Family affairs

AS the son of one writer and the father of another, I find that the title of Janna Malamud Smith’s memoir about Bernard Malamud rings with a certain unsettling truth about all children of writers -- our parents exist both in the flesh and in print, and one is the doppelganger of the other. As Smith points out in “My Father Is a Book,” it can be a crazy-making experience to hold both the fleshly parent and the ghostly one in mind at the same time. “Reading a parent’s fiction is rarely a simple literary experience; it is, or can be, much more bizarre,” Smith explains. “[T]he underlying themes possess an uncanny, sometimes creepy familiarity: they are the spooks of the familial unspoken returning to haunt.”

Smith is clearly seeking to restore her father to the stature he once enjoyed as part of a troika of Jewish American novelists that included Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Malamud may have won a Pulitzer, but Bellow won the Nobel Prize and Roth was seen as the bad boy of American letters at a time when Malamud was playing it safe: Perhaps this partly explains why Malamud is less celebrated today. Indeed, Smith assumes a burden of guilt for having previously discouraged anyone from writing a literary biography of her father: “More than a few people have suggested to me that the absence of a biography has worked to my father’s disadvantage,” she concedes, “because biographies are a way we designate writers as significant and keep their fiction alive.”

The author of “A Potent Spell” and “Private Matters,” Smith has undertaken something far more courageous than a daughter’s celebration of her father’s literary achievements. Rather, she has reached deeply into her own experience to create an intimate memoir that is also a family chronicle, a work of criticism and a cultural history of the 1950s and 1960s.

Smith does not feel obliged to argue for the enduring quality of her father’s body of work, which includes the mythic American baseball saga “The Natural” and the martyrology of a scapegoated Jewish man in Russia in “The Fixer,” but she certainly seeks to understand and explain it. The son of poor Jewish parents newly arrived in Brooklyn from the Ukraine, Bernard Malamud watched his mother descend into mental illness, attempt suicide by drinking a bottle of caustic household cleanser and later die in an insane asylum when her son was only 15. His older brother, too, would later fall under the lifelong spell of schizophrenia. All of these experiences, of course, cast a long shadow over his work.

“My father struggled to appreciate his father’s circumstances: the difficulty of immigrating, of marrying a woman soon beset by mental illness, of trying to survive her, raise two sons and eke out a living from a tiny, worthless grocery store,” Smith writes. “Dad’s compassion for his fictional characters came not only out of what he had lived and witnessed but also from the unremitting internal struggle this life stimulated. His protective tenderness toward his parents existed side by side with his sense of having been gypped, his anger about it, and then his shame and guilt.”

But Smith also holds her father fully accountable for the decisions he made in pursuit of the literary life and the pleasures he permitted himself after he had achieved bestseller status with “The Natural.” When he left Brooklyn for a teaching job in Oregon in the early 1950s -- “an exile’s way station,” as Smith describes it -- he was fleeing the poverty and illness that continued to beset his father and brother, a fact that haunted him for the rest of his life. Still, Malamud preferred the company of writers, poets, critics and artists -- and, to the anguish of his wife Ann deChiara Malamud, opportunities for flirtations and affairs.

Clearly, Malamud and his daughter were always deeply enmeshed, but she refuses to sentimentalize their relationship or, for that matter, his relationships with other women in his life. “Dependence, insecurity, and sadness in women were comfortable for him. Female aggression was completely off-putting,” she writes. “As far as I can recall, the only female characters in his bedtime stories were bad witches. Perhaps a coincidence, but his adult stories are also populated by an array of disappointing and destructive women.”

As much as Smith loves and honors her father, she is willing to reveal even the most shattering encounters between them. “Once, home from college, I said something that wounded Dad, I haven’t even a slight memory what,” she recalls of one harrowing moment. “He lashed back, as furious as I ever saw him, emphasizing each syllable: ‘NO

Smith is equally candid in honoring her mother, the product of an Italian American Catholic upbringing. “My mother was honest and had a critical mind and a sharp, intuitive intelligence,” she writes. But Malamud decreed for her a life of subservience and self-denial: “Though I love you and shall love you more,” he wrote to his future wife in 1945, “most of my strength will be devoted to realizing myself as an artist.”

The book is rich with anecdote and set in the literary high life that Malamud cherished. Theodore Roethke shows up here, and so do Bellow and Roth, Howard Nemerov, Shirley Jackson, Marc Blitzstein, Lillian Hellman, Leonard Bernstein and Alfred Kazin. Bernstein, she reports, once made a sexual overture to her father, who declined but could not resist bragging about it.

Malamud’s arrival at Bennington College, in Vermont, where older male faculty regarded affairs with their female students as a kind of perquisite, presented a fateful temptation to the boy from Brooklyn. “The Bennington sexual environment provided a perfect reef on which to scrape the bottom off our Oregon family,” reports Smith, whose father took up with one of his writing students and whose mother retaliated by conducting an affair of her own with a married man.

Smith’s acute observation of the various stresses and crises in the lives of her parents reveals a highly precocious mind at work. At 12 or 13, for example, she attended a cocktail party at the home of her mother’s lover: “His wife, manic-depressive and drinking heavily, started explaining to me that when a woman reaches a certain age, her breasts droop. To bathe, she has to lift them and wash under them with a washcloth. I found the information more potentially useful than most of what I garnered when boredom led me to trail along at adult events. Was my father standing beside me? My mother? I imagine the communication, or at least some metamessage, might have been directed at one of them.”

Perhaps the most telling example of Smith’s refusal to blunt the edges of self-revelation is her recognition of her father’s affair with a woman her own age as “a kind of quasi-incestuous symmetry.” When her father died, Smith flew home and found her father’s lover seated next to her mother in the living room. “Was she the second wife or the incestuously accomplished older daughter?” muses Smith. “I suspect, in her mind and his, she had long since become a good friend, but I lacked a narrative of the transformation and felt alien in her weeping presence. I quickly decided it would be a good idea for me not to feel, so I froze into the too-cheerful good-daughter routine at which I was practiced.... “

Again and again, Smith demonstrates her own considerable gift as a writer. After describing the period leading up to her father’s death from a heart attack in 1986 -- “I took one look at him and knew absolutely that he was about to die,” she writes of a Christmas visit in 1985 -- she closes the book with a tender coda that brings Malamud fully back to life by describing the mundane but endearing details of his work routine, including what he ate for breakfast, the kind and color of pens and paper he favored, the books on his shelves and the pictures on his walls. After noting that Malamud was an early riser, she reprises a story that Philip Roth used to tell about himself. Whenever Roth rose late, lingered over breakfast and finally pushed himself to his desk late in the morning, he’d scold himself: “Malamud has already been working for three hours.”

The book’s final line is taken from one of the many letters that Malamud sent to his daughter: “You’re one of the happy few,” he wrote, “who can make their own world.” By the end of the memoir, however, we suspect that Smith intends a measure of irony. She refuses to content herself with pleasant memories -- this is not what she sought or what she got from her father. Rather, Janna Malamud Smith is a passionate and uncompromising truth-teller, and it is by telling the truth that she has honored her father and mother as well as her readers. *