The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction Read Free

which he set aside and finally abandoned. Its central themes—moral responsibility and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of communication—were favorites of Malamud’s and found their most unusual expression in God’s Grace (1982). This self-contained opening chapter is a portrait of a mentally ill young man who confesses to the murder of his father, and concludes with an atypical surprise ending.
    The last two stories Malamud wrote, in his search for new forms, were what he called “fictive biographies.” While working on Dubin’s Lives (1979), the novel whose hero is a biographer, he did extensive reading in biographies. In New York he attended meetings of a “psychobiography” group made up largely of psychiatrists and analysts, and presented a paper or two of his own. In 1982, at the time of the publication of God’s Grace, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, when he had to undergo open-heart surgery. On his recovery and return to his home in Bennington, he turned once again to writing stories. This is from his notes in 1983:

    The biographed stories— people like D. H. Lawrence, Strindberg, Proust, and other literary characters I have become interested in. Others—Puccini, Verdi, Mahler. [Shall I] use the device I have been working on about Virginia Woolf? [Shall I] do Alma and Mahler? …
    Method: start with a scene in one life, explicate that as a fiction,
then go into the biographical element and develop further. You come out, or should, with an invention forward as a story, limited but carrying the meaning of the life as a short story.

    “In Kew Gardens,” the Virginia Woolf story, appeared in Partisan Review and the Alma Mahler story, “Alma Redeemed,” in Commentary—both in 1984. It is worth noting that there are some details in the stories which may seem fanciful, but are based on fact; that is his point. These two stories, by a master of the form, are perhaps the most unusual he wrote and provide a fitting finale to this posthumous book.
     
     
    After Malamud’s death in 1986, Saul Bellow wrote a memorial tribute to his friend and fellow writer, which was read by Howard Nemerov, at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. I quote from the Bellow eulogy:

    Well, we were here, first-generation Americans, our language was English and a language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us. Malamud in his novels and stories discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York. He was a myth maker, a fabulist, a writer of exquisite parables. The English novelist Anthony Burgess said of him that he “never forgets that he is an American Jew, and he is at his best when posing the situation of a Jew in urban American society.” “A remarkably consistent writer,” he goes on, “who has never produced a mediocre novel … . He is devoid of either conventional piety or sentimentality … always profoundly convincing.” Let me add on my own behalf that the accent of hard-won and individual emotional truth is always heard in Malamud’s words. He is a rich original of the first rank.

    To close on a personal note, I was always aware that Bernard Malamud, like all good writers, had no need of an editor, yet I considered myself fortunate to have been that editor. I was honored when he dedicated in my name The Stories of Bernard Malamud (1983), the last book published during his lifetime, but I am prouder of his written inscription, “For Bob, my first and only editor.” In
his introduction to that book he wrote: “Art celebrates life and gives us our measure.” His art has given us his measure, which is great.
     
     
    I wish to acknowledge the help I have received from friends and associates in preparing this book. The editorial assistance of novelist Robert Dunn, who worked closely with Bernard Malamud while he was writing The People, transcribing his handwritten