Bernard Malamud in 1985.
Joyce Carol Oates (TLS), Bernard Malamud, tireless craftsman:
“When Bernard Malamud was in his late fifties, a Pulitzer Prizewinner (for The Fixer, 1966) and National Book Award winner twice over (for the story collection The Magic Barrel, 1959, and The Fixer), at the height of his acclaim and yet, as always, assailed by self-doubt, he once remarked to a friend “completely out of the blue” that he regretted not having known the love of several beautiful women. The story is told in this wonderfully readable, illuminating and entertaining biography, the first full-length Life of Malamud to appear. Malamud remained married to Ann de Chiara from 1945 until his death in 1986, though the two were not consistently faithful to each other: their marriage was, by Malamud’s description, a “nervous” one; indeed the sharply opinionated Mrs Malamud was in the habit of assuring her insecure writer-husband that “though a good writer, he was not a great writer such as Faulkner or Joyce”. Knowing of Malamud’s lifelong preoccupation with routines, schedules, and devoting every possible hour to his work, his companion replied that such love affairs would have taken up a good deal of Malamud’s time: “Which of your books would you have given up for these loves?”. Malamud was silent for a moment and then said, “None”.”
Lee Siegel (NYT), The Fixer-Upper:
“For Davis, one of Malamud’s aphorisms sums up the obsession driving his work: “There’s more than morality in a good man.” The sentiment is, in fact, almost identical to Norman Mailer’s belief that the best lies close to the worst in people. Malamud believed that the stuff of goodness lay in the education roughly administered by life’s warps and woofs: the fatality of character, the irony of good intentions, the realization that right versus wrong is often a matter of hurt versus hurt. Davis knows that there’s nothing narrowly virtuous about that.”
