Bloomsday in America

This article was originally published online, in slightly different form, in  ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews  12/28/2020. 

-- By Tom Phillips 

Geography is destiny in two modern masterpieces – James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918) and Bernard Malamud’s A New Life (1961) – but these destinies point in opposite directions. Joyce’s Dublin faces East across the Irish Sea to England; Malamud’s fictional Marathon, Cascadia west over the mountains to the Pacific.  Cascadia is green and fresh, the air clear, nature an “esthetic satisfaction” so overwhelming that art is superfluous.  Dublin is “snotgreen”, reeking of dead men, dead dogs, poor old women, “general paralysis of the insane” all seen through Irish art, the “cracked lookingglass of a servant.”                                                                           

"Poldy"  -- from Joyce's notes 

Enter into these opposite landscapes a single archetype, the wandering Jew -- outsider, observer, “chief critic of everything”. The aim of this essay will be to point out the direct relation between characters and episodes in these two novels – notably Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Malamud’s Seymour Levin. This link is repeatedly suggested by Malamud, beginning with the epigraph of A New Life, a quote from Ulysses: “Lo, Levin leaping lightens in eyeblink Ireland’s western welkin."  A New Life can be read as another variation on Homer’s Odyssey, a bid by Malamud to extend the epic of human civilization to America’s farthest shore.  Spiced with biblical references, it is also the story of American Jews’ liberation from cyclical tragedy in the Old World, and the hazards of their new life in the New.    

Ulysses and The Odyssey show up in shadowy, off-the-beat references – a  template undergirding A New Life, obscured by the novel’s stunning scenery and plot. The line of literary succession is clearly marked in the opening chapters of A New Life.  Levin arrives in Marathon where his glad-handing new boss, professor Gerald Gilley, immediately dubs him “Sy.”  This young/old man, a failure at thirty, is hoping to start a new life teaching English composition at a state college of agricultural and technical science.   

In the first chapter of Ulysses, amid the melancholic ruminations of Stephen Dedalus, an offstage character named Seymour is said to be back in Dublin, starting a new career in the army after failing at his medical studies.  There’s also a passing reference to Stephen’s father as “Uncle Si."   

Anti-Semitism infects the atmosphere in both these worlds -- unmentioned in A New Life, but implicit in the boss’s dismay at meeting a bearded new man who introduces himself as “S. Levin, from the East.”  In Joyce’s Dublin, an Oxonian visitor worries that England is falling into the hands of German Jews. Stephen’s boss, the parochial schoolmaster Mr. Deasy, says Ireland is the only nation not to have persecuted the Jews – because it “never let them in."    

Nevertheless --- Mr. Leopold Bloom enters at the beginning of Joyce’s chapter two, thinking about his breakfast: grilled mutton kidney “which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” He goes to the butcher to buy a kidney, his mind wandering from the pretty girl next in line, to oranges from Jaffa, to the Dead Sea.  

Returning home he puts the kidney on the hot stove, but before feeding himself he must feed the cat and serve his wife Molly breakfast in bed – a bed Bloom knows will be the scene that day of a tryst with her latest lover.  Lounging and reading a romantic novel procured by Bloom, she asks for the definition of a word: Metempsychosis.  It’s Greek, says her husband – it means the transmigration of souls. 

Bloom reads a letter from their absent daughter Milly, then visits the privy, bringing something easy to read -- a story from Titbits magazine.  His literary appetite satisfied and bowels relieved, he tears out some pages to wipe himself clean.  Beginning his long day’s walk around Dublin, Bloom visits the post office to pick up a letter from a semi-literate mistress who knows him by his alias: “Henry Flower, esq.” 

All these themes and motifs find an echo in the opening chapters of “A New Life.”  Urine plays a special role: Gilley’s two-year-old son pees on Levin as the new instructor tells the boy a bedtime story.  Bloom’s servitude is echoed in Levin’s orientation by his new colleagues, stressing his lowly rank in the English department and the department’s subsidiary role in the college.  Bloom’s call to the jakes is parodied in Levin’s visit to Gilley’s office, where the director of composition is cutting pages out of Life Magazine for an easy-to-read scholarly project -- a “picture book of American lit.”

Touring the English department, Levin peeks in the office of the chairman and sees only a cup of coffee left by an absent secretary.  Gilley explains to the new man: “Milly probably went to the ladies room. She’s been having trouble with her kidney.”  Milly and her kidney play no part in the story, except as unmistakable references to Bloom.    

Levin inspects his new office, and hears shocked tales of its previous occupant – Leo Duffy, a fiery left-wing activist, banished for a series of political, social and sexual offenses. The name half-suggests Bloom in its shorter version of his first name, and the hint of “duffer” in Duffy. (Another professor is Leopold Kuck, as in cuckold.)  Bloom and Duffy were outcasts, strangers in their own lands.  Levin’s goal in the West will be to carve out a place for his authentic self.  He’ll take the risks despite an endless lecture on local and institutional mores from the department chair.  Prof. Orville Fairchild is a pedantic, patriotic prude with a flower neatly tucked in his lapel -- Levin’s Mr. Deasy, Nestor in the West. 

Levin is bearing the transmigrated soul of Leopold Bloom to a new time and place,  from the European Diaspora to the American Frontier.  In each setting, the ways of this soul are not those of the dominant culture, and its attempts to fit in fall short.  Bloom goes to church with his waistcoat unbuttoned -- “Good job it wasn’t further south.”  Levin teaches his first composition class with his fly unzipped.  This also suggests their susceptibility to loose women, a chink in the armor of heroes dating to Odysseus. Adultery is in the air – dominating Leopold and Molly’s thoughts, in the intense initial conversation between Levin and Gilley’s wife Pauline, and the lingering buzz of scandal over Duffy’s affair with a faculty wife.  

The dalliances of Odysseus and Henry Flower spring to life in Levin’s lost weekend with a student on the wild Oregon coast.  A siren in the shape of a small-town banker’s daughter, Nadalee Hammarstadt makes Levin an offer he can’t resist. The consequences are deferred, but deadly. 

Homer’s Cyclops and Joyce’s Citizen return as the whisky-swilling, athlete-coddling Professor George Bullock, the McCarthyite of the English Department.  Bullock is enraged by his inability to cow Assistant Professor Joe Bucket, the scapegoat of the group.  Bucket is routinely dumped on for his much-revised, oft-rejected dissertation on Laurence Sterne, one of Joyce’s literary models, to Bullock an “immoral twerp.”  Channeling Sterne’s beatific brand of satire, Bucket evokes the long-suffering  Telemachus, and Stephen Dedalus, that “bullockbefriending bard.”  And just as Bloom courts Dedalus as a surrogate son, Levin tries to enlist Bucket in his eastern-liberal  brigade.  Like Bloom, he comes up empty.   

Much labor could and should be employed in tracing all the literary correspondences in A New Life.  But Malamud’s purpose is much more than word-games.  He uses these parallels and comparisons to bring out a contrast, a disruption -- between the Old World and the New, and two opposing visions of history. 

“What new with Levin?” begins the third chapter, in the Yiddish-inflected argot of Malamud’s native Brooklyn.  Answer: “His world.”  Levin explores it, discovering Holstein cows, creatures that had “never seen a Levin.”   He meets the only other easterner in the English department, Dr. Fabrikant, who asks, “What satirical wind blew you hither?” evoking the god Aeolus whose wallet of winds blew Odysseus around the Mediterranean.  Levin says he came for a change.  Fabrikant calls it “transmogrification,” a play on the transmigration of souls.  

Malamud writes his work not as a re-enactment of Ulysses -- in the way Joyce’s work re-enacts The Odyssey -- but as a comedy with an open ending.  What is new is the transmigration that liberates American Jews from cyclical tragedy, and at the same time unites them, for better or worse, with the gentile enterprise.  

Levin learns to drive a car and exults in the freedom to go where he pleases.  His people have traveled in two generations from the ghettoes of East Europe to the farthest shores of Western civilization, demonstrating Jefferson’s theory of history as a path forward – a straight line in pursuit of liberty and happiness.   

Bloom meanwhile is stuck in Joyce’s cyclical concept of history, derived from the 18^th-Century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (Gilbert, 39ff).  Joyce’s ultimate work, Finnegan’s Wake, begins and ends with the same word-image -- “riverrun.”  America’s legendary woodsman Paul Bunyan used the same image for a joke – his tall tale about the Round River, which circled a mountain and had no outlet, a river where men got old and died trying to bring their logs to market. 

Levin’s American epiphany happens in deep woods. The instructor goes for a walk on a beautiful early spring day, even then ruminating about the weather and the “relentless rhythm of nature … change that wasn’t change, in cycles eternal sameness."  He wanders into a forest, and worries about “avoiding circular confusion,” even considers marking his way with bits of torn paper.  But in this wild place he finds his way, suddenly understands “the soul of Natty Bumppo,” Cooper’s legendary American pathfinder.  Nudging anxiety aside he goes on; spots a red-headed woodpecker, a blue jay, and an unidentified yellow bird – the three primary colors, the mixing bowl of abundant life -- and then in a clearing, his destiny: Pauline Gilley.  They make love, and the die is cast.  Levin then compulsively reveals his past – his father’s crimes, his mother’s suicide, his own descent to a place beyond hope – a tale as bleak as Paddy Dignam’s burial in Ulysses, as harrowing as Odysseus’ descent into Hades.  His love affair with Pauline then recapitulates his slow emergence from despair. 

The last chapter of A New Life is a riot of metempsychosis.  Harking back to The Odyssey, Bloom and Levin each end up with their Penelope, but in opposite ways.   Bloom crawls into the bed stained and trashed by Molly’s latest suitor, and contents himself with the dregs of her adulterous day.  Levin is a brazenly successful suitor – making off with his boss’s wife and children -- Pauline now pregnant with Levin’s child.  

The biblical roots of A New Life appear as they reveal their original names.   Hers -- Pauline Josephson -- points to the theology of Paul and the supposed lineage of Jesus, Joseph’s son. Levin goes back further. “Sam, they used to call me home,” he says, evoking the prophet who sent Israel out to fight the Philistines for the promised land. Through metempsychosis America becomes Israel’s new “home,” Levin and Pauline its potential liberators.   

As they pass through campus for the last time, they see the shape-shifting Fabrikant, sprouting red whiskers – his first beard. He has become Telemachus, Levin’s heir – assigned to teach a Great Books course that Levin proposed to the dean.  The cycle of western civilization begins anew in the far west, no doubt with Homer.  

 Levin and Pauline are off to California with a child growing in her womb, of Jewish and gentile stock.  This could stand for the story of American Jews in the 20^th century – trading the purity of their heritage for a part in shaping a new New World.  Bernard Malamud, a first-generation American Jew married to a Catholic, composed A New Life amid the gentile enterprise, teaching English composition at Oregon State College in the Fifties.  For him and his wandering, pathfinding hero, it was Bloomsday in America.

 -- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips