to “keep the department running smoothly” (37). Levin objects to favored treatment for athletes, but is brushed off with a lecture on how much they do for the school. He pursues a plagiarist; Gilley complies with the student’s request for a transfer out of Levin’s class. Levin realizes, “this man is my enemy” (178).
As for love: his heart a famished cat, Levin prowls the town in search of females. He hooks up with a waitress, only to be interrupted by his angry roommate. He lies down with a secretary, but they are interrupted by Gilley, who warns Levin against sex at the office. He beds a student, in a lost weekend on the wild Oregon coast, but soon becomes bored. And then he falls in love – a passionate connection with roots that go back before the two had met. It turns out it was Pauline Gilley who brought him out of the East. Gerald was in a jam, needing a comp teacher on short notice, and his wife plucked Levin’s resume out of a pile, attracted by his picture. Late in the final chapter, Pauline says the picture reminded her “of a Jewish boy I knew in college who was very kind to me during a trying time in my life.” (361).
“So I was chosen,” says Levin. (This is the sole reference to Jewishness in the novel.)
At the end of the academic year Seymour is fired, on “moral” grounds. He and Pauline ride off to California, with the Gilleys’ two adopted children – Gerald was sterile – as well as Levin’s own baby, growing in Pauline’s womb. Her breasts are starting to blossom at last, preparing for a natural child.
They drive away from a changing institution. The long-time department head has died of a stroke, the frozen curriculum is finally shifting. As Seymour and Pauline go through campus for the last time, they see an English Department colleague sprouting a beard. He’s been chosen to teach a Great Books program Levin had suggested to the dean.
Only as he departs from Philistia does Levin’s archetype fully emerge; he is the wandering Jew as modern intellectual hero. Thorstein Veblen described his role in a 1919 essay:
“It appears that only when the gifted Jew escapes from the cultural environment created and fed by the particular genius of his own people, only when he falls into the alien lines of gentile inquiry and becomes a naturalized, though hyphenate, citizen in the gentile republic of learning, that he comes into his own as a creative leader of the world’s intellectual enterprise …
“He becomes a disturber of the intellectual peace, but only at the cost of becoming an intellectual wayfaring man, a wanderer in an intellectual no-man’s-land, seeking another place to rest, farther along the road, somewhere over the horizon” (Veblen 38–39).
That’s where Seymour and Pauline are bound as they hit the road to California. But Levin is not just a modern archetype. Throughout the book, his name morphs through a series of changes. “S. Levin, from the East” is Seymour, then Sy, then Pauline’s poetic “Lev.” On the next-to-last page he tells her his original name: “Sam, they used to call me home” (366).
“Home” in ancestral history could be the Hebrew Bible – and “Sam” the Prophet Samuel, victorious in battle over the Philistines. (1 Samuel 7). Levin, though run out of town, has overcome. He takes as spoil the wife of his foe, and their brazen liaison violates religious as well as civic order, underscored as she tells him her original name: Pauline Josephson, a double reference to the New Testament, to the letters of Paul and the lineage of Jesus. (“New Life” is a characteristically Pauline concept, stressed repeatedly in the Epistles, e.g. 2 Cor. 5:17).
This stunning conclusion, and its religious complications, may be why A New Life – though declared a masterpiece by at least one respected critic (Lethem xi), and compared with Gatsby and Huck Finn by another (Ozick 1) – remains among Malamud’s least-read works. (The New York Public Library currently holds just one copy of A New Life, to 36 of The Fixer.) The story of a Jew humiliating an all-American institute was not something Philistia wanted to contemplate in 1961. And the taking of gentile wives has been a fraught topic for Jews since early biblical times. But Malamud – himself a Jew married to a Catholic – does not shrink from these conflicts.
They reflect a unique period in Malamud’s life – teaching freshman composition at Oregon State University, in the small-town atmosphere of Corvallis, from 1949 to 1961. Unlike Levin he stayed out of trouble. But like Levin, he stood for personal and intellectual freedom, unmoved by the conformist pressure of the Fifties in America. His friend and colleague Chester Garrison recalled: “Bern stood out as a New Yorker … out here it’s desirable, or was desirable, that one be nice and not seek confrontation … but if Bern saw something was wrong, he spoke out immediately” (Davis 77).
His most dramatic confrontation came during the Korean War, when a fellow English instructor led a counter-march against the college’s ROTC corps. The instructor, a young poet named Eugene Lundahl, was immediately fired by the head of composition, Herb Nelson (the obvious model for Gilley). Lundahl told Malamud what happened, and Malamud went straight to the dean and president to get Lundahl reinstated, at least until the end of the year. Malamud later told Nelson he had a “heart of corn flakes” (78).
This incident, and Malamud’s devastating put-down of his boss, foreshadow both the novel’s content and the culture wars of the Sixties. Jews came to the American heartland with their own set of values, based not on prudery and pragmatism, but individual freedom and fundamental fairness. This enabled them to become preeminent “disturbers of the intellectual peace” in all the movements that have convulsed America over the last hundred years. Veblen’s gifted, wayfaring Jews – out of their own milieu, teaching, living and writing amidst the gentile enterprise – were able to see clearly the failings of a nation too taken with its own success.
Malamud saw “A New Life” as a comedy, and it is often pointedly funny. The trouble with Levin, complains Gilley in a memorable rant, is that he has never experienced the challenge and thrill of fly-fishing, waist-deep in an icy stream. It would make him “a better man,” says Gilley, demonstrating by leaping around his office rug with a fishing pole in hand. Gilley’s antics waist-deep in icy water remind us of his sterility, and his name evokes not a fisherman, but a fish in a school of little fish, moving fitfully and fearfully as one. Levin, though comically flawed, is clearly a better man. And it is he and Pauline, now wandering together, who hold the seeds of a new life for America.
Works cited
- Davis, Philip. Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life. Oxford UP, 2007.
- Malamud, Bernard. A New Life, Introduction by Jonathan Lethem. Farrar Straus, 2004. Originally published 1961.
- Ozick, Cynthia. “Judging the World,” Review of Bernard Malamud: Novels and Stories of the 1960s.” Ed. Philip Davis. The New York Times Book Review, 13 Mar. 2014, pp. 1–3.
- Veblen, Thorstein. “The Intellectual Pre-Eminence of Jews in Modern Europe.” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 34, 1919, pp. 33–42. doi:10.2307/2141518.
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